"Because of that type of planning, we actually found ourselves 10 days ahead on principal photography at one point. Of course, those 10 days were probably just dumped onto the second unit [headed up by director Peter McDonald and cinematographer Jamie Anderson], but overall, the first unit did very well. The entire first-unit schedule was about 90 days."
Goldblatt shot Batman and Robin with Panavision cameras (using a Platinum as his workhorse), generally without any filtration. To fully exploit the height of the picture's enormous sets, the filmmakers shot in the standard 1.85:1 format rather than wide-screen, but wide lenses helped to achieve optimum edge-to-edge framing. "We often found ourselves working at around 24mm, but we'd often go to 17mm," the cinematographer says. "In the Gotham Museum set, we found that the 10mm lens was a bit too wide, so we went to a 14mm. I used the Primo 4:1 and 11:1 zooms quite a bit, but if we were doing a locked-off shot, I preferred to change over to the straight Primo primes the 17mm or 14mm because the image quality of those lenses was simply better than the wide end of the zooms."
This lens selection helped Goldblatt compose the type of framing favored by Schumacher. The director notes, "I like large spaces with the actors in the middle of the space, so they're almost in limbo as opposed to them being against walls. Even in 'realistic' movies, I try to have large enough spaces so that I can put people in the middle of them. I don't like people standing up against things. In action scenes, I like to start in the middle of the room and move upwards and outwards from it.
"We rehearsed those types of moves very carefully on this picture. Because one of our villains was Mr. Freeze, we were able to [base certain action scenes on] extreme winter sports ice skating, ice hockey, and so on. We have ice vehicles, freezing rays, you name it. I tried to create stunts that don't belong in any movie but a Batman movie. We kept the things that were the most spectacular, funniest or cleverest, and took out the things that resembled traditional martial arts or normal fights."
Goldblatt adds, "We made good use of the Steadicam, which was operated by Mark van Loon. He was the second camera operator on the first unit, so he could always jump into his harness quickly and do it."
Indeed, the action in Batman and Robin takes place in a series of gigantic and baroque settings. In addition to performing another architectural overhaul on the Batcave, Barbara Ling oversaw the construction of an observatory, a museum, a scientific lab in the Amazon, and a hideout for Freeze and Ivy, among other sets. Following is a detailed rundown of Stephen Goldblatt's lighting approach to each area, as well as his use of other special techniques.
"We're going to need a bigger cave."
—Alfred the Butler
With the arrival of Batgirl, the Batcave became a tad more cramped, but Goldblatt found Ling's redesign of the space to be particularly well-suited to his lighting plans. "One big improvement in the design of the Batcave was that this time Barbara built a lot of the color into the set itself," the cinematographer says. "Previously, I had put in a lot of the bluish color with the lighting. This time, Barbara's crew painted color into the rock faces and other surfaces. Also, the perspective was worked out so we could get the camera wider and lower and not go off the set. So in some ways, the set was bigger.
"The big change was in the platform that brought the Batmobile up," he says. "That was designed as two great big Bat-signal wings, with the new Batmobile a convertible sitting in the middle, like an insect. To get that to work, I placed Xenons below the grating beneath the car. I then had a company from North Hollywood, Nights of Neon, augment the look by adding white neon just beneath the symbol so that the glow of the neon would make the symbol stand out. As the Batmobile takes off, a pod rises up and opens to reveal Robin's motorcycle. I had some red neon put into Robin's symbol to reflect onto his bike. This was all shot from above, and it looked wonderful."
To further illuminate the vehicles, Goldblatt and John Tedesco also deployed a series of Italian-made NAT (New Automated Technology) lighting units, which were used heavily throughout the production. Goldblatt details, "The NATs are really fabulous. They're very powerful, and have a very narrow beam. They also have periscope heads, so you can actually move 360 degrees in either direction. They're wonderfully controllable, and you can use all sorts of strange color combinations with them RGB mixes, scrolls, and so on. We had a large rig up above the set to facilitate top-lighting, and I was able to replace some of my 10Ks with NATs. If I were to do it again tomorrow, I would replace even more of the 10Ks with NATs."
The look of the cave was further refined with the use of Universal Projectors small but powerful units designed by Tedesco's company to provide a unique "water-ripple" effect along the Batcave's walls. Tedesco explains, "We changed the heads on these projectors, and showed Stephen a way of simulating a different kind of ripple effect than has been traditionally done over the past several years. In the last few Batman films, that effect was generally done with Xenons bouncing off shards of mirrored glass in the water. Stephen did employ that technique extensively once again, but we also used the Universals to give him a real out-of-focus ripple effect, kind of a 'diving through the kelp beds' thing. It was a very reliable, old-fashioned type of moving effect like you'd see at an opera, but it worked really well."
For the scene in which Barbara Gordon discovers the Batcave, Goldblatt added a special coup de grace. "I used some very high-powered blue and red lasers to simulate the look of an elaborate security system," he says. "She's in the middle of the car's turntable, and she's surrounded by a latticework of lasers. It looks great."
Star-Gazing at the Gotham Observatory
According to Goldblatt, the film's most difficult set was the Gotham Observatory. Built to full scale on a stage adjacent to the Long Beach, California, docking area of the Queen Mary, the observatory featured a 20-ton, fully movable, copper-colored hydraulic telescope as its centerpiece. (A smaller version of part of the observatory was also constructed to facilitate other shots, using the same types of lighting units employed on the full-scale set.) In the film, the setting is first revealed during a swanky dedication party. Soon after, however, Mr. Freeze invades the space, turning it into a large geodesic refrigerator and converting the telescope into a giant "freeze gun" which he trains on Gotham City.
During AC's visit to this set while Batman and Robin was in production, Goldblatt conducted a thorough tour of the space, offering a rundown of its most interesting features. The set's entire interior had been dressed with standing shards of plastic "ice," as well as rows of icicles hanging off the telescope. Next to the telescope, frozen in place, stood two of Mr. Freeze's hapless "victims" a pair of lifelike dummies encased in sheets of ice, specially constructed by effects experts from Alterian Studios in Monrovia, California. Beyond the front end of the telescope, an open section of the dome revealed a huge TransLight painting of Gotham City at night.
As humorous and impressive as the set was at first glance, the scene truly came to life during actual takes, as Goldblatt and Tedesco fired up a swirling, psychedelic barrage of colorful "cosmic projections" planets, comets, and the like, all designed by Barbara Ling along the dome's inner walls. The cinematographer relates, "I was very interested in using projectors on this film, particularly on the observatory set. During prep, I went to New York to research those types of units with the help of a company called Electronic Arts. I brought a number of projectors back to L.A. for more testing, and we eventually became interested in using these French projectors known as Telescan Mark 4 Chameleons. They're very much like lighting fixtures; the projector beam isn't direct, it's aimed at a mirror. The mirror can send the beam anywhere, and you can distort the image or change the scrolling speed and color all from a lighting board. In that sense, the Chameleons are like hybrids of a computerized light and a projector. Barbara Ling was able to build about 40 of them into the dome."
To supplement the look provided by the Chameleons, Goldblatt and Tedesco positioned a quartet of larger, more conventional PIGI projectors (which use HMI arcs) on a scene-by-scene basis to cast general planetary patterns and magenta backgrounds on the inner surface of the dome. "At first, I was unable to get an exposure above T1.4 when the images were projected onto the observatory's gray walls," Goldblatt says, "so for this part of the sequence, we repainted the interior to the type of white used on a drive-in theater screen. This got the exposure up to an acceptable level of about T2.8, but it created another problem: the ambient lighting in the observatory and the clear parts of the projected artwork washed out the general effect, making the look too pretty and pastel rather than dramatic. Much head-scratching led me back to the original 18 percent gray surface; I also tweaked the lamps, went four points lighter on the printing lights, and used slightly lighter PIGI artwork and a selection of the more luminous artwork on the Chameleons. I finally got to T2.3 after three weeks of struggle and sleepless nights.
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