Our goal for 1.21 Gigawatts was to honor the visual look and feel of the director of photography of the original Back to the Future films, Dean Cundy. We brought in cinematographer Ryan Griswold – a friend and admirer of Cundy’s works as well as life-long BTTF fan like ourselves. Griswold brought not only his knowledge and years of expertise, but also probably every piece of camera and lighting gear he owned, making this passion project even more, well, passionate. Together with my co-director Tamara Gray, the three of us meticulously planned every frame of every shot to capture that BTTF nostalgia.
In effort to simulate that classic 80’s vibe in scope and movement, we shot on a RED Komodo camera for the entire shoot except for the final night at the mall where we used a BlackMagic PIXYS for its low-light capabilities. LOMO Spherical Cinema Primes were used throughout all setups. This helped us to obtain cinematic features, hardware, and workflow while also maintaining small, form factor builds for lightweight on-the-go shooting. This really came into play when getting those elevated crane shots. As there was no time (nor budget) to haul and build a jib, Griswold and camera operator Kiel Eulberg devised a rig where the camera(s) would be operated by a gimbal attached to a boom pole. This was quick, very efficient, and entire streets didn’t need to be blocked off to obtain these shots which helped us to move around quickly while stay efficient.
For the interior sequences like Doc’s living room and the concert finalé, Eulberg used his Steadicam rig for smooth sweeping movements that would match the style of the original movies while also giving a more contemporary excitement to the action at hand. We were all very happy with the results. For lighting “Marty’s” bedroom, we wanted to capture that mixed color temperature. Griswold used a selection of warm incandescent-like LED’s mixed with natural morning sunlight coming through the bedroom window. Both cameras were used for this scene with one on a tripod and the other via Steadicam.
We shot with all natural lighting on the day for the Burger King, McFly house, and future alley sequences. The Burger King shots were handheld using a gimbal and we ran an even smaller skeleton crew with only Griswold, 1st AC Michael Korb, and directors Erik Deutscher and Tamara Gray. Shooting the night mall sequences, we only used one light as the street and parking lot lights were enough for the most part. They just needed a little extra for edges and depth.
We shot the entirety of Day 2 principal photography on a soundstage. This included all of the time travel scenes. Directors Deutscher and Gray were inspired by the now gone Back to the Future ride from Universal Studios’ theme park and wanted to not only capture that feeling, but recreate it in-camera. Griswold loved this idea and had Lecky help him to engineer a DMX lighting grid to go along with a projection playback background (animated by our VFX supervisor, Milan Harrison). This whole system of lights was programmed to illuminate certain colors at specific times creating the time tunnel vibe. This was quite the undertaking especially for such a small production with a very limited crew.
Griswold also programmed lighting for the concert scene much like on the sound stage the previous day. This time a more straightforward and traditional flashing and changing of lighting was used. All of the moving camera sweeps, pans, and pushes for these sequences were again the result of operator Eulberg’s amazing Steadicam skills as he captured all of that energy of the rockin’ band and partying people. Watching Eulberg in action throughout this entire shoot was such a joy.