Gladiator II: Decadent and Data-rich

At the turn of the millennium, Gladiator brought John Mathieson BAFTA, Academy, ASC, and BSC Award nominations for cinematography. That movie was photographed on film emulsion, occasionally with non-standard frame rates, step printing and a 45-degree shutter. Reviewers praised the film’s “brutal lyricism” and called it “visually electrifying”.

Since then, filmmaking has certainly evolved, as has Ridley Scott’s approach to directing.

Ridley Scott on set with Pedro Pascal and Paul Mescal. (image credit: Paramount Pictures/Aidan Monaghan)

"HE LIKES TO SEE WHAT HE GETS"

“The first Gladiator, we always had A and B camera, and sometimes C, and we were often joined by the second unit,” says Mathieson. “CGI was not an option, for the most part. We originally planned for 50 visual effects shots, so we had to concentrate and compose each frame, filling the background. We would shoot mostly in one direction, because we just didn’t have the VFX budget. That forces you to really flesh out each sequence. The real tigers were hungry, horses had to run and fall. We burned things, let loose balls of fire and real arrows. That’s one reason why I believe the original hasn’t dated. We did what we could do at that time without CGI. We did some bold things.”

Gladiator II had a budget reputed to be north of $250 million. Scott now famously prefers to work with many digital cameras fed into a nerve-centre trailer, known as ‘The Brick’, where he directs the proceedings based on what he sees on eight large screens.

“He likes to see what he gets,” says Mathieson. “With current high-grade digital monitors, those images are now more vivid than ever before. Film video assist, a flickering mirror split to the ground glass, often in B&W, made it difficult to read the image – and there is not the time to get around to all those film cameras to see what they’re getting. Now Ridley doesn’t have to climb ladders and hike around in the heat. He can see it and direct it. He’s being fed great pictures instantly. Now there is a lot more going on for me and the lighting for every camera becomes somewhat tricky.”

Ridley Scott with Paul Mescal. (image credit: Paramount Pictures/Aidan Monaghan)

"I WANT IT TO BE BIG AND RICH, WITH OVER-THE-TOP LUSCIOUSNESS" 

Most of the cameras on Gladiator II were Alexa Mini LF’s, usually paired with zoom lenses, which allow quick, precise framing and reframing. Mathieson says that one might expect the larger image area, compared to the Super 35 film frame, to be an improvement. However, many images were lifted from the first Gladiator film and cut into the new film without any problems.

“For this film, I shot deep, with heavy f-stops,” he says. “I’m fed up with woolly images. I wanted hard focus, no ND, and strong, lush contrast. Up comes the colour. Bright chalk whites and deep shadows. Use the sweet spot of the lens. Don’t mush up the background. Thousands of people sitting in the Colosseum, all the horses – I want to feel that background. I want it to be big and rich, with over-the-top lusciousness, like the pre-Raphaelite painters. They knew how to create hyper-real paintings with depth working in two dimensions. Rome is pretty vulgar and decadent in this film.

“NOBODY TAUGHT ME HOW TO BE A DIT”

Digital Imaging Technician Gastone Ferrante worked at the nexus of the filmmakers and the technology, ensuring that Mathieson could concentrate on creativity. With a dozen cameras going at some points, he had his hands full. On the most demanding days, he oversaw a team of ten.

“It’s great that John lets his DIT take care of this stuff,” says Ferrante. “He will back you up if you have a request from the production, which is very helpful.”

Receiver trolley in front of ‘The Brick’. Image courtesy of the Gladiator II DIT team.

During preproduction, Ferrante designed the workflow and colour pipeline with input from the dailies lab (Kiwii) and the post house (Company 3), and reconfigured his rig to work with “The Brick”. During the shoot, he often handled exposure, iris and live grading, while monitoring the live picture and grading with Scott. Amongst the massive metadata flow was lens and other information sent to the VFX department. Ferrante used CineArk long-range transmitters as well as WiFibre. LiveGrade Pro was used to adjust primaries, to control LUT boxes and to organize the CDLs. 

Data manager Jake Bennet-Young used Silverstack Lab in conjunction with CODEX Device Manager to offload High Density Encoding (HDE) versions of the footage from the CODEX Drives. HDE is CODEX's Emmy and Academy award-winning solution that reduces ARRIRAW files to 60% of their original size on average, with zero impact on image quality. Silverstack was also used to apply the CDL grades to the offloaded footage and to balance the shots in multi-view mode.

"THAT’S WHERE HDE COMES IN…"

Working with HDE was important because of the huge amounts of data being generated. “With more and more productions shooting with multiple cameras, there’s a problem – nobody cares how many hours my data manager works,” says Ferrante. “Nobody cares how much footage the editor needs to go through. They say digital is cheaper than film because you don’t have to develop, but it’s still expensive. You have three or four copies of the negative. The more you produce, the more it will cost.

“That’s where HDE comes in,” he says. “It gives us a solution – compressing the raw data in a lossless way, at an almost 2:1 ratio. It’s a major improvement.”

Passion is the reason he has succeeded as a top DIT in the years since, he says. “Nobody taught me how to be a DIT,” he says. “If you’re passionate, you spend your nights reading and experimenting with the technology, and thinking seriously about the issues you might encounter. That’s the best way to succeed.”

After six weeks in theatres, Gladiator II is approaching half a billion dollars in ticket sales and at the time of writing it has just gained three BAFTA film nominations.

Behind the scenes images courtesy of the Gladiator II DIT team.