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A M E R I C A N C I N E M AT O G R A P H E R • N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 9 • W H E R E T H E W I L D T H I N G S A R E , T H E B O X , T H E D A M N E D U N I T E D, A N T I C H R I S T, E M M Y N O M I N E E S • V O L . 9 0 N O. 1 1
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The International Journal of Film & Digital Production Techniques
On Our Cover: Unruly 9-year-old Max (Max Records) takes a soulful stroll with Carol in Where the Wild Things Are, shot by Lance Acord, ASC. (Photo by Matt Nettheim, courtesy of Warner Bros.)
Features
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Departments
Wild Kingdom Lance Acord, ASC envisions the classic children’s book Where the Wild Things Are
Pandora’s Predicament Steven Poster, ASC creates surreal imagery for The Box
Kicked Off the Pitch
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Ben Smithard immortalizes a notorious English coach in The Damned United
The Root of All Evil Anthony Dod Mantle, BSC, DFF lends eerie ambience to Antichrist
Quality Viewing The spotlight shines on this year’s Emmy Award nominees for cinematography
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Editor’s Note President’s Desk Short Takes: Synaesthesia Production Slate: The Private Lives of Pippa Lee Cairo Time
Post Focus: Restoring Apollo 11 Footage New Products & Services International Marketplace Classified Ads/Ad Index In Memoriam: Richard Moore, ASC Clubhouse News ASC Close-Up: Anastas Michos
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The International Journal of Film & Digital Production Techniques • Since 1920
Visit us online at
www.theasc.com ———————————————————————————————————— PUBLISHER Martha Winterhalter ————————————————————————————————————
EDITORIAL EXECUTIVE EDITOR Stephen Pizzello SENIOR EDITOR Rachael K. Bosley ASSOCIATE EDITOR Jon D. Witmer TECHNICAL EDITOR Christopher Probst CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Stephanie Argy, Benjamin B, Douglas Bankston, Robert S. Birchard, John Calhoun, Bob Davis, Bob Fisher, Simon Gray, Jim Hemphill, David Heuring, Jay Holben, Mark Hope-Jones, Noah Kadner, Ron Magid, Jean Oppenheimer, John Pavlus, Chris Pizzello, Jon Silberg, Iain Stasukevich, Kenneth Sweeney, Patricia Thomson, David E. Williams ————————————————————————————————————
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Stefan Sonnenfeld
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© Kodak, 2009. Kodak and Vision are trademarks.
Colorist. Entrepreneur. Fanatic.
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American Society of Cinematographers The ASC is not a labor union or a guild, but an educational, cultural and professional organization. Membership is by invitation to those who are actively engaged as directors of photography and have demonstrated outstanding ability. ASC membership has become one of the highest honors that can be bestowed upon a professional cinematographer — a mark of prestige and excellence.
OFFICERS - 2009/2010 Michael Goi President
Richard Crudo Vice President
Owen Roizman Vice President
Victor J. Kemper Vice President
Matthew Leonetti Treasurer
Rodney Taylor Secretary
John C. Flinn III Sergeant At Arms
MEMBERS OF THE BOARD Curtis Clark Richard Crudo George Spiro Dibie Richard Edlund John C. Flinn III John Hora Victor J. Kemper Matthew Leonetti Stephen Lighthill Isidore Mankofsky Daryn Okada Owen Roizman Nancy Schreiber Haskell Wexler Vilmos Zsigmond
ALTERNATES Fred Elmes Steven Fierberg Ron Garcia Michael D. O’Shea Michael Negrin MUSEUM CURATOR
Steve Gainer 6
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Editor’s Note hen I was still in short pants, I reveled in the unruly antics of Max, the 9-year-old hero in Maurice Sendak’s pithy but pictorially splendid children’s book Where the Wild Things Are. Lately, I’ve been reliving Max’s malfeasance through my 3-year-old son, Nicholas, who occasionally gives the tantrum-throwing tot a run for his money. Despite my concern that too much Max may inspire additional mischief, I inevitably cave when Nicholas begs for one more look at the book — or, as a true child of the digital age, another glimpse at the online trailer for the new live-action movie that’s sprung from its pages. Australian correspondent Simon Gray’s story on Spike Jonze’s big-screen rumpus (“Wild Kingdom,” page 34) takes you straight into the belly of the beast — literally. The Wild Things movie and Simon’s coverage were a long time coming, but both were worth the wait; the otherworldly, emotionally affecting images crafted by Lance Acord, ASC honor Jonze’s uncompromising interpretation of Sendak’s world. “The essence of Spike’s approach was to go out and film the wild things as if we were making a ‘fly-on-thewall’ wildlife documentary about creatures in their natural environment,” Acord explains. Inventive visuals are also evident in The Box, a thriller that marks the third collaboration between Steven Poster, ASC and director Richard Kelly, a teaming that began on the indie hit Donnie Darko. AC contributor Jay Holben digs deep into the duo’s use of digital technology in an article filled with insights on “image capture” (“Pandora’s Predicament,” page 48). As Poster points out, “The workflow is different on every movie now, regardless of whether you shoot film or digital. I started a dialogue [involving] Panavision, LaserPacific, our editorial department, our post supervisor, and Thomas Tannenberger and his visual-effects team to nail down exactly what the workflow was going to be.” Fans of British soccer will surely enjoy cinematographer Ben Smithard’s work on The Damned United, which recounts the ups and downs of a football manager trying to survive the pressures of England’s Premier League (“Kicked Off the Pitch,” page 58). London correspondent Mark Hope-Jones details Smithard’s every move, right down to his use of vintage tube-video cameras to capture an authentic ’70s vibe. “That footage looks great because the colors are all over the place and a bit desaturated,” says Smithard. “There’s no other look like it; it’s the equivalent of someone from Kodak giving you 300 rolls of mint film stock from the 1970s!” Aberrant psychology is the order of the day in Lars von Trier’s controversial drama Antichrist, a cause célèbre at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. To get the details about the film’s remarkable photography, Jon Silberg tracked down Anthony Dod Mantle, BSC, DFF, last year’s ASC and Academy award winner for Slumdog Millionaire, for a Q&A (“The Root of All Evil,” page 66). “[Lars] always works intuitively, but this whole project became unusually intuitive and irrational as the film slowly began to realize itself,” says Dod Mantle, later adding, “I will go all the way for a true artist if he’s doing something different, even if there are difficulties and disagreements.” This issue also offers a recap of the year’s Emmy Award nominees for cinematography (“Quality Viewing,” page 76). “When you’re standing there with that statue in your hand, you are struck by how cool it is to be acknowledged by your peers,” says Michael Weaver, who won a statuette for Californication. “All the blood, sweat and tears you sacrifice during your career actually mean something, and people notice the work. It was an amazing honor.”
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Stephen Pizzello Executive Editor
Photo by Douglas Kirkland.
W
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President’s Desk t was late afternoon in Chicago 31 years ago. I was riding in a car with some friends, and we stopped for a traffic light at the corner of Clark Street and Diversey Avenue. I was in the passenger seat, and I looked casually out the window. And there she was. She was brunette, in her mid-twenties, about 5' 5". She was wearing older but not faded blue jeans and a sleeveless white blouse. She had on brown sandals with straps that crossed her feet twice, and no polish on her toes or fingers. She was clutching a laundry basket filled with dry, semi-folded clothes. She was waiting for a bus. The orange tone of the low sun reflected off the glass windows of a building across the street, throwing softly speckled patterns of light on everything around her, but she remained in a calm space, a spot on the sidewalk where the light only glowed as if coming from a source undefined. The warm summer breeze wafted her hair lightly, and she stepped toward the curb and craned her neck to look down the street for the bus. She reached up with her right hand to brush her long hair out of her eyes. She wore one ring, a simple silver one. The traffic light changed about 15 seconds after we stopped, and my friends and I went on our way. She never saw me, and I don’t believe my friends saw her. She wasn’t especially remarkable; she wasn’t a drop-dead beauty or a traffic-stopping bombshell. Yet not a month has gone by in 31 years when I haven’t thought of that girl. Mostly it’s a passing thought, an image that crosses my mind in the midst of dealing with daily duties. Sometimes it’s more than that, a curiosity about who she is and where she is now. It wasn’t sexual, the way you would imagine a teenaged boy would think of a slightly older woman. It was sensual, an appreciation for that particular moment in time and the sweet melancholy of knowing that this was all there would be of the encounter. Cinematographers frequently reference other works while developing the unique style for the project we’re shooting. Often it’ll be another film. Many times it’ll be a painting, a still photograph, clips from a magazine or even a piece of music. Anything that stirs an emotion and leaves an impression carries with it the seed that can be adapted to another expression of art. But your own life experiences frequently inspire the most sublime transpositions into cinematographic form. We keep a mental catalogue of these experiences to draw on as needed. They inspire our art and speak to the depth of our ability to understand how our circumstances affect our state of mind, how we find substance in our physical surroundings. And they create memories as vivid as something happening right now, moments we have deemed important in our lives, sometimes not knowing why. While shooting the film The Fixer, I was looking for a way to depict the humble surroundings of a poor priest who is hearing the confession of a man in search of redemption. I remembered an early Christmas morning when I was a child. The sun had not yet risen, and everyone was asleep. The living room was suffused with the dark blue ambience of pre-dawn, and the Christmas-tree lights sparkled gently in the somber atmosphere, an oasis of hope. I proceeded to light the scene at hand with that feeling — not the exact colors, but the feeling of that room. When the director saw the dailies, he said it reminded him of the sound of steam radiators heating up in winter. The editor remarked that the room had the smell of old wood and crisp air. I have no doubt that someday I will have to film a scene that has the same ethereal quality of the encounter with that woman 31 years ago, and I will break down the technical components necessary to make it achievable and understandable to all the other craftspeople involved in creating motion pictures: the camera assistants who must order the proper lenses, the electricians who need to get the right lights, the grips who will need to rig the cranes, the assistant director who must schedule it at the right time of day, and the art department who must have props in the proper color palette. But the inspiration will be mine. That’s what makes me a cinematographer.
I
Michael Goi, ASC President
10 November 2009
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Short Takes Senses Work Overtime in Synaesthesia by Iain Stasukevich
12 November 2009
ynaesthesia is the phenomenon that occurs when one sensory stimulus triggers a different kind of sensation — seeing colors when you hear music, or smelling one thing while you taste another. Synaesthesia is the latest project from the Bay Area directing team of Ian Kibbey and Corey Creasey. The filmmakers met while attending classes at UC-Berkeley, found that they shared a lot of the same ideas, and began shooting low-budget music videos under the moniker Terri Timely. Since then, they’ve produced more than 25 music videos, commercials, and short films. A byproduct of this work is a large backlog of visual ideas — the genesis of Synaesthesia. “Cats jumping out of speakers or plugging headphones into food — those ideas had come to us separately,” Creasey explains. “Years later, we learned about synaesthesia, and it clicked.” Adds Kibbey, “It helps to have a concept to work with; otherwise, your film becomes this mishmash of imagery and sound.” Synaesthesia depicts an evening in the life of a nuclear Asian family, during which each member experiences a different form of the condition. The first scene involves one of two young sons sitting at the dinner table as he plugs a set of headphones into different kinds of food — each of which has its own, distinctive sound. In the kitchen, the mother is chopping up a cookbook and scooping the strips onto a baking pan, while the father drops a sheaf of paper into the toaster. A book pops up, and Dad places the toasted tome on a tray and walks it through the dining room and into the living room. There, another boy is sitting on the rug, sniffing record albums and calling out colors for each one (in Cantonese, with deliberately incorrect
S
Photos and frame grabs courtesy of Terri Timely.
Top and middle: The short film Synaesthesia offers a visual exploration of the eponymous condition, in which one sensory stimulus triggers a different sensory response. For instance, in the scene pictured here, a boy (Jordan Gimkan) listens to his food. Bottom: The boy’s family, including his mother (Pearl Wong) and father (Larry Kitagawa), move through their sensory stew all but oblivious to one another.
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Above: The boxy, retro set, realized by production designer Na Young Kim, enabled the filmmakers to track from room to room. Below, left to right: Grip Keith Pikus, camera assistant Jeremy Wong, cinematographer Donavan Sell, and directors Ian Kibbey and Corey Creasey fine-tune one of the tracking moves.
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subtitles). The mother opens the oven and removes her baking pan, which contains a papier-mâché turkey. Back in the living room, a reel-to-reel player clicks on, running a ribbon of text across the tape head; along with the music that begins to play, all manner of weird objects begin to pop out of the stereo speakers: eggs, grass, smoke, fireworks, cats. The film ends with a bang — literally — when the son in the dining room plugs his headphone jack into his belly button and explodes. According to the filmmakers, the family analogy works on two levels. “We wanted to see what would happen when all these manifestations existed in one space,” Kibbey points out. “Each person’s neurological system takes in different sensory information, and they’re also a family that isn’t communicating. There are few times when they actually acknowledge one
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another, and then everything turns into chaos at the end.” The film was shot by cinematographer Donavan Sell, a Bay Area resident who met Creasey while the two were students. (Sell attended classes across the Bay at the Academy of Art University.) Sell was looking for a director with a good story, and Creasey was looking for a cinematographer. They were introduced by mutual friends and eventually collaborated on three projects over the next three years until Creasey met Kibbey, who turned the twosome into a trio. Sell recalls being impressed by the way the young Berkeley students clicked. “Ian’s got the energy, and Creasey is very technical,” he notes. “Both of them are always coming up with interesting concepts, which are hard to come by.” Synaesthesia was partially inspired by the time Creasey and Kibbey
spent in Vietnam at the outset of their commercial careers. In particular, the film was influenced by the architecture and design on display in Ho Chi Minh City’s Reunification Palace. “There’s a retrofuture vibe in Vietnam,” Creasey offers. “They’re really into the American ’70s there, but it’s interpreted through modern Vietnamese culture.” Kibbey adds, “When we were in Vietnam, we couldn’t tell if it was a Western expression of Eastern aesthetic, or the other way around.” Sell worked closely with production designer Na Young Kim to ensure that his camerawork complemented her boxy, retro set design. Constructed in Terri Timely’s studio in Fremont, Calif., the home is configured like a railroad apartment, with one room leading directly into the next. By putting the camera on a dolly, Sell was able to follow the father as he walked from the kitchen through the dining room and into the living room, capturing each environment in a single move. When the actor reached the living room, the camera was aimed straight down the length of the house, presenting the audience with a view of the entire set. Sell and Kim tried to give each room a distinct look. “We used a lot of saturated colors,” says Kim. “Donavan and I talked a lot about the color schemes. The kitchen has a pale, skyblue color. The dining room has a lot of saturated colors with the food, and the living room has dark, natural tones.” Sell notes, “Na Young’s production design really dictated the lighting, because I didn’t know what I would be doing until I got there.” Kim also attended the Academy of Art University, where she studied painting along with her productiondesign courses. “It helped me understand light and colors, and how colors can be changed by the light,” she says. “Production design isn’t just designing a space; it’s working with the director of photography and understanding how light affects that space.” Sell’s cinematography was inspired by Wong Kar-wai’s 2046 and In the Mood For Love, both of which were
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Creasey (top) prepares for the fireworks display that emanates from the family’s stereo speakers at Synaesthesia’s climax.
shot mostly by Christopher Doyle, HKSC. Singling out particular aspects of those films, he cites Doyle’s use of “supersaturated colors [and his tendency to] push them further than they would go normally, [as well as his strategy of] not lighting people with tungsten light or daylight — maybe something that matches the set more, but not practically motivated. “On Synaesthesia, we didn’t have to hold to conventions, and it didn’t have to be textbook,” he adds. “I love 2046, but I could never get away with creating that kind of look in my regular work.” With few practicals and just one visible window (in the dining room) at his disposal, Sell opted for a less motivated lighting strategy, choosing instead to let the environments speak for themselves. In each space he set a base exposure with overhead 2K space lights, then created fill by placing 5K Fresnels on the camera side and 16 November 2009
bouncing them into 12x UltraBounces for fill. Source Four Pars were used as the actors’ key lights; the one exception to this approach was the boy at the table, who was lit with a 2K space light. In the dining room, the light coming through the window seems too orange for natural light; to elicit this eerie orange glow, the cinematographer doubled up Rosco Straw filters. Another window, hidden offstage in the kitchen, was skinned with Rosco Teal to match the rest of the room. “The dining room was a tough set to light because we had to travel past it,” Sell remarks. “There’s so much going on in the living room. You can see that the walls have swatches of color on them — more Source Fours. We gave the father and the boy special lights: red and white lights that simulate the fireworks going off in the speakers.” In addition to shaking out their creative cobwebs, everyone on the project was determined to shoot with
the Red camera Terri Timely had recently purchased. Prior to Synaethesia, most of their projects had been shot on film. “I liked it, for a digital camera,” Sell comments. “You still have to treat the image like a video image and light for the highlights, but I was surprised at its latitude, and the accessories made it feel like a film camera. I can be a little lazy when it comes to lighting video, so I brought my meter, and the camera was spot-on with my readings.” The biggest plus for Sell was the Red’s PL mount, which enabled him to use Zeiss Superspeed MKII primes. “The fact that this camera lets me use the lenses I’m used to means a lot to me,” he enthuses. “The piece is meant to be visually stylized,” says Creasey. “We tried to adhere to the conventions of traditional cinematic imagery, but it does have a slightly different look than it would if we had shot on 35mm. In the end, our visual choices were really more about the lighting and the art direction than the choice of camera.” Sell dialed in the 1920x1080 HD image on set, using Red Alert software, and exported color reference clips that served as guidelines after they delivered their footage to Spy Post in San Francisco. The final color grade was performed by Carey Burens on a DaVinci 2K, but the majority of postproduction time was dedicated to rendering out r3d (Redcode RAW) files for editorial. So far, Synaesthesia has been a big hit on the Web, and the short has even inspired an interactive installation at Scion Space in Culver City, Calif. Creasey and Kibbey feel both thrilled and vindicated. “The thing we try to do with all of our work is to tap into the strange things people think about every now and again, like ‘What does a tomato sound like?’” Creasey says. “Synaesthesia is not uncommon, and our film is just a visual way of presenting this condition that everyone experiences on some level.” I
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Production Slate Women in Transition
Discovering Pippa Lee by Claire Walla Writer and filmmaker Rebecca Miller published her first novel, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, in 2008. Shortly after its release, Miller, whose feature credits include Personal Velocity (AC April ’02) and The Ballad of Jack and Rose (AC April ’05), teamed with Declan Quinn, ASC to fine-tune Pippa Lee for the big screen. The film centers on a 50-year-old woman, Pippa (Robin Wright Penn), who moves into a sleepy Connecticut retirement community with her husband, Herb (Alan Arkin), who is 30 years older. Pippa proceeds to fall delicately into a midlife crisis that causes her to reflect on her aimless adolescence — marked by a pill-popping mother (Maria Bello) and an association with her aunt’s partner, a 18 November 2009
lesbian photographer (Julianne Moore) — and reconsider her present situation, including her budding affection for a neighbor’s son, Chris (Keanu Reeves). With such a mix of characters, time periods and emotional undercurrents, Miller wanted to create a unified story that would unfold fluidly. “When I came to write the screenplay, I realized pretty early on that the way to [achieve continuity] was for the camera to actually be moving from one world to the next,” says Miller. Quinn collaborated closely with production designer Michael Shaw to create sets that combined elements from two to three different scenes, so that the camera could physically roll from one time period directly into another. The most complicated of these transitions involves three different sets: Chris’ pickup truck, Pippa’s childhood
kitchen, and her present-day dining room. Shaw created a set that put the kitchen and the dining room back-toback, and in front of the kitchen he attached the front portion of a pickup truck. The transition begins with a twoshot of Chris and Pippa in the truck and then moves to a close-up of Chris before pulling focus on the kitchen behind him, while Pippa reminisces about her childhood. After we watch an imagined exchange between an older Pippa and her mother, the camera pans right to Pippa’s present-day dining room, where we see Pippa and Herb eating dinner. “That transition moves from present-day to past to present-day again in three shots,” says Quinn. “It had to be done quickly, and all of these transitions were complicated to set up. I thought at first it would take half a day to shoot one, but each transition only
The Private Lives of Pippa Lee photos by Gene Page, courtesy of Screen Media Films.
Pippa’s mother, Suky (Maria Bello), struggles to get through another morning in a scene from The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, shot by Declan Quinn, ASC.
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Suky’s dramatic highs and lows, exacerbated by her drug addiction, eventually lead to a tearful confrontation with Pippa (Blake Lively, bottom photo).
accounts for a few seconds in the movie, and the schedule didn’t allow me that kind of time. So we made foamcore miniature models in prep and tried to think it through very thoroughly so we could do it as quickly as possible on the actual day of shooting.” Although the sets for most transitions were carefully constructed inside a small warehouse in Connecticut, where the majority of the film’s sets were built, the crew had to artfully assemble one such set on location. The action in the transition moves from a present-day restaurant, where Pippa, Herb and their grown children are eating, to the kitchen in Pippa’s child-
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hood home, where her mother is frosting a birthday cake for young Pippa (Madeline McNulty). The camera follows a piece of cake that a waiter physically brings from one set to the next. Because the scene was shot on location, the crew had to rip pieces away from the original kitchen set and rebuild it inside the actual restaurant. “It was a fairly open space, so it wasn’t too difficult,” Quinn says. “First, we rigged some lights in the ceiling to create a warm, ambient toplight in the restaurant — a mixture of 32K Kinos gelled with Lee Chocolate and Lee Pale Gold, along with a few paper lanterns hung under the Kinos to mix in a whiter light. The camera transitions to the kitchen set, and for that portion of the scene we stuck some Kino Flo tubes behind the window to simulate daylight in the kitchen. There was very little space between the kitchen-set wall and the restaurant wall, but Kinos can be squeezed into some very tight spaces.” The bigger challenge was keeping the pink frosting on the cake pink: the camera pans from a warmly lit Italian restaurant to a cooler environment, and the cake actually turned blue in the process. Correcting it back to pink was one of the most significant adjustments Quinn made to Pippa Lee in the digitalintermediate suite. Another major adjustment was altering the light and shadows for a scene that is supposed to take place early in the morning, when Chris drops Pippa off at her house. Because of the production schedule, the scene had to be filmed in “open shade” during a very shadowy part of the day. “I had to rely on the DI process to make it feel murky, and it took a lot of power windows to make it work,” recalls Quinn. The cinematographer supervised the DI over two weeks at Technicolor New York, where he worked with colorist Tim Stipan. When Quinn began prepping Pippa Lee, he had recently wrapped Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married, which was shot with handheld high-definition video cameras. Miller
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Top: The adult Pippa (Robin Wright Penn) enjoys a quiet dinner with her husband, Herb (Alan Arkin). Middle: Pippa and Herb’s son, Ben (Ryan McDonald), sits down to breakfast. Bottom: In one of the film’s flashbacks, Pippa’s parents throw a lively party.
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and Quinn agreed that look wouldn’t suit Pippa Lee. “We both thought it would be nauseating to have the camera moving that much when the story moved so much,” notes Miller. The camera is never idle, however; it constantly moves inward, gradually pushing into Pippa onscreen. Quinn explains, “The fact that it’s sitting on a dolly gives the visuals a grounded feeling, so by moving the camera a little bit all the time, we add a bit of tension.” The production used a camera package from Panavision New York. Quinn employed a Millennium for the first two weeks of the show, but “we decided we needed a lighter camera, so we switched to a Panaflex XL.” His lens selection comprised a full set of Super Speed prime lenses and a Primo 3:1 zoom. Quinn used the latter for a highspeed shot at the end of the film, but he used the Super Speeds for all other material because he wanted to capture some lens flares. “The older Super Speeds flare much more than the newer lenses and create a nostalgic feel,” he explains. “Everything looks as if it was filmed 20 years ago.” The XL was used mostly for scenes with a heightened sense of emotion, such as the moment when young Pippa takes a handful of her mother’s diet pills in an act of defiance and confronts her mother about her addiction. The two women, high on speed, melt into a semi-violent confrontation in Pippa’s bedroom. Miller wanted to do the scene in a two-shot, but she also didn’t want the camera to be completely still. Quinn dangled the lightweight XL in front of the two characters by hanging it from latex surgical tubing, which allowed him to stay focused on the action while retaining some degree of motion. “Latex tubing has incredible elasticity,” he notes. He also used that technique for many of the scenes between Pippa and Chris. This works particularly well during an intimate moment that takes place in Chris’ truck. Miller explains, “We wanted the camera to breathe in a sense, so that when you watch them fall in love, there’s a slightly airy feel.”
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Above: Quinn dangles the camera from a rig made of latex tubing, a device he used to achieve a number of shots in the picture. Right: The cinematographer prepares a more conventional setup while Miller checks a monitor.
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During prep, Miller and Quinn watched films that included Black Narcissus and High Society. Quinn recalls, “We fell in love with the Technicolor process and tried to bring an aspect of that look to the present-day story. The most interesting film in terms of color was Black Narcissus, for which Jack Cardiff [ASC, BSC] used a cool fill light with a warm sunlight effect.” To achieve a similar effect, Quinn often used Pale Amber Gold gels on sunlight sources and Pale Lavender gels on fill lights. “I’d compare it to a gelato color — delicious,” says Miller. “We wanted the film to be delicious!” Quinn also used colored gels to differentiate the periods that snake through the story. For the scenes that take place in the 1960s, during Pippa’s childhood, he created warm, slightly pink tones; for the 1970s, he went for a cooler tone “more reminiscent of the music of that period,” he says; and for the 1980s, the scenes are warm. The production’s lighting package included a 12K tungsten light, a few Nine-light Maxi-Brutes, and some small tungsten units. “I bounced bigger lights outside and tried to bring light through windows whenever possible; when we were on the sets, we’d sometimes remove a wall and bring in a fill light from 20-30 feet away so it would have a gentler effect. “You don’t need anything fancy to make a film,” he adds. “A movie is driven by the emotions of the characters, and the mood and tone are driven by the script. The most important thing is to connect with the director’s vision, and Rebecca was very articulate about how she saw the story.” TECHNICAL SPECS 1.85:1 35mm Panaflex Millennium, XL Panavision Super Speed and Primo lenses Kodak Vision2 500T 5218, 200T 5217 Digital Intermediate ¢
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Egypt’s Allure by David Heuring Luc Montpellier, CSC grew up in a small town in Ontario, studied film at Ryerson University in Toronto, and began his career shooting music videos. In the mid-1990s, he moved into narrative filmmaking, and has since compiled credits that include Away From Her, Emotional Arithmetic and The Saddest Music in the World (AC Aug. ’04). Cairo Time is Montpellier’s third collaboration with director Ruba Nadda, following Sabah and Aadan. The new film reverses the pattern of the previous
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two by placing a Canadian woman, Juliette (Patricia Clarkson), in a foreign land. As she waits for her husband to arrive, she strives to contain her growing interest in the foreign culture so she can experience it with him. But her thirst for experience draws her into the chaotic and mysterious world of Cairo, and some basic truths about her life are revealed as a result of the cultural dislocation. “The cinematographer’s responsibility is to translate abstract ideas into reality,” says Montpellier. “Once I submit myself to a concept, the technical means of how to achieve it comes
naturally. I was drawn to Cairo Time because of the character arc and the opportunities for the cinematography to underscore those changes. There are no special effects, and because the photography must be honest and ring true, the cinematography almost becomes more important than it would be in another kind of picture.” In spite of Cairo’s scenic beauty, the filmmakers wanted to avoid a picture-postcard look. Locations were chosen partly based on Juliette’s state of mind at particular moments in the story. Montpellier endeavored to create images that would evoke the appropriCairo Time photos courtesy of Foundry Films and Luc Montpellier.
In the widescreen feature Cairo Time, a Canadian woman (Patricia Clarkson) visits Egypt for the first time and becomes increasingly fascinated by its culture — and one Egyptian in particular. Top: “This was our ‘love scene,’ so the light had to evoke the passion present between Juliette (Clarkson) and Tareq (Alexander Siddig),” says cinematographer Luc Montpellier, CSC. Bottom: For a scene in which Juliette visits Tareq at a “men only” café, the filmmakers surrounded Clarkson with cool colors to set her apart from the environment.
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Why am I having so much fun? Bob Primes, ASC reveals his inner child playing with the cool toys and other kids at Clairmont Camera; a fun place to play.
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Top to bottom: A conversation between Juliette and Tareq is set against the Great Pyramid of Giza to underscore a feeling of solitude; Montpellier (left) and 1st AC Andy Jekabsons capture the scene; preparing the final shot of the film, Montpellier waits for the right light on the pyramids; Montpellier, Jekabsons and Egyptian key/dolly grip Ehab Atiya line up the final dolly shot of the picture.
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ate feelings in the viewer even if the picture had no sound; he says this goal made light and its connection to the emotional drama extremely important. The filmmakers also believed the script and the chaotic backdrop of Cairo called for the counterpoint of a more controlled, classical approach to framing and camera movement. They decided to avoid a documentary aesthetic, and that choice had many ramifications for the rest of the shoot. “Because we were shooting on location in a chaotic city of 20 million, without the resources we’d have at hand in Toronto or Los Angeles, our challenge was to create order out of chaos,” says Montpellier. “We faced a paradox. We had to be at the right places, rolling at the right times, controlling the uncontrollable.” The color palette was detailed and precise. Cairo is represented by the warm earth tones that dominate the urban landscape there. At the beginning of the film, Juliette is dressed in and surrounded by cooler, more modern tones, and she slowly progresses to warmer, more golden tones as she begins to explore and engage with the ancient city. On location during prep, Montpellier did extensive testing for wardrobe, makeup, filtration and skin tones, and to gauge the local light patterns, using a Canon 5D camera and film-stock-emulation software. “Throughout the shoot, it was a challenge to balance interiors and exteriors because of the extremely bright African sun, and I wanted to see how far I could push the film stock and still maintain detail outside windows,” he says. “I wanted to avoid blinding the actors by bringing up interior levels. However, there are many scenes where the characters go from inside to outside on a balcony, and that meant I couldn’t ND the windows. It was important for me to know how far I could go with interior levels.” Nadda and Montpellier chose to shoot widescreen (Super 35mm) to integrate the performers with the environment, to isolate single characters in the frame when emotionally appropriate, and sometimes to create the simple
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Filming widescreen enabled Montpellier to isolate characters within the frame for dramatic effect. In this scene, Juliette’s husband (Tom McCamus) arrives unexpectedly and puts an end to her potential love affair. Middle: As Andris Matiss mans the Steadicam for a walk-and-talk, the crew uses ¼ grid diffusion to soften the harsh sunlight. Bottom: Tareq takes Juliette on a tour of Cairo. “Getting a crane on the bridge was a challenge, considering that we were unable to ban traffic,” notes Montpellier.
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classicism of a still photograph. “We made an effort to frame Juliette within static shots as she first ventures out into the city,” says Montpellier. “As she begins to explore and feel more comfortable, the use of the Steadicam becomes more prevalent. We hope that helps the audience share in her emotional state.” The cinematographer used Tiffen Soft/FX filters throughout to subtly flare the whites, varying the strength according to the situation and the focal length of the lens. He chose two Moviecam Compact MKIIs, Cooke S4 primes lenses and a 12:1 Angenieux Optimo zoom; all gear came from Panavision Toronto, “whose support was crucial to our success,” he says.
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Montpellier used Kodak Vision2 250D 5205 for most daylight situations. “5205 enabled me to shoot from early morning all the way to magic hour without compromising grain; I changed ND filtration as the day went on to maintain a consistent look.” He used a slower stock, Kodak Vision2 50D 5201, for a day’s shooting in the White Desert, a barren location several hours outside Cairo. In the scene, Juliette listens to a friend confess her infidelity while she herself secretly considers cheating on her absent husband. “We chose the location to help create the right emotional impact,” says Montpellier. “The uncertainty and feeling of losing one’s points of reference were evoked by the landscape. When we first arrived, I couldn’t open my eyes without wearing sunglasses. There are chalky white and cream-colored rock formations as far as the eye can see, with the sun beating down. It’s an extremely low-contrast situation. Shooting the 50-speed stock allowed me to get the right levels with few hassles. I needed every bit of latitude I could get, and 5201 gave me that while capturing the subtle gradations of white and cream. “We used the 12:1 Optimo with a doubler to accentuate the layers of eroded rock formations, creating otherworldly shapes,” he adds. “You’d almost think you’re in Antarctica, but instead you’re in the desert! There’s a surreal quality to it.” In Cairo, the filmmakers worked hard to compensate for a lack of standard materials. There were no blimped generators, and there were shortages of flags and scrims. The locals gathered large sheets of Styrofoam and painted them black, and a pitchfork-like metal tool would then be stabbed into the edge of the Styrofoam at the desired angle and mounted on a C-stand. Montpellier says the technique worked so well that he used it on subsequent shoots. As a substitute for scrims, the crew purchased a variety of fishnet stockings that would knock down the light by a half of a stop or more. Montpellier says the local crewmembers had an amazing knack for
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adaptive engineering. Cranes and dollies were often customized. The lack of legitimate rental houses meant that equipment was located and rented through an informal network of crewmembers. Shots of cars moving through the legendary Cairo traffic were perhaps the most difficult to achieve, according to Montpellier. Standard towing rigs and process trailers don’t exist there. “We made a rig with three or four car batter-
ies and some 575-watt Pars to get light inside the car,” recalls the cinematographer. “Again, our concern was to balance the interiors and the exteriors. We’d be dragging a car behind a pickup truck with all our lamps strapped to it with about 50 ratchet straps. We would have handlers and grips hanging off the truck and waving for people to clear the way. If they didn’t move, our people would jump off the truck and try to move them physically. We would also have a
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Top left: Director Ruba Nadda and Montpellier line up a shot. Top right: A tow rig devised by local crew enabled the filmmakers to capture traveling shots. “What we call process trailers in North America do not exist in Cairo, so this called for some creative engineering,” says Montpellier.
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vehicle ahead of us trying to find the owners of parked cars and pleading with them to move them. Sometimes, our people would just pick the cars up and carry them out of the way so we could keep moving and finish the shot! It was an amazing feat.” A government censor accompanied the filmmakers on every shoot day, but on days when no official shooting was scheduled, Montpellier often went out with his focus puller and a local crewmember to capture street scenes that helped frame the story. Once the
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police hauled them in for filming without a permit, but they talked their way out of the situation. Another time, they tried to capture footage of some children laboring in a carpet-making business but were thwarted by the censor. They then proceeded to pretend to set up a big shot in a nearby area, and when the
censor wasn’t around the B camera, it was surreptitiously turned on, capturing a scene that was lit by “spill” that Montpellier “accidentally” sent over from the fake setup. “It was worth the risks,” he says. “Without that footage, the movie would be very different. It gives a sense of how it is to live in
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Cairo. I think it’s an integral part of the film.” Montpellier had other thrills, such as the opportunity to light and photograph the Great Pyramid of Giza and the Nile River at night. In both cases, he used uncorrected HMI lamps, in some cases with the lenses removed, to get the necessary levels. He was able to isolate and adjust the color temperatures in the digital intermediate, which was done at 2K at Technicolor Toronto. He also used the DI to fine-tune scenes with high contrast or widely varying skin tones, and to adjust interior and exterior levels in building and vehicle shots. Technicolor Toronto also processed the production’s footage, which meant the filmmakers sometimes didn’t see dailies, which were on DVD, for a week or more. Montpellier was able to bring his key Canadian crew to Egypt for the shoot. The focus puller was Andy Jekabsons, the operator was Andris Matiss, and the gaffer was Scott Trem-
28mm – 76mm
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blay, who had worked in the Middle East on Brian De Palma’s Redacted (AC Dec. ’07). Montpellier emphasizes that resourcefulness and openness to local solutions were the foundation of a successful shoot. “You’d be ignorant not to open your eyes to the way that things are done elsewhere in the world. Sometimes when you don’t have the right equipment, you end up being more creative. It was part of my evolution as a cinematographer, and being a North American going through these cultural experiences made me somewhat like our main character.” TECHNICAL SPECS 2.40:1 3-perf Super 35mm Moviecam Compact MKII Cooke and Angenieux lenses Kodak Vision2 50D 5201, 250D 5205; Vision3 500T 5219 Digital Intermediate Printed on Kodak Vision 2383 I
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Errata Some of the text in last month’s Q&A about Mad Men was erroneously altered during the production process. The quote that begins at the bottom of page 40 should read: “Sometimes we’ll throw out a suggestion, such as asking if a scene can be twilight instead of night; sometimes it would just look better to glow the windows soft blue instead of having it be night, with nothing out there.” And the question that begins at the bottom of page 41 should read: “With all the unusual colors and textures in the wardrobe, do you ever shoot wardrobe tests?”
24mm – 290mm
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Wild Kingdom Lance Acord, ASC helps bring a children’s classic to life with Where the Wild Things Are. by Simon Gray Unit photography by Sonny Geras, Ben King and Matt Nettheim t may seem hard to believe now, but Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are caused quite a stir when it was first published in 1963. Despite winning the coveted Caldecott Medal for Most Distinguished Picture Book, the slender, tableau-style volume — which has a grand total of just 10 sentences — drew strong criticism from child psychologists, who deemed its images too disturbing for children.
I
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Visually echoing the work of Francisco Goya, one of Sendak’s favorite artists, Wild Things springs straight out of Freudian psychoanalytical theory, which maintains that children learn to deal with strong emotions by projecting them onto fantasies. Now considered a classic of children’s literature, Wild Things tells the story of Max (played in the movie by Max Records), a 9-year-old boy
who is sent to bed without his supper after making mischief. Using his imagination, Max transforms his room into a jungle where he tames a group of fantastic creatures: cantankerous, furry, two-legged beasts resplendent with claws, teeth, scales and horns. In bringing Max’s rambunctious adventures to cinematic life, director Spike Jonze reunited with his longtime collaborator, cinematogra-
Images courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.
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pher Lance Acord, ASC. “Working with Spike again was the great attraction of doing this film,” offers Acord, who is quite familiar with the psychological complexities of Jonze’s work after shooting the features Being John Malkovich and Adaptation (AC Dec. ’02). “I initially thought the project might involve extensive use of animatronics and greenscreen, but Spike’s enthusiastic reconceptualization was unique and very exciting. He was adamant about not making an effects-driven movie.” Principal photography took place in Australia during winter and early spring of 2006. Locations were shot around the state of Victoria, while studio shoots were undertaken at Central City Studios in Melbourne. “We had a nice low sun path for the entirety of the shoot, and when the wind blew from the Antarctic, the light was so clear and bright I was getting meter readings higher than anywhere else I’ve shot,” recalls Acord. AC caught up with the cinematographer while the production was doing night shoots in Gembrook Forest, north of Melbourne. The location had been transformed into a menacing land of smoke and fire, with large, mysterious silhouettes visible on the ridgeline. A recent
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bushfire had burnt away all the undergrowth, leaving behind scorched earth and blackened trees with white leaves. Dotting the barren landscape were structures resembling huge bird’s nests — the homes of the wild things. “Gembrook is a perfect example of the type of location we wanted for the land of the wild things,” Acord notes while keeping a watchful eye over preparations. “We can see deep into the forest with long lenses, and the strong contrast provides a unique palette. Production designer Keith ‘K.K.’ Barrett was the driving force in creating a forest that wasn’t something we’d already seen on film. Whenever
possible, we’ve excluded the color green. Photographically, green can be a comforting color because it looks tranquil and fertile, and we want the forest to be a wild, untamed place of danger and adventure.” In the sequence that was being shot, Max is crowned king of the wild things and issues his first royal proclamation: “Let the wild rumpus begin!” Acord observes, “The wild things occasionally like to build large, dangerous fires. They are not mean in their destructiveness — just somewhat rowdy!” To create the wild things onscreen, Jonze opted for suitperformers whose work was
Opposite: 9-yearold Max (Max Records), the newly crowned king of the wild things, watches the sunset with Carol in Where the Wild Things Are, directed by Spike Jonze and based on the acclaimed children’s book by Maurice Sendak. This page, top: Max has a heart-toheart — and face-to-face — moment with K.W. Bottom: Cinematographer Lance Acord, ASC (left, wearing hat) and camera operator Simon Harding follow Max’s adventure.
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Wild Kingdom
Shooting on location around the state of Victoria in Australia, the filmmakers found a variety of environments for the wild things’ island. “Each location was chosen to visually reinforce Max’s emotions,” says Acord. “[Viewers] can then interpret his emotional experiences within the visual context of a forest, desert or windy cliff-top.”
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augmented with minimal visualeffects work — a decision designed to allow realistic emotional interaction between Records and the other actors. “Spike wanted the experience to be tactile for both Max and the suit-performers,” Acord explains. “He didn’t want to use CG creatures or force Max to perform to a greenscreen. He knew that using suitperformers would create some limitations, but it was a worthwhile tradeoff — the opportunity of having the suit-performers interact with Max adds so much to the naturalism of the young actor’s perfor-
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mance. Spike found an amazing group of actors, many from here in Australia; they had no experience as suit-performers, but they were really attuned to the subtleties of the script and the nuances of the voice performances.” Watching the suit-performers go through rehearsals with the naked eye, it’s readily apparent that one of the main challenges is their bulky costumes, which restrict their physicality and range of motion; the performers have difficulty simply moving around and walking down the forest paths. When viewed on monitors fed from the sequence’s
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three cameras, however, each of the wild things appears dynamic, nimble and strong. Acord points out, “Achieving that energy onscreen all comes down to establishing the best combination of lenses, framing, camera movement, staging and blocking. Getting those elements right is a constant learning curve. When the creatures are running around and ‘rumpusing,’ the operator’s right in there with them — the crazier the camerawork, the better the result. The depth of the frame is accentuated with handheld camerawork, point-of-view shots and very long lenses to compress the space,
and we also use lots of foreground elements, such as unexpected glimpses through trees. I’m constantly amazed at how lifelike their movements appear.” Enabling some of the more elaborate stunts with the wild things were lightweight versions of the creature suits that were specifically designed for the second-unit stunt performers. This group was directed by John Mahaffie and photographed by Brad Shield. Acord explains that the lighter suits “incorporated bracing where the head connected to the body. That meant less nuanced motion, but the stunt-suit perform-
Max and the wild things howl at the setting sun in two of the film’s many scenes set around dusk. “Time in the land of the wild things is somewhat indeterminate,” says Acord. “There’s a dreamlike ambiguity in many of the sequences, and in the overall timeline of the film. That’s how it was written.”
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Wild Kingdom
Above: Jealous of the attention his mother (Catherine Keener) has been giving her boyfriend, Max puts on a monstrous display in the kitchen before running away from home. Below: After running away, Max finds a small boat he uses to sail to the island of the wild things. The night portions of his journey were shot day-for-night, and Acord took advantage of the digital intermediate to finesse the look. "The DI meant I could shoot under open shade in daylight or dappled light under trees and grade it for twilight; I could also use the open sun and grade those scenes for moonlight," he notes.
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ers were able to run and jump and generally move more than the performers in the more refined suits.” The lighting of the Gembrook sequence involved a simple approach that nevertheless required a week of rigging. A circular area measuring approximately 600 square meters, the location was surrounded by eight 12Light Dinettes and another eight Nine-light Maxis gelled with ¾ to Full CTO. The lamps were run through a series of dimmers that kept them at levels ranging from 25 to 80 percent. “These lamps provide back-
light for the smoke, silhouetting the creatures and the back- to midground trees,” explains gaffer Karl Engeler during a break in filming. “The fire effect, which plays subtly on the foreground trees, is extended with flame bars, Par cans and Ground Rows.” A varying mixture of Lee 250 and 216 diffusion was applied to these lamps, as well as the 12- and Nine-lights. A very soft, top-to-three-quarter back moonlight effect was provided by two 24Ks and two T12s on 30' scaffold towers, with Engeler and his team using
the existing landscape to get the right height. The four lamps on the towers were gelled with either gridcloth or 252 1⁄8 White Diffusion. “Lance doesn’t like the spray effect you get by punching through smoke with a hard light, but we also don’t want to diffuse the lamps so much that they negate the flicker effect of the fire,” continues Engeler. “At various angles, these lamps provide the soft moonlight and also backlight the smoke high up in the trees. Around the camera, Par bars provide the firelight effect; for moonlight, six Ruby Sevens are directed straight up into a 20x20 Ultrabounce, which provides an ambience for the foreground.” “The intention is to maintain a sense of depth in the forest,” Acord explains between setups. “The forest is quite dense, we’re shooting at night, and the creatures themselves are quite dark, in the same tonal range as the trees and groundcover. So we have different layers: there’s a deep background layer of backlit smoke; a row of trees silhouetted in front of that; a layer of trees more frontlit by the firelight; and, finally, the creatures, which are silhouetted in front of that.” Acord’s other night exterior featured a soft, toplit, starlight look. Engeler and his crew built a large moon-box, constructed with a truss and containing 12 12K space lights,
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with gridcloth on the outside of the box. The rig was then hung off a construction crane, casting a soft ambient light. Acord says, “Lighting nights in this way is my biggest fear, because it’s inherently a bit unrealistic and I always approach lighting with the motivation in mind. It works for this film, however, because the scenes often comprise ‘moments’ in the story, and the timelines within individual sequences are ambiguous and purposefully dreamlike.” The cinematographer employed Kodak Vision2 Expression 500T 5229 for all night scenes. “I prefer the softer blacks and slightly desaturated color of that stock; Expression isn’t as ‘snappy’ as 500T 5218. For day exteriors, I used 250D Vision2 5205, rated at 250 but exposing for the highlights. I kept the shadow side of faces 2 to 3 stops under, and because I was using more of the stock’s toe [dark] range, the contrast was flattened out. That was my approach on all the day exteriors, even if we were on the shadow side a lot. I knew I could lift the image slightly in the DI. We used the 5205 well into the magic-hour period, and it held up very well. I love the look of a wide lens with a background falling off, so our wider lenses, such as the 27mm, were at T2.8. On the longer
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lenses, such as those in the 75mm to 150mm range, I kept things at T5.6 to T8 because we were shooting handheld and Max often could be off his mark.” Asked how such a slim tome could be translated into a featurelength film, the cinematographer points out that Jonze’s film (which the director co-scripted with David Eggers) dramatically expands the story’s emotional and psychological scope: “Spike’s approach to Where the Wild Things Are is thematic rather than a narrative-driven storyline contained within a three-act structure. The script interprets the themes of yearning and empowerment
through the mind of Max, examining how a child comes to terms with his place in the world. Spike and David explore how Max processes all the complexity of emotions in his relationships with his family and the wild things.” The film begins in the family home, where Max argues with his sister and feels jealous of his mother’s affection for her boyfriend. Acord says he and Jonze were determined to differentiate Wild Things from other children’s movies by avoiding common clichés of the genre. “In terms of the camerawork and lighting, the beginning of the film is somewhat conventional,” notes Acord. “I
Left: For a night sequence filmed in Gembrook Forest, Acord and gaffer Karl Engeler lit in layers “to maintain a sense of depth,” the cinematographer explains. “There’s a deep background layer of backlit smoke; a row of trees silhouetted in front of that; a layer of trees more frontlit by the firelight; and, finally, the creatures, which are silhouetted in front of that.” Below: As his relationship with the wild things grows more tenuous, Max talks things over with Alexander.
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Wild Kingdom wanted to impart a sense of realism and not overly polish Max’s home life. In films about children, there’s usually a kind of aspirational, fairytale quality to the home life itself; it’s often a nice Craftsman house in Pasadena with warm, glowing lights in the windows, and the family dog’s a golden retriever. I liked the idea of downplaying all this a bit, letting things be a bit more ordinary and rough around the edges. There are plenty of kids out there who live with just their mom, and their mom’s boyfriend, and not everyone gets along all the time. This film is more honest in that regard. It was important to keep the camera right there with Max, particularly in the scenes when he’s by himself, playing in his fort or with his toy boat.” In a departure from the book, Max’s room doesn’t morph into a jungle; instead, he leaves the house and finds his way to a boat that transports him to the land of the wild things. More than just scary monsters, the creatures are emotional beings that serve clear thematic purposes in the film. Acord notes, “The creatures in the original book After spinning a yarn that convinces the wild things to crown him king, Max’s first royal act is to declare a “wild rumpus.”
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are based on Sendak’s often bewildered childhood impressions of his newly-arrived relatives from Europe. Spike and David continued that idea, using particular aspects of people they know. Each ‘wild thing’ represents specific emotions, echoing Max’s relationships in the real world. Carol [voiced by James Gandolfini] is the alpha-male of the pack, the father figure for Max; he’s strong and ambitious, the kind of guy you hope will like you. K.W. [Lauren Ambrose] is like that friend of your sister’s who’s too old for you and you know it. Judith [Catherine O’Hara] and Ira [Forest Whitaker] are the slightly self-loathing aunt and uncle who always hang around. Douglas [Tom Noonan] is the rooster of the pack, the one who gets things done by soldiering through everything. Alexander [Paul Dano] is the youngest of the bunch; as the teenager, he’s jealous of the attention Max gets from the adults.” The wild-thing performances were created in two stages. First, the voices of Whitaker, Gandolfini and the other main actors were recorded onstage in Los Angeles as the group
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Wild Kingdom Right: Max bids adieu to K.W. and Douglas before returning home. Acord explains, “The script interprets the themes of yearning and empowerment through the mind of Max, examining how a child comes to terms with his place in the world.” Below: K.W., Douglas and Carol stand on their marks while Acord (foreground left) and Harding (foreground right) don EasyRigs to frame the scene from Max’s eye level.
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acted out scenes with large foam props in front of three video cameras. Acord explains, “They all wore headbands with microphones really close to their mouths, all of which was in shot, and everyone was dressed how they felt their particular character might dress. The result was like a bizarre, avant-garde theater piece!” The suit-performers then studied the footage to craft their own characterizations, which retained many of the voice actors’ physical traits. “Carol is
certainly reminiscent of James, while Ira feels like Forest at times,” says Acord. “It was amazing to see the suitperformers bring their respective characters to life with physical gestures and body language.” Another early, major decision was to shoot most of the film on location. “Normally, a film like this would all be shot on stage, and if you went on location, it would be one that had been thoroughly prepped,” Acord explains. “However, the essence of
Spike’s approach was to go out and film the wild things as if we were making a ‘fly-on-the-wall’ wildlife documentary about actual feral creatures in their natural environment. We shot in forests and on sand dunes and cliff-tops, in all kinds of weather. If you’re going to go to the trouble of shooting on location, you really want to see that interaction of the environment with the creatures, the rain and mud, with leaves falling on them and all the things that happen in the real world. We wanted to have a direct physical interaction between Max and the world of the wild things. “It was a big conceptual decision with many logistical implications,” Acord continues. “The reality of shooting with a very large creature contingent was an extraordinarily complicated undertaking. Simply getting the suit-performers onto location often required using a fourwheel-drive stake-bed truck to drive each one individually up dirt roads we cut through the forest; then, later, we’d have to walk them down paths that had been cleared and smoothed out. When we got into the stage
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Wild Kingdom
Having learned Max was never a king to begin with, a crestfallen Carol roams the island in solitude.
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work, we realized just how hard we’d made it for ourselves! There is a lot to be said for this process, however. In many ways, suited characters, like Chewbacca in Star Wars, still hold up because they are intrinsically interesting; their tactile quality is quite enchanting. Puppets and guys in suits still work, especially with kids.” Jonze’s approach also determined the style and extent of visual effects, specifically the CG component of the creatures’ faces, handled by Framestore in London. “When the CG work had just started, I saw some of the first tests, and there was a very broad range of motion,” Acord explains. “You saw a lot of the creatures’ mouths and teeth; there was a true realization of the potential of CG. For Spike, I think it was too much. Through the course of trying different approaches to the animation, they ended up with a result that looks like the best animatronics imaginable. It’s not a full-fledged realization of CG by any means; it’s very restrained and balances the use of the suit-performers and the suits themselves.” Acord and Jonze tell Max’s story with a simple but effective photographic approach. “We always tried to stay true to the concept of shooting the film from Max’s point of
view,” the cinematographer says. “A lot of scenes start from premises like, ‘This is Max,’ ‘This is Max seeing these things’ and ‘This is what Max sees.’ One of my key references was [ASC member] Caleb Deschanel’s work on The Black Stallion, which I showed to the crew during preproduction.” However, there were times when Acord felt that a different approach would better serve the story. “With strictly subjective imagery, it’s often hard to provide the viewer with an understanding of setting and place. Since each location was chosen to visually reinforce Max’s emotions, I often fought for shots that would orient viewers by showing them exactly where Max was physically. They can then interpret his emotional experiences within the visual context of a forest, desert or windy cliff-top. Finding a balance between point-of-view shots and more objective establishing shots of Max in the environment was the topic of many on-set discussions I had with Spike.” Shooting extensive handheld coverage from Max’s point of view required the lens to be at a very awkward operating height. Acord made things easier on himself and his operators by employing an EasyRig, a vest-mounted camera-
support system that reduces the load on the operator’s neck and shoulder muscles by suspending the camera and distributing the weight to other parts of the body. “Max’s eye level is somewhere between the waist and shoulder, and the best way to handhold in that position was with the EasyRig,” he says. For handheld work, Acord favored the Optimo 15mm-40mm zoom, and the 27mm-68mm compact Panavision zoom. “Panavision Primos are such beautiful lenses; they have a silky smoothness in terms of contrast, and fantastic color rendition. I considered using Zeiss high-speeds because of how compact and light they are, but in the end I opted for the Primos. “The 27mm felt like Max’s perspective on the world, and that length was used mostly when he’s awestruck at what he’s seeing — it lends an impressionistic feel to the image. When we were photographing Max, we stayed in the 40mm100mm range, and for moments when Max examines things and takes a hard look at what’s going on around him, we were in the 100mm200mm range.” Concerns about scale dictated most of the filmmakers’ decisionmaking once Max gets to the island. “In addition to showing the crea-
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Above: Jonze gives Records a lift to the location. Below: Acord takes five with Ira.
tures as Max sees them, we were always pushing the disparity of scale in frames where Max and the creatures appear together,” Acord notes. While the tallest suit-performer, in full costume, was more than 7' tall (the rest were somewhere between 6' and 7'), Acord accentuated their height in relation to Max by composing shots from unusual angles. “Max would be right down at the bottom of the frame, sometimes cropped right at the neck. The frame would be crowded with the creatures, with their sheer size pushing the frame itself outwards and upwards as Max just hangs on at the very bottom. Whenever possible, we would utilize grade differences in the terrain to
keep Max low in frame. Spike was always pushing things in this regard and sometimes we would have Max on his knees to further enhance the effect. There are a lot of compositions like that in the movie, and the strategy works perfectly to establish Max’s place amid the creatures.” Where the Wild Things Are was shot in both full-frame and 3-perf Super 35, using a 2.35:1 aspect ratio. The cameras designated for first-unit performance coverage were primarily 3-perf, while the second unit utilized full frame to allow for reframing in post. Two cameras were utilized for every setup, with a third employed as necessary. The package comprised
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Wild Kingdom Acord and Jonze catch their breath before the next rumpus begins.
two Panavision Millennium XLs, Acord’s own Aaton 35-III (equipped with a P+S Technik modified viewfinder) and a Panavised Arri 235. On the A and B cameras, the most common lens configurations were a 40mm and 75mm, or a 50mm and 100mm. “For any given scene there’s a best place for the camera
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and there’s a best lens to use,” says Acord. “Using two or three cameras can obfuscate that position, and sometimes you feel you didn’t quite get the shot. I really only like using second and third cameras when the shot has already been found; the additional cameras help in obtaining that one specific, dramatic beat that
you may have only one chance at capturing with a younger actor.” One of Acord’s favorite sequences is when K.W. swallows Max to hide him from an angry Carol. He found the discussions about how to visually represent K.W.’s gullet onscreen eerily reminiscent of the filmmakers’ debates about the “portal” sequences in Being John Malkovich. “Charlie Kaufman’s script described the portal very vaguely as ‘the membranous tunnel,’ and we had hours and hours of discussion about what that meant exactly. K.W.’s insides were also the subject of much discussion, because the emotional psychology of that scene — Max’s symbolic rebirth and his realization of how he feels about his mother — is very deep. The final product was a furry sling; when the fur was wet it had a texture like the stomach lining of a cow. The less you saw of it, the better, and I did what I could to keep
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the lighting contained on Max and let it fall off gently onto the walls of K.W.’s stomach. I also added a lowlevel backlight to the stomach lining by just the tiniest amount — the dye in the fabric was black, but the base for the dye gave a hint of a purple warmth when it was backlit.” Dailies were supplied by Digital Pictures in Melbourne and viewed as Final Cut Pro HD files. Where the Wild Things Are is Acord’s first use of a digital intermediate. Scanning was done on an Arriscan at 1080 onto HDCam-SR 4:4:4 in RGB color space. One of the main reasons for having a DI was the amount of footage shot day-for-night, day-fortwilight and day-for-predawn. “Time in the land of the wild things is somewhat indeterminate,” Acord notes. “There’s a dreamlike ambiguity in many of the sequences, and in the overall timeline of the film. That’s how it was written. Spike came to me
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at one point and said, ‘Is this actually possible?’ I’d worked with kids who weren’t much older than Max on The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, and the time restrictions with child actors can be a real challenge, especially when you’re shooting on location. The DI meant I could shoot under open shade in daylight, or dappled light under trees, and grade it for twilight; I could also use the open sun and grade those scenes for moonlight. A good percentage of the film is done that way; being able to subtly manipulate luminance, saturation and contrast was indispensable on a picture like this.” A basic look was applied to the film at London’s Framestore, where Acord and Jonze spent a week evening out the composite work. Final grading was then done by Stefan Sonnenfeld at Company 3 in Santa Monica, Calif. “We got pretty far along in London,” Acord says.
“That sped up the process with Stefan because we had a good, balanced pass of the entire film, which allowed us to spend a couple of weeks fine-tuning the look in Santa Monica.” Additional reporting by Jon D. Witmer. I
TECHNICAL SPECS 2.40:1 3-perf Super 35mm Panaflex Millennium XL; Aaton 35-III; PanArri 235 Panavision Lightweight Primo and Angenieux lenses Kodak Vision2 Expression 500T 5229, Vision2 250D 5205 Digital Intermediate
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Pandora’s
Predicament
The thriller The Box, shot digitally by Steven Poster, ASC, puts a surreal spin on a moral dilemma. by Jay Holben Unit photography by Dale Robinette
n these tough economic times, it’s difficult to imagine a scenario in which a young couple struggling to make ends meet would turn away the gift of a large sum of money. In The Box, such a couple (played by Cameron Diaz and James Marsden) is told that all their problems can be solved with the press of a button — literally. According to a mysterious stranger (Frank Langella), pushing this button will
I 48 November 2009
cause two things to happen: the couple will receive $1,000,000, and someone they don’t know will die. Directed by Richard Kelly, The Box is based on “Button, Button,” a 1970 short story by Richard Matheson. The story was adapted for television for the 1985 reincarnation of The Twilight Zone, but Kelly optioned the theatricalfeature rights to the story directly from Matheson several years ago.
“Matheson’s story was one of the most intriguing, thought-provoking and suspenseful premises I’d ever stumbled across,” says Kelly. “I desperately needed to know what happened to this couple, and I needed to know who the mysterious Arlington Steward [Langella’s character] was. I had hundreds of questions, and I wanted to be the one to provide the answers and take the story to the next level.”
Photos courtesy of Warner Bros.
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The film’s director of photography is Steven Poster, ASC, who also shot Southland Tales and Donnie Darko for Kelly. “Richard and I have been partnered since the day we met, literally,” says the veteran cinematographer. “We became collaborators the first day we started working together, and it has been that way on all the movies. Richard begins to collaborate with me at the script stage, sometimes even before a studio is involved. There are several others who come into the process early, including Richard’s producing partner, Sean McKittrick, production designer Alec Hammond and visual-effects supervisor Thomas Tannenberger.” This approach makes for a very tight-knit crew and an extended prep process, which in turn lead to a smooth production. “Every film I’ve done has been ridiculously ambitious for its schedule and budget,” Kelly remarks. “As soon as I finish a script, I get it out to all these guys and start to plant the seed of the production in their heads. It can be a year or more before we actually go into official prep, and it makes
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Opposite page: Norma Lewis (Cameron Diaz) finds herself divided over how to handle a bizarre moral dilemma in The Box. This page, top: Norma and her husband, Arthur (James Marsden), are told they will receive a million dollars if they push the button contained in a mysterious box, but a person they do not know will die as a result. Cinematographer Steven Poster, ASC notes, “Every time the box was shown onscreen, I treated it like a commercial product, emphasizing the sheen of the plastic protective top and the rich wood grain on the sides.” Middle: Arthur raids a stash of cash in a sequence shot in a basement set built onstage. Bottom: Poster poses with Panavision’s Genesis camera on location in Boston, where the locals undoubtedly appreciated his taste in baseball caps.
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Pandora’s Predicament
The enigmatic Arlington Steward (Frank Langella) explains the stakes to Norma. “Notice the part of Langella’s face that has been burned away,” Poster says. “This couldn’t have been done with prosthetic makeup. Every time we showed his face in a shot, we had to shoot clean plates to use for background replacements.”
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such a difference to have that time to discuss and consider the script. If Steven can start wrapping his mind around this project a year before we start shooting, it’s going to make for a much better production all around.” For The Box, one early consideration was the character of Steward, the mysterious keeper of the fateful device. Kelly conceived the character as someone who’d had half his face burned away in an accident, and the filmmaker was insistent that this effect be achieved digitally with the help of Tannenberger and his company, Gradient Effects. “That was a big debate for a while,” recalls Kelly. “I always wanted to do it digitally because I knew the digital process
would allow us to create something truly fantastic. I think today’s audiences are very attuned to spotting the old tricks and effects — they’re very savvy. I wanted Arlington Steward to be a legendary character, an icon. I wanted him to be someone people just can’t take their eyes off when he’s onscreen.” The choice of digital versus practical makeup effects was not an easy one. Going digital added a few days to the production schedule and created additional costs and complications. “Every scene with Arlington had to be shot with motion, and we had to be sure to shoot clean plates so Thomas and his team could paint away portions of Frank’s face,” says Poster. “We used recordable Hot
Gears, so after each scene was shot we could play back the good takes and photograph the empty set for clean plates. We couldn’t shoot handheld in any of those sequences because it would have added too much time and expense to track the effect in post. We had to be really judicious about our camera movement in those scenes; we had one sweeping Technocrane shot with Arlington because that’s all we could afford! We didn’t compromise anything; we just had to plan more carefully and be judicious.” Langella had to perform with tracking balls glued to the affected side of his face. “I think Frank was nervous about it at first, but he’s a veteran actor,” says Kelly. “After a few days, I think he started to love it because it gave him something physical to play with. He used it.” Poster notes that the teamwork Kelly fosters was critical to accomplishing the effect. “The work Thomas Tannenberger and I do together is pretty symbiotic,” says Poster. “He knows my level of understanding of visual effects, and I know his level of understanding of photography, and that makes it really fun to work with each other. One thing I did on The Box that I hope to do on every project from now on was to bring everyone together very early in prep to discuss workflow — the workflow is different on every
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movie now, regardless of whether you shoot film or digital. I started a dialogue between Panavision, LaserPacific, our editorial department, our post supervisor, and Thomas and his visual-effects team to really nail down exactly what the workflow was going to be.” The decision to make Steward’s face a digital effect firmly pushed The Box into the digital realm. “It became clear to me that this would be a perfect movie to shoot digitally, and we decided to go with Panavision’s Genesis camera,” says Poster. The early workflow discussions revolved around the use of the Codex digital recorder to record the highest possible quality image from the Genesis. Unfortunately, the budget would not allow for a Codex, and the Panavision SSR-1 (Solid State Recorder) was not yet available, so the team used the standard HDCam-SR on camera. Every day, each HDCam-SR tape was cloned on the set, and the clones were sent to LaserPacific for ingestion into the post pipeline. When reports were received that the ingestion was successful, the original tapes were sent back to the production offices. Poster had shot some tests and commercials with the Genesis, but The Box was his first digital feature. “I took the same approach to the Genesis that I do to any new film stock or imaging device: I took the
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Top: Arthur downs some bubbly at a wedding reception. Poster notes that lighting was built into the set because “we were seeing straight down into the set, which gave us nowhere to position movie lights.” Middle: Poster contemplates his exposure for the reception scene. Bottom: Steadicam operator Jody Miller tracks Diaz through the reading room at the Boston Public Library. Poster observes, “That sequence was lit mostly by existing overhead fluorescents, but we added some fill light that was handheld and moving with the camera.”
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Pandora’s Predicament Top: One of the show’s most impressive sets is Langley Air Force Base’s historic wind tunnel, which recently closed down after 78 years of operation. Bottom: “After a great deal of discussion about how to create light in this very complicated location where none existed, production designer Alec Hammond designed this Kino Flo lighting ring that could be raised and lowered on chain motors,” Poster explains. “We also added the light boxes ringing the platform.”
52 November 2009
time to understand the dynamic range, and once I understood where my limits were in terms of boosting, noise, underexposure and shadow areas, I went out and shot it as though I were shooting film.” Through testing, Poster determined that the Genesis has a base ISO of 640, and he then began to experiment with various gain settings. “I found that the gain didn’t track in a linear fashion,” he notes. “As I went up in gain, there was almost a geometric increase in speed to the point where I realized I wasn’t going to be able to come up with a meter setting that would relate to it. At that point, I decided not to use my meter at all.” Using a waveform monitor and his own trained eye, Poster found a key exposure range between 28 and 45 IRE, depending on the sit-
uation. “55 IRE as middle gray is engineering baloney,” he maintains with a laugh. “You can work with that all day long, but you’re throwing away a lot of bottom range if you do. I took all the tests I shot with the Genesis through the digital-intermediate process with [colorist] Dave Cole at LaserPacific. I didn’t have to do it all the way through to filmout, because if I see it in the DI suite at LaserPacific I know that the filmout will match what I saw on the screen. By pushing the footage as far as we could, I quickly learned the limits of the medium — where it was solid and where it got noisy. After that, I felt I had a solid understanding of the chip’s latitude.” Working from the waveform, Poster used an 18-percent gray card and positioned it where he wanted
to find his exposure. Focusing the camera on the card, he’d then set the aperture to suit his desired IRE range on the waveform and light the rest of the scene by eye. “At some point, working with a specific emulsion or imaging medium becomes intuitive, and your instincts tell you how a particular scene is going to look,” he observes. “With testing behind me, I relied on that instinctual understanding of the Genesis for the entire shoot.” Testing included more than the standard technical charts and lighting ratios. During prep, Poster actually took the camera to specific locations the production planned to use in Boston, Mass. “One really amazing location was a water-treatment plant called Deer Island,” he recalls. “There are huge treatment
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Above: Arthur approaches a teleportation device that takes the form of a large water column. Below: During filming of the scene in the Boston Public Library, Marsden extends a finger toward the empty geometric outline for the visual effect.
structures that look like giant eggs. Because of the nature of the location, there is so much free methane gas floating around that the slightest accident could cause the whole plant to explode!” For safety and budget reasons, Deer Island is lit almost entirely with high-pressure sodium-vapor fixtures, traditionally a troublesome non-continuous-spectrum source for film and digital. High-pressure sodium-vapor lights (HPS/SON) run about 2700°K, with an average CRI of about 85. After shooting tests with the Genesis at the location and manipulating the results in the DI suite, Poster decided to augment the location’s existing lighting with Luminys stand-alone high-output
HPS/SON fixtures, which the company manufactures to augment street lighting. “We used five of the [Luminys] fixtures, and they were great,” he recalls. “We shined one right down the lens a couple times to get a really great flare. Another really nice aspect of that location was the prevalence of hoses — that made our wet-down very easy!” Another location Poster scouted with the Genesis was the Boston Public Library, which served as the setting for several sequences: a chase into the reading room, a sequence involving a “water coffin” effect, and others. “The library has a huge atrium with a large, diffused skylight, and you can see into each of the wings from the atrium,” Poster
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Pandora’s Predicament
Above: This finished composite shows a worker preparing to teleport the Lewises’ son. “Underwater lights were used to create the glowing light beneath the water’s surface,” Poster notes. “The real water surface was replaced by visual effects to create movement and hide the light sources.” Below: One of the live-action elements for the scene is created on a greenscreen stage.
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notes. “It’s a really dynamic location but has a terrible mix of lighting — fluorescent fixtures, sodium fixtures, tungsten fixtures, daylight and mixes within those! Over the years, the fluorescents have been replaced haphazardly with different types of bulbs and different color temperatures. It’s a real mishmash of color temperatures! “When I tested the Genesis in there, I was astounded by its
remarkable ability to blend all those color temperatures so smoothly,” he continues. “The color science of the Genesis chip is remarkably close to Kodak’s Vision2 [500T] 5218. It’s amazing how well the camera handled those sources.” He adds, however, that his goal on The Box wasn’t to create digital images that looked just like film. “HD is its own medium, and I treated it as such. Even though The Box
takes place in the mid-1970s, I felt the Genesis look could stand on its own. Richard was a little harder to convince. When we made Donnie Darko, he was a film purist and only wanted to work with anamorphic 35mm. On Southland Tales, we had to go to 3-perf Super 35mm, and that was a tough decision for him. Convincing him to consider digital took a lot of discussions!” “I was very nervous about
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Pandora’s Predicament Director Richard Kelly and Poster scope out a scene on their third movie together.
shooting digitally,” Kelly confirms. “In particular, I was worried about motion blur with Steadicam and tracking shots, I was worried about day exteriors, and I was worried about creating anything that screamed ‘video!’ We did a lot of R&D with different types of looks. To make sure we wouldn’t get too much motion blur, Steven did thor-
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ough testing and we decided never to shoot wider than a 270-degree shutter. We also worked with filters to find a look that felt like the 1970s and wasn’t a distraction for the audience. “The film that really opened my mind to using digital, especially for a period piece, was David Fincher’s Zodiac [AC April ’07],”
continues Kelly. “Although he and Harris Savides [ASC] used the Viper on that film, the look they achieved proved to me that you can achieve a period look with new digital cameras. The images the Genesis creates transfer beautifully to film, and the grain the picture picks up when it’s printed on film really completes the image for me. After the first week of dailies, I knew the Genesis was the right choice for us.” For lens filtration, Poster tried to stay with filters that would have been available in 1976. “I worked with low-cons, double fogs, Mitchell diffusion, anything that would have been available then, but I settled on a very light level of Tiffen White ProMist. This more modern filter gave us just the edge we needed with the Genesis imaging chip, blending the palette without drawing attention to the image.” While shooting on location in
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Boston, the filmmakers were able to watch projected dailies by creating their own portable theater. The back half of a 40'-long storage trailer was partitioned off and painted black. To create a low-budget screen, Poster used stretched white-blackout material. Dailies were projected with a Panasonic PT-AE2000U full-HDcompatible LCD projector. “We had a projectionist on a short daily call, and we’d watch dailies off the cloned HDCam-SR tapes every day at lunch,” says Poster. “I’m a big fan of watching projected dailies; it really makes a big difference. First of all, it allows for the collective experience of everybody watching the footage together in a darkened room. The project becomes much more personal for everyone, and the crew gets much more excited about what we’re all working on. Projected dailies also convey the true scope of the images, so that later, when the director and
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editor are sitting in the editing room with a much smaller screen, they don’t tend to cut in closer images that are more appropriate to a TV show than a big-screen feature. Just about the only drawback is that you tend to spill food all over yourself while eating lunch in the dark!” Poster notes that his involvement in the post process comprised “not just color-timing the final, but also timing individual elements along the way. Each visual-effects shot needs a base timing for the effects artists to work from, and I try to get those elements close [to the desired look]. We also did three preview versions of The Box, and although I was off shooting another picture, I came in on the weekends to sit with Dave Cole and refine the timing for those. Because we did that, we shaved about a week off the final DI session.” Kelly says he looks forward to
working with the Genesis again. “It would be interesting to use it on a piece that goes even further into the past, like an 18th-century story,” he muses. “Several people have told us The Box doesn’t look like anything they’ve seen before, and that makes me very happy,” says Poster. “It’s always a great thing to give audiences a little something new!” I
TECHNICAL SPECS 2.40:1 High-Definition Video Panavision Genesis Primo lenses Digital Intermediate Printed on Kodak Vision 2383
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Kicked Off the
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The Damned United, shot by Ben Smithard, colorfully recalls the brief, disastrous tenure of an English football manager. by Mark Hope-Jones Unit photography by Laurie Sparham
58 November 2009
ritish actor Michael Sheen has made a name for himself playing a string of real-life characters, including former Prime Minister Tony Blair, comic performer Kenneth Williams and broadcaster David Frost. His latest incarnation is Brian Clough, a legendary English soccer manager of the 1960s and 1970s and the central character in The Damned United. Clough, who died in 2004, was a charismatic but controversial figure, adored by some and despised by others for his outspokenness and a confidence that bordered on arrogance. He is often referred to as “the greatest manager England never had,” and he passionately upheld the idea that football, as soccer is called in most of the world, could rise above the brutality of professional matches in the 1970s to be
B
“a beautiful game.” Based on David Peace’s novel The Damned Utd, the film was directed by Tom Hooper and shot by cinematographer Ben Smithard. It examines Clough’s disastrous 44day tenure as manager of Leeds United in 1974, which ended with him being sacked after getting the club off to its worst start in 15 seasons. A flashback structure cuts between this short spell at Leeds and the events that led up to it: Clough’s years as manager at Derby and his burgeoning rivalry with Don Revie (Colm Meaney), the highly successful manager who took Leeds to the top of the First Division before accepting an offer to manage the national team. A staunch critic of Leeds’ aggressive playing style, Clough steps into Revie’s shoes with the brash ambition of changing a
Photos courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics. Additional photos courtesy of Ben Smithard.
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winning formula and soon meets determined resistance. “I’ve always loved football, and I read David Peace’s book, which was fantastic,” says Smithard. “It took me awhile to get a meeting with Tom, but when I did finally meet him, I made sure I was well prepared.” Once on board, Smithard wasted no time in building good relationships with the costume and art departments, which would be crucial to re-creating the look of England between 1967 and 1974. “I was talking to those departments pretty early on,” continues the cinematographer. “There were extensive recces of locations, and [production designer] Eve Stewart’s work with the textures at those locations played a major part in the look of the film; she did an amazing job with the interiors, which made my job much easier.” Still photographs were an important inspiration for Smithard as he set about crafting a look. “Period photographs of football matches were useful because you don’t just see the players on the pitch; you see the crowd, the architecture of the stadium, the dirt and grime,” he says. “The composition of black-and-white stills from the Fifties and Sixties by CartierBresson and the other great photographers was the main influence. I’ve got a huge library of photographic books. I have a real love of documentary, which ties in with reportage and photojournalism. For me, it’s about truth and honesty; if you look at that in practical ways, a lot of The Damned United is shot with available light, much more than you’d think. I’d hate for anyone to feel that the film looks lit.” The influence of social photography manifests itself in some unconventional compositions that appear throughout the film. Characters are often positioned in the lower half of the frame with vast spaces above their heads, or at the
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Opposite: Leeds captain Billy Bremmer (Stephen Graham) performs a slide tackle in the mud. This page, top: Brian Clough (Michael Sheen) reacts to a competitor’s play as assistant coach Peter Taylor (Timothy Spall) tries to calm him. Middle: Filming one of Clough’s TV interviews. Bottom: Upon arriving in Leeds for his new job, Clough meets the press, one of his favorite activities.
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Kicked Off the Pitch Top: Derby County chairman Sam Longson (Jim Broadbent) doesn’t like what he sees on the field. Middle: Following his departure from Leeds, Don Revie (Colm Meaney) makes a splash by attending a Leeds match. Bottom: Clough greets the Leeds United team as it comes off the field.
extreme edge of frame. “If you start a film off with that kind of grammar, I think the audience will get used to it very quickly,” says Smithard. “We actually decided on a lot of those frames when we went out on recces. Tom liked putting people on the opposite side to where you would normally put them in a composed image and also having lots of air. It allows you to see the environments, which I love. If the landscape and geography are part of the story, then it makes sense to shoot with the landscape and characters in the same frame.” Smithard shot primarily with spherical Panavision Primos, and he found that this approach to composition meant the wider focal lengths were coming out of the box quite frequently. “Tom likes to use the 10mm a bit more than I usually would — I tend towards the 14.5mm,” he says. “We had the whole range of Primos up to 150mm and also the wide and long Primo zooms. The storytelling lenses, 17.5mm to 50mm, were on the camera a lot, but we did keep using the 10mm and 14.5mm because they really increase the landscape. Tom said he’d loved using the Zeiss 60 November 2009
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Photos by Ben Smithard.
Top: Longson prepares to confront Clough about his team selection in the Derby clubhouse. Bottom: In another Derby clubhouse scene, Taylor watches Clough prepare for Revie’s arrival.
rectilinear 8mm on John Adams [2008]. Panavision doesn’t really have a flat-field 8mm, but I was quite glad of that because it might have been a step too far! “I wasn’t trying to keep to a particular stop,” he continues. “I’d shoot between T2 and T5.6 depending on whether we had lots of light or not very much. I tend to prefer Zeiss Super Speeds because I like to push [exposure] as far as I can. I don’t shoot T1.3 for shallow focus; I shoot it out of necessity, and if there were a T1.1 lens, I’d want it.” The Damned United contains various forms of original footage from the time, including black-andwhite and color pitch-side action coverage as well as television interviews. In order to match this original material and evoke the period, the filmmakers shot a number of different formats. “The majority of the film was shot on 35mm Fuji color negative, but we also shot some 16mm black-and-white and 16mm Ektachrome 100D [7285],” he says. “I used my own Bolex camera, and unfortunately, it broke halfway through the shoot, but we were able to borrow an Aaton XTR-Prod for a
few days. We shot the black-andwhite material on Eastman [Double-X] 7222, which is one of the few stocks that hasn’t changed much over the years and still has a natural grain in it. The Ektachrome was a bit too sharp for what we wanted, so I pushed it 2 stops and had it cross-processed at Film and Photo London.” For TV-interview scenes that necessitated cutting between origi-
nal footage of the interviewer and new footage of Sheen as Clough, Smithard made the bold decision to utilize vintage tube video cameras; he turned to a company called Golden Age Television Recreations for period-accurate cameras that could be used in shot. Dicky Howett at GATR explains, “We supplied three EMI 2001 cameras, two of which needed to provide live feeds. Because the 2001s are so old and
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Kicked Off the Pitch
Top: Shortly after taking over as coach of Leeds United, Clough takes the team into a charity match. Bottom: Working together for Derby, Taylor and Clough celebrate their team’s long-shot victory over Leeds.
62 November 2009
require so much ancillary equipment, we put equivalent-age portables that actually work, Ikegami 79s, inside two of the EMI 2001 shells. The Ikegamis fed a live signal to period monitors and modern recording devices.” The live feed allowed Smithard to compose shots that showed the actors, the EMI 2001s filming them and the live periodlook image on vintage monitors, all in one frame. “When I switched on the Ikegami and pointed it at Michael, it was just amazing,” he says. “I honestly wondered if we
should have shot the whole film with those cameras, but they were too unreliable — they’d run for about 30 minutes before the tubes heated up so much it seemed like they were going to blow up! That footage looks great because the colors are all over the place and are all a bit desaturated. There’s no other look like it; it’s the equivalent of someone from Kodak coming up to you and giving you 300 rolls of mint film stock from the 1970s!” The production’s main cameras were an Arricam Lite and an Arricam Studio. “We chose a final
aspect ratio of 1.85:1, because we would have lost a lot of the height at some of the locations if we’d gone widescreen,” notes Smithard. “Our line producer requested that we shoot 3-perf, which was fine because Tom and I are really careful about how things are composed. When we set the frame, we were always happy with it, so I didn’t feel as though we lost anything by not having space at the top and bottom to manipulate in post.” The production ran two cameras most of the time, with Smithard and focus puller Adam Coles on the A camera. “For the second camera, we had Vince McGahon, who’s a great Steadicam operator,” he says. “Tom would jump on my camera now and then and do all the static wide shots because he loves to be at the viewfinder. In fact, you can’t keep him away from the camera — he’s like a big kid!” One occasion on which Hooper operated was for a flashback scene that takes place in Clough’s office at the Derby stadium. With his team playing archrivals Leeds United, Clough is too anxious to watch and spends the match pacing back and forth inside, chain-smoking. Along one wall of his office is a high, opaque window, beyond which silhouetted supporters sit on a tiered stand that overlooks the pitch. Each time a goal is scored, the supporters roar and leap to their feet, breaking up the light entering the room. “It was a great device to enhance Clough’s nervousness — a good sound device and a good lighting device,” says Smithard. “The thing was not to have any lighting inside the room at all; I didn’t want to break up the flow of the filmmaking by taking lights inside. We had a few 4K HMIs outside the window and built a rostrum for the extras to stand on. With the wide shot of Michael standing by the door, it’s simply the people moving that casts a rippling shadow over him. We also
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Cinematographer Ben Smithard prepares to film on the field.
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shot the opposite way, looking toward the window. Tom operated the shot with a 10mm, just going backwards and forwards on the track. I shot handheld with the other camera to get a lot of the tighter shots. I’d be running up and down the track with Tom shouting that I was in his shot and me telling him he was in my shot as well! It was an interesting way to shoot it, and both his wide stuff and my tighter shots
are in the final.” Another scene for which Smithard was able to take a bold approach to the lighting takes place in Clough’s house during a nighttime power cut. The cocksure manager has just been sacked from his Derby job, and a loyal group of family and friends have gathered at his candlelit home to offer their support. “I asked Tom if he would mind me lighting that scene with just candles, and he replied that he’d always wanted to do a scene that way,” recalls the cinematographer. “The whole room was lit with about 20 or 30 single-wick candles — the double-wick candles burn too high and give off too much smoke. I used Zeiss Ultra Speeds [T1.4] that day because I needed the extra speed, and I also pushed the stock, Fuji [Eterna] 500T, 2 stops to 2,000 ASA. You’ve got to throw away your light meter and trust your instincts in that
situation, although obviously, you’ve got to do a test first!” Smithard had film cans made up with nails sticking out of them for the candles, and while he was helping the gaffer, Stuart Drummond, set them up, “I managed to stab my hand on one of the nails. It didn’t hurt much, and we shot the scene, but the next day it got so painful I had to go to hospital. I thought they’d just give me something for it, but they kept me in overnight, put me on a drip and said they were going to operate on me in the morning! Luckily, I had the next day off. The surgeon came round in the morning and pumped me full of antibiotics. He wanted to put my hand in a cast, but I talked him out of it because I had to be on set 12 hours later. So I gave blood for Tom Hooper, as well as providing him with a candlelit scene!” For the 2K digital grade,
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which was carried out at Molinare in London, Smithard and Hooper worked with colorist Gareth Spensley on a Baselight 8. (Film prints were done at Deluxe.) “After chipping away at the look during the shoot, you get to the grading, and that last 20 percent of the image can be made to look the way you want it to look,” says the cinematographer. “Tom was in there every single day, and he allowed me to push it. The grade was a very collaborative and successful process. It was the first time I’d worked with Gareth, and he was fantastic.” “Ben and Tom brought in a lot of football-photography books that had obviously been referenced during the shoot, and our goal was to re-create the feel of those photos,” recalls Spensley. “In general, we tried to keep the palette from looking too varied to mimic the way older film stocks ACS_ADVT_7.25x4.875.ai didn’t necessarily pick up 4/30/2008
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variations in colors very well. Within Baselight, there are some very clever emulations of older photographic processes like early Technicolor, and we often used those as jumping-off points by throwing the filters at the grade and discussing where they were taking us. Ultimately, it was more important to get the feel of the period rather than just the look. It took some time to match the footage from those old tube cameras with the standard-definition archive footage of the time, because the chromatic spill was bad. Also, we had to sharpen the tube-camera footage a bit. But we didn’t have to do too much, and we could never have emulated the look of those cameras in a post suite.” For Smithard, The Damned United was “one of those dream projects. I haven’t shot another feature since then because I feel it’s a great film, AM and I’m not in any rush to 11:06:14
go out and shoot another one just for the sake of it. Put it this way: I am very passionate about it.” I
TECHNICAL SPECS Super 1.85:1 3-perf Super 35mm, Super 16mm and Tube Video Arricam Lite, Studio; Aaton XTR-Prod; Ikegami 79 Panavision Primo, Zeiss Ultra Speed lenses Fuji Eterna Vivid 160 8543; Eterna 250D 8563, 500T 8573; Kodak Ektachrome 100D 7285; Eastman Double-X 7222 Cross-Processing by Film and Photo London Digital Intermediate Printed on Kodak Vision 2383
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The Root of All Evil
Anthony Dod Mantle, BSC, DFF uses digital cameras to craft ominous images for Lars von Trier’s Antichrist. by Jon Silberg Unit photography by Christian Geisnaes
66 November 2009
fter wrapping Slumdog Millionaire for Danny Boyle, cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, BSC, DFF headed to Germany to shoot Antichrist for another favorite collaborator, Lars von Trier. Aesthetically, Antichrist is very different from von Trier and Dod Mantle’s previous collaborations, Manderlay and Dogville (AC May ’04), but it retains von Trier’s stamp of bleakness and angst. The story of a young mother, She (Charlotte Gainsbourg), and her psychologist husband, He (Willem Dafoe), gets off to a shocking and tragic start and tells an increasingly bizarre story, offering nightmarish elements and moments of horror before transforming into something entirely less describable. Dod Mantle recently spoke to AC about the difficult artistic and emotional journey he took with von Trier on the project.
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American Cinematographer: The opening of the film, which shows the child wandering through the apartment and spotting his parents having sex, is very lyrical and beautiful. What made you and Lars decide to use high-speed photography for that and other moments in the movie? Anthony Dod Mantle, BSC, DFF: Lars is never one to be very specific about such things, even with me, but he always has a series of images in his head to begin with. In the opening scene, which is a prologue of sorts, there is this terrible moment, and we were trying to create some sort of distance from it — to take that experience as far into another, different hemisphere as possible. Let’s face it: the seventh shot in the film is a penis entering a vagina. It’s at an angle you could associate with all sorts of pornographic imagery, but I would strongly argue that because of the high-speed pho-
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Photos courtesy of IFC Films and Trust Nordisk ApS. Additional photos courtesy of Anthony Dod Mantle.
Opposite page: He (Willem Dafoe) and She (Charlotte Gainsbourg) succumb to lust in a forest teeming with evil. This page, top: After their attempt at “couple’s therapy” erupts in violence, She hunts for her husband. Bottom: Cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, BSC, DFF (right) inspects some filtration.
tography, it becomes something else. I think it’s one of the most beautiful images I’ve shot; it just happens that it’s a penis traveling into a vagina! We used a [Vision Research] Phantom [HD] for all high-speed work, and we used a Red One for the rest of the movie. Lars and [his production company] Zentropa preferred digital capture, and the company has hard economic constraints that determine which equipment they will use. As with many companies on smaller budgets, they prefer to own and rent to themselves. The Red fit their economic plan. I’d used both cameras before; there’s a lot I like about the Red in terms of image resolution, particularly in the shadows, and the Phantom is a great high-speed camera. We could shoot at 1,000 fps with the Phantom, whereas the Red can only go to 110 fps. Did the Red prove well suited to the visual style you and Lars had in mind? Dod Mantle: The Red is still very difficult to use as a handheld camera. I think it needs a lot of development to be as easy to use
handheld as the SI-2K [Mini], which I used for much of Slumdog Millionaire [AC Dec. ’08]. There’s a lot to be said for the Red’s images, especially its resilience in the shadows, and there’s a lot to be said for its power in definition. But it clips very quickly in the highlights, and I think 16mm and 35mm cameras are much better for handholding. That said, the Red is new to the
world, and it will get better and better. I was very pleased with the [images] I was able to get. [Ed. Note: Dod Mantle shot at 25 fps and used Redcode 36.] As for the visual style we had in mind, Lars is basically trusting as a collaborator; he assumes the choices I make are appropriate for the film based on my expertise and the experiences we’ve had working
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The Root of All Evil Top: A concerned He checks on his wife after another upsetting interlude. Middle: Director Lars von Trier counsels his leads. Bottom: He uses psychotherapy in an attempt to reconnect.
together. On this film, he left me more to my own devices in prep than is normal. This was because of his intermittent periods of anxiety or because he just felt a little less physically strong than usual. The whole visual evolution of Antichrist was governed by that factor. Lars chose not to operate much on this film, and that inevitably became frustrating for him because he enjoys holding the camera so much. On the day, I may have been the next best thing. It was my task to do the best I could under what were, at times, rather unusual shooting conditions.
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How did you light for the high-speed work? Dod Mantle: We were shooting at 1,000 fps, so I was pouring a lot of light on the sets! I was lighting some of those apartment interiors with 18Ks, 12Ks and 100K Soft Suns. There are, for example, high-speed scenes of He and She in the shower, with the water running down their faces, and I’ll tell you, it was boiling hot in there! How did you create the black-and-white images? Dod Mantle: The images were captured on the color matrix. I used some softening diffusion on the lens, but we really had to strive to attain black-and-white during the digital grade. I tested the typical filters you’d use for black-and-white cinematog-
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raphy — oranges, yellows and reds — and on set, I showed Lars what their effects would be. We ultimately decided to shoot as clean as possible. It was quite an elaborate process in post to try to get the look of real black-and-white. The film is inspiring strong, mixed reactions. Some people are gasping in horror and claiming it’s misogynistic, and others are saying it’s brilliant and beautiful. Dod Mantle: I fear that in cinema, it’s possible to be brilliant, beautiful and misogynistic, but to me, Antichrist is far from misogynistic. It’s such a personal piece of work for Lars, and I’m glad it has an effect. Some people are moved and don’t know why; some people are moved and do know why. I have no desire to
speak for Lars. I’ve spent the last 25 years in his company but am no expert on that subject as of yet! When you and Lars started talking about the project, did you discuss the meaning of the images? Dod Mantle: About a year before we began shooting, I started having meetings with him, and things were somewhat strained. It’s not easy getting that kind of specific information out of him. He always works intuitively, but this whole project became unusually intuitive and irrational as the film slowly began to realize itself. A lot of the images are straight from his psyche. The fact that he has them is enough for me initially. He’ll explain what he can, but there are some things in this film that just can’t be articulated in a
A Phantom highspeed camera was used to shoot the movie’s intensely erotic opening scene, which reveals the cause of She’s emotional breakdown. Although Dod Mantle concedes that some may consider a portion of the sequence to be almost pornographic, he asserts, “Because of the high-speed photography, I would strongly argue it becomes something else.”
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The Root of All Evil
normal way. I had to try to understand why he wanted things a certain way. That gave me some kind of system of logic. As long as I had something to go on, it was okay. Regarding the recurring motif of the three beggars, is there a Danish cultural reference I’m missing? What are the three beggars? Dod Mantle: Perhaps they represent the editor, the photographer and the special-effects supervisor! What do I know? It’s certainly not Hans Christian Andersen, if that’s what you’re asking. Lars is an expert in creating these enigmas; they appear and recur. I would leave it as the right of authorship. You have said this shoot strained your relationship with Lars at times. Were your issues
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artistic or personal? Dod Mantle: Neither specifically, but in making a film, it’s difficult to segregate the artistic territory from the personal. In terms of artistic results, I’ve always maintained that any film and any filmmaker can only ever be as good as his director. An auteur such as Lars will always ultimately be the defining factor in his films; how he is is how the film will be. He suffers from anxiety and is medicated appropriately, and he can go in and out of clarity as we all do from time to time, but in his case it’s slightly more extreme. He’s an amusing man even on a bad day, but if you don’t know him, it can be quite unnerving. He spent up to several hours at a time away from set, just trying to find a space to be in, and he didn’t have the same joy in
executing this movie that he did on his earlier films. All the production can do in such a situation is attempt to surround the director with people he can trust, people who are loyal to realizing his project to the best of their abilities. I will go all the way for a true artist if he’s doing something different, even if there are difficulties and disagreements. All I care about in this complicated artistic vocation of ours are loyalty and honesty; any lack thereof can create massive imbalance. One of the things we debated had to do with the scenes we shot at the couple’s house in the forest. It was a real house made of 180-yearold wood. It had been used in Norway as a winter shelter for animals, and the production designer broke it down, sent it to Germany, reconstructed it in a forest and developed it as a beautiful interior. Originally, there was a plan to build a double of the house in a studio. When you’re working in an interior and you want to see the exterior, you’ve got to get lights in somehow, and I wanted to at least have an open roof to facilitate lighting and walls that we could fly — things that filmmakers have been doing for a hundred years. Otherwise, I would have liked to plate the windows using greenscreen so I could put lights outside without having them appear in the shot. Six weeks before
Bottom photo by Anthony Dod Mantle.
Top: The Phantom camera also lends a surreal ambience to a hailstorm of acorns. Bottom: Production designer Karl Juliusson at work in the practical cabin that was shipped to Germany for the shoot.
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we were to shoot, Lars and some others involved in the production pulled the studio version of the house, so we had to shoot everything in the real house. I had to light the interiors with small practicals and Kino Flos, and Lars wanted to see 270 and 360 degrees. I knew he’d brought everybody and this house to a forest in Germany because he wanted to see the exterior detail of nature through the windows! It’s the kind of difficulty cinematographers go through all the time, but the look was very important to Lars, and [shooting in a practical house] certainly made it very difficult to achieve. I suspect the strongest confusion reared its head in the offline editing, which involved an editor who had little idea about how far the material could be taken in the grade in terms of lighting. It’s common knowledge that before the era of digital cinematography, cinematographers such as Gordon Willis [ASC] often used a lot of lights to create the illusion of darkness simply by attaining a quality negative and printing down in the lab. The same applied here. When working with quality actors who are playing their hearts out half-naked in improvised scenes, the cinematographer has to have the courage and security to light up to see performance, knowing he can pull it down to wherever the ultimate lighting level should be in the final. What can happen in the digital dailies and in editing a format such as the Red is that the editor and director can sit with a somewhat alienating contrast ratio, with either too much or too little information for the director to know exactly what the visual intent was at the moment of shooting. Sometimes it is better to consult the director of photography rather than light a bonfire too early. If you know your exposures and know what you’re doing while shooting, then it is fundamental to know what you can do with the material afterwards. That’s true 71
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The Root of All Evil In a dreamlike sequence with the dark overtones of a Grimm fairytale, She attempts to conquer her fear of an ominous footbridge.
whether you’re shooting 35mm or with a cell phone. It’s strange that someone like Lars, who has worked with digital formats with a lot less latitude than the Red, wouldn’t understand that. Dod Mantle: Lars is one of the most technically knowledgeable and competent people I’ve ever worked with. More than anyone else on his films, he is fully capable of understanding any technical issue and finding a solution with you on the spot. Antichrist was an extremely complicated technical mosaic of cinematic experimentation and exploration camouflaged by a modest budget and a short shooting schedule. We got through, but not without moments of confusion and doubt, and those things tend to get inflated by people close to the creative core of the film who have motives of their own. Can you talk a bit about the scenes you shot using multiple passes? Dod Mantle: In one of the ‘visualization sequences,’ as we called them, She is traveling across the bridge in the forest. Lars and I had talked about going for the completely non-naturalistic look of a painting. I think that when you have images that last for up to 30 seconds in cinema, people start to perceive them differently, more like they would a painting. So we did many 72 November 2009
layers of high-speed photography and combined them [in post]. I’d light the scene naturalistically, and then I’d flip the lights in the other direction and shoot the water under the bridge at different frame rates, do passes for the foreground and for the background — basically anything we could do to destroy any naturalistic references. We brought in mist and fog and lit them differently for texture. It’s a painting, really. For Lars and me, these were some of the most enjoyable moments on the entire film. You did some of that work with a moving camera, didn’t you? Dod Mantle: Yes. We used a motion-control rig under the fine hands of Allan Ohlsson and my German grip, Bernd Maier. We were shooting multiple passes, but we wanted to stay away from the larger mo-co units. These shots were all worked out and storyboarded with [visual-effects supervisor] Peter Hjorth. We have worked together over the last 15 years, and Peter has been a great creative support for Lars on many films. An example of this work is the scene of He and She making love under a tree. I push in with a handheld camera to the back of his neck, and it settles. Then there is a quick, linear movement back that reveals all these human limbs reaching out from the roots of the tree. That’s an image Lars had in the
storyboards. He is a visionary, and he imagined this kind of transition without a cut that feels very different from the push in. The audience perceives the shot as seamless in one sequence, but the atmosphere of the shot, aside from the obvious addition of the human limbs, is different. It’s enigmatic. To me, it’s a transition from an earthly lovemaking scene to something that completely transcends that, a scene with apocalyptic undertones. The tree was built on location very near where we put up the house, and the ground was dug out underneath. The mo-co rig allowed us to do the whole thing in several passes; first was the portion with Charlotte and Willem, and then we did passes of the limbs, which belonged to about 18 enthusiastic male film students from Germany. I think we also used a few prosthetic limbs in places where people wouldn’t have been able to fit under the tree. Where did you do the digital grade, and what were some of the challenges of that work? Dod Mantle: We worked at Film I Vest in Trollhättan, Sweden, because Zentropa got funding from that sector. This meant we had to travel 500 kilometers to sit in front of a computer that would fit in my bathroom. Such is the world of film financing these days. I graded the film with one of my longtime collab-
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Dod Mantle’s portrait of the director illustrates one of the film’s flashback looks.
orators, Stefan Ciupek, and [colorist] Dirk Meier from Farbkult in Cologne; they were the biggest support to me throughout the project. The 2K workflow, from graded dailies through final filmout, worked so well under ridiculous time constraints. We graded on Digital
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Vision’s Film Master; the suite did not exist at the facility in Sweden before we got there, but Lars Dela worked very hard to get it up to scratch. I like to explore a lot in post, not just color and effects, but also different techniques. Portions of Antichrist are meant to be painterly,
and we did a lot of work with layering to achieve that. Some shots took eight hours to render! The shot of the woman over the bridge, approaching the house, had 25 layers. If there’s a machine that can do 60 layers, I’ll use them all! The hardest part actually wasn’t the more pictorial sequences or the black-andwhite sequences; it was balancing the naturalistic scenes inside the house. The filmout was done at the same facility, and the prints were turned around by my old colleagues at Nordisk Film in Copenhagen. All visual-effects material came from several post facilities in Poland and Sweden. The entire post team, led by Karin Maarbjerg, had to work very hard to make the Cannes deadline in time. Much of the color in the film is bold and saturated. What did you and Lars discuss about color? Dod Mantle: Green was a spe-
Photo by Anthony Dod Mantle.
The Root of All Evil
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cial color for Lars, and I’m known for my lack of love for the color green. And on digital systems, green is one of the worst colors to contend with. Lars had a very specific green in mind; he wanted you to feel like the forest is enveloping you, and he had a very clear idea about which hue of green would have that effect. Sometimes I would try to twist it around and tease him with something I thought might have a similar effect, but he always brought it back to what he liked. It’s very difficult to discuss these things if you and your director aren’t in the same room, looking at exactly the same calibrated display, and Lars stayed in Denmark during the grading sessions partially because he was not fit enough to travel and partially to complete the sound mix in time for Cannes. Sending the graded material to him only worked if Stefan or I could be in the room to hear his
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comments directly. But once we were able to look at shots together, there wasn’t a lot of time wasted on indecision. Lars is very specific about what he likes. From Frankenstein to The Exorcist, horror narratives frequently present scenarios in which science tries to conquer the natural or supernatural world. In Antichrist, the psychologist husband is up against … Dod Mantle: … something he can’t handle! Yes. Did you and Lars discuss this idea? Dod Mantle: Lars has been through a great deal of therapy for his depression and anxiety. He’s been open about that. All people have deep bouts of sadness or melancholy, fear or anxiety, and at times we all lose faith or trust in what we’re doing. I can only suspect Lars is dealing with something fundamental to
us all. Are humans more good than evil? Willem’s character implies he has solutions and wants to make everything work out, and when they don’t work out that way, the audience has to figure out who was right or wrong. I think the meaning of Antichrist is something people can debate forever. Films should create debate. That’s what ultimately keeps us alive in cinema. I
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Quality Viewing This year’s Emmy-nominated cinematographers enjoy the spotlight.
roomful of prominent cinematographers applauded television’s top behind-thecamera talents at Eastman Kodak’s 28th annual “Salute to Cinematography” dinner, held on Sept. 11 at the Bistro Garden in Studio City. Several ASC board members and past presidents attended the ceremony, joining an array of award-winning directors of photography. The level of accomplishment in the room did not go unnoticed by the nominees, who seemed awed to be surrounded by so many legendary cinematographers. That heady feeling continued at the actual Emmy ceremony, where the winners found themselves a bit stunned to be in the spotlight. Michael Weaver, who triumphed in the Half-Hour Series category for his work on the dramatic comedy Californication, summed up his feelings a few days later: “From a distance, you may think an award may not be all that
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important or meaningful. But when you’re standing there with that statue in your hand, you’re struck by how cool it is to be acknowledged by your peers. All the blood, sweat and tears you sacrifice during your career actually mean something, and people notice the work. It was an amazing honor, especially after the Kodak dinner, where you hang out with the other nominees and get to know them as people and fellow artists. There’s a mutual appreciation that puts it on a more personal level.” Echoing Weaver’s sentiments was Ousama Rawi, BSC, CSC, whose sumptuous period work on The Tudors won the Emmy for OneHour Series. “When I heard my name called, my first feeling was numbness. I had already persuaded myself that I wasn’t going to be the winner. Maybe I should have believed the fortune-cookie message I got at Chin Chin the night before the Kodak dinner; it said, ‘Be prepared to receive something
special.’ Once winning the award sank in, the feeling became one of elation. It is very special when your peers have decided your work deserves an honor.” Lukas Streibel, who won in the Miniseries or Movie category for Little Dorrit, shared his own anecdote: “The morning after my return to London, we had our burglar alarm checked. When the technician saw the golden angel on the kitchen table, he asked if I had won a badminton tournament — or was it ballroom dancing?” Also earning Emmys were cameramen Todd Liebler and Zach Zamboni, who won in the Nonfiction Programming category for Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations; and director of photography Derek Carver and cameramen Michael Applebaum, John Armstrong, Marc Bennett and Eric Freeburg, who topped the Reality Programming field with Out of the Wild: The Alaska Experiment.
Photos courtesy of Kodak.
Kodak held its annual dinner honoring cinematographers nominated for Emmy Awards. The gathering at The Bistro Garden in Studio City was a celebration of filmmaking with some of today’s most talented visual artists. (Front Row L-R): George Mooradian; Kramer Morgenthau, ASC; Michael Slovis; James Carter, ASC. (Back Row L-R): Lukas Strebel; Ivan Strasburg, BSC; John Aronson; Kodak’s Kim Snyder; Michael Trim; Mark Doering-Powell; Ousama Rawi, BSC, CSC; Michael Weaver; Matthew Clark.
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Following is a complete list of Emmy nominees (* denotes winner):
Outstanding Cinematography, Half-Hour Series
Outstanding Cinematography, Miniseries Or Movie
Matthew Clark 30 Rock, “Apollo, Apollo” (NBC) Mark Doering-Powell Everybody Hates Chris, “Everybody Hates Back Talk” (CW) George Mooradian According To Jim, “Heaven Opposed To Hell” (ABC) Michael Trim Weeds, “No Man Is Pudding” (Showtime) Michael Weaver* Californication, “In Utero” (Showtime)
Outstanding Cinematography, One-Hour Series Michael Slovis Breaking Bad, “ABQ” (AMC) James L. Carter, ASC CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, “For Warrick” (CBS) Kramer Morgenthau, ASC Life On Mars, “Out Here In The Fields” (ABC) Christopher Manley, ASC Mad Men, “The New Girl” (AMC) Ousama Rawi, BSC, CSC* The Tudors, “Episode 303” (Showtime)
Michel Amathieu, AFC Into The Storm (HBO) John Aronson Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story (TNT) Mike Eley Grey Gardens (HBO) Ivan Strasburg, BSC Generation Kill, “Combat Jack” (HBO) Lukas Strebel* Little Dorrit, “Part 1” (PBS)
Outstanding Cinematography, Nonfiction Programming Adam Beckman (director of photography) This American Life, “John Smith” (Showtime) Robert C. Case Whale Wars, “Nothing’s Ideal” (Animal Planet) Cinematography Team Deadliest Catch, “Stay Focused Or Die” (Discovery Channel) Cinematography Team Expedition Africa, “Episode 101” (History) Todd Liebler (camera), Zach Zamboni (camera)* Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, “Laos” (Travel Channel)
Outstanding Cinematography, Reality Programming Derek Carver (director of photography), Michael Applebaum (camera), John Armstrong (camera), Marc Bennett (camera), Eric Freeburg (camera)* Out of the Wild: The Alaska Experiment, “What Did I Sign Up For?” (Discovery Channel) Cinematography Team Survivor, “The Camp Is Cursed” (CBS) Bryan Donnell (director of photography) Intervention, “Chad” (A&E) Per Larsson (director of photography), Sylvestre Campe (camera), Petr Cikhart (camera), Tom Cunningham (camera), Peter Riveschl (camera) The Amazing Race, “Don’t Let A Cheese Hit Me” (CBS) Tim Spellman (director of photography) Top Chef, “The Last Supper” (Bravo) I
Above: Haskell Wexler, ASC congratulates Strasburg. Below: Aronson and Weaver chat about their accomplishments.
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Neil Armstrong repositions the Apollo 11 lunar TV camera about 70' from the lunar module after removing it from the MESA (Modular Equipment Storage Area).
One Giant Leap for Clarity by David Heuring The images from the July 1969 Apollo 11 moonwalk are burned into our collective consciousness. Neil Armstrong’s momentous hop from the ladder of the lunar landing module to the surface of the moon is a symbol of the 20th century and of humanity’s urge to explore. The millions who saw the murky black-and-white pictures on live television were group witnesses to history in a way that was wholly unprecedented; in recognition of the historic nature of the images captured on their space missions, Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins were made honorary members of the American Society of Cinematographers, joining luminaries like Thomas Edison and George Eastman on a very exclusive list. To mark the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, NASA entrusted the moonwalk images to Lowry Digital. The company’s résumé includes more than 400 restorations, including Citizen Kane, Rashomon and The Robe. Astonishingly, the original recordings of the video images transmitted from Apollo 11 to NASA did not survive. According to NASA, the original 1" videotape copies of this footage seem to have 78 November 2009
been degaussed, recertified and reused. At tracking stations in Australia and the United States, telemetry tapes recorded the transmissions from space, but a three-year search for these tapes proved unsuccessful. Lowry Digital’s work on the project was divided into two stages. From the roughly 21⁄2 hours of Apollo 11 video, 15 highlight sequences were selected and restored first so they would be ready in time for the anniversary. These 15 scenes represent the most significant moments of the 31⁄2 hours Armstrong and Aldrin spent on the lunar surface, including Armstrong’s “one small step,” the planting of the American flag, Aldrin running and jumping to demonstrate the moon’s weaker gravity, and a pause to take a congratulatory call from president Richard Nixon. The rest of the footage was restored in a second phase that was finished in September. The original images had been captured using a custom-designed video camera and beamed to earth at 10 fps. Armstrong’s famous descent of the ladder was captured while the camera was mounted on the leg of the Apollo 11 lunar landing module. Later, the camera was moved to a tripod, where it captured such images as the flag being planted and the astronauts toying with gravity.
The images were sent to Earth using slow-scan television (SSTV), a low-bandwidth mode of video communication. Scan converters, capable of 320 lines of resolution at 10 fps, were used to adapt these images to a standard U.S. NTSC broadcast TV signal (525 lines at 30 fps). The tracking sites converted the signals and transmitted them to Mission Control in Houston using microwave links, Intelsat communications satellites and AT&T analog landlines. By the time the images appeared on international television, they were substantially degraded. For the restoration, a team of Apollo-era engineers who helped produce the 1969 live broadcast of the moonwalk acquired the best of the broadcast-format video from a variety of sources. These included a copy of a tape recorded at NASA’s video-switching center in Sydney, Australia, where downlinked television was received for transmission to the U.S.; original broadcast tapes from the CBS News Archive recorded via direct microwave and landline feeds from NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston; and kinescopes, found in film vaults, that had not been seen for 36 years. Another source was a reel of 8mm film from a wind-up camera that had been handheld and aimed at a video monitor at a tracking site in Australia; this 8mm film includes the only existing copy of some brief portions of the telecast. One major puzzle for Lowry Digital was deciphering the various formats, frame rates and resolutions in the source material. Conversion techniques moved fields and frames ahead and back to make the 10 fps material work in 25 fps PAL or 30 fps NTSC. Other material had been translated to VHS format. The 8mm film images were recorded at 16 fps. All these different formats and translation techniques added their own artifacts and flaws to the images. In some cases, audio from the Apollo 11 mission
Photos courtesy of Lowry Digital.
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Top and middle: Before-and-after comparisons of the footage in which the astronauts plant the American flag on the moon. The footage was digitally restored utilizing Lowry Digital’s proprietary Lowry Process, which uses temporal imageprocessing science to reduce noise, improve detail and regain proper contrast, resolution and noise levels. Bottom: Patrick Edquist, project manager of the restoration, reviews footage.
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provided Lowry Digital with a reference for reproducing the proper speed of movements, which was sometimes distorted due to the various frame rates and standards conversions. Other issues included lag, smearing, and bleed; each of these problems required a specially tailored software solution designed by Lowry’s team. Some issues were introduced in the original photography — the camera had limited dynamic range and trouble compensating for the extreme contrast of light in space — while other problems were introduced in transmission, translation and recording; for example, the SSTV converter was sometimes unable to handle the blackest areas of the image and would revert to middle gray. Still other flaws were the result of the media aging over four decades. Lowry enlisted the help of Apolloera engineers to trace the various flaws back to their cause. “The NASA people provided us with very valuable information that helped us get to the bottom of these problems,” says senior algorithm scientist Kimball Thurston. “If you can understand what caused a problem, you are very often taking the first step toward defining a solution.” “To address these unique problems, our in-house team developed a range of specific proprietary tools,” says Lowry COO Mike Inchalik. “We did not use third-party software to repair or restore the Apollo images — all of the tools and image-processing functionality were written here and are exclusive to Lowry Digital.” For example, the facility developed “vignetting correction” that addressed the variations in brightness across the frame. (These variations are typical of an analog tube camera from that era.) The Lowry Process was also a crucial tool. This proprietary technique uses temporal image processing and powerful imaging algorithms to reduce noise and improve detail. The process compares information from a large number of consecutive frames in a sequence and uses the similarities and differences between those frames to regain proper contrast, resolution and
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noise level in each frame. According to Inchalik, “No one else has the tools we have invented over the past decade to remove a myriad of types of picture artifacts, or to reduce noise and increase image detail. Given that the original recordings of the Apollo 11 mission did not survive, this ability to deal with lost picture detail, as well as the increased noise and artifacts introduced after original photography, was essential.” Company founder John Lowry adds, “We applied a lot of the thinking that we apply to restoration generally. We try to ask, ‘What is it that we are trying to reproduce here?’ You walk a fine line all the time in that area.” Lowry utilized some basic thirdparty tools to streamline its system. One example is Nvidia Cuda, a code library used to accelerate the custom software built at Lowry. JMR’s BlueStor Extender also gave Lowry Digital’s team faster access to stored images at its Final Cut Pro workstation. In consultation, Lowry and NASA determined that some correctable flaws in the images, such as dirt and dust on the camera lens, should remain. “We could make these images ‘perfect,’ but at a certain point you begin to lose authenticity,” says Patrick Edquist, Lowry Digital’s project manager for the Apollo 11 restoration. “There are internal reflections from the camera lens that are clearly visible in the images as they were beamed to Earth, and after some discussion, NASA decided that those should be left in. The restored footage will be as improved as we can make it without changing the heart of it.” Inchalik adds, “After looking carefully at the options, NASA chose to treat Lowry Digital as a sole source provider for this restoration. That speaks to our proprietary technology and the picturequality improvements it can deliver. This work for NASA represents the first significant deployment of The Lowry Process outside the entertainment space. The underlying technology applies just as well to scientific, industrial, medical, security and military images. We’re excited by those opportunities.” The restored footage was deliv-
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Left: This camera was mounted upside-down in the Apollo 11 lunar module’s MESA compartment prior to launch. When Neil Armstrong pulled a D-ring on the module porch, the MESA door opened, and the camera recorded the image of Armstrong as he descended the ladder. Right: Stan Lebar, who worked for Westinghouse Electric Corporation in the Aerospace Division, developed the Apollo lunar TV cameras that recorded Armstrong’s first steps on the lunar surface. In his right hand, Lebar holds the Apollo color camera first used on Apollo 10 and later installed in the Apollo 11 command module. In his left hand is the Apollo 11 black-and-white lunar camera used on Apollo 9 and then on the moon by Armstrong.
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ered to NASA on hard drives as DPX files in HD resolution. NASA made video of the 15 highlight sequences available as part of its anniversary celebrations. Eventually, all of the Apollo 11 imagery will be part of a library of space-exploration materials accessible to television stations, schools and other educational outlets. Interestingly, the Apollo 11 project represented the closing of a
circle for John Lowry. In the 1970s, Lowry and his company Image Transform worked with NASA to improve images as they were sent back live from the Apollo 16 and 17 missions. Thanks to the tremendous growth in computing power over the past several decades, the ideas and methods developed by Lowry and Image Transform eventually grew into The Lowry Process, which serves as the heart of Lowry Digital’s current work.
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“It’s been a delight to revisit the Apollo program and the work we started 37 years ago,” says Lowry. “It’s been a tremendous privilege, and very exciting. For the Apollo 11 work, we started with some pretty rough images, and while they are much improved, they are still far [from] pristine. But it’s like sitting behind the lens of the camera itself: you are peering out into a world that is not what it was before. It’s not the way we are used to seeing it — it’s clearer. There are details and depth in the pictures that we have not seen before. It is quite a phenomenal experience to see that for
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the first time.”
Scenes from the Apollo 11 restoration effort can be found at http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/hd/ap ollo11.html. I
Left: Ed von Renouard was one of the first people to see the TV pictures coming down from Apollo 11. As Honeysuckle Creek’s video tech in Australia, his responsibility was to operate the slow-scan console that received the 10-fps/320-line picture from Apollo 11. He also operated the scan converter, which converted the lunar TV to U.S. standards of 30 fps and 525 lines. Here he is seen filming the monitor at Honeysuckle with a Super 8mm camera. Right: Lowry Digital founder and chief technologist John Lowry (seated) and project manager Patrick Edquist (far right) discuss the restoration with NASA’s Stan Lebar (left) and Richard Nafzger (second from left).
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New Products & Services DIGIC 4 Imaging Processors fuel the 7D’s 14-bit A/D data conversion and its ability to freeze fast motion in high-resolution with 8 fps continuous shooting for up to 126 Large JPEGs using a UDMA CF card. The camera can also capture beautiful low-light images with or without a flash thanks to a wide range of ISO speed settings from 100-6,400 (expandable to 12,800). In addition to its new stillcapture capabilities, the 7D features Full HD video capture at 1920x1080 resolution with selectable frame rates of 24p,
Fuji Adds Vivid 500 to Eterna Line Following the success of its Eterna Vivid 160 color negative film, Fujifilm has introduced Eterna Vivid 500 8547/8647. The tungsten-balanced stock boasts high color saturation thanks to an evolved version of the Eterna series’ Super Efficient DIRCoupler Technology; optimized gradation balance for attractive skin tones and grays across a wide range of exposure conditions; high contrast with crisp, deep blacks; and a seamless match with Vivid 160. Eterna Vivid 500 incorporates Fujifilm’s Super Nano-structured Grain technology, which precisely controls the light-sensitive structure of the silverhalide grain to nanoscale, resulting in extremely fine grain. The grain configuration is precisely engineered to a thickness that minimizes reflections, effectively limiting light scatter and boosting sharpness. Additionally, a yellow coupler has been developed for enhanced color formation effect during processing. Eterna Vivid 500’s optimized orange-mask density and sharpness balance result in improved scanning characteristics, and its excellent linear response and color balance facilitate 84 November 2009
color adjustment during telecine and digital-intermediate workflows while minimizing noise during scanning. Phedon Papamichael, ASC; Dion Beebe, ASC, ACS; and Kramer Morgenthau, ASC were recently tasked with putting the stock through its paces. “There was a nice amount of detail in the shadow, but I still got a very rich black,” notes Beebe. “The stock really held up under these quite extreme lighting conditions.” Morgenthau adds, “I would not hesitate to choose it for a wide variety of projects, especially something that calls for a very powerful, intense look.” Canon Releases EOS 7D Canon U.S.A., Inc. has introduced the EOS 7D Digital SLR camera. More than just an improvement on a previous model, the 7D satisfies the most rigorous professional requirements with durability, flexibility, highresolution images and customizable controls. The 7D boasts significant EOS advancements, including a 19-point Autofocus system, the Canon iFCL (intelligent Focus, Color and Luminance) Metering System and an intelligent viewfinder. An 18-megapixel, APS-Csized Canon CMOS sensor and Dual
25p or 30p; native 24p recording helps videographers achieve a more cinemastyle look for their footage without the need for post-processing. The camera also enables 720p HD recording at 50p or 60p and SD recording (in a 4:3 aspect ratio) at 50p or 60p. Compatible with more than 60 Canon EF and EF-S lenses, the 7D gives videographers fully manual exposure control, and the camera provides users with the capability to use an external stereo microphone for professional audio effects or the built-in monaural microphone. Coinciding with the 7D’s release, Canon has announced the WFT-E5A Wireless File Transmitter, exclusively for
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use with the EOS 7D. The WFT-E5A offers professional photographers a wide range of digital connectivity options — including IEEE802.11a/b/g and Ethernet — ideal for commercial and studio work. With the WFT-E5A, photographers can fire up to 10 cameras simultaneously, from across the room or across the country, while maintaining control over camera settings and remote live view on a laptop or smart phone. The WFT-E5A can also transfer and display images on DLNA-compatible televisions and photo frames, and geotagging is now possible via Bluetooth, using compatible GPS devices to append coordinate data to the images. The EOS 7D is available in a body-only configuration at an estimated retail price of $1,699; it is also sold in a kit version with Canon’s EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM zoom lens at an estimated retail price of $1,899. The WFTE5A sells at an estimated retail price of $699.99. For more information, visit www.usa.canon.com.
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mises and provides the image coverage of full [Super 35mm] in a lightweight and compact design.” The new 16-42mm zoom was developed by Thales Angenieux’s Academy Award-winning Optimo design team. The lightweight (4.2 pounds) PLmount lens boasts a fast aperture of T2.8, calibrated focus marks, no ramping or breathing, and a unique mechanical design for precise zoom and focus. For more information, visit www.angenieux.com. Cooke Unveils 5/i Primes Cooke Optics Ltd. has launched the 5/i prime lens series, designed for all PL-mount professional film and electronic cameras. “The development of the 5/i lenses has been a labor of love for us and we couldn’t be happier with the results,” says Les Zellan, chairman and owner of Cooke Optics. “We worked closely with the customers to create a truly unique prime lens, providing unmatched functionality yet preserving the luminous ‘Cooke look’ that marks our lenses out from the competition.” A key feature of the 5/i primes is a dimmable, illuminated focus ring with
two separately toggled scales (cinematographer and assistant), allowing the focus puller to read the scales in low lighting conditions. The aperture stops range from T1.4 to T22 across the line; the lenses available are 18, 25, 32, 40, 50, 65, 75, 100 and 135mm. Cooke 5/i optics offer superb optical and mechanical performance, control of flare, distortion, veiling glare and spherical aberrations at full aperture. The cam-type focus mechanism allows for smooth focus adjustments, 86 November 2009
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while the modular construction increases ease of maintenance and serviceability. The lenses are colormatched and compatible with the entire Cooke range, including S4/i and the new Panchro by Cooke. /i Technology is included as standard to provide vital camera information for postproduction pipelines. For more information visit www.cookeoptics.com.
Otto Nemenz Takes Delivery of Sony F35s Band Pro Film & Digital has announced that renowned rental house Otto Nemenz International — which is currently celebrating its 30th anniversary — has taken delivery of 10 new Sony F35 cameras. Otto Nemenz, president of Otto Nemenz International and an associate member of the ASC, explains, “With the help of our friends at Band Pro, we’re finally making the move to high definition. When they showed us the Sony F35 camera, we knew it was time. We take pride in offering our clients only the best products. The F35, together with our existing cine Cooke, Angenieux and Zeiss PL-mount lenses, gives us a system we’re proud to put our name on.” (Nemenz is seated at left in the above photo with, from left, Alex Wengert, Ryan Sheridan, Fritz Heinzle and ASC associate member Amnon Band.) The F35 CineAlta camera system captures 10-bit 4:4:4 images at 1 to 50 fps from a single, Super 35mm-sized sensor, which allows cinematographers to use familiar and comfortable 35mm PL-mount optics. For more information, visit www.bandpro.com or www.ottone menz.com.
Illumination Dynamics Moves to New Facility Illumination Dynamics, a member of the Arri Rental Group, has moved into a new location in San Fernando, Calif., featuring easy access, ample space and amenities for production crews. With 70,000 square feet of warehouse space to house the company’s expanding inventory of motion-picture lighting, grip, automated and theatrical lighting, HVAC equipment, and expendables, the rental house offers improved equipment accessibility, working environments and customer service. In addition to doubling the warehouse space, Illumination Dynamics provides 11,000 square feet of air-conditioned office, repair, conference and
demo rooms, including separate production offices with convenient telephone and Wi-Fi Internet connectivity. Repair facilities offer excellent maintenance inhouse as well as equipment servicing for customers. Dedicated entries and spacious loading docks for each department facilitate easy equipment pickup and return. For more information, visit www.illuminationdynamics.com. Denz Offers Flange Depth Controller Denz has introduced the Flange Depth Controller for PL-mount digitalvideo cameras, including the Red One, Sony F35, Arri D-21, Phantom HD and Weisscam HS-2. Based on a cross-fading principle, the FDC incorporates two lenses, which project two different masks onto the camera’s sensor. When the user turns the adjustment wheel on the FDC,
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the two projected masks shift; when the masks align, the precise flange depth — accurate to 1 Micron — can be read on the scale of the adjustment wheel. Weighing less than 1.5 pounds, the FDC can be powered by a DC 3-volt battery with an auto-off function or with an AC/DC adapter; the battery has an estimated operating time of 1,400 flange-depth measurements. For more information, visit www.denz-deniz.com. Handgrip System from Vocas Vocas Systems BV has introduced an affordable handgrip system for use with both 15mm and 19mm rails. Constructed of high-grade aluminum, the flexible, robust and lightweight handgrip system features a crown gear compatible with those of other leading brands, making the system easily interchangeable. Additionally, extender brackets offer more flexibility for various shooting situations, and real leather
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K-Cam Elevates POV Cameras K-Tek has introduced the K-Cam Camera Pole, designed to give users more creative options when working with mini HD cameras such as the Sony
HXR-MC1 and the Iconix Studio 2K. The K-Cam extends the user’s reach and provides an easy way to move the camera in and out of hard to reach places. The K-Cam Kit includes the Camera Pole; a lightweight, sturdy Swivel Adapter for mounting the camera; and a Monitor Adapter for anchoring the camera’s control unit and 2.7" LCD monitor to the body of the pole. (The Swivel Adapter can also be purchased separately.) Additionally, the Camera Pole is available in four models: the K-Cam72K traveler, which extends to 6'; the K-Cam99K, which extends to 8'3"; the K-Cam113K, which extends to 9'; and the K-Cam152K, which extends to 12'8". Like K-Tek’s Klassic Boom Poles, the Camera Poles are crafted of highdensity graphite fiber to ensure maximum strength at minimum weight. However, the Camera Poles feature a “beefier” top section to provide extra support. The poles’ telescoping sections are held in place through the company’s proprietary “captive collet” locking system, and locking collars are outfitted with a “Soft-Touch” rubber sleeve for an easy grip and comfortable touch. The mushroom pole base is molded from rugged polyurethane for optimum shock protection and long life. For more information, visit www.ktekbooms.com. Easy Calculations with pCam on iPhone The pCam graphical cinematography calculator created by David 88
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Eubank is now available as an application for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Designed for directors of photography, camera operators, camera assistants, visual-effects supervisors, gaffers, grips, editors, production designers, art directors and film students, pCam for iPhone boasts an easy-to-use graphical interface that helps the user understand how each calculation is applied. The application includes all of the correct HD and motion-picture camera manufacturers’ specs for image size and circles of confusion. Calculations available in pCam include depth of field, aperture finder, hyperfocal, field of view, framing preview, angle of view, exposure, running time to length of film, shooting time to screen time, HMI safe speeds and shutters, colorcorrection filters, diopter, macro, time lapse, underwater distance, scene illumination, light coverage and Siemens star. Calculations are made instantly and automatically as each entry is changed, and pCam saves entries until the user changes or resets them. Professional film and video formats compatible with pCam include 8mm, 16mm, 35mm, VistaVision, 65mm, 70mm, Imax, 2⁄3" CCD video and HD video. Global settings allow switching between English and Metric measuring systems, EI and ASA, and footcandles and Lux. Additionally, built-in instructions accompany each screen. For more information, visit www.davideubank.com. MatchLens Available on iPhone Developed by Don Matthew Smith, the MatchLens calculator application for the iPhone computes equivalent lens focal lengths to produce the same field of view between two cameras with different aperture/sensor
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“The beauty of a good film school is that it invites you to make mistakes, nthusiasm. but never dampens your en At LFS I made plenty, and ignited a passion.” Duncan Jones, MA Filmmaking graduate 2001. His debut feature MOON won the Michael Powell Award at Edinburgh for Best New British Film.
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sizes. Designed specifically for the movie industry, MatchLens covers 16mm, 35mm and high-definition video formats. The app also covers an extensive list of professional still and point-and-shoot digital camera formats, which can in turn be matched across all standards — film, video and still photography. For more information, visit www.indeliblepics.com. Blackmagic Design Acquires DaVinci Blackmagic Design has announced the purchase of all assets of DaVinci Systems LLC. Accordingly, Blackmagic Design will now offer DaVinci Resolve DI color-correction systems and DaVinci Revival film restoration products for sale worldwide. “I remember back in 1988 to the first day I started in postproduction and was shown the telecine suite with DaVinci,” says Grant Perry, CEO of Blackmagic Design. “I could not believe the quality of the images on the monitor, and that was the moment I fell in love with high-quality imaging and color-correction. … It’s been a while since I was a telecine engineer, however it’s incredibly exciting to be back involved with DaVinci again! We have a lot to live up to and many fantastic ideas, so it’s a very exciting time!” Blackmagic Design has initiated a wide-ranging restructuring of the DaVinci business. The new focus will be on the DaVinci Resolve color-correction and DaVinci Revival film-restoration products. DaVinci Resolve already has the power to handle complex color grades in real time even at native 4K resolutions and in stereoscopic 3-D. To accelerate development, the Resolve and Revival engineering teams have already been expanded, and further expansion is currently underway. Due to the age of the DaVinci 2K systems, which were originally 90 November 2009
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launched in 1999, Blackmagic Design will cease marketing 2K systems immediately. Support for 2K systems will continue, and spare parts are still available for customer repairs. Engineering will be dedicated to bug-fix updates and small feature releases. Annual support contracts will also immediately cease, and a new “pay as you go” system will be initiated so customers only need to pay if a fault occurs. Blackmagic Design believes this will save customers thousands of dollars of unused support payments. Customers can pay for any repairs required, and purchase and repair of secondhand DaVinci products will be supported when possible, improving the resale value of secondhand DaVinci products. For more information, visit www.blackmagic-design.com/davinci. DriveSavers Recovers P2 Cards DriveSavers, a leader in data recovery services, has announced that it has the capacity to successfully recover data from P2 solid-state memory cards. Roughly the size of a credit card, P2 cards house four highspeed, ultra-reliable flash memory cards laid out in a RAID array, which provides increased storage capacity and faster data transfer rates. These solid-state drives in rugged metal shells are a convenient and inexpensive way to store large amounts of digital data for high-definition video production. “P2 cards are considered to be one of the most durable video storage mediums available,” says Michael Hall, chief information security officer at DriveSavers. “But, like all removable media, they are inherently susceptible to physical failure and data will inevitably need to be recovered from these devices. We have successfully researched the cards and have the ability to overcome physical and logical failures to these devices.” For more information, visit www.drivesavers.com.
Scenechronize Makes Management Easy Clever Machine, a San Francisco-based software company, has launched Scenechronize, a Web-based application that offers users a true production-management system, giving producers, directors, department heads and crew 24/7 access to the most up-todate information for their film and television projects. From development to distribution, Scenechronize streamlines communications for the entire production, saving days of wasted time thanks to its automated management workflows. Whether the production involves 10 people or 200, all the vital elements — including script, breakdown, schedule, casting, location information,
reports, photos, video and dailies — are managed with up-to-the-minute information, available to the entire crew anytime, anywhere. Scenechronize’s easy-to-use interface enables anyone to get up and running in a matter of minutes. Timesaving features include automated script importing, script revision impact analysis, breakdown and scheduling. Users can organize information by scene and department, and store documents, photos and video for thorough record keeping. For more information, visit www.scenechronize.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.
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Advertiser’s Index 16x9, Inc. 92 AC 1, 53 AFI Film Festival 97 Aja Video Systems, Inc. 13 Alan Gordon Enterprises 92, 93 Arri 41 Backstage Equipment, Inc. 89 Bron Kobold 6 Burrell Enterprises 92 Camelot Broadcasting Service 87 CameraImage 73 Cavision Enterprises 17 Chapman/Leonard Studio Equipment Inc. 23 Cinema Vision 93 Cinematography Electronics 88 Cinekinetic 92 Cinerover 92 Clairmont Film & Digital 27 Cmotion 83 Convergent Design 46 Cooke Optics 19, 45 CTT Exp. & Rentals 47 Deluxe C2 Eastman Kodak 5, C4 EFD USA, Inc. 43, 82 Evidence Productions 93 Filmtools 89 Five Towns College 87 FTC West 92 Fuji Motion Picture 55
94 November 2009
Glidecam Industries 7 GV Technology Expo 79
Reel FX 6 Rosco Laboratories, Inc. 64
Innoventive 81 Innovision 93
SAE Institute 71 Sim Video Productions, Ltd. 25 Sony Electronics, Inc. 11 Stanton Video Services 85 Sundance Film Festival 95 Super16 Inc. 93 Sylvania 15
JEM Studio Lighting, Inc. 53 J.L. Fisher 21 K 5600, Inc. 57 Kino Flo 74 Koerner Camera Systems 81 Laffoux Solutions, Inc. 92 Laser Pacific 91 Lentequip, Inc. 93 Lights! Action! Company 92 Litepanels 2 London Film School 89
Technicolor Content & Theatrical 9 Telescopic 92 Thales Angenieux 32-33 Tiffen C3
Matthews Studio Equipment 93 Mole-Richardson Company 92, 93 Movie Tech AG 92 MP&E Mayo Productions 93 MSM Design 71
Walter Klassen FX 56 Willy’s Widgets 92 www.theasc.com 4, 88
Nevada Film Commission 31 New York Film Academy 29 Oppenheimer Camera Prod. 92 Otto Nemenz 63 P+S Technik 19, 45, 93 PED Denz 85, 93 Photon Beard 93 Photo-sonics, Rental 65 Pille Film Gmbh 93 PLC Electronic Solutions 75 Pro8mm 92 Professional Sound Services 6
VF Gadgets, Inc. 92
Zacuto Films 93 ZGC, Inc. 19, 45, 93
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Sundance Film Festival, Park City Utah, January 21-31
sundance.org/festival
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In Memoriam Richard Moore, ASC, 1925-2009 ichard Moore, ASC, co-founder of Panavision and recipient of the Society’s 2004 Presidents Award, died on Aug. 16 at the age of 83 in Palm Springs, Calif. Moore was born in Jacksonville, Ill., and his family moved to Los Angeles when he was 7. After graduating from University High during World War II, he
R
enrolled in the U.S. Navy’s ROTC program at the University of Southern California. A longtime interest in photography eventually brought him to USC’s cinema department. “That was somewhat unusual in those days,” he stated during a 1998 interview. “But it was really the only way I could see to somehow get into the movie business, which was something I very much wanted to do.” Moore served in the navy from 1943-1946 and was a photographic officer aboard the USS Montpelier. After graduating from USC in 1947, he found his prospects for employment at the studios were nonexistent. He made a living by doing odd jobs and taking on occasional work as a cinematographer for independent productions. “I once shot a travelogue and got a free trip to Europe, and while I was there, I wangled a meeting with Dr. August Arnold at the Arriflex factory in Munich,” he recalled. 96 November 2009
“He showed me their Arri IIA newsreel camera, the first reflex camera, and it really blew me away. I came back to Hollywood with the sole right to distribute it in the western United States.” Moore soon found himself in business with a college pal, future ASC member Conrad Hall. Moore recalled, “The people who made decisions in the movie business were very stodgy at the time. We took the camera around to all the heads of camera department at the studios, but no one was interested, and we went bust very quickly.” Shortly after that, Moore was introduced to Robert Gottschalk by a mutual friend. Gottschalk had been experimenting with underwater housings for motion-picture cameras and drew Moore into his efforts. Eventually, they discovered that once cameras were submerged, the coverage of conventional lenses became narrow because of the water’s index of refraction. Their various solutions for dealing with this issue led to what became the industry’s finest anamorphic projection lenses. It also sparked the creation of Panavision, a company that changed the face of motion-picture production. “Panavision took off really quickly,” said Moore. “CinemaScope was breaking out, and we could barely keep up with the demand for our product. Soon, we started building taking lenses, and then we got into the design and manufacture of 35mm and 65mm cameras. In 1959, Doug Shearer, Gottschalk and I were given an Academy Sci-Tech Award for the 65mm system used to photograph Ben-Hur [1959], among many other movies. Then it was right to the moon!” Soon, however, Moore became restless. “I wanted to get back to what I had originally gotten into the business for: being a director of photography.” After a brief stint as an assistant
cameraman and camera operator to qualify for union membership, Moore was hired as the cinematographer on the CBS series Daktari, in 1964. He then began a long, successful run as a freelancer. He often collaborated with Lamar Boren, ASC, most notably for the underwater sequences on the James Bond film Thunderball (1965). Moore’s big break as principal cinematographer came with John Huston’s The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972). Moore recalled, “Of all the directors I knew, Huston was the one most open to everyone’s ideas, not least of which were my own. He was a gentleman and had total control over what he was doing. That experience put me in a totally different class.” He reteamed with Huston on Annie (1982). Moore became an ASC member in 1975. His cinematography credits include the features The Scalphunters (1968), The Rievers (1969), Winning (1969), Myra Breckinridge (1970), WUSA (1970) and Sometimes a Great Notion (1971). He directed the feature Circle of Iron (1978). “I had a tremendously enjoyable career,” Moore observed. “I loved being on location, and I loved working with individuals who were really interested in what they were doing. I was well paid and had a ton of unique experiences. Who could ask for more from a job?” Moore is survived by his daughter, Marina; son, Stephen; sister-in-law, Mary Moore; and nephew, Joel Moore. — Richard Crudo, ASC I
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Willis to Receive Honorary Oscar The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences will present an Honorary Academy Award statuette to Gordon Willis, ASC, on Nov. 14 in Los Angeles. The presentation will be part of the inaugural Governors Awards ceremony, which will be held in the Grand Ballroom at Hollywood & Highland. “It’s a terrific honor,” Willis told AC. “I’m a little stunned. These things usually happen after they throw the last bucket of earth on you, so I’m glad I’m still standing!” Born in New York City, Willis began his cinematography career in 1970 with the feature End of the Road. He shot more than 30 pictures, including the Godfather trilogy, Annie Hall, All the President’s Men, Manhattan, Klute, Zelig, Pennies From Heaven and The Purple Rose of Cairo. He earned an Academy Award nomination for Zelig and Academy and ASC award nominations for The Godfather Part III. The ASC presented him with its Lifetime Achievement Award in 1995. Honorary Oscars, which will also be presented this year to Lauren Bacall, John Calley and Roger Corman, recognize extraordinary distinction in lifetime achievement, exceptional contributions to the state of motion-picture arts and sciences, or outstanding service to the Academy. “These individuals have made lasting impressions on the industry and audiences worldwide,” said Tom Sherak, president of AMPAS. “I’m thrilled that [they were] selected to be honored at our new Governors Awards event, which will be full of memorable moments celebrating their accomplishments.”
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Schaefer Visits Mexico Roberto Schaefer, ASC recently gave a roundtable talk organized by AC and hosted by Henner Hofmann, ASC, AMC at the inaugural Proa Mexico expo in Mexico City. The show attracted more than
Roberto Schaefer, ASC (left) and Henner Hofmann, ASC, AMC in Mexico.
3,500 attendees and showcased 120 exhibitors specializing in production and postproduction. The Mexico production scene yields more than 100 features every year, along with a variety of commercials, music videos and television programming; it also plays host to 87 film festivals. Hofmann and Schaefer’s hourlong chat was attended by industry professionals and students from Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica, where Hofmann was recently named director. Schaefer screened a selection of his work in commercials and features and discussed his collaborations with director Marc Forster, with whom he has teamed on eight features, including Quantum of Solace. The students quizzed Schaefer about his experiences with digital capture, including his work with the Red One camera on Leaves of Grass, directed by Tim Blake Nelson. Schaefer’s visit to Mexico City included another symposium at CCC and interaction with some of the local production houses, including Simplemente and EFD. Thinking back on his time in Mexico, Schaefer says, “I found
the genuine enthusiasm of the local filmmakers and students to be really infectious, and I would love to have the chance to work with some Mexican and other Latin American directors. I’ve worked with many non-Americans and really appreciate the varying ways of seeing the world and telling stories. “I’ve done seminars at schools around the United States, but this was my first time doing this kind of event outside of the country,” he adds. “I hope to do many more.” — Noah Kadner Dryburgh, Hurwitz, Stacey Join Society Born in the United Kingdom, Stuart Dryburgh, ASC spent most of his childhood and young-adult life in New Zealand, where he earned a bachelor of architecture degree from Auckland University. His first forays into New Zealand’s film industry came on such features as Middle Age Spread, Good-Bye Pork Pie and Smash Palace, and from 1979 to 1985, he worked as a gaffer on numerous international features and commercials. Dryburgh’s first credits as a cinematographer came on short films, music videos and commercials. In 1989, he shot An Angel at My Table for director Jane Campion, and the pair re-teamed for The Piano, which earned Dryburgh ASC and Academy award nominations in 1994. His
Willis, Dryburgh photos by Douglas Kirkland. Proa Mexico photo by Saul Molina. “Motion-Picture Canvas” photo by Todd Wawrychuk, ©AMPAS.
Clubhouse News
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feature credits include Analyze This, Bridget Jones’s Diary and Nim’s Island. Tom Hurwitz, ASC began his film career while attending Columbia University, where he majored in English and religion. As a student, he apprenticed in cutting rooms and worked as a production assistant. In 1967, with Peter Gessner, he co-produced and directed the documentary Last Summer Won’t Happen, cementing his love affair with the camera. After working as a still photographer, Hurwitz began working as a camera assistant on commercials, and later as a gaffer for commercials and features. He began earning cinematography credits on documentaries, commercials, features and telefilms, and in 1991, he decided to focus on shooting documentaries. His credits include Valentino: The Last Emperor, Wild Man Blues, Down and Out in America and The Turandot Project. He has served as an adjunct professor in the undergraduate film program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and he is currently writing the curriculum for an MFA program in social documentary for the School of Visual Arts in New York. Terry Stacey, ASC traveled to New York City after studying at the University of Manchester in England. He found work at the Collective for the Living Cinema, shooting and editing Super 8mm shorts and experimental music videos. After touring South America with a 16mm Bolex, Stacey returned to England to work as a documentary cameraman. He eventually returned to New York and began notching credits on independent features such as Love God, Spring Forward, American Splendor (AC April ’03) and Winter Passing (AC Feb. ’06). His credits include The Nanny Diaries (AC May ’07), P.S. I Love
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You and Adventureland. He has also written and directed a number of short films, including Bad Liver & a Broken Heart. Clark, Hsui Named Associates Associate member Adam Clark began his career in the film industry in 1994 as a positive developer for Deluxe Laboratories. In 1995, he was promoted to positive-developing shift boss, and in 1996 he ventured into answer printing, using wetgate, M-printers and C-printers. He then spent two years as a negative color timer, working on a Hazeltine color analyzer, and in 1999 he became a positive color timer, working with cinematographers to time answer prints for feature releases. Since 2003, Clark has served as dailies supervisor for Deluxe’s Hollywood facility. Before venturing into filmmaking, associate member Cliff Hsui began his career in Hong Kong and Taiwan’s musicrecording industry. He transitioned into shooting and directing music videos for Sony Music in Taiwan, and then decided to continue his studies at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and at FAMU in Prague. Following his studies, Hsui began working as a camera assistant, and he then made the move to digital-imaging technician. He currently serves as senior vice president of marketing and technologies for Sim Video Los Angeles. He also works as a DIT and volunteers for the Training SubCommittee on Data Handling for IATSE Local 600. Deschanel, Dykstra Launch Academy Panel Society members Caleb Deschanel and John Dykstra recently hosted “Astronaut as Filmmaker,” presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences’ Science and Technology Council. The event explored the relationship between NASA and motion pictures, with a particular focus on the recent mission of the crew of the space shuttle Atlantis to service the Hubble Space Telescope. Atlantis mission specialists Michael T. Good,
Andrew J. Freustel, Michael J. Massimino and John M. Grunsfeld; pilot Gregory C. Johnson; and Commander Scott D. Altman were present for the event. The astronauts showed clips from their 13-day mission and discussed the challenges and revelations of filming in space with digital and Imax 3-D cameras. ASC Members Go Behind Motion-Picture Canvas ASC associate member Rob Hummel recently presented “Behind the Motion-Picture Canvas,” kicking off a three-day focus on the history and evolution of motion-picture formats at the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. Following the illustrated lecture, which featured clips from The Great Train Robbery, The Adventures of Robin Hood, Lady and the Tramp and The Sound of Music, Hummel was joined onstage by ASC members Stephen H. Burum, Allen Daviau, John Bailey and Caleb Deschanel. The special focus on film formats continued with screenings of new prints of Manhattan, photographed by Gordon Willis, ASC, and The Black Stallion, shot by Deschanel.
ASC associate Rob Hummel (left) is joined by ASC members Stephen Burum, Allen Daviau, John Bailey and Caleb Deschanel at the Academy.
Edlund Discusses Beckett Richard Edlund, ASC recently participated in a panel discussion about the work of the late animator and visualeffects artist Adam Beckett. The program, “Infinite Animation: The Work of Adam Beckett,” was presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and included a screening of Life in the Atom, a short film Beckett left unfinished when he died in 1979 at the age of 29. Beckett’s work ran the gamut from experimental art films to heading the rotoscope and animation department on Star Wars. I
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ASC CLOSE-UP Anastas Michos, ASC
Which cinematographers, past or present, do you most admire, and why? Philippe Rousselot, ASC, AFC, whose sparse lighting portrays the most complex of emotions; Vittorio Storaro, ASC, AIC, for his use of color; Chris Doyle, HKSC, for his intuitive eye for framing; Robert Richardson, ASC, who has defined a style all his own; and Haskell Wexler, ASC, for his iconic body of work and never-ending enthusiasm. Also, César Charlone, ABC; Roger Deakins, ASC, BSC; Nestor Alméndros, ASC; Conrad Hall, ASC … . Where do I stop? What sparked your interest in photography? One summer, when I was a bored teenager, I found an old 2x2 still camera rattling around in a box. I’d shoot, guessing at exposures, and marvel at the happy accidents. Where did you train and/or study? Much to my regret, I didn’t attend film school. I read voraciously about film theory and technique, and I haunted art museums and photography galleries. Of course, I also went to the movies — lots of movies. Who were your early teachers or mentors? Garrett Brown, whose mastery of the moving camera and ability to transpose our three-dimensional world into a two-dimensional one continues to amaze me, and Philippe Rousselot, whose mantra “fill the frame” when composing shots of the human face stayed with me long after I operated for him. I’d like to thank both of them. As a camera operator, I learned from every cinematographer I worked with; sometimes, I learned what not to do. What are some of your key artistic influences? I try to give each film I photograph its own look by researching it meticulously using both obvious and improbable sources. I look for a point of view that’s unique to the script and then explore it. Having said that, some artists that move me are (in no particular order) Caravaggio, Miles Davis, Sebastiao Salgado, Erik Satie, David Allen Harvey, Georges de La Tour, Johannes Vermeer, Gordon Parks, Joaquín Rodrigo, Romare Bearden, Constantine Cavafy, John Coltrane and Nikos Kazantzakis. How did you get your first break in the business? When I was a non-union documentary assistant, I was introduced to Garrett Brown and a little project called Skycam, the precursor to all the ‘flying rigs.’ I went on to operate Steadicam and work on many music videos and commercials until I finally landed a job on a no-/low-budget union feature. What has been your most satisfying moment on a project? Any time my agent says, ‘They’d like to make you an offer.’ Actually, it’s probably when I’m sitting with the timer and we’re screening the answer print; that’s when I decide whether I was successful in fulfilling whatever vision the director and I defined way back in prep.
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Have you made any memorable blunders? The first day of shooting Man on the Moon, my first ‘big Hollywood feature,’ we were on Universal’s lot. Both nervous and early, I decided to calm down by stopping at Jerry’s Deli for a coffee and The New York Times. As I was reading the Op-Ed page, my cell phone rang. It was the assistant director, wondering how long I’d be stuck in traffic. It turns out I’d read my call sheet wrong, and I was well over an hour late! I arrived at the studio to see the flashing red light outside the stage door. With heart in throat, I walked in to see my director, Milos Forman, in the middle of rehearsal, and producer Michael Housman, who had championed me for the job, pacing. Luckily, my friends had my back: camera operator Mitch Dubin was setting up the first shot (a Technocrane extravaganza), and gaffer Jack English and key grip Chris Centrella were lighting the scene. Housman only growled at me. What is the best professional advice you’ve ever received? I was working with Don McAlpine, ASC, ACS, and getting impatient watching the director, producer and assistant director endlessly discuss the next setup. Don turned to me and said in his inimitable Aussie drawl, ‘Relax. Sooner or later they’ll have to come over to talk to us.’ What recent books, films or artworks have inspired you? The films Three Monkeys and Il Divo were wonderfully and inventively photographed. Lynn Nottage’s play Ruined resonated with me; Lauren Flanigan’s performance at Carnegie Hall was transcendent; and Kehinde Wiley’s exhibit at the Studio Museum of Harlem was superb. The Invention of Everything is a magical novel that reimagines Nikola Tesla’s life. Do you have any favorite genres, or genres you would like to try? I’d like to shoot a sailing film, although I know anyone in his or her right mind should stay away from working on the water. If you weren’t a cinematographer, what might you be doing instead? Had I the talent and discipline, I’d be a composer or conductor. Photojournalism would be a strong second choice. Which ASC cinematographers recommended you for membership? Haskell Wexler, Philippe Rousselot and Sol Negrin. How has ASC membership impacted your life and career? It allows me the chance to engage with the next generation of cinematographers through ASC workshops, panel discussions and lectures, all of which I greatly enjoy. It’s also an honor to be in the same fraternity as so many acknowledged masters. I
Photo by Claudette Barius.
When you were a child, what film made the strongest impression on you? Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). I was 4 or 5 when I saw it, and the evil queen had me peeking out from behind my seat.
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n? io t u ll o p IR o t n io t Looking for a solu
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ONFILM O NFILM LEX DU PONT T:: O N F I L M
““One One of of the the things things about about lighting lighting an an episodic episodic on ttelevision elevision sseries eries iiss tthat hat yyou ou aare re sshooting hooting o n tthe he ssame ame m ain ssets ets eevery ve r y w eek. Y ou n eed tto ofi nd main week. You need find w ays to to kkeep eep iitt ffresh resh aand nd visually visually interesting, interesting, ways yyet et right right for for the the stories. stories. One One of of the the great great tthings hings about about working working on on NYPD NYPD Blue Blue for for eight eight yyears ears was was that that we we tried tried all all kinds kinds of of different different tthings. hings. I lit lit the the squad squad room room more more than than 1,000 1,000 but ttimes. imes. It It doesn’t doesn’t have have to to be be complicated, co m p l i c a t e d , b ut yyou ou need need to to llight ight ffor or tthe he subject subject matter matter aand nd n ot be be obtrusive. obtrusive. There There is is so so much much talk talk about about not but don’t ttechnology, echnology, b ut I d on’t tthink hink tthe he rrole ole tthat hat cinematographers play cinematographers p lay is is going going to to cchange. h a n ge . The p l a ce w here fi lm rreally eally ssmokes mokes d igital The place where film digital media off tthe m edia iiss iin n tthe he ccomplexity o m p l ex i ty o he ttonalities onalities off colors. o colors. A character’s character’s skin skin tones tones aare re llike ike ssilent ilent dialogue. dialogue. I tell tell students students and and young young crew crew members m embers that that the the future future is is now. now. I tell tell them them to to master m aster tthe he aart rt aand nd ccraft raft of of using using the the complex co m p l ex ttonalities onalities o olors, which which play play a subtle subtle but but off ccolors, iimportant mportant role role in in the the storytelling storytelling tthat hat w o.” wee d do.” LLex ex du du Pont’s Pont’s cinematography cinematography ccredits re d i t s NYPD iinclude nclude N YPD Blue, Blue, Raines, Raines, Lincoln Lincoln Heights, Heights, Private Practice. His SSaving aving Grace Grace and and P r i va t e P ra c t i c e . H is ffeature eature ffilm ilm ccredits redits iinclude nclude C o n fe s s i o n s Confessions Saving ooff a Sexist Sexist Pig Pig aand nd S aving SShiloh. hiloh. [All these programs programs w were ere shot on Kodak Kodak motion picture picture film.] FFor or an an extended extended iinterview nterview w with ith LLex ex d du uP Pont, ont, visit w ww.kodak.com/go g /onfilm. visit www.kodak.com/go/onfilm. To T o or order der K Kodak odak motion picture picture film, fi call (800) 621-film. 621-film. www.motion.kodak.com www .motion.kodak.com © Eastman Kodak Kodak Company, Company, 2009. 20 009. Photography: Phot ography: © 2009 Douglas Kirkland
