American cinematographer (Jan-Dec 1952)

Record Details:

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A HIGHLIGHT and a lighting challenge was the illuminated staircase set with its live candelabra adorned by beautiful girls, and steps which lit up as dancer ascended. ABOVE street, wires supported muslins which were used to regulate sunlight. Here Director Minnelli (on boom) and Gene Kelly discuss a high angle shot. NARROW, three-wall set, 35 feet high, with Technicolor camera and boom almost filling the open side, posed a considerable lighting problem. sets was the little cafe and the streets that worked with it, where much of the action took place. This was an exterior on Lot 2. Here a building was cleared and the cafe interior built in conjunc¬ tion with a real street — in fact, three streets. Directly across from the wide entrance of the cafe a street extended straight away for a block to another cross-street, parallel to our foreground street, which extended a full block from the cafe on one side and half a block on the other. Such an extensive layout was a far cry from a single small street or a back¬ ing tied in with a set on a stage. We had many sequences, both day and night, to shoot from the inside of the cafe, with the streets showing in the background; also, scenes starting in the cafe on closeups and then, without a cut, pulling back with the camera to a full shot of the exterior of the cafe, then panning or rolling with the action on down the street into a long shot. Both the day and night scenes were shot in the daytime. In addition, we made other long Newcombe establishing shots and traveling scenes that were not tied in with the interior of the cafe. For these, of course, sunlight was most desirable. In lighting and balancing in¬ teriors and exteriors that work together, it is necessary to establish a marked difference between outside and inside areas of the set; also, one must stay within the exposure limits required to print properly. The new, fast Techni¬ color film was not available when we started the picture. Had it been, a great saving could have been effected — and I would now have many less gray hairs. The usual way to handle a set situa¬ tion such as this, is to box in the streets and cover everything with black tarps, then rig it heavily with arcs, high and low. This would have been a whale of a job, because of the huge area in¬ volved — and very costly. So we tried another method, which, by the way, is a very old one: The street sets already had overhead wires and white diffusers. To this we added black cloths, which could also be adjusted back and forth as desired to admit just the right amount of soft fill light for a day effect in the street. For night sequences we reduced the amount of the fill light by means of the cloths. Of course, we used a number of arcs on towers and rolling parallels to point up our day or night scenes, but we did not have to rig any of them high. We used a quarter of the lights and crew that normally would have been required had we blacked in the set solid. When it was necessary to get long shots in sunlight, we pulled all the cloths. The authenticity and the visual im( Continued on Page 36) ONLY the lower part of this set was photographed by Gilks, whose camera setup is shown on parallel in background. Remainder was a Newcomb shot. STARS of the picture, Leslie Caron and Gene Kelly, on Quai set. The background is a magnificent hundred-foot cyclorama; the foreground, practical. THE 3-STREET intersection, scene of unique dolly and crane shots, which saw camera move in and out of cafe at left, then down street. January, 1952 American Cin ematocraph er 19