18
SHOOT STORY ISLE OF DOGS
colour true and they hold their colour while dimmed. They ’ re very useful for eyelights... they have so little dimension.” The use of large 10K and 12K fresnels on miniature sets might seem surprising, especially given the option to use long exposures to maintain the required depth of field. The reality, though, is that a convincing exterior light can require upscale resources. “Although a 2K would cover the area, it wouldn ’ t look like daylight,” Oliver feels. “A big old bugeye 10K keeps the shadows together. It ’ s a natural looking light because the source is very big... you get something that looks like there ’ s a bit of atmos haze in there. Our exteriors are super simple, they ’ re one big source, usually catching that on polyboard, maybe a butterfly over the top with some fill in it so it looks like natural daylight.” Any stop-motion scene requiring a camera move must use motion control and, as Oliver says, “the purchase of motion control rigs is a very expensive thing, so I went to a guy called Justin Pentecost. Between us, we designed a set of modular components – tracker beds, pan and tilt heads, risers, various sizes and lengths which could be bolted together... which would get me more or less any move I wanted.” In conjunction with this custom- made hardware, the production used Mantis motion control software, THE 1DX CAMERAS WERE EACH TETHERED TO WORKSTATIONS RUNNING DRAGONFRAME
mainly obtained through Grays of Westminster, who Oliver is quick to credit for their excellent service. “I give him a list of 150 lenses, he says ‘ I can get 75% of this now, the rest in two weeks. ’ Who wouldn ’ t take that level of service?” The 1Dx cameras were each tethered to workstations running DragonFrame, a piece of software specifically designed for stop-motion work. As well as managing the raw frames shot by each camera, DragonFrame provides replay of frames shot to date as well as frame- by-frame control of lighting cues and camera motion, plus a guide to lip sync for any dialogue in the scene. “The camera goes into that,” continues Oliver. “When a frame is taken, it captures a raw and then it makes from that raw a JPEG with a LUT. That LUT has to work through our entire pipeline. It has to work on the studio floor where we use Eizo calibrated monitors, it has to work in our projection theatre, in our VFX environment and it gives us a pretty good first look when we take the material into our grade.” Control of the colour pipeline, Oliver feels, is crucial. “We know what we ’ re getting all the way down the line. We don ’ t have that horrifying experience of getting
collaborating with its developer in order to improve and expand its capabilities. NIKON PRIME LENSES Isle of Dogs was shot on Nikon stills prime lenses, which were the only practical way to supply the production ’ s 50 simultaneous shooting stages. It also fulfilled the need for a lens which would not suffer the problems of modern electronic lenses intended for stills use with autofocus. “We want full manual control over the lens,” says Oliver. “We don ’ t want the camera trying to talk to the lens... [Nikon lenses] are a lot more stable for focus pulling because they ’ re not full of little motors.” Lenses were
IMAGES Stills from Isle Of Dogs . In cinemas this month.
DEFINITION APRIL 2018
DEFINITIONMAGAZINE.COM
Powered by FlippingBook