Timing, as they say, is everything, and Toronto-based director of photography James Gardner is proof positive. Earlier this month, Gardner assumed camera duties on a spectacular $1-million climactic sequence for the feature Resident Evil, shooting in downtown Toronto.

Based on a popular video game, Resident Evil, budgeted at a reported $40 million, is directed by Paul Anderson, who helmed the like-minded Mortal Kombat. It stars Milla Jovovich as the leader of a military task force sent out to contain a virus that has turned a lab full of researchers into hungry zombies, and their lab animals into nasty mutants. The movie is a production of Germany’s Constantin Film and is slated for an April 2002 release.

Due to a previous commitment on a U.K. production, the show’s principal cinematographer, David Johnson (An Ideal Husband, Hilary and Jackie), could not come to Toronto to finish the film after having shot the majority of it in Berlin and London. Gardner was handed the torch, thanks to his relationship with Albert Botha, president of Toronto’s Roadhouse Productions, who was servicing the film and with whom Gardner had collaborated on the 1998 Showtime movie Naked City: A Killer Christmas.

Gardner, repped by Toronto’s Sesler & Company, relocated to Canada a dozen years ago from his native South Africa after completing a commercial contract here. He has since divided his time between spot and drama work, his feature credits including Far From Home: The Adventures of Yellow Dog (1995).

No doubt Toronto was chosen for the sequence for the usual reasons of an advantageous exchange rate and quality crews, but the city also accommodated the production’s request to recreate a scene of massive carnage along downtown’s Adelaide Street East between Yonge and Church.

Gardner lensed an interior sequence at the Humber River Region Hospital in which Jovovich wakes in a bed in the lab facility and runs outside, cutting to the film’s only exterior. The final shot, over which end credits will roll, starts close on Jovovich’s eyes, then pulls upward in a 45-second tracking shot that ultimately reveals the scope of destruction wreaked by the zombies.

Gardner explains that the scene required two weeks of preproduction. When it finally came time for the weekend shoot, the production closed down the street, removed streetcar wires, positioned a fallen telephone pole and a frenzied assortment of police cars and other crashed vehicles, and then dressed the set with volumes of strewn paper and other debris.

‘We must have had 20 special effects guys lighting fires and putting smokers in cars,’ the DOP adds.

The pullback shot was achieved with a Camcat, a computer-controlled system that suspends a camera – in this case, an Arriflex 435 – from a sled running along a pair of cables. (The rest of the film was shot with a Moviecam.) Enabling camera movement of more than 100 km/hr over long distances at any angle, the Camcat, from Austrian company Brains & Pictures, is similar to a system used for overhead tracking shots for Super Bowl broadcasts.

However, despite its practicality where cranes, helicopters or dollies aren’t suitable, the system had not been used on a feature film until Resident Evil.

‘The reason for that was that a lightweight stabilized camera mount was missing,’ says Martin Burger of Brains & Pictures. ‘The Libra III, the Nettmann Stab-C or the Wescam XR – all quite new products – filled the gap between our system and the film industry.’ In this case, Gardner used the Libra III remote gyro head to suspend the camera.

The cinemtographer describes the rigging: ‘We had a 250-foot Dwight Crane on the one side, to which the cables were connected high in the air, extending all the way down to another crane stabilized onto the ground behind [Jovovich]. So the cable actually travels through the picture, and we had to [later] take it out of shot.’

The camera move also necessitated remotely shifting from close-up to wide shot.

‘The director told me we couldn’t shoot her face on a wide-angle lens, so we had to incorporate a zoom with the whole move,’ Gardner explains. ‘So we ended up 42 inches away from her with a 70mm lens, which gave us a pretty reasonable tight shot. And then we had to begin the zoom-out during the 250-foot pullback.’

In addition to viewing VHS rushes, Gardner discussed the look of the film with Johnson over the phone. He proceeded to shoot the exterior in a cold bluish-black hue to keep it consistent with the film’s almost exclusively underground interiors. Like Johnson, he used Kodak Vision 200T 5274 stock for its fine grain.

As for completing the work begun by another DOP, Gardner believes the results will be consistent due to the continuity of the other craftspeople on board, such as production and costume designer Richard Bridgland.

‘After you’ve been going for awhile on a project, [the filmmakers] know what’s expected and which way you’ve been dealing with any particular problems,’ he says.

-www.seslercompany.com

-www.roadhousepix.com

-www.brainsandpictures.com