 Hey, what is up? My name is Rubidium. Today we are looking at the cinematography behind the new movie Sicario, Day of the Soldado. If you are not aware, Sicario was a amazing film that came out in 2015 directed by Donnie Villeneuve and photographed by Roger Deacon. Despite the budget being 30-something million did surprisingly well, though it wasn't exactly a breakout. I think it made 80-something million worldwide. But the producers decided that they wanted another shot at this and maybe with the potential of making this into a franchise. So they commissioned the Taylor Sherrod and the screenwriter to write another script. He came back with this movie, which kind of jettisons, model quandaries and the lead actors and really bases it around the villain and their anti-hero from the first film, Josh Brolin and Benicio Dottoro's characters with, let's say, limited success. But the photography shot by Darius Walski, the same guy who actually shot All the Money in the World, the last film I broke down, is really beautiful. The last time I did one of these, it was like 50 minutes long. So I'm gonna keep it short today. Just pull out a couple of stills from the trailers and the EPK and hopefully this will become a format where I can talk about films that I've seen and the cinematography that I learned something from and everyone can get something from it. So that further ado, this is the cinematography breakdown for Sicario Dei of the Soldado. So let's jump straight in, shall we? Here's a couple of BTS shots, the Alexa XL. He has his little eyepiece on, but and he's got this on some kind of Cine Saddle slider here. He has his eyepiece on, but because he's gonna slide this back and forth to get more of a dynamic shot, he's operating from this little small HD thing. So I actually wanted to start with the daytime exteriors, because there are a lot of these and I think they handle them really well. Here we have here we have Alexa XL with their, you know, master primes on a Steadycam. And if you see this guy, it's actually a diffusion frame, not to give negative feel to the actor, but to hold, and they've got two of them here, hold next to the camera so that in the camera's shot, which is Josh Brolin here, we don't get an outline on the ground of a guy holding a camera. It's really just acting as a sun's water to diffuse the shadow, even though there's, you know, you're not gonna see it in this shot because a lot of dust, but it's pretty crazy to see how we have our op, we have someone spotting him, we have this person running backwards, holding these double two frames. I can't tell what this person's doing, and this is the sound recordist, but they're all wearing ear protection because Josh Brolin is firing his rifle. He probably has ear plugs in. They took a scene that looked like this, so they picked really good overcast days, and then they turned it into a scene like this, where the sky, if we go back to here, they turned the sky to that color. So they gave everything a nice blue tint, pushed everything down, they made it feel much more menacing and threatening. They might have replaced these guys over here, but for these exterior scenes, they picked good times of day or good times of year to shoot where they wouldn't have sharp shadows. You actually see that there is a little bit of a view shadow over here. So they, you know, they picked good times where they would have much more control and they were able to make that into that, which is interesting because you see later on in a different scene, there is much sharper shadows here. This is later on in the film. It's still later in the day because the shadows are so long, but they went with a totally different grade. You know, this is where things are still murky, and then this is where, you know, towards the end of the film, there's lots more resolution. They went with more of a almost like fast and furious look, whereas this is a much more muted palette and a much more, you know, a much more somber muted look. Oh, this was just a cool little trick that I thought they did. They have lots of helicopter to helicopter aerials. So we're in a helicopter looking down on another helicopter shot, but it would have been, they had a whole bunch of scenes that take place in the ground and it would have been really expensive because, you know, helicopters are $1,000 an hour to rent at least just for the pilot and the helicopter to see nothing of the camera. So they did a really good job of blending these helicopter shots with these shots, which I'm pretty sure are, you know, there's a crane over here with a light on top that there's a guy operating it who's like swinging it around to make it feel like a helicopter. So they have much more control. Maybe they just let the bounce fill him in from where the helicopter light is hitting the ground. But I thought it was cool how they mixed up, mixed up practical helicopter shots pretty seamlessly in the edit with this kind of faux helicopter on a crane. They also do a good job of, and you'll see this in the final scene. We're going to look at, you know, rather than leaving this horizon dark, kind of populating it with lots of cool action of people swinging flashlights around and car lights. This is the conversation between Josh Brolin and Alejandro. So this is our wide. You can see the whole scene is shot pretty much with one light that they've taped, one practical skirts of paper on to give it some color or something. And we, the whole scene, you know, cuts to and forth between this and this. And there's the other single. So, you know, I can tell you that there is a much larger source over here. You know, probably a, you know, Black Mat 2L or something like that. Maybe a China big China ball looks circular in his eyes. So maybe a China ball. They've even left the lamp in his shot to kind of motivate the light. But you can see how this is a much larger source over here. But, you know, it certainly didn't pull me out of the scene. I didn't think this side was a little bit dark, but that's Darius Wolski's style. The next thing we're going to look at is how production design and the industrialness of some of these sets really lends itself to great cinematography. You have all these in the, the Air Force Base where they're staging their raids out of. Not only do they have these really cool square kind of quasi-tube banks or Kino flow banks. They don't really use to light much directly. They use them as background. And then they have these awesome cages. So when they're thrown out of focus in his close up, you get this really wonderful texture as well as, you know, all these area lights. So he's in a brightly lit place, but he stepped out of the bright into the darkness and we just get this cool split lighting on his face. The same is true of this is the opening mission in Somalia. I've shot in shipping containers before. They all have this awesome striped texture. This is probably a set though. So we have our hooded man, our kidnapped pirate. And then they've done this cool, this interesting thing where they've mixed daylight and red light. They've got two separate light sources and then they've also wet the floor so that we see all this reflection. It made for a really cool scene because you get all these great color contrasts between the red light and the white light. Cool effects in this, in this film. I think where it really shone for me was when they shoot these really, when they mix color temperatures and shoot these really beautiful, evocative scenes right at sunset or at sunrise. This is a really powerful scene where Alejandro is kind of revealing to the girl that he's kidnapped, that it was her father that killed his family. And you know, you can't, you can't fake this. Well, I guess you could green screen it, but they didn't hear. They probably just sat around and waited for blue hour. They waited for the sky to be just right to get his thing. So we have the light in the sky. We have an off-screen illumination that's, that's keying Alejandro here. Then in the background, we have, we have his key. Then we have this super green background. And then just for fun, we have a golden light in the, in the kitchen here. So you get all these, this wonderful color contrast across the whole, across the whole scene. It makes it really, really pop. It makes it really evocative. Here's another version. I think this is probably sunset as well. This is the opening raid on the, on the Somali pirates, which a lot of it is actually seen, kind of a throwback to the first film. A lot of it's seen in night vision, but we have, you know, again, this, they just chose to shoot at that in that 15 minutes where the sky is almost perfect. And they obviously have a really big, well, not that big, because, you know, the shadows are quite sharp. They probably have a, the shadows are very parallel. So they probably have a 10K or a 20K, you know, way, way over here, giving it that nice, that nice filter, like really ping these blacks and give, give a nice deep look. This is the last thing I wanted to talk about. It's whether the finale happens, spoiler alert. And they have this kind of natural ampere theater where it's, you know, it's a, it's a bowl and they bring him here to, to kill him. So they have this, this is sort of, you know, 30 feet above where they are. And they're able to use that to, they motivate it with these truck lights. But I think then they bring it, they brought in film lighting so that everything's kind of focused on this, the circle where things are going to happen. And the main, they keep the practicals of these, this main truck here with the, you know, the multiple headlights and the roof lights. And you can see how they're using this car to shoot over and pick up these boys, which are going to be instrumental in the scene. And they're using these lights to hit over and hit this guy. And then these lights, and these lights here just to give us lights in the frame. You know, when we actually see stuff, they do a really good job of keeping everything, you know, keeping this really black and having almost no detail front to camera. And then, you know, using all this stuff. I mean, this guy's face is lit by another light somewhere. But it's really just the edge on this guy that really makes it feel awesome. I want to do one of these a week if I can, because it really helps my, helps my cinematography development by looking at these films and makes me go and watch other movies. Thanks very much for watching, guys. That was my breakdown of Sicario 2's cinematography. Let me know if there's other films that you'd like to see me break down, either things that are coming out on DVD or things that are still in the cinema. I really enjoyed doing this and got a lot from it. Thanks very much for watching. I will see you next time.