Universal Studio’s sci-fi feature film, Oblivion, starring Tom Cruise, presents a post-apocalyptic earth, which would seem to demand heavy visual effects (VFX), and while there are many in the film, there are some surprising sequences that are, in fact, not CG. For two of the primary, futuristic sets — the Sky Tower and the Cloud Tower — cinematographer Claudio Miranda, ASC, and director Joseph Kosinski filmed most of the visual effects live in-camera rather than using green screens. It’s an old-school style that immerses the actors in the actual environment, but not the first instinct of filmmakers when the environment is supposed to be a cloud-surrounded glass-walled apartment 3,000 feet in the air.
Keeping it “Real”
Production Designer Darren Gilford’s stunning futuristic Sky Tower set was built almost entirely of floor to ceiling windows and highly reflective surfaces of gleaming white and chrome. Normally, this would be surrounded by a green screen, with no glass in the windows. All the sky, clouds, and glass reflections would be added by the VFX team in post-production. Miranda and Kosinski instead left all the glass in and surrounded the set with 270° of projected sky and cloudscapes that were shot in-camera. This projection solution even became the primary lighting source for the tower scenes.
Before principal filming began, VFX company Pixomondo went to Haleakala in Hawaii and filmed atop the volcano at 10,000’ for four days around the clock. Pixomondo VFX supervisor Bjørn Mayer and his team used three cameras to capture the skyscapes that would become the surrounding projection imagery on-set. The Sky Tower set was built in Baton Rouge, LA at Celtic Studios. The 270° muslin projection surface allowed Miranda to shoot from any angle he wanted. The entire screen was 594 by 42 feet (WxH) and the muslin was painted after camera tests showed the paint gave Miranda an extra half stop. Since the reflected light of the projection was an illumination source, getting every ounce of light was important.
Projection and Servers
The projection solution itself was provided by Production Resource Group (PRG) and included 11 PRG Mbox Extreme v3 media servers and 21 Barco FLM-HD20 20K projectors. The final blended image resolution was 18,288 by 1,920 pixels and consisted of 62 synched layers of 1080p video. PRG project manager Zach Alexander, the media operator on the film, used a PRG V676 control console to call up the different sunrise, full day, sunset, or night sky content options. “We made full use of the close integration of the V676 console and the Mbox media server,” comments Alexander. “The Media Display on the V676 was a huge advantage for us on this production, and it was a great visual reference while we worked during filming. Claudio [Miranda] or Joe [Kosinski] could point to a clip of sky that they wanted to use for a particular scene, and I could instantly put that clip on the screen.”
Alexander got a number of different looks that he put into the Mboxes. “Pixomondo gave me each look as enough content to fill 120° of the screen,” he recalls. “I then used the Mbox to duplicate the content and extend it to fill the entire 270°. During filming, Claudio would say ‘we like that cloud formation over there and that level of light.’ So I would duplicate that around; modify the color and exposure of the content. Everyone found it impressive that we were able to do a fair amount of adjustments live with the Mboxes.”
Moving Parts
To capture the sky in-camera also meant the thoughtful placement of the projectors, which did not necessarily mean the optimum placement for ease of blending. Alexander describes, “There were a bunch of challenges to it. Normally, if everything was perfect, you would have all of the projectors at a uniform distance from the screen; they would all have the same lens, and you would want to double stack all of your projectors. Due to the challenges and restrictions on the set, almost every one of our projectors had a different lens; we couldn’t double stack any of them; and they were all different distances from the wall. The projectors had to be hidden in the set and then sealed up so you couldn’t hear them, and each had to have their own refrigeration units to cool them. Some of the projectors were facing straight up with mirrors over the lenses to then bounce the projection onto the projection surface.”
He further notes, “Because we were at all different distances, we were at all different percentages of overlap. On top of that, the camera was moving. You could blend two projectors and they could look perfect when you were looking at it dead-on, but then when you were moving off-angle you were going to favor one side or the other, and you would actually see the seam appear. A lot depended on where they put the camera. We did as much as we could in the projector, which is the easiest way to do it, and then I would get in the Mbox to fake it the rest of the way as they moved the camera around.”
To avoid the need to blend four edges, each of the projectors were placed on their side so one HD image stretched from the floor to the ceiling, and Alexander only needed to blend the side edges. “What was really complicated,” points out Alexander, “was addressing the interesting problem that the media servers don’t really know that the other media servers even exist. Which is fine if you put the whole image up and let it sit there, but very early on they said, ‘During filming, we will need for you to move the whole thing 4 feet to the left if it lines up better for our shot.’ The challenge was, each Mbox has two outputs, meaning when we move from one output to the other, it knows when you come off the left screen, you come onto the right screen. The problem is when you get to the next Mbox, it has no idea what the other Mbox is doing. What ends up happening is that you have to not only put up the clip everyone sees on the projector output, but you have to put the clips that are on either side of that, that are essentially bleeding off-screen. So that when you pan, you don’t see a black bar appear as your clip. Each Mbox was doing a lot more work; it was doing all the work to process the stuff being seen and processing the stuff that you weren’t seeing on the off chance they wanted to move the image.”
He used the Mbox for genlock to keep all the playback in sync so they wouldn’t see any flutter. Timecode was set up for playback, and Alexander used one hero Mbox that the other Mboxes synced to. They could have synched the Mbox to the camera, but it wasn’t necessary. Miranda didn’t need to sync the projectors to the camera, as he was able to pick a frame rate on the Sony F65, which has a physical shutter and worked amazingly well with the projectors. Alexander worked closely during the shoot with Miranda and with Alex Carr, the digital imaging technician (DIT), who dealt with the cameras and the networking of the cameras. For the smaller Cloud Tower set, a separate but similar projection system was used that included a PRG V476 control console, two Mbox media servers and six Barco 20K projectors.
Supplemental Lighting
Lighting programmer Philip Galler was the board operator on the film who controlled some of the additional lighting and lighting effects. Though Miranda handled an incredible 95 percent of the Sky Tower set illumination using the reflected light from the projected imagery, he did have some supplemental lighting. There were LEDs throughout the set and arrays of Kino Flo fixtures with warm 3,200K lamps for interiors and cool 5,600K lamps to support the sky lighting. A total of 51 Kino Flo fixtures were used, with half above the set and half below.
Cruise’s character flies a fighter jet-style spaceship referred to by the crew as the Bubble Ship. The fully built ship helped to create as much realism as possible in-camera when parked on-set. For the flight sequences, it was mounted on a gimbal to simulate motion and shot in front of a green screen. Galler controlled lighting panels around the ship to create the reflected clouds on its canopy. “It was a very interesting set to light,” says Galler. “We created three large 40 by 40 foot arrays — two side array panels that each held 60 ColorBlast iWhite fixtures and a panel above with 40 iWhites. I then pixelmapped them with a ChamSys MagicQ console, using its media server. I could run low-res media through the lights to give the impression of the clouds shifting on the ship’s surface as it flew. We used wireless DMX to control the LED arrays and also tied into the triggers for the Bubble Ship’s guns to get real-time feedback for the gunfire reflections.”
To create shafts of sunlight on the ship, and the Cloud Tower set, four PRG Bad Boy spot luminaires were mounted on condor cranes. The cranes made it easy for the crew to adjust the direction of the sun. For one particular effect shot, the Bad Boys created a tunnel of light that the Bubble ship moves through as it flies into the mother ship.
Pushing the Boundaries
The choice to use projection to shoot so much in-camera was a bold one, but it offered the realistic environment the filmmakers wanted and created a lighting source that Miranda used masterfully. Of course, Miranda is no stranger to pushing the boundaries of cinematography — he won the Academy Award for his work on Life of Pi. He was nominated for an Oscar after filming the first all-digital feature The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. And Oblivion marked the first major motion picture to be shot on the Sony F65 camera. In an interview with Jon Fauer, ASC for Film & Digital Times, Miranda discussed his love of using actual elements as his primary lighting source, lighting from “real sources,” and letting the actors have “real interaction” with visual elements. He noted that he “really lit it by the projection mostly. I think the projection was doing 95 percent — that was cool.”
Miranda also noted the magical feeling of manipulating clouds, sunrises, and other projected visuals to create the illusion of a glass-walled apartment in the sky, and the ability to use the projected visuals for strategic lighting effects as well. He also credited PRG and Brian Edwards for looking after the projectors and media servers. “The background was real-time,” he said, in the F&DT article. “That is what’s unique about this job — it’s totally in camera, which is very unusual. It was a big deal. We planned this for months in advance and I was drawing and sketching it out. But it was so worth it in the end.”
Production Team
Director: Joseph Kosinski
Cinematographer: Claudio Miranda, ASC
Production Designer: Darren Gilford
Digital Imaging Technician: Alex Carr
Camera Operator: Lucas Bielan
First Asst./A Camera: Jonas Steadman
Gaffer: Chris Strong
Key Grip: Michael Coo
PRG Project Manager/Media Operator: Zach Alexander
PRG Console Programmer: Philip Galler
Lead Projectionist: William Dobbs
Co-Producer/Visual Effects Producer: Steve Gaub
VFX Supervisor, Digital Domain: Eric Barba
VFX Supervisor, Pixomondo: Bjørn Mayer
Sky Tower/Cloud Tower Projection Gear
Supplied by PRG
1 PRG V676 Console
21 Barco FLM-HD20 20K Projectors
11 PRG Mbox Extreme v3 servers
Sky Tower, Cloud Tower, Bubble Ship Lighting Gear
Supplied by PRG
4 ChamSys MQ100 Consoles
4 PRG Bad Boy Spot Luminaires
120 Color Kinetics ColorBlast iW LEDs
Supplied by Film Fixtures Department
400 Litegear LED Strips (in Sky Tower)
