Serra shot Dreams with Panavision Platinum and Gold II cameras outfitted with Primo prime and zoom lenses. Additionally, the cinematographer elected to use the Super 35 format to achieve a 2.35:1 frame, as he had on his previous collaboration with Ward. "On Map of the Human Heart, I thought we couldn't go with the anamorphic because our choice of lenses would be very limited," the cinematographer recalls. "And I knew Vincent would want to use all of the lenses that you can imagine, from the widest to the longest — which we couldn't use if we were stuck with anamorphic. Also, the effects artists on Dreams could have worked with anamorphic, but they are happier with a flat format, so I opted for Super 35."
In the film's first 10 minutes, the cinematographer made use of what he terms "more traditional lighting and composition" to detail Chris and Annie's first meeting, their romance in Italy, marriage, and even the death of their two children in a tragic car crash. "I used normal filtration, sometimes on the bluish side, and corals for happy, amorous scenes and flashbacks," Serra details. "The approach was to build the images so that they followed the dramatic structure of the film, which meant trying to find different types of lighting, color, and technical solutions."
He employed a similar photographic approach for Chris's entry into Paradise, or "the Painted World" — a CG landscape of lush Monet-style flowers and swirling Van Gogh skies literally dripping with running pigment. Since the Painted World is based on Annie's artistic depiction of their Italian rendezvous, Ward and Serra opted to shoot both sequences in the same location — Glacier National Park in Montana — to subtly underscore the parallel themes.
While shooting within the Painted World, Serra decided to create pronounced yet soft backlight effects in every shot, with disregard for motivation or source continuity. This approach, which adds a subliminal impressionistic effect, was facilitated by the fact that every shot was to be heavily processed in postproduction, allowing Serra to simply have in-frame backlight fixtures erased.
Serra filmed the sequences with Annie and Chris in a relatively straightforward manner, but Ward insisted that the camera have free reign when depicting the remarkable Painted World, even though every frame of Serra's original footage was to be digitally doctored. "Many effects films use a static camera with nodal-point tilts while shooting actors against a bluescreen," Ward offers, "and the actors feel completely constrained. If I wanted to shoot handheld, we shot handheld, and then added all of the effects later on."
Consequently, Serra found himself working with targets and markers while on location, which would allow the effects artists to re-create his camera moves in 3-D space via motion-tracking techniques. Yet despite the fact that a heavy layer of computer animation would later ebb and flow over his images to create the Painted World, Serra's compositions and lighting would still form the basis of the land's depiction.
The duo's strategy does beg an obvious question: why go to the trouble of shooting on location in Montana if the footage would be so drastically altered in post? Despite the extensive plans for the Painted World's look, at the start of physical production it had not yet been determined how the "paint" effects would be created, nor to what extent they would be used, so beginning the postproduction work with dramatic landscapes instead of bare bluescreen backgrounds seemed to be a prudent plan.
An interesting parallel setting was created using Chris and Annie's home. Open, sunlit, and inviting, the space is transformed into a bleak wreck in purgatory, where Annie will spend eternity after committing suicide — unless she is redeemed by Chris's love. Serra vividly contrasts life and death through the respective use of a beautiful warm aura and hideous cold blue tones.
The home's interior was built entirely on stage, but Serra added a sense of realism to the set by following a specific rule: "When in the studio, I shoot as I would on a practical location. I don't like to have catwalks or light from above — most of the time I have ceilings and I use windows for key lighting. To make the light coming through the windows look real while shooting daylit scenes, it's a matter of light balance and correctly choosing which windows the light should be coming through. I used some Dinos and diffusion, and tried to keep the light coming in primarily from one side, without any cross lighting from elsewhere."
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