In Hot Water

Shane Hurlbut balances rough terrains for Into the Blue
By David Geffner • Photos by John P. Johnson

When we meet Jared Cole (Paul Walker from The Fast and the Furious), he’s a Bahamian treasure hunter living in a trailer on the beach. Jared’s kind-hearted girlfriend Sam (Jessica Alba) believes in his potential, even as he’s simmered in the shadow of his more successful rival Derek Bates (Josh Brolin). When Jared’s childhood buddy Bryce (Scott Caan), shows up from New York with a luxury yacht and a new girlfriend (Ashley Scott), the athletic, hard-bodies all hit the water to free dive for treasure. They discover an ancient shipwreck and pull up relics to stake their claim. While scouring the turquoise waters, they also find a DC-3 aircraft packed with cocaine. Selling the drugs would help finance the high-tech expedition needed to pull the pirate ship, Zephyr, and her millions in gold from the sea, but it would also break Sam and Jared apart. When Bryce dives the DC-3 at night, and then, unwittingly, tries to sell the drugs back to the plane’s owners, all hell breaks loose—in the water and topside.

Since more than sixty percent of the film takes place underwater, at depths of more than fifty feet, director John Stockwell, along with director of photography Shane Hurlbut, knew the right underwater camera team was critical to Into the Blue’s success. Hurlbut, who earned an ASC Award nomination for HBO’s award-winning biopic The Rat Pack, decided to send two independent teams to the Bahamas in a “sink or swim shoot-off.”

“One unit shot HD and the other shot film,” Hurlbut recalls. “We took it all the way to film, converting digital files in a side-by-side test. John and I knew we’d be going to DI, and by originating on film we were able to dial in skin tone at 50-ft. At 20-ft underwater you lose the red layer and it just goes cyan. The HD had great clarity, but you couldn’t get any skin tone. With just a layer of cyan going to the blue water in back, the actors all looked like cadavers. Film clearly offered the most choices once we got to the DI.”

How Into the Blue came to shoot in the crystal-clear, but cool Bahamian waters was due to several hundred extras without SAG cards. “The water temperature in the Cayman Islands is about seven degrees warmer after hurricane season,” explains Hurlbut, “but John didn’t want to render any of our sharks in CGI—he wanted them all to be real. A company had been chumming this dive site in the Bahamas for several years. There were so many Caribbean reef sharks there you could almost walk across the water.”

Although the sharks were real, digital technology still played a large part in how Hurlbut approached the underwater scenes. Given the loss of contrast and depth of field due to particulate matter and conditions that varied from bright sunlight to cloud cover to a thick haze of green plankton, the DP had to re-grade every underwater scene during the digital intermediate process. Working with second unit director/DP Peter Zuccarini [see Q & A] they chose to use virtually all-ambient light underwater. The prime reason was to help liberate Zuccarini for 360-degree pans and not hinder his rapid tracking.

Shane Hurlbut had worked with director Stockwell on the romantic drama Crazy/Beautiful. But Hurlbut, an Ithaca, New York native who came up through music videos, had never shot on water. Canvassing the camera community, he was advised to anchor a large production boat as his “base camp” and tie off a smaller boat to “rotate the sun” throughout the day.

“It seemed reasonable enough,” Hurlbut laughs. “The first day of production we spent more than an hour trying to anchor the 110-ft Helen B., where I had built full storage for grip and electrical, and dark rooms for camera. John Stockwell came up to me at the end of the day and said: ‘that boat is going away. You need to figure out a better way to do this.’”

Hurlbut and his key grip, Scott Howell had prepped a secondary boat, a 14-ft wide by 45-ft long catamaran, with twin Honda 350 engines that did 25 knots. They transformed this lighter vessel into the main shooting platform. “We had a 30-ft Techno with a Flight Head, a 20-ft Foxy crane with a HydroHead and AquaCam and six other cameras,” Hurlbut recalls. “Scott rigged motion-controlled gears on the arm of the Foxy crane in an ingenious weight displacement system that allowed us to sink the HydroHead 4-ft below the surface and then rise back out of the water.”

Hurlbut and his team had two cameras in underwater housings, two in handheld mode, two in studio mode and two on the cranes. “We used all Arriflex bodies and Cooke primes,” Hurlbut explains. “I knew the Cookes would deal well with all the backlit kicks and flaring off the water and we wouldn’t have to waste time setting flags. For the cranes, we used 17-102 Angenieux zoom lenses, which worked out great.”

To speed up the days, marine coordinator Ricou Browning, Jr. outfitted the catamaran with restrooms so the dozens of crewmembers on-board would not have to be shuttled back to shore. “Everyone I talked to about shooting on water said to be prepared to only get 7-10 set-ups per day,” Hurlbut notes. “John Stockwell likes to do a lot of set-ups without a shot list; by the third day we were getting 35 set-ups because each camera was pre-built and the smaller boat was so mobile and efficient.”

The look for Into the Blue was modeled after the contrast and tones of 1965 Kodachrome. “John wanted to emphasize the heat of the Bahamas and create a bronzed feel that bordered on glamorized reality,” Hurlbut says. The DP opted for Kodak 5245, rated at 32 ASA, because of the stock’s tight grain structure, high contrast and strong saturation. For the water scenes, Hurlbut shot at T4 using only an ND-6 filter to keep the lens as clean as possible.

“Usually in bright sunlight, we’re wide open at a 2,” Hurlbut adds. “But with the Flight Head and Techno Crane, and all the movement on the water, I needed to give [focus puller] Rob Carlson a fighting chance. Rob took all the Cooke S-4 primes and marked his focus points with a gold sharpie on the rear lens cap. He then put a port cap on his remote follow focus, engaged it and had his focus marks for every lens.” To hold focus, Carlson watched a monitor, the Panatape read-out and his measurements.

Not all of the action in Into the Blue happens underwater. For a local nightclub scene, where Jared and Bryce encounter the drug dealers whose plane they’ve salvaged, Hurlbut used digital reference stills of Caribbean dancing. He shot three second exposures and allowed the colors in the various clubs to smear a deep red and gold. Gaffer Dan Cornwall then created an elaborate lighting grid above the dance floor, where he hung 460 PAR cans that were controlled on a dimmer system. Cornwall gelled the PAR cans red, gold and white. A data-flash strobe was used, as were two 7K Xenon lamps, gelled red and gold in the back to strafe the dance floor.

“John was not convinced the club lighting would work,” Hurlbut laughs, “but in the digital intermediate we did what I call ‘foldover.’ You fold the blacks over onto themselves, and they become contaminated with whatever the primary color is—in this case red or gold. You nuke the whites, crank the mid-range tones, and dump the blacks and you get this halo effect in the black that contaminates any clear color separation. Everything blends together.”

Like all water movies, Into the Blue was at the mercy of the elements. Wind dictated where each day’s location would be, as Hurlbut’s crews raced from one bay to another to find calm seas. “We got only two days of glassy conditions out of the 60-day schedule,” Hurlbut laments. “Some days we’d be shooting in 6-ft of water, where the sandy bottom was visible under this layer of brilliant turquoise. Then in the DI we’d have to match that with a week of ocean work at 60-ft depth under heavy cloud cover. Frank Roman, the colorist at Cine-Site [now Laser Pacific] did a fantastic job! We logged 297 hours in the DI suite.”

Color saturation plays a big role in all the work Hurlbut has done with John Stockwell. “On Crazy/Beautiful,” Hurlbut recounts, “I went to David Pringle, at Lightning Strikes, to build high-pressure sodium and mercury vapor lights that I could clamp on the street lights as a key source. I knew Into the Blue was going to be a mix of different color temperatures—cool white in the boatyards, sodium vapor in the hanging lights on the docks, etc. For Jared and Sam’s trailer I embraced that look, using mercury vapor off in the distance and high-pressure sodium straight in through the window, mixed with a 100W household bulb in a practical inside. It’s warm and intimate with the cooler street light drifting in from outside.”

Intimacy with the characters, in the middle of a vast and empty blue wilderness, is the dominant visual theme for Into the Blue. Whether it was gracefully free diving along the remains of a 120-ft wooden shipwreck, or going for intense and erratic handheld work topside as the treasure hunters try to stave off a tiger shark attack, the goal was always to feel the heat.

“John Stockwell likes his camera to be a sentence, not a word,” Hurlbut concludes. “It’s a documentary style, which also savors the visual beauty of a location and its characters. We took a risk not lighting any of the underwater scenes, or the scenes topside on the water, where all we used was a four by four bead-board as bounce to follow the handheld operators. But the rewards were paid back many times over: we stayed on schedule and on budget, which is unprecedented for a movie made on water. It was a blending of John’s vigilance to keep the footprint of the movie small, and my desire to have as many cameras and support gear available at all times.”