DRAMA | CATS
IMAGES From the first trailer, Cats’ digital fur capture was a talking point
really notice when you jump to large format is that the wide end is where the large format bonus comes. When you talk about using a 21mm or 28mm, those lenses in the Alexa 65 world have the same angle of view as a 12mm on a 35mm format camera, but without any of the linear distortion.” Even though the sets were big, the team wanted to make the sets feel even larger in relation to the cats and, as a result, Ross tended to stay at the wider end of the focal lengths. But one of the things he was very wary of, and one of the reasons the team did so many tests was that, once you begin to distort perspective, you start to lose the scaling. “The viewer feels like the horizontal and vertical lines are converging in an unnatural way,” explains Ross. “You realise that your centres are being lied to, you don’t see building as bigger, you end up using the humans as your scale reference. So you see humans in an oversized set, rather than ‘this is a living room, and look how small the cats look!’ It’s a fine line between those two perceptions and it was always important to stay on the second perception. He continues: “We’d typically use the 28mm to 45mm range – pretty much every close-up in the film is shot on either a 35mm or a 45mm. However (this is where there’s a bit of discrepancy in the world of large format), once you get to 28mm, it starts getting a little disappointing below that. So we ended up with a Prime DNA 28mm and then a Signature Prime 21mm and also a Sigma 16mm and then a Prime DNA 12mm.
One thing you really notice with large format is that the wide end is where the bonus is
The wide end is always a bit of a mixture, because those focal lengths are so hard to make cover the large format. We only used the DNA 12mm on about four occasions, mostly for the Rum Tum Tugger scene, because it needed to feel like a Missy Elliott music video. It was also one of our smaller oversized locations, so in order to give it grand scale, we also found ourselves on the widest end of the lenses. He adds: “Also, once you go above 80mm, at least in terms of a character close-up, there’s little difference between a 110mm on the Alexa 65 and a 65mm on a regular 35mm camera; the perspective you’re seeing is roughly the same.” CAMERA SET-UPS The cast, especially the dancers, were on an eleven-hour shift, so it was imperative that as much of the dance was captured
by Ross’s team as possible. “We shot with three cameras all the time to achieve the live vocal scenario and to get as much of the dance as possible. A typical set-up with the cameras would be a 28mm, a 45mm and a 65mm on the three cameras. Ollie [Oliver Loncraine] who was on the C camera would often find himself at 90° to Iain [MacKay] and I, sometimes going as high as the 110mm, but normally somewhere wider.” Ross shot 12-hour days every day and the dancers did 11-hour days, with an hour warm-up. “We’d still run the routines many times, but we’d run a routine, reassess, watch back maybe for ten minutes and then run it again. So we were still probably doing on the big numbers, four or five takes an hour of running a two-minute routine. It was like dancing boot camp, but very exciting.” LIGHTING PERSPECTIVE The lighting of the movie within the huge sets with the story mostly told at night was a major undertaking for Ross. “Lighting on that scale was probably the hardest thing we had to do. Working out where to place cameras was a fairly straightforward procedure, but lighting at that scale was difficult. For instance, Frankie, the prima ballerina, in three seconds can take four steps and those four steps can cover 45ft of a set and so what you’re trying to do is light that 45ft from a distance of 60ft away, so you can give the dancers the floor. “That’s the biggest challenge, how do you cosmetically deal with lighting over
24 DEF I N I T ION | JANUARY 2020
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