Not long ago, as part of its Virtual Events series, Foundry brought together three CG and lighting supervisors to talk about the craft of digital cinematography. Participating were Andrew Roberts, formerly the CG supervisor at Scanline VFX and now associate VFX supervisor at Industrial Light & Magic, along with Bardel Entertainment CG supervisor Giuseppe Improta and Illumination Mac Guff lighting lead Chris Brejon (also credited as Christopher Brejon de Lavergnée).

Andrew Roberts

The conversation covered the history of cinematography, techniques and applications used in current-day animation and visual effects, and what inspires them in terms of digital cinematography.

The Work
The discussion kicked off with the James Bond film Skyfall, directed by Sam Mendes and shot by cinematographer Roger Deakins, BSC, ASC. The group focused on lighting as part of the storytelling.

In this film, Bond’s character is in silhouette in a few scenes. The intense look and feel of these scenes are compounded by the lighting and his pose, both of which drive the action and the audience’s understanding of the story. Viewers don’t need to see the facial expressions of the characters to feel and understand the scene.

Blade Runner 2049, directed by Denis Villeneuve and also shot by Deakins, follows the same concept of lighting and silhouettes, as Improta pointed out. The choice of framing with wide-angle shots and colors conveyed the feeling of isolation and loneliness.

Blade Runner 2049

Improta reiterated Deakins’ often-shared belief that today’s most significant advance in digital cinematography is the camera’s size, not the resolution or the color. The new, smaller cameras allow for more movement through the scene.

Improta led the lighting team for Spider-Man: Homecoming, and although the lighting looks simple, it’s actually very complex. In this production, the lighting team had the freedom to do the sequence the way they wanted, and although the scene looks real, it’s entirely computer-generated. There is a fine line between animated feature films and live action these days, with more and more productions created wholly in CGI.

In terms of animated feature film inspirations, Improta said that Toy Story 4 represents a seminal point in the quality of feature film animation from a cinematographic standpoint. He argued that “the quality of the shading is perfect, and so is the integration between the realism of camera and lenses and the storytelling that animated feature films can give us through 3D. It’s incredible to see how they emulated the cameras through VR to make the scenes look realistic to the human eye.”

Improta adds that the film shows various lighting types: moody lighting with low-key exposure, contrast backlit lighting with rain, colorful lighting and lighting announced by camera use — wide-lens lighting. “The color scripts are also inspirational, and it’s interesting to see the variety of colors used,” he said.

Next up was Roberts, who discussed his experience at Scanline, a studio known for its natural phenomena shots in productions. He discussed his work on Aquaman, Gemini Man and Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, which all have shots that are constructed primarily digitally. He agreed with Improta on cinematography’s evolution toward creating everything in CG rather than editing real-life images.

     
Scanline worked on this shot for Aquaman. © 2020 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All rights reserved.

Speaking about Aquaman, Roberts explored how light can create a happy, dreamy moment in time. There is a 180-degree aerial shot of the lighthouse backlit by the sun in the lighthouse scene, filmed from a helicopter. The main element they added in CG was the tower, which was lit by a 16K spherical HDR background created by Scanline VFX’s digital matte painting department. He feels HDR is a good starting point for any production but says you can’t rely on it alone. So he refined the warmth of the key light and the balanced temperature of shadows, adding extra fill and bounce lights over the whole course of the 180-degree shot.

Giuseppe Improta

Key References
Improta highlighted Jurassic Park as an example of revelation in digital cinematography. Set on the path of becoming an animator, he saw Jurassic Park and completely fell in love with 3D. He believes that to this day, the CG is perfect, and the 3D dinosaur has had a generational impact on a lot of 3D artists, as did the composition and movement of the film.

Dave Viera’s 1993 book “Lighting for Film and Electronic Cinematography” was an inspiration for Roberts when he started in the industry. The book breaks down the layout of various iconic images from films in terms of lighting and focuses on cinematography’s basic lighting principles.

Roberts mentioned graphic novels and comics and the work of Alex Ross as creative inspiration nowadays, alongside music posters of Miles Davis. Bringing it back to current times, he mentioned the HBO show Insecure as a reference point in lighting dark skin in dramatic productions. He mentioned that before this show, many other productions would just blast a lot of light in the environment to make the characters more visible.

Insecure

In contrast, the show’s DPs, Ava Berkofsky and Patrick Cady, understood that lighting dark skin involves using a combination of specific makeup techniques, the right reflectors of the skin, large soft lights and colored lights along with polarizer filters to create the best image.

A Modern Lighting Workflow
Brejon discussed the traditional lighting workflow, which starts with the art department preparing color keys for lighting. These are generally reflected in the final render as closely as possible, as shown in the example below. But some productions and studios use their color keys as a guide, not a destination.

However, for the film Lego Batman, lit and rendered during his time with Animal Logic in Sydney, Brejon had the opportunity to work without color keys. Brejon had to create a sequence in which the main light was warm on the sets, cold in the volumetrics, and neutral on the characters based on references provided to him by production designer Grant Freckelton and lighting supervisor Craig Welsh.

Lego Batman

Coming from a technically driven studio, Brejon was not prepared for this nontraditional workflow. However, he realized later that cold volumetrics is a technique used in many films, like Rango, whose DP was Roger Deakins, and the episodic series Peaky Blinders. He now firmly believes it’s an excellent way to showcase a complementary color scheme.

To tackle the scene from Lego Batman without color keys, Brejon took inspiration from the examples provided to him from the 1985 film Legend, starring Tom Cruise, which focuses on the illogical sources of light also known as dramatic or studio lighting. In this type of workflow, wherein references are broad and are meant as an inspiration, the artist has a lot of freedom.

Brejon says the use of Light Path Expression (LPE) in Nuke was very useful to generate many iterations (based on the same batch render) and allowed him to tackle his notes very quickly. If he had to stick with one comment from production designer Freckelton, that would be to avoid too many lights cancelling each other out. Also, not working with 2D was refreshing, as Brejon did not need to interpret brush strokes to create the final image.

Chris Brejon

Brejon also stressed the importance of PBR (physically based rendering)-friendly art directors, especially for full CG PBR movies. (The original idea was first shared by ON Animation Studios CTO Pascal Bertrand). He also challenged the traditional workflow, whereby lighting comes at the end of the process, especially in animation movies, mentioning that it’s possible to tackle lighting even before animation. In Playmobil: The Movie, a scene-lighting workflow was set up to do a first blocking pass on a rough layout with a simple surfacing. This workflow even had 3D motion blur and 3D depth of field to be as close as possible to the final cinematography.

Summing Up
In the end, these three pros believe that even if VFX-heavy and animated features do have things in common, they are also quite different. There’s generally more concept development in animated feature films at the early stages of preproduction — 3D is only applied after extensive research on art and color.

“In contrast, it’s not always the case in VFX, with productions taking a blind approach. This might be due to the fact that VFX work may be shared among different facilities, while animated features are mostly done in-house,” said Brejon.

Roberts added, “There is much more opportunity for a lighting artist on an animated project to influence every aspect of what the audience sees. This explains why, during preproduction, there is more extensive concept development and visual planning (such as through color scripts), and 3D is only applied after this research is complete.”

In contrast, a traditional VFX-driven film is more reliant on the mood and tone set by the live-action plate, and the focus is on using lighting and shading techniques to seamlessly integrate elements with the filmed material.

Despite the variety of approaches and techniques, Roberts concluded that it’s important to understand the fundamental rules of cinematography and lighting, preferably with physical lights. “Once you have a strong foundation, you can leverage any new technology to your benefit and apply those artistic skills to any field you choose.”