Shooting and Painting the Civil War

uring principal photography, it became clear that a digital intermediate would be the only way to get the look of Cold Mountain – a period piece set alongside the carnage and brutality of the Civil War – just right. Six weeks were spent shooting a huge Civil War battle sequence, and cinematographer John Seale, ASC used every conceivable type of camera mount to capture the scene, including using handheld cameras in the midst of the fighting. Tobacco and chocolate graduated filters were used to help create a sense of the haze and smoke hanging over the battlefield – but those filters were problematic in shots that tilted up to the sky.

This prompted the first discussions of treating the scenes in a digital intermediate process. Eventually, the filmmakers processed the entire film using a DI at Framestore CFC in London. It was Seale’s first experience with DI on a feature film.

"The digital intermediate is quite brilliant in that you can isolate a window and regrade it without touching the rest of the frame," says Seale. "It’s lovely to be able to go back and retrim. If you think something’s still a little hot, you can just isolate the window and pull it down another two or three points. That’s quite fun."

Seale used the DI process to control color over the course of the entire film. "This film generally does not have a lot of color," he says. "The war is muddy, and obviously wardrobe and production design and set dressing all went to neutral, somber colors of war. The beginning is lovely, and the stock was handling all of those greens and yellows. In the beginning, times were good. Nicole [ Kidman ] is seen with a horse and buggy driving through corn. With the digital intermediate, I was able to lay a strip of yellow across the corn and make it look even yellower, so the whole thing has a lovely food-richness to it. We were able to say‘Let’s put a little band of yellow through there and pop it even more, so that people’s mouths will start watering.’ The grass is green, the earth is brown, the corn is yellow.

"Once the war comes along, things go downhill," he says. "We were able to enhance that as well, by taking away that wealth and food-richness in the coloring. The digital intermediate was simply sensational for that. When all the young men have gone to war and there’s nobody to harvest the corn, and it’s rotting on the stalks, we were able to degenerate that color and make it into an ugly brown."

DI techniques were also used to subtly enhance colors in flags and uniforms to help distinguish the Union and Confederate soldiers in the big battle sequence. Seale and Framestore colorist Adam Glasman added touches of flame to make certain explosions more realistic. They also used the DI to add a glimmer of highlight to facial skin in certain close-ups.

"I found that in scenes lit by the soft light and gently flickering firelight, the makeup can tend to flatten the skin," says Seale. "I got this idea that maybe I could put a little elliptical glow on [ Nicole's] cheek and add a bit of yellow to it. Instead of just being flat, warm and reddish, there would be this highlight on the cheek. You can’t actually track it with her cheek as she turns her head in her performance, so we let it drift, and it looks like a sheen of the fire on her skin that’s traveling as she turns her head. It made it so much more interesting. We worked hard on all of that sort of thing, and it was amazing how much it helped."

Seale says part of using digital intermediate is knowing how much time to spend on a given shot or sequence. "It’s a reasonably expensive process at this moment to go to the digital intermediate, certainly for a film that’s running around 2 hours and 15 minutes," he notes. "I was in that little dark room for roughly three weeks, eight hours a day. I found that it was very exciting to see how deep you can go, but you can’t do every single little thing that you see in the frame. The audience is still only going to see it once, at 24 frames a second, real time. So I tended a little more towards broad brushstrokes."

The period setting of Cold Mountain provided Seale with many opportunities to use light as an adjunct to the storytelling. "For many of the interiors, even in the day, I worked with oil lamps," Seale says. "The warmth of lanterns and firelight with the slightly cooler exteriors is a lovely combination, and it’s one that we used quite a lot. It keeps stamping home the simplicity of life back then. The lighting helped communicate that Ruby and Ada are well-prepared and capable farmers. That was quite fun, playing with that depiction of lifestyle in the lighting. Little things like that that can help a film immensely."

Seale normally chooses one high-speed stock to shoot an entire film. For Cold Mountain, he deviated from this approach. "A few years ago, you could always tell when a movie switched over from a low speed fine grain film to a high speed stock," he says. "That sudden jump worried me. I felt that using one stock allowed me to start shooting earlier and finish later, and that if the audience was still worried about the grain after settling in to the movie, then the movie is no good.

"On Cold Mountain, I did use two negatives, but they were both high speed negatives," he explains. "I used the [ Kodak Vision] 5279 film, which is a little more contrasty, and then the 5284, which is a softer negative. I used the 84 for good times prior to the war starting, and the better times with Ada. Inman’s journey is totally 79 until his reunion with Ada, where 84 was used."

Seale operated the A camera, using Panavisions and swearing by Panavision’s 11:1 Primo zoom lens. "I stick it in the front and let it rust there because I love it," he says. "I love the glass, the range, and the reliability. I love the way you can change the frame size quietly without it being seen during a shot. I generally carry about four zooms, the 11:1 and the 4:1, and the two lightweights. I use the lightweight ones for Steadicam, handholding or in tight corners."

This attention to detail is all part of Seale’s goal of recreating reality. "I don’t look for a very obvious style of lighting for each movie," he says. "I’m an unashamed realist cameraman, because I don’t know how else to do it. I always harbor that idea as the basis for lighting any movie. I don’t use diffusion filters at all. I think that feeling is built in by the way you light and the other decisions you make.

"I try to work in what I feel is the reality of ideas, to instill into the audience that it’s happening without blatantly having to show them," he says. "I haven’t really invented anything new on Cold Mountain. Hopefully I’ve just stayed with the reality of each situation, and enhanced it or de-enhanced it so that the audience gets that feeling of chill, or of happiness."