To help, Schwartzman deployed three different Technocranes – 50’, 30’ and 17’ – to capture dynamic shots. “Colin likes a very mobile camera,” he adds. What he’s less keen on was multiple cameras. “He would never throw a second camera in just to get a cutaway of somebody,” says Schwartzman. “He would say, ‘No, they get their shot. It’s an A camera shot. This is how we’re doing it.’” Only occasionally – such as the underground market and the finale, where the characters face off with the enormous Giganotosaurus in Biosyn Valley – saw more than one camera used.

A team from Helicopter Film Services, led by aerial DP and camera operator Jeremy Braben, shot dramatic aerial sequences in Switzerland and the UK. “We used our specialist 6-camera aerial array, the Typhon, mounted on the Shotover K1 gimbal rigged with 6 Red Helium and 21mm Zeiss CP.3 XD lenses in order to give a massive field of vision – ideal for use in VFX driven productions,” Braben says. “We then swapped from the Typhon 6-camera array to our custom 6-camera 360 array also mounted on the Shotover K1 stabilised gimbal, using the same cameras and lenses.”

After the shoot wrapped in November 2020, Schwartzman went to the American-founded post-production house Company 3 for picture grading. “Working with Colin is a very straight ahead process and I don’t ever try to re-light the movie in the grading,” he says. “What you see is how the movie is going to look. In a nice way, we actually had a very well graded movie, before we even got into the final DI [Digital intermediate] process.” It was a satisfying end for not only an epic film – but a saga stretching across three decades.

Words: James Mottram. This article first appeared in British Cinematographer magazine.

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