A M E R I C A N
OCTOBER 2009
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Dennis L. Smith, ASC hile shooting news and documentaries for ABC in the Seventies, I discovered that the images I filmed had a profound effect on the audience’s perception of the story. My point of view was a key component in the film. “With American Cinematographer I found my first insight into the minds of my heroes — among them ASC members Conrad Hall, Haskell Wexler and Owen Roizman, whose storytelling styles had a profound impact on me. The directors of photography spoke a language I knew but thirsted to learn more about. “With its perspective on the combination of style, technique and philosophy that goes into a film, AC has been an invaluable tool that inspires me to this day. I’m so happy to still be a storyteller!”
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©photo by Owen Roizman, ASC
—Dennis L. Smith, ASC
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Photo of George Mooradian by Joel Lipton exclusively for Schneider Optics
I’m a big believer in filters. As soon as I discovered Schneider’s DigiCon I knew it was the magic that “The Bill Engvall Show” deserved. It allows me to create a much more filmic look. I no longer have to reign in the highlights. And I can open up the blacks. I can light bolder – 2 to 3 stops now becomes 4 or 5. Our kitchen has always been a challenge—too flat. Not with the DigiCon. We have depth and separation. Thanks to the DigiCon, when we do exteriors the pavement can be hotter and the foliage plays nicely. We can really get a sense of location. My engineer loves what he sees on the monitor. And so does our colorist. The DigiCon allows us more of a range to play with and to create a stronger, richer image. Thanks to Schneider’s DigiCon, I can now create the beautiful image that “The Bill Engvall Show” deserves.
Director of Photography George Mooradian is a three time Emmy Award nominee for the hit series According to Jim. Before moving into the multi-camera world, he was cinematographer on over a dozen movies. He credits operating for
high-profile cinematographers such as Vittorio Storaro, ASC (Dick Tracy) as the foundation for the feature look he brings to his sit-com projects. Mooradian is now in his third season of The Bill Engvall Show. B+W • Century • Schneider
For George's DigiCon chat visit:
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The International Journal of Film & Digital Production Techniques
On Our Cover: Betty and Don Draper (January Jones and Jon Hamm) cut fine Sixties figures in Mad Men, shot by Christopher Manley, ASC. (Photo by Frank Ockenfels, courtesy of AMC.)
Features 30 44 58 66
Departments
8 10 12 18 76 82 88 90 91 92
Pitch Perfect Christopher Manley, ASC sells the drama on Mad Men
Hard Time Larry Smith, BSC hits with both fists for Bronson 44
A Lyrical Love Greig Fraser brings passion to Bright Star
Vicarious Thrills Oliver Wood has out-of-body experience on Surrogates
Editor’s Note President’s Desk 58 Short Takes: The Maine’s “Into Your Arms” Production Slate: The National Parks: America’s Best Idea Georgia O’Keeffe
Post Focus: Red Dwarf: Back to Earth New Products & Services International Marketplace Classified Ads/Ad Index Clubhouse News ASC Close-Up: Lowell Peterson
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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, Mark Hope-Jones, Noah Kadner, Ron Magid, Jean Oppenheimer, John Pavlus, Chris Pizzello, Jon Silberg, Iain Stasukevich, Kenneth Sweeney, Patricia Thomson, David E. Williams ————————————————————————————————————
ART DEPARTMENT CREATIVE DIRECTOR Marion Gore ————————————————————————————————————
ADVERTISING ADVERTISING SALES DIRECTOR Angie Gollmann 323-936-3769 FAX 323-936-9188 e-mail:
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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
[email protected]. Copyright 2007 ASC Holding Corp. (All rights reserved.) Periodicals postage paid at Los Angeles, CA and at additional mailing offices. Printed in the USA. POSTMASTER: Send address change to American Cinematographer, P.O. Box 2230, Hollywood, CA 90078.
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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
Steve Gainer 6
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Editor’s Note t’s not often that we devote two AC covers to the same TV show, but Mad Men has earned the extra attention. Our first article on the acclaimed series detailed the work of cinematographer Phil Abraham, who is now among the show’s directors. As this issue went to press, Christopher Manley, ASC, the director of photography on Mad Men’s second and third seasons, was in the running for an Emmy Award for his work on the second season. In late June, when the production was midway through filming its new season, AC was granted access to the super-secretive set, where plot points were being guarded like bars of gold in Fort Knox. Nevertheless, senior editor Rachael K. Bosley’s interview with Manley (“Pitch Perfect,” page 30) presents an impressive overview of both his general strategies and his approach to specific sets and shots, and Manley’s crew provided us with a detailed lighting diagram of one of the show’s main sets, Don Draper’s home. Manley notes that Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner is open to visual approaches that veer from established patterns: “It was a relief to know that the rules, so to speak, of the visual language of the show are not completely hard and fast. Matt’s very intuitive, and he’s open to breaking those rules if it works and it’s interesting.” No rule was sacred on Bronson, a ferociously offbeat indie that impressed attendees at this year’s Sundance Film Festival (“Hard Time,” page 44). The film creates an unconventional portrait of England’s most notorious prison inmate, Michael Peterson (a.k.a. “Charles Bronson”), whose violent transgressions have kept him behind bars for 34 years. Shot primarily in Super 16mm, the production reunited director Nicolas Winding Refn with cinematographer Larry Smith, BSC, whose bold lighting and lens choices lend the picture its “guerrilla grandeur.” Both filmmakers acknowledge that they set out to raise a ruckus. As Smith notes, “I wasn’t sure what kind of film it would be, but we were definitely trying to make it stand out.” Kinder, gentler themes grace Jane Campion’s period drama Bright Star, which chronicles the romance between the great Romantic poet John Keats and the “girl next door,” Fanny Brawne. Cinematographer Greig Fraser, who recently moved to Los Angeles from his native Australia, is responsible for the film’s ravishing images, but he says Campion’s first priority is always character. “Jane has a very strong visual style, but she always wants the visual to support what’s going on with the characters,” he tells Bosley (“A Lyrical Love,” page 58). “The actors’ comfort with the camera is her top priority, and that influences everything, even the choice of crew.” This issue’s special emphasis on lighting — and risk-taking — continues in our coverage of the sci-fi thriller Surrogates, in which humans carry out their lives through robot proxies (“Vicarious Thrills,” page 66). Cinematographer Oliver Wood fashioned a futuristic, high-gloss look for director Jonathan Mostow, who sang the cinematographer’s praises in his interview with New York correspondent Iain Stasukevich: “Good filmmaking doesn’t call for a rigid thought process. One reason I love working with Oliver is that he has tremendous instincts; he gets what’s going on in the moment and works from gut instinct, and that’s how I like to work. I go into every scene with a plan, but I’m always ready to see something unexpected.”
Stephen Pizzello Executive Editor 8
Photo by Douglas Kirkland.
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President’s Desk ith advances in technology for motion-picture production seemingly happening on a weekly basis, it sometimes feels as though we’re in the midst of the ultimate overhaul of our image-capture and post-workflow paradigms. There’s been a lot of talk about what a great breakthrough this digital camera is, or what a huge advance that scanner is. With all this talk about bytes, bits and megapixels, it can become difficult to keep the goal in sight, which is to tell stories visually. The entire history of the motion picture is a history of evolution and change, from the dawn of sound in the late 1920s to the introduction of color, from the flood of widescreen processes in the 1950s to the proliferation of zoom lenses and handheld cameras in the 1960s. This “digital revolution” is just another in an unending flow of changes that offer us new tools. At the ASC, we embrace change. We take each new technology and separate the fact from the fiction; we find out what it can and cannot do. Then we share this knowledge freely with the world. An example of this is the Camera-Assessment Series, tests of seven digital motion-picture cameras (compared with a 35mm camera) that the ASC undertook with the Producers Guild of America and Revelations Entertainment. As many producers have discovered in recent years, reading marketing materials is not the best way to get up to speed on new technology. The CAS is a big step toward forging a better understanding between cinematographers and camera manufacturers, and between producers and cinematographers. As cinematographers, we choose the equipment for a particular film based on our knowledge of which tools will help us visually tell that story in the best way. If lens flares are an important part of my visual aesthetic for a particular project, I’m going to use older lenses that give me those great, colorful, scalloped flares, not the newest, sharpest lenses. We do not use something simply because it is new or reject something simply because it is old. In fact, our archival safety net is 120-year-old technology. No digital medium currently has the proven longevity of properly stored film negative or black-and-white separation masters. There have been more than 80 formats of videotape since the advent of commercial television, and 90 percent of those formats cannot be played today. I have my own work on 10 different video and digital formats, and I cannot play half of them because the machines don’t exist anymore. It is important to use the best of what all our options have to offer. I recently photographed a feature film in 2-perf 35mm, a format that hasn’t been in widespread use since the 1960s and 1970s. Many great films, from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly to American Graffiti, have been shot in 2-perf. It gives you an anamorphic release print and cuts your film-negative budget in half. By way of contrast, I recently shot another feature with prosumer digital cameras because it was right for that particular job. Technology offers us more efficient tools to do our job, but the filmmaker’s inner aesthetic is still the final word. There are moments I treasure while I’m sitting in the dark with 500 strangers, and in those moments, I’m not thinking about the format the movie was captured on or wondering what post workflow was used. I’m wondering whether Michael Corleone will remember to drop the gun before he leaves the Italian restaurant, if Elaine Robinson will forgive Benjamin Braddock for having sex with her mother, whether Anna will ever be found after disappearing from the island of Lisca Bianca, if Frodo has the will to throw the ring into the Mountain of Fire, and whether Butch and Sundance will fight or jump. We remember those moments because they speak to us in purely emotional ways. They are images and words that plugged into our psyche in the right way at the right time. The technology used to create them will ultimately be relegated to historical footnotes and replaced with newer versions, but the emotional content will remain. As Bruce Lee said in Enter The Dragon, “Don’t think…feel. It’s like a finger pointing to the stars. Don’t concentrate on the finger, or you will miss all that heavenly glory.”
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Michael Goi, ASC President
10 October 2009
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© 2009 Sony Electronics Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. Features and specifications are subject to change without notice. TM Sony, CineAlta, HDCAM SR, XDCAM, HDNA and their respective logos are trademarks of Sony. & Design © 2009 Hollywood Chamber of Commerce. All Rights Reserved.
Short Takes Shooting “Into Your Arms” at Ontario Airport raveling to the Ontario International Airport in California, AC recently watched director/cinematographer Aaron Platt's rapid-fire shooting of the music video for "Into Your Arms" by The Maine. Inside a new terminal, Platt was a blur of activity, moving around numerous extras to check on lighting, camera, talent and the assembly of a motion-control rig. Platt has shot videos for artists such as Coldplay, Asher Roth, Cassie and Jet, and as a director, he has conceptualized videos for Meg/Dia and Melody Gardot. When he directs, he does his own shooting. “Hiring a cinematographer on my directing projects is tricky, not because I don’t want to stand down from the photographic throne, but rather because the speed at which I’m moving is insanely fast,” he explains. “Shooting my own projects enables me to make everything look as gorgeous as possible as fast as possible.” Platt also was doing all he could to squeeze a complex high concept out of a low budget. The storyline is basic: a girl leaves a guy behind and rushes through the terminal to make her flight, while band members positioned here and there perform the song. But the video actually presents the travelers and airport personnel moving backwards. The trick up Platt’s sleeve was to reverse the footage in post, meaning
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The “Into Your Arms” music video features a girl running backwards through a crowded airport terminal. Selling the effect required three motioncontrol shots, each of which comprised four passes: one of the girl moving forward at 50 fps, one of background talent moving backward at 50 fps, one of the band members performing at 36 fps sync sound, and a final pass for window exposure. 12
that in the final video, the girl runs backward through a crowd that’s moving forward. “It’s a simple concept that I tried to complicate by reversing the cliché a little,” he says. “We discover her meeting someone by chance at the end. “Airports are unique because so many people there are moving in and out of their lives, on their own personal journeys,” Platt continues. “[Producer] Justin Cronkite and I initially thought we’d have to shoot in a studio instead of a real airport, but I aggressively pushed for a real location. I wanted the freedom to shoot in all directions, and I didn’t want to be limited to close-ups or cheated reverses.” Securing the new Ontario terminal was a real coup. Sheira Reese Davies, the video’s executive producer at Hello & Co., had connections with the airport authorities that stemmed from a previous project. “Justin was put through the wringer for location permitting,” notes Platt. “We had to deal with the highest levels of national security and had to get special insurance. We really lucked out; we were approved only days before we shot.” With a Red One (from Alternative Rentals) mounted on a dolly, Platt also served as operator. “If you’re shooting digital and you’re on a tight budget, it’s just the way to go,” he says. “Because of its latitude, Super 16mm was a close contender for this shoot. Film might have held our highlights a little better.” The terminal offered its share of challenges: floor-to-ceiling windows looking out toward the runway on one side, all-white walls on
Photos by Benjamin Gallardo. Photos and frame grabs courtesy of Kelsey Street Entertainment.
by Douglas Bankston
Stefan Sonnenfeld
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© Kodak, 2009. Kodak and Vision are trademarks.
Colorist. Entrepreneur. Fanatic.
Above: The crew prepares for one of the motion-control shots inside a newly constructed terminal at California’s Ontario Airport. The mo-co rig was supplied by Pacific Motion Control. Below: When not on the mo-co rig, director/ cinematographer Aaron Platt (at camera) kept the Red One camera on a J.L. Fisher dolly.
14 October 2009
the other, a white ceiling with skylights, a reflective floor, and chrome fixtures and decorations throughout. “I don’t know if any camera could quite catch the full detail and latitude of the location!” says Platt. “Unfortunately, we couldn’t spend a whole day ND-ing 300 feet of windows. Instead of fighting it, I just let it go. The Red is incredible at holding detail, but this was the chip’s worst nightmare: darker interior with hot midday sun outside. More bounced lights inside would have helped, but we were also shooting a
lot of reflective surfaces. It was kind of a gaffer’s nightmare, too: we had long takes across an open space of reflective surfaces, with no capability of rigging.” (Randy Newman was the gaffer.) Lights, predominantly HMIs and a fluorescent blanket light, were bounced off Griffolyn or the ceiling or were diffused heavily with frost and double scrims. “I typically push for extreme contrast and love to press the image in radical directions, but this was a strongly character-driven story, so I wanted to tone down the styliza-
tion,” says Platt. He did, however, embrace the shiny surfaces in the terminal. “Any highlight or sheen allowed me to grab that ceiling of the [filmic] curve, along with the windows, to make a rich exposure out of a very simple backdrop.” Except for motion-control shots, the camera stayed on a J.L. Fisher dolly. “The goal was a cinematic piece of smooth moves and poetic moments in front of the camera,” says Platt. “I didn’t want any handheld because I didn’t want to come out of ‘the dream’ and have it ever feel real. Staying on the dolly also meant I could roam around the space fast. “We shot with Cooke S4 primes, my lenses of choice for digital shoots,” he adds. “We were usually no wider than a 27mm, and I think my longest lens was a 75mm. I put a coral filter on the lens to bake a little ‘love’ into the scene. I always try to make [the captured image] look extremely close to the final.” The project was recorded at a variety of resolutions to onboard drives, including 3K for the motion-control material. “With the Red, you have to be aware of the focal-length changes that occur when you increase the frame rate,” he notes. “Each time you up your slow motion, you have to lose resolution to be able to compensate for the extreme increase in material being gathered.” Platt shot a lot of cutaways in 2K at 120 fps. All non-mo-co sync material was shot at 24 fps in 4K. Crammed into one 12-hour day of production were three complex motion-control setups that used different frame rates for each pass. For example, at the controls of the remote head, Platt shot an 80'-long mo-co tracking shot at 50 fps of the girl hurrying through the terminal. “I did speed tests at the camera-rental house and locked in 50 fps as the highest I could go before having to drop to 2K resolution,” he recalls. The actress was lit with an Arri 40/25 ArriSun through a 4'x4' frame of frost diffusion, a half double net, and half of a second frost diffusion. Another 40/25 ArriSun
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Platt checks his frame inside the terminal, which presented him with floor-to-ceiling windows, white walls and ceilings, a reflective floor and chrome adornments. “The Red is incredible at holding detail,” he notes, “but this was the chip’s worst nightmare.”
through double diffusion served as backlight. 12K ArriSuns were positioned along the track and bounced into the white ceiling. An overhead bounce deflected light from a skylight to illuminate a dark alcove in the ceiling at the end of the track. With the camera moves recorded from the first pass, the second pass captured only background actors who were moving backwards, but the mo-co rig tracked in reverse. When these two shots were reversed in post, the girl ended up going backward while the background talent went forward. “Then we came to the part that made it essential to shoot this with mo-co: a third pass of the band sync-sound performing all around the terminal.” The band pass was shot at 36 fps, and the only change in the lighting setup was the addition of a 4-bank Kino (with only three tubes lit) near the lead singer. A fourth, empty-set pass exposed just for the windows. (The moco rig, from Pacific Motion Control, was operated by Adam Francis, Garritt Hampton and Joshua Cushner.) Postproduction was carried out in Los Angeles at Sunset Edit, which has a built-in Red One workflow. 16
Howard Shur worked painstakingly on the mo-co compositing, and colorcorrection was done by Marc Steinberg. “We wanted to keep the post under one roof to ensure that all quality control would be consistent through the pipeline,” says Platt. “We were trying to go natural with the coloring process and were mostly concerned with skin tone; we didn’t want to do anything that would detract from the story. The material we colored the most was the opening shots in front of the sunset sky and the girl running down the runway. Those dramatic moments allowed us to go to more extremes.” I
A Supernatural Transition From Film to Digital I shot the first three seasons of Supernatural with a 35mm dream package from Clairmont Camera. Then, the studio wanted to make a move into the digital world. One thing I wanted to make sure of was a seamless transition from film to digital. Supernatural was coming of age and I didn't want to change the look we set with the 35mm tools. I was looking for an evolution —not a new palette. I had set my mind on two D-21s for our A and B cameras and a Red One for Steadicam, 2nd unit and additional camera works. And what was most important to me was that Denny Clairmont and his team put their resources behind my choices through testing, setting my LUTs and establishing the work flow. On Supernatural we go to hell each week in our stories but one place I didn't want to go was production hell. You know what I'm talking about: weird things happening to your equipment, failure you don't expect, name it. But because of the nature of the preparation and the support of Clairmont Camera we never lost any production time due to the change of system, and whatever glitches we encountered were resolved in a swift fashion. It is well known to what extent the Clairmont family will go to service the camera crews, design and fabricate tools to fit particular demands but there is more. I found friendship, not the business bias type, but friendship based on complicity and dedication in research for the best . What am I talking about? Too good to be true? Maybe I found some kind of heaven on Earth and it's called Clairmont Camera…Heaven for the DP! Serge Ladouceur CSC
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Production Slate Capturing Natural Beauty
An Inspiring Achievement by Patricia Thomson With The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, Ken Burns’ fan base will undoubtedly expand to include outdoor photographers of every stripe. “I’d wager it’s the best cinematography we’ve ever done as a collection of filmmakers,” says Burns of the 12-hour series, which began airing on PBS last month. Buddy Squires, his longtime cinematographer and partner in Florentine Films, agrees: “The images are a central part of the story; they don’t just play a supporting role.” America’s national parks were born when Abraham Lincoln set aside a 60-square-mile tract containing ancient sequoias in what later became Yosemite National Park. Created as a reaction to the unfettered commercial development that blighted Niagara Falls, the movement quickly took root. By 1900, Yellow18 October 2009
stone, Sequoia, Yosemite, Kings Canyon and Mount Rainier were all federal parks, preserved for the people’s enjoyment. It was a democratic idea, different from the parks of Europe created by monarchs and aristocrats for their private pleasure. Tracing the growth of the park system from 1851-1980, The National Parks recounts the stories of more than 50 individuals, including John Muir, Teddy Roosevelt and John D. Rockefeller, as well as less-famous people who fought to protect the land. Case after case involves a battle between preservationists and those who aspire to exploit the land, mirroring today’s debates and underscoring the ongoing vulnerability of America’s most magnificent sites. In terms of cinematography, The National Parks exhibits all the hallmarks of a Florentine Films production. “There’s a tremendous respect for the integrity of
the image,” says Squires. “That’s something Ken and I have shared since our first work at Hampshire College.” There, they soaked up the history and aesthetics of still photography under professors Elaine Mayes and Jerome Liebling, a Photo League member. “Ken is willing to let a shot play much longer than are most people,” says Squires. “It’s not uncommon for us to have shots that last 40 or 50 seconds. Ken isn’t afraid to lose your attention. He allows people to drink in something over a greater period of time.” Florentine’s cameramen shoot independently of a script, so images are never enslaved to the text. “That requires a more complicated reconciliation in editing,” says Burns, “but I would suggest it’s one of the principle reasons our work is so successful.” Respect for the image is also behind the team’s filmic treatment of archival images. ¢
The National Parks photos courtesy of PBS.
A rainbow in the Grand Canyon is one of the spectacular natural wonders on display in the PBS series The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, directed by Ken Burns.
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They first developed their technique when shooting John Roebling’s 20' drawings for Brooklyn Bridge (1981), using a head-mounted camera with Cooke primes. For years they would pan, tilt, and move over archival photographs, exploring them as if they were live scenes the cameraman had stumbled upon. Though they now use scanned photos and Adobe After Effects, the approach remains the same. Like all Florentine productions, The National Parks was shot on film, in this case Super 16mm (framed for 1.78:1). “These parks deserve to have
all their subtleties of light presented, and there’s no doubt film still has the clear advantage [over digital formats] in terms of contrast ratio, texture and the subtleties one can pull out,” says Squires. “If one is in Yosemite at dawn and it’s -10°F, and the sun’s backlighting fog over a small stream with a mountain range behind it, and you’re pointing right in the direction of that sun, you’re not going to get the same image [with digital media]. You’ll probably get a beautiful image, but film digs into those shadows and holds onto highlights in a different way.” The National Parks shoot took
Top photo ©Craig Mellish. Bottom photo ©Lincoln Else. Used with permission.
Above: Cinematographer Buddy Squires, Burns’ longtime collaborator, films in Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah. Below: Working with producer/writer Dayton Duncan, Squires lines up a shot in Glacier Bay, Alaska.
place over six years in 53 parks; about 1,000 rolls of film were shot. “That’s about 80 rolls an hour, which is quite efficient,” says Squires, who shot 75 percent of the footage. The rest was shot by Allen Moore, a frequent collaborator based in Baltimore; Lincoln Else, an experienced mountaineer who was working as a park ranger in Yosemite; and Burns. Else started on the project as a camera assistant but eventually became a “one-man strike team,” picking up shots of wintertime Yosemite and other western locales. Florentine crews are small by design. “We’ve always scratched our heads in amazement when we’ve seen 12 crew members at an interview, or eight for MOS live shooting,” says Burns. “We just don’t need it. We’re a couple or three people. That means no matter how big a muckety-muck you are, you’re carrying something heavy!” The National Parks package was relatively bare bones. “Everything I own can fit in the back of a Saab,” says Squires. On a 10-day, mule-supported excursion into Kings Canyon, Squires and Else set out each morning carrying everything they needed in two backpacks. “I’d have an Aaton, one of my two zooms — a Canon 8-64mm or 11165mm — and an 85/Polarizer filter,” recalls Squires. “Link would have the other zoom, a 300mm Canon, a couple of Zeiss Super Speeds, a Sachtler 20 tripod, and enough film to get us through the day. The mules would carry film for the next days.” Squires also carried a Zeiss Mutar 2x extender to double the 300mm’s range, and an eShot Intervalometer for off-speed shooting. Typically, the cameramen would carry two to three magazines. “Even though it was landscape shooting, we often needed to change magazines quickly,” says Else. “You might wait for hours for nature to do what you want, but when it happens, you have to shoot a lot in a short period of time.” Most of the footage was shot on Eastman EXR 100T 7247 and, after that stock was discontinued, Kodak Vision2 100T 7212; Squires exposed both normally. “I don’t want the grain,” he says. “There are
Right: A bear sets his sights on his next meal in the Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska. Below: This archival photo shows tourists warming their feet in the waters of the Great Fountain Geyser in the early days of Yellowstone National Park.
22 October 2009
those who will say you can’t see the difference between the 200-ASA and the 100-ASA, but I can feel it, particularly on the newest 3K Arriscan transfers.” (The picture was scanned at 3K and color-corrected at Goldcrest Post, where the filmmakers worked with colorist John Dowdell.) Squires regularly uses tungsten stock for exteriors. “That evolved from camera tests I did a long time ago. I just like the feel of tungsten stock more. For exteriors, I’d almost always have an 85/Polarizer on the lens, and that’s it. Particularly in 16mm, I just don’t like to degrade the image.” Portability was another point in Super 16’s favor. “Whether hiking through Kings Canyon, rafting down the Grand Canyon or flying over Volcanoes National Park, all I’d need to do is pull the camera out of a pack, snap it on a tripod and start shooting,” says Squires. “Power consumption isn’t a problem. I floated on the Colorado River for 10 days
with a total of three Aaton batteries and no way to charge them, and there was no need to charge them. I knew I had enough charge to last double the amount of film I had.” One constant challenge on the shoot was what Burns calls “the tyranny of beauty.” He elaborates, “An overwhelming sequence of beautiful shots, if done in the same way, has a kind of numbing effect.” Though literally shooting in picture-postcard locations, the cinematographers had to avoid making picture postcards. Like Ansel Adams, whose famous image of Half Dome in Yosemite was taken a few feet from the main road, the cinematographers often wound up at common observation points. Try as they might to uncover new vistas, they repeatedly found that their ideal spot was a well-marked “inspiration point.” Else notes, “That speaks to the foresight and intelligence of the
parks’ original designers.” Much depended on being in the right place at the right time, and park rangers provided invaluable tips. “They’re the ones who know what time the sun hits a certain rock face, when a river will do what you want it to, and when the animals will be in a specific place,” says Else. Often it was a matter of waiting for the right atmospherics, either magic hour or “that cusp between a storm and clear,” says Else. “We were trying to capture these places in motion, in a state of change.” They made frequent use of time-lapse photography, which “has been part of our vocabulary for a long time,” says Squires. The longest time-lapse was a six-hour shot of Old Faithful: Like an ocean tide, a crowd fills the bleachers, watches the geyser explode and then flows out. In the quiet moments between, some buffalo amble through the frame, and then the cycle repeats. Settings depended on the speed of the subject. “If we were filming a sun shadow moving across a ridge line, we might want to film over a matter of hours, in which case we’d break out the calculator to figure out how to get a 10to-20-second shot,” says Else. “For mist moving in the valley, we might want to speed up only slightly, perhaps 12 fps or 6 fps, which would double or quadruple the speed of the thing we were watching.” Off-speed shooting was always a gamble. “You might set up a beautiful time-lapse of a mountain emerging behind fog, only to find you get a twohour shot of gray,” says Else. “Or you expect swirling, moody clouds and end up with blown-out sunlight.” “You can plan, but in the end, you have to respond to what’s happening at the moment,” says Squires. He recalls a day in Glacier National Park when uninspiring light squashed the team’s hope. But while they headed up Going-to-theSun Road, “there was an immense fog bank rolling down off the mountain with the sun coming up behind it. It was literally rising up and engulfing us, then falling back down and dissipating. We jumped out and set up the time-lapse, and it turned a day that was nothing into ¢ a day that was extraordinary.”
TECHNICAL SPECS 1.78:1 Super 16mm Aaton XTR-Prod Canon and Zeiss lenses Eastman EXR 100T 7247; Kodak Vision2 100T 7212, 200T 7217, 500T 7218 24 October 2009
In a scene in Georgia O’Keeffe, the painter (played by Joan Allen) works on a mural for Radio City Music Hall.
An Artist’s Awakening by Jean Oppenheimer Artist Georgia O’Keeffe fell in love with New Mexico the moment she stepped onto the sun-drenched desert floor and gazed at the unspoiled beauty that surrounded her: terra-cotta-colored rock formations almost geometric in design, animal bones bleached white by the sun, and wild desert flowers, all set against crystal-clear, blue skies. “New Mexico is famous for its quality of light,” notes Paul Elliott, director of photography on the Lifetime Television drama Georgia O’Keeffe. “We shot in Santa Fe, which is 7,000 feet above sea level, and the thin air and relative lack of pollution produces a very clear light.” Elliott, a British native who divides his time between Los Angeles and Santa Fe, is a three-time ASC Award nominee; he won for HBO’s 1995 biopic Truman. Directed by Bob Balaban, and starring Joan Allen, Georgia O’Keeffe chronicles the artist’s career and her tempestuous relationship with her husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz (Jeremy Irons). It was Stieglitz who first championed O’Keeffe’s work, exhibiting her paintings in his New York art gallery
in 1916, months before he ever met her. The movie cuts back and forth between New York, where the couple lived for many years, and New Mexico. The production was shot entirely on location in and around Santa Fe, and Elliott’s familiarity with the region helped the team keep to its 20-day schedule. The filmmakers spent two days shooting in O’Keeffe’s former home in Abiquiu — the first time the Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation had ever granted permission to film there. The artist’s house looks out onto Perdernal Mountain, an image that figures prominently in many of her paintings. The magnificent mesa held a special attraction for her, and the telefilm opens with a pullback from the mountain, through an open window and into the house where O’Keeffe, now an old woman, stands at her easel. (Elliott initially planned to use a dolly for the pullback but couldn’t lay tracks in the historic structure, so he used a Steadicam instead.) Dozens of photos were taken of O’Keeffe in her house, and these provided a valuable visual reference for Elliott and the other department heads. Perhaps because she lived to age 98,
Georgia O’Keeffe photos by Richard Foreman, courtesy of Lifetime Television.
Aerial cinematography, captured by 17 pilots, also played a big role. Squires favors a Tyler Nose Mount for such work. “It’s really solid, almost bulletproof,” he says. “I love it for the sense it gives of moving through a landscape.” But in a Florentine first, some aerial shots were handheld. The first occurred in Alaska’s Kenai Fjords. “There was no specific plan to do aerials, but we’d brought along a Kenyon Gyrostabilizer,” recalls Squires. After noticing icebergs, the team hired a pilot with a Cessna 172. “She let me hop in the back, open the window and shoot for a couple hours.” Satisfied with the image quality, this became a low-cost option. “There are some advantages to handheld,” says Squires, citing flexibility of position and the ability to avoid landings for magazine changes. When he was aloft over Hawaii’s Volcanoes National Park, “we were probably running film at 32 or 36 fps, and you can’t just land on a lava field wherever you want!” Shooting handheld, he was able to capture many dramatic shots of molten lava spilling into the ocean as dusk faded. The personal pleasure of such moments was matched by the gratification of knowing that the team’s images would be preserved and shared. “If one is working literally and figuratively in the shadow of Ansel Adams, there’s an imperative to strive for extraordinary images,” says Squires. “Our job is to do justice to that land, to use the light to its best possible advantage, and to help our audience understand why John Muir, Teddy Roosevelt and so many others struggled to preserve this cornerstone of our heritage. If our images aren’t truly inspiring, then we will have failed to honor the legacy of all those who preceded us.”
Above: Alfred Stieglitz (Jeremy Irons) arranges to photograph O’Keeffe in their New York apartment. Right: After relocating to New Mexico, O’Keeffe finds inspiration in the skulls that litter the desert.
26 October 2009
many of these photos show an old woman with a stern expression and a deeply lined face. To accentuate the wrinkles for the opening shot, Elliott used three-quarter backlight, hidden just outside the open window, and avoided fill. He placed a second light source out the back window to create a shadow of an animal skull on the wall. The pullback demanded a radical shift in exposure as the camera moves from the bright desert exterior to the dark interior of the room, and Elliott notes this was one of many instances when shooting high-definition video paid off. “There was a pretty huge stop-pull,” he says. “Because I was standing at the monitor, I could see exactly what we were getting. I was changing the aperture remotely as the Steadicam moved around. On that shot, I believe we went from a T11 to a T2.8 or T4.” The production originally budgeted for a Sony HDW-F900, but Elliott believed Grass Valley’s Viper would suit the project better. “The F900 doesn’t have the same dynamic range, and I was concerned we wouldn’t be able to capture the New Mexico exteriors very well with it,” he says. “Furthermore, there’s something about the Viper’s image quality that’s very forgiving with faces. It’s sharp and clear, but not harsh. Sometimes HD can be too sharp and clear.” By calling in a few favors, Elliott was able to get the camera package (provided by Camera House in Los Angeles) at a reasonable rate. Most scenes were shot with two cameras because of the tight schedule, and Elliott kept a zoom lens on each camera, a Zeiss 6-24mm DigiZoom and an Angenieux Digital Optimo 9.7-116mm. (He used Zeiss DigiPrime lenses for some scenes.) Stieglitz relied on available light for his photography, eschewing flashes and other artificial lights. He did a famous series of nude photographs of O’Keeffe, and the only illumination in the room was usually the fireplace. The light level was so low that O’Keeffe would have to sit motionless for three minutes. This scene is recreated in Georgia O’Keeffe, with the fireplace behind Stieglitz, who is seated on the floor, facing the camera. O’Keeffe’s naked back is to the camera. “With HD,
Director Bob Balaban (left) discusses a shot with cinematographer Paul Elliott and Steadicam operator Beau Chaput.
we could almost have made the shot using just firelight,” notes Elliott. “The problem is that the flames get overexposed, so we put up a Chimera with a 2K Blonde behind it just off to the side of the fire. We put a honeycomb grid on it and dimmed it down to match the firelight.” A key aspect of Elliott’s visual approach was contrasting the warm,
hard light of New Mexico with the cool, soft light of Manhattan — or, in the New York art galleries, contrasting cool outdoor light with warm interior lighting. O’Keeffe and Stieglitz’s first meeting takes place inside his 291 Gallery. Period photos of the location revealed a skylight in the middle of the room and small tungsten ceiling lights illuminating individual paintings. “On an overcast
day in Manhattan, the light coming through the skylight would be cool, whereas the light from the tungsten fixtures would be warm,” says Elliott. “That allowed me to motivate the contrast. We did that a lot in New York scenes.” The gallery set was built in a garage on the grounds of an abandoned hospital. There wasn’t enough room to reproduce the skylight, so Elliott created one by pushing blue-gelled Kino Flos and several layers of 250 right up against the ceiling. Tungsten scoop lights, designed to match the originals, illuminated the paintings on the wall. The set for another New York art gallery was built inside the former hospital, allowing the filmmakers more space. “We were able to create larger skylights there, and we put one layer of diffusion right over the Kino Flo tubes, and then a second layer maybe 6 inches away,” recalls Elliott. “We were using 3200°K tubes, and we put 3⁄4 CTB on them.” In one art-gallery scene, O’Keeffe
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gets angry when she discovers that an exhibit consists exclusively of Stieglitz’s nude photos of her. She and Stieglitz go into the corridor to argue. It’s dusk, and the hallway is lined on one side with windows. “We hung about eight dimmed-down Schoolhouse globes from the ceiling to provide warm light, and we had cool light coming through tracing paper on the windows,” recalls Elliott. “We had to frost the windows because there were empty rooms on the other side of them.” The gallery scenes point up the only problem Elliott had with the Viper. “HD has much greater depth-of-field than 35mm, and I’m not keen on that. When you’re shooting in small rooms, you tend to be on wider lenses because you can’t back up, so you have too much depth-of-field. Assuming the actors weren’t moving around too much, I found I was able to defocus the background in post with Power Windows. That helped us separate the faces a bit more from the background.”
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Balaban likes to keep the camera moving, the cinematographer adds. “The camera is always drifting slowly — a gentle, subtle movement. Bob doesn’t care for handheld, so we were on a dolly or used a Steadicam most of the time.” Given the short shooting schedule, the toughest part of the project was simply doing justice to the subject. “It really helped that all of us were in sync,” says Elliott. “I had an exceptionally good relationship with Bob, Joan and Jeremy.” The cinematographer was also very pleased with his crew, most of whom were local hires. “Jim Tynes is one of the top gaffers, and we were lucky to have him,” he says. He also has high praise for production designer Steve Altman and makeup artist Dorothy J. Pearl. In the color-correction, which was done at LaserPacific, Elliott and colorist Tim Vincent “didn’t do anything radical,” says the cinematographer. “We evened things out shot-to-shot and
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played with the balance between the cool light and warm light in the New York scenes. We also warmed up the New Mexico sequences a bit.” The only time Elliott insisted on shooting at a particular time of day was for the movie’s final scene, which shows O’Keeffe walking in the hills behind her home. “I’ve spent a lot of time in that area and know that the light on those rocks changes throughout the day,” he says. “At a certain time of day, they really come alive, turning a rich red, and I knew it would be the perfect time to shoot that scene. We were able to wrap it up in 45 minutes.” TECHNICAL SPECS 16x9 High-Definition Video Grass Valley Viper Zeiss and Angenieux lenses I
24mm – 290mm
Pitch Perfect Christopher Manley, ASC discusses his Emmy-nominated work on Mad Men, the acclaimed period drama currently in its third season on AMC. by Rachael K. Bosley Unit photography by Carin Baer t’s 1963, and change is in the air at New York ad agency Sterling Cooper. Creative director/partner Don Draper (Jon Hamm) and his colleagues are adjusting to life under British rule, thanks to the recent sale of the company to an English firm, and the transition has not been easy. Layoffs have eliminated one-third
I 30 October 2009
of the staff, and the new chief financial officer, Englishman Lane Pryce (Jared Harris), has sent even bigger shockwaves through the bullpen by bringing along his male secretary, John Hooker (Ryan Cartwright), a first at Sterling Cooper. Meanwhile, Draper is anticipating upheaval in his domestic sphere as well: he and his
wife, Betty (January Jones), are expecting their third child, an unplanned pregnancy that hasn’t exactly saved the couple’s troubled marriage. That much was revealed in the first episode of Mad Men’s new season, which began airing on AMC in August and will continue through early November. When
Unit photos courtesy of AMC. Additional photos courtesy of Louie Escobar. DVD frames ©2008 Lions Gate Television. Used with permission.
AC visited the set of the secretive production, during the filming of episode six, only a few details in the scene at hand revealed additional information: Tiny British flags dotted every desk in the bullpen, suggesting that Sterling Cooper’s new owners had crossed the pond for a visit, and Cartwright was among the actors shedding his shoes to play a scene in Cooper’s office, indicating that his character had so far survived the “gynocracy” of his new environment. As 1st AD Adam Ben Frank marshaled the troops for director Lesli Linka Glatter, the show’s director of photography, Christopher Manley, ASC, used the short breaks between setups to point out some of the lighting changes he and his crew had made to the office set since he came aboard the production last year. “There’s a virtue to sticking with one show for a while, which is that you go into the specific problems of the photography really deeply, and you learn — you have to,” observes Manley, whose résumé includes ASC Award-nominated episodes of CSI:
NY and Threat Matrix. “It’s surprising, the things I’m still learning on this show.” A few weeks later, on the heels of the announcement that he had earned one of Mad Men’s 16 Emmy Award nominations for 2008, Manley met with AC to detail some aspects of that learning curve.
American Cinematographer: We should begin by talking about how you landed Mad Men. Was it something on your reel that caught [series creator] Matthew Weiner’s eye? Christopher Manley, ASC: I don’t remember discussing many specifics about my reel with Matt. I did hear him tell one of the actors
These pages show three scenes in this year’s first episode, “Out of Town.” Opposite: Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks, center) details which accounts have been assigned to Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser, foreground left) and Ken Cosgrove (Aaron Staton, foreground right), the new coheads of account services. New CFO Lane Pryce (Jared Harris, background right) and TVdepartment head Harry Crane (Rich Sommer, background left) devised the assignments. This page, top (from left): Burt Peterson (Michael Gaston), Pryce, Bert Cooper (Robert Morse) and Don Draper (Jon Hamm) react to Roger Sterling’s late arrival at a grim meeting — Peterson has just been laid off. Bottom: Crane, Campbell and Paul Kinsey (Michael Gladis) witness Peterson’s subsequent meltdown in the bullpen.
American Cinematographer 31
Pitch Perfect A striking scene in last year’s episode “The Benefactor,” showing Draper’s first meeting with Bobbie Barrett (Melinda McGraw), is echoed in this year’s “Out of Town,” which finds Draper up to his old tricks with a stewardess (Sunny Mabrey) while on business in Baltimore.
that when I came in to interview, he wanted to talk about my work, and all I wanted to talk about was Mad Men. I loved the show — I was a big fan of the writing in particular — and he saw how thrilled and excited I was at the prospect of shooting it. I think I had some support at AMC, too: Vlad Wolynetz, one of the executives who works on Mad Men, had worked on an AMC Halloween special I shot for Roger Corman early in my career, The Phantom Eye [1999]. It was aimed at kids, and I won a Daytime Emmy for it. When Vlad found out I was up for Mad Men, he said, ‘I know him.’ It’s remarkable how many filmmakers can trace their careers back to Corman. Manley: Yeah. I actually worked with [Mad Men gaffer] Mike Ambrose on my first movie with Corman, in 1997. What I learned at Corman was how to work faster and how much I could compromise my own standards. [Laughs] But that’s an important 32 October 2009
lesson to learn, because you have to make art on a budget. When we interviewed Phil Abraham about his cinematography on the pilot and first few episodes of Mad Men [AC March ’08], he described it as a twocamera show. Is that still the case? Manley: Not exactly. We use a B camera, but far less than other TV shows. It’s a single-camera mindset. That’s one of the things I like about the show, but it’s taken a bit of a mental adjustment because I’ve done so many shows that used two cameras on every single setup. Using two cameras always compromises composition, lighting and especially focal length — when you’re shooting with two cameras, you can never use the exact lens you want. On Mad Men, we like to use the right lens for the job and get one great shot instead of two compromised shots. It’s a commitment. You’re shooting on film, which goes against the trend in TV production today. Has anyone
Top photo by Louie Escobar.
talked to you about switching to digital capture? Manley: I don’t think shooting digitally has ever come up, and I don’t think it ever will. I think Matt will shoot film till they close the labs. You mentioned on set that you’ve modified the daylight lighting scheme outside Sterling Cooper’s windows. How have you done that? Manley: The Translite of the Manhattan skyline was a big addition in season two. In the first season, they used individual backdrops on rollers, moving them around depending on the shot, but last year Roscoe manufactured the Translite for us. It’s 180 feet long [and 18 feet tall], and it’s a day/night backing. For day scenes, we light it with 5K Skypans. There used to be an Arri T-12 over each window; they were used for sun in the first season, but we ended up using them just to suggest skylight last year, because we have so many low angles we can’t really get a sun source out of the shot. We tend to come in from the sides, off the floor. But I never quite liked what the T-12 did with the blinds; it made a specular highlight that would kind of give it away as a source in addition to our sun source. I wanted something that was broader and softer and felt more like skylight, so this year we’ve eliminated the T-12s and ringed the whole perimeter of the set with cyc strips gelled with ½ CTB and 250 diffusion. That gives us an even, soft source, and the reflection on the blinds is a solid line, more naturalistic. And it turned out to be less expensive, which is a bonus. You also noted that Pat O’Mara, your key grip, has customized a lot of gear for the show. What are some examples? Manley: We were using [Kino Flo] Image 80s for keylight
Top: Christopher Manley, ASC lines up a shot in the Sterling Cooper set. Keeping scenes visually interesting in the company’s conference room, pictured here in three scenes from season two, is a consistent challenge for Manley and his collaborators. “It’s the kind of set that calls out to be lit in one very specific way,” notes Manley. In the uppermost scene, a DVD frame grab, Draper, Cooper and Sterling (John Slattery) meet with the agency’s new English owners in “Meditations in an Emergency”; middle, Draper helps the team refine a campaign for Mohawk Airlines in “For Those Who Think Young”; bottom, Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss) and Campbell partake in a staff party in “The Inheritance.”
American Cinematographer 33
New Director Shapes “The New Girl” he New Girl,” which brought Christopher Manley, ASC his first primetime Emmy nomination, exhibits the kind of storytelling ambition Mad Men viewers have come to expect, offering visual grace notes that advance the story and reveal character — to the extent that any character on Mad Men is revealed. The episode’s director, Jennifer Getzinger, was new to the job but knew the show intimately because she had been its script supervisor for over a year, beginning with the pilot. “Jen understood how we shoot the show, what type of coverage we do and what’s required better than almost anyone; there was no gap between her vision and what the show should be,” says Manley. “The dialogue and performances are so great that we try not to pour camera sauce all over them. We maintain a transparent technique, and we only depart from that in private or transitional moments, when the camera briefly comes to the fore.” Manley is particularly pleased with two flashbacks that reveal what happened to Peggy (Elisabeth Moss) during her mysterious leave-ofabsence. Both sequences are introduced with elegant transitions that Getzinger and Manley worked out on set. In the first, the camera dollies down the hall toward Peggy’s bedroom, and she steps into the shot, walking just ahead of the camera. She enters the bedroom, turns to face the camera and closes the door; as the door closes, the shot dissolves to a window, and the camera drops down into a close-up of Peggy in a hospital bed, a scene that took place two years earlier. “Chris lit that so beautifully,” says Getzinger. “The room has a dark, musty feel, and it feels like the outside world is trying to push in through the window.” In the second sequence, Peggy sits on the sofa in her apartment and looks at an armchair across the
“T
Select DVD frames illustrate the transition to Peggy’s first flashback in “The New Girl,” which earned Manley an Emmy Award nomination.
34 October 2009
room, close to the camera. The camera dollies behind the chair and rises on a diagonal; as the chair’s dark shape fills the frame, the shot dissolves into a close-up of a person’s back, and the camera reaches the end of its diagonal move at the person’s shoulder, settling on an over-theshoulder of Peggy in the hospital bed. The next shot reveals her visitor: Don Draper (Jon Hamm). “The move had to be diagonal in order to come off Don’s back,” explains Getzinger. “We actually shot the second half of the move first, so when we shot the first half, it was a matter of finding the right diagonal to match.” Another noteworthy shot is a two-shot of Don and his wife (January Jones) that rolls focus from one to the other as he reveals a health problem to her. “That fell into place as we were shooting,” recalls Getzinger. “Racking back and forth like that can be too self-conscious, but in this instance it seemed to work in a natural way. Our great focus puller, Penny Sprague, knew exactly the right moment to roll from one actor to the other.” The episode also contains a oner involving Joan (Christina Hendricks) at the desk outside Don’s office and Don at his desk, framed in the doorway behind her. (See photos on opposite page.) Getzinger recalls, “I’d planned to do that scene in four or five shots, but we were behind, and the first AD said, ‘Can you do this in one shot?’ My first reaction was, ‘What?!’ But then Chris and I worked it out, and it plays really nicely.” “You wish you had all the time in the world, but you never do, and if you did, you’d cover every scene six ways to Sunday and it would all be dull,” says Manley. “But because we had to shoot that scene in 20 minutes, we found a creative way to make it more interesting.” — Rachael K. Bosley
in Sterling Cooper, and in prep for this season, I had Pat make some custom 3-by-5 gel frames, because last year we were always putting 4by frames in front of the Image 80s, and the shape wasn’t quite right. Then we decided to replace the Image 80s with [Kino Flo] Vista Beams, which are more powerful, and although the Vista Beams are square, I still find the 3by-5s useful — we’ll often put 4foot 4-bank Kinos through a 3-by-5 frame for fill lights or eyelights. Pat also made some 2by-6 gel frames that we use for diffusion, usually toppers or bottomers. He has 6-foot and 8foot teasers, ‘WagFlags,’ which are metal blades wrapped with black Rip-Stop nylon. You can unwrap them to make them small or large, and they’re so light you can extend one very far on a C-stand and cut the light without having to rig an overhead teaser from the grid with rope. [Ed. Note: For details on the original WagFlags, see “Tricks of the Trade,” AC July ’03.] Another trick of Pat’s is a scroll, a wooden dowel wrapped with black silk that you can unroll to any length; you can clip it to the back of a fluorescent with a grip clip and get the effect of the light while keeping light off the wall. All of Pat’s stuff is really quick and easy to use. Do you still use the magnetic solids and gel frames he devised to shape the overhead fluorescents in season one? Manley: They used those because they didn’t have individual control of all the fluorescents in Sterling Cooper in the first season, and even though we put all those lights on separate channels for season two, we still use the magnetic gels occasionally. Sometimes where the actor stops is a place that requires some kind of hairlight, but the light might be hitting her nose, too, so we’ll fasten a small magnetic triangle or
rectangle wherever we need it to shape the light. The conference room is used extensively, and a number of directors have talked about the challenges of staging scenes in there. What are some of the tricks you’ve used in that set? Manley: The conference room is difficult. It’s the kind of set that calls out to be lit in one very specific way: all the windows are on one side of the room, the table is always in the same place, and people are usually sitting around it in the same way. How do you make that new and different when you’ve already shot 25 or 30 scenes there? When you’re on a tight schedule, it’s very tempting to always do what you know has worked in the past because that will be faster than coming up with something new. You can very easily get trapped in a rut, but Mike Ambrose, Pat O’Mara and I talk all the time about the problems we tend to run into in each set, and we always try to find ways to do things better and more rapidly. There’s a big, frosted glass over the table in the conference room, and we always had Mighties up there, glowing it, but this year we added 8-foot and 4-foot fluorescents under the soffit. When it was just the Mighties, it was very toppy and a little sourcey, and we used it very sparingly, but with the fluorescents in the soffit, the toplight is actually very soft and amorphous, and you can’t tell where it’s coming from. This year we also have a lot of conference-room scenes in which people are using an overhead projector or looking at film — there are a lot of ‘lights on’ and In these DVD frames from the oner in “The New Girl,” the camera dollies in on a cluster of secretaries surrounding Joan, admiring her engagement ring. After taking a call for Draper, Joan shoos the women away and gets back to business.
American Cinematographer 35
Pitch Perfect
36 October 2009
Pitch Perfect The Drapers’ kitchen is another tricky set to light because of its small size. The top photo (a DVD frame grab), featuring Don and Betty (January Jones) in season two’s final scene, shows the standard nightlighting setup for the space. The other two photos, from this season’s first episode, depict unusual treatments of the set because they are Don’s flashbacks. In the middle photo, Abigail Whitman (Brynn Horrocks) delivers the latest in a series of stillborn babies. At bottom, Abigail’s husband, Archie (Joseph Culp), visits a prostitute (Kelly Huddleston), an encounter that leads to Dick Whitman’s conception.
38 October 2009
‘lights off ’ cues, which are always tricky and a little time-consuming. There’s a scene where Don and Peggy [Elisabeth Moss] are looking at film, and when Matt came down for that rehearsal, he said, ‘When they turn off the projector, I don’t want them to turn the lights on. I want this whole scene to be in the dark.’ It’s daytime, and the curtains and blinds are closed. What do you do? I thought if they were both near the windows, they could talk to each other without looking at each other, and Don could turn to Peggy just at the end, and it would be elegant and simple. So Peggy turns off the projector, and the only light in the room is the soft light from the glowing curtains [created with a 20K on a stand outside]. It’s actually one of my favorite scenes of the year so far. I get most excited when I’ve done something really simple that looks fantastic. Have you made any tweaks to the lighting in Don Draper’s house? Manley: We’ve re-rigged some China balls in the ceiling of each room to add room tone for certain situations. [See diagram on page 36.] They were rigged there in the first season, and Mike Ambrose said they never used them, so last year we didn’t put them in, and I found there were a few occasions where I wished we had some soft overhead ambience. They’re not one of our main tools in the house, but very often they’re the easiest way to add ambient fill. When you shoot on location, there’s always some bounce off the ceiling, but when you’re onstage and the ceiling is out, you have to create that soft, low-level, toplight ambience if you want to maintain a realistic look. We still use the Whiteys [batten strips with 100-watt household bulbs] that were rigged all over the house for season one. They’re a godsend, but I find the less I use
Pitch Perfect
In the oner in “Meditations in an Emergency,” a small dolly in on Don heightens the tension of the moment, which finds Don at a crossroads in his professional and personal lives while the Cuban missile crisis looms.
40 October 2009
them, the better the shot looks. I light the scene and then only start introducing Whiteys as the last step, when I need a little backlight or fill in a particular area. They only become key lights in big wide shots where we don’t have the room for anything else. Our key is usually a 20K or T-12 through the window for day scenes, and a Barger Baglite somewhere low, suggesting a practical lamp, for night. Are there areas of the house that are particularly challenging? Manley: The most difficult is the foyer, which is very confining and really feels like a location. The ceiling is very low there and doesn’t come out, and there’s a practical staircase just inside the front door, so for lighting we have to come from the stairwell upstairs, from the side rooms or through the front door. Also, the kitchen is a lot smaller than it looks on the screen. We have lights everywhere in there, but they’re never quite in the right place — we just don’t have the room — so we spend a lot of time wrestling with fixtures, trying to get them just outside frame. The kitchen is the setting for the flashback sequence that opens the first episode of this season, when Don envisions the circumstances surrounding his birth. How did you and [director] Phil Abraham work out the staging of those scenes? Manley: I think Mad Men has always taken a creative approach to flashbacks, going back to the first one in season one [in ‘Babylon’], when Don falls down the stairs at home and flashes back to the birth of his brother. When I read the script for this season’s first episode, I tried to think of movies that had done flashbacks in elegant, organic ways, and I came up with 8½, Lone Star and Girl, Interrupted. We mixed some of the visual and aural techniques used in
those movies. Do you often reference films when you’re devising an approach to a scene? Manley: Matt and the directors will often come to me with movie references. They’ll say, ‘For this episode, you should look at La Notte’ or ‘… Bye Bye Birdie,’ and then, when I read the script, I understand why. Matt is a huge film buff. I worked as a projectionist in revival houses in Philly for several years, so I’ve seen more than most people, but he’ll sometimes reference films I’ve never heard of. Is he often specific about how a given scene should be lit? Manley: I get notes from [coexecutive producer] Scott Hornbacher and the directors, and sometimes from Matt, about how certain scenes should look or feel. Matt can get very specific, and the more specific he is, the further I can push something. If he says, ‘This scene needs to be very dark — there’s no light on in the house,’ I know exactly where to go. I don’t have to wonder whether ‘very dark’ means a little moonlight is filtering in or a practical lamp is on in the corner. Sometimes a script will say, ‘It’s very, very dark,’ and I have to ask people, ‘How dark is that?’ There’s ‘very, very dark,’ and there’s ‘You’re fired.’ [Laughs] I also have to have a lot of discussions about time-of-day lighting. For instance, recently there was a scene described as ‘night’ that took place in late June, so I had to clarify whether it was 9 p.m. night or 7:30 p.m. night, because it’s still light out in New York in late June at 7:30. The assistant directors always print out a one-line, a list of all the scenes in continuity, and I use that as a color and lighting reference. I also get a lot of help from the script supervisor, Kelly Leffler, and there’s always at least one writer on the set who can help us resolve [time-of-day] questions. Sometimes we’ll throw
Photo by Louie Escobar.
During production on season two, Mad Men creator/executive producer Matthew Weiner (right) entertains Manley with a story. At left is 2nd 2nd AD Jonathon Miller.
scene can be twilight instead of night; sometimes it would just look better to glow the windows soft blue instead of having it be night, with nothing out there. Did you learn anything new about Matt’s process when he directed an episode last year? Manley: Before we worked together on that episode [‘Meditations in an Emergency’], I had a lot of preconceptions about what his tastes were, based on what other people were telling me, but I found him to be far more openminded and flexible about visuals than I understood he was. It was a relief to know that the rules, so to speak, of the visual language of the show are not completely hard and fast. Matt’s very intuitive, and he’s open to breaking those rules if it works and it’s interesting. Can you give us an example of that? Manley: There’s a shot in the bullpen toward the end of ‘Meditations’ when Don and Joan have a dialogue at her desk and she retrieves his coat and briefcase. It’s the Cuban missile crisis, and it looks like Don might be quitting his job. It’s a very tense moment, and we found a way to block it and a dolly move that made the scene
into a oner that was kind of elegant and had the right energy. We sometimes do oners on the show, but rarely; most directors feel they need to cover themselves enough to create options in the edit. But Matt’s the boss, so if he loves it, we go for it. Another visual departure that comes to mind is the shot in ‘The Jet Set’ when Don faints in Palm Springs, and the camera assumes his point of view as he falls to the ground. How did you do that? Manley: Yeah, there was a lot of debate about whether that shot fit the visual vocabulary of the show, and I think people are still split on it. That was a Doggicam body-rig. We’ve done a similar shot this year, and it works really well. Like I said, we have a lot of rules, but they’re all meant to be broken eventually. Does that mean we might see a Steadicam shot one day? Manley: We’ve never had a Steadicam on our set, and I don’t think we ever will. Unless the storyline goes into the late 1970s? Manley: Right. Maybe then! With all the unusual colors and textures in the wardrobe, do 41
Mad Men is often hailed as a great drama, but it contains great comedy, too, and there’s a reason for that. “Matt’s a comedian,” says Manley. “He’s very, very funny — probably the funniest person I know.”
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and textures in the wardrobe, do you ever shoot wardrobe tests? Manley: Occasionally we’ll have B camera test something a few days ahead of time, but very rarely. [Costume designer] Janie Bryant and her team will often come to me with different weaves, different tweeds for the suits, and ask, ‘Will this moiré?’ I tell them they should
use what they want, and if there’s a problem, we’ll fix it. Whether something will moiré depends on so many different factors, including the fabric and the scale of the shot, that I don’t want to eliminate a whole range of material simply because it might happen. Also, people are seeing Mad Men in a lot of different ways — AMC’s signal is standard-definition, but some people watch the show on HD On Demand, which is a whole other world of sharpness and detail. When I started watching the first season, I got it on iTunes. I don’t think we’ve had many moiré problems, and some of them can be fixed in post. Have you made any changes to your post process this year? Manley: We’re using the same team we used last season, [dailies colorist] Mace Johnson and [final colorist] Tim Vincent at
LaserPacific, but we’re doing better now because we’ve all become attuned to what Matt likes and doesn’t like. Last year, I’d shoot onset gray scales and reference stills and e-mail them to Mace, and when I had time, I’d pop in to watch the final and give Tim notes, and then Matt would come in for the review and change a lot of things. His changes weren’t for the worse or for the better; he just had a different idea about how the show should look. How would you describe the look he’s after? Manley: He wants natural skin tones whenever possible, and he wants to feel the warmth in the wood at Sterling Cooper. There are a lot of warm tones, and a lot of middle tones and neutral tones, too. It’s a fluorescent environment, and the fluorescents are colorcorrect, but they’re still slightly
Photo by Louie Escobar.
Pitch Perfect
cool compared to tungsten, and that tends to dull the wood. When you think about it, letting fluorescents be cool or be green in photography is a very recent idea. I came up in the late ’80s-early ’90s, when cyan became really fashionable for a while, and that affects my taste and my perception of the world and photography. But Matt is steeped in the late ’50s-early ’60s, and keeping the light clean and white is more reminiscent of movies of that era, when [cinematographers] tried to balance everything all the time. So this year, I’m shooting my gray scales differently. We’re keeping the green level consistent so that when we add or alter green or magenta, there aren’t a lot of shifts in skin tones, lipstick or hair. Our actors have many different skin tones, and there’s a variety of color in the women’s wardrobe, hair and makeup, and
the more we wrestle that colorcorrected image, the more strange artifacts and color shifts arise that make it harder for Tim to arrive at his final, matching color. This year, between the adjustments I’ve made on set, the adjustments Mace has made in dailies, and Tim’s understanding of what Matt likes, we’re all much closer [to the final] much more quickly than we were last year. Apart from the period angle, are there aspects of Mad Men that make this experience different from the other series you’ve shot? Manley: We have less money than a lot of the other shows I’ve done, yet the show is still fairly ambitious. Overall, the challenges are similar. Shooting episodic television is a real marathon, and the schedule just kind of washes over you and becomes your life. It’s very
easy to get discouraged, but with Mad Men I don’t. This is the first time I’ve done two seasons of any show. I’ve done some good shows, but nothing this good. The quality of the writing is fantastic, and that keeps me excited about every episode. It’s rewarding to come to work and feel like I’m involved in creating great drama. I
TECHNICAL SPECS 1.78:1 3-perf 35mm Panaflex Platinum Primo lenses Kodak Vision2 250D 5205, Vision3 500T 5219
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Hard Time Larry Smith, BSC creates surreal ambience and unusual lighting schemes for Nicolas Winding Refn’s baroque prison drama Bronson. by Stephen Pizzello Unit photography by Dean Rogers and Chris Harris
44 October 2009
f Kenneth Anger were sentenced to hard time in a maximumsecurity prison run by Stanley Kubrick, his incarceration might look a lot like Nicolas Winding Refn’s Bronson, a surreal head trip that takes viewers deep inside the disturbed mind of a “lifer” who spends most of his days in solitary confinement. Prone to bizarre, grandiose fantasies, the inmate (Tom Hardy) rarely mingles with fellow prisoners or society at large, and on the rare occasions when he does, the result is more than a little of “the old ultraviolence.” Bronson’s plot is loosely based on the real-life exploits of Michael Peterson, who has developed a cult following since branding himself the most violent prisoner in England. After attempting
I
to rob a post office in 1974, at the age of 19, Peterson was sentenced to seven years in prison, but he has since seen his punishment extended to 34 years (30 in solitary confinement) after repeated run-ins with other inmates and prison staff and a two-day rooftop protest at Broadmoor Prison that caused approximately $1 million in damages. Prior to his long stretch in jail, Peterson had a brief career as a bareknuckle boxer in London’s East End; he has claimed that a fight promoter changed his name to Bronson, and that his new moniker has nothing to do with the American actor of Death Wish fame. (This assertion seems dubious coming from a man who has cagily cultivated his own celebrity.) Peterson’s obsession with
Photos courtesy of Magnet Releasing and Vertigo Films.
fame — and his creation of a colorful alter ego to help him achieve it — is the true focus of Bronson, according to Refn. “Working from the original material about him that he and other people had written, I deleted all story and just decided to make a film about a man who sees himself as someone else,” explains the director, who cowrote the screenplay with Brock Norman Brock. “Bronson is not really a biopic about Michael Peterson; it’s about the concept of
him becoming ‘Charles Bronson.’ Some of the things that happen in the movie actually happened in real life, but I took artistic license in terms of how I portrayed him and the people in his world. I structured the film very much like a circus, so all the characters around him are very theatrical. I wanted to mix the flamboyant cultures of homosexuality and crime, which really intermingled in the U.K. during the Swinging Sixties. The Bronson character is almost like a
toy soldier from that era, when Britain was still an empire and everyone had a stiff upper lip. “Bronson is probably the most autobiographical film I’ve made,” adds Refn, whose credits include the Pusher trilogy. “It’s right there in the opening line: ‘My name’s Charles Bronson, and all my life I’ve wanted to be famous.’ I probably said the same thing a million times when I was 18. The film is ultimately about an individual’s different views of himself, from the
Opposite page: England’s most violent inmate, Michael Peterson — a.k.a. Charles Bronson (Tom Hardy) — prepares for another battle with prison guards. This page, top: Cinematographer Larry Smith, BSC lit the cage scene with redgelled Dedolights and a 2-by-4 Kino Flo bank positioned overhead. Bottom left: “Nothing closer to my heart than a good cup of British cha.” Director Nicolas Winding Refn coaches Hardy on the proper way to serve tea in the slammer. Bottom right: Smith finds himself in the spotlight.
American Cinematographer 45
Hard Time Top left: After constantly shuttling between different prisons, Bronson is escorted to yet another cell — or, as he refers to it, “my hotel room.” All of the film’s prison scenes were shot at an architecturally eccentric estate in Nottingham, 120 miles north of London. Refn notes, “I asked our location people to find an old estate, a Gothic building. I said, ‘If we can’t use an actual prison, then the movie will be about the concept of incarceration.’ We used all the rooms to create the various parts of his world.” Top right: Bronson whiles away endless hours on his bunk. “We didn’t have removable walls in most of our sets, so in the cages and cells we either shot from overhead or tried to emphasize the claustrophobic feeling,” says Smith. Bottom: Bronson is eventually transferred to a maximum-security prison whose hard-nut warden (Jonny Phillips, left) is determined to break his spirit. “Bronson’s real offense is that he’s embarrassed the government, and you’re not allowed to do that in England,” Smith says. “Some of those old institutions he’s done time in are a nightmare. Nobody knows what goes on in those places.”
46 October 2009
perspective of his multiple personalities; it can also be seen as an allegory about an artist searching for a space in which to perform. Bronson tries many different things before he puts down his fists and takes up the paintbrush and pen. That’s when he truly becomes the flamboyant persona who’s so famous in the U.K.” Refn’s background in lowbudget filmmaking prepared him well for the rigors of Bronson, which was shot in five weeks for roughly $1 million. The director gained his reputation as a “bad boy
of Danish cinema” with the three Pusher films, which interweave the lives of several drug dealers who operate at different levels in Copenhagen’s criminal underworld. (All three features were shot by Morten Søborg.) Prior to completing the second and third Pusher films, Refn traveled to Winnipeg, Canada, to direct Fear X (2003), his first collaboration with cinematographer Larry Smith, BSC. A longtime fan of Kubrick’s films, Refn was thrilled to work with Smith, who had served as chief electrician on Barry
Lyndon (AC March ’76), gaffer on The Shining (AC Aug. ’80) and lighting cameraman on Eyes Wide Shut (AC Oct. ’99). “The first time I became aware of lighting was when my mother and I were watching The Shining on television many years ago,” Refn says. “It was the scene where Jack Nicholson is sitting at the bar in the Overlook Hotel. He’s speaking to the bartender, who is off camera, and a light is hitting his face from underneath. My mother said, ‘My God, that’s incredible lighting.’ Larry helped design the lighting for that scene, so it’s almost like our collaboration was somehow meant to happen.” “I got the job on Fear X through a producer Nicolas and I both knew,” says Smith. “That was my first association with Nicolas, and we got on really well. We have a lot of laughs on set, and he gives me all the freedom I need. It’s a throwback to the old days when directors directed, actors acted and cinematographers handled all the photographic duties. Nowadays, directors who are happy to work that way are rare, especially if they’re young.” Bronson’s modest budget led the filmmakers to shoot in Super 16mm, and “we didn’t try to pass it
off as another format,” Refn asserts. “The visuals in Bronson are very aesthetically oriented and designed, and Super 16’s harsh, grainy look created an interesting contrast with that.” Smith says he would have preferred to shoot on 35mm, but he notes that his approach to composition — expansive framing achieved with very wide lenses — lends the film a “guerrilla grandeur” that matches the scope of Bronson’s fantasies. The cinematographer recalls, “At one point, I told [production designer] Adrian Smith, ‘I was looking at this whole production a bit skeptically because of the lack of money, but somehow, it works.’ And he replied, ‘I was thinking the same thing.’ Of course, I would still rather have shot the movie in 35mm, mainly because you have more lens choices, especially with faster lenses. When you’re using the wide-angle 16mm lenses, you just can’t get down to a stop of T1.3 or T1.4 — you’re stuck at T2, and you’re struggling at that stop. The average stop on this film was about T2, and sometimes I was pushing a bit to get under that. “On this show, we had an Arri 416 and a spare that we used occasionally. We were on a very tight budget, so we used one film stock, Kodak’s [Vision2 500T] 7218, for almost everything. I tried to get Vision3 [7219], which had just come out, because I felt it would help with the grain structure of 16mm, but our budget wouldn’t allow it. We only changed stock a couple of times, mainly for the greenscreen material we shot in the theater where Bronson performs for an imaginary audience. We shot those on 35mm, using 5218. “I like wide-angle lenses, and I used them all the time on Bronson — 5.5mm, 8mm, 9.5mm and 12mm,” Smith continues. “We primarily used Zeiss Ultra 16 lenses, but we also had a Super Optex 5.5mm lens that was really good. ¢
Top: Patients in a lunatic asylum wander aimlessly through the ward. These scenes were shot in the Nottingham estate’s underground ballroom, where Smith controlled the lighting via domed skylights in the ceiling. Bottom: After being transferred to the psych ward, Bronson prepares to attack another inmate.
American Cinematographer 47
Hard Time Top: Refn and Hardy rehearse the scene in which a jaunty Bronson is declared sane and released from prison. Middle: While searching for a way to make cash on the outside, Bronson runs into his flamboyant prison associate, Paul Daniels (Matt King), who offers to arrange fights for him on the bareknuckleboxing circuit. “The strip club where they meet up again was actually one of my favorite locations,” says Smith. “There were no windows, and it was supposed to be nighttime inside the club. I used a bit of bar light and local light, and I hung some mirror balls from the ceiling. Believe it or not, I lit the club mostly with Dedolights bouncing off the mirror balls; I may have used the odd 1K or 2K here and there, but not much more than that. Dedos work really well in that kind of lowlight situation. I put blue gels on them to get that deep-blue color.” Bottom: During his brief stint as a free man, Bronson strikes up an awkward romance with the sultry but fickle Alison (Juliet Oldfield).
48 October 2009
When I’m shooting 35mm, I’m a great fan of the 18mm focal length, so when I’m shooting 16mm, I tend to stay around [the equivalent of] that length. There’s not much longlens stuff in this movie; I had a long lens when we were covering the fight scenes with two cameras, but we still stayed pretty wide. I’m not a fan of shooting on lenses so long that you can’t see the set.” Refn concurs: “I usually prefer wide-angle lenses because I like to see what’s behind the characters. But I don’t like it when things become distorted, so there’s a very fine balance with wide-angle lenses. I like to have a sense of depth, but within the bounds of reality.” In keeping with his preferred method, Refn shot Bronson in chronological order. “If you shoot in story order, you have a much better overview, and you can see the film progress in front of you,” he maintains. “The film was very improvisational because I was searching for its meaning as we were making it. We actually reshot 40 percent of the movie within our five-week schedule because it kept changing as we went along.” Some of that flexibility sprang from the fact that approximately 80 percent of the movie was shot at one location: a rambling, architecturally eccentric estate in Nottingham, in the heart of England’s East Midlands. Smith notes, “The real Peterson/Bronson is a hot potato in England. Nobody wants to speak about him, and none of the prisons would allow us access, but our location scouts found a bizarre mansion that’s been owned by rich aristocrats over the years. It’s fallen into disrepair, but it has corridors that are very similar to corridors you’d see in institutions. The corridors did need work, but they didn’t need a lot of distressing. They looked pretty good if we just added lines and markings on the floors and walls and some
prison bars to top things off. The production-design budget was very small, but Adrian did a brilliant job. I didn’t have very much money in my department, but he had even less.” The movie’s dungeon-like settings were fashioned from the estate’s warren of hallways, tunnels and rooms, which included a large, underground ballroom. Refn notes, “The estate was built by a man who was physically deformed. He didn’t like people to see him, so everything was built underground. It’s enormous. The rumor was that some of the tunnels went so far you could actually follow them all the way to London!” Bronson is first shown standing naked in a metal cage, balling his fists and bouncing on his feet as he awaits the arrival of guards. Bathed in deep-red lighting, he cuts a hellish, intimidating figure; strategically positioned toplight sharply defines his baldpate and rippling muscles. “The cage was set up in an old armory on the estate,” Smith says. “It was actually a cage within a larger cage, and it was built out of metal mesh. I told Adrian I wanted to stage the scene in a way that would make the viewer feel as if he’s right inside the cage. We didn’t have removable walls in most of our sets, so in the cages and cells we either shot from overhead or tried to emphasize the claustrophobic feeling. To light that first view of Bronson, I used just six 150-watt Dedolights with heavy red gel on them. When the guards came in, I added one 2-by-4 Kino Flo bank overhead.” Minimalist lighting and bold hues prevail in many of the film’s key scenes. Refn, who is color blind, says he can “only react to really diverse colors,” but that Smith’s lighting style has a “magical sensuousness” he appreciates. “The contrast in his lighting is something I really respond to. In Eyes Wide
Top: Smith’s mixed lighting lends a flashy look to a fightclub scene in which Daniels watches his man in action. Middle: Bronson exults after dispatching his opponents. Smith’s crew hung mushroom lamps to illuminate the foreground; to add visual interest to the background, the cinematographer blasted uncorrected HMIs through extractor fans on the side wall. Bottom: Bronson prepares to battle dogs in a Nissen hut. Smith’s minimalist lighting was hardly enough to warm the movie’s star, who toughed out the shoot in frigid conditions. “I can’t think of many other actors who would endure what Tom Hardy did on this show,” the cinematographer marvels. “The places we were shooting in, during winter in the north of England, were absolutely freezing. I had every layer of clothing on you could imagine, but I was still cold. And I have to tell you, Tom never complained, and he was lineperfect. It’s amazing to me that he was able to think straight.”
American Cinematographer 49
Hard Time Left: A young Peterson launches his life of crime in one of the film’s flashback sequences. “I used filters as much as possible for the flashbacks,” says Smith. “I created the look entirely in camera, using very saturated tobacco filters. The filters I used are some of my own that I had made up years ago; I very rarely use them because they’re too saturated. They went wrong, basically, but I kept them anyway — some are on the light side, with almost nothing on them, and some have too much coloring. Occasionally you just pull something out of the kit and it works for you.” Middle: Toplight emphasizes the brawler’s muscular physique. Right: Bronson entertains an appreciative audience in the theater of his mind.
50 October 2009
Shut, he was able to make the main character’s everyday life look mystical. I would almost say Larry is the lighting-cameraman version of [French director] Jacques Tourneur, who always worked within the realms of reality — everything was suggested rather than seen. Larry’s lighting creates that same sensation.” Addressing his general approach, Smith offers, “I prefer to see the sets and let those spaces dictate how the lighting will be, not the other way around. I don’t premeditate how a scene will look because until I’ve seen the set, I don’t know! The set is like a voice, and it tells you something. On Bronson, I looked at my time constraints, I looked at the lights that were already in place at the location, and I looked at how we could make a couple of the scenes a bit more stylized, and I basically just mixed it up like that. I was always conscious of not spending too much time lighting things because we were on such a tight schedule. Direct Lighting really helped us out by donating equipment to our cause.” Smith’s stylized approach is typified by a courtroom scene in
which Bronson is sentenced. The cinematographer applied cold, blue lighting leavened with arch framing and aggressive dolly moves to lend the moment a droll humor. He explains, “That scene was done in a wing of the estate where people actually live. Funnily enough, it felt like a courtroom — that estate literally has everything you need if you’re creative with it! We couldn’t prelight everything for the courtroom scene, but I had an idea of what I wanted to do. The room was on the north side of the house, which meant if I put a light through the window, I’d have control of it; the sun wouldn’t constantly be coming in and out. We used a single source: an 18K HMI outside the window. I kept it very blue and cold because I wanted to give every scene its own personality. I didn’t filter the lens for that one, and in the digital grade I kept everything uncorrected. “We only had half a day to do the courtroom stuff, but we covered it pretty well and just tried to make it look interesting,” he adds. “I wasn’t sure what kind of film it would be — whether people would love it or hate it — but we were def-
initely trying to make it stand out.” For a sequence in which Bronson is transferred from prison to a psychiatric ward, the filmmakers took full advantage of the estate’s underground ballroom, which had originally been designed as a passageway for horse-drawn stagecoaches. “The ballroom has three large, dome-shaped skylights built into a garden aboveground, so all the light was actually coming in from those domes,” says Smith. “I didn’t have a lighting package or even a tie-in to help me deal with the ballroom in any way. Sure enough, when it came time to shoot that sequence, it was a very windy, sunny day, so the clouds were coming in and going out — the exposure was up and down all the time. So I just worked in reverse: we covered two of the domes and used the middle dome for lighting, and we hung a big 18K above it and blacked out the rest so we’d have some control over the ballroom interior, which was about 150 feet long and 80 feet wide. “A space like that is a nightmare if you don’t have the budget to light it properly, so you have to be creative and find a way to make
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Hard Time
Top left: After taking his art teacher hostage, Bronson fashions an eccentric costume for the ensuing torture session and his inevitable battle with guards. “When he was getting ready to have a fight, Bronson was like a warrior, an African chief,” Smith says. “He realized if he was naked and greased up, the guards couldn’t get a grip on him — he could hurt more of them because the fight would last longer. He started out with cooking lard he stole from the kitchen and later added boot polish as well.” Top right: Bronson’s artistic mentor (James Lance) is lashed to a column and decorated to resemble a perverse Magritte. The prison art room was one of the few sets where Smith moved a wall to accommodate the camera. Bottom: Bronson ascends the room’s staircase to shout his demands to the warden. 52 October 2009
it look interesting. Luckily, because the roof was at ground level, I could send the crew guys up there with sandbags and loads of black plastic to just throw over the domes. The wind caused the plastic to fly off occasionally, but generally speaking, it held up for the day. “When it got to be nighttime, we shot a rather unhinged
disco scene with all the patients dancing about. We just positioned a bunch of Dedolights on stands, as if they’d created their own discotheque in the ward. I must say, that bit has a weird kind of realism!” Offbeat ambience enhances other settings, including a theater where Bronson imagines himself performing vaudeville-style routines for an imaginary audience
while dressed in elaborate makeup and a natty suit. “We shot those sequences in an old, abandoned theater, so we had to get the place up and running again,” says Smith. “It was a beautiful theater, and in many ways it was a joy to shoot there. But it had no heat, and most of the old lightbulbs weren’t working. We changed as many of those as we could, but we didn’t have
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Hard Time Top: Refn, who cites Stanley Kubrick and Kenneth Anger as key influences, has a captive audience while inspecting a set built in one of the rooms at the Nottingham estate. Bottom: Bronson peers out from his cage with cheerful defiance. “Obviously, he must be crazy after spending so much time in solitary, but this guy isn’t your typical madman who goes into prison,” says Smith. “He isn’t a career criminal who’s murdered, raped or pillaged. He likes being in prison — he feels it’s his stage.”
54 October 2009
time to rewire the ones that were completely out, so there’s probably a light out here and there in the actual scenes! I used a follow spot to light Tom on the stage. Originally there was greenscreen behind him that we used to project a series of photographs, but at some point we decided that wasn’t very interesting. For his first monologue, when he’s wearing his prison garb, I used a bluish follow spot aimed through some prison bars we’d used on our other sets. It creates only a vague impression of prison bars, but it adds something extra to the look. “We had a very small audience for the theater scenes, so we put most of our extras in the front rows and filled out the crowd with dummies that looked like people. We dressed all the dummies, but they still didn’t look too real, so I crushed the look down and kept the lights off the audience to create a kind of surreal atmosphere. I tried to make it feel as if you’re looking through this gloom and can’t really tell what’s there. If you watch the movie closely, even through the gloom you’ll notice that when the audience is clapping, there’s not much movement at the back!” Most of the fight scenes in Bronson were covered with a handheld camera by operator Bob Binnall. “We didn’t use a Steadicam because we couldn’t afford one,” notes Smith. “The rest of the camera moves were done with tracks or dollies. For some situations, we just put the camera on the ground, stabilized it with a sandbag and then moved it around.” Bronson’s brawling continues when he is released from prison; the authorities are so fed up with his violent shenanigans that they have him declared sane. He is free for just two months before he deliberately commits a crime to get himself thrown back
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Hard Time
Bronson offers authorities an obscene salute from a prison rooftop after escaping his cell to stage a protest.
56
in the slammer. During his time on the outside, however, his escapades are just as outrageous. Striking up an awkward romance with the sultry, fickle Alison (Juliet Oldfield), he re-establishes contact with a flamboyantly homosexual associate from his prison days, Paul Daniels (Matt King), who offers to arrange fights for him on the underground circuit. Bronson soon finds himself taking on all comers in a series of seedy, backwater venues. In the first of these sequences, which are tied together as a montage, Bronson pummels a middle-aged opponent who eventually succumbs under a series of heavy blows. “That fight was shot in an old barn on the estate,” Smith says. “We were originally going to shoot in a bigger, more dilapidated barn that was just opposite the one we used, but when we got in there, we discovered a lot of asbestos. So
we moved into the little barn, and in a way, the smaller size helped, because it tightened the whole scene up. The small barn had a few natural windows, so I just aimed a few HMIs through them, added a bit of smoke inside and let the interior take care of itself.” A second matchup was staged on another part of the estate, in an old shooting range with very few windows. In his struggle to create an interesting look, Smith had his electricians hang some mushroom-shaped lamps to illuminate the foreground action, then turned his attention to some extractor fans high up on a wall in the background. “I wanted to create some depth for the background, so we took the covers off the extractors to expose the fan wheels and aimed some HMIs through one or two of those. That gave the background lighting some shape. We used
uncorrected HMIs with our tungsten film, so they went blue quite naturally. I also added some red light to the scene. In the timing process, you sometimes tend to do a 50-50 grade, so you end up adding a bit of warmth to the blue and vice versa. But in this case, I specifically told the lead timer, Bernie Greiner at the Post Republic, not to do that.” The climax of the montage finds Bronson battling dogs in a Nissen hut, a variation of the Quonset hut. “It’s basically a Ushaped hut made from corrugated steel, with a transparent ceiling that’s like a plastic skylight,” Smith explains. “By the time we got to that scene, it was night, and I had no light. We simply positioned an 18K as high as we could at one end of the building and shone it through the skylight. Apart from that, we aimed some smaller lights through
some broken portions of the back wall; the thugs and dogs were lined up back there, but you could tell it was dark outside, so I just fired a few lamps through the openings. I think I also added some smoke or atmosphere to make everything look a bit surreal. There’s no manual for that type of situation!” Bronson generated buzz at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and became a hot topic with English reviewers upon its U.K. release last spring. At the premiere screening in England, attendees were surprised to hear an audio greeting from the real Bronson, who taped his comments surreptitiously and had an associate smuggle the recording out of prison. Reminiscing about the premiere with a wry laugh, Smith recalls, “His message was a bit rambling. A lot of Bronson’s family was at the premiere, and many of the ‘wise
boys’ from the London underworld showed up. It was like a scene out of GoodFellas! The next day, some of the papers gave it very good reviews, and others panned it. People are basically in one of two camps: they love it or hate it.” I
TECHNICAL SPECS 1.85:1 Super 16mm, Super 35mm Arri 416, Arricam Zeiss Ultra 16, Arri Master Prime and Super Optex lenses Kodak Vision2 500T 7218/5218 Digital Intermediate Printed on Kodak Vision 2383
57
A Lyrical Love
Director of photography Greig Fraser turns to poetry for inspiration for Bright Star, which depicts the intense, short-lived romance between John Keats and the girl next door. by Rachael K. Bosley Unit photography by Laurie Sparham teenaged girl sits alone on the bed in her room, facing a window that offers a view of a brilliant summer afternoon. Deep in the throes of her first romance, she doesn’t see the day as much as feel it, basking in the warmth and light as she silently savors thoughts of her new beau. A puff of wind suddenly flutters the curtains, and she lies back, letting the breeze waft over her. Comprising a single shot, it’s the kind of quiet moment that wouldn’t play out in many movies, but the film at hand is Jane Campion’s Bright Star, which
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58 October 2009
chronicles the romance between Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish) and John Keats (Ben Whishaw), one of the great Romantic poets. The film’s cinematographer, Greig Fraser, calls Campion’s mandate to “find the images in the poetry” one of the biggest challenges he has confronted in his career thus far. “Understanding Keats’ poetry was like learning how to read again,” he says. “I tried to come to a good understanding of not only what was being said, but also the colors those words conjured up and what those combinations of words were saying to me. I read the script, studied some
of Keats’ poetry, read more about him and then read the script again, and it felt really fulsome.” Fraser, who recently moved to Los Angeles from his native Australia, has worked steadily on commercials, short films and music videos since he segued from commercial stills photography to cinematography a decade ago. Bright Star is one of three features he shot last year; the others were Scott Hicks’ Boys Are Back, currently in release, and Glendyn Ivin’s Last Ride. American Cinematographer: You shot two short films for Jane Campion before making Bright
Frame grabs/photos courtesy of Apparition. Photo of Fraser by Clea Cregan.
Star. What are some qualities that distinguish her from other directors you’ve worked with? Greig Fraser: I first worked with Jane on the short The Water Diary [2006], and it was one of the nicest experiences I’d had on a shoot up to that point. We all strive to get the most out of our 10 hours, but that was the first shoot I worked on where the goal was to get the best out of the 10 hours. It was a revelation to me that things aren’t always done better faster. It’s important to not only work quickly but also do things with integrity. Jane has a very strong visual style, but she always wants the visual to support what’s going on with the characters. The actors’ comfort with the camera is her top priority, and that influences everything, even the choice of crew. I was lucky to have a lot of prep time for Bright Star, and I cast my crew in London, knowing what Jane is like — she doesn’t like to have big personalities around the camera. I met with a lot of gaffers and grips, and I cast people who would not only do
well technically but also give Jane the space she needed: [1st AC] Simon Tindall, [2nd AC] Henry Landgrebe, [key grip] Gary Hutchings and [gaffer] Mark Clayton. What else did you focus on in prep? Fraser: When I first arrived in London, Jane and I spent two weeks going through the script and blocking every scene. When you don’t have the actors or the location or even an idea of the physical space, that can be a very trying process; you’re basically guessing what the actors will do in what you think the space will be. But I think that process gave us both a sense of comfort because, at the end of it, we knew we had the skeleton of what we needed to do. Even if it all changed on the day — and it did — we knew we were going in prepared. Also, as soon as I arrived in England, I realized I had no understanding of how the light worked there, so every morning during prep, I went out with a stills camera and a film camera to just see what happened as the day devel-
oped. The light is beautiful and soft, totally different from Australia. In Australia, it feels as though the sun is almost burning you, but when the sun comes out in England, it feels like something growing. I wanted to try to express that visually. All of the shots I filmed during prep were widescreen [2.35:1] because Jane and I were both adamant that it was the best format for the movie, but when we projected the wardrobe and makeup tests, we instantly realized it wasn’t right. As soon as we
Opposite: Neighbors John Keats (Ben Whishaw) and Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish) discover that their bedrooms share a wall. This page, top: The happy couple savors every minute together. Below: Director of photography Greig Fraser (pictured on another project). “When Jane [Campion] sent me the script, she talked about not referencing images, but about trying to find the images in the poetry,” he recalls. “That was a huge part of the project’s appeal. I’ve never had a love of period dramas as such, but I’m a firm believer that words, particularly poetry, can change perceptions. You can see the world differently.”
American Cinematographer 59
A Lyrical Love Top: Fanny, an accomplished seamstress, works on the collar for her new party frock. Bottom: Temporarily separated by Keats’ travels, the young couple exchanges letters on a regular basis. “When the sun comes out in England, it feels like something growing, not something harsh, and I had to try to express that visually,” says Fraser. “I tried to light the interiors bright, but not too bright. We blacked the ceilings in all the rooms so that when we lit through the windows, we’d instantly have contrast.”
60 October 2009
put human beings in the frame, it just didn’t work. Did you consider shooting at the story’s actual location, the Keats House in Hampstead? Fraser: We did, but when we looked at it, we all agreed it wasn’t viable for filming. The rooms are tiny, and because it’s a historic site, we wouldn’t have been allowed to put anything on the ceiling or walls, and I wanted to black the ceilings in all the rooms so that when we lit through windows, we’d instantly have contrast. Also, the Keats House is in the middle of a residential area — it was country in Keats’ day — so we would’ve been limited to one angle, looking into the house, and would’ve had to [digitally] paint out the city beyond. The location we eventually chose [in Bedfordshire] needed a lot of work inside, but it was lovely to be able to look out and see the world. It was like an interior/exterior studio; if we knew the weather was going to be really beautiful in half an hour, we could plan to go outside at that time. How tricky was it to structure the shoot given that there are key exterior scenes in just about every season? Fraser: We started the shoot in February or March and shot all the winter exteriors first; then we went inside for seven or eight weeks, and then we went back outside in spring/early summer. While we were shooting interiors, we’d occasionally go outside to shoot scenes like fields full of flowers. Almost all of the snow in the movie is fake, but one weekend during the shoot, London had its biggest snowfall in 15 years, and I went out and shot all day — everyone knows how much it costs to make snow, even for a single shot. I had my own Arri 235, and I owned the lenses we used on the show. I shot several rolls, and one of those shots made it into the film. Another scheduling challenge was that Jane wanted to shoot in continuity as
much as possible. The story spans four years, and there were certain blocks of scenes she wanted to shoot in order to help the actors maintain emotional continuity. It was a logistical nightmare — it meant going from a scene in the front, right-hand side of the house to one in the back, left-hand side — but I put it out to my guys, and they made it happen. Gary put a second dolly upstairs so we wouldn’t have to move one up and down the stairs, and Mark choreographed our lights outside so we could physically go from a scene where Fanny storms out of a downstairs room to a scene where she’s crying in a room upstairs. How did you maintain lighting continuity? Fraser: You take a bit of a hit with that in a situation like this. My perfect-world scenario would’ve been to control existing light with negative fill and solids and not put light through the windows, but England has very inconsistent sun. We didn’t have the resources to completely tent windows and create our own light, so we just had to go with it. There were a lot of scenes that went in and out of cloud [cover]; I just set the exposure
where it should be and hoped like hell the sun wouldn’t come out! At the start of a take, we had someone watching the sky, and they’d say, ‘We’ve got about a minute of clouds.’ So we’d go for it, and then, in the middle of the take, the sun would come out and light the whole room! The digital intermediate is really important in situations like that; if the director decides to use a shot where the exposure is changing, the DI can help even out
those differences. Did you know from the beginning that you’d have a DI? Fraser: Yes. Jane had done a DI on one of our short films and was really enthralled by the process, and I’m quite comfortable with it because I shoot a lot of commercials. I really pushed to do it at 4K, and Deluxe/EFilm in Sydney came through for us. I’ve never been happy with 2K. You can just tell something’s missing. ¢
Top: Fanny savors a new letter from Keats, who has inspired her to cultivate a butterfly farm in her bedroom. Bottom: Fanny shares her joy with her sister, Toots (Edie Martin). The filmmakers were able to treat their primary location, a property in Bedfordshire, England, as an indoor/outdoor studio. “We spent about seven weeks shooting interiors, and we’d occasionally go outside to film certain exteriors, like the fields full of flowers,” Fraser recalls.
American Cinematographer 61
A Lyrical Love
Above: Fanny and her siblings take a dance lesson as their mother (Kerry Fox) looks on. Below: Fanny and John revel in a spring afternoon.
62 October 2009
How did you create the ‘sunlight’ you sent through the windows of the house? Fraser: I tried HMIs for certain scenes, but the quality of light felt too electric, so we went with tungsten sources, Wendy Lights, that were gelled, and we changed the level of gel to change the degree of spot in them. We had about 10
Wendy Lights on cherry pickers with very long arms; we couldn’t place the bases close to the house because the art department had created the whole front yard, and there was a little ledge at the back of the house. There was a debate early on because it cost more to rent those cherry pickers than to do scaffolding, but I knew they’d save us time,
and they did. Mark did a really great job of coordinating them so they’d be in the right place for the right scene. Certain pickers had lights for certain seasons — for instance, we’d go Full Blue and full-grid diffusion in winter, and 1⁄4 Blue and half-grid in summer. Keeping track of it totally did my head in! How did you approach the large night interiors, such as the ball scene in which Fanny offers Keats her critique of Endymion? Fraser: We floated a 7K tungsten balloon light over the dancers to suggest a chandelier overhead, skirting it and putting it through a few layers of half-grid diffusion, and we used China balls for close-ups and for fill. We started the film with standard, store-bought China balls, which I really like to use, but Mark and I quickly realized they weren’t soft enough. We had to remove every trace of electricity from the feel of the light, so we diffused them more heavily than I usually do. Occasionally we used real
A Lyrical Love In one of the film’s few handheld scenes, Keats confronts his friend, Charles Armitage Brown (Paul Schneider), about a Valentine’s Day prank.
candles, too. Ben and Abbie have very different skin tones, so we had to warm up the China balls we used on him and cool down the ones we used on her to bring their skin tones closer together. We did the same with their poly [bounces] — we sprayed his with tea and hers with blue dye. In combination with their
64
makeup and wardrobe, it felt like it worked. Overall, the camera moves are fluid and controlled, but there are a few instances, like the Valentine’s Day confrontation in the rain, where you go handheld. How did you make decisions about that? Fraser: They were usually
quite spontaneous decisions based on the blocking and how the scene felt. Jane knows I shoot a lot of handheld, and she made it clear Bright Star wasn’t handheld, but she occasionally let me loose. Sometimes we’d try it and decide it didn’t work. The Valentine’s Day scene was pretty improvisational; I could almost go 360 degrees around the actors if I wanted to. I like to work handheld. Coming from a stills background, I’m used to having the flexibility of the camera on my hip. I do my own operating, and I always try to build the camera small enough that I can put it on my shoulder. Sometimes I find a frame in the viewfinder that seems to be the best frame, but when I’ve got the camera on my shoulder and my eye on the eyepiece, I realize it isn’t quite the right spot, and if I’m handheld, I can just shift [the frame]. I always try to
light so I have the flexibility to do that. Does Campion do many takes? Fraser: No. She casts so well that the actors generally don’t require many takes. It’s very rare for her not to get something she wants out of an actor. She’s so in tune with people, the actors as well as the characters. If an actor walks on set feeling a bit fragile, Jane knows what to say and how to say it in order to get that person to the necessary place. You mentioned you used your own lenses on the picture. What were they? Fraser: I shot most of the film with Cooke S4s, but I used Optica Elite [primes] for certain applications, some close-ups and landscapes. I think lenses are the most important tool cinematographers use, and it always frustrated me
when I couldn’t get the lenses I wanted because someone else was using them or the budget wasn’t big enough. I also wanted to be able to go out and shoot some things by myself, and when you rent lenses, crew politics are always involved with that. You shot two other features on the heels of Bright Star. Did that interfere with your ability to be involved in Bright Star’s DI? Fraser: I worked on some of the final grade, but then I started Boys Are Back, so I had to leave most of it to [colorist] Olivier Fontenay and [editor] Alexandre de Franceschi. During the shoot, I watched [digital] rushes every day and sent reference stills to the colorist [at Arion Communications in London], so the rushes were all where I wanted them to be, and Olivier used those as a guide. Some of my initial ideas didn’t work once
the whole picture was cut together, and I had Olivier to tell me that; for instance, he’d say a scene needed to be more wintry or more summery to help the visual flow. Olivier’s passion is amazing, and I worked with him on Last Ride, too. He has the same passion for my images that I had creating them, and that’s fantastic. I
TECHNICAL SPECS Super 1.85:1 3-perf Super 35mm Arricam Studio, Arri 235 Cooke S4, Optica Elite lenses Kodak Vision2 50D 5201, 250D 5205; Vision3 500T 5219 Digital Intermediate
65
Vicarious Thrills
Surrogates, shot by Oliver Wood, creates a future in which humans live their lives through robot proxies. by Iain Stasukevich Unit photography by Stephen Vaughan, SMPSP
66 October 2009
magine a world where you can be whomever you want. You always look your best. You live your life free from risk and free from the toll of time. You’re still you, only better. That’s the world depicted in the sciencefiction fable Surrogates, and director Jonathan Mostow suggests it’s a glossy reflection of the world we live in today. “This film is a metaphor for how humans interact with modern technology, and you could say it’s set five minutes from now,” he says.
I
Images courtesy of Touchstone Pictures. Lighting diagram courtesy of Frans Weterrings III.
“The future is now,” affirms cinematographer Oliver Wood. “Here is always somewhere else. We’re taking that to its logical conclusion: people aren’t living in their bodies at all.” Surrogates presents a world in which a person’s “surrogate,” a robot, interacts with the world while the actual person stays at home and experiences life vicari-
ously. The film was adapted from a five-part comic-book series, but Wood, whose credits include kinetic action films (The Bourne Ultimatum; AC Sept. ’07) and high-key comedy (Step Brothers), says the source material wasn’t used as a reference in developing the picture’s look. “I just went with what I was given, which was the story, and then production
designer Jeff Mann and I sat down and started from scratch,” says Wood. The story is set in Boston, Mass., and mortal concerns such as injury, disease and murder aren’t much of a concern until two humans are murdered while connected to their surrogates. These crimes attract FBI agents Greer (Bruce Willis) and Peters
Opposite: FBI Agent Thomas Greer (Bruce Willis) plugs into his “stim chair” to take control of his robotic alter ego in Surrogates, photographed by Oliver Wood. This page, top: Alongside Agent Jennifer Peters’ surrogate (Radha Mitchell), Greer’s surrogate pays a visit to robot manufacturer Virtual Self Industries after two humans die while connected to their robot counterparts. Bottom left: One of Virtual Self Industries’ display models. Bottom right: Wood (foreground) examines a stim chair.
American Cinematographer 67
Vicarious Thrills
Above: Accented by greenscreen composites, Virtual Self Industries’ headquarters appears onscreen as a sort of architectural surrogate, with smooth, angled surfaces of wood, concrete, steel and Plasticine. Below left: FBI Supervisor Andrew Stone (Boris Kodjoe) gives Peters her marching orders. Below right: Trouble brews for Dr. Lionel Canter (James Francis Ginty) and his date (Helena Mattsson).
68 October 2009
(Radha Mitchell), who operate “surries” of their own. The agents discover that one of the victims, a college student, had links with Canter (James Francis Ginty), the man who helped invent the surrogates, and they soon find themselves unraveling a plot to bring down the entire surrogate population. The film divides its time between two environments, that of the surrogates and that of the “Dreads,” humans who have chosen to reject the surrogate lifestyle. Because Surrogates takes place very close to the present day, the filmmakers wanted to devise a strong but subtle delineation
between the two worlds by using a mix of natural and artificial aesthetics. “We wanted a world that was familiar but also filled with elements that displaced you,” says Mann. “There’s always something in the frame that suggests the future.” Every surrogate had to look its best, despite the fact that each was played by a real actor. “Everyone had to look airbrushed and perfect, like they’re on the cover of a magazine,” says Wood. “Casting the surrogates was a challenge,” notes Mostow. “Some people think Hollywood is overflowing with gorgeous people, but when you’re talking about the idealized human form, very
few people actually fit that bill. On top of that, the good-looking people also had to be good actors.” Every actor was given the high-gloss treatment, particularly Willis. “Bruce is the most human actor you can imagine,” notes Wood, who also worked with the actor on Die Hard 2. “I can’t think of any actor who looks less like a robot. His characters are all too human.” Stripping all hints of imperfection from the actors meant favoring a highly stylized approach to lighting. Wood describes the surrogate world as “a perpetual fashion show.” Shooting mainly with Kodak
The nightclub visited by both murder victims’ surrogates was staged inside Boston’s Chestnut Hill Pumping Station. “We tried to give Oliver as many different sources as possible in the wide shots,” says gaffer Frans Weterrings III. “It was a great mix of modern lights and old incandescent fixtures.”
Vision3 500T 5219, he lit the surrogates almost exclusively with Kino Flo Image 80s, wrapping wide throws of flat light around their faces. “Kino Flos are the softest lights you can get for faces,” he notes. In situations calling for the softest light possible, he placed frames of light-grid diffusion in front of the fixtures.
Mann worked to integrate Wood’s lighting ideas into the practical locations and sets (built in a warehouse in Boston and on the Paramount lot in Hollywood), making it easy for Wood to move from one setup to the next without doing major readjustments. One of the most complex environments, a nightclub visited by
both murder victims, appears in the film’s opening moments. Staged in the husk of an industrial waterworks (Boston’s Chestnut Hill Pumping Station), the scene illustrates the extreme liberties people can take with their surrogate selves. “We had a lot of license with that location,” recalls Mann. “It had high ceilings and
American Cinematographer 69
Vicarious Thrills Right: Director Jonathan Mostow (beneath crane, in white shirt) prepares Willis (in helicopter) for a crash sequence that will lead to the destruction of Greer’s surrogate. Below left: Mostow runs through a scene involving Maggie Greer (Rosamund Pike, left) and her “industrial beauty” shop, where robots attempt to improve on perfection. Below right: Unplugged from its host, Maggie’s surrogate lies inert.
70 October 2009
these incredible boilers with fasteners and brass everywhere. We had a lot of fun with the lighting in there.” Among the lighting elements he integrated were 20-watt incandescent light bulbs in blueglass insulators hanging from the ceiling; sweeping spotlights; soft, floating sources; and multicolored video clips projected onto a frosted-acrylic wall. “We tried to
give Oliver as many different sources as possible in the wide shots,” says gaffer Frans Weterrings III. “He wanted the look to be slick. We used [VariLite] VL3000s and [Martin] Atomic strobes and rewired the station’s equipment lights, and we used Source Four Pars for edges and pools. It was a great mix of modern lights and old incandes-
cent fixtures. We wanted to light so that when we went in for a tight shot, we only had to bring in a soft source to get the ‘surrogate look’ with the Kinos.” Greer and Peters’ investigation into the death of the two clubgoers leads them to Virtual Self Industries, an ultramodern structure of wood and concrete plated with layers of steel and
Plasticine. It is a kind of architectural surrogate; all of the surfaces are smooth and angular, and even the wood looks like a veneer. The entire building is filled with surrogates, so the filmmakers decided it needed a special treatment; the trick was to make it look modern without going over the top. Wood used two 18K hybrid (tungsten/HMI) balloons and nine 18K Fresnels going through silk to create the “sunlight” coming through the lobby’s gigantic skylight. Weterrings’ crew swapped out the location’s exist-
ing fluorescents with properly balanced ones, and Mann filled the set with translucent, acrylic material that Wood could bounce light from or shoot through to create layers of depth and illumination. Subtle LED accents custom-built to the filmmakers’ specs were provided by Color Kinetics. For some sets, like the basement of an FBI building, where an army of surrogates conducts an illegal wiretapping operation, Wood relied exclusively on practical fluorescent fixtures. “We should have bought stock in Kino
Flo,” quips Mann. Weterrings explains, “We spent a lot of time working with Jeff to build our lighting into several sets, including the surveillance room. We wanted the actors to be able to move about freely, and we built in a lot of fluorescent tubes so that no matter where the actors stood, there would be no harsh shadows. We did a lot of our lighting in the surveillance room by simply turning some Kinos off to create depth and shadow.” The challenge of lighting the surrogates was often com-
Above: Canter enjoys a ride in his limo while Armando (Jeffrey De Serrano) takes the wheel. The limo interiors were shot onstage against greenscreen. Below: Quik-Volt personal recharging stations rejuvenate the robots’ batteries while their owners are unplugged.
American Cinematographer 71
Vicarious Thrills
Above: His surrogate destroyed, Greer risks his real body to continue the investigation, which ultimately leads him to the real Canter (James Cromwell). Below: Confined to a wheelchair, Canter originally conceived of robotic surrogates as a means to help others with handicaps and keep soldiers safe from battle.
72 October 2009
pounded by the inclusion of a human in the same scene. “I wanted to make the humans attractive in another sort of way, so I went with a more natural look,” says Wood. “It wasn’t glossy and high-fashion like the surrogates, but it wasn’t unattractive, either.” Greer, more than any other character, spends a large amount of time outside his surrogate. At home, he struggles for real face-time with his surrogate-
addicted spouse (Rosamund Pike), and after his own surrie is destroyed by the Dreads, he decides to stop using one altogether. “When lighting scenes shared by humans and surrogates, we focused on the surrogate first,” says Weterrings. “In scenes featuring the human Bruce with Radha’s or Rosamund’s surrogate, we’d use big, soft sources to wrap the light and smooth the women’s faces out, bring in an LED to get a
little eyelight, and then cut any toplight. In the reverse with Bruce, we’d go for a more natural look, using less light — maybe a tungsten or HMI Fresnel — and not softening it to better accentuate the harshness of his facial features.” The robot world is mostly indoors, whereas the human world is set mainly in outdoor locations. The largest all-human environment is the Dread reser-
vation, a giant compound with trees, farms and an outdoor market. The first time it appears in the film is when Surrogate Greer crash-lands a helicopter into a Dread container yard while transporting the suspected surrogate killer. Wood’s lighting approach was “completely the opposite of what we did in the surrogate world,” he says. “I shot [Kodak Vision2 250D] 5205 and didn’t use any lights at all outdoors.” When the sun dipped behind a building or disappeared into the clouds, the crew tapped a couple of 18K HMIs and 12'x12' frames of light grid. For the few indoor scenes on the reservation, Wood used the 18Ks to blast light through windows and used no fill. Long inspired by John Frankenheimer’s Seconds (shot by James Wong Howe, ASC), Mostow sought to replicate that visual style in Surrogates. “Jonathan has always wanted to make Seconds,” muses Wood, who also worked with the director on U-571 (AC June ’00). “Frankenheimer’s style was deep focus and wide-angle lenses, with two or three people in the frame at the same time. We took a bit from that in Surrogates.” Shooting Super 35mm, Wood favored prime lenses ranging from 10mm to 21mm. “25mm was going long for us,” notes Mostow. To achieve the deepest focus possible, Wood employed 24mm and 45mm Slant Focus lenses from Panavision. Depending on the direction in which the focal plane is rotated, subjects at vastly different depths can be brought into equal focus. (The depth-of-field appears to have increased, but only the focal plane has been changed.) The effect is similar to that of a split diopter, only without the blurry 73
Vicarious Thrills “Jonathan has always wanted to make Seconds,” says Wood, referring to John Frankenheimer’s 1966 film, photographed by James Wong Howe, ASC. “Frankenheimer’s style was deep focus and wideangle lenses, with two or three people in the frame at the same time.”
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vertical line down the center of the frame. “We used the Slant Focus lenses for the agents’ first interview with Canter, the surrogates’ inventor; for most car shots; and for some others, including shots moving behind Greer’s boss, Stone [Boris Kodjoe], who is most often seen as a surrogate, over his shoulder to Agent Peters and Bobby [Devin
Ratray],” says Wood. The filmmakers also Dutched shots at every opportunity, using a Tango head on both the A and B cameras. “We tried to be unconventional, and Dutching gives the picture an arresting quality,” says Mostow. “Sometimes we’d set up a level shot, and Oliver would say, ‘That’s not our movie.’” Wood agrees,
“Level shots just looked wrong. However, A-camera operator Joe Chess once came to me and said, ‘I want to do a dead-straight shot.’ So there are a few of those, too!” Surrogates’ visual style enabled the filmmakers to improvise when opportunities presented themselves. Many times, plans were tossed out the window in favor of a better idea mere minutes before the cameras were set to roll, as long as the new shot fit within the stylistic parameters. “Jonathan and I made pretty firm decisions about how the movie should look, so it wasn’t too hard to extemporize,” says Wood. “And the style worked in both the natural and the unnatural environments.” “Good filmmaking doesn’t call for a rigid thought process,” notes Mostow. “You can’t steamroll over an interesting moment.
One reason I love working with Oliver is that he has tremendous instincts; he gets what’s going on in the moment and works from gut instinct, and that’s how I like to work. I go into every scene with a plan, but I’m always ready to see something unexpected.” Surrogates’ visual effects, supervised by Mark Stetson, were extensive. More than nine vendors created a total of 700 shots, with the lion’s share dedicated to removing wrinkles or shaving stubble for surrogates. Wood and Company 3 colorist Stephen Nakamura refined these touches further in the digital grade, with Nakamura using a da Vinci Resolve 2K to modify a custom look-up table he had designed for Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (AC March ’03). “I took the midtone range of the image and changed the gamma curve,” says
Nakamura. “I brought the blacks up and brought the whites down, so any skin tones that were darker became lighter, and vice versa. We wanted the surrogates to look like mannequins, with no bright key side or dark fill side.” Wood avoided deep shadows to begin with, but Nakamura’s LUT added depth to the image without straying from the cinematographer’s original intentions. “Oliver gave me a great negative, and it was easy for us to go in with Power Windows and add contrast to the rest of the world while keeping the skin tones bright and smooth,” says Nakamura. Although plenty of modern technology went into the making of Surrogates, Mostow hopes the film’s cautionary message about the dangers of such technology will shine through. “The cool
thing about Surrogates is that it doesn’t preach,” he says. “It’s a Hollywood-style mystery, and if, when the movie is over, people want to talk about the ideas behind it, we will have made a good science-fiction film, too.” I
TECHNICAL SPECS 2.40:1 Super 35mm Panaflex Platinum, Millennium XL; Arri 435, 235 Panavision Primo, Slant Focus lenses Kodak Vision3 500T 5219, Vision2 250D 5205 Digital Intermediate Printed on Kodak Vision 2383
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Post Focus
The crew of mining spaceship Red Dwarf stands on a digital G-Deck, created by visual-effects house Fin Design & Effects in Sydney, Australia, for the three-part miniseries Red Dwarf: Back to Earth.
76 October 2009
Red Dwarf Returns by Stephanie Argy When director Doug Naylor and cinematographer Andy Martin set out to shoot three new episodes of the sci-fi sitcom Red Dwarf for the British channel Dave, they wanted to give the show added polish, but they knew they would have to work within a very limited budget. In collaboration with visualeffects supervisor Mike Seymour, they devised an innovative workflow that included a mostly greenscreen shoot with multiple Red Ones, the distribution of visual-effects work to 18 artists around the world, and a final colorcorrection at Evolutions in London. The original Red Dwarf series, which ran from 1988-1999, centered on a Liverpudlian slacker named Dave Lister (Craig Charles), a crewmember on
a mining spaceship. After a Cadmium 2 radiation leak, Lister finds himself three million years in the future, the last surviving human in the universe; his only companions are the hologram of his pompous bunkmate (Chris Barrie); a sanitation robot, Kryten (Robert Llewellyn); and a bipedal humanoid, Cat (Danny John-Jules), who is the distant descendent of a pregnant cat Lister had smuggled aboard the ship. The series careened from genre to genre, referencing such films as Alien, Dark Star, Citizen Kane and Rebel Without a Cause. Red Dwarf became a cult phenomenon, and when Dave began rebroadcasting it, the station “started to get incredible figures,” recalls Naylor, who co-created and co-wrote the show with Rob Grant. That viewer interest led Dave to ask Naylor to do a clips show, but Naylor suggested doing two new
narrative episodes, which soon evolved into three. In the new episodes, Red Dwarf: Back to Earth, the four characters end up on Earth in 2009 and discover they are characters in a TV series. Concerned about their eventual fate, they embark on a metaphysical quest to track down their creators, beginning with the actors who portray them. To keep expenses low, Naylor decided to shoot much of the show against greenscreen, something he hadn’t been able to do with the DigiBeta cameras he’d used on the original production. He was keen to try the Red One, but his cinematographer, Andy Martin, was initially less enthusiastic. “I’d read about it, and I’d heard a lot of people talking about it — usually maligning it,” recalls Martin, who had been a camera operator on Red Dwarf ’s
Images courtesy of Mike Seymour and Fxphd.
last season. Seeking advice about Red One workflows, Naylor turned to visualeffects supervisor Mike Seymour, a colleague. At the time, Naylor didn’t know Seymour was an early Red adopter — he owns camera body #22. “Mike knew the path we’d have to go through,” says Naylor. “Immediately, all my anxiety dissipated.” Seymour and John Montgomery are co-founders of fxphd.com, an online training resource for visual-effects professionals. They recognized early on that the One would require a bridge between what’s required of the camera in terms of production and what’s required for a timely post process. On Red Dwarf, the cameras’ .r3d files were immediately copied to RAIDs for safekeeping; the files were then transcoded to Avid’s native DNxHD for editing in Avid, and the same project could be shared with Final Cut Pro via Automatic Duck Pro Import FCP 2.0. While one copy of the .r3d files stayed in London, ready for use in the final online, another was sent to Australia to be used for the visual-effects shots. Although Seymour designed Red
Dwarf ’s production workflow, Naylor initially believed he couldn’t afford to have Seymour work on the actual episodes. Then, Seymour suggested he come aboard as the visual-effects supervisor and second-unit director, and that he use the artists and resources of his Web site to create most of the effects shots. “We put together what we called a Special Ops group, a group inside the fxphd.com structure,” says Seymour. He corralled
18 specialists and set up a virtual post structure enabling them to exchange files via a network built by Sohonet. The systems and programs used by the artists included Adobe After Effects, Apple Shake, Autodesk Maya, Inferno and Flame, The Foundry Nuke and RFX Pftrack. Seymour also tapped Fin Design & Effects in Sydney for some virtual set designs. In all, the effects team completed 262 shots in 27 days. Martin delivered textbook
Above: The original shot, captured onstage at Shepperton Studios against a greenscreen measuring 50'x120'. Below: Cinematographer Andy Martin (gesturing) and visual-effects supervisor/2ndunit director Mike Seymour (left) examine the shot at hand.
American Cinematographer 77
Right: Kryten (Robert Llewellyn, left) and Arnold Rimmer (Chris Barrie, wearing blue) find their marks in the sleepingquarters set while Martin lines up a shot. Below left: Martin checks the backlight on The Creator (Richard O’Callaghan) for a scene referencing Blade Runner. Below right: The crew prepares for a crane shot on the Coronation Street set in Manchester.
greenscreen photography, which simplified Seymour’s work. The greenscreen measured 50'x120', which allowed Martin to get a good separation between the foreground and back-
78 October 2009
ground, both of which he exposed at the same level. The cinematographer also tried something new: he occasionally switched two-thirds of the greenscreen lights off while lighting the foreground actors and elements in order to judge the contrast on those subjects. “That worked really well,” he says. Before the shoot began, Martin conducted a series of tests, pushing the One to its extremes to see what he could learn. Some of his discoveries contradicted what he’d heard about the camera. For instance, he had been told
to avoid strong backlight, especially when shooting against a greenscreen, because an “edging” effect would appear around the subjects. In fact, he found that backlighting looked very good, and he consequently decided to push that look. Fitting the cameras with Zeiss Ultra Primes, Martin rated the One at 160 ASA, but the filtration the camera required at the time to shoot under tungsten light resulted in an effective ASA of 50. “I found my results were looking a lot like Fuji 250-ASA daylight
Director Doug Naylor guides actor Richard Woo through a scene.
stock,” he notes. “I thought they looked very natural.” In turn, Naylor was pleased to find that the One’s 4K mode allowed him to pull more than one angle out of each shot during the edit. “We could zoom in 200 percent on any frame,” he recalls. This allowed the filmmakers to turn three shots into two shots, two shots into singles and singles into close-ups; this was especially beneficial given that the crew had 14 days to shoot all three episodes. Seymour’s team rendered the finished shots as DPX files, which were sent to London via Sohonet for the final online at Evolutions, where a Baselight was used. For the non-visual-effects material, colorist Nick Adams was able to access the original media at full resolution. (Most shots were 2K, but some were 4K.) James Hunter, chief engineer at Evolutions, notes, “Working natively with the Red rushes gives you a lot more flexibility in the grade. In general, grades aren’t done from rushes in long-form TV post. People convert from Red to DPX and essentially bake in a first-light telecine equivalent. That was probably the most important aspect of us changing the traditional workflow; it has a lot of benefits for all formats.” Seymour adds, “We worked
with the look Andy established on set, except for some tricky shots where we did a second special-effects grade for a technical reason, normally detail for keying.” Martin was initially concerned that the image’s blacks might wash out to a gray somewhere along the workflow, but that fear never materialized. “I was gobsmacked by the density of the blacks,” he says. “They really are very rich.” He was also surprised at how little grain and noise was in the image. “At times, it was almost too clean, but I would much rather have that than the alternative!” Once the episodes were finished, production rented a cinema to screen them for the cast and crew. Naylor notes that one of the great surprises for the actors was seeing their work combined with the virtual sets; during the shoot, they were somewhat baffled by the massive greenscreen. “It was very different from how we used to shoot the show,” says the director. “In its time, Red Dwarf was responsible for some less-than-brilliant greenscreen shots — because of budget, not talent — so they were right to be dubious. There was nothing onstage other than a square floor and a
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Top: In order to complete 262 visual-effects shots in 27 days, Seymour formed a “Special Ops” group from participants on fxphd.com. A custom workflow was devised to bring the work, which was spread across the globe, back together for the final output. Middle and bottom: Chicago-based visual-effects artist Jeff Heusser worked with Autodesk Flame to comp Dave Lister (Craig Charles) onto the television screens around actress Karen Admiraal.
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single squid tentacle! When they saw the final images, they were absolutely thrilled.” Even during production, it was clear how much the series meant to its fans. “People were going mental when they saw the actors on the street,” recalls Seymour. “When we went on location and the actors were in costume, people’s mouths would drop as they drove by. These characters are really loved in English culture.” I
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white or RGB LED configurations. LoCaster, the location model, is an ideal companion for mobile applications and interview situations, whereas the BroadCaster is designed to offer more control remotely. For more information, visit www.arri.com. LEDStorm Shines Across Range LEDStorm offers a range of LEDbased lighting solutions, including the LS-711 on-camera light ring, the PL-11 Panel Light and the FlexiLED system. Incorporating bulbs with a 130degree angle, the LS-711 is primarily used as a beauty fill light, and it allows cinematographers to shoot with even
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Matthews Extends Max Line Matthews Studio Equipment has introduced the Maxine lighting stand. The Maxine follows the successful Max and Mini-Max stands, all of which are designed to get the fixture “up and out,” away from the main support column. Maxine is manufactured out of lightweight aluminum and can support a 10-pound fixture at 7' high with a 6'-long horizontal reach. The stand can go as high as 13' and drop to 16" below horizontal, making it an ideal tool for a small, mobile production crew. For more information, visit www.msegrip.com. Metal Halide Lamps Join Showbiz Line GE Consumer & Industrial has added to its Showbiz line of globes with ultraviolet-control, single-ended, hotrestrike metal-halide lamps. Compared with GE’s standard CSR hot-restrike lamps, the new lamps cut total UV emissions by over 85 percent and reduce UVB and UVC by over 95 percent. Designed for use in Par or Fresnel fixtures, the new line of Showbiz CSR UV-C lamps features wattages of 575, 800, 1,200, 2,500, 4,000 and 6,000, with future development already in place for 12,000. Each lamp provides light output matching non-UV-C lamps in the respective wattages. Color temperature of the Showbiz CSR UV-C lamps is 5800°K. Rated life for each lamp in the new line runs between 300 and 750 hours, depending on the
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wattage. All of the lamps in the new line provide a color-rendering index over 90, and precise chemical dosing in all Showbiz CSR UV-C lamps produces stable lamp color temperatures over the life of the products, ensuring consistent performance in all types of fixtures. For more information, visit www.ge.com. Zylight Announces Intelligent IS3 Zylight LLC has announced a new series of full-size Intelligent Studio fixtures. The first light in the series, the IS3, boasts four-times-brighter output than other LED fixtures in its class. The IS3 combines Zylight’s colormixing technology and high-quality construction to meet the demands of location and studio professionals who require an extremely bright and wide soft source, while offering all of the
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able battery. For more information, visit www.zylight.com. LEDz Releases Brute 30
LEDz has announced the Brute 30 LED fixture, a 90-watt, 5500°K fixture boasting an output equivalent to a 400-watt HMI. The Brute 30 features two on-board dimmers for maximum control, and the unit produces a wide horizontal beam spread perfect for larger productions and events. The Brute 30 measures 16" wide by 13" high by 4.5" deep and weighs 14 pounds, with an input of 11-240 volts AC (1.0-0.5 Amps) and an output of 12 volts DC (10 Amps). The entire LEDz product range is available through Hollywood Rentals. For more information, visit www.holly woodrentals.com or www.led-z.com. Gekko Intros Kedo, Kelvin Tile Gekko Technology has introduced two LED-based luminaires, the Kedo focusable spot lamp and the Kelvin Tile. Developed in collaboration with some of the world’s leading lighting designers, the single-source Kedo is capable of generating millions of indi-
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temperature and illumination level without the inconvenience and loss of optical efficiency associated with more traditional methods. It can be switched quickly and easily to produce 2900°, 3200°, 4300°, 5600° and 6500° Kelvin as well as matching a wide range of color gels. As an LED-based fixture, Kedo has a lumen output warranted for 20,000 hours. The Kedo’s low power consumption keeps heat generation to a minimum and, as it passively cools, operation is silent.” Gekko Technology recently purchased the Kelvin Tile product line from Element Labs, and the company introduced the rebranded fixtures during IBC in September. The LED-based lighting system employs a combination of red, green, blue, cyan, amber and white LED elements in a 16x15 matrix to
generate high-quality, full-spectrum white light specifically for film and video production; the color temperature remains consistent throughout the full range of intensity variation. Measuring approximately 12"x 12"x4" and weighing roughly 9 pounds, each Kelvin Tile delivers up to 419 Lux at 5500°K or 273 Lux at 3000°K (both measured at a 1-meter distance) with a power consumption of only 85 watts. Beam angle is 108 degrees at 50percent intensity. The Kelvin Tile can also be supplied with an omni mount, single or double yoke mount, removable barndoors, and Kelvin Paintbox control software. “We were extremely impressed with the Kelvin Tile, both as a product and as a concept, and felt Element Labs and Gekko shared color quality as a core value,” says Amphlett. “The Kelvin Tile is a compact soft light giving directors or cameramen total control over color temperature from 2200° to 6500° Kelvin, with resets at 3000° and 5500°K. It is a soft-light companion to the focusable Gekko Kedo … designed for general softlight applications, including concealment of wrinkles and shadows.” Additionally, Gekko Technology has expanded into new headquarters, providing the company with nearly three times the floor area of its former premises. Gekko Technology Ltd, Units 34, Cotton Drive, Dalehouse Lane, Kenilworth, CV8 2UE. For more information, call +44 (0)8448 005 326 or visit www.gekkotechnology.com. Litepanels Makes Splash with SeaSun Litepanels has teamed with HydroFlex to develop the Litepanels SeaSun underwater-housing series, bringing the advantages of Litepanels’ LED technology — including the fixtures’ small form factors, panchromatic light output, low power draw and low heat generation — to productions shooting beneath the waves. Litepanels SeaSun fixture housings are constructed of aluminum and Plexi-
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Each fixture can be either camera mounted or stand mounted, and both come with a full set of five filters, including conversion to 3200°K. Additionally, users have the choice of Canon, JVC, Panasonic or Sony battery-mounting plates. For more information, visit www.prompterpeople.com.
glas, and are rated watertight to a depth of 100'. As a production crew descends beneath the surface, the water filters out many colors of light from the sun. Litepanels’ panchromatic LEDs, which emit a continuous spectrum of light color, are ideal for supplementing ambient light below the surface because of their even color spectrum. Additionally, the small overall volume of Litepanels fixtures makes it easier for the units to be weighted to remain slightly negatively buoyant underwater, in turn making it easier for divers to swim with the lights, and the units are also easy to lift back aboard the support vessel after the dive is completed. The low power draw of Litepanels fixtures allows the units to be carried untethered while still providing long shooting times from small battery packs fitted within the SeaSun housing. Furthermore, unlike many traditional underwater lights, which need to be extinguished before surfacing in order to prevent heat damage to their housings, the low heat generation of Litepanels’ SeaSun fixtures allows the units to be taken out of the water while still illuminated. SeaSun underwater housings are available for both Litepanels 1x1 and MicroPro fixture designs. SeaSun 1x1s are available for Litepanels’ Standard (5600°K or 3200°K in flood or spot), Bi-Color (variable between 5600°K and 3200°K) and Bi-Focus (5600°K with variable focus) models. The smaller SeaSun MicroPro operates off six AA batteries and can provide continuous light for up to five hours when utilizing Energizer e2 lithium-ion 86 October 2009
batteries. Additionally, for its proprietary lighting systems, Litepanels was awarded a Technology & Engineering Emmy Award from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. The Emmy statue — the first in the Academy’s 61-year history to be awarded for television lighting technology — was presented on Aug. 22 at the Renaissance Hotel in Los Angeles. For more information, visit www.litepanels.com. MicroBeam LED from FloLight FloLight, the lighting division of Prompter People, Inc., has introduced the MicroBeam 128 and MicroBeam 256 dimmable 5400°K LED lights, which deliver the equivalent power of a 100- or 200-watt hot lamp, respectively. Mark Ditmanson, president of Prompter People, says, “The ability to deliver this much light for almost eight hours, combined with MSRPs of just $379 [for the MicroBeam 128] and $559 [for the MicroBeam 256] will appeal not just to those who crave longevity, but also to videographers and photographers on a very constrained budget.”
Ikan Illuminates iLED 150 Replacing the iLED 100, Ikan has introduced the iLED 150, a lightweight, versatile and affordable lighting accessory. Featuring a ¼-20 threaded mount, the luminaire can be mounted to most cameras’ shoe adaptors or to most types of camera-accessory brackets.
The included gels easily slip into the attached gel frame, allowing users to quickly change color temperatures and further customize the light’s output. The iLED uses 144 LED lights to create a powerful, even and energy-efficient lighting solution, and the iLED 150 boasts brighter diodes with more accurate color temperature (6300°K) than its predecessor, the iLED 100. Additionally, the fixture features a built-in dimmer knob, and it includes support for the popular “L” series battery packs. Other features include a gradual power-up of the LEDs, making the fixture less harsh on the subject’s eyes, and ventilation slots for cooler lighting. The iLED 150 measures 6"x 3.25"x1.375" and weighs only .85 pounds with a battery (.45 pounds without). The fixture operates from 12-24 volts and boasts a low power consumption of less than 10 watts with a brightness of 60 Lux. For more information, visit www.ikancorp.com.
16x9 Takes Bebob Lux-LEDs into Field 16x9 Inc. has introduced the LuxLED40 and Lux-LED60 by Bebob Engineering. The versatile, portable LED lights have been created specifically for work in the field. The Lux-LED40 has been designed primarily as a hand light, although the system is outfitted with a standard yoke mount for attaching to a stand when a shooting scenario calls for hands-free lighting. The Lux-LED60, on the other hand, has been designed to function as a location light, mounted on a stand; it comes equipped with a handle for optional use as a handheld unit. (A kit containing three lighting stands in a convenient carrying case may be ordered separately.) Through the employment of highefficiency LED technology, Bebob’s LuxLED fixtures are capable of generating greater brightness at a lower power consumption when compared to standard tungsten fixtures. The sophisticated arrangement of the units’ high-output LEDs allows for seamless variable focus of the illumination angle. Output is fully dimmable, and an innovative, incorporated cooling system keeps the LEDs cool to the touch. Both lighting units are available for Anton Bauer, V-Mount or PAG battery mounts. Powered by a 12-volt lithium-ion battery pack, the LED40 provides more than 2 hours of continuous illumination, while the LED60 offers more than 1.5 hours. For more information, visit www.16x9inc.com. I SUBMISSION INFORMATION Please e-mail New Products/Services releases to
[email protected] and include full contact information and product images. Photos must be TIFF or JPEG files of at least 300dpi. 87
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American Cinematographer 89
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Advertiser’s Index 16x9, Inc. 88 Abel Cine Tech C2 AC 1 Aja Video Systems, Inc. 15 Alan Gordon Enterprises 88, 89 Arri 37 Backstage Equipment, Inc. 6 Bardwell & McAlister, Inc. 64 Barger-Lite 87 Bron Kobold 75 Burrell Enterprises 88
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Camelot Broadcasting Service 85 Cavision Enterprises 27 Chapman/Leonard Studio Equipment Inc. 21 Chimera 5 Cinema Vision 89 Cinematography Electronics 6 Cinekinetic 88 Cinelease, Inc. 87 Cinerover 88 Clairmont Film & Digital 17 Convergent Design 56 Cooke Optics 19, 89 Deluxe 63 Denecke 88 Eastman Kodak 13, C4 Evidence Productions 89
Filmtools 87 Five Towns College 85 Fuji Motion Picture 39 Glidecam Industries 9 Golden Animations 90 GV Technology Expo 51 High Def Expo, Inc. 53 Hines Lab 89 Hollywood Post Alliance 73 Hydroflex 79 Innovision 89 JEM Studio Lighting. Inc. 79 J.L. Fisher 23 K 5600, Inc. 65 Kino Flo 43 Laffoux Solutions, Inc. 88 Laser Pacific 55 Lee Filters 4 Lentequip, Inc. 89 Lighttools 42 Lights! Action! Company 88 Movie Tech AG 88 MP&E Mayo Productions 89 MSM 73 Nalpak 90 New York Film Academy 25 Oppenheimer Camera Prod. 88 P+S Technik 19, 89 Panasonic Broadcast 7 PED Denz 83, 89 Photon Beard 89 Pille Film Gmbh 89 Powermills 89 Pro8mm 88
Schneider Optics 2 Sony Electronics, Inc. 11 Spectra Film & Video 89 Stanton Video Services 83 Super16 Inc. 90 Telescopic 88 Thales Angenieux 28-29 Tiffen C3 VF Gadgets, Inc. 88 Visual Products 6 Walter Klassen FX 57 Welch Integrated 81 Willy’s Widgets 88 www.theasc.com 74 Zacuto Films 89 ZGC, Inc. 19, 89 Zipcam Systems 41
Clubhouse News Suschitzky will be honored at the Manaki Brothers 30th International Cinematographers’ Film Festival, which will run Sept. 26-Oct. 10 in Macedonia. Spinotti will be honored at the Plus Camerimage International Film Festival, which will run Nov. 28-Dec. 5 in Poland.
Society Welcomes McLeod From an early age, Geary McLeod, ASC was fascinated by the black-and-white images flickering on his family’s television. By his junior year at the University of Massachusetts, he knew he wanted to be a cinematographer. He rounded out his classroom education by watching foreign films in art-house cinemas and working in a photography studio and for PBS affiliate WGBH’s 16mm documentary unit. After moving to Los Angeles, McLeod worked at CFI before beginning a union apprenticeship program as a second assistant. Climbing the ranks of the camera department, he spent seven years as a first assistant for Stephen Goldblatt, ASC, BSC, and moved up to camera operator after pulling focus for Ernest Dickerson, ASC on Malcolm X. McLeod notched his first cinematographer credit in 2000, on the series City of Angels. Since then, he has shot such series as Danny, Barbershop, Dirt and The Mentalist. His feature credits include Who Made the Potatoe Salad? and Not Easily Broken. Through Local 600 and Hollywood CPR, McLeod teaches entrylevel camera skills to inner-city youths. Suschitzky, Spinotti to Accept Lifetime Honors Society members Peter Suschitzky and Dante Spinotti will be the recipients of lifetime-achievement awards this fall.
Stein, Fortunato Host Workshops ASC members Ron Fortunato and Peter Stein recently visited Abel Cine Tech in New York City for two events organized by StudentFilmmakers.com. Fortunato seasoned a Q&A with the audience with clips from such projects as Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (AC Dec. ’07), Nil by Mouth and Gossip Girl. Afterward, Stein conducted a lighting workshop, “Lighting to Create a Mood.” Hora Talks 3-Strip Technicolor John Hora, ASC recently joined visual-effects artist Harrison Ellenshaw and production designer Tom Walsh for the discussion “Designing for 3-Strip Technicolor” at the American Cinematheque’s Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood. Their conversation focused on Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s Black Narcissus, which was shot by Jack Cardiff, ASC, BSC, and designed by Alfred Junge. Cardiff and Junge won Academy Awards for their work on the picture. Wexler Presides at Aero Haskell Wexler, ASC was the guest of honor at the American Cinematheque’s Aero Theatre in July for a double-feature presentation of Medium Cool, which Wexler wrote, directed and photographed, and Coming Home, which Wexler shot for Hal Ashby. Richard Crudo, ASC interviewed Wexler about his work on both films.
Associates on the Move ASC associate member Stephan Ukas-Bradley was recently promoted from manager of technical services at Arri’s Burbank facility to the new position of product manager-digital production. In this expanded role, Ukas-Bradley will provide technical support to the sales and marketing of Arri digital cameras across North and South America. “Production is at an extremely interesting crossroads now, and there are many different options,” says Ukas-Bradley. “I’m very excited about helping to offer the best digital solutions that meet creative, technical and budget needs.” ASC associate Rob Hummel has joined Prime Focus as CEO of Post Logic Studios. “Post Logic is poised to take full advantage of its global network of facilities that will enable us to provide our clients the best quality at the greatest value,” says Hummel. “I look forward to working closely across companies to deliver Hollywood clients the greatest quality and value for their film, television, DVD and digital projects.”
AC, ASC on Facebook American Cinematographer magazine and the ASC are on Facebook. “Become a fan” of both pages to stay upto-date on ASC events and other noteworthy film-related events around the world: www.facebook.com/American Cinematographer and www.face book.com/the.ASC. I
American Cinematographer 91
ASC CLOSE-UP Lowell Peterson, ASC
Which cinematographers, past or present, do you most admire, and why? When I first came to Los Angeles, there were five Japanese movie theaters, and the lighting and compositions in the films they played resonated with me. Kazuo Miyagawa shot the great Mizoguchi films, but in his later career at Daiei Studios, he became a master of color cinematography. Fujio Morita shot many of Hideo Gosha’s movies. I also admire Sven Nykvist, ASC for his ability to illuminate the inner lives of women. Russell Metty, ASC is another big influence; he applied blackand-white technique to shooting color, and his work with Douglas Sirk is an inspiration for my current project, Desperate Housewives. Of the many great modern cinematographers, I most admire Gordon Willis, ASC. What sparked your interest in photography? I joined a college film society and watched a lot of movies. I remember having a sort of epiphany when I saw Rebel Without a Cause and realized there was a grammar to making movies. I was struck by the scene on the living-room stairs between James Dean and Jim Backus, and how the use of high and low camera angles visually expressed the drama of the scene. Where did you train and/or study? I did some acting as a child and toured with a theatrical company. The sense of belonging to a community of artists was very appealing. I enrolled at Yale intending to study architecture, but after joining the Yale Film Society, I began to see the possibility of a career in the movies. Eventually I ended up at UCLA’s film school. Who were your early teachers or mentors? Bobby Liu, ASC taught me how to block a scene and line up a shot. Ed Brown, ASC taught me a lot about framing and operating. And from Craig Denault I learned about lighting with big sources and how to use soft light on actresses while creating contrast in other parts of the frame. All of them showed me how to treat a crew with respect and get joy from the day-to-day work. What are some of your key artistic influences? The quality of light in Watteau and Vermeer, the compositions of Utamaro, the Zone System of Ansel Adams, the directing styles of Vincente Minnelli and Nicholas Ray, the group improvisation of Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk, and modern opera and theater. 92 October 2009
How did you get your first break in the business? I partnered with a fellow UCLA film student, Nick von Sternberg, and we broke into low-budget features. He was the cinematographer and I was his assistant on sub-Roger Corman and Blaxploitation movies. What has been your most satisfying moment on a project? The discovery of soft bounce light while shooting a period student film. We taped white bed sheets to the set walls and bounced the lights off of them. Have you made any memorable blunders? Early on as a director of photography, I was so intent on the work that I sometimes ignored the politics of the production. I had to learn how important the relationships with directors, producers and other departments are to realizing the cinematography. What is the best professional advice you’ve ever received? I was honored to have John Alton, ASC visit my set when I first became a cinematographer. He told me to light the people, not the sets. What recent books, films or artworks have inspired you? Michael Powell’s autobiography, John Doyle’s revival of Sweeney Todd on Broadway, several great modern-opera productions, and recent music by Radiohead and The Killers. Do you have any favorite genres, or genres you would like to try? I would love to shoot a musical. If you weren’t a cinematographer, what might you be doing instead? I might be a theater techie or doing music recording — something where I wouldn’t have to get up so early in the morning! Which ASC cinematographers recommended you for membership? Bobby Liu, Ed Brown and Michael Watkins. Allen Daviau was head of the Membership Committee, and he supported me at a time when there was some resistance to inviting television cinematographers to join. How has ASC membership impacted your life and career? As a student of film history, I became aware of that unbroken line of cinematographers with the initials ASC after their names, from the silent-film pioneers through all my heroes of the 1940s and 1950s and on into my era. Joining that list of artists was certainly the most important event of my career. When I walk into the Clubhouse, I think back on a hundred years of film images that are seared into our collective memory, and then I meet with my ASC colleagues and start looking ahead to what the future will bring. I
Photo by Danny Feld.
When you were a child, what film made the strongest impression on you? My sister Wendy used to take me to the movies, and she created in her little brother a lifelong movielover. When I was a little boy, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) scared the hell out of me, but I was fascinated by the fantasy world Ray Harryhausen created. As a young teenager, I was in awe of the epic quality of Cheyenne Autumn (1964), and in retrospect, I’m certain I responded to the 65mm photography of Monument Valley.
n? io t u ll o p IR o t n io t Looking for a solu
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ONFILM P E T R A KO R N E R : O N F I LM
“I have learned to always trust my instincts. In the end, cinematography – like any other art form – very much comes down to a matter of taste and the personal experiences you intuitively bring to your work. You have to be genuine and deliver your very unique visual interpretation of the story arc. The trust of a director gives you the freedom to make bold visual choices. Great films resonate with us for a long time. Some films make us re-evaluate our lives and others give us a good laugh when we need one. I like creating atmospheric images for the story to unfold in, as a means of transporting the audience and giving wings to their imagination. I hope that in my lifetime I get to contribute to films that impact people; whether it is by granting them access to a world they didn’t know, or by changing the way they look at the world around them.” Petra Korner was born and raised in Vienna, Austria. She studied filmmaking at New York University, FAMU Prague and the American Film Institute. She has lived in New York, Prague, Paris, London, Los Angeles and Buenos Aires. Her credits include The Wackness, Burgua dii Ebo (The Wind and The Water), The Informers, and Wes Craven’s 25/8. She received the 2009 Kodak Vision Award for Cinematography from Women In Film. [All these programs were shot on Kodak motion picture film.] For an extended interview with Petra Korner, visit www.kodak.com/go/onfilm To order Kodak motion picture film, call (800) 621 - film. www.motion.kodak.com © Eastman Kodak Company, 2008. Photography: © 2008 Douglas Kirkland
