Most of the dialogue scenes were shot by Don Peterman, but Keith’s work crops up all over the movie. "I did the Whoville Christmas lighting contest," Keith Peterman says. "That was an exterior shot on the Universal backlot. The Whos always go overboard decorating for Christmas, and there are two neighbors competing for first prize. Their lights start out pretty normal, but eventually they [become] ridiculous displays."
The first two stories of each house were built full size on the backlot, but the upper stories were added digitally during postproduction. Keith Peterman’s job for this scene was to create the blinding glare from the Whos’ overwhelming displays. "We decided to use 16 Dino lights mounted on lifts high above each house," he says. "The Dinos stood in for the upper stories. Some of them were gelled red, orange, yellow and green, and they were all on dimmers so we could create the look of pulsing and chasing Christmas lights. We didn’t have to worry about getting the Dino lights in the shot because they’d be covered up later by the CGI. By the time the contest reached its grand finale, we needed the spectators and judges down below to be four or five stops overexposed. They put on welder’s glasses just to watch; it was almost like faking a nuclear detonation!"
Keith Peterman also lit some interior scenes, including one in which The Grinch>sucks up Christmas presents and a cat with a big vacuum hose. "There were a lot of practicals lighting that scene, lots of glowing ornaments and Christmas lights, so I just supplemented them with table lamps and Kino Flos," he says. "I had a Kino Flo backlighting the cat and a 5K key on it from the side."
Fans of Dr. Seuss’s book will remember the moment when a kinder, gentler Grinch decides to return the presents he stole, delivering them to Whoville in his sleigh. For that sequence, Keith Peterman’s unit went to Solitude, Utah. "That scene actually begins on a soundstage," he details. "A mountain set was lit for dawn and the ’sun’ hit The Grinch. We had metal shutters on 1 1/2 CTO-gelled Dino lights, and we opened the shutters slowly, so you can see the light change on him as he has his change of heart. He gets into the sleigh with Cindy-Lou Who and Max [the dog] and starts sledding down toward Whoville, but he falls out and ends up skiing behind the sleigh. That part of the sequence was shot on location in Utah. We didn’t use any lights for those long shots, just natural light with the sun really low in the morning and late afternoon. We got good footage of the stunt skier from a Steadicam on an insert-snowmobile, and we also did some shots with the camera mounted on the snowmobile.
"When we got back to Universal, I did some closer bluescreen shots of The Grinch to intercut with the long-shot location footage," he continues. "I had to have shots suggesting both bright overcast and full sun, because he goes in and out of this low morning sun during his trip downhill. For the overcast inserts, I lit The Grinch with a 1/4-blue-gelled, diffused 20K key light, adding rimlight with 1/4-blue-gelled, diffused Maxi-Brutes behind and above him. For his sunny inserts, the key light was a 10K with a 1 1/2 orange gel from the back or 3/4 from the side."
Close-ups of actresses Taylor Momsen (who plays little Cindy-Lou Who) and Christine Baranski (Martha May Who-vier) presented special difficulties for Don Peterman. Howard wanted the actresses to look great on film, despite the strange hair, weird clothing and outlandish colors that defined their characters. Fortunately, Peterman has accumulated a great deal of experience shooting cosmetics commercials, so he knows how to put an actress’s best face forward. He explains, "For their stationary close-ups, I employed the same type of soft light I use when I do makeup ads for TV. I use a big box that’s 6 feet long by 2 feet square; I put a light at the back end and three evenly spaced sheets of tracing paper inside. The light comes out very, very soft, but it’s still controlled.
"To give Christine Baranski a romantic look, I used that box light, a 100mm lens, a #2 or #3 Tiffen Black ProMist filter on the camera, and an amber backlight. All of that desaturated the colors a bit, provided diffusion and gave her a kind of glow. The box light was placed above the camera magazine, pointing down at about a 45-degree angle toward the actress’s forehead to hide the shadow behind her. You do get a chin shadow, but it’s a very soft one.
"It was even tougher to light close-ups for moving actors," Peterman notes. "You couldn’t light them from the ground [because] it would take too long to set up. Instead, we let the actors move around and we just followed them with handheld lights. A lot of the time, we used a Xenon flashlight on The Grinch to pick up his eyes; it was a handheld DC light that could be gelled. We used a yellow gel for close-ups because his eyes were yellow. We’d also pick out his dog’s eyes with a 1/2 CTO on the flashlight; Gary Palmer was so good at it you don’t even see it it’s just a glow."
Peterman also used a Chinese lantern with Photofloods inside as a moving key light, hanging it from an old-fashioned, 30’-long sound boom. "I used the Chinese lantern when we were following Cindy-Lou Who walking up the mountain to see The Grinch; there was so much toplight coming down that the Chinese lantern would sometimes act as more of a moving fill. We used gelled fluorescent lights on long poles the same way, especially for shots of The Grinch’s dog, Max. The dog had dark eyes, and he always looked better with a little highlight in his eyes, so we’d lead him along with a fluorescent on a pole his very own close-up light. Also, I’d always backlight him with orange."
The Grinch’s cave was a set that stood three stories high (see diagrams labeled "First Floor [Grinch Cave]" and "Second Floor [Grinch Cave]"). Most of the cave was modeled out of Styrofoam, and the "rocky" terrain was not easy to negotiate. Hauling lights around the set would have caused expensive delays, so Peterman once again relied upon pre-rigging.
Discussing the setup illustrated in the "Second Floor [Grinch Cave]" diagram, Peterman details, "I had 13 7K 1/2-CTB-gelled Xenons pointing down all at the same angle to suggest shafts of glaring, overcast daylight coming through cracks in the cave’s roof. When The Grinch walks through these shafts of light, he’s briefly overexposed by about two to three stops, which works really well. For night sequences inside the cave, we made the same 7K Xenons a bit colder and dimmer by changing the gel to full CTB, suggesting an overcast night. I sometimes put silver reflectors on the cave floor so the Xenon light would bounce up and illuminate some of the stalagmites and stalactites. All of that gave the impression of a cold, dank cave."
Peterman also hid fluorescents around the cave to uplight the walls and model the crags. On the second-floor cave diagram, you’ll notice a cluster of fluorescents on the left; that’s the location of The Grinch’s bedroom. Peterman explains, "Behind his bed there were lots of holes built into the walls, and we put 5,000°K fluorescents there to give the room a little glow, as though light was leaking in through cracks in the rock."
The cave also features very shallow pools of water (mostly on the first floor) that Peterman wanted to light with submersible units. No off-the-shelf units would fit in 6" of water and provide a 25’ throw, so custom lights were built by Pace Technologies, whose team worked closely with first-unit assistant chief lighting technician Lou Ramos. "They managed to create waterproof 1,500-watt far-cyc units that did the job beautifully," Peterman says. "The round lights strung across both floors of the cave were practicals, tungsten bulbs with different colors on them. You’ll also see some odd-shaped lights, which in the movie will look deep orange those are also practicals, The Grinch’s floor lamps, and they were 500-watt oversized bulbs shaped like huge household bulbs. We had about five. We also had a semi-circle of 4-foot-by-2-foot Kino Flos, which lit up the ramp that led to the second floor. They gave a little cold glow on people and threw shadows on the wall to make things spooky. I also threw a lot of green backlight on The Grinch in the cave without justifying where it was coming from; we used green-gelled Par lights, because we needed a powerful spot to hit him in that gigantic set! Whenever The Grinch was around, I made sure there was a slightly green glow coming from him."
Like Whoville, the cave set was smoked with atmospheric mist, but inside the cave the technique caused some problems. "Controlling atmosphere-smoke is always difficult," Peterman says. "Sometimes the shafts of light would look great, but we couldn’t see beyond them, so we’d have to wait for the smoke to clear a bit. By the end of the first week, I’d learned to smoke the cave very early in the day to give it a chance to settle down."
Perhaps the greatest challenge faced by the filmmakers was the Mount Crumpit set, an unforgiving pile of Styrofoam rock, synthetic crags and plastic boulders that was all but impassable to the camera crew. Key grip Mike Anderson finally conquered Mount Crumpit by using a suspended camera platform he helped design: a Panaflex Platinum on a Libra head was mounted on a Super Technocrane, which swung the camera high over the manmade terrain and put it wherever it needed to be.
Peterman describes another interesting move, a seamless blend of crane and Steadicam: "We put Steadicam operator Greg Smith on a big crane and took him from the ceiling all the way down to the floor, where he just stepped off the platform and walked right into a Whoville marching band. You think this big boom shot is going to end, but the camera just keeps moving right along with the actors. We did a lot of Steadicam and handheld shots because it just took too much time to lay track in those sets. The handheld shots were done with the Panavision Platinum and a 500-foot magazine. The operator on those was Ray de la Motte, who had a very good touch with ’Whoey’ imagery."
Peterman’s lab of choice for The Grinch was CFI, with whom he has collaborated on several major productions. He notes that lab contact Art Tostado and color timer Ron Scott have been invaluable contacts there.
With all of Grinch’s obstacles and strange challenges now behind him, the cinematographer says he will remember the production with great fondness. "It was a happy experience," he says. "The great thing about the lighting was that we could do anything we wanted! Ron stuck pretty close to the pictures in the book for costumes, hair and sets, but not for the lighting or camera angles. Who knows how Whoville is really supposed to be lit on film? We decided that for ourselves."