Spacebound

Prior to the beginning of the show's principal photography, Schwartzman set out to shoot a daytime shuttle launch at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Accompanied by his crew, he brought along 13 cameras to cover the April 1997 event. That alone was a complex task, but NASA's protocol added an extra degree of difficulty. "After they fill the shuttle's tanks [with liquid oxygen and hydrogen], there's a 24-hour lockdown period when nobody is allowed within almost four miles of the launch pad," Schwartzman details. "But we had cameras within 150 feet of the pad, so we had to figure out a way to set these cameras up, let them sit for two days in the Florida heat and humidity, and have them operate perfectly."

Because NASA rules prohibited the filmmakers from using their own camera-activation system (which could have interfered with the space agency's finely tuned electronics), a special code was added to the computer launch sequence to trigger Schwartzman's array 45 seconds before main-engine ignition. "Organizing that was easy," the cinematographer maintains. "The difficult part was explaining to Panavision that we had to leave these cameras including Panastar IIs rolling at 120 fps out in the middle of this sweltering swamp for a couple of days. I had to know that these cameras loaded and ready to roll would work."

Toward that end, camera assistant Richard Mosier conducted a series of tests and made special preparations. Two 65mm camera power supplies were linked together to ensure that each camera's batteries would operate for at least 48 hours. To prevent condensation from forming on the lenses, each was rigged with a ring of 25-watt bulbs that would cause any ambient moisture to evaporate. Finally, blast-proof bunkers were built for each camera. "It all worked perfectly," Schwartzman confirms. "The footage is spectacular."

However, Bay later had a sudden inspiration that would send Schwartzman back to the Kennedy Space Center six weeks later. As the director tells it, he was in a NASA bathroom when he happened to look up and see a large poster of a shuttle blasting off into space at night. Taken with the image, Bay changed the film's script to include a night launch. "We used both of the launches we filmed in the picture," Schwartzman says. "But from a photographic standpoint, the night launch may have been the most challenging part of the movie."

As the shuttle sits on the pad at night, it is lit by 40 10K Xenon lamps, bathing the enormous vehicle and towering gantry structure with some 200 footcandles of light. "That gave us a decent stop," Schwartzman begins, "but as soon as the solid rocket boosters ignited, we'd suddenly be up to 16,000 footcandles in about 11/2 seconds. We could have used some sort of photocell with an auto-iris controller, but I didn't want to have a dynamic exposure change affect the footage." The cameraman's alternate solution was to preset the exposure on each of his individual 15 cameras, determining his stop by calculating each unit's distance from the shuttle, the angle of the shot in relation to the launch sequence, and the orbiter's altitude as pictured in frame .

Determining these set exposures required some inventive research. "I contacted this wonderful guy named Red Huber, a still photographer from the Orlando Sentinel who has shot every single shuttle launch," Schwartzman explains. "Studying his photographs, I selected some specific shots and determined where he was set up to get each one. Red and I then went though each photo, and he told me which stock, the shutter speed, and f-stop he had used. From there, I figured out what the stop should be for each of my cameras, based upon the use of [Kodak's 100 ASA EXR] 5248 and my various frame rates which were anywhere from 24 to 120 fps. NASA had given me a bunch of information about the footcandles produced during the launch, but most of it turned out to be wrong, so I couldn't have done this scene without Red's help. Also, shooting the day launch told us which angles worked best with various frame rates and focal lengths." While all of the night launch footage turned out beautifully, the cameraman reports that an Eyemo camera fitted with a 40mm lens, placed some four miles away from the launch pad, may have produced the "hero" shot for the sequence.

On the rock

During a subsequent two-week "mini-shoot," the filmmakers traveled to Washington D.C., New York City and then Texas to film exterior establishing material and "Americana" footage that would give the picture's story a broader emotional scope. The production then moved on to the Badlands of South Dakota to begin shooting scenes set on the asteroid.

In the film, the shuttles Independence and Freedom crash-land on the stony juggernaut's jagged, storm-wracked surface. The landscape is violently active, with hot gases erupting though the crusty ground as the surfaces quakes with tremors. Towering crystalline formations stab upward, making the barren world appear even more aggressive and hostile.

Shaken after their hair-raising voyage through space, yet driven to succeed, the members of the Earth's demolition crew don their space suits and rev up a pair of six-wheeled all-terrain vehicles called "Armadillos." Protected by their artificial skins, the intrepid heroes begin searching for a prime drilling site. In these scenes, Armageddon's cinematography and production design mesh seamlessly to render a fantastic new world.

"Like every good movie, we started with some of the toughest stuff," Schwartzman says of the Badlands shoot. "On the first night, we were lighting up about five square miles of landscape."

"We had more trucks than I've ever seen in my entire life," Bay confirms. "John had two Major Muscos, an SMSNite Sun, and about 40 18Ks it was really unbelievable."

Given Bay's penchant for cool blue night exteriors, Schwartzman's fixtures were primarily uncorrected HMIs, which allowed him to get the most from his wattage. Roads were cut to create a "Musco Highway," allowing the cinematographer to position his immense fixtures, while seven miles of cable were run to provide power. Schwartzman recounts, "We also had a Night Sun and 27 6K Pars a lot of stuff just to light up this landscape. And it was beautiful." However, the illumination also attracted the attention of every flying insect within a 100-mile radius, causing huge clouds of the creatures to collect around the lights. Fortunately, the various fixtures served collectively as the world's biggest bug zapper. "The heat killed them all by the second night," the cameraman says

Schwartzman credits gaffer Andy Ryan and rigging gaffer Jeff Soderberg with laying down the electrical infrastructure for the shoot over a period of two weeks before the main unit arrived. "To maximize the location, we were moving the Muscos two or three times a night, but because we were so organized, it happened without a problem."

The Badlands portion of the shoot was not without its mishaps, however. The first night's work consisted of a scene in which the members of one shuttle crew pull themselves from the remains of their wrecked ship. Bay details, "We'd created this amazing crash site, using airplane parts trucked in from Arizona, and the first setup was a massive wide shot. Unfortunately though, nothing was working that night. Our 100-mile-per-hour fans would start and stop, the steam machines would blow fuses everything had failed before we even broke for dinner."

The crew returned to again try to film the establishing wide shot. "We were so far back that the actors looked like little dots," Bay describes. "Ben Affleck was the first to be seen climbing out of the wreckage, but as he was walking out, he kept leaning down, as if he was trying to find something on the ground. I radioed to him, 'Ben, what are you doing?' There was no response, because his line was shorted out. He kept reaching out for something on the ground, and it turned out he was looking for a rock so he could smash his helmet's face plate he couldn't breathe! We had to work out all of these kinks in the suits before Bruce Willis came onto the show; the other actors were sort of like guinea pigs in that process!"

Back to NASA

Granted complete cooperation, Armageddon arrived at the Kennedy Space Center ready to utilize the facility. "As the NASA guys describe it, this is the 'world of big toys,'" Bay begins. "And they do have the world's biggest toys. The vehicle assembly building where they service the shuttle before and after each launch actually has its own weather system. They bent the rules for us, and we got the most cooperation since Apollo 13. About the only thing we weren't able to use was the 'Vomit Comet' [zero-gravity training aircraft], because allowing Apollo 13 to use it broke the rules. The FAA says that it would cost $60 million to retrofit the plane to certify it for civilian use. Even with our budget, that was out of the question."

Shooting at the Kennedy Space Center included adhering to some specific restrictions, since the extent of the Administration's aid always hinged on safety issues. "There were a lot of restrictions in areas where they were doing things like handling solid rocket fuel, which is of course highly flammable," Schwartzman says. "We had to have all of our lighting fixtures approved by NASA. Fortunately for me, our rigging gaffer, Jeff Soderberg, did an extraordinary job of dealing with the NASA officials in such a way that they relaxed a lot of their restrictions. For example, they allowed me to bring some 4K Pars in, which they rated as 'non-explosive' because the fixtures had sealed globes within globes. And they let me use HMI Pars wherever I needed to."

However, the immense size of some of NASA's facilities sometimes left the cinematographer to simply augment the existing lighting, rather than illuminate things as he normally might have done. "In a perfect world, I would have rewired the whole place," Schwartzman describes. "But while I would have loved to do that, we traveled to the Kennedy Space Center to shoot what was there to capture the reality and scale of the place. Their lighting served as my base ambience, and from there I worked on creating mood and shadow." This included adding pools and highlights, and using fluorescent fixtures to create accents.

Interestingly, NASA was quite curious about many of the cameraman's lighting units. "They asked a lot of questions about my Kino Flos," Schwartzman remembers. "We'd used a lot of Wall-O-Lites in one building, and this guy later came up and said, 'Okay, what are these and where do I get some?' For a moment I thought about telling them that I had designed them, but I gave them [Kino Flo company owner] Frieder Hochheim's number instead."

However, lighting was only one of the filmmakers' challenges, as Bay's kinetic cameras demanded constant movement. The director recalls, "While shooting in the vehicle assembly building [where the shuttle is positioned with its massive fuel tank and towering solid rocket boosters], we used a Technocrane [obtained from Panavision Remote Systems] for a specific sequence in which Bruce Willis's character is talking to another guy while walking around the orbiter, with most of the dialogue taking place alongside the wing area. And this was a real shuttle. The guy who runs the facility told me, 'I'm putting my career on the line. You can't touch this $6 million Kevlar piece [on the spacecraft wing].' It was a heat-resistant panel about four feet long $6 million! So we had Bruce right there and the Technocrane brought the camera within four inches of this wing surface. Later in the schedule, we shot some scenes at a historic Craftsman-style house in Los Angeles, where they told us, 'You've got to watch the floors!' We told them, 'Listen, we're used to shooting around billion-dollar spacecraft, so we'll be fine.'"

Schwartzman adds that his "accent" lighting within the vast vehicle assembly structure included using 80 6K Pars and wheeling in a Musco.

For the sequence in which Armageddon's faux space jocks board their ships, the filmmakers were allowed to shoot on NASA's actual launch gantry, where the shuttle Endeavor stood vertically poised on the pad waiting for a takeoff scheduled for just a few days later. "There are two big issues of concern at NASA," Schwartzman says, "One is FOD, which stands for Foreign Object Debris, and the other is 'taping-and-tethering' making sure that everything is connected to something else. While we were on the gantry, NASA was far less concerned about me using my lights than they were about someone dropping a screw near the base of the shuttle. Every piece of camera tape had to be accounted for. If we went up there with 42 pieces of equipment, we had to come down with 42 pieces or we'd stay up there until we found it. Every scrim was wired to its light so it could only fall three feet. We also couldn't use clothespins to attach gels to lamps because they might spring apart."

Schwartzman reports that NASA did allow him to run cable up the gantry and bring along a couple of 4K HMI Pars and 1200-watt HMI Pars for fill working less than 100' from the bottom of the "locked-and-loaded" orbiter. "They wouldn't let us bring in a generator, so we tied in with their 110 AC transformers," the cameraman says. "In most cases [at the NASA facilities], I had to provide my own power, but the gantry was a special case."

Adds Bay, "We also shot in the clean-room passageway up there, which leads right to the hatch where the astronauts enter the ship. We hadn't planned it, but while we were on the gantry, someone from NASA asked, 'Do you want to get in there?' We had just two minutes to get a shot of Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck leaning into the hatchway, but not going inside, so we went with the light we had. Bruce was very funny, whispering, 'Mike, do you have the cameras rolling? I'm going to make a break for it' as if he were going to jump inside the shuttle! But NASA had some technicians in there to make sure he didn't go too far."

The "firing room" a control center featuring a set of massive 25'-tall windows looking out onto launch pad 39B was one area at NASA where Schwartzman did do extensive lighting. The extra illumination was very necessary, given that he was replicating the awesome blast created by a shuttle liftoff. "The firing room is the closest spot to the pad during a real launch," the cameraman details. "Of course, I couldn't get cameras in there when we shot our night launch. But they gave me clearance to work there even though [the Endeavor] was really on the pad and ready to go up a few days later. We could shoot in there from 8:30 to 10:30 p.m. just two hours."

Schwartzman began his lighting earlier that day by replacing NASA's warm-white fluorescents with Kino Flo 3200°K tubes. Outside, 10 Dinos were mounted on 86' Condors and positioned near the main window, along with ten 70,000-watt Lightning Strikes units. "The firing room is located on the fourth floor of the building," he says, "so the top of this window is about 80 feet in the air. To create a moonlight effect, I also ripped in a couple of 18Ks to add some nice modeling on the interior walls. Then, as the guys went through the countdown and got to T minus four seconds, we throttled up eight Dinos on dimmers to simulate the shuttle's engines, which are very warm when compared to the solid rocket boosters. During an actual launch, the shuttle's engines burn for a few seconds, coming up to 100 percent of their capacity. But they're not enough to lift the shuttle; when the boosters kick in, the orbiter instantly shoots upwards for 88 seconds until they burn out. The boosters are so bright that at night they light up half the state of Florida. To create that effect, we instantly brought up the rest of our Dinos and set off all of the Lightning Strikes units. What was great was that we didn't use actors for that scene; the real NASA launch team came in on their own time to do it. They later told me that our launch lighting was very similar to the real thing, but maybe a bit brighter and more dramatic. That was neat."

Not incidentally, NASA safety protocol banished Schwartzman's dimmer controls from the fire room, because its electromagnetic operation might affect the sensitive launch computers. Radio communications were also banned for the same reason; this restriction compelled the cameraman to place his dimmer boards in the basement of nearby building and rely on a string of assistants with loud voices to relay his instructions to the board operator. "Basically, NASA didn't want our lighting control board in the same room with the big red button that sets off the shuttle's engines," he says. "So after I gave a signal, I literally had five people shouting 'OKAY, NOW!' down along this chain to finally tell someone to push a button. We had to build that communications lag into our lighting cues."

Despite such difficulties, Schwartzman contends, "I think our enthusiasm for the space program was met halfway by the enthusiasm the NASA guys had for filmmaking. The public affairs people initially told us 'You can't do this or that' when we arrived, but the facility heads were suddenly put in charge once we started working, and within about an hour there were no restrictions. They were great, and shooting there was a highlight of my career."

Bay estimates that NASA and the Air Force allowed the production to utilize approximately 19 billion dollars' worth of aircraft and facilities during the Armageddon shoot.

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