In the 1920s, a 13-year-old boy of Norwegian extraction was sent to an elite English boarding school. He was horrified by the tyrannical cruelty of adolescent prefects and adult teachers alike. “I was appalled,” he wrote many years later, “by the fact that masters and senior boys were allowed literally to wound other boys, and sometimes quite severely. I never got over it.” The only bright spot he found in the gloomy world of the British “public school” was the nearby Cadbury factory, which occasionally enrolled the schoolboys to test new chocolate bars.
The schoolboy, Roald Dahl, grew up to become a writer of children’s books, and his teenaged fantasies about working in a Cadbury laboratory, and the possible cruelty of children and adults, inspired Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, first published in 1964. The book’s blend of dark fantasy and quirky humor has enthralled young readers for decades, and it spawned a popular film adaptation in 1971, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
This
month will see the release of a new adaptation of the book, Charlie
and the Chocolate Factory,
directed by Tim Burton and shot by Philippe Rousselot, ASC, AFC.
Burton’s work ranges widely from the violent comedy of Mars
Attacks! to
the fairytale fantasy of Edward
Scissorhands,
and Rousselot notes that “the encounter between Dahl and
Burton is
pretty exceptional, a very good marriage. Tim wanted to be very close
to the spirit of Dahl; he didn’t want to make a nice film for
kids.
Dahl is very ironic about childhood and the world of adults, and Tim
wanted to preserve that. He wanted to make a film for children that
is not childish.”
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is Rousselot’s third picture with Burton, after Big Fish and Planet of the Apes (see AC, Aug. ’01). The French cinematographer is renowned for the elegant, sophisticated lighting he has brought to films that include French avant-garde projects and Hollywood fantasies. His credits include Constantine (AC, April ’05), Antwone Fisher, The People vs. Larry Flynt, Merci la vie, Too Beautiful for Youand The Emerald Forest. Rousselot earned Academy Award nominations for Henry & June (AC, May ’91) and Hope and Glory, and he won the Oscar for A River Runs Through It (AC, June ’93). He has garnered three ASC Award nominations, for Dangerous Liaisons (AC, May ’89), The Bear and A River Runs Through It.
Charlie
and the Chocolate Factory recounts
the story of Charlie, a poor, good-hearted boy who lives in the
shadow of Willy Wonka’s impressive chocolate factory.
Isolated from
his own family, Wonka launches a worldwide contest to select an heir
to his candy empire. Five lucky children, including Charlie, draw
golden tickets from Wonka chocolate bars and win a guided tour of the
candy-making facility, which no outsider has seen in 15 years. Each
child brings a parent, and the group is guided by Wonka through an
amazing series of giant rooms in the mysterious factory. The
chocolatier’s workers are short, impish beings called Oompa
Loompas, who punctuate the many twists and turns of the tour with
music and dance.
The production built a variety of dazzling sets onstage at Pinewood Studios in England. Rousselot spent eight weeks in preproduction at Pinewood and recalls that much of the communication with Burton was indirect. “Tim and I spoke very little. He is not someone who likes to talk a lot — he gives you a few key words. He said, for example, ‘Everything that is candies and sweets has to look very appetizing.’ In a way, that sufficed, because once I understood that, I knew how to proceed, or at least what I needed to discover.
Obviously,
Tim is very visual,” he continues. “He and the
production
designer, Alex McDowell, gave me an enormous amount of visual
information in the form of drawings and other images. The walls of my
office in Pinewood were covered by colored images of the characters
and the sets in different versions and formats. From time to time,
we’d look at them with Tim and he’d indicate which
looks he
preferred, and we spoke very precisely about technical issues. I
started to feel a little guilty — I thought, ‘Here
I am,
preparing a very big film but having very few conversations with the
director.’ But then I realized we’d already made
two films
together, and if I didn’t know what Tim wanted, it meant that
I
hadn’t understood anything. So, in fact, there was no need to
have
exhaustive conversations.”
As
he worked on the lighting design, Rousselot often felt he was in
uncharted territory. “I couldn’t start looking for
images to
inspire me — nothing else resembled the visuals from the art
department and Tim’s indications for this film! I’d
look at the
art department’s research for, say, the Chocolate Factory,
and a
lot of that came from German imaginary architecture of the early 19th
century, along the lines of Metropolis.
But I couldn’t tell myself that I was going to make a German
Expressionist film! I started with a blank slate. Willy
Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
wasn’t a visual reference because it’s incredibly
dated. There
are films like The
5000 Fingers of Dr. T,
but they belong to an era when Hollywood films were made very
differently.”
The
largest of McDowell’s surreal sets was the Chocolate Room,
a
grassy
expanse divided by a chocolate waterfall and river and dotted by
candy trees. Rousselot started with a “crazy idea”:
to shoot and
light the gargantuan set, which was built on
Pinewood’s 007
Stage, without actually touching it. “This was one
of my
fantasies from the start,” he recalls. “The set was
very
impractical for shooting because it was all curves and
extraordinarily fragile — as soon as you stepped onto the
grass,
you destroyed it. So I started out with the twisted idea of doing
most of the shots with a Cablecam to avoid putting down a flat,
tracks and a dolly. With the Cablecam — a
system with two
wires
that cover the X and Y axes and an additional capability for a Z axis
that can go up and down — you can theoretically put the
camera
anywhere in the set.”
Ultimately,
however, the actual mix of camera supports in the Chocolate Room
included not only the Cablecam, but traditional dollies and
Technocranes positioned along the sides of the set.
“It’s
interesting to talk about failures,” muses Rousselot.
“I use the
term loosely, because it wasn’t a disaster. There are often
techniques that only work halfway on a film, and then, two or three
films later, they all of a sudden work perfectly. Sometimes it takes
several films to bring an idea to fruition. In the end, we used the
Cablecam for 20 percent of what I had planned. There is a normal
resistance from the crew that doesn’t want to be far from the
actors, and naturally, the director needs to be near them, too. But
when you add the video monitors, all of a sudden you have an army
going across the set. You destroy the set for every shot, and then
you rebuild it afterwards.” The cinematographer says he hopes
to
use the Cablecam in the future, but with more
“circumspection.”
Rousselot had a similar respect for the fragile set when designing the lighting for the Chocolate Room with his “marvelous” gaffer, John “Biggles” Higgins. Rousselot decided early on to keep all the lighting off the set, and to suspend the fixtures from a ceiling grid above the Cablecam installation. According to Higgins, the massive scale of tungsten lighting fixtures included 600 space lights, 100 Pars, 56 Maxi-Brutes and 12 20K Mole Beams, all suspended from the ceiling. The total potential power consumption provided by three generators off-stage was 4 megawatts, enough for a small city, although Higgins is quick to point out that “we never used all the lights at once.”
Each
space light contained five 800-watt bulbs, and the crew wired each
light with two cables, allowing for three intensities: two bulbs,
three bulbs or five bulbs. This enabled Rousselot to change the
overall intensity without dimming, which changes color temperature.
Half of the space lights provided an overall level for the huge stage
and were fitted with black skirts to limit spill. The remaining units
could be quickly lowered by cable to provide sources for a scene
staged below. To provide maximum coverage, skirted and skirtless
lights were alternated on the ceiling grid.
Directional Mole Beams created big spots of sunlight to dapple the landscape below. They were placed on either side of the river, so that portions of the left side of the river could represent a continuation of the right side while maintaining the sunlight’s direction. 1K Par spotlights were disseminated through the grid to pinpoint details in the colorful landscape, providing backlight to set a candy tree or giant candy cane apart from the background. Pars from the side of the stage were also used to skim the Chocolate River and create ripple effects on actors.
The Maxi-Brutes, which held six 1K Pars each, were outfitted with custom egg crates to limit spill and were grouped in clusters of four, creating a total strength of 24K. These powerful soft sources were typically used to highlight features of the landscape, such as hillocks. “If I turned on all the lights, I’d get a T8,” says Rousselot. “But of course, I never used them all, because we didn’t want a mood of blinding light! This lighting setup allowed me to have fairly powerful soft light without putting any light stands on the set and without having to build a platform above the river. From time to time, we placed a Chinese lantern on a stand, which didn’t do too much damage to the set.
We had a lot of lights, not because we needed all of them, but because I wanted to avoid moving them so we could shoot quickly,” Rousselot continues. “There are many shots I lit with three Pars, two Mole Beams and six space lights. I tell cinematography students not to be intimidated by big sets because the problems are the same as in small sets — a big set is just a small set multiplied. I tell students to set up for 10 square meters and then multiply that as many times as they need to.”
Naturally,
the wide Chocolate River reflected many of the lights
hanging above
it. “The other reason for having so many space lights was
that we
wanted to be able to darken the lights to avoid reflections when we
did camera movements,” explains the cinematographer.
“Sometimes
we put up black flags, but that was a lot of work; it was much
simpler to just turn off a light. Sometimes I’d turn a light
off
during a camera movement and replace it with a less bothersome one.
Because they’re fairly soft sources, you don’t see
the lighting
change.” This flexible lighting scheme allowed Burton
considerable
freedom in staging shots, which suited the director’s
freehand
style. Rousselot recalls, “Almost every day, Tim would start
by
saying, ‘We’re going to shoot over there, but
we’ll do it as an
experiment and see what happens. If it’s no good,
we’ll start
over.’ In fact, we almost never started over, but we started
every
day with the feeling that we didn’t really know where the day
would
take us. Every day we shot tests that transformed into
scenes.”
Rousselot
and Higgins credit the Light by Numbers system for simplifying the
complex job of keeping track of the settings of 700-odd lights.
According to Chris Gilbertson, the system’s creator, Light by
Numbers integrates existing dimmer technology with custom software
and hardware designed for film shoots. Features include the
memorization of the light settings for each take, accompanied by
frame grabs from the video assist. Light by Numbers also documents
each lighting setup using CAD documents from the art department or
manual input. On Charlie,
Gilbertson generated 2-D and 3-D lighting plots of each major setup,
which proved useful on set and in post, where it helped
visual-effects artists match Rousselot’s lighting on virtual
elements.
A key feature of Light by Numbers was Gilbertson’s ability to remotely control the dimming console on the set by means of a small remote unit. Rousselot explains, “Everything — light changes, fade-ins, fade-outs — was in Chris’ little remote box, so I was free to really improvise. I could say, ‘Try lighting that row there,’ and see immediately whether it worked. Chris saw the same thing I did, so instead of saying, ‘It might be the 18th light in the third row from the back,’ I could isolate the light with a laser pointer, and because he had the reference grid in his head, he could quickly change it.”
Rousselot credits second-unit director of photography Jonathan Taylor for his “wonderful work” on visual-effects and insert shots. A big part of Taylor’s job involved multiplying a single actor, Deep Roy, to create the countless Oompa Loompas in the film; this involved multiple motion-control passes to reproduce the same movements again and again. (See sidebar on page 44.) When matching principal photography, Taylor used Light by Numbers to call up the dimming settings of the initial shot.>
The
Light by Numbers system met its greatest challenge in a sequence in
which a large, seahorse-shaped galley barrels down a cavernous tube
lined with portholes. The galley was shot on a green screen stage,
and the illusion of portholes moving past it was created by rapidly
cross-fading a series of Mac 2000 fixtures (1,200-watt HMIs) across
the boat. Each porthole whizzing by was represented by a series of
lights. These fast and complex lighting changes were recorded onto
the system and then recalled when Taylor came in to shoot second unit
without the principal actors.
The
“TV Room” set is a model of lighting simplicity
and elegance. In
collaboration with the art department, the light sources were
incorporated into the set, creating a room that literally lit itself.
The room is made of two intersecting domes topped by concentric
circles of light. In one half of the room, Higgins’ crew
installed
rings of 2K Blondes shining through diffusion for two of the ceiling
circles, and four Six-light Maxi-Brutes above the central tube, where
a child can engage in a Wonkish form of “virtual
reality.” Four
Nine-light Maxis were dressed by the art department to provide white
in-frame practicals. The second half of the room has only two
Maxi-Brutes above its elevator center. The white walls of the room
reflect the strong, soft, circular sources above.
Rousselot
used a
similar scheme for another set, the “Nut Room,”
which features
nut cracking squirrels who are lit from above by space lights.
“When
we did coverage, we brought some units onto the floor, but they were
minimal,” recalls Higgins. “I’ve worked
with Philippe on three
films, and his requirements might be complicated in that he wants as
much control of the lighting as possible, but his approach is always
very simple.”
Higgins adds that Rousselot sometimes used a Chinese lantern hung on a modified Fisher sound boom to provide a soft source directly above an actor. When the staging required it, the cinematographer would operate the boom himself. “Philippe is a ball of energy,” notes Higgins. Alluding to Rousselot’s recent passion for playing classical music, the gaffer adds with a chuckle, “I think every set should come equipped with a grand piano so Philippe can play some Brahms when he has a free moment.”
The
“Inventing Room” set also featured some built-in
practical
sources: 24 Mac 2000s were built into several of the zany
candy-making machines that fill the space. Often used in rock
’n’
roll venues, the Mac 2000 incorporates a rotatable head, built-in
color wheels, and a host of programmable gobo patterns. The
computer-controlled sources gave the fanciful machines a throbbing,
colorful glow. Another two dozen Mac 2000s were positioned above and
on the floor to augment the lighting effects reflected on metal
ducts.
Rousselot photographed Charlie with a Panavision package: Panaflex Millennium XLs and Platinums and Arri 435s. He used Primo lenses, rarely using a zoom, and used a Frasier lens for macro work. He shot everything but greenscreen material on Kodak Vision2 500T 5218, which he rated at ISO 400; greenscreen material was filmed on Vision2 200T 5217. Working with 5218 allowed the cinematographer to set his stop at a comfortable T3-T3.5. “I find 5218 very versatile,” notes Rousselot. “Of course, I had to take into account that we were going to do a digital intermediate [DI], so I played with it. As is true of other sensitive stocks, 5218’s grain has a slight defect, which is that it sometimes has problems in uniformity. You can get waves of density in the image that you notice in the highlights. In the all-white TV Room, that created a little problem when we went to the DI. We spoke to Kodak, and apparently there’s not much they can do about it. But you have to put the problem in perspective: we did some fine-tuning in the DI, but even if we hadn’t done that, I doubt anyone would have noticed.”
Charlie
represents
a direction that may be surprising to those familiar with
Rousselot’s
pioneering work on subtle, dark interiors in films such as Queen
Margot,
a lighting reference for some European cinematographers to this day.
For his part, Rousselot confesses that he went through moments of
intense self-doubt as he fashioned Charlie’s
bright world. “At one point, I was in a panicked state about
the
overall treatment because it wasn’t tied to any
convention,” says
the cinematographer, who viewed high-definition digital dailies
during most of the shoot. “It was very scary, and I had never
done
anything like it: no diffusion, gaudy colors, very bright lighting,
and more comedy-style coverage. It was very hard for me, and at one
point I said to the editor, ‘Look, you have to tell me what
you
honestly think of the images. Are they ugly?’
That’s when we
asked colorist Peter Doyle [The
Lord of the Rings]
to come in and grade select scenes; we had an assortment of shots
scanned, then we graded them, output them to film, and considered
grading options. That reassured me. Also, I had the impression I
wasn’t respecting the brief we started with, which was a much
darker, more contrasty image, but as a film evolves, its ambience
evolves, and you have to follow the film. You
can’t always be
anchored to your starting point.”
Although
working with Doyle assuaged Rousselot’s concern, the
cinematographer notes emphatically, “We have to refute the
notion
that you can do anything you want [during a shoot] and then fix it in
a DI, because that’s utterly false. If you don’t
make beautiful
images to begin with, you won’t have beautiful images at the
end,
DI or not. I’m not just trying to maintain the dignity of the
cinematographer when I say this. The unfortunate truth is, if you do
an ugly shot it will always be ugly, whether you saturate it,
desaturate it or change its colors. With a DI, you can eliminate
constraining elements and improve elements in the image, but the
initial image always remains. Ugliness is eternal.” With a
laugh,
he adds, “And beauty is fleeting.”
Building on his experiences with the Lord of the Rings trilogy and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, colorist Peter Doyle designed a custom color-grading facility for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, along with a network pipeline to shuttle select 2K images to multiple sources in England and the United States.
In
the last few weeks of the shoot, Doyle set up a grading station at
Pinewood Studios so that he and lead colorist Mel Kangleon could
begin refining the look of Charlie
with
director of photography Philippe Rousselot, ASC, AFC and director Tim
Burton. The original 35mm negative was scanned into the digital realm
on a Northlight scanner at Cinesite in London, and after the grading
was completed, Cinesite recorded the digital files out to 35mm with
an Arrilaser Film Recorder.
In the grading, we really needed to work with Philippe on each scene,” recalls Doyle. “Often, we took whatever lighting cues he had put in and just amplified them. Philippe and Tim are both extremely collaborative and very open, so we also came up with some of our own ideas to open up the discussion.”
Throughout the grading, the team viewed images on a 26'-wide screen, which was also used to project film and hi-def preview cuts. “Our goal was to emulate the theatrical experience,” notes Doyle. “That way, everyone knew exactly what the film would look like.
“Charlie
was a complicated film to grade,” he continues.
“I’ve never
seen anything quite like it.” The grading involved a variety
of
techniques to enhance the lighting by “putting more dynamics
into
wide shots, heightening shafts and pools of light, burning and
contrasting here and there, letting the highlights really bloom, and
pushing the center of the light down so that the grass had a real
glow.” For group shots in the Chocolate Room, the colorists
inserted “inverse grads” to darken the bottom of
frame, also
adding a little green reflection from the grass below. In general,
says Doyle, “we put in more shading and modeling.”
Time was also
spent keeping the color of the Chocolate River consistent in
different camera angles.
To heighten lead actor Johnny Depp’s expressive eyes, the filmmakers borrowed a technique from George Hurrell’s classic Hollywood portraiture. “Johnny’s face is extraordinary, and we sought to make him look incredibly glamorous, to give the image that quality of Forties photography where the guy was shot through silk stockings and punched little holes in them to make the eyes really sharp,” says Doyle. “We used those kind of tricks, but digitally, with moving color images. In group shots, there are a lot of great performances with eyes, so we tried to give [those actors] a glamorous look while keeping the sharpness and the detail.”
The
bulk of Charlie
is characterized by amazingly vibrant colors. According to Doyle, the
filmmakers’ goal was to “see how much color we
could get on a
film print. And that’s where we are: we have about as much
color as
a film print can handle. To be precise, we boosted the color to the
limit of the film print and then pulled back all the little colors
that exploded and became unwatchable. We re-tracked the densities of
certain colors so that the image made sense again. I must say,
I’m
incredibly happy with the result, but it does dazzle. We have some
colors you don’t normally see on film prints because they
tend to
fall away, like deep burgundy.”
Throughout the process, the colorists strove to keep the images “very sharp and clean,” says Doyle. Rousselot shot Charlie in Super 1.85, a format that covers more negative by imprinting the area normally reserved for the sound track. On the final film recording, the image was reduced to fit in standard 1.85:1, which “sharpened it a bit,” notes Doyle.
Building on the existing high-security Sohonet that links postproduction houses in the London area, Doyle and his team implemented a pipeline that shared 2K scans and effects shots among a central storage in London, the production at Pinewood, Cinesite, visual-effects houses in London, and Warner Bros. in Los Angeles 24 hours a day, seven days a week. “Each facility can schedule itself; they can send data when they’re ready, and we can take data when we’re ready, though it does get a little tricky at delivery time,” explains Doyle.
Doyle’s team created custom look-up tables (LUTs) to transfer the 2K data to HD. This allowed for the creation of HD preview cuts as the picture evolved. “Obviously, HD is not absolutely identical to film — a film print looks better — but the general feel is definitely there,” says Doyle.
Even at 100 megabits per second, the network could only deliver about 1 frame of 2K footage per second. Thus, the network could only ferry short sequences for grading, effects and previewing. Copies of the entire film were more efficiently delivered in disk or tape form by “sneaker net”: fast-moving humans.
When special-effects supervisor Joss Williams lobbied to create Charlie and the Chocolate Factory's Chocolate River in camera, director Tim Burton gave just one caveat: “Make sure it looks edible.” Williams recalls, “Early on it was a tossup whether the Chocolate River would be digital or practical, and we felt CGI would be much more limiting on set, and more expensive. Tim wanted to do as much as possible in camera, so we did a number of small-scale tests to see if we could get the look right.”
After
several weeks of testing different substances to give the river
“that
yummy look,” Williams found the perfect thickening agent:
Natrusol.
But getting the right consistency was less tricky than finding the
right color. “We were going in the milk-chocolate
direction,” he
says. “We played around a lot to get the right color; it
looked a
bit gray to the eye, but on film, it looked fantastic. We made 1.25
million liters of it and used it all the way through the shoot. We
planned on having it last eight to 10 weeks, but then the filmmakers
decided to keep it for another four, which resulted in a smelly week
or two! The chocolate waterfall was easier to keep good because we
were pumping that around continuously.”
By making the Chocolate River practically, the filmmakers were able to expend visual-effects capital on various other aspects of Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. One of these was the Oompa Loompas, the strange tribe of small creatures who run Wonka’s phantasmagoria. Visual-effects supervisor Nick Davis tapped The Moving Picture Company (MPC) in London to create the creatures, which were all played by one actor, Deep Roy. However, Burton actually wanted the Oompa Loompas be considerably smaller than the diminutive Roy. “Deep is 4 feet, 2 inches high, and Tim wanted the Oompa Loompas to be 2 feet, 6 inches, so there was our immediate challenge: our star was more than one and a half feet too big,” says Davis.
The scale issue, as well as the seemingly endless replication of Roy, demanded a variety of approaches, including motion-control shots of Roy in different areas of oversized sets, bluescreen shots for which the actor was composited into conventional-scale or digital environments, and fully CG shots of Oompa Loompas that were created via motion capture and/or hand animation. “We had to figure out whether to shoot plates on set, build overscale sets or create virtual sets,” says Davis. “In the end, we mixed all three.”
Adding to the challenge was the fact that the Oompa Loompas had to sing and dance. “We asked to see Danny Elfman’s songs as soon as possible,” recalls Davis. “Meanwhile, we’d discuss possible blocking for the numbers with Tim and the choreographer. As soon as Tim approved a song, the choreographer would work out a routine with Roy, then we’d bring in a bunch of professional dancers, videotape them [going through the routine], and work with Tim to previsualize the entire sequence until we knew every single cut. That previz became a bible for each song — we didn’t deviate from it.
Once we had the previz, we figured out how to best accomplish each shot,” Davis continues. “Whenever the Oompa Loompas were one fourth the size of the screen or smaller, we made them CG because that enabled us to do more dynamic camera moves. When we used motion control, we had to scale up any camera moves by a factor of 1.73.”
Because
Burton was keen to use Roy instead of CGI whenever possible,
“we
actually spent six months with two units, one shooting plates and the
other doing repeat motion-control passes on Roy against
bluescreen,”
says Davis. “The motion-control work was a huge undertaking
— we
did about 3,000 takes, often to music! These were often very
complicated mo-co moves during complicated dance routines that
sometimes required Deep to interact with himself. Deep’s lip
sync
had to be bang on, plus he had to exactly hit his mark. He put in
some serious hours, that’s for sure!”
The results are thrilling, he adds. “MPC got it down to where the CG Oompa Loompas and the real ones look absolutely identical.”