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“I’ve been a Schneider fan for 50 years – from my first 4x5 format lens to precision glass filters for HD and 35mm work, to Century Achromatic Diopters for DV. There are effects that only filters can create. For day exteriors, I rotate a Tru-Pol in my hands and look through it to see how it affects the color saturation of the sky, water, trees, and shiny objects like cars or glossy paint. On ‘Baadasssss!,’ the Classic Soft ® allowed me to diminish distracting artifacts on an elderly Ossie Davis’ face, without compromising the integrity or power of his character. I love the sense of surrealism the Black Frosts can render. On a ‘Night Stalker’ flashback, we blew out the windows and added a Black Frost. It created a sometimes subtle, sometimes powerful image without compromising the sharpness and deep blacks. For the short film ‘Cry of Ecstasy,’ I wanted to dynamically portray an artist’s canvas. By adding the Century Achromatic Diopter to the Panasonic DVX100, I got really dramatic edge-to-edge sharp full-contrast images without fringing. From Achromatic Diopters to filters, Schneider is an important addition to this cinematographer’s toolbox.” TM
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The International Journal of Film & Digital Production Techniques
On Our Cover: Michael C. Hall portrays a justice-seeking serial killer in the television series Dexter, shot by Romeo Tirone. (Photo by Jim Fiscus, courtesy of Showtime.)
Features 30 46 56
Departments
8 10 12 18 64 68 72 80 81 82 83 84
Cutting-Edge Camerawork Cinematographers from the TV series Dexter, Life on Mars, True Blood and The Unusuals analyze their strategies
A Life Full of Miracles Robert F. Liu, ASC receives the ASC Career Achievement in Television Award
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A Very Active Member Isidore Mankofsky, ASC reflects on his life’s work after receiving the Society’s Presidents Award
Editor’s Note Letters Short Takes: Clap Your Brains Off Production Slate: Gomorrah
46
Tokyo Sonata Post Focus: Alien Trespass Filmmaker’s Forum: Peter Sova, ASC
New Products & Services International Marketplace Classified Ads Ad Index Clubhouse News ASC Close-Up: Peter Wunstorf
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Editor’s Note erial killers are not generally known for their charm, but the protagonist of the Showtime drama Dexter (played by Michael C. Hall) could give even charismatic ladykiller Ted Bundy a run for his money. To illustrate the dual nature of the show’s homicidal vigilante, cinematographer Romeo Tirone takes a different approach to the two worlds Dexter occupies. “By day, he’s kind of a nerdy lab tech, and by night, when he’s on the prowl or in the kill room, he’s a powerful, sinister figure,” notes Tirone (“Cutting-Edge Camerawork,” page 30). “I use lighting to differentiate the two [looks]. When he’s in the everyday world, we use a lot more front light and see pretty much his entire face. When he’s on the prowl, we toplight him.” Our special focus on television production also includes an overview of ABC’s Life on Mars, a series whose look has been crafted by three accomplished ASC members: Kramer Morgenthau, who shot the pilot, and Frank Prinzi and Craig Di Bona, who alternate shooting regular episodes. Although the show concerns Sam Tyler (Jason O’Mara), a detective who time-travels back to the 1970s, Morgenthau didn’t attempt to mimic the look of Seventies cinematography while setting the visual template: “We could’ve gotten away with snap zooms, fog filters and so on, but we didn’t do any of that .... The camerawork has more to do with what Sam is feeling because he’s in a completely alien world.” “Sexy,” “sweaty” and “saturated” are a few of the adjectives that best describe the look of True Blood, HBO’s Southern-Gothic vampire series. Checco Varese, AMC lent an abundance of atmosphere to the show before passing the camera to first-season cinematographers Matt Jensen, John B. Aronson and Amy Vincent, ASC. For the upcoming second season, Jensen will share the load with Tirone, who knows a thing or two about bloodletting after his stint on Dexter. “So much of the first season of a show is trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t,” Jensen observes. “We try to continue to refine the look to keep it fresh for us and the audience.” The Unusuals, a new show premiering in April on ABC, has also evolved since its pilot was shot on film by Peter Levy, ASC, ACS. Regular weekly episodes are now captured on high-definition video by Roy Wagner, ASC, who employs Sony’s F23 and EX3 cameras. “The EX3 can be managed and manipulated with the same paintbox technology the F23 uses,” Wagner says. “However, we’re not painting on the set at all; all image manipulation is done in front of the sensor. This is not unlike old-school film cinematography. Manipulation is created through exposure, lighting and filtration.” Two other masters of classic techniques are profiled this month: Robert F. Liu, ASC, who received the Society’s Career Achievement in Television Award at last month’s ASC Awards ceremony (“A Life Full of Miracles, page 46) and Isidore Mankofsky, ASC, who accepted the Presidents Award for his contributions to both the big and small screens (“A Very Active Member,” page 56). Both men are devoted Society stalwarts whose participation enriches us all. Those of you seeking further enlightenment are encouraged to visit your local arthouse cinema to catch Gomorrah and Tokyo Sonata, two fine foreign films featured in this month’s Production Slate section (page 18), and read this month’s Filmmakers’ Forum by Peter Sova, ASC (“Shooting Push in Hong Kong,” page 68).
Stephen Pizzello Executive Editor 8
Photo by Douglas Kirkland.
S
Letters Schaefer Joins “Grumpy” List Regarding the letters you’ve published by John Toll, ASC, and Jim Stinson about the recent Filmmakers’ Forum by John Bailey, ASC [“The DI Dilemma, or: Why I Still Love Celluloid,” AC June ’08], I have this to add: I, too, am a grumpy cinematographer, and I have some additional reasons to be grumpy. I agree with Mr. Bailey and Mr. Toll about the eroding control we have over the quality and integrity of our images. I agree when Mr. Toll takes on Mr. Stinson for being so cavalier when he writes, “ … the cinematographer’s level of control depends on his contractual and personal relations within the production. So get control, already.” Possibly Mr. Stinson was just trying to be provocative when he wrote that, but I find it annoying and insulting, as well as simplistic and naïve. A case in point is my work on Quantum of Solace [AC Nov. ’08]. I’ve shot every film Marc Forster has made so far; we have an unusual and wonderful working relationship, and on his films, my responsibilities include controlling the framing and grading of the film. I am expected to follow through all of the post to make sure the images correspond to what we discussed and I set out to achieve in production. I am expected to make sure the visual-effects work conforms to my original photography in color, contrast and tenor. I am expected to do a grade for HD previews as well as the final DI corrections and the grades for the home deliverables (i.e., pan-and-scan, DVD, Blu-ray, cable and airline versions). The problem is that although the director, editors and visual-effects supervisors remain on the payroll throughout post, the director of photography does not. The studios and producers have commended me for doing such a wonderful job of delivering a great film, yet they won’t reach into their pockets to compensate me for my time, which was considerable. They say they 10
refuse to set precedent. Some cinematographers have been paid for their DI work, but most have not. When I go off the production’s payroll, I need to find another job, and that usually means I won’t be available to do what my director expects me to do and I also want to do. With the tools available in the digital realm, it is too easy for anyone in post to change the images in terms of framing, color, frame rate, etc. Now, with the specter of largeformat digital acquisition looming on the horizon, there is talk of “capturing” images in formats comparable to Imax and then just “finding” the desired image within the larger frame. We now use large-format imaging for visualeffects work, to capture plates that can be repositioned later for specific needs, but considering that as a way to do principal photography is frightening to me. If Mr. Stinson could include me in his mailing list when he explains how to “get control, already,” I would be grateful. I also think that the ASC and the IA Local 600 should take proactive roles in trying to set agreements with the studios and producers to protect the cinematographer’s role. This truly feels like a “Wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am” way of being involved in the creative process. Roberto Schaefer, ASC Venice, Calif. Letters to the editor can be sent to: Letters, American Cinematographer, 1782 N. Orange Dr., Los Angeles, CA, 90028. Letters must include your full name, address and telephone number. AC reserves the right to edit submissions for length and clarity.
Short Takes Creating “Clap Your Brains Off” With Canon’s Mark III
The DJ gods, portrayed by NSM PSM band members Pato (in green) and Kay Watson, scan their vinyl collection to craft an appropriate mash-up for the music video “Clap Your Brains Off,” directed by Frank Beltrán and photographed by Khristian Olivares. In the video, the album covers come to life and break into the Droste effect, as inspired by M.C. Escher’s Print Gallery.
12 March 2009
nless you’re an animator, it’s easy to forget that a single motion picture is made up of hundreds of thousands of individual pictures. In 1878, Eadweard Muybridge needed 12 still cameras to capture the entire stride of a galloping horse, and today,
U
there are many directors and cinematographers who are still experimenting with the same creative tactics. Frank Beltrán and Khristian Olivares are two such filmmakers, and their video for Mexican party band NSM PSM’s “Clap Your Brains Off”
finds its inspiration in a number of unique visual works. First, a bit of back story: Beltrán had been working steadily as an assistant director in the Mexican advertising industry while the members of NSM PSM built up a strong fan base with their lively mash-ups. They’d all met previously at parties and through mutual acquaintances, so when the time came for NSM PSM to make a video for the first single off their first album, Beltrán was a natural first choice. “I didn’t have all the ideas on hand,” Beltrán recalls, speaking by phone from Mexico City. “The video started to transform as we shot it, and the band liked each idea I presented.” The concept behind the video is that there are DJ gods who are mixing an album with different records. Every time they pull a record off the shelf, we get pulled into the cover, seamlessly segueing into a musical number featuring the band. Each scene is a different take on a circular, repeating pattern. “I wanted to style several key scenes after Sebastian Perez Duarte’s pictures,” says Beltrán. “He’s a photographer I found on Flickr.com who employs the Droste effect, inspired by M.C. Escher’s Print Gallery, in some of his pictures. I learned how to apply the complex mathematical equation he used to get the effect through Josh Sommers’ tutorials, which I also found on Flickr.” Sommers had released the equation to the public as a plug-in for Gimp, an open-source photo editor. Beltrán explains the steps involved: “First, you had to take the pictures in a certain way, then you had to center them, cut them and crop them. Then you had to write down the math
Photos by Roger Gómez, Adrian Lejarazu and Frank Beltrán, courtesy of Beltrán.
by Iain Stasukevich
Above: The filmmakers prepare a shot with a crane specially built by industrial designer Javier Romero. Below: Inspired by French photographer Denis Darzacq’s Hyper photo series, Beltrán staged a group of break-dancers against a checkerboard floor and had them perform a series of identical moves in front of the locked-off camera.
14 March 2009
formula in a program called MathMap that runs through Gimp. To make matters worse, it took up to 15-20 minutes for each image to process!” He did the math: If NTSC video runs at almost 30 fps, and each frame took at least 15 minutes to process, then he was looking at 450 minutes to process 1 second of footage. Beltrán’s research led him to Bill Horne, another member of the “Escher’s Droste Print Gallery” group
on Flickr. Horne had written a Droste code in the Java programming language that takes 11 seconds to process an image instead of 15 minutes. “[Bill] became the main reason I decided we could do it,” says Beltrán. The director turned to a programmer friend, José Manuel Silva Vela, to rewrite the code for automation and on-the-fly effects, such as rotation and zoom increments. Once he knew he’d be able to
achieve the effect he wanted, Beltrán had to figure out how to actually shoot the video. He decided to use Canon’s D1-EOS Mark III, which is capable of capturing 10 fps for up to 110 continuous shots. That way, he could capture a 10-megapixel image, use 35mm lenses, and have the ability to adjust the ISO from 50 to 6400. “Canon gave me an EF 28-200mm zoom lens as sponsorship and loaned us an EF 1635mm lens,” says Beltrán, adding that most of the video was shot with the latter. A Canon EF 35mm USM wideangle lens was used for some shots. Beltrán wasn’t comfortable taking on the photography himself, so he turned to a friend, cinematographer Khristian Olivares. The two had met on a commercial shoot in Mexico City, when Olivares was a camera assistant. By the time “Clap Your Brains Off” came along, Olivares had shot several commercials and music videos. “I needed a real cinematographer in order to get things right,” says Beltrán. Some of the Droste scenes were photographed on a soundstage at the Universidad Intercontinental, Beltrán’s alma mater. For this work, Olivares rigged the Mark III to the lighting grid and shot straight down at the floor as actors danced around the
Roberto R ober o to Schaefer, Schaeferr, ASC | D Director irector of P Photography hotogrraphy “When I saw w the Nila light I was pr pretty ettyy impr impressed essed that LEDs could be as pow powerful as these. I thought t the Nila lights would ld be b a rreally eally ll good d thing to use on the moving vehicles in Quantum of Solace because of their durability durability, y,, rrobustness, obusttness, size and punch. W We e took a chance and d looked at them. I a am m glad we did. I used the Nila N lights mostly for ccar ar shots but I also used them t at times in place e of an HMI or tungsten n light on stage and on n location. location So I was mix mixing xing it with other sour sources rces and it worked quite q well. I found them m very controllable contr ollable e with the inter interchangeable changeable lenses. I rreally eally liked d that the lenses wer were e so customizable customizab le for shots. I was also pleased p with their size,, the fact that you can putt them anywher anywhere; e; they y ar are e the size of a small bookshelf b speaker speaker.. The e built-in electronic electr onic dimmer d is also a nice plus. p For Quantum of o Solace I had bracketss made that allowed d me to put them toge together ether like a Nine-Ligh Nine-Light. ht.
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Schaefer’s work Schaefer’s w includes Quantum of Sola Solace, ce, Finding Neverland d, Stranger Than Fiction, T he Kite Kite Runner, Ki Runnerr,, Neverland, The W aiting F or G uffman, B est IIn nS how an nd For Y o our Waiting For Guffman, Best Show and Your Cons sideration. He was nominated fo or a BAFT TA Consideration. for BAFTA for his work on Finding Neverland.
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Along for the ride, Beltrán aims the Canon Mark III dSLR at two band members seated on a carousel. The camera recorded 3456x2304 JPEG images at 10 fps.
surface of a large record album. Another scene was shot at a swimming pool, where Olivares placed a homemade camera crane on the edge of the diving board to get an overhead shot of some synchronized swimmers. In both cases, he was able to operate the camera and monitor the picture by running long remote-control and video cables from the camera to a video village. Another source of inspiration was the photo series by Denis Darzacq called Hyper, wherein break-dancers were photographed mid-break at high shutter speeds. Without the telling motion blur, the resultant image 16 March 2009
depicts the dancers magically frozen in air. Beltrán was amazed by the photos and wanted to add the element of motion, and also stop-motion, to them. A group of break-dancers was asked to perform a series of identical moves in front of the locked-down camera. In a riff on the Muybridge experiments, Olivares photographed each dancer’s performance three times, and then the frames from the best takes were essentially shuffled in postproduction. After one dancer begins a move, every few frames, the footage from another dancer performing the same move is cut in. It was a difficult effect to achieve, given the
complex nature of the dance moves. To assist the dancers, Beltrán staged the action on a checkerboard floor. “They knew which square they had to put their hands on,” recalls Olivares. “They had a lot of problems getting the moves just right with all the spinning around.” One of the album-cover scenes takes place on a carousel with the members of NSM PSM. For this scene, Beltrán and Olivares used a special lens adapter normally used to create virtual-reality Quicktimes for realestate presentations. The adapter, manufactured by 0-360.com, requires that the taking camera be placed on its back, shooting up into a cone-shaped mirror mounted in the center of the lens’ field of view. A special plug-in is needed to unwrap the image, which in the video can be seen as the ultrawidescreen shots of the band on the carousel. It’s a true panoramic image — if the left and right side of the screens were connected in a loop, one would have a complete 360-degree view of the playground. “Clap Your Brains Off” was photographed in JPEG format to allow for the highest resolution and an extended continuous shooting capability. Fix Comunicación in Mexico City turned Beltrán’s 3456x2304 and 3888x2592 processed stills into 720x480 QuickTime image sequences at 29.97 fps (played back at 10 fps). The video was edited on Final Cut Studio, and Red Rentals Mexico did a 2K online for the HD master. The final product is decidedly lo-fi, just as the filmmakers intended. “I didn’t want the video to look stylish or have the usual color-correction,” says Beltrán. “I wanted a video that would look like we’d just grabbed a camera and started shooting.” Olivares agrees, adding, “These kinds of projects should look different than anything you’ve seen before. I loved working with the still camera, and I’m really happy with the results.” I
Production Slate Italian Crime and Japanese “Face”
Demythologizing the Mafia by Patricia Thomson When most people hear “Mafia,” they think of Sicily’s Casa Nostra, but far more powerful is the Camorra in Naples. Responsible for 4,000 deaths, the Camorra network reaches deep into the European economy, earning $200 billion through illegal activity and profiting from legitimate enterprises such as construction, fashion and tourism. But it wasn’t until Neapolitan writer Roberto Saviano wrote the exposé Gomorrah, in 2006, that the public took notice. More than a million copies of the book were sold in Italy, and it has since been translated into 33 languages. Thrust into this unwelcome spotlight, the Camorra responded with a death threat against Saviano, who now lives under full-time protection. 18 March 2009
When Italian director and cameraman Matteo Garrone read Gomorrah, he saw it as “an important, powerful book [that was] full of strong images,” he says. “I’m a visual director; I used to be a painter. So when I read the book, I thought there was the possibility of making a Mafia movie different from those I’d seen before.” Shot in the periphery of Naples, the movie makes use of practical locations, non-professional actors, realitybased storylines and a spare cinematic language that Garrone devised with cinematographer Marco Onorato, AIC, a frequent collaborator. Onorato earned David di Donatello Award nominations for his work on Garrone’s The Embalmer (2002) and First Love (2004), and he has shot seven of the director’s eight fictional features. (The exception was Roman
Summer. “I was occupied with another project,” Onorato says. “I’m sorry about that, because it’s a film I love.”) As it happens, Onorato is Garrone’s stepfather. When Garrone started out in the film business, Onorato hired him as camera assistant. When Garrone began directing, he, in turn, hired Onorato as director of photography. “We work well together,” says Garrone. “He’s a great director of photography, and we share the same ideas about cinema.” On Garrone’s films, the duo discuss all aspects of cinematography but divide the work; Onorato handles lighting and Garrone operates the camera, which is typically handheld. Onorato observes, “I think a cameraman is an executor, whereas a director who also operates camera is a creator. So it’s
Gomorrah photos by Mario Spada, courtesy of IFC Films.
Two young gangsters in Gomorrah, Ciro (Ciro Petrone) and Marco (Marco Macor), try to emulate Scarface’s Tony Montana in all that they do.
Left: Two characters maneuver through the notorious Scampia housing project, where most of the film was shot. Below: A tailor (Salvatore Cantalupo) works with his Chinese associates.
critical to put him in a position where he can feel free. [On Gomorrah], Matteo and I sought to find the right locations and create the right atmosphere so he could be free to move with the camera according to how he felt.” Garrone says his decisions about camera moves are intuitive. “When I shoot, it’s important for me to be on camera because I invent. Also, the actor doesn’t always make the same move, so every shot is different.” But on Gomorrah, Garrone was careful to ensure that camera moves and other visual elements never upstaged the story. “The raw material … was so visually powerful that I merely filmed it in as straightforward a way as possible, as if I were a passerby who happened to find myself there by chance,” he wrote in the press notes. “We wanted to shoot the movie like a reportage of war, like a documentary,” Garrone tells AC. “We think that’s close to the soul of the book, which is a kind of reportage and denouncement. We wanted to give the audience the feeling of being inside, seeing and smelling, so it was important to be very simple when shooting, to be invisible. When you try to show how good you are
at moving the camera or framing, the audience immediately comes out of the movie. That, for me, was sometimes very difficult because my strong point is making the frame.” One touchstone was Roberto Rossellini’s Paisà, shot in 1946 in various parts of Italy. “The lesson from Rossellini was very important,” says Garrone. “Through those characters, he showed the situation of the country, but without judging. That, for me, was the most important thing: without judging. In Gomorrah, I leave the viewer the
freedom to have his own opinion. The material is so strong it doesn’t need any comment; every time I tried to comment on what I was shooting, it became banal.” Like Paisà, Gomorrah follows multiple storylines. Focusing on five characters from the book, Garrone and his team of screenwriters (including Saviano) show various low-level drones who depend on the Camorra for their livelihoods: Don Ciro, who delivers money to families of imprisoned clan members; 13-year-old Totò, who
American Cinematographer 19
Left: Cinematographer Marco Onorato, AIC, who shot the picture with director/ cinematographer Matteo Garrone. Right: Franco (Tony Servillo) is the intimidating manager of a toxic dump.
20 March 2009
desperately wants to join the local clan; Marco and Ciro, two loose cannons who worship Scarface’s Tony Montana; Roberto, a college graduate who takes an apprenticeship in waste-management and discovers its illegal underpinnings; and Pasquale, a tailor who works under the table for the clan in high fashion but secretly trains Chinese competitors. Gomorrah was shot in Super 35mm with a single Arricam Lite. The filmmakers considered shooting Super 16mm and finishing with a digital intermediate as a cost-saving measure, but they were dissatisfied with the test results. They shot Kodak Vision3 500T 5219 and had the ENR process applied to release prints at Technicolor in Rome. “We did a 90-percent application of the ENR process on Kodak [Vision] Premier,” says Onorato. “Shooting widescreen was important because there were some frames that needed widescreen, such as the scene at the beginning of the film that shows the children in a swimming
pool,” Garrone notes. The camera starts tight on the children playing in a plastic pool, and as the shot moves wider, it reveals the pool’s location on the roof of a vast, squalid housing project in Scampia, where most of the film was shot. “It’s one of the most famous places in Europe for drug dealers, so it’s a kind of symbol,” says Garrone. He also singles out a shot of a dump where hundreds of barrels of toxic waste are being illegally buried in a quarry. The scene begins with truck drivers walking off the job because of an accident, and the project manager recruits children to drive the eight-wheelers instead. From atop the quarry, a wide shot reveals the scope of the ecological nightmare and the line of trucks snaking down a switchback, their barely-adolescent drivers already in the clan’s employ. “Locations are very important because they tell something more about the story and characters,” says Garrone. “For instance, the two boys who pretend to be Tony Montana are anarchists, so they’re surrounded by open space. That’s completely different from the story of Totò, who wants to go inside the clan. That’s like going into the army or prison, so it was important that [his environment] be claustrophobic.” Garrone and Onorato prefer to use prime lenses, in this case Zeiss Ultra Primes, and avoid zoom lenses.
“The only filters I usually use are NDs and polarizers,” adds Onorato. They favored the 20mm, 32mm and 40mm primes. “We didn’t use wide angles very much because, again, we wanted to be invisible,” says Garrone. “I was often very close to the [actor] and pushed the background out of focus. We worked a lot on staying close to the actor.” Many shots in the film run long and without cuts, and the camera moves are always motivated by the characters’ actions. “We worked a lot [of the details] out on location,” says Garrone. “But then we shot like it was something happening in that moment.” A PeeWee dolly, a 13' Robin crane and a 36' Sky King crane with Panther remote head were used, but infrequently. “They’d stick out, so we used them only when we thought it was very necessary,” says Garrone. For example, the PeeWee’s hydraulic lift allowed Garrone to follow Totò as he climbed up a wall to fetch a gun, and a crane provided a key overhead perspective after a clan massacre. “It was important to be above to see all the bodies the character is walking between,” says Garrone. The housing project the production used was slated for demolition, so most of the residents had vacated. “It was like an empty studio — perfect for
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TECHNICAL SPECS 2.40:1 Super 35mm Arricam Lite Zeiss Ultra Primes Kodak Vision3 500T 5219 ENR Process by Technicolor Rome Printed on Kodak Vision Premier 2393
22 March 2009
Ryuhei Sasaki (Teruyuki Kagawa) languishes in a long unemployment line after losing his job.
The Sorrows of a Salaryman by Chris Pizzello Few directors can conjure an atmosphere of supernatural menace like Japan’s Kiyoshi Kurosawa, the filmmaker behind such uniquely disturbing, existential horror films as Cure and Pulse. With his new film, Tokyo Sonata, the director lends subtler terror to a more commonplace drama: the unraveling of an ordinary family whose complacent existence implodes when the patriarch, Ryuhei Sasaki (Teruyuki Kagawa), is “downsized” out of a job. Mortified by his loss of “face” and paralyzed at the prospect of informing his wife (Kyoko Koizumi) and sons (Yu Koyanagi and Kai Inowaki) about this development, Ryuhei decides to avoid the issue by pretending nothing has happened — he leaves home each morning in a suit and tie and spends his daytime hours searching fruitlessly for work and killing time in public parks with an old friend who has also lost his job. But the ruse eventually catches up with Ryuhei, as the strain of preserving his secret tests the fraying bonds within his family. A film with a familial theme was a new challenge for Kurosawa, and he called on cinematographer Akiko Ashizawa, JSC, who had also shot his films Loft and Retribution, to help imbue
the seemingly commonplace milieu with a fresh visual aesthetic. Born in Tokyo, Ashizawa is one of the few female cinematographers in Japan. “When I was a student, I had no interest in film, but that all changed when I saw Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou,” she recalls via e-mail. “I started working as an assistant in independent film productions as a student, and then began working professionally as an assistant director of photography in TV commercials. A female assistant director of photography was an anomaly, but because it was a relatively new field, there was less sexism there than in other sectors of the film industry. However, there were times when I made mistakes, and someone would comment that it was because I’m a woman. That, of course, bothered me.” Kurosawa contacted Ashizawa after seeing her work in Kunitoshi Manda’s Unloved, and the two have since enjoyed a harmonious collaboration over three films. “I think Kurosawa and I both believe in ‘the catharsis of perfection,’” says the cinematographer. “There are numerous parts involved in a shot, from writing to art direction to camera operation, and if each crewmember made perfection the single goal, it would not necessarily be beneficial to the project as a whole. If perfection is 100 percent, then we’d
Tokyo Sonata photos courtesy of Regent Releasing; Ashizawa photo courtesy of Flavor of Happiness Film Partners.
shooting,” says Garrone. When lighting this and other interiors, Onorato strove for naturalism. “If you observe light, you realize every environment exists naturally by itself; consequently, in a film where you should be invisible, you try to make the most of the natural light sources and intervene to reinforce them when necessary, but always with discretion,” he says. Many interior scenes take place in the housing complex, a labyrinth of walkways, stairways and apartments. “I took advantage of the windows, at times reinforcing the light with some Kino Flos positioned outside, and we eventually used the practicals inside as well,” says Onorato. “Most of the time, the crew teased me about how I covered the set. They said, ‘Marco doesn’t place light; he takes it away.’” He typically relied on small units, often “Kino Flos and neon lamps. A couple of times, I projected a 4K HMI to create a moon effect, but I don’t believe I ever used more than a 10K. It just wasn’t necessary. “For night exteriors, I asked the production designer to re-establish some of the neon lights that used to be part of the housing complex, then I cut into that with warm light coming from the apartment windows facing the corridor,” adds Onorato. “Overall, it was very stimulating. Bellissimo.” Since its premiere at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, Gomorrah has won many honors, including the European Film Award for Best Cinematography. The picture was Italy’s submission for this year’s Academy Award for Foreign-Language Film.
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Top: The interior of the family’s home was created as a set, and cinematographer Akiko Ashizawa, JSC often chose voyeuristic angles impeded by various “distractions” — chairs, wooden beams, window frames and other structural elements — within the frame. “By including all those intrusions, we hoped to portray the family within the society, as well as the individuals within the family, in new ways,” she says. Middle: Sasaki reacts badly when his older son (Yû Koyanagi) seeks his permission to join the military, forcing his wife (Kyôko Koizumi) to play peacekeeper. Bottom: Sasaki is eventually forced to accept a janitorial job at a mall.
24 March 2009
prefer to go with a shot in which each part achieves 80 percent. When Kurosawa edits, he usually chooses the first take because by the time we get to the second take, it is too perfect, too prepared; that makes the cast and crew nervous, but he has a way of [making the most of] that initial energy.” Kurosawa lauds Ashizawa’s versatility as a cinematographer. “The high quality of her work can roughly be broken down into two parts,” he observes via e-mail. “She has a natural talent when it comes to creating a balanced composition; instead of just going along with my taste, she counters it by creating a fragile balance, and I find that impressive. The second part is her extraordinary sense of color. I’m relatively conservative about color, and I think Ashizawa possesses a sense that is possibly more radical. So I am always excited to start shooting right between her instinct for balance and her radicalism.” The filmmakers spent much of their prep time searching for a house in Tokyo that would suit the middle-class Sasaki family. They finally settled on a humble, two-story structure next to some active railroad tracks. “The old neighborhood we chose is not in the throes of modernization, but it is not safe from it, either,” says Ashizawa. “The placement of the house next to train tracks, as well as the electrical wires surrounding it, is not unusual in Japan. Instead of treating the surroundings as an encumbrance, we saw them as positive contributions and even emphasized them. We used locations in both eastern and western Tokyo and combined them to create a surrealist atmosphere that could exist anywhere, but in actuality does not.” The house interior was created on set, after the filmmakers carefully considered design, color and texture; these elements were exploited by Ashizawa in her inventive framing. “The camera was placed where we could ‘peek’ at the family,” she says. “We placed it on the very edges of window frames, the dish cabinet, the handles of the staircase, and even behind bars and
Right: After attempting to rob the family home, a homeless burglar (Koji Yakusho) makes an unexpected connection with Mrs. Sasaki. Below: The Sasakis’ younger son (Kai Inowaki), a piano prodigy, provides a ray of hope for the family with a stunning recital. Ashizawa captured most of the boy’s performance from a distant, stationary position that lends the sequence a powerful stillness.
26 March 2009
wooden beams — places where one would usually avoid placing the camera because there are so many distractions within the frame. By including all those intrusions, we hoped to portray the family within the society, as well as the individuals within the family, in new ways.” She strove to maintain a relatively normal visual perspective within the house (and through much of the film) by employing a Zeiss 40mm lens on the camera, an Arri 535B. Kurosawa notes, “I wanted to express narrowness, proximity and a stifling closeness while
keeping enough distance from the subjects to maintain a comfortable objectivity.” Japanese productions feature a lighting designer in addition to a cinematographer, and on Tokyo Sonata, Ashizawa (who operated the camera) consulted with Tokuju Ichikawa on the lighting scheme in the Sasaki home. “I consider him my best work partner because he exceeds all my expectations,” says the cinematographer. “In regard to the lighting, we talk about drastic matters freely, so our working relationship is far more flexible than
what is traditionally seen in the Japanese film industry.” The filmmakers mixed colored lights inside the home to suggest the clashing relationships within the family. “We lit the dining area with 3200°K lights, while the kitchen area and living room featured cyan fluorescent lights,” says Ashizawa. “For the area near the front door, we mixed the exterior light with a green-tinted light, and we shot the night scenes with an 85C [colorconversion] filter. The living-room area closest to the TV was lit with a storebought tungsten fluorescent light called an ‘eco light,’ which created a subtle texture. Green and cyan-blue tints are usually avoided, but we chose to use them instead; the mix of colors was a crucial part of delineating the chemistry of the family members, as well as the particular circumstances in which the family is placed.” This nuanced mixture of light required careful handling of the negative. “The team at Tokyo Laboratory, headed by [color-timing supervisor] Ryoichi Hirose, did brilliant work,” says Ashizawa. “I shot the film on [Kodak Vision2 500T] 5218 and [50D] 5201, and all the footage was pushed one stop. For example, the 5218 was processed at 1,000 ASA, but the exposure was stopped at 640 and then printed darker at the lab. We printed on Kodak Vision Premier so the blacks would appear deep and rich. I always aim to express a rich shade of black and also make use of the granularity of the film. I am still emboldened by something Janusz Kaminski said in American Cinematographer a few years ago: ‘Raw films today often lack granularity or are very vague about it. If the image does not incorporate the grain, it will [look] digitized.’” One of the subplots in Tokyo Sonata concerns Ryuhei’s wife, Megumi, who suppresses an independent streak (hinted at by her red sweater) in favor of her duties as wife and mother. Her devotion to her family lends poignancy to a grainy, unnerving dream sequence in which she imagines the unannounced return of her oldest
Left: Ashizawa lines up a shot. Right: Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa runs through a scene with Kagawa.
son, who has left home to assist U.S. troops in Iraq and appears shell-shocked by the experience. “The dream sequence was something Kurosawa and I talked about a lot, especially concerning to what extent we should convey it as a dream,” recalls Ashizawa. “It couldn’t be too obvious, but it also couldn’t be so subtle that the audience wouldn’t register it as a dream. When you underexpose shots but print [the negative] to normal density, the black appears hazy, and the image is blurred. It’s usually considered a mishap, but we used it intentionally with the 5218.” In a bizarre plot twist, Megumi is kidnapped from her home by a hapless burglar (Koji Yakusho) and ends up willingly spending the night with him in a beach house by the ocean. She briefly considers the possibility of running away with him and starting a new life, but as she walks along the shore the next morning, she seems to have an epiphany about her matriarchal role. The subtle play of emotion on her face is augmented by the rising sun. “Initially, we hoped to use only natural light as the sun came up, but that’s very difficult to achieve,” notes Ashizawa. “In the end, it was better to work toward the exact look we wanted for the scene; [the final look] has a surreal quality that I love. An 18K HMI and the camera were mounted separately on pickup trucks, and we waited until dawn. We needed to capture the exact moment when the sky turns bright, which occurs for just a single moment. Kyoko understood that very well and did a remarkable job in just one take.” The Sasakis’ story culminates 28 March 2009
some months later, in a wordless scene in a music hall. The parents have each accepted their lots in life, and Ryuhei has relaxed his once-unyielding attitude about his young son’s desire to play piano. The camera watches from a stationary position in the distance as the boy’s flawless performance of Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” renders his parents and the entire recital audience speechless. “It was important that the final scene look entirely different from the rest of the film,” says Ashizawa. “The recital hall was formerly a bank that was built in 1927. The ceiling was very high, so we set up a few 10K HMIs on the upstairs landing area, but we focused the light on the floor and not directly on the subject so the light would be diffused around [the boy]. Between the lights, we used what Ichikawa and I call ‘seaweed,’ a partition that controls the light and renders a subtle effect.” Kurosawa observes that the film’s melancholy mood was augmented by the winter season in which it was filmed. “The diagonal ray of light in the winter gives the work a wonderfully nuanced shade,” says the director. “Maybe I feel that way because I am Japanese. This may be a bit strange, but I feel the light in Tokyo Sonata is very European, and I feel that the unexpected manifestation of European influences in a Japanese film shows how this film was somehow blessed with an ability of transcend nationality. “I think the story of Tokyo Sonata is particular to Japan, but even a strictly localized story can be accepted by
everyone around the world as a global expression once it is transformed into film,” he adds. “That is probably an inherent trait of cinema.” TECHNICAL SPECS 1.85:1 35mm Arri 535B Zeiss Superspeed lenses Kodak Vision2 50D 5201, 500T 5218 Printed on Kodak Vision Premier 2393 I
ERRATA One of the cutlines in our coverage of Quantum of Solace (Nov. ’08) contained an error. In the photo at the top of page 30, Daniel Craig is walking past the terminal at England’s Farnborough Airport, not a set built by the production. “Our production designer, Dennis Gassner, is one of the most talented designers I’ve worked with, but this was not one of his sets,” reports Roberto Schaefer, ASC, the film’s director of photography. “The Farnborough terminal was chosen for its stunning modern architecture.” In our coverage of Slumdog Millionaire (Dec. ’08), we incorrectly reported that the Canon EOS-D1 Mark III can shoot bursts of up to 30 RAW frames per second. According to director of photography Anthony Dod Mantle, BSC, DFF, “the camera could only reach up to about 11-fps bursts. This depended on the use of menus in the camera as well as the size of the files.”
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Cutting-Edge
Camerawork
The television series Dexter, Life on Mars, True Blood and The Unusuals present their cinematographers with varied creative challenges. by Jay Holben, Jean Oppenheimer, Iain Stasukevich and Patricia Thomson 30 March 2009
n an effort to survey the primetime scene, AC recently interviewed the directors of photography responsible for crafting the looks of Showtime’s Dexter, ABC’s Life on Mars, HBO’s True Blood and ABC’s The Unusuals. For Dexter, we spoke to recent Emmy nominee Romeo Tirone, who has shot the first three seasons of the series; for Life on Mars, we spoke to pilot cinematographer and recent ASC Award nominee
I
Kramer Morgenthau, ASC, as well as series cinematographers and ASC members Frank Prinzi and Craig Di Bona; for True Blood, we spoke to Checco Varese and Matthew Jensen, who together set the look of the show’s first season; and for The Unusuals, we spoke to pilot cinematographer Peter Levy, ASC, ACS, and series cinematographer Roy H. Wagner, ASC.
Dexter unit photography by Peter Iovino and Cliff Lipson, courtesy of Showtime.
Dexter by Jean Oppenheimer Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall) has one of the more unusual sidelines for a TV hero: he’s a serial killer. His job as a blood-spatter analyst for the Miami Metropolitan Police Dept. serves as a perfect cover for his nighttime activities: eliminating killers who have somehow slipped through the criminal-justice system. Romeo Tirone has been the director of photography on Showtime’s Dexter since the series made its debut, in 2006. He earned an Emmy nomination last year for his work on the show (for the episode “The British Invasion”), which is shot on high-definition video. Shortly after he completed the third season, he spoke to AC about his approach to the Los Angelesbased production. “On the first two seasons of Dexter, we shot with a Panavised Sony F900 and used an Arri 435 film camera for ramping and slowmotion work. For season three, we switched to a Sony CineAlta F23, and I was able to do speed changes incamera, which allowed us to eliminate 35mm altogether. Thanks to its four preset hyper-gamma settings, the F23 is a vast improvement over the F900, especially in terms of being able to shoot outside and in highcontrast situations. We also started using a Sony EX1 last year; it’s onethird the size of the F23 — perfect for confined quarters — and has a 1⁄2-inch chip that cuts very well with the F23’s 2⁄3-inch chip. We could put an operator in a car with the EX1 and have Michael drive around the block and do a scene while we’re setting up another shot with the other cameras. The EX1 is also a great third camera whenever we do stunts because it’s easy to rig from the ceiling, something that would take far longer to do with the F23. Sony gave me the EX1 to try out, and
we just never gave it back! “We’ve used the same Primo Digital Zooms all three seasons, a 627mm, an 8-72mm and a 25112mm. Because of the speed at which we have to move, we pretty much live on the zooms, and except for some of the kill scenes, we usually shoot with two cameras. I have a 1⁄8 Tiffen Black Pro-Mist on the lens all the time to take the edge off the HD image. On the first two seasons, I shot day exteriors with a straw filter to get that warm Miami feel, but when we switched to the F23, I found I had more control over warming up the image with the onset paintbox. I use the paintbox on the set to control the iris, color saturation, black levels and highlights, essentially doing my first pass at color-correction while the actors are rehearsing, and sometimes we ride these levels during the shot, which allows me to move the camera through different lighting situations quickly. Our digital-imaging technician, Daniel Applegate, is a real collaborator when it comes to the look and how far we can stretch these cameras. “I would describe Dexter’s look as a graphic-novel style with a Scorsese-Cronenberg-Kubrick influ-
ence. The main character operates in two worlds; by day, he’s kind of a nerdy lab tech, and by night, when he’s on the prowl or in the kill room, he’s a powerful, sinister figure. I use lighting to differentiate the two. When he’s in the everyday world, we use a lot more front light and see pretty much his entire face. When he’s on the prowl, we toplight him; Michael’s features play exceptionally well in that style of light. “Red is a signature color, although we try to use it sparingly, primarily when Dexter is in his ‘dark passenger’ mode. My blue is a kind of symbolic darkness; we can see what’s going on, but we feel like the characters are in the dark. I like to motivate the color with practicals, such as neon signs or a car’s taillights. “I try to give each kill scene a different feel by tinting them all differently. In the first season, one of Dexter’s first kills was a serial drunk driver who was running people over and then leaving town. Dexter caught up with him, and we gave the kill scene a really green tone, playing to the graphic-novel sensibility. “For kill scenes, the room is sealed with plastic sheeting, and Dexter’s victim lies naked on a table
Opposite page: Serial killer Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall) dispatches a carefully prepared victim. This page: Dexter bids farewell to another of his targets in his special “killing room.” In this set, cinematographer Romeo Tirone used two Source Four Pars to create overhead lighting that bounced off the cellophanewrapped victims.
American Cinematographer 31
Cutting-Edge Camerawork
Left: Dexter uses a mannequin to test the bloodspattering properties of a rather blunt weapon. Right: Tirone captures the grisly scene with his camera under wraps.
32 March 2009
in the center of the room, bound with strips of plastic. Two Source Four Pars shine down from above on the plastic-wrapped victim, and that light bounces around the room. I’ll let the exposure blow out a little to obscure any nudity. There’s no separate light on Dexter; when he leans in close to the victim’s face, he’s lit by the light bouncing off the plastic encasing his prey. When he stands up, he’s in the toplight that gives him that sinister look. “We use two hardware-store clip lights as practicals in the room. One is on the display Dexter wants his victim to see — usually photos of the people that person has harmed — and the other is shining on Dexter’s tools. When he picks up a knife, he’s lit by the light reflecting off the blade. “Because HD really reads into the darkness, I can light large spaces like the kill room with small units. And because the plastic sheeting obscures whatever is behind it, I can
scatter practical lights around, which enhances the depth of the set. We typically shoot kill scenes with one camera and go handheld, which, in conjunction with the overhead lighting, allows us to do 360-degree moves. “The police station is one of our permanent sets, and before they started building it, I was able to give the art department my specs for the floor. I wanted it to be smooth enough to dolly on without having to lay dolly tracks or put down a dance floor. Sometimes we’ll shoot three different scenes in one long, rolling master; depending on how far around we’re going, we’ll use either a Steadicam or a dolly. We might start on a wide shot, then move into the over of one scene, and then maybe a character will start walking away and we’ll push back and reveal the master of the next conversation. We’ll push into the over of that and then follow an extra walking in the background, then pan right and find someone else at his desk. Then we go back and pick up the other side of all the conversations. We have to get through seven to nine pages a day, and this strategy saves us a lot of time. “A 60-foot-wide day/night TransLite appears in most of the shots in the police station. For day scenes, the backing is lit from the front by Skypans and cyc strips, and
for night scenes, it’s lit from behind with Skypans and Source Four Lekos that we gel with different colors to give the buildings more of a Miami flavor — whole buildings are hot pink or neon purple. To add to the realism, we poke small, single LED lights through the backdrop to suggest flashing lights on top of buildings and construction cranes. We’re always adding to the backdrop. We’ve even added rope lights programmed in a chase sequence to suggest traffic on a causeway off in the distance. “The house where Dexter’s girlfriend, Rita, lives, is also a permanent set. We put 10Ks through the windows and supplement with Source Four Pars on stands to intensify the feel of sunlight bouncing around the room. We also have 2K and 5K soft boxes above the set — using either Lee 129 or light grid cloth — and both of them give a really beautiful, soft light. Additionally, we’ll tape pieces of unbleached muslin to the floor and bounce lights off them. “Most of the sets have floating ceiling pieces that can come and go; Jason Hodges, my key grip, devised the system that has all the ceiling pieces hanging from the perms. Depending on what we’ll see in the shot, we’ll bring down half a ceiling or even something as small as a trian-
Life on Mars unit photography by Eric Liebowitz and Patrick Harbron, courtesy of ABC.
gle-shaped piece for the corner. That gives us the ability to light from above and still shoot from low angles. “As with the kill scenes, we go for a surreal look for Dexter’s flashbacks. We want them to feel like fragments of memory — subjective, with tight close-ups against an indistinct background. You don’t see all the details of the environment. When Dexter recalls his mother’s murder, for example, we tighten the shutter angle from 45 degrees to 11.5 degrees, depending on the intensity of the memory. “Dexter was my first intensive experience with HD. To be honest, I came onto the show a bit of a film snob, and now I’m a champion of HD for what it is. You can create beautiful images with it, but you have to understand its limitations. The biggest limitation is probably the viewfinder, which is the worst place to see what’s going on in the frame — the operators can’t use the viewfinder to determine whether their shots are in focus. We’ve worked out a remotefocus system in which both of our 1st ACs, Steve Hurson and Brad Richard, are off set, watching a monitor. As the actors move, the 2nd ACs, Warren Feldman and Paul Tilden, whisper into a radio, giving the 1st ACs the marks. We have remote stations that can be wheeled around from set to set, and that really enhances our speed. Making the day is everything in TV. “I owe everything to my crew, which also includes [gaffer] Earl C. Williman, [A-camera operator] Martin J. Layton and [B-camera/ Steadicam operator] Eric Fletcher. You may have the vision in your head, but you need a good crew to realize it.”
Life on Mars by Iain Stasukevich ABC’s Life on Mars is the story of Sam Tyler (Jason O’Mara), a modern-day police detective in New York City who is struck by a vehicle while on duty and wakes up in 1973 — it’s The Wizard of Oz as police procedural. Adapted from a BBC series that was a hit in the United Kingdom in 2006, the ABC series changes few details apart from the city and the actors. Harvey Keitel, Michael Imperioli and Jonathan Murphy portray the hard-boiled officers in the fictional 125th Precinct, and Gretchen Mol, the staff psychol-
ogist, plays Tyler’s closest confidant. The pilot, titled “Out Here in the Fields,” was directed by Gary Fleder and shot by Kramer Morgenthau, ASC, who notched an ASC Award nomination for the project. They studied Adam Suschitzky’s cinematography in the British series, which was directed by Bharat Nalluri. Morgenthau notes, “There isn’t a lot of coverage, which allows the actors to play in one frame. It’s a fairly graphic approach to telling the story.” Fleder adds, “I think the British series is fantastic — every shot has power. I wanted to exploit its graphic integrity, so I took something like a hundred frame
Top: After being transported back to the year 1973, timetraveling detective Sam Tyler (Jason O’Mara) attempts to defuse a volatile hostage situation. Bottom: Tyler (far right) tries to make sense of his predicament during a surreal briefing set in the present day.
TECHNICAL SPECS 1.78:1 High-Definition Video Sony F23, PMW-EX1 Panavision Primo lenses
American Cinematographer 33
Cutting-Edge Camerawork
In a 1973 scene, Tyler and Det. Ray Carling (Michael Imperioli) sit in as Lt. Gene Hunt (Harvey Keitel) attempts to strong-arm a suspect.
34 March 2009
grabs from the show as reference material.” For the present-day scenes in the pilot, Morgenthau used a new film stock, Kodak Vision3 500T 5219, with Panavision Primos and lit for a naturalistic feel. For the 1973 scenes, he used more dramatic lighting and asked Kodak for the oldest emulsion in its catalog, Vision 500T 5279. “5279 is not as perfect and sharp-looking [as Vision3],” he notes. (Kodak discontinued 5279 shortly thereafter, and the production has since shot the period scenes on Vision2 500T 5260.) Though Morgenthau considered using older lenses for the 1973 scenes, in the interest of speed and efficiency, he decided it would be better to stick with the Primos and degrade the image with Clear and Warm Tiffen Pro-Mist filters. He also enhanced grain by underexposing by 2⁄3 of a stop and force-processing the negative by 1 stop at Technicolor New York. Morgenthau stresses that he wasn’t trying to mimic a 1970s cinematographer shooting in the 1970s. “If we wanted to do that, we could’ve gotten away with snap zooms, fog filters and so on, but we didn’t do any of that. We only did zooms as very slight creep-ins on faces or to
change the frame for coverage. The camerawork has more to do with what Sam is feeling, because he’s in a completely alien world. Our techniques weren’t so much vintage as story-related, character-related and emotion-related.” After ABC picked up Life on Mars, the production hired two directors of photography, ASC members Frank Prinzi and Craig Di Bona, to take turns shooting episodes. Both cinematographers say they approach the story as Morgenthau did, using Tyler’s displacement as a source of inspiration. They’re on the lookout for what the production calls “the Martian Way,” moments when Tyler gets past and present confused. For example, he might see a modern newscast on a 1973 TV set or receive a phone call from the future. “Is it Mars? Not really, but then again, it might as well be,” says Prinzi. That’s one reason the series has fairly loose visual parameters, he adds. “As long as we do it on time, make it cool and make it exciting, we can do pretty much anything we want visually.” He describes the approach as “jazz lighting” — always changing in time with the story. When Tyler and the other cops aren’t out on the street, they’re
in the office, a set designed by production designer Stephen Hendrickson and rigged by gaffer Russ Engels and key grip Richard Guinness Jr. Hendrickson had the ceiling built with exposed trusses, girders and fluorescent practicals, and above that, recessed muslin panels hide a permanent grid of Par cans fitted with dichroic and tungsten bulbs. The muslin works as diffusion for the lights above it and also as a false ceiling when shots are lit from the floor; Prinzi and Di Bona both enjoy shooting from low angles. Grid lights are individually patched through a dimmer board, allowing the light-board operator to easily shift the interior ambience from cool to warm. Engels used a lot of Brass, Straw and 1⁄8 and 1⁄4 CTO gels on the lamps, and, depending on the action in a scene, extreme color temperatures are sometimes mixed within a single setup. During the day, keylight is usually motivated by one of the set’s many picture windows, “like in a Vermeer painting,” says Di Bona. For the pilot, Fleder wanted heavy shafts of sunlight raking across the space, and a smoke machine was used to give shape to the light. “The idea was to make ’73 very smoky, but the network mandated that we couldn’t have anyone smoke onscreen,” recalls Engels. After some cast members had an adverse reaction to the smoke, production decided to reserve the smoke machine for occasional use. Another touch carried over from the pilot is the hot splashes of light that accent the background of many interiors. Morgenthau’s crew created these with 10K Molebeams. “Those go 5 or 6 stops over,” says Prinzi. “Sometimes I’m shooting at a T2.8 and the background light is at a T32!” New York City is as much a character as a temporal point of reference. “It’s the greatest backdrop in the world — you can’t find that texture anywhere else,” says Di Bona.
Photo by Gary Fleder, courtesy of Kramer Morgenthau.
The production’s biggest challenge was finding a location that didn’t include modern devices, such as ATMs. Fleder recalls, “I didn’t think it was possible, but we drove down Orchard Street [on the Lower East Side], and sure enough, there was a 2 1⁄2-block stretch that could pass for 1973 — if you squinted.” Morgenthau, Di Bona and Prinzi all praise Hendrickson’s production design for bringing 1970s New York to life. When he wasn’t designing studio sets, he was on location, dressing entire blocks of downtown Manhattan to look like Richard Nixon was still in office. “I had to find an architectural vernacular to represent the age and decay of New York in 1973,” says Hendrickson. “I did it by using architecture from the 19th century as a jumping-off point.” The city of the series is layered with brick, cast iron, old stucco and plaster, all chipped and distressed. Hendrickson tended toward darker settings, including basements and cellars, “because that’s rich and gives the cinematographers textures to light,” he says. The filmmakers were so clever in their efforts to avoid anachronisms that almost no digital effects were required to remove physical traces of 2008. (CG work is more often used to add buildings, such as the World Trade Center, to backgrounds.) For a scene set on a rooftop, Di Bona’s methods included shooting the actors against the dark night sky and cheating shots around telling parts of the skyline. Prinzi found that backlighting or using an extremely long lens to throw the background out of focus allowed him to shoot safely in almost any direction. It helped that both cinematographers are longtime New Yorkers and remember what the show’s neighborhoods looked like back then. At its core, Life on Mars is a science-fiction story, and when a “burp” in reality sends Tyler into a
ASC member Kramer Morgenthau (pictured at work on another project) shot the Life on Mars pilot.
different dimension, the production’s modern Panavision cameras are swapped for hand-cranked 35mm and Super 8mm cameras. (Most of the show is shot with Panaflex Platinums and Millennium XLs.) When Tyler first awakens in 1973, there’s a 360-degree camera move around him as he tries to process what has happened. Fleder had Morgenthau shoot the move with a Platinum and a Panavisionmodified hand-cranked Arri 2-C mounted side by side. “There’s some hand-cranked double-exposure stuff in that scene as well,” recalls Morgenthau. “I was thrilled that some of that stuff made it into the show.” The recurring flashbacks that show Tyler chasing a girl wearing a red dress through a forest are intended to be disorienting to the audience, so they were shot handheld in Super 8 on Fuji Reala 500D 8592 that had been re-cartridged by Pro8mm in Burbank. The final color for Life on Mars is set in the dailies by colorist Chris Gennarelli at Technicolor New York, and then taken a step further in the online by colorist Mike Sowa at LaserPacific in Hollywood. “Color is one of the things that gives away period,” notes Morgenthau. “Modern color stocks are vibrant,
and if you look at color photographs from the 1970s, you’ll notice that the separation of colors was not as clean. I wanted color bleeding into the blacks.” Morgenthau took digital stills of his lighting setups and colored them in Adobe Lightroom before passing them on to Gennarelli. Prinzi and Di Bona work hand-in-hand with Technicolor to get the dailies as close as possible, but a lot of the final decisions are out of their hands; the production schedule often prevents them from giving notes on every shot. In the series’ second episode, Tyler made a list of 12 possible explanations for his mysterious predicament, and they included injury-induced coma and extraterrestrials. No one who spoke to AC knows which answer is the right one, or how long it will take Tyler to figure it out, but they don’t seem to be too bothered. They’re having such a good time they’re in no rush to spoil the mystery of the Martian Way. TECHNICAL SPECS 1.78:1 35mm, Super 8mm Panavision and Arri cameras Panavision Primo lenses Kodak Vision3 500T 5219, Vision 500T 5279, Vision2 500T 5260; Fuji Reala 500D 8592 ¢ American Cinematographer 35
Tormented vampire Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer) prepares to sink his teeth into Jessica (Deborah Ann Woll).
True Blood by Jay Holben When writer/director Alan Ball hired Checco Varese, AMC to shoot the pilot for HBO’s horror fantasy True Blood, the cinematographer spent the next several nights “doing my homework,” he says. “I watched everything I could that was on TV at 10 p.m. I flipped to one channel, and it looked fantastic; the show was moody and had lots of camera energy and a bit of a blue tone. Then I flipped the channel, and that show looked great, but it looked just like the first one. Then I flipped again, and again, and saw that most of the shows looked the same. That’s not the case now — there are a lot of great shows with a lot of great looks 36 March 2009
— but at the time, they all looked the same to me! I thought True Blood merited a very different look, something sweaty, hot and sexy, which is what Louisiana feels like. Alan, [production designer] Suzuki Ingerslev and I decided to make it a saturated show, with red reds and green greens.” Another key component of the look is humidity, which had to be artificially created for the Los Angeles-based production. “When you’re in a very humid climate, there isn’t any dust,” notes Varese. “So whenever we shot an exterior, I made sure every inch was wet down.” Fire hoses were used to wet down the vegetation in the background and Hudson sprayers were used to saturate the closer greens. “I
was obsessed with that detail because I think it really refines the look,” says Varese. “When you see those details in the trees in the background and the sheen in the foreground, it really looks like Louisiana. The constant wetness was tough on the actors, but it really enhanced the look.” Set in the sleepy town of Bon Temps, La., True Blood is based on Charlaine Harris’ Southern Vampire Series, which was begun in 2001 with the publication of Dead Until Dark. The invention of synthetic blood has enabled vampires to integrate themselves into human society, but the transition has not been smooth. Tensions in town reach a boiling point when a comely local, Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin), takes up with a vampire, Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer), and Sookie’s associates and loved ones begin turning up dead. Varese achieved his nightexterior look by pushing Kodak Vision2 Expression 500T 5229 by 11⁄2 stops (to 1,500 ISO) and overexposing his highlights and deeply underexposing the shadows while maintaining skin tones right at key. “I wanted the night look to have a rough-around-the-edges feeling, and pushing the stock a stop and a half gave it more texture and grain without making it grainy. You have to control your tones, however.” To create overall ambience for night exteriors, key grip Miguel Benavides and gaffer Jonathon Bradley strung lines of aircraft cable 40' above the ground, just over the trees, in a small section of the Warner Bros. backlot in Burbank. From the cables, they hung rows of 6K space lights. Then Varese incorporated an LRX Piranha, an 80' boom arm with three remotecontrolled fixtures, a 12K HMI and a 12K tungsten as his moonlight backlight. Varese always made sure the “good guys” had an eyelight. For
True Blood photos by Jamie Trueblood, Prashant Gupta and John P. Johnson, courtesy of HBO.
Cutting-Edge Camerawork
“bad guys” and ambiguous characters, he eliminated any reflections in their eyes, ensuring they had a dulleyed look. He even went as far as blocking out windows and masking set items to eliminate any reflective sparkle in the characters’ eyes. When shooting a pilot, “you’re responsible for creating something that’s repeatable,” Varese notes. “So even though you always have extra time on a pilot, you can’t get too extravagant or too exotic. If the show is picked up, what you’re doing has to translate into the flow of a regular production. You have to make sure your choices are flexible enough to last.” After True Blood was picked up for a full season, Varese began working in rotation with cinematographer Matthew Jensen, but after the first few episodes, the writers’ strike brought production to a halt. Varese took a job on a feature, and when the strike was resolved, he was unavailable to return to True Blood, so Jensen took over as the show’s primary cinematographer. (John B. Aronson and Amy Vincent, ASC also shot episodes in the first season. For the second season, which will begin airing in June, Romeo Tirone will alternate episodes with Jensen.) “Matt and I collaborated in a very organic way,” Varese recalls. “I never sat down with him and said, ‘This is how you have to do it,’ because every cinematographer has his own style.” Jensen adds, “Checco and I talked a little bit about a few aesthetic ideas, but the beginning of the season was so crazy that we didn’t have much time to talk. I watched the pilot many times, and we discussed the improvements Checco wanted to make.” Jensen helped refine the show’s visual language through lens selection and camera positioning. “I wanted to avoid shooting on long lenses because that has become standard TV grammar, and also, I feel Suzuki’s phenomenal sets really lend
themselves to shooting with wider lenses,” says Jensen. “Most of them have actual hardwood floors and hard ceilings, so you want to see the whole set. I also wanted to experiment with moving the camera closer to the actor for a close-up instead of shooting it with a 75mm lens; I’d rather use a 40mm and move closer because that puts the audience in the middle of the action. We were
usually shooting with a 25mm, 27mm or 40mm Cooke S4, and occasionally even an 18mm. For day exteriors, I’d usually pull out the Optimo zoom, but onstage we were mostly shooting with primes.” Jensen typically lights the sets to a T2.8 and works at T5.6/8 for day exteriors. “With the wider lenses at a T2.8, there’s a nice feeling to the falloff. I love to get the camera close
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Cutting-Edge Camerawork Right: Telepathic waitress Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin) takes an order at Merlotte’s Bar and Grill, a set that created some challenges for the crew. Below: Sookie and her brother (Ryan Kwanten) visit in her kitchen.
to someone with a 40mm lens and see that shallow depth of field with a very gentle falloff in the focus.” One of the show’s key sets is Merlotte’s Bar and Grill, where Sookie is a waitress. It’s a place where several of the main characters gather at least once per episode. “That’s where we do our highest page count each episode,” says Jensen. “Alan [Ball] was very specific that he wanted it to feel like a family place. We first considered using practicals and neon to light the set, but that proved to be a little too moody, so then we started rigging all the ceilings with fixtures, but that was tough because they’re hard ceilings, and
38 March 2009
we’re shooting so wide that we’re nearly always seeing them. We had to cut away sections of the ceiling that could be removed when they were off-camera so we could position Kino Flo DMX fixtures there. For season two, we’re cutting back a bit on the lighting budget, so the Kinos had to go. My gaffer, Evans Brown, came up with a fixture he calls ‘Triffids’ [named for The Day of the Triffids], which are basically homemade lightboxes. He took 750-watt Nooks and built an aluminum casing around them, sprayed black on the outside and white on the inside, and then faced them with 1000H. We have dozens of them in
the ceiling; they have a nice, soft spread but can be really punchy. They’ve enabled me to lift the base in Merlotte’s and get more exposure to show off more wood in the sets.” Jensen also found lighting behind the bar to be a bit of a challenge, thanks to a header built into the set above the bar. He and Brown incorporated “Razor” lights, which were created by Denny Eccelston, Varese’s feature-film gaffer; the fixtures feature two black PVC pipes with long slots cut into one side, and a 2' or 4' Kino Flo tube is placed inside the inner pipe. By rotating the two pipes in opposite directions, the user can adjust the intensity of the light (by controlling how much light spills out the larger slot) as well as its direction. “They’re great tools for getting an edgelight or a little keylight into places where you just can’t put any other fixture,” Jensen says. The house Sookie shares with her grandmother, Adele (Lois Smith), is a location that initially gave Jensen some problems. “The house is small, and there’s a lot of white, especially in the kitchen, where a lot of action takes place,” he says. “Although white walls are usually something a cinematogra-
Cutting-Edge Camerawork
TECHNICAL SPECS 1.78:1 35mm (3-perf) Arricam System Cooke S4, Angenieux Optimo lenses Kodak Vision2 200T 5217, Expression 500T 5229 40 March 2009
The police-precinct set on The Unusuals has fixed walls and ceilings, which requires series cinematographer Roy Wagner, ASC to light shots very precisely with less equipment.
The Unusuals by Patricia Thomson Tonally, the new ABC/Sony Pictures Television cop show The Unusuals harks back to the 1970s, taking M*A*S*H’s seriocomic sensibility as its model. In technique, however, the series is a harbinger of the future. Using Sony’s PMW-EX3 and F23 4:4:4 side-by-side, the show is among the first to combine prosumer and professional-grade high-definition video cameras on a daily basis. Shot on location in Manhattan and at Brooklyn’s Steiner Studios, the show follows police detectives in a Lower East Side precinct. When a new officer is transferred to Homicide, she begins to learn the secrets and idiosyncrasies of her colleagues, who include a publicity-craving officer who steals cases, a detective with a brain tumor who repeatedly steps in harm’s way, and the afflicted officer’s paranoid partner, who won’t remove his bulletproof vest. When Noah Hawley, The Unusuals’ executive producer and writer, pitched the show to ABC, he
stressed it was “a cop show, not a procedural,” he says. “That means it’s about character. The crimes exist to solve the character, not the other way around. The other thing I said was, ‘This show is M*A*S*H. This is what happens when you put relatively sane people into a crazy world that’s trying to kill them; the only sane response is to be a little crazy.’” He also added a dose of New York attitude. “That’s funny to me, and it was missing on TV. There’s a humorlessness to a lot of law enforcement on TV.” The pilot, which will air April 8, was directed by Stephen Hopkins and shot by his longtime collaborator, Peter Levy, ASC, ACS. Their previous pilots include 24 and Californication. “When I asked Stephen what we were going for, he pointed to M*A*S*H, a lighthearted treatment of a serious subject, and he also said he wanted to avoid the clichéd gritty New York look — he wanted colors,” says Levy. “The script was pretty flip, so we didn’t want to impose an overly serious style.” Levy shot the pilot in 3-perf 1.78:1 with cameras supplied by
The Unusuals photos by Patrick Harbron, courtesy of Sony Pictures Television.
pher shies away from, I found them to be a blessing. We’re normally in the kitchen in the mornings or during the day, and I found I could really underlight the interior and have a lot of light blasting outside on our TransLite and Chromatrans backings. I try to light them to about 3 to 5 stops over key, reflected reading. I shoot on 5229, and I’m amazed at how much detail holds in the highlights and the blacks. Because the drops are highly reflective, we found that any unit on the floor could cause a really bad glare, so we rigged cycstrips on pipes far above the drops. We have I-beams on chain motors that hold our ‘sun,’ which we made with a 20K tungsten and 12-Light MaxiBrutes in season one. For season two, we’ve replaced them with BigEye 10Ks with T-12 globes and Leonetti’s Master Blasters, single fixtures with four 1K FCM globes; they’re really punchy but take up less space.” With the overexposure outside the windows, Jensen will set the interior exposure as much as 2 stops under. “I also tend to fill inside with 1⁄4 CTB, and we use a lot of smoke in the kitchen to add atmosphere and a sense of humidity. It works well. “So much of the first season of a show is trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t,” he concludes. “It’s really a process because you rarely have time for extensive testing. You need four or five episodes to figure out how the actors photograph, what effects look realistic, how dark the night should be and so forth. We try to continue to refine the look to keep it fresh for us and the audience.”
Cutting-Edge Camerawork Right: Det. Delahoy (Adam Goldberg) reveals the grisly contents of a makeshift “evidence locker.” Below: Peter Levy, ASC, ACS (wearing gray T-shirt) helps block the scene while shooting the pilot.
Panavision New York. He worked with a Panaflex Platinum and a Millennium XL2 and used Primo primes and an Angenieux Lightweight Optimo (15-40mm) zoom. “Because of the show’s lighthearted nature, we tended to shoot a bit wider, putting more air around the actors, so the audience would have time to read the body language. We were giving the actors a kind of
42 March 2009
tableau to work with; human comedy plays best in one shot.” When ABC ordered 12 episodes of the show, production decided to switch to high-definition video, and Roy H. Wagner, ASC took over as director of photography, reuniting with producer Peter O’Fallon. Their previous collaborations include Party of Five and Pasadena. Wagner arrived in New
York in December and had no prep time; he came straight from Chicago, where he was shooting The Beast, a noirish Showtime series — the polar opposite of The Unusuals. “I’m the last choice you’d make for a comedy,” jokes Wagner. “I generally do dark shows, like CSI [AC May ’01]. I think I’ve done only two or three comedies my whole career, but I like doing different kinds of things.” With eight days per episode, The Unusuals started out shooting five days on location and three in Steiner Studios. The practical locations are typical of New York: fivefloor walkups, narrow storefronts and even narrower railroad apartments. A small, lightweight camera was needed to navigate such spaces. “Where’s the EX3?” asks Wagner, striding through a Brooklyn storefront on a snowy afternoon. He was hoping to show AC one of the two EX3s that are on set at all times. “They’re so small, you can’t even find them!” he notes. Finally, in an aisle marked “Body Disposal,” he spots one. “I can get them into places where you can’t even get a Super 16 camera,” says the cinematographer.
“That helps us give the show a sense of reality. “On the first day, we did 65 setups,” he continues. “We were using EX3s to run with the characters, jump fences, all kinds of things we’d never do with big cameras. The stuntmen were actually jumping down and hitting the camera, which made it much more visceral.” The camera’s remote-control capability allows Wagner to operate it from the video cart, which is handy when the camera is in a hard-to-reach place. “We literally stick one to the ceiling about once a day,” says grip Brendan Quinlan. “Roy puts them everywhere.” “It’s not 4:4:4 color space,” notes Wagner. “We record 4:4:4 RGB with the [Sony CineAlta] F23; that provides the maximum amount of information for post. The EX3 uses 4:2:0 color sampling, which effectively means it’s recording color information at half the horizontal resolution and one-quarter the vertical resolution of the luminance. But the EX3s have a substantial processing capability that allows them to be side-by-side with the F23.” The EX3 captures images with three ½" Exmor CMOS sensors. Seen next to the F23’s output on the video cart, the difference is barely discernible. “There might be engineers who could spot the difference, but the audience won’t,” says Wagner. “We’re not using a digitalimaging technician, but the EX3 can be managed and manipulated with the same paintbox technology the F23 uses,” he continues. “However, we’re not painting on the set at all; all image manipulation is done in front of the sensor. This is not unlike oldschool film cinematography. Manipulation is created through exposure, lighting and filtration.” Wagner prefers to use multiple cameras, and he runs two to four at all times on The Unusuals. Two are F23s with Fujinon HA zooms (4.559mm cine-style, 7.3-110mm cine-
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Cutting-Edge Camerawork
Wagner (left) brings decades of film experience to the set but has embraced the potential of high-definition video.
style and 13.5-570mm optically stabilized), and two are EX3s with Fujinon 14x zooms. The show is framed at 16x9, and all cameras record at 24 fps. (The F23 records to HDCam-SR tape, and the EX3 records to Sony SxS flash memory cards.) Working with multiple cameras offers several advantages. “For one, I like how performances match,” says Wagner. “Actors with comedic skills are constantly refining the material and trying different approaches to it, and if you use just one camera, nothing’s ever going to match. Multiple cameras make it easier for actors and the editor, and the lighting strategy it imposes on the cinematographer is not that difficult to do.” Another advantage is speed. “I don’t know how Roy does it, but he works faster than anyone I’ve ever worked with,” remarks Denis Doyle, the show’s first assistant director.
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“I’m always trying to find ways to give the actors and director more time, because the more options we have in the editing room, the better our chances of making a great show,” says Wagner. Recently, that has led to a greater reliance on zoom lenses. “On the last several shows, I’ve used Fujinon zooms because they’re incredibly good, incredibly sharp and match very well. Working at the speed I like to maintain, it’s good not to have to change lenses all the time.” Like Levy, Wagner tends toward wider focal lengths on The Unusuals to facilitate the comedy. “For example, we’d use a 21mm instead of a 35mm, or a 17 instead of a 21mm or 24mm,” says Wagner. Shooting quickly also means lighting for 360 degrees. On the precinct set, there are fixed walls and ceilings and no lighting grids. Wagner keeps the amount of equipment low and lights scenes rather than shots. “If
you walked onto that set, you’d say it looks like a real place, not a set — there are no movie lights,” he says. “I light through windows and I use a lot of practicals. I control every light that goes on set and am very involved in where they’re placed. I push light through our 135-foot backing, and I also have 5Ks outside the windows. A lot of bounced light comes off the floors from that light.” “It’s all precision lighting, but with a lot less amperage,” observes gaffer Timothy McAuliffe. For night exteriors on a film shoot, continues the gaffer, “I’d usually put a Condor down the block with a 10K or MaxiBrute on it, but [with HD], I’m at street level with a Par can.” Wagner notes, “I don’t use Condors to light nights — when I see big crosslights, I think it looks like a TV show. It just doesn’t look right.” Instead, he carries sodium- and mercury-vapor lights mounted on plates; these are
often placed in frame to mimic streetlights. “Film is not really good at low light levels,” says Wagner, “but HD allows you to see night as you actually see it by eye. Collateral [AC Aug. ’04] is a prime example. Often, people will walk by our monitors at night and say, ‘Wow!’ because it shows exactly what they’re seeing. “I love film — I’ve been a film cameraman for 40 years — but I truly love the potential of HD,” he concludes. “Truthfully, I’d love to shoot a series using only the EX3.” TECHNICAL SPECS 1.78:1 3-perf 35mm; High-Definition Video Panaflex Platinum, Millennium XL2; Sony CineAlta F23, PMW-EX3 Panavision, Angenieux and Fujinon lenses I
45
A Life Full of
Miracles
Veteran cinematographer Robert F. Liu, ASC receives the Society’s Career Achievement in Television Award. by David Heuring 46 March 2009
Photos courtesy of Robert F. Liu.
Opposite: Director of photography Robert F. Liu, ASC, on the set of the hit series Family Ties. This page, left: Filming The Sand Pebbles, on which Liu (lower right, holding radio) was a first assistant director. Below left: Liu (center) and fellow Chinese exchange student Mr. Lin (right) visit with James Wong Howe, ASC, in 1960. Below right: Six years later, Liu’s father (second from left) sees the family off as they prepare to immigrate to the United States.
obert F. Liu, ASC, who was recently honored with the Society’s 2009 Career Achievement in Television Award, forged a cross-cultural career at a time when such international experiences were rare. When he was a young man, his talent was recognized by Chinese film pioneer Chuang Kuo Chuen, and he found Stateside mentors in
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director Robert Wise and cinematographer James Wong Howe, ASC. Liu went on to earn Emmy nominations for his work on the hit series Lou Grant and Family Ties. Liu was born in Shanghai in 1926. He had six brothers and one sister. His father, who had been educated in the United States on a YMCA scholarship, worked as sen-
ior clerk at Anderson Clayton, an American firm with offices in Shanghai. Young Bobby and one of his brothers shared an early interest in chemistry, and together they turned the family home into a veritable laboratory, making everything from batteries and soap to enlarging paper. As a child, Liu enjoyed the exploits of Tom Mix and other leg-
American Cinematographer 47
A Life Full of Miracles Top: Liu poses with camera operator/future ASC member Lowell Peterson (center), 2nd AC Lex Rawlins (right) and 1st AC Doug Scott (seated) on the set of the NBC series The Duck Factory. Middle: Liu enjoys a light moment with actor Ed Asner on the set of Lou Grant. Bottom: Liu checks the light for a Lou Grant exterior.
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ends of the silent cinema. By the time he reached high school, he had begun experimenting with his brother’s 8mm Kodak camera. “I was fascinated with moving pictures, but I never thought I would end up in the business,” he says. “I was very fortunate.” Inspired by Walter Pidgeon’s portrayal of a U.S. ambassador to Mexico in Holiday in Mexico (1946), Liu set his sights on a career in diplomacy, and he earned a bachelor’s degree in political science. Upon graduating, however, he realized that such a career did not align with his principles. “The saying was, ‘An ambassador is an honest man sent abroad to tell lies,’” he notes. “When I heard that, I decided it wasn’t for me.” In 1949, Liu made his way to Hong Kong and took his first steps toward a career in filmmaking. A friend brought him to Great Wall Studio, where he found work as a boom man in the sound department. Great Wall was also home to Chuang Kuo Chuen, who financed, wrote, directed and shot features, and in 1951, when Chuang was offered a chance to be the director of photography on a film in Taiwan, Liu worked as his assistant. The two remained close, and in 1957, Liu married Chuang’s daughter, Ivy. In 1959, sponsored by the National Academy of Arts and Crafts in Taiwan, Liu made his first trip to the United States, with the understanding that he would teach others upon his return to Taiwan. With the U.S. government paying his tuition, he was sent to the University of Southern California, where one of his professors, Herbert Farmer, encouraged him to pursue a graduate degree. Liu subsequently earned a master’s in film from USC. During his studies, Liu met Howe and Wise, and a few years later, when Wise went to Taiwan to make The Sand Pebbles
A Life Full of Miracles Top: Liu (standing, second from right) poses with some Kodak executives and the other participants in the 1959 visiting student program at the University of Southern California. The students are at Kodak’s Santa Monica office. Middle: When Robert Wise came to Taiwan to scout for The Sand Pebbles, Liu (seated next to the camera, wearing sunglasses) was shooting a World War II movie on Eastmancolor for the Central Motion Picture Corp. His fatherin-law, Chuang Kuo Chuen, was the director. Bottom: Liu poses on the set of his first feature as director of photography for the Central Motion Picture Corp., in 1962.
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(1966), he brought Liu aboard the picture as first assistant director. Liu subsequently directed and edited a documentary, Industry: A Free China, for the U.S. Information Office in Taiwan. “When I showed the film to James Wong Howe, he complimented me on the editing, and that meant a lot to me,” Liu recalls. “I didn’t pay a lot of attention at the time, but that film helped me immigrate to the United States. “When I came to America for the first time, in 1959, I realized what freedom actually is, and I dreamed of immigrating to the United States someday,” he continues. “A dream doesn’t cost anything!” Without family in the United States, he needed three things to make his dream a reality: an advanced degree at an established U.S. university, five years of experience, and a special achievement in his field. When Industry: A Free China won an award at an Asian film festival, it fulfilled the final requirement, and Liu’s immigration was approved. He wrote to Farmer, who immediately offered him a job running USC’s motionpicture laboratory, and in 1966, Liu and his family moved to America. Almost three years later, Liu left his job at USC for a chance to work as a cinematographer. He spent almost four years as the principal cinematographer at the UCLA Media Center, where he shot documentaries and surgical films for various medical departments. His next step was to enter the camera union, and he tried entering the Minority Group Pool Program as a cinematographer but was turned down. He tried again, this time as a second camera assistant, and within two weeks, he had a job on Gunsmoke. “I have to thank John Flinn [ASC],” he says with a laugh. “The day he went out for his acting career, I was hired on
Gunsmoke in his place. John didn’t know it, but he helped me get a foot in the door.” Liu went on to work for cinematographer Edward Plante on the series Medical Center. After Gene Polito, ASC worked with Liu on Westworld (1973), he moved Liu up to first camera assistant on the series Adam’s Rib, and shortly thereafter, Richard Glouner, ASC promoted Liu to operator on the series Columbo. “I’m very grateful to both of those men,” says Liu. After operating for one season on Lou Grant, a single-camera series shot on 35mm, Liu moved up to director of photography and went on to shoot three seasons of the show. When he took over, he suggested employing fluorescent lighting, which was rare at the time. “The main newsroom set was lit with a tremendous number of Photofloods above the ceiling,” he recalls. “They used a lot of electricity and lasted a very short time, and they made for a very hot set — very uncomfortable for the actors. Everyone wondered whether fluorescents would work, but I knew from experience that color temperature could be played with very easily as long as your light sources were uniform. I ordered warm white fluorescents, which mingled well with our tungsten sources onstage. “I also gradually convinced the producer to shoot more on location and less onstage,” he continues. “When I started, we were doing about five days onstage and two days on location for each hour-long episode. I proved I could make the transition seamless, and by the end of the last season, we were working five days on location and two onstage. That was rare for a TV series at that time.” Liu became an ASC member in May 1984, after he was recommended by Society fellows
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A Life Full of Miracles
Two shots from The Duck Factory. Left: Producer/director Rod Daniels and Liu signal for some adjustments. Right: Liu looks on as director Gene Reynolds lines up a shot.
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Glouner, Harry Wolf and Ted Voigtlander. When he attended his first dinner meeting at the ASC Clubhouse, “I looked around and realized I had worked with about one-third of the members present,” he recalls. Liu compiled dozens of
episodic-TV credits, including The Nanny, The Martin Short Show and Hardcastle & McCormick, and he earned two Emmy nominations over the course of his career, one for Lou Grant (in 1982), the other for Family Ties (in 1989). “This job was always fun,” he remarks. “My
mind is always open to figuring out a better way, and the things you learn stay with you. I have no regrets about going from the bottom to the top twice; if you enjoy it, it doesn’t matter. Whatever job you’re assigned, you must do that job well.
“I’m very proud of being born Chinese, but I am deeply grateful to have been adopted by this great country. I love America — this is from my heart. And it’s such an honor to be in this prestigious society, the ASC. The members are not only loyal to each
other, but also very thoughtful about future generations. I think it’s very important to care about those coming up. We should give them as much as possible. “I never expected to be honored with the ASC Award, and it was very fulfilling to receive such
an acknowledgement from the people I worked with. My life has been one miracle after another, and this award was one more miracle to me.” I
Two shots from The Sand Pebbles. Left: 1st ADs Ridgeway “Reggie” Callows and Liu. Right: 1st AC Roger Sherman (left), 2nd AC Kenneth Peach Jr. and Liu enjoy a break on the set.
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Member
The ASC honors Isidore Mankofsky, ASC with its Presidents Award. by Douglas Bankston hen he was a child, future ASC member Isidore Mankofsky didn’t sit in a darkened theater and see a classic film that wowed him. His parents weren’t artists. He didn’t take any art classes, and he never went to the ballet or opera. He
W 54 March 2009
didn’t even own a camera, but when the time came for a career decision, he plucked “photographer” seemingly out of thin air. “When I was in high school, somewhere along the line, it dawned on me that I’d like to do photography,” he says with a shrug. “I don’t know where that
came from.” He got his first camera just before he joined the U.S. Air Force, which took him to Korea. He recalls, “It was a 35mm Argus C3, and I’m not sure how it came into my hands, but it wasn’t with me for long — after it got plenty of use in basic training, I lost it in a poker
Photos courtesy of Isidore Mankofsky.
game to a quartet of noncoms.” Mankofsky, who recently accepted this year’s ASC Presidents Award, was born in New York City and raised in Brooklyn, the Bronx and Chicago. His parents had emigrated from Odessa, Ukraine, in 1923. After high school, he enlisted in the U.S. Air Force, and when he was stationed in Germany, he was assigned to the motor pool. After relentlessly badgering the squadron commander, he received a transfer to special services, where one of his jobs was to take pictures of the base athletic teams for the base magazine. Knowing nothing about photography, he had to learn to shoot, process the film and print the pictures. “You could say that was the beginning of my career in the magical world of motion pictures,” he notes wryly. Following his honorable discharge, Mankofsky enrolled in the Ray Vogue School of Photography in Chicago, but a quick look around revealed a lot of competition. “Then, as now, everyone who picked up a camera thought he was a professional photographer. But motion-picture photography was different — it was magical. It hadn’t dawned on me that it was just 24 still frames per second.” Mankofsky traveled to Santa Barbara, Calif., to enroll in the Brooks Institute of Photography’s motion-picture track. When one of his instructors got a call for an “all-around” person to work at KOLO television station in Reno, Nev., Mankofsky interviewed for the job and was hired. One of his first assignments was to document, on black-and-white 16mm, the new TV-antenna building on Mount Rose. “I still have the film, my first effort as a professional cinematographer,” he notes. He returned to Chicago and worked as an industrial photographer at Stewart Warner Electronics for a short time, and then, just when he
This page, top: In 1970, Mankofsky (right) and director Larry Yust film a sequence in Paris from the rear of a makeshift camera car. The project was a 16mm film version of Ernest Hemingway’s My Old Man, part of the Encyclopedia Britannica’s Short Story Showcase series. Middle: Mankofsky lines up an Arriflex 16mm camera while on location at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco for the Encyclopedia Britannica film Seaport, also directed by Yust. Bottom: In 1956, Mankofsky trains his Bolex on legendary playwright Arthur Miller (left) during an interview for KOLO-TV in Nevada.
American Cinematographer 55
A Very Active Member Top: Mankofsky mans the Mitchell BNCR on the set of Testimony of Two Men, a 1977 miniseries for Universal TV. Yust (far right) directed one chapter of the three-part postCivil War costume drama, with Leo Penn helming the other two. Middle: Mankofsky checks the light level on the fill side of Christopher Reeve’s face during production of Universal Pictures’ timetravel romance Somewhere in Time (1980). Bottom: The director of Somewhere in Time, Jeannot Szwarc (right), peers over Mankofsky’s shoulder as the cinematographer lines up a shot.
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was about to return to California, a stroke of luck occurred during a handball match at the local YMCA. (He still plays the game to this day.) His opponent, Jim McGuinn, a producer of educational films at Encyclopedia Britannica Films, asked if Mankofsky would be interested in shooting a series in Florida. Over the next 13 months, Mankofsky shot 161 half-hour 16mm films that comprised a complete lab course in chemistry. One of his frequent collaborators at Encyclopedia Britannica was director/ producer Larry Yust. Their 1969 film version of Shirley Jackson’s short story The Lottery, part of Encyclopedia Britannica’s Short Story Showcase series, gave Mankofsky the opportunity to try diffused light, a technique that had not yet gained a foothold in the industry. His dilemma was how to shoot a film with an outdoor setting on a studio-bound set. “Outside, even on a sunny day, the light in the shade is soft — it’s just ambient light,” he notes. “The only way to do it I could think of was to hang a bunch of big bats in the permanents and shine Maxi-Brutes through diffusion material.” Mankofsky’s work at Encyclopedia Britannica was a training ground, much like music videos and commercials are to today’s cinematographers. “Each film was an opportunity to do something that I added to my book of knowledge,” he says. “Because each film presented its own problems, the cinematographer was, among a lot of other things, a problem solver. I learned as I went along. Of course, I made mistakes. I did everything — aerials, time-lapse, high-speed. I can’t even swim, and I shot water work! In my nine years at Britannica, I don’t think I had to reshoot anything. I’m sometimes asked how I learned composition, and it just came to me.” He adds that Yust was such a stickler for symme-
try that “he has influenced my framing ever since!” Mankofsky spent 17 years trying to join the camera guild, to no avail. When a group of cameramen filed a lawsuit that ultimately broke down the union’s wall of nepotism, Mankofsky, who wasn’t part of the suit, was grandfathered in. That led to his first union picture, American International Pictures’ Scream Blacula Scream (1973). On that picture, the dilemma was shooting a dark-skinned actor, William Marshall, who was wearing a mostly black costume at night. “In my days at Britannica, I shot with Kodachrome, which was a very contrasty film,” Mankofsky recalls. “I had learned to be very careful with my lighting because Kodachrome didn’t have much latitude, maybe 1 stop, and then you were in trouble. Print stocks at the time weren’t very good; they were also contrasty. I had to get the contrast down, and I did that by having the lab flash the film.” Flashing the film, which brings up detail in the blacks but does not affect highlights, would have some producers breaking into cold sweats, but the powers-that-be had no idea Mankofsky had instructed the lab to do such a process. In that era, he notes, producers were more handsoff. “They weren’t quite as dictatorial as they are now,” he jokes. In 1975, Mankofsky started working at Universal TV. His agent had received a call from a production that was seeking a feature cameraman to shoot a pilot, and from then on, Mankofsky was pigeonholed as a TV cinematographer, a tag he felt he never shook completely. “I felt like it held me back,” he says. “I stuck to my guns in not shooting series.” He specialized in miniseries and telefilms; his credits in those genres include Captains and Kings (1976), Columbo: How to Dial a Murder (1978), Goldie and the Boxer (1979) and Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy (1981). ¢
Top: The ABC movie-of-theweek version of Neil Simon’s Broadway Bound remained stagebound, utilizing a twostory set of interiors and exteriors. Here, Mankofsky takes a light reading on Hume Cronyn, who won an Emmy for his supporting role. Middle: Director Debbie Allen toasts Mankofsky before dragging him in front of the camera and onto the dance floor for a scene in Walt Disney Television’s Polly: Comin’ Home! (1990). Bottom: A giant among miniatures, Mankofsky takes a reading on the set of Too Loud a Solitude (2007) before shooting the crane shot that opens the film. Based on Bohumil Hrabal’s book, the film uses rod puppets to enact the tale of a simple man who saves books from destruction in communist Czechoslovakia. At the time, Mankofsky had shot every kind of puppet except rod puppets. “They were the hardest to work with because the rods were quite objectionable at times,” he recalls.
American Cinematographer 57
A Very Active Member
Above: Mankofsky breathes a sigh of relief as his meter registers the whopping 1,600 footcandles of fill light necessary to film a stagebound exterior of Miss Piggy for MuppetVision 3-D (1991), a specialvenue film for Disney theme parks that still plays today. Below: Mankofsky (far right) observes the 3-D camera rig being lined up for a shot on MuppetVision 3-D. Disney built the 65mm cameras and the two-camera 3-D rig, with the top camera firing down into a mirror. The film stock in this camera was run backwards, takeup to feed, in order to correct the mirror’s flipped image, thus avoiding a quality-degrading optical in post.
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During this stretch, Mankofsky also shot some features. In 1979, Jim Henson called upon the cinematographer to shoot The Muppet Movie, the Muppets’ first big-screen venture. Henson’s The Muppet Show had a high-key, live-TV look that everyone knew wouldn’t translate to the cinema, and Mankofsky had to devise more film-appropriate visuals. The only caveat Henson had was that the
color of the Muppets’ fur, especially green, had to be true. “Green on film, especially at night, can be tough, and Kodak stocks at the time weren’t particularly sensitive to green,” notes Mankofsky. “But it was great working with the Muppets. First of all, no one complained about the light in his eyes or how long he had to stand in — you just stuck them on a pole. And the puppeteers were really nice guys. When I asked Henson to move Kermit to the right a little for a better frame, Henson wouldn’t answer; Kermit would answer. “Henson didn’t want any special effects,” he continues. “He wanted everything live. For example, when Kermit was driving an older Studebaker, four or five puppeteers were working the puppets from the floor of the car, so the car had to be modified so it could be driven from the trunk. A wide-angle lens poked out of the distinctive front of the Studebaker grill so the driver could see. “The question I’m asked most about The Muppet Movie is how Kermit rode the bike. We took a crane with an arm extended out, and monofilament ran from that down to the bike. Kermit’s feet were strapped to the pedals, and the pedals would turn as the bike wheels turned. The voice and mouth movements were remote-controlled; we’d just pull it along. However, the shot I’m most proud of is the one that shows Kermit sitting in the director’s chair in the big soundstage. Where’s Henson? I did that in such a simple way, and no one has figured it out. I put a couple mirrors in, and Henson is behind the mirrors. I lit it so the shadows in the mirrors looked like they continued past the chair legs.” Mankofsky followed the Muppets with the period film Somewhere in Time (1980), starring Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour. He had met the director, Jeannot Szwarc, while at Universal. “I’d subbed on a couple of shows
Jeannot was doing,” he remembers. “One Sunday morning, he called me up to see about having breakfast at Canter’s, and he asked if I’d do the film. We had a great relationship on the film, but oddly enough, I never worked with him again, nor with any of the executives on that film. They never called me back, and I’ve never known why!” Mankofsky still marvels at Seymour’s photogenic quality. “No matter how you lit her, she looked gorgeous,” he says. “The light just wrapped around her. Of all the actresses I’ve photographed, she was the easiest.” Somewhere in Time didn’t do particularly well in its theatrical release, but it eventually caught on in secondary markets and gained a cult following. Avid fans of the film hold an annual convention at the shoot’s location, Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island, Mich. Mankofsky soon shot another feature, Richard Fleischer’s The Jazz Singer (1980), and then photographed several telefilms, including Portrait of a Showgirl (1982), In the Custody of Strangers (1982) and The Burning Bed (1984). In 1985, he hooked up with director Savage Steve Holland to shoot the comedy Better Off Dead, starring John Cusack. The film was a hit, and Warner Bros. ordered up another Holland/Cusack picture, One Crazy Summer. Mankofsky recalls, however, that Cusack refused to do some of the gags in the second picture. “A lot of the material that was really good isn’t in the movie,” says the cinematographer. “Or, if it’s in the film, it isn’t the way it was supposed to have been done.” On both comedies, Holland managed to stick Mankofsky in front of the camera. “In One Crazy Summer, he had me brushing the teeth of the fake dolphin, and he also had me inside the thing to film in the water,” he says. “In Better Off Dead, I’m the neighbor in an aardvark coat, cutting the hedges.”
Sandwiched between those comedies was a George Lucas TV spectacle, Ewoks: The Battle for Endor (1985), a sequel to The Ewok Adventure. On The Ewok Adventure, producer Thomas G. Smith had called Mankofsky to shoot the second unit for Industrial Light & Magic; the two had worked together at Britannica. “Tom is one of the most loyal people I’ve worked for,”
Mankofsky notes. “Whenever he had the opportunity, he’d try to get me on a film.” When John Korty, director of Ewok Adventure, had to leave the production early due to a scheduling conflict, “George Lucas decided to direct the rest of it, and I shot that material,” recalls Mankofsky. “George is a very, very nice man but an impatient director. He’s a lot like me; when something
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A Very Active Member Right: Mankofsky poses at the ocean’s edge with a “maneating dolphin” during production of the Warner Bros. comedy One Crazy Summer (1986) in Nantucket. The film was Mankofsky’s second gig with director and gifted animator Savage Steve Holland, following their collaboration on the hit comedy Better Off Dead. Below: The cinematographer, who can’t swim, climbed into the prop dolphin to grab a POV shot through its mouth.
60 March 2009
starts to slow down, I’ll go and do it myself.” When time came for the Ewok sequel, Mankofsky shot first unit for directors Jim and Ken Wheat. Actor Wilford Brimley didn’t get along with the directing duo, so scenes featuring Brimley were directed by production designer and future director Joe Johnston. “I would quietly go over to Wilford and ask him to move his hat a bit so I could see his eyes, and he’d say, ‘Oh, sure,’” recalls Mankofsky. “If the Wheats had asked that, he would have thrown them out.”
Over the next 10 years, Mankofsky shot numerous TV movies, including Fatal Judgment (1988), A Very Brady Christmas (1988) and The Heidi Chronicles (1995). He earned Emmy nominations for Polly (1989); Love, Lies and Murder (1991); and Afterburn (1992). He won an ASC Award for Love, Lies and Murder and notched additional nominations from the Society for Davy Crockett: Rainbow in the Thunder (1989) and Trade Winds (1994). In 1991, Mankofsky reunited with the Muppets to shoot a special-
venue film in 3-D, a new format for him. On MuppetVision 3-D, which still plays at Disney theme parks today, Mankofsky was the creative cinematographer while Peter Anderson, ASC served as the technical cameraman. “Peter wanted to shoot tests every day, but the producer came in and said, ‘Just shoot, and if it doesn‘t turn out, then that can be considered the test,’” Mankofsky says. “We only had to reshoot one day out of the whole schedule, and that was because the cameras went out of sync.” Mankofsky remembers the massive amount of light needed for the shoot: “On a big outdoor set where Miss Piggy is fishing, I had 100 coops that each held six 1,000watt bulbs just to get the fill-light level where we wanted it. For keylight, I had an 18K, and for backlight, I had a Xenon. It got so hot up in the permanents that we had to stop shooting; it overpowered the air-conditioner! I needed 1,600 footcandles and had no idea how to get that, but after turning on all those coops, I put my meter up, and it read 1,600 footcandles exactly. Whew!” When Mankofsky started down his cinematography path, he had two goals: to win an Academy Award and to join the ASC. The goal he has met has turned out to be the most rewarding, he says. A former member of the Society’s Board of Governors, he serves as the Society’s secretary and chairs several committees, including the Heritage Award Committee, the Constitution and Bylaws Committee and the Newsletter Committee. Recently, he was the curator of an exhibit of ASC members’ still photography. “I don’t know why I do all those things!” he laughs. “When I was in the service, they told me to never volunteer for anything. But I’ve never been one to just sit around the house.” I
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“Before” and “after” versions of a scene from Alien Trespass (featuring Jody Thompson) illustrate the effect of Digital Film Central’s EmulsionSpecific Grain Reduction process. 62 March 2009
Degraining Super 16 for Alien Trespass by Noah Kadner
Alien Trespass, an independent feature that was recently given its premiere at the 2009 Palm Springs International Film Festival, presents a classic 1950s sci-fi plot with a unique twist: it was designed to look as though it was
actually shot in 1957 rather than simply set in that era. Depicting an accidental alien invasion of a small American town, the movie was directed by Robert Goodwin and shot by David Moxness, CSC. “This had been Bob’s passion project for a long while, and I was really into the idea,” says Moxness. “It’s one thing to shoot a period piece and another to actually be one.”
Aiming for a theatrical release on 35mm, the filmmakers initially explored high-definition video and 35mm as potential acquisition formats, dismissing Super 16mm because of its pronounced grain. “I’ve worked with a lot of HD in television, but I was against it for this project from the start because it felt like the wrong aesthetic and emotion for a 1950s picture,” says Moxness. “We needed the image to have a noticeable texture, so I really pushed for film. However, 35mm was stretching the overall budget a bit too far.” During prep in Vancouver, Digital Film Central introduced Moxness to a process called Emulsion-Specific Grain Reduction. “It’s a remarkable proprietary recipe they use after the film is scanned for the digital intermediate,” explains the cinematographer. “They showed us a demo, shot on 16mm, of a hallway filled with smoke. After ESGR was applied, the grain was gone, but you could still see all the detail and the smoke. It looked like a perfect solution — we would be able to shoot on Super 16 and deliver a solid 35mm print.” Alien Trespass was filmed over 15 days on stages and locations around Vancouver. Moxness and his team used two Arri 416s and worked almost exclusively with 35mm Zeiss Ultra Primes, favoring the 12mm, 20mm and 28mm. “I brought along a whole box of lenses, but I tried to shoot the whole picture on those three primes to give the film a rigid, 1950s consistency,” says Moxness, who tapped Clairmont Camera for the package. He shot most of the picture on Kodak Vision2 200T 7217 and 50D 7201. “I ended up making one shot on [Vision2 500T] 7218 one day, when the schedule got away from us a bit, but apart from that, we used the slower stocks. I wanted to go with older EXR stocks, but Kodak told us they just
Frame grabs courtesy of Digital Film Central.
Post Focus
wouldn’t be available in a reliable quantity.” Working in the 1.85:1 aspect ratio, Moxness aimed for a period Technicolor palette enhanced with careful use of filtration. “Modern film stocks are less saturated, and I really wanted to shift things tonally,” he says. “We used CTO gels on the lights to achieve a warm bias combined with warming filters on the lenses, primarily Tiffen corals. We also used Tiffen Classic Softs and Schneider Black Frosts to control contrast.” During filming, Moxness added subtle, playful touches to the cinematography to pay homage to the technical limitations of the era. “On our process photography, we ran some of our backgrounds slightly out sync, even though it was all done with greenscreen,” he says. “So, for example, a car pulls up and stops, and the background plate stops just a beat later. We also played with lighting cues by having the cue slightly behind the actor’s action. In one sequence that was inspired by a sequence in the original War of the Worlds [1953], you see a practical light go off onscreen, and then we go to pitch black before coming back up with dimmed lighting.” After the production wrapped, DFC scanned the original camera negative using an Arriscan. “We scan Super 16 at 3K and then downconvert to 2K for grain reduction and the DI,” explains James Tocher, DFC’s founder and DI producer. “The Arriscan’s ability to scan Super 16 at 3K really helps improve the image quality. 16mm stocks are really good these days, but a lot of people don’t realize how much resolution there is behind the grain. The ESGR process utilizes a proprietary processing algorithm specific to each film stock —7219 receives a different method than 7201, for example. We first sort the project into its specific stocks, then we begin attacking the grain directly.” “Other degraining processes typically blur and soften grain by mushing it together,” he continues. “Then they use image-sharpening similar to the Unsharp filter in Photoshop to give
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you the illusion of retained detail. The resulting artifacts are really evident in areas of the frame that have fine detail like wispy smoke or hanging fog. With ESGR, it’s not nearly as much of a tradeoff between grain reduction and loss of detail as it used to be.” For Moxness, using ESGR was a simple addition to the DI workflow. “It’s not an all-or-nothing process,” he notes. “You can choose the percentage of grain reduction on a shot-by-shot or scene-by-scene basis. They bring up each scene and implement a pre-built formula that they think will be the best match for the specific contrast and color tones and then manipulate from there. It takes a little extra time, but it didn’t hold up our post at all.” DFC has applied the ESGR process to 35mm projects as well, according to Tocher. He estimates that the process adds one day to the total DI time on an average project; reels can be processed while the DI continues simultaneously. “We spent the better part of a year developing this process after looking at the existing real-time and rendered processes on the market,” he notes. “A lot of broadcasters have been discouraging the use of 16mm because the grain takes a serious compression hit on their digital broadcast signal, and that’s really the big fringe benefit of ESGR: the Blu-ray discs and broadcast versions derived from our masters are virtually grainless, allowing for flawless compression.” DFC plans to offer the ESGR process to the post market at large sometime this year, he adds. After grain reduction, Alien Trespass’ DI was completed at DFC using a Baselight 2K color-correction system playing out to a Christie 2K digital projector on a 13' screen. “We spent most of our six days in the DI enhancing the 1950s Technicolor look we’d set out to achieve,” says Moxness. “I come from the pre-‘fix-it-in-post’ days, so I try to deliver the best image at the end of each shoot day rather than leave it to the DI.” Alien Trespass will be distributed theatrically by Roadside Attractions. I 64
JOIN HOLLYWOOD’S PROFESSIONALS IN 2009 For the Pre-Production• Production• Post Production Community
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Filmmakers’ Forum Shooting Push in Hong Kong A-camera operator Stuart Howell prepares to film an opening shot for Push on a bamboo bridge that was constructed about 150' above the city streets. “They say bamboo is stronger than steel, and it did hold up, but it was scary sometimes,” says director of photography Peter Sova, ASC, who was filming in Hong Kong for the first time.
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irector Paul McGuigan and I have made five films together, beginning with Gangster No. 1 (AC June ’02). Each has presented a unique challenge, but none more so than our most recent collaboration, Push. The film is about a group of American expatriates who possess extrasensory powers and hide out among the crowds of Hong Kong. A top-secret U.S. agency, The Division, pursues them, hoping to harness their powers for dangerous purposes. Dakota Fanning, Chris Evans, Camilla Belle and Djimon Hounsou star. Paul looked at a few different cities, but by the time I came aboard, he had settled on shooting in Hong Kong, where the story is actually set. When I arrived in the city, I was immediately struck by the sheer amount of artificial light. You see photographs of Hong Kong, but it isn’t until you’re there that all the neon really hits you. Fluorescent tubes, incandescent bulbs, colored lanterns and a huge amount of neon — it’s quite impressive. The Chinese see red as the good-luck color, and when you walk into a grocery store, you see dozens
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of red lamps. They believe the more light they have, the more business they’ll get. We couldn’t have fought against the way the place looked even if we’d wanted to! Every kind of light was there; the question was how to control it. We shot everything in Hong Kong, on location and on sets built on local stages. Paul and I had previously worked with François Séguin, a brilliant production designer, on Lucky Number Slevin (AC April ’06). He and I embraced the Hong Kong scene and worked to bring it to the look of Push. The colors on the sets — rich reds and yellows and hues of green — seamlessly meld with the exteriors. François built the set of a large restaurant for an important fight scene between Nick (Evans) and Carter (Hounsou). When I walked onto it, I said, “The floor is real marble! How can you afford it?” His Chinese crew had brought it from mainland China, where real marble is cheaper than what it would have cost to fake it. Night shooting in the city was all about working with available light and then subtracting from it. When lighting
an actor, I tried to use the same kind of light that was already there. I could have replaced it with a combination of movie lights and gels, but I wanted to do a “Hong Kong movie” and work quickly using what was available. The look of the place was extreme, and I wanted to go with that, so I used the same kinds of tubes you see all over the city as my movie lights. I had a wonderful local best boy whose nickname was Dragon. Every day, seven days a week, he went to various markets to find an assortment of tubes. Finding two that match is difficult; they mostly come from the mainland, and any two from the same unit can easily be 2000°K different. But Dragon and other electricians managed to find all kinds of tubes and put together batches that were at least within 500°K of each other. Less than that, and you really don’t notice the difference. During location scouting, Paul had discovered a monastery where photographs of deceased monks were mounted on walls and lit by red bulbs; green tubes illuminated the rest of the rooms. We wanted to preserve this unusual look, so I asked François to build a wild wall that would match the existing red wall, which I could then both photograph and use as a light source. I lit the opposite side of the room with green tubes (6000°K-7000°K) that matched the rest of the monastery. The actors’ faces were sometimes warm and reddish on one side and greenish on the other. I liked the way this mixture worked. We approached our day exteriors similarly, finding what was there and then adding to it. For a complex confrontation and chase through a local fish market, we built our own extension onto a real, functioning fish market. We used our fish-market set so we could rig
Photos by Sylvain Bernier and Peter Sova, ASC.
by Peter Sova, ASC
for the most demanding stunts. With a 24-hour reset time after exploding fish tanks, and a five-camera setup that included a top camera traveling on wire rigs, we were able to match the new market with the old one. After arriving, we’d have to work quickly. In the real fish market, there wasn’t much use planning ahead because it would look different every day, but we were able to shoot reactions of the locals going about their business. Paul also brought an old, windup Bolex and grabbed some shots that made it into the final cut. Though the look of Hong Kong was perfect for Push, I realized quickly that I’d had the wrong idea about the way movies are made there. Paul and I are both big fans of Wong Kar-wai, but he can take 18 months to make a movie. On local movies, the crews were on a totally different pace than I’m used to; they’ll shoot for 20 hours and then stop for days. My Canadian gaffer, Sylvain Bernier, had to coordinate some big locations with a lighting crew of about 30, only a few of whom spoke English. My first local gaffer, known as Hong Kong Boy, would get upset with the crew because if he said he needed a light moved a few feet, 10 of them would run to the same place. They were eager to please, but it wasn’t very efficient. Hong Kong is an incredibly polluted city, and I was often disturbed to find our trucks running unnecessarily. The explanation was that if the motors were running, we didn’t need permits for specific places. It didn’t make sense to me, but I needed to put lights somewhere. When shooting night exteriors, it wasn’t easy to get the cooperation of locals. Night filming in those neighborhoods isn’t done much at all, and when it is, residents are not compensated for giving their permission. Another difficulty was filming car scenes on location. Between permit issues and congested traffic, we chose to shoot all the car interiors onstage against bluescreen or greenscreen. Hong Kong is the most traffic-jammed city I’ve ever seen, and you can’t get much cooperation to divert any of it for a movie. Our second unit shot plates for the driving scenes in interesting locations.
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These shots show production designer François Séguin’s radical transformation of a soundstagelobby space (top) into the unfinishedskyscraper set (bottom) for the film’s finale.
Sometimes I’d be having dinner somewhere and make a note that a particular street would make a good background for one of the driving scenes. Visualeffects supervisor Kent Houston was great to work with; he was with the team whenever they shot those plates, and he was always present when I shot the foreground elements against bluescreen. I was able to reference the backgrounds, which he later composited at Digiscope in Santa Monica. (Kent also supervised the pregrade of many visual-effects shots with colorist Trent Johnson at Technicolor Digital Intermediates in Los Angeles. I’ve worked with Trent and TDI on my last four films.) Onstage, we’d have five or six setups with lights on dimmers to simulate the effects the street lighting would have on the people in the car. For day-exterior driving scenes, I’d usually bounce 20Ks into real Chinese silk, which was affordable there. We tried to make the best of the 68 March 2009
crowded sidewalks and the difficulty of attaining permits by shooting certain exteriors with the actors amid real crowds, hiding our camera away inside a small truck. We cut holes in the truck’s canvas top so we could park nearby and shoot with long lenses from inside the truck. Paul and I thought we would get better material if we didn’t disturb the natural flow, but we quickly realized it was impossible. Everything was so crowded that our view of at least one of the actors was always blocked by a pedestrian. We attempted to shoot with this hidden camera at a long, outdoor market at night, but we quickly gave up. Instead, my operator, Stuart Howell, and my great focus puller, David Morenz, got closer to the actors and followed them, handheld, through the outdoor market into an indoor vegetable market. Most people in the crowd just went about their business and ignored us. It wasn’t like shooting in
Times Square, where everybody’s jumping around and waving their arms to get into the shot. Dragon was in the crowd ahead of the actors, pulling a little cart with some battery-operated fluorescent tubes to help fill in the actors’ faces. If Dragon or the front of his cart got into the shot, it didn’t matter; you can’t tell where that light is coming from, and Dragon blends right into the crowd. Something I noticed right away in Hong Kong was all the bamboo scaffolding. Even if they’re building a 100-story skyscraper, the scaffold is bamboo. We used a lot of bamboo ourselves, both onscreen and in our grip department. We set a climactic fight scene on the roof of an unfinished skyscraper, using what looked like a forest of bamboo (only a small exaggeration of what a construction site like that would really look like). We also used bamboo to build lighting platforms. They say bamboo is stronger than steel, and it did hold up, but it was scary sometimes, particularly in an opening shot of Nick walking across an open-air corridor 14 floors above the street. Initially, we tried to hang the camera from a wire rig suspended outside the building to follow him, but that was just too expensive. Instead, the bamboo crew fashioned a bridge parallel to where Chris would walk 150' above the street. Stuart could track with him from his apartment to the elevator, then pan around to reveal the Hong Kong skyline, and finally tilt down to the teeming street below. Stuart doesn’t feel extremely comfortable with heights, but he agreed to do it. We were rarely able to rehearse or block the actors for exterior scenes. With constant changes, additional pressures were put on my focus puller, as well as the electricians, led by Sylvain, and my grips, led by Chunkie Huse. When you’ve made a lot of films and understand how to do varieties of lighting, how to work with color temperatures and how to design a look, there’s something really exciting about pushing everything to the point where you’re sort of walking on a tightrope all the time. That’s how it was on Push. We were constantly being pushed to the limit. I
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GUILLERMO NAVARRO, ASC hotography became my companion early on, and it led me to my first job on a film set, shooting stills. After that, I was completely hooked on making moving pictures. “Living in Mexico, when someone would arrive with a copy of American Cinematographer, it was like a beacon. It let me know there actually were people able to dedicate their lives to cinematography; it was my inspiration to keep chasing after my dream. “AC is an important reference for keeping track of this medium’s evolution and our role as cinematographers. It is important not only for those of us who are working, but also for those who are coming up.”
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©photo by Owen Roizman, ASC
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New Products & Services a single industry-standard DVI-I duallink cable, the RIP and RIB together allow remote access to all of the Red One’s immediate I/Os — including start/stop — at distances of up to 50'. The combined system’s built-in video distribution amplifier can also send up to five preview outputs. For more information, visit www.aslgear.com.
P+S Technik Updates Weisscam Building on the success of the Weisscam HS-1, P+S Technik and cinematographer Stefan Weiss have introduced the Weisscam HS-2 digital highspeed camera. In contrast to the HS-1, the HS-2 boasts integrated functions and components, making an additional computer unnecessary for operation. The HS-2’s 35mm sensor features a global shutter to allow capturing at high speeds. The camera’s DigiMag DM-2 offers up to 2TB of storage, and an on-board monitor enables real-time preview. Additionally, as a two-stream camera with dual-link HDSDI output, the HS-2 can support a raw workflow, and an external de-bayer box allows real-time de-bayering of raw data into standard definition. The entire system can also be completely controlled by a small and lightweight control device. Other features of the HS-2 include 1,500 fps recording at 2K resolution, 2,000 fps recording at 1080p, 600 ASA sensitivity, 9 stops of latitude, PL lens mount and an optional optical viewfinder. The camera can record in YCC 4:2:2, RGB 4:4:4 or raw uncompressed. ZGC is handling North and South 70 March 2009
American distribution of the Weisscam HS-2. For more information, visit www.pstechnik.com, www.weisscam.com or www.zgc.com. Air Sea Land Gear, Inc., Breaks Out Red Panel Supporting the Red One digital camera, Air Sea Land Gear, Inc. has introduced the Remote Interface Panel. Providing quick and easy access to the Red One’s I/O interface, the RIP converts all audio, video, time code, genlock and monitor connectors into full-size industry-standard connectors. The RIP can also be used in stand-alone mode or in conjunction with Air Sea Land Gear’s optional RIB (Remote Interface Box) break-out box. With the use of
Telemetrics Unveils Compact Pan/Tilt Head Telemetrics’ line of servo-based Pan/Tilt units now includes the compact PT-CP-S4 Pan/Tilt Head, offering side camera mounting, a DC-DC converter to power accessories over long cable runs, a newly designed cable-management system, serial data control with multiprocessor architecture and more. “The new PT-CP-S4 has been designed for user versatility and performance,” says Anthony Cuomo, Telemetrics’ vice president and general manager. “It’s the perfect tool for accommodating a variety of cameras and studio setups without compromise.” The PT-CP-S4 can be configured with the camera — either upright or inverted — mounted on the side or on the top. The DC-DC converter at the base of the head converts 48-volt power to the appropriate voltage levels for the
timed presets are available with multiaxis convergence. Additionally, the unit offers optional camera control for a variety of cameras, as well as Bluetooth wireless control. An auxiliary control interface is also included for Telemetrics’ Trolley, Elevating Pedestal and Elevating Wall Mount. For more information, visit www.telemetricsinc.com.
head, auxiliary robotic devices, camera, lens and viewfinder. When the pan/tilt head is used with Telemetrics’ PS-RM48V power supply, cable distances between the control location power supply and the pan/tilt unit can be measurably increased. The unit is controlled through serial data using RS232 or RS-422 and also features multiprocessor architecture with flash-based RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) servo controllers. The PT-CP-S4’s newly designed cable-management system routes cables to the camera through the pan/tilt head, thereby preventing the cables from swinging freely or continually flexing with the camera’s movements. The head also boasts Telemetrics’ velocity servo controls for equally smooth preset motions and joystick control. End stops can be set either mechanically or electronically, and heavy-duty cross roller bearings and isolation-mounted motors provide quiet operation. Up to 255 programmable
Remote Station Goes on Location Rental Station, a division of Media Distributors, has unveiled the Remote Station, an on-location post solution for turnkey video editing and storage management. The Remote Station consists of a road-ready, high-definition editing system secured in two Anvil-style road cases. Each Remote Station includes a high-end Panasonic SD/HD-SDI video monitor, Genelec reference speakers, a Mackie audio mixer and custom Apple MacBook Pros running Final Cut Studio 2. The detachable accessory-case lid features folding legs to form a comfortable editing desk for on-location use. “There is an increasing demand from our clients to deliver end-to-end solutions that bridge from production to postproduction,” says Steve Klein, CEO of Media Distributors. “Our preconfigured fleet of HD edit systems is great for local projects, but we feel like the Remote Station is an ideal solution for remote locations or for professionals
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who need a real-world postproduction solution for digital dailies, media archival using LTO, or even just editing with tight deadlines. With a short consultation up front, we can customize the Remote Station to the specific needs of each client, no matter where they are or what they’re doing, all the way up to 4:4:4 HD and 4K work.” For more information, call (888) 889-3130 or visit www.therentalsta tion.net. Superlight Studios Opens Santa Monica Facility Superlight Studios, an interactive advertising production facility, has announced the launch of its new Santa Monica facility, along with its expansion into feature film and commercial visual effects. The Santa Monica facility was recently occupied by MacGuff Los Angeles, a local branch of the French visualeffects house; Superlight has joined forces with MacGuff and become the company’s stateside production arm. Pat Hadnagy, Superlight Studios’ executive producer and general manager, heads the new facility, where he is joined by fellow executive producer Sarote Tabcum Jr. With a team of experienced producers, CGI artists, compositing artists, visual-effects supervisors, photographers and cinematographers, Hadnagy and Tabcum are in charge of directing Superlight’s expansion into feature film and commercial visual effects. In addition to its full-service facility in Santa Monica, Superlight Studios maintains photography studios and post facilities in several other locations, including Rancho Dominguez, Calif. and Troy, Mich. Superlight Studios’ new
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facility is located at 2403 Main St., Santa Monica, Calif. 90405. For more information, call (310) 362-2202 or visit www.superlightstu dios.com. PostFactory Installs DI-Grading Theater Berlin’s PostFactory has installed a new digital-intermediate grading theater. Purpose-built to DCI specifications, the grading theater features a FilmLight Baselight HD system, a Christie 2K digital projector, 7.1 surround sound and FilmLight’s Truelight projector probe for color calibration. PostFactory received the Baselight in September, and the company will also receive FilmLight’s newly developed GPU upgrade to boost system performance. A new version of Baselight software, with features such
as stereoscopic grading, will also increase functionality, and PostFactory has incorporated FilmLight’s recently developed Avid integration, allowing Baselight to share storage with the facility’s editorial and compositing systems. PostFactory has set up its internal network so that output from any of its post systems can be directed to the DI theater. The output from an editing system, for example, can be projected onto the cinema screen for side-by-side comparison with the output from the Baselight. For more information, visit www.filmlight.ltd.uk or www.postfac tory.de.
Leica Introduces D-Lux 4 The Leica D-Lux 4 is a compact digital camera with powerful optics, a 1:1.63" CCD sensor, 10.1 megapixel resolution and a comprehensive range of settings. Sporting a high-speed Leica DC
Vario-Summicron 5.1-12.8mm f2.0-2.8 lens — the equivalent of a 24-60mm focal range in the 35mm format — the D-Lux 4 also boasts an integrated image stabilizer to reliably protect against camera shake in all photographic situations. The lens consists of eight elements (four aspherical) in six groups; the optics are individually matched to the camera sensor, working in harmony with the electronics and software. Furthermore, the large image sensor also makes it possible to retain the full 24mm wide angle, and the camera can take photos in 4:3, 3:2 or 16:9. The camera’s 460,000-pixel display has a wide viewing angle and enables photographers to make a reliable assessment of the picture composition when shooting and reviewing. The viewing angle can also be adjusted to ensure a clear view even when capturing extreme camera perspectives. Focus, shutter speed, stops and exposure override can all be set manually with the camera’s joystick, and for users who like photography to be less complicated, the D-Lux 4 integrates many improved automatic functions. Like the Leica C-Lux 3, the D-Lux 4 is capable of recording 30 fps video in high definition. The D-Lux 4 is supplied with a battery charger, a powerful recharge-
able battery and a comprehensive software package. A high-quality leather case is available as an optional accessory, as are a range of products designed to extend the camera’s potential. For more information, visit www.leica-camera.com. Leica Unveils S2 dSLR Leica Camera AG has introduced the Leica S2 digital SLR, featuring a custom 37.5-megapixel, 30x45mm CCD sensor in the company’s classic 3:2 aspect ratio. In designing the camera, Leica’s
engineers took a close look at the best existing dSLR designs, combining them in a practical camera body that incorporates the performance parameters of a medium-format digital camera with the ergonomics, form factor and handling ease of a 35mm SLR. The resultant S2 boasts an advanced dual-shutter system with an in-body focal-plane shutter and in-lens leaf shutters, an ultra-high-precision auto-focusing system, a new series of lenses designed to work with the new sensor, and a Maestro image-processing system that reduces power consumption and provides in-camera JPEG capability. For more information, visit www.leica-camera.com. Zacuto Supports dSLRs Zacuto is now supporting dSLR cinematography with a line of accessory kits accommodating varying needs: the Docu kit, the Cine kit, the Newsman kit, the Indie kit and the Filmmaker kit. The kits allow users to work
with dSLR cameras in much the same way they would a prosumer camcorder. All kits are balanced for smooth movement and low user fatigue in both tripod and handheld use. Zacuto’s trademarked Z-Release (quick release) allows for fast installation of such components as an articulating arm, mattebox, follow focus, wireless microphone, on-board monitor and more. The combination of Zacuto’s height-adjustable Universal Baseplate and Z-Spacer allows users to mount any mattebox or follow focus to any dSLR, and the new Zacuto Zwing-Away Adapter — included in the Filmmaker kit — can turn any mattebox into a swingaway mattebox. Zacuto has also created a universal case that keeps the camera package assembled for shipment. For more information, visit www.zacuto.com. Southpaw Ships Tactic 2.0 Soutphaw Technology Inc. is now shipping Tactic 2.0, the next generation of its fully customizable workflow infrastructure. Available for Mac OSX, Windows and Linux, Tactic 2.0 offers a single software solution to manage the complex flow of digital assets, ensuring dependable, efficient and cost-effective workflow pipelines. New features of Tactic 2.0 include project-customization tools, a visual node-based pipeline editor intended to visually create pipeline processes, a browser and custom-view builder designed for creation of custom views within the Tactic Web interface, and a powerful client API enhanced to control every aspect of Tactic. “Our goal has always been to keep everything open and all things possible,” says Remko Noteboom, CTO
of Southpaw. “With Tactic 2.0’s innovative and advanced new features, facilities can construct and integrate their own pipelines seamlessly across various departments, creating limitless potential for project and tool customization.” Southpaw has also announced that Digital Domain has integrated Tactic into its workflow. “It’s very exciting to work with Digital Domain’s dedicated, creative and talented group of digital artists, and we are thrilled they have chosen to integrate Tactic into their production pipelines,” Noteboom adds. Phil Peterson, Digital Domain’s senior technology officer, notes, “Tactic promises to provide us with a solid infrastructure for managing the complex flow of digital assets through our pipeline.” Tactic 2.0 has a suggested retail price of $895 per user; this includes all software upgrades and technical support for the first year. For more information, visit www.southpaw.com. Domke Introduces Long-Lens Bag Domke, a division of The Tiffen Co., has added the F-300 Long Lens Bag to its Classic Collection. The bag is designed to protect SLR and dSLR cameras that have a 300mm lens attached. The F-300 is foam padded on all four sides, and the design allows the camera — with attached lens — to be stored vertically for faster access. A 45degree-angle, zippered main compartment allows quick access and sure handling of the lens barrel, and the bag also boasts an expandable front pocket with fitted weather flap as well as a rear pocket for accessories. The adjustable 2" Gripper Shoulder Strap consists of twin tracks of highAmerican Cinematographer 73
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friction rubber that are woven into the thickest, toughest cotton webbing so that it clings to the shoulder and runs completely around the bag for extra support. The side of the F-300 also sports hook and loop straps to hold a monopod, and easy-glide YKK zippers offer further protection and durability. The F-300 is made of heavyweight cotton canvas, which breathes to minimize condensation. The smooth, soft texture is friendly to both equipment and clothing, and the fabric is naturally water resistant. For more information, visit www.tiffen.com.
create, organize and publish film, video, audio, theater, comic books and other media. Version 1.0 also contains an Internet friendly tool enabling online collaboration for writing and scheduling. Celtx’s unique hybrid architecture combines the strengths of desktop and Web applications, offering control, stability, power and flexibility. Intended to replace the traditional paper, pen and binder approach to prep, the software includes such features as Adapt To, which converts a fully formatted script of one type (such as a stage play) to a fully formatted script of another (such as a screenplay); iPhone, which allows Celtx projects to be viewed on users’ iPhones; Catalogs, a searchable dashboard view of all story elements and production items; Sidebar, which allows users to easily annotate their work; Project Scheduling, which fully integrates with the script breakdown and provides call sheets and shooting reports; and Storyboarding, which offers a variety of ways to view and manage images. For more information or to download Celtx 1.0, visit www.celtx.com.
Celtx Smoothes Prep with Version 1.0 Developed by Greyfirst Corp., Celtx version 1.0 is available for free download. The fully integrated preproduction software suite allows users to
Producers’ Guide to Michigan ProducersGuideToMichigan.com is a new Web site designed to allow producers anywhere in the world to find film resources in Michigan and allow local talent and business owners to
connect with filmmakers. The site answers the needs of filmmakers and film-related businesses by offering an immense directory of professional production companies, legal services, producers, studios, limos, hair stylists, caterers, shooting locations, costumers and countless other resources. Nick Johnston, the guide’s cofounder, notes, “In popular shooting locations like L.A., it’s common to find numerous production management services and directories to help filmmakers find anything required to complete a production. We simply didn’t have a onestop resource like that here before this site.” For more information, visit www.producersguidetomichigan.com. Pond5 1.0 Goes Online Pond5.com, an open marketplace for stock footage, has launched version 1.0 of its online service, where any video creator with professional-quality video footage can make it available for use in productions ranging from features, series and industrials to wedding and Web videos. The company’s online collection now includes more than 50,000 broadcast-quality SD and HD clips available for instant download, starting at $5 per clip. Prices on Pond5 are set by the artists themselves, with an average price of around $40 for HD and $20 for SD footage. For each sale, the artist earns 50 percent of the selling price. The rapidly growing collection features work from more than 400 artists and libraries from around the world, spanning such categories as lifestyle, aerials, motion backgrounds, editorial and effects. All footage is reviewed for content and quality by Pond5 staff; approved clips are made available for instant search, preview, licensing and download. Clips on Pond5 are licensed under a simple, industry-standard “royalty-free” license agreement and can be used in virtually any production for a flat fee. New features included in version 1.0 include an on-screen Clip Bin and Cart, which streamline the process of finding, organizing, sharing and select-
ing footage by letting users review and act on their clip choices immediately, from any screen on the Web site. Additionally, the Pond5 Stock Footage Widget offers a fully customizable selection of continuously updated clips that can be created by any visitor at Pond5.com. The Widget can then be embedded anywhere on the Web, from Facebook and Myspace pages to blogs, Web sites or even a desktop. The Widget works hand-in-hand with Pond5’s referral program, which offers referrers 5 percent of sales or purchases made by referred users for a full year. For more information, visit www.pond5.com. CineForm Offers HD, 4K Solutions CineForm, Inc. has expanded its line of high-fidelity compression-based workflow solutions for the post marketplace with Neo HD and Neo 4K software products for Mac OSX. The new products extend CineForm’s workflow solutions to all QuickTime-based video-editing and content-creation applications for the Mac platform up to 4K spatial resolution, including Final Cut Pro, Motion, After Effects and others. Both products offer CineForm’s compression-based technologies, including Active Metadata architecture for renderless color workflows, plus numerous format conversion utilities in support of most HDV, HD, 2K and 4K cameras on the market. David Taylor, CEO of CineForm, notes the company’s objective “has been to enable seamless workflows across Windows and Mac platforms, and between standard industry applications like Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro and others. Using Neo HD or Neo 4K for Mac, our customers can now easily capture, edit and share media during postproduction with colleagues who may be using different applications on Mac, or who may be using Windows.” Neo 4K supports up to 4096x4096 spatial resolution with 12-bit precision, and is intended for online editing using Final Cut Pro or other Macbased nonlinear editors with no need for
proxy files or conforming. Neo 4K also supports 12-bit CineForm RAW, its compression format for the emerging class of high-resolution digital cinema cameras such as the Red One and Silicon Imaging’s SI-2K. Neo HD supports up to 1920x1080 spatial resolution, and it can work with virtually all HD cameras on the market, including Grass Valley’s JPEG2000-based Infinity camcorder. Both Neo HD and Neo 4K support CineForm’s 10-bit YUV and 12-bit CineForm 4:4:4 (RGB) compression formats. Apple’s ProRes is also offered as an optional compression format when Final Cut Studio 2 is installed. Other features of both products include ReMaster, which provides image/video preprocessing plus camera- and fileconversion functions, and SetActive Metadata, which manages CineForm’s Active Metadata architecture for nondestructive color workflows without rendering. For more information, visit www.cineform.com. Pinnacle Updates VideoSpin Pinnacle Systems, Inc., a part of Avid Technology, Inc., recently redesigned its VideoSpin.com Web site, which hosts a free, downloadable version of Pinnacle’s VideoSpin software and a variety of resources for video-editing beginners. Visitors to VideoSpin.com can experience how easy editing and sharing can be by clicking on the interactive, step-by-step tutorials, and for more information they can view white papers, how-to videos and user reviews, or search the online glossary and frequently asked questions. Visitors can also sign up to receive a monthly
newsletter featuring further information and special promotions for Avid products. The site also hosts spotlighted YouTube videos edited in VideoSpin, and visitors can rate their favorites and submit their own videos to be shown on the site. VideoSpin is designed for Windows XP with SP2 and Vista systems, and the program includes support for AVI, MPEG-1, WMV, Real Media and Windows Media with WAV audio support. The application can also be used with the Advanced Codec Pack (available for $15.99) to create, edit and export video in other file formats, and for one-click DVD creation, users can purchase the InstantDVD Recorder for $19.99. For more information and to download VideoSpin for free, visit www.videospin.com. Lightworks Unveils Version 1.3 Lightworks has launched version 1.3 of its editing software for Alacrity and Softworks. Version 1.3 includes a number of new features and advances to offer faster and easier editing for video and film productions. With real-time mixed-format editing and native support for avi, mxf and QuickTime, Lightworks 1.3 offers easy integration in the world of open file transfers. Supported formats include HDV, XDCam and P2, and OMF, AAF and DPX sequences are also supported for interchange. Building on Lightworks’ proven multi-seat editing, version 1.3’s full networking now supports larger volumes, allowing easy integration with large storage arrays of over 100TB. Lightworks 1.3 also maintains full metadata interchange and native-file-format
American Cinematographer 75
support with the Geevs video server, allowing integrated tapeless systems to be built. An optional HD Codec pack for Lightworks 1.3 allows Lightworks to edit with Red raw files and Prores422 files from Final Cut Pro. For more information, visit www.lwks.com. Karesslite Comes to America Gekko Technologies’ Karesslite is now available in the United States through Gekko’s dealer network. Aimed at studio and documentary market sectors, the Karesslite is a soft LED panel boasting a large projected output and beam-modifying optics with a strong punch and high versatility. The fixture can be used in an array of applications, either as a single unit or mounted in multiples. The Karesslite also features built-in DMX and batterypower options, and a padded carrying bag is available to protect the fixture. Gekko has also announced that Hotcam Video Facilities in New York has joined the company’s dealer network. For more information, visit www.gekkotechnology.com or www.hot camny.com. Boris Expands Continuum with Film Look Boris FX has expanded its Continuum family of visual-effects plug-ins with the release of Film Look. Effects included in the unit include Film Process, Film Damage, Match Grain, Film Grain, Deinterlace and Prism. Film Process deepens the color response of a digital image to emulate film’s dynamic color range; it can also be used to color grade and mimic a variety of analog lens filters, optical processes and special effects. Film Damage simulates the appearance of old film stock, allowing users to add scratches, grain particles, hair, dirt, dust and water spots, as well as simulate flicker and camera shake. 76 March 2009
Match Grain takes a snapshot of media that’s gone through a telecine and generates a grain structure to match, enabling users to add grain to video footage so it will cut more seamlessly with film-originated footage. Film Grain, on the other hand, creates an auto-animated noise effect designed to simulate the appearance of grain particles in film emulsion. Deinterlace converts interlaced video clips into progressive-scan frames, and it can convert 29.97 fps NTSC video into 24 fps frames by adding pulldown. Prism is typically used to simulate the photographic effect of chromatic aberration in which a bad lens can generate prismatic color fringing along edges of high contrast within the image. Boris Continuum Film Look supports Abode After Effects and Premiere Pro, and Apple Final Cut Pro and Motion. For Avid systems, the Film Look filters are included as part of Boris Continuum Complete AVX. The Film Look unit is available for a recommended price of $299, and customers who purchase individual units may
credit the price toward the purchase of the full Boris Continuum Complete plugin suite. For more information, visit www.borisfx.com. Massive Releases Version 3.5 Massive Software has released Massive 3.5, a new upgrade to the company’s artificial-intelligence-driven animation system, which allows artists to create and direct anything from CG humanoids to birds, animals, cars and more, delivering realistic and emotive virtual performances. Massive “agents” are 3-D characters that use sight, sound and touch to interpret and react autonomously to the world around them. “The release of Massive 3.5 improves on many of the mostrequested features from Massive users, including extended support for FBX files and Python scripts,” says Stephen Regelous, Massive Software’s founder and product manager. “With Agent Fields, Massive users can easily and efficiently handle local interactions
he trilogy book set and DVD, Storaro: Writing With Light, is the project of a lifetime: an encyclopedia by a single man — a visionary, a researcher and a scholar — about the mystery of vision. Each book explores Storaro’s films and philosophies through a collection of writings, inspirational paintings, Storaro’s own color photographs and black and white production stills documenting his work. Each volume contains over 400 pages, including color paintings, hundreds of Storaro’s color photographs from the various films, and black and white production stills that document his work on the sets of his various films.
The set also includes a DVD on the creative journey of the author, touching on around 40 films, and extending the collection of images, studies, and research that make up Storaro’s collected work.
Each volume is bilingual in Italian and English and is printed with the highest quality and care, measuring approximately 12 x 12 inches.
between large numbers of agents. Agent Fields can be applied with the simplicity of particle-based simulators, without losing the flexibility extensibility of Massive.” Other features of Massive 3.5 include Maya particle-file support, improving integration and allowing a Massive simulation to be imported into a Maya scene as simple particles, and improved dynamics and increased control of hair and fur; Mental Ray hair shader allows users to get high-quality hair and fur renderings without writing custom shaders. For more information, visit www.massivesoftware.com. Craft Director Tools Available for Mac Users of Autodesk Maya can now enjoy Craft Animations’ Craft Director Tools — a process-driven animation suite based on neural networking, artificial intelligence and autonomous control systems — on the Mac OSX Tiger and Leopard platforms. “Craft Director Tools offer an entirely new way of animating by quickly and accurately directing the physical motion paths of objects such as cars, planes and helicopters,” explains Luigi Tramontana, Craft Animations’ cofounder and CTO. “Using either autopilot functions or input devices such as joysticks and Direct X game controllers, professional animating is now as fun as playing a game. We are thrilled that the creative Mac community can now receive the benefits of these tools.” Craft Director Tools include Craft
Camera Tools, providing users with immediate, professional-quality cinematic results in real time; Craft Vehicles, allowing artists to create the most realistic and accurate simulations for inmotion vehicles; and Craft Accessories, simulating and animating props such as missiles, cameras and other moving parts. Broadening its already widespread FreeWare catalog, Craft Animations has also announced free light versions of Craft 4-Wheeler, Craft ObserverCam and Craft Airplane. 4Wheeler allows users to modify acceleration, top speed, steering angle, brake force, suspension and weight of any four-wheeled vehicle; ObserverCam boasts the ability to move in all directions, enabling camera animations with the help of input devices; and Airplane lets users rig and animate any type of airplane model in addition to modifying weight, top speed, elevation speed and turn speed. Additionally, TurboSquid, the online marketplace of 3-D animation assets, is now an official reseller of Craft Director Tools. For more information, visit www.craftanimations.com or www.turbosquid.com.
FilmFellas Premieres Online Zacuto, in conjunction with Vimeo.com, has premiered FilmFellas, a new series of Webisodes offering behind-the-scenes conversations with influential and emerging filmmakers who are active in independent productions. Cast and topics change regularly,
with a new episode premiering every two weeks. January and February featured “Film School and Beyond,” a four-part series exploring a variety of topics for young filmmakers, from schools and mentors to gaining experience and finding distribution. The second four-part series, “Mumblecore and More,” will premiere in March and April and dig into directing styles, business models, credit-card debt and more. To watch FilmFellas in full-screen HD on Zacuto’s Vimeo channel, visit http://zacutovideo.com. Mobigrip Keeps Electronics on Leash Reno, Nev.-based Mobigrip has introduced the Mobigrip device leash for handheld electronic devices. Mobigrip is
an assistive disc with an integrated bungee, and it attaches easily to almost any handheld device, including cell phones, iPods, digital cameras, remote controls and more. Mobigrip’s bungee gently secures the electronic device to the user’s finger and helps keep it secure in the palm of the hand. Manufactured in the United States, Mobigrip is designed for easy application: Users simply peel, stick and secure the Mobigrip to a portable electronic device. Furthermore, the Mobigrip is removable, leaves no residue, and is available in a wide range of colors and patterns. For more information, visit www.mobigrips.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.
78 March 2009
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American Cinematographer 81
Advertiser’s Index AC 39, 69 Alamar Productions, Inc. 80 Alan Gordon Enterprises 80, 81 Arri 41 Backstage Equipment, Inc. 43 Band Pro 5 Bron Kobold 63 Burrell Enterprises 80 Camelot Broadcasting Service 43 Cavision Enterprises 27 Center for Digital Imaging Arts at Boston 51 Chapman/Leonard Studio Equipment Inc. 11 Cine Gear Expo 65 Cinekinetic 4 Cinematographer Style 79 Cinema Vision 81 Cinemills 71 Cinematography Electronics 6 Clairmont Film & Digital 21 Cooke 6 CPT Rental Inc. 81 Debbie Clifton 80
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Eastman Kodak 9, C4 Entertainment Lighting Services 80 Filmtools 67 Five Towns College 67 FTC/West 81 Fuji Motion Picture 49 Glidecam Industries 13 Golden Animations 81 Hybrid Cases 80 K 5600, Inc. 45 Kino Flo 53 Laffoux Solutions, Inc. 80 London Film School 63 Maine Media Workshops 6 Movie Tech AG 80 MP&E Mayo Productions 81 NAB 29 NBC/Universal 37 New York Film Academy 17 North Carolina Film Commission 23 Oppenheimer Camera Prod. 80 P+S Technik 51 Panasonic Broadcast 7 PED Denz 44, 81 Pille Film Gmbh 80 Production Resource Group 15 Pro8mm 80
SAE Institute 59 Sim Video Productions, Ltd. 25 Sony C2-1 Schneider Optics 2 Stanton Video Services 64 Super16 Inc. 80 Superflycam 43 Tiffen C3 VF Gadgets, Inc. 81 Videocraft Equipment Pty 80 Walter Klassen FX 52 Welch Integrated 61 Willy’s Widgets 80 www.theasc.com 64, 77, 67, 71, 79, 81, 82 Zacuto Films 81 ZGC, Inc. 6, 51
Clubhouse News ASC Talents in Palm Springs ASC members John Toll and Vilmos Zsigmond were the guests of honor at the Palm Springs International Film Festival/Palm Springs Art Museum seminar “Talking Pictures: A Close-Up on Great Hollywood Cameramen” in January. Toll’s latest feature, Guillermo Arriaga’s The Burning Plain, was the festival’s closing-night film. In an interview with David Kaminsky, M.D., a former PSIFF vice chairman, Toll and Zsigmond discussed their respective approaches to the craft and screened clips from the World War II drama The Thin Red Line (1998), which brought Toll his second ASC Award and third Oscar nomination, and the Vietnam War drama The Deer Hunter (1978), which brought Zsigmond his second Oscar nomination and helped cement his reputation as one of the leading cameramen of the American New Wave. “The Thin Red Line was a cinematographer’s dream — [director] Terry Malick is so visually articulate, and he wanted to tell this story primarily with images,” said Toll, who screened a clip showing the Americans’ attack on a Japanese encampment in the jungle. “Terry wanted to explore the idea of war as the real enemy, and the random nature of the violence was something we tried to convey visually.” Toll acknowledged that his early experiences as a camera assistant and operator on documentaries came in handy on Malick’s film, but he noted that he and the director were not interested in creating a vérité feel. “We didn’t want to use handheld to simulate a documentary sensibility, like so many films do today,” he said. “We went handheld for some scenes because Terry wanted me to be free to improvise [moves] within a sequence, to follow dialogue and really explore the emotional thread of the scene.” After screening the final scene in
The Deer Hunter, wherein the friends at a soldier’s wake break into a spontaneous rendition of “God Bless America,” Zsigmond admitted he found the scene “corny” when he first read the script. “But [director] Michael Cimino said, ‘Just wait for the rehearsal, and see what the actors do with it.’ And he was right. For me, the key moment in this scene is when the woman comments on the weather … she says, ‘It’s so gray.’ That told me everything about how the scene should look and feel.” Both Toll and Zsigmond demurred when Kaminsky asked them to describe their respective styles. “I’m not sure I can characterize my ‘style’ so much as my approach,” said Toll. “Whenever I read a script, I’m constantly trying to visualize what the story should look like. What is the nature of the story, and how can we tell it with images?” Zsigmond concurred, adding, “I think the most difficult part of moviemaking is the beginning. Regardless of how much prep you do, I’ve found that the style of a picture starts to develop in the first or second week of the shoot — probably because I’ve worked with so many directors who are great improvisers. “We cinematographers don’t shoot ‘our’ movie,” he added. “We create the movie together with many contributing artists.” After the interview, James Chressanthis, ASC introduced a screening of his documentary about Zsigmond and the late Laszlo Kovacs, ASC, No Subtitles Necessary. Another ASC member, Dante Spinotti, was present at the festival on camera, in Eric Bricker’s documentary Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman, which chronicles the life and influence of the renowned architectural still photographer. In the movie, Spinotti notes that Shulman’s photography, particularly the famous Los Angeles shot “Case Study House #22,” signifi-
cantly influenced his work with Michael Mann on Heat (1992). Recalling that his and Mann’s attempts to closely replicate the photo were unsuccessful, Spinotti sits down with Shulman and gets him to divulge how he got the shot. Visual Acoustics won the festival’s Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature. — Rachael Bosley Rawlings Teaches Wounded Marines Richard M. Rawlings Jr., ASC is serving as a visiting faculty member at the Wounded Marine Training Center for Careers in Media in San Diego, Calif. Rawlings, whose recent credits include Desperate Housewives and Gilmore Girls, is teaching cinematography at the center, which enlists industry professionals to instruct and mentor wounded Marines so they can pursue careers in media and the arts. Founded by cinematographer Kevin Lombard and his wife, Judith Ann Paixao, the center graduated its first class last year. (Levie Isaacks, ASC wrote about the inaugural cinematography class in the May ’08 issue of AC.) For more information, visit www.woundedmarinecareers.org. Green, McAlpine Discuss “Art of Light” The UCLA Film & Television Archive’s “Art of Light” series recently spotlighted ASC Lifetime Achievement Award honoree Jack Green, ASC and ASC International Award honoree Donald McAlpine, ASC, ACS with screenings at the Hammer Museum. The archive screened Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992), shot by Green, and Bruce Beresford’s Breaker Morant (1980), shot by McAlpine, and both cinematographers discussed their work following the screenings. I
American Cinematographer 83
ASC CLOSE-UP Peter Wunstorf, ASC
When you were a child, what film made the strongest impression on you? A Clockwork Orange (1971) had a profound effect on me. I sat in the lobby afterwards and just knew I was going to make films.
What sparked your interest in photography? My father made 8mm home movies, and I started to experiment with his camera. I set up a studio in the attic and made a science-fiction film complete with in-camera titles, effects and exploding galaxies. Where did you train and/or study? I was not formally trained, so I learned mainly through reading books at the public library. It was there I discovered American Cinematographer; the library had bound volumes of back issues. After high school, I started knocking on doors. There was an opening at CKRD, a small-town TV station. I had nothing to show, but they needed to hire someone quickly. I realized early on how important a good attitude is. Who were your early teachers or mentors? Ken Hewlett, CSC; Harvey LaRocque; and Suzanne Whitney taught me how to tell story with a camera and set me on the path to lighting. I will also always remember my high-school teachers Mr. Adams and Mr. Macarthur for their love of teaching and ability to connect with students. What are some of your key artistic influences? The work and ideas of Gordon Willis, Woody Allen, Stanley Kubrick, Edward Hopper, Egon Schiele, Thomas Eakins and Rembrandt, many photographers, and a lot of music. How did you get your first break in the business? It was on a movie called Hyper Sapien, photographed by John Coquillon, BSC. They needed an extra loader, and I was thrown into the hot seat. John was very encouraging. He was always sharing stories and explaining why he was doing things. It was a wonderful experience. What has been your most satisfying moment on a project? A scene in which a little boy stands in a dark hallway leading to the afterlife, not the usual white light. Looking through the viewfinder, I realized it was exactly how I’d imagined it on my first read of the script. It came together effortlessly with two lights and a fluorescent practical.
84 March 2009
Have you made any memorable blunders? During filming of the pilot for Millennium, we were shooting in a stripclub set, and I arrived right at call time. I still needed to take some light off the walls but succumbed to the pressure to shoot. The next morning, I was called into the camera truck and had to explain why the shot didn’t look like I’d said it would. What is the best professional advice you’ve ever received? ‘Be yourself.’ I was about to interview for the aforementioned pilot, and I was nervous. My good friend Dominique Fortin said, ‘Just be yourself; they will like you.’ I didn’t try to fake it. I thought it went badly, but in prep, the producer told me, ‘You came in and only spoke about the work, and that’s all Chris Carter cared about.’ What recent books, films or artworks have inspired you? Photographer Todd Hido, Edvard Munch at MoMA, The Spirit of the Beehive, and those early films by Ingmar Bergman and Sven Nykvist, ASC, which I’d never seen. Also, authors Eckhart Tolle and James Hollis. Do you have any favorite genres, or genres you would like to try? I would love to do an old-fashioned vampire film in black-and-white (no CGI or flying cameras), a hopelessly romantic love story, and a Woody Allen movie. If you weren’t a cinematographer, what might you be doing instead? Hmmm … can you get paid for cooking and entertaining? Also, the more I get to know people, the more interested I become in psychology. Aren’t cinematographers also part-time psychologists? Which ASC cinematographers recommended you for membership? Steven Poster, John Bartley and Alan Caso. How has ASC membership impacted your life and career? To become a member of the ASC is the greatest honor and very humbling. I’ve met some of my heroes, and they are such gentlemen. My first time in the ASC Clubhouse as a member, I mentioned Bullitt to William Fraker, ASC, and his eyes lit up. He spoke about it with such enthusiasm it was as if he’d photographed it yesterday! I look forward to meeting other members. I
Photo by Brenda Bastell.
Which cinematographers, past or present, do you most admire? ASC members Gordon Willis, Rodrigo Prieto and Harris Savides, and so many more. Prieto is continually doing something fresh and new. Savides is forever simple and elegant, often using old-school methods. And Willis’ work in Klute, the Godfather films, Pennies From Heaven, and his eight films with Woody Allen is meaningful, innovative and so right for the story; his influence can still be felt today.
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