Every so often, a project comesalong that you just can’t passup, and when I read the conceptfor Muse’s “Knights ofCydonia” music video, I knew it

was one I had to shoot. Clocking inat more than six minutes, the song isdefinitely a departure from main-stream radio fare. A cross betweenEnnio Morricone’s SpaghettiWestern scores and Queen’s“Bohemian Rhapsody,” the trackstumped many music-video direc-tors. Muse is known for theirunconventional approach to bothmusic and videos, so director JosephKahn submitted a treatment for“Knights of Cydonia” that featuredBarbarella-style warrior women,robots, unicorns, holograms,motorcycles, and a mysterious hero

who appears in the guises of a roguecowboy and masked avenger. Theband loved it, but they feared itwould cost a million dollars tomake.

The solution was the fortu-itous discovery of a Western town“backlot” that had been recentlyerected in Bucharest, Romania,where we could use set pieces leftover from the feature ColdMountain (see AC Jan. ’04). The“Knights of Cydonia” video wasproduced by Richard Weager of HSILondon, and he and Kahn were ableto take me and Dan Ming, my 1stAC/2nd-unit cinematographer, toRomania to execute the project on arelatively shoestring budget.

Kahn’s treatment was rifewith visual references to Spaghetti

Director of photography

Christopher Probst details his award-winning work onthe stylish musicvideo for Muse’s

“Knights ofCydonia.”

by Christopher Probst

Unit photography byRichard Weager

OnceUponaTimein Bucharest

66 September 2007

logical mud-volcano formation afew hours south of Bucharest thatprovided a few hundred yards ofcracked clay and mud — an idealdesert location. The local crews wereexperienced not only because of theinflux of U.S. features shootingthere to save a buck or two, but alsobecause of Romania’s lucrativecommercials market. However, theproduction imported an excellentEnglish gaffer, Mark Taylor, andproduction designer, MorganKennedy.

Our 21⁄2-day schedule beganwith a half-day load-in and skele-ton-crew shoot, which we used toget a running start on our extensiveambitions. This half-day’s workcomprised the video’s openingmontage/dressing sequence insidethe hero’s log cabin. With our hard

Westerns; cheesy, metaphysicalkung-fu flicks of the 1970s; and sci-fi influences like Buck Rogers, Planetof the Apes and Star Wars. In short,the video is basically a trailer for thekind of schlocky Seventies low-budget movie ostensibly shot in aSoviet-bloc country and funded byshady, arms-dealing producers withmisguided ambitions to be moviemoguls. When Joseph and I begandiscussing how the visual designcould support that idea, I was quickto pull out my DVD of Once Upon aTime in the West, mindful of its bold,widescreen compositions and hard,three-point lighting style. Kahnemphatically agreed, and that filmbecame the launching point for ourlook.

Once in Romania, we scoutedour backlot, as well as an odd geo-

three-point lighting philosophyfirmly in hand, we established agame plan: we would use large HMIunits blasting unsoftened light at thecharacters for exteriors, and moreold-school key/fill/kicker lightingfor interiors. The cabin set had twosmall, boarded-up windows thatprovided source-lighting motiva-tion, and we placed a 6K HMI out-side each, sending shafts of slightlycooler daylight through the smokedinterior. Inside, several 2K and 5Ktungsten Fresnels were used to cre-ate warm, hard sidelight on the set,where Russell Bain, the actor por-traying our nameless “hero,” per-formed some corny kung-fu-stylemoves for the opening-credit mon-tage.

On the first day of the mainshoot, the company moved to the

Director JosephKahn’s treatmentfor Muse’s“Knights ofCydonia” videocalled forBarbarella-stylewarrior women,a SpaghettiWestern lookand feel, andreferences toclassic kung fuand sci-fi filmsof the 1970s.Below: Theproductionprepares to filmin the Westerntown backlotconstructedoutsideBucharest,Romania, usingset piecesoriginally builtfor ColdMountain.

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American Cinematographer 67

desert location to shoot sequencesin which the hero — having beencaptured, stockaded and humiliated— is thrown out to die. Thoughgraphic and alien-looking, the loca-tion was a fairly small geologicalanomaly amid the verdantRomanian mountains, so we choseangles that would allow us to keepany greenery out of frame. However,because of the site’s remote locationand the production’s tight pursestrings, only putt-putt generatorscould be used; this limited us toHMI units that were 4K or smaller.We scheduled carefully to utilizenatural sunlight, modifying it asnecessary. This approach provedmore than adequate for the blazing-hot desert effect we needed whenthe hero, thirsty and hallucinating,

first encounters our Barbarella-styleheroine.

The second full shoot daycomprised all the remainingsequences to be shot on the studiobacklot. Our approach to these exte-rior daylight scenes was pretty uni-form; most of the time, a scene wasstaged with the sun as a top/back-light and 18K HMIs aimed at theaction as 3⁄4 hard frontlight. Hotedgelights were created with HMIPars or via shiny boards redirectingthe sunlight.

The interior sequencesentailed a typical saloon scene —including the mandatory bar fight— and a more intimate scenebetween our hero and his love inter-est. Having learned my craft in anera of ultra-fast lenses and highlysensitive/broad-ranged film stocks, Itend to prefer the more naturalisticfeel of large, soft sources and wrap-ping bounced light, so shining rawunits on actors’ faces was a bit of adeparture. Doing something inten-tionally “ugly” is always a bit terrify-ing for cinematographers; I alwaysfeel I need to create the most flatter-ing lighting and show just how slickI can be!

However, as I was lighting the“love scene” in a loft in one of thecabin interiors, it occurred to methat perhaps I’ve been too harsh on

the old-school approach. The bed-room loft set had overhead woodrafters where I could rig several 1Kand 2K Fresnels to provide thescene’s illumination. This dovetailedneatly with our three-point studiolighting strategy, and I was amusedto find myself applying the idea withgusto: if a 1K was aimed at the duoas a key light and any resultant shad-ow on their faces was too dark, I sim-ply aimed another 1K at them fromanother angle to create fill. This wasa totally foreign approach to lightingfor me, and I wondered if I had gonecrazy. But after all the keying, fillingand edgelighting was done, the resultlooked quite beautiful.

Hewing to the eclectic aesthet-ic established in Joseph’s treatment,the saloon interior location wasdressed as a bizarre hodgepodge ofseemingly conflicting genres. Thebar scenes feature neon signage, anelectronic jukebox that projectsholograms of the band, and a hurly-burly clientele. The sequence beginswith the nameless hero enteringthrough swinging doors and step-ping into a tight close-up. This firstshot was planned to include thewaning throes of daylight and had tobe shot before dark. Adding sometoplight-bounced HMIs to raise theambience of the room, we aimed ahalf-corrected 5K at a 3⁄4 angle for

Once Upon a Time in Bucharest

A unicorn and a mysterious heroalso figure into the story. Below:

Setting up the unicorn shot in adesert-like stretch of terrain a few

hours south of Bucharest.

68 September 2007

the hero’s end-position close-up andthen flagged it off to create a dra-matic slash of light across his eyes,evoking a more classical hard-light-ing feel.

From there, night quickly fell,and the rest of the sequence was shotnight for day. We continued to applya toplight bounce provided by two4'x8' sheets of beadboard armedover the center of the set from a sec-ond-floor catwalk. Additional 2Kswere aimed from above to createpools of light for the bar and clustersof tables, and we also placed severalof these units in corners to providebacklight when necessary. The holo-grams of the band were added inpost from bluescreen performancescaptured in London after theRomania shoot.

The long shoot day finishedwith a large night exterior sceneshowing our hero unearthing arobot and discovering what he’sbeen after: the futuristic technologyof the compact disc! (Remember, thevideo is supposed to have been shotin the late Seventies/early Eighties.)Although we see the entire town litup at night, Joseph decided not toshoot a wide master. Instead, we seethe whole set in tighter shots that,because of the staging of the action,pan the expanse of the town. Forthese night shots, the production

obtained a Condor that looked likeit should have been sent to a scrap-yard 40 years ago. Still, it was enoughto provide a high, half-corrected18K HMI backlight to enhance theglows we placed in windows with 1Kand 2K open-face Pars, and the “fire-light” glows on buildings that wecreated with hidden 12'x12' and8'x8' bounces and 10Ks on dim-mers. To finish off the backgroundlighting, we had about 60 extrasholding torches. The foregroundaction was lit with low 4'x8' bouncesand 2Ks warmed with variousstrengths of orange, red and yellowgels and controlled with MagicGadgets flicker boxes.

The band appears as a holographic image in asaloon and as a hallucination in the desert.Middle: Cinematographer Christopher Probst(center, with back to camera) oversees thelighting of the “love scene.” Bottom: Filming thehero in the desert.

American Cinematographer 69

Throughout the shoot,Joseph and I decided to adopt theshooting style of 1970s action andlow-budget cinema, so we madeample use of zoom lenses and snap-zooms in shot. We had two Super35mm Arri 435ES cameras runningfull-time, and a full set of ZeissUltra Prime lenses to go with ourtwo Angenieux zooms, a 25-250mm T3.5 HR and a 17-102mmT2.9

Although Kodak’s Vision200T 5274 stock has been discontin-ued in the States, I was able to obtainsome to use as our main emulsion;for night scenes, I employed Vision2500T 5218. To help “cheese up” ourimages, we shot everything with starfilters on the lens. Even if we didn’thave a highlight in shot that would“bling” the star, the filters served as amild contrast reducer and softeningelement.

A final significant contribu-tion to the look of the project wasour decision to have low-con printsstruck from all of our camera nega-tives for the telecine transfer. Josephand I had previously used low-conprints for a Jamiroquai video, andwe both liked the quality of thecreamed-out highlights. This tech-nique was perfectly suited to thefaded, bleached-out look we soughtfor the Muse clip. This idea was fur-

The videoincludes a

forced-perspective

Planet of theApes reference

that Probstachieved with a$5 souvenir from

HollywoodBoulevard and a

14mm lensstopped down toa T22. The hero’s

discovery of acompact disc

marks a changein his fortunes.

70

Once Upon a Time in Bucharest

ther enhanced by input fromCompany 3 colorist Dave Hussey,who proceeded to “step on” thewhites in the transfer and apply lib-eral amounts of magenta to theblacks, suggesting the look of an oldprint that was beginning to fade andshift to magenta.

The icing on the cake wasadded in the online process, whenJoseph and effects artist DavidLebensfeld of Ingenuity Engineadded some scratches, dirt, misreg-istered perfs and bad film splices.These effects were used sparingly

and spread throughout the video tokeep them from being too obvious.

For a cinema junkie like me,“Knights of Cydonia” was a sheerjoy to create. Joseph and I haveworked together since 1995, andour history together serves toincrease our body of referencesfrom job to job. That, in turn,excites us to push each new projectfurther. Collaborating with a visually adept director is every cinematographer’s dream, andJoseph constantly demands the bestfrom me.

Christopher Probst won theMusic Video Production Association’sBest Cinematography Award for hiswork on this project. !

TECHNICAL SPECS

2.40:1Super 35mm

Arri 435ESZeiss and Angenieux lenses

KodakVision 200T 5274,

Vision2 500T 5218

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