Probably the most anticipated movie of the summer, The Dark Knight Rises, is sure not to disappoint. I have always been a long time fan of Christopher Nolan's style of film-making and his practical approach to filming special effect scenes. In this in-depth 13 minute making of featurette Christopher Nolan and his crew talk about the scope of filming a movie this size, the scale of the locations and how important it is to them to try to film all of their special effects in camera decreasing the amount of CGI used in post.
Starting principle shooting in India they move on to the UK , then Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, and finally ending in Manhattan. They used several different cameras, but mostly shot on IMAX cameras (as you can see Miss Catwoman smashing in the video below, ouch). They show four stunt men hanging from a broken fuselage of an airplane, being shot through windows and eventually skydiving. They also briefly speak of how they created a new 30 ft' long and 17 ft' wide, flying batmobile. The scene in which the police battle the mercenaries on Wall Street in New York took eight months of preparation and about 1,200 extras to shoot is described as controlled chaos.
The cinematography portion of the featurette starts at about 7:30 minutes, so if you can sit tight through some new footage and character bios then you are surely in for a treat. I know that I will be standing in line for the midnight premiere on July, 20th, will you be?
The filming of Wayne Manor was done just across the road from my office and created a huge buzz locally. It looks very different in the film than it does in real life.
I cannot wait for this movie to come out. I'm a huge fan of Christopher Nolan, and specifically the lighting style of Wally Pfister. Movie cinematography has informed me on the craft of photography more than still photography has, and Wally is incredible.
Its hard to imagine after doing a project of this size, quality and significance that one could ever find another project to really match the satisfaction on a persona level.
I recently had the chance to see the second movie in this series on an 80" LED screen. I was blown away with things I had never noticed in the other viewings I had previously.. This is really going to be a movie like no other we've ever seen before.