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The production tapped Arri headquarters in Munich for most of its needs; Arri Rental Division supplied camera, grip and lighting equipment, and Arri Film & TV Services did photochemical and digital lab work. Griebe filmed Perfume with Arricam Studios and Lites and used an Arri 435 for additional work. “By truck, Munich is only a day’s travel from Barcelona, so if something ever went wrong, Arri was right there for us, which made things a lot easier,” says the cinematographer. “Arri’s service was perfect, and I love that everything was all in one place.” Perfume gave Griebe a chance to take out Arri’s latest lenses, the Master Primes, and he was extremely happy with the results. “We had a full range of Master Primes on the show, and we also had the new Master Zoom [16.5-110mm], which is a wonderful, wonderful lens that perfectly matches all the prime lenses. It’s also a very large lens, probably the biggest I’ve ever worked with! We also had an Angenieux Optimo [24–290mm] zoom, and as big as that is, it looked small next to the Master Zoom! The Master Zoom was the lens of the day because Tom likes zooms very much. He likes the fact that we can quickly change focal lengths without any fuss; it keeps us moving quickly and is much easier on everyone.” For sequences that called for the camera to be extremely close to its subject, Griebe used the Kenworthy/Nettman Snorkel Lens System. “Especially for the first murder, the girl selling plums [Karoline Herfurth], we wanted to be very close to the bodies to suggest the sense of smell,” he explains. “I did many tests with the Revolution and other snorkel/borescope systems, and I found the Kenworthy system to be the simplest to move around.” As Grenouille chases the plum seller’s beautiful scent, the young woman retreats from the city streets to a dark, secluded courtyard, where she slices up her unsold fruit by candlelight. A single candle burns on the table, and Grenouille slowly approaches her from behind. He inches toward her, inhaling her aroma, and the camera moves as close to her skin as possible. The Kenworthy/Nettman Snorkel allowed Griebe to put the lens in the position of Grenouille’s nose and hover mere inches above the line of the actress’ neck and shoulder. “We wanted to see her body and his nose very close,” says Griebe. “The Snorkel is a very good system; there’s a very tiny mirror on the front element that allowed us to get very close and maintain great depth of field.” Given the story’s period, Griebe had to find an effective way to create and suggest firelight for interiors and night scenes. “We tested actual candlelight, and although I was happy with the levels of exposure we were getting, I wasn’t happy with the flicker — it became horribly distracting. I read that when Kubrick and John Alcott [BSC] shot the Barry Lyndon sequences with only candlelight, they had problems with flicker, too, and they had to completely seal the set. But if the actors are moving with the flame, then you can’t control [the flicker] at all. I decided the only solution was to augment the candlelight and eliminate the problem of flicker altogether.” Griebe decided to use a China ball with a standard 200-watt bulb on a handheld boom. The lantern was fed into a rheostat dimmer and brought down near the 50-percent range to warm the source and bring down the intensity while an electrician held it just out of frame and followed the actor through the scene. “I think that feels just like candlelight — soft and warm — and it was easy to do,” says Griebe. “We didn’t try to put any special bulbs behind the candles.” The sets built onstage at Bavaria Film in Germany were designed without hard ceilings so that Griebe could create ambient light with a large, soft source overhead. An example is the home and workshop of Baldini (Dustin Hoffman), an Italian perfumer with whom Grenouille apprentices. Built on the largest stage at Bavaria Film, the set was lit from above with a 12'x12' softbox faced with full gridcloth diffusion. Several feet above the gridcloth face was a large piece of Ultrabounce; a 10K fixture was hung at each corner of the softbox and aimed up into the Ultrabounce, creating a bounce that fed through the gridcloth and onto the stage. For daylit scenes, Griebe’s crew hung four 6K space lights between the Ultrabounce and gridcloth for a bit of extra punch. “I keep the soft source very high above the stage and use the 10Ks to bounce first and then come through the diffusion,” explains the cinematographer. “I’ve found this to be very effective. With four 10Ks and four space lights overhead, I can quickly go from bright daylight to a very dim night ambience and then fill that from the floor with some soft, blue light.” Keeping things soft, Griebe often used tungsten helium balloons as key lights for interior scenes, and turned to larger balloons for a complex night sequence in a garden labyrinth. After learning all he can from Baldini, Grenouille journeys to the town of Grasse to further refine his skills. He learns the art of enfleurage, extracting an object’s essential oils by encasing it in a layer of odorless fat, which absorbs the scent. Bent on creating the most beautiful scent in the world, Grenouille extracts oils from a number of maidens, and the jewel in his aromatic crown is Laura (Rachel Hurd-Wood), who is closely guarded by her father (Alan Rickman) because of a recent spate of murders. In the garden labyrinth behind their home, where Laura and several party guests play a game of hide-and-seek, Grenouille waits for the moment to make his move. Griebe recalls, “That was a very difficult location for us. The house was on a hillside, and we couldn’t bring any equipment trucks up there. We had no place to put a light on the hillside and could do very little to the structure itself. We found the only way to light that sequence was by positioning four tungsten helium balloons over the maze.” Some of the most visually extraordinary moments in Perfume show Grenouille enshrouded in shadows. The film opens with one such image — his face emerges from blackness to a point just on the threshold of visibility — and the effect is palpable. The motif is repeated when Grenouille follows the unsuspecting plum seller, when he arrives at Baldini’s doorstep late one night, and when he is forced to confront the consequences of his horrific crimes at the film’s climax. According to Griebe, these moments were created by eye, with no metering or special post work, although he and the DI team at Arri had to finesse the look-up table (LUT) to get just the right black level on the print. On set, it was merely a matter of trusting the toe of the emulsion to resolve an image in massive underexposure. “We shot most of the picture with the Arri Master Zoom, which is a T2.8, a healthy stop,” says Griebe. “For that deep shadow work, we just took light off, and I went by eye. I don’t really feel you can measure those kinds of low light levels; you just have to trust your eye and trust Kodak.” He adds that he is “not very technical” in his approach to lighting, even less so when it comes to metering his exposures. “I do everything by eye, and in the end, I trust Kodak. Their stocks today are so good.” Griebe shot daytime scenes at about a T5.6. For the rest of the sequences, to match the look to the Master Zoom, he stayed close to a T2.8. “T2.8 is good for consistency as well as for the focus puller, especially if you’re doing Steadicam, which can be a nightmare for focus if you’re wide open.”
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