THE TERMINAL
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DVD
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"Also, having daylight as our base gave me the flexibility to work with or without an 85 filter, and that allowed me to create a very cool, blue ambience and then light the foreground with warm tungsten sources to highlight the story's romantic aspects," Kaminski continues. "That way I could put the characters in a nucleus of warmth surrounded by a cool environment. I never would have been able to do that if we hadn't started with daylight as our base."

Of course, once the filmmakers decided to go with daylight-balanced ambience, they still had to figure out how to illuminate more than 5 million cubic feet of space. The set's ceiling consisted of 4'x10' panels of clear, corrugated plastic material, and the lighting job was complicated by the fact that the set was 60' high, which left a mere 10' above the set to rig lights. "The set was an exercise in multiplication - every choice we made became a factor of 100 or more," says Devlin.

The crew began by mounting 110 4K Pars within nine 60' troughs in the ceiling and aiming them down through 9'-diameter, V-shaped gridcloth "socks." To make the artificial daylight permeate the space in a realistic way, the filmmakers decided to try draping a huge swatch of white material over the entire set to bounce light, essentially surrounding the space with a soft source. Led by Kwiatkowski and rigging grip Charlie Gilleran, the crew accomplished this by mounting an elaborate truss system to the ceiling of the hangar; this became the support structure for all of the material and cabling. Just below the truss system, they created a puzzle of Ultrabounce material (a thin hybrid of Griffolyn, gridcloth and beadboard) that was pieced together with cable and Velcro flaps. This material covered literally every surface above and to the sides of the set, creating an "envelope" of white bounce that blended into the painted backing. (In the end, about 189,000 square feet of Ultrabounce was wrapped around the set.)

To light the material evenly, the crew first tested a bank of 10 18K HMIs parallel with the Ultrabounce, but the resultant light raked across the surface of the bounce. "It was like lighting a cyc from the side rather than the front, and it wasn't working at all," says Devlin. "If we spotted in the 18Ks, then the side nearest the fixture would be overly hot, and it would fall off to nothing very quickly. Also, we were wasting a lot of light, because in effect we were only lighting with the center of the beam and losing the top and bottom of the light completely. Furthermore, HMIs are notorious for all having slightly different colors. It looked like we'd need 100 or more 18Ks to light the Ultrabounce, and the idea of then running around to add various levels of Minus Green to each fixture was just insane."

Devlin contacted Lightning Strikes to discuss the company's 100K SoftSun sources. "I asked David Pringle how many 100K sources they had, and he said, 'I've got three sitting right here!'" Devlin pauses to laugh at the memory. "I replied, 'Three? I think we're going to need a couple more.' Three 100Ks sounds like a lot of light, but at the end of the day, it wasn't going to get us there."

Lightning Strikes subsequently visited the Palmdale set to test the 100K SoftSun and see if it would meet the production's needs. Fortunately, the instrument was perfectly suited to the job: the rectangular configuration of the unit's light beam made it the perfect source to rake across several hundred feet of Ultrabounce. The production subsequently obtained 20 100K sources to light the ceiling and another 10 for the backing. Adding to the fixtures' suitability was the fact that they operate off of 480 volts as opposed to 120/240, and therefore require less cabling. "Even with the reduction in cable, rigging gaffer Kevin Blauvelt ended up with 85 or 90 conductors of 4/0 cable running to the ceiling," recalls Devlin. "But that was a huge improvement over the 300-odd conductors necessary for using a bunch of 18Ks."

The SoftSun fixtures had some additional benefits: they're DMX-controlled, and because they're Xenon sources rather than mercury halide, their color is much more consistent, and they are dimmable to 5 percent of their output without a change in color temperature. Because the 650' backing was lit with just seven SoftSuns, Kwiatkowski and his crew made up a number of color frames on rolling stands that could be positioned in front of the units, facilitating swift changes from daylight to dusk, dusk to night and so on. "With the SoftSuns, it took 10 minutes to slide in the frames and give Janusz whatever color he wanted," says Devlin.

Although the Lightning Strikes fixtures wound up saving the day, it was no easy task to get them up and running. Pringle and his team worked for 14 weeks to manufacture and fine-tune the fixtures, and to keep the space above the set from overheating, 20 Mole Fans were installed on the roof deck to circulate the air. Control of the fans was delegated to the sound mixer, who could easily shut them off when the cameras rolled.

The interior of the set required a staggering amount of light. It contained more than 11,000 4-foot fluorescent bulbs, in addition to thousands of tungsten and halide bulbs. Each vendor was given its own lighting design, and cabling for all of the shops and escalators was installed in the floor before the granite was laid.