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Levie Isaacks, ASC have always loved movies and responded to good stories. When I got out of the Army and returned to college, I got a job answering the phone at a TV station, and soon I moved into the news department. When I was handed a Bell & Howell camera, my love affair with making movies began. “One of the other cameramen at the station showed me American Cinematographer, and my eyes must have grown to the size of silver dollars when I saw it. I couldn’t believe there was a magazine about how cinematographers actually worked, one that would give me a chance to learn with every new issue. “I keep every issue of AC, and I’ve always used it as a reference for techniques I want to experiment with. AC is a great inspiration.”
©photo by Owen Roizman, ASC
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—Levie Isaacks, ASC
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The International Journal of Film & Digital Production Techniques
On Our Cover: Gudrun Ensslin (Johanna Wokalek) and Andreas Baader (Moritz Bleibtrau) spearhead a group of German terrorists in The Baader Meinhof Complex, shot by Rainer Klausmann, BVK. (Photo by Jürgen Olczyk, courtesy of Vitagraph Films and Constantin Film.)
Features 32 44 58 70
Departments
8 10 14 20 78 86 96 98 98 100 102 104
Anarchy in the BRD Rainer Klausmann, BVK recaptures a turbulent era for The Baader Meinhof Complex
A Nazi’s Worst Nightmare Robert Richardson, ASC reteams with Quentin Tarantino on Inglourious Basterds
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An Appetite for Crime Robert Gantz tails a legendary French bank robber for Mesrine
Testing Digital Cameras: Part 2 The ASC/PGA Camera-Assessment Series points the way toward workflow solutions for digital cameras
Editor’s Note President’s Desk Short Takes: Love Hate Production Slate: North Face
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District 9
Post Focus: The Red Shoes Mr. Hulot’s Holiday
New Products & Services International Marketplace Classified Ads Ad Index ASC Membership Roster Clubhouse News ASC Close-Up: Alexander Gruszynski
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The International Journal of Film & Digital Production Techniques • Since 1920
Visit us online at
www.theasc.com ———————————————————————————————————— PUBLISHER Martha Winterhalter ————————————————————————————————————
EDITORIAL EXECUTIVE EDITOR Stephen Pizzello SENIOR EDITOR Rachael K. Bosley ASSOCIATE EDITOR Jon D. Witmer TECHNICAL EDITOR Christopher Probst CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Stephanie Argy, Benjamin B, Douglas Bankston, Robert S. Birchard, John Calhoun, Bob Davis, Bob Fisher, Simon Gray, Jim Hemphill, David Heuring, Jay Holben, Noah Kadner, Ron Magid, Jean Oppenheimer, John Pavlus, Chris Pizzello, Jon Silberg, Iain Stasukevich, Kenneth Sweeney, Patricia Thomson, David E. Williams ————————————————————————————————————
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CIRCULATION, BOOKS & PRODUCTS CIRCULATION DIRECTOR Saul Molina CIRCULATION MANAGER Alex Lopez SHIPPING MANAGER Miguel Madrigal ———————————————————————————————————— ASC GENERAL MANAGER Brett Grauman ASC EVENTS COORDINATOR Patricia Armacost ASC PRESIDENT’S ASSISTANT Kim Weston ASC ACCOUNTING MANAGER Mila Basely ASC ACCOUNTS RECEIVABLE Corey Clark ———————————————————————————————————— American Cinematographer (ISSN 0002-7928), established 1920 and in its 89th year of publication, is published monthly in Hollywood by ASC Holding Corp., 1782 N. Orange Dr., Hollywood, CA 90028, U.S.A., (800) 448-0145, (323) 969-4333, Fax (323) 876-4973, direct line for subscription inquiries (323) 969-4344. Subscriptions: U.S. $50; Canada/Mexico $70; all other foreign countries $95 a year (remit international Money Order or other exchange payable in U.S. $). Advertising: Rate card upon request from Hollywood office. Article Reprints: Requests for high-quality article reprints (or electronic reprints) should be made to Sheridan Reprints at (800) 635-7181 ext. 8065 or by e-mail
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American Society of Cinematographers The ASC is not a labor union or a guild, but an educational, cultural and professional organization. Membership is by invitation to those who are actively engaged as directors of photography and have demonstrated outstanding ability. ASC membership has become one of the highest honors that can be bestowed upon a professional cinematographer — a mark of prestige and excellence.
OFFICERS - 2009/2010 Michael Goi President
Richard Crudo Vice President
Owen Roizman Vice President
Victor J. Kemper Vice President
Matthew Leonetti Treasurer
Rodney Taylor Secretary
John C. Flinn III Sergeant At Arms
MEMBERS OF THE BOARD Curtis Clark Richard Crudo George Spiro Dibie Richard Edlund John C. Flinn III John Hora Victor J. Kemper Matthew Leonetti Stephen Lighthill Isidore Mankofsky Daryn Okada Owen Roizman Nancy Schreiber Haskell Wexler Vilmos Zsigmond
ALTERNATES Fred Elmes Steven Fierberg Ron Garcia Michael D. O’Shea Michael Negrin MUSEUM CURATOR
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Editor’s Note inematic ambition is evident in every frame of The Baader Meinhof Complex, which earned a Best Foreign Film nomination at the 2009 Academy Awards. Shot by Rainer Klausmann, BVK, the tense political thriller retraces the history of the Red Army Faction, which tore a violent swath through West Germany for a decade, beginning in the late 1960s. The filmmakers enjoyed extraordinary cooperation from German authorities, who allowed them to use locations that included even Bismarckstrasse, a six-lane highway that serves as one of Berlin’s main thoroughfares. “We couldn’t believe that,” marvels director Uli Edel, noting that the production needed the access to film key scenes of student protests at the capital’s biggest opera house, the Deutsche Oper. “To close one of the main veins of the city for three days and nights, just so we could restage that scene, was amazing.” Klausmann amplified the historical realism by capturing the drama with an intense, documentary-like camera style. “Finding a visual approach to the film was easy because to my mind, you can’t play around with history — you have to go for the facts,” he tells London correspondent Mark Hope-Jones (“Anarchy in the BRD,” page 32.) As our coverage confirms, however, executing this strategy was far from simple. The makers of the four-hour crime epic Mesrine (“An Appetite for Crime,” page 58) faced equally daunting logistics while telling the story of a flamboyant bank robber who thoroughly enjoyed his status as France’s “most wanted man” from 1973-’79. The French government extended extraordinary privileges to the production, which managed to shut down one of the busiest intersections in Paris, Porte de Clignancourt, to shoot the film’s climax. “It’s unheard of,” cinematographer Robert Gantz tells Jean Oppenheimer. “That plaza is a major entry and exit point for Paris.” A pair of Americans working abroad, director Quentin Tarantino and cinematographer Robert Richardson, ASC, brought European flavor to their work on the World War II revenge drama Inglourious Basterds. The filmmakers shot most of the picture at Babelsberg Studios near Berlin but peppered the project with scenes staged at various locations in both Germany and France. The resulting visuals reflect Tarantino’s fondness for both homage and audacious framing: “Quentin and I will have these interesting little battles while I’m composing a shot,” Richardson tells European correspondent Benjamin Bergery (“A Nazi’s Worst Nightmare,” page 44). “I naturally move to one side or the other, especially when shooting anamorphic, whereas Quentin enjoys dead-center framing. For singles in particular, we’re just cutting dead-center framing from one side to the other, with the actors looking just past the barrel of the lens.” If you haven’t already guessed, the theme of this issue is international production, and it is also reflected in Production Slate articles about the features North Face (shot at rugged locations in Austria and Switzerland) and District 9 (shot in South Africa), along with a Short Takes piece on the British project Love Hate. This issue also includes another installment of our coverage of the ASC/PGA Camera-Assessment Series (“Testing Digital Cameras: Part 2,” page 70). This time around, key participants outline the workflow solutions applied to tests involving seven digital motion-picture cameras. Stephen Pizzello
Executive Editor 8
Photo by Douglas Kirkland.
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President’s Desk ince being elected president of the ASC, I’ve been asked by a number of people what my favorite movies are and what I believe in. I don’t intend for this column to be about me, but in the interest of helping the filmmaking community get to know me better, I offer these admittedly random insights. My favorite films are an eclectic bunch, a baker’s dozen that have all imparted some pearl of inspiration in just the right way. The Graduate (1967) – My favorite film. I’ve seen it more than 120 times in theaters since I was 8. The cinematography, by Robert Surtees, ASC, taught me the emotional value of shadow and widescreen composition. And then there was Katharine Ross. L’avventura (1960) – I fell asleep the first two times I tried to watch Antonioni’s examination of the idle Italian rich because I kept waiting for him to get back to the plot about the missing girl. It wasn’t until I realized what he was saying about emotional disconnection through architectural composition that I felt the characters’ plight acutely; Anna may be physically lost, but all of us are emotionally lost as well. Winged Migration (2001) – Yes, it’s 90 minutes of birds flying, but this film made me feel like I knew what it was like to fly with them. It’s rare that a movie can change my perspective on something I see every day. This one did. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1968) – Eli Wallach’s search for the grave with the gold is still one of the greatest moments in movie history. As he frantically scans all the graves, the combination of photography, editing and music is so overwhelming that you completely forget his character cannot read. Spirited Away (2001) – Hayao Miyazaki’s animated masterpiece created an amazing world of fantastic creatures and unusual events and made it all seem real through the eyes of a child. I still want to take a ride on that train skimming the surface of the lake. C’était un rendez-vous (1976) – Claude Lelouch mounted a 35mm camera on the front of a Mercedes and tore through the streets of Paris at 6 a.m. at 85 mph, blowing past red lights and driving up on sidewalks in one unbroken nine-minute take. Pure cinema. Watch it on the big screen and sit in the front row. King Kong (1933) – A big movie in the best sense of the word. This gets down to the core of what makes movies magical. All That Jazz (1979) – You can accuse Bob Fosse of ripping off Fellini’s 8 1⁄ 2 all you want, but I happen to like open-heart surgery with my musical comedy. A perfect partnership of dance, choreography, photography and editing, it was the natural successor to the unbroken-take, MGM style of dance on film that Vincente Minnelli did so well in the 1940s and 1950s. Cemetery of The Elephants (1975) – Armando Robles Godoy manages to tell the story of a man’s life from boyhood optimism to old age and disillusionment in the space of 15 minutes and makes it emotionally devastating and unbearably poignant. The Creeping Terror (1964) – Hideously awful and enormously entertaining movie about a space creature that looks like a big, walking carpet with
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an orifice that swallows women whole. You will not be able to get the dancehall music out of your head no matter how hard you try. Pandora’s Box (1929) – It was a tossup between this and Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. (1924) for my favorite silent film. Pabst’s examination of the morality of an immoral girl was one of the pinnacle film achievements in early cinema. You cannot watch the ending without wanting to step into the story and take Louise Brooks away. Day for Night (1973) – François Truffaut shows all the problems that happen when you make a movie and still manages to make it seem like the most fun you could ever have. Like real life. L.A. Story (1991) – It took a lot for me to move to Los Angeles, and I had a hard time even tolerating the place, but Steve Martin showed me I was taking everything a bit too seriously. Thank you, Steve. In terms of my beliefs: I believe working in the motion-picture industry is the best job in the world, and anyone working in the business who doesn’t feel that way should get out of it and do something else. I believe we will be using film until we no longer feel compelled to compare every new digital medium to film, and when I hold a roll of film in my hands and look at the individual frames through a light bulb, I’m looking at the greatest wonder in the world. I believe I was never complete until I met my wife, Gina, and even though my son calls everything “Daddy” — the cat, his toy truck, his breakfast — the first time he said it, he was saying it only to me. I believe I will always remember Mary Carlisle’s cameo as Impy the secretary in the 1932 Technicolor short film The Devil’s Cabaret, but I will never remember what I had for dinner the night before. I believe new technology is great and valuable and will be replaced by newer technology as soon as I learn the previous version. I believe daydreaming is not only worthwhile, but an important artistic activity to be encouraged and nurtured — but not if you work on the electric crew. I believe William A. Fraker, ASC, BSC is no mere mortal, but a benevolent angel sent to earth to remind us that we work in a magical, romantic industry. I believe I will never get over being accepted as a member of the ASC. Never. Don’t even get me started on the whole president thing. I believe that as phenomenal as the 1930s and the 1970s were in the history of cinema, the best is yet to come. The craft of cinematography is a living, breathing and constantly evolving art form. Visual storytellers are what we are in any media. There are young filmmakers out there who have absorbed the best of the past and have a vision for the future. You ain’t seen nothing yet.
Michael Goi, ASC President
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Stefan Sonnenfeld
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Short Takes Embracing Inner Anger The formerly wimpy Tom (Ben Whishaw) exults in the demonic influence of his inner Hate, which takes the form of an attractive female (Hayley Atwell) in the 19-minute short Love/Hate, directed by Blake and Dylan Ritson. The project was shot by John Lynch, who used Arri’s proprietary Mscope format with the company’s D-21 digital camera.
lake and Dylan Ritson’s short film Love Hate is a cautionary tale about the perils of being too nice. At the center of the tale is Tom (Ben Whishaw), an affable milquetoast who, despite his prejudices, does his best to put on a happy face for his job, his acquaintances and, on occasion, his exgirlfriend. He maintains his positive veneer until one fateful afternoon when he is confronted by the physical manifestation of his inner ire, which arrives in the form of an attractive and very
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assertive female (Hayley Atwell). She’s had enough of Tom’s antics as a bumbling pushover and is determined to turn him into a full-time hater. Love Hate is the third film written and directed by the Ritson brothers, following the comedic shorts Out of Time (2004) and More More More (2007), which earned screenings at the Berlin, London and Turner Classic Movies film festivals, among others; Love Hate has followed suit, winning the Jury Award at the Palm Springs
ShortFest and a nomination for Best British Short at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. The filmmakers were interested in shooting Love Hate in HD, which became an especially exciting prospect after producer Scott Jacobson got in touch with Arri Media U.K.’s Milan Krsljanin, who in turn offered to supply the production with Arri’s D-21 film-style digital camera. “They came across as extremely articulate and thoughtful people,” remarks Krsljanin. “They were looking for a tech-
Photos and frame grabs courtesy of Origin Pictures. Photos by Nigel Beach.
by Iain Stasukevich
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Right: Mscope exploits the D-21’s dual-stream HD output by splitting the camera’s 4:3 images into two 16:9 HD frames that can later be recombined in post to create a single 2:1 squeezed image. Below: Blake and Dylan Ritson review a scene.
nology to help them express their ideas in a more cinematic way, and while a lot of filmmakers are using digital formats to cut costs, sometimes the power of the image is compromised. I thought shooting anamorphic would be of interest to them, and they jumped at the idea.” Enabling anamorphic capture with the HD camera is Arri’s proprietary Mscope format, which takes advantage of the D-21’s 35mm-size sensor to capture full-aperture anamorphic images while recording to a 16:9 HD source. Using Mscope, the D-21’s dualstream HD output splits the camera’s 4:3 image into two 16:9 HD frames, wherein all of the even lines are recorded to the first frame, called the E-
16 September 2009
frame, and all of the odd lines are recorded to the second frame, called the O-frame. Each separate 1920x1080 frame possesses the captured image’s full horizontal resolution and half the vertical resolution (1728x720 pixels), with a border of 180 lines top and bottom, and 96 pixels left and right, so a single stream can be viewed as a letterboxed 2.40 image on an HD monitor. Both data streams are captured to the same HDCam SR tape and recombined on a postproduction workstation, creating a single 2:1 squeezed image containing 1728x1440 pixels of the sensor’s 1920x1440 native scanning resolution. Despite the complexities of the hardware, it’s actually a simple workflow solution.
The Ritsons knew that using anamorphic lenses would lend their project a bigger look, and they set out to find a cinematographer who understood the anamorphic format. They eventually partnered with John Lynch, whose credits include music videos for Blur (“Song 2”), Robbie Williams (“Millennium”) and Bjork (“All is Full of Love”). Lynch immediately saw the benefits of using the wide aspect ratio to capture Tom’s plight: “When it’s anamorphic, you can have Tom on one side and Hate on the other, and you see their relationship in one frame,” he says. “The story charts the descent of somebody who’s generally a nice guy into this dark place,” Lynch continues. “I wanted to map that with the camera, so we started off with a lot of space around him, framing-wise, and then got increasingly claustrophobic. The lighting becomes darker and more contrasty, like a 4:1 ratio, and I used less diffusion on the lamps to make it more punchy.” While writing the script, the Ritsons envisioned a realistic look for Love Hate, with conditions ranging from daytime exteriors in bright sunlight to nighttime interiors in poorly lit underground tunnels. Adding to the realism, the filmmakers shot on location all around London over the course of five hectic days, with 25 to 30 setups per day. With a limited lighting package that essentially comprised LED panels, Dedo lights, bits of poly silver and an
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Right: The milquetoast eventually realizes his embrace of Hate has turned his life upside-down. Bottom: Cinematographer John Lynch.
18K for some day interiors, Lynch took advantage of the D-21’s variable ASA to make the most of whatever illumination was naturally available to him. “I treated the camera as if I were using film,” the cinematographer remarks. “I floated around the 500 mark when we were inside, and went down to between 50 and 100 when we were outside. I went to 800 ASA once, when we were underground in a subway walkway.” Tom and Hate enter the subterranean walkway on their way home from a party. “It’s a dark scene, and the whole idea is that Tom is drunk,” explains Blake Ritson. “We put John and the camera on a rickshaw, and the movement adds a queasy quality to the shot.” Lynch elaborates, “The walkway had LED lights in the roof, which shifted color every 10 seconds, from green to blue to red. It’s an unusual effect, and it added to the beauty of the scene.” For a
18 September 2009
small amount of fill, Lynch also positioned a handheld Sun Gun near the camera. As the film progresses, Tom becomes increasingly infatuated with Hate, and in one scene, the two share a bath. Despite the scene’s sinister undertones, Lynch and the Ritsons chose to light it with soft candlelight. “It’s got a very romantic feel,” says Dylan. Lynch adds, “We had a small China ball in the bathroom with us, but I ended up putting my jacket over it, so in the end there was nothing there apart from the candles. The camera was set to 500 ASA, and my meter was coming up E, which means there’s nothing there. But I was still very comfortable — I’m not afraid of the dark.” Through most of the shoot, Lynch kept his Hawk anamorphic lenses at a T2.8, eschewing the notion of a “sweet spot” in the middle T-stop range. Shooting wide open allowed him more flexibility in low-light situations, although it also kept 1st AC Nathan Mann on his toes. “Milan let us know we could set the camera up in different ways, like if we wanted to calibrate the exposure to be biased towards highlights or shadows,” Lynch explains. “I didn’t want to bias towards darkness, because when we went outside we’d have to recalibrate the camera. I set the exposure calibration in the middle of the exposure range and treated it like film.” Post work for Love Hate was carried out at London’s Ascent 142. Because it was the first project to use
Mscope, a proprietary Smoke plug-in called Spark was developed specifically for the image recombination. The grade was performed on a da Vinci Resolve by colorist Rob Pizzey, who also used the system to unsqueeze the HD picture into a flat 2.40:1 image. The final film was mastered to HDCam SR, and an anamorphic film print was also struck to Kodak Vision 2383. “This is our first time with the format and we found it to be a really exciting process,” Blake enthuses. “It presented us with a lot of creative possibilities.” Krsljanin adds, “All of the elements came together nicely. The filmmakers really used their tools to capture the insecurities of the characters in a visually compelling way. They had a great cinematographer and a great cast; it was a match made in heaven. I know they’ll continue to make big moves in the motion-picture industry.” TECHNICAL SPECS 2.40:1 High-Definition Video Arri D-21 Hawk lenses Digital Intermediate Printed on Kodak Vision 2383 I
Production Slate Political Climbers and Extraterrestrial Immigrants
A Perilous Peak by Jon Silberg In the early 1930s, as Adolf Hitler’s government set about working Germany into the racist and nationalistic fervor that would perpetuate World War II, mountaineers who were keen to conquer the treacherous north face of Switzerland’s Eiger Mountain provided the perfect iconography for the propagandists. The German film North Face (Nordwand) depicts the attempt by German mountaineers Toni Kurz (Benno Fürmann) and Andreas Hinterstoisser (Florian Lukas) to scale the peak. Players in their story include the cynical newspaper editor (Ulrich Tukur) who wants to exploit their pursuit, and the climbers’ young journalist friend (Johanna Wokalek), who hopes the story will be her big break but grows 20 September 2009
increasingly worried about the pair’s safety. North Face was directed by Philipp Stölzl and photographed by Kolja Brandt, who won Germany’s Lola Award for his work on the picture. The two had collaborated on a number of music videos and commercials, but Brandt speculates that it was his documentary-style approach to the 2006 feature Tough Enough that sold Stölzl on his ability to meet North Face’s challenges. Stölzl was inspired by Kevin Macdonald’s documentary/dramatic reenactment hybrid Touching the Void (AC March ’04) and hoped to achieve a similar degree of realism in North Face. He and his collaborators eventually decided to first shoot stunt climbers on location, then shoot the actors in a studio, and do some elaborate compositing in post. In
accordance with this plan, Stölzl, Brandt and a skeleton crew comprising a costumer, an assistant director and a few assistants traveled to Switzerland six months prior to principal photography and set about shooting on the Eiger and other nearby locations. Brandt’s goal was to get the camera in close to the climbers while maintaining the ability to read the surrounding environment. To achieve this, he and B-camera operator Tommy Ulrich were suspended by rope alongside the professional climbers and filmed with Arri 235s, pulling focus themselves. “I love to have the camera on my shoulder and be right where everything happens,” says Brandt, who spent three months training at a climbing gym before the shoot. “And luckily, I’m not afraid of heights!” The impetus
North Face photos and frame grabs courtesy of Music Box Films. Additional photos courtesy of Kolja Brandt.
The German film North Face depicts an attempt by childhood friends Andreas Hinterstoisser (Florian Lukas, left) and Toni Kurz (Benno Fürmann) to scale the treacherous north face of Eiger Mountain in 1936.
Bottom photo ©Kolja Brandt. Used with permission.
Left: Kurz and Hinterstoisser are joined in their quest by Austrian climbers Edi Rainer (Georg Friedrich) and Willy Angerer (Simon Schwarz). Below: Director Philipp Stölzl (foreground, left) and the crew prepare to film Schwarz and Friedrich in the studio, which was actually a large, industrial freezer.
to keep the cameras close to the climbers was inspired in part by Robert Capa’s still photography. “Capa always had the camera really near to the thing he was shooting — he said, ‘If your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough,’” says Brandt. “Philipp and I didn’t want to have a lot of shots from far away with long lenses.” He did use long lenses, however, to delineate the perspective of the spectators who gather at a cozy hotel at the foot of the mountain to witness the climb. “The spectators were watching the climb through a telescope, and for that perspective, we used long lenses to emphasize how much distance there is between them and the things they’re looking at on the mountain,” he says. “They couldn’t know what was really happening out there, even though they could see it.” Shooting on the mountain, the team used the weather to determine which scenes would be shot when and where. Snow, mist and general overcast conditions were the norm. “The wall is a north face, so only part of it gets direct
sun, and then only in the late afternoon,” notes Brandt. He shot these scenes on Fuji Super-F 64D 8522 and Eterna 250D 8563, using a mix of Cooke and Angenieux lenses. “We took two Angenieux Optimo short zooms [15-40mm] to the mountain because the short Cooke zoom lens wasn’t out at the time,” he says. “I shot most of the rest of the picture with Cooke S4 primes, my favorite lenses. We used really long lenses for the spec-
tators’ perspective, including a Canon 1,000mm lens for one shot. I knew we were going to finish with a digital intermediate, so I wasn’t worried about the slight differences between the lenses.” The Eiger region “is actually very good for shooting,” he continues. “You can go up to Jungfraujoch by train, and there is a tourist platform made of steel that we could attach ropes to and drop down from. The platform is at 3,500
American Cinematographer 21
22 September 2009
Photos by Thomas Ulrich, ©Kolja Brandt. Used with permission.
Above: Director of photography Kolja Brandt shoulders an Arri 235 to film Swiss Alpinist Stefan Siegrist (doubling for Fürmann) on Jungfraujoch. Right: Brandt pauses for a photo op.
meters [11,483'], and we would hang down about 20 or 30 meters [70'-100']. From there, we were looking down another 100 meters [328'] to the first ledge. The stunt doubles, who are wellknown Alpinists, would be lowered, and I would be lowered with a safety climber. The camera was on its own rope, so when the mag was empty, an assistant could pull it up, change the mag and lower it back down to me. Dietmar Raiff, my great first assistant, and his crew had all the equipment and film stock in a tent on the platform — we couldn’t take the lenses or stock inside because of the temperature difference — and they worked tirelessly, even in the worst storms.” For the studio portion of the shoot, a section of the mountain’s face was recreated in an industrial freezer that measured roughly 100'x66' and had a 49' ceiling. “The cooling machines were very loud, and we also had wind machines going, so it was impossible to shoot any sync sound,” notes Brandt. “But we felt it was important to shoot in an environment that was really cold. We wanted the audience to really feel the coldness and see the actors’ breath.” He shot these scenes with an Arri 235, teaming with B-camera operator Franz Hinterbrandner, who wielded an Arricam Lite. To create the overcast-day look onstage, he bounced Dinos and 10Ks off the enclosure’s gray, concrete walls and through butterfly nets. Just outside the frozen stage, editor Sven Budelmann received a line from the camera tap so he could create rough comps of the finished scenes. “Every two or three hours, Philipp could go out and watch a whole scene,” says Brandt. “It was very helpful to have that reference right there.” He credits visualeffects supervisor Stefan Kessner with making the location and studio footage blend seamlessly in post. Most of the scenes that are not set on the mountain take place in the hotel where the spectators gather. After attempting to secure the actual inn at the Eiger, the production decided to shoot at a similar location in Austria. In the hotel, Brandt transitioned to an Arricam Lite and mainly shot Fuji Eterna 500T 8573. (He
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used 8563 for some day scenes.) “We had a very talented production designer, Udo Kramer, who put all kinds of practicals in the lobby for us,” says the cinematographer. “To light the hotel dining room, my gaffer, Christoph Nickel, used a mix of 800-watt Redheads with Chimeras, a couple of Lowel Rifa-lites and Zips for semisoft backlight, and a 6K Barger Baglite with a Chimera for the tables in the background. Some 1Ks bounced off the ceiling provided a little
24 September 2009
more fill, and in the adjacent room, we had 2Ks bouncing off big polys. All of the dining-room lights were on a dimmer and gelled with ¼ CTO. We worked at a very low light level — T2.5 to T2.8 — with the 500-speed stock. That gave us a nice look and really helped point out the contrast between the guests’ comfortable environment and the climbers who were struggling to survive.” The negative was processed by Arri Film & TV Services, which also provided DI services to the production. The negative was scanned at 2K on an Arriscan, colorist Traudl Nicholson graded the picture on an Autodesk Lustre Master, and the finalized files were filmed out via an Arrilaser. Brandt emphasizes that the time spent in the DI suite was important because it enabled him and Stölzl to work through some important creative issues. “Philipp has a very good eye, and he started grading it before I was able to get there,” says the cinematographer. “During the shoot, we had talked about having soft blacks, not crushed blacks, and going for a look that wouldn’t take the audience away from the mountain. But when I got to the DI suite, the picture had really crushed blacks and an aqua-color, 1950s kind of look. I know Philipp, and I wanted him to have an opportunity to experiment, so I said, ‘It looks good.’
“After a week of roughly grading it, I wrote him an e-mail over the weekend and said, ‘I think we’re wrong with this look.’ We met again on Monday in the DI room, and he asked what I’d meant, and I reminded him how we’d talked about it initially. After that, we got the picture to the look you see now, which I am very happy with. That’s what I like about the DI: it’s a process. You can try everything out.” Brandt marvels at the fortitude displayed by climbers like Kurz and Hinterstoisser. “You have to respect them. Today, we climb mountains with lots of equipment and warm jackets, and they didn’t have any of that. We could call a helicopter if we needed it. We could change our clothes when they got wet. We could have hot tea. I’m a physical guy, and I love that kind of work, but when I look at what those climbers achieved back then, it really touches me.” TECHNICAL SPECS 2.40:1 Super 35mm (3-perf) Arri 235; Arricam Lite Cooke, Angenieux and Canon lenses Fuji Super F-64D 8522; Eterna 250D 8563, 500T 8573 Digital Intermediate ¢
Bottom photo ©Kolja Brandt. Used with permission.
Above: This frame grab shows a climber at work on the Eiger. Below: Bcamera operator Thomas Ulrich (hanging from the Jungfraujoch platform) prepares to film on location in Switzerland.
Aliens in South Africa by Jay Holben In the winter cold and swirling dust of Johannesburg, South Africa, military teams mobilize quickly to round up a group of illegal immigrants and return them to District 9, their slum in Soweto. There, like so many of South Africa’s poor, these lost and confused souls survive in corrugated steel shanties. But the inhabitants of District 9 aren’t human. In fact, they aren’t even from this planet. Directed by Neill Blomkamp, District 9 (based on Blomkamp’s short film Alive in Joburg) follows a race of extraterrestrials that have inadver-
26 September 2009
tently landed on Earth and are subsequently sequestered by the government. The project is the first feature for Blomkamp, a visual-effects artist, and cinematographer Trent Opaloch, who has collaborated with Blomkamp on commercials and music videos in Vancouver, British Columbia. Blomkamp, a native of Johannesburg, was keen to shoot all eight weeks of principal photography on location in South Africa because he knew the conditions and textures of the real Soweto could not be effectively re-created anywhere else. “The studio [Sony Pictures] talked about shooting some of the movie in New Zealand, but we just couldn’t re-
create Johannesburg on a backlot or stage,” says Opaloch. “The textures there are really amazing. In the end, we shot about 95 percent of the movie in Johannesburg, with a little bit of splinter work in Wellington, New Zealand, and some motion-capture work in Vancouver. “A number of large-scale productions have been shot in the area, and there is good support for [filmmaking],” he continues. “Our keys were from New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Canada and South Africa, but we hired the majority of our crew locally in Cape Town and Johannesburg. Those guys were really amazing. They work on commercials and features all the time, and I had a great experience with them.” One of the key reasons for shooting on location was the quality of Johannesburg’s winter air. “Winter there is hardcore,” says Opaloch, “and in the townships, people burn whatever they can to provide warmth. We’d drive to the location in the morning and see people burning tires to cook their breakfast on. It’s certainly not a healthy environment, and the layers of atmosphere this dust and smoke puts on the horizon is unbelievable — it looks and feels like a war zone. We scheduled the photography in the harsh winter months specifi-
District 9 photos by David Bloomer, courtesy of Sony Pictures.
Right: Wikus Ven De Merwe (Sharlto Copley) marvels at the mothership that brought an alien species to Earth in District 9, directed by Neill Blomkamp and photographed by Trent Opaloch. The film was shot almost entirely on location in Johannesburg, South Africa. Below: The entrance to District 9, where the aliens are sequestered and forced into a humiliating existence.
Top: Backed up by Multinational United agents, Ven De Merwe hopes for a friendly exchange with one of the aliens. Middle: An alien offers its human guards an inscrutable expression. Bottom: With the help of 1st AC Houston Hadden (right) and 2nd AC P.J. Makosholo (wearing yellow), Opaloch (seated at camera) frames a shot for Blomkamp (holding monitor).
28 September 2009
cally to get that look. “It’s amazing how different the summer looks,” he continues. “We had to do some pickups in December, South Africa’s summer, and it was clean and green and lush! We had to be very selective about our framing to try and match the winter photography.” The winter shoot had a visible effect on the gear, which included six Red One cameras owned by Peter Jackson, the film’s producer, and two Sony PMW-EX1s. “My first assistant, Houston Hadden, would take me into the camera truck and show me the dirt and grime he was pulling out of the camera every night, and it looked like an ashtray had been poured out of the camera!” recalls Opaloch. Despite the conditions, however, the cameras remained in working order throughout the shoot. The One’s 4K image serves as the movie’s main perspective, whereas the 1920x1080 HD image from the EX1 represents footage shot by journalists embedded in the alien township. “We briefly considered shooting Super 16, and we talked a bit about shooting with the Sony F23, but the Red offered us more of the look and functionality we wanted,” says Opaloch. “If Sony’s F35 had been out at the time, we certainly would have considered it, too. “I like the Red system, and we got a lot of support from the company,” he continues. Working in Redcode 36, “we were shooting onto 8-gig CF cards, which started to feel a bit like a film shoot because we were limited to the shooting time, about 4½ minutes per card. Also, the accessories for the Red were all what we’re used to using [with film cameras]. The great benefit to shooting digitally was the ability to run to the digital-imaging technician’s truck and see the footage right away.” On the truck, Red camera supervisor Jonathan Smiles had two 30" HD monitors. Smiles would receive the CF cards from the set, open the footage in Red Cine, and then he and Opaloch would apply either a preset or custom curve to the raw footage for viewing the selected shots. ¢
Opaloch looks through the Red One’s electronic viewfinder. “The great benefit to shooting digitally was the ability to run to the digital-imaging technician’s truck and see the footage right away,” he says.
“We were shooting in a lot of high-contrast lighting, and I was mostly concerned with how highlights were being represented in the Red footage,” says Opaloch. “I was careful to make sure the highlights didn’t blow out, and that meant using a lot more fill than I would normally use.” He used a combination of 18K and 4K HMIs to help shape and fill in the
30
harsh sunlight. The production also carried a 20'x30' silk that could be flown from a crane to diffuse the sunlight from above or used on the ground to soften the HMIs. “For the journalists’ material, shot with EX1s, we just let the highlights go,” he adds. “We also let the focus go on those cameras to make it feel more immediate, real and rough around the edges.
When you embed visual effects into that footage, it grounds the effects in a kind of reality that’s really unique. “The most helpful thing to me was the built-in light meter in the Red,” continues Opaloch, who was working with Build 15 of the camera. “I had heard bad things about the built-in meter, but [the problems] were all ironed out by the time I got to work with the camera. With the combination of my light meter, the built-in meter and the ability to run into the truck and check the shots, I had absolute confidence in how we were shooting.” Opaloch rated the One at 320 ISO. One of the oft-discussed concerns about the Red system is its infrared sensitivity and the resultant color anomalies that can arise while employing ND filters in high-contrast situations with high IR light — in other words, the conditions encountered by the District 9 crew. “I certainly noticed IR pop-off,” says Opaloch. “We ended
up shipping in some IR NDs and frontsurface mirrors from London, but it was difficult to integrate them in handheld situations, especially when we were trying to backlight action as much as possible. With the stack of filters and backlight, there was always the risk of getting reflections on the filters and ghosts in the image. Whenever possible, we strove to fix the problem by being careful about what we shot; we’d adjust wardrobe when it was a problem and allow a little IR spill into the shadows when we couldn’t control it, knowing that we could time it out later. Tiffen has since introduced Red IR-ND filters that take care of this issue.” Actor Jason Cope portrayed the aliens in the movie, donning a trackball suit so the visual-effects team, comprising artists from Embassy Image Engine and Weta Digital, could replace his human form with various alien ones. “A big directive for us was to eliminate as much
rotoscoping as possible,” says Opaloch. “Because we would be replacing Jason completely with CG characters, we knew that the cleaner the background was, the easier the replacement would be. If we had a shot where Jason was going to enter the frame against some dense foliage that would require heavy rotoscoping, we moved over two feet to avoid that background. We also knew that any given shot could become a visualeffects shot — we might add the mothership to a sky shot, for example — so we always made an effort to keep simple, trackable geometry in the frame. If we could give the visualeffects artists a little piece of background that would make tracking easier, we tried to do it all the time. “District 9 was a really amazing experience,” he concludes. “I love doing things that are exciting and interesting, and it was great to contribute to a film that’s so different.”
TECHNICAL SPECS 1.85:1 4K Digital Capture and High-Definition Video Red One; Sony PMW-EX1; Vision Research Phantom HD Cooke and Angenieux lenses Digital Intermediate Printed on Kodak Vision 2383 I
Errata In our July coverage of Public Enemies, the Zeiss 6-24mm DigiZoom was omitted from the list of lenses used on the production. Cinematographer Dante Spinotti, ASC, AIC made equal use of the Zeiss and Fujinon zoom lenses he discussed in the article. In the same issue, the name of actress Yolande Moreau was misspelled in our coverage of Séraphine.
31
Anarchy
in the BRD
The Baader Meinhof Complex, shot by Rainer Klausmann, BVK, details the rise and fall of a German terrorist group. by Mark Hope-Jones Unit photography by Jürgen Olczyk 32 September 2009
n the summer of 1967, during protests against the Shah of Iran’s state visit to West Berlin, an unarmed student named Benno Ohnesorg was shot and killed by a plainclothes policeman. Ohnesorg’s killing sent shock waves through German society, crystallizing the anger of a youth movement that viewed America’s presence in Vietnam as imperialism and its own government as authoritarian. The Baader Meinhof Complex charts the 10 tumultuous years that followed, as student protests paved the way to organized domestic terrorism. A particularly single-minded group of extremists, led by Ulrike Meinhof and Andreas Baader, founded the Red Army Faction to wage war on the state. As the group’s attacks intensified, the West German police were forced to modernize in order to make arrests that provoked new kidnappings and killings. Despite the arrest of several key Red Brigade members, the violence escalated, eventually culminating in the bloody “German Autumn” of 1977. Although he has worked predominantly in Germany throughout his 28-year career, cinematographer Rainer Klausmann, BVK is Swiss and has always lived in Zurich, so the real events depicted in the film had a limited impact on him as a young man. “I got married in 1970, and I was more interested in my new wife than in political affairs!” he says. “I knew the story a bit from newspapers and television, but it wasn’t really part of me; I was never a student and I wasn’t in Germany at the time.” Instead of studying film at college, Klausmann learned his skills on the job in the early 1980s. “I was an assistant in Switzerland with [cinematographer] Hans Liechti and then Thomas Mauch, a German director of photography,” he explains. “I was second camera on Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo [1982] with Mauch and then started out on
Photos courtesy of Vitagraph Films and Constantin Film.
I
Opposite: Terrorist mastermind Andreas Baader (Moritz Bleibtrau) is cornered by German police during a shootout in broad daylight. This page, top: Two members of the Red Army Faction, Willy Peter Stoll (Hannes Wegener, left) and Peter-Jürgen Boock (Vinzenz Kiefer, on car) ambush a highlevel target. Middle: Journalist Ulrike Meinhof (Martina Gedeck), who becomes Baader’s accomplice, surveys the scene as protesters attempt to blockade the Axel Springer Group Publishing Houses, an incident sparked by the shooting of political dissident Rudi Dutschke. Bottom: Cinematographer Rainer Klausmann, BVK lines up a shot. American Cinematographer 33
Anarchy in the BRD Right: For a scene in which Dutschke gives a speech protesting the Vietnam War, the production filmed at the actual location, an auditorium at the Technical University in Berlin. “The only problem was that it was much bigger than we expected!” says director Uli Edel. “We realized we weren’t going to be able to do it with just 400 extras. On the day, we got 1,200, which filled half of the room, and we eventually doubled them with visual effects.” Below: In a meticulous re-creation of a famous news photograph taken by Bernard Larsson, a young woman (Leonie Brandis) tends to dying student protester Benno Ohnesorg (Martin Glade), who was shot and killed by a police officer during demonstrations against the Shah of Iran’s state visit to Berlin. The scene was shot at the exact location of the real incident, near the Deutsche Oper Berlin.
34 September 2009
my own. Eventually I was working with directors like Oliver Hirschbiegel and Fatih Akin; the scripts got better and the work got better.” In 2004, Klausmann shot Hirschbiegel’s Downfall, an Academy Award-nominated study of Hitler’s final days in his bunker beneath war-torn Berlin, for German producer Bernd Eichinger.
When Eichinger took on The Baader Meinhof Complex, he coaxed director Uli Edel, an old friend from film school, back to Germany from a successful television career in the States. Neither man had any doubt that Klausmann was the man they wanted behind the camera: “I’ve known Rainer for 20 years, and I’ve always followed his work, although we never had an opportunity to do
anything together,” says Edel. “When this movie came along, I knew he would be perfect.” Though Klausmann had been little affected by the events of the time, he was sensitive to the fact that Edel felt a great emotional connection with the story, having lived through it at close quarters as a student in Germany. “Finding a visual approach to the film was easy because to my mind, you can’t play around with history — you have to go for the facts,” says Klausmann. “Uli didn’t want to present his own vision of that era; he wanted to tell the real stories.” Many of the events from those difficult years, when West Germany was still a relatively young democracy, are so well known that to stray too far from reality would have alienated the film’s domestic audience. “The shooting of Rudi Dutschke [a student activist who narrowly survived an attempt on his life in 1968] was comparable [in cultural impact] to the assassination of John F. Kennedy,” says Edel. “I know exactly where I was when I heard the news. Everybody in
Top: Police bear down on students protesting the Shah’s visit. Bottom left: An explosion rocks the U.S. Parkplatz. Bottom right: Director Uli Edel (standing in truck, to the right of boom operator) and the crew prepare to capture a street scene.
Germany does, so you cannot change these things too much.” The most iconic moments of the story were therefore re-created on set with scrupulous attention to detail; they serve as visual anchor points, punctuating a chronological narrative that links them all together. “Those images were burned into the consciousness of a generation,” says Edel. “The image of a woman leaning over the dying Ohnesorg went around the world, so we wanted to get as close as possible to the reality of that. Most German people
remember Ohnesorg and Dutschke without necessarily knowing how they were connected; what I tried to do was to give those 10 years a narrative that lets you understand how it all started and where it went.” Klausmann’s cinematographic approach was principally dictated by the film’s fast-paced montage structure and the decision to cut original television footage in with the action throughout. “We watched a lot of real footage and there were long discussions about what [clips] to use,” he says. “The color matching of the film
was influenced by what we used, because our movie had to fit with the real stuff; we avoided strong reds, blues or greens and we desaturated the image in the DI. Otherwise, it would have looked like two different movies, and that’s not good.” For the same reason, Klausmann’s camerawork was informed by a newsgathering style that would complement the spontaneous energy of the archival material. “The idea was to make the whole film in this documentary style so it matched the original footage,” says
American Cinematographer 35
Anarchy in the BRD Police crack down hard during the Shah protests.
Edel. “I gave the actors a lot of freedom, especially in the bigger scenes with all the extras. It was very important that we could really follow the action; we did not want to create the action through cuts. That’s why there were so many Steadicam and handheld shots.” This approach suited Klausmann well: “Uli knows that I like to handhold the camera,” he says. “The actors like it, too, because they can
36 September 2009
do what they want and it’s my problem to follow them! I don’t like too much technical stuff, [like] using a lot of cranes and modern gear; I prefer to do it the way I think it was, to make it more real. If you’re nearer to reality, you’re nearer to the story and it’s more likely to work. I never used filters on the film; it was just about the available light and using what was there.” Klausmann opted to shoot
with Arricam Studios and Lites and Arri Master Primes. “I first used the Master Primes when they gave me two or three to try on The Invasion [2007],” he says. “I really liked them then, and I think they’re still the best lenses available. Their speed is good, but mainly I like the way they match with colors, and they’re not as hard as the previous [Zeiss] Superspeeds. To me, they’re perfect.” In the spirit of authenticity, Edel made an effort to shoot at locations where real events had taken place. “We always tried to get the original location first, and we got very lucky with the most important places,” he says. One such setting was the Deutsche Oper Berlin, the opera house that was the backdrop to the protests that led to Ohnesorg’s death. To Edel’s surprise, city authorities granted the production permission to shut down Bismarckstrasse, a sixlane highway. “We couldn’t believe Berlin gave us that,” the director continues. “To close one of the main veins of the city for three days and nights, just so we could restage that scene, was amazing.”
Top: Baader listens to radio reports of Red Army Faction activities while languishing in his cell at Stammheim Prison. Below left: Red Army Faction member Holger Meins (Stipe Erceg) struggles during his arrest. Below right: Astrid (Katharina Wackernagel) resists a pair of guards at KölnOssendorf Prison.
1st AC Astrid Miegel, who has worked alongside Klausmann for the last eight years, says four cameras were used on Bismarckstrasse to capture the chaos of a demonstration that descends into violence and panic. “One Lite was handheld, two were Steadicam and one Studio was fixed on a static dolly with an Angenieux 25-250mm,” she details. “The Steadicams had several of the most important shots, so it took time for Rainer to get those exactly as he wanted them; then, near the end, he came over to our Studio and
we just searched for little details at the long end of the zoom.” “With four cameras running you get the chaos, no problem,” says Klausmann. “But within that [overall approach] we wanted to get specific images that had appeared on the original news coverage of the event. You have to start with the big shots, with everybody there, and then you move closer and closer until you’re getting little moments like the young girl being crushed against the barrier. We had talked a lot about how it should look, and then we story-
boarded all of it; capturing that sequence was primarily a logistical problem.” Heavy rain at the location cost the crew almost an entire day, but shooting with multiple cameras allowed them to make up the time. However, this also created the risk of cameramen wandering into each others’ frames. “There is a moment where you see one of our handheld cameras fully in the shot,” admits Edel. “But it was a great moment and I didn’t want to lose it just because of the camera, so we left it there — and
American Cinematographer 37
Anarchy in the BRD Right: Gudrun Ensslin (Johanna Wokalek) and Horst Mahler (Simon Licht) take aim while receiving military training at a camp in Jordan run by the Palestinian organization El Fatah. Below: Ulrich (Jakob Diehl) takes a tense phone call during the occupation of the German embassy in Stockholm.
nobody ever notices!” Edel stayed close to his cinematographer throughout these hectic setups, rather than trying to control too much at once. “A lot of directors have microphones and talk to the cameramen from behind the monitors, but I never do that,” he says. “I was generally running along next to Rainer and the main camera; I like to be where he is so I can guide him and communicate with him constantly.” The only other scene that required four camera teams was set
38 September 2009
in an auditorium at the Technical University in Berlin, where Dutschke gave a speech protesting the Vietnam War just weeks before he was gunned down. Edel location-scouted the university during prep and found the auditorium eerily unchanged by the passing years. “It’s still exactly the same,” the director attests. “I think we just had to cover some modern loudspeakers, but the rest was absolutely original. The only problem was that it was much bigger than we expected! We realized we weren’t going to be able to do it with just 400 extras. On
the day, we got 1,200, which filled half of the room, and we eventually doubled them with visual effects.” Working with supervisors from Arri Film & TV Services in Munich, Klausmann and Edel shot separate plates with the extras packing first the ground floor and then the upper level of the auditorium. “The Arri guys came on set and told me what was possible, or not possible, or possible but very expensive!” says Klausmann. “Occasionally you have to do things you don’t like, because otherwise the effects become too costly; the camera movement might be limited or you might have to be very careful about the background. It helped to go through the shot list in advance with the visual effects team and plan exactly what we were going to do.” Klausmann kept the lighting in the auditorium as simple and natural as he possibly could. “We switched on the fluorescent lights that had been there for more than 20 years, and that was it,” he says. “They were the old kind of fluorescent tubes, but they were fine; we didn’t change any bulbs. The light was a little bit green, but the place looks like what it should look like: a
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Anarchy in the BRD
Top: Baader rises to taunt the judge as he and his co-defendants stand trial in Stammheim Prison. Middle: The multipurpose hall at Stammheim, another authentic location, also remains virtually unaltered. General lighting was provided by existing fluorescent tubes in the ceiling, but a few small fixtures, including colorcorrected 4-bank Kino Flos, added supplemental fill for close-ups. Bottom (from left): 1st AC Astrid Miegel, operator Markus Eckert and 2nd AC Miriam Fassbender tend to their duties.
40 September 2009
university hall. We just corrected for the green a little bit in the DI.” Gaffer Peter Fritscher recalls, “The university had a system that allowed us to change the color of the fluorescent tube lights, but only in the entrance — not the whole hall. We just matched those to the lights we couldn’t change in the rest of the hall. There were no other film lights at all; we just used reflector board for the actors’ eyes on some of the close shots.” Shooting fluorescents with Kodak Vision2 250D 5205 gave the four camera teams just enough light. “Rainer and I were about one stop underexposed because we were on the zoom, which was only a T3.5,” says Miegel. “The Master Primes on the other cameras were around T2.8.” Klausmann’s preference for natural lighting and the use of either Vision2 50D 5201 or 250D 5205 for all interior scenes (only night scenes were shot on Vision2 500T 5260) meant that lenses were almost wide open throughout the shoot. “We were usually somewhere between T2 and T2.8,” continues Miegel. “It makes my job harder, but I’ve worked with Rainer for eight years and it’s always like that!” When Meinhof, Baader and other prominent RAF members were arrested in June 1972, they were sent to Stammheim Prison in Stuttgart and eventually faced a trial that lasted from 1975 until 1977. The lengthy hearings were held inside the prison in a multi-purpose hall that remains virtually unaltered to this day; once again the filmmakers were able to recreate events in the exact location where they originally took place. “My approach to lighting that room was the same as at the university,” says Klausmann. “I mostly used what was there.” Suspended above the hall were about 50 banks of fluorescent tubes that had been there since the prison was built. These provided general lighting, but a few small fixtures, such as 4-bank Kino Flos, were used to
Anarchy in the BRD Edel (left) and producerscreenwriter Bernd Eichinger take five on the Köln-Ossendorf prison set.
add supplemental fill for close-ups; these units were color-corrected to match the fluorescents on the ceiling. Despite the size of the hall, only two cameras were used for the courtroom scenes, and handheld camerawork was abandoned in favor of Steadicam and tripod shots. “It’s kind of a static scene,” says Edel. “If
42
people are sitting and talking through a whole scene there is no reason to pick up the camera and shake it around, so I said, ‘Let’s just put it on a tripod.’ I hate handheld camerawork when there’s no reason for it, and I’m very happy with those scenes. Trial scenes can seem very boring, but of course they’re really
not; if you don’t move the camera too much they can be quite intense.” Efforts to shoot at original locations were so successful that stage work on the film was limited to nine days at Bavaria Studios in Munich, where historical accuracy and realism remained overriding goals. Production designer Bernd Lepel rebuilt the cells and communal hallway that had housed the RAF inmates at Stammheim during the trial, even sourcing original fixtures and fittings from the prison’s basement. “Bernd’s priority was to make that set as close as possible to how Stammheim had really been, so I decided to use the same light and told him not to change anything for me,” says Klausmann. “Often in a studio, it’s tempting to light from above because it’s easy, but I don’t like that approach. We installed the original light fittings in the ceiling and supplemented those with light
coming in the windows — just as we had at the prison.” Fritscher adds, “We used color-corrected Osram Lumilux tubes for the practical fixtures on the ceiling to match what had been there in the original location. From outside the windows we had Dinos behind 8by-8 and 12-by-12 frames of silk, Light Gridcloth, half diffusion and full diffusion. In the hall there was a big wall of glass bricks; coming though that we had one Quarter Wendy and three Dinos behind a 20by-20 of Light Grid.” The naturalistic lighting design gave the actors and camera total freedom of movement, allowing Edel to shoot as though he was at another authentic location. “For smaller scenes like that, we always used just one camera,” says Klausmann. “I prefer to work that way because the actors know what’s going on and I’m able to control the whole thing. With more than one
camera you always have to keep a distance from the actors so the cameras don’t see each other.” Arri Film & TV Services handled almost every aspect of post, including front-end lab work, visual effects and the 2K digital intermediate. Alex Klippe, a DI producer at the facility, oversaw the ingestion of all the old newsreel footage. “There was film negative, print film, HD video, DigiBeta and MPEG-4 material from various archives and private collections,” he says. “We scanned all the neg and print at 2K on an Arriscan, just like the rest of the film. We captured all the video with Clipster and blew it up to 2K in Lustre, using a LUT for the linear-tolog conversion. The MPEG-4 material was rendered out to a single file sequence in Shake.” Both Klausmann and Edel attended the final grade and worked together to blend all of the disparate
elements together into a seamless whole. “For me, it was a successful collaboration,” says the cinematographer. “Uli is a good director to work with; he’s really quiet and he knows what he wants to do, but you can discuss anything and offer other opinions. We’re about to start a new film together in Berlin, so something must have worked!” I
TECHNICAL SPECS Super 1.85:1 (3-perf Super 35mm original) Arricam Studio, Lite Arri and Angenieux lenses Kodak Vision2 50D 5201, 250D 5205, 500T 5260 Digital Intermediate Printed on Kodak Vision 2383
43
A Nazi’s
Worst Nightmare World War II is the backdrop for Quentin Tarantino’s stylized revenge fantasy, shot by Robert Richardson, ASC. by Benjamin B Unit photography by François Duhamel, SMPSP
uring a press conference at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Quentin Tarantino maintained, “I am not an American filmmaker. I make movies for the planet Earth.” The director and his crew were at the festival for the world premiere of his latest creation, Inglourious Basterds, whose intentionally misspelled title is the first of many twists from a production that combines a European milieu with its earthling auteur’s stylized sensibilities. The World War II saga was shot mostly at the Babelsberg Studios near Berlin, with an international cast that includes Brad Pitt, Mélanie Laurent, Diane Kruger and Christoph Waltz. One of Tarantino’s
D
44 September 2009
innovations was to allow the characters to speak in their native tongues; the subtitled film skips easily from French to English to German, and mastery of foreign tongues, the subtlety of accents, and even body language are all important plot points. Inglourious marks the third collaboration between Tarantino and Robert Richardson, ASC, following Kill Bill: Vol. I (AC Oct. ’03) and Vol. II. Prior to teaming with Tarantino, Richardson shot 11 films for Oliver Stone before establishing an ongoing rapport with Martin Scorsese (for whom he recently shot the forthcoming thriller Shutter Island). Richardson has won two Academy Awards — for JFK (AC Feb. ’92) and The Aviator (AC Jan.
’05) — and notched three other Oscar nominations, and he has been nominated for eight ASC Awards. Inglourious Basterds unfolds as a series of chapters that weave three subplots united by one very bad guy, Gestapo Col. Hans Landa (Waltz). In an opening that evokes Spaghetti Westerns, Landa and his posse of Nazis drop in on a French farmer and his family. While soldiers and the family wait outside, Landa methodically asks the farmer increasingly pointed questions about the whereabouts of missing Jewish neighbors during a cat-andmouse sequence that builds inexorably to violence. After Landa kills her family, Shosanna (Laurent) escapes to Paris,
Images courtesy of The Weinstein Co.
Opposite: Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) questions a French farmer in an early, pivotal scene in Inglourious Basterds. This page, top: Sgt. Donny Donowitz (Eli Roth, left) and Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) are two of the “Basterds,” a unit of JewishAmerican soldiers who terrorize Nazis behind enemy lines. Bottom: Cinematographer Robert Richardson, ASC shapes the light.
where she runs a movie theater and meets top Nazi brass. When Shosanna learns that her theater has been chosen for the VIP premiere of a Nazi propaganda film, she sees an opportunity for revenge. Elsewhere in France, a unit of Jewish-American soldiers, led by hillbilly Aldo Raine (Pitt), lurks behind enemy lines terrorizing Nazis with the threat of mutilation, scalpings and executions by baseball bat. Tales of these “Basterds” eventually reach Hitler, who throws a fit. Meanwhile, in London, the British high command hatches a plot to blow up the movie premiere. German-speaking agents are sent to a cellar tavern called La Louisiane, where they meet with a glamorous German actress (Kruger) who is actually a British secret agent. In a lengthy scene, the agents exchange pleasantries with a party of drunken German soldiers, and then with a suspicious Gestapo officer, before engaging in a climactic shootout. As always with Tarantino’s films, Basterds is rife with cinematic references. Indeed, much of the action takes place inside the movie theater during the projection of a black-and-white “film-within-a-
film” directed by Eli Roth; the production even arranged for lead actress Laurent to learn how to run a film projector. The final sequence gathers its main characters at the big movie premiere, leading to a spectacular, surprising conclusion followed by an ironic epilogue. In discussing Tarantino’s approach to moviemaking, Richardson agrees that the director qualifies as a film “purist.” Richardson’s longtime camera assistant, Gregor Tavenner, concurs, noting that Tarantino eschews the
“video village” found on most contemporary sets. “The only video monitor on the set is the small one on the camera,” says Tavenner. During takes, Tarantino stays next to the camera, near the actors. If there is a dolly move, he climbs along for the ride, looking at the actors and glancing at the small Transvideo monitor on the camera to check the framing. Tarantino favors shooting with a single camera, going against the trend for two cameras, which often necessitates lighting and stag-
American Cinematographer 45
A Nazi’s Worst Nightmare Escaping to Paris after her family dies at the hands of Nazis, Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent) takes charge of a movie theater.
ing compromises. “You get such a handcrafted movie,” Tavenner enthuses. “The actors know they’re going to do a lot of setups because it’s only one camera, but they get to perfect their craft. The camera rolls for as many takes as necessary to perfect each shot, and it’s a real joy and a pleasure.” Tavenner explains that the director enforces a quiet set: “Quentin creates a beautiful environment for the actors to perform in. The crew is trained to be so
46 September 2009
respectful.” Tarantino bans cellphones from his set; a security person at the door collects all such phones. Tavenner recalls a tense moment when producer Harvey Weinstein came to visit the set and the guard asked for his phone. There was a moment’s pause, but Weinstein finally handed over his cellphone and nodded to his assistant, who then handed over four more. “Everybody cheered,” Tavenner recalls with a chuckle. Richardson’s longtime gaffer,
Ian Kincaid, describes another Tarantino tradition on the set: every hundred cans of exposed film are celebrated on the spot with a glass of champagne for each crew member. “Quentin is very gracious. He’ll say, ‘Hey, everybody gather ’round. Let’s celebrate another 100 rolls!’ — even if it’s 11 in the morning.” During production, Tarantino also arranged for evening crew screenings of features he personally selected. Part of the period style of Inglourious Basterds is created via dolly and crane movements. “In a way,” says Tavenner, “it’s a classic style. There’s maybe one Steadicam shot in the whole film.” A Technocrane was used sparingly (once to sweep across the audience in the movie theater), but the bulk of the crane shots were done with Richardson riding a one-person crane made by Grip Factory Munich, allowing for more organic, less automated movements than a remote head would produce. “I often use a crane as a dolly when the space allows, because it allows for greater movement,” the cinematographer notes. “I can also do a track-
When her theater is chosen for the premiere of a Nazi propaganda film, Shosanna recognizes an opportunity to avenge her family’s death. The climactic sequence brings the theater — and the Nazis inside — to a fiery end.
ing shot without seeing the dolly track in frame.” Inglourious was shot with Panavision anamorphic Primo and G-Series lenses, as well as the company’s new anamorphic zooms and a “Panavised” Cooke. “The Primos held up the best in terms of overall resolution,” Tavenner asserts. “You have a sweet spot between T2.8 and T4. If you can close those lenses down a stop, you gain quality that is well worth it.” Richardson explains that Tarantino’s propensity for wideangle lenses and centered framing give the film a contemporary, original feel. “I could have shot the movie with just the 35, 40 and 50mm,” he says. “That’s not what you would do on an old-fashioned movie, though; this lensing is more modern. “Quentin and I will have these interesting little battles while I’m composing a shot,” Richardson continues. “I naturally move to one side or the other, especially when shooting anamorphic, whereas Quentin enjoys dead-center framing. For singles in particular, we’re just cutting dead-center framing from one side to the other, with the actors looking just past the barrel of the lens.” Part of the distinctive look of
Inglourious Basterds stems from its disregard for pure naturalism and lighting motivation, which also contributes to its impressionistic period feel. For example, the look of the opening scene in the farmhouse is defined by hot, hard daylight that shines down onto a table, bouncing to illuminate the two characters. Although one can imagine a skylight above the table, there is no clear motivation for the farmhouse lighting. “I don’t believe there always needs to be a motivation for a light,” says Richardson. “Sometimes you have to light for what you feel the sequence is.” ¢
American Cinematographer 47
A Nazi’s Worst Nightmare Right: Shosanna greets a German admirer who barges into her projection booth. The 20K backlighting Laurent also provides some bounced fill from her red dress. Below: Richardson frequently employed a oneperson crane manufactured by Grip Factory Munich. “I often use a crane as a dolly when the space allows,” says the cinematographer.
He explains that he avoided a source-y approach to the scene (i.e., having the main source come through the windows) in part because this “would have put a lot more light on the background. Here you feel the daylight on their faces but the background is relatively dark. The room was tiny and the source was isolating them in that small space.” He points out that the
48 September 2009
table bounce is also adapted to the action of the scene: Landa fills out his paperwork, while the farmer has a tendency to look down. “I felt it was important to have light in their eyes and to always have that bright spot available to the iris if so desired,” he says. The toplight source also gave the actors the opportunity to play with the light by moving in and out of the shadows, and it
enabled Tarantino’s camera staging, which involved several wide-angle dolly moves around the table. “When the camera started on one side and ended on the other, there were very few places to get a light in,” Richardson observes. The cinematographer would often add a soft fill light during the scene, and he felt free to adjust the direction of the top keylight from shot to shot. “When I had the opportunity, I would add a level of bounce, and I would move the toplight to one side or the other to help the dark side move toward camera. I prefer to have the face lit from the opposite side — not backlit, but ¾ — and I want the dark side toward my lens as often as possible; there’s something I like aesthetically about that choice. I’m willing to flip a key in a sequence to accommodate that.” Tarantino told Richardson he wanted to see the landscape through the windows of the farmhouse, which required the quick changing of ND gels on the windows to adjust for the changing weather outside. Kincaid notes, “We’d sometimes
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A Nazi’s Worst Nightmare
Above: Shosanna discovers her German admirer is a Nazi war hero and the star of a propaganda film based on his own exploits. Right: Richardson takes a moment to soak in the backlight.
50 September 2009
have to bring the light way up inside” to balance with the exterior view. All of the scene’s sources were daylight-balanced HMIs, and inside, the main overhead source comprised Par 1.2Ks rigged in an attic above the table. Most of the lights were gelled with ¼ CTO to lend the “daylight” a slight warmth. Large sources outside provided some soft light and an occasional touch of hard light inside. These external sources included 18K Arrimax HMIs on turtle stands bounced up on big muslin frames, a
12K Par through the door, and a 6K Par through a window to create a small spot of sunlight on the wall. Kincaid confirms that there was no lighting whatsoever, not even a passive bounce, during the 100' tracking shot of Shosana running away in profile at the end of the sequence. Achieving this shot was simply a matter of choosing the right moment to film against the naturally soft backlight of the northern sky. Filming began on location at a farmhouse in northern Germany,
with an initial plan to capture mostly exterior shots before moving to a soundstage for the interiors. But Tarantino quickly decided to start shooting the dialogue inside the house before continuing to shoot the same scene on the Babelsberg stages near Berlin, creating a challenge in terms of lighting continuity because the location and stage footage had to cut together seamlessly throughout the 25-minute sequence. To maintain continuity, the location lighting was duplicated in Babelsberg, and Richardson decided to use HMIs on the soundstage, “which we never do,” says Kincaid. For the windows, Richardson used greenscreened plates when necessary, or painted backdrops masked with black net when the windows were less “present” in the frame. The roomy soundstage allowed for bigger bounce fills than the location, but the principle was the same: “muzz and muzz.” Kincaid explains that Richardson eschews “plastic” diffusion or bouncing material like beadboards or Griffolyn in favor of cotton muslin or real silk. A “muzz and muzz” soft source involves hard lights bounced off muslin and then diffused through muslin again. The sides of the setup are covered with black material to prevent spill, creating a pie-shaped, soft light box. Richardson explains his affinity for muslin by noting it “has a more natural feel on the skin. I don’t feel as many highlights coming back,” whereas plastic materials give a “shine off of makeup or skin.” Richardson claims that the muslin-bounced diffusion lends a unique quality to the soft source. “It’s the quality of the wrap of the light. I don’t feel the shadow of the source. I enjoy the way the light moves across the face.” Because the soft light has to be cut and flagged, the cinematographer usually tries to obtain the largest possible diffusion
A Nazi’s Worst Nightmare Landa (near right) draws his weapon of choice, and Raine responds in kind (far right).
surface for the location. For example, when Pitt’s character interrogates a Nazi in the ravine scene, the bounce is a 12-by, but for tight interiors, the cinematographer will sometimes just staple a 4' piece of muslin bounce to the wall. For a few scenes in Inglourious, Richardson uses a passive bounce as a key. A 12K provides most of the lighting for a brief but memorable scene in which Shosanna wields a hatchet and threatens a film developer positioned on a table. The hard source backlights Shosanna and her accomplice, and then bounces off the table to provide a soft key on her face. The lighting is completed by a practical above and a 12K positioned on a Condor outside a window. A similarly elegant use of hard light and bounce can be seen toward the end of the film, when a smitten German soldier barges into the projection booth and confronts Shosanna at the doorway. Shosanna is backlit by a 20K positioned farther back on the set, and the soldier acts as her moving bounce: a strip of muslin was pinned to him off-camera. “Depending on how close she moves to him,” Richardson comments, “there is a movement [in the light] and a lighter and darker quality on her face.” A hint of red bounce also comes from Shosanna’s red 52 September 2009
dress. On the reverse shot, a similar setup lights the German, with a 12K bouncing off of the red dress. Other backlights were added to extend this effect once the actors move further inside the booth. Richardson used a mixture of hard and soft sources for a beautiful scene on the top floor of the theater. As Shosanna prepares for the fateful premiere by applying her makeup, a 20K shines in through a circular window to provide a searing backlight. In front of the mirror, her face is keyed by a warm, soft source comprising a cluster of small, tungsten “golf ball” bulbs dimmed way down and diffused through muslin. Kincaid explains, “The muslin lends a creamy feel to her skin. When we’re shooting a beautiful woman, we’ll go muzz-muzz. Generally, the front is bleached muslin and the back is unbleached. Unbleached muslin has a tighter weave; it’s a nice, rough surface, so it has no sheen. It’s a bit erratic, but it softens the light, and then the bleached muslin in front unifies it.” Kincaid reveals that Richardson often uses rows of dimmed tungsten bulbs with diffusion to create soft sources that can fit in tight places. “On this film, we used soft frosted bulbs on wires, bunched in balls, attached to squares of wood and even draped around the cam-
era,” says the gaffer. A variation of this technique was applied for a scene in which Shosanna is whisked off to meet Goebbels in a swanky French restaurant. Their encounter was shot in a private dining room at Berlin’s Einstein Café. Rows of tungsten bulbs were suspended from the low ceiling and diffused with muslin to create a soft top source, which was supplemented by several Chinese lanterns and a Par can throwing a pool of hard light down onto the tablecloth. Kincaid notes that Richardson frequently uses lightweight Par cans. “You can cluster them, and we use them for accent lights, for narrow backlight, and often for bouncing,” he says. The long scene in the La Louisiane tavern posed one of the show’s biggest lighting challenges. Ten characters meet around two small tables in the cramped basement bar. The three British agents try to talk their way out of the tavern, leaving one table of drunken Germans and then accepting a round of drinks with a suspicious Gestapo officer. The tension rises until the scene explodes in a shootout. The tavern set had very low ceilings and little room in which to maneuver. Richardson deadpans, “For all intents and purposes, it was a practical location built on a stage.” Kincaid adds, “We said to ourselves, ‘Okay, this is like the trailer scene in Kill Bill.
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A Nazi’s Worst Nightmare Quentin wants to create the feeling that nobody’s getting out of here easily.’” Complicating matters further, the actors frequently move from seated to standing positions. After trying and rejecting inframe practicals as too cluttered, the crew attached rows of tungsten bulbs to the ceiling, adding two layers of muslin beneath them to create a soft base light. The headroom was so tight that the bottom layer of muslin had to be removed when actors stood. Richardson then decided to add Parcan toplights and bounced backlights as the shots progressed, reflecting the scene’s mounting tension. “Slowly, as the scene evolved, I moved from the soft top and started adding hard lights off the table to increase the contrast. I also began bringing in soft backlights to separate actors from the background. I just felt this need to do it as I went along, but I tried not to do it in an obvious manner so the audi-
54
ence wouldn’t be aware of it.” Although the transition is subtle, Richardson confesses that he wondered at the time whether altering the light was “a gigantic error.” Kincaid concedes, “We were very busy in there; every setup was a new challenge. We have a saying, though: Pressure makes diamonds.” When the shootout starts, the lighting changes dramatically, with beams of hard light shining through the smoke and gunfire. Tarantino punctuates the scene with a few of his signature snap-zooms into Germans firing their weapons. The timing of the shootout feels realistically rapid, without the extensive high-speed work that has become a convention in contemporary action films. The lighting for the dramatic climax in the movie theater involved a series of 6K and 9K Maxi-Brutes hung from the ceiling with black skirts and silk frames. A fire effect
was created mostly with real fire generated by an extensive network of gas pipes, supplemented by red gels on the Maxis. Richardson did the digital intermediate for Basterds at EFilm with colorist Yvan Lucas, and the colorist says he did the color-correction “the old-fashioned way,” starting from the qualities Tarantino and Richardson liked in the workprint made by Arri Munich during shooting. While he was timing the tavern scene, Lucas recalls, “Bob said, ‘Yvan, I know you come from film, so you’re going to match the faces, right? You’re not going to do it like the video timers, who match the backgrounds?’ His point was that faces are what jump out at you, and that was the big idea of the film: to work the old-fashioned way, by matching faces, and then seeing what we could do with the backgrounds if there were any problems.”
Asked how Richardson’s penchant for strong hard light impacts the digital grade, Lucas notes that he sometimes uses Richardson’s highlights to find the timing of a shot. “I’ll often start with the faces, but I can also find my density value in relation to the strong highlight. It’s like a visual reference that shows me where I have to place the shot. If the white is too bright, it’s not very pretty. By adding density, the white remains very overexposed and very strong, but it gets more body. In fact, there is very little choice in timing. There is one value that’s really right. Often when Bob sees what I’ve prepared for him, he doesn’t ask for density changes because I’m already where he wants to be. “Bob has a very particular way of lighting a face — it’s very chiseled,” Lucas continues. “That allows me to go to a density value I would never dare use on another
film. There is a gradation in the grays of the shadows that I can work with. His lighting allows me to go to a darker and very interesting density value without smothering the blacks.” For example, the colorist adds, referring to the scene in which Shosanna stands at the window before applying her makeup, “because the backlight is very strong, there is detail in the blacks. Although she is in the shadows, her face is delineated. When you add density, you see the cheekbones ... but with this gradation. It’s very beautiful, and it’s due to the very hard light.” Reflecting on his work, Richardson muses, “When I’m shooting, I don’t sense the passage of time. I start and finish the sequence, and I don’t recall the majority of what takes place in between unless I have a tremendous problem or I’m trying to rectify something in the
middle of the sequence. Nothing exists except for that moment. The closest thing to it is when I jumped out of an airplane and parachuted to the ground. I don’t recall anything after jumping ... until my chute opened.” I
TECHNICAL SPECS 2.40:1 Anamorphic 35mm Panaflex Millennium; Arri 435 Panavision Primo, G-Series lenses Kodak Vision2 200T 5217, Vision3 500T 5219 Digital Intermediate Printed on Fuji Eterna-CP 3513DI
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An Appetite for
Crime
Mesrine, an epic thriller shot by Robert Gantz, tracks the flamboyant exploits of a legendary French bank robber. by Jean Oppenheimer Unit photography by Roger Arpajou
58 September 2009
acques Mesrine would have fit perfectly into today’s celebrityobsessed media culture. A career criminal who specialized in bank robberies, kidnappings and brazen prison escapes, he was unusually witty and charismatic, qualities that made him a popular figure with the press and public alike. He grew up in France but first gained notoriety in Canada, where his crimes fueled his legend and earned him the title of “Public Enemy Number One” — after returning to Paris, he quickly vaulted to the top of France’s mostwanted list, remaining there from 1973 until his death in 1979. A man of supreme self-confidence and explosive rage, Mesrine could be charming one moment and vicious the next. By his own — albeit dubious — count he killed 39 people during his lifetime, and he died as violently as he had lived, in a hail of bullets after police ambushed him as he and his girlfriend sat in their car at a Paris intersection. “Jacques Mesrine is a part of French history and culture, like John Dillinger or Bonnie and Clyde are for us,” says cinematographer Robert Gantz, the sole American on an otherwise French crew. Mesrine marked his second collaboration with director Jean-François Richet, following 2005’s Assault on Precinct 13. (The cinematographer’s other credits include the features Lake City and Mindhunters, the series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, and dozens of music videos and commercials.) Based on the autobiography Mesrine wrote during one of his many stints in prison, the project was conceived as two separate features split into act one and act two of the protagonist’s life. Telling the story in this fashion required a marathon production, with two months of prep, a nine-month shooting schedule and more than 100 locations — whenever possible, Richet planned to shoot where events had actually taken place. L’Instinct de Mort, the first of
Photos courtesy of La Petite Reine and Roger Arpajou.
J
Opposite: Early in his criminal career, Mesrine (Vincent Cassel) beds a prostitute, Sarah (Florence Thomassin). This page, top: As Mesrine’s notoriety grows, he and his accomplice, Jeanne Schneider (Cécile De France), become stars in the media, where they are portrayed as the Bonnie and Clyde of France. Middle: Cinematographer Robert Gantz (at eyepiece) lines up a shot with camera assistant Laurent Hincelin. Bottom: In 1969, Schneider and Mesrine are cornered by Arizona police in the desert.
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An Appetite for Crime
Above left: The impulsive Mesrine smashes a bar glass in the face of a belligerent customer. To capture the full intensity of the moment, Gantz switches to handheld camerawork immediately after the glass breaks. Above right: Mesrine and his criminal colleague, Paul (Gilles Lellouche) finish the job. Bottom: Mesrine’s adventures take him through the Pigalle neighborhood in Paris, home to the famous Moulin Rouge cabaret (visible in background). To light this sequence, Gantz deployed a Condor-mounted 18K backlight gelled with ½ CTB, shooting on tungstenbalanced Vision2 500T stock with no 85 filter.
the two films, takes place in the 1960s when Mesrine (Vincent Cassel), just out of the army, is trying to find a direction for his life. He discovers he has an aptitude for burglary and finds a mentor in underworld gangster Guido (Gérard Depardieu). “Jacques is living the life he wants,” says Gantz, who sat down with AC during a recent trip to Los Angeles. “He’s reasonably happy and carefree as he ascends the criminal ranks. To reflect this, I used a lot of red, blue, green and orange light — the colors of the 1960s.” To suggest how in control Mesrine feels at this point in his life, Gantz favored the fluid moves of the Steadicam and dolly. “It’s all about the
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camera expressing whatever emotions are on the screen,” he asserts. Mesrine’s vicious streak is often underlined by handheld camerawork, as in a scene that begins with him relaxing at a bar. When another customer becomes belligerent, Mesrine suddenly smashes a glass in the patron’s face, completely without warning. “That scene starts off with classic static camera angles,” remarks Gantz. “The image is so calm, the audience is totally caught off guard when Mesrine suddenly erupts. As soon as the glass shatters, we switch to handheld.” In the first film, Mesrine falls passionately in love with Jeanne
Schneider (Cécile De France), a woman as fearless and violent as he is. They move to Canada, where they are arrested after a kidnap victim escapes, and when both end up behind bars, the images become almost monochromatic, with a hint of sickly green. “The bright lighting we had early in the film reflected Mesrine’s feelings of freedom,” says Gantz. “Now he’s trapped and can’t get out. And the longer he is incarcerated, the blander the images look.” Gantz kept the camera on the Steadicam and dolly throughout Mesrine’s incarceration and escape with a fellow inmate; only when the two men return to the prison and try to free their friends does Gantz take the camera handheld. The second film, L’Ennemi Public No. 1, was shot almost entirely handheld, and the color palette is much darker, with Gantz now lighting in subdued earth tones. The tone of this film becomes more frantic as Mesrine’s magnetism gives way to unbridled egoism. He begins wearing disguises; dubbed “the man of a thousand faces,” he seems to be daring the police to catch him. “Our basis for this film was The French Connection,” volunteers Gantz. “We consciously wanted to give it that 1970s style of filmmaking, not only with the handheld camera, but also with a lot of zooms. Jean-François fell in love with the zoom, and we did a lot of slow and
snap zooms during the action sequences using a 28-76mm Angenieux Optimo that 1st AC Olivier Fortin got for us.” The bulk of the camera equipment came from Panavision Alga Techno and included Primo primes; 3:1 (135-420mm), 11:1 (24-275mm) and 4:1 (17.5-75mm) Primo zooms; two Millennium XLs; and a number of Arri 435s, 235s and Eyemos. (The latter were used for car-crash scenes.) The Angenieux, reserved for handheld shots, was used extensively in the second film. The production’s gear included 50' and 30' Super Technocranes with Z-Head three-axis remote heads, and key grip Jean-Pierre Deschamps also brought some of his own equipment. “Jean-Pierre had the best car-rigging stuff I have ever seen,” marvels Gantz. Gantz used Kodak Vision2 500T 5218 and 200T 5217 on both pictures, but he took a different approach to a brief sequence set in Algeria, where Mesrine served in the French army; this scene was shot in Super 16mm and underwent a bleachbypass at LTC in Paris. (All of the production’s footage was processed at LTC. The digital intermediate was carried out at Duboi, where Gantz collaborated with colorist Fabien Pascal.) In the scene, Mesrine takes part in the brutal interrogation of an Algerian prisoner. “We used two Arri 16SR-3s and the old Zeiss 11-110mm T2.2 Super 16 zooms because we didn’t want the scene to look too good,” notes Gantz. “We wanted the lens flares and the crazy highlights you get with the bleach bypass. I lit the scene with oldschool Photofloods, the kind they actually used in interrogation rooms back then, and we screwed in standard 250-watt bulbs. I didn’t use any other lights inside, but I brought a 12K through the window and used a bit of smoke. I love the way that scene looks.” In the first of two audacious casino robberies, Mesrine and Jeanne burst into the room holding shotguns. Working onstage, Gantz recalls, “Jean-
Top: Resourceful inmate François Besse (Mathieu Amalric) is searched in prison, where he meets his future criminal partner, Mesrine. For this shot, Gantz used a Kino Flo to create a back sidelight. Middle: This shot of the prison interior was made with natural daylight, using tungstenbalanced Vision2 stock and no 85 filter. Bottom: Guards use the wand on Mesrine, who is sidelit by a Kino Flo.
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An Appetite for Crime
Top: Mesrine’s right-hand man, Jean-Paul Mercier (Roy Dupuis), awaits a rendezvous in a forest outside Paris. An 18K was deployed to light the background, while a Kino Flo unit provided sidelight for the foreground. Middle: Mesrine employs the element of surprise after hiding in the trunk of a car. Bottom: Gantz (far left) discusses a setup with director JeanFrançois Richet (center) and 1st AC Olivier Fortin in a forest outside Montreal.
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François wanted to move the camera in circles, [but we were limited] by the size of the room, which was small and had low ceilings. We had to light from the side and [couldn’t completely circle the actors]. Strangely enough, there was a problem at the lab and we had to reshoot the scene. When Jean-François and I talked about it, we realized that neither of us was happy with what we had shot previously — this is Jacques and Jeanne’s first robbery and it needed to have more excitement.” A larger location was found for the reshoot, with higher ceilings that permitted Gantz to craft pools of light from above. Once Mesrine and Jeanne storm into the room, the camera never stops moving and neither do the thieves, who continually swing their guns around to cover the room, turning in tight circles while the Steadicam swirls around them in the opposite direction. “We had a great Steadicam operator named Eric Catelan,” declares Gantz. “He was also the A-camera operator.” Mesrine is incarcerated four times during the course of the two films. The second prison is in Canada — the exterior was a facade erected outside Paris, and the interiors were built in a warehouse — and when Mesrine arrives, he is stripped, thrown into solitary confinement and beaten by guards. As he cowers, traumatized, in a corner of the cell, the camera starts on his face and pulls all the way back to the very high ceiling, spinning as it widens out. At the very end of the shot, Mesrine’s body makes a slight, almost involuntary jerking motion. “That’s one of my favorite shots in the film,” acknowledges Gantz. “We did it with a crane arm and a Z-Head three-axis head. I operated because in France they rarely use a geared head. If you notice the slight movement Vincent makes at the end of the shot, it looks bizarre. That’s because the camera actually started at ceiling level and spun into him; we reversed it in post. It looks far more intense that way.” One of the film’s more harrow-
An Appetite for Crime Gantz takes a meter reading while preparing to shoot a riverescape sequence.
ing scenes takes place inside a cave in the Forest of Halatte, where Mesrine lures a journalist whom he plans to murder. Mesrine, an accomplice, and reporter Jacques Dallier (Alain Fromager) walk deep into the cave until they arrive at a kind of cul-desac where Mesrine has arranged a dozen or so candles on a rock ledge. Mesrine orders the journalist to strip, and then brutally beats him. “Boy, that was difficult,” says Gantz, shaking his head at the memory. “The electricians put up spreaders because there was nothing to hang the lights from, and I had Kino Flos as backlights and no frontlight. I used a light diffusion, like an Opal, and probably a ½ CTO. I was wide open: T2.6. “Even though we had a good ventilation system in there, it got terribly smoky from the candles,” the cinematographer continues. “At one point we had to stop shooting for half an hour to try and suck the smoke out with fans. Another difficulty was that Fromager had to be naked throughout the scene, and it was impossible to hide pads on his body to cushion any blows. He had to fall on the ground and roll around as he was being kicked — you can’t just fall on the ground like that without injuring yourself. The actor did the entire scene himself. He did an amazing job.” Gantz stayed at a T2.8 or a T4 for most of the film. “I would have 64 September 2009
preferred to shoot more of it at a 4, just to get a bit more depth of field, but in the end I always find when I’m lighting that it looks better at 2.8. We had two really good focus pullers on the production, Pierre Mazard on L’Instinct de Mort and Olivier on L’Ennemi Public No. 1.” Gantz describes his general approach to lighting as “less is more.” He notes that he likes to key from the side; with a smile and a slight growl, he adds, “To me, frontlight is a dirty word. For day interiors, I like to let the natural light come through more than anything else. If I have to amplify it, I will, but I don’t want to overpower the natural light. “I always try to motivate the light, but there are certain conventions I always use,” he continues. “If it’s night, the action’s going to be backlit. There’s a scene where Jacques and Guido beat up a pimp. It’s nighttime and they pull into a courtyard, get out of the car and start whipping him, but they are right up against a wall. I tried to figure out a way to get a backlight on them and ended up putting a light in a room high up in the building. While I don’t think you should be able to see a lot at night — because, in reality, you can’t — you have to at least have an edge on the characters so you can see their shapes.” Mirrors are used to great visual and thematic effect throughout the
film, and on more than one occasion Mesrine sits at a poker table, reflected in multiple panels at once — a visual metaphor for his fractured personality. Early in the first film, when Mesrine enters a prostitute’s room, he first appears to be standing in the doorway on the right side of the frame, but he when he enters from stage left, we realize that the shot of him in the doorway was, in fact, his reflection in the mirror. The camera then slowly dollies right and pans left as Mesrine walks to the bed and sits down beside Sarah (Florence Thomassin), who has her head bowed. As the camera moves, it picks up multiple images of both Mesrine and Sarah, overlapping reflections within reflections. Finally, as Mesrine sits, the back of his head appears in frame and we realize he and Sarah are sitting in front of the mirror, and that all the action so far has merely been a reflection. With the camera still catching the mirror image, Sarah lifts her head and reveals a badly beaten face. “That was a really hard shot,” admits Gantz. “In fact, it was probably the most complicated shot we did. I had to adjust each section of the mirror. The camera was on a dolly and Eric had to pan at exactly the right moment; otherwise, we’d either miss the image we wanted or we’d see Eric and the camera in the mirror. We didn’t erase anything in post. The only technical problem we had was that on the best take, Sarah’s focus was slightly soft. So they ended up doing a head replacement on her from another take.” Leading up to their first jail sentence in Canada, Jeanne and Mesrine kidnap a wealthy man confined to a wheelchair. The kidnappers enter the man’s bedroom in the middle of the night and sit on his bed; the Steadicam, meanwhile, shoots from behind multiple pieces of beveled glass, resulting in multiple distorted images of each participant. “Years ago, I did some Oil of Olay commercials, and we shot through beveled glass,”
An Appetite for Crime Dogged police commissioner Robert Broussard (Olivier Gourmet, center, with gray hair and white shirt) examines the scene after his men gun down Mesrine and his girlfriend, Sylvie (Ludivine Sagnier), in a busy Paris intersection at Porte de Clignancourt.
Gantz relates. “I spoke with production designer Emile Ghigo, who was able to find a folding screen with beveled glass. Even when they sit on the bed, there are three images of everything. Jean-François was really specific about what he wanted; it took 21 takes to get it right. “One of the things I like about working with Jean-François is that
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he’ll listen to other people’s ideas, but he knows what he likes. He is especially involved with framing and movement. He pretty much let me handle the lighting, but he is very sure of what he wants to do with the camera.” Richet maintains, “The toughest scene to get was when Mesrine is shot and killed. It happened at one of
the busiest intersections in Paris, a place called Porte de Clignancourt, and I wanted to film at the exact spot.” That required shutting down the plaza, and such is Mesrine’s allure in France that the production received special permission to do so. Gantz is still amazed: “It’s unheard of. That plaza is a major entry and exit point for Paris.” The lead-in to the killing and the actual shooting constitute one extended sequence during which Mesrine and girlfriend Sylvie (Ludivine Sagnier) leave their apartment, get in their car and head out of Paris, driving through Porte de Clignancourt. A canvas-backed truck pulls in front of them at a red light, and suddenly the canvas is pulled away to reveal men with guns who start firing into Mesrine’s car. This sequence repeats several times, serving as the opening scene of both films and ending the second film, and the lead-
in was shot from two different perspectives. The first time it unfolds as Mesrine and Sylvie would have experienced it; they leave their apartment and walk to the car, but fail to notice the policemen staking them out. “It’s not literally from their point of view,” Gantz notes, “but it is how they would have seen it.” The second time the scene unfolds almost the same way, except “this time we see everything from the policemen’s point of view. Now viewers understand what is really going on.” Before the sequence was shot, the crew spent one day practicing in a parking lot dressed to match the geography of the intersection. Six cameras were used to follow Mesrine’s car as it wends its way through traffic and stops at the Clignancourt intersection. “JeanFrançois wanted the sequence covered from all angles, including overhead,” says Gantz. “The car was never
up on a process trailer; instead, we put rigs on the car and let Vincent drive. “We were able to film the really close stuff another day at another location,” he continues. “Using long lenses, we were shooting mostly into the car and truck. You couldn’t see any background, so those shots could be staged anywhere. If you notice, everything from Vincent’s point of view is shot traditionally, but whenever we see the police, the camera is handheld. Then, once the gunfire starts and all hell breaks loose, it’s all handheld.” Three handheld cameras pick up the aftermath: cops swarm the vehicle, Sylvie is pulled from the car, and a media frenzy erupts as hundreds of reporters arrive at the scene. “We wanted it to look like 16mm news footage, so I added saturation and contrast in the DI to make it feel more like reversal film. We were also shooting at T5.6 or a T5.6/8 split —
by giving the assistants more stop, focus pulling was easier.” Looking back on the 11-month production, Gantz shakes his head. “It was such a massive monster to organize, and on a show like that, so much is out of anyone’s control.” But the worst part of the shoot, he adds, was “sitting in Paris traffic.” I
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Testing Digital Cameras: Part 2 The post process for the ASC/PGA Camera-Assessment Series illuminates how 7 digital motion-picture cameras fit into the industry’s standard workflow. by Stephanie Argy
his is the second part of our report on the CameraAssessment Series that was recently conducted by the American Society of Cinematographers and the Producers Guild of America. The series, detailed in the June ’09 issue of AC, assessed seven digital motion-picture cameras, comparing each of them to 35mm film, the benchmark standard for theatrical motion-picture quality. This article contains no judgments or conclusions about individ-
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ual cameras or how they performed. Instead, we focus on the participants’ general thoughts about the tests, what they learned, and what still needs to be explored. Although this article discusses the overall post workflow, the details of that work — for example, how much time was spent color-correcting specific scenes shot by specific cameras — will be reported at a later date. There are many ways for digital cameras to be integrated into a production, but the CAS was
designed to test them within a commonly used film/digital post workflow designed for theatrical releasing on print film and digital cinema (DCP). “As far as we know, this is the first time anyone has done a photographic performance assessment of the seven selected digital cameras using a common, film-centric, digital-intermediate workflow finish,” says Curtis Clark, ASC, chair of the Society’s Technology Committee. “We wanted to know how these seven cameras would fit in that workflow
Photos by Richard Crudo, ASC. Illustrations courtesy of the ASC Technology Committee.
without putting the footage through a series of proprietary, ‘secret sauce,’ post-facility contortions.” “We also wanted this assessment to be applicable to production and post now,” adds producer Lori McCreary, chair of the PGA Motion Picture Technology Council and president of Revelations Entertainment, which funded the CAS. “Because most feature films are finished at 2K resolution, we chose a 2K post workflow.” Many people were eager to suggest alternate approaches based on their experiences with custom workflows. “As a result of their individual experiences, filmmakers develop highly personal and frequently conflicting perspectives on digital-camera image quality, corresponding with their varied results,” says Clark. “To get an effective and manageable handle on the digital cameras’ image performance, we realized it was necessary to eliminate the ‘wild card’ variability of multiple workflows by selecting a commonly deployed workflow for all the cameras. We’re talking about a theatrical-motion-picture post workflow — not DVD, and not HD broadcast. Television production will require a different assessment series based on an HDTV Rec. 709 finish, a different
deal. The digital-camera workflow finishing you can do on a MacBook Pro in Apple ProRes HQ is not consistent with the DI workflow that is used for most studio productions. “The manufacturers of most of the current digital motion-picture cameras who participated in the CAS have adapted their HD imagecapture technologies to be more compatible with the prevailing, filmcentric DI workflow by adopting a Log-mode encoding of their image capture as opposed to gammaencoded, ‘linear’ HD video,” he continues. “These Log modes attempt to emulate the characteristics of film negative, reproducing a wider dynamic range of scene tones [from
highlight to shadow] within a wider color gamut that is closer to film than the conventional HD Rec. 709 color-space gamut.” To briefly recap our June ’09 report, the CAS shoot took place over two days in January 2009 at Universal Studios. The digital cameras were the Arri D-21, the Grass Valley Viper, Panasonic’s AJHPX3700, Panavision’s Genesis, the Red One and Sony’s F23 and F35. The same tests were also filmed with an Arri 435 using two tungsten stocks (Kodak Vision2 200T 5217 and Kodak Vision3 500T 5219) and two daylight stocks (Kodak Vision2 250D 5205 and Vision3 250D 5207). One cinematographer was assigned
Pictured on these two pages are ASC members who were among the cinematographers who participated in the CameraAssessment Series. Opposite page, from left: Michael Goi, Shelly Johnson, Nancy Schreiber, test supervisors David Stump and Curtis Clark, and Peter Anderson. This page, from left: Robert Primes, Karl Walter Lindenlaub, Steven Fierberg, Kees Van Oostrum, Matthew Leonetti, Kramer Morgenthau (at camera), Richard Edlund and Rodney Charters.
Testing Digital Cameras: Part 2 What is the ASC CDL? The ASC Color Decision List is a framework developed by the Society’s Technology Committee that allows the interchange of basic RGB color-correction information between equipment and software made by different manufacturers. Although the basic controls of most color-correction systems are similar, they differ in specific implementation. The terms Lift (for dark tones), Gain (highlights), and Gamma (mid-tones) are commonly used by most color-correction systems, but those definitions may vary in detail from system to system and manufacturer to manufacturer. To avoid confusion, the ASC proposed a set of three defined transfer functions with unique names: Offset (lift), Slope (gain) and Power (gamma). Each function uses one number for the red channel, a second for the green and a third for the blue. Thus, the three transfer functions for the three color components can collectively be described by nine parameters. A tenth number, Saturation, was specified in Version 1.2 of the ASC CDL, and is applied to all three channels together.
to each camera and stayed with it throughout the tests; each camera manufacturer helped choose which cinematographer would be paired with its camera. The cameras all passed through six different test scenarios, each with its own on-set cinematographer. After the shoot, each camera manufacturer was responsible for converting its own images to 10-bit log DPX files and delivering those files to LaserPacific, which joined Deluxe Laboratories in donating post services to the project. (All of the 35mm processing was done at Deluxe.) The 35mm footage was scanned at 4K on a Spirit 4K scanner and then downconverted to 2K 10bit DPX files. All of the files were then ingested into an Autodesk Lustre for color-correction. The entire post workflow, which had to accommodate the schedules of people who were volunteering their time, lasted five months. The results were a film print and DCP for public presentation. “We cut out most of 72 September 2009
the editorial phase in order to get the material ready to screen as quickly as possible,” says Dave Stump, ASC, chair of the Technology Committee’s Camera Subcommittee. “It was really an exercise in seeing how ingest and color-correction worked rather than how an entire editorial workflow worked.” Because the goal was to make the images suitable for printing to film, a film-print-emulation display look-up table was applied to all of the footage, simulating the look of the images when recorded to film. However, “it was discovered soon after we started our work that a lot of the digital cameras delivered images that didn’t give me enough range to work with in a traditional Cineon workflow,” says LaserPacific colorist Mike Sowa, who graded the tests. “When I put up some of the images and looked at them with the print-density LUT applied, the information in the lowlights appeared to be clipped.” To expand that image area and gain access to the digital cameras’ full dynamic range, Sowa had to apply an Input Device Transform (IDT), which adjusted the gamma slope of the cameras’ Log-mode images to more closely match film negative. “Although they’re designed to emulate film-tone scale, the Logencoded gamma slopes of the various digital cameras are not congruent with the Log gamma slope of film negative,” explains Clark. “Applying the IDT ensured that the final color-grading accurately predicted the filmout results.” Doug Jaqua, who works in color science at LaserPacific, notes that each of the cameras has its own method of encoding the digital signal to record the largest dynamic range the camera can capture. “The problem is that they all do it differently,” he says. “None of these things play well together out of the box in a common workflow.” Stump adds
that the digital cameras are linear recording devices, whereas film is an analog medium characterized in log terms, and because the DI/DCP pipeline was designed for film, it is built around film’s log signal. “When you plug a digital camera into a film workflow, inevitably the signal from that camera has to be transformed into the Cineon log signal space that accommodates film,” says Stump. “That doesn’t just happen; it requires a significant amount of effort.” At the moment, each post facility creates its own input processes to convert the raw material from an electronic camera into a form that will work within that facility’s infrastructure. “Every post house has to create its own input matrices,” says Stump. “That input-matrix data is the special sauce of every lab for every camera.” The CAS guidelines prevented LaserPacific from applying its own special sauce because the workflow had to be platform- and facilityindependent, able to be reproduced anywhere. Fortunately, the ASC Color Decision List includes a Power function — approximating the traditional Gamma function of color correctors — that could be used as an IDT, offering Sowa the full dynamic range of the digital cameras’ Log-encoded images for colorcorrecting. Because the 35mm footage would serve as the benchmark for the tests, Sowa began by color-correcting that footage. He sat with the cinematographer from each test scenario and did two passes on the film footage. First, they did a “best-light” color-correction with no secondaries, windows, dynamics or keyframing; because the cameras often moved through changing lighting conditions during the scenes, Sowa optimized the timing for one moment. Then, they did a final grade using the full DI toolset except for noise-reduction and sharpening tools. (The CAS guidelines forbade
Testing Digital Cameras: Part 2
noise reduction and sharpening throughout the entire workflow, both on set and in post.) With the look set for the filmoriginated footage, Sowa set to work on the images from the digital cameras. Again, there were two passes: the best light (optimizing for the same moment chosen for the film camera) and then the final grade, which focused on making the footage match the look of the film footage as closely as possible, regardless of how many adjustments were needed. At no time were any of the digital cameras matched to one
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another or even shown side-by-side. “It was the goal of the PGA and the ASC that no electronic camera would be directly compared to any other electronic camera,” says Bill Bennett, ASC, who was the on-set cinematographer for the Arri D-21 and sat in on many of the grading sessions. The camera manufacturers were allowed into the DI suite, but only while the footage from their particular camera was onscreen. “We decided to do the color-correction on a scene-by-scene basis,” says Bennett. “Most of the time, the
manufacturers were able to send a representative for each timing session. They had to come back day after day and wait in the lobby until their camera came up.” He adds that he found it valuable to see the whole post process. “Cinematographers usually show up for the color-timing session, but we don’t often see the data-transformation aspect of it, or all those other peripheral things. To learn about how that happens was very helpful.” The final film print and DCP were first presented at a pair of events in June, the PGA’s Produced By Conference and a private ASC event. One of Clark’s initial impressions was that “we now have digital motion-picture cameras that are refined and capable of producing some extraordinary results in today’s DI workflow environment,” he says. “You can use a top-performing digital camera without necessarily being handicapped by choosing that camera over film. A few of these cameras are demonstrating that they are able to adapt to existing, film-centric DI workflows and do so very effectively.” However, says Stump, no one should assume that enough time and effort can make images captured by any digital camera look like film. “That’s not the right conclusion to draw from this,” he says. “We’re almost there, but we have to keep making more demands of the manufacturers to refill our toolbox with electronic tools. There are still many things you can do with film that you can’t do with electronic tools. The manufacturers have been listening — that’s why all these cameras look so good — but let’s not let anyone off the hook. This test points out where we can improve the entire imaging chain, from acquisition to display. It isn’t good enough yet.” At the Produced By Conference, McCreary mentioned a few of the improvements manufacturers still need to make. “We would love optical viewfinders in the digital
Testing Digital Cameras: Part 2
cameras — in our assessment, only the Arri D-21 and the Arri 435 film camera had optical viewfinders,” she said. “We also asked for true 2K and 4K cameras in terms of both sensors and storage — no compression. Another request was that the manufacturers help us define and implement metadata standardization.” Bennett agrees that manufacturers need to provide an easier way to input the metadata on set and tie it to the file itself, ensuring that it is always present and retrievable in post. He notes that the CAS incorporated a primitive sort of metadata in the form of color Post-It notes that were always visible in frame; a different-color Post-It was used for each camera. “That way, we knew we’d always be able to tell which camera it was,” he says. Stump, who also chairs the ASC Technology Committee’s Metadata Subcommittee, believes metadata is one of the last great places to save money in filmmaking. “Producers and the studios expend an enormous amount of effort to squeeze every nickel out of the production budget and get it on the screen,” he says. “If they only knew how much is being squandered by inefficient workflows that could be automated by metadata! People just don’t recognize it for what it is. It’s 76 September 2009
going to take the whole community to implement a rich, automated, uninterrupted stream of metadata, but if the entire industry pursues it, the production community will realize big savings they never knew were there.” Stump also notes that although 4K finishes are uncommon, there is good reason to push camera manufacturers in that direction. “It was announced in June that Texas Instruments and all the projector companies are going to be supplying 4K projectors, which means 4K exhibition will eventually be ubiquitous. That will give us 4K projection, 4K DCI standards, and a fairly nice movement toward 4K finishing, workflows and color correctors. The only thing we don’t have is a true 4K digital-acquisition device that supplies co-sited RGB pixels at 4K each. Everyone has to realize that ‘good enough’ isn’t good enough.” Based on the CAS, though, there is a great deal of optimism about the manufacturers’ level of engagement and commitment to the industry. “It’s quite a tribute to the manufacturers that they all stepped up and participated fully in the CAS,” says Bennett. “In the post phase, we got the distinct impression that they were learning as much or more than we were about blend-
ing their cameras into established workflows. They all made some tremendous realizations.” Already, some of the camera manufacturers are beginning to offer their own LUTs to bridge the gap between the images their cameras capture and the film-centric DI workflow used for the CAS. “The more camera manufacturers have to stew in that juice, the better they can appreciate why digital is not ubiquitous as an acquisition medium yet,” says Stump. “In that respect, the CAS was a huge success.” Bennett emphasizes that the CAS is only a starting point, and before commencing any project, filmmakers should “test as much as possible, and carry those tests all the way through to the way in which it will be distributed — film print, television, Blu-ray DVD. You must test all the way through the process to discover the limits of each imaging system and then work within those limits. All imaging systems have limits. Even with paint on canvas, artists had to learn what they could and couldn’t do. Then, applying their skills, they could make beautiful images. “As digital acquisition evolves, we’re learning what these cameras’ strengths are, and the cameras are being used for those strengths,” continues Bennett. “That’s the biggest benefit the CAS can offer filmmakers: we can use the cameras in the situations to which they’re best suited.” “The CAS is a current snapshot,” says Clark. “In two years, these cameras will have moved toward even higher resolution and an expanded color gamut with a wider dynamic range of scene-tone reproduction, along with an advanced 4K post workflow. But we need to understand how they perform right now in the workflow that is most commonly used.” Stump adds, “You don’t know which way is forward is until you know where you are.” I
Thank You for Your Participation in the Camera Assessment Series Project Digital Motion Picture Camera Manufacturers: Arri–D-21 • Panasonic–HPX3700 • Panavision–Genesis Red–Red One • Sony–F35 and F23 • Thomson–Viper Kodak Key participants who enabled the CAS project: ASC Technology Committee Curtis Clark, ASC, Chair David Stump, ASC, Camera Subcommittee Chair Al Barton, Workflow Subcommittee Chair Lou Levinson, DI Subcommittee Chair Glenn Kennel, DI Workflow Specifications Coordinator
Revelations Entertainment Lori McCreary, President
Producers Guild of America (PGA) Set Producers Hawk Koch Michael Manheim O.D. Welch Producers Nick Abdo Charles Howard Camera Producers Paul Geffre Pamela Keller Lisa Sotolongo Bruce Devan Yvonne Russo Kim Van Hoven Behind-the-Scenes Producers Jon Lawrence Michael Shores Cory McCrum, Postproduction Producer Lori McCreary, Chair, PGA Technology Council
LaserPacific Brian Burr Doug Jaqua, Mike Sowa, Ron Burdett Rob Smith, Sean Lohan, Chad Gunderson and the LaserPacific team
Deluxe Laboratories Cinematographers who participated: Assigned to individual scenes Rodney Charters, ASC Richard Edlund, ASC Steven Fierberg, ASC Michael Goi, ASC Jacek Laskus, ASC Matthew Leonetti, ASC Stephen Lighthill, ASC Robert Primes, ASC John Toll, ASC Assigned to individual cameras Peter Anderson, ASC Bill Bennett, ASC Mark Doering-Powell Shelly Johnson, ASC Karl Walter Lindenlaub, ASC Kramer Morgenthau, ASC Marty Ollstein Nancy Schreiber, ASC Directors of Photography Project Supervisors Curtis Clark, ASC David Stump, ASC Kees Van Oostrum, ASC Special thanks to Tom Walsh, President, Art Directors Guild George Perkins, Exec. Producer, Desperate Housewives
Very special gratitude to the production crews!
Pictured here and on the next two pages are frame grabs from the recent digital restoration of The Red Shoes, directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger and photographed by Jack Cardiff, ASC, BSC.
Brand-New Shoes by Robert S. Birchard Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes, an “art film” about the world of ballet, was eagerly embraced by audiences upon its release in 1948 and has remained a cult favorite ever since. Noted for its vivid color cinematography by Jack Cardiff, ASC, BSC, and its somewhat over-the-top passion for dance, the film is a favorite of Martin Scorsese, whose Film Foundation recently helped the UCLA Film & Television Archive digitally restore the movie in concert with the British Film Institute. The restoration team’s original goal was to do a new photochemical restoration using wet-gate contact printing from the original three-strip Technicolor camera negatives, a procedure the UCLA Archive had used to restore The Barefoot Contessa (1954) and Becky Sharp (1935). “We gathered a lot of material from England, including 48 reels of cut picture negatives, an original 1948 Technicolor nitrate print, and a 1955
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safety reissue print,” recalls Robert Gitt, preservation officer for the UCLA Archive. “We took everything to Dave Cetra at Cinetech, and he made a new print using the three Technicolor negatives, color-timing the entire thing. That’s when we discovered some pretty shocking problems. “The picture negative was covered with mold — there were chalky deposits all over it,” continues Gitt. “[Archivist] Barbara Whitehead cleaned all 48 reels by hand and then ultrasonically; that took the worst mold off but left behind stains and little cracks and crevices in the emulsion. We were relieved when we saw Cinetech’s first test reel — all of the fungus damage had been eliminated simply with the use of diffused light and wet-gate printing. Then, when we saw the whole movie, we discovered that a lot of the material was badly out of register, much more so than in any other Technicolor film I’ve worked on. There had been differential shrinkage in the elements over the years, but what was even more worrisome was
that there were extreme vertical-registration problems in quite a number of shots. We discovered that the problem actually went way back; we found records from Technicolor in London that showed they’d had to make corrections in 1948 to compensate for verticalregistration problems.” Gitt soon realized that the only way to do a photochemical restoration would be to go back to the cumbersome method of optical printing, which would add film generations and build up contrast. A digital restoration seemed to be the way to go. He recalls, “Cinetech was interested in using a combination of photochemical and digital techniques, and they did some tests using wet-printed master positives that came out very well, but we know that theoretically, it’s best to use the original picture negative if you can, so we also did some tests at Warner Bros. Motion Picture Imaging using the original negatives. Both facilities did very good work, but when we blew up the image very large, it was evident that scanning the original negs produced a result that was less grainy and sharper. So the decision was made to work with the original YCM negatives at MPI and use digital techniques exclusively to fix all the film’s problems, including mold damage.” At MPI, the 48 reels of original negatives — yellow, cyan and magenta records for each of the 16 finished picture reels — were scanned at 4K on a Northlight, and the scans were cleaned up using both automated and manual techniques before being recombined. “Normally, we don’t tweak the color levels when we do the recombine because we don’t want to affect what the color timer will eventually work with,” notes Bill Baggelaar, MPI’s senior vice president of technology. “On occasion, we’ve had to do major preliminary
The Red Shoes images courtesy of UCLA Film & TV Archive.
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corrections, but for The Red Shoes, the YCM color values were introduced at standard settings.” The recombined images were turned over to MPI colorist Ray Grabowski, who graded them under Gitt’s supervision, with input from Schoonmaker and Scorsese. “The shadow detail and color information in Cardiff’s original negatives is amazing — genius, really,” marvels Grabowski. “We used [FilmLight] Baselight 8 hardware and software for the color-correction, and we also used Baselight’s degraining tool here and there. The goal was to keep the look of the original film as much as possible. We did no grain
reduction except for some of the optical effects, where the grain structure would change and be very obvious.” Indeed, the optical effects were a problem on The Red Shoes, and they offer a clue to the beauty and limitations of the three-strip Technicolor dye-transfer printing system that was used from the early 1930s to the early 1950s. Gitt explains, “When Technicolor did dissolves and fades, the entire preceding shot and the entire following shot were copied optically, and in some cases the shots went on and on. There’s one reel [in The Red Shoes] where a shot involved in an optical effect goes on for two minutes. Technicolor was
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rather cavalier about controlling the contrast of its opticals; they didn’t attempt to make them match the surrounding footage. That’s because they had a trick up their sleeve. The Technicolor process allowed them to make corrections at the last minute as the matrices were being made for dyetransfer printing. In making the three
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matrices, which were gelatin relief images that they would soak with dye to print, they used an optical printer, so each negative was exposed a frame at a time, and they could not only change the exposure to alter the color balance and brightness of the scene, they could also change the contrast shot-to-shot or even within a shot. That’s the stage
where they corrected color-registration problems as well. Today, Eastmancolor developing is standardized; if you want to break the rules, you can develop it to a lower contrast, but the colors start wandering off in different directions, and the results aren’t easily repeatable. With digital technology we can easily modify the contrast, even shot-to-shot as Technicolor did in 1948. That’s a big plus.” MPI digital conformist Katie Largay assisted Grabowski throughout the project, maintaining a spreadsheet for every reel and every shot that included what the source data was and any relevant notes. “Katie wrangled the data, and it was a load of stuff,” notes Grabowski. “We were working at 4K resolution, and there were a lot of things going back and forth with fixes and many inserts of newly repaired material. Keeping track of it all was very timeconsuming, and Katie’s attention to detail allowed me to concentrate on the color-timing with Bob Gitt.” John Polito at Audio Mechanics restored the sound using mainly two 1948 track masters. “One of the masters had extensive fungus damage, and only small parts of it were usable,” says Gitt. “The other was in generally good shape, with some fungus damage at the ends of the reels. John also worked with the 1955 Technicolor projection print; it had splices here and there, but the sound was good on it, and the reel ends were in better shape.” Once the digital work was finished and approved, the processing and final printing were carried out at Cinetech. The restored film had its premiere at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. “When you run the final print side-by-side with the digital version at the same size and with the same screen brightness, it matches very closely,” observes Billy Patten, the project manager at MPI. “Because we’ve recorded to Eastman Color negative and printed on Kodak Vision [2383], the print is slightly grainier than the digital version, but in terms of color and contrast, they’re very close.” ¢
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The 2009 Cannes Film Festival also saw the debut of a newly restored Mr. Hulot’s Holiday (Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot), which stars writer/director Jacques Tati as the nearly silent title character. Tati himself revisited the movie several times over the course of three decades. The black-and-white picture was originally shot in 1951/1952 in Saint-Marc-sur-Mer, a small French resort on the Atlantic coast. In 1962, Tati re-edited parts of the movie and reworked the score and the sound mix. In a nod to the popular postman character from his first feature, Jour de Fête, he also superimposed a color stamp and a postmark over the final shot of the movie. Then, in 1977, as Mr. Hulot’s Holiday began to attract a new following, Tati saw Jaws and was inspired to shoot additional footage. His original cut had a scene in which Hulot goes out on the ocean in a folding canoe, then gets caught inside it when it collapses on him. As he struggles to get free, the canoe keeps snapping open and shut, looking like the biting jaws of a shark. The new shots featured panicked people on the beach, running away from the shark. (A close examination of their hairstyles reveals that they were photographed in the late 1970s, not the early 1950s.) The restoration of Mr. Hulot’s Holiday represented an unusual collaboration between two film foundations, the Thomson Foundation for Film and TV Heritage and the Fondation Groupama Gan pour le Cinéma, as well as the rights holder, Jérôme Deschamps (Tati’s nephew), and the Cinémathèque Française. This sequence of images illustrates a repair on a single frame from Mr. Hulot’s Holiday. Steps in this repair included the removal of both actors from the frame, the reconstruction of the background, rotoscoping, and a partial actor replacement. 82 September 2009
When it came time to do the restoration, the first matter to settle was which version should be treated as the definitive one. “Restoration is not only technical, it’s also creative and ethical,” says Séverine Wemaere, head of the Thomson Foundation. “Today, many works are called ‘restoration’ but are really just materials that have been cleaned. Some respect the author, but some take too many liberties. You really want to go deeply inside the movie and not betray the filmmaker by doing a restoration that is not what he would have wanted.” In this case, because the director had made all the changes to the movie himself, it was decided that the third and final version should be the basis of the restoration, which was carried out at Technicolor in Los Angeles. Noting that she was pleased with Technicolor’s recent restoration of Lola Montès (AC Sept. ’08), Wemaere says, “A team that wins, you take it again.” Overseeing the project was Lola Montès veteran Tom Burton, vice president of digital services at Technicolor Digital Intermediates. Mr. Hulot’s Holiday was shot on nitrate shortly before the highly flammable stock was phased out of use. The Technicolor team considered scanning the original nitrate negative, but after doing test scans of both the original negative and an interpositive, Burton decided to work from a fine-grain IP made on Kodak 2366. There were many splices and grading notches in the negative, so when Technicolor struck the IP, they had to do custom adjustments in the gate of the contact printer to stabilize the negative as much as possible as it went through. The negative was in bad shape, partly because of all the work Tati had done on the movie over the years. Damage included tears, vertical scratches, warping at splices and perf damage. The black-and-white was completely gray. “You couldn’t see Mr. Hulot’s Holiday in good condition any more, and that was what pushed me to do this,” says Wemaere. “The object was film heritage. Many, many film¢ makers were inspired by Tati.”
Mr. Hulot’s Holiday images courtesy of Technicolor.
Celebrating Mr. Hulot’s Holiday Anew by Stephanie Argy
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This image shows the finished product.
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The restoration was both digital and photochemical. Wemaere explains that there were two goals: to get the best new elements so the film could be shown again, and to create a new film negative so the movie could be preserved properly. “Who knows what
digital format will still be in effect in 10 years?” she muses. One of the biggest challenges was the schedule. Wemaere says the project should have taken one year, but by the time all the necessary elements were located, it was December 2008,
and the goal was to have the restoration finished in time for Cannes in May. “It became a race,” she says. Different phases of the process that ordinarily would have been sequential all went on at the same time. The IP was scanned (using Arri and Spirit scanners) to create a 2K master; the color correction was done by Tim Peeler on a da Vinci 2K Plus; and the image repair was done using an array of tools, including da Vinci Revival, MTI Correct, Digital Vision Phoenix and Adobe After Effects. A team of about 20 people worked in two or three shifts. “Organization was the key,” says Danny Albano, a visual-effects artist and compositor on the project. From a technical standpoint, the biggest issues were stabilizing the image to compensate for the jitteriness caused by perf damage; cleaning up the damage, especially from splices that had been taken apart and put back together (often leaving missing frames); and combining materials from different
sources. Many of the existing opticals and effects were questionable, to say the least, presenting the team with the recurring question of which to restore and which to leave untouched. In one instance, an image of a horse kicking a car rumble-seat and trapping a man inside was created using a split-screen composite, but in the existing footage, the two sides of the composite shift noticeably against one another. “Deciding whether to fix something like that is tricky,” says Burton. “In this case, we decided to do it.” A major alteration was in the overall look of the film, which was taken from muted, low-contrast grays back to higher-contrast blacks and white — turning what had become a cloudy day back into a sunny one. Burton admits that adding the color stamp at the end of the movie, one of the changes made in Tati’s 1962 revision, was complicated because it meant combining color and black-and-white stocks. The team wanted to replicate
the original scenario as closely as possible, which led them to print the stamp on color stock (Kodak Vision 2383) and the rest of the picture on black-andwhite (Kodak 2302). As a result, they had to splice in that extra color shot by hand and accept the subtle focus issues caused by the different thicknesses of the print stocks; black-and-white stock has one layer of emulsion, whereas color has three. While the picture-restoration work went on in California, Léon Rousseau at L. E. Diapason in France was cleaning up the sound. According to Burton, Rousseau had a complete reference sound track to work with — no splices, no missing pieces. Because small bits were cut out of the picture, there was a lot of communication backand-forth to ensure that picture and sound would sync perfectly when they were combined immediately before Cannes. Wemaere says she and Gilles Duval of the Fondation Groupama Gan
share a philosophy about film restoration: films shouldn’t just be restored, they should also be shared with the public. Four film prints and a digitalcinema version of Mr. Hulot’s Holiday have been created, and following its debut at Cannes, the movie was screened at other film festivals. Wemaere notes that the restoration was launched at the height of the financial crisis. “Nobody wanted to enter into any projects, and our two foundations working together set such a good example,” she says. “When money is short everywhere, collaboration becomes even more important. We didn’t just share the costs, we also shared the experience, and it was a joy.” I
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New Products & Services
Panavision, Loumasystems Unveil Louma 2 Panavision Remote Systems and Loumasystems have introduced the Louma 2, a new-generation cameramovement system built on an openarchitecture platform. The system expands Louma’s telescopic-crane technology exponentially with the introduction of ShotAssist, an open-architecture, programmable software platform that enables cinematographers to plan intricate multi-axis shots and execute them with less rehearsal and fewer takes. Master/slave coordination between any axis of the crane and remote head is possible. “Today’s technologically and visually sophisticated audiences are pushing directors and cinematographers to be ever more creative in developing eyearresting shots,” says Jean-Marie Lavalou, Academy Award-winning cofounder of Loumasystems. “We designed the Louma 2 to meet those demands by creating an open-architecture system so flexible that virtually any shot imaginable is possible, and any technology innovation can be incorporated.” 86 September 2009
Specifically designed for the film industry, the Louma 2 boasts smooth, stable and quiet operation in all of its movements.The Louma 2’s ShotAssist software extends the original Louma crane’s back-pan compensation to every axis, including pan, tilt and telescope of the arm; pan, tilt and roll of the remote head; and even focus, zoom and camera speed. Pan, tilt and roll limits are all available at the touch of a button with adjustable ramps to aid framing. One of the applications of this software is the ability to create straight-line “dolly” shots, with the telescope compensating for the arcing of the boom while the head self-corrects with the back-pan compensation. The Louma 2 frees operators of the “mechanical” work of compensating for the crane, enabling them to focus purely on the art of framing. The Louma 2 boasts a newly developed arm, allowing over 24' of telescopic travel. A two- or three-axis remote head and leveling gear can be switched easily from overslung to underslung and back. Additionally, the remote head is fully equipped with
Preston F.I.Z. and remote-start connections, as well as 12-volt and 24-volt camera and accessory power hookups. The new ultra-rigid arm and remotehead construction permit a high degree of image stability, and all cabling is internal, so there are no cables running along the exterior of the arm. The unit also comes with custom trolleys and an operator’s cart, and it can be ready to shoot in less than 60 minutes. Key specifications of the Louma 2 include a maximum lens height when overslung of 37', and when underslung of 32' 10"; a telescopic range of 24' 2"; a maximum telescopic speed of 2.6 meters per second; a maximum camera load with two-axis head of 100 pounds, and with three-axis head of 66 pounds; a clearance of 4' 11" wide by 7' high; a maximum length of 32'; a track width of 3' 3"; and a maximum overall weight of 4,130 pounds. For more information, call (818) 316-1080, or visit www.panavision.com, www.loumasystems.biz or www.lou ma2.com.
Cineped Provides 360-Degree Support Cineped has announced the availability of its panoramic 360-degree camera-support system, which enables camera operators to capture exceptional images with ease. More than a dolly or tripod, the system features a 42", 360-degree rotational sliding camera plate; extendable, automaticpositioning telescopic column; digital remote control; and a diamond-style mobile base with heavy-duty rubber wheels. Designed to allow for a wealth of camera angles — including horizontal and vertical movement, panoramic/360-degree movement and compound camera moves — Cineped maneuvers with fine-tuned, virtually noise-free operation. With a weight capacity of 120 pounds, the sliding rotational camera plate can carry multiple cameras simultaneously. The telescopic column, with a base height of 58" (with camera), extends to a height of 74.5". When the telescoping column is removed, the sliding rotational camera plate can attach directly to the mobile base for capturing low-angle shots. The mobile base is a mere 27" wide, enabling setup in tight shooting spaces. Cineped is also ideal for smooth transitions, extreme closeups, and tabletop and POV shots. For studio or location shoots, Cineped’s completely modular design allows easy transport and fast camera
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repositioning. Including the sliding camera plate (45 pounds), telescopic column (39 pounds) and mobile base (70 pounds), the total weight is 154 pounds, and assembly is quick and trouble-free. Manufactured in the U.S.A., the Cineped system includes a digital remote control box, a battery/charger, an AC/DC converter and a low-mode adaptor. For more information, visit www.cineped.com. Arri CSC Relocates, Expands Arri CSC will relocate its New York camera-rental department to a custom-designed facility adjoining the company’s lighting and grip division in Secaucus, N.J. The adjoining buildings have a combined footprint of 91,000 square feet; the new camera-rental facility is 36,000 square feet, representing an expansion of over 50 percent. The new camera department will feature multiple prep bays and four dedicated testing rooms surrounded by optical, mechanical, digital and technical support departments, all on one level. The Secaucus location also accommodates parking for more than 70 vehicles, with no impact on vehicle loading and unloading via dedicated bays. Arri CSC, 25 Enterprise Ave. North, Secaucus, N.J., 07094. For more information, call (212) 757-0906 or visit www.arricsc.com. Porta-Jib Goes Exploring Porta-Jib has announced the Explorer, an all-in-one lightweight jib/tripod/trolley/dolly system for cameras weighing up to 20 pounds. The Explorer’s various configurations are made possible by a custom four-sided extrusion and corresponding dovetail clamps with spring-loaded safety pins. The jib can be miniaturized to 18", or it can be extended to put the camera 9' in the air. With the addition of two monopods, the jib becomes a 6'-long elevated trolley system; the jib arms simply fold over to become the trolley’s 6' rails, and the conversion takes only 3 minutes. 88 September 2009
A gas lifter in the tripod provides 35 pounds of vertical lift, making leveling the rails and setting their height a quick one-person operation. By removing two more quickrelease screws, the entire rail system can be lifted off the tripod and placed on the ground for low-angle work; the tripod’s spreader then detaches, and the spreader’s legs and feet become the leveling supports for the rails on the ground or on a tabletop. The rails come in 3' lengths, so longer configurations can be obtained with the purchase of more rails and clamps. The versatile spreader boasts two other functions as well. First, since the legs are made of the 4-sided extrusion, the feet of the tripod clamp positively anywhere along the length of the leg, allowing the tripod to be rigidly mounted with its legs completely vertical like a center column. This columnlike position allows the arm a greater range of motion than if restricted by outward-angled legs. Secondly, the spreader can transform into a 3-wheel dolly by simply removing the leveling feet and clamping on a set of wheels. The Explorer’s wheels are also unique in that they can function as track wheels on traditional steel track, PVC pipe or Porta-Jib FlexTrak, and they additionally function as
floor wheels, which is especially useful when repositioning the jib or trolley system. The jib’s rigid and lightweight (22 pound) design is ideal for shoots in remote locations. The Explorer also features a weight bucket, eliminating the need for steel counterweights; the bucket can be filled with dirt, sand or rocks once on location. The Explorer jib and trolley system can mount to any 100mm tripod, but using the Explorer tripod provides the added ability to clamp the legs vertically. Even with the jib’s small footprint, its 36" arm boasts a 64" lift, allowing operators to put the camera approximately 9' off the ground. The Explorer can be purchased as a complete system — comprising the jib, tripod, trolley and dolly — or as separate components. For more information, visit www.porta-jib.com. Polecam Extends to 7th Heaven Polecam has announced its longreaching, truly portable camera rig, Polecam 7th Heaven. Incorporating seven rigid carbon-fiber elements, which interlock to achieve an 8-meter reach (approximately 26'), 7th Heaven delivers unprecedented versatility in terms of horizontal and vertical camera location while giving operators total control of boom angle, pan and tilt. “Like the standard 6-meter Polecam, 7th Heaven can be carried anywhere and set up or dismantled in less than 10 minutes, without need for spanners, screwdrivers or any other assembly tools,” says Steffan Hewitt, Polecam’s founder and managing director. “The 6meter span is ideal for most practical purposes, but 7th Heaven’s 8meter reach allows much closer wildlife shooting where you want to get near your subject without risk of being eaten. It also has obvious advantages for live events such as concerts or sports, and at crowded
news briefings where you can go clean over the heads of other reporters.” 7th Heaven is made possible by a new formulation of high-rigidity carbon-fiber elements, also now supplied as standard with the fiveelement Polecam rig. Using a combination of laminated and spun carbon-fiber with 24-percent more fiber, the new formulation delivers a 15-percent
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increase in boom stiffness. 7th Heaven is fully compatible with all standard Polecam accessories, including heads, underwater housings, HD and SD cameras, CCUs and recorders. It also retains the internal ducts and total freedom from stabilizer stanchions that allow wiring to be routed inside the rig rather than left exposed to snagging or other physical abuse; this also saves on rigging and de-rigging time by eliminating the need for external cable straps and allowing surplus cable to be stowed within the boom. For more information, visit www.polecam.com.
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ACS France Supplies Europe with PFC Ultimate Arm ACS France recently signed an exclusive partnership with Performance Filmworks Canada, becoming the European supplier of the PFC Ultimate Arm, a robotic crane fixed on a 4x4 AMG Mercedes ML55. This system has provided amazing results for the film industry, performing even in off-road and inclement-weather conditions. The PFC Ultimate Arm is a lightweight robotic arm that can be used on most any automobile as well as boats or trains. ACS France is offering the Ultimate Arm integrated onto the Mercedes ML55. The arm is mounted on top of the vehicle, and the camera installed on the Lev Head or Stab-C Compact. The crew works in the safety and comfort of the ML, operating the head via joysticks or wheels. The PFC Ultimate Arm was honored with a Technical Achievement Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The arm can rotate 360 degrees in six seconds, and the vehicle can travel at speeds up to 100 miles per hour while maintaining a steady image. The camera’s highest position is 5.4 meters (17.7') above ground, and it can dip to below ground level. The PFC Ultimate Arm has also been used in extreme temperatures ranging from 129°F in Death Valley to -40°F in Alaska. ACS France specializes in equipment that consistently produces unique and inspiring images, be it aerial film90 September 2009
ing, flying cameras (Cablecam) or running cameras (Speedtrack). For more information, visit www.aerial-france.fr or www.performancefilmworks.com. Tuffpak Heads Abroad Manufactured by Nalpak, Tuffpak tripod cases are now available in Europe. Florian Granderath, founder of Camera Support Granderath, stocks all sizes of the Tuffpak case line and maintains a distribution network throughout Europe. Features of Tuffpak cases include an octagonal shape, preventing the cases from rolling; wheels for most models, making transportation easy; protected and recessed handles, increasing storage space and decreasing shipping dimensions; and rotationally molded construction, eliminating seams and welds, and increasing wall thickness at all bends. For more information, visit www.casu.tv or www.nalpak.com.
Plasticase Unleashes Nanuk Nanuk is a new line of professional-quality protective Plasticase, designed for professionals who need to rely on robust, lightweight and highperformance cases for protection in the harshest environments. Plasticase developed Nanuk’s new, high-impact NK-7 resin to withstand environmental extremes. With their rounded corners and reinforced wall construction, Nanuk cases are built to absorb shocks, providing optimal impact resistance and protection to sensitive equipment. All Nanuk cases are also watertight and impervious to dust and dirt.
Nanuk cases come loaded with numerous standard features valued by professionals, such as the PowerClaw Latching System, which prevents the cases from opening unexpectedly during transport or when dropped. Additionally, the foldable handle is molded from NK-7 resin and over-molded with softtouch rubber for greater comfort. As a result of the exceptionally robust construction, Plasticase offers a lifetime warranty on its Nanuk cases. “We invested heavily in R&D in order to develop Nanuk,” says JeanPierre Grenier, president of Plasticase. “We wanted to produce cases that are optimally functional, very stylish and able to endure the toughest environmental conditions. Professionals often work in rigorous surroundings and conditions using valuable materials and equipment. Therefore, you can’t afford to compromise when it comes to quality
and reliability. With Nanuk, we provide a product that performs extremely well on all fronts.” The Nanuk line of protective cases currently comes in seven formats and seven standard colors. Plasticase is already working on a new generation of the Nanuk line, which will feature larger sizes as well as wheels and pull handles. For more information, visit www.plasticase.com or www.nanuk case.com. Convergent Design Ships NanoFlash Convergent Design has introduced the NanoFlash portable HD/SD recorder/player. Using the Sony XDCam 422 Codec, NanoFlash records HD/SD video and audio onto Compact Flash (CF) cards. Featuring HD/SD-SDI, HDMI and analog audio I/O, NanoFlash delivers exceptional video quality at useradjustable video bit rates up to 160 Mbps (XDCam 422 Codec) or 220 Mbps 4:2:2 (I-Frame-only), making its images virtually indistinguishable from uncompressed, even when capturing highmotion, complex scenery. 24-bit 48 KHz
uncompressed audio (embedded or consumer-level analog) complements the video, and both are conveniently stored in either MXF or QuickTime file format on CF cards. (The NanoFlash boasts dual CF card slots.) The footage can then be played and edited directly off the cards or copied to a hard drive via a third-party external USB or Firewire800 CF card reader. ¢
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Unlike Firewire-based recorders, NanoFlash bypasses the camera’s builtin Codec to record at higher-quality levels. The never-compressed HD/SDSDI or HDMI output from a live camera source is fed directly into the NanoFlash, maintaining the pristine quality directly off the CCD/CMOS sensors. Additionally, NanoFlash offers on-set playback without any of the rewind/re-cue issues associated with tape. The lightweight (less than 1 pound), low-power (6 watts when active, 0.2 watts in standby) NanoFlash boasts silent operation, with no fans or moving parts, and rugged, solid-state construction in an all-aluminum case. The nearuniversal NLE support — including Avid, Final Cut Pro, Edius, Vegas and soon Premiere — provides users with a wide array of editing options, and compatibility with nearly all HD/SD formats — including 1080i60/50, 1080psf30/25/24, 720p60/50 and 480i/576i — allows NanoFlash to be used with a wide range of cameras and video sources. The NanoFlash is now shipping, with a suggested price of $2,995. For more information, visit www.convergentdesign.com. Canon Releases Firmware Update for 5D Mark II Responding to user requests, Canon U.S.A. Inc. has issued a firmware update enabling manual exposure control in the EOS 5D Mark II digital SLR’s video mode. With the ability to capture full HD video on a 24mm x 36mm sensor, the EOS 5D Mark II has been enthusiastically received by studios, independent filmmakers and professional videographers. However, the consensus was that the camera needed manual exposure control within its video mode if it was to reach its full potential. Now, after months of extensive engineering and testing, Canon offers a free, downloadable firmware update that gives users full control over ISO, aperture and shutter speed while capturing video. For more information and to download the free firmware update, visit www.usa.canon.com. 92
Mitchell mount: top mount, underslung and cantilevered; the custom counterweight tray should be used whenever the slider is cantilevered. That Cat is also offering new, lower pricing across its entire range of camera sliders, and the company has announced that its Silent Cat sliders are now available in Los Angeles for daily rental at Birns & Sawyer. For more information, visit www.cameraslider.com or www.birn sandsawyer.com. IDX Offers High-Load Batteries IDX System Technology, Inc., has introduced the company’s new premier power system, the E-HL9 Series, a highperformance, high-load Lithium Ion battery line designed for the age of professional HD production. Specifically geared for the industry’s power-hungry video and film camera systems, the E-HL9 Series enables productions to shoot continuously for long periods, while handling the extreme inrush associated with many of today’s most sophisticated recording and lighting systems. With a 10-amp capacity and nearly 50-percent-greater power delivery over previous IDX batteries, the new models deliver the battery energy demanded by today’s intensive production equipment.
To sustain performance, E-HL9 Series batteries are designed with a high-level class of cell specifications, and an accelerated high-rate discharge handles up to 10 amps/120 watts. The series can also be used in critical situations requiring a high DC power draw, such as on-board lighting applications. While delivering a significant power payload, the high current draw is engineered not to adversely affect the longevity of the battery. Its architecture results in an extended overall life cycle of nearly 10 percent. The E-HL9 Series comprises two high-energy Lithium Ion batteries, the EHL9 and the E-HL9S. The latter is an economical alternative battery with the same single-unit power capacity as the E-HL9 and a three-LED power indicator display; this standalone version has the durability of all IDX batteries, including triple safety, and features such as a two-year product warranty. The E-HL9 on the other hand offers one of the most flexible solutions to expandable capacity, IDX’s PowerLink feature, which can directly connect two batteries, delivering a total power capacity of 176 watt hours. The E-HL9 also supports DigiView, enabling a viewfinder reading for battery levels in many cameras, and a five-LED power status display delivers an accurate, incremental capacity reading. IDX’s computer-based Battery Management System (BMS) can also be used on the E-LH9 for enhanced diagnostics and a comprehensive review of the battery’s history of use. The E-HL9 Series is safe for air transport; DOT/IATA regulations make it possible for unlimited spare Li-ion batteries under 100 watt hours to be transported in carry-on luggage. For more information, visit www.idxtek.com. VES Presents Entertainment Production Summit The Visual Effects Society will present a Production Summit for the greater entertainment industry on Oct. 24 at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Marina del Rey. The event will bring together practitioners from all crafts and offer a
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rare opportunity to examine innovative approaches to producer challenges, technology developments and the globalization of the production industry. Eric Roth, the executive director of the VES, observes, “Because the entertainment industry is changing so rapidly — on the creative, technological and business fronts — we’re bringing together all industry stakeholders to discuss the challenges we all face in looking at our entertainment future. The Production Summit will be a central meeting place of common concerns and challenges that will create new dialogue and solutions across all guilds and studios.” The summit’s sessions will include “Through the Kaleidoscope,” three interactive sessions delivering a multifaceted examination of prep through post; “XRay: Surviving (and thriving in) the Postproduction Pipeline in the 21st Century”; and “Hot, Flat and (Getting) Crowded: The Business of Production and the New Global Economy.” The summit will bring together an international group of directors, producers, cinematographers, editors, technologists and visual-effects leaders responsible for moving the industry into the next decade. “The industry overall is currently being challenged by enormous economic constraints, and has responded by starting fewer projects,” says Jeffrey A. Okun, VES board chair. “They want to do them fast and inexpensively, while at the same time reaching for the highest quality. This mandate is causing tremendous stresses and strains throughout the entire pipeline of projects. This summit will lead the discussion on how we all will get to the future, and by envisioning the future we can begin to create it.” For more information and to register, visit www.visualeffects society.com/productionsummit2009. I SUBMISSION INFORMATION Please e-mail New Products/Services releases to
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RATES All classifications are $4.50 per word. Words set in bold face or all capitals are $5.00 per word. First word of ad and advertiser’s name can be set in capitals without extra charge. No agency commission or discounts on classified advertising.PAYMENT MUST ACCOMPANY ORDER. VISA, Mastercard, AmEx and Discover card are accepted. Send ad to Classified Advertising, American Cinematographer, P.O. Box 2230, Hollywood, CA 90078. Or FAX (323) 876-4973. Deadline for payment and copy must be in the office by 15th of second month preceding publication. Subject matter is limited to items and services pertaining to filmmaking and video production. Words used are subject to magazine style abbreviation. Minimum amount per ad: $45
CLASSIFIEDS ON-LINE Ads may now also be placed in the on-line Classifieds at the ASC web site. Internet ads are seen around the world at the same great rate as in print, or for slightly more you can appear both online and in print. For more information please visit www.theasc.com/advertiser, or e-mail:
[email protected].
EQUIPMENT FOR SALE 435 & 535B Package - Sacrifice $135,000. Details at www.big-storm.com/camera USED EQUIPMENT. PRO VIDEO & FILM EQUIPMENT COMPANY. (972) 869-9990. Arri 435ES very complete package plus 18-100 Zoom lens, Arri Varicon. Excellent prices Contact
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Deluxe C2 DV Expo 95 Eastman Kodak 13, C4 Filmtools 87 Five Towns College 91 Fuji Motion Picture 56-57 Gekko Technology 49 Glidecam Industries 65 Golden Animations 97 High Def Expo, Inc. 85 Innovision 97 JEM Studio Lighting. Inc. 12 J.L. Fisher 41 K 5600, Inc. 31 Kino Flo 43, 67 Laffoux Solutions, Inc. 96 Laser Pacific 81 Lentequip, Inc. 97 Lights! Action! Company 96 Lite Panels 2 London Film School 89 Mac Group US 11 Matthews Studio Equipment 97 Movcam 25 Movie Tech AG 97 MP&E Mayo Productions 97 MSM 6 New York Film Academy 73 Oppenheimer Camera Prod. 96 Otto Nemenz 17
P+S Technik 79, 97 Panasonic Broadcast 7 PED Denz 93 Photon Beard 97 Photo-sonics, Rental 66 Pille Film Gmbh 97 Pro8mm 96 Professional Sound Services 89 Rag Place, The 93 Rosco 30 SAE 87 Servicevision USA 55 Sim Video 51 Stanton Video Services 91 Super16 Inc. 97 Telescopic 96 Thales Angenieux 9 Tiffen 19, C3 VF Gadgets, Inc. 96 Walter Klassen FX 54 Welch Integrated 99 Willy’s Widgets 96 www.theasc.com 10, 12, 84, 92, 101 Zacuto Films 97 ZGC, Inc. 29, 79, 97
PRO EDUCATION WORKSHOPS and Networking Events Pre-register Online and Get the latest updates on upcoming Filmmaking Workshops. Visit: www.studentfilmmakers.com/workshops
Call for Workshop Instructors We invite filmmakers, cinematographers, directors, editors, sound engineers, producers, and screenwriters to submit a syllabus and brief biography for consideration. Reach us at: http://www.studentfilmmakers.com/contact.shtml
American Society of Cinematographers Roster OFFICERS – 2009-’10 Michael Goi, President Richard Crudo, Vice President Owen Roizman, Vice President Victor J. Kemper, Vice President Matthew Leonetti, Treasurer Rodney Taylor, Secretary John C. Flinn III, Sergeant-at-Arms MEMBERS OF THE BOARD Curtis Clark Richard Crudo George Spiro Dibie Richard Edlund John C. Flinn III John Hora Victor J. Kemper Matthew Leonetti Stephen Lighthill Isidore Mankofsky Daryn Okada Owen Roizman Nancy Schreiber Haskell Wexler Vilmos Zsigmond ALTERNATES Fred Elmes Steven Fierberg Ron Garcia Michael D. O’Shea Michael Negrin
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ACTIVE MEMBERS Thomas Ackerman Lance Acord Lloyd Ahern II Herbert Alpert Russ Alsobrook Howard A. Anderson III Howard A. Anderson Jr. James Anderson Peter Anderson Tony Askins Charles Austin Christopher Baffa James Bagdonas King Baggot John Bailey Michael Ballhaus Andrzej Bartkowiak John Bartley Bojan Bazelli Frank Beascoechea Affonso Beato Mat Beck Dion Beebe Bill Bennett Andres Berenguer Carl Berger Gabriel Beristain Steven Bernstein Ross Berryman Michael Bonvillain Richard Bowen David Boyd Russell Boyd Jonathan Brown Don Burgess Stephen H. Burum Bill Butler Frank B. Byers Bobby Byrne Antonio Calvache Paul Cameron Russell P. Carpenter James L. Carter Alan Caso Michael Chapman Rodney Charters James A. Chressanthis Joan Churchill Curtis Clark Peter L. Collister Jack Cooperman Jack Couffer Vincent G. Cox Jeff Cronenweth Richard Crudo Dean R. Cundey Stefan Czapsky David Darby Allen Daviau Roger Deakins Jan DeBont Thomas Del Ruth Bruno Delbonnel Peter Deming Caleb Deschanel Ron Dexter Craig Di Bona George Spiro Dibie
Ernest Dickerson Billy Dickson Bill Dill Bert Dunk John Dykstra Richard Edlund Frederick Elmes Robert Elswit Geoffrey Erb Scott Farrar Jon Fauer Don E. FauntLeRoy Gerald Feil Steven Fierberg Gerald Perry Finnerman Mauro Fiore John C. Flinn III Ron Fortunato William A. Fraker Tak Fujimoto Alex Funke Steve Gainer Ron Garcia Dejan Georgevich Michael Goi Stephen Goldblatt Paul Goldsmith Frederic Goodich Victor Goss Jack Green Adam Greenberg Robbie Greenberg Xavier Perez Grobet Alexander Gruszynski Changwei Gu Rick Gunter Rob Hahn Gerald Hirschfeld Henner Hofmann Adam Holender Ernie Holzman John C. Hora Gil Hubbs Michel Hugo Shane Hurlbut Judy Irola Mark Irwin Levie Isaacks Andrew Jackson Peter James Johnny E. Jensen Torben Johnke Frank Johnson Shelly Johnson Jeffrey Jur William K. Jurgensen Adam Kane Stephen M. Katz Ken Kelsch Victor J. Kemper Wayne Kennan Francis Kenny Glenn Kershaw Darius Khondji Gary Kibbe Jan Kiesser Jeffrey L. Kimball Alar Kivilo Richard Kline
George Koblasa Fred J. Koenekamp Lajos Koltai Pete Kozachik Neil Krepela Willy Kurant Ellen M. Kuras George La Fountaine Edward Lachman Ken Lamkin Jacek Laskus Andrew Laszlo Denis Lenoir John R. Leonetti Matthew Leonetti Andrew Lesnie Peter Levy Matthew Libatique Charlie Lieberman Stephen Lighthill Karl Walter Lindenlaub John Lindley Robert F. Liu Walt Lloyd Bruce Logan Gordon Lonsdale Emmanuel Lubezki Julio G. Macat Glen MacPherson Constantine Makris Karl Malkames Denis Maloney Isidore Mankofsky Christopher Manley Michael D. Margulies Barry Markowitz Vincent Martinelli Steve Mason Clark Mathis Don McAlpine Don McCuaig Seamus McGarvey Robert McLachlan Greg McMurry Steve McNutt Terry K. Meade Chris Menges Rexford Metz Anastas Michos Douglas Milsome Dan Mindel Charles Minsky Richard Moore Donald A. Morgan Donald M. Morgan Kramer Morgenthau M. David Mullen Dennis Muren Fred Murphy Hiro Narita Guillermo Navarro Michael B. Negrin Sol Negrin Bill Neil Alex Nepomniaschy John Newby Yuri Neyman Sam Nicholson Crescenzo Notarile
David B. Nowell Rene Ohashi Daryn Okada Thomas Olgeirsson Woody Omens Miroslav Ondricek Michael D. O’Shea Anthony Palmieri Phedon Papamichael Daniel Pearl Edward J. Pei James Pergola Don Peterman Lowell Peterson Wally Pfister Gene Polito Bill Pope Steven Poster Tom Priestley Jr. Rodrigo Prieto Robert Primes Frank Prinzi Richard Quinlan Declan Quinn Earl Rath Richard Rawlings Jr. Frank Raymond Tami Reiker Marc Reshovsky Robert Richardson Anthony B. Richmond Bill Roe Owen Roizman Pete Romano Charles Rosher Jr. Giuseppe Rotunno Philippe Rousselot Juan Ruiz-Anchia Marvin Rush Paul Ryan Eric Saarinen Alik Sakharov Mikael Salomon Harris Savides Roberto Schaefer Tobias Schliessler Aaron Schneider Nancy Schreiber Fred Schuler John Schwartzman John Seale Christian Sebaldt Dean Semler Eduardo Serra Steven Shaw Richard Shore Newton Thomas Sigel John Simmons Sandi Sissel Bradley B. Six Dennis L. Smith Roland “Ozzie” Smith Reed Smoot Bing Sokolsky Peter Sova Dante Spinotti Robert Steadman Ueli Steiger Peter Stein
S E P T E M B E R Robert M. Stevens Tom Stern Rogier Stoffers Vittorio Storaro Harry Stradling Jr. David Stump Tim Suhrstedt Peter Suschitzky Alfred Taylor Jonathan Taylor Rodney Taylor William Taylor Don Thorin John Toll Mario Tosi Salvatore Totino Luciano Tovoli Jost Vacano Theo Van de Sande Eric Van Haren Noman Kees Van Oostrum Ron Vargas Mark Vargo Amelia Vincent William Wages Roy H. Wagner Ric Waite Michael Watkins Jonathan West Haskell Wexler Jack Whitman Gordon Willis Dariusz Wolski Ralph Woolsey Peter Wunstorf Robert Yeoman Richard Yuricich Jerzy Zielinski Vilmos Zsigmond Kenneth Zunder ASSOCIATE MEMBERS Alan Albert Richard Aschman Volker Bahnemann Kay Baker Joseph J. Ball Amnon Band Carly M. Barber Craig Barron Thomas M. Barron Larry Barton Bob Beitcher Mark Bender Bruce Berke John Bickford Steven A. Blakely Mitchell Bogdanowicz Jack Bonura Michael Bravin William Brodersen Garrett Brown Ronald D. Burdett Reid Burns Vincent Carabello Jim Carter Leonard Chapman Mark Chiolis Denny Clairmont Cary Clayton
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Emory M. Cohen Sean Coughlin Robert B. Creamer Grover Crisp Daniel Curry Ross Danielson Carlos D. DeMattos Gary Demos Richard Di Bona Kevin Dillon David Dodson Judith Doherty Don Donigi Cyril Drabinsky Jesse Dylan Jonathan Erland John Farrand Ray Feeney William Feightner Phil Feiner Jimmy Fisher Scott Fleischer Thomas Fletcher Steve Garfinkel Salvatore Giarratano Richard B. Glickman John A. Gresch Jim Hannafin William Hansard Bill Hansard, Jr. Richard Hart Robert Harvey Charles Herzfeld Larry Hezzelwood Frieder Hochheim Bob Hoffman Vinny Hogan Robert C. Hummel Roy Isaia George Joblove Joel Johnson John Johnston Frank Kay Debbie Kennard Milton Keslow Robert Keslow Larry Kingen Douglas Kirkland Timothy J. Knapp Ron Koch Karl Kresser Lou Levinson Suzanne Lezotte Grant Loucks Andy Maltz Steven E. Manios Robert Mastronardi Joe Matza Albert Mayer, Jr. Andy McIntyre Stan Miller Walter H. Mills George Milton Mike Mimaki Rami Mina Michael Morelli Dash Morrison Nolan Murdock Mark W. Murphy Dan Muscarella
Iain A. Neil Otto Nemenz Ernst Nettmann Tony Ngai Mickel Niehenke Marty Oppenheimer Walt Ordway Larry Parker Michael Parker Warren Parker Doug Pentek Kristin Petrovich Ed Phillips Nick Phillips Jerry Pierce Joshua Pines Carl Porcello Howard Preston David Pringle Phil Radin Christopher Reyna Colin Ritchie Eric G. Rodli Andy Romanoff Daniel Rosen Dana Ross Bill Russell Kish Sadhvani David Samuelson Peter K. Schnitzler Walter Schonfeld Juergen Schwinzer Ronald Scott Steven Scott Don Shapiro Milton R. Shefter Leon Silverman Garrett Smith Stefan Sonnenfeld John L. Sprung Joseph N. Tawil Ira Tiffen Arthur Tostado Bill Turner Stephan Ukas-Bradley Mark Van Horne Richard Vetter Joe Violante Dedo Weigert Franz Weiser Evans Wetmore Beverly Wood Jan Yarbrough Hoyt Yeatman Irwin M. Young Michael Zacharia Bob Zahn Nazir Zaidi Michael Zakula Les Zellan HONORARY MEMBERS Col. Edwin E. Aldrin Jr. Neil A. Armstrong Col. Michael Collins Bob Fisher David MacDonald Cpt. Bruce McCandless II D. Brian Spruill 101
Clubhouse News Delbonnel, Notarile, Stoffers Join Society Bruno Delbonnel, ASC, AFC was born in eastern France. The son of a soldier, he broke with family tradition to pursue his interest in the arts. At La Sorbonne in Paris, he studied philosophy and watched two films a day, frequenting theaters scattered throughout the city. Delbonnel got his start in filmmaking when he received a government grant to direct a short film; renowned cinematographer Henri Alekan shot the film and inspired Delbonnel to pursue a career in cinematography. After working as a camera assistant for 15 years, he moved up to cinematographer, earning his first credits on commercials. His feature credits include Amélie (AC Sept. ’01), Infamous (2006), Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009) and A Very Long Engagement (AC Dec. ‘04), for which he won an ASC Award. He is currently shooting Faust for Alexander Sokurov. Raised in Brooklyn, N.Y., Crescenzo Notarile, ASC attended the Nikon School of Photography before earning a bachelor’s degree in film production and communication at the New York Institute of Technology. Beginning his professional cinematography career in the 1980s, he shot music videos for such artists as The Rolling Stones, U2, Steve Winwood and Bruce Springsteen and commercials for such companies as American Express, Pepsi, Revlon and Cover Girl. Notarile’s credits include the features Bullet (1996), Truth Be Told (2002) and Timecop: The Berlin Decision (2003); the pilot for Skin, and the pilot and 102 September 2009
series Hawaii. He is currently working on the series Ghost Whisperer. Rogier Stoffers, ASC, NSC was born in Utrecht, Netherlands, and studied French language and literature and theater and film at the University of Utrecht. He was admitted to The
Netherlands Film and Television Academy’s cinematography program, where he shot the thesis project Alaska (1989), directed by Mike van Diem; the film won the Dutch Golden Calf for Best Short and a Student Academy Award. Stoffers and van Diem reteamed for the feature Character (1997), which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film and the Golden Frog at Camerimage. Stoffers’ feature credits include Quills (AC Jan. ’01), John Q (2002), School of Rock (2003), Disturbia (2007) and Lakeview Terrace (2008). Baker, Band, Chiolis Named Associates Kay Baker of Telecorps Sales & Leasing, LLC, began working in Colorado’s film industry through Denver’s Film/Video Equipment Service Co. Her efforts helped revitalize the Rocky Mountain Vid Expo, which over the years has attracted numerous ASC members. Baker has helped organize seminars at the ASC Clubhouse and has also assisted with the ASC Awards. Amnon Band was born near Nahariya, Israel, and grew up in the
agricultural settlement of Moshav Lehman. An early interest in agricultural engineering sparked a lifelong passion for machines and technology, and after a stint in the Israel Defense Forces, Band moved to Los Angeles and dove into the film industry. In 1984, he opened Band Pro as a one-man operation. He continues to serve as the company’s president and CEO, and he has overseen its expansion into Israel, Munich and New York. Grass Valley’s Mark Chiolis, who currently serves as senior marketing manager, has been with the company for more than 15 years. He has been active in the company’s development of digital cinematography solutions, most notably the Viper camera, and has collaborated with the ASC Technology Committee. Prior to joining Grass Valley, Chiolis worked in operations, news and production management for a number of television stations. He also notched a number of credits shooting video for such events as the Reno Air Race. Deluxe Dedicates Bud Stone Building Deluxe Laboratories recently hosted the dedication and ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new Bud Stone Building at the company’s Hollywood campus. Named for Burton “Bud” Stone, an honorary ASC member who died last year, the building will enable Deluxe to meet increased demand for motionpicture film processing and print delivery while reducing utility and chemical usage, and reducing, reusing and recycling raw materials during the production of film prints. “As Deluxe continues to expand its worldwide footprint to fulfill growing demand for both film and digital services, it is an honor to officially open our newest facility in Hollywood in Bud Stone’s name,” says Ronald O. Perelman, chairman of Deluxe. The company’s
this year for Slumdog Millionaire, covered the craft of cinematography and the state of the art.
president and CEO, Cyril Drabinsky (above, right, pictured with Perelman and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa), an associate member of the ASC, adds, “By keeping Deluxe’s extensive array of creative and production services here in Hollywood, we encourage the highly skilled labor pool and creative community leaders in the motion-picture industry to stay within the community.” 3 ASC Members Invited to Join Academy Society members Russ Alsobrook, Henner Hofmann and Rodney Taylor are among 134 artists and executives active in theatrical motion pictures who were recently invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. “These filmmakers have, over the course of their careers, captured the imagination of audiences around the world,” says Academy President Sid Ganis. “It’s this kind of talent and creativity that make up the Academy, and I welcome each of them to our ranks.” McGarvey in Conversation at Edinburgh Fest Seamus McGarvey, ASC, BSC, who recently became an official patron of the Edinburgh International Film Festival, interviewed photographer/filmmaker Willie Doherty and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, BSC, DFF, in two separate events at this year’s festival. McGarvey and Doherty, a twotime Turner Prize nominee, discussed their shared sensibilities and their collaboration on Ghost Story. McGarvey’s conversation with Dod Mantle, who won ASC and Academy awards
Kurant at the Cinémathèque Willy Kurant, ASC, AFC recently visited the Cinémathèque Française in Paris to lead a discussion about cinematographer Henri Alekan’s work with filmmakers Agnès Godard, AFC; Jean-Louis Leconte; and Denys de la Patellière following a screening of Wim Wenders’ The State of Things (1982). The film also features the cinematography of Martin Schäfer and Fred Murphy, ASC. Kodak Hosts Greenberg at Los Angeles Fest The spotlight was turned on Robbie Greenberg, ASC for this year’s Kodak Focus presentation during the Los Angeles Film Festival, which was held in June. Greenberg, a fourtime ASC Award winner, shared his insights into the artistry and technology of filmmaking while screening clips from his work, which includes the
honored with this year’s Cine Gear Lifetime Achievement Award at the Cine Gear Expo in June. Phillips launched his first company, Waynco, when he was 20 years old. He joined Matthews in 1971 and has since been honored with two Technical Academy Awards, a Scientific
and Engineering Award, and an Emmy Award for developments in camerasupport technology such as the Tulip Crane and the Cam-Remote. “We all congratulate Ed on this award,” says George Spiro Dibie, ASC. “His commitment to our industry, support and services is exemplary. He cares so passionately … and he is always available to help and assist the pros and emerging filmmakers.” Phillips says, “Over the past 40-some years, I’ve enjoyed a very special relationship with this industry. I’ve listened to production needs and have done everything I could to give our artists the best tools available. Being honored with this award says we’ve been doing something right. And I’m not slowing down!” I
Emmy-winning Introducing Dorothy Dandridge and Winchell, the Emmynominated Warm Springs, Iron Jawed Angels and James Dean, and the features The Milagro Beanfield War, Save the Last Dance and Wild Hogs. Phillips Receives Lifetime Achievement Award ASC associate member Ed Phillips, president and CEO of Matthews Studio Equipment, was American Cinematographer 103
ASC CLOSE-UP Alexander Gruszynski, ASC
Which cinematographers do you most admire? Without question, Conrad Hall, ASC. Also, ASC members Gregg Toland and James Wong Howe for their artistry in black-and-white cinematography. What sparked your interest in photography? I got it backwards. In my teens, I decided I wanted to be a filmmaker, and I found out that in order to apply to a film school, one had to submit a photographic portfolio, so I picked up my father’s still camera — a Russian camera, a Zenith. Once I started looking at the world inside the rectangle, I was hooked. My first inspiration was a photo album by Irving Penn. Where did you train and/or study? At the Danish Film School in Copenhagen. Who were your teachers or mentors? The man who taught me the most about light and lighting was a Danish gaffer named Ove Hansen. He was a guileless and unassuming man; you’d never hear him mention Caravaggio or Vermeer, but he had an infectious passion for light. Gunnar Fisher, who shot Ingmar Bergman’s early films, was also an influence. What are some of your key artistic influences? The iconic black-and-white movies — Touch of Evil (1958) and Andrei Rublev (1966) among them — were particularly important to me in developing my craft. I felt black-and-white was truly a cinematographer’s medium; knowing how to interpret, manipulate and translate colors into shades of gray was essential to creating the look of the film, whereas in color cinematography, the look is to a greater extent a collaboration with the production designer. Also, studying Eisenstein’s drawings and storyboards was very important to my understanding of the art of visual storytelling. How did you get your first break in the business? While at film school, I teamed up with a fellow student, a director named Jon Carlsen. After we graduated, we collaborated on several short films, which led to an opportunity to shoot my first feature. What has been your most satisfying moment on a project? When my collaboration with the director becomes intuitive, and he doesn’t need to explain his intentions in detail anymore.
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Have you made any memorable blunders? Just after film school, I was hired to be one of three cameramen on an industrial about the construction of high-voltage power lines. In order to film the workers hanging the wires, they needed someone to climb to the top of a tower just above the insulators and jump into a cart that was suspended on the wires 150' above the ground. There were no safety lines, and no other cameraman wanted to meet the challenge. Seeing this as my chance at a break, I volunteered. When I reached the top, I was petrified with fear but somehow managed to get the job done. When I finally came down, I kissed the ground and felt very proud of myself — until the next day. It turned out that all the footage had vignetting because the bellows matte box was extended too far, and I hadn’t noticed it the entire time I was shooting. Needless to say, it was my last day on the job. What’s the best professional advice you’ve ever received? I think it was Sven Nykvist, ASC who once said, ‘Take chances, but when you do, lower the ASA setting on your light meter.’ To this day, no matter how great the latitude of the film stock is, I always calibrate my meter to a lower setting than what the manufacturer recommends. What recent books, films or artworks have inspired you? The book Color: A Natural History of the Palette, by Victoria Finlay, is a fascinating account of how colors are represented in the physical world and how pigments originated. All of us cinematographers who communicate with production designers through color swatches or pick theatrical gels with our gaffers have experienced how difficult it is to convey our intended use of color. Color is a compelling read, and even though it doesn’t directly deal with photography, I found it very inspiring and highly relevant for practitioners of our craft. Do you have any favorite genres, or genres you would like to try? Perhaps because of the movie I saw 20 times as a child, I’ve had a lifelong fascination with Westerns. If you weren’t a cinematographer, what might you be doing instead? I would be a Sanskrit scholar. Which ASC cinematographers recommended you for membership? Francis Kenny, Jacek Laskus and Jerzy Zielinski. How has ASC membership impacted your life and career? I was a nervous wreck when the ASC Membership Committee viewed my reel. When Owen Roizman, ASC said, ‘Your reel speaks for itself,’ it meant more than any award or accolade I’d ever received. It’s not a coincidence that the three cinematographers whose work I admire the most bore the insignia of this honorary society. I
Photo by Alissa White.
When you were a child, what film made the strongest impression on you? I grew up in Communist Poland, and most of the movies playing in theaters were Soviet social-realist dramas that nobody wanted to see because we lived it in our everyday lives. At the time, the only American movies distributed in Poland were Westerns, and when I was 7, the local cinema showed Winchester ’73 (1950), starring Jimmy Stewart. It played for six months, and it made such a strong impression on me that I sneaked in to see it once a week. I must have seen it at least 20 times.
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ONFILM LARRY FONG
“When I was a kid, I got a magic set for Christmas. In my teens I shot short films using my dad’s Bell & Howell 8mm camera. For me, both magic and filmmaking give an amazing sense of wonder to the creator and viewer, one that takes us out of our everyday lives and transports us to a place of mystery. My passion for both of these disciplines has led to incredible experiences and friendships that I will never forget. But sometimes making things look effortless is not so easy. To me the biggest challenge in cinematography, like any illusion, is to make an elaborate and often difficult situation appear to be completely natural. Not only is skill and mastering of the craft necessary; one must get into the mind of the director to read his thoughts. Then you must interpret his dream, understand his vision, collaborate, improvise, and deliver. But as organic as the process may be, recording the image is not something I leave to chance. The color palette, latitude, grain, and contrast that are unique to film all contribute to the ultimate emotional response of the audience...and that’s where the real magic is.” Larry Fong launched his career by shooting hundreds of commercials and award-winning music videos. His narrative credits include episodic television such as the pilot for Lost, which earned an ASC Outstanding Achievement Award nomination, and the feature films 300, Watchmen, and the upcoming Sucker Punch. [All these films were shot on Kodak motion picture film.] For an extended interview with Larry Fong, visit www.kodak.com/go/onfilm. To order Kodak motion picture film, call (800) 621-film. www.motion.kodak.com © Eastman Kodak Company, 2009. Photography: © 2009 Douglas Kirkland
