PRODUCTION BEDLAM
lens change would have become a 20-minute re-rig.” DRAWING THE FRAME From the outset, Butler and director Jon Shaikh were clear that Bedlam was a widescreen film. “We are both suckers for scope,” Butler says. “So the delivery was always going to be 2.39:1. That was non negotiable. The question was how we would capture and crop to get there, how much we would throw away and how much safety we’d need if we had to reframe.” Butler used a simple online aspect ratio calculator, inputting capture and delivery resolutions, the squeeze factor and the target aspect ratio to get a visual of what the sensor saw versus what would make it to the screen. “It showed you the exact band you were keeping, what you were losing left and right side and what scaling factor you were applying,” he explains. “That was useful to know, but creatively I do not like thinking, ‘It’s fine, we will crop it later.’ For me, the frame is the frame. If Jon and I both liked what we saw in that 2.39 box on the monitor, that was the shot. I did not want to be watching playback thinking in percentages.” The safety area around that box did get used, but only sparingly and deliberately. “On stunt days, we were dropping guys on their backs over and WE ARE BOTH suckers for scope, SO THE DELIVERY WAS ALWAYS GOING TO BE 2.39:1 ”
over,” Butler says. “If the boom sneaks in three times in a row and everyone is aching, you have to ask yourself if you really want to make the stunt performer do it a fourth time or if you can fix it. Sometimes a tiny rescale is kinder and completely invisible.” That attitude also fed into how the team managed exposure on the darkest material. “Dark scenes were purposely overexposed by one stop so that the shadows remained detailed and dense when the image was pulled in post.” FIRELIGHT FLICKERING IN THE LAST CIRCLE OF HELL If the format choice gave Bedlam scale, the lighting strategy gave it teeth. Butler tended to start from the existing light in a space, even when that ‘existing’ light was entirely constructed. “I was usually looking at the room thinking, if this really existed in this period, where would light be coming from?” he says. “How does it sit naturally? Then you augment that.” For Bedlam , he and Jon broke the asylum into three distinct strata. At the top, there was the gallery level, the part open to fee-paying members of the public, which was relatively clean and presentable. Below that were Jack’s cell and the women’s ward, which were essentially single-source environments with a narrow window or a candle. Deeper still lay the criminal ward.
“That was the last ring of hell,” Butler describes. “No daylight, no windows, nothing. The only thing penetrating that space was fire.” They could have faked it with LED units, fire effects, banks of bulbs on tinfoil and all the usual tricks, but in practice, the sets and schedule made it easier and better to go as real as possible. “In those criminal ward sets, there was nowhere sensible to rig large fixtures,” Butler says. “You were in these stone tunnels. Everything was low and cramped. We ended up relying heavily on handheld torches and fire pits for the main effect, then sneaking Astera tubes in just to give us a whisper on faces.” A scene with Jack and Sarah cowered inside a pitch-black cell, while the ‘beast’ tore through guards in the corridor, tested limits. The only light on the actors was what spilled past the door as bodies and flames crossed the frame. “We shot most of that at around ISO 1250,” Butler comments. “On the monitors it was right down at the bottom of what you could see. I remember going to Mark and saying, ‘I think I might have completely messed this up.’” Kozlowski’s first line of defence was always on-set monitoring and scopes. “You look at it with the LUT on, you look at the histogram, the waveform and you ask if there is actually something there or if you are kidding yourself,” he says. “In
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