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Ron's Empire

May 15, 2009 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman

Ron Howard builds his own Vatican.

CERN shots

Angels & Demons was designed to be a film project from the get-go, but some backgrounds and visual-effects plates featured in the film were shot with the Red Digital Cinema Red One camera because a unique opportunity presented itself. That opportunity came in the form of getting footage to supplement an important sequence in the film in which the antimatter material used in the bomb scene gets stolen from a real-world facility that actually does dabble in that sort of thing.

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The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) laboratory near Geneva is where headline-making antimatter tests have been conducted in recent months. In 2007, Howard got permission to film briefly inside the facility, so Bickerton headed up a three-man unit that took a Red camera, secured from a London-based company called Mine Films, into CERN to capture a handful of antimatter shots seen in the movie.

"We went there during our hiatus period before shooting in the U.S.," Bickerton says. "They were very welcoming, but only available before May because they were planning at be in operation May onward [that timeframe later got delayed]. So I went there and shot hours of material on the Red, and we do have some 100 percent CERN shots in the film, cutting with 35mm."

Since the facility is so huge and he was limited to bringing in a tiny crew, Bickerton also wanted to find a way to put the Red camera on a mobile crane to maximize the scope of the footage he could acquire. Bickerton tracked down British cameraman Simon Priestman, from a reality TV show that featured the kind of sweeping crane shots he was looking for, and invited him to CERN.

"[Priestman's Stanton Video Services Jimmy Jib system] is a 40ft. crane with a simple power pod head at the end of it, and the operator can control the head and crane and at the same time, meaning we could go in there with a small crew," Bickerton says. "Simon brought his whole system to go with the Red camera, operating head, and crane at the same time, and that helped us tremendously. We also shot extensive stills in that environment to incorporate backgrounds with foreground plates we would be shooting later in Los Angeles. Our data wrangler and visual-effects assistant Holly Gosnel took those photos, and The Moving Picture Company later projected our stills onto some geometry that CERN was kind enough to hand over. From this, we built an image-projected environment to go behind some of the sets in Los Angeles."

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