 Hey, welcome to the Crimson Engine. My name is Rubidium. Today we are looking at the cinematography of Blade Runner 2049. I've broken down a couple of okay movies of the last couple of weeks. This one is an absolute favorite of mine. It was critically acclaimed and yet did not do well at all at the box office, which sort of is what happened in the original Blade Runner. My take on this is that this film is sort of so out there and amazing that it'll probably be 10 years before the general public gets what's so great about it. Then it'll have special editions and all the things that the original Blade Runner had. And other science fiction filmmakers will probably be ripping this off for the next 30 years until they forget how poorly this one did and make a third. But there is lots of amazing innovation, lots of incredible production design and camera work in this film. Awesome performances. So that further ado, let's jump in and look at the cinematography of Blade Runner 2049. So we're going to go through a couple of preliminary stills just to sort of look at the style and the technique. And then I'm going to drill down a little deeper and look at some of the kind of overarching themes of how they shot this film. Here we have a really cool detail where they're using this giant, you know, 100 foot silk bouncing light off it or through it. I think off it, because you can see the shadow and that's giving this very soft illumination you see here where, you know, it very, very clearly mimics the sky on Overcast Day. This is another interesting still. This is a remote, I'd say motion controlled head with a Canon 1DC or 1DX. And my guess would be that these are miniatures and they use a lot of practically made miniatures in the film. And that they're using this because it's small and because it can take stills, raw stills, and they're doing some kind of motion controlled advance through here. And for that, they wanted a small, cheaper camera to kind of like move through this space on the head. Here we have the screen. The OP is Roger Teakins. Roger, they've got they've put it into the camera shooting 24 frames per second. This is take five. This is something from the Japanese and this is camera A. I believe there was a single camera shoot there. You can look online and find a whole bunch of previs of this film. Obviously with visual effects shots, they previous pretty much everything. If you don't know a previs is sort of, you know, high school level animated visual effect of the entire movie where you have little these little people moving through, but it's it's lit. Basically, the idea is that the director can know what the cut looks like before he starts shooting. So he knows all the shots that he's going to go and get. There's also a lot of practically built stuff. Anytime you have a character in this case, this is the journalist who's doing a BTS. Anytime you have characters interacting with the environment, they have to build it. So so they've just built this set in a back lot and they've used the green screen. Anytime the character crosses over the sky, they're going to want to green there so that they can map out the green and add their set extension. Same with this. Here we are on another back lot. Why didn't they green screen all of this because they can just trace this line? It's the moving line of Ryan Gosling walking forward that they're going to have to rotoscope out. But instead of that, they've just, you know, put up their giant double height green screen. Same with this one. Here's the set that they've built. This is these are just boxes. You can see they're staging over here. So this is the camera gear and lighting gear. They've lit it and they've built the set. And then what they do is extend this little section and then they create all this in CGI. So they've known what they were going to do beforehand because they've done all their previs and they know how much they, well, they, they shoot as much as they can and then they can extend it. This is in stark contrast to how, you know, early CGI environment films were done where pretty much everything was green screen because, you know, before visual effects were as advanced as they are now and of course with more computer processing power and more experience, people get better every year. They weren't able to match foreground with background very easily. Now, as CGI gets better, they've found out that they do this on almost every shot where they build some of the set and then they use that as a reference to extend the set backwards and it, it pushes back the edges of the world and lets them, you know, and Blade Runner 2049 is, is great for, let's get off that Phantom Menace still, is great for, you know, really pushing back the edges of the Blade Runner world and letting us see how the world operates outside of the story and makes the story so much more believable because you feel like the world goes on forever. Interestingly, this is kind of a throwback to early visual effects. This is Citizen Kane where they shut the cars going along a road and then they would extend that optically, not digitally. The next thing I want to talk about is the camera motion in this film. Almost everything is either on a crane or a dolly, mainly on a crane. Actually, there's no shaky camera work in this film. It's all very stable and it reminds me of a David Fincher quote where he talks about how a stable camera gives the gives you the illusion of, you know, the wheels of fate grinding to their inevitable conclusion. Whereas a shaky camera kind of makes you feel like anything could happen. Anything's up for grabs. A lot of this stuff was on these kind of telescoping cranes so that as Ryan Gosling walks forward, the camera here on the head can follow with him. I mean, there's lots of reasons for that. I mean, this is not, this is not a cheap way of doing it, but it lets you go much further than if you had a dolly track here. You can only start the shot as far back as you could start to see the dolly track in shot. So with a telescoping crane, you can get much further back. You can crane forward extending that or even roll on the wheels and you don't have to worry about dolly track. This is really interestingly lit. This is an exterior, but they're shooting it in a studio. They've got their space lights up here. Then they've got their like light bar to give him this crazy backlight. Roger Deakins, BSc, ASC, PhD, shot this movie and he's famous for using these, this remote head and these wheels. This one's called the PowerPod. I believe it's kind of an older setup. So he's watching the monitor here and he's controlling the camera, which will be on the crane on a head. PowerPod classic remote head camera system. So you have this little box that opens up. It has a wheel here and a wheel here, one for tilt and one for pan. And using these, you can get very slow, smooth camera work, much like the early days of Hollywood where you had a geared head because the cameras were so big, you couldn't move them manually. Well, you can now, but this is sort of a throwback to that. And I think this one was like $11,000. You can get it online. DJI sell this awesome thing called the DJI Master 3 wheel axis. I think this is like $8,000, you know, three different axes. It's remote rather than wired and you know, you can get a two wheel one as well. So if you have a gimbal or you have even the Ronin S, which I'm going to review next week, has the ability to accept messages from these. And like you can start doing your own Roger Deakins if you like. So the last thing I wanted to talk about on this film is another tendency of more and more blockbusters are doing, which is building the lights into the set. Here is the girl in her sort of isolation chamber, creating memories. And all along here and all through here is lit by light ribbon, which is a high output LED, very small on dimmers running through the whole room. And in the ASC article, Roger Deakins talks about how this is how this whole set was lit with, you know, with light ribbon running through the set. And it means that you can have, you know, total control over the amount of light where it's not where it's coming from. But you can also shoot in 360 degrees around your subject and know that you're never going to see lights because the lights are built into the set. Same as this love's really epic office where you have a one light source with a really probably, you know, light mat, two 4Ls or something with a kind of probably very shallow dish full of water with a wave maker in it. So it gives that it gives a bit of a caustic kind of interruption to the light. And then that's, you know, shooting down and spilling on all these walls. I mean, it looks like that's how the scene is lit. There's no other lights coming into it. It's all really lit with this one amazing practical. And they've probably chosen to stage her here and the other woman here so that she's lit in a way that they want. And, you know, when they go to the wide, they don't have to move all these lights out of the way because all the lights coming down, they probably just bring in bounce and take out bounce when they need it. But really efficient way of working, very expensive way of working because if you're building sets, it adds a lot more time to your set build. And it takes a lot of coordination between the D.B. or the gaffer and the production designer art director. But in the end, you have something that's really flawless and gets you shooting really quickly because if you only have Harrison Ford and Ryan Gosling for a couple of months, you don't want to be, you want to get the maximum pages per day out of your shoot. So that was my look at the cinematography of Blade Runner. Hope you guys got something from it. Leave your questions in the comments. I didn't break down some of the kind of more famous scenes like the office scene because I feel like a lot of other people have already done that. Try to keep these short enough that you can kind of watch them while you're having a coffee before you start work. Please suggest more movies to break down. I think next week I'm going to do a Marvel movie. I'm not sure if it's going to be Black Panther Infinity War or something else, but I really feel like they don't do a great job of creating a powerful imagery. I'm kind of interested to know why. Again, thanks for watching. I will see you next time.