In characteristic De Palma fashion, many shots began in the spaceship's cockpit, then followed the actors out into other parts of the ship. As a result, Burum had to contend with a variety of difficulties. The actors were reeling off reams of dialogue, and they also had to appear weightless while moving through the various setpieces, which necessitated countless practical effects gags in addition to all of the other logistical issues. The cinematographer explains, "We did all of the simulated weightlessness, both in the spaceship and out in space, in two ways: we had the actors either puppeteered on wires or balanced on teeter-totters to get them to float. We also overcranked [the camera] a bit to help create the illusion, and the actors made very deliberate motions as they pushed off one object and grabbed onto another while traveling through the sets. In addition, we always tried to make sure that the orientation of the frame didn't tell you where up or down was. We'd hang somebody upside-down in the frame and have other people right-side up, and then use the Technocrane's four-axis head to do a spinning forward move. We did as much of that as we could, because it really helped to convey the illusion of weightlessness."
Due to the necessity of wire and rig removals to pull off the weightless gags, these elaborate Super Technocrane moves usually had to be encoded for repeatability, adding another layer of complexity to the shoot.
Since the huge spaceship sets themselves were elevated on platforms, the Super Technocrane also had to be mounted on a platform. "If our actors were on elevated sets, we wanted the Technocrane to be at exactly that level so we'd have the least amount of arc in the crane arm. As a result, we were always moving all of these platforms," Burum recalls. "Brian would explain what he wanted to do, we'd rehearse it all with the stunt people on wire rigs to make sure we could pull it off, and then we'd figure out where the platforms had to go. After that, Brian would look at the shot with the stunt people, and if he said, 'Okay,' we'd put the actors in their spacesuits and shoot the scene."
All of the platforms, weightless rigs and other equipment tended to make lighting the spaceship sets cumbersome, so Burum and production designer Ed Verreaux planned to use as much in-set source lighting as possible a technique that had served them well within the space-station interiors. Like those sets, the spaceship sets utilized a number of functional SGI flat-screen monitors and faux video screens. Burum details, "We wanted to light the space station and spaceship in a way that looked real, but we also wanted to be able to add a bit of drama to the look, so Ed and I incorporated all of the lights we needed into the design of the sets. It was all source lighting, except that we'd often remove the side or top of the set and drop the Technocrane straight down in which case we had to simulate the lighting that was missing. We had a lot of back-projected video that had to be coordinated and balanced, and we knew we'd only get so much level out of them. We could only build up our light so much before we underexposed the screens, and that gave us our basic exposure. Basically, though, the whole thing was lit up by units that were designed into the sets, mostly fluorescent Kino Flos and small MR-16 units."
Burum maintains that the most demanding aspect of the entire shoot was filming within the 40'-diameter, fully functional centrifuge set, whose rotation presumably creates its own gravity. "That set was called the 'Lower Hab,' but we dubbed it the 'Wheel of Cheese,' because of its segmented sections," Burum says with a chuckle. "The problem was that it was set up 7' off the ground, so we needed an area to shoot in that was considerably high and pretty wide. Unfortunately, the Bridge Studio stage, where we built the centrifuge, was only 85' wide which meant that given our 40'-diameter set, we had only 20' on either side of the Wheel where we could put lights and the Technocrane. The factor was that we couldn't light the Wheel from the outside, because when it was turning, you'd see the shadows turn as well. Once again, we lit it all from within the set, using Kino Flos and a lot of MR-16 lights for accent. Of course, we also had to deal with a whole range of issues, including video screens, while we were doing these incredibly long tracking shots through this big 'Wheel of Cheese.'"
The huge set actually rotated 360 degrees on massive hydraulic rollers. In effect, it acted like a giant treadmill, upon which the actors could walk in place. Burum explains, "We were out on the side on a platform with the Technocrane, so we were able to move the crane in and out of the set. We did one shot where somebody was walking along past people in all these rooms along the centrifuge. We had the actor walk in place on the centrifuge as all of the people in the rooms rotated past him. That meant that everybody who was sitting at the tables in the rooms had to be strapped in, because they were going to be upside-down at certain times. There were shots that started with the camera upside-down and the actors in the rooms right-side up, and then we'd bring them around till they were upside-down and kind of follow the tilt of the set. It was a very, very complicated thing to shoot, and it actually required two camera operators one person to control the pan and tilt, and another to do the spin and shift on the fourth axis every once in a while. To make matters worse, sometimes we had people coming through the center of the Wheel, where there was a tube that connected the non-gravity area of the ship to the gravity portion. For those shots, we had to fly actors through the tube as if they were weightless, then 'change' to gravity as they entered the centrifuge, and then follow them as they climbed down ladders while the Wheel was rotating."
Despite the logistical challenges presented by Mission to Mars, Burum proudly reports that production wrapped 14 days under schedule. The cinematographer achieved a wide variety of looks within the film, while still hewing to De Palma's almost contradictory mandate: "Brian wanted to depict everything in a very realistic manner, but he also wanted to make Mars very romantic. Authors have written about Mars for years, and we wanted to fulfill audiences' expectations of what Mars looks and feels like. I wanted everything on Mars to look red, so I made everything in space look neutral and everything on Earth look cool, blue and green. That way, when you saw Mars, the red really hits you, like 'Wow! We're really in a different, strange place!'"