Creating and photographing the ice storm itself required another battery of tests. Fortunately, some preproduction planning paid off, adding a degree of chilly authenticity to the sequence. Recalls Schamus, "We did some second-unit work on the storm long before the main shoot began. Hoping it would be below freezing, we drove up through Connecticut at night with a bunch of hoses and a water truck that we used to wet down streets and trees to get ice. On one of those nights, we actually encountered the only real ice storm to hit that area in 30 years. We got some terrific footage of the real thing. However, it soon turned into a snowstorm, and we couldn't use most of what we filmed. We digitally removed the snow from the ground in a few shots, and about five of those are in the finished film."
The second unit's success in getting real ice footage increased the pressure on Elmes to create a credible facsimile. His research began in earnest. "As part of our camera tests, we took tree branches, wet them down, threw them in the freezer, and then photographed them in big close-ups," the cameraman details. "We then shot samples of artificial ice and compared them. We found that transparent hair gel works very well when sprayed on roads and other surfaces. It also has a nice, friendly aroma."
While backlighting may seem to be the obvious approach to illuminating ice, Elmes' experimentation led him in other directions as well. "Ice is both transparent and translucent," he offers. "It acts as a lens in that it captures detail and light behind it, but it has a reflective surface as well. We looked at hard and soft light, because the ice appears in both the evening and day scenes. Also, there's a moment when the storm stops, the sky is clear, and we explore this crystal wonderland. Everything is glassy you can slide on the ice covering the roads; we see this magical quality through the eyes of Mikey Carver.
"The sense of 'coolness' in those scenes was something Ang and I discussed quite a bit as we tried to define what the ice storm meant, and how we could capture that feeling on film. It wasn't just a matter of 'make it blue and therefore it will feel like ice.' I would find samples of colors in paintings to show to Ang an attempt to define a way of doing it without going over the top or becoming cliché. I don't like the idea that blue light equals night, so we tried to find a more subtle approach, especially since the second half of the film primarily takes place at night. Defining this coolness was also important in how it would contrast with the warmer settings we were cutting to. This is a character-driven film, and anything too strong would have overwhelmed that."
Lee elaborates, "Like Fred, I don't agree with the idea that blue equals 'night.' It's just an easy way out. We therefore tried to make our nights colorless, actually reducing any blues created or suggested by any lack of exposure. Part of this came through in the lighting, as we used reflections to suggest more light than is actually there."
Elmes explains, "We created the coolness with a combination of the lighting, the gels I used on the fixtures and the color timing, and DuArt and Technicolor were very supportive of that. Through the tests we did, we found two sets of timing lights, one for day interior and day exterior, and the other for night shooting. This allowed me to change the color of the lighting on the set in order to make adjustments. We did our best to lock these timing lights in place early on, which sometimes meant reprinting something once or twice to find out how the lab was developing each stock, and ascertaining the proper ASA rating for the stock, lenses and my meters. From there, I could show Ang a print that was representative of what I wanted.
"Knowing that the timer has read the script, and that he or she knows what we're trying to do with the story, is a key part of this for me," he adds. "That way, if I can point out a specific scene, the timer will understand the parameters. The timer is a part of the visual team. For dailies, the people who watched over me at DuArt were Don Donigi and Steve Blakely. In Los Angeles, the timing at Technicolor was done by Gloria Kaiser, who did a fabulous job."
Elmes used Kodak's 200 ASA 5293 for the bulk of the film, on both night interiors and day interiors, "because it's a very sharp film and has a good contrast range. For the night exteriors, given our relatively modest budget, we needed the 500T Vision stock, which intercuts well with the 93. We occasionally used 5248 for exteriors because it has a bit more contrast and helped us to capture the photo-realistic look on sunny days.
"For me, the EI rating of a given stock is different on each film," he maintains. "Kodak says that 5293 is 200 ASA and an f2.8 equals 50 footcandles. That may or may not have been the case on The Ice Storm, while we were processing at DuArt and shooting with these cameras and lenses. The film speed changes with the look of each film, depending on what I'm photographing. I'll do tests, send it to the lab, ask them to make their best print, screen it, and then decide how to rate it."
Production on The Ice Storm wrapped after several weeks of stage work in New York. Pointing out that the characters sport winter costumes throughout the film, Schamus notes, "We built several interior sets at the Harlem Armory. By the time we got there in June, it was really hot."
Elmes has reservations about calling the Harlem Armory a "soundstage." The facility's lack of lighting gridwork proved especially troublesome. "We had to bring in a truss grid and fly all the pipes ourselves before we could even begin to light the film," he says. "Another problem was that the space had a tin roof. The noise was very bad whenever it rained. However, not having a real stage is not the end of the world, and a lot of films shot in Los Angeles are now done in warehouses."
Looking back on the project, the cinematographer says, "The Seventies as a period lends itself to a certain garishness, and were conscious not to make the film a Seventies showpiece. But I love doing period films, because they give me license to create a different reality and see things through different eyes."
