DEFINITION April 2018

FEATURE TOMB RAIDER

ACTION PLAN Hugely experienced camera operator and now action movie DOP George Richmond explains the plans behind achieving the shots

WORDS JULIAN MITCHELL PICTURES WARNER BROS

he reboot of Tomb Raider is upon us, this time with Oscar winning actress Alicia Vikander taking the lead role of Lara Croft. She has impressively bulked up for the part and the movie production has done the same with Kingsman DOP George Richmond shooting. We weren’t able to see the movie before talking with George but the trailer serves up an action treat with some heroic and death defying sequences on a huge canvas. We asked George: what was the secret of shooting such a huge action film? “The movie appealed to me because it was a fresh start to the franchise and it wasn’t repeating what had come before; it was a new approach,” he says. “I wouldn’t call the movie an action movie: it’s an adventure movie. It’s very much a journey of a central character to find her father. At the start of the movie you have to get everybody settled on the concept of the movie, so everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet. For example, there is the endurance boat sequence near the beginning. There’s lots of VFX involved, lots of practical effects involved. We surrounded it with water cannons, rain effects, lightning effects, effects going on the silk in the roof to give you an ambient light, all to fake this huge storm that’s going over. put a huge boat, 16m or bigger, on a hydraulic gimbal and then

“There’s a lot danger to the camera crew and the cast with something like this, a lot of moving parts. That sequence in particular was heavily previs’d, we worked on it all through prep and right up until we started shooting. It was broken down on a shot-by-shot basis. I’m not saying that the previs is stuck to religiously, but you use it as a base to make sure that every morning when you start you know what section you’re going to shoot. Overnight you’ve got the special effects crews preparing where the water cannons are for the first few shot; all that kind of stuff. “A sequence like that, because of the dangers involved and because it’s quite precise, needs massive preparation. But then you get into other sequences, like a scene where we need to have Lara under fire all the time. For that, while we have an idea of what we’re doing, we can settle on the fact that we can get this kind of thing done in about four days. Because again there are many moving parts but in a different way. For a lot of that stuff we leave ourselves the option to adjust and play with it while we’re actually doing it. For exterior shots it allows me to assess the weather and how the sun is working, what the clouds are doing... We can make some snap judgements to keep continuity for the light, for example.” CAPE TOWN Tomb Raider was shot mostly in South Africa. There was a sequence supposed to be Edinburgh harbour in Hong Kong where they built a 90x60m, one-metre-deep tank set. “To do something like that anywhere else in the world is complex,” says George. “We built it at Cape Town Film Studios where they have the space, where we’re allowed to do it and the construction is a little bit cheaper than elsewhere in the world. We shipped in a four-point wirecam to hang a wire over this enormous

THE MOVIE APPEALED TO ME BECAUSE IT WAS A FRESH START TO THE FRANCHISE

DEFINITION APRIL 2018

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