American Cinematographer.2012 10

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OCTOBER 2012

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The International Journal of Motion Imaging

34 Dead Mans HandGreig Fraser lends high style to lowlife crime forKilling Them Softly50 A Very Tough Beat

Roman Vasyanov captures unique perspectives forthe cop dramaEnd of Watch

64 Payback TimeSteve Yedlin tracks time-traveling killers through Looper

76 Hitchcock BlondeJohn Pardue emulates directors classic style in The Girl

DEPARTMENTS

FEATURES

VISIT WWW.THEASC.COM TO ENJOY THESE WEB EXCLUSIVES Podcast: Mikael Salomon, ASC and Ben Nott, ACS on Coma

DVD Playback:Jaws Singin in the Rain Les Vampires

On Our Cover: Jackie Cogan (Brad Pitt) is summoned to clean up a mob problem inKilling Them Softly, shot by Greig Fraser. (Photo by Melinda Sue Gordon, SMPSP,courtesy of The Weinstein Co.)

8 Editors Note10 Presidents Desk12 Short Takes:ASC Andrew Laszlo Heritage Awards20 Production Slate: Chasing IceArbitrage86 Post Focus: Blinding90 New Products & Services94 International Marketplace95 Classified Ads96 Ad Index98 Clubhouse News

100 ASC Close-Up: Robert Primes

O C T O B E R 2 0 1 2 V O L . 9 3 N O . 1 0

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O c t o b e r 2 0 1 2 V o l . 9 3 , N o . 1 0

T h e I n t e r n a t i o n a l J o u r n a l o f M o t i o n I m a g i n g

Visit us online at

www.theasc.com

PUBLISHER Martha Winterhalter

EDITORIAL

EXECUTIVE EDITOR Stephen Pizzello

SENIOR EDITOR Rachael K. Bosley

ASSOCIATE EDITOR Jon D. Witmer

TECHNICAL EDITOR Christopher Probst

CONTRIBUTING WRITERSStephanie Argy, Benjamin B, Douglas Bankston, Robert S. Birchard,

John Calhoun, Michael Goldman, Simon Gray, Jim Hemphill,David Heuring, Jay Holben, Mark Hope-Jones, Noah Kadner,

Jean Oppenheimer, Jon Silberg, Iain Stasukevich,

Kenneth Sweeney, Patricia Thomson

ART DEPARTMENT

CREATIVE DIRECTOR Marion Gore

ADVERTISING

ADVERTISING SALES DIRECTORAngie Gollmann

323-936-3769 FAX 323-936-9188

e-mail: [email protected]

ADVERTISING SALES DIRECTOR Sanja Pearce

323-952-2114 FAX 323-876-4973


ADVERTISING SALES DIRECTOR Scott Burnell

323-936-0672 FAX 323-936-9188


CLASSIFIEDS/ADVERTISING COORDINATOR Diella Nepomuceno

323-952-2124 FAX 323-876-4973


CIRCULATION, BOOKS & PRODUCTSCIRCULATION DIRECTOR Saul Molina

CIRCULATION MANAGER Alex Lopez

SHIPPING MANAGER Miguel Madrigal

ASC GENERAL MANAGER Brett Grauman

ASC EVENTS COORDINATOR Patricia Armacost

ASC PRESIDENTS ASSISTANT Delphine Figueras

ASC ACCOUNTING MANAGER Mila Basely

ASC ACCOUNTS RECEIVABLE Corey Clark

American Cinematographer (ISSN 0002-7928), established 1920 and in its 92nd year of publication, is published

monthly in Hollywood by ASC Holding Corp., 1782 N. Orange Dr., Hollywood, CA 90028, U.S.A.,(800) 448-0145, (323) 969-4333, Fax (323) 876-4973, direct line for subscription inquiries (323) 969-4344.

Subscriptions: U.S. $50; Canada/Mexico $70; all other foreign countries $95 a year (remit internationalMoney Order or other exchange payable in U.S. $). Advertising: Rate card upon request from Hollywood

office. Article Reprints: Requests for high-quality article reprints (or electronic reprints) should be made toSheridan Reprints at (800) 635-7181 ext. 8065 or by e-mail [email protected].

Copyright 2012 ASC Holding Corp. (All rights reserved.) Periodicals postage paid at Los Angeles, CAand at additional mailing offices. Printed in the USA.

POSTMASTER: Send address change to American Cinematographer, P.O. Box 2230, Hollywood, CA 90078.4


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OFFICERS - 2012/2013

Stephen LighthillPresident

Daryn OkadaVice President

Richard CrudoVice President

Kees Van OostrumVice President

Victor J. KemperTreasurer

Frederic GoodichSecretary

Steven FierbergSergeant At Arms

MEMBERS OF THE

BOARDJohn BaileyStephen H. Burum

Curtis ClarkRichard CrudoDean CundeyFred Elmes

Michael GoiVictor J. Kemper

Francis KennyMatthew LeonettiStephen LighthillMichael O'Shea

Robert PrimesOwen Roizman

Kees Van Oostrum

ALTERNATES

Ron GarciaJulio Macat

Kenneth ZunderSteven Fierberg

Karl Walter Lindenlaub

MUSEUM CURATORSteve Gainer

American Society of Cinematographers

The ASC is not a labor union or a guild, butan educational, cultural and professional

organization. Membership is by invitationto those who are actively engaged asdirectors of photography and have

demonstrated outstanding ability. ASCmembership has become one of the highest

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This months special focus is lighting, but in the productions

were showcasing, most of the characters slink through theshadows. Hit men run rampant in Killing Them Softly andLooper; brutal gangbangers target LAPD cops in End ofWatch; a famous film director torments his leading lady in TheGirl; and inArbitrage, a wealthy hedge-fund manager cooksthe company books, commits adultery and then compoundshis problems with a fatal car crash. Family fare its not, but allof these stories are told with visual flair.

For the mob saga Killing Them Softly, Greig Fraser anddirector Andrew Dominik carefully stylized their storys lowlifesettings. Although we shot on location in New Orleans, we

were aiming for something generic, a little town between New Orleans, Boston and D.C. thatwe called Shitsville, Fraser tells Benjamin B (Dead Mans Hand, page 34). We wanted theplace to look like its on the down-and-down, on the way out. We wanted viewers to feeljust how smelly and grimy and horrible it was, but at the same time, we didnt want to alien-ate them visually. That was the challenge!

The police drama End of Watch, shot by Roman Vasyanov and directed by David Ayer,takes place amid similarly bleak areas of Los Angeles. Their approach involved capturingdynamic footage with a variety of small digital cameras, some of which were attached to leadactors Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Pea to provide kinetic perspectives. Its difficult toalways motivate POV camerawork and make it feel real, so I suggested we incorporate someslightly more traditional coverage by shooting a little handheld in a very energetic style,Vasyanov explains to Jay Holben (A Very Tough Beat, page 50). I shot a lot of the hand-held very wide and very close to the actors, often with an 8mm lens just 10mm from theirfaces! It creates the feeling that youre always waiting for something to happen, and thatsreally the life of a police officer: theyre always on edge, waiting to spring into action at amoments notice.

On the sci-fi crime thriller Looper, which takes place in the Near Future of 2042 andthe Far Future of 2072, Steve Yedlin used the 35mm anamorphic format to cleverly enhancethe visual strategies of director Rian Johnson. Rian described the overall look he wanted ason-the-ground science fiction, Yedlin tells Iain Stasukevich (Payback Time, page 64).Instead of everything looking futuristic and fancy, things look a little more realistic andjunky.

More glamorous images were required for the HBO telefilm The Girl, shot by JohnPardue. In chronicling director Alfred Hitchcocks obsession with actress Tippi Hedren, Pardueand director Julian Jarrold found themselves emulating looks created for The Birds andMarnie by cinematographer Robert Burks, ASC. The overall style of The Girl is quite natu-

ralistic, but when I shot scenes that were homages to Burks, I tried to light them the way hewould have, Pardue says (Hitchcock Blonde, page 76). This is very evident in our depic-tions of Hedrens screen tests, the Birds attic scene and the Marnie seduction scene. I lookedat many photographs from the sets of those two movies to try to get into the mindset thatexisted back then.

Stephen PizzelloExecutive Editor

Editors Note

8


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Bob Primes, ASC reveals his inner child playing with the cool

toys and other kids at Clairmont Camera; a fun place to play.

I've played in some great camera rental houses.

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new tools, toys and widgets to make our work more

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But that's old news. Everyone in the biz knows that!

I want to talk about how much fun I have at Clairmont.

The sign of a well managed team is the morale and

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Clairmont is a busy place, yet somehow, miraculously,

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create solutions and are just as crazy about the latest

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It is this uncanny ability of everyone you encounter to

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The major finding of a recently released 2011 Writers Guild of Americasurvey was that screenwriters believe their status in the industry hassignificantly deteriorated over the past several years. We are notsurprised. Im sure writers know that soon, there will be more drones inthe U.S. Air Force fighting fleet than real planes with real pilots (the kindthat can wear scarves around their necks), and that in some cases, pilotsno longer pilot passenger jets, but input their instructions throughphony levers to computers that actually do the flying.

In the world we live in, computers are seen by many as ademocratizing force, but computers are also changing traditional crafts.What about the craft of cinematographers? Well, some upsettingstories came across my desk over the summer. One concerned a cine-matographer who was not informed when a studio feature that he shotfor a director he had worked with many times before was to be color-corrected; the director, not the cinematographer, was in the DI suite.Another story told of a big-budget TV movie that was re-timed by thedirector and editor over the protests of the cinematographer and thenetwork.

It is upsetting that those two directors did not respect their on-set collaborators enough to continue collaborating through postpro-duction. But we are more concerned with the notion that cinematog-

raphers are merely pilots (with or without scarves), camera guys and gals whose job begins and ends with on-set cine-matography.

In fact, cinematographers learn a tremendous amount by staying with a production through color correction and allthe other stages of the DI. We learn not only what worked in our imagining of the film, but also how we can make produc-tion better by making post better, faster and cheaper. In the coolness of the DI suite computers like it chilly there istime to look at the image closely, and to consider with our director what we might have done differently. With the help ofthe colorist, the cinematographer also learns how the image is altered as it goes to various display devices.

Anyone can enter a DI suite and say, I know what I like, just as anyone can tour a museum and say the samething. But color correction is not just about deciding on a look you like, just as exposing a digital image is not only aboutlighting and calculating exposure while watching a monitor. Color correction is about scene-to-scene consistency of skintones, of props and locations no matter what time of day they were captured, and, of course, of noise levels.

Directors who do not collaborate with their cinematographers through post seem shortsighted to us. They do adisservice to their films, their producers and their profession, and a disservice to the notion that our community of film-makers makes better films when all of us are well informed throughout the process.

Stephen LighthillASC President

Presidents Desk

10 October 2012 American Cinematographer


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ASC Honors 3 with Andrew Laszlo Heritage AwardsBy David Heuring

The ASC presented Andrew Laszlo Heritage Awards to threeoutstanding student cinematographers during an awards ceremonyat the Clubhouse in June. Damian Horan of the University of South-ern California won the graduate competition forJosephine and the

Roach; H.R. McDonald of the Art Center College of Design won theundergraduate competition forAexis; and Travis LaBella of North-western University won the documentary competition, a new cate-gory this year, for Language of the Unheard. (Also nominated in thegraduate category were Benjamin Kitchens of the American FilmInstitute for Narcocorrido and John Walstad MacDonald of Chap-man University for The Bullet Catcher. The other nominees in theundergraduate category were Nicholas Wiesnet of ChapmanUniversity for The Drop and Adam Lee of Loyola Marymount Univer-sity for Reclamation. LaBella was the sole nominee in the documen-tary competition.)

Short Takes

The ASCAndrew Laszlo

HeritageAward-winning

student filmsareJosephine

and the Roach,shot by DamianHoran (top);

Aexis, shot byH.R. McDonald

(middle); andLanguage of

the Unheard,shot by Travis

LaBella(bottom).

I



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Josephine and the RoachCinematographer:Damian HoranDirected by Jonathan Langager, the

dialogue-freeJosephine and the Roach is asurreal short film about a cockroach thatfalls in love with the woman whose apart-ment he infests. The roach sharesJosephines appreciation for early 20th-century French classical music, and whenshe practices her accordion, he accompa-nies her on the violin (unbeknownst to her)from his little hole in the wall. They areperfect for each other, but, alas, Josephinehas approximately 45,000 times as much

body mass, and their reproductive systemsare totally incompatible. Complicatingmatters further is the fact that Josephine isalready married to a brutish exterminator

named Moe.Langagers goal was to create a

magical world where one could imaginesuch a romance existing, and he and Horansought inspiration in the bold visuals of Deli-catessen (shot by Darius Khondji, ASC, AFC)andAmlie (shot by Bruno Delbonnel, ASC,AFC). Jon loves to take risks, which is whyhes so wonderful to work with, saysHoran, who hails from Houston, Texas. Wewanted to make strong choices.

The primary photographic chal-lenge, according to Horan, was the roach,which was portrayed by two puppets, one2" tall and one 2' tall. Maneuvering thelatter required as many as six puppeteers.Finding a way to sneak in a light or two forthat greenscreen work was a difficult chal-lenge at times, says Horan.

Most of Josephine and the Roachwas shot with a Panavision Genesis andPrimo lenses, and Horan used a PrimoMacro Zoom for very close shots of theroach that maintain shallow depth-of-field.Framing for 2.40:1, he used focal lengthsthat were either very wide or very long. Tophotograph the miniature set depicting theworld of the roach, Horan used a Red OneMX, shooting 4K for 24-fps material and3K for higher frame rates, which he used tolend additional weight to the bugs move-ments. Innovision Optics Probe II Plushelped get roach POV shots from within theapartment.

In the script, the world outsideJosephines drab quarters was described asbustling and romantic, and Horan hinted atthis by hanging a variety of gelled bulbs atdifferent distances beyond the windows. Inthe main room of her apartment, he usedvery saturated blue light to suggest herisolation and often keyed from her TV set,her only connection to the outside world.By contrast, the kitchen, where she falls inlove with the roach, appears warm andinviting.

Camera moves were especiallyimportant in the visual design. For a shotthat shows Josephine finding a miniaturebox of chocolates left for her by the roach,we used a Primo Macro Zoom, whichallowed us to put the miniature box in theforeground, making it look rather large,says Horan. As she reaches out and picksup the box, we boom up to her eye leveland rack to her, revealing how small thebox actually is. I think the shot links the


Left (top tobottom):

Josephine(Jenna Augen)

practices heraccordion andfaces off withher husband,

Moe; roachpuppeteers

(from left)Damon Stea,

Stu Hirsch, LinoStavole, David

Agnew andChristian Hall.Right: DamianHoran lines up

a shot.


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miniature and real worlds together in a veryromantic way.

Horan wasnt entirely satisfied withthe battery-powered miniature lights heused in the miniature set, but a remoteslider from Innovision helped him create aclean plate for the visual-effects team,which had to remove rods from the roachpuppet. Working with puppeteers in sucha tight miniature set was definitely a biglearning curve, says Horan. Shooting atT5.6 on a miniature set and being able tocontrol the light in a believable way was alot harder than I thought it would be.

Aexis

Cinematographer:H.R. McDonaldThe main character inAexis, directed

by Eric Chang, recalls a succession of enig-matic memories as he tries to figure outhow he died. The possibility of separate real-ities is indicated, and an advanced technol-ogy, along with an assassin in pursuit of it, ishinted at. Throughout the film, the maincharacter jumps around in time, and thefilmmakers designed the images to reflect

his confusion and paranoia.The script had a temporal ambigu-

ity that suggested the story could be takingplace in the future, says McDonald, anative of New Orleans, La. To suggest this,I arranged my compositions to give thearchitecture a knife-like sharpness, puttingthe character in a hostile environment. I wasalways looking for a composition thatwould further that idea and suggest a kindof fascist control. We limited camera movesto keep the emphasis on the compositions.We also used reflections in mirrors tosuggest the multiple lives this characterseems to be living.

The script included a sequence in

which the actors had to perform a sceneand then play it again while reversing theiractions. A subsequent scene then presentsvaguely similar actions but a differentoutcome. Similarly, the camera move, aslow dolly combined with a pan/tilt, had tobe performed three times: once normally,once in reverse, and once forward again butslightly different.

McDonald shot with a Red One MXin 4.5K 2.40:1 Widescreen mode, using Red

Pro primes and an Angenieux 12-120mmzoom. I usually prefer to use older zoomson the Red to soften the image a bit, but wewanted sharpness for this film, so theprimes were appropriate, he says. I alsoused a Canon [EOS] 5D Mark II for theunderwater shots and a brief shot with aLensbaby. Ive found that the 5D intercutspretty well with the Red on close-ups, but Iwouldnt use that camera on wide shots.

With one exception, the entirepicture was lit with Kino Flos, including 4-bank systems and Single Selects, all withdaylight-balanced tubes. The exception wasa 1K tungsten-balanced accent light. Theenvironment was so sharp, rigid and angu-lar that I felt it would have been a poor deci-sion to use hard light, says McDonald.The soft light balances out the look andkeeps it from becoming too theatrical.

McDonald says that all of his cine-matographic decisions are informed by theavailable time and gear. I typically workwith rushed schedules, limited crew andonly as much equipment as will fit in mySubaru Forester, he says. I guess youcould say that at the moment, my specialtyis doing a lot with a little, andAexis was noexception. Fortunately, Eric gave me near

total freedom in crafting the look and find-ing the shots that worked best.

Language of the UnheardCinematographer: Travis LaBellaDirected by Jacqueline Reyno and

Matthew Litwiller, the documentaryLanguage of the Unheard focuses on fourmembers of the Oglala Sioux Nation wholive on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation,which borders the Badlands in South


Clockwise fromtop left:

Reflections playa key role inAexis; H.R.

McDonald (left)talks over a shot

with director EricChang (center)and 2nd AC LeiTao; McDonaldsets up a shot.


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observes LaBella, who shot 16x9. I wasable to dial in some custom scene files toget the most dynamic range. The camerasstock lens gave us good range, but on the13-inch sensor, it was difficult to get shallowdepth-of-field for interviews and othershots. For everything other than wide shots,I tried to be on the longest possible focallength while staying as wide open on thelens as I could.

LaBellas strategy for exteriors some-times included an ND grad filter taped tothe front of the lens. I knew going in thatI would ultimately color correct the images

in Apple Color, so for landscapes, I madesure to retain as many highlights as possible,knowing I could bring up the shadowslater, he says.

Some interviews shot indoors werelit with existing window light, and otherswere lit with a China ball and a Kino FloDiva 400 for eyelight.

I learned that its important on adocumentary to try to get to know yoursubjects really well and engage them in

conversation without the camera, saysLaBella. We participated in a sweat lodgewith one of our subjects, for example, andwe often spent hours talking with thembefore shooting. I think this helped whenwe eventually turned the camera on, and itmade it a pleasant experience for every-one.

The Heritage Award is named for adifferent ASC cinematographer each year.This years honoree, Andrew Laszlo, ASC,came to the United States as a refugee fromHungary in 1947, after escaping forced-labor army units and serving time in two

concentration camps. His cinematographycredits included the TV series Naked City,the TV miniseries Shogun, and the featuresStreets of Fire, Rambo: First Blood, TheWarriors, The Night They Raided Minskysand Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. He wasthe author of Every Frame A Rembrandt andIts a Wrap! He died in 2011.


Dakota. The filmmakers wanted to repro-duce for audiences the isolated feeling thatenvelops visitors to the vast reservation.The landscapes there are truly breathtak-ing, notes LaBella, who hails from Rye,N.Y. I used long, slow pans in most wideshots to try to show the expanse of thespace. When we filmed the people of thereservation, we tried our best to be flies onthe wall.

The productions main camera, aPanasonic AG-HVX200, was chosenbecause it was readily available from North-western Universitys equipment cage over

the course of the eight-month shoot, whichthe filmmakers arranged so they couldcapture different seasons. LaBella also useda Canon EOS 5D Mark II to get additionalcoverage of the Lakota Invitational basket-ball tournament. Gear was chosen carefully,as everything had to fit in one vehicle forthe 14-hour drive from Chicago to PineRidge.

Even though the HVX only shoots720p, I think its an underrated camera,

Clockwise from top left: Travis LaBella and directorJacqueline Reyno at work; landscape shots of Pine

Ridge Indian Reservation and the neighboringBadlands; interviewee Bill Quijos.


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An Award-Winning Document of Climate ChangeBy Patricia Thomson

Growing up on Staten Island, Jeff Orlowski turned the shedout back into a bouldering wall, making endless loops on climbinggrips he had fastened. When he wasnt climbing there or in CentralPark, he was in his basement darkroom, printing photographs underhis fathers tutelage. Little did he know that these hobbies wouldmesh years later and lead him to a cinematography prize at theSundance Film Festival.

His winning film, Chasing Ice, which he also directed, wasoriginally intended to be a portrait of an obsessed photographer,James Balog of National Geographic. However, it offers convincingevidence of climate change, featuring time-lapse images of disap-

pearing glaciers that are so irrefutable even skeptics cant shrug themoff.

Twenty years ago, one of those skeptics was Balog. Trained asa geomorphologist, the Colorado-based photographer began hiscareer leery of global-warming claims. But a New Yorkerassignmentshooting glaciers in Iceland altered his thinking. He pitched a largerstory to National Geographic, and it was while shooting The BigThaw, one of the magazines most popular cover stories, that hestarted to think time-lapse photography would be the best way torecord these dwindling glaciers. He subsequently launched theExtreme Ice Survey, whose mission was to deploy 30 cameras on 18

glaciers in Greenland, Iceland, Alaska and Montana and create athree-year time-lapse record.

He thought it would be easy, Orlowski says with a laugh,but he quickly discovered that the equipment didnt exist for along-term endeavor.

Orlowski joined the project while he was finishing an anthro-pology degree at Stanford University, where he also took some film-making classes. A friend had introduced him to Balog, and in March2007, Orlowski began volunteering. Initially, his job was to helpBalog set up field cameras and shoot video on the side. He boughta Panasonic AG-HVX200 to take to Iceland.

We had no real plan, Orlowski says. We knew nobodyhad ever done time-lapse work on this scale before. There are scien-tists who did time-lapse 20 or 30 years ago, but only for a couple of

months in the summer, and only one photograph a day. It seemedobvious that we needed to record this, so for the first two years, Ifollowed James and shot video for the sake of documentation, notreally knowing what would come of it. We werent planning onmaking a documentary. (Chasing Ice includes additional footageshot by Balog, David Breashears, Michael Brown, Adam LeWinter,Svavar Jonatansson and others.)

Prior to their first outing, Balog spent months in his garageworking out a time-lapse system that could survive years unat-tended. Nikon donated 25 D200s. Balog had to customize every-thing else, including the solar-panel system that would keep the

Production Slate

C h a s i n g I c e p h o t o s b y J e f f O r l o w s k i A d a m

L e W i n t e r J a m e s B a l o g a n d T a d P f e f f e r c o u r t e s y o f E x p o s u r e L L C

National Geographic photographer James Balog shoots by a moulin on the Greenland Ice Sheet.

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batteries charged, and the camera housings(Pelican cases outfitted with a Plexiglaswindow and weather hood).

Balog, Orlowski and field assistantSvavar Jonatansson started with the SolheimGlacier in Iceland. They immediately realizedthat the cameras mounting system Bogen tripods bolted down and stabilizedwith guy wires wouldnt work. Theground was too soft to keep the shot stableover time, especially in Icelands weather and

wind. After a trip to the nearest hardwarestore, which was 50 miles away, they affixeda wood frame with tripod head to a cliffwall. Trying to find pressure-treated woodin Iceland, where there are no trees, wasvirtually impossible, Orlowski notes. Theyalso devised a new post mount that wasusable when bedrock was at hand.

The documentary shows the teamreturning six months later and finding theirwork a complete failure. Cameras had been

felled by falling rocks, cables had been eatenthrough by foxes, and Plexiglas had beensandblasted till it was opaque. But, mosttroubling, the cameras werent firing.

The system Balog had devised wasclever enough. It avoided the pitfall of stan-dard intervalometers, which never switch off

and thus constantly drain power. Balogfound a scientist to design and build anintervalometer that would turn off at nightbased on the cameras GPS coordinates andbetween hourly daytime shots. It had aninternal calendar and knew the number ofpictures it was supposed to take on a givenday, because it knew when the sun came upand set, says Orlowski. Conceptually, thatmade sense. The problem was when youreout in the field and a timer isnt working, youcant just grab one from Alaska and use it inIceland because theyre programmed differ-ently. And when youre out in the field andthe screen stops working and you dontknow why, thats a problem! Wed see thisLCD screen with no data, just a solid linegoing across.

It took months to troubleshoot. Ascientist on one expedition disassembled thewhole system and measured the electricalpathways within the circuit board. He identi-fied a surprising culprit: the double-stick tapeused to mount the timer. When thetemperature changed, the tapes thicknesschanged, so the contacts between circuitboard and screen didnt click, saysOrlowski. Ultimately, engineer Adam LeWin-ter worked with National Geographic engi-neers to devise a simpler timer that used alight sensor to determine if there wasenough light to shoot, then powered downthe whole system between shots.

Meanwhile, Orlowskis Panasonic hadits own issues. Sub-zero temperaturesdecreased battery life and made the LCDscreen flicker. (He remedied both problems

with rip-and-shake handwarmers.) Unableto afford P2 cards, he purchased a 60GBFirestore hard drive that had to be tetheredto the camera. Logistically, that was themost nightmarish part of production, saysOrlowski. I tried to keep the camera anddrive inside my jacket so the batteries wouldlast longer. I was sometimes standing therein terrible wind and snow, trying to peek inand see if the hard drive was on so we couldroll! At some point, Panasonic came aboard

Top: Balog climbsa section of

ancient ice at the

Columbia Glacierin Alaska. Middle:Adam LeWinter

on a month-longglacier-watching

trip at theIlulissat Glacier,

Greenland.Bottom: Chasing

Ice director/cinematographer

Jeff Orlowskishoots in a

canyon on theGreenland Ice

Sheet.


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26/104


and gave us P2 cards. That made my life a loteasier.

For the last two years of the three-year shoot, Orlowski switched to a SonyPMW-EX1, which recorded to SxS Promemory cards. No hand warmers werenecessary, but a pen was required to pressbuttons because Orlowskis fingers wereoften buried inside three layers of gloves.

In 2009, Orlowski officially starteddown the documentary-feature path afterconvincing Balog of its feasibility. He startedworking with producers Paula DePr Pesmenand Jerry Aronson, and he began conduct-ing interviews with EIS participants andscientists using a Sony PMW-F3 (with Sony50mm and 85mm prime lenses, or a Nikonadapter with a Nikon 135mm lens).

Orlowski interweaves shots of stun-ning beauty throughout Chasing Ice, not justBalogs stills, but also his own video images,which make the most of the exquisite light-ing conditions and ideal camera positions

that Balog sought out. Orlowski alsoincludes his own shorter time-lapsesegments, which depict such things as icecircling in the current and the NorthernLights.

All of these beauty shots take Chas-ing Ice out of the realm of everyday doc. Somuch of climate change is described incharts and graphs and numbers, but thatsnot how we wanted to approach it, saysOrlowski. We didnt want the film to be

science-y. I wanted just enough science tounderstand the context of what James isdoing, and no more.

Chasing Ice includes awesomefootage of the thunderous calving of variousglaciers. The first was captured at StoneGlacier in Greenland, when the team was

still unloading gear from the helicopter.Wed all noticed that one of the [glacial]peninsulas looked really weird, and just on awhim, I set the Panasonic to roll, recallsOrlowski. Suddenly, people started to yell.The peninsula the length of roughly fivefootball fields was starting to crack androll on its side, like a log. The only reasonwe caught that at all was because of thePanasonic and the P2 cards, says Orlowski.The special Loop feature allows it to rollforever. When you hit stop, it saves the lastx-minutes of footage, based on the card.

Orlowski had about 50 minutes inthe loop. Because glacial calving can start soslowly, and the cracking sound takes severalseconds to reach the viewer, its virtuallyimpossible to catch the beginning of suchan event based on ones eyes or ears.Orlowskis foresight got that indeliblemoment recorded.

That success was dwarfed, however,by the calving at Ilulissat Glacier in Green-land, an event the filmmakers stalked likewild prey. An ice fjord 5 miles wide, it is oneof the worlds most productive glaciers.With Balog temporarily sidelined by a badknee, Orlowski and LeWinter set up campand prepared four video cameras and fivetime-lapse systems. The EX1 had two hourscapacity, and during weeks of waiting,Orlowski let it roll continuously. If nothingnoteworthy occurred after an hour, heddelete the clip and start recording again.That gave us an ability similar to [the Pana-sonic Loop function] in terms of long record-ing times, he says. If anything happened,

we knew we had it. If nothing happened,we could delete the clip easily and restart.After three weeks, they hit pay dirt. An iceblock the size of Lower Manhattan and3 times taller began calving. It lasted 75minutes, the largest calving event evercaptured on tape.

Data management and cameramaintenance were the toughest part of thattrip, consuming two to three hours everynight. Youve got to swap memory cards,

swap camera batteries, charge batteriesconstantly, download all the memory cards,backup all the footage, and make sure thelaptop batteries are always charged, saysOrlowski, who used eight 500GB harddrives, one generator and a 50' extensioncord in Greenland. Setting up a complete

digital-download and backup station in alittle tent thats being pounded by wind isnot the most convenient thing.

Nor was reaching the locations.Greenlands most accessible glacier, forinstance, required flights from Colorado tothe East Coast to Copenhagen to Kanger-lussuaq to Ilulissat, and then a helicopter tobase camp. Baggage fees topped $40,000by Orlowskis estimate, even though gearwas winnowed down mercilessly beforeeach trip. He notes that he was a bitsurprised by the film worlds approach topacking gear. Theres a Pelican case foreverything. One camera body gets its ownlarge case with lots of padding, and thatgets tossed around [in transit]. In the photoworld, you have a backpack with yourcamera body and dozens of lenses, all withdivider foam. Everything is safe, padded andon your back, so its not getting tossedaround. Even though theres a lot ofcustomized gear out there for filmmakers, Ifound there wasnt a camera case that func-tioned this way.

Orlowski therefore devised a back-pack system based on these principles. Ilined a cheap, plastic garbage can withfoam padding. The EX1 fit right in, and thatwhole thing fit into the main compartmentof my hiking pack. The camera had struc-tural support, and it was easy to pack andremove. I had extra compartments for allthe climbing gear, camera accessories,batteries, and extra layers of clothes andgoggles.

At press time, Orlowski was mulling

over ideas for his next film. Whatever it is,he muses, I hope the locations arewarmer!

TECHNICAL SPECS1.78:1

Digital Capture

Sony PMW-EX1, PMW-F3;Panasonic AG-HVX200

Sony and Nikon

Balog installs a time-lapse camera at theColumbia Glacier in Alaska.


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Changing FortunesBy Jean Oppenheimer

Part thriller, part cautionary tale,Arbi-trage presents a man, Robert Miller (RichardGere), who seems to have the perfect life.Handsome, charming and respected, heruns a successful hedge-fund company,donates millions to charity and has a lovingfamily. Behind the scenes, however, he facesfinancial ruin and possible prosecution. Arisky investment proved a disaster, forcinghim to borrow to cover his losses and thencook the company books to conceal themistake. If he can sell his trading empire toan interested banker in time, nobody will bethe wiser, but the banker is stalling, andRoberts creditors are losing patience.

The financial mess is only one ofRoberts looming troubles. He is also carryingon an affair, and one night, he falls asleep atthe wheel, crashing the car and killing hismistress. He flees the scene and tries to

cover his tracks.The films early scenes, such as

Roberts birthday dinner at home and hisconversations with his daughter (BritMarling), are bathed in warm light. Itsuggests a feeling of emotional intimacyand closeness, and yellow is also associatedwith wealth and power, says French direc-tor of photography Yorick Le Saux, whoteamed with director Nicholas Jarecki for hisU.S. feature debut.

Yellow remains a signature colorthroughout the film, especially in terms oflighting. Working with gaffer ShawnGreene, Le Saux developed a plan thatrelied mainly on tungsten lights, most ofwhich were gelled with CTS. Wetended toward 1Ks for edgelight and back-light and China balls for keylight, and weused a lot of natural muslin on everything,Greene recalls.

Although the car accident marks aparticularly dark point in the story, it, too, isbathed in yellow light, courtesy of sodium-vapor streetlamps that the filmmakers hadrigged with their own bulbs. For thissequence, Le Saux shot Kodak Vision2Expression 500T 5229. (He shot some othernight scenes on Vision3 500T 5219.)

Greenes crew retrofitted the street-lamp casings to accept 1K, 400-watt and100-watt sodium bulbs. My crew also builta few custom China balls using muslin anda variety of sodium bulbs, adds the gaffer.

The lights are small and really powerful they pull 10 amps and you can place twoon a putt-putt and position them waydown the road or in the woods nearby. Youdont need a big generator, and you donthave to run all that cable. A few Par cansgelled with CTO and Magenta wereused to create hot points of light in thetrees that played out-of-focus behind theactors, says Le Saux.

Greene laughs as he recounts the

producers reaction when they noticed howfew lights were set for the crash scene.They didnt think it was sufficient andasked me to put up a Condor. When Yoricksaw the Condor, he said, Whats that for? Isaid, Nothing. We never needed it.

To capture the action, a processtrailer holding two Arricam Lites (one on a75mm prime, the other on a 135mm prime)preceded the car, and Le Saux, who servedas the A-camera operator, stood in the treeson the passenger side, handholding anotherLite and using the long end of a zoom lens.Two Eyemos were buried in the dirt close tohim, and another Eyemo was rigged insidethe car. (Because the car didnt move asplanned, the buried Eyemos got nothing;meanwhile, the Eyemo inside the carjammed.)

After the car came to rest, Le Sauxmoved around it, continuing to shoot.Smoke was pumped in, and additionalsodium lights were lined up along the road,

hidden behind bushes and edging trees tohelp create depth. The idea was more tolight the trees and the road, not necessarilythe actors or the car, explains Le Saux.

After fleeing the scene, Robertreaches a gas station and phones Jimmy(Nate Parker), a young man with whom hehas a mysterious connection. Jimmy pickshim up and drives him home, unaware ofthe trouble Miller has gotten himself into. LeSaux continued to use 5229 for this scene,


Hedge-fund

manager RobertMiller (RichardGere) meets withhis daughter (Brit

Marling) as histroubles deepen

in the dramaArbitrage.

I


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pushing it 1 stop for a grittier look.To light Robert and Jimmys conversa-

tion in the car, says Greene, we found awell-lit route that had a lot of practical street-lamps. On the process trailer, we encircledthe car with 650-watt Tweenies and dimmedthem up and down to suggest the passing

streetlamps. We positioned 1K Mickeybounces in front as the key. I think we usedthem through 2-by-3-foot frames of 250.Rosco Litepads softened with muslin andgelled with CTB simulated dashboard lights.We only corrected them halfway, so theywere still a little blue and green, notesGreene.

The productions many locationsincluded an elegant house near GramercyPark that served as Roberts home. Lightingthe master bedroom for a key day-interiorscene required some ingenuity. We neededto push a lot of daylight through thosewindows, and trees lined the street that thewindows faced, so we couldnt get any liftsin there, explains Greene. We rigged 10Joker Bug 800s above the windows andbounced them into white showcard covesthat the grips built. That gave us a directionalbounce. Every HMI was gelled with CTO.

Arbitrage, which is Jareckis secondfeature (following the documentary TheOutsider), promised to be a demandingshoot: 60 practical locations spread acrossNew York City, and a 31-day schedule. Nickand I spent a week putting ideas down onpaper, recalls Le Saux. Working with anovice director is different than working witha director who has made a lot of films, andthat time was a way for me to learn whatNick had in his head. It was less aboutmaking a shot list than about discovering themovie together.

When designing shots, they talked interms of feelings. Each morning, Nick hadto bring me five words about what the

emotions or sensations of the sequencewould be, says Le Saux.

As for camera moves, Le Saux is not afan of the Steadicam. I prefer having agood dolly grip and making my own moves.Our dolly grip, Joe Doughan, was fantastic.Whenever possible, I suggested to Nick thatwe use a dolly rather than a Steadicam. Hedescribes Jareckis visual approach as classi-cal, noting that this differs from his own,more intuitive approach. I think I was hired

Top: A caraccident makes

matterssignificantly

worse for Miller.Middle: After

fleeing the scene,he is aided by a

friend (NateParker). Bottom:

CinematographerYorick Le Saux

(left) and 1st ACLudovic Littee

prepare to shoot.


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to bring some energy to the camerawork, tobring it alive, he observes. Jarecki concurs,noting, Yorick was always saying, We stayloose. We stay loose. He has that jazz-musi-cian quality, and I would come back withmore of the classical approach. Somethingvery nice came out of the mix.

We never marked an actor, andthey would change their [moves] from taketo take and Yorick would adjust accord-ingly, recalls 1st AC Ludovic Littee.Although a good 85 percent of this picturewas filmed with Yorick sitting on the dolly,the shots have almost a handheld feel. Wewerent locked into any position. Yorickusually was on a zoom, and hed find hisfocal length on the fly.

Dance floors, the absence of marks,a preference for low T-stops (T2.8-T4), andshooting scenes in long masters are all typi-cal of Le Sauxs method. The cinematogra-pher points to a scene late inArbitrage thatshows Robert and his wife (Susan Sarandon)arguing in the master bedroom. Le Saux

was seated on the dolly. Susan and Richardwere constantly moving around thebedroom, and the lead kept changing one moment Susan had the power, andthen Richard did. They were crossing eachother, unaware of who would be in frame.The shot was five minutes long, and eachtake was different.

Le Sauxs camera package camefrom Arri CSC and included Cooke S4 primelenses ranging from 18mm to 135mm, and

Angenieux Optimo 28-76mm and 24-290mm zoom lenses. The productionsnegative was processed by Deluxe NewYork, and most of the digital-intermediateprocess was carried out at EFilm in Holly-wood, where Le Saux worked with coloristNatasha Leonnet. (Polish facility AlverniaStudios, which created some of the visualeffects, also did the 4K scan of the nega-tive.)

Leonnet says she learned a lot fromworking with Le Saux in the DI suite. Yorickwould often play the color against theemotion. For example, the car accident isvisually beautiful, even magical, yet it isshowing death and destruction. Theconfrontation between Robert and hisdaughter in Central Park is very soft andbeautiful, but really we are seeing the familydisintegrate before our eyes. There is thisbeauty playing against whats happeningonscreen, and its a little destabilizing for theviewer. We arent sure if Robert is a goodperson or not, and our sense of unease is

another layer of the film.

TECHNICAL SPECSSuper 1.85:1

3-perf Super 35mm

Arricam Lite

Cooke S4, Angenieux Optimo

Kodak Vision3 200T 5213, 500T 5219;Vision2 Expression 500T 5229

Digital Intermediate

Director Nicholas Jarecki and Le Saux assess a setup.

0


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U

pon its world premiere at this years Cannes FilmFestival, Killing Them Softlyattracted attention for itspowerful performances and stylish filmmaking. Its

cinematographer, Greig Fraser, recalls, WatchingJames Gandolfini and Brad Pitt act together was one of thehighlights of my career so far. Thats the part of the job thatreally amazes me not shooting out of helicopters, but

watching these actors do their thing.Directed by Andrew Dominik, Killing Them Softly

follows several small-time criminals whose fates becomeintertwined with the armed robbery of a high-stakes pokergame run by Markie (Ray Liotta). The robbers are Frankie(Scoot McNairy) and his junkie friend, Russell (BenMendelsohn), who have been hired for the job by Johnny

Amato (Vincent Curatola). The robbery brings the mobsactivities to a temporary halt, and a dispassionate hit man,

Jackie Cogan (Pitt), is brought in to investigate the crime.

He subcontracts a fellow hit man, Mickey (Gandolfini), tohelp him restore order.

Speaking toAC a few months after Cannes, Dominikrecalls that in developing the look of the picture, he andFraser spent several weeks exchanging ideas and shootingtests in Los Angeles. I was very interested in doing some-thing that didnt look lit, and Greigs attitude about that wasreally good his [approach] is very much about reacting to

whats there at a location and supplementing it, says thedirector. Our basic idea was a low-con image, a kind ofcreaminess, that harked back to a look that might have

DeadMans

Hand

DeadMans

Hand

Greig Fraser captures agritty milieu withcinematic lan for

Andrew Dominiks

Killing Them Softly.By Benjamin B

|


37/104

www.theasc.com October 2012

existed in the Seventies. Greigsuggested that Panavision anamorphiclenses in tandem with the kind oflighting style we wanted wouldproduce a really creamy image, and weshot a lot of tests with Panavisionlenses on his [Canon EOS 5D MarkII] DSLR. Then it was a matter ofcoming up with a look [on film] that

would match what we were getting onthe 5D, because we loved that. It was a

very shallow depth-of-field withlayered grays there were no realblacks in it. That look is pretty impos-sible to duplicate on film, I think,because once you get down to therelease print, moving away fromcontrasty images is kind of tough.

A new film stock, Kodak 500T5230, proved to be key, according toFraser. We were the first feature to useit, and it has a beautiful creamy qual-ity, he says. I didnt test much of it,mind you, because we didnt have

enough time. We shot some as wedrove around L.A., printed it, andthought the results looked amazing.

We then put in an order for about200,000 feet of it, which gave them alittle shock up there in Rochester! Butthey came through.

We shot most of the movie onthat stock, all the night interiors andexteriors, he continues. Its not ascontrasty as [Kodak Vision3 500T]

5219. Comparing 5219 to 5230 is likecomparing photo prints on glossypaper and matte paper. 5219 is glossy,and 5230 is matte. 5219 zings; itssharp. With 5230, the blacks absorb

you a bit more; they take a little moreeffort to welcome you in. You canalmost feel the textures and touch thetones.

Some of the images in KillingUnitphotographybyMelindaSueGordon,

SMPSP.

PhotosandframegrabscourtesyofPlanB,

EFilmandTheWeinsteinCo.

Opposite: Jackie Cogan (Brad Pitt) finishes off a hit in a unit still from Killing Them Softly. This page: Anervous Frankie (Scoot McNairy) tries to keep it together while robbing a high-stakes poker game with

an unreliable pal. The images on this page are frame grabs from EFilm.


38/104


Them Softlypossess a strange soft qual-ity, with slightly blurred backgroundsand bright flares. These moments werepartly fashioned by the HS50, anolder-generation lens customized byPanavision optical engineer Dan

Sasaki. Fraser explains, We asked Danto shift some of the lens elements tohelp throw the background crazily outof focus, with a slight doubling of theout-of-focus elements. He made thebokeh even more elongated than it

usually is; the falloff was fantastic, andwe also got a great flare at the bottomof frame. It was a very interesting andexciting effect. This optical magic isparticularly noticeable toward the endof the film, in a shot of Jackie walkingat night with fireworks going off in thebackground.

Throughout the shoot, forwhich he also employed G-Series andSuper High Speed lenses, Fraseremphasized the bokeh by maintaininga shallow depth-of-field, shootingbetween T2 and T2.5 even in day exte-riors with the help of ND filters.Everyones been trying to get theanamorphic image as sharp and cleanas possible, and there we were, tryingto mess it up, he notes wryly.

When defining the look ofKilling Them Softlys nameless town,Dominik and Fraser used a choicegeographical phrase: Shitsville. Fraserexplains, Although we shot on loca-tion in New Orleans, we were aiming

for something generic, a little townbetween New Orleans, Boston andD.C. that we called Shitsville. We

wanted the place to look like its on thedown-and-down, on the way out. We

wanted viewers to feel just how smellyand grimy and horrible it was, but atthe same time, we didnt want to alien-ate them visually. That was the chal-lenge!

The bleak, often violent world

Dead Mans Hand

Top to bottom (all frame grabs): Cogan consults with a mob contact (Richard Jenkins) about hisinstructions; Markie (Ray Liotta, back to camera) prepares for punishment from the Caprios (Trevor Long,

left, and Max Casella); in a shot whose bokeh was enhanced by a customized Panavision HS50 lens,Cogan ignores some nearby fireworks as he heads to a meeting.


39/104


presented in the film is often suffusedwith a low-contrast softness. Thats acombination of stock, lenses andlighting, says Fraser. Where possible,I always used soft lighting.Cinematographers sometimes use hard

backlight to give the appearance ofsharpness, but I tried to avoid that. Wewere going with soft lenses and softlighting, and often with soft faces.Creaminess is what Andrew and I

wanted, not milkiness, which is differ-ent. Creaminess is something you feel

you can enter into, like a bath; youwant to be absorbed and encompassedby it. These were our lofty expecta-tions. It wasnt always completelyobtainable, but we did our best.

Desaturation was another key tothe look, and one of the filmmakerscriteria for locations was that they notbe too colorful. In prep, Fraser testedflashing 5219 (because 5230 was not

yet available) with a Panaflasher toreduce contrast, but he finally opted toobtain some of that feeling in the digi-tal grade, which the filmmakersconducted with colorists OlivierFontenay and Mitch Paulson at EFilmin Hollywood. Throughout the DI,

we were always trying to pull down thehighlights, pull up the mids and haveeverything kind of meet in themiddle, Dominik recalls.

Frasers approach to a location isto start with the existing lighting. I

wont say we shot with natural lightbecause we controlled everything, saysthe cinematographer. The Kodak5230 helped us blend [our lighting] in

with the locations. We tried to justaugment what was there with approxi-mately the same color, and to end up

with something beautiful.To get more perspective on his

technical approach to the picture,Fraser suggested we speak to two of hiscollaborators, gaffer Jay Kemp and keygrip Kurt Kornemann, who also

worked with him on Let Me In (ACOct. 10). Kemp notes that Frasersapproach to lighting locations inKilling Them Softly involved matchingthe spectrum of urban lighting and

Top: Cinematographer Greig Fraser and director Andrew Dominik prep a scene with Ben Mendelsohn(seated), who portrays Frankies partner-in-crime Russell. Middle: A frame grab from the scene wherein

Russells luck runs out. Bottom: Fraser discusses a setup with Steadicam operator A.J. Johnson and 1st AEric Swanek (left) as 1st AD Scott Robertson (far right) and other crew stand by. Fraser and Johnson

shared A-camera-operating duties on the picture.


40/104


fluorescents, much as they did on LetMe In. On this movie, we tended toembrace the green world, says Kemp.We balanced mostly to an urbanmetal-halide and cool-white environ-ment, which is a hyper-blue with agreen spike. Then it was a matter ofincremental balancing to try and getthe sources even closer in color.Depending on the scene, we either

addition to shots of the nervousrobbers. We could have made thatscene moody and smoky, but we choseto deglamorize it and make it lookmore like a supermarket, says Fraser.Part of the reasoning, he adds, was todifferentiate this heist from an earlierone that is shown in flashback.

At first I was a bit unsure aboutthe restaurant location, but Andrew hasa bloody great eye, and he liked it,continues Fraser. I had to struggle abit. It was all toplight, but I did addsome fill for the eyes. We added green-ish fluorescent practicals above insteadof Kino Flos. We corrected some of thegreen, but kept a little bit. Ive neverhad much success making Kino Flos

look green; I get better results runninggreen tubes and pulling the green.

Putting most of the lightingoverhead allowed the crew to movequickly as they grabbed shots below.We had just one day to get this scene,and there were a lot of shots, so we hadto move through it, says Kemp. Wehad to cover 10 actors, and Greig

wanted a fast solution [for lighting] soAndrew could concentrate on perfor-

embraced the green or timed it out. Ingeneral, green enhances urban storieslike this one because its true to theenvironment.

This approach is evident in thelighting of Frankie and Russellsrobbery of the poker game, a scene that

was shot in a restaurant with yellow-tiled walls. The scene includes manyreaction shots of the card players, in

Dead Mans Hand

Top: Liotta standsready to take a

fall for the scenein which hischaracter is

savagely beatenby twocolleagues.

Johnson andSwanek prepare

to capture theclose coverage,

which is keyed byan Image 85

softbox. Bottom:The team films

Russell andFrankie breaking

into the game.The need to

capture manyshots quickly wasa factor in Fraserstoplight approach

to the scene.


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mances. The location was pre-riggedby our rigging department, and then

we came in and pre-lit. There was afront room and a back room, and werigged both to give Andrew and Greigsome choices. They chose the backroom on the day.

We quadrupled the CoolWhite fixtures overhead by addingindustrial fluorescents with a switchbay to turn individual units on and off,continues Kemp. We created a blue-green environment with a bed of Cool

White fluorescents above and usedblack teasers to keep light off the walls.Greigs work on these kinds of scenes

was often a mix of toplight andeyelight, and we added very littlebelow; we kept the camera side darkerand lit from the top or backlight zones.

Wed steal some toplight with bead-

board bounces or maybe add a 2-by-2Kino Flo with Cool White fluorescenttubes, and for close work we used aLitepanels Mini corrected to Cool

White fluorescent.Because the yellow-tile walls

were so reflective, Fraser also employedsome negative fill. On the tightershots, Kemp explains, we brought in4-by-4 floppies to get unwanted[bounce] off the actors faces.

Top: 2'x3' LEDDogPads wereintegral to thelighting ofnumerousnighttime carinteriors, includin

this process-trailecoverage of Pittfor Jackies car-tocar shooting ofMarkie. Preparinto film at right(front to back) arSwanek, Fraserand Johnson.Middle: ACreamsourceClassic keys Pitt aa Phantom Flexcaptures high-speed coverage othe shooting.

Bottom: A framegrab from thefinal sequence.


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The film includes a number ofdialogue scenes between Jackie and amob contact (Richard Jenkins) in thelatters parked car. Fraser recalls shoot-ing a quick test in Dominiks own car inLos Angeles during prep: We liked

the feeling of a light-colored car youfeel enveloped, safe and warm. In thescene, the bright interior acts as asource of reflected light. It was likeputting the characters inside a softbox,says Fraser.

Long day-exterior scenes are achallenge for cinematographersbecause of the suns movement andchanging cloud patterns. To minimize

varying light conditions over the two

days they spent shooting Pitt andJenkins car scenes, the filmmakerspositioned the vehicle in the shadeunder a bridge, and Fraser supple-mented the natural light with two 220-

watt daylight-balanced Creamsource

Classic LED lights from Outsight.There were no lights inside the

car, says Fraser. We used negative fillfrom behind camera mostly to elimi-nate camera shadows, but it also gavetheir faces some shape. We added oneCreamsource, and then another, to adda little bit of oomph. To manage thenatural daylight in the background ofsome shots, he added a single or doublenet far enough from the car to be invis-

ible. Because we shot on film, we hadthe ability to pull the background in alittle in the DI if it wasnt quite right,he notes.

Pitt and Jenkins were solely litwith the two Creamsources for thosescenes, which is pretty remarkable,adds Kemp. The lights were punchedthrough a 4-by-8 frame of Lee 250[Half White Diffusion], mostly abovethe windshield. They required somecorrection to be true 5,600K withoutthe green spike that can be typical ofLEDs.

Though the lighting was simple,the car interior was a big grip jobbecause of the black solids used tocreate negative fill, according to

Kornemann. We had multiple 20-by-20 solids flying in the air, and we weredancing those around the car all daylong, he recalls. Two of them were onstands, and one was on a flyswatterhanging off a Condor. We had four tosix lines going back to the crane and tothe ground for stability in the wind.

Although Killing Them Softlyfeatures very little hard light, Fraserssoft light can be very strong indeed, as

Dead Mans Hand

Top: Frasershoots referencestills as Dominikwatches Pitt runthrough a scene

with McNairysstand-in.

A 100K SoftSunoutside the

windows providesa strong soft key.Bottom: A frame

grab from thefinal scene.


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in a daytime scene in which Jackieintimidates Frankie in a bar. We

wanted a strong source outside, so thefront of the room was very soft, saysthe cinematographer. The idea was tocreate as soft a light as possible andalso give the actors quick resets. Wedidnt have to do a big lighting change

every time we changed shots. Pitt andMcNairy were backlit by a 100KSoftSun positioned to hit the windowsof the location. It wasnt a specularsource; it was a nuclear ambient source,directional without being harsh, saysKemp. We used the SoftSun to createexplosive ambience and supplemented

that with three Arrimax 18Ks for moredirectional pushes. We filled andshaped the faces inside with theCreamsource Classics and LitepanelsLED 1-by-1s and Minis on the bar.

We played the Creamsources very lowand very diffused, as if daylight wasbouncing back at the actors.Kornemann recalls blocking sunlight

with 20-by solids on stands in thestreet outside.

Another striking use of strongsoft light occurs in a hotel room where

Jackie confronts Mickey about hisperformance on the job. Fraser hadthree 18K Arrimaxes shooting downdirectly into the windows from across acourtyard, and not much else. Thesheer curtains on the window trans-form the 18Ks into a powerful softsource. When the window was offcamera, we let hard light hit the sheersto create a soft ambience, and when it

was on camera, we softened the 18Ks,says Kemp. There was very little[lighting] inside the room, just a

Litepanels 1-by-1 or Mini foreyelight. Fraser notes that Dominiksangles were simple: We shot two sizesof Gandolfini and Pitt, a mid and atight. Andrew was just concentratingon the actors.

I knew going into this film thatwe werent going to go in for a wholelot of coverage we were just going tohave each character have his shot, saysDominik. The idea was to simply sit

Dead Mans Hand

Top and middle:Strong soft light

keys the hotelroom where

Jackie confrontsfellow hit manMickey (James

Gandolfini) abouthis dubious work

ethic. Both ofthese images are

frame grabs.Bottom: Dominik,

Pitt and Fraserdiscuss the setup.


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there and let the characters do the

work. I had so many really good actorson this movie that it was kind of point-less to direct. I mean, you could, butthey knew who those characters wereand what they were doing.

Frasers treatment of night exte-riors in the film is notable for theabsence of strong visible sources.Instead, a distinctive, low-contrast pallis sprinkled with bright glints of light.I love sourceless night, he says.

When you go out in the middle of

nowhere, you dont see backlights andfrontlights. Ever since I started shoot-ing, its been my passion to createsourceless nights. I wanted the nightsin this film to have an envelopingambience.

Greigs night lighting is trans-parent, affirms Kemp. He gives thescene a coating of toplight, but without

you feeling the source. Sometimes Illwant to add another light, and hell say,

No, its about putting one light in theright place. Sometimes that one lightis a Condor with a huge softbox, and

well make 2-foot incremental moveswith it until we find the sweet spot and Greig is pretty masterful atfinding the sweet spot that doesnt givethe source away. Then he might add anLED eyelight and fortify the back-ground with on-camera practicalindustrial fluorescents and metal-halide or high-pressure sodium-vaporlight fixtures. All of that combines tocreate a very realistic look.

The toplight coating in KillingThem Softlywas provided by two typesof softboxes suspended from Condorcranes. One comprised Arri X HMIs,the other Kino Flo Image 85s, andboth were modified with Diving Bells,

tall cones of Full Black Grid andDuvetyn with a wide base that canaccommodate gels or diffusion.(Created by Kornemann, Diving Bells

were also used extensively by the teamon Let Me In.) The HMI configurationincluded four 4Ks in a grid pointingthrough a 12-by with controllablesiders, says Kemp. We added blueand green gels to them to match metal-halide, and we used DMX ballasts so

Dead Mans Hand

Top: LED DogPadsare rigged to keya free-driving car

scene featuringPitt and McNairy.Bottom: Fraser

films another ofJackies hits as

gaffer Jay Kempholds the 1'x18"

pad of LiteRibbonLEDs that will beactuated by the

firing of the gun.Frasers crew

worked closelywith LiteGear to

engineer the LEDgunshot effect.


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we could control them from theground wirelessly with Luminaire soft-

ware that was set up by [best boy elec-tric] Theo Bott. That saved us fromputting a man in the Condor.

The Image 85 softbox was lesspowerful, comprising six eight-tube

units of 600 watts each that were fittedwith daylight tubes with green andblue [gels] added to match metal-halide, says Kemp. The X-Light soft-box was used for most of thehigh-speed photography, but theImage 85 variant was used for close-ups because it was cool enough to bepositioned fairly close to the actors andoffered a more appealing quality oflight.

In one striking night-exteriorscene, a reluctant Markie is invited toget into a car by two fellow mobsters(played by Max Casella and TrevorLong) on a deserted residential street.Rain begins to fall, and the image isboth poetic and realistic, with various

points of light in the distance givingdepth to the frame. Fraser used theImage 85 softbox for toplight andaugmented it with dozens of smallbackground lights, including industrialmetal-halide units on tall MomboCombo stands and 8' industrial fluo-rescents. (All of these were powered bysmall putt-putt generators.)

We put commercially availablecompact fluorescents on C-stands or

on buildings in the distance to createspecular points of light, Kemp recalls.They were only 13 to 27 watts apiece,but they read as background street-lights or any type of source, really.

We hung them everywhere; they justfloat in space and give depth to thescene. We used metal-halides either inframe or as crosslight to create thosepools of light you typically see on citystreets. We dressed all this to shot. If

we had a frame that included a largearea of black information, wed flythese units in the background to givesome depth. If we were shooting in aresidential neighborhood, wed oftenask residents to turn their porch lightson to achieve a similar effect.

Many cinematographers wouldhave used five Condors to light a scene

like that, but Greigs approach creatednatural depth with great efficiency,adds Kemp. It wasnt in our budget tohave layers of Condors lighting thebackground, and in any case, that

wasnt the aesthetic Greig wanted.For a sequence that shows

Markie being brutally beaten by thetwo men, Fraser shot the action with aPanArri 235 at a 45-degree shutterangle. Dominik notes that this was a

Dead Mans HandTop: A large

softbox modifiedwith a Diving Bell

keys the stagecomponent of

Markies death

scene. Bottom:Frasers grip andelectric crews

devised thishelicopter rigfor poor-mans-process work. It

comprisedLiteRibbon LED

panels ofvarious color

temperatures,DogPads, a

wireless DMXreceiver and a

large battery cell

(on the platformatop thecentral pivot).


49/104

departure from his original idea, whichwas to shoot high speed with aPhantom Flex. We tried to maintain acertain ironic distance in somesequences, and the beating was goingto be done in that style, but when I saw

the Phantom footage, I decided not touse any of it, says the director. Theimages were so beautiful, so extraordi-nary, that cutting them into the picture

would have completely undercut all theviolence, which I wanted to be rudeand shocking. Greigs video footage ofthe stunt rehearsal of the beating hadthis real sense of spontaneity and ugli-ness to it that felt more appropriate.

For wide shots of the beating,the main source was the X-Light soft-box diffused with Soft Frost. Close

work was keyed by the Image 85 soft-box, which was hung very low, literally2 feet above Ray Liottas head, saysKornemann. It was a not an easy sceneto shoot. We were in wetsuits for twonights while they dumped rain on uscontinuously! Ray and the other twoactors were terrific sports about it.Fraser had an 800-watt HMI JokerBug mounted to the camera for part ofthe scene to achieve what Kempdescribes as a front-lit photojournalis-tic effect. Dominik notes, Im a bigfan of front lighting, and I wanted thebeating to look horrible but just slightlyglam in a way.

The filmmakers did make exten-sive use of the Phantom Flex foranother nighttime attack, Jackies car-to-car shooting of Markie. Thissequence inspired one of the moreunusual lighting effects designed forthe production: a remote-trigger LEDgunshot effect, which Frasers crew

created in close collaboration with AlDeMayo and Lee Parker at LiteGear.The LED gunshot effect was origi-nally designed for the scene in which

Jackie shoots Markie, but when wetalked to Al and Lee about engineeringthe effect processor, we asked them tomake something that would be univer-sally applicable, recalls Bott. Theeffect was actuated by a Piezo triggerattached to the grip of the gun, and the

WE CREATESTORYTELLERS.

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www.uncsa.edu

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Other notable alumni include cinematographer Tim Orr,writer/director Jeff Nichols, producer/director Jody Hill,editor Zene Baker, writer/director Craig Zobel, andsound designer Will Files.

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trigger was tuned by the LiteGeareffects processor to respond to the

vibration of the hammer striking thefiring pin. By attaching the Piezo trig-

ger to the handle and having the sensorremotely tuned, we had the flexibilityto use the effect with whicheverfirearm was used in the close-up. It was

intended to be enhanced in post, andwas conceived in part as a visual-effectsreference.

Al and Lee also offered us theability to plug any lighting fixtureutilizing 12-volt barrel connectors into

the effects processor [up to 15 amps12-volt DC], so we designed and builta variety of LED LiteRibbon fixturesto accommodate the needs of specificscenes, Bott continues. The effectsprocessor and trigger device workedboth AC and DC, and were smallenough that the actors could concealthem in their wardrobe much like a

wireless lav microphone. Because ofthis flexibility, the effect worked inalmost every scene in which Jackie killssomeone on camera.

For extreme-high-speed close-ups of bullets flying from the barrel of

Jackies gun, the filmmakers shot at12,000 fps with a rotating-drumMillisecond High Speed Camera fromCordin Co. The Phantom is great for

Dead Mans Hand

Fraser lines up a shot on location in Louisiana.


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recording details like droplets of waterand ricocheting shells at high speed,but we needed a camera even fasterthan that to capture those bullet close-ups, notes Fraser. We could set theMillisecond to spin at X revolutions

per second [and sync it] to expose thefilm when the gun was fired.Looking back at his work on the

picture, the cinematographer muses, Alot of directors would have been a littleanxious about filming a seven-minutedialogue scene without any unusualframing or a lot of camera moves, butthats where Andrew is great: he knewthis film was about the performancesand that with actors like these, wedidnt need any gags or tricks to makethose scenes feel more exciting. Itsabout great dialogue performed bygreat actors, and thats really whatevery cinematographer hopes for, isntit?

Dominik notes that the filmsroster of strong performances did

complicate the edit, however. Whenyoure young and new to filmmakingand only 10 percent of what you shoot

works, that tends to be alarming tillyou get to the cutting room and findout that you only need 10 percent of it

to work, and actually, the fact that only10 percent works makes life easybecause you can just throw 90 percentaway, he says. On this film, the edit

was difficult because the rushes were ofsuch high quality performance-wisethat it was impossible to choose. It wasreally a nightmare trying to decide

which take was better.Additional reporting by Rachael

Bosley.

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With a population of 3.7 million patrolled by fewer than10,000 police officers, Los Angeles has long been ripeterrain for police dramas. The latest entry in the genre,

End of Watch, offers a novel visual conceit: OfficerTaylor (Jake Gyllenhaal) is making a short film about a day-in-the-life of an LAPD patrolman for one of his night-schoolclasses, and most of the action is captured by his small Canoncamcorder and by the lapel cameras he rigs to himself and hispartner, Officer Zavala (Michael Pea).

The story follows Taylor and Zavala, who are solid cops

and good friends, for about eight months as they patrol SouthCentral L.A. and make a series of busts that inflame a danger-ous drug cartel. Contributing to the voyeuristic POV isfootage captured by various other cameras around the city:surveillance and security cameras, police dashboard cameras,and even criminals cell-phone cameras.

To help him create the movies diverse visuals, direc-tor/writer David Ayer chose Roman Vasyanov, a youngRussian cinematographer who had never lived or worked inthe United States. A graduate of the Gerasimov VGIK cine-matography school in Moscow, Vasyanov has shot commer-

cials and four features (Nochnoy Prodavets, Okhota na Piranyu,Tiskiand the musical Hipsters) in Russia, and his work caughtthe eye of the United Talent Agency, whose reps brought himto Los Angeles and introduced him to Ayer.

In my interview with David, he told me he wanted toshoot this movie in a handheld POV style, recalls the cine-matographer. He showed me videos captured by police dash-board cams and lapel cams, and videos taken by soldiers in

Afghanistan who had cameras taped to their helmets. It wasall very real, very raw and very immediate. Some of it felt likea first-person-shooter video game and was very engaging in

End of Watch, shot by RomanVasyanov, puts viewers in the shoesof two tenacious Los Angeles cops.

By Jay Holben

|

A Very

ToughBeat

A Very

ToughBeat


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that way. It was a great meeting, butthen I left for Moscow and thought that

was the end of it. Three weeks later, hecalled said, I want you to do my movie!

This shoot was quite differentfor me, he muses

Documents

American Cinematographer.2012 10