Lubezki and Cuarón Tests the Limits of Filmmaking Technology on Gravity
For Gravity, his latest feature film, director Alfonso Cuarón imagined how it might feel to be stuck in space without a spaceship, slowly running out of oxygen, dodging debris. His former film school chum and longtime collaborator Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki, ASC, AMC says that the idea appealed to Cuarón in part because of its elemental nature.
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The irony, of course, is that Gravity became one of the most technically demanding projects ever attempted, and another example of innovative filmmaking from the team of Cuarón and Lubezki, whose previous credits include Children of Men, Great Expecations and Y tu Mamá Tambien. A wide range of technique was considered and tested, including underwater tanks, mirrors, green screen, robot-controlled moving lights, wire rigs and the “vomit comet,” which involves shooting in a jumbo jet that creates zero-G conditions by plunging earthward for a few seconds.
“The Cage” (a lightbox fitted with 196 2’X2’ LED Panels fitted with 4096 bulbs) was not the only high tech equipment on the project. Framestore developed software that helped balance the LED light for digital cameras, for example. “Almost every piece of equipment that we used to do the movie was either custom-made for the movie or was just coming out on the market and in beta testing,” says Lubezki. “Every minute, we were testing and trying new things. It’s exciting, but very scary because if something breaks, suddenly you have to stop production. Six months earlier, we could not have done this movie the way we did it. We could not have done it without the special robotic camera mount that was built for us, Framestore, the Master Prime lenses, or the Codex recorders.”
Lubezki credits the Codex Recorders used on the film as one of those indispensable tools that made the movie possible. “There was no other way of getting the data that we needed from the cameras,” he says. “No other camera had the latitude and quality of the ALEXA, and there was no way of extracting that aside from Codex. The amount of information and the quality of the information is far superior. It helped immensely.”
Digilab, a sister company to Codex, was also on hand to handle all the data and apply LUTs according to Lubezki’s specifications. Digilab helped Lubezki design dozens of LUTs for various situations, and about 20 were used for the majority of the film. Digilab also set up a near-set screening room, and the Codex Vault was used for on-set data wrangling.
The additional data gathered by the ALEXA-ARRIRAW-CODEX workflow came in handy for the extensive CG and visual effects work. Lubezki calls Webber his closest collaborator on the film aside from Cuarón.
“ARRIRAW was really important to what we were able to do,” says Webber. “It gave us flexibility and quality. For so much of the movie, we were just filming faces, and everything else was going to be CG. That meant we had to do an awful lot of manipulation of what was filmed. When you’re filming it, you don’t have the whole environment, so you’re kind of filming with the best guess of what you need to do. You’re going to need to manipulate it a fair amount later, and the ARRIRAW enabled us to do that.
The above article is a partial repost, the original article can be found here