Shooting Mad Max 4 on digital

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Mad Max: Fury Road is the fourth installment in writer / director George Miller's post-apocalyptic action franchise. It is also the first digital film for cinematographer John Seale, whose career spans more than 30 years and such iconic titles as Witness, Dead Poets Society and Rain Man.

Facing inhospitable conditions on Mad Max: Fury Road in Namibia, as well as intense action scenes and the need to accommodate a massive number of visual effects, Seale and his crew chose to shoot principal photography with ARRI Alexa cameras and capture on Codex Onboard recorders. This workflow has become popular among filmmakers for its ruggedness, reliability and easy integration with post-production.

Originally, Fury Road was intended to be shot near Broken Hill in New South Wales, Australia. However, several years of unusually heavy rainfall caused the desert in the area to bloom with wildflowers making it unsuitable for the film's wasteland setting, and production was moved to Namibia. The coastal deserts of that African country are among the most formidable in the world, featuring sand dunes measuring 1,000 feet high and 20 miles long. Frequent sandstorms and intense heat required special precautions by the camera crew.

I'd shot plenty of film-negative films in deserts and jungles under severe conditions, but never digital, notes Seale. So I was a bit worried, but I had a fantastic crew of people who had done that had worked with digital cameras in jungles, deserts, dry, heat, wet, moist, whatever. They were ready and put together full precaution kits of rain covers, dust covers and even heat covers to take the heat off the cameras in the middle of the day.

We were using a lot of new gear. Seale adds. Everything that our crew did in pre-production in Sydney and took to Namibia worked very, very well for the entire time. Our time loss through equipment was minimal.

Seale's crew was outfitted with six ARRI Alexas and a number of Canon 5Ds, with the latter used in part as crash cams in action sequences. The Alexas were supported by 11 Codex Onboard recorders. The relatively large number of cameras and recorders helped the camera crew to remain nimble. While one scene was being shot, the next was being prepped. We kept two kick cameras built the whole time, and two ultra-high vehicles rigged the whole time, recalls camera coordinator Michelle Pizanis. When we when drove up (to a location) we could start shooting, rather than break down the camera at one site and rebuild it at the next.

The original Mad Max is remembered for its gritty look. Fury Road took a different route due to the film's heavy use of visual effects. The DI and the post work is so explicit; almost every shot is going to be manipulated in some way, Seale explains. Our edict was just shoot it.' Continuity of light wasn't really a question. We knew that the film would be cut very quickly, so there wouldn't be time to analyze every shot. Intercutting between overcast and full sun wasn't going to be a problem. On this film, the end result controlled the execution.

In order to provide maximum image quality and flexibility for post-production manipulation, Seale and his crew chose to operate the Alexa cameras in ARRIRAW mode. That, the cinematographer noted, made Codex an obvious choice as only Codex recorders were capable of reliably capturing ARRIRAW.

The choice to go with Codex was definite for the quality of the recording and post-production considerations, Seale said. Everyone said Codex was the recording device that we had to have. Once again, we were a little worried about desert heat and desert cold. It changes so much from night to day. And during the day, we had dust storms, dust flying everywhere. We sometimes had moisture in the air. But the Codex systems didn't fail us. They came straight through with flying colors and, in post, they are very happy with the results.

Shooting digitally with Codex offered an advantage over shooting on film as it avoided the need to reload cameras with film negative.

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