The Undiscovered Countryside Insurrection features the most elaborate use of location shooting in a Trek feature since The Voyage Home (AC Dec. '86), the bulk of which was set in and around contemporary San Francisco. For this new film, two separate sites in California — Lake Sherwood in Thousands Oaks and the Lake Sabrina area in the Sierra Nevada Mountains — represented the idyllic Ba'ku world.
However, this is not to say that creating a sense of "paradise" was easy. The filmmakers had to fight against the sun on a daily basis as the 1998 production took place from April to July, with the outdoor filming scheduled for May and June. Time was often spent waiting for the sun to swing around and place the actors in proper lighting. "Matt and I chose the locations based on our ability to maximize the sunlight," Frakes recalls. "Overall, we tried to find locations that spent more time in backlight than frontlight. Having frontlight didn't matter as much for group shots, but if the scene had the Enterprise crew, or our leading lady, Anij [actress Donna Murphy], then we definitely preferred to use backlight."
Taking his cues from the film's plot, Leonetti describes, "This planet rejuvenates the human body and makes people look young as long as they stay put — some characters have been there for 300 years, but look as if they are only about 40 years old. Given that idea, we did lean towards a lush, green look, primarily using backlight [from the sun] and putting diffusion on the lens." After a battery of tests, the cinematographer opted to shoot the Ba'ku environs through a 1/2 Tiffen Black ProMist filter to soften the imagery captured on Kodak's fine-grained 100 ASA EXR 5248.
Leonetti favors long lenses, and primarily deployed Panavision's C-series anamorphic primes, partly because their light weight was well-suited to the film's extensive use of Steadicam. He notes that "for scenes set on Ba'ku, we used some really long lenses — up to a 600mm and 800mm — because they give everything a bit more sparkle and the images are prettier. Just to do a close-up in anamorphic, you have to use a 180mm to get in tighter, but most of the movie was shot with 50mm, 75mm, 180mm and 400mm lenses."
For one effects-filled sequence, Leonetti was required to use a spherical 50mm lens. In this romantic scene, Picard and Anij stand beside a waterfall while she uses her psychic powers to essentially "stall" time, making the water and other scenic elements seemingly slow and freeze in place. The cameraman recalls, "The effects people didn't want to have to deal with anamorphic [plates] when doing the composite work for the visual effects, which include beams and shafts of light. They asked us to shoot the scene with a spherical lens, explaining that after they did their work, they could go back and anamorphosize the image." (See "Effecting an Insurrection," beginning on page 40).
Much of the action on Ba'ku involves the Starfleet officers defending the indigenous people from various phases of Son'a attack. Leonetti therefore had to compose some shots around CG effects that would later be composited into the sequence. As a result, he had to erect greenscreens for several scenes shot on location. One such case was a night exterior as the Ba'ku attempt to elude capture by making a mass exodus into a remote mountainous region. Several Ba'ku are seen running towards camera as they are "tagged" with markers by Son'a drones buzzing overhead, and then beamed off the planet's surface. In order to shoot the elements needed for the insertion of both the computer-generated Son'a drones and the transporter effects, Leonetti and his crew "built a 60' by 40' greenscreen. We then brought in a 150' crane, hung the lights right on it — four Far Cyc lights with 216 diffusion paper and full plus-green gels, and four Master Lights for the end — and just pulled up the whole apparatus, including the lights and greenscreen. We did it with a crane because we thought that would be the cheapest and fastest way, since the greenscreen had to come back out for us to do the clean pass. You can't touch the lights once the scene has been lit, because it all has to match [throughout the various passes]. But I also had to make sure that there was enough room on the top of the frame for the drones to be flying through."
Another scene featuring the attacking drones became a lesson in location logistics. The sequence in question was shot over three days a 10,000' mountain peak in Mammoth, which became the site of a phaser-slinging, Sergio Leone-style standoff between the mechanical marauders and the Enterprise crew. Even from the base camp parking lot, the mountain's peak — another 2,000' in elevation — could only be accessed by helicopter, and each flight had a maximum load of just four people. All of the equipment had to be carted in by chopper four days prior to shooting, and remained on the location overnight. Luckily, Leonetti was spared from having to set up greenscreens, since the protagonists and the CG-generated assailants were never seen in the same frame; photographically, all the sequence required were locked-off background plates of the snowcapped mountain ranges.
For night sequences set in the Ba'ku village grounds, Leonetti had to light up an expansive zone surrounded by greenery. The community itself was a cluster of open-air stucco structures influenced by Far Eastern architecture and drafted by production designer Herman Zimmerman (whose credits include the three previous Trek films, as well as the TV series Deep Space Nine and Voyager). While working within the Angeles National Forest on First Contact, Leonetti had to contend with the verdant foliage absorbing an abundance of his illumination. In that film, however, the forest doubled as a 21st-century refugee camp equipped with makeshift generators, thus allowing for a source-lighting approach. The Luddite lifestyle of the Ba'ku, however, left Leonetti with little motivation for his sources. "There are no streetlights in the town, because technology of any kind is not permitted," the cinematographer details. "The Ba'ku have gone back to a very simple and serene way of life. We therefore had to come up with moonlight which, naturally, we had to simulate. When lighting such an effect, you can only use one source, and only light one side of people's faces. Consequently, you've got to put in some other lights so that the audience can actually see the people. Our biggest problem was the fact that the village set was about 700' long by about 250' wide. We got back over 1,000' with the camera, and we could see the entire town plus a lake to the left of it. So where do you put the lights?"
Leonetti resolved to backlight the borough by deploying a BeBee NightLite truck (situated some 250' from the set's edge, see diagram on page 33) consisting of 15 4K HMIs, each with a nearly 360-degree turning radius. In preproduction, he and his longtime gaffer, Pat Blymer, spent four hours one night testing the fixture's range of throw on the Paramount lot. Leonetti's background in lamp desiging and building (as a co-owner of Sunray Manufacturing) inspired him to utilize three special lenses — spot, medium and wide — on each of the BeBee's 4K heads. Given that the widest-set lenses lent the largest light spread, yet the least amount of ambiance, the cameraman applied the medium and spot lenses when he wanted to illuminate areas further away from the camera. To create a slight fill light on the opposite side of the town, he aimed in four 18Ks from alongside a hill parallel to the lake.
"We also had to light the front of the main building somehow, otherwise it would have been dark," Leonetti adds. "To do that, we'd use Master Lights or smaller HMIs and bounce them into a 12' by 12' Griffolyn and back onto the building. We'd also hide lights behind other buildings and near bushes, primarily Master Lights bounced into 4' by 4' white cards, along with a few 1K and 2K zip lights. To light the side of bridge, we'd hide 4K Sunray HMIs and bounce them into the water so that we'd get that sparkling effect. The special effects guys would then agitate the water to break up [the lighting patterns on the lake's surface]. We wouldn't put as much of an exposure there because we didn't want it to be as bright as the immediate source. However, we did try to imply that it was all coming from one source, which, obviously, you can't really do."
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