Rebirth of an Icon: building the frame, then taking it away
Solid Sky, quarried in Brazil and estimated to be 1.2 billion years old, now hangs in the lobby of 550 Madison Avenue on a set of massive steel chains.
Most Milkbox projects start with an idea or a script that’s created months before the shoot. This one started with a rock that formed 1.2 billion years ago in what is now Brazil.
Before Milkbox ever picked up a camera for The Rebirth of an Icon, the documentary short about 550 Madison Avenue’s renovation, co-founder Andrew Bordwin was on location for a very different job: documenting the installation of Solid Sky, a 24-ton striated cerulean orb of Azul Macaubas quartzite by artist Alicja Kwade.
“It arrived in a crate. We were there when it came off the truck.”
Quarried in Brazil, the giant blue sphere now hangs in the building’s lobby from a set of steel chains, a polished spherical robin’s egg that weighs as much as a CAT 324 excavator.
What’s the best time to lift up the sky?
The crew needed a crane to carry the stone into a lobby that was still an active construction site, during the least disruptive slot available: 10pm on a Saturday night in January.
“The rental for the crane started at midnight on a Sunday, which is the cheapest they could get, and also that’s when the traffic is at its lowest, least disruptive,” Bordwin says. “It’s labeled very carefully, north, south, east, west, very carefully. They laid it in, they did renderings.”
The crew, including a time-lapse operator stationed in the lobby’s upper gallery for the whole shoot, didn’t get home until mid-afternoon the next day.
“It was like a twenty hour day. This is January, so it’s cold. Still got PTSD from this shoot.”
When one frame isn’t enough to tell the truth
To capture an image of something as visually impressive as the Solid Sky installation takes more than one camera or one exposure. To capture a clear and true representation of the sculpture requires constructing the final image from multiple shots.
Comparing published photographs of Solid Sky, Bordwin points out how the wide-angle distortion in a single ultra-wide frame would bend the curve of the ball and the supporting chains.
The chains supporting a perfectly spherical Solid Sky appear correctly as straight lines in this composite photo © FCharles Photography
The alternative isn’t a wider lens, it’s more frames. In a later shoot of the massive sculpture, photographer Fred Charles created a single image from a composite of ten or more exposures stitched together, each one pointed at a specific segment of the lobby. No single lens could capture a wide enough field of view without distorting straight lines into a curve.
Build the shot, then take it apart
That same approach, get everything into the frame, then remove the elements that don’t belong, shows up again in how Milkbox shot the interviews in Rebirth of an Icon.
Every sit-down interview is built the same way: light the subject, frame a wide shot with the building visible behind them.
“You keep this frame locked down, you don’t change the camera,” Bordwin explains. “You leave the chair, you leave the model, you take everything out, and then you shoot ten seconds with everything out. And then you take that shot and you strip her back in.”
This composite approach removes every distracting element that would otherwise be visible in the shot: the lighting rig a few feet from the subject’s face, the second camera capturing close-ups, the cables running across the floor.
“That’s why we have this manicured shot that has this kind of wow factor,” Bordwin says. “You can’t shoot that shot in many places, because the building’s in the whole shot, top to bottom, and the view from the building is the background. It sells the space and it sells the building.”
An example of a composite shot from Milkbox’s Rebirth of an Icon video
Bordwin estimates it’s used in roughly nine out of ten Milkbox interview setups.
It’s a strange kind of honesty: an image built from several careful, narrow truths ends up looking more real than one shot trying to capture everything at once. It’s the same patience it took to get a 24-ton stone sphere into a lobby in the middle of the night.