SHOOT STORY | THE G I RL I N THE SP I DER ’ S WEB
IMAGES The film is set in Sweden but much of the shoot took place in Berlin.
lenses are f/2.8, so if you compare them to, say, a Master Prime that’s f/1.3, it’s kind of the same depth-of-field... so it wasn’t that much of a drag. Yes, you needed more light because the reality is that the camera is ISO 800 and the lens was f/2.8, and a lot of the things we’re used to doing, when we light with one candle and an LED, we couldn’t do.” Often, though, this wasn’t a big problem. “A lot of stuff we did on stage,” Pedro continues, “where it didn’t matter if you needed a bigger or smaller light, because we had what we needed. When you were outside in the street and there was no control over the street lights and stuff like that, sometimes without any shame we just jumped to the normal Alexa, the mini. Get me the Master Primes! I’m not afraid of mixing cameras.” Pedro estimates that up to 15% of the film was photographed on the Alexa Mini, with Master or Ultra Primes particularly for shots involving drones where the much bulkier Alexa 65 would have been difficult to handle. Establishing shots of the city, which would make good use of the high resolution, were photographed with the Alexa 65 from a helicopter. “It’s counterintuitive,” Pedro concludes. “What I felt with the 65 was that it’s better to use it in small houses and locations because you have a better wide lens without distortion. If you need a 12mm on the normal [Alexa] it looks really weird. It’s beautiful if you know how to use it, but if you’re in some other kind of place it’s difficult to use a 12mm. But the 25mm on the Alexa 65... it’s a very wide lens, though it’s not round, it’s not like you’re looking through the eyepiece in a door. When you’re in a small space it looks great.” WORKFLOW The film was shot in the Alexa 65’s open gate mode, producing a 6.5K raw file that gave digital imaging technician Rodrigo Gomez a lot of data to handle. Pedro used Arri Berlin’s dailies service, which he describes as “flawless, and we provided a lot of material.” Shooting for a 2.39:1 finish meant that most of the spare resolution was
at the top and bottom of the frame, rather than at the sides. “There was a little bit of reframing... most of all top and bottom because the image didn’t have much to the sides.” EFilm’s New York facility finished the film under the supervision of colourist Mitch Paulson, whose huge credit list includes Blade Runner 2049 , Skyfall and parts of the Hunger Games , Maze Runner , and X-Men franchises. “I was in New Orleans shooting,” Pedro recalls. “Fotokem in New Orleans set up a room, and they made friends with EFilm, so I was in a room in New Orleans grading before going to set because I was shooting at night. I had about eight sessions, but I know there were about twenty days of grading.” At the time of writing, Pedro Luque was in New York shooting a pilot for Swamp Thing , based on the DC Comics character, and directed by Len Wiseman. “It’s about this comic book that was created in the seventies that I happened to cross paths with in the eighties, when I was about twelve. When they asked me to shoot the pilot, it’s very dark, and Len asked me personally, so I said ‘of course!’”. Pedro tells of a sound stage containing a swamp set under a “ceiling of Skypanels that you can change in colour and everything – it’s a big one, and it’s difficult to shoot because everything’s in the swamp – wading, or in a boat!” THE SWAMP THING SERIES IS INTENDED TO PREMIERE NEXT YEAR; IN THE MEANTIME, THE GIRL IN THE SPIDER’S WEB IS ON GENERAL RELEASE.
The 25mm on the Alexa 65... it’s a very wide lens, though it’s not round. When you’re in a small space it looks great
24 DEF I N I T ION | DECEMBER 20 1 8
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