Quick factual recap for A1 course work- PRODUCTION TECHNOLOGIES
Films are greatly impacted on budget
- Warner Bros: wonder Woman $150 million, Aquaman $160 million, Wonder woman 1984 $200 million
- Belstone pictures: Tank 432 £150k, Tucked £49k
Production technologies:
Cameras/ storage
Lights
Green screens
Motion capture
CHI graphics and animation
Other editing
Cameras:
- Belstone pictures used the Arri Alexa camera (cost £13,000 pounds to hire), a top-of-the-line digital camera used for high end budget movies and adverts.
- They also used a Zeiss Super Speed MKIII T1.3 lens set. A £350 daily hiring fee lens that is very expensive to hire for a low budget company and is a wide-angle lens that is used to create a claustrophobic atmosphere in the tank.
- Because the Arri Alexa is digital, it stores all of the video footage on a memory card, which is a low-cost option than film reel. Using a digital camera also means you can use a higher shooting ratio because you can shoot and store more footage digitally in a cheap way, meaning you can try multiple angles for each scene at a low extra cost.
- Some positive impacts of production of using digital cameras are that they are quite light and more portable, so they are easier to use in handheld shots and to film inside the tank as well as saving lots of money as its not as expensive as 35mm film. Another advantage of using this digital camera is that the camera doesn’t require a large crew to operate.
- Some disadvantages of digital footage are that the audience can tell the difference between the grit of digital and reel film footage. The footage doesn’t look as nice and sometimes the image quality can drop depending on the quality of lighting.
- Due to Belstone low budget, they shot 10-12 pages of the script everyday rather than the normal feature film of 1-2 pages of script a day. This meant they were rushed in the shooting timetable for Tank 432 and couldn’t afford to make mistakes using expensive film reel.
- Warner bros used the Panavision millennium XL2- main camera when filming Wonder Woman. It’s a 35mm film reel camera and costs over £1000 a day to hire. This is a high budget piece of equipment that they hired for aprox 7 months (£200,000 in total)
- They also used a set of Panavision Primo Spherical Lenses (usually come in a set of nine) and cost aprox £3000 a week to hire (£85,000 on lenses in total)
- Film stock- Kodak 5219. Aprox £900 per 1000ft. 10 minutes of filming time before the canister needs to be changed. For wonder woman, they spent about £126,000 thousand on a film stock alone.
- Processing and developing film reel and cost between £15,000 and £50,000 depending on which type of film you used. This requires special equipment and personnel
- Shooting on 35 or 75mm film requires very heavy and difficult to operate cameras which means they require more equipment to use e.g. tracks and cranes as well as a more expensive and professional crew. However, using film reel makes the image look a lot nicer and professional.
- Warner Bros also hired an Arri 435- slow motion camera. It costs £200 a day to hire and can shoot up to 150 frames per second which is useful for the battle scenes.
CGI and special effects:
- Motion capture/ CGI was used in all the Wonder Woman featured films
- It was used to create a number of stunt sequences and action sequences which would have been physically impossible to film
- This technology can help to make a high concept film more exciting and dramatic, which makes it feel more ‘high budget’. (high concept- bigger audiences)
- CGI was even used in green screening to create backdrops for images such as explosions or mountain cliffs
- One particularly interesting moment of Wonder Woman where they used CGI was the beach battle scene when a group of Amazonians jumped from a cliff with rope and swung down. They used CGI to create these very realistic women and the cliff they swung down from.
- Nearing the end of the Wonder Woman production, Warner bros decided to reshoot some scenes when Gal Gadot was 5 months pregnant. They wrapped green cloth around her stomach and digitally removed/ flattened parts of her stomach to make it look like she wasn’t pregnant.
- Patty Jenkins, the director of Wonder Woman, decided they should film as much of the film’s stunts and action ‘in camera’ as possible (without CGI). They hired real athletes and trained them how to fight to create real warriors instead of using CGI to make muscle definition or fight scenes.
- There were aprox 1800 shots of CGI in Wonder Woman. To do this, they hired hundreds of staff to and companies to complete the editing. In total, it took 9 months to just do the special effects for the films. (aprox 1200 crew members to work on visual effects)
- Tank 432 had minimal special effects as it is hard to make convincing images with such a low budget.
They had 1 man (Tom Longmore) to edit the film’s effects and used Adobe Premiere, who edited the film on his home computer.
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