BACKGROUND

How did you get your start in miniatures cinematography?

Nigel: My background is graphic design. At my college in Newcastle they had a rostrum camera and nobody would touch it, so I thought I'd give it a go, and I took to it like a duck to water. When you're starting out there's not a definite path to things, but looking back there's a logical sense to it. The way you run a rostrum camera is not dissimilar to the way you run a moco [motion control] rig and the disciplines, especially when you're shooting your own animation and shooting a lot in-camera material.

I did stop motion and drawn animation when I was working my way through the camera department grades, which I think is important because if I ask one of my crew to do something they know you have done the same job yourself in the past. I'm not against somebody starting at the top, but I quite like people who have gone through the ranks because they have an appreciation of what the vital people who make up the rest of the crew do. It goes back to something JosÈ [Granell, Model Unit Supervisor] was saying the other day, that although we have a big effects sequence with explosions triggered by a computer, a lot of the effects we're doing are not a million miles away from Georges MÈliËs (1861-1938) in late 19th century France. I like that we're moving on, but at the same time we're using all this information that people before us have achieved.

What actually allowed you to break into film world and turn cinematography into a career?

Nigel: I'd always taken 35mm stills from when I got a camera when I was about thirteen or fourteen, and I also love drawing and drawing led to animation, so I did stop-frame drawn animation. I thought that was the way I was going to go, so I went to the National Film and Television School at Beaconsfield. With stop animation I was frustrated with how long things would takeÖ when I got a script together I was desperate to do it, and I'd probably still be there drawing it now. Don't get me wrong, I've done my time as a stop-frame camera operator, and I do enjoy it, but I got frustrated with how long things took. I came out of film school as an operator and I switched to doing more live action. I visited the crew of Superman II at Pinewood Studios in 1980 and that was the crew that I ended up working with. JosÈ and I have worked together over 20 years.

You met JosÈ on that Superman II?

Nigel: JosÈ worked a lot for a guy named Derek Meddings who was the director of the units that I worked with. My cameraman was Paul Wilson, so we learned the ropes with them. We worked for other supervisors but those were the two main people that we worked for. I went through the grades with them and special effects was a logical way to go in because of the disciplines of being a rostrum cameraman. You're in a room on your own, you've got to go through your own checklist; motion control is only a rostrum in 3D.

What I'm pleased about is that JosÈ and I worked for Derek and Paul, and I'd like to hope that there'll be another two people who come through and they'll take over from us. It's important because you're passing on that heritage that someone passed on to us, but we're also building on it. All that people learned before us isn't thrown away or ignored; it goes into the toolbox. A new thing comes out and it's flavor of the month and it's gradually assessed and learned and put into perspective - slit scan is an example - everybody was doing it.

What is slit scan?

Nigel: Slit scan was a technique used in the late ë60s onwards [e.g. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)] in a lot of commercials and movies using the technique where you could travel past a point of light. Because you were shooting at slow speeds you almost animated a three-dimensional streak of light from it. Superman: The Movie (1978) titles are another that comes to mind. That technique now is probably rarely used, but it's in the toolbox. Morphing is another example ‚ at one point in the later 1980's everybody seemed to be morphing everything, but now it's used in a more restrained manner. We like jumbling techniques up: CG and 3D and models, it makes it harder for the audience to pick stuff out.

At your initial meeting for a film project, have you ever had to say what the filmmakers want is not possible?

Nigel: Nothing is impossible; it's just trying to come up with a methodology that will get the look that people want. The camera tilt that we did on Big Ben was quite a specific brief, and it's then coming up with a way you can do it that's sensible budget wise, and that's going to aesthetically give the look the director wants and, with explosions, that's going to be safe and match what the units have done prior to us. That's partly where experience comes in, JosÈ and his producer [Antony Hunt] over the years have become very good at saying how many weeks they need and how much it will cost.

We've broken down what we need light-wise and power-wise, and you start to get a feel for things, how to go about it and to hone down what's required. But we mustn't ever forget what the aesthetic brief is or you're going to have a disappointed client, and they're not going to come back again. It's no good selfishly doing what we think they should do. We do everything we can so clients walk away with the footage they want in their film. If it sticks out like a sore thumb because we've built it wrong or I've lit it wrong, there's no benefit in that whatsoever. Hopefully it's seamless.

V MINIATURE WORK

How much prep work goes into what you do for the miniature explosions?

Nigel: A lot goes into it; we've been discussing this since back in April [2005]. We came off the back of doing Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and the latest Harry Potter film and this was the next thing we started discussing. You might not have meetings every day, but you start thinking of things in your head and you get into the mood of the thing. I looked at the graphic novel again, just to get into the feel. And then as you get nearer the shoot, there are very specific things we have to do. One thing springs to mind: I was very worried because in the past we've blown up Big Ben (it's something we seem to do over the years, for The Avengers we had to blow one up) and I knew that one of the problems is getting the clock face right. It's got to be the correct exposure to compete against the ignition flash of the explosives, but it's still got to look how people perceive Big Ben if you're in London at night.

The laws of physics are somewhat against us. It's a confined space - a tenth scale model - and you don't want to overheat the explosives inside. You also don't want to cast shadows on the clock face, as quite often JosÈ needs the charges to be placed close inside. When we did an initial test for the shoot we went with a method we'd employed before, where we used a conventional 10K filament in its housing, and the shadows looked rather like someone had got their washing drying inside Big Ben! So we had to go with a different method. Prior to the shoot I tried using large photofloods against the Perspex rear face. I wanted that worked out in my mind, and I knew what our shooting stop was going to be because we've done a lot of explosives over the years. It was crucial that before I came into the shoot I knew what I was going to get out of Big Ben: I wasn't going to get a shadow, it would look like you see it at night, but it would still work with the charges.

The Parliament buildings model is a similar problem; we need to match the main and second unit footage that they shot at the embankment at Westminster, and the way the government has lit Parliament is quite specific. The problem we've got is that we're shooting a miniature, but at the same time we've got the constraint of again trying to compete with the ignition flash of the explosives. The dilemma for us is that we've got to use a small source that's in scale with the Parliament light sources, but at the same time it's going to compete with an explosion.

We did tests in the workshop - over the years you start to get a feel for what things are going to work. However you need to do those final look-sees, even if it's just taking final measurements. We did a couple of days of shooting on film beforehand, and after that I might take spot or incident light readings, so I know before we come on the floor for Parliament and Big Ben, because it's a tight schedule - if we're way out of balance. I'm not so much worried about what your floor source is for, say, moonlight, or what the more general washes are going to do, but specific things like the clock face or practicals impinge on scale and on ignition flashes. If we don't get that right beforehand it could have a catastrophic effect on the shoot.

How does scale affect your work?

Nigel: Once you get onto natural elements for model photography - if you've got smoke or rain, if you've got fire or explosives - if you go twenty-fourth scale you're going to have a problem. If you look back at the immediate post-war effects movies in Britain, they're on a budget and a lot of the models are on a smaller scale. So the second they did London during the blitz for example and some of the buildings were on fire - no disrespect to the people who were doing it - but on that scale and on that budget, they struggled to attain reality.

On this project Big Ben is tenth scale and Parliament is tenth scale, which gives you more of a fighting chance because of the way gravity starts to help you. The way JosÈ [Granell, Model Unit Supervisor] and his team power the explosives, depending on how tightly they're packed, depending how much charge is in there and if you push any air behind them, you've got a little bit of control over how it reacts with a scale model. The larger the scale the easier it is to make it look real, and you get all the little bonuses like when you start to get parts of the Big Ben clock face coming off and the fingers and the glass, they behave a little bit as if, God forbid, somebody did it for real.

You're always going to fight a battle because production is going to say, ìCan we build it smaller scale, because it would be slightly cheaper?î I also have a way I like to light explosions that on a cheaper production you couldn't. People try to do explosions in the middle of the lens at t5…6 - t8, and I'm not saying it's wrong, but what happens is that you're not competing with the ignition flash of the explosives. We're lighting here to the stop of t22, which if you do stills, you know it's a tiny aperture. The plus side is you're shooting on a larger-scale model and you're shooting where you know you're going to capture the richness, and at that first ignition flash you're not burning a hole in your negative. It can increase the budget, but to me it's worth doing because the reward down the line is that you get the dynamics from the explosion - they behave themselves much more like a real charge would, and because you've shot it stopped-down, you're capturing all the core of the explosion. Which you wouldn't do normally; even on a video camera you'd struggle to capture that first initial flash.

Because we've blown things up before, you start to get a mental library of how to go about it. Also, depending what constituents are in the explosives, they have an effect on the explosion. Certain products will burn warmer - rubber dust is one thing that springs to mind, that when it ignites it burns a richer, warmer color. Whereas, if you've got high metallic content in your explosives, that burns whiter. So, with mixing those, you're starting to already get a range within the explosion. Those are things that you can read about, but on the whole you learn on the hoof over the years. JosÈ and myself have both been lucky that we worked with a cameraman and a director that did a lot of this sort of work, and they in turn worked for people before them, such as Wally Veevers & Les Bowie, so you feel like you're carrying a torch a little bit. There are things you glean that your predecessors have done, and hopefully you will in-turn pass them onto people who come through with us.

How do the high filming speeds affect what youëre doing?

Nigel: It's a mathematical formula that you can take the square root of the scale and multiply it by 24 and that gives you the speedÖ if only life was so straightforward! That's a good starting point, but sometimes you might deliberately kick the explosion more. I've been on shoots where you might not have all your cameras at the same speed, so for a certain angle you might run the camera at 75 or 100 frames per second, then other cameras would be 150 to 200 frames. [Normal running speed for live-action is at 24 fps.]

On this, in testing, we blew up some pieces of the Old Bailey, trying different mixes of materials to see how they would react to the charges. We also did tests on glass for the Big Ben clock face. We shot a range of speeds, already narrowing it down, and then on the back of those tests we could narrow it down further so, to be honest, nearly everything we've shot has been 150 frames. Then we've also used the Photosonics camera from Movietech (which was developed through NASA technology) that has the ability to go up into the low 400s. For Big Ben when we're that little bit closer we shot around the 200-mark, and that just works for that framing. It is something that James [McTeigue, Director] would have looked at, as well as Dan, the Visual Effects Supervisor, and those are the speeds that we've settled on. On another shoot, you might have gone for slightly different camera speeds, so it depends a little bit on what you're filming.

Is the camera itself a dictator of frame rate?

Nigel: Yes, the workhorse of the shoot really is the 435 Arriflex, which over the last four or five years has almost become our main camera. For years we used a Mitchell S35, and it's a lovely camera that very rarely goes wrong, and you can vary the shutter on it, however it's quite cumbersome. Where it struggles in the present day is the video tap off it, which has become much more crucial nowadays. The beauty of the 435 is that you've got a very strong video tap on it, and the camera is much lighter, so you have the ability to perhaps get to places you couldn't go before. You can handhold it if you have to, and it's a lot more ergonomic; you can flip the eyepiece over from the traditional side to the other side of the camera. To be honest, it has freed us up a lot.

It's also a direct swap: it's the same camera we used on the one shot we've had on the shoot where we used motion control, on Big Ben. So you're keeping consistency in your camera. Another big advantage with it, especially with the Extreme version that has been out for about 6 months, you can go to one hundredth of part of a frame per second, right up to 150 frames, so for a model unit that's incredible. We can do agonizingly slow stop-frame on motion control where I quite usually shoot half a frame a second or slower, and here we have the same camera shooting 150!

Once you get above 150 frames there are cameras that will go faster and there are digital cameras that will go faster still, but the beauty with the Photosonic (which has been around longer) is that it holds the film still. It's multi-pin registered every time it takes a frame, and you're going up to 400+ frames. I mean, I can't get around the fact that a film will hold 24 times a secondÖ if you can just imagine the engineering to hold a piece of film still 400 times a second, I take my hat off to them! It's an incredible piece of engineering. Unlike quicker cameras it's not a rotary prism, so we're starting off with something that's film registered, which makes life easier in post. You've got a rock-steady image at 200 frames a second, and that's exactly what we wanted for Big Ben.

What cameras did you use to shoot the Big Ben explosions?

Nigel: On Big Ben we actually ended up with four to five cameras. The Photosonic was centered more on the clock faces - because we've got the two clock faces that are punching out left and right of you. Also, because you're slightly closer than the wider shots, that higher speed helps; you capture all the debris. On all the rushes we could see the outer casing of the clock face, the hands, the glass, as they gracefully drop down in an arch in front of you. On the wider cameras that isn't crucial because they can see a bit more - they've got more room and frame for things to happen, which gives you the freedom to perhaps go a slightly slower camera speed.

What would you say is the most challenging of the buildings?

Nigel: I think the most challenging was probably Big Ben when it was allied to the motion control move that in turn was firing all the explosives. Normally someone is triggering the explosions manually, they've got the control of it in their own hands. (Parliament, although that's semi-automatic, again we've got control because it's a physical thing: the dolly is running down the track and the dolly is hitting switches that we've set up in line with the viewfinder, so we know exactly when a charge is going to go off.)

I've shot motion control since 1982, so I know what motion control can do. The nature of the specific move James and Dan wanted for this Big Ben shoot was challenging. The camera moved from looking down at the foot of Big Ben to tilt up to the clock face, and the choreography of the explosions was timed to that move, ending on the face, with a very specific action on the face details, so you could see the glass begin to billow and then the punch that takes it through. That moco move then, had to trigger the explosions, so a servo arm was driving the charges. That is a bit scary because it is firing the charges for all the other cameras, and once Ian Menzies [motion control supervisor] presses the button on the rig, that's it. There's no going back. That destroys a thirteen-week build on the model, and a whole day setting the thing up with charges. That was a bit nerve-wracking because JosÈ isn't physically striking the charges, the computer is. I know it's the right way to go and it's the way people do it, but it's taking it out of your hands.

THE OLD BAILEY

Are there any particular challenges with blowing up the Old Bailey?

Nigel: The Old Bailey is difficult because there's not a huge amount of additional debris - there's not a large amount of window glass. On Parliament there's a lot glass on that frontage and Big Ben had glass and the clock face. The other problem is there's a different tone to it from that of the other buildings, and that's because we're mimicking Portland stone here, which is the specific quarry where [Sir Christopher] Wren took his stone from for most of the rebuilding of London after the 1666 Great Fire, which is why a lot of the post-fire London buildings are that color.

In the tests we did we had to try to get this stone to fragment and shoot out at you properly. It's also been quite hard because you've got to have the statue of Justice splitting, you've got to have the roof element going and some of the windows, but we've also got to try and push the effect of the stone shattering coming towards you. Lighting-wise it's probably not quite so hard for me because it's a minimal amount of practicals that we're able to completely make up, because at night only a few practical lights are set on the real building. But for JosÈ and the physical effects guys, this is harder for them because it's a more solid object and you're not kicking glass out; you've got to make the building do the kicking.

How do you work with matching changes in scale ‚ from the real buildings to the differently scaled models?

Nigel: I've always kept a reporter's notebook; I guess you've seen me clutching this red notebook throughout the day. Depending on the shoot, I'll quite often go to the extent of surveying all the lights before we go into another set up and make notes in my books. It helps with crucial things like angles and when you're coming in with the lights to try and get these right, even if it's a simple thing. On the clock face the light is coming at 2 o'clock, the weaker moonlight or reflection is coming in at 7, that might be simple, but things like that you need in the right place, when you're placing things and when you're jumping scale.

The way the real Old Bailey is architecturally lit, the spotlights are coming up from a lower level to hit Justice from underneath, so they're up-lighting the building. Therefore I will mimic those positions and those colors so that you're already starting to have a consistency, even though there's a scale jump. I know what I'm going to shoot, so I'm lighting to a level that I've already pre-determined and I've written down what my stops are, so I know what strength the moonlight is, and I know what strength the kicks are. In effects work you have to do that, it's a bit tedious but you have to have an element of note keeping. Also, all the camera guys are keeping notes of all the camera positions. We're now going for our second big hit on the Old Bailey, the four cameras are mimicking what we did the first time and have all been laser measured, along with the angles and tilts.

There has to be a certain amount of thoroughness and discipline because, especially on a longer shoot, you're going to shoot out of sequence. Five or six months later you'll come to shoot the last part of a scene, although on this project we're lucky that it's just a few days later. You have to do certain amount of note taking; it means you're keeping to your own continuity. The only thing I would say is that you always need to be prepared to alter something a bitÖ just because that's what you did last time, you still need to check yourself. You should always trust your eyes and what you see through the camera, and then you might tweak it a bit, but at least you're coming from a starting point.

There's the motto on the side of the Old Bailey written in stone - I knew we were going to go to that close up in a slightly larger scale - so when I lit the full Old Bailey model I made sure that a pair of the up lighters were on the corners of where that carved motto is. It was only subtle. So when I went to the larger scale I knew I had the visual excuse to try and make the lettering a bit more interesting. There are little things like that where you do have to think ahead. The other thing I say quite often to people is to keep it simple. I think a lot of it is forgetting sometimes that you're on a film stage and wondering, what would it do if I were there? How would it react? Would there be streetlights? Is there a light from another building? Is that building up-lit? I think that's the same for Adrian [Biddle, First Unit Director of Photography] on the main unit floor and Harvey [Harrison, Second Unit DoP] on the second: that a lot of it is thinking, ìI'm in the room, where would the light come from in here?î I think any DoP has to ask those questions because that gives you the foundation, the scaffold, a point to come from.

I don't mean that all lighting has to be clinically logical because that would be wrong. Believe me, you can kill models. There are no hard and fast rules and every shoot's different. If you're soft lighting, you can perhaps do things a different way, but if you're lighting with harder light and you come on square to the front of the model, you'd kill the model and the model maker would probably kill you. There are certain things you have to do and models will look better if you light them slightly different ways. Some people would say it's common sense, some people would say experience - I'd also say use your eyes when you're outside from film. If you are in London, look at buildings and how the buildings are lit and then bring that back with you to the movie.

The lettering gave me an excuse for a little bit of shape, so the lettering then wasn't flat lit; there were little random kicks. Then the pillars that are above the lettering - rather than even shadows - I deliberately cross lit, and again you've got shadows broken up in the arches, so it makes it more interesting on the eye, but it's not dissimilar if you went and looked at the Old Bailey and what you'd get for real.

However you have the increased challenge of the miniature work and being forced to work with hard light.

Nigel: Yes, but if you've got your sums right and you've got your ratios and angles right, you could shoot Big Ben or Parliament at two frames a second and then you could shoot it at 150 frames a second, and you shouldn't be able to tell the difference. If you haven't done your sums right then errors will stick out like a sore thumb. When I started out, I might have been intimidated by that fact. It's partly understanding the laws of physics, and having the confidence that you know what you're doing. You can jump those speeds and those scales, and as long as you've held onto certain rules, you're not going to get that jarring on the eye.

HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT

For Parliament the camera runs down a track during the explosion; did that pose specific challenges?

Nigel: Yes, it was tricky for us because James and Dan gave us the specific angles they wanted as we ran down the embankment. It's tricky for a couple of reasons, one being that we've got to match the real Parliament buildings because they're going to be inter-cutting the footage that main and second units got in London at great expense. (Parts of London were shut down for the movie, and we were very lucky to get access to those areas, so we're beholden to make whatever we do with miniatures match the footage they got in London.) Then secondly, the challenge for us is to get what is required by the shoot: we've got to make the glass kick out in time with the camera traveling at speed, we've got to make it look like the real building while we're at an angle

What I was most worried about was probably the camera shutter strobing, because you've got two cameras running at high speed on a dolly very close to the model. The moonlight in these shoots that the main unit sent me is very subtle, and the ambient light from London is not really that strong, it's mainly local light and local light on the building. I was also worried that when I introduced lifts without moonlight at this brighter exposure to cope with the explosions, that we might end up seeing the shadows of two cameras traveling down the side of Parliament. However, I think getting the sweet spot on the lenses so the light matches the ìlookî we want on the building, but doesn't start to cause a problem with the camera shutter, was probably the hardest thing.

I don't have the luxury of large up-lights hitting the wall of Parliament, so we're using tiny powerful dichroics [lights] that are 24 volts and scalding hot to touch. That's the only thing that will give us the exposure that we need when the building starts to blow. That's the dilemma of countless model shoots: the holy grail is finding light sources that are really strong that can cope with an explosion, but are also on scale with the model. When you start to fight the laws of physics, that's where it gets difficult.

You need to get the light up so bright that the explosion doesn't damage the film?

Nigel: Because your eyes are adjusted to the dullness of the stage, you think I've gone mad when you see how brightly everything is lit. It's very hot and very bright, but you know if you need one more stop on the lens you're doubling your light, that's the laws of physics. We're running at 150 frames and 200 frames, so you're consequently ramping up all the time and that's why there are so many lights on the stage when we go with the shot. You could quite easily shoot it with less lights, however the price you pay when the explosion goes off is that it will burn off the negative because you've not stopped down enough on the camera. Perhaps on another shoot that might be the look you're after, no two shoots are ever the same.

So that is one of the challenges, particularly on Parliament, because we've not got much space to get those lights in. Thank heavens that [Sir Joseph] Bazalgette in the Victorian period built an embankment wall, because if he hadn't we'd be in trouble, we'd have nowhere to hide anything.

How much interaction did you have with the other cinematographers from the main and second units?

Nigel: To be honest, on this one, it's not been a great deal because they were shooting out in Berlin. I have looked at their footageÖ that's the thing we pride ourselves on, that if we're given material, I like to think we're pretty good at matching it. That's half the fun of doing this sort of photography. All the DoPs we have had to match over the years, light in lots of different styles. On this film, the footage that they've got in London, are places that I'm familiar with already, and the second you see the footage they've got and you can talk through things, you've got a feel for it.

We did liaise: we didn't go for a very heavy moonlight because the moonlight when they shot wasn't that strong. Depending what movie you're on you can go very deep, sometimes called Hollywood Blue, and with V that wasn't the look that they wanted. I double-checked with Adrian and Harvey, and we've only gone a quarter blue for our moonlight. So things like that you have to check on. On this one, to be honest, it's been a bit more straightforward. We're not dealing with any imaginary place - it's a place they've shot for real, a place that we know already.

On the Parliament shot, why was the camera pulled by a car?

Nigel: Because it works! That's the thingÖ don't knock something if it works. To get the speeds we needed to go at, we knew that the low base dolly was going to have to move pretty fast, and that's a simple way to run a 2:1 ratio cable on the pulley system. I try and take some stills when we shoot - I'm not getting very many on this job - and I forgot that where I was standing to try and capture the moment, a Land Rover was about to come by pulling the dolly, but luckily someone reminded me. We could have gone through a lot of expense and worked out another way of doing it, but this works, and as we saw on the rushes this morning it was a really nice effect.

How many takes are you trying to do on each shot that is needed?

Nigel: We've tried to allow James and Dan to have at least two attempts on everything. The idea with that is if something doesn't go quite right, we're covered. Also, if you get what you need the first time, it then gives you the freedom to perhaps try a different angle, to try something slightly different. The way we set up Parliament - what I call the money part of the shot - is the right hand end of Parliament, but the advantage of having had two sections because the building is a repeated gothic pattern, it meant that the other 30 ft we could use as a safety background. That's good news because it saves Dan having to possibly build an additional part of Parliament digitally, or trying to use some of the footage from the second unit.

In Parliament's case, having the two bits of building, we set the charges off on the right hand part looking back, and now that frees us up to swap them over and prepare this ënew' right hand half again on the half of the building we haven't detonated. The one that's slightly damaged will now be slightly repaired and become a background. That was something that Jose came up with, and it pays off because it will save some time and money later on. Another advantage is that if we needed to we could start the charges a little bit further up, now that we've got the initial set of explosions exposed.

What do you mean by starting the charges a little further up?

Nigel: The model is 42 feet long, and 30 feet to the right of the centerline is where the detonators are going to go. There's a mirror image in the choreography of the bang, so when V fires them off they come from a central point on Parliament and open out. One of the cameras that we used on the first take will be flopped to give the other side of the explosion. Because we've got explosions starting from that point that look great, if we want to start them a fraction earlier, we have the luxury of doing that.

Does it make a difference that all the miniatures are being blown up?

Nigel: It does. It's strange how things go in cycles. I did Band of Brothers, where there are a lot of explosions, and then you'll get a run where you don't do anything explosive. We had a little reprieve last summer where we destroyed a helicopter for Sahara. With the Harry Potter films there's an in-house joke that they're going to write somewhere in the last book that Hogwarts somehow blows up, because we've gone years without doing something like that for them.

This film has been great fun for us. I don't care how many times you've done it, it does get slightly tense when you're going to do a big bang and people are concentrating, and there are all the health and safety issues as well. I never get fed up doing this job; no two are the same. I don't know why, but there's a childish delight in blowing up famous landmarks! Over the years I think we've blown up Big Ben three or four times on different movies. It seems to be a popular one to do because it's an iconic building, it's known in America as well as here. You know you've done a day's work, but it's good fun as well. It's very unusual for everything to get destroyed. That doesn't always happen in the scripts.

MINIATURES & VISUAL EFFECTS

How have visual effects changed your job in recent years?

Nigel: The biggest change is probably 3D pre-visualization. When I started you would have the art department - we'd usually have somebody from the art department specifically with the model unit - and they would come on set with blueprints and we'd look at the stage and mark out where everything was going to be. You would come up with lot of the camera positions and moves, although there would be sketches as well, you would decide where the cameras were going to be. It was a lot more intuitive, a lot more would happen on the floor. I would also say that the action you did would be also a lot more intuitive - what you got on the floor is what you went with. A lot of what you shot would be the finished negative, so what you saw after shooting is what you got in the film.

What has happened now is like any improvement, there are good and bad sides to it. Now, a lot of the shots are pre-visualized in 3D, and it seems often to have been approved by a committee of people much earlier, quite often before we're involved in the picture. So a lot of the creativity on the floor is gone. A lot of the positions will be stipulated and, especially with the explosions, you've got to do that. It can reach the point, particularly when you're using motion control; a lot of moves have already been signed-off in 3D. So when you come onto the floor and have done your surveying to get the camera exactly where you need to be for the 3D, my input, or JosÈ's in this area has reduced over the years. When you're coming onto the floor now, it can partly be an accounting decision, not a creative one, because a model unit schedule can now be driven by a 3D pre-visualization that's been signed off on, so you can write a much tighter schedule.

We're lucky on V for Vendetta in that a lot of what we're doing, what you see in the camera - the explosions - especially on a lot of the alternative angles, apart from a little bit of cleaning up and possibly a little bit of sky going in, the shots are pretty close to what-you-see-is-what-you-get. It's nice to do that.

The digital effects side has taken away a little bit from what we did on stage, not because we're not capable of doing some of it. If we capture all the separate components of a shot, in post-production they can then play around and alter things later on. Lighting-wise computers have come in (not so much on this shoot), but now I'd normally run a lot of the things through a lighting desk that, probably even 5 years ago, I wouldn't have done. I can now have total control of the floor just from one desk. That costs more initially to pre-rig and set up, but saves you days and days on the schedule. So there are good things that are coming through all the time.

What does the lighting desk allow you to do?

Nigel: It gives us the ability to memorize lighting set ups and animate lights, and you can use the desk in motion control to trigger events for each other, be it lighting effects or explosions. You move on and the camera is freer, we're more adventurous. If you stand still, other people will move on instead of you. You keep trying to find new ideas, keep trying to push it. I quite like the idea that you can pull things from other industries and not just look at the film industry. Motion control is not a million miles away from laser robots or spray robots in the car industry. Those crossovers are exciting, where something comes from another industry that takes for granted.

Thanks for your time Nigel.



Nigel: To close, it's a few months on from having done this interview on H Stage, Shepperton. I cannot let the sad loss of Adrian Biddle, our V for Vendetta DoP, go unmentioned. I was lucky enough to work with Adrian on several movies as I came through the ranks: Aliens, Princess Bride and Willow. To have lost somebody so talented, so young is just plain unfair.