The project's construction crew included as many as 80-100 artisans during periods of peak activity. The production took up every free inch of space at Leavesden, where sets included the Van Tassel Manor House and other dwellings, a creepy cemetery, and portions of the Western Woods. Stage H at Shepperton housed the rest of the Western Woods, including a witch's cave and the Tree of the Dead, a huge gnarled landmark that serves as the Headless Horseman's gateway to hell. Heinrichs notes, "Some of the designs are reminiscent of the old German expressionist films The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu, which have a very strong, graphic, two-dimensional look within a three-dimensional environment. That's something Tim and I have always liked to play with in the films we've done together."
The production designer's biggest task was the construction of Sleepy Hollow's town center in Marlow. Nestled in a hunting preserve that came complete with a duck pond, the faux village included everything one might expect from a turn-of-the-19th-century storybook setting: a covered bridge, a church, a blacksmith's shop, a farmer's union, a notary public, a halfway house and a general store. During AC's nocturnal visit to the production in February of 1999, a freezing rain had turned the town's dirt road into a muddy ankle-deep soup, adding further authenticity to the tableau but causing Burton to catch a nasty cold. Surveying the scene while applying a handkerchief to his reddening nose, the director seemed like a man who might be happy to lose his head to the Horseman's axe. "Happens to me on every shoot," he moaned.
The crew's grim slog was brightened a bit by Lubezki's lighting setup, which comprised three giant softboxes suspended from a trio of 250-ton construction cranes. The roof of each unit contained six 24-light (Par 64) Dinos aimed downward, while three of the sides contained a trio of 9-light Maxi-Brutes angled at 45 degrees. According to gaffer John Higgins, "Our initial idea for that set was to have a tank-track road ringing the set, and we did tests with various lighting rigs at the positions we could access from the tracks. That idea proved to be impractical for many reasons. Instead, we decided to suspend these very large soft sources on rotating bases that could be positioned at any point above the set and still be kept hidden. The art department built a fantastic scale model of the set, and when we studied it we thought there might be three points where we could position our supports. We eventually located a company that had three 250-ton telescoping cranes with a reach of 67 meters [approximately 220 feet]. The art department then made working scale models of these cranes, which we positioned around the model. This test confirmed that the only way to reach all points on the set was to use three cranes. We then did a test with a half-size version of our rig, which confirmed that our theory would work."
Each of the completed softboxes consisted of a 20' x 20' base with sides 12' high built from scaffolding. The units had to be strong enough to be suspended safely with the lights attached, and the set's roads also had to be reinforced to support the cranes' weight. Each box could provide 250K of light, and full gridcloth was affixed to the bottom and sides of each. Long black ropes were attached to the corners of the rigs so the crew could control their rotation from the ground. The last lamp mounted on the base of each rig was a 70K Lightning Strikes unit, and the power to the rigs was provided by twin 200K generators. The rest of the power for the set was provided by three other generators, while a complete cabling system was wired and then buried during construction of the set. The system enabled the lighting crew to deliver large amounts of power to any part of the set very quickly.
The enormous sources cast a broad, soft glow over the Sleepy Hollow set, lending the picturesque sets an ethereal ambience. Lubezki offered some further insights into the origins of his lighting strategy while hiking up a wet, sloppy path to the set's hilltop entrance, which was marked by a pair of stone columns adorned with stag's heads. "I've been on this movie from almost the very beginning," he said. "I usually like to participate a lot in the design process, as I did with [production designer] Bo Welch on A Little Princess. On this one, though, Tim, Rick and the costume designer, Colleen Atwood, were already a team; I was the only new person in that group, so I was more like a pupil who was learning, and I stayed a bit quiet. When I began seeing all of the various models, the first thing that came to my mind was, 'Stop this insanity, tell Rick to create a window, or to make the ceilings higher.' All of those instincts of mine were working almost against the process, though, because Tim and Rick were creating very complicated designs. I decided to just sit back and learn from what they wanted to do, rather than throwing out ideas that would be obtrusive. They were open to my suggestions, and they agreed with most of them, such as painting all of the trees inside the soundstages black. But in general, I stood back and listened a bit more than I've done on other movies.
"One day we had a big meeting with everyone, and we talked about building everything at Leavesden Studios. When we went to England on the first scouting trip, they showed me the sets on the stages, and I thought they were joking all of the stage ceilings were really low, and the sets were less than 20' high. That created some big limitations, and as a result, I had to throw out my initial plans for the lighting. My first idea had been to employ huge sources, most of which would come from the back to create silhouettes, and to use very little fill light. However, the approach I eventually adopted worked out much better: I decided to create a huge toplight, which I had never done before. The stage ceilings were so low that we couldn't really hide lights in the greenbeds. Instead, we created a huge sense of sky for the exteriors shot in the stages. We installed over 500 space lights up in the ceiling, very close to each other, and then pumped smoke into the rafters to create a false sky and obscure the fixtures. That way, all of the light would seem to be coming from the sky, as it would in reality. Being low helped me because I was getting the stop I wanted, and it was easier to control the smoke."
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