"Nevertheless, we still had problems with ambient bounce washing out the image. Peter MacGregor-Scott is a former sailor, and he suggested that we rig 'negative fill,' i.e. black material, in sailing-ship fashion along the sides of the observatory. It could be pulled up and down very quickly to counteract the bounce-back."
Rounding out the dome's lighting scheme were a ring of 12 NAT lights installed in the ceiling; some standard fixtures along the floor; blue-gelled 2Ks to illuminate the various ice shards from within; Kino Flos hidden beneath the telescope's platform; and neon "zapping" effects installed into the scope's barrel by Nights of Neon. The film's actors were illuminated as much as possible with conventional lighting units, because the theatrical lights tended to produce unpleasant and unexpected color casts on flesh tones.
To cover the huge space, a Technocrane was mounted atop a Titan crane, and aerial rigging wizard Earl Wiggins (who had aided Goldblatt on Batman Forever), built a special truss rig a 24' revolving arm with a camera seat at one end and a counterbalance at the other high up in the dome. "We put the Technocrane on the Titan quite often," says Goldblatt, "because that gave us a 50- or 60-foot reach for these great sweeping moves on the big sets."
Goldblatt eventually found it possible to shoot the set at his preferred exposure of T2.3 while using the 5279 stock, retaining deep blacks (using printer-light settings of 37-41-43 at Technicolor Los Angeles), but he says that his hair turned even grayer in the process. "Just getting an exposure really drove me crazy sometimes," he admits. "At one point, I was just in despair. The lights we were using weren't really designed to be used on films, but for theater work. Thankfully, the footage turned out wonderfully well."
Icing Up Gotham Museum
Equally light-intensive was the film's Gotham Museum set, which stretched more than 200' from end to end on Warner Bros.' enormous Stage 16 (see fold-out lighting chart). With its vaulted ceiling, cathedral-style windows and various "artifact" displays, the structure presented Goldblatt and Tedesco with another brain-twister.
Once again, the space had to be lit to simulate the icy conditions that exist after Mr. Freeze blows through. "We used more computerized lighting on this set than anywhere else in the film," says Goldblatt. "The very nature of the set it's a big museum, after all allowed us to keep some of our fixtures right in the frame sometimes, as 'track lights' and things like that. Even though some of our lights were enormous, they looked like museum spotlights, so we could get away with it easily. The set had been built wall to wall, so we couldn't possibly have lit it conventionally."
Tedesco offers a rundown of the team's lighting arsenal: "Every single sculpture and display had to have a light on it, but our trim height was 55 to 60', and that's a long ways away. We had to use some pretty high-powered stuff to pattern the floor and illuminate the sculptures and tapestries. We used conventional framing projectors like Source Fours and Shakespeares things that are now state-of-the-art for theatrical lighting to frame areas and cut them off. We also used some very high-intensity, low-voltage pin spots to shine light down on the showcases. We then overlaid that with about 40 NATs that were hung in our overhead grid. Those units lit the ice shards from overhead and created various looks in different parts of the room. Some of the shards were almost 20' tall, so we also put a whole series of program lights and fiber-optic lasers underneath them; the stage floor had been built up to accommodate extra lights from below. The lasers gave us a shimmering effect, and we also used lots of studio color moving lights on them so we could change the color from blue to magenta.
"The floor of the museum was supposed to be covered with ice, so we also shot high-intensity searchlights into some revolving special effects drums, which gave us a cold, bluish-white ripply effect that animated the ice. We laid that effect over our saturated colors, topping it off with some lasers."
More conventional lights equipped with color scrollers were positioned outside the museum's windows to create slowly changing colors. Goldblatt notes, "The distances on that set were pretty forbidding, but we were shooting between T2.8 and T4 in that environment. The great thing was that the various looks we created were memorized by the computer and backed up, so the second unit could just call them up and play around with them as the situation required. I also was very concerned to build in redundancy, so we had more lights in there than we needed; if something broke down, we had spares readily available. It's a bit difficult to get up to those lamps we'd have had to bring in Condors during the shooting day, which would have delayed everything."
In fact, several interesting things were happening high up in the set's rafters. Motorized mirror rigs assembled by rigging grip Tommy Doherty (under the supervision of key grip Charlie Saldana) swept beams of Xenon light through circular skylights and onto the museum floor. Goldblatt also explains that he and Tedesco equipped Schwarzenegger's Mr. Freeze costume with an autopilot system that allowed them to program five or six of the NAT lights to track his movements around the museum. "We put a transceiver on his costume, and then the lights would follow him," Goldblatt says. "It worked with other characters as well for example, if we wanted to have backlight on a character who was zipping around on roller skates. Instead of having a follow-focus operator trying to track the actors, the lights are simply locked onto them. We weren't in a situation where we could use this technique as much as I would have liked, but we did use it quite a lot."
Tedesco elaborates, "We also used the autopilot system in the observatory and botanical garden sets. The second unit found it helpful when they were shooting scenes involving guys with ice hockey sticks and pucks. We'd put the transceiver on the bottom of a stick, and the lights would follow that thing right across the ice floor. We could also use this system for positioning lights and directing them at a certain area for an upcoming scene. It cut down on the programming time and made the lives of the grips and gaffers much easier. It often meant the difference between four hours of relighting and 20 minutes of relighting."
A good deal of complex action occurs in the museum, and Goldblatt had to find a way to capture it all effectively with the camera. He once again tapped the expertise of Earl Wiggins, who built a special tracking rig along the length of the set's ceiling. "Earl put two tracks along the ceiling, and then helped us to hang a camera crane," Goldblatt explains. "It enabled us to traverse the whole set very rapidly, spin the camera in a 30' diameter circle, and go up or down to any height. We could really put the camera anywhere."
Wiggins details the reasoning behind the rig: "There were two good justifications for being in the air. One was to be able to float above the actors' heads, and the other was because there was a lot of thick artificial fog on the floor, and a traditional dolly shot would have disturbed the fog. Steve brought me in during the construction phase, and I installed two overhead I-beam track systems. Both of them were 200' long, and they were equipped with aluminum carriers, which we call skates, that have 62 rollerblade wheels on them. Suspended off of that was an aluminum boom arm that was about 24' in length. The balance point was actually off the center; there was 18' of arm on one side, and only six feet at the other end, so we had to heavily weight the smaller end. In total it weighed about 1,200 pounds, including camera, batteries, and a two-man crew one to control the spin and a cameraman to ride the unit and control the camera. That rig enabled us to really fly down through the set; the arm could spin 360 degrees, and we could raise and lower the whole thing from the floor to the ceiling."
The rig helped the filmmakers to capture an attention-grabbing introductory shot of Mr. Freeze, but Goldblatt still had to use his cinematic wits to conquer a slight logistical difficulty. "We wanted to show the whole museum and then rush in to Freeze's face from as wide as possible to a close-up," the cinematographer says. "Earl's rig was beautifully built, but we still couldn't come to a dead stop, so we shot the whole thing in reverse. We started on Arnold's face and moved back, and had him walk backwards up the museum's steps during the camera move. All of the stunt people in the scene ran backwards as well."
[ continued on page 4 ]