FRANKENSTEIN PRODUCTION
THE doctor’s
house alone WAS SHOT IN AROUND five or six locations ”
the filter behind the lens and that burns the highlight out beautifully. If you put a diffusion filter in front of the lens you get a filter flare instead of a lens flare, which makes a big difference. Our lenses were 24mm and you can get really nice close-ups with that. It’s not a super wide angle because the sensor is big, but it is a beautiful lens as it doesn’t distort and has a wonderful depth-of-field fall-off in the close-ups.” Laustsen is particularly proud of the scene when the creature sees the sun for the first time after Frankenstein opens his bedroom’s blinds. “That’s a very romantic scene with lots of flare and light coming through the window,” he explains. “There were lots of times when we shot directly into lights like that.” To capture the underwater sequences, Laustsen relied on an age-old theatre trick that he’d previously used in The Shape of Water . “You fill a stage with lots of smoke,” he says. “Then you have a film projector hanging and shooting straight down with a gobo that makes it look like there’s water moving around. There’s no water there at all, it’s 100% smoke with light moving around. On top of that, you have a small wind machine in order to make the characters’ clothes move a little and you are shooting high speed. We fell in love with it during The Shape of Water . It does look a little artificial but somehow also real. And the actors aren’t restricted because there’s no water: it’s an old gag from the theatres.”
If, for example, our costume designer Kate Hawley is making a green dress and I’m lighting it with red, then it’s going to 100% change. We tried to be very specific about the colour palette for each scene, but I don’t do a LUT.” OLD TRICKS Laustsen opted to shoot the entire film on ARRI ALEXA 65, accompanied with Leitz THALIA 65 lenses. “For the last few years, we’ve shot ALEXA 65 on remote heads and then LF on the Steadicam. We used 95% of the sensor, so we had 5% crop for the visual effects. I really love the ALEXA 65 because I like the big sensor combined with the tighter lenses, but sometimes it gets a little too sharp.” To resolve this, Laustsen shot with a diffusion filter inside the camera. “I had
A LOYAL CUSTOMER Laustsen used an ARRI ALEXA 65 for all 105 days of the shoot
The shoot lasted around a staggering 105 days. “We shot in Toronto for a very long period of time, then Guillermo and I went to London to do some of the lab scenes, which was a more miniature shoot. We then went to Scotland with another team as well. Frankenstein’s house consisted of five or six different locations and that was a challenge to keep the same feeling and colours going from one frame to another to make it look like it’s all the same location.” Laustsen enjoyed reuniting with del Toro. “It’s like coming back to your brother,” he concludes. “This was a very visual story and although I like to be in the studio controlling everything, the locations on this film were fantastic. You just cannot build those locations. Guillermo has been dreaming of making this film his whole life, so it felt like I was doing something very special.”
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DEFINITIONMAGS
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