Page 29 - Fujifilm Exposure_26 Jack Cardiff BSC_ok

THE DP VIEW
T DOMINIC CLEMENCE here’s a scene in the film
that’s set in the Caribbean, although it was actually filmed in a hotel at Heathrow. There was a large covered atrium
with a swimming pool and a bar area with various palm trees around it.
We were using the F-250 daylight stock and I knew we had to try and get a really strong key light in there. We worked with a series of 18ks behind half silks.
We were restricted with the size of lights we could use, although we could run our own power in, but we only had a half day pre-rig time in the hotel. We had to hire the hotel for that period so there was a budgetary implication.
Basically I tried to get as much strong key in there as possible, from one particular corner. And then we used a number of helium balloons with HMI in, to just bring up the ambient levels and the feeling of a lot of brightness.
The rest was down to art direction, hiding the fabric of the hotel. I sup- pose it was about a half stop over exposed, and really in post production it was a question of saturating the colours and bringing up the contrasts.
Filmmaking is about illusion, why should it be any different creating the Caribbean in a hotel in London than it is creating a hospital out of a derelict site? It’s all part of that illusion, creating a believable reality out of a fiction. ■
Photos main: John Hannah and above, with co-stars on set of Amnesia
Fuji Motion Picture And Professional Video • Exposure • 27