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FEATURE TOMB RAIDER
set of boats and rafts with lots of gangways wrapped up in blue screen so they could extend Hong Kong into the background. Also for the island sequences we needed the sun as we wanted that innate feeling of heat. But again in Cape Town, although you can’t guarantee sun, they have a pretty good record and I think we hit around 95% success rate for our sun days. There was also a lot of building for this film. If we were in London we would have probably needed five or six stages; in Cape Town we had seven warehouses and built the sets inside like a night-time forest, a sea cliff wall and all the elements of the tomb as well, some of which needed to be built in the day while they shot on another one at night, like the descent down into it.” George is a big fan of prepping as much as possible, which is especially important with so many different elements to a film like Tomb Raider . He had about 12 weeks of preparation time on it which is about average according to George. “I will try and bring my gaffer and key grip into discussion as quickly as possible; I think they had about eight weeks each, and we just take meeting after meeting sorting it all out. We work very closely with the first AD to make sure that the plans are getting voiced WE HAD SEVEN WAREHOUSES AND BUILT THE SETS INSIDE, LIKE A NIGHT-TIME FOREST
TOP On set with both cameras and George’s operators. George was on a permanent comms link with the operators to suggest shots and give feedback without being too annoying.
around the different departments and we try and give ourselves as much wriggle room as possible moving towards the shoot when final decisions are made. The team is vast.” VIDEO GAME ORIGINS We’ve all seen the ‘film of the video game’ type of movies and most of them have been disappointing. The PlayStation video game however for Tom Raider was not an inspiration for this shoot. “For sure, parts of her journey are parts of the video game. The boat sequence for instance is in the video game; the game is kept in mind, but we didn’t shoot a video game. The concept was to
shoot it more real, to basically have everything grounded in physics. So nothing amazingly fantastical is happening and we have this idea of emphasising the emergency of the character, so would go in close with the camera. Everything was mostly handheld. It has this kind of active feeling; it’s what I would call ‘quiet handheld’. It’s not throwing the camera around in some crazy fashion like the Bourne movies do, but it was a considered handheld when we were in close. When the camera was wider it was then we would get it moving on more traditional platforms like dollys, cranes and steadicams. For me it really works and allows you
DEFINITION APRIL 2018
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