In fall 1888, a sense of sheer terror pierced the hearts of whores working Whitechapel, a down-trodden district of London, as the now-infamous Jack the Ripper embarked upon hideous acts of meticulous murder that left its vivisected victims as little more than fodder for rodents. Immortalized in international pop culture, the spate of wretched murders remains unsolved. But some scholars believe them to have been decreed by the monarchy’s highest ranks. That purported Crown conspiracy is the subject of From Hell, a critically revered graphic novel authored by scribe Alan Moore (V for Vendetta, Watchmen) and illustrator Eddie Campbell (Bacchus, Alec).Done up in sooty, black-and-white etchings, this 16-part comic relates the rise-and-fall of Jack the Ripper, and his role in covering up Prince Albert’s dark alley dalliances with a prostitute and the shame of their misbegotten progeny.

Directors Allen and Albert Hughes are reputed for their unflinching take on the harsh toll that urban street life puts on African-American males. Kicking off with kinetics, the cautionary gangstas-in-the-ghetto tale Menace II Society (1993) made the then 20-year-old helmers the youngest moviemakers ever entered into Cannes’ Directors Fortnight. The Blaxploitation era heist flick Dead Presidents (1995) pumped-up adrenaline with its ultra-graphic portrait of racial disillusionment in post-Vietnam America.But since then, the directing duo has been searching for a project to expand their horizons. (On set, Albert handles matters of camera and lighting while Allen deals with actors’ performances.) After considering bio-pics on supreme guitarist Jimi Hendrix, FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover and billionaire recluse Howard Hughes, they turned to Jack the Ripper, and scored rights for From Hell. The Hughes Brothers have held interest in this shady historical figure since seeing an In Search Of. . .special on the killer in the mid-Seventies.

Cockney-bred Inspector Fred Abberline (Johnny Depp) is once again condemned to his old haunt of Whitechapel, now charged with scouring the borough for a methodical murderer. The dapperly dressed assassin is targeting call girls plying carnal trades in filthy flophouses and begrimed backstreets. Abetted by steadfast Sergeant Godley (Robbie Coltrane), Abberline unearths clues as to the killer’s upscale pedigree. With authorities purposed to pin the crimes on a stooge, the stymied Abberline gets an unbargained-for ally in Buckingham palace physician Sir William Gull (Ian Holm). Hot on the Ripper’s trail, Abberline becomes entranced by red-tressed “daughter-of-joy” Mary Kelley (Heather Graham), who is eager to protect her fellow harlots from a mob squad’s pressure for hush money. Discerning this payoff to be tied to the cutthroat’s true identity, Abberline and Kelley realize that Jack the Ripper could be much closer then either fathomed.

The Hughes Brothers’ six-year hiatus in feature filmmaking saw them delve into non-fiction — directing the mack-daddy doc American Pimp and executive producing Scratch, Doug Prey’s study of turntablists. But they also spent a great deal of that downtime researching the Jack the Ripper phenomenon. Though its script is adapted from the serialized comic, the directors spiced up elements of From Hell with archival information gleaned from documentaries, books, primary sources and Q-and-A sessions with expert historians (known as “Ripperologists”) to clear up any long-standing fallacies that people now accept as fact. “One misconception is that he stabbed his victims — he sliced them, but never stabbed,” remarks director Albert Hughes. “He murdered on weekends, which means he was a working man. He took organs from the bodies, and most people don’t realize that the victims were all prostitutes. He wasn’t the one who called himself ‘Jack the Ripper.’ The tabloid press sent in a fake letter signed Jack the Ripper, which is where the name came from.”

Back in 1997, both brothers visited the serial killer’s old hangoutsin London’s East End — including Christchurch and the Ten Bells Pub — first alone and then led by “Ripperologists.” Their first trip to the working girls’ beloved watering hole revealed that 110 years post-Ripper a sordid spirit still exists there. “We walk into the 10 Bells Pub during lunch hour and all these drunken men are in a circle around a stripper finger-banging herself on the floor,” remembers Hughes. “I thought, ‘This is weird. There’s all this Jack the Ripper memorabilia and a stripper with a bunch of drunken guys around her — it doesn’t make any sense.” (Perhaps Hughes’ tale has been making the rounds because production designer Martin Childs reports having walked past the 10 Bells in June 2001 on an unrelated location scout to see a window sign reading “We no longer have exotic dancers.”)

Impressed with the murky darkness and radicalframing displayed in Lost Highway, the Hughes Brothers approached its cinematographer — Peter Deming, ASC — to shoot From Hell. This graduate of the American Film Institute broached the world of music videos before amassing a wide-ranging list of credits. His resume includes TV projects like On the Air, Hotel Room and Cosmic Slop, along with features Evil Dead II, Hollywood Shuffle, House Party, My Cousin Vinny, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, Scream 2 and 3, Music from the Heart, Mulholland Drive and the impending Austin Powers sequel Goldmember.

In preparation, the Hughes Brothers and Deming reviewed the cinematic history of Jack the Ripper. The fiend’s dastardly deeds are replayed in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger (1926) and its 1944 remake, Pandora’s Box (1928), Man in the Attic (1953), Jack the Ripper (1958), Study in Terror (1965), Hands of the Ripper (1972), Murder by Decree (1978) and Time After Time (1980). “We were influenced by every movie [in that list], because we wanted to make the definitive Jack the Ripper, taking elements that worked in all the films — even the corny ones,” says Hughes. “In looking at Hitchcock, the influence from The Lodger was the fascination that the crowd had with death. Everybody is always peering over somebody else’s shoulder to look at death. Then, we looked at Psycho, Rear Window and Vertigo. I’m not that big of a Hitchcock fan and I know it’s sacrilegious to say, but I think he’s a bit overrated. But there’s a lot of good things for the time — as far as the way he made you think about what’s there when it’s really all inside your head.” To counter impressions of From Hell having the posh polish of a Merchant Ivory movie, they also watched period pictures like David Lean’s Oliver Twist (1948) to absorb the grimy, grungy feel of 18^th Century, inner-citysqualor. The Hughes Brothers also leaned to Francis Ford Coppola (specifically The Godfather and Bram Stoker’s Dracula) for his effective use of transitions, montages and superimposed shots.

London Kills Me

The directors depict the murders with an almost Hitchcockian philosophy, not only to heightenon-screen suspense, but alsoto offset their public profile from Menace and Dead Presidents as bloodfest enthusiasts. Drawing from other Ripper reels’ relatively sanitized slayings, a classic shot of inferred violence tracks the silhouetted Jack haunting his victim, cuts to her shocked profile and then pans down to his leather doctor’s bag during the ensuing butchery. “Our approach was to not show too much,” elaborates Hughes. “Some scenes you see a flash of gore that you can’t make out. It’s more about setting the audience up to think that the murder might be coming from one direction and it happens from the other direction. Somebody is being pulled into darkness, and all you see is the bloody knife coming up and down. Or all you see is an over-the-shoulder shot of Jack — his back and the girl creeping off to the edge. But you don’t see the incisions — all you hear is the knife against flesh-and-bone. When people see that, they think they see much more than they really are. There’s only one shot inthe movie where you see a girl’s throat getting cut.” Massacres up to that point are suggestive in nature, so the shock of the aforementioned throat-slitting did raise the eyebrows of the MPAA, which eventually bestowed the film with its R rating.

Another preconceived notion dashed by the Hughes Brothers on From Hell is the image of a top-hatted Jack wading through cotton-thick clouds of London fog whilst stalking unsuspecting prey. Being a stickler for accuracy, Hughes actually dug up “weather reports and almanacs from back then and found that there were pretty clear days that weren’t cold,” the director expounds. “[The Ripper’s killing spree] started in summer and ended in November. Fog is cool, and we did use smoke machines a lot, but not as fog. The mist idea came out of the fact that two murders actually played out in the mist. So if all the murders didn’t happen in fall, why not try and show people a different take [on the mythos.] Using mist as our fog replacement was troublesome, but I’m glad we did it. You’ve got to get these rain towers up and get the right consistency. Because mist is not so thick, it doesn’t fall in a straight pattern. If the wind blows a certain way, [the mist] might start waving according to what the wind is doing and blow away from your shot. We did a lot of tests at the beginning of pre-production getting the mist to look right.” Hundreds of misting sprinklers attached to giant crane rigs sent columns of fine spray showering onto set. Deming had to finagle his fixtures to get a proper exposure because mist reads more faintto the naked eye than when caught on film.

In transposing the black-and-white comic into a four-color, filmic universe, the Hughes Brothers drew from some of its panels, took tearsheets from print ads and Albert did his regular practice of downloading frames from VHS films onto a video color printer. Compiling these visuals into a notebook as a reference for color schemes, storyboards followed. But the directors rarely take an overarching approach to a movie, and instead imagine potential images on a scene-by-scene basis. Though the Hughes Brothers have gone on record calling From Hell a ghetto film, the directors had no intention of conceiving a “Victorian Seven” and, as such, kept stylization to a minimum. “Look at Traffic, which is a good movie, but is overstylized in the color palette department,” observes Hughes. “It’s deep blue in Washington D.C. and overkill warm in Mexico.If you shot it normally, people would get the point anyway because it’s two different settings. Overemphasizing the difference draws attention to itself and the movie could stand on its own without that. I told Peter that we were looking for something other than the Michael Bay-type commercial look. So he brought in a warm palette, and the [Fogal] stocking made a dreamy look with the brights bleeding a little, but whites and highlights softening out. It felt like an antique photo, which was cool.”

From Hell’s period-appropriate, brown-wash monochrome arises from a technique Deming applied on Lost Highway, which is photographing all day scenes through filtration that combines a chocolate #1 filter with Fogal stockings behind the lens. (He added a light Black ProMist on close-ups.) Night sequences could not profit from this tactic because its intense filtration factor — a stop of one-and-three-quarters — is too thick for shadowy scenery. (The muddy blacknights of Lost Highway had the chocolate sheen simulated in postproduction.) “You have to watch out for shadow areas because they will block up pretty quickly — particularly with the new Vision print stocks, which have much more contrast,” cautions Deming, whose stop range hovered around a 2.8. “I think that they backed off from the contrast in the print stock, but you have to light into dark areas and dark wardrobe more. Because you can go thin pretty quickly with the chocolate filter, you shouldn’t be afraid to overexpose a little. But you have to be careful, which is why we didn’t use it at night [on From Hell].”

In Dreams

Part of Inspector Abberline’s prowess as an investigator comes from psychic visions of the murders — sort of after-the-fact impressions like those experienced by the protagonists of Profiler and CSI. His inner meditations, dream states and hallucinations brought about by smoking opium are interpreted through cross-processed reversal stock 5285,which imbues the footage with a contrasty, nauseating shade of yellow-green and makes reds, particularly blood, pop with an electric-like haze. Adding to its unsettling effect, the moviemakers messed with image stability, turning the camera on and off while rolling, ramping frame rates between 5 to 60 fps, and enacting speed changes on Steadicam shots. Director Hughes knew reversal’s attributes from personal use of 16mm and scrutiny of Oliver Stone’s JFK. “I shot my daughter with Ektachrome in a park on an overcast day and it had a nice old blue-black feel,” attests Hughes. “It’s like shooting slide film — just rich and solid with an almost hyperreality to it. We did some tests in London [with the 35mm] and found that if we didn’t correct the colors at all, it had a green quality.”

Because these reveries are rife with dissolves and overlays, rendering superimposed shifts in computer was more expedient than doing endless sessions of optical upon optical. Electronic editing had the unforeseen aftermath of altering color and contrast. “We cross-processed it and at the same time pushed it a stop,” discloses Deming. “What originally is 100 ASA becomes 50 when cross-processed and then it got pushed back to 100. In post, virtually all of that cross-processed footage was digitized, composited with other shots digitally and then outputted. There was a lot of grain added digitally to all the cross-processed footage. So the final look is pretty different from the on-screen look of cross-processed footage. Making a print from a straight cross-process has a heavy green-yellow saturation — there’s no latitude at all — even less so when shooting reversal straight. It’s also very low latitude stock, so it ends up being very contrasty. Particularly, in this case, where we there’s lots of dark wardrobe, dark sets and faces highlighted by practicals. What they did digitally was keep the color but reduce the contrast and add grain.”

The moviemakers entertained early discussions about further fine-tuningthat cross-processed hue through skip-bleach or ENR. But they preferred an emulsion process, given that postproduction procedures can be subject to last-minute budget cuts. “We talked about skip-bleaching part or going really grainy,” the cinematographer reflects. “We tried reversal stock, as reversal and then cross-processed, with both HMI and tungsten light. It [cross-processing] is the one look that we all responded to because it can’t be tampered with or reversed. Typically, the most effective method [of ENR or bleach-bypass] is done in the prints. If you’re going to checkerboard it with anything else, you have to figure out how to do it in the intermediate. We weren’t sure if that was going to work. Also, at that point, you’re spending money in the lab that [the studio] could decide not to spend. Then you’re stuck with wanting a look and not having the resources to carry out the plan.”

The moments of extra-sensory perception are a hodge-podge of straight reversal, cross-processed reversal, standard footage and CG-images. But Deming did distinguish between opium-fueled mirages, prophetic foretelling of death and musings of a longing for family. He shot reversal stock for the Inspector’s dreams about his wife and a wedding, with the former done straight and the latter blown-out with extreme desaturation. While photographing Jack the Ripper’s slicing spree, he had to swap lighting setups to account for exposure discrepancies between Vision 500T (5279) and Ektachrome. “Reversal film is daylight stock, so we had to switch over to HMIs, and it’s so slow — you’re shooting 100 [ASA] versus 400 — so you need lots more light,” indicates Deming. “When you get into bigger units, more light levels and an extremely contrasty filmstock with very little latitude, the subtler aspects of lighting fall by the wayside. Going from straight negative to cross-process reversal is pretty shocking. I remember one of the first times we did it, the brothers came out and said, ‘Wow, it’s so bright out there — so flat. What are you thinking?’ But when we got the film back they understood what I was talking about.”

Abberline’s drug-induced dementia also entailed agitated frames, affording it a jaded, home movie look, complete with hairline scratches and skipped sprockets — all done digitally. Hughes had hoped to obtain that in-camera, but doing so with a fully functional, hand-cranked Bell & Howell proved futile. “We almost decided to work with a hand-crank camera, but it turned out to be too clean,” says the director. “It wasn’t vignetting on the sides, or doing a staccato effect like I had hoped, and it was regular 35 so we had to squeeze it [because of the anamorphic format]. We sent the camera back the second week and created the hand-crank look in postproduction mostly, you know, making the frame jump and flickers, and adding grain and vignettes.”

As his prime camera, Deming carried a Panavision Platinum  (backed by a GII), with the full complement of anamorphic, superspeed lenses, except for a zoom. He opted for more formal, staid framing style on the upper-class citizens and royalty, and did rapid, handheld and Steadicam shots of Whitechapel’s low-class riff-raff. He filmed all day scenes with Eastman EXR 100T (5248) except for two moments designed to be under sunny skies, for which he turned to EXR 200T (5293). All night work was captured on Vision 500T (5279) with a measure of Vision 800T (5289) for larger night exteriors, such as the wooing of victim Dark Annie (Katrin Cartlidge) as she’s coaxed into a coach en route to Hanbury Yard.

Many movies referenced for From Hell sported some rather extreme framing, such as Lost Highway and Sergio Leone’sepic Once Upon A Time in America (1983). Being much enamored of numerous widescreen films, and having composed Dead Presidents in Super 35, the directors gave serious thought to anamorphic. While Deming worked within the 2.35 frame on Lost Highway, the Scream movies, Mystery, AlaskaandAustin Powers, From Hell marks the Hughes Brothers’ bow with that elongated aspect ratio. Quizzing the cinematographer about the pros and cons of anamorphic versus Super 35 sold the directors on the former, primarily “because Peter is totally into keeping the quality of his negative.” That choicelater left Albert Hughes somewhat frustrated for reasons other than the extra time required in lighting up a longer expanse of frame at a higher stop. Having familiarized himself with 35mm lenses on Dead Presidents, Hughes faced the consternation of ultra-sensitive focus, larger-sized optics for Steadicam, and the occasional inconvenience of composing shots through an unsqueezed eyepiece. His discouragement became a constant source of on-set banter between he and Deming — one that continues to this day. “Just recently, I joked with him ‘I don’t like anamorphic, and I’m never shooting in it again,’” laughs Hughes. “Peter says, ‘I like anamorphic, it’s clean, it’s ‘this’ and it’s ‘that.’ So I say, ‘I was wondering why Scorsese still stuck with Super 35, and I finally know the answer — because it’s filmmaker friendly.’ First, the lenses stay the same. You don’t have to use more lights as the big rumor goes, which some cinematographers say is not true. But the big [advantage] is that you can readjust and repull shots in post, which cinematographers hate to hear. But the truth is that I’m more a stickler for the grain quality of the print that goes out [which is why he prefers Super 35].”

A Town Called Malice

Most of From Hell unfolds at nighttime in the bedraggled backalleys of London’s underbelly. So Deming had to work out a means of illumining night exteriors on the enormous Whitechapel set based in Prague, Czech Republic from the blueprints of production designer Martin Childs. The Hughes Brothers did not want moonlight as source, opting instead for a smoggy, orange glow. “It’s all very much source lighting — candles and lanterns,” Deming maintains. “Actually, From Hell is right at the time when electricity is starting to happen, but mostly in the upper-class areas, so that became a good way of differentiating the two worlds. Upper-class areas, typically, were a little more up-key and brighter — that [clean look] also worked its way into the production design. Sources aren’t as generous in the other areas [like Whitechapel], so it’s much darker, shadowy and dirty.” He deployed tungsten sources to edge out the buildings, raking them with definition yet maintaining a contrasty aura. “Depending on the situation, we had a lot of lifts around with 9 and 12-light MaxiBrutes,” continues the cinematographer. ”We also had a lot of practicals hidden around set. We had Par lamps, which were doing lighting effects for the streetlights. Then, if we could, we might use an 8-by bounce as a keylight.”

Production on From Hell occurred from June to September 2000, and included six weeks of night photography. First call tended to be at 5:30 p.m. with Deming’s team setting lamps until dark and then calibrating light levels until first slate. Every evening, gaffer Robbie Baumgardner stationed fixtures around set for a 360-degree ambiance while also keying its some 350 windows. Seventy-five of these panes were set dressed with curtains, lamps or boxfronts so he illuminated those area with a multitude of smaller fixtures, like peppers, inkies, tweenies, blondes and redheads and even bare bulbs to warm a curtain. Back in the 1880s, gas-mantle lanterns lined the streets, so the gaffer placed round vanity bulbs within the gaslamp housings and dimmed them down to mimic kerosene flames. To cheat a brighter gaslight, Baumgardner invented a do-it-yourself gizmo that he could easily reposition to facilitate filming from alternate angles. “I went to a hardware store in Prague and got a tool that welders use when they can’t see around corners — it’s a magnet on an articulating arm and a mirror,” the gaffer explains. “I took off the mirror, put a socket on the end of it, wired it down to the lamp, and put them all on dimmers. As we changed position of camera, all we did was pop the arm off the back of the lamp and pop it to the other side. We used 100-, 150-, 200- and sometimes 500-watt mushroom lights to glow walls behind the lamps. We black-wrapped them so you couldn’t see through the lantern that another light was back there.”

“One aspect to consider about anamorphic is the much wider field-of-view,” continues Baumgardner. “So when lighting this big set, we tried to keep everything off the ground, so that you could look 180 degrees and not see any lights [in frame]. So much to the producers’ chagrin, we lit from rooftops — we had to build lots of platforms on top of the sets, which they had not anticipated. We ended up using tops of the sets almost virtually around the whole set, which was a lot of walls. Having hundreds of square feet of platforms provided us with incredible options for lighting from above — especially in broad strokes — without having cherrypickers everywhere. Because there were courtyards and five-foot alleys that ran 40 feet high, we had to be able to light from above. There were so many internal walls [in the Whitechapel set] that you wouldn’t be able get cherrypickers in where you needed lights.”

From Hell opens by showcasing the Whitechapel district in an intricate establishing shot — one inspired by the serpentine Steadicam slipping its Copacabana move in Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas. Hughes dared lavish the horror film such an unveiling after immersing himself in Hitchcock and checking out aprior Ripper picture’s lengthypan ofLondon. “It’s always been a dream of ours to do a really long shot, but you can’t beat the master,” the director admits. “Hitchcock did it the best by stringing 10 different shots together into one. I saw one Jack the Ripper movie that starts on the rooftops, but it didn’t go down [into the city] — it’s just a sidetracking shot along the rooftop. I thought it would be cool if we did that, put St. Paul’s Cathedral in the background, go down the building, through the windows into the sweatshop factories, and then down to the ground to the bowels of the ghetto. I wasn’t able to get the moves I wanted when we were shooting. Because of certain limitations, like the cobblestones [surfacing the streets], all our Steadicam shots came out looking really rugged. In the end, the more rugged style works because it’s in the ghetto. It was meant to be very classy, but I’m glad it wasn’t — that would have been too clean for the scene or the neighborhood.”

Running three minutes long, the Steadicam move starts some 45 feet up on crane (itself set on a 19-foot platform) outside a building’s third floor and dips down to the ground. During this vertical pan, the camera peers through the windows to show a cotton mill and boarding house. Reaching street-level, the shot wends it way through an alley onto a main street and then cruises the entire set. It picks up on flame-haired hooker Mary Kelly before diverging to three other characters conversing and crisscrossing paths, then rejoins Kelly in an alley as she gets thrust against a wall. Though set lighting already existed in a “broad stroke” scheme, certain lamps had to be dimmed up and dimmed down in mid-shot to avoid casting shadows, depending on the potential camera trajectory. Also, Baumgardner had to track alongside actress Heather Graham with a Chinese lantern for a persistent beauty light. A nasty thunderstorm forced production to shut down that evening because wicked, 30 mile-an-hour winds nearly toppled some crewmembers off of Condors. After the tempest subsided, filming resumed, finishing just before day peaked. “We managed to pull it off before the Sun came up and, actually, some of the best shots were as it was getting light,” asserts the gaffer. “There was a blue ambience that picked up all the wet cobblestone and the wet walls. The cut I saw is using some of the later ones as the Sun was coming up, which is great. It adds a new dimension — an ambient level not there in the middle of the night.”

With most exteriors confined to the Whitechapel set, production had to explore several options for interiors. The best bet turned outto be a selection of age-old, baroque castles locatedacross the Czech Republic. Because of these edifices’ great historical significance — some dating back to the 10^th Century — the crew could do little or no rigging. Many of these sets represent the loftiest bastions of Victorian England — Buckingham Palace, the HQ of Special Branch, and the Freemasons’ secret compound — so Deming often flaunted their fancy grandeur with wideshots. Most interiors benefited from helium balloons (round and tube-shaped), mimicked candlelight and kerosene flames via multiple Chinese lanterns (each loaded with two 500-watt bulbs), and 100-, 200- and 500-watt bare bulbs dimmed to minimum output. He almost always dimmed his sources or gelled them with a one-eighth or one-quarter CTO. From the first-level balcony of Castle Kacina, production shot the Mason’s meeting hall, lit ominously with multiple candelabras. Within the chateau’s grand rotunda, Deming floated an 11-foot, tungsten helium balloon covered with a black Visqueen skirt to reduce outlying spill.

Buteven with Childs’ faithful recreation of the ward of Whitechapel, authentic accuracy could only go so far, mainly in regards to the proper scale of London’s imposingarchitecture. Filling out these expanses required the input of Illusion Arts, whose tasks ranged from the mundane to the monumental: CG-augmented rootftops, wire removal for toppled coaches, placing reflections within eyes, a circa 1888 façade for Buckingham Palace and cityscape profiles of metropolitan London. The Hughes Brothers exploited CGI on the Vietnam scenes of Dead Presidents — to enhance the Florida-bound shoot by adding background mountain ranges, removing muzzle from water buffalo and sparking mortar flashes — but the demands of From Hell represented a significant step forward. The directors had great faith, however, in the working method of Syd Dutton and Bill Taylor, whom Albert Hughes describes as “old school analog guys working in digital.” Coming from a traditional perspective made Illusion Arts more inclined to start from an organic approach before segueing into digital techniques. “Sid is really into matte painting, and the first thing I told him, ‘I don’t want any matte paintings in this movie,’” recollects Hughes. “But he says ‘Not so fast,’ because we did ask for some models to make it look real. He did some matte paintings that are so subtle, but not in the traditional sense — more like clouds and backgrounds.”

During any extravaganteffects setup, Bill Taylor would be on-set to place tracking markers as digital reference points. One Vistavision shot, dubbed by Deming as “Ludgate Circus,” encapsulates the Whitechapel set with greater London in the distance and focuses on a train before craning into the Underground subway system. Because of this shot’s eight-perf format, Deming removed the Fogal net and chocolate filter, letting Illusion Arts duplicate its Hershey-hued colordigitally. Also impressive is an image of the Ripper’s carriage riding the crest of hill, which was electronically transposed to a bridge along the embankment of the River Thames.

Hughes lauds their tenacity, citing one elaborate crane move that returned to the drawing boards so many times that he was ready to throw in the towel if not for Dutton’s persistence. “We were panning down from Christchurch and we had only built a third of the church,” describes the director. “We built pretty high up, but there’s another three sections [upwards]. We always knew CGI would add in the top of the building. But I shot a tilt boom-down on a crane, so in case that shot didn’t work out, I could always cut it right at the point as it hits our set. I always protect myself with shots like that to make sure that I can cut into it. So they added the top onto the church and, man, it went back so many times. It was more to do with the grain structure, and that the mood light, the angle of the church and the clouds didn’t look right.”

Besides upping the ante on Abberline’s opium-doped dementia, Illusion Arts was also on hand to digitally line-up shots that might be plagued by discrepancies in frame rates.At one point, Deming programmed a time-lapse, motion-control move (with an Arri 435) as the inspector and Sergeant Godley examine the decaying remains of prostitute Polly (Annabelle Apsion) after she’s diabolically disemboweled. The exterior shot fades through three different sections of night into dawn’s first light and then early day, after which the proceedings pick up in normal time. After doing the standard night photography, production performed three passes on the night portion. The transition from pitch dark into early sunrise was undercranked at rate of three frames-per-second. The last section catches Abberline emerging from a crowdof onlookers to kneel down and examine the corpse, before “decelerating” everyone’s motion into 24 fps. Pulling offthe motion-control shot had to be interrupted by a one-day recess. Production placed a perimeter around the apparatus with 24-hour guards so that no one would upset its placement, forcing the shot to be redone from scratch. Fortunately, the weather remained clear with no precipitation or wind unsettling its position.

Buffs of “new jack cinema” might be surprised to see the Hughes Brothers tackle the realm of Victorian London, but the moviemakers had a strong yearning to escape their comfort zone, and found that the guerilla-style production of American Pimp greatly aided the transition. “We did learn a lot from our two movies, and always consider them a rung-in-a-ladder to something at the end,” surmises Hughes. “If Menace was the first rung, and Dead Presidents the second rung, and there’s 20 rungs in this ladder, we jumped to the ninth rung with From Hell. It’s more from learning while taking five years off, buying an Avid editing machine and 16 camera and doing our own documentary. That’s how we learned how to refine certain things that were hard for us to achieve. Learning how to deal with color — in production design, cinematography, and lighting — is one area where we’ve grown. On our first movies, we did pay attention to certain colors in wardrobe and production design, but we never used it as an overall tool.”