TECH IMMERSIVE
YOU CAN’T FILM MACRO IN 180° 3D LIVE ACTION. THAT WAS the gauntlet they threw down ”
conversation about how you’re going to make the audience feel they’re in with the bugs. When we put the headset in and watched our rushes, we felt like we were there with the animals, the same size as the animals. We filmed a scorpion – that does provoke some reactions, but you can’t help but be overwhelmed by the beauty and the sculptural quality.” Special technology, though, demands special techniques. “You’re losing a stop because of the beam splitter,” Parks points out, “and we wanted to feel like you were in that world – not only did your creature need to be in focus, but
whatever was between you and the creature also needed to be in focus.” As such, Hollingworth faced a need for “a lot of light. If you’re not using the sun, your light has to be painted out. The studio stuff we shot in the round, so to speak. We built a 200º set and I put some circular truss in and we had a 220º backdrop hanging from the truss. We then lit and, by virtue of it being circular, your distance to the centre of the circle is always the same. From a lighting point of view, it’s not that tricky. Your lights are all at the same distance. And from a camera point of view, you’re always looking at a backlight.”
“We had animal trainer Mark Amey wrangling,” Hollingworth says. “We had owls, hedgehogs, starlings… we had bumblebees – we also built an underground set. The art director, Jamie Andrews, built a burrow to which we would then introduce some bees. The massive problem was getting the amount of light into a tiny set. The main set we lit quite economically. “We used a lot of Aputure Novas, the XT26 – but lighting was really quite easy once it was rigged. Once all the lights were up on the rig, we could control them on a desk remotely, and we were able to be quite creative quite quickly. I’ve
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