Navarro notes that image sharpness was an integral element in bringing Spawn's edgy story to life. "I had used very heavy filtration on Desperado and From Dusk Till Dawn, but none whatsoever on Long Kiss; on that picture, I knew that I would lose a percentage of sharpness during the blow-up and squeeze to Super 35. Instead, I used the lighting to provide any softness that I needed, because I wanted to make the negative as pristine as possible. On Spawn, I followed that same approach. The stories in both Long Kiss and Spawn had a harder edge, and needed to be as crisp as possible."
This was also a concern, since the creation of Spawn's world would rely heavily on digital effects. But Navarro insists, "Digital effects are no longer a restriction to what stocks you can use. I usually used the new 5279 Vision 500T for nights, and 45 and 97 for exteriors. 5298 had been my choice for night exteriors and interiors for many years. I learned to work with very low light levels while keeping the blacks black, so the transition to the Vision 500T has been a very natural one. I really don't do anything differently."
It was sometimes necessary to use VistaVision cameras for the film's effects work, however. Navarro recalls, "I didn't use VistaVision at all for The Long Kiss; we did everything with Moviecams. Of course, the registration had to be perfect and meet certain specifications, but we could do it with 4-perf. On Spawn, we sometimes needed VistaVision for both our location work and the bluescreen material.
"ILM supplied us with an older butterfly-type VistaVision camera, and we learned to use it ourselves; it was not difficult. The only drawback was that the older Zeiss lenses they had were not fast enough, so the lighting had to be changed. We didn't use VistaVision that often, but when we did, those shots would often involve dolly moves, since motion tracking is now so easy to do. That was the main problem with effects in regard to camera movement just a few years ago. You could have a very kinetic scene, but when you got to the effects shot, you'd have to cut to a static, locked-off frame just so the visual effect could happen technically. Now, the whole point is to add motion whenever possible."
Dippé adds, "In the end, VistaVision is safety you have more resolution and can always blow things up or reposition them in post. If you really know what you're doing, it's less necessary, because 4-perf now works fine for digital special effects. But there were times when we were doing a very complicated shot and we either had to nail the setup perfectly, or allow ourselves to compensate later by shooting in VistaVision. That was a tradeoff we could make when necessary.
"It's funny," he adds. "After my first year of working with the VistaVision cameras at ILM, my impression was, 'God, these things are horrible.' But there are times even today, in the era of 'digital magic,' when VistaVision will save your ass."
Navarro adds, "Mark and Steve Williams had the effects portion of the film mapped out very well, which made it easier for me to deliver the elements they needed for their postproduction work. I think things went smoothly in this area because the director was also basically the special-effects supervisor. On other films I've had to deal with two people, which creates a triangle of decisions. Also, Mark knew not to do things in a way that would be unnecessarily expensive or time-consuming. But doing bluescreen work is always time-consuming, because the actors are interacting with things that aren't really there. This means you have to do extra takes for safety. When the post people are putting the puzzle pieces together, they need to have more choices, just in case the eyelines or any other things are wrong."
Considering the unique credentials and background he brings to his position as director, Dippé offers, "Digital special effects are just another set of tools in the filmmaker's bag of tricks, along with different lenses, cameras, film stocks, crane arms and all of those other parts of the filmmaking process. Because of my experience at ILM, the process is a bit more natural for me. I knew where we could push things and be on the edge. Because effects setups eat up a lot of time and money, there were times when we could get away with stuff, like not having the camera locked off. We could also take some liberties with rigging, because they're so easy to remove. We even had more freedom with our lighting and exposures, although exposures are always an issue in effects work. Our practical special effects work such as using the Violator animatronic puppet or doing explosions was impacted minimally, primarily because those were difficult and often one-time setups. We had to prep some areas for hours beforehand, but even during shooting they required a certain amount of follow-through, especially when stunts were involved."
At the end of AC's visit to the Spawn set at the Natural History Museum, the crew began finalizing preparations for the big stunt of the night, in which the leather-clad villainess would plunge from the balcony to her demise. At floor level, a pyramid of champagne glasses was constructed atop a formation of cardboard boxes designed to break the stuntwoman's fall. The preparations, complete with multiple-camera setups, safety padding and several run-throughs, took hours.
Lee offers a rundown of the lighting used at the Museum rotunda site: "We were very restricted by the shots and the locations. The big setpiece of the scene is Spawn crashing through this huge skylight, and there was a weird mix of digital work and live action. In addition to being able to see all 360 degrees of the room, we could see 90 degrees up into the ceiling, so everything was designed to be looked at. Of course, we later thought, 'If everything is going to be done digitally, we can just hang an 18K straight down from the ceiling and have it taken out later.' But we didn't really do that very much. Personally, I can't stomach the idea of lighting in a way that would leave a lamp in frame for someone else to remove. About 60 percent of the time, on any shot, the best place to put a light is in the frame. A lot of the most beautiful and convincing sources are the ones that you sneak in there, and that's part of the challenge of our work. But if you can make something look that much better, why not take advantage of the option?
"Our solution to lighting the rotunda was to put a ring of about 80 evenly spaced MR16 Par cans which I tend to be using a lot lately all around the ceiling. They were directional enough so that you could point the camera at them without flaring, but they created a general, soft light because there were so many other sources. That's what we based the entire room on. It took two days to get them up and spaced and installed so they wouldn't do any damage to the structure. We also floated an LTM lighting balloon with eight 1K bulbs in it."
The centerpiece of the museum set was a large statue clutching a glowing orange sphere. Says Lee, "The statue was there when we got to the location, but we replaced the globe it originally held with this opaque ball, which we lit from within. It was a nice touch. There was track lighting installed around the perimeter of the room under the balcony and on the second floor; although it would have been a great backup, we ended up not using much of it. We just left the standard bulbs in.
"That was our overall illumination, but we also did a lot of bouncing into white and silver reflectors often aimed through something else to create sidelight. Unfortunately, the room is a circle, so it was tough to get a good sidelight on anybody. Once you get out of frame, you're not really at anybody's side anymore. You're more frontal."
Everything in the rotunda was run through dimmers in sections, including the practicals. Says Navarro, "I use dimmers when I can and when time allows it. Even if we're on location, I like to have all of the practical lights on dimmers. It's a better way to control the intensity of something, rather than using gels. I'll also use dimmers if I know that different levels of light are required on the same set, like the range between dusk and night."
Adds Lee, "We tried to make the lighting in the museum as simple as possible. The great thing was that there were so many practicals and little bulbs that the overwhelming number of them created the right effect. So the lighting plan was dictated by the space and how we were going to shoot it. It was a beautiful space."
Just prior to the shooting of the museum sequence, the stuntwoman doubling for the villainess was hung from a steel cable directly above the crystalline pyramid, as she gripped a release cord that would drop her 25 feet to the target. As the cameras rolled, she twisted into a "falling position" and pulled the release. With a crunch, she hit the formation of champagne flutes dead-center, sending glass shards flying everywhere.
"That stunt worked beautifully, and it's so effective that we're having problems with the MPAA!" reports Dippé. The director found that one of his biggest challenges was in toning down Spawn's visceral impact to PG-13 levels. "The sequence works very well, and it's very pretty; I like stunts that have a sort of beautiful violence. But this was a hard movie to shoot. Once we got into the unreal elements of the story, every single shot involved this phantasm interacting with complicated effects. On top of that, we had scenes with little kids and dogs everything you're warned not to do on your first film."
Navarro is currently shooting Quentin Tarantino's new film, Jackie Brown a heist thriller based on the Elmore Leonard novel Rum Punch. "It's been a relatively short time since I moved to the U.S., and I don't want to be stereotyped into one style," the cinematographer says. "I want to be able to come up with the looks or the images any story demands, and have the opportunity to work in other genres."
