PETER LEVY ASC, ACS “I came to realize that light is a very malleable medium. With the right tools and skills you can make it do almost anything you want. The manipulation of light is infinitely satisfying. Our sense of taste and style become the determining factors in deciding the appropriate way to photograph the subtext or poetry of the scene. Because we communicate in a visual medium, we try to express ourselves succinctly with choice of the right visual grammar. Our photography creates a visual conduit for the story to flow through. People love movies because of the emotional responses they have to the characters and the story. The memory of those responses is what lives in their hearts.” Peter Levy ASC, ACS began his career shooting documentaries in Australia. He won an Emmy® Award for the telefilm The Life and Death of Peter Sellers. His credits include Predator 2, Ricochet, Cutthroat Island, Broken Arrow, The War at Home, Lost in Space, Under Suspicion, Lonely Hearts, and the upcoming The Reaping, as well as the pilots for 24 and Without a Trace.
[All these films were shot on Kodak motion picture film.]
For an extended interview with Peter Levy, visit www.kodak.com/go/onfilm
To order Kodak motion picture film, call (800) 621 - film. www.kodak.com/go/motion © Eastman Kodak Company, 2006. Photography: © 2006 Douglas Kirkland
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WHEN WORDS AREN’T ENOUGH SPEAK THE LANGUAGE EVERYONE UNDERSTANDS. Powered by KODAK Color Science, KODAK Look Manager System and KODAK Display Manager System are designed to streamline the production process—from preproduction to digital dailies. Now you can create looks, share them with a touch of a button, and display the look of broadcast and projected print film. Communicate in color with the language of look. For more information, visit kodak.com/go/ac.
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Congratulations to Robert Primes for his Emmy® Nomination for Sleeper Cell
Photo of Robert Primes by Joel Lipton exclusively for Schneider Optics
“I’ve been a Schneider fan for 50 years – from my first 4x5 format lens to precision glass filters for HD and 35mm work, to Century Achromatic Diopters for DV. There are effects that only filters can create. For day exteriors, I rotate a Tru-Pol tm in my hands and look through it to see how it affects the color saturation of the sky, water, trees, and shiny objects like cars or glossy paint. On ‘Baadasssss!,’ the Classic Soft ® allowed me to diminish distracting artifacts on an elderly Ossie Davis’ face, without compromising the integrity or power of his character. I love the sense of surrealism the Black Froststm can render. On a ‘Night Stalker’ flashback, we blew out the windows and added a Black Frost. It created a sometimes subtle, sometimes powerful image without compromising the sharpness and deep blacks. For the short film ‘Cry of Ecstasy,’ I wanted to dynamically portray an artist’s canvas. By adding the Century Achromatic Diopter to the Panasonic DVX100, I got really dramatic edge-to-edge sharp full-contrast images without fringing. From Achromatic Diopters to filters, Schneider is an important addition to this cinematographer’s toolbox.”
Robert Primes, ASC is known for his television work on the groundbreaking series thirtysomething, Felicity (2000 ASC nomination and 1999 Emmy Award), MDs (2002 ASC
www.schneideroptics.com 7701 Haskell Ave.
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Award for HD), My Antonia (1995 Emmy) and Harrison: Cry of the City (Emmy nomination). Feature films include Baadasssss!, Bird on a Wire, and Money Talks.
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The International Journal of Film & Digital Production Techniques
Features 32 50 60 70
Darkest Noir Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC investigates L.A.’s most infamous unsolved murder in The Black Dahlia
Conjuring the Past Dick Pope, BSC lends cinematic sleight of hand to The Illusionist
Vikings on the Warpath Daniel Pearl, ASC travels back in time to 874 A.D. for the saga Pathfinder
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A Call for Digital Printer Lights Richard Crudo, ASC discusses the need for more precise image control in the digital age
Departments On Our Cover: LAPD Detective Dwight “Bucky” Bleichert (Josh Hartnett) pursues a vicious killer in the atmospheric drama The Black Dahlia, shot by Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC. (Photo by Merrick Morton, SMPSP, courtesy of Universal Pictures.)
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Editor’s Note DVD Playback 60 Production Slate Short Takes Post Focus New Products & Services Filmmakers’ Forum Points East International Marketplace Classified Ads Ad Index ASC Membership Roster Clubhouse News ASC Close-Up 18
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The International Journal of Film & Digital Production Techniques • Since 1920
Visit us online at
www.theasc.com ———————————————————————————————————— PUBLISHER Martha Winterhalter ————————————————————————————————————
EDITORIAL
EXECUTIVE EDITOR Stephen Pizzello SENIOR EDITOR Rachael K. Bosley ASSOCIATE EDITOR Douglas Bankston TECHNICAL EDITOR Christopher Probst CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Stephanie Argy, Benjamin B, Robert S. Birchard, John Calhoun, Bob Davis, Bob Fisher, Simon Gray, 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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CIRCULATION, BOOKS & PRODUCTS CIRCULATION DIRECTOR Saul Molina CIRCULATION MANAGER Alex Lopez SHIPPING MANAGER Javier Ibanez ———————————————————————————————————— ASC GENERAL MANAGER Brett Grauman ASC EVENTS COORDINATOR Patricia Armacost ASC PRESIDENT’S ASSISTANT Delphine Figueras ASC ACCOUNTING MANAGER Mila Basely ASC ACCOUNTS RECEIVABLE Corey Clark ———————————————————————————————————— 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. Subscriptions: U.S. $50; Canada/Mexico $70; all other foreign countries $95 a year (remit international Money Order or other exchange payable in U.S. $). Advertising: Rate card upon request from Hollywood office. Article Reprints: Requests for high-quality article reprints should be made to Sheridan Reprints at (800) 394-5157 ext. 28. Copyright 2006 ASC Holding Corp. (All rights reserved.) Periodicals postage paid at Los Angeles, CA and at additional mailing offices. Printed in the USA. POSTMASTER: Send address change to American Cinematographer, P.O. Box 2230, Hollywood, CA 90078.
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ZEISS on
Michael Mann has a very dynamic visual style. His camera is never static. He creates anticipation, a tension in the frame that comes from a feeling that your peripheral vision has been taken away. You are in the driver’s seat. Achieving this on ‘Miami Vice’ came down to a combination of great operators with almost entirely handheld cameras. A critical part of this combination was the Zeiss 6-24mm ™
DigiZoom . It has a great range, is lightweight and high speed. It responded well to a variety of extreme conditions, from brilliant daylight to very low light night exteriors. It handled the humidity in Miami and, due to its compact size, allowed us to fit into some pretty tight spaces, including the front seat of a Ferrari and the cockpit of a powerboat – places one usually cannot go with a zoom. This lens lived on the A-camera. Of course the zoom capability was key. Imperceptible zooms were constantly part of the visual storytelling, always pushing in and pulling you closer to the action. In realizing Michael’s vision of ‘Miami Vice’, the DigiZoom was a perfect fit.
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American Society of Cinematographers The ASC is not a labor union or a guild, but an educational, cultural and professional organization. Membership is by invitation to those who are actively engaged as directors of photography and have demonstrated outstanding ability. ASC membership has become one of the highest honors that can be bestowed upon a professional cinematographer — a mark of prestige and excellence.
OFFICERS - 2006/2007 Daryn Okada President
Michael Goi Vice President
William A. Fraker Vice President
Caleb Deschanel Vice President
Victor J. Kemper Treasurer
Michael Negrin Secretary
John Hora Sergeant-at-Arms
MEMBERS OF THE BOARD Curtis Clark Caleb Deschanel George Spiro Dibie Richard Edlund William A. Fraker Michael Goi Francis Kenny Isidore Mankofsky Daryn Okada Woody Omens Nancy Schreiber John Toll Kees Van Oostrum Roy Wagner Haskell Wexler
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Editor’s Note ight up front, I’ll confess: since reading Steve Hodel’s Black Dahlia Avenger on a flight to Europe several years ago, I’ve harbored an unhealthy obsession for all things Dahlia. After tearing through that book in a matter of hours, I recommended it to everyone I met, causing a mini-frenzy in my immediate circle of friends. AC’s art director, Micki Gore, was forced to abandon her reading after developing a severe case of night sweats and sleeplessness; advertising sales rep Sanja Pearce began haunting my office to offer her own bizarre theories about the case; and my brother, Chris, drove straight to the murder site at 39th and Norton to soak up the bad vibes. I, of course, topped them all by weaseling my way into the former Hodel home on Franklin Ave. in Hollywood (aided and abetted by ASC member Curtis Clark, who was shooting a commercial in the alleged “house of evil”). I’ve now read nearly every book about or inspired by the case, including John Gilmore’s Severed, Donald H. Wolfe’s The Black Dahlia Files and James Ellroy’s novel The Black Dahlia. The latter yarn provided the blueprint and title for director Brian DePalma’s new film, which, strangely, is the first theatrical feature inspired directly by L.A.’s most infamous unsolved crime. Seeking to lend the Forties-era picture an appropriately noir look, DePalma called upon old friend Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC, who knows a thing or two about evocative cinematography. In preparing my piece about the show (“Darkest Noir,” page 32), I grilled not only Vilmos, but also production designer Dante Ferretti, gaffer Nimi Getter, colorist Mike Sowa and A-camera focus puller Alexander Bscheidl. That should tide me over until I gather my fellow Dahlia groupies for the movie’s opening weekend. Atmospheric images also grace The Illusionist, a turn-of-the-century tale about a magician whose powers put him at odds with a prince. To evoke the story’s period, Dick Pope, BSC stunningly simulates the look of an early color-photography technique called the autochrome. Pope graciously allowed New York correspondent Pat Thomson to peek into his bag of tricks (“Conjuring the Past,” page 50). Moving even further back in time, to 874 A.D., Pathfinder pits warmongering Vikings against Native Americans in an epic tale of abandonment and revenge. Fred Schruers, a well-traveled senior editor at Premiere, flew north to British Columbia to seek out cinematographer Daniel Pearl, ASC and director Marcus Nispel as they toughed it out in a boggy marsh. Fred’s visit to the set produced a piece that captures the shoot’s rigorous logistics (“Vikings on the Warpath,” page 60). This month’s issue also offers a compelling argument for more precise image control in our digital age, courtesy of Richard Crudo, ASC. In a carefully considered piece (“A Call for Digital Printer Lights,” page 70), Richard outlines some of the obstacles that continue to plague cinematographers during film-to-digital transfers of their work, and suggests a range of solutions. (Of course, we all know Richard misses the ability to vent his spleen in his monthly President’s Desk column, so we were happy to give him the space.)
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Photo by Douglas Kirkland.
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“XDCAM HD is The New Betacam” “The image that the PDW-F350 puts out is absolutely stunning,” says director/cameraman Jody Eldred. “XDCAM® HD is the new Betacam®.” Eldred and Mark Falstad, both Emmy Award winners, took PDW-F350 camcorders to the ends of the earth. Eldred went to Israel to shoot 1080/24P. Falstad went to Alaska to shoot the legendary Iditarod® sled dog race in both news-style 60i and documentary-style 24P. Featured on Sony’s XDCAM HD Disc Set, the results speak for themselves. Falstad says, “We shot pictures that I never dreamed possible. For instance, in the middle of the night with only a hazy moon and no chance of making a picture, I simply turned on the Slow Shutter at 64 frame accumulation and we got the classic shot of a glowy tent in the mountains. And absolutely no noise because I wasn't boosting gain. It was stunning!” “To do time lapse, I put the camera on my tripod, easily set up the frame count on the LCD display and hit the trigger. It was that fast. Overcranking at 60 frames per second, you can see slow motion of the dogs’ paws kicking up snow and the ears and tongues flying. And you can play it back immediately in the camera. The PDW-F350 gives me a toolset that I never imagined having, especially at a price of $25,800 [MSRP].”
“It’s way too good.” –Jody Eldred
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“XDCAM HD makes me a better cameraman.” –Mark Falstad
Jody Eldred came to a similar conclusion. “I’m very impressed with the skin tone, the way the reds work, the good detail in the darks and the highlights. I have $160,000 invested in my F900 HDCAM™ package. But the F350 really deserves to wear its CineAlta™ badge. In fact, it’s way too good for a camera at this price.” Astonishing HD picture quality and an incredible toolset at an affordable price... that’s the new Betacam.
See Jody and Mark’s dramatic footage. Register to get your XDCAM HD Disc Set at www.sony.com/XDCAM
© 2006 Sony Electronics Inc. All rights reserved. Features and specifications are subject to change without notice. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. Sony, CineAlta, HDCAM, Betacam and XDCAM are trademarks of Sony. The New Way of Business is a service mark of Sony. Iditarod is a registered trademark of the Iditarod Trail Committee.
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DVD Playback Elevator to the Gallows (1957) 1.66:1 (16x9 Enhanced) Digital Monaural The Criterion Collection, $39.95 “I love you!” pant the first of two very different couples who traverse the romantic, suspenseful terrain of Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows. As Florence (Jeanne Moreau) and Julien (Maurice Ronet) whisper into the telephone, it becomes clear that someone stands in the way of their consuming passion. Florence tearfully vows to meet Julien once he has dispatched her husband, who is also his employer. After the murder, Julien realizes he has left behind some incriminating evidence and returns to the scene of the crime, foolishly leaving his convertible idling on the street during his search. Enter couple two, Louis (Georges Poujouly), a rebel looking for a cause, and his girlfriend, Veronique (Yori Berton). They slip into Julien’s car, and when Julien fails to promptly return — after getting stuck in the building’s elevator — they take off. Florence, glimpsing Veronique in Julien’s passing car, thinks her lover has deceived her. Elevator to the Gallows was Malle’s first feature film, and he was determined to make a picture that
showed postwar Paris as it really was. He wanted to hint at what he felt the city was becoming: more commercialized, less sympathetic and more American. Impressed by cinematographer Henri Decaë’s crisp work in documentaries and his stark, noirish images in Bob le Flambeur, Malle hired him to photograph Gallows. Using newer, faster monochrome negatives, Decaë was able to give Elevator crisp daytime sequences and realistic urban nights. It was Decaë who insisted Moreau wear very little makeup; he believed the available street light would bring out her strong facial features in night sequences. Other filmmakers had frowned upon Moreau’s bone structure and deemed her face “too complicated” for film, and she had previously worked in only a handful of pictures. Malle and Moreau have both credited Decaë with being directly responsible for the stardom Moreau found after Gallows. Decaë later collaborated with Malle on four more pictures. The Criterion Collection recently released an extraordinarily good two-disc DVD of Elevator to the Gallows. The picture transfer, which appears to be from the 2005 restoration that led to a theatrical re-release, is stunning, offering ultra-crisp resolution and sharp contrast. The audio track, clean and fully pronounced in its original monaural state, is also excellent, giving life to Miles Davis’ landmark score, one of the film’s most famous elements. The package’s well-produced supplements begin on disc one with trailers for the film’s original theatrical release and its recent re-release. Disc two begins with a 17-minute excerpt from a 1975 Canadian television interview with Malle. Next is an excellent
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18-minute interview with Moreau (taped in 2005), who gives substantial insight into the making of the picture. Also featured are a joint interview with Moreau and Malle from the 1993 Cannes Film Festival, and a brief bit from French TV circa 1957 that spotlights actor Ronet. Fans of Miles Davis will be thrilled with a supplement devoted to the film’s score. It’s divided into three sections: the first comprises six minutes of footage filmed on the legendary night of Davis’ improvisation; the second, “On Piano, Rene Urtreger,” is a 15-minute interview with the only surviving musician involved in the scoring session; and in the third, Village Voice music critic Gary Giddins and horn player Jon Faddis offer a solid portrait of Davis and the pivotal role Elevator played in his career. This informative, 25minute piece underscores the unique chemistry in the collaboration of the filmmaker and musician. For many, Elevator to the Gallows signaled the birth of the French New Wave. Shortly after the film’s release, many of the directors associated with the movement, including Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, made their first films. But regardless of how Elevator is categorized, it remains a high note in the history of French cinema. Paired with the wistful sound of Davis’ horn, Decaë’s shots of Moreau’s iconic face as she walks along rainswept Paris streets are among the lushest and most evocative moments in modern cinema. This truly excellent presentation of Elevator to the Gallows is not to be missed. — Kenneth Sweeney ➢
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Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales: The Bakery Girl of Monceau, Suzanne’s Career, La Collectionneuse, My Night at Maud’s, Claire’s Knee and Love in the Afternoon (1962-1972) 1.33:1 Dolby Digital Monaural The Criterion Collection, $99.95 Eric Rohmer once described his six “Moral Tales” as a group of films with one story: a man is interested in one woman, then distracted by another. This statement is true in the most general sense, but it falsely implies that the films are repetitive. On the contrary, each tale allows Rohmer to develop and build on his motifs, which culminate in the 1972 masterpiece Love in the Afternoon. Collectively, the films are one of cinema’s greatest explorations of the ways in which men and women choose to manipulate the truth. Though a member of the French New Wave, Rohmer distances himself from colleagues Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut by eschewing references to other movies. As the “Moral Tales” label implies, he is obsessed with moral and philosophical issues, and the ways in which language can be used to expose as well as conceal. But Rohmer’s camera hides nothing; with his cinematographers, he has honed a detached style that exposes his characters’ emotions with honesty and clarity. This recently released boxed set from The Criterion Collection allows viewers to chart the evolution of one of France’s greatest filmmakers. The first presentation is the 1962 short film The Bakery Girl of Monceau, a romance starring Barbet Schroeder as a young man
who develops a pastry habit while pining for a woman he meets outside a bakery. The camerawork, by Bruno Barbey and Jean-Michel Meurice, follows the New Wave tradition of naturalistic location shooting, and many of the elements Rohmer developed in subsequent films are evident in the picture. Rohmer and Schroeder converse in the 83-minute supplement “Moral Tales, Filmic Issues,” and The Bakery Girl of Monceau is also accompanied by Rohmer’s 10-minute short Presentation, or Charlotte and Her Steak (1951). The second film, Suzanne’s Career (1963), is a 55-minute meditation on friendship, sex and money that also serves as a sort of documentary on contemporary Paris. Daniel Lacambre’s 16mm black-andwhite cinematography lovingly captures the details of the city in a manner that gives the locations weight and texture, which in turn add dimension to characters who are defined by their surroundings. (Interestingly, Lacambre went on to excel at a very different kind of low-budget independent filmmaking when he emigrated to the States and joined Roger Corman’s New World Pictures.) Suzanne’s Career is accompanied by the 1964 short Nadja in Paris, the first of Rohmer’s collaborations with Néstor Alméndros, ASC, who went on to shoot the remaining Moral Tales. Nadja is a modest work, but with their next collaboration, Rohmer and Alméndros created the first in a string of classics. La Collectionneuse (1966) was conceived as the fourth tale, but it became the third when scheduling conflicts delayed My Night at Maud’s. The first Moral Tale shot in color and on 35mm, La Collectionneuse introduces Alméndros’ gift for using natural light. In addition to a theatrical trailer, a supplement also included with all subsequent films in the set, La Collectionneuse features a 1977 interview with Rohmer and his 1966 short film A Modern Coed, also photographed by Alméndros. My Night at Maud’s (1969) is a perfect union of sound, image and narrative that is observationally astute and technically impeccable. The picture perfects what would become the defining visual approach for the subsequent films: formal,
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precise compositions that allow the audience a direct connection to the characters’ most deeply felt emotions. Supplements on My Night at Maud’s include Rohmer’s 1965 television program On Pascal and a 1974 episode of the French TV show Telecinema that was devoted to Maud’s. In Claire’s Knee (1970), Rohmer and Alméndros further develop their technique of expressing meaning via delicate gestures. One such gesture — the hero touching the titular knee — serves as the movie’s climactic moment. Shooting on a beautiful lake between France and Switzerland, Alméndros used the lush setting to give Claire’s Knee a greater sense of romanticism than the previous films in the cycle. At the same time, through careful exposures, he never allowed the location to overwhelm the characters and drama. Included on the disc is a brief episode of the French TV show Le journal du cinema that features interviews with the stars of Claire’s Knee, along with a charming 1999 video short, The Curve. The final film, Love in the Afternoon, which concerns a married man tempted to stray, is the most complex in the cycle and the most generous to its characters. The climactic scene, in which the man and his wife realize the depth of their feelings for one another, affects our perspective of not only the characters at hand, but also of the Moral Tales as a whole. After 10 years and six films, it appears as though Rohmer and his characters have finally achieved a balance between reason and passion. This disc includes another Rohmer short, Veronique and Her Dunce (1958), as well as an 11minute interview with Rohmer fan Neil LaBute. The transfers of all these films live up to Criterion’s usual high standards, though the source elements for The Bakery Girl of Monceau and some of the other shorts appear a bit worn. Fans of Rohmer’s work will be thrilled with the comprehensive extras and directorapproved transfers, and those unfamiliar with his work will find this set to be an enlightening crash course. — Jim Hemphill ➢
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Syriana (2005) 2.35:1 (16x9 Enhanced) Dolby Digital 5.1 Warner Home Video, $28.95
“Constantly saying 'one day, I'll make a film' gets tedious. LFS lets you make ilms instead of just fi t talking about it” films Babak Jalali, Iran, LFS graduate 2006 Director “Heydar, an Afghan in Tehran” nominated for BAFTA best short film and won Best Student Film at the New York City Short Film Festival 2005.
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A detailed examination of the energy industry’s role in American foreign policy might not sound like the stuff of gripping entertainment, but Syriana is just that: an exciting thriller that’s all the more suspenseful because it’s entrenched in real-world issues. Director/writer Stephen Gaghan (Traffic) explores the subject of America’s dependence on foreign oil through a complicated, ensemble-based narrative that jumps from the Persian Gulf to Washington to Europe while establishing connections between corporations, governments and terrorists. The plotting is quite complicated, and an astonishing amount of material is packed into the two-hour film. Gaghan’s dense screenplay is lent even more depth by cinematographer Robert Elswit, ASC (Good Night, and Good Luck; Magnolia; Boogie Nights), who uses the widescreen frame and fluid, handheld camerawork to provide multiple perspectives within each scene. The frame is in a state of perpetual flux, but the constant repositioning of the camera allows the viewer to assimilate more information throughout each sequence without becoming disoriented. Elswit’s visuals are incredibly subtle and effective. His combination of handheld camerawork and naturalistic lighting gives Syriana the appearance of a documentary, but at the same time, his use of lenses and composition creates highly subjective images that beautifully express the emotional states of the characters. Elswit is particularly adept at manipulating depth of field; within the
same scene, he often rapidly moves between deep-focus compositions that provide context and long-lens shots that isolate specific characters or objects. This allows the viewer to simultaneously get both a wider perspective and an intimate experience. Warner Home Video has done Syriana justice with this DVD, whose transfer allows the home viewer to appreciate the nuances of Elswit’s palette and the intricacies of the film’s elaborate sound design. In a movie with this many characters and storylines, the sound mix is crucial, and Syriana uses an impeccably calibrated balance of dialogue, effects and music to provide clarity and texture. The disc’s Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack is as stunning as Elswit’s imagery in this flawless transfer. In addition to the film’s theatrical trailer, the DVD features two enjoyable 10-minute featurettes, “A Conversation with George Clooney” and “Make a Change, Make a Difference,” which illuminate the filmmakers’ intentions but do not offer much in the way of technical information, and a fascinating collection of three deleted scenes that focus on CIA operative Bob Barnes, played by Clooney in an Academy Award-winning performance. These scenes expand on the film’s moral complexity and make Barnes’ fate even more chilling. It’s too bad the articulate Gaghan did not contribute an audio commentary to this package, but Syriana still offers plenty of illuminating insights on its own. — Jim Hemphill ■
NEXT MONTH’S REVIEWS Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler (1922) Cinematographer: Carl Hoffmann Seven Samurai (1954) Cinematographer: Asakazu Nakai Mr. Arkadin (1955) Cinematographer: Jean Bourgoin
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Production Slate
Cave explorer Juno (Natalie Mendoza) fends off a fearsome “crawler” in The Descent. Makeup for the creatures was designed by Paul Hyett and executed by Neil Morrill. Cinematographer Sam McCurdy notes, “At first their skin was pure white, but Neil and I immediately decided they had to have a grubbier, ‘underground’ look. They needed that filth.”
Creepy Crawlers by David E. Williams British director of photography Sam McCurdy felt a chill run down his spine when he first saw his name stenciled on a parking space at Pinewood Studios. “I’d started out 15 years ago working the floor at Pinewood, reloading magazines while learning as much as I could,” he remembers, “so to return there as a director of photography to shoot a feature film was bizarre.” It was January of 2005, and McCurdy had arrived at the venerable complex to shoot The Descent, a horror/action movie written and directed by Neil Marshall, with whom McCurdy had worked on the cult horror hit Dog Soldiers (2002). Similar in setup to that
film, which featured British recruits lost in the wilderness and attacked by ferocious werewolves, The Descent tracks a group of female spelunkers who must fight for their lives against a mutant strain of blind, cave-dwelling humanoids dubbed “crawlers.” McCurdy says the spare-yetatmospheric look of late-1970s fright films informed his approach to The Descent. “Neil and I grew up on the same kinds of movies,” says the cameraman, who cites The Goonies (shot by Nick McLean) and Halloween (shot by Dean Cundey, ASC) as the films that sparked his interest in cinematography. “The Goonies is amazing because of the compositions and camera placement, and Halloween has this graphic simplicity. Neil and I wanted that same feeling,
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that simplicity. We didn’t want any visual clutter, just a straight-ahead look that delivered the story. There was a quality to the horror films of the late 1970s largely based on suspense; they didn’t use gore, fancy lighting or overly clever camera moves, just strong images. “Neil and I have a good shorthand,” he adds, “and on The Descent, we’d often describe our scenes in terms of what Cundey and John Carpenter had done in Halloween, The Fog, Escape from New York and The Thing, which are all beautiful anamorphic pictures. Years from now, they will still be considered some of the most beautifully shot horror movies ever made.” True to their influences, McCurdy and Marshall chose to shoot The
The Descent photos by Alex Bailey, courtesy of Lionsgate Entertainment.
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Above: Bloodied but still battling for her life, Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) seeks an escape. Below: In an earlier scene, Sarah picks her way through a cavern, using a torch to light the way. “The trouble with lowlight work comes when you have very bright sources that drop off quickly, like torches or firebrands,” says McCurdy. “A person’s face near [the source] may be a T16, but just a foot or so away, you’re barely registering anything. So realistically supplementing those sources to get a bit of the backgrounds was the challenge.”
Descent in a widescreen format, opting for Super 35mm 2.35:1. “Given the lowlight conditions we’d be shooting in, we had to shoot in Super 35, otherwise my focus puller would have killed me,” says McCurdy. Properly lighting the creepy albino crawlers — whose makeup was designed by Paul Hyett and executed by Neil Morrill — was a concern. “We did two days of camera tests with different prosthetics,” recalls McCurdy. “They started off more wide-eyed and creature-like, but we evolved away from that look to something more human. At first their skin was pure white, but Neil and I immediately decided they had to have a grubbier, ‘underground’ look. They needed that filth. Plus, their skin would have had an improbably stark
look if we hadn’t brought it down. They’d look almost phosphorescent, and although that was the original idea, we could see in the tests that as soon as we put the crawlers in a dark environment, they were far too bright, too reflective. For the story, we needed them to blend into the shadows at times.” These camera tests also determined McCurdy’s selection of film stocks. “Finances do influence how a cinematographer has to shoot a picture, and on the modest budgets we often work with in the U.K., it can mean the difference between shooting 35mm or Super 16mm, or even high-definition video,” he says. “Fortunately, there was no doubt we’d shoot The Descent on 35mm, but there was a financial question of whether we’d shoot on Kodak or
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Fuji stocks. So we did tests, and I found that Fuji Eterna 500 [8573] looked absolutely fantastic in our low-light conditions. The contrast in the Fuji was much better than in the Kodak stocks, in that it dropped right off in the shadows while the Kodak seemed to be searching for things in the darkness. Kodak just didn’t have the contrast we wanted — too much latitude for our use. So we ended up using Eterna 500 for the entire picture. I probably could have used Fuji’s midrange stocks for our exteriors, but I absolutely needed the speed for our studio work and also wanted to keep things a bit simple.” McCurdy saved the production money by shooting in 3-perf, “so while we shot the picture with Arri cameras — Studios, Lites and a 435 — and Zeiss Ultra Prime lenses from Take Two, we screened dailies at Panavision because it’s one of the few places where we could screen 3-perf.” He relied almost entirely on Ultra Primes throughout the studio portion of the shoot, primarily “because of the distances involved. Often, we were 12 inches or less from our subjects, so zooms were out of the question, with the exception of stunts or other shots where we might need a quick re-frame of the action. “My focus puller, Jonathan Garwes, has never asked me for much over the many years we’ve worked together, but between what he needed to do his job and our tests, we tried to avoid shooting wide open. Even in the really dim scenes, we’d try to build things up with a backlight or additional contrast so we could have at least a T2.8. There were occasional shots that were lit just with torches or firebrands, getting us down to T2.1 or T1.4, and we knew we’d just have to crush all those blacks in post. To that end, we tried to keep everything as clean and sharp as possible so we’d have the best image possible to take into the digital intermediate [DI].” The lens filtration McCurdy did use consisted of Tiffen 80C and 80D correction employed in place of standard 85s for day-exterior scenes. “We
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Above: Juno leads the athletic Rebecca (Saskia Mulder) through a tunnel. Below: Cinematographer Sam McCurdy (at camera) lines up a shot. Observing, from left, are director Neil Marshall, stunt coordinator Jim Dowdall and 1st AD Jack Ravenscroft.
wanted to cool everything off, and I find that the 80s create a kind of silvery gloss I really like, especially in the kind of light you get in the U.K.” Following two weeks of exterior location shooting in the Scottish wilderness and in London, the production arrived at Pinewood to film the caving sequences over the next five weeks. There, production designer Simon Bowles (also a veteran of Dog Soldiers) had built a warren of caverns and tunnels. “Simon and I have done a few movies together now, and he was great about letting me have input on his designs,” says McCurdy. “He built much of the caves with a self-expanding foam that had a nice surface texture and
could be easily cut away to allow the camera or lighting in wherever we needed it. That made a big difference.” The underground action begins as the six women rappel down into the cave complex through a large opening in the earth, shafts of bright daylight following them into the darkness, carried by a mist of water droplets. “We lit that scene with a big space-light setup, 20 or so units on the grid above coming down as a single source,” says McCurdy. “We then had four snooted 6Ks shooting down within that to give us those shafts. For lower-angle shots looking up into the women’s faces, we used very heavily diffused Kino Flo ring lights on the camera for fill and then a
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bit of additional backlight to add an edge. We used that setup throughout the picture and also often used pieces of white reflector boards strategically stapled onto the set walls or floor to bounce back the headlamps that the women wore. As we did rehearsals, Neil and I noted where the women would be looking and then stapled up the reflectors to get the best effect.” Given the subterranean setting, the filmmakers knew their sources would be limited to whatever the characters brought with them: headlamps, flashlights, glow sticks, flares and improvised firebrands. “We wanted to stay true to those sources,” McCurdy says. “The trouble with low-light work comes when you have very bright sources that drop off quickly, like torches or firebrands. A person’s face near [the source] may be a T16, but just a foot or so away, you’re barely registering anything. So realistically supplementing those sources to get a bit of the backgrounds was the challenge.” To that end, McCurdy and gaffer Andrew Taylor devised filter packs to match his supplemental lamps to their sources. “The glow sticks were probably the easiest, as we could just wrap Mini-Flos in a mint green and hide them about the set as needed. But the red flares were horrible; that kind of red is very difficult to photograph well and can later become very noisy in the digital realm. Also, the flares burn quite quickly, so you have a problem of maintaining the light. They’re beautiful when they first go off but become quite hideous, as they create so much smoke and noise. Our solution was to start with wide shots showing the girls striking a flare and then tossing it off camera. As soon as the flare was out of frame, we’d bring up our supplemental lighting — gelled lamps on flickerboxes — and douse the real flare. In post, we graded that wide shot of the real flare to perfectly match our following shots, usually taking out a bit of the red. Instead of fighting to match all those shots to the real flare, we just changed one shot, which was much easier.” Because each of these sources
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offers its own distinctive hue — crimson red, warm orange, sickly green and bright white — The Descent benefits from an array of lighting that helps keep the visuals fresh. However, McCurdy dismisses any notion that he planned the resultant color scheme. “I really wish I could take credit for it,” he laughs, “but it was more subconscious than that, really. We start with white light at the beginning and gradually strip that away to get more of the greens and reds to help suggest our characters are traveling into the various levels of hell. Then, we come back into white daylight at the end of the film. Our story told us where we were going, but we didn’t exactly plot out every step of how we would get there.” With a chuckle, McCurdy adds, “I also think we got quite fed up with the red flares at some point and stopped using them as much.” McCurdy and Marshall graded The Descent with colorist Kevin Phelan at London’s Lip Sync Post, and the colorcorrected files were recorded out to 35mm on an Arrilaser. “We did a lot of testing with different print options,” notes the cinematographer. “They’d output about five minutes of footage and we’d have a print made at Deluxe, running that back-to-back with the same scene from our original printed rushes to see what artifacts we were picking up in the digital process. Well, the difference was just huge, mostly in the blacks. And because we were making a horror movie set in a giant cave, the blacks were most important. We needed the darkest blacks to keep the audience guessing what was in those corners, away from the light.” “There are a lot of good British directors working today who are trying to keep productions based in the U.K. or Europe,” notes McCurdy, who will soon re-team with Marshall on the $25 million project Doomsday. “It’s films like The Descent that are helping a new generation of filmmakers learn the craft, but with more money comes more responsibility and oversight, so we’ll see how far we can go with the next one.”
Revisiting a Cult Favorite by Jay Holben In 1972, when British Lion Films was on the verge of closing its doors, millionaire John Bentley purchased the studio and decided to put a film into production quickly to allay fears that he would strip the company down and sell off the assets. The film was The Wicker Man, an odd horror yarn about a fictional island off the coast of Scotland and a policeman’s search for an allegedly missing child. The picture was still in production when British Lion Films was sold again, this time to Michael Deeley, who, upon seeing the finished film, pronounced it one of the worst he’d ever
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seen. After tapping Roger Corman for editing and marketing advice, Deeley recut the picture and released it. The Wicker Man was a box-office success and has since become a favorite midnight movie. A new take on The Wicker Man, directed by Neil LaBute and shot by Paul Sarossy, CSC, BSC, will appear in movie theaters this month. “I had seen the original Wicker Man and had always regarded it as an odd but wonderful cult film,” says Sarossy, whose credits include Where the Truth Lies (see AC Sept. ’05), Affliction (AC Nov. ’98) and The Sweet Hereafter (AC Dec. ’97). “It’s one of those films that sticks with you for a long time. It’s a fascinating
The Wicker Man photos by Alan Markfield, courtesy of Warner Bros.
A massive wicker effigy is set ablaze during the finale of The Wicker Man, a remake of the 1973 cult hit about a police detective who uncovers dark deeds while investigating a crime on a remote island.
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Right: Sister Summersisle (Ellen Burstyn) is one of the unusual characters the detective encounters during his investigation. Below: The officer, Edward Maulis (Nicolas Cage), discovers a mysterious earthen mound.
premise, and I was excited to work on a remake.” Most of the picture was filmed in and around Vancouver, British Columbia, and about half was shot on Bowen Island, just off the coast. “We had remarkably few sets,” says Sarossy. “About 90 percent of the film was day exterior; that’s normally challenging in that part of the world, but miraculously, we were only disturbed by the rain for 10 minutes over 45 days of shooting! Completely by luck of the draw, we were hit with gorgeous weather.” The story follows Edward Maulis (Nicolas Cage), a sheriff who is called
out to a small, secluded island to investigate the alleged disappearance of a little girl. Everyone on the island denies the child’s existence, and as his investigation progresses, Maulis uncovers evidence that the entire community is covering up a very dark matter. “For a scary film, we have very few night scenes,” notes Sarossy. “We were somewhat students of the Polanski school of filmmaking: creating a creepy atmosphere in plain sight. For day scenes, we definitely did not resist the beauty of the island. We felt the juxtaposition of the gorgeous environment with the sinister things that were
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happening created an interesting tension.” Working without the benefit of classic high contrast and deep shadows, Sarossy often created atmosphere through composition and camera movement. “I tried to invest the frame and compositions with an increasing sense of dread as the story goes on,” he says. “We know something odd is afoot, and we worked to represent that compositionally, making the frame tell the story as much as we could. As the story progresses, Maulis wanders about the island conducting his investigation, and the camera is like his companion as the clues and details are revealed. As the investigation goes on, we realize most things are not as they initially appeared; then the camera represents Maulis’ innocent eye and we start to obscure parts of the frame. We get glimpses of things, and we peek around corners and shoot through doorways. I was very often creating a frame within a frame, and we had little elements pass through the frame almost casually — did we see that? “The whole story takes place over the course of three days,” he continues, “so we do have some night scenes, and in them the camera is very mobile and subjective so as to enhance the feeling of dread. “The camera movement around Maulis suggests he is being watched. He’s not alone in these dark places he’s investigating.” Sarossy’s sinister camerawork incorporated a great deal of Steadicam work by operator David Crone. “David’s one of those guys who practically lives in his rig,” the cinematographer notes with a laugh. “We did use Steadicam quite a bit to give the actors as much freedom as possible.” Sarossy filmed The Wicker Man in Super 35mm 2.35:1 with Panaflex Millennium cameras and Primo prime and zoom lenses. “We pretty much had a B camera running full-time,” he notes. “That was because of the daylight hours we had to work with, and because we were conscious of scheduling turnaround time for the cast. If you aren’t careful, the schedule can get later and
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Above: Two of the local residents, Dr. Moss (Frances Conroy, foreground) and Sister Beech (Diane Delano), hold Maulis down as another resident prepares to break his legs. Below: The crew gets ready to film one of the production’s many day exteriors on location in British Columbia.
later each day and really eat into the available daylight hours. “I’m very conscious of the shortcomings and compromises of using multiple cameras,” he continues. “It affects not only my department but also the sound department. They get upset if we’re trying to do a wide and a close at the same time, because it really compromises the sound quality of the
closer shot. We tried very hard to work in the additional camera in a responsible way that didn’t compromise things visually. That usually translated into not doing a wide shot and close-up at the same time, and trying to instead get a different perspective on the scene with the B camera.” Although The Wicker Man went through a digital intermediate (DI), a
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digital finish was not part of the filmmakers’ original plan, and it was therefore not a factor in the decision to shoot Super 35 instead of anamorphic. “We knew we had a great variety of complicated situations for the camera, among them aerial, underwater, Steadicam, and twilight shots that would need extra speed,” explains Sarossy. “That was the main reason I chose Super 35. Also, it was much more practical to shoot with multiple cameras, as there are many more [spherical] lenses available. I love anamorphic and leap at the chance to shoot in that format, but this wasn’t the film for it.” The Wicker Man’s emphasis on daylight hours also meant Sarossy had to depart from his usual strategy of avoiding HMIs. “I love tungsten lighting,” he says. “There’s an incredible articulation possible because of the huge variety of small tungsten fixtures that are available. HMIs are a necessary evil; they’re large, clunky and cumbersome. Still, for day-exterior shoots, HMIs are obviously the tool of choice.” However, the cinematographer did get to employ some tungsten units, as the island has very little electricity
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Director of photography Paul Sarossy, CSC, BSC (center), Steadicam operator David Crone and 1st AC Shawn Harding await the next setup as Cage (in background) gets a quick touchup.
and relies on kerosene lanterns and firelight for interior illumination. For day interiors, Sarossy streamed HMI daylight through the windows and augmented it inside with warm tungsten lighting through flicker boxes to simulate kerosene lamps. “Because there is very little modern lighting on the island, we ran into the classic conundrum of lighting without a source of light
on night exteriors,” he says. “I’ve found it’s very often difficult to successfully create artificial moonlight. You can light a local area, but the falloff in the distance betrays where the light is really coming from.” In an effort to avoid this, Sarossy used Maxi-Brutes overhead that were often double-diffused with 12'x12' or 20'x20' muslin bounces, creating a soft,
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nearly directionless ambience. “I tend to light high and then underexpose, rather than not use enough light,” he explains. “I try to shoot at a T4. I believe in giving the focus puller a fighting chance. I’ve never really preferred using such a tiny depth of field that you’re conscious of it.” One of the few sets the production built was a ruined church, which is the centerpiece of the island community. The set was constructed in an open field, and Sarossy had a 40'x40' silk positioned over the open ceiling to control daylight over the course of the shooting day. For sequences set in the church at night, gaffer Burton Kuchera came up with the idea of rigging a series of Maxi-Brutes on the truss holding the silk. A 12'x12' muslin bounce was mounted above the silk, and the Maxis were aimed straight up at the muslin so the light would bounce off the muslin and pass through the 40-by silk into the church. “We called the rig our ‘pyramid of light,’” recalls Sarossy. “At night, you could see that big cone of light from a mile away. It created
an incredibly soft, beautiful toplight that dissipated gently around the set. It was the most convincing moonlight I’d ever seen.” The Wicker Man climaxes with the burning of a huge human effigy made of wicker wood. “We had one shot to get that right, because the effigy was so large only one was made,” says Sarossy. “We had nine cameras rolling, and we had to shoot it all in one take and leave it to the gods. It ended up going off perfectly, actually! One of the camera angles was from the base of the effigy looking up, and at one moment the burning head falls down right on the camera. It’s an amazing shot, because the camera keeps rolling as it’s engulfed in flames, and burning embers are basically melting the camera!” The Wicker Man marked Sarossy’s first experience with a DI, and he notes that although he is pleased with the results, he found the process to be far less convenient than a photochemical finish. “The shortcoming of DI
Sarossy and his crew prepare to film the town’s pagan celebration.
is that the cinematographer must be physically in the facility when it’s being done,” he says. “With conventional timing, you can be off on another project in another part of the world, and they’ll send prints for you to review so you can send notes back to the timer. The DI is certainly much more powerful, but it’s much less convenient, especially if you’re on another project when they’re
ready to do the DI. I had to fly down to Los Angeles to grade Wicker Man on my days off from another project I was shooting in Toronto. “However, our very first session at Pacific Title put my mind at ease,” he adds. “Our colorist, Corrine Bogdanovicz, is incredibly visual, and she did a beautiful job with the film.”■
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Darkest Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC brings an air of dread and doom to The Black Dahlia, whose plot springs from Los Angeles’ most famous unsolved murder. by Stephen Pizzello Unit photography by Rolf Konow, SMPSP
Noir
ust after 10 a.m. on January 15, 1947, a young housewife named Betty Bersinger was walking south on Norton Ave. in Los Angeles, pushing her 3year-old daughter in a baby carriage as she made her way to a shoe-repair shop two blocks south of 39th St. Strolling down the sidewalk, which bordered an empty field, she suddenly noticed a pale-white figure lying among the weeds. As she slowed to take a closer look, she mistook the form for a discarded mannequin because its top and bottom halves were lying a foot apart. On closer inspection, however, Bersinger realized to her horror that she was staring at the mutilated corpse of a neatly bisected female.
J
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Bersinger quickly pushed the baby stroller to the nearest house, pounded on the door, and told the woman who answered to phone the police. That call set off a rapidly growing sensation at the crime scene, where the late Elizabeth Short would, in death, finally receive the attention that had eluded her as a would-be Hollywood starlet. The ghastly tableau inspired months of lurid headlines in the nation’s newspapers, which referred to the raven-haired victim by her nickname, “the Black Dahlia” (a moniker inspired by the 1946 noir movie The Blue Dahlia). A gruesome landmark in the annals of L.A. crime, the Black Dahlia murder remains the city’s most notorious unsolved crime.
Photos courtesy of Universal Pictures.
Numerous authors have written books detailing their pet theories on the case, but no one has definitively identified the killer. Surprisingly, given the classic noir trappings of the case and its era, few films have used the incident as a backdrop. Aside from the 1974 telefilm Who Is the Black Dahlia? (a production that employed retired lead detective Harry Hansen as its “technical director”), the 1981 feature True Confessions (which incorporates elements of the case into its plot), and the recent indie-film exploitation effort Black Dahlia, this seemingly fertile material had remained neglected. Enter director Brian DePalma, who knows a thing or two about
creating morbid thrills onscreen. Rather than adapting one of the true-crime accounts of the case, DePalma opted to adapt James Ellroy’s novel The Black Dahlia, in which Short’s murder threatens to destroy the lives of two Los Angeles police detectives who team up to hunt the killer. Ellroy, of course, has staked a claim as the king of literary noir by exploring men’s darkest impulses in such books as L.A. Confidential, American Tabloid and My Dark Places. Intent on lending his picture an appropriately stylized ambience, DePalma recruited his old friend Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC, who had
worked with the director on Obsession, Blow Out and The Bonfire of the Vanities. Zsigmond relished the opportunity to apply his skills to a noir drama, although he admits he was unfamiliar with source material. “I didn’t know much about the Black Dahlia before I signed onto the project, so the whole story was basically fresh to me,” he says. “I didn’t read Ellroy’s novel, so my approach to the movie was based on Josh Friedman’s script and my discussions with Brian. Of course, we all knew this was a film-noir idea. I’d seen L.A. Confidential and knew it was based on a book by Ellroy. That movie is a good example of what I call ‘color
Opposite: Police detective Dwight “Bucky” Bleichert (Josh Hartnett) hunts for a killer in the Hollywood Hills. This page, above: The murder victim, would-be actress Elizabeth Short (Mia Kirshner), sees her showbiz dream turn into a horrifying nightmare. Below: Director Brian DePalma (left) confers with cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC (center) and production designer Dante Ferretti on location in Bulgaria.
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Darkest Noir noir,’ because it’s shot in color but has the feel of a black-and-white movie.” Zsigmond was well prepared to explore Ellroy’s shadowy milieu of hardboiled cops and dangerous women. A native of Hungary, he grew up watching an era of blackand-white classics such as Citizen Kane and The Third Man, and learned most of his lighting techniques while shooting black-andwhite projects. “In film school, I got my training in black-and-white only, because it was 1951 and we didn’t have color film at the school yet,” he recalls. “During my final year, we started to get some color film, but I never got to use it. Black-and-white always depended on light and shadows, so we had to learn to light well. With black-and-white film, you cannot just bounce a light into the ceiling and get good results, because it would look so boring you wouldn’t be able to watch it. You have to create lit areas and shadow areas, and essentially, the shadows are more important than the lights. “When I started to shoot color, I still lit like I was working in black-and-white because that’s the only way I saw movies. Later on, when soft-lighting techniques came along, I tried to use them but never really enjoyed it. I find soft lighting very boring. I grew up studying painters like Caravaggio and Georges de la Tour, whose lighting is more realistic, with light coming through windows and from sources like candles or fires. For me, lighting is always about trying to duplicate the romanticism of sources. I think the more abstract forms of lighting, like soft-lighting techniques, don’t create any tension in movies, especially crime movies. When you’re doing a crime film, you have to create shadows. The Black Dahlia was certainly that kind of movie, so I couldn’t think of a more appropriate way to light it.” Lighting was only part of
Above: Police and reporters converge on the grisly crime scene at 39th and Norton. The murder site was re-created at an uncompleted residential development in Sofia. Right: During a nighttime sweep of the area, Bleichert (right) discusses the case with his partner, Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart).
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Zsigmond’s challenge on the show, however. He and a fellow Academy Award winner, production designer Dante Ferretti, were also tasked with creating a believable facsimile of 1940s Los Angeles in Bulgaria, where tax incentives and inexpensive labor helped reduce the project’s budget. Zsigmond recalls, “There was talk about shooting in France, and then they talked about shooting in Italy, and then Germany, but we ended up in Bulgaria. That was a shock to me, because I thought we’d lose a lot of familiar territory by not shooting in Hollywood. Ultimately, we did about eight days of shooting in Hollywood, and I think we got enough flavor from the real locations. At any rate, the site of the murder doesn’t look like it did back in the Forties because it’s become a more residential neighborhood. It was easier to re-create that street and others from scratch in Bulgaria, where the mountains actually looked pretty similar to the Hollywood Hills. Of course, if we had shot in the States, all the interior sets would have been built on stages
anyway, because I don’t think we could find many interiors today that look like they did in 1947. By building everything from scratch, we were able to better re-create the period. “Still, it’s a shame that doing a picture in Hollywood now costs so much, because it would be so much easier to stay in town,” he continues. “It’s hard to believe that shipping heavy furniture and props and hiring local technicians would reduce the
budget by 50 percent. It’s a real struggle to shoot in L.A. for economic reasons, so you have all of these shows going to Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Romania. It’s really a pity that we cannot somehow find a way to make these movies in Hollywood.” Ferretti was also nonplussed when he learned he would have to build wholly believable L.A. settings in Eastern Europe. “Brian basically
Above: Ferretti’s Art Decoaccented police station, constructed in an abandoned paper factory, gave Zsigmond the opportunity to create a classic noir atmosphere with hard shafts of light generated by HMI units positioned outside the set’s windows. The overhead fluorescents were mostly cosmetic for day scenes, but for nighttime scenes in the squad room, gaffer Nimi Getter fitted the fixtures with Osram tubes (Lumilux 830 Warm Whites at 3,000°K) to boost their illumination. Left: Zsigmond manipulates a handy set of moveable Venetian blinds to paint Eckhart with slashes of light.
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Darkest Noir
The film’s opening sequence, depicting the notorious Zoot Suit Riots of June 1943, was staged on an exterior “East L.A.” street set built by Ferretti and his crew in Bulgaria. The complicated shot, which begins on a burning palm tree and then glides down to the fighting at ground level, was executed with a SuperTechnocrane mounted on a dolly.
gave me the script and said, ‘Good luck,’” he recalls with a wry laugh. “He felt that I knew L.A. very well and could pull it off. Nevertheless, I did a scout in L.A. just before we left, and we did a lot of research about the Black Dahlia. I looked at the real murder site, even though that street doesn’t look the same today, and I also looked at all of the pictures that were taken back in the Forties. When you have good information at your disposal, it’s not that difficult to design convincing sets. What makes it difficult is when you have to work in an unfamiliar country with crewpeople you don’t know very well. I brought all of my key people from Italy, the States and London — construction coordinators, painters and so on. Plus, I brought a graphic designer from L.A. to work on all of the neon signs and posters for our street sets. But I also used a lot of Bulgarian laborers from Sofia, and they were very good. We hired local carpenters, plasterers and other craftsmen, but most of them had only worked on low-budget projects, so we had to teach them certain things about working on a movie of
this size. “Initially, I was told I could find whatever I needed in Bulgaria, but after two weeks I realized I couldn’t get anything,” continues Ferretti. “So I spoke with my set decorator, who then went back to L.A. for several weeks to collect props. In all, we shipped over about seven containers full of props and set dressing; we even shipped over the period cars! We ultimately built everything from scratch in Bulgaria, including about 25 interiors that were constructed in an abandoned paper factory. I started my work four months before shooting began, and it was a very big job.” The interior sets built within the former factory included a police station, a portion of City Hall, several nightclub interiors, the houses and apartments of various characters, a seedy motel, and many offices. Exterior sets built at other locations in Bulgaria included the murder site, a stretch of Hollywood Blvd. (which did double duty as a street in East L.A.), six Beachwood Canyon bungalows, and two boxing rings (one of which was built in an
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ice-hockey arena). Back in L.A., the production built a diner on a beach in San Pedro and newspaper-office interiors, and also lent a Forties look to a block of the real Hollywood Blvd. in front of the Pantages Theatre. The Black Dahlia opens in spectacular fashion with a sequence depicting the infamous Zoot Suit Riots of June 1943, a vicious outbreak of hand-to-hand violence on the streets of East L.A. that pitted U.S. military soldiers and sailors against Mexican-American youths. Ferretti and his team built the “East L.A. street” in an unfinished development just outside Sofia, where only the sidewalks had been completed. (This set was later converted into a stretch of Hollywood Blvd., and the opposite side of the same street was redressed as the murder site.) The riot scene begins with a shot of a burning palm tree and glides down to street level to sweep viewers right into the fighting. After dollying down the street through the action, the camera zooms into a side alley, where hardnosed cop and former boxer Dwight
U.S. sailors charge toward their hand-tohand battle with MexicanAmerican youths.
“Bucky” Bleichert (Josh Hartnett) rushes to the aid of Sgt. Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart). Their friendship — and partnership — ensues. The riot and other scenes afforded DePalma prime opportunities to cover action in one continuous shot, a tactic he generally prefers to traditional coverage. Zsigmond enthuses, “What I like about Brian is that he has the courage to do a shot that’s two minutes long, and if it’s well-choreographed you end up with a really classic sequence. As a cameraman, you enjoy doing those shots, because when you’re finished you’re so proud that you managed to photograph something that was so difficult to do. It also looks great on the screen, because there aren’t so many cuts; I hate watching movies that have lots of cuts. If Brian can do something in one shot, he will. He never does the usual, boring stuff. He knows when he needs an extreme close-up, but over the course of an
entire movie he’ll only go to an extreme close-up maybe 10 times. That way, they have more impact.” To capture the riot scene, the filmmakers dollied a SuperTechnocrane along a track that ran the length of the street. When the shot reached the end of the track, they took advantage of the crane’s telescoping arm to move the camera into the alley with the two hero cops. Gaffer Nimi Getter, who has worked with Zsigmond on and off since 1992’s The Long Shadow (the cinematographer’s only attempt at directing), estimates that 40 percent of the film’s scenes were done as continuous shots. He expresses admiration for DePalma’s free-flowing style: “We were only supposed to use the SuperTechnocrane for the riot scene and one other scene, but Brian liked it so much that we kept it until the end of the shoot, since we only had a few days left in the schedule — and he took full advantage of its unique capabilities. Some people
have a lot of equipment lying around the set, but often they won’t use it or will use it for things you could accomplish more easily with simpler methods. On this show, we used equipment to do things that only those pieces of equipment could do, which was nice.” In lighting this street set, Getter says he and Zsigmond “exhausted the entire equipment supply of Bulgaria” and also employed additional lighting equipment that had been shipped from Mole-Richardson and other facilities. “We had lots of Dino lights, lots of cranes, miles of cables, you name it. The set dressings that Dante and his people created were incredible — all the marquees and neon signs looked completely real. We had to use one generator just for that stuff! Then, of course, we had to bring in our own streetlights, which were numerous. We used Dinos mostly for backlight or three-quarter backlight, but we also used many 10Ks, American Cinematographer 37
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Darkest Noir Right: Blanchard and his paramour, Kay Lake (Scarlett Johannson), form a cozy romantic triangle with Bleichert. Below: Bleichert also finds himself tempted into a series of passionate encounters with wealthy, bisexual bad girl Madeleine Sprague (Hilary Swank).
5Ks and smaller units to light the sides of the buildings and shape the architecture. There were a lot of fires burning during the riot scene, and we augmented those by creating a variety of flicker effects on the Dinos and on small 1K and 2K units that we hid around the set.” The SuperTechnocrane is also showcased in a grand reveal of the Dahlia’s corpse, a shot staged as a
vertical crane move that culminates in a God’s-eye view of the murder site. The early-morning scene begins with a shot of the two detectives in their squad car. The camera then rises up the side of a nearby building and over the roof to reveal the corpse in the distance. The ambitious shot doesn’t end there, as Zsigmond details: “A woman starts screaming, and we follow her to the next street
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over, where we see a bicyclist go by. Then we pan to the original street where the cops are, with the crane still high up. The camera eventually drops and tilts down to show a truck driving by and a couple of principals walking in the street. Taken as a whole, the shot establishes the entire geography of the scene, and it goes on forever; it’s a beautiful, beautiful shot. Everything had to be just right — the timing, the choreography, the driving. The 1st and 2nd ADs had to give cues while Brian was watching the video monitor, and it took us about six tries to get it just right. Someone other than Brian might have shot the scene in the standard way, with a wide establishing shot and then a person walking by the body, but we don’t even go close to the body in our shot.” No less ambitious were the scenes shot on Ferretti’s interior sets, which presented a variety of logistical difficulties. The production designer notes that the cavernous space was often “freezing cold,” and Getter reveals that the structure was hardly an ideal place to create a
Left: Hartnett and Johannson prepare for a scene staged in the house Kay shares with Lee, where Zsigmond and DePalma (observing at far right) strove to create a lighter, more inviting ambience. Note the fluorescent fixtures supplementing the hanging oncamera sources. Below: Bleichert reaches out to Kay as a potential source of salvation.
soundstage: “When we saw it for the first time, it was completely rundown. The windows and skylights were broken, and we had to use miles of black plastic to cover them. Also, there wasn’t really any way to hang lights. Fortunately, we didn’t really have to do that, because most of the sets had hard ceilings that we rarely removed; if we did hang anything, it was inside the sets themselves. Sometimes we cut holes in the ceilings to accommodate lights, but most of the time we just let them be.” One of the most important sets was the spacious police department, which was dressed with Venetian blinds that allowed Zsigmond to create the hard slashes of light that have always been a classic motif of film noir. “The fixtures you see in that set were not really lighting anybody in the day scenes,” notes Zsigmond. “They were just decorative, because we needed much more light than they could provide.” Getter and his crew lit the set through the windows with a row of HMIs of varying intensities that included 18Ks and 12Ks; when light-
ing from inside the room, they deployed 6Ks or smaller units. Smoke was added to enhance the shafts of light. “For the night scenes, we based the lighting on the practicals that were in the set,” Getter adds. “There were fluorescents hanging overhead that we fitted with good Osram tubes, and lamps on all of the desks. Those were our main sources of light.” “On this picture, I used directional light as much as I could, and that allowed me to create shadows because I could cut it more easily,”
says Zsigmond. “We mainly used Mole-Richardson lights with Fresnel lenses in them. I used the barn doors on the fixtures to create soft shadows, and flags to create hard shadows. Many times we used dimmers when we had characters moving from one room to another. “When it came time to do close-ups, I tried to go with the mood of the scene, so I was often keeping the characters in silhouette or half-light,” he continues.“I usually try to avoid toplight because it’s not really pleasant on any actor’s face. I American Cinematographer 39
TLFeBOOK
Darkest Noir
Above: The detectives observe the interrogation of a prime suspect from behind a one-way mirror. Right: Bleichert and Det. Russ Millard (Mike Starr) ponder the evidence in a hotel room illuminated by a red neon glow.
always try to get a modeling quality from my key light. Many times I would use a 45-degree angle for my key light, or a 90-degree sidelight. I hardly ever use backlight, because it looks unnatural unless the sun is directly behind the actors. I use fill light almost all the time, and I’m a
great believer in it. Many people feel that with today’s film stocks, you don’t have to use fill because your ambient light basically gives you fill. Sometimes ambient light can look good, but sometimes that kind of light is not so great because it’s coming from the wrong angle —
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especially if it’s coming up from the floor. If the effect of ambient light isn’t good on the faces, then I would rather use fill light that comes from the direction of the camera. The nice thing about fill light is that it also gives you a little eyelight; even a very small amount of fill will show up in the actor’s eyes. To create fill on this picture, I would usually use a big source, like an HMI or a tungsten 5K or 10K, coming through a 4'x4' piece of diffusion material in a frame, like Rosco 216 or 250.” To create moonlight effects for night scenes, Zsigmond usually used gelled HMIs, but he did employ a lighting balloon for one scene in which Bleichert hunts for clues around the Beachwood Canyon bungalows beneath the vintage “Hollywoodland” sign. The balloon, which contained six 1.2K HMIs, was gelled with 1⁄2 CTO. “To tell you the truth, it’s rather difficult to work with a balloon because it’s very hard to control the light,” Zsigmond opines. “If you go too high with it, it doesn’t give you enough light, and if
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Darkest Noir The hardnosed detectives make a name for themselves by beating each other to bloody pulps in a boxing match that provides the police department with some splashy publicity. To illuminate the ring, the crew installed 500watt bulbs in “mushroom lights” hanging from an overhead grid. According to Getter, “On the ring itself, we had a stop of about T5.6. Above the grid, we hung some additional units to create lighting that gradually fell off; the first two rows around the ring were at T4, and the next few rows were at T2.8. Vilmos wanted to see all the way to the back of the arena.” Zsigmond adds, “All of the boxing sequences were shot with long lenses or with wide-angle lenses on the Steadicam. We were mostly shooting inside the ring, almost creating the POVs of the boxers. When the Steadicam was not in the ring, we used long lenses from a Giraffe crane, or dollies. We also got some low angles from very close to the ring, shooting up into the lights.”
you’re low, it can create too much light in some places.” In creating moonlight with standard fixtures, “I like to go just halfway toward a blue effect,” he says.“If I used an HMI, I’d warm it up with 1⁄2 gel. If I used a tungsten light, I would only put a 1⁄2 CTB on it. Using half correction on HMIs and half on tungstens makes it easy for me to avoid using filters on the lens. I don’t like to use filters in front of the lens too much.”
Zsigmond did apply some lens diffusion to scenes involving lead actresses Scarlett Johansson and Hilary Swank. Johansson plays Kay Lake, a woman living with Blanchard who becomes increasingly interested in Bleichert, and Swank plays a bisexual femme fatale who lures Bleichert into a series of torrid trysts. “I couldn’t possibly shoot such beautiful actresses without a diffusion filter on, because
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lenses are too sharp today and people don’t want to see raw faces,” he maintains. “My favorite diffusion filter is the Tiffen Soft/FX. I would go with a strength of 1⁄2 or 1, up to a maximum of 2, because that’s already very heavy; I try to be careful, because I don’t like the look of diffusion. If you watch any of my movies, you’ll never detect that I have the diffuser on. That would be bad, because we’re not in the Doris Day era! Many times, to make the cut better, I even use a bit of diffusion on the male actor, because otherwise the shots will not blend together.” According to A-camera focus puller Alexander Bscheidl, Zsigmond’s primary lenses on the show were Angenieux’s 24-290mm and 17-102mm zooms, although he also employed an Arriflex Lightweight Zoom, as well as Zeiss Ultra Primes for situations involving multiple cameras, longer-lens compositions or Steadicam work by operator Jaromir Sedina. “I like zoom lenses — I have since my days
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Darkest Noir
The seedy Red Arrow Inn, where Bleichert has his trysts with Madeleine, was another set Ferretti’s crew built in the “freezing cold” paper factory. The production designer flew in a graphic designer from Los Angeles to create the show’s neon signage, and all of the period cars were shipped from the States.
with Robert Altman,” says Zsigmond.“You have all of the lenses you need in a zoom; I don’t like changing lenses all the time, so it’s very convenient. Also, there are many times when I like to change the size of the lens during a shot, especially on dolly shots. When you use a zoom, you don’t have to build the
dolly track so precisely to suit a particular lens. Many times when you’re shooting with a standard lens, you’ll make a little mistake and realize the dolly should have ended up a bit closer to the actor. With a zoom lens, I can accomplish everything easily, because I can start at 24mm and go to a 27mm or 30mm. Or I
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can keep the dolly and zoom moving and end up in a close-up. For me, all the conveniences of using a zoom are unbeatable. Some of the directors I’ve worked with never liked the zoom before we worked together, but they started to like it when they saw how convenient it was and how much faster we could work. Plus, the lenses are so good now that zoom lenses are really almost as sharp as standard lenses. Some of them are even so sharp I have to use diffusion on them!” As an aside, Zsigmond points out that The Black Dahlia includes a number of split-diopter shots, one of DePalma’s favorite special techniques. “Brian doesn’t like to use techniques that are very obvious, and I don’t see that particular technique as being manipulative because in real life, the human eye can see both foregrounds and backgrounds,” he says. Getter adds, “Split-diopter shots are always a bit tricky, especially when you’re shooting moving actors from a moving dolly and you want to keep two different focal planes sharp at all
times. Those particular shots took a lot of time and calculation, but we always managed to pull them off.” Because the show’s main production company, Nu-Image, had its own supply of Arriflex cameras, Zsigmond shot with Arricam Studios and Lites and used Arri 435s for high-speed work. He encouraged DePalma to shoot in 3perf Super 35mm (2.35:1) for both practical and economic reasons, and used Kodak Vision2 500T 5218 as his sole film stock. By opting for Super 35 over anamorphic, he could employ spherical lenses, which gave him a bigger stop for the film’s lowlight situations. Zsigmond also knew 3-perf would save money in terms of film costs and developing, savings that could later be applied to the show’s 4K digital intermediate (DI) at LaserPacific. “I realize now that if we hadn’t done a DI, I could not have done as good a job with the period look,” says Zsigmond, who adds that The Black Dahlia was his first experience in a DI suite. “With the DI, you don’t lose anything [in the final transfer] like you did when it was an optical step. Another advantage of the DI is that all of the dissolves, fade-ins, fade-outs and special effects can be incorporated when you’re actually doing the scanning, which means you’re not losing a generation when you go from regular footage into the opticals. “The 4K scan was the selling point for me,” Zsigmond continues. “I told Brian that the only way I would do the movie in Super 35 was if we could go 4K; I didn’t think 2K would be good enough because Super 35 has a smaller negative size than anamorphic. Brian really loves the anamorphic format, so I had to convince him we wouldn’t lose much image quality by shooting in Super 35 with a 4K scan. That’s how we ended up at LaserPacific — they were willing to give us 4K at a good price. The DI was absolutely a budget consideration; I had to
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Darkest Noir Right: Seeking leads in the case, Bleichert questions an actress in her moodily lit apartment. Below: A lighting balloon illuminates a Beachwood Canyon bungalow, built in an area of Bulgaria that resembles the Hollywood Hills. Zsigmond notes that the illumination from balloons can be hard to control, but adds that “the digital intermediate rescued us by allowing us to tone down the parts of the scene that were too hot and make it look like a dark, moonlit night.”
promise I wouldn’t get too fancy, and that I wouldn’t spend five or six weeks doing the work. I knew that if I lit the movie properly, I wouldn’t have to spend as much time on the DI. In the end, the grade took about
14 days.” Colorist Mike Sowa confirms that LaserPacific was eager to tackle the 4K process on Dahlia, not only because of the project’s prestige, but also because it gave the facility the
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chance to streamline its DI workflow. “At that point, we had only done 2K projects,” says Sowa. “We had some limitations in terms of 4K — data storage, rendering time, and the amount of time it takes to record to negative, which is a very slow process when you’re dealing with 4K files. On Black Dahlia, we were able to smooth out some of those issues.” Sowa adds, “Because Vilmos had never done a DI before, his primary concern was whether what we were looking at would translate to film. That’s a pretty typical fear if a cinematographer hasn’t done a DI, but we took great pains to ensure the quality of the images before Vilmos saw them. We did some little filmout tests to show him, and they were right on.” The DI was carried out on a Discreet Lustre, and the footage was projected on a 33'x13' screen with a 2K Christie “Black-Chip” (or DLP) Digital Cinema Projector. Sowa says Zsigmond’s mandate for the look was “desaturated sepia.” The cine-
matographer notes that during production, he “tried to avoid selecting colors that were too garish, and we stayed away from greens during interior scenes because greens are not great against skin tones. We let the wardrobe department do what they needed for the period clothes, but they knew we didn’t want too many colors. We wanted the whole movie to have a desaturated look, with the exception of certain scenes involving Kay, Scarlett’s character. When we showed her in the house she shares with Lee, we tried to make those sequences warmer, lighter and more inviting, because that house is the only place where Bucky truly feels he’s at home. In the rest of the environments, we wanted the atmosphere to be darker and desaturated, with lots of cigarette smoke and other stylistic touches from the Forties.” Sowa reveals that he and Zsigmond also dialed a bit more color into Johansson’s skin: “Brian felt that her beauty didn’t come through with the desaturated sepia look, so we scaled it back a bit on her.” He adds that scenes involving blood were “toned down” during the DI to make the effect subtler.“We use the Lustre as a data-conform tool and a grading tool all in one. It gives me great latitude to create a lot of the visual effects through rotoscoping, and it gives me all of the basic colorcorrection tools as well. I really love the box, and once Vilmos saw the kinds of things I could do with it, he became thrilled with the process. I found this project to be a lot of fun, because the movie has quite a few interesting transitions, like window wipes that start in the middle of the shot and work their way to the outer edges of the frame. Those were an interesting challenge, because I had to make the following scene match into the previous scene and track the windows with my color correction.” Zsigmond, of course, is no stranger to creative image manipulation. In fact, he can be considered a 47
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Darkest Noir Zsigmond’s crew had high praise for the veteran cinematographer, whom they described as “exceptionally generous with his knowledge.” From left: 2nd AC Alexandre Szabo-Fresnais, A-camera focus puller Alexander Bscheidl, Zsigmond, and gaffer Nimi Getter.
pioneer in that regard. On McCabe & Mrs. Miller, he famously flashed his negative with light to create a desaturated, Old West feel; on Deliverance, for which he used the Technicolor dye-transfer process, he introduced a black-and-white matrix to mute the forest colors and create a more ominous, suspenseful tone. On later
projects, he went back to flashing and also experimented with the Technicolor’s ENR process. He maintains that the DI allows a level of creative control that goes well beyond these old-school tricks. “The DI gives us a lot of tools that allow us to do practically anything, and I don’t think I could do another movie
TLFeBOOK
without one,” he says. “We can make the look more contrasty, less contrasty, more colorful, less colorful and so on. We have a tool here that really improves the final answer print. Before the DI, we were very limited in what we could do with the timing of a print. In order to control our images and get a good result, we
had to be very sharp and very good on the set. Today, we sometimes can let certain things go on set if we don’t have enough time to fine-tune the lighting or if we don’t have the right weather. For example, we can rely on the DI to diminish the difference between sunny footage and overcast footage. That’s a great thing for us. Today we have the problem of never having enough time in the schedule, so a DI helps in that regard as well.” “Some people say, ‘Today we have faster films, so you don’t even need to light.’ But I say regardless of whether you have slow film or fast film, you still have to create a look! It did help me to have a 500-ASA film on this movie, because I needed a negative that allowed me to control contrast. With black-and-white film, we always had that kind of control — if you needed more contrast, you overdeveloped your negative, and if you needed less contrast, you under-
developed it. With color, you could not do that to the same degree. But now, with the DI, we can achieve those results much faster.” Zsigmond’s continued enthusiasm for his profession is obvious, and his love of moviemaking was readily apparent to his crewmembers. Speaking to this point, Getter has the last word:“Vilmos is not only a great craftsman and artist, he’s also an amazing person, and you can feel that straightaway. On the set he’s quite amazing. He’s not young, as we know, but he has an incredible amount of energy, and more than that, he belongs to a generation of working people, which is becoming rarer and rarer, especially when you become a star in your profession. He’s up on his feet from call time to wrap time. Even when we were doing a very, very complicated shot, where it would take an hour or two to reset for the next take, he would
not sit down to wait for everything to be ready. He would constantly walk around, look around and find something to improve here or there. He’s extremely willing to adopt whatever ideas you can give him.” ■
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49
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Dick Pope, BSC creates a handsome, antique look for The Illusionist, the tale of a turn-of-the-century magician whose tricks put him at odds with a prince. by Patricia Thomson Unit photography by Glen Wilson hough he is best known as Mike Leigh’s longtime cinematographer, Dick Pope, BSC has acquired another particular specialty in recent years: 19thcentury costume dramas set in the world of the theater. Pope first ventured into this territory with Leigh’s Topsy-Turvy (see AC March ’00), one of seven films he has shot for his
T
compatriot since 1990; in that film, the focus was 1880s England and the light opera of Gilbert and Sullivan. A few years later, Pope revisited 1850s England for Nicholas Nickleby (2002), in which the titular protagonist attaches himself to the traveling Crumbles theater troupe. Now there is The Illusionist, written and directed by Neil Burger
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(Interview With the Assassin), which required Pope to immerse himself in the Austro-Hungarian empire circa 1900 and explore the world of magic, early cinema, and an early color-photography technique called the autochrome. Based on a short story by Steven Millhauser, The Illusionist tells the tale of Eisenheim (Edward
Photos courtesy of Yari Film Group Releasing.
Opposite: During a commanding performance onstage, mindblowing magician Eisenheim (Edward Norton) proves that he still has a powerful effect on his former paramour, Sophie (Jessica Biel). This page: Eisenheim teaches Chief Inspector Uhl (Paul Giamatti) a simple but effective trick under the watchful eye of his business manager, Josef (Eddie Marsan).
Norton), a brilliant magician who becomes entangled in a love triangle. Set in Vienna and shot largely on practical locations in Prague, the film begins in 1885, when the adolescent Eisenheim and young Duchess Sophie are smitten with each other, but prohibited from contact because of class differences. After they’re separated, the story jumps to 1900, when Eisenheim is attracting ever-growing crowds with his stage performances. As his fame rises, so does the status of his audiences. Soon he is performing for the Crown Prince Leopold (Rufus Sewell) and his fiancée (Jessica Biel), who turns out to be the duchess Eisenheim once loved. Suspicious of the illusionist, Leopold orders Chief Inspector Uhl (Paul Giamatti) to spy on him. Meanwhile, Eisenheim ruffles the prince’s feathers with public taunts about his ambitions to the crown. When tragedy strikes, Eisenheim summons his powers to bring down the monarchy before it destroys him. Though Burger was planning to work with a mostly Czech crew on the production, he sought out
Pope because he was convinced the cinematographer’s work would enhance the story’s emotional dimension considerably. “Dick’s films with Mike Leigh are incredibly cinematic because they’re so wellobserved,” says Burger. “He’d done these period films for Leigh — Topsy-Turvy and Vera Drake [AC Jan. ’05] — and made them look so beautiful and inhabit their particular time so perfectly. Plus, there’s a real emotional quality to the lighting. Dick has a very beautiful way of lighting faces that makes them more luminous. I knew The Illusionist was going to be a dark film, yet I wanted to be able to connect with these characters, and I knew he would be able to do it.” Pope acknowledges that lighting faces “is a big thing for me. I’m totally in love with it and have been since I was a young boy, took up a camera and immediately concentrated on portraiture.” He adds that this is one reason he gets on so well with Leigh. “The landscape of the human face is, in a way, what cinema is all about. That’s where the emotion is. The rest of it leads up to that.”
From the time he wrote the script, Burger wanted to conjure an early-cinema look for The Illusionist, and he made autochrome photography the cornerstone of the visual design. “In films like Nosferatu, there’s something very creepy in the image itself — in the grain and density, the way it flickers, the vignetting,” says the director. “Those create a disquieting feeling, and I wanted a disquieting, unnerving undertone for this picture. I didn’t necessarily want to make it look old; I wanted it to be real but otherworldly, to inhabit this realm of dream and mystery.” Burger did not want to go with black-andwhite, and he eventually discovered the autochrome, a color-photography technique that was almost contemporaneous with his story. During that period, cinema and magic were closely interwoven, and magicians tapped early movingimage and projection devices to help create their illusions. Burger arrived at his first meeting with Pope carrying a copy of The Art of the Autochrome. “When I met Neil, I knew very little American Cinematographer 51
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Conjuring thePast The purposeful Eisenheim ignores Uhl’s advice to forget his feelings for Sophie, who is engaged to marry Crown Prince Leopold.
about the history and detail of these autochromes,” recalls Pope. “It came as something of a revelation to me when he opened the book.” Invented by the Lumière brothers in 1903, autochromes involved unique transparencies created by coating a sheet of glass with microscopic starch grains dyed red, green and blue, which formed a screen of color particles. Carbon black was applied over the plate, filling in the spaces around the starch grains. Then a silver gelatin emulsion was applied over the color screen. When the plate was exposed, the base side was turned toward the subject, and the color screen acted as a filter over the emulsion. The developed plate rendered a positive color image with delicate color qualities that resemble handtinted photographs. “There’s almost a sepia tone without any sepia,” notes Burger. “Because of the primitive emulsions, certain colors that are the predominant dyes seem to leak into all the other colors. You can get a green or
golden tinge, even though it’s not sepia and may have all the colors of the rainbow.”In The Illusionist, gold, ochre, rose and green dominate the palette, particularly before Eisenheim’s emotional decline motivates a shift to a more monochromatic look oriented around sickly green hues. “They were not quite like anything I’ve seen,” says Pope of the autochromes. “Many were really crude but very beautiful, like looking at color for the first time, which back then, of course, was the case. The focus too could be really selective, as you would achieve with Swing & Tilt lenses. The glass wasn’t perfect; it could be quite bubbly in places, and you’d lose focus in those spots. So color wasn’t the only unusual characteristic; it was the focus as well.” Pope’s challenge was mimicking the look of the period technique with modern cameras, lenses and emulsions. He chose to film The Illusionist with an Arricam Studio/Lite package from Arri
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Munich that included Cooke S4 prime lenses, and he shot the picture on Kodak Vision2 500T 5218 and Vision2 200T 5217. “It took us quite a while to find the best way to capture this look,” says the cinematographer. “It was quite tricky and involved quite a lot of experimenting. For instance, I did a major test of various scenarios inside and outside Eisenheim’s theaters with stands-ins in costume and makeup. It was a full day, from morning until very late at night.” After putting various lighting techniques, film stocks and filtration through their paces, Pope began experimenting in collaboration with visual-effects supervisor Viktor Müller at UPP in Prague. “We worked together on different manipulations of the film, including various strengths of bleach bypass applied to the print, the interpositive, and the original digital output neg,” recalls Pope. Müller adds, “We also combined bleach bypass on the positive with bleach
Uhl’s admiration for the magician tests his loyalty to the prince.
bypass on the negative, as well as combining digital bleach simulation with positive bleach bypass.” The principle was there, but the effect was always “too much,” says Pope. “It’s a difficult thing to describe, but autochromes are very subtle. When you first look at them, they appear quite desaturated and pastel, but when you look closer, certain strong colors shine through. So we abandoned the physical bleach bypass but took the basic idea into the digital-intermediate [DI] suite and manipulated the image with a lookup table we devised, one that would bring out these greens, reds and yellows. After that, we were there very quickly.” Because the production did not plan to print any dailies, this lookup table became a critical tool in maintaining a consistent look for the DVD dailies, he adds. Knowing that time for the DI would be limited, Pope tried to accomplish as much as he could in camera. “I thought perhaps all I’d need, come the DI, was this magic
lookup table, this simple twist of the dial, to immediately bring the whole thing into this fabulous autochrome world,” he says wryly. “If only life were like that!” Down the line, the autochrome illusion was completed at EFilm by colorist Steve Scott. Highly regarded by Pope, Scott was introduced to Burger by Pope early in the project. “After a good deal of exploration with various software tools and filters, a final look was achieved by first desaturating the image, then reintroducing saturation to the skin tones and various spot colors,” explains Scott. “A filter was then applied to slightly blur the luminance of the shot while keeping the color component sharp. This represents a pretty broad generalization of the process and techniques, as each shot was dealt with individually to optimize the effect and to keep the look understated. Of course, there were shots throughout the film that required unique solutions. For example, in one scene, Leopold slaps Sophie across the face.
We animated and auto-tracked a very soft shape onto her cheek, which allowed us to slowly bring up a flushed color as she recovered from the blow. It’s subtle, but it supports the narrative. A final pass was taken to make sure all of the blacks and highlights were rich and consistent, and to make final color tweaks to assure the entire picture had a cohesive ambience.” During production, the book The Art of the Autochrome steered Pope toward certain lighting decisions. For example, most autochrome landscapes “were taken with the sun over the shoulder and were never really backlit — it’s the forerunner of the early Kodak Box Brownie,” says Pope. He and his collaborators scheduled exteriors with this in mind. “Luckily, we were shooting in spring, so we had quite a low sun. I love some of these exteriors because they are absolutely like that autochrome book.” One favorite is a wide shot of Eisenheim running down a riverbank and plunging into an icy river to reach American Cinematographer 53
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Conjuring thePast Initially impressed with Eisenheim and his abilities, Leopold (Rufus Sewell) turns confrontational as he senses a rival for Sophie’s affections.
Sophie; another shows young Eisenheim chasing after her carriage along a main street beneath the castle walls. In keeping with the look of early cinema, Pope avoided Steadicam shots and wide-angle lenses. He mainly used the S4 primes in the 32mm-150mm range. In the theater, he used an Angenieux 17-80mm Optimo zoom on the camera crane for maximum flexibility. In order to maximize the picture area and record the most information, Pope shot The Illusionist in Super 1.85:1. He notes, “We talked about doing Super 35mm, but the film is set in a theatrical environment, so the proscenium arch was important to capture, as was the audience stacked up vertically in balconies and circles. We would have missed a lot of that or been forced out very wide to get it.” In addition to the autochrome look, other techniques of early cinema occasionally come into play, particularly during the prologue, which
is set in 1885. These include the flicker effect of hand-cranked cameras, vignetting, distressed film, and iris transitions. During preproduction, Pope tested different ways to create such effects in camera, but the filmmakers ultimately decided to construct them all in post. “I really think that was a wise decision, because without an assembly, how do you know exactly where these effects are needed?” says Pope. “We might have chosen wrong areas to apply it to, the wrong strength of the effect, and so on. Most importantly, it would have taken our eyes off the ball of the main event.” Instead, these effects were achieved in the DI. Scott explains, “Where required — and especially in the first section of the film, which was a semi-flashback and the most complicated look — a very soft and subtle oval vignette that matched the proportions of the aspect ratio was added to bring down the outside of the frame. Sometimes this oval shape was discarded and irregular vignettes were used to take
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advantage of the particular composition of a shot. The final touch was adding a subtle hand-animated flicker effect to suggest early cinematography.” During principal photography, Pope’s biggest challenge was filming Eisenheim’s performances on practical locations before a live audience. The production used two historic theaters: an opulent theater in Prague and a more dilapidated one in the rural town of Tabor. Both are still active stages, so filming had to be squeezed in between shows. The production’s very first location was the Prague theater. “It had to be, because it was their only dark week in our entire schedule, and we had exactly five days inside to finish,” recalls Pope. “It was a baptism of fire. “We went straight into illusions on the stage,” he continues. “The very first thing we did was the illusion with the growing orange tree, which was a logistical nightmare.” Based on magic tricks of the period, the illusions were to be
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Conjuring thePast Eisenheim demonstrates his showstopping “orange tree illusion.” This complex sequence was shot with a SuperTechnocrane on the very first day of the shoot at a rented theater. “Because a play was just finishing its run, all we had was the one day to get in the theater and prep the entire interior,” Pope recalls. “The grips and the producers had sweat pouring off their brows with the thought we wouldn’t make it.”
achieved in camera as much as possible. “I always wanted the audience to be thinking, ‘How does Eisenheim do it?’ rather than, ‘How do the filmmakers do it?’” says Burger. In the case of the orange tree, an intricate set of gears pushed out leaves folded within stems, which then bloom. This mechanical process constituted the major part of the illusion, but it was just one part of the puzzle facing Pope. Sweeping camera moves on a Super Technocrane meant the tricks would share the shot with both Eisenheim and his audience, which was a kind of collective character shouting at the stage. The bigger camera moves encompassed all three elements: audience (including principal actors), magician and magic trick. “On the very first day of the shoot, we had our principals on stage and amongst a full theater audience of hundreds,” says Pope. “Very first up was the most challenging shot of the entire film! This was compounded by the fact that a play was just finishing its run, so all we had was the one day to get in the theater and prep the entire interior. The grips and the producers had
sweat pouring off their brows with the thought we wouldn’t make it. The camera was to be placed at the back of stage looking out at the packed theater, while in center-stage foreground, Eisenheim was to step up to the table and begin the illusion. As the orange seed in the pot began to sprout and grow, we were to track in towards it, then circle it 180 degrees, then track back out over the front of stage and then out over the audience, skimming their heads as we pulled right back towards the rear of the theater stalls, while all the time the shrub was to continue to grow into a fully mature orange tree bearing fruit, but now with the camera angle diametrically opposed to where we had started. “The fact that I had never before worked with any of my crew made what was a very ambitious and complicated camera move even trickier,” continues the cinematographer. “We had to deal with how to physically move around Edward Norton without destroying his performance, communicate with a largely non-English–speaking audience, and deal with the really complicated mechanics and timing of
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the tree growing. It’s the type of move that could be a serious contender for a heavily rotoscoped CGI effect, but it was mainly achieved in camera, which makes it so much more believable. The credibility of The Illusionist hangs on the very authenticity and believability of its illusions.” Pope decided a Technocrane would enable him to achieve many angles fairly quickly. “I know from experience that theaters are really awkward to work in, and setting all but the simplest of shots can be really time-consuming,” he says. Key grip Robert Kodera deliberated for some time about what was physically possible in such a tight space, and he ultimately decided a 25' SuperTechnocrane was the only option. “Full credit to him, as this decision proved to be spot-on,” says Pope. “The crane hadn’t as long a reach as I wanted but was very short at the back. Our only option was to build its track along nearly the entire length of a side aisle, largely to maximize the number of positions we could achieve, but also to keep it out of the shot from onstage. But of course, it was a theater with a steep
rake, and the track had to be leveled to stage height. Although we could quickly remove sections of track on stage when necessary, the downside was the real possibility of the bucket knocking against the theater boxes that lined the aisle. But because everything had been measured perfectly, that didn’t happen, and the shot worked.” During the orange-tree illusion, he continues, “we had to fully extend this shortish arm to get the camera across to the center of the stage and auditorium so the symmetry would be maintained. We tracked into and then tightly around the table with the growing plant, sucking the arm first in and then out, while Edward deftly moved out of and then back into the sweeping shot while the camera maintained perfect alignment with the center of the theater.” The shot also incorporated a hidden zoom and a major lighting change. “It was the toughest of calls, but it worked great straight off, and my crew were superb,” enthuses Pope.“I think the success of this first major challenge set the tone for the rest of the shoot, which became a hugely enjoyable and rewarding experience.” Pope’s lighting package was based on the rig he’d developed for Topsy-Turvy’s historic theaters, “units that were fast, flexible and omni-directional, because with Mike Leigh I had to be prepared for whatever he was going to hit me with.” Helium balloons, China balls, and practicals were the main sources. “With skirts and systems of chopping the light, I can control [helium lights] like a directional soft light. I’m very specific about how they’re played. It’s something I’ve evolved over the past few years. I use them as specific lighting tools, not as big, general sources of illumination My gaffer in Prague, Vaclav ‘Enzo’ Cermak, was brilliant at taking all this onboard and had everything patched through dimmers and fed 57
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Conjuring thePast Pope ponders his camera placement. “My challenge was to make the magic look believable,” he says.
back to a lighting desk.” These units were combined with practical footlights, which housed Edison-style bulbs with low color temperatures appropriate to the era. The footlights were designed, built and installed by production designer Ondrej Nekvasil and his art department. “They had
reference pictures, and Ondrej had them made by Czech craftsmen, beautifully,” says Pope. No flames were used in the location. In fact, says Pope, “We weren’t even allowed to strike a match.” But once the production moved to the theater in Tabor, Pope eliminated electrical sources and based his look on flame.
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“We did the footlights in flame, the units again custom-designed and built by Ondrej, and they rule the whole feel of the theater. We installed gas lighting in the auditorium, and I supplemented that with both real and simulated flames.” This theater is where Eisenheim performs his more seditious tricks: conjuring souls from beyond the grave to make accusations against the prince. For Pope, just as for magicians of the period, smoke and mirrors were instrumental in producing the ghostly apparitions, which were actually a form of hologram. How smoke was used is crudely demonstrated in the film by the chief inspector, who uses a rudimentary movie projector to throw a person’s image onto white smoke. For Eisenheim’s more subtly crafted apparitions, Pope “tested many things, and it was tricky. If you fill an enclosed area with smoke, you can
project a moving picture onto it and create a hologram-like effect with a wavering, otherworldly feel. One of theater’s favorite tricks consists of projecting ghostly images onto carefully lit shark’s-tooth theatrical gauze and making them appear and disappear to great effect. This goes right back to Victorian theater. Those magicians extensively used these early holograms in such a sophisticated way that I’m sure they could trick a turn-of-the-century audience. They wouldn’t have so much luck these days, but studying these tricks formed the basis of how we went about creating the apparitions.” Pope’s proudest moment was a mirror illusion done almost entirely in camera. For this trick, Sophie is brought to the stage and shrouded in a hooded cloak. An 8'-tall mirror is brought before her. Initially, her reflection is as it should be, but soon its movements no longer mirror
hers. A puff of vapor rises and exits the mirror, like the breath of life escaping, and the reflection collapses to the floor. “We discussed this scene endlessly,” says Pope. “At the beginning, we considered using bluescreen and covering the mirror in chroma-key blue, rather than going through the possible nightmare of revealing the entire rig of film lights and film crew in the reflection and also revealing the fact that there was no audience in the upper circles! So I had a swivel mechanism put on the mirror. Then, when we were looking into it, I lit up the audience quite a lot to compensate for the fact that the glass was quite old and I was losing a lot in the reflection. So I was able to control the reflection problems and light levels, and to me it looked perfect.” In the end, bluescreen was limited to just a few of the reflected elements in the middle of the scene.
Actual mist was pushed out through a hole in the mirror; it was enhanced digitally only as it began to dissipate. “I had been dreading this scene, but it came together,” says Pope. “My challenge was to make the magic look believable. Doing so much of it in camera definitely makes it more believable, and I’m really pleased with it.” ■
TECHNICAL SPECS Super 1.85:1 35mm Arricam Studio, Lite Cooke, Angenieux and Canon lenses Kodak Vision2 5218, Vision2 5217 Digital Intermediate Printed on Kodak Vision 2383
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Vikings on the
Warpath
Pathfinder, shot by Daniel Pearl, ASC, pits Norse invaders against Native Americans in 874 A.D. by Fred Schruers Frame grabs by Encore Hollywood Unit photography by Doug Curran
n the call sheet for today’s work on Pathfinder — officially Day 51 of 51 shooting days — the note under “Location” says “Widgeon Marsh/far far away and out of call service.” In truth, the densely wooded valley leading to this provincial park in British Columbia is only about an hour from downtown Vancouver, but guarded by forbidding rock walls and what geologists call a “slough” of deep mud. Cinematographer Daniel Pearl, ASC arrives on this early December day with the same challenge he has faced
O
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over the previous couple of months: the sun will set at about 4:20 p.m., and in the forest where director Marcus Nispel has staged most of the film’s scenes, it grows dark even earlier. At least it’s not raining for a change — this afternoon the forecasters have correctly predicted snow. For Pearl, whose first cinematographer credit was Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and who also shot the 2003 remake with Nispel, the task was to make a virtue of the job’s limitations. After all, he and Nispel were
on a restricted color palette of browns and grays. “It’s not a very happy tale,” says Pearl, “so we didn’t want happy, bright, bubble-gummy colors. We didn’t want the look to be colorful and poppy. This film is going to look quite desaturated.” “I come out of music videos, and we get hired to do a lot of glossy commercials,” notes Nispel, who estimates he has done some 300 shoots with Pearl.“The main reason to do a movie is to go against the grain of what I normally do, which is why [on film projects] I usually go for kick-ass topics and a painterly style. My background is in illustra-
tion and painting, and I’ve always loved the look of Degas and Rembrandt. [On Pathfinder,] I didn’t want to do an epic; I wanted to make an anti-epic. I wanted to achieve a very small movie with big ideas. In a way, the story appeals to my immigrant mindset, because we’re making a movie about the first American hero.” During preproduction, the duo sought to impress executives at 20th Century Fox by shooting eyecatching test footage in a swamp in Thousand Oaks, California, which showed an actor rising out of the water to fell a full-dress Viking amid
Photos courtesy of 20th Century Fox.
telling a story that was set in 874 A.D., a time when, according to some recent archeological finds, Vikings may well have preceded Columbus to North America’s shores. The saga’s main character is Ghost, a savagely mistreated Viking child who is abandoned by his clan and raised by North American Indians. Ghost eventually grows to become a fierce warrior (played by Karl Urban) whose destiny sends him into a grim and bloody battle with the seagoing warriors who left him behind. To convey the movie’s era and sober tone, the filmmakers settled
Opposite page: Abandoned by his Viking clan and raised by Native Americans, Ghost (Karl Urban) becomes a skilled warrior and confronts the bloodthirsty Vikings in Pathfinder, which boasts a striking desaturated look. This page, top: Viking leader Gunnar (Clancy Brown) checks his compass. “[Director] Marcus Nispel wanted the Vikings to be down and dark and sketchy,” says Daniel Pearl, ASC. “It’s a bit more ominous if you can’t make out who’s beneath the helmet.” Bottom: Ghost’s adoptive family counsels the young warrior in a steam hut.
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Vikings on the Warpath In a flashback set 15 years before the story’s main action, young Ghost arrives in North America with his Viking clan. The almost monochrome visuals the filmmakers had in mind were facilitated by the circumstances of the shoot: a densely wooded area of British Columbia and a September start date. “The local crew guys kept saying, ‘Come November, there is no light in the forest — zip,” recalls Pearl.
shafts of cathedral light. Ultimately, their visual strategy for Pathfinder married a restricted color palette with the expansive, cross-lit style they had employed on the Chainsaw remake. “We’re trying to make the film feel old, because the story supposedly takes place more than a thousand years ago,” says Pearl. Nispel notes that the resultant scheme is “full of atmosphere and desaturated stone colors, like da Vinci painting Mona Lisa — and you don’t get to do that if you’re selling beer.” Pearl adds that nature and circumstance enhanced the production’s nearly monochrome aesthetic. Thanks to delays in the greenlighting process and Fox’s dictum that a film this philosophically bleak had to be made for a price — i.e., north of the border — the filmmakers found themselves scheduled for a September start in a northern latitude. After a preliminary scout and conversations with seasoned local crewmembers, the filmmakers realized they were in for a prolonged struggle. “At first, Daniel was really sad,” says the mischievous Nispel, “because he learned that in these forests, even on a bright day, it’s almost pitch black.” Nispel had heard that when The 13th Warrior came to Vancouver to take advantage of the area’s normally abundant
rainfall, the filmmakers were “punished with good weather.” However, Nispel’s own reverse optimism didn’t pan out: “We came here hoping for good weather because we wanted shafts of light in the forests. Didn’t happen, so we got all this fog and rain.” Though Pearl had to create some innovative solutions to accommodate the weather, he notes, “For lighting, I had a fairly standard HMI feature package, except that I tend to carry more than 50 percent of my heads as Fresnels.” To simulate the primitive illumination of the period, “I also had a small tungsten package with a good selection of Mole Baby Softs, from 4Ks on down, which I like to use for fire effects. Because we were not that into creating color on this film, I used 1⁄4 or 1⁄2 CTO for nighttime fire effects and no gels at all for the daytime fires. To get the varying intensity and subtle shadow shifts that indicate firelight, I had the electricians wave their arms at an irregular rhythm in fairly close proximity to the source. I did have a few Kino Flos on hand, but I used them sparingly.” Thanks in part to his trust in what a digital intermediate (DI) could do, Pearl stuck with an emulsion he had come to rely on during previous shoots: Kodak Vision2 500T 5218. “5218 was outstanding.
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The grain structure is so ideal for what Marcus and I wanted that I decided to shoot the whole picture on it, even our few full-sun exteriors. This is my second picture in a row using only 5218, and production absolutely loves it. I couldn’t be happier with the tonal range it captured and its response to the look we gave it in the DI suite at Encore Hollywood. “I rate it at 400 ASA, and for a few scenes I’ve pushed it one stop with no noticeable increase in grain. I find the stock to be very filmic, but Kodak has made it so good that we need the DI process to get back to the kind of old-style contrast I want. I keep that in mind when I expose the film, capturing everything and then later just crushing away what we don’t need.” Standing ankle-deep in the boot-sucking mud of the Widgeon slough, he and Nispel share a wry smile as wranglers bring a splendid white mare onto the set. Striving to complete the last of the production’s “clean-up days,” they are shooting page 4 of Laeta Kalogridis’ script using a 6' slider that has often stood in for dolly track in the location’s confining canyons, streambeds and stands of old-growth trees. “We’ve made extensive use of the compact slider and a Fisher 10 dolly,” says Pearl.“We’ve also occasionally used a
Ghost and Indian Father (Wayne Baker) are silhouetted in the forest as the older man dispenses some wisdom.
30-foot Technocrane, sometimes mounted on the arm of a Chapman Titan truck crane. That rig gave us a reach of about 60 feet in the air and limitless flexibility, due to the fact that the dual crane arms create an elbow at their junction. To get some idea of what this allows compared to fighting the arc of a single crane that goes in the opposite direction of what is normally required, imagine trying to feed yourself without an elbow.” Pearl notes that he used “zero Steadicam” on the shoot but numerous handheld shots. (Don Reddy was the A-camera operator.) Although the production’s Panaflex Millennium XL is one of the lighter 35mm sound cameras, by the time a video transmitter, filtration, a spray deflector and Panatape were added to the camera body, it grew much heavier. Pearl notes with a smile, “The production did pay for Don to have weekly massages as thanks for the great job he was doing.” As Nispel prepares to capture a shot involving the horse and actress Michelle Thrush (portraying the character Indian Mother), Pearl checks the setup, gives the fstop to B-camera operator Wayne McConnell, and sets off to shoot a much more challenging sequence, hiking down a muddy logging road to meet up with a purportedly tame
mountain lion that will be filmed leaping across the frame in slow motion. He’s been told the big cat is noise-sensitive, a fact that doesn’t jibe well with a crewmember’s comment that a particular camera running at accelerated frame rates sounds like “a baloney chopper.” Thanks to his good rapport with 1st AD Eric Hays, Pearl has survived worse. As Nispel remarks, “We’ve been working in the worst weather you can imagine — ice, rain, snow, on water, in whitewater. It’s been really, really crazy, and we’ve been working mostly at night. We went to one location, and after the second day, thanks to the slippery rocks, moss and snow, we had 17 people down with injuries that forced them to leave the set.” Pearl describes that particular location as “treacherous,” but adds that local gaffer Owen Taylor and his crew “were great at getting the big heads into incredible perches on massive rocks.” Tramping toward his encounter with the mountain lion, Pearl comments, “Wayne has been doing a great job for us, and he’s been good at understanding my lighting style, so I don’t have a problem leaving him to protect my interests on inserts. For the dramatic scenes, Don is a fantastic operator. This is my third show in a row with him, and his credits go on forever.
He’s an old friend of mine from Texas. We got to know each other back in ’73. He was director of photography on Benji during the summer I was shooting the original Chainsaw. It was so strange for us to be 23 years old and shooting movies that would both become big films in their respective genres. We struck up a bit of a friendship based on the fact that we were such anomalies; at the time, we were about half the age of the youngest working cinematographers.” If Pearl had begun to worry as soon as he got a taste of the weather around Vancouver, his first recruiting meetings with the local savants were even more daunting. “When I was interviewing crew guys up here, they kept saying,‘Look, you’ve got to understand that come November, when you go into the forest, there is no light in there. Zip.’ That’s another reason I decided to shoot the entire film on 5218; I knew I would need the speed. I also knew I would be shooting a lot of stuff at night that was supposed to be daytime, and that I’d be shooting in dark places where there was no light in the middle of the day.” Gesturing from the hazy twilight on the path toward the darkening recesses of the forest, he adds, “Look at this now. You go into the forest, there’s nothing in there. “Simon Jori, my incredibly American Cinematographer 63
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Vikings on the Warpath
The production prepares to film with a 30' Technocrane.
quick and efficient assistant cameraman, knows the routine up here. He mentioned to me that Tiffen had a filter called the LLD, which stands for Low Light Daylight. I had never heard of it, because I hadn’t really been in situations where you’d always be on the edge of even having an exposure. Normally, with 5218 or any of the tungsten-balanced stocks, you would use an 85 filter, which takes two-thirds of the stop of your light. Well, the LLD filter cuts the ultraviolet of daylight and colors the film a bit, but not fully. It has no exposure compensation and no light loss; it almost looks like a piece of clear glass, and I found it to be the ideal tool for our daylight scenes. It’s also been helping with the desaturation of colors by clipping a lot of the warmth out of them. This picture is not nearly as warm as it would be if
I were using an 85.” The brief Pearl and Nispel set for themselves on Pathfinder was in many ways a variation of their work on the Chainsaw remake, a project Pearl had pondered hard before joining. “Marcus is a very smart man, and it was his idea. At the time when he got hired to do the picture, I was shooting most everything he was doing. The producers were actually not that keen to have me shoot it, but he had two ideas that I think proved to be true and helped the film: he knew I was the one guy that wouldn’t go in there and just copy the original film, which was a gritty, vérité kind of thing. For me, there was no percentage in that since I’d already done it. He also knew that nobody would care more about the remake than me, because the original basically made my career. Prior
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to shooting Tobe Hooper’s film, I was told I could not be in the film business and that I would probably wind up being a film professor. And I believed it until I shot that film. Then, suddenly, I was in the film business. Based on that history, Marcus knew I had to make Chainsaw great again, or else I was giving it all away. I had gotten a lot from the original, but all of that could’ve been wiped out if the second one didn’t turn out to be a successful film. “For most situations, I’m a devout cross-lighter, particularly for dramatic material like Pathfinder,” Pearl continues. “The rich images you get that way appeal to my eye. When I’m looking for camera positions with my operators, I often tell them to ‘shoot the light.’ This doesn’t mean actually photographing the
TLFeBOOK
Vikings on the Warpath
The cunning and stealthy Ghost emerges from a swamp to surprise a Viking warrior.
lighting instrument, but rather finding the camera position, relative to the light and the subject’s eyeline, that captures my look. Over the years I’ve had to explain my approach to numerous students in lighting seminars, and I’ve come up with an analogy that best explains it. Think of the lighting setup as a billiard shot where the key light is the ball, the subject is the bumper, and the camera is the pocket. I’m most happy when my light strikes the subject at such an angle that if the subject were a mirror, the light would be sent right down the lens.” Nispel later comments,“What Daniel has down is the one-source lighting approach, which means you don’t want to go into a bright set. Instead, you backlight it. You need shiny floors, and you need to wet it down. You need to smoke it up and get the backlight to illuminate the smoke. Then he shapes what’s in front of it.” In applying this strategy to
Pathfinder, however, Nispel gave Pearl a mandate to keep the villainous Vikings largely obscured. “The Vikings are frequently not lit at all,” says Pearl. “Marcus wanted them to be down and dark and sketchy. He feels if you get too good a look at the Vikings, they might be laughable in some way. We shot them from low angles with wide lenses, and you don’t get to see their faces very much. It’s a bit more ominous if you can’t really make out who’s beneath the helmet.” However, as seasoned actor Clancy Brown brought more and more dramatic pith to the role of Gunnar, the Viking leader, Nispel began to remove the actor’s helmet a bit. Regarding these threatening characters, Pearl says he eventually began to “round them out with light. We play with a lot with light and shadow on all of our characters, but there’s a little less light and a little more shadow on the Vikings.” Shadowy faces proved to be another practical benefit, as Pearl, forced to light a series of complex daytime tableaux while darkness descended, found himself creating a day look inside an artificial bank of fog. In such cases, he says, “it’s quite common to put big lights up on Condors to light big areas, [but] we were in some places where we couldn’t even use Condors. I think we’ve been pretty successful at creating a daylight look in nighttime situations. A lot of scenes set in the day, maybe one-third, were actually shot at night. We had a very tight schedule in terms of the number of setups and the scope of the project. The movie’s big, there’s a lot of action in it, and Marcus shoots at a very fast pace.” Creating a sizable backdrop that would play as daytime, says Pearl, “was about placing big lights far back. We use a lot of smoke in the movie to diffuse the light. But the thing is, when you’re really in daylight, there’s light as far as you can see. At night, there’s only light as far
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as you provide light. So you have to create some sort of an end to the set. Basically, we’ve done that by backlighting the smoke. You can’t see beyond that, so it creates a false sense of infinity.” Another homemade aspect of the film, so to speak, was the signature desaturation. “We’ll get a look for this film that would be very hard to achieve any other way,” says Pearl. “There are other ways to desaturate film, like the bleach bypass we did on the Chainsaw remake. But on this film, we’ve been able to go beyond that. That’s one of the advantages of using 3-perf Super 35mm [2.35:1]. There’s an old joke that in filmmaking there’s a triangle of ‘good, fast and cheap,’ and you can only ever have two of them. But with Super 35’s larger negative area, you get the ‘good,’ shooting 3-perf answers to ‘cheap,’ and running at 67.5 feet per minute, as opposed to 90, necessitates fewer reloads, which, over a 51day schedule, helps out on ‘fast.’ It allows you to shoot faster film, and it allows you to push in developing if you need to. I basically use just a little overexposure all the time because I think that results in a better product when we’re doing the final grading; you can bring [your exposure] down, but if you bring it up, it can get grainy and noisy. “We mainly shot with zooms, using the Panavision Primo 17.575mm on the A camera and the Primo 25-275mm on the B camera. We also carried a set of Primo primes ranging from 14mm to 150mm. Marcus likes to use the optical dynamics of the wide end of the 4:1 zoom to create dolly masters.” Although the production was light on its feet, budget constraints and the awkward locations led Pearl to use three cameras for the battle scenes. “Much of the film was shot off-speed, sometimes 6 fps for 6 fps, but more frequently we overcranked. Due to the frequently
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Vikings on the Warpath Longtime collaborators Nispel (left) and Pearl amidst some of the production’s 2,900 storyboards.
inclement weather, my gaffer urged me to go with the more reliable magnetic HMI ballasts.” At one point, the threat of losing a day’s work forced Pearl to
come up with a solution that may prove useful to other filmmakers. The situation arose from a pretty standard scenario: “We occasionally used shutter angles to compensate
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for illegal HMI speeds, which is a practical technique up to 60 fps. While we were shooting a flashback to the massacre that took place when our hero was still a young boy, one camera was mistakenly set at 80 fps, which is neither a legal nor shutter-fixable speed. I called the telecine suite at Technicolor Vancouver, where they were doing the dailies, and asked them to send me a DVD so I could view the problem. Sure enough, the footage flickered.” Pearl realized that that if he separated the footage into odd and even frame numbers, “what I had was actually two sets of 40-fps takes at a 90-degree shutter, one being the odd-numbered frames and the other being the even-numbered frames. I put the DVD into my Mac Powerbook and viewed the flickering shot. Then, remembering that the DVD software allowed for 2x
viewing, I checked the shot at double speed and there was no flicker.” Pearl convinced the colorist to run his telecine machine at exactly double speed. “To everyone’s surprise, there was no flicker when the footage was run at 48 fps. In the end, we simply used every other frame, resulting in a flawless 40-fps shot that’s featured in the film and the trailer. I’ve since wondered how many millions of dollars of reshoots could have been saved by other productions over the years with this method.” As the mountain-lion shot is captured (it would later wind up on the cutting-room floor), the camera crews reunite for one last, arduous shot. A prone Urban mounts and “rides” a bucking but stationary sled while a wind machine, simulating the foul weather that had earlier sent real snow and freezing rain down, blows prop snow into his
face. With that shot, it’s finally time to pack up, but not before Brown shrugs off his helmet one last time to say, in his actor’s baritone, that he’s thankful for how the crew has stepped up: “This has been a very difficult challenge, and I’ve got 20 years to tell me that’s it’s the toughest I’ve seen. What you guys have done is unbelievable. You’re awesome. Give yourselves a hand.” Nispel clutches the actor and thanks him, and when Pearl takes a moment with Brown, Nispel cites an example of Pearl’s exemplary work on the show. “The climactic sequence plays against this big rock wall, and for timing reasons we had to shoot in the daytime but still keep this crushed [night] look. So Daniel said, ‘Look, if the sun comes out, I’ll just put some blacks up and we’ll deal with it.’ But then, while we were shooting the sequence over 10 days, the sun came and went, and there
was rain, then no rain. It was like four different movies, you know? Daniel’s work blows me away all the time, but what blew me away this time was that he could balance it. When you watch that footage now, you have no idea what the differences were.” ■
TECHNICAL SPECS Super 35mm 2.35:1 (3-perf) Panaflex Platinum, Millennium XL; Arri 435 Primo lenses Kodak Vision2 500T 5218 Digital Intermediate
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A Call for
Digital Printer Lights A cinematographer’s suggestions for better, more precise image control in the digital age. by Richard P. Crudo, ASC
ne of the most frustrating obstacles that continue to plague cinematographers in this hybrid era is the absence of a way to accurately and consistently dictate the look of our work during film-to-digital transfer of our dailies. For decades, those of us shooting for theatrical release have used the Hazeltine printer light as a simple, consistent measure of what we’ve put on the negative, both technically and creatively. With nothing comparable to call upon in the telecine suite, we find that despite all best efforts, we’re not just flying blind, we’re working without a net. Every time out it’s a new adventure, and the results are never precise. Right now, short of sitting at the colorist’s elbow, there exists no industry-wide method for us to properly judge what we’re doing
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digitally, let alone protect our vision. Fair or not, a lot of what we do is judged by an unforgiving “first impressions are lasting impressions” ethic. With print dailies now the exception rather than the rule, a large portion of our time is spent reassuring nervous directors and producers that the movie won’t ultimately look the way it does in the electronic dailies. Through the application of existing technology, however, it’s now possible for us to quickly and easily regain full control over our work. What follows is a step-by-step analysis of why and how we should do it. On the Print Side: The Genius of the Hazeltine The Hazeltine console is an analyzer used for determining what
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grade of color and density should be applied to the printing of a distinct length of negative. Hazeltine workflow begins with a basic calibration tailored to the demands of a particular emulsion or desired effect as measured against the laboratory’s standard practices. Drawing from a lab roll of up to 2,000', a color timer scrolls the developed film across a scanning head, stopping to address a single still frame from each shot that has been executed by the cinematographer. Simultaneously, a positive representation of that negative image is relayed to an onboard cathode-ray tube. Also built into the console and subject to the additive system are three separate dials, one governing the amount of red (R) that will
make up the image, one governing the amount of green (G) and one governing the amount of blue (B). Each of these dials is incrementally marked to render a measurement of 1 point through 50 points. A fourth dial governs overall density, also designated to a scale of 1 through 50 points. Working by virtue of an experienced eye or from the cinematographer’s written or verbal instructions, the timer refers to the CRT’s positive still-picture representation of the negative frame and uses these density and R-G-B controls to “dial in” an acceptable image. Under clinical conditions, for example, a midrange R-G-B Hazeltine setting (the printer light) for a properly exposed and developed negative would be 25-25-25. What this means on a practical level is that a sunny day exterior will look “normal” when given that specific amount of red, green, blue and density. In other words, when projected onscreen, the sky will appear blue, grass will appear green, the brightness level will replicate that of a clear day, and so on. Keep in mind that the success of color timing (noted, as always, in the subjective quality of the resulting print) is wholly subservient to the potential or limitation set by the combination of exposure and the lab’s processing controls. Nonetheless, a certain amount of latitude is inherent to the system’s design. Variations in color can be realized by shifting the R-G-B printer light values up or down, either individually or in combination within the established 50-point range. On the other hand, density corrections are generally made in an amount that is identical across the board. Thus, equally increasing the value of the overall printer light will result in a darker print; decreasing it will render a lighter print. It is also important to note that density as
measured in printer points has a direct relationship to exposure at the lens. For example, in most labs, 8 points of density on the Hazeltine represents the equivalent of 1 T-stop of density during actual exposure of the action on set. Fractional modifications apply in kind. The complete catalog of printer-light information (as assigned to each shot by the timer) is ultimately relayed by computer to the contact printer in order to create the positive. During the screening of dailies, a hard copy of this information is delivered to the cinematographer for reference and approval.
Through the application of existing technology, it’s now possible for us to quickly and easily regain full control over our work. Hazeltine Advantages a.has predictable, quantifiably repeatable results b.enables exact communication among many different parties c. provides the option of removing the timer’s opinion from the process d.printer lights help determine/personalize precise film-speed rating e. makes anomalies easy to isolate/correct f. time-tested, established standard
g.simple, reliable, easy to use h.6-stop range of correction i. printer lights tell all you need to know about color, density and lab controls Hazeltine Limitations a.no immediate feedback b.lack of secondary correction c. no gamma, gain, lift, luminance or chroma control d.corrections are general; no Power Windows or specific treatments available Although it’s considered somewhat primitive in certain quarters, the Hazeltine remains a standard part of the process by which photochemically based projects marked for theatrical release are printed. Don’t be misled by complaints about a mature technology. The simple three-number coordinate it generates empowers cinematographers to control the final appearance of their images with boldness and exactitude. The One-Light Print The use of a single, predetermined set of Hazeltine numbers takes the guesswork out of the lab’s dailies-printing protocol and places total control of the film’s look where it belongs: in the hands of the cinematographer. Each night, dailies timers scroll an incredible amount of negative through their Hazeltines. These tens of thousands of feet are culled from a wide range of productions shot under a variety of circumstances. Very often, the timer’s only guidance in determining what information gets sent to the contact printer is a barely legible scrawl at the bottom of a camera report: print cool … print warm … day for night … dawn effect, and so on. Though lab technicians can be surprisingly good at extracting meaning from the indefinable, using a American Cinematographer 71
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A Call for Digital Printer Lights single printer-light setting (arrived at through the cinematographer’s own testing and choosing) eliminates the problems caused by relying on vague, highly personal and subjective written or verbal descriptions. In addition, working in this manner allows the cinematographer to introduce any amount of variation in color and density to the image in a quantifiable and repeatable way. Whether these changes are effected through filtration used on the lens, gels over the lamps, or a well-considered shift in the printer light is a matter of taste and experience. Assuming the cinematographer’s working method and the lab’s chemistry are both up to code, the immediate payoff from using a single printer light is a day-to-day image consistency on par with that of the still photographer’s vaunted “previsualization.” For the long term, answer- and release-printing procedures are much simpler affairs because corrections to color and density become a matter of finetuning rather than a complete rebalancing of the entire film. But remember that the onelight print designated by the cinematographer’s choice is markedly different in concept from what dailies personnel commonly refer to using the same words. Left to its own devices, any lab can deliver a one-light print every day. The difference is that because the dailies timer is making color and density decisions using his or her judgment, the lab’s version will inevitably change its R-G-B Hazeltine values from negative roll to negative roll, or even among different shots and setups within the same roll. The printer light that ultimately results from the cinematographer’s testing procedure is something peculiar to that cinematographer, and is meant for use in printing negative from situations that match the lighting conditions under which the test was
performed. Thus, it is possible — indeed preferable — to shoot an entire feature film on the same printer light. That said, it is also viable to establish printer lights for defined situations or effects, i.e., day/exterior, night/exterior, night/interior, etc. When that is done, the positive looks exactly the way the cinematographer wants it to
We best realize our digitally transferred images only when we’re able to provide immediate guidance in the telecine suite. look, not the way the Hazeltine timer (or anyone else, for that matter) interprets it to look. A detailed explanation of the procedure used to determine a specific printer light for dailies can be found in the eighth edition of the American Cinematographer Manual, in the chapter “Finding Your Own Printer Light” (pp. 112-120). On the Digital Side An industry-wide equivalent of the Hazeltine printer light, an ironclad indicator of both technical standards and specific artistic vision, does not currently exist in any form in the electronic realm. The rationale for developing this capability is as follows: The Hazeltine process gives us the option of excluding the arbitrary judgment of the timer in rendering the look of our dailies. The film-to-digital process creates a barrier by requiring the colorist to
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make independent creative decisions. This is no knock on colorists. They are a necessary part of our process, and every one I’ve known has done his or her job amazingly well. But the fact remains that we best realize our digitally transferred images only when we’re able to provide immediate guidance while physically present in the telecine suite. Unfortunately, this can’t always be the case. I also know that many cinematographers are satisfied by their long-term relationships with specific timers and colorists. During the finishing stages of a show, the input of a talented timer or colorist provides an indispensable contribution that goes a long way toward making us all look like heroes. However, to a great degree, a sacrifice of control is inherent to what goes on in the digital suite. An Example, Part 1 Rather than restate the familiar film-to-digital workflow, a simple but disturbingly common scenario illustrates my point: You compose, light and expose a shot of your lead actress for a not-quite-silhouette effect in which she is kept in the dark, but only so dark that you’ll still be able to see her eyes onscreen. Technical details are as follows: Key exposure at the lens: T2.8 Backlight: +1 stop Front fill: -2 stops Printer light: 29-31-26 The next day, you view the print of this shot in dailies, rendered at the very same printer light you chose during preproduction testing (29-31-26). The lead actress is indeed dark, and her eyes are definitely readable. The result is exactly what you intended. Later, though, it’s an entirely different story in the digital dailies. Despite regular and vigorous com-
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A Call for Digital Printer Lights munication, the colorist was ultimately forced to make a decision that he thought would suit your eye. This choice is not necessarily a bad one, it’s just not your own. And the colorist’s error is compounded by inefficient or incorrect calibration of the displays used to watch the digital dailies. Thus, the electronic effect is one of no silhouette at all. You see the actress’s eyes, but you see a lot of other things, too. The overall image quality is too bright, flat, washedout and devoid of the strong graphic texture apparent in the print. Now explanations are in order for everyone who was not able to see the projected film in the screening room. An overly simplified hypothetical? Sure. But this sort of thing goes on in one form or another all the time! Every cinematographer has suffered a similar situation; some have even experienced catastrophic consequences. Keep in mind also that this example only addresses the issue of density, a much simpler conceit than that of color. Now transpose the number of places at which the digital-dailies process can go wrong, and you’ll begin to understand the urgency of this argument. The Failure of Current “Solutions” Written descriptions on camera reports … verbal descriptions on minicassettes … Polaroids sent in with the negative … special gray cards … telecine-analysis films … referencing of still stores … computer or Web-based previsualization systems …. Some cinematographers are pleased with what they get from one or another of these techniques for relaying information about their work to the colorist. But each will also admit that these methods fall far short of the consistency that would be enabled by a measured, printer light-like system. Then there’s ease of use. Existing previz systems are cumbersome and intru-
sive to employ on set. They also require a substantial investment of time and effort after wrap if you want to communicate your wishes for the treatment of what you’ve just shot. What could be less complicated than providing a series of numbers that lock in the look from the get-go?
We must create a protocol that delivers the exact same look during each transfer session. An Example, Part 2 After a few weeks of living with the print of the nearly silhouetted actress, the director tells you he’d now prefer to see her in total silhouette. Armed with the knowledge of what your negative and lab can deliver, you dutifully call the timer and order a reprint of the shot. You then designate a pass that is 12 Hazeltine points (11⁄2 lens stops) darker than the original. Witness the math: Original printer light: 29-31-26 New printer light: 41-43-38 Simple, reliable, quantifiably repeatable — and easy to communicate. No visit to the lab is required. In fact, you didn’t even have to see the second version to know you’d get exactly what you wanted. Doing the same thing electronically is impossible. Somehow, calling in from location and saying, “Give me 1⁄16 of an inch more of a spin to the northeast on the density
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tracking ball” just doesn’t have the same precision. Digital Telecine Advantages a. immediate feedback b. an essentially infinite number of choices for the look c. primary and secondary color correction d.ability to effect gamma, gain, lift, luminance and saturation e. easy access to a variety of effects; Power Windows capability Digital Telecine Limitations a. cinematographer must be physically present to get exactly what is desired b. no option to measure color, density, gamma, gain, lift, luminance or saturation c. no precise means of communication with colorist, especially with so many choices at hand You can see that by using the Hazeltine theory as a model, it’s imperative that we develop and implement the equivalent of a digital printer light (DPL) on the electronic side. The Proposal The effort to meet this demand needs to unfold in an orderly fashion according to a practical and achievable design. First, we must create a way to calibrate the entire digital workflow within a universally interoperable color space. This is an issue of overriding importance not just for cinematographers, but for everyone in the industry; nevertheless, its absence at this moment is no obstacle to the development and implementation of a DPL capability. Second, working within this arena, we must create a way to precisely measure what R, G, B, C, M, Y, gamma, gain, lift, luminance and
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chroma are doing at any point during the digital transfer process. These numbers will represent the DPL. Third, we must create a protocol that delivers the exact same look during each transfer session within a given facility simply by setting the telecine controls to the chosen coordinates, just like the Hazeltine. The point system by which numeric value is assigned (the DPL) can be entirely arbitrary in nature and precisely tailored to the working methods of the cinematographer. There are an infinite number of look choices available in digital transfer, but the fact is, we’re interested in only one look at a time. If a certain project demands a variety of textures to be applied over different scenes or sequences, then a variety of DPLs can be designated for use — once again, just like the Hazeltine. Furthermore, the R, G, B, C, M and Y coordinates must be set up to track directly with the lab’s Hazeltine printer light. In other words, a 2-point increase in blue on the Spirit or the da Vinci must have the same effect as adding 2 points of blue to the print. In keeping with this, software must be designed to detect and compensate for any drift or deviation from the “norm” anywhere in the digital transfer system. Because this norm is established by the cinematographer during preproduction testing, what’s most important is what the cinematographer actually sees on the display. After choosing a specific look or looks, consistency must be guaranteed. Fourth, we must create a method by which to record all relevant negative and transfer information as metadata. This road map must then follow a project from inception to completion and should include reference to any changes made to the image during postproduction as well. In doing so, it will
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A Call for Digital Printer Lights for all time provide a record of the cinematographer’s original intent. Ideally, a universally interoperable color space within the digital workflow should apply from image creation through image delivery, but its development represents an enormous challenge. Although a solution is most certainly within our reach, this proposal accepts a system of calibration unique to the post facility in which the cinematographer happens to be working. Don’t forget, the primary application of the DPL is for electronic dailies. With that, each production is essentially a “one-time-only” affair whose baseline measurements, whatever they may be, are, in effect, solely for that specific project in that specific facility. For example, a cinematographer wraps Movie A on Friday and returns to the same facility on Monday morning to start anew with Movie B. Because Movie
B calls for an entirely different visual texture, fresh tests and calibrations will be needed in order to find the DPL that delivers this new look.
Tell us what the machinery is doing at any given instant, and let us measure it so we can repeat its effect. The DPL in Practice After arriving at a desired look or looks on film during prep, the same test negative is brought to the digital facility for the next step.
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Utilizing the services of a talented colorist, the cinematographer works to find the appropriate digital look or looks. When satisfied, the cinematographer makes note of the relevant R, G, B, C, M, Y, gamma, gain, lift, luminance and chroma settings on the transfer console; these figures make up the DPL. At the end of each working day during production, the camera assistant enters these DPL numbers on the camera report (along with the Hazeltine printer lights for the print side, if print is involved). The colorist receives the camera report at the digital facility and sets the console controls to these exact coordinates. Then the negative is scrolled through the scanner, and the electronic dailies are timed precisely to the cinematographer’s directions.
Further Advantages 1. A practical DPL will for the first time qualify electronic dailies to give meaningful information to the cinematographer. The concurrent use of a single Hazeltine printer light with a single DPL will automatically corroborate what’s seen onscreen in both the digital and film domains. Granted, there is an innate difference between the two mediums that’s unlikely to be bridged. But cinematographers long ago mastered the internal computations and adjustments of the eye needed to make substantive judgments about different forms of image creation and delivery. 2. As stated earlier, today’s digital transfer can render remarkable images from all but the most grievously deformed negatives. But currently, on productions that do not print their dailies, the cine-
matographer is literally in the dark in this respect.“Is my exposure good or bad?” There’s no way to know. Often, mistakes don’t show up until the release-printing stage, at which point it’s too late to remedy any problems. In helping cure this infuriating problem, it’s ironic that the DPL may in some cases render the need to see a print superfluous. 3. Ridiculously long hours and tight schedules mitigate against all but the most superficial participation in the transfer process for the television cinematographer. It’s easy to see how the DPL will help solve that dilemma. Just having the ability to communicate in a language that means the same thing at all times to all parties will represent a huge step forward on that front.
that we’ve already got the rocket that goes to the moon. What we need technicians to do is merely install a speedometer. Tell us what the machinery is doing at any given instant, and let us measure it so that we can repeat its effect. Believe me, this can be done. Be on the lookout for Part 2 of this article, in which ASC President Daryn Okada will recount his real-world experience with a prototype DPL system. ■
Looking Ahead Take a quick look around any digital suite, and you’ll recognize
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Short Takes Hermès and TCM Celebrate Short Films by Elina Shatkin his experience as a documentary filmmaker to make a short about his Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother and their shared passion for classic movies; Van Peebles took a page from his own life by casting his children in Baadasssss Grandkids!, a playful, mock trailer for his feature Baadasssss! (see AC May ’04); and Dunne, in his as-yet-untitled mockumentary, explores what might have happened to the executive who turned down Steven Spielberg’s request to use M&Ms in E.T. Following are details about three other productions, Merhige’s The Din of Celestial Birds, Sweeney’s In the Eye Abides the Heart, and Sigismondi’s Postmortem Bliss.
Above: Three frames from the experimental short The Din of Celestial Birds, directed and shot by E. Elias Merhige (right).
ilmmaking, like politics, often makes strange bedfellows, and evidence of this is Behind the Camera: The Shorts Circuit, a slate of short films jointly sponsored by luxury-goods manufacturer Hermès and broadcaster Turner Classic Movies. This mini-festival, which begins airing on TCM on Sept. 15, features classic short films by Martin Scorsese, Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch, Roman Polanski, Stanley Kubrick, François Truffaut and Yasujiro Ozu, as well as six new shorts directed by Griffin Dunne, Peter Gilbert, E. Elias Merhige, Floria Sigismondi, Mary Sweeney and Mario Van Peebles. For the new films, Gilbert drew on
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The Din of Celestial Birds Merhige drew on his early feature Begotten, a wordless depiction of humanity’s creation, for The Din of Celestial Birds, which he photographed as well as directed. “When I originally conceived Begotten, it had two other parts, and Din is part of a preamble that takes on the role of the creation myth,” explains Merhige. Featuring no dialogue and shot entirely with miniatures, the film was an attempt to create “a silent film from the future,” one that would allow Merhige to utilize the extreme polarities of technology, from the earliest cinema cameras to modernday software. “I used almost every kind of format in the making of this piece,” says Merhige. His equipment included a No. 1A Folding Pocket Kodak camera from 1903, a Hasselblad 501 medium-format still camera, an old 35mm Mitchell rackover camera, 16mm Bolex and Arri-S cameras, a Leica M-series microscope adapted for use with an Arri-S camera, and a Sony HDR-FX1 high-definition MiniDV camcorder.
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The Model 1A yields a negative that’s about 4"x5", but film is no longer made for it, so Merhige changed the sprocket wheels to match the perforations on 120 medium-format film and shot with Kodak Portra 400NC/400VC and Portra 800. Another challenge with the camera was the extensive light leakage, “which was sometimes good and sometimes not so good,” says Merhige. “We had to black out areas in the back of the camera with tape and black cloth.” To shoot the miniatures, Merhige used still photography in a stop-motion manner, mounting the Model 1A to an aluminum rack and rail system that allowed him to hold the camera perfectly still yet move it horizontally or vertically down to the precise millimeter. “I could create the light changes I wanted by moving the camera and changing the light slowly and carefully with each shot.” He also used chemical reactions to create some of the more celestial effects, including portions of cloud vortices and the “birthing of worlds” section of the film. Though he won’t reveal the details, Merhige says these chemical reactions are created in a small glass dish and lit from behind or underneath with the camera looking down into the reaction.
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Director Mary Sweeney (standing) poses with the stars of In the Eye Abides the Heart, Alejandra Lopez Yasky and Juan Minujin.
For the 16mm and 35mm cinematography, Merhige used a standard complement of Schneider and Zeiss lenses, as well as two lenses he designed himself. Both of the latter were uncoated and custom-made by a glass blower in Santa Cruz, California. “One [of these lenses] creates a feeling of looking through an endless tunnel,” says Merhige. “It leaves everything in the center very crisp, while everything on the outer edges becomes softer and softer in gradations. The other lens has more of an anamorphic feel; you can rotate it, and as you do, the world takes on this pliant quality, like taffy, and looks as though it’s being pulled apart.” To achieve the film’s high-contrast black-and-white look, Merhige shot the 16mm and 35mm footage on Kodak Vision 200T (5274/7274) and Vision 500T (5279/7279), then made a series of prints and desaturated them so they would be generations away from the original negative. Merhige shot with a final aspect ratio of 2.35:1 in mind, composing images that could be blown up or scaled down to conform to the format. The results were mostly composited on an Oxberry optical printer, with additional digital compositing done on a software application developed specifically for the film by Miguel P. Eckstein, who studies vision and image perception at the University of CaliforniaSanta Barbara. Eckstein wrote several algorithms that allowed Merhige and his team to take a series of stills and stitch them together into a single file, which could then be treated as one layer in the overall composite. “Some layers of compositing were modified in the digital realm, which helped a great deal in smoothing out the flow of the visual narrative,” says Merhige. “Scenes were later stitched together digitally to help create one seamless, flowing world/film.” Despite the extensive manipulation of formats and technologies, Merhige wanted Din of Celestial Birds to be a truly handcrafted film. “It was really about getting into the physical nature of cinema as it has transformed and evolved. I believe film can create a philosophical dialogue about the macrocosmic and
microcosmic archaelogy of perception as a kind of hologram, taking us beyond the limits of the possibilities of what we can see.”
In the Eye Abides the Heart Sweeney’s name has appeared in the credits of many films directed by David Lynch, her one-time romantic and creative collaborator. During their partnership, Sweeney produced and edited several of Lynch’s features, including Lost Highway, The Straight Story and Mulholland Dr. For her directoring debut, In the Eye Abides the Heart, Sweeney chose to explore the timeless essence of romantic love. The idea came to her when she heard the piece of music that gives the film its title. The original tune was translated from German into English by Stephen Foster in 1851. Sweeney recruited Steve Marker of the band Garbage to update the music, and Marker convinced lead singer Shirley Manson to provide vocals for the new arrangement. The chance to make the film dropped into Sweeney’s lap just as she was preparing to serve as a judge for the Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival. Friends in the city connected her with a local production company, and Sweeney decided she would shoot the film there. During the festival, she spent her mornings attend-
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ing screenings and her afternoons at Aqua Films, where she prepared for production. Immediately after the festival, she shot for two days, working with Argentinian cinematographer Marcelo Lavintman, ADF, who has shot numerous music videos, documentaries and features since he graduated from Universidad del Cine in 1994. In the Eye Abides the Heart, which takes place entirely outdoors and was shot in black-and-white, is divided into two sections, each of which presents a young couple in love. One is set in the early 1900s, and the other unfolds in modern times. “I set the movie in two different periods because the lyrics of the song to me express an idea that is timeless,” says Sweeney. “And I wanted the whole movie to be silent because I wanted to rely on images to tell the story.” “Mary wanted the sequence set in the past to look like a movie from that period, with exaggerated contrast and without camera movement,” says Lavintman. “For the present-day story, we agreed on less contrast, a more modern kind of diffusion, and putting the camera on a Steadicam.” To further differentiate the two sections, the section set in the past was shot at an aspect ratio of 1.33:1, whereas the present-day section was shot at 1.78:1. “I knew the first half of the film would have a 1.33:1 ratio, so we framed everything to make sure I had room at the edges to cut it off and put in a mask that would replicate
TLFeBOOK
In Postmortem Bliss, a 15-yearold boy (Nick Fowler) asks himself some existential questions.
an old-time vignette,” says Sweeney, who also edited the film. Because of budget constraints, Sweeney and Lavintman shot on highdefinition (HD) video, using a Sony HDW-F900 and a Cine Style F 5/50 lens. Lavintman manipulated the f-stop so the modern segment had more depth of field and the historical segment had
less. Aside from a polarizer for a few shots containing skies, Lavintman used no filtration for the first portion of the film. For the second portion, he used Tiffen Soft/FX filters in varying gradations. The black-and-white look was achieved during production by modifying the camera’s RGB settings. Lavintman details, “[HD operator] Rino Pravato and I set the luminance by dropping down the blue, as if I had used a yellow filter, and dropping the green a little to control the leaves lit by the hard sun. Then we set the chrominance at -99, the minimum, so we could obtain a black-and-white that kept the luminance setting.” Much of the rest of the look can be credited to luck, according to Sweeney. “Everything we did to the image — a little bit of blossoming in the whites, flickering the image, a tiny bit of scratching — was done in post,” says Sweeney. “The fact that the wind was blowing and the leaves were golden was just a gift from God.”
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Postmortem Bliss For music-video director Floria Sigismondi, Postmortem Bliss was an opportunity to explore adolescent angst. Based on a script by her husband, Lillian Berlin, the film explores the interior landscape of a 15-year-old boy who questions the nature of his existence, which is predicated on prescribed medications. “I wanted the film to have a very printed look, quite pushed and little gritty,” says the director. “And [I felt] the kid should look greasy and sweaty, like he’s been up all night.” To achieve this feel, she worked with cinematographer Nicola Pecorini, with whom she had collaborated on the Fiona Apple video “O’ Sailor.” “Floria was very clear from the beginning that she wanted the piece to look very real, very normal,” says Pecorini. “My main concern was to find a way to allow her as much time as possible to deal with the performance.” Having such a young actor and such a difficult script required Pecorini and his crew to maximize their time; the cinematographer swears
the crew never spent more than 10 minutes turning around or changing shots during the one-day production. Shooting in a friend’s apartment in the Silverlake area of Los Angeles, Pecorini made the most of the location. “It was a small house with very low ceilings and very little room both inside and outside,” he says. “We lit everything from the outside using 12-lights with very narrow spots corrected with 1⁄2 CTB and going through full or half diffusion.” Sigismondi and Pecorini agreed that the camera should always be moving to allow for quick repositioning and to transmit the “floating” feeling that the drug Ritalin can induce. They wanted Postmortem Bliss to have a handheld feel, but worried that such a style would be too distracting. Instead, they chose to shoot with an Aerocrane fitted with a Weaver Steadman three-axis head and mounted on a Chapman PeeWee dolly. “It’s the same configuration I used on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas [AC May ‘98] and Tideland,” says Pecorini, who collaborates
regularly with director Terry Gilliam. Shooting in Super 16mm, Pecorini used Kodak Vision2 7218, which he rated “by the book” at 500 ASA. He knew that every minute would make a difference, so he dropped his resistance to using zoom lenses and shot mostly with a Canon 7mm-63mm T.2.8 zoom mounted on an Arri 16SR-3. (He also used a Canon telephoto lens and a Century prime lens.) On of the film’s most striking moments is an underwater segment that shows the protagonist floating in a pool. The tight budget and schedule did not allow for underwater housings, so Sigismondi used a small, pre-fab paddling pool that was set up on the curb outside the house. Old linoleum was laid on the bottom of the pool, a backdrop that matched the color of the apartment was placed in the water at the back of the pool, and props from the apartment were placed in the pool to make it look as though the bedroom was filling with water. Protected by a splash
Director Floria Sigismondi checks an image with cinematographer Nicola Pecorini.
box from Clairmont Cameras, the camera was placed at the bottom of the pool and tilted up to catch reflections from the surface, creating an unexpected, mirror-like effect. “As we were waiting while the camera was being loaded, we caught a shot of the actor’s feet and legs on the top, and it was such an interesting shot I decided to use it,” says Sigismondi. “I love to have things as scripted as possible, and then I look for magic to happen.” ■
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Top: Oblivious to a spectacular view of Paris, tough-as-nails police detective Barthélémy Karas ponders the case at hand in Renaissance. Bottom: Bislane (left) discusses her sister’s disappearance with a mutual acquaintance, Dmitri.
Paris Circa 2054 by John Pavlus Although widely employed in video games, the animation technique known as motion-capture (mo-cap for short) has had relatively little exposure in feature filmmaking. The technology blurs the line between production and post, as well as that between live-action filmmaking and traditional animation, by “capturing” real-time information about an actor’s movements in three dimensions and then mapping that data onto a computer-animated character. The thriller Renaissance, which is set in Paris in 2054 and will open in U.S. theaters
this month, tries to push the technology in new directions. Renaissance pits a hardboiled cop named Karas (voiced by Daniel Craig) against a vast corporate conspiracy he can only vaguely fathom. When a brilliant young scientist named Ilone is kidnapped, her employer, the Avalon Corp., sends Karas on the hunt. But what begins as a routine missing-person case soon deepens into a morass of conflicting loyalties and doublecrosses over nothing less than the possibility of attaining eternal life. Matching the dark plot is a starkly graphic look that uses animated chiaroscuro “lighting” to split everything onscreen into pools of inky black and
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shards of sharp white, with almost no gray in between. The filmmakers intentionally sidestepped the issue of photorealism; Renaissance instead looks like a cyberpunk crime comic come to life, offering stylized animation, dizzyingly detailed Parisian backgrounds, and fluidly realistic performances by digital characters. The visuals the filmmakers had in mind took nearly a decade to realize. Director Christian Volckman started developing the project in 1998 with Marc Miance, a 23-year-old who showed him a short test of the distinctive chiaroscuro look at an animation festival both men had entered. Over the next six years of fundraising, testing and script-writing, Miance launched his own animation company, Attitude Studio, to meet the production’s escalating technical demands, which included 90 virtual Parisian sets, more than 100 characters, and 200 dynamic props and accessories ranging “from the small ashtray that sits on the Avalon boss’s desk to all the moving vehicles,” according to Volckman. Production began in 2004 and took more than a year, although the mo-
Renaissance frame grabs courtesy of Miramax Films.
Post Focus
TLFeBOOK
Top: Karas pursues a suspect on the city’s multilevel streets. Bottom: Bislane remembers her sister, Ilona, a promising scientist of considerable ambition.
cap workflow dissolves many of the traditional distinctions between production and post. “It’s very complex because you have all the problems normally expected on a 2-D animated feature, all the problems of a 3-D animated film, and all the problems of a live-action cast, such as post syncing,” says Volckman. “It’s a huge amount of work, and sometimes you go nuts.” For one thing, the work of framing shots and editing them together proceeded virtually in tandem on Renaissance, “which is bizarre because it’s usually the other way around,” says the director. “Normally in live action, once it’s shot, it’s all over. You go to the editing room, and if you’re missing anything, you’re screwed. But with mocap, it’s reversed. You still have to think
of the framing you want, but when you’re with the actor you mainly work together to anticipate the [shots], because only later, in editing, do you choose exactly what your coverage is. If you look at the cut of the scene and think you’re missing a necessary closeup, you just go back into the mo-cap machine that has the action recorded in a 3-D volume and say to your collaborator, ‘Can you make a close-up of her at this moment?’ The process is actually very organic.” Volckman’s collaborator in this process was Henri Zaitoun, whose title was digital camera supervisor. Zaitoun’s post duties often paralleled those of a traditional camera operator, except his “camera” was a weightless cube in virtual space that was moved with a
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mouse instead of a dolly or geared head. “We could play each scene from this camera’s point of view and follow the action in real time with our mouse,” explains Zaitoun. “It was really fun to do, just like following actors on a set with a real camera. The camera object in the volume also has a focal-view setting that we could use to zoom in or out, and we even created our own plugins to approximate handheld-style movement. We usually programmed our camera moves according to an animatic, but we could use the mouse to modify the initial movement in real time and record it as a different take.” Zaitoun’s team used a program called Motion Builder to execute these realtime manipulations. Volckman worked closely with
Zaitoun and editor Pascal Tosi during this stage, creating shots scene by scene in chronological order to match a detailed animatic, and also modifying scenes or adding new shots when necessary to improve the flow of the edit. “The only constraint you have is time,” says the director. “You can edit and frame your film for 10 years because you can always go back and try infinite options. Someone like John Woo would probably freak out, because he would always be able to create more and more coverage of a single scene.” Zaitoun agrees, adding that most of the time, the Renaissance team exercised the kind of discipline most filmmakers do in choosing shots. “For some simple scenes, we just created two or three shots that were edited together immediately, but for others that were more complex, we often made 100-150 different shots. When the editor saw everything, he was really … well, impressed!” Although the filmmakers could theoretically generate an endless amount of coverage, they did only have one 3-D mo-cap take — that is, one set of raw data captured from the actors’ movements — to draw upon for framing each scene. “In that sense, it’s similar to live-action because you can’t go back and reshoot the actors’ literal movements,” explains Volckman. “But for a sense of rhythm and finding the right shots for the right moment, it’s great.” Preceding the six-month process of framing and editing Renaissance were three months of mo-cap work that supplied the raw material for the animated performances. Every human action in the film, ranging from a simple conversation on a couch to an elaborate gun battle in Avalon’s headquarters, was performed by the film’s cast on a 6x10-meter square surrounded by a circular array of 24 digital-video cameras. The actors all wore closefitting jumpsuits studded with dozens of mo-cap sensors, each of which corresponded to a respective point mirrored in the 3-D virtual space. “The cameras were all shooting in infrared, so they 87
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only registered those markers on the actors’ bodies,” says Volckman. “They didn’t see anything else, so in the mocap footage, you only see these dots in space flying around corresponding to the actors’ body movements. That makes it hard, in a way, to choose your best takes. Luckily, we also had three normal video cameras shooting reference footage at the same time, especially for close-ups.” Because so much of an actor’s performance is in his or her eyes, the Renaissance team decided to create special eyeglasses that held tiny mo-cap cameras that captured the wearer’s eye movements. “The glasses were barely heavier than normal glasses, so the actor could feel at ease,” says Olivier Renourd, Attitude Studio’s technical supervisor. “With the big mo-cap process, you’re trying to establish a position in 3-D space, so you always need at least two cameras to see a given point. But for the eye, you can capture in 2-D space with one camera because the pupil just moves around an essentially flat plane.” This process is what sets mo-cap animation apart from keyframe animation, in which artists build the characters and their body language from scratch. Because real actors are recorded, the characters’ movements become imbued with an extra level of naturalism; it also allows actors some freedom to improvise. “It’s all acted out like a stage play,” says Volckman. “It’s not as though you have to start and stop and break it all into pieces to get all your separate shots just right. It’s more natural and lets the actors get into character better, and once it’s in the box and everyone’s happy, we go to the next scene or sequence. “Then again, the actors don’t have anything physical to help them in the process — no sets, no wardrobe, very few props — so they have to really visualize how the film is going to look,” he continues. “But once you put the right elements in for them to play with, they can do whatever they want or need to do and can improvise a lot. Of course, since this was my first film, I was trying
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to control everything and not go crazy! At some points, you’re asking yourself why you’re doing mo-cap at all when you know that talented animators can do a really good job animating people. But in the end, you see it does make a huge difference when you’re looking for something lifelike and human to get humans to generate it in the first place.” Ironically, the final stages of Renaissance’s post phase hewed closely to a more traditional animation workflow. While the mo-cap rigging supplied the broad strokes of character movement and Zaitoun’s digital camera allowed great flexibility in choosing shots, each edited sequence went back to a team of keyframe animators that added all the fine details to tie these elements together, including facial expressions and hand movements (which weren’t recorded by mo-cap sensors), clothes and props, and the allimportant final rendering, which wrapped the hard black-and-white noir lighting effects around the animated models. “The scenes we worked from were kind of naked, all gray with no lights and no textures,” recalls Zaitoun. “In order to edit it well, we tried to give our rushes an approximation of the final shading in order to avoid some problems that might arise in rendering the movie’s particular graphical style. We tried to anticipate some lighting problems and cheat when necessary. For instance, in one sequence we put a crowd in the dark so some final rendering time could be saved.” Keyframe animation director Pierre Avon supervised these finishing touches, working with a team of 12 Maya artists who received each edited sequence one week after Zaitoun and Tosi had finished it. “We’d start as soon as the editing was approved by Christian so we wouldn’t waste time animating things that would be offscreen,” says Avon. “Except for the eye movements, we created all the facial expressions, lip-sync and hand movements from scratch, using the video reference footage as a guide. But no rotoscoping was done.”
Renaissance was transferred to 35mm by London’s Moving Picture Co., and Technicolor London generated the IN, IP anwer print and overseas release prints. The team agrees that the mo-cap process, though technically arduous, pays off in terms of creative choices. “Because of all this technology, you find that you can’t separate the artistic problems from the technical problems — they’re always blended together,” notes Volckman. “You have to be very present through the whole process, closely concentrating all the time. But once you know how to manage the tools, all that limits you is your own imagination.” AJA’s DPXtoQT Translator Streamlines 2K DPX, Cineon Workflows by Jay Holben Developed by Kodak in 1992, Cineon was designed as an early filmdigitizing system complete with a scanner, drives, workstations, proprietary compositing software and a film recorder. It was intended to be an endto-end solution for 2K and 4K digital film production; the system was first put to the test on the 1993 restoration and rerelease of Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. Although the system in its entirety has long since been rendered obsolete, the Cineon file format has become an industry standard. An RGB bitmap file (extension .cin), Cineon was created to represent the full density range of scanned film images. It is not intended to be a presentation or end format (like JPEG or TIFF), but rather an intermediate format to maintain image information from the film negative through the digital process and back out to the new film negative. The Cineon file assumes a gamma of 1.0 so that any negative can be reproduced on the recorder, retaining the original negative’s gamma. Most of the time, Cineon data is stored in log format, which directly corresponds to the density of the original negative. Each channel (R, G, B) is 10 bits in a 32-bit package (2 bits
are unused). It can accommodate a range of film-frame sizes and resolutions up to VistaVision. The sampling of 1024 values is scaled so that each of the code values from 0-1023 represents a density difference of 0.002, which totals a density range of 2.046 — the equivalent to an exposure range of around 2,570:1, or about 11.3 stops of latitude range. SMPTE developed a “generic” form of the Cineon file format with Digital Picture Exchange, or DPX (extension .dpx). It is nearly identical to Cineon but has more user-friendly header information (metadata). DPX files can often be linear as well as log. The DPX file headers are flexible, allowing variable image headers to accommodate the needs of different media, whereas the Cineon file format is targeted to digital film. These two file formats are the de facto standard for visual-effects work with digitized film files. To present the amount of information necessary, the Cineon or DPX file is very large. Each file represents one frame of scanned negative, and each 2K (2048x1556 pixels Academy frame size) Cineon or DPX file can easily be over 12.5MB per frame. Visual-effects artists typically work with these files on a frame-by-frame basis, or at most on a shot-by-shot basis, and are not necessarily overwhelmed by the volume of files in a sequence. Editors, on the other hand, work with whole sequences of shots on software platforms that cannot deal with a Cineon file sequence with ease. Final Cut Pro cannot import Cineon files at all unless first translated via a third-party program to an FCP recognized format. (However, Avid’s 64-bit-supported DS Nitris can conform and finish using 2K Cineon/DPX files either natively at full resolution or by high-definition proxy, with the ability to switch instantly between the two.) Playing back a sequence in real time with potentially thousands of sequential Cineon or DPX files is incredibly taxing on hard drives, even for the fastest and most robust systems, because 2K DPX or Cineon files can require data-transfer rates of 89
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up to 300MB per second (12.5MB per frame x 24 frames per second). AJA, the maker of Kona video cards, has developed a solution for this problem that is especially aimed at Final Cut Pro editors who need to work with Cineon or DPX files: DPXtoQT Translator. DPXtoQT Translator is a software solution that incorporates a QuickTime (the native working format for Final Cut Pro) “wrapper” around a sequence of Cineon/DPX files to create a QuickTime “reference movie.” This puts the
Cineon/DPX files into QuickTime format without altering the files, compressing them or writing any new information. A reference movie is merely a file of pointers that refer back to the original source material, wherever it is stored. When a reference movie is created, it does not alter the original media files at all; it just “points” the software to where those original files reside and gives the software clues for how to deal with that material. This format was created to make very small QuickTime movies that act like full QuickTime renders, but in a fraction of the file size. The main difference is that the reference movie cannot be separated from the original material (i.e., moved to another system), or the pointers will point to nothing. AJA has capitalized on this concept to create QuickTime reference “wrappers” for bulk Cineon and DPX files in the Macintosh environment. The reference movie can then be imported into an application like Final Cut Pro or
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AJA’s Kona TV and played out to HD or SD monitors simultaneously as an HD crop of the 2K Cineon/DPX material and an SD down-conversion. Without the AJA system, if a Mac editor wants to work with a Cineon (.cin) or DPX (.dpx) file sequence, he has to rely on the effectiveness of the internal graphics card. Most of the time, even with the fastest hard drive, this technique rarely works because the graphics cards simply can’t play back the massive data in real time. Also, many Mac applications use QuickTime exclusively without any way to directly import Cineon or DPX files. (Apple Shake and Adobe After Effects can import native .cin/.dpx files.) The alternative is to work with downconverted proxies rather than the real files, and it adds a considerable amount of time to the workflow to render those proxies. With the QuickTime wrappers, an editor can play 2K Cineon/DPX files directly on the Final Cut Pro timeline. In addition, with the AJA Kona 3 card, the 2K QuickTime reference movie can be
exported directly to a 2K projector for review in full resolution without requiring additional rendering. Utilizing the AJA system with sufficiently fast hard drives and the Kona 3 card, an editor can watch Cineon or DPX files on any available HD or SD monitor — or even both simultaneously — at the full real-time frame rate. In addition, he can create real-time HD crop and SD down-conversion dailies via HD-SDI or SD-SDI outputs and component (or composite) connections from the AJA Kona 3 hardware. For facilities tasked with making SD or HD screener copies of 2K material, this method is sure to be a timesaver. (For PC users, there is less need for QuickTime reference movies because Cineon and DPX files can be imported directly via the Kona’s PC counterpart, the Xena2Ke card, and are seen by PC applications as a single file, as though they are in a sequential series.) The software can also work in reverse, creating a DPX or Cineon file
sequence from a 2K QuickTime movie (QTtoDPX), or it can create a fully rendered QuickTime 2K movie that can be moved away from the original DPX or Cineon files to another system. In all, it’s a more manageable and efficient system of data wrangling. The AJA Kona 3 V2 upgrade brings about the 2K resolution video support. Additionally, Kona 3 V2 will address users’ needs with support for hardware-based 1080-to-720 or 720-to1080 cross-conversion, further streamlining dailies and deliverables creation at broadcast picture quality in real time. 2K telecine to the Kona 3 simultaneously creates 2K DPX files and 2K QuickTime reference movies. Material can then be played out at 2K via HSDL (High-Speed Data Link). Furthermore, Kona 3 V2 allows 2K files to be viewed on HD 1080 24p-supported video monitors, and this 1080 HD playout can also be down-converted to SD in real time. Other new features of Kona 3 V2 include 16-channel embedded digital
audio — allowing for full support of all audio channels on HD tape formats, such as HDCam SR — and 96kHz AES audio. Kona 3 is priced at $2,990, and owners of Kona 3 can download the V2 software from AJA’s Web site at no cost. For more information, visit www.aja.com. New Allies in Post Since our recent report on Creative Bridge’s Mobile Digital Lab & Theater (Post Focus, June ’06), the firm has partnered with Gamma & Density. The two companies recently completed “pre-post” on the independent film Pie & Burger with director of photography Jim O’Keefe and director Clare Sera. Creative Bridge’s Jeff Olm and Brian Gaffney oversaw the 4:4:4 pre-post workflow and delivery of color-corrected dailies using Gamma & Density’s 3cP system. ■
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New Products & Services
In the Contour Reality System, the actor is captured by two arrays of synchronized digital cameras and lit by customized fluorescent lamps that strobe 90 to 120 times per second, beyond the threshold of human perception.
Contour Reality Capture by David E. Williams Computer-animated feature films involve the cinematography disciplines of composition, lighting and angles, and now even depth of field is being used to great effect. However, with rare exceptions, virtual cinematography is a specialty performed by those already working in that sphere, and not one where traditional directors of photography have had much opportunity to bring their talents into play. Unfortunately, asking a cinematographer to stay on as a paid post collaborator on visualeffects-heavy films is an infrequent
request at best. A keen eye for visual aesthetics and storytelling can make the most of the real and virtual filmmaking worlds, but the divide between them is crossed by only the flimsiest of technological and methodological bridges. One is marker-based motion capture, which records the movement of a human subject as a series of dots. Originally developed for applications such as sports medicine, mo-cap precisely tracks human skeletal motion by forming a 3-D stick figure of lines connected between the dots. But any onscreen character must be far more than a moving stick figure, so although mo-cap
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requires actors and a sense of space and timing, the collection of mo-cap data alone is not considered cinematography; instead, it is used as a starting point. But the keyframe-animation process required to flesh that stick figure out into a realistic character is expensive and time consuming. And in the case of creating CG humans, it is a technique that many believe has not realized its full potential. (Film critics often deride the resultant avatars as “lifeless” and “zombie-like.”) However, the Contour Reality Capture System, which was introduced at this year’s Siggraph convention, may not only help bridge the traditional and
Preparing a performer for a Contour capture session requires just a few minutes of phosphorescent makeup application. The FDA-approved phosphorescent makeup can be mixed with base makeup to provide natural skin color.
virtual filmmaking worlds, but also breathe genuine life into “synthespian” performers. The system, a proprietary apparatus developed and now offered by the San Francisco mo-cap studio Mova, employs two synchronized camera systems to simultaneously capture 3-D geometric and full-color visual information of the subject. These two sets of data are later combined to result in a high-definition, volumetric, digital representation of the action that can be later imported, modified, manipulated or retargeted to a CG character using off-the-shelf animation software. “Production tools exist today that give a director complete photorealistic control of every object within the 3-D volume of a scene, including camera position, composition, lighting, characters and props,” says Steve Perlman, founder and CEO of the Palo Alto-based Rearden Companies, which owns and American Cinematographer 93
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Preparing to film with Contour. The custom fluorescent lamps serve to both recharge the phosphorescent makeup and provide dramatic subject lighting.
operates Mova. “But while we have powerful 3-D ‘editing’ tools, what we lack is a practical 3-D ‘camera’ that can shoot a live scene volumetrically with production-level quality. That’s where Contour Reality Capture fits in. It’s a volumetric cinematography system that captures all of the visible surfaces of a scene in 3-D.” Mova was founded in 2004 by Rearden to provide 3-D mo-cap services using its Vicon MX-40 marker-based system, and the company’s credits include the video games The Godfather, From Russia With Love and Eragon. Mova’s sister company, Ice Blink Studios, which Perlman co-founded with Doug Chiang (production designer on The Polar Express), also is closely tied to mo-cap production, having provided visual effects and art direction for Sony Pictures’ Monster House and Warner Bros.’ upcoming Beowulf. The chief architect behind Contour, Perlman is the holder of more than 60 patents pertaining to multimedia and communications technologies.
He first attracted notice as a key researcher at Apple Computer, where he led multimedia initiatives, including the development of QuickTime, in the late 1980s. He is perhaps best known for founding WebTV Networks, which was acquired by Microsoft in 1997 and has since evolved into Microsoft’s IPTV technology. What exactly is “volumetric cinematography?” Perlman explains, “We all got a sneak preview of it in The Matrix, when Trinity [played by CarrieAnn Moss] froze in mid-jump and the camera view spun around her. Despite having a large ring of cameras surrounding Moss, the camera motion was limited to a single path while the entire scene was frozen. Contour allows for the same level of realism achieved in that shot, but with the entire scene in motion, with complete flexibility of camera position, and with full control over lighting and compositing. And if the actress doesn’t quite achieve the desired pose in her jump, you can use Contour to reposition her limbs in 3-D
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during post.” Traditionally, human skeletal dynamics have been recorded and represented in the form of mo-cap data, which is later combined with digital skin, hair and clothing. Although this process is well suited for capturing skeletal motion for CG characters, it captures only the barest clues of the motion of deformable surfaces, such as a human face, where we typically see the finer points of an actor’s performance. Using conventional mo-cap to record the subtleties of a smile or furrowed brow is akin to the actor performing while wrapped in a head-totoe latex suit, with their expressive eyes, fine facial characteristics and nuanced surface textures largely erased. Conversely, Contour instantaneously records an entire human performance — simultaneously capturing skeletal movement as well as high-definition surface physical characteristics in terms of 3-D surface geometry, color and lighting — and literally “imports” this performance into the digital realm, all in
ingenious transportability
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An array of digital cameras captures the actor’s image at 24-120 fps. The cameras are positioned to capture the actor from a variety of angles, enabling determination of the surface geometry with extreme precision.
a single real-time pass. Contour records the image with high-resolution digital cameras, and the subject may be lit for any desired effect — for instance, to match a previously determined background or setting. The cameras can be run from a standard 24 fps up to 120 fps, allowing for the capture of fast action or the creation of slow-motion effects. The geometric
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information is recorded by an array of grayscale digital cameras — no less than two and as many as hundreds — with each photographing the performers from a slightly different angle. The visual information is recorded by a smaller array of color digital cameras — no less than one and as many as dozens — also photographing the performers from a variety of angles.
David Ward/WRITER/DIRECTOR Sleepless in Seattle, The Sting
Contour is used on a light-tight soundstage lit by custom stroboscopic fluorescent lamps that illuminate the subject with white visible lights and black lights that are synced with both camera systems. Typically strobing at 90 times per second, the flashing effect is invisible to the human eye, which perceives the scene as normally lit. The visual-camera shutters open each 1/180th of a second and capture information while the fluorescent lights flash on (these are the “lit frames”). The geometry-camera shutters open each 1/180th of a second while the fluorescent lights flash off and the soundstage is in pitch darkness (the “dark frames”). And what these geometry cameras see in pitch darkness is the most interesting part of the Contour system. A special, FDA-approved, hypoallergenic phosphorescent makeup (similar to the glow-in-the-dark makeup sold in Halloween stores) is applied in random patterns onto everything in the scene that is to be captured, including an actor’s lips and nostrils and right up to the edge of the eyes. Charged during each “lit” frame, the phosphor emits a random-pattern afterglow during the “dark” frames. These patterns are captured by each geometry camera from a different angle and then fed into a small array of computers. The computers correlate the random patterns seen by the cameras from different angles and triangulate between the cameras, producing a 3-D model of every surface visible in the scene during that frame. Anything that is not covered by the phosphorescent coating is not captured. Using 1.3-megapixel cameras, Contour can reconstruct the 3-D surface of a human face with better than submillimeter precision, resulting in a high-resolution 3-D mesh in excess of 100,000 polygons. This is more than enough resolution to pick up the shape and motion of wrinkles and nostril flares. In comparison, the faces in the mo-cap feature Beowulf were captured with fewer than 200 polygons using a marker-based system, and it was then up to a post team to synthetically create
John Badham/DIRECTOR Saturday Night Fever, WarGames Dezso Magyar/ ARTISTIC DIRECTOR No Secrets, Summer
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The five stages of the Contour process: 1) video of a live performance is captured during each “lit” interval; 2) a phosphorescent image is captured during each subsequent “dark” interval; 3) data from the phosphorescent images is used to construct high-resolution 3-D surface geometry of the actor; 4) to provide an onset preview, textured geometry is created by applying the live performance image onto the 3-D surface; 5) finally, a vertex tracking mesh is generated to allow animators and effects artists to retrospectively define the vertices they need to track.
all the details in the faces. Contour’s resolution is so far in excess of what is needed to achieve photo-realistic results that in many applications, lower-resolution meshes (e.g., 1,000-2,000 polygons) are preferable. To this end, Contour offers a feature that allows users to retrospectively select only the points on the face where polygon vertices are required for their specific application, whether it be for high-resolution feature-film use or a video-game character. The system will then produce a lower-resolution mesh that precisely tracks these vertices through the performance from frame to frame. This also allows a single captured performance to be stored as a permanent asset that can be repurposed any number of times, saving both talent and production expenses. The phosphorescent makeup is mostly invisible under normal lighting conditions, so by combining the phosphor with appropriate base makeup, filmmakers can achieve almost natural
skin tones. The performer’s eyes and teeth — not covered by the makeup — can be tracked optically. After a Contour mo-cap shoot, the surface geometry and the visual image are “reconstructed” overnight (each frame currently takes less than 60 seconds to compute), resulting in a highres, full-motion, naturalistic 3-D representation of the subject, which can then be easily manipulated with such animation programs as Autodesk’s Maya, 3ds Max and MotionBuilder, or Avid Softimage’s XSI and Face Robot. “We’ve designed Contour to work with as many tools as possible,” notes Perlman. “In fact, there’s a $250 piece of software called Poser that is used to pose 3-D characters, and we’ve been dropping data right out of Contour and into Poser without a hitch.” During the four-year development of Contour, the use of phosphorescent makeup arose as a novel solution to a distinct dilemma. “We knew we had to have something that could take a
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relatively smooth surface and give us a texture that we could grab hold of and track,” says Perlman. “The hard thing is that we’re often dealing with actresses who invest a lot of time and energy into making their skin perfectly smooth. If it’s perfectly smooth, then there’s no way to determine the shape of the face. So we tried several different things. “We first tried putting black paint on the face and capturing the reflection of light on the surface. But we learned that when you’re dealing with reflected light, each camera is going to see the reflection differently, depending on its point of view of the surface. That’s why marker-based capture uses retroflective markers — they reflect back to the point of the light source. So as the character moves, you see a nice bright spot on the camera because the lights are around the camera lenses. If you use reflection as opposed to retroflection, you get all screwed up, because as the character moves, any highlights at the point of reflection
move, making it look like the face is moving around even if it isn’t. So we couldn’t get reliable results. One solution was to use extremely flat lighting, where you put the subject in a lockdown situation and use reflector boards all around to eliminate highlights. You can get good capture results by doing that, but it’s just not practical when you have actors walking around and you need dramatic lighting. They may sweat and have shiny spots on their faces and so forth.” Perlman and his team then considered using retroreflective paint, “which is used for things like highwaysafety signs. But it’s not safe to apply that stuff to human skin, and also, it doesn’t deform. Retroreflective paint has tiny glass beads in it that reflect light back to the source. First of all, this would be dangerous to ingest or get in your eye, and second, the paints are really rigid once they dry because of the glass beads. We needed something that would stretch and move with the skin. We also tried ultraviolet paints to see if we could get a good capture. It would work in controlled situations, but it wouldn’t work easily and efficiently in a typical production situation. “By that point, we were running Mova, and we were extremely sensitive to the costs and challenges associated with production. So we started looking at phosphorescent pigments and the notion of flashing the lights on and off. This was based on knowledge I’d gained when I designed large-screen monitors for Apple and researched the human visual system’s threshold for flicker perception. You’re much more sensitive to flicker perception in your peripheral vision than in your foveal [center-view] vision. Large monitors have more of their area in your peripheral vision, so running large monitors at 60Hz, which is where Apple was running their small monitors, would create an annoying flicker in the corner of your eye. So we started testing monitors, running them at up to 80 or 90Hz, and I was able to determine at what point humans stop seeing flicker. “Twenty years later, we were
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able to apply that knowledge to the strobing lights we use for Contour, making them flash on and off at a rate that is imperceptible to the human eye. Lo and behold, we can sync the cameraarray system so that the shutters are only open when the lights are dark and only see the phosphor of the makeup. Because phosphor is emissive rather than reflective or retroflective, we can get a clean read without highlights or shadows.” Of the lighting setup used with Contour, Perlman says, “The black lights do a good job of charging the phosphor in the makeup and are largely invisible to the RGB-color cameras used to capture the visual image of the subject. The lighting units are modified Kino Flo motion-picture fixtures fitted with both black-light and white-light tubes. Each holds four tubes, and we tend to mix them up to even out the illumination. Black lights are also placed all around the stage to evenly illuminate and charge the phosphor. The white lights are placed however you want to light
the subject from the standpoint of beauty lighting. For example, if you want the subject to be in a half-light shadow, you would have the combined white and black lights on the illuminated side, and only black lights on the “dark” side. So the white light defines the normal, visible lighting, while the blacklights are there strictly to evenly charge up the phosphor. All the lights strobe during the capture process, with the phosphor glowing during the dark phases. This is all done in a darkened studio. Also, there is a key difference between fluorescence, the glowing illumination that occurs when phosphor is exposed to light, and phosphorescence, which is the afterglow. We’re relying on phosphorescence.” Perlman notes that because the raised reference markers placed on the performer’s face for traditional mo-cap work are slightly offset from the surface of the skin, the resulting data is not always a precise representation of how that surface moves. By having the random phosphorescent patterns
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applied directly on the skin, Contour captures the geometry of the surface itself. By combining this detailed information with skeletal motion, Contour can also be used in conjunction with a marker-based system, allowing filmmakers to use the best of both technologies. The only special requirement placed on the performer is that he or she must wear the phosphorescent makeup, which is mixed with a standard base and applied with a sponge like regular makeup. The subject must not touch or otherwise disturb the makeup once it is applied. Although a “smudge” will not alter the surface geometry as perceived by Contour, it will result in a discontinuity of any retrospectively tracked vertex that falls within the smudge. The system would continue to capture the performance with full 3-D resolution, but some post cleanup of the data would be necessary to link the pre-smudge vertex location with the post-smudge vertex location. Some post tweaking might also be needed for tracking vertices in areas of very high surface deformation, such as
around the lips and eyes. (Mova expects that future versions of Contour will automate more of this process.) Contour allows for multiple actors to be captured simultaneously, allowing for complex group scenes. The performers’ hand movements and gestures can also be captured. Contour relies on the ability of its cameras to have an unobstructed view of a given surface; if a hand is holding an object and only the outer surface of the hand is visible to the cameras, then Contour will only be able to reconstruct the outer surface. Contour was designed to offer users on-set creative control that is close to what they expect with traditional cinematography. Although it typically takes an overnight render to reconstruct a full-resolution capture session, the system provides a low-res preview version of the finished 3-D reconstruction image that can be quickly generated on-set, allowing the cinematographer to properly light the subject for a desired effect and the
director to check the performance. Reducing the amount of time required to create full-resolution imagery is simply a matter of applying more computing power to the processing. Full-resolution images in real time on set are possible with Contour today at a cost that could be justified by a large-scale production, but within a few years, given the steady advance of computing power, it will be within the reach of more modest production budgets. Contour can also be adapted for use on any moving camera platform, even a Steadicam or Helmetcam, giving the user great creative latitude. The system can even be used to capture the geometry and textures of textiles in motion. Clothing is timeconsuming and difficult to faithfully simulate with CG animation techniques, but Contour can capture a garment’s exact geometry, motion and texture once it has been treated with a phosphor-based dye. Rather than donning the form-fitting Lycra suits necessary for marker-based mo-cap work, actors can
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be costumed for their characters, and Contour will capture the fabric’s motion and the actor’s motion simultaneously. Perlman also foresees using Contour in conjunction with traditional stop-motion animation. “You just mix the phosphor in with the material being used, such as clay or silicone,” he explains. “The Corpse Bride was done with puppets made of silicone over metal armatures, while Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit was done with modeling clay. You would mix the phosphor in at a lowenough density that you wouldn’t notice it under normal stage lighting — you’d just see the normal colors of the silicone or the clay. But when you turn off the lights, it will glow, and because the phosphor is just a powder that is mixed in, there will be a random pattern to it. “A complex shot like Wallace and Gromit driving through people’s gardens in a car is very expensive, because it contains so many different objects that must all be animated,” he
continues. “You also have a motioncontrolled camera that’s following the action. All this is very difficult to coordinate and execute. An alternative might be shooting the scene with Contour and breaking it into components on separate sets, lighting and animating them as you would normally, and then combining the images and rendering them in 3-D on a hi-def monitor for viewing. Because it’s now a digital version of the physical puppets, you would be able to composite characters and elements together using a tool like Maya for evaluation. In this case, Contour could be used to replace a motion-controlled camera, because once the digital information was captured, you would have full freedom of motion in 3-D; you could zoom in, pull back or fly through the air. And if you have a character that flies, rather than being forced to suspend the character with some sort of harness, you could just put it on a separate set and position it on the ground in the position you want it to be in when it’s flying.
“Also, if you wanted to reduce the audience’s perception of the strobing effect of stop-motion animation — or not, if that’s part of your artistic expression — you could just turn on motion blur in your 3-D package and instantly turn stop-motion into gomotion. So we think Contour could also dramatically lower the cost of stopmotion animation and afford a lot more creative control. “In the parlance of computer graphics, Contour is the first technology to successfully cross the ‘Uncanny Valley,’ a perceptual zone where a CG face looks almost photo-real, but not quite photo-real. Such images are disturbing to the human visual system because our brain thinks it’s seeing a face with some defect. Humans don’t have that reaction to caricatures, such as cartoon faces, because we know they aren’t real. But as faces approach photo-real, either you are spot-on, or you have something worse than a caricature. Contour will give you a spot-on
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photo-real face. Then you can focus your energy on what you should be worrying about: making a great movie or video game.” For more information and to view demos, visit www.movapodcast.com. Kelly HiDef Depth-ofField Calculator The Guild of British Camera Technicians‘ HiDef Depth-of-Field Calculator (produced in association with Panavision Europe) is specifically designed for the new dedicated camera lenses used for shooting high-definition video for big-screen cinema. With scales for 16x9, 1.85:1 and 2.40:1 anamorphic and spherical digitalcinema projection, the Kelly HiDef Calculator has the same formatting as earlier Kellys but with a much finer optical circles-of-confusion standard — 4/10,000in. — employed for use with HD CCDs. The HiDef Depth-of-Field Calculator is produced by motion-picture tech-
ERRATUM The Panasonic AG-HVX200 article that appeared in the June issue needs two clarifications:
nicians for camera technicians in film and television and is designed to fit into a back pocket. With Imperial scales on one side and Metric on the other, the calculator will yield at-a-glance depth-of-field and hyperfocal-distance properties for any lens size set at any aperture — invaluable for factoring in distances and available aperture settings when working out accurate split- or deep-focus shots. The Kelly HiDef Calculator is a beneficial tool because in things to do with focus, any perceived depth of field is a factor of image magnification. Eyefocusing through the camera, or by
cts
the for
re stry u t ic u p d n n oi o i t mo vide and
P
u d ro
reference to a monitor, does not give an accurate picture of what will be seen on a large screen, where that same image will be blown up to several thousand times its original size. The HiDef Depth-of-Field Calculator has scales for 5mm, 7mm, 10mm, 14mm, 20mm, 35mm, 40mm, 50mm, 75mm and 100mm HD lenses. The HiDef Depth-of-Field Calcu= 43 plus lator retails for £29.99/C = £2.50/C3.55 p&p. Price includes U.K. VAT. To order, call the GBCT, 011-41 (0)20 8813 1999 or E-mail
[email protected]. ■
The AG-DVX100 was mentioned as a “revolutionary highdefinition (HD) camera, bringing true 24p acquisition ….” Though the DVX100 does record in 24p, it is a standard-definition camera. The HVX200 is the HD camera. According to Panasonic technical literature, the HVX200’s 4.255mm Leica Dicomar Wide-Angle Lens is the 35mm equivalent to 32423mm. However, when we tested it side by side against 35mm cine lenses at Otto Nemenz rental house, the Leica’s cine focal-length equivalent was more in the range of 20240mm.
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Filmmakers’ Forum Postcards from an International Celebration of Cinematography
The inventor of the Steadicam, ASC associate member Garrett Brown, trips the light fantastic at Cinematographer’s Day in Bangkok.
mong the hundreds of film festivals around the globe, Cinematographer’s Day at the Bangkok International Film Festival is one of the few events to offer an in-depth tribute to the art of cinematography. The event was conceived in 1999 by Luciano Tovoli, ASC, AIC and was part of the Palm Springs Film Festival. Over time, Cinematographer’s Day stretched to several days of screenings and seminars, and in 2003, the event became part of the Bangkok festival. Cinematographer’s Day is coordinated by David Kaminsky, M.D., a doctor with a passion for cinema, and cinematographer Frederic Goodich, an instructor at the American Film Institute. After holding the event in Bangkok for three years, the duo is weighing whether to move Cinemaotgrapher’s Day back to California. They hope to contribute profits from the proceedings to the ASC’s educational and building funds.
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Over three intensive days in Bangkok last February, Cinematographer’s Day events comprised screenings and colloquia on the themes of camera motion, Asian cinematography, and digital film restoration. Anthony Dod Mantle, DFF, BSC; Christopher Doyle, HKSC; Jeong-hun Jeong; Pierre Lhomme, AFC; Donald McAlpine, ASC, ACS; and Masaharu “Shoji” Ueda, JSC were among the participants. The occasion prompted conversations in English, French, Thai, Japanese and Korean that sometimes went late into the evening. As Goodich notes, Cinematographer’s Day facilitates a warm camaraderie between filmmakers from different cultures. For example, Doyle and Dod Mantle discovered a shared experience as expatriates; Doyle is an Australian who made a name for himself in Hong Kong cinema, while Dod Mantle is an Englishman who relocated to Denmark and became a key figure in the Dogme95 movement.
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At Cinematographer’s Day, Doyle said he believes the current renaissance in Asian cinema is due in part to sheer youthfulness. “There are more unconventional approaches in Asian films than in Western films simply because there is less experience of conventional approaches. Don’t forget that it is also a younger film community. On my films, I’m the oldest guy on the set — even the producers are younger than I am! At the same time, many people in Thailand know the French New Wave [films] back to back.” Each year, Cinematographer’s Day honors an individual cinematographer. This year, there was a tribute to Dod Mantle, and director Thomas Vinterberg came along to participate. The cinematographer and director are friends and neighbors who have worked on four features together, including the groundbreaking digital-video (DV) feature Festen (a.k.a. The Celebration), It’s All About Love (see AC April ’03) and Dear Wendy (AC Oct. ’05). The low-res DV cameras used in Festen worked well for its “home movie” feel, Super 35mm brought out the lush romanticism in It’s All About Love, and high-definition (HD) video created some real challenges on Dear Wendy. When asked about shooting HD, the digital pioneers had a surprising response. “Actually,” says Vinterberg, “we both really hate shooting HD, but we can’t afford anything else. Denmark is a small country.” Dod Mantle added: “I consider HD to be a brutal medium, in particular when depicting human skin. It’s very hard to work with as opposed to film, which is like velvet. So I used traditional methods to create a diffusion and softness that HD seriously lacks. I also kept the flares,
Photos courtesy of Frederic Goodich and Benjamin B.
by Benjamin B
aberrations and other faults of the old Zeiss Standard Speed lenses we used.” Camera movement was a leitmotif throughout Cinematographer’s Day. Gene Kelly’s widow, Patricia Ward Kelly, regaled the audience with film excerpts of her husband’s choreography and dancing, topped by a screening of An American in Paris. McAlpine showed a very different approach to dance with an excerpt from the more recent musical Moulin Rouge, which he shot for director Baz Luhrmann (AC June ’01). Kelly stressed that her husband’s directorial approach involved a frame that respected the dancer’s entire body, with very few cuts. “Gene would say that if you’re shooting dance, there’s a very specific place where the camera needs to be. Some cinematographers would try something imaginative — put the camera on the floor, for example — and Gene would say, ‘No, put it straight up, shoot straight on, full figure. If you shoot from below, the body is distorted.’ Gene called the camera ‘the one-eyed monster’ because it has no peripheral vision. Sometimes on public-television dance presentations, the camera pulls back to encompass the entire stage, and Gene would say that if you’ve lost the body and the kinetic force, you get a dancer that looks like a nail file. Gene wouldn’t allow zoom lenses on cameras because it would enable the cameraman to alter the frame. He would conceive every cut, every turn.” She added that her husband would not permit multiple cameras because he suspected it would facilitate other edits. “Gene didn’t want producers and others determining how the scene would be put together. He edited in the can.” McAlpine explained that the Moulin Rouge process was the opposite of Kelly’s approach, involving multiple cameras and angles and extensive editing of more than 200 hours of footage. “When we shot Moulin Rouge, the musical was a dead genre. We had to shoot for younger audiences who were not steeped in the cinema that we came from. Editors tell me that if you shoot conventionally and put together two shots, kids today are so visually literate
Left: Enjoying the festivities are AFI graduate Ed Button; Jeong-hun Jeong; Shoji Ueda, JSC; and Donald McAlpine, ASC, ACS. Below: Cinematographer’s Day honoree Anthony Dod Mantle, DFF, BSC (left) pals around with good friend Christopher Doyle, HKSC.
that they’ll know what the next five shots will be.” Another approach to multiple cameras, and to camera motion, was presented by Ueda, who shot four films for director Akira Kurosawa, including Ran, an adaptation of King Lear. Ueda noted that Kurosawa shunned camera motion because he believed moving should be the attribute of the actor. “Kurosawa-san didn’t want the camera to do the acting, so he always put the camera in one place and waited for the right moment to capture the picture.” Kurosawa often used multiple cameras, not to provide editing options, but to avoid having to shoot the same performance many times. The director would position as many as six cameras to catch the action from different vantages. “Kurosawa and I were oldfashioned,” said Ueda. “We didn’t like to look at monitors and shoot short shots of different angles, so we would spend a lot of time rehearsing, and once everyone knew what they were doing, Kurosawa-san put his trust in the cameramen and we would shoot in one day what would normally take several days or a week.” The Japanese cinematographer added that with enough preparation, “the first take is usually the best take, because the crew and actors are enthusiastic and filled with power.” Jeong presented an excerpt from the violent and provocative Korean film Sympathy for Lady Vengeance. He explained that the film begins with a fairly static camera that becomes beautifully agitated as the tale of twisted
revenge unfolds. Dod Mantle shared his experiences with the rapid, handheld movement on his latest films with Lars von Trier. The director was outfitted with a jerry-rigged backpack equipped with a high hook, upon which was suspended an HD camera that von Trier would swing around quickly, sometimes quite erratically. “On Dogville [AC May ’04] and Manderlay, Lars was at a period in his creative life where he wanted to point the camera rather than frame it. I ended up shooting 40 percent of the films trying to think like him, which is almost schizophrenic. But if you make a journey like that, you can’t do it halfway, because you’ll end up with something mediocre. You have to go there even if you get the vegetables thrown at you afterwards, and I’ve had a lot of vegetables thrown at me!” Who better to continue the discussion on camera movement than ASC associate member Garrett Brown? Brown has the unique distinction of
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The event’s organizers, Frederic Goodich (left) and David Kaminsky, M.D.
adding a word to the vocabulary of cinema: Steadicam. The multi-talented Brown invented the camera support system in the Seventies, operated it on breakthrough films like The Shining, and went on to train a generation of Steadicam operators. In Bangkok, Brown gave a
wonderful illustrated presentation, starting with archival footage of his first tests of the prototype Steadicam, which he captured while running through fields after his wife. He also offered an incisive analysis of a beautifully choreographed Steadicam sequence, operated by Larry McConkey, from Carlito’s Way. Brown railed against arbitrary Steadicam moves, citing an example from a famous TV show set in a hospital. He distinguished a handheld camera placed on the shoulder from the Steadicam: “There’s a great difference between the camera in the hand and on the shoulder. The shoulder gives you a very predictable eye level, which is a convention of its own. There’s a misconception about the Steadicam; it’s not just a stabilizer, it’s also a way of holding the camera that provides a certain amount of freedom in relation to your body. I cherish the second part more than the first. The stability was the easy part, and learning what to do with the camera in your hand at the end of your
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arm was the difficult part. The question is, ‘How do you interact with the camera if it’s in your hand?’” Lhomme recalled that “the Steadicam came to us like a dream. We could shoot in a way that we could not imagine using handheld. With fast action, handheld introduces a brutality that is an accidental result of shooting handheld.” McAlpine added that “if there’s some kind of fight and you want to be right in there, in close, then handheld’s really the correct way to do it. If someone punches into a lens, it looks good. If he’s punching into a Steadicam, it looks too good!” Many cinematographers outside of the United States are accustomed to doing their own camera operating. To them, the introduction of a Steadicam shot means another operator on the set. Dod Mantle said, “One of the hardest things for me is having a Steadicam operator and not getting something. It’s hardest when you can see and feel what you want to shoot, but you can’t put your
finger on it. It’s like a painter working very hard, and at the end of the day the brush slides and he gets something. I’m not saying the operator can’t get that, but very often in shooting a film, there are moments when you see things others don’t. Of course, if I were working with Garrett, he would probably read my mind and know me better than I know myself.” Doyle added, “Until you trust the integrity of the person who operates the camera, it’s difficult to let go.” “Many movies ago,” noted McAlpine, “I had to give up the wheels to someone else, the camera operator. But I fooled myself into believing that this loss is a reward, because it gives me time to contemplate the battle. To a degree, I’ve always regarded moviemaking as a battle. The operator is at the front line. Now the films I’m involved in are so complex that it’s another game altogether, and I do have to stand on the hill and just watch people die.”
Gathering together for a group shot are (from left): McAlpine; Ronald Boullet of Eclair Labs; Pierre Lhomme, AFC; Kaminsky; Dod Mantle; a Thai interpreter; Doyle; Thomas Vinterberg; Jeong; Ueda; and Goodich.
After the laughter died down, Kaminsky shared a quote from Richard Crudo, ASC, who noted that cinematography is about “image creation” rather than “image capture.” In response to that, Lhomme recalled that his mentor, Ghislain Cloquet, ASC, AFC, told him, “You can play with the cards the director deals you. What you can bring to the film is totally dependent on the direc-
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tor’s mind and needs. Some directors don’t need you, they need a machine. They just want to see the action and the camera has to follow it. If they ask nothing, you can do very little. If they ask a lot, you give a lot. So if you love what you do, if you love cinema, you try to work with directors who ask a lot. The more they ask, the better you feel.” ■
Points East Shaping a New Life Against the Odds
Above: Sherry (Maggie Gyllenhaal) hits the pavement in search of a job in Sherrybaby, which was shot on location in New Jersey. Below: Sherry attempts to reconnect with her young daughter after serving time for a drug-related offense.
t the end of the analog era, it’s great to have 16mm film,” says director of photography Russell Lee Fine, whose latest feature, Sherrybaby, followed the Super 16mm-digital intermediate (DI)-35mm path that has become increasingly popular in the indie
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world. “Film technology is so good now that you can shoot the smaller negative, do your scan, and it looks better than a lot of 35mm films did 10 years ago.” As a character-driven, naturalistic drama, Sherrybaby benefited both from the compact size of the Super 16 camera
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and from the DI, which permitted some timesaving shortcuts on set. In the film, Maggie Gyllenhaal plays Sherry, a single mother and recovering heroin addict who is released from prison and tries to start life anew with her young daughter. Although Sherry is initially optimistic, reality soon intervenes in the form of claustrophobic halfway houses, bleak job prospects, and relatives who are reluctant to trust her with her own child. While developing the script, director/writer Laurie Collyer extensively researched the lives of ex-con mothers and how they adapt to family and society upon their release from prison. In addition to getting the emotional details right, Collyer aimed for realism on the technical side. Sherrybaby was shot entirely on practical locations in New Jersey. “I wanted the film to be dominated by the performances,” says Collyer. “I didn’t want it to be over-the-top in terms of style, or one of those shaky handheld movies.” “We didn’t want Sherrybaby to be beautiful,” says Fine, whose credits include the features O, The Grey Zone (see AC Oct. ’02) and the television series The Wire. “We didn’t go for beauty lighting or trying to make Maggie look great. We wanted to have a gritty look that would feel plausible and realistic. We didn’t want to make it look like a documentary, but rather an enhanced version of documentary reality. There are some handheld, follow-the-character moments, and others when the camera pulls back and you see someone framed through a doorway very nicely. Some things are a bit more artful, especially when Sherry’s on the street.” Fine shot the picture with an Arri 16SR-3 mounted with a Zeiss
Sherrybaby photos by Macall Polay, courtesy of IFC Films. Photo on page 110 by Paul Schiraldi, courtesy of Russell Lee Fine.
by Patricia Thomson
Filmmaking Starts Here
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Sherrybaby director of photography Russell Lee Fine takes a break on the set of another project, the television series The Wire.
11-110mm zoom or Zeiss Superspeed primes. “There are no dolly moves,” notes the cinematographer. “We wanted it feel like either the camera was on sticks, or the character was driving it handheld. That’s a fairly unique strategy.” Because of the story’s somber tone, the filmmakers hoped to shoot in
fall or winter, but principal photography was scheduled for summer 2004 when financing came through. Toning down the brilliance of summer’s colors was one of Fine’s tasks. “One characteristic of new film stocks is that most of them are very colorful,” he observes. “Even the ones Kodak bills as ‘less saturated’ are still very intense when you get into
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the video world.” Except for a few night scenes that were filmed on Kodak Vision2 500T 7218, he used Vision 200T 7274. “74 is not a low-color stock, but after testing it, we knew we could selectively reduce the color palette.” During the final color correction, which was carried out at Goldcrest in New York, Fine sought a contrasty, desaturated look. “We didn’t want too much green in the foliage or the reds to pop out in the skin tones; we took it all down. Then we isolated the shadow areas and allowed them fall to black very sharply. We wanted the image to have an almost black-and-white quality.” When shooting low-budget projects such as Sherrybaby, Fine tries to clear his calendar before preproduction officially begins. “I usually have three weeks of prep on a movie like this, but I try to give myself a couple of extra weeks because directors get very busy. They’re casting and having to answer questions all day long, so my time with them is limited. I scheduled meetings
with Laurie about five weeks out, and we went through every scene. I wanted to know what she thought was the important part of the scene: Is it the little girl? Sherry’s mood? Is it the fact that she’s in a strange, new world? Once Laurie identified the important part of the scene, we’d discuss visual ideas.” The rough shot list developed during these meetings was refined as locations were secured. Fine was involved in the scouts and posted all of his stills on a Web site so his collaborators could see them. In addition, he posted images pertaining to framing, shot angles, and even details of contemporary dress. “The costume designer was in Brooklyn, the production designer was in Manhattan, and we were in New Jersey,” he explains. “This way, we could all look at the same thing.” He adds that he found the Web site useful for “vague storyboarding.” For example, he mapped out shots at the Newark bus terminal, where Sherry
arrives in the first scene. “I’d shot digital stills of those angles inside and outside, and Laurie and I would refer to those when we discussed ideas for shots. Once you have that image in your mind, you remember it later on.” A more flexible approach was needed for scenes with 7-year-old actress Ryan Simpkins, who plays Sherry’s daughter. “A second handheld camera was key, because she wasn’t going to match from take to take,” says Fine. “Fortunately, it played into the story — we wanted to feel the strangeness between her and her mother.” For Collyer, the handheld work in these scenes adds a subtle emotional dimension: “It really creates an unsettled feeling. You get the sense that with Sherry and her daughter, you’re on shaky ground.” Naturalism extended to the lighting as well. “I tend to be a minimalist when it’s called for,” says Fine, “so for day interiors, I’d just use a big source outside, usually a 12K through
bleached muslin. That would create a general amount of key light, and I would let fill fall where it wanted to. This wasn’t a movie where we were relighting for the close-ups; we weren’t trying to glamorize the characters. Often I wouldn’t add eyelights or do things I would normally do in a typical dramatic situation. I let those things go, lighting rules be damned.” In the end, says Fine, he’s pleased with the film’s rough edges, which are in sync with the story. “If I had to do it over again,” he says, “I’d make it even funkier.” ■
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International Marketplace
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Classifieds RATES All classifications are $4.50 per word. Words set in bold face or all capitals are $5.00 per word. First word of ad and advertiser’s name can be set in capitals without extra charge. No agency commission or discounts on classified advertising.PAYMENT MUST ACCOMPANY ORDER. VISA, Mastercard, AmEx and Discover card are accepted. Send ad to Classified Advertising, American Cinematographer, P.O. Box 2230, Hollywood, CA 90078. Or FAX (323) 876-4973. Deadline for payment and copy must be in the office by 15th of second month preceding publication. Subject matter is limited to items and services pertaining to filmmaking and video production. Words used are subject to magazine style abbreviation. Minimum amount per ad: $45
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Advertiser’s Index AC 16a-b, 97 Alan Gordon Enterprises 113 American Film Market 109 Arri 13 ASC Press 99 Backstage Equipment, Inc. 6 Band Pro Film & Digital 5 Barger-Baglite 47 Basson 16 Birns & Sawyer 69 Bron-Kobold 87 Burrell Enterprises 112
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Eastman Kodak C2-1, 15, 31, C4 EFD, USA Inc. 77
Ads may now also be placed in the on-line Classifieds at the ASC web site. Internet ads are seen around the world at the same great rate as in print, or for slightly more you can appear both online and in print. For more information please visit www.theasc.com/advertiser, or e-mail:
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EQUIPMENT FOR SALE Arri Super 16mm SR2 Camera, 11-110 zoom, primes, acc. and support. Cooke 18-100, 25-250, 300mm Nikkor, Zeiss 14mm, Dutch Heads, Weaver Steadman and more. Personal gear and Boutique NM Rental closeout. (505)982-4959 See at: www.wardrussell.com Large Dolly and Crane Selection: Egripment, Elemack, Lt. Wt. Jibs and more. Including remote camera cranes 25’+ height with remote head. For details call Visual Products, Inc. (440) 647-4999.
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Otto Nemenz 79
Film Emporium, Inc. 112 Filmtools 75 Finnlight 99 Fletcher Chicago 107 Flying-Cam 6 Fuji Motion Picture 9 Full Sail 21
P+S Technik C3 Panasonic Broadcast 27 Panther GMBH 45, 95 PED Denz 103, 113 Pille Filmgeraeteverleigh 112 Professional Sound 89 Pro8mm 113
Gamma & Density 57 George Paddock 85 Gekko Technology 88 Gillard Industries, Inc. 112 Glidecam Industries 23 Go-Easy Lighting Inc. 106 Hand Held Films 112 Highway 350 Corporation 112 Hybrid Cases 112 Hydroflex 117 Isaia & Company 75 JBK Cinequipt 112 JEM 117 J.L. Fisher, Inc. 55 K 5600, Inc. 43 Kino Flo 48 Laffoux Solutions, Inc. 112 Lights! Action! Company 112 Lighttools 102 London Film School 16 Los Angeles Film School 25 MAT Spec. Remote Camera 65 Media Distributors 83 Microdolly Hollywood 113 Mole-Richardson 91 Moviola 113 MP&E 112
Sachtler 41 Samy’s DV & Edit 49 Schneider Optics/Century 2 Service Vision 76 Sharp Shooter 96 Sim Video 73 SMS Productions, Inc. 113 Sony Electronics, Inc. 10-11 Stanton Video Services 99 Ste-Man, Inc. 82 Super16 Inc. 112 Sydney Film School 57 T8 Technology Company 68 Technocrane S.R.O. 100-101 Tiffen 29 Transvideo 90 Ultra Camera Mounts 112 VF Gadgets, Inc. 113 Videocraft Equipment 113 Visual Products, Inc. 17 Welch Integrated 111 Willy’s Widgets 112 www.theasc.com 89, 113 ZGC, Inc. 30, C3 Zinio 97
New York Foundations 45 New York Cine Equipment 119 New York Film Academy 67
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American Society of Cinematographers Roster OFFICERS – 2006-’07 Daryn Okada, President Michael Goi, Vice President William A. Fraker, Vice President Caleb Deschanel, Vice President Victor J. Kemper, Treasurer Michael Negrin, Secretary John Hora, Sergeant-at-Arms MEMBERS OF THE BOARD Curtis Clark Caleb Deschanel George Spiro Dibie Richard Edlund William A. Fraker Michael Goi Francis Kenny Isidore Mankofsky Daryn Okada Woody Omens Nancy Schreiber John Toll Kees Van Oostrum Roy Wagner Haskell Wexler ALTERNATES Robert Primes Victor J. Kemper Laszlo Kovacs John Hora Stephen Lighthill
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ACTIVE MEMBERS Thomas Ackerman Lance Acord Lloyd Ahern II Herbert Alpert Russ Alsobrook Howard A. Anderson III Howard A. Anderson Jr. James Anderson Peter Anderson Tony Askins Charles Austin James Bagdonas King Baggot John Bailey Michael Ballhaus Andrzej Bartkowiak John Bartley Frank Beascoechea Affonso Beato Mat Beck Dion Beebe Bill Bennett Andres Berenguer Carl Berger Gabriel Beristain Steven Bernstein Ross Berryman Michael Bonvillain Richard Bowen David Boyd Russell Boyd Don Burgess Stephen H. Burum Wilmer C. Butler Frank B. Byers Bobby Byrne Russell P. Carpenter James L. Carter Alan Caso Michael Chapman Rodney Charters James A. Chressanthis Joan Churchill Curtis Clark Peter L. Collister Jack Cooperman Jack Couffer Vincent G. Cox Jeff Cronenweth Richard Crudo Dean R. Cundey Stefan Czapsky Allen Daviau Roger Deakins Jan DeBont Thomas Del Ruth Peter Deming Caleb Deschanel Ron Dexter George Spiro Dibie Craig Di Bona Ernest Dickerson Billy Dickson Bill Dill
Victor Duncan Bert Dunk John Dykstra Richard Edlund Frederick Elmes Robert Elswit Geoffrey Erb Jon Fauer Don E. FauntLeRoy Gerald Feil Steven Fierberg Gerald Perry Finnerman Mauro Fiore John C. Flinn III Ron Fortunato William A. Fraker Tak Fujimoto Alex Funke Steve Gainer Ron Garcia James M. Glennon Michael Goi Stephen Goldblatt Paul Goldsmith Victor Goss Jack Green Adam Greenberg Robbie Greenberg Alexander Gruszynski Changwei Gu Rick Gunter Rob Hahn Gerald Hirschfeld Henner Hofmann Adam Holender Ernie Holzman John C. Hora Gil Hubbs Michel Hugo Judy Irola Mark Irwin Levie Isaacks Andrew Jackson Peter James Johnny E. Jensen Robert C. Jessup Torben Johnke Frank Johnson Shelly Johnson Jeffrey Jur William K. Jurgensen Stephen M. Katz Ken Kelsch Victor J. Kemper Wayne Kennan Francis Kenny Glenn Kershaw Darius Khondji Gary Kibbe Jan Keisser Jeffrey L. Kimball Alar Kivilo Richard Kline George Koblasa Fred J. Koenekamp
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Lajos Koltai Laszlo Kovacs Neil Krepela Willy Kurant Ellen M. Kuras George La Fountaine Edward Lachman Ken Lamkin Jacek Laskus Andrew Laszlo Denis Lenoir John R. Leonetti Matthew Leonetti Andrew Lesnie Peter Levy Matthew Libatique Stephen Lighthill Karl Walter Lindenlaub John Lindley Robert F. Liu Walt Lloyd Bruce Logan Emmanuel Lubezki Julio G. Macat Glen MacPherson Constantine Makris Karl Malkames Isidore Mankofsky Michael D. Margulies Barry Markowitz Vincent Martinelli Steve Mason Don McAlpine Don McCuaig Robert McLachlan Greg McMurry John McPherson Terry K. Meade Chris Menges Rexford Metz Anastas Michos Douglas Milsome Charles Minsky Richard Moore Donald A. Morgan Donald M. Morgan M. David Mullen Dennis Muren Fred Murphy Hiro Narita Guillermo Navarro Michael B. Negrin Sol Negrin Bill Neil Alex Nepomniaschy John Newby David B. Nowell Sven Nykvist Rene Ohashi Daryn Okada Woody Omens Miroslav Ondricek Michael D. O’Shea Anthony Palmieri Phedon Papamichael
Daniel Pearl Edward J. Pei James Pergola Don Peterman Lowell Peterson Wally Pfister Alex Phillips Clifford Poland Gene Polito Bill Pope Steven Poster Tom Priestley Jr. Rodrigo Prieto Robert Primes Frank Prinzi Richard Quinlan Declan Quinn Earl Rath Richard Rawlings Jr. Frank Raymond Tami Reiker Gayne Rescher Marc Reshovsky Robert Richardson Anthony B. Richmond Bill Roe Owen Roizman Charles Rosher Jr. Giuseppe Rotunno Philippe Rousselot Juan Ruiz-Anchia Marvin Rush Paul Ryan Eric Saarinen Alik Sakharov Mikael Salomon Harris Savides Roberto Schaefer Aaron Schneider Nancy Schreiber Fred Schuler John Schwartzman John Seale Christian Sebaldt Dean Semler Eduardo Serra Steven Shaw Richard Shore Newton Thomas Sigel John Simmons Sandi Sissel Bradley B. Six Dennis L. Smith Roland “Ozzie” Smith Reed Smoot Bing Sokolsky Peter Sova William Spencer Dante Spinotti Robert Steadman Ueli Steiger Peter Stein Robert M. Stevens Vittorio Storaro Harry Stradling Jr.
S E P T E M B E R David Stump Tim Suhrstedt Peter Suschitzky Alfred Taylor Jonathan Taylor William Taylor Don Thorin John Toll Mario Tosi Luciano Tovoli Jost Vacano Theo Van de Sande Eric Van Haren Noman Kees Van Oostrum Ron Vargas Mark Vargo Amelia Vincent William Wages Roy H. Wagner Ric Waite Michael Watkins Jonathan West Haskell Wexler Jack Whitman Gordon Willis Dariusz Wolski Ralph Woolsey Peter Wunstorf Robert Yeoman Richard Yuricich Jerzy Zielinski Vilmos Zsigmond Kenneth Zunder ASSOCIATE MEMBERS Alan Albert Richard Aschman Volker Bahnemann Joseph J. Ball Carly M. Barber Craig Barron Thomas M. Barron Larry Barton Bob Beitcher Bruce Berke John Bickford Steven A. Blakely Mitchell Bogdanowicz Jack Bonura William Brodersen Garrett Brown Ronald D. Burdett Reid Burns Vincent Carabello Jim Carter Leonard Chapman Denny Clairmont Emory M. Cohen Sean Coughlin Robert B. Creamer Grover Crisp Daniel Curry Carlos D. DeMattos Gary Demos Richard DiBona
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Kevin Dillon David Dodson Judith Doherty Don Donigi Cyril Drabinsky Jesse Dylan Raymond Emeritz Jonathan Erland John Farrand Ray Feeney Phil Feiner Jimmy Fisher Scott Fleischer Steve Garfinkel Salvatore Giarratano Richard B. Glickman John A. Gresch Jim Hannafin William Hansard Bill Hansard, Jr. Richard Hart Roman I. Harte Robert Harvey Don Henderson Charles Herzfeld Larry Hezzelwood Bob Hoffman Frieder Hochheim Robert C. Hummel Roy Isaia George Joblove John Johnston Curtis Jones Frank Kay Milton Keslow Robert Keslow Larry Kingen Douglas Kirkland Timothy J. Knapp Ron Koch Karl Kresser Lou Levinson Suzanne Lezotte Grant Loucks Andy Maltz Steven E. Manios Joe Matza Albert L. Mayer, Sr. Albert Mayer, Jr. Andy McIntyre Stan Miller Walter H. Mills George Milton Mike Mimaki Rami Mina Tak Miyagishima Michael Morelli Dash Morrison Nolan Murdock Mark W. Murphy Dan Muscarella F. Jack Napor Iain A. Neil Otto Nemenz Ernst Nettmann
Mickel Niehenke Marty Oppenheimer Larry Parker Michael Parker Warren Parker Doug Pentek Ed Phillips Nick Phillips Jerry Pierce Joshua Pines Carl Porcello Howard Preston David Pringle Phil Radin Christopher Reyna Frank J. Ricotta Sr. Colin Ritchie Eric G. Rodli Andy Romanoff Daniel Rosen Dana Ross Bill Russell Kish Sadhvani David Samuelson Peter K. Schnitzler Walter Schonfeld Juergen Schwinzer Ronald Scott Steven Scott Don Shapiro Milton R. Shefter Leon Silverman Garrett Smith John L. Sprung Joseph N. Tawil Ira Tiffen Nat Tiffen Arthur Tostado Ann Turner Mark Van Horne Richard Vetter Joe Violante Dedo Weigert Franz Weiser Evans Wetmore Beverly Wood Jan Yarbrough Hoyt Yeatman Irwin M. Young Bob Zahn Nazir Zaidi Michael Zakula Les Zellan HONORARY MEMBERS Col. Edwin E. Aldrin Jr. Neil A. Armstrong Col. Michael Collins Bob Fisher Cpt. Bruce McCandless II David MacDonald Barbara Prevedel Dr. Roderick T. Ryan Bud Stone Richard F. Walsh
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July Strictly Social The oppressive triple-digit heat dampened the shirts but not the spirits of ASC members, associate members and guests at the July Strictly Social event. While the barbecue and drinks flowed, attendees talked shop and traded production stories in the relaxed setting of the ASC Clubhouse lawn. Held monthly and open to members and guests, Strictly Socials are a great way to reconnect and catch up with comrades, both old and new. I
Nasir J. Zaidi (right) hangs out in the AC booth at the Cinema India 2006 Expo.
Zaidi and AC in India ASC associate member Nasir J. Zaidi of Spectra Cine traveled to Mumbai (formerly Bombay), India, in May for the Cinema India 2006 Expo. He spent three days in the American Cinematographer booth meeting numerous Bollywood filmmakers and even the president of the Nigerian Society of Cinematographers. Zaidi noted that some of the concerns raised by our counterparts in the East were long working hours and no control over the final quality of the work. Sound familiar?
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Strictly Social photos by Mark Bender.
Clubhouse News
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1. Isidore Mankofsky, ASC; AC Circulation Director Saul Molina; and Bogen’s Wayne Schulman; 2. Mrs. Larry Parker and Mankofsky; 3. William A. Fraker, ASC; Richard Crudo, ASC; Laszlo Kovacs, ASC; and Technicolor’s Bob Hoffman; 4. Eric Rodli from Eastman Kodak talks with ASC Events Coordinator Patty Armacost; 5. Mike Morelli from Eastman Kodak with Armacost; 6. David Mullen, ASC with Denis Lenoir, ASC; 7. Gil Hubbs, ASC with George Spiro Dibie, ASC; 8. Daniel Pearl, ASC, Don Henderson from Eastman Kodak; a guest; and Mankofsky; 9. Molina and Schulman; 10. Cory Eisner serves dinner to Mullen; Donald M. Morgan, ASC; and Kovacs.
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New York production works…Come see how
New York Cine & Digital Equipment Show Where Industry professionals can see the future of New York production now The latest in film, video and HD cameras, lighting, sound, camera support and post production Seminars that will translate technology into technique
October 10-11, 2006
Opening night cocktail reception, 6 - 8 PM The Metropolitan Pavilion 125 West 18th Street New York City
REGISTER N www.NYCDES.com
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W!
ASC CLOSE-UP Philippe Rousselot, ASC, AFC When you were a child, what film made the strongest impression on you? When I was 4 or 5 years old, I saw a black-and-white Disney short that terrorized me. Later, I saw La belle et la bête [Beauty and the Beast] by Jean Cocteau, which enchanted me at the time and still does today. Which cinematographers, past or present, do you most admire? Past: Edward Tissé; Eugène Shuftan; Gregg Toland, ASC; Henri Alekan, AFC; Katsuo Miyagawa, and Gianni di Venanzo. Present: Néstor Alméndros, ASC (I cannot put his name in the “past”); Bob Richardson, ASC; Vittorio Storaro, ASC, AIC; Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC; Cesar Charlone, ABC; Bruno Nuytten; Jean François Robin; Huai-en Chen, and all the others, because I’m always amazed by other cinematographers’ work and don’t understand how they do it. What sparked your interest in photography? La belle et la bête, photographed by Henri Alekan.
What’s the best professional advice you’ve ever received? One piece of advice I gave myself was not to follow any rules. Another, from Jean-Jacques Annaud, is, ‘Always wear the appropriate shoes on set.’ What recent books, films or artworks have inspired you? The book Europe Central, by William T. Vollmann. (If it did not influence my work, it did influence my musical taste). Also, the film version of The Constant Gardener, directed by Fernando Meirelles.
Who were your early teachers or mentors? Néstor Alméndros, for whom I worked as a loader and a 1st AC. Even during the most apparently banal conversation with Néstor, you’d learn more about cinematography than you could through years in a film school. What are some of your key artistic influences? The paintings of Pierro della Francesca; the photographic works of Sarah Moon; German Expressionism; the paintings of the French 18thcentury school (actually, everything in the Louvre, which I visited every Sunday for years, religiously); Marivaux’s La Dispute on stage, directed by Patrice Chereau; and films by Sergeï Eisenstein, Fritz Lang, Kenji Mizoguchi, Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman and so many others …. How did you get your first break in the business? A young director called Guy Gilles. I helped Guy shoot a short directed by a friend of his, and Guy subsequently asked me to shoot his following features. What has been your most satisfying moment on a project? A very simple shot of an actor wearing a brown shirt against a wall that was the same color. In that moment, I realized I could get away with not using any backlight.
Do you have any favorite genres, or genres that you would like to try? I always wanted to shoot a film noir, and I’m doing one right now. So maybe a Western? If you weren’t a cinematographer, what might you be doing instead? If I had any talent, I might have been a piano player in a bar, a painter, an engraver, a cabinetmaker, a gardener, or a grip — almost anything except a career in the meat industry or the military. Which ASC cinematographers recommended you for membership? John Bailey, Willy Kurant, Steven Poster and Vilmos Zsigmond. How has ASC membership impacted your life and career? Meeting colleagues through the ASC is the same as breathing life into an inert body; it rekindles the passion one has for one’s work. And that’s on top of the fantastic amount of information the ASC shares with the film community. ■
Have you made any memorable blunders? Many. The thing about blunders is that they are all very memorable. The biggest, though, was signing on to shoot X-Men 3. 120 September 2006
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Photo by François Duhamel, SMPSP.
Where did you train and/or study? The Vaugirard film school in Paris.
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