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30 An Angry Young ManLance Gewer lends emotional intensity to the South African drama Tsotsi
42 Heart and SoulEllen Kuras, ASC captures a memorable concert performance in Neil Young: Heart of Gold
50 Retro SexyMott Hupfel frames an erotic icon in The Notorious Bettie Page
58 A Master’s PaletteJack Cardiff, BSC recalls his stunning work with three-strip Technicolor
66 A Style of SubtletySydney Pollack is honored by the ASC for his filmmaking achievements
Departments
Features
Visit us online at www.theasc.com
On Our Cover: A young South
African gangster (Presley Chweneyagae)experiences major lifechanges in Tsotsi, shot
by Lance Gewer.(Photo by Blid
Alsbirk, courtesy of Miramax Films.)
8 Editor’s Note10 President’s Desk14 DVD Playback20 Production Slate72 Short Takes76 Post Focus81 New Products & Services86 Points East90 International Marketplace91 Classifieds92 Ad Index93 Clubhouse News94 ASC Membership Roster96 ASC Close-Up
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M A R C H 2 0 0 6 V O L . 8 7 N O . 3
The International Journal of Film & Digital Production Techniques
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M a r c h 2 0 0 6 V o l . 8 7 , N o . 3The International Journal of Film & Digital Production Techniques • Since 1920
Visit us online at
www.theasc.com————————————————————————————————————
PUBLISHER Martha Winterhalter————————————————————————————————————
EDITORIALEXECUTIVE EDITOR Stephen Pizzello
SENIOR EDITOR Rachael K. Bosley
ASSOCIATE EDITOR Douglas Bankston
TECHNICAL EDITOR Christopher Probst
CONTRIBUTING WRITERSStephanie Argy, Benjamin B, Robert S. Birchard, John Calhoun, Bob Davis,
Bob Fisher, Simon Gray, Hugh Hart, Jim Hemphill, David Heuring, Jay Holben, Ron Magid, Jean Oppenheimer, John Pavlus, Chris Pizzello, David Samuelson,
Jon Silberg, Kenneth Sweeney, Patricia Thomson, David E. Williams
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ASC STAFF ACCOUNTANT Diella Nepomuceno————————————————————————————————————American Cinematographer (ISSN 0002-7928), established 1920 and in its 87th year of publication, is published
monthly in Hollywood by ASC Holding Corp., 1782 N. Orange Dr., Hollywood, CA 90028, U.S.A.,(800) 448-0145, (323) 969-4333, Fax (323) 876-4973, direct line for subscription inquiries (323) 969-4344.
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4
When creative minds like James Cameron and Robert Rodriguez want to take HighDefinition to extremes, they turn to noted cinematographer and innovator Vince Pace.
And when Pace looks to push the envelope, he turns to Band Pro. “I do the things otherssay can’t be done,” says Pace. “Having the right support to make the director’s vision a reality is invaluable. No one understands the intricacies of High Definition equipment like Band Pro.”
From top HD tools like Sony F950 cameras, Zeiss DigiPrime® and DigiZoom™ lensesto SR-1 technology, it’s all in Band Pro’s warehouse. “I know I can always turn to them forthe quality tools my projects dictate,” Pace explains. But what really makes the difference,he adds, is the unmatched experience of Band Pro experts like Jeff Cree and Michael Bravin.“When taking HD to the extremes, that experience is invaluable. It’s the support I can dependon while pushing the boundaries—like the Pace Technologies adaptation ofthe Sony F950—the Advantage camera.
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OFFICERS - 2005/2006Richard P. Crudo
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Owen RoizmanVice President
Daryn OkadaVice President
Curtis ClarkVice President
Russ AlsobrookTreasurer
Michael GoiSecretary
Kees Van OostrumSergeant-at-Arms
MEMBERS OF THE BOARDRussell P. Carpenter
Curtis ClarkRichard P. Crudo
George Spiro DibieRichard EdlundFrancis Kenny
Isidore MankofskyDaryn Okada
Woody OmensOwen RoizmanNancy Schreiber
John TollRoy Wagner
Haskell WexlerVilmos Zsigmond
ALTERNATESJohn Hora
Stephen LighthillMichael Goi
Kees Van OostrumRuss Alsobrook
MUSEUM CURATORSteve Gainer
American Society of CinematographersThe 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
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This month’s special focus on independent productionsled us to investigate a number of intriguing projectsthat reflected the indie ethos either in concept or
budget.While attending the AFI Fest in Hollywood last
fall, senior editor Rachael Bosley was impressed byLance Gewer’s cinematography on the South Africandrama Tsotsi, which tells the story of a young gangsterwho begins to change his violent ways after takingcharge of a newborn baby left behind during a carjack-ing (“An Angry Young Man,” page 30). The film’simagery reflects the teen’s emotional and psychological
evolution in understated ways. “The cinematography of Tsotsi lies in interiors, theemotional states of the characters,” says Gewer, whose earlier work had earned theadmiration of director Gavin Hood. “There isn’t much camera movement, and whenthere is a move it’s always dictated by the choreography of the characters and the story.Our work was more about keeping the camera quite still, exercising restraint, studyingthe characters and trying to get to know them quite intimately. We worked with theemotional beats of the story, trying to catch every nuance and implication.”
Inner emotions are also on display in Neil Young: Heart of Gold, a visually raptur-ous concert film shot by Ellen Kuras, ASC for director Jonathan Demme (who previouslydemonstrated his innovative approach to the genre with the 1984 Talking Heads filmStop Making Sense). The cinematographer’s ardent enthusiasm for Young’s music isreflected in her evocative work on the picture, which represents a record of two showsstaged at Nashville’s historic Ryman Auditorium. Kuras took full advantage of a seriesof painted backdrops created by Michael Zansky: “They’re like landscapes of memory,which echoes the Canadian prairie/childhood Neil sings about, without being literal.We wanted each song to be like a painting within a painting.” She offers many otherinsights in a piece penned by New York correspondent John Pavlus (“Heart and Soul,”page 42).
The Notorious Bettie Page also demonstrates an affection for its real-life inspi-ration, a pinup model who became an erotic icon after posing for a series of fetishphotos during the uptight 1950s. Despite the project’s modest budget, cinematographerMott Hupfel and director Mary Harron took an ambitious approach to the picture’s visu-als, shooting primarily in black-and-white but also employing splashes of vivid, eye-catching color. Hupfel detailed his full range of strategies for New York scribe JohnCalhoun (“Retro Sexy,” page 50).
Other notable indie projects are also on offer in this month’s installments ofProduction Slate (page 20), Short Takes (page 72) and Post Focus (page 76).
This issue also features salutes to a pair of cinematic titans: cinematographerJack Cardiff, BSC, who recalled his triumphant work in three-strip Technicolor for histo-rian Robert S. Birchard (“A Master’s Palette,” page 58), and producer/director/actorSydney Pollack, who was profiled by David E. Williams after earning the ASC’s Board ofGovernors Award (“A Style of Subtlety,” page 66).
Stephen PizzelloExecutive Editor P
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Editor’s Note
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8
10 March 2006
Currently, a movement is afoot in the United States to make the camera operator a negotiable,elective position. The adoption of this practice will essentially put an end to the operator’s pres-ence on our crews, save for exceptional cases. In my opinion, there is no possible way to justify
such a misguided idea. If this horrifying prospect actually becomes reality, it won’t just be the oper-ators who will feel the repercussions — the entire industry will suffer.
While the tiniest percentage of cinematographers still choose to keep their own eyes to thefinder, the rest of us (myself included) believe strongly in the vital, indispensable role of the cameraoperator. There are a number of reasons why this way of working has been the industry standardfor more than 80 years, and any one of them is compelling enough justification for the mandatoryinclusion of this individual on our crew.
Camera operating is a full-time, full-attention job. Maintaining composition; enforcingeyelines; executing smooth moves; watching focus; noting errant shadows and objects; flagginganomalies in hair, makeup, costumes and set dressing — all of these duties are performed in realtime as the camera is running. Operators must also serve as fully deputized liaisons with the other
departments; help to determine equipment needs; help to refine blocking; and otherwise assist the cinematographer in any of ahundred different ways. Plainly, these responsibilities require the complete and undivided attention of a single person.
From their position behind the lens, camera operators are the first to see our work, and they do so in infinitely greater detailthan anyone in video village; only their word is immutable when it comes to the question of whether you’ve got the shot. Mostcinematographers have done their share of operating on low- or no-budget films. Speaking from experience, much of the execu-tion is intuitive — similar, in a sense, to making music. If any distraction is indulged, even for an instant, the shot will already beblown. From any perspective, serving as cinematographer is an all-encompassing pursuit; when you do both jobs at the same time,one or the other is inevitably shortchanged.
Camera operating is a unique talent and is not part of every cinematographer’s skillset. Ever see someone new to thegeared head attempt to use it? It’s like watching a camel try to climb a ladder. Even the relatively simpler fluid head demands atremendous sensitivity in order to be handled effectively. While most cinematographers like to think of themselves as good oper-ators, the truth is that many of us are better at imitating camels.
Although there are aspects of the operator’s job that can be learned and improved upon, the essence of it is nothing shortof a God-given ability. The qualities that elevate some operators are the same intangibles that allow certain cinematographers toachieve greatness: superior taste and artistry. The best operators always move their eyes during the shot and make literallyhundreds of minute and organic adjustments on the fly. Their ability to think on their feet — not only to flirt with perfection, butto rescue what might surely end up as a busted take — makes them worth 10 times their pay in their real value to a production.
Then there are the overtly physical attributes. Hand-to-eye coordination is a given, as are a good set of legs and a strongback. Operators often find themselves working from some unusually contorted positions. And imagine shooting a 90-day sched-ule, sometimes completely handheld. If lighting that much of a film isn’t enough to kill you, I promise that the additional wear andtear of operating at the same time will do the trick.
The camera operator saves time and money by freeing up the cinematographer. The days of the cinematographer sitting ina chair and pointing to the greenbeds are long over. Here in the U.S., most of us confer with the director to establish the frame orchoose the camera move. After that, our work really begins. As anyone who has recently lit a set of almost any size will confirm,this act requires more of our involvement than ever before. Hi-def shoots in particular require the cinematographer to spend aninordinate amount of time in a dark tent, glued to a monitor. Without a camera operator, it’s impossible to work effectively in thisfashion.
Let’s end right now the ridiculous perception that camera operators work only while the shot is happening. Their contribu-tion is equally significant while we’re lighting; this is the point when their penchant for finding faster, more efficient ways of doingthings really shines. Plus, the extra set of eyes helps us avoid mistakes that can lead to delays. Listen up, producers: this savestime and money! If anyone ever sat down to figure out how much is gained by having a seasoned camera operator on hand, I’msure an Act of Congress would guarantee their presence on every set.
Still not convinced? If the camera operator helps save an average of five minutes per setup over the course of a 25-setupday... well, you do the math.
And then there’s everything else. In large part, the camera department has hewed to the tradition of making its membersadvance through the ranks before attaining the status of cinematographer. Operating represents a crucial step in the learningprocess. Furthermore, serving on a camera crew in any capacity demands a lot of double-checking and backup. The operator’sperch provides a rare view of the entire enterprise that often serves as an early-warning system for the cinematographer. Withthe operator at the eyepiece and the cinematographer standing close by, it becomes easier to spot anything that might negativelyaffect the frame.
To state the case best, there has yet to be a movie made on which the camera operator’s technical savvy and creativitydidn’t contribute in many substantive ways to making the whole show better. Need I say more?
Richard P. Crudo, ASCPresident
Ph
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by D
ougl
as K
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President’s Desk
© 2004 ARRI Inc.
Actual SizeActual facts: www.arri.com
Introducing the ARRIFLEX 235 35mm motion picture camera.
14 March 2006
Lifeboat (1944)1.33:1 (Full Frame)Dolby Digital 2.020th Century Fox Home Video, $19.95
Alfred Hitchcock was never oneto back away from a technical or logisti-cal challenge, but on the 1944 produc-tion Lifeboat, he faced a problem thatwas particularly daunting. The film hasjust one extremely small location — thetitular lifeboat — and nine characters,so the question for Hitchcock and hiscollaborators was how to make such alimited canvas visually and dramaticallycompelling. A screenplay by acclaimedwriters John Steinbeck and Jo Swerlingcertainly helped generate tension, butwhat really gives the film its energy isan innovative visual approach, whichbrought Oscar nominations to bothHitchcock and his cinematographer,Glen MacWilliams, ASC.
Lifeboat’s premise allows for aclassic Hitchcockian moral exploration:the eight survivors of a German bomb-ing are stranded in a lifeboat, wherethey pick up a ninth passenger, astranded Nazi. Within the confinedsetting, MacWilliams rarely repeatscompositions or angles, which is one ofthe reasons the movie doesn’t feelstilted or theatrical. Another is thepicture’s sophisticated manipulation ofpoint of view, as Hitchcock andMacWilliams (who had previouslycollaborated on Waltzes From Vienna)
employ subtle changes in lighting andcamera placement that shift the viewer’sidentification from one character toanother. Although Lifeboat is a wartimethriller and Hitchcock was fiercely loyalto Britain and the United States, thecomplexity of the screenplay and theartistry on display prevent the film frombecoming didactic.
MacWilliams’ black-and-whitecinematography is stylish yet extremelyfunctional; whenever he uses light toexpress character or theme, the light ispractically motivated rather than purelyself-conscious. In one shot, for example,a shadow passes over the duplicitousGerman’s face, emphasizing his dualnature, and it is caused by a realisticsource: a sail blowing in the wind.Images like this abound in Lifeboat, andlight, camera movement and contentbecome inextricably bound to oneanother.
20th Century Fox’s new DVDcaptures many of these images beauti-fully, though the disc is far from perfect.Scratches and other artifacts in thesource material are particularly evident inthe opening scenes, and there are minorpicture flaws throughout the movie.Nevertheless, there are many strikingpassages in which the richness ofMacWilliams’ photography is impecca-bly captured, particularly in scenes wherehe uses extreme contrast to convey themoral ambiguity of the characters.
The use of sound in Lifeboat isevery bit as impressive as the visuals,and in some ways extremely audaciousfor a Hollywood studio film of that era.The filmmakers eschewed a traditionalscore in favor of a dense combination ofoverlapping dialogue, ambient noise,and silence — in fact, some of the mostdramatic moments in the picture aredistinguished by a nearly total lack ofsound. The DVD’s monaural soundtrackpreserves the intricate sound designwith clarity and precision, and an equally
strong stereo mix is featured as well.An outstanding audio commen-
tary is provided by film-studies profes-sor Drew Casper, who combines biogra-phy, historical context and aestheticanalysis. Even avowed Hitchcock schol-ars will gain new insights and learnnew facts from Casper’s thoroughinvestigation of what he unhesitatinglycalls one of Hitchcock’s masterworks.
Casper’s insights are comple-mented and expanded upon by a 20-minute documentary, “The Theater ofWar,” in which he is interviewed alongwith Hitchcock’s daughter and grand-daughter. The featurette is brief butinformative, and allows viewers a lookat the tank on the Fox lot where theentire film was shot. Steinbeck scholarRobert Demott provides a bit of back-ground on Steinbeck’s role in theproduction. (Contemporary viewers maybe surprised to learn that Lifeboat wasnot particularly popular at the time of itsrelease because many misinterpretedits political stance.) A theatrical trailerand gallery of photos complete thesupplements.
— Jim Hemphill
The Tales of Hoffmann (1951)1.33:1 (Full Frame)Dolby Digital Monaural The Criterion Collection, $39.95
Romantic obsession and thedoomed attempts to grasp it is the coreof Michael Powell and Emeric Press-
DVD Playback
16 March 2006
burger’s vivid adaptation of JacquesOffenbach’s opera The Tales of Hoff-mann. In making the picture, Powell andPressburger (the legendary British film-making team known as The Archers)built upon the fantasy elements of theirearlier films, particularly The Red Shoes,to create an entirely unique atmospherein which to mount the stories of poetE.T.A. Hoffmann as seen through Offen-bach’s eyes.
In a surrealistic theatrical space,Hoffmann (Robert Rounseville) fanciesthree different women for each of theopera’s three acts. In Act 1: The Tale ofOlympia, he is infatuated with a radiantdancing doll (Moira Shearer). In Act 2:The Tale of Gulietta, he is bewitched bya Venetian courtesan (Ludmilla Tcherina)and desperately tries to win her affec-tion. Finally, in Act 3: The Tale of Anto-nia, Hoffmann passionately proclaimshis love to an ailing singer (Ann Ayars).Each of these acts, as well as a prologueand epilogue, set Hoffmann up with anidealized woman, only to have herconsumed by an older male with sinisterintentions. Played in each vignette byfamed ballet dancer Robert Helpmann,this older man — a crazed dollmaker, asatanic Svengali, and a seductive doctor— foils all of Hoffmann’s attempts atromance.
To mount this dark, operaticfantasy, The Archers enlisted productiondesigner Hein Heckroth to create a lusharena where song and dance couldconvey the narrative to the camera.Heckroth had won an Academy Awardfor his work on The Red Shoes, and hisbold, rich design for Hoffmann wouldearn him another nomination. Heck-roth’s plans required an expert cine-matographer, and The Archers chosefrequent collaborator Christopher Chal-lis, who had previously shot The SmallBlack Room, Gone to Earth and TheElusive Pimpernel for them. Aware thateach act of the film was designedaround a single primary color, Challissought to convert the lighting effects ofa staged musical or opera to the cinemaframe. He noted that in live theater, thehuman eye could read the subtlest ofshadings, and low light was often used
to achieve distance effects. After deter-mining that a wide-ranging use of lightwould be essential for Hoffmann, thecinematographer set up one of themost elaborate arc-light grids in thehistory of British cinema. Indeed, Chal-lis noted in his autobiography (Are TheyReally So Awful?) that at the time ofproduction, no other British film hadever used as many lamps for the Tech-nicolor palette.
The Criterion Collection recentlyreleased Hoffmann on DVD with excel-lent results. The dual-layer DVD-9boasts an effective home-screen real-ization of Technicolor’s three-stripprocess. Challis’ extraordinary lightingis well realized in a consistently pleas-ing picture transfer. The nearly pristinesource material from the British FilmInstitute’s restoration internegative iscrisp, featuring rich colors and deepshadings. The monaural audio track isfree from age-related defects and playssmoothly.
Borrowing from its 1992laserdisc edition of Hoffmann, Criterionhas included an excellent audiocommentary by director Martin Scors-ese and film-music historian BruceEder. Both men make interesting pointsabout the film, with Eder focusing moreon the film’s place in the musical andopera-film genres and Scorsese notingnumerous creative and technical flour-ishes. In addition to the film’s theatricaltrailer, supplements include productionstills, a collection of Heckroth’s designsketches, a solid essay written by filmscholar Ian Christie, Powell’s 1956 shortfilm The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and acharming interview with cult horrorfilmmaker George A. Romero. (Romerogushes over Hoffmann and notes itsunusual influence on his own films.)
Criterion has once again dustedoff a title from its laserdisc library andupdated it for DVD with superb results.The Archers’ unique fantasy of seduc-tion and betrayal is not for all tastes,but it is certainly a landmark in itsapproach to storytelling, musicalperformance, cinematography andproduction design. At a time whenmusical films have difficulty finding an
audience, it is refreshing to be remindedof such a well produced, artistic andclever film treatment of an opera. In thestoried career of The Archers, this is acrown jewel.
— Kenneth Sweeney
The Bird With the Crystal Plumage (1970)2.35:1 (16x9 Enhanced)Dolby Digital 5.1, 6.1 DTS-ES, Dolby Surround 2.0, MonauralBlue Underground, $29.95
Two Italian masters of cinematicstyle, writer/director Dario Argento andcinematographer Vittorio Storaro, ASC,AIC, conspired on the unusual 1970thriller The Bird With the CrystalPlumage, the auspicious feature debutof both filmmakers. This new two-discDVD from specialty distributor BlueUnderground serves as the best-yetvideo incarnation of the film in anyformat, making it a unique and invalu-able introduction to both men’s careers.
Loosely based on the 1949 shortstory “The Screaming Mimi,” whichwas first adapted by Hollywood in 1958,Crystal Plumage opens as Sam (TonyMusante), an American writer living inRome, inadvertently stumbles upon amurder taking place in a chic art gallery.Inside, he can see a beautiful woman(Eva Renzi) grappling with a black-garbed figure at the top of a treacherousstairway, each fighting to control a long-bladed knife. Shot in Technicolor Rome’sproprietary two-perf Techniscopewidescreen process — used hereunder the trade name Cromoscope —the film immediately takes advantage ofits 2.35:1 frame in this harrowing scene,
�
as Sam tries to enter the gallerythrough the double glass doors of itsatrium-like opening. He is immediatelytrapped between them, with the resul-tant enclosure transformed into a trans-parent prison from which he helplesslywatches the bloodied woman sufferafter the killer flees the scene. It hasbeen said that Argento conceived ofSam’s predicament while watching fishcircling in an aquarium, and Storaro’scompositions perfectly capture thisconcept, as the gallery’s glass-walledchamber fills the frame edge-to-edge,presenting our ostensible hero as ahuman “exhibit.”
After the police fail to find theirsuspect, Sam decides to investigate thecase on his own, and he soon gains theattention of the maniac and those whoseek to conceal his identity.
Designed by productiondesigner Dario Micheli, the film’s care-ful yet pervasive use of primary blues,reds and yellows adds a distinctivevisual touch that foreshadows Storaro’scolor-rich work in subsequent films.Indeed, it’s not every picture thatfeatures a mysterious nocturnal assas-sin (Reggie Nalder) clad in a Day-Gloyellow jacket, a bold sartorial selectionthat ultimately ensures his escape fromSam.
A later chase sequence offersone of the film’s most facile yet effec-tive images: the darkness of a jet-blackframe is suddenly pierced as Sambursts through a doorway in thedistance, the bright amber light castinghim in a tense silhouette as he seeks tofind his assailant. Without warning, thelights come up, revealing that thefiendish killer has cleverly led Sam backto the art gallery for nefarious reasons.
A lively and highly informativeaudio commentary by film journalistsAlan Jones (author of the authoritativetome Profundo Argento) and KimNewman not only succinctly dissectsthe production but also places it in thecontext of the times, crediting the film’smany innovations and explaining howthey later impacted the genre.
Disc two offers four brieffeaturettes: “Out of the Shadows,”
which features an anecdote-rich inter-view with Argento; “Painting WithDarkness,” a more conceptual discus-sion with Storaro; “The Music ofMurder,” an interview with composerEnnio Morricone; and “Eva’s Talking,”featuring actress Renzi. In their respec-tive interviews, both Argento andStoraro are candid about their frustrat-ing-yet-fruitful collaboration, and eachoffers genuine admiration for theother’s abilities while politely skirtingany specifics.
— David E. Williams�
NEXT MONTH’S REVIEWS
An Unmarried Woman (1970)Cinematographer:
Arthur Ornitz
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (2005)
Cinematographer:John Bailey, ASC
Mysterious Skin (2005)Cinematographer:Steve Gainer, ASC
18
20 March 2006
When Foreheads Collideby Robert S. Birchard
“A cinematographer will neverget a job off the projects Larry does,”laughs cinematographer Kevin Jones,who has shot two pictures withwriter/director Larry Blamire. “The LostSkeleton of Cadavra was in black-and-white and had a deliberately cheap,underlit look [see AC April ’04], and Trailof the Screaming Forehead is deliber-
ately overlit. We didn’t need to worryabout unnatural light sources; we hadheavy backlight and often unmotivatedkeylights. My gaffer had a problem withthe look of the picture, but we assuredhim it was supposed to look that way.”
Shot in the imaginary “miracle ofCraniaScope” with the imprimatur “RayHarryhausen Presents,” Trail of theScreaming Forehead tells of an earthlyinvasion by alien foreheads and has asubplot involving Dr. Sheila Bexter (Fay
Masterson), a scientist who discoversthat the center of human intelligence isthe forehead rather than the brain.Bexter isolates this untapped power bymeans of an extract she calls “Fore-headizene.” Her amorously inclinedboyfriend, Dr. Philip Latham (AndrewParks) is a willing guinea pig for Bexter’sexperimental potion in hopes that hiscooperation will lead to more than agoodnight kiss. The serum transformsLatham’s puny human head until itbecomes all forehead. In the end, it’sthe foreheads from outer space vs. TheForehead from Earth in a battle to thefinish. Will civilization as we know itsurvive?
The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra,shot on MiniDV and produced on aminiscule budget, was picked up fordistribution by Sony Pictures in 2001and gained a small but avid cult follow-ing. A press agent could make much ofthe fact that the budget for Blamire’snew film is nearly 20 times higher thanthe production cost of Cadavra, butdon’t imagine some mega-buck Holly-wood blockbuster. All in all, Foreheadcost well under $1 million.
“The idea for Forehead came tome just after I finished Lost Skeleton,”recalls Blamire. “Lost Skeleton was atakeoff on the ultra-cheap Ed Woodstyle of film from the 1950s. Forehead isin a similar vein but more polished. Iwrote it for the principal cast fromSkeleton, but it doesn’t have the inten-tionally stilted acting style of that film.This was envisioned in color with thebright look of early 1960s CinemaScopeand more sophisticated special effects,including stop-motion animation. Stopmotion is magic, and it has a differentfeel than the digital effects being donetoday.”
Although it only amounts to 10
Maximum Ingenuity on Minimal BudgetsProduction Slate
Trai
l oft
he S
crea
min
g Fo
rehe
ad p
hoto
s by
Rob
ert
Dev
eau
an
d R
ober
t B
irch
ard,
cou
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Larr
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lam
ire.
Right: Dr. PhilipLatham (Andrew
Parks)sympathizes
with Dr. SheilaBexter’s (Fay
Masterson)theory of
“foreheadial”intelligence.
Below: Lathamand Bexter work
on isolating theuntapped power
of humanintelligence.
22 March 2006
or 12 shots and less than two minutesof footage, the stop-motion animationis what led Harryhausen to attach hisname to Forehead. It was also the hookthat brought Chiodo Bros. Productions— Charles, Richard and Edward Chiodo— into the project. The brothers havelent their talents as visual-effectswizards, animators, and character andprosthetic designers to such projects asTeam America: World Police (AC Nov.’04), Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, Robocopand Killer Klowns From Outer Space.
For Forehead, Charles Chiododesigned the forehead prosthetics andthe three stages of Latham’s transfor-mation based on an illustration byBlamire. “We love the older science-fiction films so much that even with thelimited budget, we were eager to workon Forehead,” says Stephen Chiodo.“Larry really gets what these films wereabout. They had real drama, real threats
and real love stories. Even though thebudgets were small and the effectswere often terrible, the actors neverwinked at the camera. They believed inwhat they were doing.”
Script, principal cast and specialeffects aside, getting even a low-budgetfilm off the ground requires belief andfaith of a more tangible sort. Financingcame from “Lucky” Swift, an attorneywho “wanted to get out of the law busi-ness.” Swift explains, “I started towatch Lost Skeleton, and I almost turnedit off after the first 10 minutes, but thenI got hooked. My husband and I wereimpressed with Larry’s work, and wetracked him down and becameacquainted. He showed me the script forForehead, and I found it intelligentlygoofy. When his original investors fellthrough, I told him I’d finance the picture.Every one of my financial advisers coun-seled against it, but it felt right to me,
and after all, you only go around once.”Although Forehead was origi-
nally scheduled for 23 days of principalphotography, line producer BetsyMackey convinced Blamire it could beshot in 18. “It may seem like stating theobvious,“ says Mackey, “but the draw-back of working on a low-budget film isthe low budget. You can’t simply throwmoney at a problem. There was no waywe could spend 23 days shooting if wewere going to get the locations weneeded and the caliber of crew wewanted.” Mackey scouted locationsherself, only hiring a location managerfor one week to make sure the properpermits were obtained. “We were fortu-nate to find locations we could doubleup on,” she says. “There were some-thing like 30 locations described in thescript, but ultimately, we only had tomake four moves.”
Obviously, the shorter schedulepresented challenges for the productionteam. “You never have enough days, andcutting back from 23 to 18 days [lost us]the opportunity for more coverage,” saysJones. “Fortunately, Larry storyboardseverything, which is a huge plus on alow-budget picture because you don’thave a lot of time to experiment. But weweren’t slaves to the boards; Larry wasopen to suggestions, and we also lookedfor setups we could eliminate.”
Jones shot Forehead on a SonyHDW-F900 Series 3 high-definition (HD)video camera that was rented from HDCinema in Santa Monica. The rentalhouse was close to one of thecompany’s major locations, the VeteransHospital in West Los Angeles. “We shot24p and composed for 2.35:1 withmasks on the monitor and in theviewfinder,” says the cinematographer.“I was a little concerned that we wouldbe sacrificing some of the 16x9 imagearea by composing for 2.35. Canon wascoming out with an anamorphic adapter,but it wasn’t yet available. George Lucasand others had used the Sony systemwith 2.35 framing and proved it wouldwork, so we went that way.
“The idea was to get the look ofa picture like Jerry Lewis’ The NuttyProfessor,” he continues, “so we chose
Above: Latham’sbrow
unexpectedlybegins to expand
after he servesas Bexter’sguinea pig.
Below:Cinematographer
Kevin Jonesframes up a
forehead.
24 March 2006
middle-of-the-road camera settings thatwe found on Band Pro’s Web site, bandprodigital.com, emphasizing primarycolors over a wider range of colors. Thesets and costumes had strong blues andreds and pure whites. The flesh toneswere not necessarily flattering; theywere kind of warm. I lit the principalsusing Straw gels on the lights.
“We did the best we could to geta film look, and we may be able to domore in post,” Jones continues. “[3⁄4"CCD] HD cameras have virtually unlim-ited depth of field, which of coursedetracts from the film look. We had agood Canon cine-style zoom lens thatwent from 25mm to 100mm. We usedthe long end of the zoom and shot wideopen at a shutter speed of 1⁄48 of asecond with an ASA rating of 320 at aT2.2 aperture to compress the depth offield. There are ND filters built into thecamera that you can dial in, but we alsoused ND filters on the lens. The Canonzoom wasn’t always as long as weneeded it to be, but we also did a lot ofwide-angle stuff, and it was good forthat.”
Jones and his crew — cameraoperator Gianni Trutman, first assistantFrank Chritchlow, and second assistantTony Denham — found there wereadvantages and disadvantages to work-ing in hi-def video. “We shot at a 10:1ratio, 26 rolls of 45-minute tapes —191⁄2 hours of footage,” says Jones.“There was never a consideration forthe number of takes or how much
footage we were shooting. That wouldhave been a budget concern if we’dbeen shooting film. On the other hand,there are more steps required in post toget an HD production to a theatricalrelease, and there are fewer lensesavailable for the cameras.
“Also, HD’s power requirementis higher and the camera is cable-bounda fair amount. We didn’t need to sync toan external recorder. We recorded theproduction sound in the camera, but thatmeant we were also wired to the soundmixer. Fortunately, it wasn’t a problembecause we were working close to thesound guy. We carried a generator allthe time except for the last day, andmost of the time the camera wasplugged into AC power, but we did havebatteries to use as needed. I alwaystook a battery-powered monitor on loca-tion so we could go mobile.”
Jones is enthusiastic about theF900’s performance but notes that therewas one baffling breakdown. “Equip-ment is always going to break downfrom time to time, and there’s never aright time for it to happen,” says thecinematographer. “One day we startedgetting some electronic glitches wherethe camera seemed to overheat andshut off. I’d never had that happenbefore. We swapped out a couple ofcomponents and shaded the camera,and that seemed to solve the problem,but we’re still not quite sure whatcaused it. Overall, though, we had apretty good production record.”
A Period Hi-Def Projectby Noah Kadner
The setting for Formosa is Albu-querque, New Mexico. It’s 1951, andClay Crawford (Jamieson Stern) is onthe run from the law when he happensupon Formosa, a social-guidance-filmstudio on the skids. Eagerly adopted bystudio chief Sid Silver (Steven Gilborn)and his daughter, Anne-Marie (JessicaKiper), Clay lends his bad-boy aura toFormosa’s previously inhibited andstatic 16mm black-and-white teenfilms. In the process, he woos Anne-Marie and becomes the studio’s topactor.
Formosa was my feature-direct-ing debut, and to make the digitalproduction I teamed with director ofphotography Tyler Oliver. “I love a chal-lenge,” says Oliver, “so when you cameto me with an indie set in the Fiftieswith a large cast, lots of greenscreencompositing, and almost no money, Isaid, ‘Let’s do it!’”
Oliver and I had worked onseveral short films and industrialstogether, and we share a philosophy ofusing limitations as creative inspiration.On a recent project for the UnitedNations, we created a short espionagethriller to illustrate proper securityprotocols. “I think the U.N. was expect-ing a dry corporate video,” says Oliver,“but we incorporated recognizabletalent, CG effects, expressive cameramovement and cinematic lighting.”
As a first feature, Formosapresented a greater set of challengesthan our previous projects. The filmincorporates many production elementsthat low-budget films typically avoid. Aperiod setting alone can be a recipe forproduction headaches, even more sowhen combined with complex scenesfeaturing a large ensemble. For Oliver,the biggest challenge was maintaininga classic Hollywood look on a shoe-string budget and tight schedule.“Everything needed to work: cameramovement, set design, lighting andmakeup,” he says. “This wasn’t a gritty,handheld drama where we could ‘runand gun.’ We knew the entire project
Rev. Beaks(James Karen,
right) serves ashost to one of
the many alienforeheads
invading Earth.
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26 March 2006
would be compromised if the imageslooked cheap or video-like. It wouldtake the audience right out of thestory.”
We considered shooting on35mm but hoped to preserve ourmodest budget for talent and produc-tion design rather than film stock andpostproduction costs. As an earlyadopter of Panasonic’s AG-DVX100 24pMiniDV camcorder, I was intrigued bythe more advanced AJ-SDX900. Oliverand I determined via testing that theSDX900’s 4:2:2 color space, native 16x9CCD chips, and high-definition lenseswould be our best option. “We felt thePanasonic was a camera that could, iftreated professionally, capture footagecomparable to 35mm and in line withour budget,” says Oliver.
He wanted to push the digitalmedium as far as possible. “I’m an intu-itive shooter, but I’m also technical, andI felt that if I could bring both sensibili-ties together I could really push theenvelope on Formosa.” Enlisting gafferTrevor Houghton, he set out to create alighting strategy that was both cost-effective and beautiful in the classical
Hollywood style. “There’s a misconcep-tion that you don’t need to light digitalas much as film,” he notes. “If anything,you need to be more careful with yourlighting when shooting 24p. At the veryleast, you need to approach a digitalproject with the same attention to detailas a 35mm project.”
Oliver and Houghton utilizedstrong backlight, hair lights, toppers,and other old-school lighting techniquesto give Formosa a classical Hollywoodfeel. “Normally I use one large, soft keyand minimal backlight, but this filmrequired a different approach,” says thecinematographer. “For inspiration andreference, we looked at Bugsy [shot byAllen Daviau, ASC] and L.A. Confiden-tial [shot by Dante Spinotti, ASC, AIC].We also watched a lot of 16mm black-and-white social-guidance films fromthe Fifties. I was curious to see how thecamera would handle hard lightbecause softer is usually better withvideo. But with minimal tweaking, thecamera delivered. I think that’s largelydue to the SDX900’s Cine Gammacurves, which are designed to mimic theresponse curve and exposure latitude of
film. Happily, the contrast range trans-lated to digital in a really pleasing way.”
Choosing the SDX900 alsomeant we could afford to rent twocameras throughout the shoot. Weinitially intended to use the B-camera asa backup, but before long we wererolling both cameras at least half thetime. “I don’t quite understand thephysics of it, but two-camera coverageseems to give you an exponentialamount of footage,” says Oliver. “Manyscenes had more than a dozen charac-ters interacting, and we knew going inthat the script would be difficult. Byusing two cameras, we were able tocomfortably shoot the larger scenes andrack up generous amounts of additionalfootage.” Oliver credits 1st AC ChrisShaun, who also operated the Bcamera, with keeping the cameradepartment running smoothly despite ahectic pace and harsh locations that ranthe gamut from chilly nights to dustydesert vistas.
Shooting digitally also allowedus to give the actors additional creativefreedom. Because we were constantlyrolling tape, they could experiment andimprovise and be confident the editorwould be able to cut their performancesinto coherent scenes. The actors had tobe on their game at all times becausewe constantly moved cameras aroundfrom character to character, catchingmoments of spontaneity. Of course,there’s a danger of overcoverage, too,and that’s where 1st AD MartyVesselich helped me set the pace prop-erly. When I’ve shot 35mm, moneyconcerns often caused me to cut at amoment’s notice and maybe skip thatadditional take. For filmmakers like mewho are just starting out, these 24pcameras are miraculous.
We shot Formosa in 20 days,with one week onstage in Los Angelesand the remainder on location in NewMexico. The biggest challenge on loca-tion was the film’s period setting. “Wecouldn’t afford to dress an entire streetas 1951, so we’d get to a location andestablish maybe a 90-degree field ofview,” explains Oliver. “We might havea few picture cars and a building façade
The “before”frame is a 16x9
anamorphicnative frame inDVCPro50. The
“after” frameshows the same
image withscratches,
desaturationand film-grainfilters applied
and is matted toapproximately
1.33:1 toemulate the
16mm films ofthe social-
guidance era.
Form
osa
phot
os b
y N
oah
Kad
ner
,cou
rtes
y of
Hig
h R
oad
Pro
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as background. In staging our reverseshots, we took ‘cheating’ to a wholenew level. As usual, the limitationsforced us to find creative solutions. Iremember one shot in particular wherewe literally had one wall to shootagainst, and it was white — a cine-matographer’s nightmare! But we founda section of wall that had a red linepainted on it, positioned the hood of a
picture car at the bottom of the frame inthe foreground, and staged the actorsperpendicular to the camera. Weembraced the ‘flat’ composition insteadof fighting it, and it came together withan almost Edward Hopper feel. Theemotional beats in that scene happenedto suit the look. Sometimes you getlucky.”
To simulate 1950s-style rear
projection for driving scenes, we optedfor greenscreen compositing. We alsoshot a scene set at a drive-in on thegreenscreen stage when it proved diffi-cult to find a vintage drive-in theater inthe area. “We found a huge warehousein New Mexico that could accommo-date all the picture cars and the minimaldrive-in set,” says Oliver. “Trevor and hiscrew really rose to the challenge ofquickly and beautifully lighting thegreenscreen setups. The cars of theForties and Fifties are loaded withreflective chrome and polished wood,which can be difficult to control spill on,but it worked out with careful flaggingand rigging of silks.” The crew shotbackground plates on rural roadsoutside Albuquerque. It was seriouslythrifty, little more than a high hatstrapped on the back of a stakebedtruck. Luckily, we were able to useimage-stabilization software in post tohelp smooth out the camera shake.
Formosa also features a mix ofvintage and modern-day re-creations of
28
CinematographerTyler Oliver
(right) and 1st ACChris Shaun
prepare to shoota background
plate for theprocess-
photographydriving scenes
from the back ofa stakebed truck
on the outskirtsof Albuquerque.
Fifties social-guidance films. Thesemovies were typically 15 minutes orless and were shot on 16mm black-and-white; they highlighted issues such aspremarital sex, alcohol abuse, andcheating on tests at school. These filmswere part of my original inspiration forFormosa, so it was important to me thatwe re-create them in look and tone.Oliver did this by changing his lighting toa flatter, less complimentary stylespecifically for these scenes, whichwere also captured with the SDX900. “Ihad to fight my normal instincts andthink like a social-guidance cinematog-rapher would,” he says. “That meantvery static compositions, ‘bad’ lightingwith harsh shadows, and masking the16x9 frame to the 1.33:1 aspect of theoriginal 16mm films.” In post, the colorwas removed and digital dust, hair,gate-weave and scratches were addedto the footage to create a reasonablefacsimile of the vintage films.
The rest of the post workflowbrought additional challenges and some
unexpected advantages. In addition toediting natively in 24p using Apple’sFinal Cut Pro, color correction in the digi-tal realm was essentially a digital inter-mediate (DI) without the scanning costs.Colorist Andrew Lichtstein at Techni-color Digital Intermediates gradedFormosa on a da Vinci 2K in just 10hours. “I’m a child of the digital age —I grew up with Macs and Photoshop,”says Oliver. “When I first discoveredprinter lights, I was baffled by howcrude the system was. I was alwaysasking, ‘Why can’t we just telecine it?’Finally, that day is here, and not just forbig-budget films.”
To be honest, we hope peoplewill watch Formosa and assume it wasshot on 35mm. Luckily, it passed the testfor Oliver and me at a recent festivalscreening, where it was projected fromDigiBeta on Christie’s 2K digital projec-tor and directly followed the screeningof a 35mm feature. Our images werepin-sharp and vibrantly colorful, notice-ably better than those of the 35mm
print, which was soft from edge to edgeand visibly grainy and faded. Afterwatching Formosa on monitors for solong, we all breathed a huge sigh ofrelief. �
Red (SaginawGrant, left) andSven (ErikHolland) capturethe action atFormosa Studio.
30 March 2006
Depicting a few days in the life ofa young gangster on the streetsof Johannesburg, Tsotsi is set ina world many filmmakersmight have rendered with
visceral camerawork, an extremecolor palette and dizzying editingpatterns. But the story, which comes from a novel by Athol Fugard,called for another tack. The days inquestion follow a carjacking thatleaves the gangster, Tsotsi (PresleyChweneyagae), in possession of anewborn boy who was tucked awayin the back seat when the car wasstolen. Panicked over the find, Tsotsi
stows the infant in his dilapidatedshack, and over the next several days,as he tries to figure out what to do, hebegins grappling with an entirely newset of feelings: empathy, responsibil-ity and remorse.
Although violence and insta-bility pervade Tsotsi’s life, the film isan intimate study of his emotionaland psychological evolution, and thisfocus on the inner realm led direc-tor/writer Gavin Hood, who adaptedFugard’s book for the screen, to offerthe project to director of photogra-phy Lance Gewer, a fellow SouthAfrican whose work he had admired
A streetwise criminalcomes of age in
the South African film Tsotsi,
photographed byLance Gewer and
directed by Gavin Hood.
by Rachael K. Bosley
Unit photography by Blid Alsbirk
An AngryYoungManAn AngryYoungMan
American Cinematographer 31
for some time. “Lance and I hadmutual friends in the industry, and Ibumped into him at the lab or thestudio every so often, but I was awareof his work, particularly his earlyshort films, before I actually methim,” says Hood. “He has a very clas-sical eye, as well as a certain restraintthat really allows the performances inthe pieces he photographs to shine,and that’s very much what I neededfor Tsotsi. I wanted to achieve a beau-tiful film that you only think about asbeautiful after you’ve come out of thestory.”
Born in Johannesburg, Gewerhas honed his skills on South Africanfilm and television projects for 20years. Although the country’s favor-able weather and proximity toEurope have made it a favorite desti-nation for commercial shoots, Gewernotes that apartheid and its compli-cated legacy have created an unusualtraining ground for aspiring cine-matographers. “Working your wayup the industry ladder, especiallyduring the changes South Africa hasgone through in the time I’ve beeninvolved, is not your normal experi-ence,” he says. “The commercial
world goes on all the time, but thefeature world doesn’t necessarily.There have been eras of bad films anderas of almost no films,but there havebeen periods when a flux of filmsenabled one to learn the ropes. I waslucky to enter the industry duringone of those periods, the mid-1980s,and I worked on 13 features andalmost 200 commercials as a cameraassistant.”
By that time, however, Gewerhad left the cinematography programat Pretoria Technikon Film andTelevision School and was alreadyshooting and directing independentprojects.A number of these were low-budget 16mm features produced forAfrican audiences and destined fordistribution in villages and town-ships, where they were typicallyprojected in people’s garages orcommunity halls. “We shot them inthree to five days with a crew of four,”he recalls. “The shoots were reallyquick and nasty yet were an incredi-ble experience. It was great to shootfilm and work within those limita-tions because that’s ultimately whatfilmmaking is about: making themost of what’s at your disposal.”As he
continued to compile cinematogra-phy credits, Gewer regularly returnedto the industry ranks to assist, but in1993 he decided to pursue cine-matography full time. “I had to kindof leave the mainstream industry tobecome a cinematographer because Ifound that trying to work my waythrough the industry held me back.I’d take a step away and do what Icould do,and then I’d have to find myway back in again.”
Before notching his firstfeature credit on Beat the Drum(2003), Gewer shot documentariessuch as Mapun-gubwe — Secrets ofthe Sacred Hill and White Farmers,Black Land, and short films such asSacrifice and Come See the Bioscope(both of which he also directed). Itwas Gewer’s work on short films thatcaught Hood’s eye at film festivalsand other showcases in the region.“When I looked at Lance’s work, I feltwe had a very similar way of seeing,”says the director. “I want everymoment in a film to count, and Iattribute that to my background instill photography, where you’re tryingto capture an emotional moment.You could freeze almost any frame in
Opposite: Tsotsi(PresleyChweneyagae)scans the crowdat a train stationin search of hisnext victim. Thispage: Afterchoosing a mark,Tsotsi and hisgang (from left),Boston (MothusiMagano),Butcher (ZenzoNgqobe) and Aap(Kenneth Nkosi),keep an eye onthe man aspassengersprepare to boardthe train.
Pho
tos
cou
rtes
y of
Mir
amax
Film
s.
32 March 2006
Lance’s movies and it would feel like abeautiful still that could stand on itsown. That’s a particular sensibility;others see the world in a much morekinetic way.
“Tsotsi appears to be a gangsterstory, but it’s actually much more anintimate, coming-of-age story,”Hoodcontinues.“Tsotsi transitions from anangry young man who does somereally terrible things to a young manwho finally begins to know himself,and to make that transition believable
I knew I needed an actor with anextraordinary ability to communicatethoughts, and, in order to read thosethoughts, a cinematographer whowould light and frame and shoot sothat we as director and cinematogra-pher were not on display, but ratherthe performance was on display.”
This emphasis on the internalled the filmmakers to develop a styleso subtle that a slight, slow push in ona character has the kind of dramaticimpact that is more often achieved
with a much bolder move.“The cine-matography of Tsotsi lies in interiors,the emotional states of the charac-ters,” says Gewer. “There isn’t muchcamera movement, and when there isa move it’s always dictated by thechoreography of the characters andthe story. Our work was more aboutkeeping the camera quite still, exercis-ing restraint, studying the charactersand trying to get to know them quiteintimately. We worked with theemotional beats of the story, trying to
Above: In hisshack, Tsotsi
attempts to carefor an infant that
was left in hishands during a
carjacking.Below: The
smooth-talkingFela (Zola,
second fromleft) takes
advantage ofTsotsi’s
downtime bytrying to recruit
Butcher andAap to work
for him.
An Angry Young Man
American Cinematographer 33
catch every nuance and implication.”Hood adds, “When people heardwhat Tsotsi was about, a number ofthem said, ‘You should shoot it likeCity of God,’ but stylistically our filmis closer to Central Station, more of aone-on-one relationship movie. Cityof God is a great film and the hand-held style was appropriate for it, butTsotsi is not a chaotic story apartfrom its opening scenes. We had toget the audience right into Tsotsi’smind, and he’s initially somebodymost viewers feel is very differentfrom them. I didn’t want to usehandheld because I didn’t want theaudience to feel we were in the room,documenting; I didn’t want to lookat the character in a vérité way.”
One of the first decisions thefilmmakers made was to shoot inSuper 35mm. Gewer explains,“Gavin’s intention was to make anintensely emotional and engagingpsychological thriller set in a worldof contrasts — love and hate, wealthand poverty, revenge and forgive-ness, anger and compassion — andwidescreen was the only way wecould visually tell that story. Weneeded to get a sense of the charac-ters in the space and the broadness ofthat space; it’s a world vulnerablepeople inhabit.” Noting that theproduction’s original budget waseven more modest than the final oneof $3 million, he adds, “We didn’thave enough money to shootwidescreen, but the producers [PeterFudakowski and Paul Raleigh] wentout and raised it. They were behindus all the way.”
Most of Tsotsi was filmed witha single camera, a MoviecamCompact, and Zeiss Variable Primelenses. Gewer also used Angenieux5:1 17-102mm and 10:1 25-250mmzooms and a Canon 400mm prime,but the Variable Primes carried theday. “Our shoot was about eightweeks, and the Variable Primeshelped us save time,” he notes.“Instead of physically moving thecamera you can slightly reframe the
shot, and if you’re tracking with anactor you can push in during themovement and disguise a zoom.” Hecites his focus puller, Pam Laxen, forher excellence in the field. “Pam hasworked on about 50 features and isan incredibly good assistant. We shotroughly 80 percent of Tsotsi at night,and we were shooting wide open. Wewere always taking the stop rightdown for extra depth. Pam copeswith this situation extremely well andis also very good at running the spacearound the camera for me; she helpsothers do what they need to do in anun-chaotic way.”
The filmmakers occasionallyworked from Hood’s rough story-
boards, which the director describesas “bad South Park drawings”intended to indicate “what theemotional beats of the scene are.” Heelaborates, “I had a lot to say aboutthe angles because I feel the way youphotograph an actor has a hugeimpact on the emotion conveyed byhis performance. There’s a time whenyou know you want to be in tight anda time you really want to back off;that decision is emotional, and out ofthat decision you then compose theimage to be also beautiful. I talk withmy cinematographer a lot aboutframing and composition becausethat to me is part of the emotionalcore of the storytelling. On Tsotsi, we
The cameramoves behinda colored-glassmobile toassume Tsotsi’spoint of viewas he watchesMiriam (TerryPheto) nursehis newcharge.
favored being very wide or prettytight. There’s not much in between.”
Tsotsi was shot mostly on loca-tion in Kliptown, Soweto, duringSouth Africa’s winter. When Gewerbegan scouting the area, he foundhimself on some of the same streetshe had haunted while filming low-budget features two decades earlier.“In those days, we’d drive around andlook for a suitable location — some-thing that could pose as a hospital orpolice station, for example — andwhen we found one we’d transform ita bit and just start filming. By chance,we ended up using many of the samesites for Tsotsi, and they hadn’t reallychanged.”
As they developed their light-ing scheme, Gewer and his gaffer,Oliver Wilter, took their cues fromthe locations, which included anurban train station, a middle-classsuburb, and the impoverished town-ship on the outskirts of the city.“Thelighting in those areas is all verydifferent,” notes Gewer. “The town-ships have a mix of sodium andmercury light — oranges and greens— radiating from the big securitylights that illuminate these large
34 March 2006
An Angry Young ManRight: Setting up
a crane movethat will trackthe gang as it
leaves Tsotsi’sshack aredirector of
photographyLance Gewer(foreground),gaffer Oliver
Wilter (center)and key grip Ari
Stavrinos.Below: In
preparation forthe shot, Gewerchecks the light
on the actors.
areas. Even today, many people stilldon’t have electricity in their homes,so they use oil lamps, candles and coalfires inside. We looked at 8 Mile forthe way it made use of mixed lighting;we wanted that kind of texture, asgritty a feel as we could achieve. Tsotsiis an antihero, and we felt it was veryimportant to be honest to the charac-ter. We used a lot of sodium andmercury bulbs in practicals on set,but we used them mostly in the back-ground while keeping the skin tonesclean and natural.
“Oliver and I have done quite afew productions together, and he andhis team were incredible,” Gewercontinues.“We were working very fastand usually at night, and we didn’thave Wendy lights or heliumballoons, so we lit really big nightexteriors with 18K and 12K HMIs,20K incandescents, and 6K and 4KCinePars that were mounted on highriser stands and kept as far from thesubject as possible. This gave us quitean interesting, contrasty effect. Theterrain — the fields, the grass and theroads — became quite gritty asopposed to soft.”
The film’s largest setup was anight exterior that appears early in thefilm, after Tsotsi has savagely beaten
one of his friends, Boston (MothusiMagano), at a neighborhood bar.After Tsotsi runs out of the bar, thecamera picks him up and follows himthrough a dark alley, then downthrough a river and out across a large,grassy expanse that separates histownship from a distant suburb.“Wecombined two shots to achieve thisand used a disguised wipe/dissolve soit would appear as one shot,” says
Gewer. “For the first part of the shot,we used a Steadicam [operated byDeon Vermeulen] to follow Tsotsi ashe runs into shot and down a narrowalley between the shacks. At the endof the alley, the camera loses sight ofhim for a moment and wipes over asheet of corrugated iron, where wedissolve to the next shot. The secondshot was done with my operator,Marc Brower, using an Arri geared
After a thought-provokingencounter with ahomeless mannear the trainstation, Tsotsiheads back tothe township forthe night. Formost of thepicture, thefilmmakersstrove to keepthe characterdead center inthe frame, “asthough he’s on atrack he can’t getoff of,” saysdirector GavinHood. Left:Gewer and Hooddiscuss theirnext shot.
American Cinematographer 35
An Angry Young Man
head on a [31-foot] Giraffe crane. Itbegins by wiping over the same sheetof corrugated iron [to accommodatethe dissolve] and climbs into the airto reveal Tsotsi running away fromthe camera. He runs down a hill,through a river, up the embankmenton the other side, and across amassive, burnt field toward thesuburb in the distance.
right from the alley, where we used alot of small [150-watt, 300-watt, 650-watt, 1K and 2K] incandescents — aswell as a few small HMIs for ‘moon-light’ — out to the big field,which weilluminated with a variety of HMIs,CinePars and 20K incandescents.”
While scouting in the town-ship, Gewer came upon a lightingmotif that he decided to use through-out the picture to subtly underscoreTsotsi’s psychological state. “Whiledriving around Kliptown at night, wecame across a little butchery that wasset apart by its green and pink fluo-rescent lighting. This inspired arecurring theme in our lighting. It’squite subtle, but you’ll notice a hint ofpink light in the background of manyshots — we called it ‘butcher’s pink.’ Ithink of it as a suggestion of the loveand compassion Tsotsi yearns for inhis harsh world.” It was quite a chal-lenge to get the pale-pink hue toregister on film, however. “It’s a diffi-cult color to work with and needed tobe carefully exposed and timed toread right on film, even down to theprojector lamp; if the lamp was toobright, it would cause the pink to readas an off-white pink. On set, I foundmyself using two or three times more
“As he runs across the field, itbegins to rain; we used two rainmachines in the foreground to createthe effect. This shot was done aroundmidnight on one of the coldest nightsof the year, and the water from therain machine froze as it landed! I wasusing Kodak’s Vision2 500T [5218],which I rated at [ISO] 400, and lit thescene to about T2. We had to light
36 March 2006
Right: Taken byGewer with his
mobile phoneduring a locationscout, this photoof a butchery in
Kliptowninspired a
lighting motifthat appears
throughoutTsotsi in several
variations.Dubbed
“butcher’s pink,”the motif
underscoresTsotsi’s growing
awareness ofwhat’s missing
from his life.Below:
“Butcher’s pink”enlivens the look
of Miriam’sshack as Tsotsi
watches herbathe his infant.
American Cinematographer 37
gels on the sources than I expected tojust to get it to read.”
One example of the “butcher’spink” motif can be seen in a night-exterior wide shot in which Tsotsifollows a wheelchair-bound homelessman under a highway bridge. Manypractical fixtures were used in theshot, and one is a fluorescent fixturethat casts pale-pink light on a wall farbehind the action. “On the wall, weplaced practical fluorescent tubesgelled with two sheets of Lee FleshPink and enough ND filtration tosufficiently dim the color so it wouldread as pink on film rather thanblown-out white,” says Gewer. “Wesupplemented this with a 5K Fresnelgelled with two layers of Flesh Pink tocreate the pink falloff on the wallunder the fluorescent light. I believewe also added some CTO to enhancethe color. We shot this scene on 5218and exposed it at T2 to capture theexisting lights and natural ambienceof the city. To suggest the isolation ofthe characters in the vast and threat-ening space, I used 10mm and 14mmlenses for wide shots and long lensesfor full shots and close-ups.”
Another place where“butcher’s pink” appears is in the
shack belonging to Miriam (TerryPheto), a young woman in the town-ship. After spotting her with her ownbaby, Tsotsi follows her home andforces her at gunpoint to help care forhis. Though their relationship isinitially antagonistic, he is drawnback to her home because it exudeseverything that is missing from hislife. “Miriam’s shack had to suggest a
little nest, a place that had theelements Tsotsi was searching for inlife: love, compassion and normality,”says Gewer. “We built the interiors ofMiriam’s and Tsotsi’s shacks on astage, and [production designer]Emilia Weavind and the art depart-ment did a fantastic job of it. That’swhere we had most of the scenes withthe baby,and Gavin wanted to be able
Above: A hint of“butcher’spink” is cast onthe backgroundwall as Tsotsitracks awheelchair-boundhomeless manunderneath abridge. Below:Gewer preparesfor one of thefilm’s manynight exteriors.
38 March 2006
to work very closely with the actorson those scenes.”
Miriam’s shack features paleblue walls and curtains, and the“butcher’s pink”is created by sunlightcoming through a window made ofpink glass. “Homes in the townshipsare made of materials other peoplehave disposed of, so you see lots ofcorrugated metal and window frameswith glass that isn’t the norm,” notesGewer. “Miriam’s and Tsotsi’s shackshad to suggest that homemade qual-ity. Her shack is warmer and a lotmore colorful than his, partly becauseof the colored-glass mobiles she hasmade for her baby. For day scenes inher shack we filled in with soft
sources and incandescent lampsthrough the windows, and we placeddifferent colored glass in some of theframes.”
In Tsotsi’s shack, Weavindlimited the color palette to rusts andreds.“Emilia, Lance and I talked quitea bit about how to get into Tsotsi’smind without using voiceover,” saysHood. “I really wanted to feel everyflicker of thought in his head, whichmeant the audience had to focus onthe actor as rapidly as possible inevery scene. We chose to strip downthe interior [of his shack] and usethree or four shades of the samecolor. Similarly, the only color hewears apart from black is red.
Everything is designed to not pullyou out of what’s going on in hishead.” Lighting Tsotsi’s shack “wasabout creating another world, aworld in which this character livesbut loves very little,” says Gewer. “Italso had to suggest a haven, a placewhere he feels safe, secure and incontrol. It’s the place where he comesto terms with himself, and the light-ing changes a lot from scene to sceneaccording to his mood. I feel lightingcan be quite imaginary in that sense— it’s sometimes about creatingwhat’s in the mind of the character aswell as suggesting reality. We had toget at what each scene was about: isTsotsi feeling vulnerable or secure?
“In the moodier scenes, theshack is dark except for a singlecandle on the table that appears tolight Tsotsi’s face — I used 150-wattincandescent lamps to re-create thatfeel — and shafts of light created byseveral HMIs coming through littleholes in the corrugated-metal walls,”continues the cinematographer.“Depending on the time of day, wealso used smoke. People in the town-ships make coal and wood fires everyday at about 4 a.m. and then again inthe afternoon, thousands and thou-sands of fires. In winter you canhardly breathe, let alone see morethan 30 meters in front of you,because of the smoke these firescreate.”
Throughout the shoot, Gewerused a 150-watt Pepper as an eyelightfor Chweneyagae, who appears inalmost every scene. “If anything wasmy brief, that was it: we had to seePresley’s eyes at all times. His eyes arethe world of the story. We kept thePepper’s intensity very low. All it hadto do was twinkle in his eyes to bringthem out.”
Tsotsi was finished with a digi-tal intermediate (DI) at The VideoLab in Johannesburg, but the deci-sion to do a digital grade wasn’t madeuntil after the shoot got underway.“Video Lab was considering bringingin a [Discreet] Lustre, but it didn’t
An Angry Young ManEnsconced in his
shack, Tsotsicontemplates hisoptions. “Presleyis quite a unique
character, andI’ve never
worked with anactor like him,”
Gewer says ofChweneyagae,who had never
been in a filmbefore. “He was
always incharacter, but it
didn’t distracthim when
someone talkedto him; he did to
a T what weasked him to do,
and he did itwithout losing
character.”
become a certainty until after we’dstarted shooting,” says Gewer.“Whenthey got the Lustre we ran some tests,and for me it was quite a tossup.Gavin and I both felt the footage thatwas timed photochemically was tech-nically superior, but we knew whatwe stood to lose if we didn’t do a DI.We wouldn’t have been able to effectshots the way we did, and we would-n’t have been able to give the picturethe same consistent grade.” Hoodadds, “From the producing/deliverypoint of view, we thought the DIwould be helpful in the event Tsotsisold around the world. We wereshooting in widescreen and had todeliver multiple versions, includingan HD 16x9 version, a 4x3 version,and subtitled and non-subtitledversions. In all there were about nineversions of the film, and when youcan store all nine versions in the digi-tal world, it makes your file deliverythat much easier.”
Nevertheless, Gewer embarkedon the shoot with a photochemicalfinish in mind. “We shot the film asthough it would be finished on film,and that forced us to be quite disci-plined during the shoot,” says thecinematographer. “We achieved thelook we wanted [on the negative] andenhanced some scenes, especially inTsotsi’s shack, during the digitalgrade.” The DI also enabled Gewer toeven out South Africa’s harsh, toppysunlight on day exteriors. “We oftendarkened the foreground to achievegreater depth in the image so the eyewould travel off into the distance. Wedidn’t use many filters on the lens.”
Hood notes that the DI wasparticularly helpful for a tricky exte-rior that was shot in waning light. Inthe scene, Tsotsi takes the baby to oneof his childhood homes, a set of large,concrete construction pipes on theoutskirts of the township. The pipesare inhabited by several youngorphans who approach Tsotsi with amix of curiosity and suspicion. “Wehad to shoot that scene in a singleafternoon, and it’s full of little chil-
39
dren who’d never been on camerabefore,” says Hood. “In fact, somewere orphans who actually lived inand around the area. We had to getwide shots, close-ups and reverses,and the sun was going down. It’s thekind of scene you would shoot overtwo or three days if you had thebudget, but we had to get it in aboutfive hours between midday andsunset. Lance was under enormous
pressure to maintain the feel of late-afternoon light for the whole scene,and he did a brilliant job. We got thewide shots with great, late-afternoonhorizon views that give the scenedepth; then, as the sun slowly disap-peared, we framed to keep the sky outof some remaining close-ups andLance kept giving us light, knowingthat as long as the scene was well litand well exposed he would be able tomanipulate it [in post]. He filled inwith reflectors and then, when thesun was actually gone, with two 18Ks.There’s no doubt the original imageswould have held up, but the DI was amarvelous tool for bringing lightingcontinuity to that scene.”
The production’s footage wasprocessed by The Film Lab, TheVideo Lab’s sister facility, and wassubsequently scanned at 2K on aSpirit DataCine. Gewer spent aboutfour weeks in the DI suite with Hoodand Brett Manson, a dedicated Lustre
colorist, but the team, which wasworking from a hi-def monitor, hadto start from scratch after the initialfilm-outs revealed inaccuracies in thelook-up tables. “We’d had DVDdailies telecined at 2K [by The VideoLab] throughout the shoot, and eventhough focus wasn’t critical and thecolor rendition wasn’t accurate, theyproved to be a very good referenceduring the grading process,” saysGewer. “When problematic shotsarose in the grade, Gavin and I knewwhat the negative really looked likebecause we’d seen the rushes.
“The grade took 12 weeksaltogether, and after setting the lookwith Gavin and Brett, I had to moveon to another project,” he continues.“Because of limited storage wecouldn’t have all the reels up at onetime, but we eventually got to thepoint where we could do four at atime. It was the first DI carried out onthe Lustre in South Africa, and Brett
Gewer and 1stAC Pam Laxenshare a laugh
between takes.
An Angry Young Man
did amazingly well. Seeing theprocess through from film to thedigital domain; integrating all theeffects, titles and subtitles; and thenrecording out to film was a big test.”The color-corrected files were trans-ferred to 35mm with a KodakLightning 11 Laser Recorder. Festivalprints were made on Kodak VisionPremier 2393, and general-releaseprints were made on Vision 2383.
Tsotsi made its U.S. debut lastfall at the AFI Fest, and MiramaxFilms began releasing it in the Stateslate last month. It was South Africa’ssubmission for this year’s AcademyAward for Best Foreign LanguageFilm, and Gewer was recently invitedto discuss his work at theCamerimage Film Festival, whereTsotsi was screened in competitionwith 14 other features from aroundthe world. “Many of us who workedon Tsotsi had been in the industry fora long time, searching for a film like
this,” he says.“When it came around,we just knew — we didn’t know howgreat it would be or that it wouldachieve what is has achieved, we justknew it would be a great film tomake. It’s an opportunity I’mcompletely thankful for andhumbled by.
“It was definitely the mostdifficult film I’ve ever done, but alsothe most rewarding,” continuesGewer. “Every setup was intenseemotionally; there were no cutawaysor simple establishing shots.Fortunately, the actors were incredi-bly good, our producers had realrespect for the medium and didn’thold us back, and our director had avery strong visual sense and knewhow to tell a story collaboratively. Themovie required of all of us everythingwe had to give, and making it had aprofound effect on everyone. Thespirit and energy were tangible everyminute we were on set; one didn’t
have to look through the camera tofeel it. We knew we were making areally good film that would be impor-tant for a long time to come.” �
41
TECHNICAL SPECS
Super 35mm 2.35:1
Moviecam CompactZeiss, Angenieux and Canon
lenses
Kodak Vision2 100T 5212, Vision2 200T 5217,Vision2 500T 5218
Digital Intermediate
Printed onKodak Vision Premier 2393 and
Vision 2383
42 March 2006
When friendly locals in thevillage of Nyack, New York,shoot the breeze, it mightlead to a game of cards or abackyard barbecue. But
when the locals are Ellen Kuras,ASC and director JonathanDemme, it can lead to a once-in-a-lifetime collaboration with a leg-endary recording artist. Such wasthe genesis of the concert film NeilYoung: Heart of Gold, which Kurasfilmed in Nashville’s historic RymanAuditorium last fall. “Jonathan waskind enough to loan me a room inhis editing suite in Nyack for twomonths, and he and I often talkedover coffee,” recalls Kuras.“One day,during one of those chats, I said,‘I’m such a huge fan of Neil Young.
It’d be great to have an opportunityto work with him someday.’ A weeklater, Jonathan called and asked if I’dlike to work with him on a concertfilm with Neil Young! Jonathan’s thekind of person and director whoputs things into action right away.”
Demme, of course, is nostranger to concert films, havingcreated one of the genre’s contem-porary classics, Stop Making Sense(1984). Shot by Jordan Cronenweth,ASC, that film famously eschewedaudience cutaways and other con-ventional coverage in favor of amore stylized approach to its sub-jects, The Talking Heads. AlthoughHeart of Gold marks Kuras’ firstforay into rock-concert cinematog-raphy, she had recently worked in
the live-performance arena for BlockParty, Michel Gondry’s quasi-docu-mentary performance portrait ofcomedian Dave Chappelle, and wasable to bring that experience to bearon Demme’s film. Their collabora-tion turned out to be a “concertfilm”in name only, fusing grand aes-thetic flourishes with disarming inti-macy to pay tribute to the famousRyman Auditorium and the musi-cian Kuras calls “one of the greatestmusical, political and spiritual inspi-rations I’ve ever had.”
The director of photographyon such films as Eternal Sunshine ofthe Spotless Mind (see AC April ’04),Blow (AC March ’01) and Summer ofSam (AC June ’99), Kuras earnedplaudits for her work in digital video
Ellen Kuras, ASC captures Neil Young in concert atNashville’s historic Ryman Auditorium.
HeartandSoulHeartandSoul
by John Pavlus
Unit photography by Ken ReganAdditional photos by Ellen Kuras
Super 16] and three 25-250mm [50-500mm in Super 16] AngenieuxHRs. “I was lucky to get thoseOptimas — thanks to CharlieTammaro at CSC — because wewere on a tight budget.
“The Ryman was formerly atabernacle church, and given that it’ssuch a small venue, we had ordereda number of moving lights to savespace so we wouldn’t have to hang10 lights for different focus positionsor color,” she continues. When itcame time to rig the Ryman’s light-ing grid, Kuras was compelled toreconsider using gelled tungsten Parcans rather than the electronic mov-ing lights, which comprised 32
on the features Personal Velocity (ACApril ’02) and Bamboozled, but shetook a determinedly analog approachto Heart of Gold, shooting in Super16mm. “A lot of the mikes and mon-itors in the Neil Young world are ana-log. He uses old instruments thathave an distinctive timbre, a round-ness to their sound,” she says. “In away, some of my work has been in thesame vein — I still used the old[Eastman EXR 200T] 5293 stockwhen [Vision 200T] 5274 becameavailable — so I was very excited tokeep the feeling of this concert with-in the analog world.” She didn’t use5293 this time, but she did chooseanother Kodak stock, the high-speedVision2 500T 7218, to wring themaximum range out of low light.“Neil is ultra-sensitive to bright light,so I didn’t want to blind him. Super16 is so good now that I knew we’d befine with the digital blowup, yet Iknew it would still be a struggle to geta good stop.”
The tough stop was exacerbat-ed by the production’s zoom-heavylens package; at T3.5, some of thezooms were considerably slower thantheir corresponding prime lengths.“And I knew I didn’t want to shootthe older 35mm Angenieux zoomlenses wide open,” adds Kuras. “Thereal sweet spot is closer to a T4,although the Optimas still performspectacularly at T2.8.” Her 35mmoptics, which she chose “not only fortheir clarity but also for their throw,because there wasn’t enough stop toput extenders on Super 16 lenses,”included three 24-290mm AngenieuxOptimas [equivalent to 48-580mm in
American Cinematographer 43
dichroic glass wedges. “I was veryparticular about the differencebecause color doesn’t feel as deep orround when it’s electronically gener-ated,” says Kuras.“I even asked a per-son to stand onstage and lit half hisface with a gelled Par can and theother half with a moving light, and Ifound the feeling just wasn’t thesame.” Fortunately, John Nadeau,Kuras’ longtime gaffer, came to therescue. With less than two days leftbefore showtime, Nadeau proposedreplacing most of the moving lightswith Par cans and Lekos. Kurasadmits she was slightly incredulousat first. “I looked at him cross-eyedand said, ‘Can we really afford that
Opposite: Anoverview of thestage shows theeffect of acarefully lit,richly huedbackdrop. EllenKuras, ASC saysthe intentionwas to createthe feel of “aseries ofpaintings withina painting.” Thispage, top: Close-ups provide anintimate view ofthe performer.Below: Bathedin an orangeglow, Youngbelts out a tune.
Pho
tos
and
fram
e gr
abs
cou
rtes
y of
Para
mou
nt
Cla
ssic
s.
44 March 2006
kind of time?’ At that point, we hadjust two more hours till the bandwould come in to rehearse. But Johnsaid, ‘I know how important thisfilm is to you, and you’ll live with itfor the rest of your life, so why notdo what your intuition says?’ So forthe next two hours, the electriciansjust went crazy. I can’t tell you howrelieved I was when I saw the differ-ence it made the next morning.”
By that time, Kuras andNadeau had just 36 hours to designand light the entire 20-song concert.
This task was no small feat, given thelayered visual concept Demme hadconceived with Kuras, whichinvolved massive, richly hued back-drops sliding in and out behind themusicians “like a series of paintingswithin a painting.” However, thefilmmakers were eager to visuallyreference the Ryman’s storied musi-cal history, even at the expense ofsimpler logistics. “When the Rymanused to do old radio concerts, thebackdrops were advertisements forwhomever was sponsoring the
show,” explains Kuras. “Our showwasn’t an advertisement, but [thebackdrops] lent so much to the filmthanks to Michael Zansky’s paint-brush. They’re like landscapes ofmemory, which echoes theCanadian prairie/childhood Neilsings about, without being literal.Wewanted each song to be like a paint-ing within a painting.”
In further homage to theRyman’s radio-show tradition,Demme moved the musiciansaround the stage for every song. In
Above: The useof varied
backdrops andlighting cuesallowed the
filmmakers tocreate a diverse
array of looksfor the concerts.
Below: Youngperforms
“Falling off theFace of the
Earth.”
Heart and Soul
American Cinematographer 45
the old days, musicians would shuf-fle around in a similar fashion whilewaiting their turns at the mike. “Icouldn’t just use the same lights inthe same spots for the bass player orbackground singers,” says Kuras. “Inaddition to being quite a lightingchallenge, the dynamic choreogra-phy was an invaluable learning expe-rience about the spatial relationshipsof sound and how musicians worktogether.”But the old concerts had atleast one element in common thatmade Kuras’ job slightly easier: theyall used stage footlights.“Those wereour secret light source; they meantwe had consistently perfect eyelightfor Neil.”
Kuras and her crew toiled for20 hours straight the day before theshow, grabbed six hours of rest,and then began again at 6 the fol-lowing morning, continuing “liter-ally until the curtain opened.”Lighting 20 song-scenes in one sus-tained burst “was about seriousintuition,” laughs the cinematogra-pher. Of course, it also helped tohave a lighting-board operator,Steve Leiberman, who “was pro-gramming all the cues in at light-ning speed.” That particular skill,Kuras adds wryly, helped avert anear-catastrophe just before show-time: “When we started shooting,we had the front lights up but for-
got the cue to put the lights onbehind the curtain! So all of a sud-den we were frantically trying toreset that cue so the musicians couldsee what they were doing behind thecurtain before it opened. Steve’s fin-gers were going like wildfire.”
“I started prep on the filmafter Ellen had been living with thealbum for weeks,” recalls Nadeau,“and in our first conversation, weboth gravitated to the mood of thesong ‘Falling off the Face of theEarth.’ Ellen described the feeling as‘the very last ray of light before aneclipse.’What imagery.We ended upwith a deep-blue horizon back-ground, which silhouetted the band,
Kuras, alongtimeadmirer ofYoung’s music,says theperformer wasintent oncelebrating theRyman’s historywhile alsoreflecting uponhis own lifeexperiences.
and a skid/book light — a Lekogoing into a reflector through Opaldiffusion — for Neil.”
A Los Angeles lightingdesigner, Jeff Ravitz, was brought into help Kuras with the unique prob-lem of mounting a concert. Ravitzspecializes in concerts and awardsshows and had worked withDemme on The Manchurian
Candidate, lighting the massive con-vention scene. “Jeff was fantastic,especially in helping us pick outmusic cues to accentuate the lightingand giving advice on moving lightsand specific units we weren’t accus-tomed to using,” says Kuras. “Hehelped us tailor the look so it wouldtranslate as a stage show as well asfor nine cameras.”
Kuras strove for a stylizedapproach, but unlike Stop MakingSense, which was assembled fromtakes captured over several concerts,Heart of Gold is a record of just twoperformances. Although nine ArriSR-3 cameras ensured a variety of compositions, Kuras’ lightingcouldn’t possibly be tailored to all ofthem. “In the end, John [Nadeau]and I decided that our ‘series ofpaintings’ concept meant we shouldlight for the wide shots rather thanthe close-ups. We also had to acceptthat having cameras covering 360degrees meant we would sometimesbe fully lit on the camera side. Butthe close-ups from the two wingcameras were terrific because wewere able to capture an intimacy.”
Choreographing the posi-tions and framing of the nine cam-eras was actually the last element ofHeart of Gold to come together.During a two-week prep, Demmeand Kuras plotted out compositionsfor seven cameras, but they laterdecided to order two more in orderto give more attention to the back-ground musicians. “OriginallyJonathan said he wanted 80 percentof the movie to be about Neil,” saysKuras, “but one of the things I loveabout the film is that Jonathan choseto highlight some of the musiciansyou’d never see in a concert film. Tobe able to see the bass player and hislittle idiosyncratic movements isfantastic.” At one point, the movieeven awards a roadie his close-up ashe carries off one of Young’s guitarsduring a scene change and thenstands in the wings, enjoying thenext song.
Eight of the camera positionswere to be fixed, while a Steadicamroved the stage and wings through-out the performance. However,Demme’s desire to establish musicalrelationships in the frame spurredKuras to mount four of the fixedcameras, including two in the wings,on dollies. “Jonathan really wantedto show the relationship between
Above: Kuras(seated, front)
and Young posewith several
other membersof the camera
crew (standing,from left):
operator JackDonnelly, 1st
AC PeterMorello, 1st AC
Jay Feather,operator
Charlie Libin,1st AC Dave
Mellow,operator Peter
Agliata(partiallyvisible),
operator AlisonKelly, and 1st AC Kip
McDonald.Seated next to
Kuras is RickGioia, her
1st AC.Right: Kuras
goes over somedetails with the
crew.
46 March 2006
Heart and Soul
Neil and the horns, or Neil and thebackground singers, so we had to beable to move the cameras slightly toreframe, given that the blocking
changed from song to song. The restof the cameras were placed on plat-forms in the audience, just belowNeil’s eyeline.” Demme also dis-
cussed framing with the eight othercamera operators — ASC memberDeclan Quinn, Chris Norr, CharlieLibin, Alison Kelly, Tony Janelli,Peter Agliata, Jack Donnelly, andMark Schmidt — as well asSteadicam operator Kyle Rudolph.The crew had just one camera run-through during the concert’s finaldress rehearsal.
Very long takes were a givenfor covering the musicians’ continu-ous performance, and Kuras’ crewoutfitted most of the camera maga-zines with 800' loads. Demme alsowanted continuous coverage ofYoung throughout the show, sousing the dress rehearsal as a refer-ence, camera assistant Rick Gioiaconferred with the film’s editors todevise staggered coverage that wouldprevent rollouts from occurringduring key moments. “A couple ofthe cameras started rolling a fewminutes before the concert even
Heart and Soul
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Kuras covers atalking pointwith director
JonathanDemme.
48
started, just to make sure we wouldbe covered within the staggered sys-tem,” says Kuras.
Bookending the concert aretwo interludes that establish thefilm’s themes of simplicity and inti-macy. Heart of Gold begins with agrainy, handheld view of Nashville’smodest skyline from the window ofa moving car, and then proceedsinto a suite of vérité -style interviews(also conducted from the passengerseat of a car) with individual musi-cians as they converge on the Rymanto unload their instruments. WithKuras’ encouragement, Demmefilmed all of this material himself onMiniDV.“He really wanted to be theonly one in the car with the musi-cians, so I just set [the camera] up asmuch as I could and said,‘Godspeed.’ At the time, I was in themiddle of trying to get all the light-ing organized, so I certainly had myhands full. We laughed together
when I asked to see his dailies!”What plays out over the film’s
closing credits is a coda comprisingnothing but Young, a guitar and anempty auditorium. “Jonathan envi-sioned this moment to happenimmediately after the last audiencemember left the Ryman,”says Kuras.“I didn’t have time to light it as a sep-arate piece, so I ran around andturned off lights.” Although threecameras were hastily set up onstage,the song plays out in a single, unin-terrupted take. Facing the emptyseats and framed by the Ryman’smagnificent painted windows,Young strums an abbreviated ver-sion of “Old Laughing Lady” beforepacking up and exiting the building.
Young was so impressed withKuras’ work that he has since askedher to light his performances on LateNight with Conan O’Brien andSaturday Night Live. “Working withboth Jonathan and Neil was the
chance of a lifetime,” says the cine-matographer. “Both men havegreatly influenced my creative, per-sonal and professional life, and I wasready to do whatever it took to makethis film the best I could. I wasthrilled to have an opportunity towork with both of them.” �
TECHNICAL SPECS
1.85:1Super 16mm
Arri SR-3Canon 16mm lenses;
Angenieux 35mm lenses
Kodak Vision2 500T 7218
Digital Intermediate
Printed on Fuji F-CP 3513DI
50 March 2006
Cinematographer MottHupfel re-creates thevisual essence of the
1950s for The NotoriousBettie Page, which detailsthe life and times of an
erotic icon.
by John Calhoun
Unit photography by John Walsh
Cinematographer MottHupfel re-creates thevisual essence of the
1950s for The NotoriousBettie Page, which detailsthe life and times of an
erotic icon.
by John Calhoun
Unit photography by John Walsh
RetroSexy
As she demonstrated with thefilms I Shot Andy Warhol andAmerican Psycho, MaryHarron is not a director lack-ing in stylistic vision. For her
latest project, The Notorious BettiePage, she wanted to construct a timecapsule of the 1950s. “Mary’s ideawas that you would feel for amoment that this is an old moviefrom the Fifties that we’d found andare showing to you,” says director ofphotography Mott Hupfel.“That ledus into decisions we were advisedagainst but fought for valiantly.”Shooting in black-and-white for thebulk of the movie, which chartsPage’s brief, infamous career as anS&M pinup girl and stag-film star,wasn’t in itself a controversial deci-sion, but the filmmakers’ insistenceon using black-and-white negativewas considered risky. The picture’soccasional shifts to vivid color fur-ther complicated technical matters,as did Harron and Hupfel’s attemptsto avoid any kind of digital finish.Their visual scheme was nothing ifnot ambitious, especially given theproject’s $6 million budget.
But the duo considered theirambitions crucial to capturing thedistinct vibe of the period, and of aculture that considered the spectacleof a wholesome-looking Americangirl in a black pageboy haircut andbondage gear so scandalous. TheNotorious Bettie Page follows theerotic icon (played by GretchenMol) from her youth in Nashville,through her career as a New Yorkphoto model and eventual target ofa 1955 U.S. Senate investigation intopornography, and her fade into con-tented obscurity at the end of thedecade.
Prior to The Notorious BettiePage, Hupfel had only one high-pro-file feature to his credit: the black-and-white picture The AmericanAstronaut, which brought him anIndependent Spirit Award nomina-tion in 2002. The New YorkUniversity film-school graduate
American Cinematographer 51
Opposite: Pinupmodel BettiePage (GretchenMol) strikes aplayful pose.This page, top:PhotographerPaula Klaw (LiliTaylor) and herhusband, Irving,recruit Bettie asa fetish model.Bottom: Bettiealso catches theeye of Miami-basedphotographerBunny Yeager(Sarah Paulson).
Pho
tos
cou
rtes
y of
Pic
ture
hou
se.
52 March 2006
spent much of the 1990s assistingcinematographers Lee Daniel andMike Spiller before breaking out onhis own with music videos and doc-umentaries.“Mary and her husbandwatched American Astronaut,” saysHupfel, “and her husband said, ‘Youshould check this guy out.’ I thinkshe was reluctant, but we met andreally got along. At the end of themeeting, I said, ‘It’s going to be hardto get me [approved] for thisbecause I haven’t done very manymovies,’ but she said, ‘Don’t be sosure.’ I soon learned that when Marysays something will happen, it willhappen.”
Filming on location in NewYork was another non-negotiable
issue for Harron.“I don’t think Marywould have gone anywhere else,”saysHupfel, who is based in the city.“She’s Canadian and she’s not one tosay no to Canada, but she was veryadamant about telling this story inNew York.” The storefront studiowhere Bettie did much of her workfor Irving Klaw (Chris Bauer) andhis sister, Paula (Lili Taylor), was re-created in a Bleecker Street location,and the production also ventured toother areas in Greenwich Village,where Page took acting lessons, andthe beach at Coney Island, where sheposed for her first photos.“Trying tofind locations in New York wherethere isn’t a single modern amenityis impossible,” notes Hupfel.“On thebeach at Coney Island, we’d movethe camera four feet in one directionso that the streetlight a mile awaywould be hidden behind a treebranch.”
The film’s production sched-ule ran 32 days, with a week inMiami at the end of the shoot.(Scenes set in Tennessee were shot inHaverstraw, New Jersey.) Severalweeks of prep gave Hupfel time toconduct tests and determine the bestapproach for the monochrome visu-als. “Mary and I talked about black-and-white movies we liked, and ourmain references were old Sam Fullermovies like Pickup on South Streetand Underworld, U.S.A. Othermovies we looked at were Buñuel’sWuthering Heights, for the formality,and Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears ofPetra Von Kant, for the fetishizationof shoes.”
But the Fuller films, particu-larly Pickup on South Street,remained the primary point of refer-ence.“It’s the period and the [visual]economy,” explains Hupfel. “Interms of lighting, those moviesweren’t really classic, super-contrastyblack-and-white; they were kind ofoverlit. I tried to keep some of that[quality].” Possibly responding to aremote quality that he and Harronfound appropriate for their story, as
Right: Thedemure,
guileless Bettiewaits to testify
at Senatehearings
probing theimpact of
pornography onthe nation’s
youth, wheresome of her
fetish photosserve as prime
examples.Below: Page
takes charge.
Retro Sexy
American Cinematographer 53
well as an air of tawdriness thatechoed Page’s work, Hupfel sawsomething else while watching theFuller movies: “I think we werelooking at old prints or mediocrevideo transfers. The windows wereblown out in a certain way, and Itried to put some of that into themovie so it’s almost like you’rewatching an old, bad print of amovie. I worked really hard to makesure all the windows and lamps andreflections on floors burned out justa bit more than they should. Weused a lot of diffusion, we pushedthe film stock, and we did all sorts ofthings to make it look slightlydegraded.”
The studio’s initial suggestionthat the filmmakers shoot on colorstock and pull the color out in a dig-ital intermediate (DI) was rejectedbecause Harron believed the resultwould not look enough like theFifties. Yet because Bettie Pageincludes color sequences, printingon black-and-white was never arealistic option. “Woody Allen [andGordon Willis, ASC] did it on Zelig— cutting A and B rolls of black-and-white and color,” says Hupfel.“It can be done, but it gets reallycomplicated. Not all theaters havethe dual-system sound that’s neces-sary to project it. Also, it would havebeen necessary to splice black-and-white into color in some instances,and HBO [Picturehouse] was con-cerned about sending prints full ofsplices all over the country, which isunderstandable. It was always in theback of my mind that we were goingto get a black-and-white print forfestivals, but we never did.”
The testing process did exam-ine all options. “We tested everypossible scenario,” says the directorof photography. “We tested five different film stocks, we pushed andpulled, and we developed it and digitally graded it every possible way with different filters to come up with what Mary wanted.”Eventually, they settled on Eastman
Plus-X 5231, pushed two stops, astheir camera negative. “Then I useddifferent diffusion filters, TiffenBlack Pro-Mist 1⁄8 to 1⁄2, dependingon the tone of the scene, to help thelights bloom and take the edge offthe grain we picked up by pushingthe stock. We had to get the differentblooms just right in order to makethe images feel like an old, crappyversion of Pickup on South Street.”
Hupfel notes that he usedPlus-X pushed two stops on TheAmerican Astronaut, “but becausethat movie was printed on black-and-white, it has a grittier feel. Onceyou print to color film, everything
gets smoothed out.”To cut down onthe contrast added by printing tocolor, Hupfel and his gaffer,Timothy Berg, used “an absurdamount of fill light,” says the cine-matographer. “Everyone on setthought it was too much, but I’ddone the test and had figured outthe math. It was normal black-and-white lighting — a lot of direct lightand not a lot of bounce — but witha lot of fill light. On color exteriors,there was an 18K HMI over thecamera all the time, sometimestwo.”
When photographing Mol,Hupfel used old Mitchell B and C
Bettie enjoys amoment ofromance on abeach in Miami.CinematographerMott Hupfelstrove to lend thefilm’s Floridascenes thebrightly huedlook of picturepostcards.
filters to help give the actress a peri-od look. “I lit her like they used tolight Olivia de Havilland. They putthe filter on, and she’d have to turnher head a certain way, and this lightwas up here, and there’s the speciallight for the eyes: classicalHollywood lighting. Gretchen lovedit and Mary loved it, and the make-up artists said, ‘How did you dothat?’ I said, ‘I did it like the guys 50years ago.’ It’s like my old Czech filmteacher taught me at NYU: there’sonly one way to do the close-up,with seven different lights — but inschool we only had four lights in thekit. Gretchen was often lit with abounced 2K and an additionaldirect Tweenie or Inky to pop hereyes. I liked to do low, soft rimlights,either heavily diffused Inkies or 2-by-2 Kino Flos, just behind hershoulder and just out of frame.”
In certain locations, such asthe courtroom at Brooklyn BoroughHall (where the Senate hearingscenes were shot), the productionneeded large sources.“We spent a lotof time prelighting the courtroomto get a feel for it, and we paid a lotof attention to showing the intrica-cies of the woodwork in order toovercome the heavy contrast that’screated by printing black-and-whiteonto color stock,” says Berg. Whenshooting on a modest budget, the
trick is to limit your “big guns” to afew days on the schedule, adds thegaffer. “We only had two Condordays on the entire film. I’ve workedas an electrician on huge films likeWar of the Worlds, where we had 10Condors laid out over five blocks,and we just didn’t have that kind ofoption on this show.”
Of course, many of BettiePage’s locations couldn’t evenaccommodate large movie lights. Inthe Klaw studio and other small sets,the filmmakers often used fixturesdevised by Berg and referred to as“wagon trains” or “covered wagons.”The gaffer explains, “It’s a strip ofbatten with a lightbulb every 6 inch-es, and we wrapped chicken wirearound them so we could use diffu-sion. The strips look like coveredwagons would if you took the mate-rial off them.” Hupfel says, “Thoseunits were really great. Timothy hadsome that were 2 feet long, some 4feet long, and some 8 feet long. It’sbasically like an old-fashioned KinoFlo. In a lot of places, we were able toput them up in the ceiling to create alevel of light, and then I could bringclassical hard light — Fresnels rang-ing from a Dedolight up to a 2K,depending on the size of the loca-
tion — in from the sides. That gaveus the exact feel we needed.”
In terms of camerawork andshot setups, Hupfel also harkenedback to the “old days”— specifically,once again, to Fuller.“There’s a scenein an office in Pickup on South Streetthat starts off on a two-shot,” saysHupfel. “When someone talks, it’scovered in a single, then the cameradollies back out to a two-shot. Then,when a third person comes in, thecamera dollies out to a three-shot,and then back in to a two-shot. It’sbasically one dolly move doing allthe coverage. In movies made today,if the actor feels like he wants to walkover there, then we must let him.But in that scene, the actors aredoing things in order to fit into theshots that had been set up.” Hupfeland Harron often tried to mimicthis style, using a master dolly inmany scenes even if they also didcoverage. In one example, Page istied up for a photo shoot in the Klawstudio, where she has a friendly con-versation with the photographer(Jared Harris) about Jesus.“We cov-ered that whole scene in a singledolly shot,” says the cinematograph-er. “We go back and forth — whenwe’re on her, we’re on her, and then
Above: Hupfelgives director
Mary Harron apeek through his
viewfinder.Right: Bettiestruggles to
grasp theStanislavski
Method afterenrolling in a
class taught byan acting coach
(AustinPendleton).
54 March 2006
Retro Sexy
when he moves back, there’s a semi-circular move and we’re on him.”
The production re-createdseveral of Page’s bondage movies,notably Sally’s Punishment, using ahand-cranked Bolex and EastmanDouble-X 7222 pushed one stop.For the rest of the picture, Hupfelused Arricam Studio and Lite cam-eras and Cooke S4 prime lenses.“Westuck pretty exclusively with threelenses: we did all of our close-ups ona 75mm and most of our coverageon a 27mm, and when we needed toget somewhere in between, we useda 40mm. Setting everything up withthe same lenses somehow felt moreold school.”
At the close of the New Yorkshoot, Hupfel shot his first colorscene for the film, a sequence wherePage has an epiphany during achurch service in Miami. He foundhimself at a disadvantage becausenone of the Miami material hadbeen filmed yet, yet he had to matchthe look of it in the church.“When Igot to the location, I realized what Ihad planned wasn’t really working,and I ended up using all the lightson the truck to achieve the look Iwanted in color,” he says. “We hadseven 10Ks hanging off the ceiling,an incredible amount of soft light,and used [Tiffen] White Pro-Miststo milk out the colors. It was difficultto keep that wildly overlit feelingand give the church some dimen-sion; it took lots of very broad andwell-placed strokes. But it’s myfavorite scene; I love the mood of it.”
One reason Hupfel needed so much light was that his color negative, the since-discontinuedEastman EXR 5248, is rated at ISO100, which worked well for theMiami scenes.“I asked Kodak to digup the oldest color film they couldfind, and it was 48, which just looksgreat — the colors really pop,” hesays.“I find all the Kodak stocks a lit-tle crazy compared to the way reallife looks, but the craziness of 48 wasright for this movie.” The look of
55
scenes set in Miami, where Pageworks with a female photographer(Sarah Paulson), was inspired byperiod postcards. “It’s not really aTechnicolor look,”says Hupfel.“Thepostcards almost look like there’s alayer of wax over them; they’rebright colors, but somehow they’re
milked out the tiniest bit. I guessthat’s what diffusion and fill light do.By that time, [makeup designer]Nicki Ledermann had worked outsuch good makeup with Gretchenthat she had a sheen to her face, likeeverything was coated in some sortof a film.” In the bright sun of
Miami, the 100-speed tungstenstock operated more in the 50-speeddaylight realm, and once again,Hupfel “filled it in absurdly. I’d besitting with the camera in the day-light, and right behind me would betwo direct 18Ks. The sky was read-ing as 64, Gretchen was reading as64, and everything was brought upto the brightest. The crew said,‘You’re crazy, she’ll burn!’ But shenever did.”
Some of the other techniquesthe filmmakers devised didn’t go aswell as hoped. Visual shifts fromblack-and-white images to colormagazine covers were achieved opti-cally, but some had to be digitallyenhanced. And the attempt to printblack-and-white on color stockwithout doing a DI brought upother issues. “The problem is, whenyou shift from a very bright shot to adark one, the color shifts even if theprinter lights don’t change a lot,”
Retro SexyHupfel makes a
point whilediscussing a
scene withHarron.
56
says Hupfel. “The scene printsslightly green, or slightly blue orpink. The timer has to make subtlechanges, and that change will affectthe next shot. We never did get adecent black-and-white print, eventhough we had prints in our test thatlooked fine.
“When we were doing thecolor timing [with David Poltz] atDuArt in New York, we were alsodoing the DVD transfer from an IPin Los Angeles, and that transferlooked gorgeous,” he continues.“Everyone up and down the line hadbeen seeing the prints and freakingout a little bit, and all of a suddenthey saw this perfect-looking DVD.So the decision was made to do a DIat LaserPacific, but it was done byusing the video files for the DVDtransfer rather than by scanning thenegative. LaserPacific did an incred-ible job, but I would like to havebeen able to go back and scan the
negative.” The major loss was theblooms Hupfel had so lovinglycrafted for the Pickup on SouthStreet look. “I spent a long time [inthe DI suite] trying to get the high-lights back, but the video couldn’treally handle the different levels, andwe’d lost that information. In thecourtroom, I’d fought to have high-wattage bulbs put in all the littlelamps, and the strong glow I wasafter now just looks like a flat, whitelamp shape with a slight bloomaround it.”
Still, the cinematographerdoesn’t regret shooting the picturethe way he did. “If we’d done it theway we were originally asked to, wewould have shot on color and donea DI in New York,”he says.“The waywe did it was unique, and I was ableto control [the images] better; youlose so much control if every deci-sion is being made on that comput-er. Even in this version, the black-
and-white looks the way I imaginedit except for the highlights, and thecolor is what I hoped it would be.There are eight or 10 shots I’d like tofix, but aside from that, it’s prettyperfect.” �
TECHNICAL SPECS
1.85:135mm and 16mm
Arricam Studio, Lite; BolexCooke S4 lenses
Eastman Plus-X 5231, EXR 100T5248, Double-X 7222
Digital Intermediate
Printed on Kodak Vision 2383
57
58 March 2006
Renowned British cinematogra-pher and director Jack Cardiff,BSC recently visited LosAngeles to help celebrateTechnicolor’s 90th anniversary
with special events at the Academyof Motion Picture Arts and Sciencesand the American Cinematheque. In
2001, Cardiff was awarded an hon-orary Oscar — a first for a cine-matographer — for his singularachievements in color cinematogra-phy. Nominated three times forOscars in that category, he won forhis work on Michael Powell andEmeric Pressburger’s Black Narcissus
(1947). On his recent visit to LosAngeles, Cardiff sat down with AC todiscuss his career.
“It’s a perfectly true story, andperhaps unbelievable, but I startedas a child actor in 1918 when I was 4years old,” recalls Cardiff. “By thetime I was 14, my acting career was
Jack Cardiff, BSCreminisces about his achievements
with Technicolor’sthree-strip process.
by Robert S. Birchard
A Master’sPalette
cameramen, and the French cam-eramen, too, were sort of ‘itty-bitty.’George Perinal was considered oneof the best cinematographers at thetime, but he used dozens of lights —a little bit here, a little bit there —and it didn’t look natural. A bigdirector who had been a camera-man came over from America to doa screen test, and when this directorcame on the set, he said: ‘Are youready, Peri?’ Peri said, ‘Yes.’ Then thedirector said to the gaffer, ‘Kill thatone, kill that one …’ and he killedabout 10 lights. Watching that was alesson to me: simplicity.”
Although Cardiff cut his teethin black-and-white cinematographyas an assistant, his path towardbecoming a director of photographybegan when he went to work for theEnglish branch of Technicolor. “Iwas working as a kind of operator
behind me and I was working as atea boy on The Informer [1929], oneof the last British silent films — apart-talkie, actually. The Germandirector, Arthur Robison, had stom-ach trouble and had to drink Vichywater, and I used to bring it to himon a tray. I heard the boys in thecamera department went abroad alot, and I thought that soundedgreat. So I got into the cameradepartment as a number boy, notbecause I was interested in photog-raphy, but because I thought I mightget a fling at traveling abroad. Ofcourse, for the next two years I onlymanaged to get to the Isle of Wight,and just for one afternoon.”
Cardiff would go on tobecome a cinematographer notedfor masterful three-strip Technicolorfilms such as A Matter of Life andDeath (1946), Black Narcissus (1947)and The Red Shoes (1948), and healso became a director of note.Although his name is synonymouswith the golden age of British cine-ma, he says that his influences werelargely American. “We were makingvery economical little films at thetime and Hollywood was sendingover these big classics with wonder-ful sets and lighting,” says Cardiff. “Igot to realize the photography ofcertain people, among them [ASCmembers] George Barnes, HarryStradling and Gregg Toland.Eventually I worked for Stradling asan operator on a number of picturesin England. He was a delightful man.
“At the same time, I formed aterrific love of painting, particularlythe impressionists. They were dar-ing, they had audacity, they hadideas. This was great training, and Isaid to myself, ‘Audacity is the ticket.’I started to paint and still do. I hadthis sort of general education aboutlight and also saw the way lightworked in films.
“There are several aspects oflighting. There’s a broad sweep that’ssort of impressionistic and reason-ably realistic, but some of our British
American Cinematographer 59
and junior cameraman, and Iwould occasionally do odd insertsfor features. A German, Count vonKeller, came to Technicolor with hiswife; they’d been traveling aroundwith a 16mm camera shootingamateur movies, and their friendsadvised them to get a proper colorcamera and a cameraman to gowith them. They were told theycouldn’t borrow a three-strip cam-era, as there were only four inBritain. The Kellers said, ‘Alright,we’ll pay for it.’ I was assigned to gotouring with them. We had a vanand a whole Technicolor crew, andwe shot travelogues.
“The Technicolor authoritiesat Westbury didn’t want their cam-era treated carelessly — the beam-splitting prism was a very delicatething. The camera had to bechecked in the bedroom of the
Opposite: InBlack Narcissus,a prime exampleof three-stripTechnicolorphotography,Deborah Kerrplays SisterClodagh, anAnglican nunwho spearheadsan effort toestablish areligiouscommunity in theHimalayas.According to the film’scinematographer,Jack Cardiff, BSC(pictured at left),the three-stripsystemsometimes sawcolors differentlythan the eye.“Before westarted BlackNarcissus, Iknew we had tobe very carefulbecause nunsdon’t usemakeup,” hesays. “If theaudience couldtell they weremade up, wewere dead. Wetried to banlipstick, but wediscoveredduring testingthat Technicolorexaggerated thereds a bit so thatthe nuns’ naturallips looked likelipstick. Weended up havingto add a bit offlesh color to thelips to take downthe reds.”
Fram
e gr
abs
cou
rtes
y of
Tech
nic
olor
an
d IT
V (
Gra
nad
a In
tern
atio
nal
).P
rodu
ctio
n s
tills
cou
rtes
y of
ITV
.
60 March 2006
assistant cameraman, who also hadto clean it every couple of days.Technicolor ordered us not to everput the camera in a dangerous posi-tion, but I disobeyed all the rules. Itook it on top of Mount Vesuviusduring an eruption! Technicolor wasfurious, and I was about to be fired,but then they sent a telegram sayingthey’d been impressed with thedailies and my job was secure, atleast for the moment. Those littletravelogues were exciting work andgave me an opportunity to lightwhat I liked. I gained great confi-dence in my abilities, but I wanted tophotograph a big production.
“I had worked with a verygood cameraman, Claude Friese-Greene, as a focus puller and opera-tor. His father, William Friese-Greene, arguably developed one ofthe first cameras to record motion inEngland. Director Norman Walker
wanted Claude to photograph TheGreat Mr. Handel in Technicolor, butClaude was a black-and-white man.He said, ‘I’m sorry, but I haven’t gotany color photography backgroundand don’t want to take a chance onthat.’ Then he had the idea of work-ing on it with me. He said, ‘Let Jackphotograph the first two weeks ofthe picture and I’ll watch.’ And that’show I got my first break as a lightingcameraman on a set.
“After that, it was back toshooting inserts and doing second-unit work, which is very drearybecause the first unit does all theexciting things. I was working sec-ond unit on one or two exteriorsand Michael Powell came to super-vise, and I think he sort of liked mywork because I worked very fast andwas confident. One shot I had to dowas of a wall with animal’s headsmounted on it. This shot depicted a
love affair gone bad; the characterhad gone around the world shootinganimals to forget his lost love. Theanimal heads had horns, and [theywere] very difficult to shoot becauseevery light I put on [them] madeduplicate shadows — horns all overthe bloody wall — but I had all dayto do it. Eventually I heard someonesay, ‘Very interesting,’ and I turnedaround and there was Powell. Hesaid, ‘Would you like to photographmy next film?’ It was A Matter of Lifeand Death.”
Technicolor’s three-strip sys-tem utilized three separate rolls ofblack-and-white film to create colorseparation masters in the camera;the color was achieved in printing.Yellow, cyan and magenta dye-soaked matrices struck from theoriginal separation negatives werebrought into contact with a blankroll of film in a process that was sim-
The vibrant hues of thethree-strip
process areevident in this
scene fromBlack
Narcissus, inwhich Sisters
Clodagh andRuth (KathleenByron) consultwith Mr. Dean(David Farrar),
a localgovernmentofficial who
becomes theobject of Ruth’serotic fixation.
A Master’s Palette
American Cinematographer 61
ilar to color lithography. Cardiff hasgreat respect for the vibrant colorTechnicolor could achieve, but heacknowledges that the three-stripsystem made for a difficult workingenvironment. “The Technicolorcamera needed an enormousamount of light — I think it was 650footcandles at a lens aperture of 2.5.Generally we were forced to use arclamps to get enough light, and thatcould be a problem with the actors.In a two-shot, for example, one per-son wouldn’t take any notice at all,but the other would say, ‘I’m sorry,but the lights are so strong! Take itdown a bit.’ I did all I could to makeit easier for the actors; I had barndoors on all the lamps so I could puta little lid over them or take out glare.
“Black Narcissus was shot at atime when everyone used arc lampsand hardly any Inkies. The noisefrom the arcs was such that the soundpeople routinely said, ‘We’ll have todub this later.’ We also had a lot ofhaze from the carbon dust — everyhalf an hour we’d open the stagedoors to let the dust haze get out.
“To achieve a higherdiaphragm setting to get more depthof field, we had to increase the light.Most cameramen don’t like tochange their levels, but it’s some-
times necessary, and I got used todoing it. Once or twice Powell want-ed someone very close in the fore-ground sharp and someone in thebackground sharp, and the pooractors were almost burned alive! Itwas a tough, tough way of working.
“We also had a big blimp thatwas bloody difficult. There was acertain lack of freedom in movingthe camera around. You couldn’tdolly with it, not like you can withthe average small camera. There wasno reflex viewing, and therangefinder system on the side of
the blimp was just adequate.“We didn’t stop to reload
film. We had two cameras all thetime, and when we needed to reloadwe’d slide out one camera from theblimp and replace it with the other.That saved a lot of time. If we hadn’tdone that, we would’ve had to stopat least every 15 minutes to reloadthe camera.
“Technicolor also laid down a
Top left: SisterClodagh tends tobusiness. Above:Cardiff adjustsan arc light onthe set of theTechnicolorproduction TheMagic Box(1951), based onthe life ofWilliam Friese-Greene, a Britishinventor who isoften creditedwith inventingcinematographyin Britain. Infact, Friese-Greenedeveloped asequentialcamera that wasa precursor tomotion pictures.Left: A lobbycard for BlackNarcissustrumpets theglories ofCardiff’scinematography.
62 March 2006
lot of strange laws. They were inter-ested in showcasing their process,not necessarily in the requirementsof filmmakers. If an actor was sup-posed to wear a white shirt, we hadto deal with different grades ofslightly grayish whites becauseTechnicolor dictated we couldn’t usepure white. But after a while, whenwe were shooting outside, we’dnotice that passersby wearing whitelooked all right [on film]. So eventu-ally we were able to have whites onstudio sets.”
Like other cinematographersworking in the three-strip process,Cardiff also had to contend withwhat he terms “a so-called colorexpert.” Natalie Kalmus, ex-wife ofTechnicolor co-founder HerbertKalmus, received credit asTechnicolor consultant on BlackNarcissus, but Cardiff says she wasnever on the set. “Natalie would befloating about, but a lot of directorssaid they didn’t want her on the set.[On Black Narcissus] there was awoman called Joan Bridges who was
very meek and just made occasionalsuggestions.”
Even though some filmmak-ers resented the presence of the colorconsultants, Technicolor’s rules wereimportant because the three-stripsystem sometimes saw colors differ-ently than the eye. “Before we start-ed Black Narcissus, I knew we had tobe very careful because nuns don’tuse makeup,” says Cardiff. “If theaudience could tell they were madeup, we were dead. We tried to banlipstick, but we discovered duringtesting that Technicolor exaggeratedthe reds a bit so that the nuns’ natu-ral lips looked like lipstick.We endedup having to add a bit of flesh colorto the lips to take down the reds.”
One major frustration inworking with three-strip Techni-color was that the cinematographerand director saw most of theirdailies in black-and-white. It wasstandard practice for the Techni-color laboratory to supply mono-chrome work prints for most of thefootage. “At the end of each scene in
the rushes, there was a pilot shot thatwould give us an indication of thegeneral colors,” recalls Cardiff.“Sometimes the director would askto see an entire scene printed incolor, but that happened only veryoccasionally. The monochromerushes were printed from the cyanrecord, and that could sometimesgive you a shock. When I first start-ed, I photographed a commercialfilm called Steel, and I filmed in afactory that had big, flaming-hot,bright-orange ingots. When we sawthe rushes, there was nothing to beseen — the ingots just disappeared!We were terrified, but then we real-ized the cyan record didn’t pick upyellow at all.”
A hallmark of Cardiff’s stylewas his audacious use of coloredlights to add dramatic impact to ascene. “When I had a lamp effect, Iused a warm filter on what weresupposed to be the source lights andthen sometimes used a very paleblue filtered light to fill. You couldbuild up a lot of [visual] interest just
A Master’s PaletteFor this
overhead shot,the three-strip
camera isunblimped,
cutting down onweight and
cumbersomebulk. Because ofthe considerablenoise generated
by both the arclamps and the
Technicolorcamera, much of
the film’sproduction
sound was goodonly as a guide
track forpostproduction
looping.
American Cinematographer 63
by the color relationship itself.“I had a system for lighting
candle effects. Overhead I had a fullspot, soft, gelled with an amber filterto create light that looked as if itwere coming from the flame. ThenI’d get a painter to paint the candle adark ochre so it looked like theshadow a candle would cast. Iemphasized it by painting it darkand then gradually easing off so thatwhen it got to an inch from the top,it was clear. That looked like thething was on even before we lit it,and I had the light on a dimmergoing up and down during thescene. It was very complicated. Ieven had an electrician with a longstick punch the rope holding theoverhead spot so it wangled a bit tomake it look like the flames. Oddlyenough, even with the high light lev-els required by Technicolor, we hadno problem picking up the actualcandle flame.
“There’s one shot in BlackNarcissus that makes me go ‘Ugh!’every time I see it: the long shotwhen the nuns are carrying candles.It’s a very long shot and it’s all arc-lit,and I couldn’t get any effect of thecandles. If we did that today we’dhave an actual candle and an Inkythat was very low, but in those dayswe were bothered so much with theNatalie Kalmus [edict] that therecouldn’t be any positive black. Youhad to light everything, and if theshadows were left without any lightat all there were occasionally timeswhen they looked a bit green or red.I used to take a chance with that a bitand let the shadows go, because oth-erwise it’s just like a theatrical pan-tomime and not realistic.
“By the time we made TheRed Shoes, my third picture withPowell, the Brute lamp had comeout, and I loved it. I learned of itwhen I was in Hollywood for somereason, and Pete Mole at Mole-Richardson said he’d made a newlamp and offered to show it to me. Itwas big, but I like to use one lamp
and then fillers, and he said this onelamp would do it. They had just oneunit and were making a second one.I thought it was marvelous, and hesent over the first two Brutes.”
One of the most visuallyexciting moments in Black Narcissusoccurs when Sister Ruth (KathleenByron) puts on a red dress she hasordered by mail and, with awkwarddetermination, applies lipstickbefore she attempts to seduce Mr.Dean (David Farrar), the Englishadviser to the local Indian prince.“The scene is purposely larger thanlife,” says Cardiff. “We thought weneeded that exaggeration. Funnilyenough, the shot where Ruth puts
that lipstick on became extraordi-narily successful. A lot of peoplewho have nothing to do with thecinema say, ‘Oh, I know that film, ithas that terrifying shot with the nunputting the lipstick on.’”
Black Narcissus is set in India,but except for a few exteriors thatwere shot in Ireland, nearly all of thefilm was filmed on soundstages andon the backlots at the Denham andPinewood studios in England. Artdirector Alfred Junge’s sets andscenery achieve credibility eventhough they were conceived in atheatrical, painterly vein. Part of theillusion was achieved through thematte paintings of Percy “Papa”Day.
Top: Theexterior of the“house ofwomen,” formerhome to the oldgeneral’s wivesand set aside asa convent by thenew general.Onscreen, thebacklot setsgive a near-perfectimpression ofbeing in themountainousregions ofnorthern India.The illusion wasfurtherenhanced by thelarge windmachine.DirectorMichael Powellis to the left ofthe camera,wearing a whiteshirt and darkAscot. Bottom:In this closerangle of thewind machine,Powell(kneeling atcenter) conferswith Cardiff(wearingsunglasses).
“The backlot of any studio is usuallyin dreadful condition,” notesCardiff. “There were trucks and bitsof rubbish all over the place, but wehad one thing in our favor: PapaDay. Like the early days of glassshots, we just made a matte with apiece of black cardboard that blottedout the background, Day wouldpaint the missing parts of thescenery, and we’d make a reversematte with the cardboard and shootit. Many viewers thought we’d goneout on location — in fact, Powell gota letter from someone who said he’dlived in that particular place, and hethought it was all real. Day was great;everyone called him ‘Papa’ becausehe looked about 150 years of age,but he was quite sprightly and hewas probably 60.”
Because Black Narcissus was“studio-bound,” several “exteriors”were shot in the great indoors of asoundstage. “It was asking for trou-
ble to do exteriors on a stage, but Ithink I made it work,” says Cardiff.“To make it look natural, I had a lotof lights above with bluish filters —like a sky reflection — that illuminedthe tops of [the actors’] heads, andwhat was absolutely necessary togive an effect of sunlight [were unitswith] amber filters [lighting] theactors.
“In A Matter of Life andDeath, there’s a scene where DavidNiven is supposed to be in a gardenand the magician casts a spell thatfreezes Niven in time. Well, as it wasmagic, it obviously had to be some-thing very different from ordinarylight. I suggested to Powell that I usea lemon filter for sunlight instead ofamber so the light wouldn’t lookthat natural, and he loved the idea.Not many people noticed it, really,but it was there.”
Even though Cardiff wasclosely associated with Technicolor’s
A Master’s Palette
The bell tower outside the Himalayan convent appeared to behundreds of feet above a deep canyon, but the set was built
only a few feet off the ground on the backlot at Denham Studio.The illusion of height was supplied by Percy Day’s matte
paintings. The unblimped Technicolor camera is lashed to theparallel to prevent an accidental fall. The light-hungry
Technicolor three-strip system required supplemental light onday exteriors — note the large pile of arc lamps at the ready.
64
three-strip system and won anOscar for his cinematography onBlack Narcissus, he was not particu-larly sorry when the three-stripcameras were retired in the early1950s. “We were very happy whenEastmancolor came in because wecould use 10Ks instead of big arclights and have it quiet. I was work-ing on a three-strip film withHitchcock, Under Capricorn [1949],and Ingrid Bergman was in it. Everyscene we did was with arc lights, andbecause of the noise on set most ofthe sound recordings were justguide tracks and to be dubbed after-wards. Ingrid put her foot down onone sequence. She said, ‘I don’t wantto act this scene knowing it has to bedubbed. I’d like this sequence shotwith incandescent light.’ Now, itwasn’t impossible; you could useincandescent light on a very smallset, but very few people did itbecause it required so many Inkies.
So I said, ‘Sure.’ I used 5Ks on thespot rail and one or two smallerlamps downstairs. It was difficult,but I did it. Ironically, the scene hadto be retaken because for the first
time, even with the huge blimp, weheard the noise of the Technicolorcamera!” �
65
Pho
to b
y D
ougl
as K
irkl
and.
The always-dapper Cardiffrecently sharedhis memories ofBlack Narcissusprior to ascreening of thefilm at theAcademy ofMotion PictureArts andSciences inBeverly Hills.Presented by theAcademy inassociation withthe British FilmInstitute, theevent was part ofa salute toMichael Powell.
66 March 2006
“Idon’t mean to be coy aboutit, but I was never what Iwould call a great shooteror great visual stylist,” saysdirector Sydney Pollack,
recipient of this year’s ASC Board ofGovernors Award. “There are manyother directors who are very techni-cally proficient in terms of lightingand the camera, and I do have agood basic knowledge, but my headhad always been more in the drama.The shooting of a film is a tool fortelling that particular story, so I’venever really come up with a particu-lar style that’s as extreme as whatother directors are known for. Thatside is simply more intuitive forother people. All I really knew as adirector when I started was some-thing about acting.”
The Board of GovernorsAward, which Pollack accepted latelast month at the 20th annual ASCOutstanding Achievement Awards,is bestowed upon individuals whohave made significant and lastingcontributions to the art of filmmak-ing. Previous recipients includeGregory Peck, Charles Champlin,Fay Kanin, Steven Spielberg, MartinScorsese, Jodie Foster, Robert Wise,Francis Ford Coppola, RobertAltman and Gilbert Cates. Over thecourse of his career, Pollack has
worked with an array of ASC greats,including Loyal Griggs (The SlenderThread), James Wong Howe (ThisProperty Is Condemned), PhilLathrop (They Shoot Horses, Don’tThey?), Harry Stradling Jr. (The WayWe Were), and Owen Roizman(Three Days of the Condor, TheElectric Horseman, Absence of Malice,Tootsie and Havana). More recently,Pollack has collaborated with ASCmembers John Seale (The Firm),Giuseppe Rotunno (Sabrina),Philippe Rousselot (RandomHearts) and Darius Khondji (TheInterpreter).
When asked which film firstmade an impression on him becauseof its cinematography, Pollackreplies, “It was probably A Place inthe Sun, or maybe Shane. What’sinteresting is they were both shot bythe same cameraman, Loyal Griggs[working under William C. Mellor,ASC], who was the cinematographeron my first movie, The SlenderThread [1965]. I didn’t select himbecause of that, it was just chance.Loyal was very old at that time, andthat was a black-and-white picture— the only black-and-white film Iever made. There was emotionality
ASC Board of Governors honoree Sydney Pollack deftly balances plot and performance with picture.
by David E. Williams
A StyleofSubtlety
I’ve ever worked with. He under-stands the camera and cameramovement. He knows what lensesdo and whether a particular shotcan or can’t be made. It’s a rarepleasure to work with someone whoreally understands these things,especially on a difficult assignmentlike this.” Hearing this praise today,Pollack offers, “I was so anxious toprove I could fill the big screen thatI made everybody seasick with The
in those two pictures of his that I didn’t understand at the time andprobably couldn’t explain today. In A Place in the Sun, I remember theshots of the boats in the distance and Montgomery Clift’s face whenElizabeth Taylor comes to see him injail at the end, those gigantic close-ups. But I suppose I really becamemore consciously aware of cine-matography by studying [ASC mem-ber] Boris Kaufman’s work in EliaKazan’s movies.”
Given Pollack’s own reputationas an “actor’s director,” this shouldcome as no surprise, as the exemplarycollaboration between Kazan andKaufman produced a trio of powerfulfilms: On the Waterfront, Baby Dolland Splendor in the Grass. “I was real-ly into Kazan at the time,” recallsPollack. “There always seemed to beenormous tension in Kaufman’swork, in the framing and lighting. Itcreated the perfect mood for thedrama.”
While filming They ShootHorses in 1969, Lathrop told AmericanCinematographer, “[Pollack] is proba-bly the most knowledgeable director
American Cinematographer 67
Slender Thread. You have to takeDramamine to watch it! We werezooming in every shot and up inhelicopters and I was wheeling peo-ple around on furniture dollies, andI had to do that myself because myoperator weighed about 240pounds and nobody else couldbudge him.When I watched the fin-ished film, I thought it was a messvisually. I was trying too hard, but Ilearned from it.
Opposite:Pollack plots asequence in theUnited NationsGeneralAssembly roomwhile filmingThe Interpreter,shot by DariusKhondji, ASC,AFC. This page,top: Pollack andDustin Hoffmanwork out ascene for the hitcomedy Tootsie(1982), whichshowcased notonly a hilariousscript but alsothe Oscar-nominatedcinematographyof OwenRoizman, ASC.Bottom: Pollackand Roizman(center) onlocation in theDominicanRepublic whilemaking their fifthfeature together,the steamydrama Havana(1990).
�
68 March 2006
“I don’t feel I’ve ever been‘prepared,’ but I have felt the pres-sure to prepare,” he continues.“Truth be told, I don’t know if I real-ly know what to do. I don’t think I’veever held anybody up on a set whiletrying to figure out what the nextshot is, but I often get the shots whileI’m there, after the actors’ rehearsal.Of course, if we’re doing somethingreally complex, like the bus explo-sion in The Interpreter [see AC May’05], then I’ll prepare.
“It was on my third film, TheScalphunters [shot by DukeCallaghan and Richard Moore,ASC], that I first used widescreen,and I found there was a differentkind of preparation that had to gointo filling the screen. It was such abig frame. My experience in stillphotography really helped in thatregard; I had a bathroom darkroomin my little New York apartment
with trays in the bathtub, and I wasalways playing around with compo-sitions. I had no idea I was going toend up directing films, but I paid alot of attention to [composition]. SoI was tremendously interested in thecamera when I started directing, andI then learned most of what I cameto know while working in televi-sion.”
This training ground consist-ed largely of a two-year stint on themedical drama Ben Casey, duringwhich Pollack worked with camera-man Ted Voigtländer, ASC and“directed pretty much every otherepisode,” as well as segments of TheAlfred Hitchcock Hour and TheFugitive. “In those days, TV produc-tion wasn’t set up so you could see aset before you shot it,” he recalls.“You might see it the night before.And it was rare to have more thanfive days to shoot an hour-long
show, so you had to work fast. I did15 or 17 episodes a year for almostfive years, and that was my filmschool. I learned editing, lenses, howto shoot action, how to create ten-sion, and I did it in an environmentwhere the stakes weren’t that high.On Ben Casey, if I made a mistake onan episode, we were on to the nextone before that had even aired.”
Coming of age as a director inthe 1960s, Pollack was part ofAmerican film’s transition to a morenaturalistic approach. “The last filmI did in the classic Hollywood stylewas The Way We Were, which wasalso a period Hollywood film aboutHollywood. Every shot almost lookslike a studio gallery still that you’dsee in the hallways at MGM, and thatwas what we were going for. I alwaystry to use a visual style that best suitsthe story but doesn’t draw too muchattention to itself. In my later films,
Pollack andcinematographer
Phil Lathrop,ASC largely shot
They ShootHorses, Don’t
They? (1969) onStage 4 at
Warner Bros.,where the
film’s centralmarathon dancecompetition was
imaginativelycovered with all
manner ofmoving cameras
— fromtowering cranes
to skateboarddollies — to
bring theaudience into
the action.
A Style of Subtlety
the stories we were telling wouldn’thave been served by the ‘Hollywood’style. For me, stories and acting dic-tate the look of a film. I didn’t startas an art director, editor or cine-matographer; I came at filmmakingfrom a completely different point ofview.”
Asked how his perspectiveson acting for the camera may havebeen influenced by his experiencesperforming in such films as Tootsie,Husbands and Wives and Eyes WideShut, Pollack says, “Stanley[Kubrick] was a great photographer.He had a cinematographer on thepicture [Larry Smith], of course, butStanley chose the lights and thelenses and was a stickler on compo-sitions. I don’t go that far at all. As adirector, my goal is always to be veryprepared but leave room for the cre-ative contributions from both thecinematographer and the actors.That’s a question of balance.
“The movies I’ve directedhave been so character-driven that Ihave always had to draw a line at apoint where I didn’t want the cine-matography to draw too muchattention to itself. I never wanted tomake a film about the cinematogra-phy. But I have been so lucky inworking with cinematographerswho figure out how to shoot thepicture in a way that supports thework of the actors while still makinga visual statement. In a way, thatbrings out the emotion of the pic-ture.”
The 1990 thriller Havana,which stars Robert Redford as ashady American in steamy, pre-Castro Cuba, is perhaps Pollack’smost expressionistic work in termsof camerawork and lighting, cour-tesy of longtime collaboratorRoizman. “That look was driven bywhat Havana was like in 1959,” saysPollack.“It was this phantasmagoriaof sexuality and sensuality — thenightclubs, music and colors ofCuba. I wanted to catch all that. Iwas pushing for a strong visual style,
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70
and I was very comfortable workingwith Owen — I always was — andthat allowed both of us to be moreexpressive. We started using [Tiffen]Pro-Mist filters that added a visualbuzz to everything, and it was fun.That look was right for that picture.
“One of the reasons I lovedworking with Owen was that he wasable to make the film look morebeautiful than reality, but not somuch so that you were just gaspingat picturesque shots and beautifullighting. His work always stayedwithin the context of the drama andsupported it. That’s creativerestraint. All the cinematographersI’ve worked with have had that, butthey also knew when to push intomore extreme concepts. Owen cer-tainly could. Look at Darius[Khondji]’s work in Evita — it’svery visually expressive, but [direc-tor] Alan Parker is very much a
visual stylist.“Owen was also the first cam-
eraman I worked with who was mycontemporary,” he continues. “He’sabout my age, we had similar expe-riences and influences, and webecame very close friends.Creatively, that relationship was fan-tastic. Owen knew what to trust mewith and what not to trust me with.We grew together both craft-wiseand in our standing in the business.I came off some successful picturesbefore we met on Three Days of theCondor, and together we did a stringof extremely successful films.”
Location became a centralcharacter in Pollack’s romantic epicOut of Africa (1985), which wasphotographed on location in Kenyaby David Watkin, BSC. The filmearned both men Academy Awards,among many other honors.“Building the landscapes into the
visual style was organic thematicallybecause of what the film was about,”says Pollack. “I was trying to tell astory about possession, and I wantedthe background and foreground torhyme with each other. The story isabout a woman [played by MerylStreep] who wants to possess anunpossessable man [played byRedford] and possess and change acountry. The colonials came to thatpart of the world and tried to turnindigenous Africans into littleEnglishmen, in the process destroy-ing something unique. So the identi-ty of the African people and landwas an important character in thepicture. World War I is also in thebackground. All those themes beganto echo each other and led me tofind a style of shooting that wouldreflect that.
“There were also technicalissues we had to take into account.
A Style of Subtlety
We were on the equator — the ugli-est light in the world was comingstraight down on us at an elevationof 5,500 feet. It’s the only place inthe world where I’ve had an honestexposure reading of f/32; even insnow, you’d get less! So we did aweird thing by using the fastest filmavailable at the time [Agfa 320],even though we had all that light,because the thicker emulsions of thefaster film softened the look.We alsotried to shoot all the key scenes inthe early morning or afternoonbecause the light was so ugly duringthe rest of the day.”
As a director, the creative liai-son between cast and camera, whatwisdom does Pollack impart to hisactors? “The main thing I empha-size is that the camera is a micro-scope. It absolutely cannot be liedto, so if you are relaxed and think athought, the camera will see it. Too
many actors believe they need toadd something more to make thatvisible — a habit that comes fromstage work — but the best filmactors know how much work thecamera is doing for them and let itdo what it can. They make the cam-era come inside to them rather than
trying to give so much. HarrisonFord knows that. Robert Redfordknows it better than anybody. TomCruise learned it. The camera is a liedetector.” �
Pollack andcinematographerJohn Seale, ASC,ACS check acompositionwhile filming thethriller The Firm(1993).
71
72 March 2006
Early in preproduction on his award-winning short film The Big Empty,Newton Thomas Sigel, ASC faced a
dilemma familiar to indie filmmakerseverywhere: how to favorably describehis film to “the suits.” Luckily for Sigel,the suit in question was friend and
collaborator George Clooney, who part-ners with Steven Soderbergh in theproduction company Section Eight.Hoping to give his project some credibil-ity, Sigel gave the script to Clooney andasked to use Section Eight’s name. Thescript review went about as well as one
could hope. Sigel recalls, “Georgelooked at it and said, ‘I don’t quite knowwhat this is about, but sure.’”
So what is the film about? “Itseems pretty straightforward, but atfirst I had trouble describing it withoutgiving away the whole story,” saysSigel. “Now I find that describing theopening is a good way to get people offon the right foot.” The camera startsinside a vagina, as a speculum parts itto reveal an obstetrician’s eye peeringin. The camera then rises up through thebody as the doctor raises his head frombetween the parted legs and addressesthe camera: “I’ve never seen anythinglike this!”
“That lets you know right awayfrom what point of view we’re going tobe telling this story, and that there’ssomething a bit unusual about thislady,” says Sigel, who photographedThe Big Empty and co-directed it withhis wife, J. Lisa Chang. The main char-acter, Alice (Selma Blair), does havequite a problem: she’s literally emptyinside. Her birth canal leads not to awomb, but to an arctic wasteland.Adapted from Alison Smith’s short story“The Specialist,” the film follows Aliceas she travels from doctor to doctorhoping to find an explanation — and acure — for her inner void.
Sigel says he and Chang “pulledon every favor we were ever owed fromevery job we’d ever done in our entirelives” to stretch their $50,000 budgetfor the project. They were putting alltheir savings into this labor of love andhad to make every penny count. Procur-ing Panavision equipment and Kodakfilm stock wasn’t difficult for theveteran cinematographer, but Sigeladmits that attracting actors to theoffbeat project might have been difficult
A Gynecological Firstby John Pavlus
Short Takes
without the Section Eight imprimatur. “Iwas worried that we needed some kindof legitimate company to approachsome of the actors we wanted,” hesays. “Having that name gave us a bit ofadded credibility.” (In addition to Blair,the cast includes Elias Koteas, RichardKind, Hugh Laurie, and, as an extra,Haskell Wexler, ASC.)
To create the singular openingshot, Sigel approached AndrewClement of Creative Creature Engineer-ing, who is known for his impeccablework creating animatronic infants. “Iasked him, ‘How are you with avagina?’” Sigel deadpans. “And he said,‘So far, no complaints.’” Clement built atube out of silicone that was largeenough to accommodate a lens andsmall enough to reasonably match thesize of the speculum, and he coated theinside with Fairy dishsoap “to give it amore organic feel,” says Sigel. To lightthis unique interior, Sigel placed twohard sources as three-quarter backlightto rake along the inner walls of the pros-thetic as the doctor peers inside. “Then,as the lens rises up through the body,there’s a dissolve to the B side of theshot, which was done on a set with thecamera between Selma’s legs in theforeground and the doctor framed in the
background. We used some internalorgans as the ‘wipe’ between the twoshots.”
The filmmakers storyboarded theentire film and prepped for two weeksbefore embarking on one week of princi-pal photography. Sigel operated himself— his main camera was a Panaflex
Millennium equipped with Primo lenses— and shot in the 1.85:1 aspect ratio.“As much as I love 2.35, it seemed 1.85was the best of both worlds,” he notes.“We could compose in a way thatwould work both for the film’s televisionlife and its festival life.” He says he hadno trouble calling upon friends and
Opposite: In TheBig Empty, anobstetricianpeers into awoman’s birthcanal anddiscoverssomething quiteunexpected. Theshort film, shotby NewtonThomas Sigel,ASC, was a laborof love co-directed by Sigeland his wife, J.Lisa Chang. Thispage, left: Thewoman, Alice(Selma Blair),awaitsinspection in amedical theater.Below: Aspecialist (EliasKoteas) preparesto take a peek.
American Cinematographer 73
colleagues for production help, but“because those people are really good,they’re always working. Finding crewwho had that many days in a row freewas pretty near impossible.”
Sigel and Chang decided theirstory called for a visual tone that wassomewhat grounded in reality, albeitone “that never existed, or only exists inthe imagination,” according to Sigel. Helit the interiors in an organic, source-motivated style, yet suffused them withan ethereal softness by using lightTiffen Soft/FX diffusion filters on thelens to create an “allegorical, fairytalequality.” An exception to this approachwas the office of the specialist (Koteas),whose eccentric understanding ofAlice’s condition demanded a moodierstyle.
Sigel shot The Big Empty on testrolls of Kodak Vision2 500T 5218 andVision2 100T 5212. Matching thedonated stock wasn’t a concern, butrationing it often was. He recalls, “Wewere always juggling how much toshoot when so that we wouldn’t runout. We also had almost no 1,000-footloads, so mag changes were frequent.”
With their compressed shootingschedule and tight budget, the filmmak-ers were compelled to choose locationsbased on their proximity to each otheras well as their suitability. The SectionEight connection proved useful in thatregard, allowing Sigel to use sets fromthe television series ER for the doctors’offices and Alice’s apartment. But thescheduling consideration proved espe-cially challenging when scouting for thelecture hall in which The Specialistpresents Alice and his diagnosis of hercondition to his colleagues. The sched-ule allotted just one day to shoot thatscene and two others, one in a book-store and one in a sports bar. “Wewanted something like one of thoseold-time medical theaters where theyused to dissect cadavers,” says Sigel.“We did find stuff like that, but neverclose enough to the bookstore to makeit work for our schedule. Because ofthat, and because The Specialist isgiving a slide presentation in a dark-ened room, we decided to suggest the
74
setting more abstractly.”The production rented an empty
warehouse and built risers to seat a rowof doctors and scientists. “We putSelma in the gynecological chair, whichwas gently spinning around on aturntable, and filled the frame with arow of white coats,” says Sigel. Heframed Koteas at a podium in front of alarge screen, upon which is projectedfootage taken from an “expedition” toAlice’s icy interior. (In reality, these wereclips from a documentary about theArctic.) “I like that scene because it getsacross what the specialist is about andsets the tone by using impressionistictouches instead of a big wide shot withlots of detail,” says Sigel.
Sigel finished The Big Emptywith a digital intermediate (DI), andalthough the process might seem like aluxury for a short film, “so is doingprints,” he says. “Until you have nomoney, you don’t realize how expensiveevery little thing is.” Once again, he wasable to leverage professional connec-tions, this time from Technicolor DigitalIntermediates, where he grades muchof his commercial work with coloristSteve “Sparkle” Arkle. “I went to Tech-nicolor and said, ‘I’ve been really loyal toyou guys, and now you’re gonna pay forthat!’” he jokes. “Of course, I wasalways doing my work at 11 p.m., orwhatever bizarre hour Sparkle wasn’tworking on other projects. TechnicolorCreative Services was just then building
its DI suite, so we actually became oneof the guinea pigs to get them up andrunning.” The DI greatly enhancedproduction values by letting Sigel“create a certain softness and fairytalequality that we didn’t have the resourcesto do completely in camera. Ultimately,Sparkle was able to correct most of mydisasters!”
The Big Empty has won awardsat the USA Film Festival, the Malibu Film
Festival, and the Athens InternationalFilm and Video Festival. Of his maidenvoyage in the tumultuous realm of “free-bie filmmaking,” Sigel couldn’t beprouder. “It was a nonstop process ofpulling rabbits out of hats, but it was allvery seamless. Lisa and I were so in syncabout everything that we only had onedisagreement: when to break for lunch.”
�
Sigel seeks out an interesting angle withhis Aaton.
75
76 March 2006
The Fractured World of KatieBirdby Stephanie Argy
In the horror film KatieBird*Certifiable Crazy Person, a woman(played by Helene Udy) recounts herjourney from innocent girl to serial killerfor her psychiatrist, who is also her loverand next victim. In the process, themovie flashes back to KatieBird’syounger years, when her father (LeePerkins) raised her to live the only life he,his father and grandfather had allknown: that of a murderer.
The subject matter is intense, anddirector Justin Paul Ritter chose a stylethat was equally challenging: 90 percentof the movie comprises multi-paneledframes that present each scene fromseveral perspectives simultaneously.Because KatieBird was shot with fourdifferent digital-video (DV) cameras, itoffered the filmmakers an unusualchance to compare footage from thosecameras side by side.
Before making KatieBird, Ritterhad worked on other filmmakers’projects, mainly doing visual effects. Butby the end of 2002, he decided to makea movie of his own. “I told myself nomatter what, I was going to shoot a
feature by December 12, 2003, becauseif I didn’t make it by then, I’d be out ofmoney.”
Years earlier, while working atRoger Corman’s Concorde Pictures,Ritter had talked his way into rewritingscreenplays for the company, but hesoon found himself so burned out oncop-by-day/stripper-by-night moviesthat he could no longer face the page.“When you put all your creative energyinto something you really don’t like, iteats you alive, and you don’t have anyenergy to do anything for yourself,” hesays. On his fourth rewrite, he stared athis computer screen for two weeks, andthen, in desperation, discarded thestudio’s original idea and spent two dayswriting whatever came into his mind.“This insanely angry abomination of ascreenplay poured out of me, and it wasKatieBird. I was hoping they would be asoffended by my material as I was bytheirs, and I succeeded. There was a lineof people waiting to fire me.”
Ritter tore up the studio’s checkand held on to the rights to his script,and he felt it was natural to return tothat script for his first feature. During hisyears in production, Ritter had crossedpaths several times with Joshua Fong, acinematographer who has also worked
as a storyboard and comic-book artist,and he asked Fong to shoot KatieBird.Impressed by what Anthony DodMantle, DFF, BSC had accomplishedwith DV on 28 Days Later (see AC July’03), Ritter and Fong started out thinkingthat at worst, they could makeKatieBird using Fong’s own Canon XL1.But they investigated other options andwere eventually able to obtain a SonyHDW-F900 HD camera; the body camefrom Jeff Blauvelt of HD Cinema andthe accessories were provided byPanavision’s New Filmmaker Program.
Ritter began to envision a way oftelling his story in a series of multi-image frames, which would not onlyenable him to show footage from vari-ous cameras onscreen at the sametime, but also make it possible for himto fit many more shots into the movie.The three other cameras Fong eventu-ally used on the picture were his CanonXL1, a Panasonic AG-DVX100, and thefirst incarnation of JVC’s HDV camera.
KatieBird was shot in Palmdaleand El Segundo, California, over 10 daysin December 2003. Ritter spent thefollowing year doing postproduction,working with Fong and producer MattQuan. (Quan did all the sound editingand mixing and also marketed themovie.)
The key element of the project’spost phase was Ritter’s development ofthe multi-paneled narrative style. He cutthe movie straight through from begin-ning to end, and for about the first half,he used the simple matte tools built intoFinal Cut Pro. However, he found thosetoo limited for the kind of cropping andmoving he wanted to do. Searching theInternet, he found a $10 filter calledDH_Box (from Digital Heaven), whichallowed him to quickly reposition, resizeand crop an image. Because he couldwork so much faster with DH_Box, hewas able to experiment more, and hefeels the multi-paneling becomes
Post Focus
KatieBird*Certifiable
Crazy Personwas shot by
Joshua Fongusing four
digital-videocameras and
then presentedin a multi-
paneled formatto convey the
fractured mentalstate of its main
character(Helene Udy).
American Cinematographer 77
increasingly effective as the movie goeson. “In the end, the $10 filter becameour most valuable storytelling tool,” heremarks.
One challenge was trying todevise fresh multi-panels as the movieprogressed. “It became a real brainteaser to try not to repeat myself,” saysRitter. He also learned to apply the tech-nique to underscore the emotion ofscenes and enhance their dramaticeffect. “When you get to scenes wherethe really aggressive, violent actions arehappening, there are more abrupt cuts,and there’s also more black spaceonscreen,” he explains. “Also, having animage separate down the middle duringa dialogue scene really helped us createdrama.”
Fong says watching the multi-paneling develop reminded him howflexible cinema can be as a storytellingmedium. He points out that when hedoes comic-book illustration, he workswith six or seven images on a page.“That’s basically what we had with themulti-paneling,” he says. “Digital toolsenable cinema to become more of agraphic-design and layout medium.”
When Ritter began post onKatieBird, he discovered there wasn’t alot of information about how to edit anHD project, particularly one with such atiny budget. He subsequently triedseveral approaches that he warns otherfilmmakers against. For example, on theadvice of someone who presentedhimself as an HD expert, Ritter decidedto downconvert his master tapes andedit on DVCam, which he captured intoFinal Cut Pro using an Aurora Ignitercard. He had shot at 23.98 fps, but hecaptured at 29.97 because he’d beenassured that when he did his online, the
footage would match up perfectly. Infact, when he did the online he foundthat every edit was off by one to threeframes. Because KatieBird has about5,000 edits, the online process, whichshould have taken a few days, ended uptaking 10 weeks.
Also, Final Cut Pro does all of itscropping based on percentages of thesize of the image, so when Ritter wentfrom the 4x3 DVCam image he’d beenworking with to the 16x9 images of themasters, he found that none of the crop-ping translated over correctly. He had toredo the multi-paneling for the entiremovie.
Ritter did the online himself,upgrading his video card to a BlackmagicDeckLink HD card. “It’s a phenomenalcard,” he says, adding that if he had thechance to do post again, he wouldcapture the HD footage using PhotoJPEG proxies, which are the same reso-lution as HD footage. “We never wouldhave had to go through all those addi-tional post steps.” However, he’s a littleglad he did. “I thought I was pretty goodat Final Cut Pro, but now I feel socomfortable with the machine. I hopenever to face those problems again, but
it’s the only way to learn.”After the edit and online were
finished, Fong and Ritter carried out thecolor correction. “Josh was therearound the clock,” says Ritter. Theybegan by using the three-way color-corrector filter in Final Cut Pro. Fongwent through a scene, made the differ-ent footage match and established theoverall look, and then Ritter took thecorrected footage and applied a colorshift to the entire scene. Scenes depict-ing teenaged KatieBird were tintedgreen, scenes with adult KatieBird wereblue, and scenes featuring KatieBird’sfather were a muted gold. But Fong andRitter quickly found that applying thecolor tint affected the original colorcorrection, and shots no longermatched. After several weeks ofbattling the problem, Ritter tried usingblend modes rather than traditionalcolor-correction filters for the secondpart of the process. He explains, “Let’ssay I needed to drop down highlights.Instead of trying to pull down thewhites, I would make a white panel,layer it on top of the image, and use ablend mode like Darken or Multiply.” Hecould also create the tints by using a
Kat
ieB
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Above: During apsychiatrysession,KatieBirdrecounts theimpact hermurdering father(Lee Perkins) hadon her childhood,which led her tofollow in herfather’s footsteps(below). Editingin Final Cut Pro,Ritter used a $10plugin to quicklyreposition, resizeand crop animage.
semi-opaque color panel for the toplayer. The new technique meant entiresequences could be tinted at once, andthe overall color shifts wouldn’t destroyFong’s original color correction. Equallyimportant was the fact that working thisway introduced no additional grain ordegradation to the images.
Ritter says people are sostunned when they learn how lowKatieBird’s budget was that he hasstopped sharing the information. In oneinstance, he says, a distributor backedout of an agreement to handle themovie because he claimed that if Block-buster found out he was offering themsuch an inexpensive movie, it would beharder to negotiate with the outlet inthe future. “The most frustrating thing isthat when people find out what it cost,they want to take advantage,” saysRitter. “But if we’d paid for everything, itwould have cost maybe half a milliondollars. Everybody on the show was avolunteer. The hard-cash cost was low,but I gave up years of my life, and otherpeople gave us so much help becausethey believed in what we were doing.”
Ritter has submitted KatieBird toseveral film festivals, and a screening at(Yet) Another Hole in the Head in SanFrancisco in June 2005 was particularlysuccessful, garnering coverage inFangoria and interest from distributors.Ritter ultimately decided to go with asmall company, Heretic Films, whichreleased KatieBird on DVD in lateFebruary. There are also plans forlimited theatrical releases in New Yorkand San Francisco.
Ritter says he made KatieBirdpartly because he wanted to empoweryoung artists who are always lookingfor excuses not to finish, or even start,their projects. “How many times do youmeet someone with a screenplay whosays they can’t let anyone see it until it’sperfect? I decided to push forward with-out ever looking back. I wanted toremove any room for excuses. Making amovie like this is a really scary venture,but if KatieBird can be in Fangoria andAmerican Cinematographer, almostanything can happen.”
Distribution Options Blossom for Indiesby Stephanie Argy
For most independent filmmak-ers, getting traditional theatrical distrib-ution has always been difficult, but newtechnologies are providing new andvaried ways for them to connect topotential audiences. “We have tounlearn a lot of things that have beendrilled into our heads,” says DanielMyrick, co-director of The Blair WitchProject and creator of the Web serialThe Strand. “It used to be you’d make amovie and hope you’d get into festivals,and festivals, of course, were aboutgetting picked up by distributors. But allthat has changed. As an emerging film-maker, you almost have to throw out therulebook.”
The facts regarding traditionaldistribution are daunting. As productionand postproduction tools have becomemore accessible, the market has beenflooded with movies. This year, theSundance Film Festival alone received3,148 feature submissions and 4,327short-form submissions. Because manycompanies that used to acquire moviesat festivals have gone into productionthemselves, they now use festivals topublicize their own products rather thanseeking others.
The advent of DVDs has alsochanged the economics of distribution.“About 10 years ago, VHS copies sold
for $80 to $90 each,” says Carlo Scandi-uzzi, an independent filmmaker and co-founder of online DVD vendor IndieFlix.“The number of units sold hasn’t changedvery much, but the same unit in DVD isonly about $9. You’re generating a frac-tion of the money that you used to gener-ate 10 years ago, so the economics are nolonger there for the old paradigm.”
Although the old models of filmdistribution may be breaking down, newones have come along that make it easierfor many more filmmakers to get theirwork seen. These include the Internet,cellular phones with video capability, andApple’s video iPod. “Theatrical distribu-tion is no longer the holy grail,” saysJustin Bergeron, co-founder and CEO ofHD Pictures & Post.
Slamdance co-founder DanMirvish says he advises filmmakers toask themselves what they want to get outof their projects: “Do you need to makemoney to pay back your investors? Do youneed the perfectly justifiable ego boost ofshowing a film in front of an audience?Do you want to enhance your career? Doyou want to build a good press kit? Focus-ing on what you want forces you to makedecisions.”
Many independent filmmakersstill begin by screening their movies atfestivals and seeking some sort of theatri-cal exhibition. “Most of the money comesfrom television [rights] and DVD, but mostof the prestige comes from a theatricalrelease,” says Margot Gerber, who co-
78 March 2006
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founded the Alternative Screen Indepen-dent Film Showcase at the AmericanCinematheque. To generate some of thatprestige, some filmmakers who haven’tfound theatrical distribution work withbookers who help place their films intheaters on the indie circuit. However,once the costs of prints, shipping andadvertising are tallied, this can be anexpensive proposition.
But even in the theatrical realm,the paradigm is changing. “One of themore exciting developments in theatricalis digital projection,” says Myrick. “Oncetheaters convert, they will open them-selves up to a whole range of content.There will be no more middleman and nomore prints or deliverables hassles,which can be enormously expensive.” Headds that when The Blair Witch Projectwas screened at Sundance, the festivalprojected only film, and the 35mm printthe filmmakers had to strike cost fivetimes more than the entire production.
Theatrical-delivery options arealso evolving. National CineMedia, an in-theater advertising company owned byCinemark USA, AMC Theatres and RegalEntertainment Group, has built a digital-distribution network called DHN, whichdelivers advertising and pre-recordedevents to theaters via satellite. Now thecompany is beginning to use the samesystem for independent films. Accordingto Tom Galley, chief operations and tech-nology officer, independent filmmakersprovide a master, generally on D5, whichis then digitized, encrypted and sent tothe theaters authorized to receive themovie. According to Galley, the currentsystem is not digital cinema because thetheaters are using lower-cost LCD projec-tors, but it does offer independent film-makers a cost-effective way to get theirmovies out to a relatively wide audience.“So far, we’ve done it on up to 250screens,” says Galley. “It puts them in abusiness that otherwise would beprohibitive.”
For most filmmakers, though,theatrical exhibition is most valuable as ameans to generate buzz that will helpDVD sales. And although there aredistributors who handle DVD releases,there are also many options available for
filmmakers who want to self-distributetheir DVDs. Web sites such asindieflix.com, filmbaby.com, microcin-ema.com and even amazon.com all sellDVDs by independent filmmakers, andboth greencine.com and netflix.com rentthem. “Netflix is very open to buyingsmaller films,” says Gerber. Noting thatthe company has started to produce itsown movies (such as Comedians ofComedy), she adds, “They’re very inter-ested in promoting their little stable ofindie films.”
IndieFlix founders Scandiuzzi andScilla Andreen estimate every indepen-dent movie has a core fan base of 200-300 people — typically cast, crew, andfriends and relatives. Although that isn’ta lot of people, an online library of 1,000films that each attract that many view-ers means hundreds of thousands ofpeople, many of whom would neverotherwise seek out indie films, areconnecting to the community as awhole. Andreen and Scandiuzzi aretrying to create a Web site that invitesthose people to explore further andlearn about other films in the collection.The key to making the idea work, theysay, is for filmmakers to be active aboutpromoting their movies. “There’s acertain amount of education we need todo with filmmakers,” says Scandiuzzi.“We need to make them understandthat they have a lot more clout than theythink they have.”
Shultz agrees that grassrootsefforts are the most effective way topublicize a movie. “Find a core audiencethat’s interested in your film. Whatever
it is, there’s a niche, and you’ve got to findit. If it’s a film about the elderly, get theword out to people who work in gerontol-ogy.”
Film-festival consultant ThomasEthan Harris says that kind of nichemarketing is one of the reasons gay filmsare so successful. “If you make a lovestory with two white lovers, where do youadvertise that feature? There aren’t‘white lover’ magazines. But there are gayTV networks and free gay publicationsdistributed on the street. Gay viewers canfind out directly about projects that wouldinterest them.”
Scandiuzzi and Andreen hopeIndieFlix will provide another way toconnect filmmakers with their audiences.“Often we see filmgoers talking to film-goers and filmmakers talking to filmmak-ers,” says Scandiuzzi. “But we would likefilmmakers and filmgoers to have adialogue. Filmmakers can get a pulse onwhat the audience thinks, good or bad.And they will have a built-in audience for
Opposite: Topublicize hismusical filmOpen House,director DanMirvishlaunched acampaign toreactivate theAcademyAwards’dormant OriginalMusicalcategory. Thispage, top andbottom: DanielMyrick went sofar as to makehis California-set serial TheStrandspecifically forthe Web.
American Cinematographer 79
the next movie and can start talkingabout it before they even start shooting.”
Publicity of all sorts is also impor-tant. Harris says that for a DVD release,quotable critics become essential, whichis why it’s worthwhile for a movie to playat important festivals. But filmmakersare also getting much more entrepre-neurial, promoting their movies onMySpace, creating podcasts, and even,in the case of Mirvish’s Open House,launching a quixotic but well-publicizedcampaign to reactivate the dormantAcademy Award category for OriginalMusical. “If the goal is to get attentionfor your film and build a fan base for aneventual DVD release, there’s more thanone way to skin a cat,” says Mirvish.“You need something to boost yourprofile, and what it is isn’t necessarilythe most obvious thing.”
One of the best-known moviespromoted with guerrilla tactics was TheBlair Witch Project, which created anonline mystique that has becomelegendary among indie filmmakers.Myrick has taken his use of the Internetto an even higher level with his currentproject, The Strand. He got the idea forthe show, an ongoing series set inVenice, California, two years ago. Hetook it around to the television networks,but at that time executives had troublegrasping the idea of a reality/fictionhybrid. Myrick decided to shoot the firstfew episodes on his own to demonstratethe concept, and as he started topromote them on the Web, he realizedthe Internet had become a legitimateavenue of distribution for such a project— as well as a better way to maintaincontrol of it. “The idea of going back tothe networks with a pitch didn’t appealso much anymore,” he recalls. “We hopethis will be a kind of launch pad for othershows.”
Myrick has partnered withseveral technology companies, includingBrightcove and BitPass, which handlethe technical and financial end of theonline distribution. “The technology isliterally changing month to month,” hesays. “The real hurdle is that filmmakerswant to keep our heads in what we thinkwe’re good at: going out and shooting
the stuff. Guys like Brightcove allowguys like me to focus on the creative.”BitPass founder Kurt Huang notes thatcompanies like his also help filmmakersbuild a relationship with their fans.“Building a brand is currently an impor-tant direction for a lot of filmmakers,” hesays. “It’s almost like a music label, butwithout the Draconian contractual rela-tionships.” Huang believes a Web seriallike The Strand is probably the best fit forthe Internet at the moment. “You cangive away the first episode and getpeople hooked.”
The biggest recent developmentin distribution may be the release ofApple’s video iPod, which Mirvishpredicts will revitalize the market forshort films, at least for a little while. “Inthe dot-com boom of the late ’90s, all theattention and distribution were with theshorts,” he recalls. “After the dot-comcrash, shorts once again becamesecond-class citizens. My guess is therewill be a return to the frenzy, becausenow everyone wants short things to puton cell phones and iPods. There will be awindow of about a year or two when it’shot to make shorts.”
Although the prospect of sortingthrough new distribution possibilitiesmay seem overwhelming, David Levy,president of production at HD Pictures &Post, notes that even the studios mustcontend with it. “I promise you, at Sonyand Paramount and Warner Bros. they’resaying, ‘How are we going to get ourheads and arms wrapped around all thisnew stuff? How can we succeed wherethe recording industry has failed in termsof being cutting edge and not being leftin the dust?’ The independent filmmaker,even the guerrilla filmmaker, is just asfar along in figuring this stuff out as thebig guys on the backlot. If you’recomfortable working at a modestbudget, you can be confident that therewill be a way to get your work outthere.” Myrick adds, “I love the fact thatthings are changing at such a fundamen-tal level. In my opinion, there’s neverbeen a better time to be an independentfilmmaker.” �
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Assessing Panasonic’s AG-DVX100Bby Jay Holben
Panasonic recently released theAG-DVX100B, a revision of theDVX100A, with 22 updates and changesboth major and minor.
The camera’s onscreen menusystem has been given a slight overhaul,and I didn’t notice the differences until Ilooked at the DVX100A and 100B sideby side. The 100B has a new, smallerfont that makes the overall menu layoutper “screen” cleaner and easier to read.The new camera also boasts a newpaint job with a suave name: BlackSapphire. Amazingly, the new colorscheme improves the readability ofbuttons and labels inside the flip-outviewing screen, even in relatively low-light conditions. This is a nice improve-ment over the 100A.
The standard camera packagenow comes with a larger, longer-lastingCGR-D54 5400mA battery that extendsthe 45-minute capacity of the previousCGR-D16 1600mA battery to more thanfive hours. Panasonic has also adjustedthe zoom speed at the “medium” settingto fall more naturally in line betweenslow and fast.
The improvement in the Elec-tronic View Finder’s (EVF) resolution isimpressive, even though it has onlygrown from 180,000 dots to 230,000dots. The physical screen size — .44"— hasn’t changed, but detail is easierto see. Unfortunately, that doesn’timprove the ability to judge criticalfocus. (Panasonic offers an enhanceddetail feature for both the EVF and flip-out viewfinder, which makes criticalfocus much easier to attain). An inter-esting addition to the EVF is the abilityto switch between black-and-white andcolor for contrast viewing.
The tripod mount on the base of
the camera has been reinforced.Although I had no quarrel with the previ-ous mount, if a user adds matteboxes, afollow focus and other accessories, thebeefier mount should be welcome.
The manufacturing process forthe 100B has been altered so that thecamera is now RoHS (Restrictions on Hazardous Substances)-compliant,ensuring it is environmentally safe.(Primarily, this means the new manufac-turing process eliminates lead.) Also,the End Search function has been modi-fied to work in Camera mode so the userdoesn’t have to switch to VCR mode tofind the end of the previously recordedmaterial.
With the 100B, Panasonic hasfound a way to eliminate the soundecho everyone encounters when record-ing in 24p mode with the DVX100 and100A. When shooting in 24p and moni-toring the sound from the headphonejack, a user will experience a two-framedelay that created an echo effect on thenatural location sound. This slight prob-lem makes audio monitoring from thecamera nearly impossible in 24p mode.The 100B has a menu feature, identifiedas “HP” (for Head Phones), that enablesusers to switch from “live” (which moni-tors audio straight from the mike) to“tape” (which monitors from the recordhead). “Live” eliminates the echo, but
because it has much more room tone,hiss and high end, there is a consider-able quality difference between it andthe “tape” setting. So what is therecording really going to sound like?Thorough testing prior to recording isrequired.
One of the next features is theability to connect two DVX100stogether to transfer Scene file settingsor time-code information from onecamera to the other. At first, the idea ofsyncing two cameras was very exciting.I didn’t have two 100Bs, so I hooked a100B to a 100A and followed the ratherconvoluted steps outlined in the manualto transfer the time code from the B(master) to the A (slave). I accomplishedthat, and the time codes matched, butthat was it. Although the cameras werestill connected, hitting Record on themaster didn’t start the slave. In the end,the transfer was no different thanmerely presetting the time code manu-ally on the slave camera to match themaster camera. Additionally, transfer-ring the time code from one camera tothe other was more difficult than manu-ally adjusting the presets.
The 100B’s tape-drive mecha-nism has been upgraded to be morerugged. Although this is nice change, italso creates an annoyance: when youload the tape and close the drive, you
American Cinematographer 81
New Products & Services
have to wait for the drive to lower andthe heads to engage before you canshut the outer door. When you’rerunning and gunning, waiting for thedrive to drop before you can close theouter door is bothersome. Also, thisupdate apparently has eliminated the“interval rec” feature that the 100 and100A had. It’s still possible to do one-frame recording, but there is no longer abuilt-in intervalometer for time-lapsephotography.
A slight breakaway has beenadded to the flip-out LCD screen thatallows it to bend out 30° further thanthe previous 90° point. This allows moreflexibility to operate from the flip-outscreen and also reduces the risk ofbreaking the LCD off in the event it getsbumped. The screen has received aslight increase in resolution — from200,000 pixels to 210,000 — but thatpales in comparison to two otherchanges. First, it is now possible to view“squeezed” material in letterbox format.When shooting in 16x9 digital anamor-phic mode with the 100A, you viewed asqueezed image on the LCD and in theEVF. In the 100B’s “squeeze” mode, youview a letterboxed image. There is alsoa mode that allows you to manuallycontrol the aspect ratio; when using anoptical anamorphic adapter, you canmanually dial in the proper image to seean unsqueezed picture. Additionally,Panasonic has increased the viewingarea to the full recorded frame, not justthe “overscan” area.
Finally, and probably most signif-icantly, Panasonic claims the 100B’s LCDscreen is a matter of “what you see iswhat you get.” Being well acquaintedwith the limitations of LCD technology, Iwas keen to test this claim. The firstproblem is that, as with nearly all LCDscreens, the angle at which you viewthe screen considerably alters the repro-duction of the image. By experimentinga bit, I found a position that seemed torepresent the best contrast on the LCDmonitor, with the richest blacks. Thisposition seemed to be about 20° tiltedaway from perpendicular to my vision.Any variance greater than 5° in anydirection seemed to degrade the quality
82
of the blacks and contrast. Right away,this puts a kink in the “what you see iswhat you get” theory, as you are onlygetting what you see as long as you’reseeing it from the precise position.
I hooked the 100B via an S-videocable to a JCV TM-H1750CGU high-resolution 17" NTSC monitor. Using theSMPTE bars generated from the DVX, Ibalanced the monitor’s color, brightnessand contrast. Then I turned to the LCD.Of course, the DVX doesn’t have a blue-gun-only feature to calibrate the color,so I turned to the custom blue filterprovided in Joe Kane’s excellent DVDVideo Essentials: Optimizing YourAudio/Video System, and balanced thecolor looking through that filter at theLCD. Surprisingly, it fell in line prettynicely, better than most old NTSC moni-tors I’ve had to balance in the field. Ialso placed the 100A next to the 100Band set it accordingly. The 100A’s LCDscreen clearly exhibited much weakerblacks, and the color didn’t quite fall inas well.
Then I put up my Gamma &Density Gamma 2U color chart, lit it andframed it up with both DVXs. The JVCmonitor was positioned right in my lineof sight so that I could stand at the 100Bwith the LCD at the optimum positionand also see the NTSC monitor. I wasvery quickly impressed at how accu-rately the LCD represented what I wasseeing on the monitor. The 100A’s LCDwas nowhere near the quality and accu-racy I was seeing with the 100B. Thelatter was not perfect, but it was quiteclose. Overall, the NTSC monitor had alittle more color saturation (especiallycomparing SMPTE bars), particularly inthe blue and green, but hue and contrastrepresentation seemed dead on. TheLCD was nowhere near as sharp as theNTSC monitor, however, so fine lines inthe chart weren’t as clear on the cameraas they were on the monitor, especiallyaround the red portions of the chart,where the color seemed to bleed everso slightly on the LCD.
I concentrated on the two areasof the Gamma 2U chart designated torepresent video 100IRE and 90IRE.These are very close together, and it is
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83
Magic Bullet Editors v2.0by Jay Holben
Designed for integration intononlinear-editing programs, MagicBullet Editors version 2.0 features MagicBullet’s Look Suite with a few extratools, but without the well-known 24pconversion capability. Look Suite is acustom color-correction and filter setthat allows the user to create a varietyof interesting looks, including bleachbypass, color grads, and cross process-ing.
In Magic Bullet Editors v2.0, theLook Suite includes adjustments to pre-filtration gamma, contrast and satura-tion. You can add “camera filters” suchas white diffusion, black diffusion andcolor gradients, and you can simulate athree-strip Technicolor look. Finally, LookSuite adds post-filtration applications ofoverall warm/cool color tone and post-filtration gamma, contrast and satura-tion. It is just a bit more than the colorcorrection and filters that come withApple’s Final Cut Pro.
Magic Bullet boasts DeepColortechnology, a proprietary rendering algo-rithm that processes pixels at four timesthe precision of similar applications andapplies floating-point imaging process-ing to ensure the highest possible outputquality. I tested this against one of myfavorite filter sets, Digital Film Tree’s55MM v5.0. Both were applied in FinalCut Pro 5.0 on the same 24p-originatedfootage from a Canon XL2 on a dual2GHz PowerMac G5 with 1.5GB RAM. With the 55MM suite, I had much moreprecise control over the built-in mattingpower and more than twice as manypreset filters than with Magic Bullet. Forsome odd reason, the preset MagicBullet looks for Final Cut Pro aren’t avail-able from the pulldown effects menu;instead, they are enclosed on the soft-ware disc as a project file from whichyou have to open and then copy thefilters. This seems like a tedious step.
Working with one minute offootage, I took the Bleach-Bypass filterfrom 55MM and Magic Bullet andapplied each to the same footage (seeimages above). The first major differ-
ence was the render times. For MagicBullet to apply the default BleachBypass preset look on one minute of DVfootage, rendering took 31 minutes 13seconds. The default 55MM Bleach-Bypass filter on the same footage took 7minutes 20 seconds, significantly less.With a bit of tweaking on both filters, Iwas able to quickly achieve nearly iden-tical results in appearance and renderedeach out. I then compared them side byside, enlarged to 400 percent, to seewhat happened to the picture. Lookingjust at the eyeball of the subject in theDV footage, I examined both images anApple 23" Cinema Display screen andon a JVC TM-H1750 high-resolutionNTSC monitor. The two effects weren’tidentical, but they were very close. The55MM retained more detail in the iris ofthe eye, but Magic Bullet seemed tohave a slightly less blockier contrastwith slightly more details in the fold ofthe subject’s eye. The blacks on theMagic Bullet were somewhat strongerthan the 55MM filter. Aside from that,there were no differences in terms ofresolution or artifacting resulting fromrendering.
Aside from color-correction filtra-tion, Magic Bullet Editors offers theMisFire suite of filters to emulate vari-ous kinds of damage associated withfilm-originated material. This set offilters is valuable to the common user,although it would most likely be appliedwith a very light touch. You can create
84 March 2006
hard to distinguish their different bright-ness values on an NTSC monitor whenexposing for 18 percent gray to 55 IRE.Starting with the chart slightly overex-posed, I began stopping down the irison the camera until I visually coulddistinguish a difference between the100 IRE and 90 IRE areas on the LCDmonitor. I then did the same thing whilewatching the NTSC monitor and discov-ered that I could discern a differencebetween the two areas on the NTSCmonitor about 2⁄3 of a stop earlier than Icould while looking at the LCD screen— not a significant difference.
I brought in a strand of Christmaslights to see how well the camerarepresented high contrast. Putting thelights on the black back of my colorchart and zooming in on a single bulb, Iexposed the image on the LCD monitorto taste and then began comparing thatimage to the NTSC monitor. The LCDscreen reproduced the plume from thefilament of the bulb just slightly largerthan the NTSC monitor did — 5 to 10percent at most. Looking at the LCD onthe 100A, the plume from the filamentcompletely filled the bulb; there wereno discernible details in the bulb at all.On the 100B, there were definitelydetails that were almost exactly what Iwas seeing on the NTSC monitor.
I was extremely impressed thatthe LCD monitor performed as well as itdid. Of course, the moment I introducedany ambient flare on the LCD or movedit out of the prime position, the “whatyou see is what you get” effect wasobliterated. When operating the cameraon a daytime exterior, you won’t seewhat you’re getting unless you shieldthe LCD from all ambient light. But ifyou’re shooting onstage and can posi-tion the LCD just right, you’ll be amazedby the image’s accuracy. In the realworld, however, you would do well tohave a reference NTSC monitor that hasbeen properly set and shaded.
The upgrades to the 100B clearlyshow that Panasonic is listening andresponding to its user base. For moreinformation, visit http://panasonic.com/business/provideo/cat_camcorders.aspor call (800) 222-0741.
film-like scratches, flicker, gate weave,blotches, dust, grain and more. Again,render times are a little high; oneminute of DV footage took 16 minutes43 seconds to render for the defaultsettings on the Gate Weave filter.
Editor Eric Tozzi has become abig fan of the Magic Bullet Editors tool.While cutting the documentaryArmand, about the painter ArmandMerizon, Tozzi worked with a largeamount of material that had been shotby members of the painter’s family.“Most of what they had shot wasnatural-light, run-and-gun footage,”recalls Tozzi. “Magic Bullet was a life-saver, because I could quickly runthrough a number of different looks tosee which would work for a givensequence and really sweeten up thefootage. I like the flexibility MagicBullet gives you; with open presets, youhave the ability to tweak almost infi-nitely. It isn’t just ‘one template fitsall.’” Tozzi is currently cutting the TVseries Travel the Road, whose postteam is using the full version of MagicBullet to set the final look of the show.
Magic Bullet Editors is availablefrom Red Giant Software for $395 andworks with Final Cut Pro, Avid XpressPro, Motion, Sony Vegas and AdobePremiere Pro.
For more information, visitwww.redgiantsoftware.com or call(260) 625-5343. �
85
To be considered for a product review inNew Products & Services, contact AssociateEditor Douglas Bankston to make arrangementsat (323) 860-6672; E-mail: [email protected];product shipping address: 1313 N. Vine St., Holly-wood, CA 90028; postal service mailing address:1782 N. Orange Dr., Hollywood, CA 90028.
For press release submissions, pleaseinclude any images and full contact informationwith submission. Images may be sent as colorslides, color or black-and-white prints, or digitalfiles (Mac Photoshop TIFF or high-quality JPEGformat, 300 dpi) on CD. E-mailed image attach-ments must be a minimum of 300 dpi in the afore-mentioned formats. Mailed materials will not bereturned without a self-addressed, stampedenvelope.
86 March 2006
Forget the ivory tower. “Baptism byfire” is how Boston University’s PaulSchneider describes the New Televi-
sion Workshop, his eight-credit classthat will culminate this month with thebroadcast of a TV pilot written, producedand crewed by BU students. The half-hour comedy, Roller Palace, will debutMarch 20 on mtvU, a channel owned byMTV that reaches more than 725colleges and universities. “Most of thestudents had never encounteredanything of this scale,” says Schneider, a
veteran film and television director/producer whose credits include JAG,L.A. Law and Beverly Hills 90210. “Theydid an actual production from start tofinish with all the difficulties of being onlocation, shooting in winter, and with theproper prep, budgeting and scheduling.In hindsight, I think we could have madeit 12 credits because it was a hugeamount of work.”
When Schneider arrived at BU’sFilm & Television Department in 2002,he noticed a paucity of outlets for TV-
Points East
writing students, so he devised a TV-writing competition. BU alumnus TedHarbert, CEO of E! Networks, organized apanel of professional judges in Los Ange-les and a $2,500 prize. “One day I casu-ally suggested to our department chair,Charles Merzbacher, that it would begreat to actually produce the [winning]script,” says Schneider. “Everybodythought it was a great idea. The onlyproblem was coming up with themoney.”
In 2004, Schneider found a willingbroadcaster in mtvU, which in turnhelped locate funding through MSN, oneof its advertisers. “In return,” saysSchneider, “we had to integrate theirvideo-conferencing technology into ourscript. As it turns out, we came up with aclever way of doing it that makes thescript even funnier.” The 2005 winner,written by Liz Coopersmith, “is about apampered, wealthy woman in her early20s living in Manhattan,” he explains.“Her father has recently been incarcer-ated for insider trading. As the pilotopens, she discovers her mother isdivorced and is marrying her high-schoolsweetheart, who owns a hot-dog empo-rium on the Jersey Shore. This spoiledgirl suddenly has to relocate to theJersey Shore, and her life is turnedupside-down. It’s a fish-out-of-waterstory.” As for incorporating MSNMessenger, he says, “We posit that thefather is such a con man that he’sobtained a video link in jail so his daugh-ter can talk to him via her laptopcomputer.”
Coopersmith’s script came out ofSchneider’s spring 2005 Advanced Writ-ing for Television class. By fall, 14production students had been selectedfor the New Television Workshop, wherethey would become the crew. Amongthem, the frontrunner for director of
Students at Boston University Create Roller Palaceby Patricia Thomson
Above: Doug(Dann Maurno)
has a video chatwith his
daughter fromhis cell
as fellow conSuaze (Franco
Trambino) lurksin the
background.Below:
CinematographerRohan Chitrakar
(foreground)makes final
lightingadjustments in
the cell with the help of a
hi-def monitor.P
hoto
s by
Joh
n M
essi
nge
r.Fr
ame
grab
an
d ph
otos
cou
rtes
y of
Roh
an C
hitr
akar
.
American Cinematographer 87
photography was Rohan Chitrakar, asecond-year master’s student who had abackground in still photography andsome documentary experience. “Rohanis a very talented young man,” saysSchneider. “When I asked around thedepartment about who might be quali-fied, the consensus was that he was theperson.”
The camera department includedthree others, Josh Carroll (camera oper-ator), Shannon Mita (1st AC) and SamRosenthal (2nd AC). Corinne Pickett wasthe gaffer and Blake Smith was the keygrip. Meanwhile, students from BU’sSchool of Theatre did production design,and acting majors supplemented theprofessional cast.
No one in Schneider’s class hadever worked with a crew of that size —student films typically involve no morethan four students. “In the past, I’vedone almost everything with the lightingand the camera,” says Chitrakar. “Onthis project, we had huge crew respon-sibilities and so many different depart-ments. It was mind-boggling for me torealize I didn’t have to do everything, andthat my responsibility as director ofphotography was to be more of a leader,to delegate tasks. It was really hard inthe beginning because I’m a very hands-on person, and it was very hard tocommunicate exactly what I was think-ing to Josh or the gaffer during the firstfew practices. Slowly I realized howimportant it was to express the visualideas I had.”
Instrumental in this learningprocess was another BU instructor,Austin de Besche, a Boston-based cine-matographer (Return of the Secaucus 7,Lianna) and director. He was one ofseveral professionals recruited to act asmentors and provide technical training.De Besche gave students a crash courseon Panasonic’s high-definition AJ-HDC27F VariCam, as well as the Zeiss35mm prime lenses and P&S Technik Pro35 adapter system chosen for the single-camera shoot. “Because we do a fairamount of 16mm, and because hi-defvideo may be where we’re going in thefuture, we felt it would be interesting to
try this format,” says Schneider. DeBesche adds, “It was totally the rightchoice. The students could work it easilyinto their particular editing system. It’sprofessional-level both in terms of thepicture it takes and in terms of thehandling. It’s got all the controls theywill have to think about in a professionalsituation.” (The HD package wassupplied by Boston Camera, while gripand electric gear came from HighOutput.)
De Besche created hands-onexercises almost immediately. “I wouldsay, ‘Okay, let’s set up a shot. What areyou going to do first? Go ahead and trythat.’ Then, ‘Maybe the reason youshouldn’t do it that way is this, [and] ifyou go about it this other way, it’ll bemore efficient. And while you’re doingthat, your assistant should be workingon this.’ It was making a list of tasks andhelping them get those done in the rightorder.” Working with Chitrakar, deBesche steered him towards finding apersonal style, doing tests to show thedirector, and giving instructions clearly.“I’d explain how not to jump away fromthe supervisory work to plug in an exten-sion cord,” says de Besche. “It’s impor-tant to keep that hierarchy in place sothe boss is always looking at the bigpicture. It’s easy for helpful people tosay, ‘Gee, we need an extension cord!I’ll go get it.’ But it’s really inefficient.That took some convincing.”
Students had to become accus-
tomed to 7 a.m. calls, meeting a dailyschedule, and contending with thehazards of location shoots in wintryMassachusetts. One day, 50-mph windsthreatened to bowl over their HMIs;another day, the temperature was socold the Pro 35 adapter froze. All thewhile, students were executing chal-lenging camera moves, often using aSteadicam or Fisher dollies, equipmentlacking in their regular classes.“[Schneider] did not back off and givenothing but easy camera setups,” deBesche attests. “There were definitelycomplex moves going on quite often,and everybody responded pretty darnwell.”
Carroll says his trickiest shotwas a handheld close-up of two womenwrestling on the ground. “I had to get onmy knees and pull focus at the sametime,” he recalls. “It was really difficultbecause the camera didn’t havehandles.” For Chitrakar, a big challengewas motivating camera moves. “I grad-ually realized when they would beappropriate,” he says. “By the end, Iwas able to discuss this with Paul, andit ended up being a pretty gooddialogue.”
De Besche notes that real equip-ment, real shooting schedules and realchallenges made this a different experi-ence from many cinematographyclasses, including his own. “This was,‘Bang! Here’s the real world. You gottamake it work.’ And they did.” �
Chitrakarinspects thefrozen Pro 35 lens adapter as bittertemperaturesbring theproduction to an unexpectedhalt.
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All classifications are $4.50 per word. Words set inbold face or all capitals are $5.00 per word. Firstword of ad and advertiser’s name can be set in capi-tals without extra charge. No agency commission ordiscounts on classified advertising.PAYMENT MUST AC-COMPANY ORDER. VISA, Mastercard, AmEx andDiscover card are accepted. Send ad to ClassifiedAdvertising, American Cinematographer, P.O.Box 2230, Hollywood, CA 90078. Or FAX (323) 876-4973. Deadline for payment and copy must be in theoffice by 15th of second month preceding publication.Subject matter is limited to items and services per-taining to filmmaking and video production. Wordsused are subject to magazine style abbreviation.Minimum amount per ad: $45
CLASSIFIEDS ON-LINEAds may now also be placed in the on-lineClassifieds at the ASC web site.
Internet ads are seen around the world atthe same great rate as in print, or for slightlymore you can appear both online and in print.
For more information please visitwww.theasc.com/advertiser, or e-mail: [email protected].
Classifieds
EQUIPMENT FOR SALE
Mint used 16mm and 35mm cameras, lenses, accessories,support at great prices – www.gallusproductions.com or callMarcus (310) 717-4477.
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The Visual Products ads you see here are just a sample of thethousands of motion picture items we have available. Allequipment comes with a money-back guarantee! Check outour continuously updated complete list online at www.visu-alproducts.com or call us at (440) 647-4999.
Camera/Projector Manuals Hard-to-find, out-of-printwww.hollywoodmanuals.com.
Moviecam magazines for sale. Call Visual Products Inc. (440)647-4999.
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BUY-SELL-CONSIGN-TRADE. 40 YEARS EXPERIENCE. CALLBILL REITER. PRO VIDEO & FILM EQUIPMENT COMPANY.(972) 869-9990.
WORLD’S SUPERMARKET OF USED MOTION PICTUREEQUIPMENT VISUAL PRODUCTS, INC. CALL (440) 647-4999.
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Arri 35-3 3rd generation camera for sale, with an orientableviewfinder door, WA eyepiece, also a fixed viewfinder door withSony B&W CCD camera (NTSC), CEI speed base, 3x 400’ maga-zines, 2x triple 12 volt batteries, 3x 12 volt battery chargers, 7xvarious ground-glasses, 2x power cables, Rt side handgrip, US$20,000 Or Best Offer. Also, a complete set of Zeiss T2.1 PLprimes, from 14mm to 135mm, some as a set of 6 for US$ 13,900OBO, and the rest singly varying from the 14mm at US$ 5,900OBO to the 40mm at US$ 2,750 OBO. Also a NEW, never beenused, Nikkor 300mm T2.0 that has been converted to neutral witha PL adapter by Century, as well as 400mm, 600mm, and 800mmCanon lenses, all converted to PL by Century. All of this equip-ment was my personal camera equipment and was never in rentalhouse use. All are in excellent condition. See my web page forthe complete listing and prices. The buyer pays shipping andinsurance FOB Los Angeles, CA. http://www.wfb4.com/35mm_Motion_Picture_Camera_Equip_for_Sale.htmlor e-mail me at [email protected] and I will send you the list-ing. Bill Bennett, ASC
Lighting Lighting and More Lighting HMI and Tungsten best pricesanywhere far too many to list. Call with your requirements. VisualProducts, Inc. (440) 647-4999.
300mm T2 Nikkor for sale. Contact Robert Primes, ASC, (323)851-8444, [email protected] . 91
Advertiser’s IndexAC 16a-b, 17Alan Gordon Enterprises 91Arri 12-13ASC Press 70, 82
Backstage Equipment, Inc. 69Band Pro Film & Digital 5Barger-Baglite 6Boston Camera 6Brooks Institute
of Photography 64Burrell Enterprises 90
Cavision Enterprises 55Chapman/Leonard Studio
Equipment Inc. 39Chesapeake Camera 6Cinebags 90Cinekinetic 8Cinema Vision 90Cinematography
Electronics 69Cine Power International 80Cinequipt 83Cineworks 29Clairmont Film & Digital 11Cooke 25, 85Coptervision 57
Dalsa C3
Eastman Kodak C2-1, C4EFD, USA Inc. 55
Film Emporium, Inc. 90Filmtools 74Fletcher Chicago 40Flying-Cam 39Frame Forge 83Fuji Motion Pictures 15Full Sail 7
Gillard Industries, Inc. 91Glidecam Industries 19Go Easy Lighting 56
Hand Held Films 90Highway 350 Corp. 91Hybrid Cases 90Hydroflex 95
Innoventive Software 83International Film & TV
Workshop 69
JBK Cinequipt 90
K 5600, Inc. 28Kino Flo 49K-Tek 90
Laffoux Solutions, Inc. 90Lights! Action! Company 90London Film School 82Los Angeles Film School 23
MP&E 90
NAB 88-89Nevada Film Commission 75New York Film Academy 9
Panther 41PED Denz 4Pille Filmgeraeteverleigh 90Professional Sound 95Pro8mm 91
Schneider Optics/Century 2Sharpshooter 10SMS Productions, Inc. 91Sony Electronics INSERTStanton Video Services 74Ste-Man, Inc. 48Sunpredictor 18Sydney Film School 74
T8 Technology Company 65Technocrane S.R.O. 47Tiffen 21
Ultra Camera Mounts 90
Vancouver Film School 27Visual Products, Inc. 85
www.theasc.com 92Welch Integrated 71Willy’s Widgets 90
Zacuto Films 90ZGC, Inc. 25, 85
92
New MemberLong known as a mentor to both
aspiring and established filmmakers,Ron Dexter, ASC has been welcomedinto the Society’s ranks.
Dexter’s interested in film can betraced to his years in the U.S. Navy,when he first took up still photography.After leaving the service, he attendedthe University of California-Berkeley,where he continued shooting, develop-ing and printing stills and discovered thefilms of Ingmar Bergman, MichelangeloAntonioni, Jean Renoir and David Lean.Upon graduating with a degree inpsychology, Dexter decided motionpictures were a “higher form” of photog-raphy, and he audited production coursesat the University of California-Los Ange-les (UCLA) while working in the school’sfilm department. His first break came onthe Disney wildlife film Sam Connorsand the Wahoo Bobcat, for which hebuilt sets and worked on the cameracrew.
Dexter’s career has since encom-passed special effects (he worked withLinwood Dunn, ASC and Cecil Love onIt’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World), theAcademy Award-nominated documen-tary Harvest (which he shot for CarrollBallard), Star Trek (for which he madestar background plates), and the RogerCorman film Gasss (on which Dexter
convinced Corman to sign one of his onlyunion contracts). He has alsophotographed more than 450 commer-cials and public-service spots.
Over the years, Dexter has devel-oped numerous products for the filmindustry, many of which prefiguredadvances made by other companies, andhe has never hesitated to retool gear tobetter suit his needs. His contributionsinclude DXTR tube track with skate-board-wheel dollies, the “Pitching Lens”system (made in collaboration withContinental Camera), and the “Shaki-Cam” (which later became the BodyMount and Pogo Cam).
Dexter and his wife, Jill, haveoperated their own production companyfor 22 years, and he has taught at UCLA,University of California-Santa Barbaraand Santa Barbara Community College.
Kemper Receives Lifetime Achievement AwardVictor J. Kemper, ASC was
recently honored with the LifetimeAchievement Award at the FourthAnnual Pune International Film Festivalin Pune, India. The award, which cele-brated Kemper’s contributions to advanc-ing the global art of filmmaking, markedthe first time the festival presented atribute to a cinematographer.
Kemper’s credits include TheCandidate, Dog Day Afternoon, The LastTycoon, Last of the Red Hot Lovers, Pee-
wee’s Big Adventure, The Gambler andThe Eyes of Laura Mars.
Associate Member Hetos DiesPhilip Hetos, the first color
timer to receive onscreen credit (for1983’s Scarface), died on January 8 atthe age of 73.
Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylva-nia, Hetos first found work in the filmbusiness with a job at Paramount
Studios in 1949. The following yearssaw him try his hand at various jobs inthe industry, and he eventually became acolor timer, a position he enjoyed atPathé Lab, Movie Lab, Technicolor,Deluxe Laboratories and CFI. His creditsinclude Young Guns, Sneakers, JerryMaguire, Magnolia and Road to Perdi-tion. In addition to being an associatemember of the ASC, Hetos was a long-time member of Film Technicians Local683.
He is survived by his wife, JudyTaylor; sons Philip (Mike) Hetos andDoug Taylor; daughters RhondaVanderver and Cindy Lainez; a sister,Dorothy Palis; a brother, David Hetos;and 11 grandchildren. �
Clubhouse News
American Cinematographer 93
Left: Kodak’s Rajesh Jiandani, Victor Kemper, ASC and ASC associatemember Milt Shefter.
94 March 2006
American Society of Cinematographers RosterOFFICERS – 2005-’06Richard Crudo,
President
Owen Roizman,Vice President
Daryn Okada,Vice President
Curtis Clark,Vice President
Russ Alsobrook,Treasurer
Michael Goi,Secretary
Kees Van Oostrum,Sergeant-at-Arms
MEMBERSOF THE BOARDRussell P. CarpenterCurtis ClarkRichard CrudoGeorge Spiro DibieRichard EdlundFrancis KennyIsidore MankofskyDaryn OkadaWoody OmensOwen RoizmanNancy SchreiberJohn TollRoy WagnerHaskell WexlerVilmos Zsigmond
ALTERNATESJohn Hora
Stephen Lighthill
Michael Goi
Kees Van Oostrum
Russ Alsobrook
Victor DuncanBert DunkJohn DykstraRichard EdlundFrederick ElmesRobert ElswitGeoffrey ErbJon FauerDon E. FauntLeRoyGerald FeilSteven FierbergGerald Perry FinnermanMauro FioreJohn C. Flinn IIIRon FortunatoWilliam A. FrakerTak FujimotoAlex FunkeSteve GainerRon GarciaJames M. GlennonMichael GoiStephen GoldblattPaul GoldsmithVictor GossJack GreenAdam GreenbergRobbie GreenbergAlexander GruszynskiChangwei GuRick GunterRob HahnGerald HirschfeldHenner HofmannAdam HolenderErnie HolzmanJohn C. HoraGil HubbsMichel HugoJudy IrolaMark IrwinLevie IsaacksAndrew JacksonPeter JamesJohnny E. JensenRobert C. JessupTorben JohnkeFrank JohnsonShelly JohnsonJeffrey JurWilliam K. JurgensenJanusz KaminskiStephen M. KatzKen KelschVictor J. KemperWayne KennanFrancis KennyGlenn KershawDarius KhondjiGary KibbeJan KeisserJeffrey L. KimballAlar KiviloRichard KlineGeorge Koblasa
Kenneth D. Peach Jr.Daniel PearlEdward J. PeiJames PergolaDon PetermanLowell PetersonWally PfisterAlex PhillipsClifford PolandGene PolitoBill PopeSteven PosterTom Priestley Jr.Rodrigo PrietoRobert PrimesFrank PrinziRichard QuinlanDeclan QuinnEarl RathRichard Rawlings Jr.Frank RaymondTami ReikerGayne RescherMarc ReshovskyRobert RichardsonAnthony B. RichmondBill RoeOwen RoizmanCharles Rosher Jr.Giuseppe RotunnoPhilippe RousselotJuan Ruiz-AnchiaMarvin RushPaul RyanEric SaarinenAlik SakharovMikael SalomonHarris SavidesAaron SchneiderNancy SchreiberFred SchulerJohn SchwartzmanJohn SealeDean SemlerEduardo SerraSteven ShawRichard ShoreNewton Thomas SigelJohn SimmonsSandi SisselBradley B. SixDennis L. SmithRoland “Ozzie” SmithReed SmootBing SokolskyPeter SovaWilliam SpencerDante SpinottiRobert SteadmanUeli SteigerPeter SteinRobert M. StevensVittorio StoraroHarry Stradling Jr.David Stump
Fred J. KoenekampLajos KoltaiLaszlo KovacsNeil KrepelaWilly KurantEllen M. KurasGeorge La FountaineEdward LachmanKen LamkinJacek LaskusAndrew LaszloDenis LenoirJohn R. LeonettiMatthew LeonettiAndrew LesniePeter LevyMatthew LibatiqueStephen LighthillKarl Walter LindenlaubJohn LindleyRobert F. LiuWalt LloydBruce LoganEmmanuel LubezkiJulio G. MacatGlen MacPhersonConstantine MakrisKarl MalkamesIsidore MankofskyMichael D. MarguliesBarry MarkowitzVincent MartinelliSteve MasonDon McAlpineDon McCuaigRobert McLachlanJohn McPhersonTerry K. MeadeChris MengesRexford MetzAnastas MichosDouglas MilsomeCharles MinskyRichard MooreDonald A. MorganDonald M. MorganM. David MullenDennis MurenFred MurphyHiro NaritaGuillermo NavarroMichael B. NegrinSol NegrinBill NeilAlex NepomniaschyJohn NewbyDavid B. NowellSven NykvistRene OhashiDaryn OkadaWoody OmensMiroslav OndricekMichael D. O’SheaAnthony PalmieriPhedon Papamichael
ACTIVE MEMBERSThomas AckermanLance AcordLloyd Ahern IIHerbert AlpertRuss AlsobrookHoward A. Anderson IIIHoward A. Anderson Jr.James AndersonPeter AndersonTony AskinsCharles AustinJames BagdonasKing BaggotJohn BaileyMichael BallhausAndrzej BartkowiakJohn BartleyFrank BeascoecheaAffonso BeatoMat BeckDion BeebeBill BennettAndres BerenguerCarl BergerGabriel BeristainSteven BernsteinRoss BerrymanMichael BonvillainRichard BowenRussell BoydDon BurgessStephen H. BurumWilmer C. ButlerTaylor ByarsFrank B. ByersBobby ByrneRussell P. CarpenterJames L. CarterAlan CasoMichael ChapmanRodney ChartersJames A. ChressanthisJoan ChurchillCurtis ClarkPeter L. CollisterJack CoopermanJack CoufferVincent G. CoxJeff CronenwethRichard CrudoDean R. CundeyStefan CzapskyAllen DaviauRoger DeakinsJan DeBontThomas Del RuthPeter DemingCaleb DeschanelRon DexterGeorge Spiro DibieCraig Di BonaErnest DickersonBilly DicksonBill Dill
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Tim SuhrstedtPeter SuschitzkyAlfred TaylorWilliam TaylorDon ThorinJohn TollMario TosiLuciano TovoliJost VacanoTheo Van de SandeEric Van Haren NomanKees Van OostrumRon VargasMark VargoAmelia VincentWilliam WagesRoy H. WagnerRic WaiteMichael WatkinsJonathan WestHaskell WexlerJack WhitmanGordon WillisDariusz WolskiRalph WoolseyPeter WunstorfRobert YeomanRichard YuricichJerzy ZielinskiVilmos ZsigmondKenneth Zunder
ASSOCIATE MEMBERSDon AdamsJoerg AginAlan AlbertRichard AschmanVolker BahnemannJoseph J. BallCarly M. BarberCraig BarronThomas M. BarronLarry BartonJohn BickfordSteven A. BlakelyMitchell BogdanowiczJack BonuraWilliam BrodersenGarrett BrownRonald D. BurdettReid BurnsVincent CarabelloLeonard ChapmanDenny ClairmontEmory M. CohenSean CoughlinRobert B. CreamerGrover CrispDaniel CurryCarlos D. DeMattosGary DemosRichard DiBonaKevin DillonDavid DodsonJudith Doherty
Don DonigiCyril DrabinskyJesse DylanRaymond EmeritzJonathan ErlandJohn FarrandRay FeeneyPhil FeinerJimmy FisherScott FleischerSteve GarfinkelSalvatore GiarratanoRichard B. GlickmanJohn A. GreschJim HannafinWilliam HansardBill Hansard, Jr.Richard HartRoman I. HarteRobert HarveyDon HendersonCharles HerzfeldLarry HezzelwoodFrieder HochheimRobert C. HummelRoy IsaiaGeorge JobloveJohn JohnstonCurtis JonesFrank KayMilton KeslowRobert KeslowLarry KingenDouglas KirklandTimothy J. KnappRon KochKarl KresserLou LevinsonSuzanne LezotteGrant LoucksAndy MaltzSteven E. ManiosJoe MatzaAlbert L. Mayer, Sr.Albert Mayer, Jr.Andy McIntyreGreg McMurryStan MillerWalter H. MillsGeorge MiltonMike MimakiRami MinaTak MiyagishimaMichael MorelliDash MorrisonNolan MurdockMark W. MurphyDan MuscarellaF. Jack NaporIain A. NeilOtto NemenzErnst NettmannMickel NiehenkeMarty OppenheimerLarry Parker
Michael ParkerWarren ParkerDoug PentekEd PhillipsNick PhillipsJerry PierceJoshua PinesCarl PorcelloHoward PrestonDavid PringlePhil RadinChristopher ReynaFrank J. Ricotta Sr.Eric G. RodliDon RogersAndy RomanoffDaniel RosenDana RossBill RussellKish SadhvaniDavid SamuelsonPeter K. SchnitzlerWalter SchonfeldJuergen SchwinzerRonald ScottSteven ScottDon ShapiroMilton R. ShefterLeon SilvermanGarrett SmithD. Brian SpruillJohn L. SprungJoseph N. TawilIra TiffenNat TiffenArthur TostadoAnn TurnerMark Van HorneRichard VetterJoe ViolanteFranz WeiserEvans WetmoreBeverly WoodJan YarbroughHoyt YeatmanIrwin M. YoungBob ZahnNazir ZaidiMichael ZakulaLes Zellan
HONORARY MEMBERSCol. Edwin E. Aldrin Jr.Neil A. ArmstrongCol. Michael CollinsBob FisherCpt. Bruce McCandless IIDavid MacDonaldBarbara PrevedelDr. Roderick T. RyanBud StoneRichard F. Walsh
96 March 2006
When you were a child, what film made the strongest impression onyou?The first Godzilla was a childhood favorite when it played on TV; it actually hasa fairly atmospheric black-and-white look. I also loved the early Disneyanimated features. By high school, I was a big fan of the original Star Trekseries. But the biggest impact came from seeing Close Encounters of the ThirdKind in a movie theater when I was 15. It was the ultimate cinematic experi-ence of my youth. I’m still in awe of that movie.
Which cinematographers, past or present, do you most admire?Vittorio Storaro, ASC, AIC; Gordon Willis, ASC; Conrad Hall, ASC; GeoffreyUnsworth, BSC; Jack Cardiff, BSC; Gregg Toland, ASC; David Watkin, BSC;Gabriel Figueroa, AMC; Néstor Almendros, ASC; Robert Richardson, ASC;Roger Deakins, ASC, BSC; Allen Daviau, ASC; Freddie Young, BSC; Vilmos Zsig-mond, ASC; George Barnes, ASC; and Jordan Cronenweth, ASC — to name afew.
What sparked your interest in photography?My father always has been an avid photographer, so it was part of my child-hood. In high school, I remember first learning about cinematographers when Inoticed that Superman: The Movie was dedicated to the late GeoffreyUnsworth. I loved his pastel, fog-filtered work on that movie and managed tofind the American Cinematographer article that his operator, Peter MacDonald,wrote about working with him. What deeply impressed me was the admirationthat directors and crews who had worked with Unsworth expressed for him asa human being and an artist.
Where did you train and/or study?I started making Super 8 movies when I was in high school and didn’t attendfilm school until I was 27, so a decade of self-learning passed before I got anyformal training [at CalArts]. I arrived at film school more or less proficient withthe basics of camera and lighting, and I was asked to shoot dozens of gradu-ate-thesis projects for other students. So what I learned in film school was lessabout technical matters and more about working with directors and crews.
Who were your early teachers or mentors?I relied heavily on back issues of American Cinematographer as my private filmschool; I read every issue going back to the late 1920s and re-read the 1970sissues (a great period for the magazine and for movies) numerous times. AtCalArts, my graduate-thesis adviser and mentor was Kris Malkiewicz, author ofthe textbook Cinematography, which I had actually memorized a decade beforemeeting him. I recently got to collaborate with Kris on a new edition of thatbook, a great honor.
What are some of your key artistic influences?My mother is Japanese, and living in a house with Japanese art on the wallscertainly influenced my early aesthetic development — as did, perhaps, themany Japanese monster movies on TV. Growing up in the California desert hadsome impact on my sense of space and light. I love the paintings of Hopper,Caravaggio, Vermeer, Rembrandt, Sargent, da Vinci and Van Gogh. I’m also abig fan of American landscape paintings, particularly by the Hudson RiverSchool. The work and ideas of Vittorio Storaro have always been a major inspi-ration. My favorite directors are Kurosawa, Kubrick, Lean, Ford, Welles andHitchcock — the usual suspects!
How did you get your first break in the business?I started shooting features right after film school, mainly micro-budget projectsthat I got through connections made in school. The budgets have slowly
climbed over time. The first movie anyone noticed was Twin Falls Idaho, and thenNorthfork. Both were directed by Michael Polish, and both netted me Indepen-dent Spirit Award nominations.
What has been your most satisfying moment on a project?Doing a crane shot in 35mm anamorphic on the vast plains of Montana in thewinter for Northfork. It was the closest I’ve felt to doing work in the spirit of JohnFord and David Lean, despite the tiny budget.
Have you made any memorable blunders?Early on, I moved a 5K that I probably shouldn’t have touched and unknowinglyplaced it under a fire sprinkler, which went off in this very expensive mansion. Iexpected the owner to throw a fit when she saw her drowned master bedroom,but it turned out she had been hoping something would go wrong. Apparentlyshe had a habit of renting out her mansion to productions whenever she wantedto get some remodeling done, figuring that they would damage something andshe’d get money from the insurance claim.
What’s the best professional advice you’ve ever received?I was nervous about shooting my first feature, and luckily, I ran into Allen Daviau,ASC, who advised me to know my first week of production, what I needed to do,backwards and forwards. I discovered that being hyper-prepared like that notonly boosted my confidence but also set the right tone for the production. Thecrew quickly realizes that you know what you want and are aware of how longthings should take.
What recent books, films or artworks have inspired you?I find some of the locations where I have worked to be very inspiring. Mostrecently it was the Santa Fe region of New Mexico. In the past few years, RobertRichardson’s cinematography for Snow Falling on Cedars has probably impressedme the most, as well as Conrad Hall’s work in Road to Perdition.
Do you have any favorite genres, or genres that you would like to try?Shooting a science-fiction movie set on a spaceship would satisfy a childhooddream, especially if it were a Star Trek movie. Like many cinematographers, I’dlove to shoot a Western, a black-and-white film noir, and a period epic in 65mm— not necessarily in that order.
If you weren’t a cinematographer, what might you be doing instead?I’d probably be teaching filmmaking. If not, I might be trying to make a living asa writer.
Which ASC cinematographers recommended you for membership?Robert Primes, Roy Wagner and Denis Lenoir.
How has ASC membership impacted your life and career?For one thing, I got to cross “get into the ASC” off my list of lifelong career goals!It has been a tremendous honor and a great pleasure to meet and socialize withmy heroes, some of whom were responsible for the greatest moments in cinemahistory. It’s a wonderful organization of true artists. �
ASC CLOSE-UPM. David Mullen, ASC
