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One of the key action sequences in Superman Returns involves the Man of Steel saving an out-of-control airline that is plummeting to earth. The aircraft set was mounted on a large gimbal that could provide up-and-down and shuddering motion. “There are a lot of visual- and special-effects elements in that sequence, but it’s really the lighting that sells the idea of the plane going down,” notes Sigel. “The sequence takes place during the day, so the cabin had to be lit through the windows, but this was complicated by the fact that the windows weren’t very large and were positioned down low.” Another concern was that the view outside the windows encompassed most of the soundstage. Sigel’s solution was to position large areas of white muslin on both sides of the set and light them from behind with Dinos, creating a very soft source that illuminated the interior of the cabin and still read on camera. “There’s so much action going on in that sequence that we couldn’t afford to spend time lighting every shot,” he says. “Given the small aperture of the windows, the soft light provided plenty of contrast.” To create the illusion of the plane spinning out of control, Conway and his crew positioned rows of 20Ks just above the windows and programmed them for a chase sequence. Conway explains, “The 20Ks gave us a hard-sunlight effect coming through the windows, and by chasing the light in prearranged sequences down the length of the windows, we created the effect of the plane spinning. Every one of the practical lamps inside the cabin was cabled to the dimmer because at one point, the power had to flicker and then go out altogether. That changed the ambience inside, and it changes yet again when the plane begins to leave Earth’s atmosphere.” No film about Superman would be complete without Kent Farm, the site of his original arrival on Earth. For Superman Returns, this setting, complete with a house, a barn and a specially grown field of corn, was constructed near the town of Tamworth, which is located in northern New South Wales. In an unusual step, the Kent house was constructed to facilitate the shooting of both exterior and interior scenes. Featuring working power outlets, the house was raised off the ground to accommodate the mass of lighting cables that ran to the dimmer room, which was disguised as the Kents’ woodshed. Tamworth proved to be an ideal location not only for normal day exteriors, but also for sunset shots. “Tamworth has a totally justified reputation for its sunsets — they are some of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen,” says Sigel. At the beginning of the Superman Returns schedule, the filmmakers capitalized on this by shooting a series of sunrises and sunsets, capturing the last rays of sunlight as they disappeared over the horizon. These shots were later intercut with exterior scenes shot at magic hour, in which the setting sun was replicated with 100K SoftSuns. “We used two techniques,” explains Sigel. “We’d set the levels on the SoftSuns quite low to get that wonderfully warm color of the setting sun, and then we’d completely fade the lights out at the last minute to suggest the sun disappearing behind the horizon. Another, somewhat more manual technique was to slowly fly large black cards in front of the lamps.” To create ambient levels for the night exteriors, Conway and his crew (which included rigging gaffer Iain Matthieson, rigging best boy Matt Clyde, and best boys Moses Fotofili and Peni Laloa) constructed a series of “moonboxes.” Conway explains, “Tom wanted to replicate the quality of light you get from a helium balloon, while avoiding the cost of the helium and potential weather problems.” Each moonbox was a six-sided half-sphere containing 30K panels of Par cans. Each panel was diffused with Hard Gridcloth, and the whole structure was hard-mounted to the end of a construction crane. “These lights could withstand 25- to 30-knot winds and provided an ambient level of T2 to T2.8,” says Conway. “To give the light some shape, we could turn any combination of the six panels on or off.” The boxes were originally intended as an ambient source, but Sigel was so impressed with them he also used them as backlight sources for night exteriors. The Kent farm is also the scene of Superman’s spectacular return — his space pod tears a scorched trench in the ground as Martha Kent watches from her kitchen. The sequence was originally filmed on the Tamworth location. As the pod hurtles over the house, hard, rapidly moving shadows flicker across the kitchen. To depict the light from the pod, the special-effects department flew a large flare on a wire rig. Some time after the production had relocated to Fox Studios in Sydney, however, pickup shots were required for the kitchen scene. Given that the scene could not be repeated indoors with the flare, Sigel had to find a way to re-create the effect with lighting. “I needed a source that was dimmable and movable and would replicate the light of a flare, which is bright and stable in the middle and flickering at the edges,” he explains. To achieve this, the crew built a mobile lighting unit consisting of a 20K and a 10K bulb removed from their housings. These two bulbs provided the central illumination, while the flickering edge of the practical flare was re-created by a series of 5K bulbs positioned around the two central globes and set on a flicker pattern. The entire apparatus was then attached to a crane and flown over the kitchen set to provide the desired movement in the shadows. “It was rather complex to use because it had to dim up and down, flicker and physically move at the same time,” says Conway. “However, the effect matched the location footage perfectly.” Synonymous with the Superman legend are the Kryptonian crystals that serve as the superstructure for the Fortress of Solitude, along with the space pod Superman constructs for the long journey to Krypton. For the 1978 film Superman, cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth, BSC photographed the superhero’s redoubt in cool, icy-blue tones (AC Jan. ’79), but Sigel took a different approach: “I wanted the lighting to endow the crystals, which were actually fiberglass, with a sense of life, a pulsing, breathing quality.” The space pod was a partial build, with large sections created digitally. To maximize shooting time, 30 10K tungsten lamps were positioned high and low around the set to create specific raking and 3?4-backlight angles, which brought out the texture of the scoured and beaded surfaces. These lamps were wired to execute a slow dimming sequence that endowed the set with a sense that the crystals were “breathing.” Additional Par cans were used to highlight certain areas of the set. “With Superman Returns, I finally got to color-correct an effects film the way I wanted to,” notes Sigel. “Once the picture was fairly locked, I asked for that version of the cut to be loaded into our DI suite at Technicolor Digital Intermediates. Then I began to work with colorist Stephan Nakamura, even though most of the effects shots were only temps. This allowed us to give a lot of feedback to the visual-effects team as to how we wanted things to look, and also identify problems early on. We even made ‘mini-LUTs’ for individual shots so the visual-effects vendors could apply them to their work. As more effects were finished, we’d update the reel, and then go back over it again.
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