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IT’S PREMIERE NIGHT. THE LOOK CINEMATOGRAPHER HAD IMAGINED.
©Eastman Kodak Company, 2007. Kodak and VISION are trademarks.
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ON SCREEN IS EXACTLY WHAT THE GUESS WHO HELPED MAKE IT HAPPEN?
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A Kodak imaging scientist, that’s who. In fact, KODAK Imaging Science is hard at work throughout the entire motion picture process. The advanced technology of KODAK VISION2 Motion Picture Films provides cinematographers the highest degree of image quality and creative flexibility. In post, 10-bit logarithmic files invented by Kodak are now the industry standard for digital intermediate postproduction. And KODAK Color Science leverages advanced 3D Look-Up Tables (LUTs) to allow visual effects artists, colorists and other creatives to communicate visually from script to screen. Learn what else we’re doing to improve workflow, enhance image quality, and help ensure what you envision is what you get at www.kodak.com/go/motion.
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The International Journal of Film & Digital Production Techniques
Features 32 44 54 70
One-Man Riot Squad Simon Duggan, ACS pushes the action envelope in Live Free or Die Hard
Laws of the Jungle Peter Zeitlinger enters the heart of darkness with Werner Herzog on Rescue Dawn
A Hollywood Whodunit Alexander Gruszynski, ASC brings pop style to Nancy Drew: The Mystery in the Hollywood Hills
44
Pièce de Résistance Pierre Lhomme, AFC recalls his collaboration with Jean-Pierre Melville on the recently restored French classic Army of Shadows
Departments On Our Cover: The unstoppable John McClane (Bruce Willis) takes on a group of Internet terrorists in Live Free or Die Hard, shot by Simon Duggan, ACS. (Photo by Frank Masi, SMPSP, courtesy of 20th Century Fox.)
8 12 18 72 78 84 86 92 94 95 96 98 100
Editor’s Note DVD Playback Production Slate Short Takes Post Focus Filmmakers’ Forum New Products & Services Points East International Marketplace Classified Ads Ad Index Clubhouse News ASC Close-Up
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Visit us online at
www.theasc.com
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Dale Brooks, ABC-TV / Walt Disney Co
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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
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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 Kim Weston ASC ACCOUNTING MANAGER Mila Basely ASC ACCOUNTS RECEIVABLE Corey Clark ———————————————————————————————————— American Cinematographer (ISSN 0002-7928), established 1920 and in its 88th 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 2007 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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Editor’s Note
Getting the perfect shot is always a tricky job! But the Cine 30 HD and its new sideload mechanism are the trick to that perfect shot! www.sachtler.com
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I
t’s been 12 years since we last saw John McClane delivering wisecracks while whupping the bad guys, but Live Free or Die Hard promises enough state-of-the-art mayhem to make even Jack Bauer look lazy. Bruce Willis is back onboard for this summer’s biggest action blockbuster, and cinematographer Simon Duggan, ACS assures us that while McClane is “older and a bit wiser, age certainly hasn’t wearied him.” Describing the fourth film in the franchise as “incredibly kinetic,” Duggan notes that technical advances allowed him to fulfill director Len Wiseman’s main goal: achieving a level of realism that would make the series’ gun battles, car chases and stunts seem even more spectacular. “Even when the [onscreen] events are pushing the boundaries of reality, the audience doesn’t want to be taken out of the moment,” Duggan tells Australian correspondent Simon Gray (“One-Man Riot Squad,” page 32). “Shooting a large part of the movie on location, the style of the stunt work, and the cinematography all came from a desire to create a sense of realism.” A more stripped-down version of realism informs Werner Herzog’s Rescue Dawn, the harrowing true tale of a U.S. Navy pilot who endured months in a Laotian prison camp before leading fellow inmates in a daring escape. Collaborating once again with cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger (Grizzly Man), Herzog is back at what he does best, setting human drama against intimidating natural environments — in this case the jungles of Southeast Asia. As Zeitlinger notes to Fred Schruers (“Laws of the Jungle,” page 44), “There is a key sentence in Rescue Dawn when Dieter and the other prisoners in the camp are talking about escaping, and one of them says, ‘The jungle is the prison.’ That was leading Werner’s intention; that’s the reason we tried to make it as real as possible and keep the audience in the world of the jungle, rather than show it to them with long-lens photography. [Long lenses] make for beautiful pictures, but that’s not the world you are in.” Harrowing adventures are also ahead for anyone who watches the newly restored French World War II drama Army of Shadows. Released last year in U.S. theaters and now available on DVD, this 1969 classic teamed director Jean-Pierre Melville with cinematographer Pierre Lhomme, AFC. Recalling his work on the film and its subsequent restoration (“Pièce de Résistance,” page 70), Lhomme tells Paris-based correspondent Benjamin B that the digital-intermediate process allowed him to create a new negative that may be more faithful to Melville’s vision than the original print was. “By doing the restoration of this film, I restored my own memories — no joke,” says Lhomme. “To restore is to discover, and 35 years [after I shot this film], I rediscovered it on the big screen and saw its extraordinary cinematic qualities.” After absorbing all of this hard action and heavy drama, some of you may want to seek out lighter, more family-oriented fare. One fun option is Nancy Drew: The Mystery in the Hills, shot by ASC member Alexander Gruszynski. In bringing the famous girl detective to the big screen, Gruszynski and director Andrew Fleming crafted a variety of looks to reflect all of the movie’s moods. “The film has elements of a thriller, a comedy, a mystery and an adventure, all wrapped under the label of a teen film,” Gruszynski observes in his interview with David Heuring (“A Hollywood Whodunit,” page 54). “The nature of the material made it difficult to create a consistent style, and jumping back and forth between the different looks helps to create some excitement.”
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- UNleashed Magazine
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at 1440 x 1080 with 4:2:2 color sampling. Designed specifically for processing the immense volume of information in 1080 HD signals, DIGIC DV II ensures optimal image quality for HD video. Then there’s Canon’s Super-Range Optical Image Stabilizer (OIS) that uses a gyro sensor to detect camera movement and activate an optical system that compensates for shake and jitter. The 20x HD Video Zoom lens incorporates Canon’s Super-Range Optical IS technology to further
improve low-frequency vibration control. The result is extraordinary camera shake correction at long focal lengths—without any additional image degradation. And with our XH A1 and XH G1 models, you get Instant AF: an external sensor that works together with Canon’s high-performance autofocus system. Focusing time gets reduced and accuracy is increased, even in any low-light situation. Image, display and the functionality of the camera can be customized to suit your preference or application. You get total image control with color correction, fine parameter adjustments and selectable frame rates that let you capture and output video in 60i, 30F or 24F. Not to mention the 50i/60i optional upgrade that is available to use for worldwide shooting. Which is why our HD camcorders never fail to do their job. Which means you can always do yours. To learn more about Canon HD camcorders, call 1-800-OK-CANON or visit www.usa.canon.com/HD
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DVD Playback All That Jazz (1979) Special Music Edition 1.85:1 (16x9 Enhanced) Dolby Digital 5.1 20th Century Fox Home Video, $19.98 Death, substance abuse, and infidelity might not seem like natural subjects for the genre that spawned Singin’ in the Rain, but they inspired director/choreographer Bob Fosse to create a seminal American musical, All That Jazz. Using the exuberant style of classic musicals to explore dark themes and morally ambiguous characters, Fosse and cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno, ASC, AIC reinvented the genre. All That Jazz is a brutally honest yet exhilarating self-portrait in which Roy Scheider plays Fosse surrogate Joe Gideon, a selfabsorbed, self-loathing artist whose disregard for others is surpassed only by his supreme devotion to his work. Gideon experiences a midlife crisis and must come to terms with his personal failures just as his professional life is hitting its peak. Plagued by visions of an angel of death (Jessica Lange), Gideon fuels himself with speed, alcohol and sex as he tries to complete a film and a Broadway show before his vices kill him. Given his work with Federico 12 July 2007
Fellini, Rotunno was a natural choice to shoot the film. Like the blocked director in Fellini’s 81⁄2, Gideon views life through the prism of his art, defining his relationships and memories by imagining them as the kinds of musical numbers he excels at staging. The only way Gideon can relate to anyone is through the work he loves, a sentiment conveyed not only in the film’s fantasy sequences but also in more realistic scenes, such as a touching dance Gideon shares with his daughter. Rotunno reinforces the character’s complexity through a visual style that alternates between high stylization and gritty reality: the fantasy sequences are as elaborate as anything from MGM’s heyday, but the opening “On Broadway” number plays like a documentary on the process of casting a stage musical. The cinematographer also employs great contrasts between light and shadow, especially in dark portraits of Gideon in his apartment at night. The transfer on this new DVD nicely preserves the nuances of Rotunno’s photography and has a tonal range comparable to theatrical release prints of the film. The Dolby 5.1 mix is strong in the musical numbers, but in other scenes most of the sound is directed toward the center channel, with minimal use of the rear speakers. The disc includes an insightful commentary track by editor Alan Heim — an appropriate choice, given the film’s heavy reliance on cutting to generate meaning. All That Jazz is actually structured like a musical composition, with visual and aural motifs that deepen in meaning as they reappear throughout the story. Just as Rotunno often aban-
dons reality in favor of emotional truth, Heim shatters temporal continuity to jump back and forth in time — and back and forth between life and fantasy — several times within the same scene. Every edit and composition perfectly expresses Gideon’s inner state at a particular moment in time. Unfortunately, this disc doesn’t include the select-scene commentary by Scheider that was available on Fox’s previous DVD. It’s a curious omission, given the actor’s absence from the disc’s featurettes. The 23-minute “Portrait of a Choreographer” is an affectionate but superficial collection of reminiscences about Fosse by various friends and admirers, including Liza Minnelli (Cabaret). The 8-minute “Perverting the Standards” is a slightly more incisive consideration of the film’s unorthodox approach to the musical form, featuring interviews with noted composers and songwriters. The remaining supplement is a 31⁄2-minute piece on the recording of George Benson’s “On Broadway,” the song that opens the movie. Also featured are two galleries of production and publicity stills, a “music machine” feature that enables the viewer to jump to many of the film’s set pieces, and a karaoke supplement for those who feel inclined to sing along with the number “Take Off With Us.” Heim’s commentary is the only supplement of real worth to filmmakers and scholars, but it and the transfer are enough to make this new edition of All That Jazz a worthwhile purchase. — Jim Hemphill ➢
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The Queen (2006) 1.85:1 (16x9 Enhanced) Dolby Digital 5.1 Miramax Home Entertainment, $29.99 “Standing by the door, we bow from the neck. I will introduce you. The queen will extend her hand. You go to her, bow again and then shake her hand. It’s ‘ma’am’ as in ‘ham,’ not ‘marm’ as in ‘farm,’ and when you are in the presence, at no point must you show your back.” These are the rules briskly set out for newly elected Prime Minister Tony Blair (Michael Sheen) as he prepares to meet Queen Elizabeth II (Helen Mirren) for the first time in May 1997. It would prove to be a summer of many firsts. A few months later, while the queen and her husband, Philip (James Cromwell), are on their annual retreat at Balmoral, Princess Diana, the ex-wife of Prince Charles (Alex Jennings), is killed in a car accident in Paris. Over the ensuing weeks, as the world mourns the death of “the people’s princess,” Queen Elizabeth, fully formed by the long-standing traditions of the British monarchy, is strongly encouraged by Blair to adopt a more modern stance on government and royal protocols. With The Queen, director Stephen Frears has fashioned a remarkable docudrama of subtle power and complexity. A meditation on the conflicted role of the monarchy in Blair’s England, an indictment of the media, and a frank look at the royals’ difficult relationship with Diana, it is also a complicated portrait of a leader steeped in tradition who is forced to reconsider some of her most closely held beliefs. 14 July 2007
Frears felt strongly that in addition to using some actual news footage of the events in 1997, the film should use different visual textures for Blair and the queen’s separate worlds; he wanted a gritty, provincial look for Blair’s sequences and a smooth elegance for the queen’s. Wisely, Frears tapped cinematographer Affonso Beato, ASC, ABC (Live Flesh, The Big Easy, All About My Mother) to bring his scheme to life. A veteran of many international projects of varied styles, Beato, working closely with production designer Alan MacDonald, realized the films’ distinct worlds, made room for the video news footage, and fused it all into one cohesive vision. For Blair’s sequences, he shot Super 16mm with spare or stark lighting and few contrasting primary colors; when transferred to 35mm, this yielded evident grain and sharp tone. By contrast, he shot the queen’s world in 35mm, incorporating a warmer lighting scheme and deeper, more solid colors. This recently released DVD of The Queen is a solid translation of the theatrical presentation. The image is letterboxed at 1.85:1 with a crisp, accurate, handsome transfer that is enhanced for widescreen viewing. The visual shifts between the story’s two worlds are well reproduced here, with the subtle juxtaposition’s thematic impact intact. The audio track, like the queen herself, is pronounced but never showy. The Dolby Digital 5.1 presentation really comes to life when Alexandre Desplat’s mournful, low-key score appears. The DVD’s supplements offer insight into the difficulty of reconstructing recent history. An excellent 20minute featurette, “The Making of The Queen,” includes interviews with Frears, screenwriter Peter Morgan and actors Mirren, Sheen, Cromwell, and Sylvia Syms (who plays Elizabeth, the Queen Mother). Also featured are two audio commentaries, one by British historian Robert Lacey, who explains the changing role of the royal family over the years, and the other by Frears and Morgan, who occasionally share
notes of interest when they’re not silently absorbed in watching their film. Although The Queen is likely to be remembered mostly for Mirren’s extraordinary performance, which brought her an Academy Award and numerous other honors, what really distinguishes the film is how simple it appears to be at first, and how gracefully it reveals its complexities. Filled with rich detail and uniformly excellent performances, The Queen is an intimate examination of a leader whose public face is quite opaque. — Kenneth Sweeney
Notes on a Scandal (2006) 1.85:1 (16x9 Enhanced) Dolby Digital 5.1 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, $29.98 Zoe Heller’s novel Notes on a Scandal is such an internal piece of literature that at first glance, it might not seem well suited to the screen. Yet in the hands of a gifted team of actors and filmmakers, it became one of the most affecting and entertaining films of 2006, a character study with the intensity of a thriller. Notes on a Scandal tells the story of Barbara Covett (Judi Dench), an aging, lonely teacher who is captivated by her school’s new hire, the attractive and warm Sheba (Cate Blanchett). Sheba’s life, which includes a husband (Bill Nighy) and two children, seems to have everything Barbara’s lacks. When Barbara learns Sheba is having an affair with a pupil, she is overcome with jealousy and anger, and becomes determined to use the situation to her advantage. These characters constantly reveal new facets of themselves right
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ONE-YEAR FILMMAKING PROGRAM 16mm • Digital • 35mm • HD
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up until the final scene. The broad psychological range of the piece is expressed and elaborated upon by the cinematography of Chris Menges, ASC, BSC (Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Dirty Pretty Things), which conveys both the intimacy of the relationships and their harsh collision with the outside world when the scandal explodes. Throughout the film, Menges subtly manipulates point of view, giving the images a layered, multidimensional perspective. For example, he often works handheld to evoke an immediate, documentary-style sensibility, yet in those same rough compositions he lights Blanchett with a soft, glamorous approach that reflects the way Barbara sees her. Richard Eyre, the film’s director, has observed that Menges is in love with the human face, and every image in Notes supports this claim; it’s a film of great surface beauty, and Menges’ method often comments ironically on the ugly behavior at the story’s center. His lighting and framing are subtle and precise, and the cinematography strikes a careful balance between subjectivity and distance that allows the audience to consider the moral implications of the content without being alienated by it. It also allows the perspective to shift dramatically; early scenes link the viewer to Barbara’s point of view, and later, the scope of the tale is expanded to present the perspectives of Sheba and her husband as well. This DVD features a luminous transfer that displays Menges’ palette in all its varied glory. The Dolby 5.1 mix provides an added dimension to the community portrayed in the story, as the rear channels evoke a vivid sense of English street life. Eyre provides an illuminating commentary track that covers every facet of the production. His narration is supplemented by about 30 minutes of featurettes that include interviews with Eyre, Heller, screenwriter Patrick Marber, and the actors. These documentaries, which 16
include nine short “Webisodes” from the movie’s promotional Web site, contain many insights into the movie’s content and form; the only downside is that there’s some repetition, with the same information from the making-of featurettes repeated in many of the Webisodes. However, since the filmmakers are so articulate this is a minor complaint. — Jim Hemphill ■
NEXT MONTH’S REVIEWS
The Sergio Leone Anthology: A Fistful of Dollars; For A Few Dollars More; The Good, The Bad and The Ugly; Duck, You Sucker (1964-1971) Cinematographers: Massimo Dallamano; Federico Larraya; Tonino Delli Colli, AIC; Giuseppe Ruzzolini
Matador (1986) Cinematographer: Ángel Luis Fernández, AEC
The Chocolate War (1988) Cinematographer: Tom Richmond
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Production Slate Flesh-Eating “Pets” and a Family Drama
Zombies in Suburbia by Patricia Thomson Take a zombie flick, mix well with a heartwarming boy-and-his-dog story, season with a vintage Technicolor look, and you might have a recipe for disaster.
18 July 2007
But in the hands of writer/director Andrew Currie and director of photography Jan Kiesser, ASC, CSC, this approach yields a perfectly balanced comedic concoction called Fido. The time is the 1950s, and the setting is the idyllic suburb of Willard, a
place of maple-lined streets, white picket fences, and nuclear families. It’s Leave It to Beaver land, except for one thing: years ago, the Earth passed through a cloud of space dust that caused the dead to rise from their graves. These flesh-eating zombies were a menace to society until a collar was invented that made them docile. Soon, communities were filled with rotting zombies who delivered newspapers, pumped gas, cleaned house, and sometimes even served as the family pet. The Robinsons are the last on their block to get a zombie. Because of a childhood trauma, Bill Robinson (Dylan Baker) has resisted, but his wife, Helen (Carrie-Anne Moss), finally prevails. She and son Timmy (K’Sun Ray) quickly warm up to the new household member, whom Timmy names Fido (Billy Connolly). The two play, take long
Fido photos by Michael Courtney, courtesy of Lionsgate Films.
Right: In the period comedy Fido, the Robinsons (from left: Dylan Baker, K’Sun Ray and CarrieAnne Moss) are the last family on their block to acquire a domesticated zombie (Billy Connolly, center). Below: Director of photography Jan Kiesser, ASC, CSC sets up the shot.
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Above: Young Timmy Robinson discovers that the place where he buried an intrusive neighbor has been discovered. Right: Fido twirls Mrs. Robinson around the living room.
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walks, and bond after the zombie protects Timmy from the town bullies. Helen, meanwhile, finds a degree of companionship in Fido that her intimacy-phobic, golf-addicted husband doesn’t offer. All goes well until Fido’s collar malfunctions one day in the park and he kills the neighborhood crank, Mrs. Henderson. Returning at night to bury the evidence, Timmy encounters the old lady, now an unfettered zombie, and has to decapitate her with his shovel. Neighbor Mr. Bottoms (Henry Czerny), head of security at zombiecontrol agency ZomCon, suspects something is amiss at the Robinson household and soon uncovers the truth, threatening to destroy the happiness the family has found with Fido. With a laugh, Kiesser says Currie’s script “intrigued me. On the page, it’s a graphic, traditional zombie movie, and I wondered how that would work on the screen. But what got me was the level of humor and the subtle social commentary and political satire. That suggested there was more going on in the writer’s head than was necessarily on the page. So I was looking forward to the interview.” For his part, Currie thought Kiesser would be “perfect” for the project. “There’s a real diversity to Jan’s work,” says the director. “He’s worked a lot with Alan Rudolph, he was 2nd-unit director of photography on Kundun, he was a camera operator for Vilmos Zsigmond [ASC] for five years, and he also shot Fright Night.” When they met to
discuss Fido, he continues, “Jan had a strong understanding of what I wanted to achieve. He knew the style intimately and completely got what I was going for.” What Currie wanted was a Technicolor look reminiscent of Douglas Sirk’s melodramas. Kiesser recalls, “Andrew had specific film references, format ideas, and postproductionpipeline ideas that informed the overall look of Fido. When I saw all that, I realized he had developed his visual concept very thoroughly.” Currie showed Kiesser an 11"x17" stylebook with full-color illustrations of key images. He also put together a DVD presentation that included orchestralmusic samples, zombie images and film clips; this was initially used as a sales tool when Currie was pitching the
project, but it later became a touchstone for the creative departments. Sirk’s films, such as Written on the Wind and Imitation of Life, were key references. “Those films have a very beautiful, idealized visual palette,” says Kiesser. “Everything looks very perfect and in its place, but when you get to know the characters, you realize that the order disguises a tremendous amount of dysfunction. And that’s pretty much the world Andrew wanted to expose.” The director adds, “I wanted the world [of Fido] to have a very stylized and glossy surface, and make it very lush and beautiful, because I wanted to contrast that with what’s rotting in the neighborhood, so to speak.” At the outset, Currie budgeted for a 2K transfer and digital intermedi-
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Along with Fido and Timmy, Mrs. Robinson watches as the shed she set on fire, with ne’erdo-wells inside, burns to the ground.
ate (DI) with the final Technicolor palette in mind. However, he also wanted to incorporate certain retro techniques during the filming, such as rear-screen projection and a handpainted moon on composite plates. The production’s modest budget determined other choices, such as shooting spherical widescreen instead of anamorphic, and shooting 3-perf. For his camera package, Kiesser felt strongly about using Cooke S4s. “I knew they would enable me to shoot unfiltered and still get that Technicolor feel,” he says. “Quite often I’m torn between Primos and Cooke S4s, but I felt the quality the Cooke lenses have, especially in portraiture, was perfect for this show. But because we chose S4s, we were unable to afford the Arricam system, so we used an Arri 535B instead.” (Clairmont Camera provided the package.) During preproduction, Kiesser and the other department heads plotted out how they would achieve a highly saturated Technicolor look. “We had a lot of conversations about colors, their intensities, and the number of principal colors we wanted in each scene,” he recalls. The team decided to limit each scene to two main colors. The Robinson’s kitchen, for instance, is turquoise and bright red. “We tried to avoid colors that were close to flesh tones, so that in the DI we would be able to simply push the saturation on those primaries a little 22 July 2007
bit, or lean one way or the other to heighten the look, without affecting skin tones.” After extensive testing, Kiesser determined that the best film-stock choice was “Kodak Vision2, hands down. We were able to get that really pushed, three-strip Technicolor look we wanted.” He used 250D 5205 for day exteriors, and 500T 5218 for nights and interiors. Fido also contains a black-andwhite film within a film, a faux 1940s educational film explaining why zombies roam the earth. After obtaining stock footage of B-17s and marching armies on BetaSP and DigiBeta, as well as a VHS clip of rampaging zombies from Currie’s short film The Night of the Living, Kiesser tested various options for matching this pre-existing material. “We ended up shooting Super 16mm, using Kodak Double-X 7222 and forcing it 2 stops to increase the grain,” he says. This material was filmed with an Arri 16SR-3, 16mm Zeiss prime lenses and a Canon 8-64mm zoom. Per Kiesser’s instruction, 2nd-unit director of photography Randal Platt lit these scenes in a flat style; Kiesser later used tools in the DI suite to boost contrast. Fido was shot mostly on location in Kelowna, British Columbia, a small town whose tree-lined streets and 1940s-era houses resembled the world of the film. All that was needed was
fresh paint on several houses, and the transformation of patchy green-andbrown lawns into emerald carpets during the DI. (At Warner Bros. Motion Picture Imaging, colorist Raymond Grabowski and supervising colorist Jan Yarbrough devised a look-up table that mimicked the Technicolor look, and small adjustments were then made on individual shots.) Near Kelowna was an abandoned distillery that served as ZomCon headquarters. Conveniently, a forest fire had ravaged the hillside behind the factory the year before, and its charred landscape made a perfect setting for the “Wild Zone,” an area beyond the community gates where flesh-eating zombies roam free. “We couldn’t have accomplished that digitally on our budget,” Kiesser says of the burnt landscape. Camera movement in Fido includes a judicious use of cranes. “The crane shot is a touchstone of the Fifties style, so it was really critical for Fido,” says Currie. Eagle Camera Support Systems supplied the production with four cranes: two Movietechs, a Felix and a Phoenix. Kiesser used these with a Hot Gears remote-head system. In one crane shot, Timmy leaves school and the camera pulls back to reveal two zombies holding the doors open for the kids, then goes higher to reveal the whole schoolyard and Fifties-era setting. A crane shot also introduces the Robinsons’ neighborhood, moving from the lush maple trees down to the quiet suburban street just as Bill Robinson pulls up in his immaculate Chrysler sedan. For Kiesser, those trees were a little too lush. “Between preproduction and the shoot, the leaves had filled in so much [the street] was like a dark tunnel, and there was a huge contrast range with the houses, which were often frontlit. I was wondering what the heck to do.” A local crew member, greensman Paul Bingham, contacted the city’s arborist and persuaded him to prune the trees — at no cost to the production. “They spent an entire day thinning the trees,” says Kiesser. “And I asked them to come back two more times! I’m
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happy I did. We got some really great dappled light.” Inspired by scenes in Gone With the Wind and Night of the Hunter, Currie decided to shoot some of Fido’s sequences in silhouette. During storyboarding, he determined which scenes they would be. In one example, Timmy dispatches Mrs. Henderson with a shovel, and the two figures are silhouetted on a knoll under a craggy tree and very large moon. “[The silhouette] was an interesting way of depicting what’s happening — the chopping up of a human body — in a low-definition way that viewers actually laugh at,” notes Kiesser. “It worked really, really well.” In that shot, the tree was real, and the moon was a hand-drawn matte painting. “Because we were going to be adding the moon, we shot the action against a 20-by-20-foot greenscreen placed slightly behind an elevated knoll in the park. Everything just barely fit in front of the greenscreen!” Greenscreen was also used for scenes involving rear-screen projection. “Andrew was fascinated by the process photography used in driving shots in the Fifties,” says Kiesser. “He found a certain level of humor in it.” The background plates were shot conventionally, and Kiesser desaturated them and gave them a cool, bluish tint in the DI. “We couldn’t film a lot of plates because of limited time and money, so we went for specific angles. We lined up shots with finders and got specific heights, distances and focal lengths, so we knew where we were going when we got onstage. If [rear-screen] isn’t done right, it looks artificial, and I was trying to hold onto a certain level of reality so it wouldn’t take viewers completely out of the story. But we also wanted it to look a little quirky. I hope we found that compromise.” Overall, Kiesser believes the Fido team achieved the right tone. He recalls that after a festival screening of the film, a 70-something woman remarked, “I don’t like gory things, but this was really funny.” Kiesser laughs at the memory: “When you get it, you get it.”
24 July 2007
Close friends Ann (Claire Danes, left) and Lila (Mamie Gummer) celebrate Lila’s imminent wedding in a scene from Evening.
Lasting Love by Jean Oppenheimer Director of photography Gyula Pados, HSC pays the director of his latest film, Evening, the ultimate compliment: “He has the eye of a cinematographer.” In this instance, the declaration happens to be true, because until he turned to directing two years ago, Lajos Koltai, ASC, HSC was an award-winning cinematographer in his own right. When it came time to choose a cinematographer for his directing debut, the Holocaust drama Fateless (see AC Jan. ’06), Koltai turned to Pados, a fellow Hungarian who had transformed Budapest’s labyrinthine underground subway system into a lyrical purgatory in the award-winning picture Kontroll (AC April ’05). The collaboration proved so fruitful that Koltai asked Pados to shoot his second feature, Evening, based on the novel by Susan Minot. A romantic drama about memory and regret, Evening concerns an elderly woman who, on her deathbed, recalls a summer that shaped her future. The story jumps back and forth between the present and the past, with Vanessa Redgrave portraying the central character, Ann, as an old woman and Claire Danes portraying her younger self. “We
wanted a muted, desaturated look for the present, with as little color as possible in both the lighting and production design,” says Pados, speaking by phone from his home in Budapest. “The elderly Ann’s bedroom, where much of the present-day action takes place, is all whites and [pale] browns and grays. We didn’t want a huge difference between the key and fill lights; HMIs, heavily diffused with Frost, came through the bedroom windows, providing a soft, white ambient light for day scenes. I used the Varicon system on these sequences to further soften the blacks.” By contrast, the flashbacks, which constitute most of the story, are colorful and vibrant. These scenes are set at a Newport, Rhode Island, mansion where Ann’s college friend, Lila (Mamie Gummer), is getting married over the weekend. Livening things up is Lila’s eccentric brother, Buddy (Hugh Dancy), also a close friend of Ann’s. It is here that Ann meets and falls in love with Harris (Patrick Wilson), a lifelong friend of the family. The Newport mansion is perched on a high bluff; almost every window opens onto magnificent, manicured lawns and a brilliant, azure sea and sky. Interior colors are soft blues and greens, and sunlight streams
Evening photos by Gene Page, courtesy of Focus Features.
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Above: The elderly Ann (Vanessa Redgrave) shares her reminiscences with one of her daughters (Natasha Richardson). Below: Young Ann escapes the wedding festivities with Harris (Patrick Wilson).
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through the windows, providing strong backlight for the actors and an overall glossiness to the scenes. It isn’t surprising to learn that two quintessentially American artists, Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper, served as visual references for Evening. Hopper’s use of color and his passion for sunlight are evident in the film’s flashback sequences, while Wyeth’s signature white, gray and wheat tones dominate the present-day scenes. “Hopper is one of my favorite painters, and I always had him in my mind for this film,” says Koltai. “When I saw the house that had
been selected for the mansion, I couldn’t believe it — it was exactly what I had envisioned.” Koltai also had a very specific image in mind for Ann as she lies in bed, drifting toward death. “I always pictured the room as a boat that’s drifting away from this life. There would be two big windows, one on either side of the bed, and billowing curtains that would look like two sails. Our wonderful production designer, Caroline Hanania, found me a Wyeth painting that showed a perfect relation of curtains to windows. As Ann dies, the curtains are blowing, just like
the sails of a boat.” In addition to contrasting color palettes, Koltai wanted past and present differentiated by camera movement. The camera is largely stationary in the present, as Ann nears death, whereas lively tracking shots bring vitality to the past. According to Pados, Koltai organized the shooting schedule around the sun. “Lajos has a fantastic eye and knows what moment to shoot. He planned each day so we could always shoot in backlight. We filmed interiors when the sun was high in the sky, and knocked off outdoor shots in the late afternoon, with its beautiful sunset glow. If you plan well, you only need a little fill. For that we used 12-by-12 white silks.” To give the film a sense of intimacy, Pados, who does his own operating, stuck primarily with 21mm and 27mm Primo prime lenses. “This is a very emotional story, and we always wanted to feel close to the characters in both the past and present. Lajos loves faces, but he didn’t want long lenses on close-ups; he wanted to feel we were right there with the characters. He prefers primes for that reason.” The cinematographer kept 1⁄4 Tiffen Black Pro-Mist on the lens the entire time. The camera package, rented from Panavision New York, also included 4:1 (17.5-75mm) and 11:1 (24275mm) Primo zooms and two Panaflex Platinums. Pados notes that using both cameras simultaneously was rare. Koltai and Pados hoped to shoot anamorphic, as they’d done on Fateless, but the studio objected, so they shot 3perf Super 35mm instead. Pados shot the picture on three Kodak Vision2 stocks: 500T 5218, 250D 5205 and 50D 5201. Footage was processed at Technicolor New York, and the final color timing was accomplished with a digital intermediate (DI) at Modern VideoFilm, where the filmmakers worked with colorist Joe Finley. The entire film was shot on location, and in the mansion the crew was not allowed to place anything on the walls or hang anything from the ceilings.
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Director Lajos Koltai, ASC (right) and cinematographer Gyula Pados, HSC discuss their next shot.
“Lajos and I both come from Eastern Europe, where there is no money to build sets, so we are used to shooting in real locations,” laughs Pados. “Actually, we both prefer that. A real location has a different atmosphere to me and, I believe, for the actors as well.” He recalls that the biggest challenge was lighting day interiors in the mansion in such a way that the sea and sky outside were always visible in the distance. “There were huge windows, and it’s difficult to get the same amount of light inside when you have a bright sunny day outside. You have to balance [the light levels] somehow so you can see both inside the room and outside the windows.” One such scene finds Lila and Buddy’s mother (played by Glenn Close) sitting in an enclosed porch, with windows behind and to the side of her. Six 18Ks were required to create enough light inside the room. Sheets of .9ND were placed over the windows — because of windy conditions, hard gels were used most of the time — and a heavy Frost filter was on the lens. The dinner following Lila’s wedding was filmed in an enormous ballroom in another Newport location. With 200 extras, 57 setups and only one shooting day scheduled, the filmmakers had their work cut out for them. Pados used both cameras and lit the room so different kinds of shots wouldn’t require major lighting changes. Two 4K helium balloons provided ambient light, while 28 July 2007
ornamental crystal practicals — each fitted with a 60-watt bulb — in the center of each table helped light actors’ faces. “Our gaffer, Jerry DeBlau, rolled small pieces of Frost diffusion paper around each of those bulbs to soften the light a bit,” says Pados. “We dimmed them down to make them a touch warmer, and we also dimmed the helium balloons.” While the A camera concentrated on tracking shots, the B camera, equipped with slightly longer lenses, handled cutaways. At one point during the reception, Ann joins the orchestra to sing a song dedicated to Lila. Harris joins her during the number, and they dance around the stage. “Jerry built two 2-by-4-foot light boxes out of white plastic and filled them with heavily diffused bulbs — I think we used F-1,” recalls Pados. “The boxes were so light the electricians could move them around quickly. One provided the key light for Ann and Harris; the other provided ambience and fill.” A key scene in the film occurs in the present, when an elderly Lila (Meryl Streep) visits Ann, whom she hasn’t seen in years. Awakening from a sleep, Ann sees Lila bathed in strong backlight and mistakes her for an angel. The bedroom is adjacent to an enclosed porch, and the sunlight pouring onto the porch reaches into the bedroom. “I wanted a strong beam effect, so we put a 6K Par outside the porch window,
creating a strong backlight on Meryl. You can’t really see who she is. Ann is close to death, and we wanted to make this scene a bit dreamy.” Lila lies down on the bed, her face just inches from Ann’s, and they reminisce. “It’s one of the most intimate moments in the film,” notes Pados. “Lajos wanted to use extreme close-ups for the two women. The light coming through the window and bouncing off the pillows is the only light in the scene. We moved the pillows so the light would bounce off them and into the actresses’ faces. I had a 40mm lens on, and we used a little arm on the Fisher dolly to position the camera.” Evening was Pados’ first U.S. shoot, and he has high praise for his crew. “Lajos recommended gaffer Jerry DeBlau, and he turned out to be one of the best I’ve ever worked with. He’s always thinking about the story and how to make the atmosphere better. I don’t think I could have done this film without him.” Focus puller Blackford “Boots” Shelton “did a wonderful job,” adds Pados. “He had to do walking shots without rehearsals, which was especially difficult because the actors walked around without marks for many of the scenes. “Also, I really like being part of the prep, and fortunately, [production designer] Caroline Hanania and I were able to spend a lot of time collaborating before the shoot. She has wonderful taste and contributed many great ideas. “Evening is really about choices,” he muses in conclusion. “We always wonder whether we’re choosing the right thing, and this is about a woman questioning the choices she’s made in her life. We wanted the differences between the past and the present to be gentle, not extreme. We didn’t want to distract from the emotions at play with a strong stylized look.”
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THE CLAIRMONT ADVANTAGE…
Simon Duggan, ACS, and crew members share their experiences in the shooting of “Live Free or Die Hard” with Bruce Willis You’ll have to agree that there are three key factors in the success of most any shoot. First is the skill of the crew, from the DP right down through the assistants. Second, there’s selecting the optimum equipment (cameras, lenses and accessories) for the job. Third —but critically important from our point of view— is the performance and dependability of the equipment, as well as technical support. That’s what The Clairmont Advantage is all about. We thank Simon Duggan, ACS (Director of Photography), Anthony Cappello (“A” camera 1st AC), and John Holmes (“B” camera 1st AC) for elaborating on points two and three. Credit Holmes for the production stills used in this ad.
THE EQUIPMENT USED
DUGGAN: “When it came to selecting the cameras and equipment for Live Free or Die Hard I went with essentially the same package from Clairmont that I’d used for a previous project, Underworld: Evolution. Between Main and Action units we used a complete Arriflex package including the Arricam ST and LT, several 435s and two of the lightweight 235s. Lenses included complete sets of Cooke S4 Primes from
12mm through 180mm and a full set of Optimo Angenieux Zooms, the 15-40mm, the 17-80mm and the 24-290mm lens.”
WHY CLAIRMONT?
DUGGAN: “I had a very good experience the first time I used Clairmont, and the ACs all wanted to go there knowing they would be looked after. And when it came to pricing, Clairmont was very competitive.”
Award-winning cinematographer Simon Duggan, ACS, on the set of “Live Free or Die Hard” HOLMES: “I’ve had dealings with Clairmont Camera for 18 years now, and I can always count on reliable gear and great service. Their equipment is second to none! I have dealt with rental houses all over the world and I have dealt with some good ones —but I would have to say that Clairmont is my favorite.” CAPPELLO: “I’ve worked with Clairmont for over ten years and my experience has always been a good one. Their staff, especially Alan, Irving and Tom Boelens have been extremely helpful, supportive, and reliable.”
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DUGGAN: “Clairmont had everything we required right on schedule and the gear was all in like-new condition. The ACs
“A” Camera operator Mitch Dubin (left), “B” Camera 1st AC John Holmes, and “B” Camera/Steadicam operator Colin Hudson (right) on the set of Live Free or Die Hard
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had full run of the facility for checking and testing all the gear. We had additional equipment needs that came up during the shoot, and it was prepped by Clairmont’s staff and sent direct to the set.” HOLMES: “Sean, the rental agent I work with, has made the impossible possible when we need equipment and the town is busy. When out of town he always gets us what we need when we need it.” CAPPELLO: “When it comes to Arriflex and other cameras, Clairmont is the house to beat...bar none!”
COMPLETE CONFIDENCE IN THE EQUIPMENT
DUGGAN: “Clairmont’s equipment is really very well maintained so it’s rare to have a problem with any of the cameras and lenses. I’ve been caught before with bad lenses, but I’m confident the guys at Clairmont rigorously check the gear when they put a package together before the ACs start their tests. Clairmont Camera makes my job easier because I don’t have to worry about the quality of the equipment. I know that in the event of a problem or a piece of equipment getting damaged they can usually replace or repair it immediately.”
Simon Duggan, ACS (right) discusses a shot with Jeff Murrell, Chief Lighting Technician
EXCEPTIONAL SERVICE
HOLMES: “Clairmont Camera has gone above and beyond the call of duty many times during the years I’ve dealt with them. Once, when we were shooting a commercial at night, the director wanted a 10mm lens and the widest we had was a 14mm. I called Denny Clairmont at home at 3 AM and by 3:30 we had the lens. He did not hesitate and helped us out when we really needed it.” CAPPELLO: “When you have the commitment of a guy like Denny, who is overseeing the operation on a daily basis and willing to do what it takes to help you get what you need, that makes your job very easy. When it comes to service, I rate Clairmont highly as they really
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IN SUMMATION… The true measure of any company is how customers like doing business with them. At Clairmont Camera we try to be the very best we can in every aspect of our operation, so that we may continue to earn the support of our many valued customers. I Equipment in like new or better condition I Ready on schedule I Many special cameras and lenses I Competitive pricing on camera packages I Exemplary service and tech support
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One-Man
Riot
Squad John McClane is back for more action in Live Free or Die Hard, shot by Simon Duggan, ACS. by Simon Gray
Unit photography by Frank Masi, SMPSP and Peter “Hopper” Stone 32 July 2007
I
n 1988, Die Hard rejuvenated the action-film genre and popularized everyman hero John McClane (Bruce Willis), a modern-day cowboy whose quick thinking and even quicker one-liners belied a troubled personal life. In that film, McClane overcame daunting odds to dispatch the bad guys and save the day in a Los Angeles high-rise office building, where McClane was attempting to reconcile with his estranged wife. Live Free or Die Hard, the fourth and perhaps final installment in the franchise, is set almost 20 years after the
events of the first film, but McClane is no less troubled. Now a retired cop, he is divorced and a recovering alcoholic. Assigned by the Department of Homeland Security to transport hacker Matt Farrell (Justin Long) into custody, McClane must fend off attacks by a gang of cyber-terrorists led by Thomas Gabriel (Timothy Olyphant), who believe the ethical hacker, or “white hat,” will be a threat to their ambitions. As the gang systematically shuts down the nation’s critical and financial infrastructure, McClane leaps into action in his usual inim-
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Photos courtesy of 20th Century Fox.
Opposite: The indestructible John McClane (Bruce Willis) takes on a group of Internet terrorists in Live Free or Die Hard. This page, top: Held hostage by terrorist leader Thomas Gabriel (Timothy Olyphant), McClane’s daughter, Lucy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), listens as the criminal kingpin negotiates with her father. Below: McClane attempts to protect ethical hacker Matt Farrell (Justin Long), who may be able to foil the terrorists’ plans.
itable style. “McClane is older and a bit wiser, but age certainly hasn’t wearied him,” confirms the film’s cinematographer, Simon Duggan, ACS. “Live Free or Die Hard is an incredibly kinetic movie; everyone and everything is always on the move.” To make the film, Duggan reteamed with director Len Wiseman, with whom he had previously collaborated on Underworld: Evolution. The duo’s goal was to make Live Free or Die Hard look as realistic as possible. “I know that sounds almost contradictory,” says Duggan, “but we both felt that although Die Hard was groundbreaking for its time, audiences now are incredibly discerning about the level of realism they expect from action films. McClane is very much an everyman character, and the film is set in a recognizable, real world, so even when the events are pushing the boundaries of reality, the audience doesn’t want to be taken out of the moment. Shooting a large part of the movie on location, the style of the stunt work, and the cinematography
all came from a desire to create a sense of realism.” Duggan shot Live Free or Die Hard in Super 35mm using an Arri package supplied by Clairmont Cameras. “Our kit consisted of two lightweight Arricam LTs, a couple of 435s and the compact 235. The 235 is my personal favorite; it’s a great
handheld camera and you can squeeze it into the tightest of spaces.” The cinematographer used Cooke S4 primes and Angenieux Optimo zooms. “I’ve used the Cookes a lot. They’re very sharp but not in an artificial way, and they have a certain roundness to them. I often used wider lenses. Between 21mm and
American Cinematographer 33
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One-Man Riot Squad Right: Another terrorist, Mai (Maggie Q), gets tough with Matt. Below: A mix of fixtures illuminates Matt’s workspace. For insert shots of fingers typing on computer keyboards, Duggan employed a Revolution snorkel lens to create wideangle close-ups.
40mm, you feel more a part of the action and get a greater sense of the environment. The B and C cameras were by necessity on longer lenses, around 60mm to 75mm, depending on the shot.” At least two cameras were used for each setup; one was always on a
34 July 2007
Steadicam and the others were usually handheld. For dolly shots, Duggan had the operator place the camera on a Cinesaddle rather than a head. “It’s just a more kinetic way of shooting and gives you a different kind of movement in the frame,” he explains. As befits a story that
involves cyberspace, the movie is littered with insert shots of fingers typing on computer keyboards, and Duggan decided to give many of these shots a dynamic feel by using a Revolution snorkel lens for wideangle close-ups. The cinematographer shot the picture on two Kodak Vision2 stocks, 500T 5218 (often pushed 1 stop and rated at ISO 800) for studio and night work and 250D 5205 (rated at ISO 200) for day-exterior work. “I shot most of the film around f2.8 to f4, with the exteriors around the f5.6 mark because I prefer more depth outside,” says Duggan.“I also pushed the negative as I needed to. I often push stocks and feel very comfortable doing so when I know I’m going to a digital intermediate [DI], because contrast and color shifts are easy to correct.” For logistical and aesthetic reasons, much of Live Free or Die Hard was shot on location. “The sheer size of places like the Edison Power Plant at Redondo Beach could never have been built in a studio, but
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Left: Crewmembers set up an elaborate car rig for one of the film’s highoctane action sequences. Below: Willis dangles in an elevator shaft built on a soundstage.
more importantly, the Die Hard films are very much about the environments where the action takes place — everyone remembers the Nakatomi Plaza from the first film,” notes Duggan. “For this movie, we made great use of roads, tunnels and a variety of industrial locations. Len and I believed shooting on actual locations whenever we could was the only way to go.” When asked if a locationheavy shoot might dilute the role of the production designer, Duggan disagrees.“Not at all. This is my third film in a row with Patrick [Tatopoulos], after I, Robot [see AC July ’04] and Underworld: Evolution, and my communication with him and his team on this movie was just as essential, if not more so. They built some amazing sets onstage that were important to the plot but impossible to shoot on location, including FBI headquarters, an elevator shaft that McClane crashes down inside his vehicle, and a massive cooling tower that features a dramatic fight sequence. On a larger scale, Patrick’s
team built a 1,000-foot section of concrete freeway for a fighter-plane attack on McClane’s truck. We talked constantly about the angles Len and I wanted to shoot; Len likes to shoot from low angles into ceilings, so we were very seldom able to put rigging overhead. Patrick always considered how I planned to light a set and incorporate it into his designs.” The action in Live Free or Die Hard essentially starts in Washington, D.C., when McClane and Farrell, riding in a police car, are chased by members of Gabriel’s gang, who are in a helicopter. Duggan recalls, “We shot Baltimore for Washington in these opening sequences, and it was important to give them a warmer look that would contrast with the blue-green palette of the later night scenes. While I tried to work in the shadow of the tall buildings as much as possible, the pace of shooting meant we ran the gamut of lighting conditions — morning and afternoon shade, full sunlight, rain, and even night for day. Knowing we’d finish with a DI gave American Cinematographer 35
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One-Man Riot Squad Right: A tow rig is used for a chase scene in which McClane and his young friend commandeer a police car. Below left: An Ultimate Arm mounted atop a Mercedes SUV is used to capture dynamic chase footage. In other situations, a MotoArm was employed. Below right: The show’s second unit films a police car crashing through a tollbooth.
me the confidence to keep shooting late into the day.” (The DI was carried out at Company 3 with colorist Siggy Ferstl.) Knowing he would need to match footage shot under diverse conditions during the timing process, Duggan tested several looks for the scenes shot in Baltimore. “I found a slightly warm sepia tone that worked beautifully with the sand-
36 July 2007
stone tones of the buildings and skin tones, and it also fit the mood of a warm summer day.” To previsualize looks, he took digital stills and tweaked the images in Photoshop. “Those images were then used as references by the telecine operator. I compared the screen on my laptop to his screen, we lined them up so we had the same visual reference, and that was it. It was a low-tech
approach, and it worked perfectly.” In order to maximize shooting time, Duggan kept his day-exterior lighting concepts simple. “Maintaining a good pace on set benefits everyone, and Bruce is so familiar with his character by now that he was always eager to move ahead. There are so many logistical considerations involved in location shooting that simple is usually best.
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My approach was often to use HMI fixtures for harder backlight and directional soft bounce for fill.” The action quickly moves from daylight into darkness as McClane and Farrell’s police car is forced into an underground tunnel by the villains’helicopter. The terrorists, who have gained control over the computerized traffic-control system, direct vehicles into the one-way tunnel from both ends, and sequentially turn out the lights, plunging the tunnel into almost complete darkness. “This is the first major sequence in the film, and it was very time-consuming to set up,” recalls Duggan. “The location was a working 1,000-foot-long service road, part of which was open to the ground level. To create the tunnel effect, we blacked out the rest of the road and then lit it with about 60 Lumapanels mounted along its length. Rigging gaffer D.J. Lootens and his crew had to lay miles of DMX cable, as every single tube in each panel was linked to a control desk. When the Lumapanels are turned off, the main source becomes the headlights of the cars, which we supple-
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mented with tracking and panning Source Four Lekos through the shots, using them as back- and rimlight. For very low-level fill, and to create some color contrast, I used more Lumapanels as bounced sources, creating a shadow-less blue/green ambience, and then punctuated the scene with small red glows, justified
by the taillights of the cars.” Live Free or Die Hard features action sequences involving a multitude of cars, trucks and helicopters, and even a jet fighter. As is the norm with action movies, much of the stunt and special-effects work that didn’t involve the actors was shot by the second unit, led by director Brian
A flying police car collides with the villains’ helicopter in a spectacular stunt that was staged the old-fashioned way by specialeffects coordinator Michael Meinardus and his crew. Led by director Brian Smrz and cinematographers Jonathan Taylor, ASC and Brian Capo, the second unit captured the action.
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One-Man Riot Squad
Above: After stealing the villains’ mobile command center, McClane is pursued by a jet fighter and eventually ends up dangling precariously from the trailer’s back end. The trailer was hung from a 35-ton industrial crane. Right: Shots of McClane driving the semi at breakneck speeds were accomplished with a truck cab placed on a computerized hydraulic motion base, which allowed the cab to be rocked violently.
38 July 2007
Smrz and cinematographers Jonathan Taylor, ASC and Brian Capo. “The main-unit cinematographers always say the second unit gets to do all the fun stuff,” Duggan says with a laugh. “However, those guys really knew their stuff, so I was more than happy to leave it to them. Working with special-effects coordinator Michael Meinardus, they created some fantastic sequences with cars being catapulted through the air, sometimes into helicopters, sometimes into other cars and
sometimes several at a time. It’s some of the most amazing stunt work I’ve ever seen, and, of course, the explosions look great, too.” While the second unit wreaked havoc, Duggan and his crew shot process-vehicle work with Willis and Long. “We also mounted their police vehicle, with them inside, directly on a high-performance truck for realistic pursuit sequences through city streets, and for dynamic coverage using the MotoArm, a remote-operated crane
on top of the vehicle used for highspeed maneuvers.” (For other chase sequences, an Ultimate Arm was employed.) The close-up dialogue coverage in the vehicles relied on simulated travel lighting effects against greenscreen. “I’ve always used extensive interactive lighting with greenscreen work,” he notes. “I’m convinced that’s what ultimately sells it. A film like Live Free or Die Hard was made for interactive lighting, and we used a great variety of lighting rigs to achieve different effects.” For sequences that show McClane driving a semi truck at breakneck speed through freeway interchanges, Duggan had the truck cab placed on a computerized hydraulic motion base, enabling the cab to be rocked about violently. “Bruce’s close-up work was done against bluescreen using interactive lighting. We see Bruce with the appropriate movement as well as moving shadows, light, flying debris and smoke as his rig is fired upon. We always had three-camera coverage, including a Technocrane sweeping around the cabin. All these cues sell it to the audience as real.” Another sequence shows
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McClane and Farrell commandeering a helicopter and flying over D.C., which has gone dark because of a power outage. To light the actors, Duggan bounced Mini-Brutes gelled with Rosco CalColor 30 Cyan into a 12'x20' frame of Ultrabounce, creating a shadow-less soft source. To suggest ambient moonlight, as well as reflections of moonlight off the helicopter rotors, the crew used what they dubbed “The Commutator” (a wooden mockup of the rotor blades) and old-fashioned whirly-barrels. Above The Commutator, Duggan mounted a 5K gelled with CalColor 30 Cyan. The whirly-barrels — vertical, cylindrical versions of the rotor blades — were placed in front of or behind 8'x8' or 4'x4' frames of Opal diffusion, depending on the setup. Red and green flashing navigation strobes placed on the starboard and port sides of the helicopter completed the lighting. Duggan used a combination of HMIs and fluorescents for most of the night scenes. HMIs gelled with Full Plus Green and Lumapanels, ParaBeam and VistaBeam fluorescent fixtures fitted with Cool White tubes created a blue-green look for industrial exteriors and interiors.
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Above: The command trailer careens past an explosion on a freeway interchange. To facilitate this sequence, production designer Patrick Tatopoulos and his crew built a 1,000'-long section of concrete freeway. Left: The Ultimate Arm captures the action.
When using tungsten units, the crew added CalColor 30 Cyan to achieve a similar look. Although the extensive use of fluorescent lighting is normal for Duggan, he decided to test them again against tungsten soft lights. “I still think the fluoros provide a smoother, slightly more reflective feel. “To enhance the industriallighting theme of many of our locations and sets, we fit Lumapanels, VistaBeams and Kino Flos with Cool White tubes, which have almost twice the output of normal color-
corrected tubes. We even had enough punch to use some of these lamps for backlighting in large areas.” The production filmed existing underground structures of a working power plant and water-treatment facility, such as long, narrow tunnels and access stairwells. “They were difficult locations to work in because there was minimal space to hide our lighting,” says Duggan.“But logistical limitations can often lead you to lighting decisions that work out better, and that was often the case on this film. We used a lot of Source American Cinematographer 39
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One-Man Riot Squad
Above: The jet fighter pursuing McClane was mounted on a hydraulic motion base that provided 360-degree movement. Right: Cranemounted lights, a remote camera on a telescoping arm, bluescreens and Ritter fans help sell the illusion of flight.
40 July 2007
Fours as directional backlight and for skimming walls; we didn’t have to worry about the source being in shot as long as it wasn’t focused straight down the barrel of the lens. I also played dozens of fluorescent and LED fixtures as both practicals or as sources hidden amongst the structures within the plant. D.J.’s
crew ran miles of cable throughout the power plant and swapped out hundreds of existing bulbs.” Chief lighting technician Jeff Murrell had brought LED lighting units to Duggan’s attention during preproduction, and they quickly became the cinematographer’s favorite tools. “The 1-by-1
Litepanels LED was great for tight situations when close proximity to the actors was required,” says the cinematographer. “They provide a soft yet directional and dimmable light source with little spill and heat output. They can also be joined together and easily hidden behind tables or under chairs. I used them
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Diagram and photo courtesy of Simon Duggan.
for a variety of purposes.” Duggan found LEDs well suited to the terrorists’ mobile command center. “Gabriel has a command center in the trailer of a semi, and it’s basically a series of booths with a computer in each one. For reasons of practicality, I used the LEDs almost exclusively on this set, with some Kinos in the ceiling to create ambience. We were able to hide the LED panels in all sorts of places on this set, because the directional quality of the light is quite amazing. Once they are off-axis to the lens, there’s no spill at all.“ The LEDs also proved to be very useful as eyelights. “I always make sure the actor has detail in his eyes, because that’s where a lot of the performance is,” notes Duggan. “It’s one of the main reasons I tend not to use a lot of toplight on actors. There’s a scene in the power station where Bruce is leaning over a computer console, and we had three moving cameras on him: a Technocrane circling the action, a Steadicam on a longer lens following in the shadow of the crane, and another camera hidden behind a
5k
5k
N
A rig dubbed “The Commutator” (a wooden mockup of rotor blades) and old-fashioned whirly-barrels (vertical, cylindrical versions of the rotor blades) were used to creative believable lighting for a nighttime helicopter sequence. The A camera was equipped with a 65mm lens; the B camera with a 75mm lens; and the C camera with a 27mm lens.
box. The only way I could light Bruce was by using the LEDs from a low angle. He had some initial concerns, but when he realized the angle of the lighting provided a strong eyelight, he was more than happy. I rarely use eyelights mounted on cameras, but given these types of shots, I had a 2by-6-inch LED Mini Litepanel mounted on the Steadicam, just to give that reflection to Bruce’s eyes.” The use of soft fluorescent light paid off for the film’s female
stars as well. “There’s not much you have to do for Maggie Q and Mary Elizabeth Winstead, but fluorescents are a reflective light source that fills out imperfections in the skin,” says Duggan. “Using them as my key lights meant I didn’t need to use any softening filters throughout the film.” At the other end of the spectrum, the BeBee Night Light proved to be a favorite for lighting large exteriors and interiors.“The BeBee saved American Cinematographer 41
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One-Man Riot Squad Taking a meter reading, cinematographer Simon Duggan, ACS sports a Balin T-shirt that may indicate his desire to go surfing after completing the grueling shoot.
us in many situations where we quite simply ran out of daylight, which is what a BeBee should be used for,” says the cinematographer. “For the last confrontation between McClane
and Gabriel, which takes place in a warehouse as Gabriel is getting ready to leave, I used two 15-6K HMI BeBees outside the windows, which were frosted glass. This extended our
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shooting day by three hours, which saved production time and money.” In the movie’s biggest action setpiece, McClane, having stolen Gabriel’s mobile command center, is pursued by a jet fighter that has been sent a false order by the terrorists. The fighter pursues McClane over multiple intersecting freeways, and in the process, the pair wreak havoc. “It was great fun to shoot that,” recalls Duggan. In keeping with the filmmakers’ desire for realism, shots that included Willis were filmed outdoors in front of semicircular 45'x200' bluescreen. The production built a large section of destroyed freeway, the fighter plane, and the trailer section of the truck in real scale. The plane was mounted on a hydraulic motion base that provided 360-degree movement, and the trailer was hung from a 35-ton industrial crane. Willis was thereby able to do many of his own stunts
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with a safety cable, such as being on the tailfin of the jet, or hanging from the back of the truck. To facilitate the digital effects that would tie this sequence together, Duggan and visual-effects supervisor Patrick McClung opted to shoot in the open sun. The cinematographer notes, “By having the jet mounted on the turntable, we could keep it orientated to the sun for shooting, but more significantly, as it ‘banked’ and ‘turned’ on the mount, the visual-effects guys were getting the movement of the actual light and shadows, enabling a much more realistic effect.” Deluxe Laboratories in Hollywood processed the production’s footage, and the filmmakers viewed the first two weeks of dailies on 35mm and high-definition DVD. The rest of the time, Duggan had to be content with DVD dailies. “I’d like to see more projected
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dailies, because things like focus can only be properly judged on the big screen. It’s a matter of being confident that what you’re seeing on the DVD means the negative is the way you want it to be. After two weeks of film dailies, I knew what I was getting. Every couple of weeks, Deluxe would supply me with ‘virtual printing lights’ from the neg without a print.” Duggan sums up his experience on Live Free or Die Hard by stating, “On a film like this, you need a crew that is not just enthusiastic and hard-working, but also able to maintain a sense of humor over a long period of time. A-camera operator Mitch Dubin and B-camera/ Steadicam operator Colin Hudson were always looking for creative angles and movement. Jeff Murrell and [key grip] Michael Anderson were incredibly resourceful and backed by great support teams.
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Laws of the
Jungle Cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger reteams with Werner Herzog on Rescue Dawn, the harrowing true story of a U.S. Navy pilot who escapes a POW camp during the Vietnam War. by Fred Schruers Unit photography by Lena Herzog 44 July 2007
I
n August 2005, director Werner Herzog, cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger, and a production company about 50 times larger than Herzog’s preferred shooting complement of two arrived in northwestern Thailand for a month of filming. Their work began in the dense rain forest near Khorat. “It was the jungle jungle,” says Herzog, “but it was not arduous. We had catering, we had good hotels in the area, we had basically everything.” He contrasts the shoot to what he endured 37 years earlier
on Aguirre: The Wrath of God, which he has called “a barefoot film”: “That was a small crew of eight. We lived on rafts and in makeshift native Indian huts. There was never any settlement nearby.” Rescue Dawn is based on the true story of German-born U.S. Navy aviator Dieter Dengler (played by Christian Bale), who, like Herzog, grew up in Germany during the lean postwar years. The new film is a companion piece to Herzog’s 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly. It
Photos courtesy of MGM and Top Gun Productions.
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delves deeper than the documentary did into the harrowing adventure lived by Dengler after he was shot down in 1966 on a secret mission over Laos. Dieter was held captive by Pathet Lao guerillas for 136 days before he and some of the other imprisoned Americans escaped. After spending 23 days evading recapture in the jungle, he was rescued by U.S. forces. To stand in for the jungles of Laos, Herzog chose a location in the remote Northwestern Hill Country of Thailand, near the border with Burma. To the north and east lay the Golden Triangle, and somewhat south, the tourist destination of Krabi, conveniently close to an inland area chosen by Herzog “because I wanted to have these very strange, beautiful limestone rock formations. There’s a holiday resort nearby, so we had good hotel facilities, but we
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moved inland to do the shooting.” After shooting several pictures for Herzog over the last 12 years, Zeitlinger qualifies as something of an expert on the director. When it’s down to just two filmmakers — as it was recently, when
Herzog and Zeitlinger crawled into snow caves formed by the heat from an active volcano in Antarctica — the Czech-born cinematographer is Herzog’s go-to man. Zeitlinger well understands the motive for going into the figu-
Opposite: In a scene from Rescue Dawn, Pathet Lao guerrillas lead U.S. Navy pilot Dieter Dengler (Christian Bale) to a POW camp after his plane is shot down during a secret mission over Laos. This page: En route to the camp, the guerrillas test Dengler’s mettle by having him dragged through a village for sport.
American Cinematographer 45
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Laws of the Jungle Right: Dengler whiles away some time with Duane (Steve Zahn), a fellow American prisoner. Below: Director Werner Herzog gives some last-minute instruction to Bale and Zahn as cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger (holding camera) and 1st AC Erik Söllner stand by.
rative and literal bush, often with handheld cameras bearing short lenses: “There is a key sentence in Rescue Dawn when Dieter and the other prisoners in the camp are talking about escaping, and one of them says, ‘The jungle is the prison.’ That key sentence was leading Werner’s intention; that’s the reason we tried to make it as real as possible and keep the audi-
46 July 2007
ence in the world of the jungle, rather than show it to them with long-lens photography. [Long lenses] make for beautiful pictures, but that’s not the world you are in.” Zeitlinger’s solidarity with Herzog’s intent is the key to a loyalty reciprocated by the director, who tells AC that Rescue Dawn’s neophyte producers, who wanted
something on the order of the deft action flick The Rundown, did not want Zeitlinger to shoot the picture. “Peter’s strong and has a great eye, and having him around, I was confident,” says the director. “The production company tried to move him out before he’d shown up on the set, and that was my line in the sand. I said, ‘If you force Zeitlinger out, I might as well go, too.’” The film that first drew Herzog’s attention to Zeitlinger was one that delved into the cinematographer’s own history as a refugee. Zeitlinger was 9 years old when he fled with his mother to Austria from the Soviet Union’s 1968 occupation of Czechoslovakia. He reflected on that period of his life while shooting and editing Ulrich Seidl’s Loss Is to Be Expected, about the turbulence created in society and families when the Czech/Austrian border was opened after 40 years. When the producers balked at financing the film’s completion, Herzog,
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then living in Vienna, saw footage and spoke up for the film, gaining it the funds to finish. He told Zeitlinger he liked the film’s handheld cinematography. “I responded by saying it would be so fine to make a film with him,” recalls Zeitlinger. “Three years later, Werner phoned me and said, ‘Hey, I have a job for you.’” Over their next few collaborations, Zeitlinger learned Herzog’s method, whereby the director, often with a hand on the cinematographer, dictates the shot by whispering in his ear. Herzog had used cinematographer Thomas Mauch on a number of films, including the jungle adventures Aguirre: The Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, and Jorg Schmidt-Reitwein on statelier fare such as Heart of Glass and Nosferatu. (“Sometimes there have been difficult choices to make,” the director told his Herzog on Herzog chronicler Paul Cronin, “about which of these fine cameramen to work with on particular films. Thomas Mauch is the cameraman I go to when I need something more physical … Schmidt-Reirtwein has a very good feeling for darkness and threatening shadows and gloom,
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in part, I suspect, because just after the Berlin Wall went up he was caught smuggling his girlfriend out of the East and was placed into solitary confinement for several months.”) Herzog, whose collaborations with Zeitlinger include Grizzly Man (see AC Aug. ’05) and Invincible, makes it clear that he requires very game directors of photography. The first thing he says about Zeitlinger is, “He’s a man of enormous physique. He used to be a hockey player for one of the best teams in the world.” With some amusement, Zeitlinger elaborates, “It was a children’s league in Prague. [Making that claim] is very important for Werner, and he does it at any possible situation. One interviewer who spoke to him about Invincible complimented my cinematography, and Werner said, ‘Yes, he’s very good. He used to be an ice-hockey player.’” Having decided that upclose handheld shots — many made with a 14mm lens — would dominate their work on Rescue Dawn, Herzog and Zeitlinger went into the shoot with one crucial influence in mind. The cinematographer explains, “One of
the favorite 14mm-lens movies is Soy Cuba [I Am Cuba], a movie from the ’60s that was a propaganda movie for the Russians, against the Americans. Although we used other lenses on Rescue Dawn, notably a 35mm and a 25mm, we even used the 14mm with a handheld camera for special moments. With that lens, when you make just a very small movement the frame changes totally. My favorite scene we used it for comes just after the escape, when Dieter and the other escapees reunite in the forest. Gene [Jeremy Davies] and Dieter are having a discussion about their shoes, and just a slight movement of 20 centimeters to camera left brings Jeremy very close in frame. He acted it very well, [using] ‘the [Klaus] Kinski spiral,’ as Werner might call it; he turned toward the camera, even when he was talking with Christian, who was almost behind him. It’s not only a very good scenic moment, with the landscape behind them, but also an optic and acting moment working simultaneously to show the characters in a tense situation.” Zeitlinger’s responsibilities were substantial, thanks to
Herzog, Söllner and Zeitlinger prepare another take in the camp. “Erik has worked with me on many Herzog movies,” Zeitlinger says of his 1st AC. “When we’re looking down into a deep abyss and Herzog says, ‘Peter, I will hold you onto your belt when you turn the camera down over the edge,’ Erik takes out his harness and mountaineer rope and says, ‘Werner, I will secure Peter. He’s the one who gave me the job, not you.’ Erik is the one who cut a path for me through the jungle on this shoot. He had a machete in one hand and the focus wheel in the other.”
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Laws of the Jungle Right: The other prisoners listen as Dengler lays out his escape plan. The filmmakers set scenes in the hut at different times of day to help suggest the passage of time. Below: Herzog outlines his plan for the actors.
Herzog’s dictum that there is no storyboarding, ever. “You don’t find it in the past and you won’t find it in Rescue Dawn, nor in the future,” says the director, who even gave Zeitlinger license to critique the acting. “On one scene,
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for example, Peter stopped the camera and said, ‘Werner, we have to go into it once more. The scene has no rhythm.’ And he was right. Something to do with how the actors would mill around and how the camera would get into it
had no rhythm. So in five minutes flat, we came up with an alternative version that all of a sudden flowed and worked and had suspense and rhythm.” “As the operator, I’m the first audience,” says Zeitlinger. “Sometimes Werner accepted my comments and sometimes he didn’t. That’s my way of working with all directors, because I’m not looking at only the framing, I’m also listening to what the actors are saying and trying to feel the scene. If the performance does not really express what it should, I will feel it and say that to the director.” During prep for Rescue Dawn, Zeitlinger proposed shooting in a widescreen format, with the rationale that “it’s shaped more like the view our eyes have of the world. It’s more a window into the world than a framed image. And I thought it would help our intention to create reality.” However, Herzog doesn’t care
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Left: On the run from their captors, Duane and Dieter try to camouflage themselves on the river. The prominence of the color green in the picture’s palette led the filmmakers to scour the globe for more of their primary stock, Fuji 64D, when their supplier ran out of it. “I would always choose Fuji when filming in a rain forest,” says Herzog. Below: Preparing to film the actors at river’s edge.
for widescreen. “When the image is too stretched out, I don’t like it, and I say that as a spectator. My screen ratio is 1.85:1.” To take advantage of a bigger negative, Zeitlinger shot in Super 35mm and framed for a final 1.85:1 extraction. Herzog secured a digital intermediate (DI) before Zeitlinger came aboard the project. “Many decisions were made in the production department before I arrived, and I was pleased to learn we would finish with a DI,” says the cinematographer. “Even though I had not done a DI for a theatrical release before, I was quite familiar with the advantages of digital grading, thanks to my work on feature films for television. “Werner knew we would need to integrate some CG effects, and he also wanted to be able to reframe in post, and those things are easy with a digital internegative,” continues Zeitlinger. “We thought we would need to reframe some of the freestyle multi-camera scenes, but I actualAmerican Cinematographer 49
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Laws of the Jungle The escapees survive a harrowing set of rapids.
ly don’t remember any take that we had to reframe in post; our Thai B-camera operator, Picha Srisansanee, did a very good job. Overall, to save time and money we used just a few of the capabilities the DI offers — it was like having an orchestra at your fingertips and only using the first violin — but at least we preserved an untouched original negative for future use. Werner loves to use stock material for his movies, and that’s much easier when it isn’t cut into pieces.” (The DI was carried out at Warner Bros. Motion Picture Imaging.) Shooting Rescue Dawn digitally was not even considered, even though Herzog acknowledges it is the wave of the future. “I’m a man of celluloid,” he says. 50 July 2007
“We should not forget that celluloid is something much more living, and it has a certain depth of layer, of chemistry, that very often renders the most fascinating results. When you shoot digitally, you end up with a digital file that doesn’t have the same kind of depth.” Zeitlinger shot most of Rescue Dawn on Fuji Super F-64D 8522, a choice that created anxiety late in the shoot, when production learned its supplier had no more on hand because Fuji had discontinued it. “Our location was green jungle, and green especially shows the difference between Kodak and Fuji,” notes the cinematographer. “Fuji 64-ASA produces a fresh and shiny green with a touch of steel blue in it, whereas with Kodak,
especially the 50-ASA, green tones go more toward brown. So we tried to find more Fuji 8522 all over the world, from Japan to America. Finally we found some rolls in Munich.” He used Fuji Eterna 250D 8563 on day exteriors when he started to lose light, and Eterna 400T 8583 for interiors and night material. “We used some graduated Tiffen Neutral Density filters to control the sky and clouds, but we didn’t use any soft filters, as they do in the commercial filmmaking world,” he adds. “Basically, the look of the movie is very, very clean.” Much of the film’s action takes place in the POW camp, where Dieter shares a bamboo hut with other captured Americans,
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including Gene and Duane (Steve Zahn). “Werner and I wanted the light in the hut to look natural, so we didn’t use any lamps inside at all for the day scenes,” notes Zeitlinger. “We had three 64-kilowatt generators powering four 6K, six 4K, eight 2.5K and two 18K HMIs that were set around and under the hut, and we used mirrors and reflectors to squeeze the lightbeams through the narrow gaps in the bamboo floor and walls. We set every scene in there at a different time of day to create the illusion of time passing by. “For night interiors, I used mostly Kino Flo Image 80 flatheads and 4-banks, and for exterior night scenes we used two HMI helium balloons, which were enough to light a vast area to a stop of T2. Even though the light from the balloons was soft, the landscape was full of mysterious shadows. “I like to work with shadows more than light,” continues Zeitlinger. “In the real world there is never a clean, unfiltered or unbounced light. In the jungle only a few gaps between the leaves allow the sun to break through, and the reflections from the leaves tint the light green. That’s the impression I was trying to achieve.” He only used artificial lighting on day exteriors when there was significant cloud cover, or when the team was losing light. “Toward the end of the day, to maintain the warm light of sunset I used four Dinos with tungsten spot lamps. I prefer to use big units and send the light through some natural obstacle or bounce it rather than use small lamps.” The production’s camera package comprised a Moviecam Compact and SL, and an Arri 435 and 235. Zeitlinger used Arri/Bayonet-mounted Zeiss Superspeeds (18mm, 25mm, 35mm, 50mm and 85mm) and a
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Zeitlinger and Herzog line up a shot in the camp.
14mm Zeiss Ultra Prime. Relying on Zeitlinger’s nimble feet and instincts, Herzog eschewed shooting coverage whenever possible. When a second camera was involved, Zeitlinger would set it up and then keep an eye on that camera’s framing via a wireless video feed that sent the image to a small screen mounted near his own eyepiece. Herzog clearly preferred single-camera handheld sprints through the jungle, which were facilitated by a crewmember who raced ahead of Zeitlinger, hacking a path for him. “When the actors are plowing through the densest thickets, it’s just sensational,” marvels Herzog. “It still baffles me how Peter shot it. It looks like no camera on God’s wide earth could
ever follow those guys through those vines. “I don’t use many long lenses,” he continues. “They’re harder to work with than wider lenses because everything in frame has to be perfect. In this movie, we’re not focusing on one face alone.” Herzog was devoted to the ensemble ethic because “this story is a test and trial of men, not a prison movie, not a war movie.” That proved to be true on both sides of the camera, but no one was more avid than the director, says Zeitlinger. “One of the most beautiful locations was the waterfall that Duane and Dieter had to pass under. There was such a strong wind, with the slippery stones permanently covered by the spray of the waterfall. It was American Cinematographer 51
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Laws of the Jungle
Following his rescue, an ecstatic Dengler is greeted by his fellow servicemen.
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very difficult to move on those stones to set up the camera. We built a cable car to cross the wild water to be able to find the right spot for the camera. Werner
doesn’t wear shoes in the jungle; because you often lose them in the mud, the only way to move in the muddy jungle is barefoot. On the slippery rocks at the waterfall,
Werner slipped as he was trying to help stabilize the camera, and the nails on both his big toes were torn off, but he succeeded in preventing the camera from going into the water. With his toes bleeding, he said, ‘Let’s continue shooting. The main thing is that we did not lose the camera.’” In addition to going on a diet in solidarity with his actors — he lost about half of the 58 pounds Bale dropped — Herzog ran through stunts for them. Zeitlinger recalls, “There was an old rope-and-plank bridge over a river, and many of the boards were rotten and weak. Werner wanted the actors to rush over the bridge while we shot from a distant bridge. Christian was keen to do everything — running barefoot through the jungle, hanging upside down with real ants crawling on his face, eating real mag-
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gots and worms — but he refused to run across the bridge before it had been checked for safety. The sun was already low and we had to move on, so Werner ran over the bridge and proved it himself. Sometimes Werner likes resistance [from actors]; he is strong enough to deal with it. And sometimes it brings a better result. If Christian had not refused to run at the first moment, we would not have had the good light, because we were in a hurry and would not have waited for it.” Bale adds, “I love that there’s somebody as dangerous and crazy as Werner, but I’ll tell you, he’s not nearly as dangerous and crazy as people think. He gets to those places on occasion [but] no guns were pulled on me at any point. It was great heading off to the jungle without knowing what we were going to do each and every day.
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Werner had last read the script about two years before we shot the movie! Every day was like, ‘What’s happening today?’” Zeitlinger believes Herzog’s reluctance to rely on video playback has enhanced a symbiosis: “Because we’ve made so many films together, I think I manage quite well to figure out what his intuition is.” On the other hand, he continues, “Werner’s approach to the art is always fresh and kind of naïve, which I think is the highest approach to cinema. The stories he tells do not feature the classic structure that leads to a happy ending. He’s always attracted to special characters who are looking for some kind of truth or reason. “I think there is something of Werner in all these characters, even if the person is his complete opposite, like Kinski. Fitzcarraldo
has the vision to build an opera house in the jungle. I think this wish to do something that nobody else believes in is a very strong part of Werner. It makes him special, and also powerful enough to achieve what he has achieved.” ■
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A Hollywood
Whodunit Alexander Gruszynski, ASC brings his keen eye to Nancy Drew: The Mystery in the Hollywood Hills, in which the famous teen detective solves a show-biz murder. by David Heuring Unit photography by Melinda Sue Gordon, SMPSP
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itian-haired teen sleuth Nancy Drew first hit the big screen in the 1930s, in four films photographed by legendary ASC members Arthur Edeson and L.W. O’Connell. Since then, she has been featured in dozens of books (written by various authors under the pseudonym Carolyn Keene), numerous television series, and a popular line of video games. Her
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latest appearance is in the new film Nancy Drew: The Mystery of the Hollywood Hills, shot by Alexander Gruszynski, ASC for director Andrew Fleming. A native of Warsaw, Poland, Gruszynski became interested in filmmaking at an early age thanks to his father, who was a screenwriter. After his family immigrated to Denmark, Gruszynski studied at the
National Film School, and he began his career by making documentaries. “We shot a lot of black-andwhite in film school, and I was tremendously influenced by the cinematography of Robert Krasker [The Third Man] and James Wong Howe [ASC],” says Gruszynski. “What’s so amazing about those noir films is the beauty of the shadows.” In the mid-1980s, he traveled
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Photos courtesy of Warner Bros.
Opposite: Girl detective Nancy Drew (Emma Roberts) feels she’s being followed as she tries to solve a murder mystery. This page, top: Nancy is joined on her adventures by her pals Ned (Max Thieriot, top) and Corky (Josh Flitter). Bottom: Nancy bonds with her dad, Carson (Tate Donovan), whose business trip takes them both to Hollywood.
to New York to photograph Almost You for director Adam Brooks. Soon thereafter, he met Fleming and shot the director’s first feature, Bad Dreams; they have since collaborated on five other pictures, including The Craft (see AC May ’96), Dick and The In-Laws. Gruszynski’s other credits include the features Tremors and Five Fingers and the telefilm Kingfish: A Story of Huey P. Long (AC May ’96), which earned a 1996 ASC Award nomination and a 1995 Cable ACE Award for cinematography. Gruszynski also earned a 1995 Independent Spirit Award nomination for I Like It Like That and a 1994 Camerimage Golden Frog nomination for Den Russiske sangerinde. Coming into Nancy Drew, Gruszynski was unfamiliar with the popular series of mystery stories. The script was not based on any particular book in the series, and the story is set in the present. The adventure begins when Nancy (Emma Roberts) accompanies her father on a trip to Los Angeles, where they rent a decrepit mansion once inhabited by a famous actress
who disappeared under mysterious circumstances. “The film has elements of a thriller, a comedy, a mystery and an adventure, all wrapped under the label of a teen film,” says Gruszynski. “The nature of the material made it difficult to create a consistent style, and jumping back and forth between the different looks helps to create some excite-
ment. I’m a firm believer in juxtapositions, dramatically speaking. If you tell a story entirely in darkness, the darkness loses its dramatic value. Your eye gets used to the darkness and the mystery is gone. Darkness only means something if you juxtapose it against brightness.” The filmmakers chose the Super 35mm format, in part because
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A Hollywood Whodunit Right: Nancy tends to a fallen Corky as Trish (Kelly Vitz) and Inga (Daniella Monet) look on. Below: The crew adds some bounce to Roberts’ step while filming the sequence.
“there’s a built-in excitement in the ’Scope format,” says Gruszynski. “There’s a lot of area that can be used editorially, and a lot can be happening in the same frame. I like the big canvas. I like wide shots where you don’t have to worry about losing detail. In this case, we had a
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girl roaming around alone in a large, dark house; she’s a small figure in a big space. With Super 35, we could make the point with a static frame as opposed to panning around to show her surroundings. I think the wide frame creates a whole different tension for the audience.”
The production’s camera package comprised three Panaflex cameras — two Platinums and a Lightweight — and two were used for most setups. “As a cinematographer, I can’t ignore the fact that shooting with two cameras is actorfriendly,” notes Gruszynski. “One of the great things about working with Andy is that although he prefers working two cameras simultaneously, he is flexible enough to drop the second camera if it’s too hard to fit in lighting-wise. But generally, using two cameras helps the performances and saves shooting time. In most situations, you can find another good angle within 90 degrees from your master. As long as you collaborate with people who understand and care about light and look, it’s perfect.” He adds that throughout the Nancy Drew shoot, he was “aided by the expert eyes of [A-camera/Steadicam operator] Henry Tirl and [B-camera operator] Dale Myrand.” Gruszynski’s lenses were Primo primes and 11:1 (24-
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Leshing (Marshall Bell), a caretaker who knew the famous actress who once owned the Drews’ mansion, reveals details about her as the woman’s image plays on a screen. Cinematographer Alexander Gruszynski, ASC and gaffer James Plannette used an LCD projector to simulate the beam of light emanating from the onscreen movie projector.
275mm) and 4:1 (17.5-75mm) Primo zooms. “To a certain degree, I went against my own philosophy on this project,” he says. “I’ve been very strict about using primes because that gives you a certain visual discipline. But there’s a convenience with zoom lenses that justifies using them in some situations.” Asked if he depended on certain focal lengths on Nancy Drew, he says, “When I start a project, I never make a conscious decision to stick to certain lenses, but strangely enough, there often seem to be one or two lenses I end up using much more than any others. I can’t really explain it. It must be intuitive. “The ’Scope format tends to shift you to wider lenses. For Nancy Drew, I mostly used the 21mm and 27mm primes. Of course, the second camera usually had a longer lens; that’s a practical rather than an aesthetic decision, because you have to stay out of the first camera’s view.” The production was scheduled for about 42 days, with roughly half of that time spent at locations in
Los Angeles and the other half onstage at Warner Bros. The main set was the Drews’ rented home, the dark mansion. “The house needed its own visual feel that would be different from the outside world,” says Gruszynski. “It’s much darker and more high-contrast, with a lot of dramatic and not necessarily motivated lighting. In post, we desaturated it somewhat, giving it a feeling closer to an old black-and-white movie.” Shafts of light were often brought through windows and glass partitions and broken up in interesting ways by greenery outside, and by imperfections in the glass. The quality of light was hard, resulting in distinct, dramatic shadows. Gruszynski often lit with 7K Xenons bounced off mirrors, which helped him direct and control the light in tight spaces around the large sets. Light depicting moonlight was neutral, while sunlight sources were gelled with 1⁄8 or 1⁄4 CTO to be a touch warmer. In the story, Nancy discovers the mansion is connected to a near-
by apartment building by a secret underground tunnel. “That was a great opportunity to create some darkness and visual excitement,” says Gruszynski. “The tunnel breaks at two corners, which allowed me to put some very dim, almost unnoticeable light in the background to pick up a little edge. Of course, Nancy is holding a flashlight, which we reflected back toward her with a bounce card to get some exposure on her face.” “Emma was a dream to photograph,” he continues. “She has a very fair complexion that glows, almost like she’s lit from inside, and that adds a certain innocence and purity to the character she plays. I generally lit her face with less contrast. I couldn’t claim that this formed an entire philosophy, but it affected my thinking on an instinctive level.” Gruszynski used three Kodak Vision2 film stocks on the show: 200T 5217 for most day exteriors; Expression 500T 5229 for Nancy’s hometown, a location rendered in American Cinematographer 57
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A Hollywood Whodunit Right: Nancy surprises her landlady (Pat Carroll) while exploring the old mansion. Below: Director Andrew Fleming works with Roberts for a scene in which Nancy and her father travel to Los Angeles on a night train. In addition to the fixtures used to light the interior of the compartment, Gruszynski employed a low-cost strobe box to create the effect of movement outside the window.
cooler and less saturated images; and 500T 5218 for all other material. The movie includes scenes in which Nancy watches projected black-and-white footage of the actress who once lived in the mansion. Gruszynski created the “old” footage by shooting on 5218 and draining the color out in post; to
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give the footage an aged look, scratches and dirt were added digitally by the effects house Hydraulx. The black-and-white images required classic dolly moves and a direct, hard-light approach. “In traditional black-and-white lighting, as a rule there is no such thing as bounce light,” Gruszynski says.
“Bounce light as keylight was only used extensively with the advent of color photography. So when I think of lighting for a black-and-white look, I think of direct, defined, spotted keylight coming from a very distinct source. The light must be illuminating the subject and also creating a sense of the spectrum, because you have no actual color spectrum to work with. When you photograph in color, you get a lot of things for free, so to speak, because the color itself creates variation. In black-and-white, there’s a lot of nuance that just doesn’t register. The effects need to be more pronounced, and you have to be much more aware of shaping things with light, which is done with distinct shafts rather than soft ambience.” On the set, the old clips were projected using a digital LCD projector. In the story, they emanate from an old 35mm projector Nancy has discovered in a projection booth. An important dialogue takes place in the booth between Nancy and Leshing (Marshall Bell), an old
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caretaker who reveals details about his relationship with the actress as her image plays on the screen. These shots were designed to include the head and shoulders of both characters, as well as the moving shaft of light emanating from the projector, which crosses the top of the frame and is visible on the front element of the projector lens. Gruszynski and his gaffer, James Plannette, found that running the projector with film during takes created too much noise, and running it without film didn’t look right because the shaft of light had no variations. “In a moment of desperation, it struck me that if we turned the LCD projector around and projected its image onto the lens of the 35mm projector, it would look as though the light was coming from the 35mm projector,” says Gruszynski. “We placed the LCD projector about 4 feet away, out of frame, with the beam directly on the axis of the other projector, and you
could see the image moving in the shaft of light and on the 35mm projector’s lens. There’s a little spill onto the projector body that can be explained by reflections from the inside of the booth’s window. For my money, it’s totally believable that the 35mm projector is running.
“Sometimes you feel like everything you do has been done before, either by you or someone else,” he adds. “That was one moment where I thought, ‘Wow, I’ve learned something.’ James and I found the solution to a problem, a solution I didn’t know existed.’”
Above: Nancy and her pals tool around Tinseltown in a stylish, retro Nash Metropolitan convertible. Left: The crew captures the scene with the help of a tow rig.
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A Hollywood Whodunit Gruszynski provides some “book light” as Roberts reads in bed.
Another low-tech solution that gave Gruszynski satisfaction was devised for a scene in which Nancy is traveling to Los Angeles by train at night. She is reading while her father sleeps. “There wasn’t much of a set,” he says.“The shade is
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half-drawn, and there’s nothing to look at out the window. I was trying to figure out how to make it look interesting, and how to make it look like it’s a moving train. It’s the middle of nowhere, so what kind of lighting effect is realistic? I tried all
different kinds of lighting, wipes, effects, and so on, but they all looked fake. Finally, out of frustration, I got one of those strobe boxes you can get at Radio Shack for $20. Normally you’d have a strobe that can be synced to the camera, but this wasn’t one of those. You could dial it faster or slower, and I found a speed that worked. It had a feel a bit like the little sparks that are sometimes created by train wheels and tracks. These flashes were penetrating the window, creating the feeling of speed and movement. The effect was extremely simple and low-tech, and I liked it.” The decision to finish Nancy Drew with a digital intermediate (DI) was made midway through the shoot, so Gruszynski planned and executed the cinematography with a traditional photochemical finish in mind. “I’m very conservative when it comes to exposing film. I come
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from the old school: create a thick negative no matter what. I do like low-level lighting, but I don’t like finding myself on the wrong side of exposure. You can always print things down. You can’t print them up, at least in the chemical world. Of course, with a DI you have quite a bit more latitude. There’s a lot you can do in the DI that takes some of the load off your shoulders in production. But I don’t necessarily like to depend on that, because in a way it changes the whole creative process.” The DI was carried out at Pacific Title, where Gruszynski spent about a week working with colorist Maxine Gervais. The scans were done at 4K resolution. “Of course, the DI eliminated the optical step with Super 35, which makes a huge difference, and it simplified certain other things tremendously,” says the cinematographer. “The
problem is that because you have all these options, the process kind of takes on a life of its own. The color correction can take a long time. “I’m a firm believer that cinematic storytelling is all in the subtleties. Whatever tricks you use and whatever you do with your color scheme can’t become self-conscious and take the audience out of the movie. In the case of Nancy Drew, we didn’t do a lot of gymnastics in the DI. We changed some saturation levels, but we were very restrained. It’s an approach I take to all my creative work. You get an approximation of what you’re trying to do in production and then just finesse it in post, rather than changing the whole thing around. “The decisions about subtle nuances are made in the context of how strong a statement you want to make,” he concludes. “Nancy Drew is a teen movie that doesn’t have
that kind of pronounced genre feel written all over it. Andy and I wanted to take the audience on a little mystery trip, but our point of departure wasn’t consciously stylized. Knowing what’s enough and what’s too much is intuitive.”
TECHNICAL SPECS 2.40:1 Super 35mm Panaflex Platinum, Lightweight Primo lenses Kodak Vision2 200T 5217, 500T 5218, Expression 500T 5229 Digital Intermediate Printed on Fuji Eterna-CP 3513DI
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Pièce de Résistance
Pierre Lhomme, AFC recalls his work on Army of Shadows, Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1969 masterpiece about the French Resistance that was released in the States for the first time last year. by Benjamin B 62 July 2007
F
rance, 1943. A German soldier peers into a holding cell. Seven French prisoners in leg irons are spread out across the large space. One of them, Gerbier (Lino Ventura), fishes out a pack of cigarettes and throws it to his neighbor. Each man in turn takes out a cigarette, and throws the pack, then a lighter, to the next
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Photos courtesy of Rialto Pictures and The Criterion Collection.
Opposite: In a scene from Army of Shadows, two agents of the French Resistance, Gerbier (Lino Ventura, left) and Felix (Paul Crauchet), discuss an imminent operation. This page, top: Director JeanPierre Melville (far left, in white hat) stands by as the crew sets up a shot at Gestapo headquarters. Below: Cinematographer Pierre Lhomme, AFC.
man. One man puts the cigarette behind his ear, saying, “I’ll keep it for later.” The sixth man takes out a cigarette, looks at Gerbier, and crumples the pack: there are none left for Gerbier. The camera dollies in slowly on each man, lost in his own thoughts. Through the door, a soldier says something in German. Gerbier translates, “He says to hurry up, because they’re coming to take us and he doesn’t want any trouble.” The man takes his cigarette from his ear and retorts, “One has the troubles one can.” The scene is from Army of Shadows (L’armée des ombres). With a few sober shots and sparse dialogue, director Jean-Pierre Melville takes the cliché of the condemned man’s last cigarette and creates a scene of powerful emotion. Based on Joseph Kessel’s book about his work with the French Resistance during the Nazi occupation of France, Army of Shadows is a series of vignettes that include a few dramatic moments, but the
story mostly focuses on the everyday work of the Resistance: moving a radio transmitter, hiding wanted men, arranging parachute drops, and swiftly reorganizing when members are captured. Released in the United States for the first time last year, Army of Shadows topped many critics’ lists of the best pictures of 2006 — an extraordinary achievement for a 37-year-old film that was a critical and commercial flop when it opened in France in 1969. Melville, who died in 1973 at the age of 56, was a maverick who toiled on low-budget films outside of the mainstream. He is considered by many to be the godfather of the Nouvelle Vague, and was among the first to shoot on location. His most celebrated films include Le Samourai and Le Circle Rouge, but Army of Shadows, which is closely related to his own wartime experiences, is his most personal picture. Following a restoration of American Cinematographer 63
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Pièce de Résistance Melville keeps a close eye on proceedings during the filming of several French prisoners awaiting execution.
the film that was supervised by its director of photography, Pierre Lhomme, AFC, Army of Shadows was theatrically released by Rialto Pictures in 2006. The Criterion Collection recently released a DVD of the film that includes rare French television interviews with Melville, interviews with Lhomme and editor Françoise Bonnot, and an excellent documentary about the liberation of Paris in 1944. Over the course of his career, Lhomme, now a vigorous 77 years old, collaborated with a host of influential directors, including Chris Marker, Robert Bresson, Jean Eustache, Dusan Makavejev, Patrice Chéreau, Marguerite Duras and Bertrand Blier. His credits include Le Joli Mai, The King of Hearts, The Mother and the Whore, Camille Claudel and Cyrano de Bergerac. He served as the first president of the AFC. The cinematographer recalls meeting Melville to discuss 64 July 2007
Army of Shadows in 1968, when Lhomme was in his late 30s. “I was surprised when he called me, given the small number of films I’d made,” he says. “He told me to meet him in a small, provincial railway station near his home. When I arrived, the station square was deserted except for a white Camaro. I said to myself, ‘That’s Melville.’ I approached the car, and out came a man wearing a Stetson hat and Ray-Ban sunglasses. He opened the door and said, ‘Monsieur Lhomme, climb in.’ We zoom off, and he immediately starts talking cinema. He had seen the few films I’d made and told me what he liked about my work, and he spoke about the directors he liked: William Wyler, Howard Hawks and Robert Wise. That was how it began.” The subsequent shoot took 14 weeks, “back when we only worked eight hours a day,” and Lhomme notes this was a tight schedule for a 140-minute feature.
He reveals that Melville wanted to shoot the picture in black-andwhite, but the financiers mandated color. The filmmakers subsequently strove for images that were as desaturated as possible, leaning toward the blue tones. “Melville hated warm colors, so every effort was made to avoid them, and bright colors in general,” says Lhomme. In addition, a thin orange-yellow wash of paint was sometimes added to the set walls and later timed out by adding blue; this allowed the filmmakers to achieve paler skin tones while keeping the walls gray. The restoration of Army of Shadows was initiated by Studio Canal with assistance from the CNC, the French National Center for Cinema. Lhomme was involved in the timing of the restored print and the digital master, working with restoration supervisor Ronald Boullet and color timer Raymond Terrentin
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at Éclair Laboratories. (Béatrice Valbin of Studio Canal shepherded the project from start to finish.) When asked whether the restored version matches the original 1969 print, Lhomme replies with a laugh, “I don’t remember what the original print looked like anymore!” The truth underlying his jocular response is that because the prints have faded, there is no absolute reference for the look of the timed print. During production, Lhomme shot a reference shot, called a “Lily” in France, with a small grayscale for each setup. He kept a few frames of the negative of these Lilys and stuck them to the appropriate pages of his script. Prints from these Lilys served as a reminder of what was on the negative, and as a starting place for timing. Lhomme notes that the digital-intermediate (DI) process allowed him to create a restored negative that is perhaps more faithful to Melville’s vision than the original print was, in that he was able to further desaturate the images and increase the blue tonalities. The DVD might be even more faithful, he continues, because it was a further refinement of the DI created for the new “digital” negative. “By doing the restoration of this film, I restored my own memories — no joke,” says Lhomme. “To restore is to discover, and 35 years [after I shot this film], I rediscovered it on the big screen and saw its extraordinary cinematic qualities.” The principal camera Lhomme used on Army of Shadows was a 35mm Mitchell with an external parallax viewfinder. “I started my career with this camera, and it’s tough for a first assistant,” he remarks. “The viewfinder swivels with change of focus, so you need an entente cordiale between the first assistant and the operator.” The production also used a lighter but noisier Cameflex, “which was the
This sequence of frames from the DVD depicts Gerbier’s arrival at a prison camp in rural France at dusk. The interior scene, shot on a soundstage and featuring a painted backing behind the window, gives way to a wintry exterior. “I love those end-of day scenes,” notes Lhomme. “We had to work quickly with meticulous planning beforehand [in order to get them].”
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For the restoration, the team at Éclair Laboratories scanned three film elements: the original negative, different strands of internegative that had been spliced to the original, and a worn print of the film’s first 141 frames, which show the Germans marching on the Arc de Triomphe (before/after frames above). Lhomme supervised the color timing of both the new print and the DVD.
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jewel we would never part with,” he adds. The lenses used were a T4 Angenieux zoom and Cooke primes. The film stocks were Kodak
5251, with an EI of 50, and the then-new 5254, with a “fast” EI of 100. Lhomme notes that these slow stocks made it difficult to use the
zoom indoors. Army of Shadows begins with its most spectacular scene: German soldiers parading toward the camera with the Arc de Triomphe behind them. Obtaining permission to shoot in front of an iconic Parisian monument was a coup for Melville, and in a later interview he called it “perhaps the most expensive shot in the history French cinema.” According to Lhomme, the Germans were played by dancers who had spent many hours practicing military marches. In an interview on the Criterion DVD, editor Bonnot recalls that Melville was uncertain about where to place the marching scene, and the shot was constantly moved back and forth from the beginning to the end of the movie. When the picture was released in Paris, Melville had one last change of heart. Bonnot recalls, “We took
Diagrams by Benjamin B.
Pièce de Résistance
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a splicer and went to all six of the theaters where the film was showing, and we actually cut the scene from the end and moved it to the beginning!” The first audiences that day saw the shot at the end of the movie, she adds. The second shot in the film is a rainy exterior of a police van that is transporting the main character, Gerbier, to a prison camp. One of Melville’s trademark zooms singles out the van in the landscape. Lhomme recalls telling Melville that the raindrops from the rain machine in the foreground would disappear out of focus at the long end of the zoom, and the director therefore decided the scene should be shot without rain. He then set up a “rain shot” in front of a black background, which was optically combined with the zoom shot in the lab. The resulting scene works, although the trickery is visible to careful viewers. Lhomme notes that Melville loved to employ such tricks, which he had learned on his low-budget films. Broadly speaking, the style of Army of Shadows can be seen as a blend of classical cinema and Nouvelle Vague, a mixture that reflects, in part, the difference in sensibilities of the director and his slightly younger cinematographer. Steeped in documentaries and the location photography of the Nouvelle Vague, Lhomme was unhappy with the lack of realism in many of Melville’s “old school” approaches. In an interview on the DVD, Lhomme recalls, “I had to stand up for my ideas of lighting, and it was a kind of game we had. Melville once said to me, ‘Look at Hitchcock! His films are full of cardboard sets, and no one cares.’ And I answered him, ‘But I care.’” The sequence in the prison camp at the beginning of Army of Shadows illustrates this stylistic duality. Like most of the production’s interiors, Gerbier’s meeting 67
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Pièce de Résistance In one of the film’s bestknown sequences, Gerbier supervises the execution of a young traitor, Dounat (Alain Libolt), at a seaside house. All of the men are committing murder for the first time. The sequence starts with daylight outside the windows and ends at twilight.
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with the camp commander was shot on a soundstage. Windows give out to painted background panels, and the modulated shadows come from units hung above the set, creating a classical, almost theatrical look that still respects the onscreen light source. When Gerbier steps outside the office, the shot is a dusk exterior, and an elegant dolly move follows him as he is taken to his quarters by two guards. “I love those end-of-day scenes,” says Lhomme. “We started to shoot as soon as the light was right, and we had to work quickly with meticulous planning beforehand. The lighting axis had been chosen and set up, and the dolly tracks had been laid. In such cases, you have to be well prepared, and everyone has to know what he has to do. I was very lucky we had gray weather, otherwise there would have been no way to do it.” Lhomme recalls another moment of the shoot, when the crew went on location in Marseille to shoot the reunion of two key characters (played Paul Crauchet and Jean-Pierre Cassel) in a bar. Melville left as the crew finished up in the location, and then Lhomme went outside to set up for the final night exterior of the two walking in the street. Suddenly the Camaro drove up, and Melville asked Lhomme to hop in. “We drove to a deserted section of Marseille, and Melville said, ‘I made a mistake. This is where we should shoot.’” Lhomme noted that it was 1 a.m., and the crew would need another half-day to switch locations. “Melville said, ‘I won’t get any more time. We’re already two days late. But I have a photographer friend here, and I’ll ask him to photograph this location, and we’ll shoot [the action] onstage in Paris.’” In the end, Lhomme remembers, the actors walked in front of giant blowups of the photos — Melville’s primitive version
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of today’s TransLites. Onscreen, the scene has a credible though abstract quality. One of the best-known sequences in Army of Shadows takes place 30 minutes in, when Gerbier has to oversee the execution of a traitor, Dounat. The young traitor is picked up in a square by Felix, a Resistance member posing as a policeman, and taken by car to a seaside house. In the house, the shades are drawn, and Gerbier, Felix and another colleague, Claude, debate how to kill the whimpering boy. Clearly new at this, they end up strangling him with an improvised garrote, an ordeal that marks their rite of passage into the Resistance. The emotional impact of the execution sequence comes in great part from its rhythm and length. Melville takes the time to show each beat of hesitation, decision and fumbling as the Resistance members carry out their first execution. Throughout the picture, many scenes play out in lengthy wide shots with a minimum of dialogue, allowing the viewer to become immersed in the action. As Lhomme puts it on the DVD,“As an audience member, you always have time to think, even to ask yourself what you would do in that situation. What’s so strong about Melville’s mise en scène, about his way of storytelling, is that the audience is not violated. It’s not manipulative cinema.” The 11-minute execution sequence begins with a simple day exterior, as Felix meets with the traitor and takes him to the car. Lhomme remembers providing a little fill for the scene with a white sheet. To the cinematographer’s chagrin, the car ride was shot on a soundstage with classic rear-screen projection. Melville orchestrated a dolly move alongside the car. “It’s the opposite of what I would have done, and I was really unhappy,” says Lhomme. “Since the end of the
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Fifties, we had been shooting car scenes in real cars on location, just as we had stopped shooting cars without windshields. But Melville loved rear-screen.” Lhomme notes that the basic lighting unit for this scene was a quartz lamp with ordinary tracing paper diffusion, and often a 1⁄4 CTB gel to offset the warm tone of the paper. For closeups, he was forced to put Mitchell diffusion in front of the lens so “the close-ups wouldn’t look sharper than the wide shots.” When the car stops, the film shifts to a day exterior, which was shot on location in Marseille. Melville films the traitor being walked to the safe house in one economical shot that combines zoom, pan and crane moves to follow the trio down an alley. “You don’t really notice the moves because they’re well done,” says Lhomme. “The camera operator, Philippe Brun, was one of the best.” The action inside the house was shot on a soundstage, and the set was a modest, nondescript space. The scene begins with dark, moody day interiors, with light seeping in from shuttered windows. Then, in a wide-angle oneshot scene, the men close the curtains and turn on an overhead bulb, changing the setting to a night-like interior. With the slow film stocks of the time, says Lhomme,“I could not light whimsically. I had an overall indirect light and added punctual strokes to underline the light sources. In fact, I was trying to apply to the soundstage what I had learned on location. It must have been tough doing all those lighting changes in one shot.” All of the light sources had to come from walkways above the set, because Melville’s propensity for wide shots made it impossible to place lights on the floor. “When the lighting is above, it follows that
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Pièce de Résistance
Above: At left is Lhomme’s “Lily,” a gray-card reference frame, for the execution scene, and the shot at right shows the final look. “Melville hated warm colors,” notes Lhomme, “so every effort was made to avoid them.” Below: Lhomme today, still not far from a camera.
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the top of the set is more lit than the bottom, so you often have to graduate the top of the set,” says the cinematographer. “Some of the great art directors would ask if I wanted them to graduate the top of the set, and I always answered, ‘Of course.’ Or you can use grad filters on the camera. Nowadays it’s easy to do that in the DI.” Once the curtains are drawn, the lighting underlines the hard shadow line of the circular shade above the bare bulb. Part of the dark area, Lhomme notes, was hiding the hard shadow of the “giraffe” microphone boom above the set. The garroting of the traitor happens mostly offscreen; instead, we see tight shots of the three executioners, emphasizing their transformation. The action is lit starkly from above with almost no fill. “I was using a maximum of contrast,”
says Lhomme.“I didn’t want to lose Felix’s eyes, but I put them in as much darkness as possible. There’s a minimum of fill, which I adjusted by eye; I probably used a piece of coarse drawing paper fixed on a French flag with three clothespins. Also, there’s a small light on Gerbier’s eyes, so as not to lose his [expression].” The scene returns to a wide shot as the men lay the body down and cover it with a blanket. The light is turned out, and the screen is almost entirely black as the camera follows Gerbier to the window. With a laugh, Lhomme observes that the shot is “magnificently underexposed! On the DVD I retimed it a little bit, but in projection there was almost nothing. It’s very rare to have a director who loves nocturnal ambience, who is not afraid of the dark, who is not
afraid to guess rather than see. Melville pushed me toward darkness until this shot, where I blew it. I was very unhappy and wanted to redo the shot. I said, ‘Jean-Pierre, it doesn’t work, you really can’t see anything,’ and he said,‘Don’t worry, it will work once we put in the music.’ And it did! The shot could be black leader, but Luc Demarsan’s magnificent music fills it in.” As Gerbier peers out the window, Melville places the camera in a new vantage point: outside pointing in, framing a stunning shot with dark, soft, blue lighting that has a contemporary feel. “This shot marks the passage of time — we started in daylight and carried on through penumbra, towards night,” says Lhomme. The shot is also unusual for its lack of depth of field, highlighting Gerbier’s isolation as he ponders his deed. “You know, the everyday production of Army of Shadows was so stressful and rushed that I finished shooting without knowing I had worked on a great film,” concludes Lhomme. “Every time I see this film, I’m astounded. What is impressive and rare is the use of durations that allow for the intelligence and the sensitivity of the audience. Melville’s mise en scène is so rigorous and sober. He had a respect for the audience that is often lacking today.”
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TWENTY-ONE CINEMATOGRAPHERS AT WORK by Benjamin Bergery
n Reflections, professional cinematographers analyze their craft in terms of technique and aesthetics in an array of wide-ranging lectures given to college classes. Each lesson includes 35mm film frames and lighting diagrams depicting specific setups. The cinematographers also discuss many other aspects of their profession, such as working with directors, handling politics on the set, and time management. Level: College through Professional • Paperback • 268 pages • ISBN # 0-935578-16-1
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Short Takes A Surrealistic Ghost Story by Elina Shatkin
C
inematographer Adam David Meltzer knew he wanted to collaborate with director Hoku Uchiyama the moment he walked into the cafeteria at Art Center College of Design and saw Uchiyama storyboarding a spec
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spot for a competition. “It combined puppets and live action in a way that was visually inventive and very bold,” says Meltzer. Uchiyama’s spot, a PSA about drunk driving, went on to win second place at the Cannes Young
Directors Awards in 2003. When Uchiyama met with Meltzer to discuss the short film Rose, about a young man who returns every year to the same spot on the same day to commune with the ghost of a dead woman, he came with equally unique and comprehensive ideas about the visuals. “Hoku had done illustrations of all the characters and all the costumes,” Meltzer recalls. “He was already in the process of storyboarding and creating animatics. He had put all of this on a DVD that he was presenting to people he wanted to work with.” Uchiyama wanted to emphasize the story’s fairytale elements. “I’ve always been in love with classic fairytale images that are extreme, evocative and very simple,” says the director. “They have a way of staying with you.” Uchiyama and Meltzer took inspiration from Stephen Gammell’s illustrations for Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, a book that features high-
Photos and frame grabs by Adam David Meltzer, courtesy of Hoku Uchiyama.
Right: A young boy (Blaine Miller) bonds with the spirit of a dead woman (Kathryn Robinson) in Rose. Below: Cinematographer Adam David Meltzer (far left), 1st AC Aaron Schuh and Robinson go out on a limb for their art.
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The short’s stylized images were inspired by Stephen Gammell’s high-contrast illustrations for the book Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.
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contrast images with deep blacks set against misty whites. “The whole world looks covered in graphite, which is what we wanted for Rose,” notes Uchiyama. He also had very definite ideas about camera moves. Says Meltzer, “Hoku really takes the reins when it comes to moving the camera, and he expressed from the beginning that he wanted a lot of movement.”
Accomplishing these moves often tested Meltzer’s creative powers. One of his favorite moments in the film is a dramatic but simple scene in which Rose (Kathryn Robinson) and the older Travis (Phillip Rogers) lie on the ground as the camera circles above them. “We didn’t have a crane or a Power Pod, so I had to figure out a way to get the camera to spin and boom down on them
without blocking the light,” he explains. He and key grip Mark Napier mounted a Weaver Steadman three-axis head onto an 8' two-axis Clairmont jib and clipped a C-stand gobo head and arm onto the Steadman head. Meltzer then walked several circles around the actors while operating the camera, which was being boomed down. Meltzer shot Rose in Super 16mm with an Arri 16SR-3 that came from Clairmont Camera. He used Zeiss Superspeed primes, as well as an Elite 4.5mm lens, an Optika 7mm lens, a 200mm Canon lens and a 50mm Arri Macro lens. “The Superspeeds went down to T1.3, and we needed every bit of that because 80 percent of this film was shot outside at night,” he notes. “I was really pushing the bottom of the meter, taking exposure readings on the background that read .75. Fortunately, I knew the film stock could handle it.” To avoid the grain of a highspeed stock, Meltzer made the somewhat risky decision to shoot the entire film on Kodak Vision 200T 7274. “I love its grain structure and contrast,” he says. “I didn’t want too much grain, but I also didn’t want zero grain because
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Meltzer shoulders the camera while capturing a scene with actors Tim Cowgill (as Rose’s father) and Robinson.
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that looks too much like high-definition video.” He rated the stock normally and used ND filters on the lens when shooting day exteriors. “Hoku was a little nervous at first,” he recalls. “It was really dark, we were shooting 200-ASA stock, and we didn’t get dailies until three days into the night shoot — and they were on DVCam, so they weren’t much to judge things by. But even on the DVCam dailies, Hoku was happy with what he saw. We definitely pushed the limits of the toe of the film stock.” The 11-day shoot took the crew to Piru in Ventura County and Tejon Ranch on the border of Los Angeles and Kern counties, where they shot in the woods at an approximate altitude of 3,000'. The logistical problems of hauling equipment to the Tejon location and shooting there were numerous. Meltzer recounts, “It was hard to get stuff to the location because there were dirt roads. We shot in December, so it was freezing outside. On two different nights the generator, which was lighting not just the scene but the whole set, gave out, so we were stranded in the dark for hours while waiting for the rental company to bring us a new genny. Then, a massive branch fell down and broke through our trailer. We had a Condor, but it was so windy there we often couldn’t send anyone up in it.” Lacking the budget to rent large HMIs, Meltzer had to make the most of natural light. He used Fomecore
bounces, Ultrabounces, and negative fill during the day, and a Nine-light MaxiBrute gelled with 1⁄2 CTB when magic hour drew near. He always sent the light from the mirror boards through frames of Opal to add softness while maintaining the sourcey quality of the light. He added 1⁄4 or 1⁄2 Tiffen White Pro-Mist to the lens on day exteriors in the woods to help give the image a fantasy feel. The primary lighting consideration throughout the film was Rose. “We were trying to create a world where the dead and decayed are beautiful, so we wanted Rose to have her own special light,” says Meltzer. “This was the kind of movie where giving the lead her own light was appropriate.” To enhance the character’s ghostliness, Meltzer didn’t give her an eyelight and intensified the shadows under her eyes by placing 6'x6' solids above the actress to cut some light off her. The biggest challenge was shooting outside in the woods at night. Meltzer typically lit these scenes by keying 5K tungsten Fresnels and 2K and 1K open-faced tungsten units off 6'x6' or 12'x12' frames of Ultrabounce, wrapping light softly around the actors. Uchiyama wanted to make sure viewers could see as much as possible in the surrounding woods; to accomplish this, Meltzer placed a 24K Moleeno gelled with 1⁄4 CTB on a Condor to serve as backlight and/or moonlight. For larger scenes, Meltzer added 5K and 10K units
through Opal frames to bring up the overall fill in some of the darker areas in the background. “The tricky part was that we didn’t have the crew, the space or the time to move the Condor every time we turned around,” he recalls. “Instead, we’d flip the action and slightly change our camera angles so the backgrounds didn’t look exactly the same.” The film was processed at FotoKem, and DVCam dailies were provided by Magic Film & Video and graded by Jerald Jones. Uchiyama had a 1.85:1 matte added in post because he believed it enhanced the landscapes in the film. He and Meltzer carried out the final color correction themselves, working on editor Hovig Menakian’s Final Cut Pro system. “I’d shot the film very lowcontrast so that in post we could bump up the contrast to give it that dreamlike feel,” say Meltzer. “On top of that, we desaturated the image until all that was left were little touches of color. We used a vectorscope, which allowed us to determine exactly how much color we had in each scene. All of this helped to give Rose its aged, surreal look.”
To have your short-form project considered for coverage, send us a copy of the work on DVD (Region 1) and include a brief description of the photographic techniques used and your contact information. If you want the DVD returned to you, include a postage-paid, selfaddressed envelope. Upon request, you must be able to provide highresolution stills (TIFF or JPEG) for illustration purposes. Send to: Short Takes, c/o American Cinematographer, 1782 N. Orange Dr., Los Angeles, CA, 90028. Because of the volume of submissions, personal responses are not possible. If you do not hear from us within 6 months of submission, you can assume we are unable to cover your project.
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At the front end of LaserPacific’s new AIM colormanagement workflow, telecine colorist Bruce Goodman grades dailies through a print stock look-up table using a calibrated Panasonic PT-AE1000U wide-gamut LCD projector.
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LaserPacific Aims for End-ToEnd Color Management by Douglas Bankston Color management in a hybrid filmdigital workflow is still in its infancy, meaning images frequently won’t match in appearance from one post step to the next and extra time (and money) is spent bringing those looks back in line. Factor in a shift toward digital dailies, a decidedly video affair that behaves differently than film, and surprises at the digital-intermediate (DI) and filmout stages can result. Hollywood post house LaserPacific has heeded cinematographers’ calls for accurate images by developing an end-toend color calibration system for digital postproduction, aptly titled AccurateImage, or AIM. The closed-loop system faithfully emulates a project’s film look throughout each step of postproduction, and any color decision or change made during the early stages of the project are carried through and accurately represented on digital displays. To achieve this, LaserPacific first tackles the digital-dailies bugaboo. “This is where we’ve put a lot of technology —
calibrating the telecines so that they match scanners,” says Glenn Kennel, LaserPacific’s vice president and general manager of motion-picture feature film services. “That’s critically important, because we capture the whole range of the negative and lay it down to tape in a raw scan mode that preserves the flexibility for further color correction downstream.” The tape Kennel refers to is 10bit HDCam SR. “It’s like a digital proxy on SR tape of the original negative,” he explains further. “Yes, it is HD resolution, but it is at a very low compression ratio, full color sampling, full range. It has a very high-quality picture record.” Dailies telecine color grading is done through a print stock look-up table (LUT) using a calibrated Panasonic PTAE1000U projector, not a CRT monitor. LaserPacific characterizes, calibrates and builds LUTs specific to each Panasonic projector. What the dailies colorist references for grading are still-image proxies taken on set, primarily JPEGs (though other formats will work) that are treated by the cinematographer in a program such as Adobe Photoshop or Kodak’s Look Management System and sent to Laser-
Pacific through the Internet via FTP. LaserPacific calibrates the cinematographer’s monitor to match the colorist’s. The name of the game for LaserPacific’s AIM is, obviously, calibration. “That has to be done routinely, otherwise these things could drift out of control,” Kennel notes. Because of this rigorous, internal scanner, telecine and display characterization and calibration, AIM is proprietary to LaserPacific and its parent, Kodak. However, it supports the ASC Color Decision List (CDL), so implementation across facilities could happen in the future. “CDL is the color communication mechanism that follows from the dailies telecine to the dailies playback in the field,” says Kennel of the ASC’s numerical annotation of nine color settings that carries through the workflow, much like an edit decision list (EDL). “With all the look-management and previsualization systems out there, the weak links are that most don’t support the CDL yet, so they lack a common communication language, and displays aren’t necessarily calibrated. Some are, but not all.” Dailies playback on set utilizes the AIM Dailies Player, which is built upon an industry-standard digital cinema platform — the Kodak Digital Cinema Server — with full color gamut and a very high bit rate to prevent compression artifacts. The Kodak server plays back encrypted JPEG 2000 files on hard drives (downloaded either from drives, or by direct data link if the location has the bandwidth) while a proprietary LUT adjusts the images in real time to mimic the projected-film look (based on the chosen print stock and print lab). Dailies are projected by a Panasonic PTAE1000U that is calibrated on site to match the AE1000U back at the ranch. Not only does the cinematographer receive and then view accurate dailies, he also is afforded printer-light control in the AIM Player. For example,
Photos courtesy of LaserPacific.
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while viewing a particular shot, the cinematographer decides he wants to see into the shadows a bit more. He merely adjusts the printing density slider on the player’s graphical user interface to print up the shot, and the shot can be played back with that adjustment nearly instantaneously. Plus, that adjustment can be saved into the CDL, which accompanies that shot through the workflow in an ALE file, preserved within Avid or Final Cut Pro in editing and output as part of the timecode stream for the conform that is used for the preview grading down the road. The change is not baked in, thus the digital negative retains its original full range. “It’s actually as though you have a lab on set,” Kennel remarks. “You have the digital negative, the print model which is the LUT, the calibrated system, and the controls in between so you can print it up or down.” The Panasonic PT-AE1000U is a high-definition, 1080p “home-theater”style LCD projector with Rec 709 color space and a contrast ratio Panasonic claims to be “up to 11,000:1,” though that won’t be achieved in real-world conditions. Uniquely, the projector has a wide color gamut mode that brings its gamut closer to that of digital cinema’s P3. Panasonic has even gone so far as to work with cinematographers to refine this feature. So if the cinematographer makes an adjustment on the Dailies Player that is out of gamut on the projector, chances are it will also be out of gamut on film. Dailies copies that go to editorial and to producers (usually on DVD) have the final print film look LUT applied to them so that they can view truer creative intent. “Essentially, we have to rebuild that table to compensate for the characteristics of the display devices they are using,” says Kennel. “We can’t do that perfectly because we don’t control their environments, but we get it pretty close. We do a gamut mapping for the smaller gamut of a video display, and we also do a tone-scale mapping because it will be viewed in ambient light conditions. That’s important for consistency so that editorial, the director and the executives all see the same picture.” It’s no secret the director, editor and executives often become 79
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The AIM Dailies Player is built upon the industrystandard Kodak Digital Cinema Server.
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enamored with the video look after months of editing. With LaserPacific’s film-look emulation applied to those dailies, surprises in the DI stage can be minimized in most cases because the original creative intent has been maintained. In the DI, LaserPacific rescans the selects and applies the CDL to those files, which means the DI starting point is where the preview left off — which included global corrections and primary corrections stored in the CDL. “You’re maximizing time and creativity in the DI suite,” Kennel adds. “We want to be able to build on the color-correction decisions that were made before so we don’t have to start over at each step in the process.” Daryn Okada, ASC enlisted a beta version of AIM during production of the comedy Harold and Kumar 2, as did Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC on Bolden!, a biography of jazz cornet player Buddy Bolden, though the beta versions lacked printer-light control in the AIM Dailies Player. (Zsigmond was scheduled to receive a software upgrade for printerlight control in the Dailies Player before the end of production.) “The dailies had an entirely different feel than any high-definition dailies, truly more filmic,” notes Okada, who would have been saddled with standarddef DVD dailies on a video monitor if he hadn’t selected the beta AIM dailies. “The gamma and everything in the detail from lights to darks were pretty closely represented, not like linear video.” With the ability to see his fullrange HD dailies projected on a 6' screen
at 14 foot-lamberts of brightness, Okada noticed proper “tonalities of skin tones that you don’t see when you have other digital-video setups. We got more detail affordably and colors represented accurately. It was a compelling image for people to watch, like back when we could watch film dailies. There are no longer excuses for the images to look any different when they are rescanned for DI or go to film. “The AIM system kept the crews coming back [to view dailies],” he continues, “and also enabled us to become tuned to our jobs without having to second-guess what we were doing. The hair and makeup people could see the response of a certain color on a face. The camera crew could see when a shot was just hanging on to focus so they could feel out the characteristics of the lens. You’d lose all that with any type of standard-video dailies because video resolution is so low that the tolerances are too wide.” At LaserPacific, both Harold and Kumar 2 and Bolden! will undergo preview assemblies with color grading, followed by DI finishes. Simplifying Deliverables with Digital Multi-Masters by Simon Cuff The work involved in making multiple versions and multiple deliverables has made postproduction extremely complex. For historical reasons, the investment priority and apparent raison d’être of post houses has been to focus on editing, visual effects and grading, while the versioning and deliverables side has been viewed as something of an add-on, with a smaller investment in equipment and personnel. However, recent trends in the media market seem to indicate a switch of priorities. It is often the talent for the original post work that first attracts customers to the premises, so it would seem investing in an efficient post-post process could pay dividends. In today’s multi-resolution, multiplatform world, we must ask if the solution to multiple deliverables is a universal
digital master at the highest spatial resolution. Technically, this should produce a good, oversampled source for downconverting to make the other deliverables, but achieving good spatial resolution is only a part of today’s mix of requirements. In recent years, the scale of this operation has ballooned, with examples of requirements for more than 60 versions of one production to multiple formats. Quite often this results in the client being charged significantly more for these versions and deliverables than for the original online. The notion of a universal master supposes that the onward operations are linear. That might have been true in the past, but it was always a compromised, one-size-fits-all concept. Now there are some requirements that challenge that notion, and others that dictate an altogether different approach. Good technical quality for all viewing platforms, creative aims, commercial and censorship requirements, and the ever-present desire to make changes right up to the last moment all indicate the need for a new methodology for making deliverables and versioning that uses a far more flexible form of master. The Traditional Universal Digital Master In using a universal digital master, some considerations must be taken into account. The look of images on the screen is part of the creative aim and includes the control of color and grain. The process of grading tends to stretch the contrast and thus increase the appearance of grain. Therefore, the ideal workflow order is linear, in that grain management should be completed before starting the grade. The universal digital master is a suitable solution only if clients are prepared to accept one grade on all deliverables. Today they rarely are. If any of the deliverables are to be encoded or compressed, the resulting image noise or grain can adversely affect the efficiency of the coding. For example, DVD, HD-DVD and Blu-ray encoding all involve 4:2:0 sampling of YCrCb color space at 8-bit resolution. This “pre-compression” also
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has the effect of magnifying the noise and so increasing signal-to-noise ratio of the encoder input. Noise is exactly what you don’t want to feed into MPEG4 codecs, which are based on DCT blocks and interframe and intraframe compression. This process is susceptible to “grain” noise, as it can be interpreted as high-frequency image content, and thus wastes valuable bits. Movies are coded for theatrical exhibition using a totally different process, with 4:4:4 sampling of XYZ color space and wavelet-based JPEG2000 compression that is only intraframe. In this case, some grain is often desirable to suggest a filmic look. The upshot is that the grain, or noise, management of a “film” master will have to be revisited to further reduce its appearance and create a clean, crisp look on video discs and in transmissions. That process is best done before grading — effectively pushing the grain management up the workflow to before the grade. Another consideration is the quality of images on different types of screens. The appearance of grain noise and blocking artifacts on CRT screens differs from that on LCDs. CRTs are becoming much less available, and the public is switching to LCDs. The 8-bit digital system of LCDs means that LSB (Least Significant Bit) noise (a truncation of pixel color information values when downconverting from 10 bits to 8 bits), especially in blacks, is more apparent than when viewing the same material on CRTs. Also, computer-generated images with smooth surfaces may show banding errors. With CRTs, the minute inaccuracies introduced by analog noise and the smearing effect of the analog device as it scans actually enhance viewing by randomizing the LSB truncation and so smoothing its appearance. Such noise could help reduce the digital noise noticeable in dark picture areas on LCDs. It would seem that LCD displays would benefit from the introduction of a degree of non-coherent noise that is “friendly” to the encoder to reduce the visibility of LSB truncation effects and blocking. Although there are no technical problems associated with reducing image size to fit smaller screens, there is often also a requirement to change the visual
emphasis, especially for very small displays used for mobile viewing. When the picture is so small, it’s necessary to apply stronger vignettes and more of them to draw the viewer’s eyes to key characters or action. A creative grade different from the cinema grade might be required for the DVD version, which is generally viewed in a living room with much higher ambient light than a cinema. To compensate for the viewing conditions, the TV grade involves lifting the darker scenes. Typically this takes one to five days for a feature-length project. Different audiences might require or be delivered different versions of the production. This may involve straight cutting, in which case it may be possible to work directly from the universal digital master, but in many cases it will not. In the search for new revenue streams, product placement is increasingly used. The brand that is to be shown may vary according to the location of the audience; for example, the logo on the fin of an aircraft might have to be changed. Clearly, this would require going back the original material and reassembling it with the new logo added to an original, or pre-prepared, blank fin. Then the scene must be reinserted into the film. Some material included in the universal digital master might not be acceptable in some countries, or two versions might be required, one for family viewing and the other to be shown after the “watershed” hour. In either case, this will require further editing, and the people doing this work will probably work from the source material and reassembly. If making cuts or changes to the images, work on the audio must follow. This may require access to the source audio to correctly rebuild the tracks so that they again fit with the onscreen action.
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Digital Multi-Masters Clearly, there are ample grounds for seeking a new post workflow and producing a new type of master. This 81
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should give access to any part of the program and allow changes to any aspect, even work that was completed early on in the workflow and is now “buried” under several layers of additional work. The traditional workflow does not allow this, as the universal digital master is flattened, merging all layers and not carrying any of the data describing the original sources and all the processes that have been applied to it since. The requirement is to store all the metadata associated with making a master; this is not just a shot log or an EDL, but all information about the footage used and all the detail of the processes applied to the media from grain management through all post. This should then allow someone to revisit any stage of the operation at any time. At the end of the process, the finished project can exist as the original footage including visual-effects shots and metadata, which contains all the information of the processes applied to the material to make a master. This requires a database to store and recall all the metadata and a storage infrastructure that allows fast access to all the media, as well as all the equipment and applications needed to process the 82 July 2007
media. Organizations with big budgets can build and support their own systems, but most post houses do not have the resources, specifically the programmers and engineers, to create such bespoken solutions. There needs to be a simpler solution to meet the needs of modern post facilities. A major part of the solution must be a database that can manage the metadata and associated source media. Most facilities have “secret sauce” elements to their workflows, but they need a backbone infrastructure that is off the shelf and can be managed and maintained. This must include storage infrastructure and media and metadata management. Avid’s Interplay looks like a possible database solution. It is also a part of Avid’s Open Storage Initiative. This means its storage, including the Unity ISIS (Infinitely Scalable Intelligent Storage) media network and databases, is now being opened up. Avid claims more than 100 file types, both media and non-media, are supported by Interplay, including multi-resolution video, Microsoft Office documents, Adobe Photoshop and After Effects layered files, MPEGs, TIFFs and spreadsheets. This is designed to create a businesswide workflow that can assist large and
small production teams to manage media. Interplay and its access to the Unity ISIS environment could be used as a part of a move toward implementing digital multi-masters. It will allow sharing the process over appropriate platforms while building metadata of the processes and media used. The work could be spread over several platforms in the facility as well as outside. It should then be possible to revisit any part of the project at any time, and to be provided with the complete and precise settings and media that were originally used. For example, if the grading of a digital film master needed adjusting for home viewing rather than theatrical exhibition, the necessary processes could be accessed while the rest of the work remained unchanged. In this case, the processes would start pre-grade with revisiting grain management to further reduce the grain noise for more efficient MPEG coding and better presentation on LCD screens. Next comes aperture correction to adjust sharpness, followed by grading to improve home viewing by giving the appropriate lifts to the darker scenes while leaving other aspects of the grade untouched. Then the result needs to be
Diagram courtesy of Simon Cuff.
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rescaled for the DVD format, while again keeping an eye on sharpness. Other individual adjustments, such as pan and scan, can also be made, and a complete DVD specific media master produced. In many cases, mastering can provide the confidence of knowing exactly how the production will look on the target platform. Much has been made of grading suites furnished with digital projectors that have been set up using color-management systems to show the footage as it will be seen when printed on a selected film stock. This is useful, but only if the target platform is film. What if it isn’t? Having the results immediately available for realtime replay allows interactive grading. It is important to see the detail on a big screen, but if the target medium is an iPod, it’s worth checking the replay on that, too. This goes for all target viewing platforms. Mobile devices, high-definition DVD players, new types of TV screens, and digital projectors for cinemas all have different requirements for giving viewers the optimum experience. The high-quality versioning they require can no longer be adequately achieved by working from a flattened master tailored for film output and exhibition. The demand for versioning justifies a new, more flexible multi-master that will allow any aspect of the post process to be adjusted. This can be realized with a data-centric, nonlinear approach not only for the digital intermediate/post operation, but also for versioning. A multimaster setup could be achieved by adding a database to log and recall all the process settings and source-material metadata. In order to put this within reach of most post facilities, it must be available off the shelf. Simon Cuff, president and COO of Digital Vision, first presented this concept in “Digital Multi-Masters: Seeing the Forest and Not the Trees” at the 2007 Hollywood Post Alliance Technology Retreat.
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Filmmakers’ Forum South Korea Hosts Cinematography Summit by Curtis Clark, ASC
I
was recently given the honor of representing the ASC at the first International Digital Cinema Technology Forum, which took place in Seoul, South Korea. The event was initiated and sponsored by the Korean Society of Cinematographers with significant participation from the Japanese Society of Cinematographers. The purpose of the forum was to review and assess the changes that digital motion-imaging technologies are making in production and postproduction workflows, and how these technologies are affecting the cinematographer’s ability to execute and manage a photographic look. I was asked to talk about the impact high-definition digital motionpicture cameras are having on the cinematographer’s ability to maintain creative control over his or her photographic vision. In addition to my presentation, there were complementary presentations by members of the KSC and JSC that investigated aspects of the challenging nature of new digital-imaging technologies from the cinematographer’s perspective. The emphasis was on a thorough understanding of the impact these digital technologies are having on the workflow, so that they might be more effectively harnessed to support the cinematographer’s creative intent. What really struck me about this innovative forum was the group’s recognition of the significance of sharing our respective ideas, perspectives and experiences in ways that strengthened our confidence in being able to gain expert skill in using digital-imaging tech84 July 2007
nologies. This sharing also reinforced a collective resolve and determination to influence the further development of these technologies in ways that will better serve the cinematographer’s needs. The experience was especially gratifying because of the considerable number of Korean and Japanese cine-
“What really struck me about this innovative forum was the group’s recognition of the significance of sharing our respective ideas, perspectives and experiences ….” matographers in attendance. Fortunately, I was able to spend some time with my gracious hosts at the KSC, especially KSC President Sang Woo An, discussing these issues with a view to exploring ways we can better coordinate future collaborative activities between the ASC and KSC, along with the JSC. During our discussions, the idea emerged of creating a Pacific Rim association of cinematography
societies, starting with the three principal societies whose members attended the forum and extending it to other societies in Asia, as well as Australia and New Zealand. The KSC and JSC showed tremendous respect for the historic leadership role of the ASC and the important work being done by the ASC Technology Committee. President An indicated that the KSC intends to create a technology committee modeled after ours. This tangible manifestation of international solidarity between cinematographic societies in expressing a determination to address the immense technology challenges common to all cinematographers has certainly reinforced my sense of optimism that we will not only be able to maintain but also enhance the traditional role of the cinematographer in this new era of digital production and postproduction. For us to have the greatest chance of success, the ASC, in conjunction with our fraternal cinematography societies around the world, must make a concerted, sustained and coordinated effort to not only ensure that cinematographers gain access to the tools essential for the creation and management of their images, but also help them acquire a genuine understanding of how to effectively use them.
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New Products & Services JVC GY-HD250U by Jay Holben I was eager to try out the new GYHD250U professional 1280x720 HDV camera from JVC. This is no “prosumer” handycam boasting “HD,” this is a professional-grade camera utilizing the HDV format for cost-effective high definition. Right off the bat, the GY-HD250U is a breath of fresh air in the small digital-camcorder arena. The JVC designers have adopted many professional camcorder functions and incorporated them into this camera — what JVC calls “compact shoulder form” — while seamlessly integrating the common benefits of a small digital prosumer camera. Upon picking up the camera, I noted that the gain switches, whitebalance settings and power switch were exactly where I would expect to find them on a full-sized professional camera, easily accessible to the left hand and controlled through the same switches and buttons with which I am accustomed. This was wonderful to see. The 250 is designed for field operation as well as the studio — no fumbling for buttons at the back or top of the camera while shooting handheld. Everything you need on the fly is immediately and comfortably accessible to either hand in natural shooting positions. The camera has a 1⁄ 3" bayonet 86 July 2007
mount and can accept many available professional ENG lenses; adapters are available to accept 1⁄ 2" and 2⁄ 3" lens mounts. An additional benefit to this, beyond the flexibility of choosing the best lens for your application and price range, is that the iris control is actually a physical iris in the individual lenses, not an electronic dial or switch on the camera body. I was pleasantly surprised to see that there is also a 250,000-pixel 3.5" color TFT LCD flip-out screen. This is not something you’d expect to find on a professional camera, but in the world of small-camera digital video such screens are invaluable. I was excited to see this low-end feature integrated into a highend camera. Other great features of the 250 are a padded speaker on the left side that enables the operator to casually monitor sound while shooting. It’s comfortably placed and quite functional. The “compact shoulder form” is exactly what the term implies: a camera that sits very comfortably on your shoulder and weighs a mere 10 pounds with viewfinder, microphone, Fujinon 16x lens, and Anton-Bauer Dionic90 battery. An additional feature is the viewfinder extension (with an adjustable range of over 2.5"!) that allows you to shoot from right or left eye, offering incredible flexibility. The physical design of the camera is the best of both worlds, prosumer and professional. Digging deeper, I found the menu control to be a bit clumsy. To access the camera’s main menu, you must press the menu button and the shutter control wheel. This is frustrating, and I can’t imagine any benefit that would
outweigh the inconvenience of struggling to get to the menus, which I was rarely able to easily do with my left hand while holding the camera. Even when I put the camera down, turned it around and used my right hand, it often took two or three tries to get into the menu; I often went into the first page of the menu — one step too far — because I had inadvertently pressed the button too many times. I wanted to easily access the camera’s menu on the fly, but I was never really able to do that because of the two-button requirement. The GY-HD250U is a 1⁄ 3" 3-CCD native 16:9 HDV camera. The imager is 4.864mm x 2.739mm, giving it a diagonal of 5.5mm (for a lens equivalent of 2.3x to 16mm). I tested two Fujinon lenses with it, the Th16x5.5BRMU (5.5mm to 88mm, provided by Birns & Sawyer in Hollywood) — one of the standard lenses offered in available JVC packages — and the HTS18x4.2BRM (4.2mm to 76mm, provided by JVC). Both lenses had a considerable amount of breathing but had very clean, medium-contrast images. With ENG lenses, the right-hand grip is on the lens, including the zoom rocker, VTR start/stop button, and other controls (depending on the lens). This makes the camera very easy to hold, and with the handgrip at the front of the camera, the balance is distributed more evenly. JVC also manufactures its own film-lens adapter, the HZ-CA13U, which connects to the 1⁄ 3" bayonet mount and can accept any PL cine lens. This is not like many other adapters on the market; rather, it is more of a standard extension tube with only a single element to help refocus the cine lens’ image directly onto the camera’s imager. Such a simple adapter has exponentially fewer elements than even the standard ENG lens, and as a result, is actually a full 2 stops faster than standard lenses. With the Fujinon lenses, I tested the camera’s ISO and found a result between 200 and 320 in 24p mode and
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500 in 30p mode. With the Cine Adapter, I was surprised to find the ISO to be 1000 to 1250 in 24p mode. The camera is designed to work seamlessly with this kind of adapter; it has a menu function for flipping the viewfinder image so you can operate without requiring additional optical elements to flip the viewing and recorded image. Focusing mainly on narrative cinematography as opposed to newsgathering or event videography, I tested the camera primarily in 24p mode with Cine Gamma turned on. I put the camera through a series of technical tests, examining the ISO, latitude and color reproduction, and then put it through its paces in a full day of shooting on a seven-minute short film shot in a practical location with very minimal lighting. Through the generous assistance of Bill Meurer and Steven Tobenkin of Birns & Sawyer, I was able to test the camera and the HA-CA13U adapter with a full complement of 16mm Zeiss Superspeed lenses, in addition to several of the accessories Birns & Sawyer manufactures specifically for the JVC 250. One of the first accessories that caught my eye was the handheld bracket. I have found that most handheld brackets aren’t comfortable — I’m generally happier just holding the lens rods — but this one was flexible enough to set the camera perfectly on my shoulder and center the weight naturally between my hands and shoulder. Working handheld, which is common with small digital cameras, is painful when all the weight is only on your arms all day long. The 250 has a very comfortable weight, and with the Birns & Sawyer handheld bracket I could move around all day long without discomfort. This is a wonderful accessory, especially with the Cine Adapter on the camera, because the adapter does not have a handgrip (like ENG lenses). Testing the camera’s latitude, I found a very limited high end of about 221⁄ 2 stops of overexposure to loss of detail; with underexposure, I found 4-4 1⁄ 2 stops to loss of detail. As with all digital media, there is greater shadow sensitivity, but there is also a good deal of noise that comes with underexposure. Determining 87
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The JVC GYHD250U with Fujinon zoom lens above, and below with the H2-CA13U Cine Adapter.
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wherein the noise crossed the threshold of acceptability was no small feat. Unfortunately, due to extremely limited support for the JVC ProHD (or what should be called HDV Pro) format, I didn’t have the opportunity to take the footage through a full workflow. ProHD can only be played in JVC ProHD decks; Sony and Panasonic do not have decks that support the format. Of the 15 post facilities I consulted in Los Angeles, only one had support for JVC ProHD: Digital Film Tree. Unfortunately, their schedule was so packed that we were not able to book time to review my test footage in their workflow. Ramy Katric, the company’s cofounder and CEO, said Digital Film Tree generally advises clients to “transfer off of HDV as quickly as possible. When they come in with HDV footage, we’ll usually bump that up to HDCam SR right away and take it from there.” The HDV format has always struck me as a rushed concept intended to get “high definition” into the hands of techsavvy consumers. On paper, it is an extreme compromise, trying to force a 1280x720 image or, worse, a 1920x1080 image onto a tiny MiniDV tape. It utilizes the same language as DVDs — MPEG2 compression in GOPs, or Groups of Pictures — to achieve this data squeeze, taking what should be at least 100 megabytes per second (MB/s) and cram-
ming it into 25 MB/s (19.7MB/s in the case of JVC ProHD HDV), exactly the same data rate as standard-definition (720x480) MiniDV. The difficulty I had trying to find a post workflow for my HDV footage confirmed my initial trepidation about the format, and some of the results I eventually saw left me more puzzled than satisfied. Before I started testing, I understood that Final Cut Pro HD, an early supporter of the HDV format (even back to version 4), could work with JVC ProHD. Then I discovered that only Final Cut version 5.1.2 could work with the format, but not in 60p. (Avid claims it will offer support for ProHD in the future.) Unfortunately, I only had Final Cut 5.1.14, as did Blissium, a professional editorial house in Santa Monica that I was using at the time. I contacted three other professional editorial facilities that feature Final Cut Pro HD systems, and they, too, only had Final Cut 5.1.14. (While I was doing this test, Final Cut announced version 6 — FCP Studio 2 — but I did not have the opportunity to test this footage with it.) The upgrade from 5.1.14 to 5.1.2 costs $700 (buying 5.1.2 new costs $1,300) and requires an operatingsystem upgrade from OSX to OSX Tiger. Apple, instead, generously provided me with a new Intel Core Duo 2 MacBook for this review, and JVC sent me the BRHD50U ProHD deck. This deck integrated with the MacBook well via FireWire 400 (IEEE 1394), and I had no problems capturing, editing and working with multiple layers of ProHD footage. At the time of my test, I had JVC’s new DTV24L1U 24" LCD HD monitor, and I used it throughout my testing. The BR-HD50U deck has three options for HD output: analog HD component, FireWire 400 and HDMI. The camera has an HD-SDI output, so why doesn’t the deck? On the JVC 24" LCD, I was startled by the level of noise evident in underexposure. I viewed live footage from the camera as well as playback of recorded media from the camera, both via HD-SDI, and playback from the deck via the HD analog component output. Even at 2 stops under, the noise levels
were beyond what I would consider acceptable. On playback, any noise I noted in live viewing turned into horribly aliased and blocky artifacts. But later, through the assistance of Birns & Sawyer, I reviewed the test footage using the BR-HD50U deck and a Sony BVM-D20F1U HD CRT and noticed very different results. Even as far as 41⁄ 2 stops underexposed (the point of loss of detail), the noise levels were quite acceptable, and I didn’t see any overly obtrusive aliasing or blocky artifacts. I cranked the brightness on the Sony monitor nearly to the top and saw little appreciable increase in noise or artifacting. The CRT review returned excellent results and demonstrated a camera latitude of about 71⁄ 2-8 stops. On the JVC 24" LCD, the results were much more disappointing, 5-51⁄ 2 stops. Unfortunately, I was not able to compare the CRT and LCD results side by side. The BR-HD50U has a composite SD output for instant down-conversion to SD, and at first I thought this was a welcome feature. But the result was less than satisfactory, with highly compromised black levels, extreme noise and artifacting, and total loss of detail in anything less than 2 stops underexposed; I found the downconversions entirely unusable. On top of this, in addition to the fact that 14 of the 15 professional post companies I contacted do not work with JVC ProHD, the two major duplication facilities in Los Angeles that I typically use for down-conversions also do not work with the format. With the Fujinon lenses, I found a great disparity between the aperture markings on the lens and the aperture readout in the camera’s display, as much as 3⁄4 of a stop at times. I elected to go by the readout in the display as a control for all testing with the ENG lenses, and T-stop markings for the cine lenses. (There is no stop readout in the display when using the Cine Adapter.) The camera offers gain settings from 0 to +18dB, but I found +9dB to be too much noise for my taste. I also would have appreciated the option of -6dB, or even just -3dB, for higher-key situations. To nitpick, the gain switch seemed to be inverted, with high gain in the lower position and low gain in the higher position. I have seen
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this configuration on other cameras, and it always strikes me as counterintuitive. Because this switch is assignable, I merely inverted the settings so that high gain was at 0 and low gain was at +6. I was relieved to find audio-level controls easily accessible to the left hand rather than hidden in the camera menus or at the back of the camera. This is a great touch that shows an understanding of how fieldwork really happens. The VTR playback control buttons on the camera seem to go against every other element of design, because they are improperly placed and hardly practical. They hide under the earpiece monitor and are only labeled as cutout shapes on the small black buttons (black-on-black) — no easy markings and no light on the buttons. These controls need significant refinement in order to be more practical. The camera has two XLR audio inputs and comes with a mono microphone with XLR plug. Unfortunately, the two XLR inputs are at the front right-hand side of the camera, which means you have obtrusive trailing cables when connected to an external sound mixer. I was very pleased to see that the viewfinder has peaking adjustments, though I found the max peaking setting still quite low for focus assistance in dark locations. The viewfinder also has JVC’s Focus Assist, with color highlight selectable in red, green or blue. This was rarely useful, as it only seemed to work in areas of extreme contrast — areas where I could easily judge focus without it. For my day of shooting, I was primarily working in handheld mode with the HZ-CA13U Cine Adapter and Zeiss Superspeed lenses. The camera was so light and comfortable that I rarely took it off my shoulder between takes. I did notice, especially on 25mm and longer lenses, a vignetting around the upper portion of the frame with the Cine Adapter. This suited the look I was going for, but other Cine Adapter users should test for this first. I did not have a sound mixer for my small shoot, so I was running primarily with the camera mike. I was a bit frustrated to note that the color bars aren’t SMPTE-standard, but rather ARIB Multi-Format HD color bars, which are less useful for simple field cali-
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Get behind the camera. Youcantellagreatstorybehindthelensofacamera.AttheAcademy,you’ll have the opportunity to develop your ideas into a working script while learning film industry fundamentals of preproduction, audio for media, advancededitingtechniques,DVDproduction,andspecialeffects. Students have the opportunity to create fiction and non-fiction movies and produce them in digital format from conception to completion. Call the Academy today and schedule a tour of the campus to see first hand why IADTTAMPA is the place to train for a career that you can love.
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bration. In addition, although the camera can generate internal 1kHz tone to go with the color bars, these are two separate menu selections quite far from one another. You can easily assign bars to a function button, but you must still go deep into the menus for tone. The camera is designed to integrate with an OEM FireStore DR-HD100 DTE (direct-to-edit) drive. The two communicate so that the VTR start button on the camera simultaneously starts the FireStore DR-HD100 and the camera’s tape drive — a nice feature. However, the FireStore only connects via FireWire 400 and only records HDV footage; it does not record anything different from what is recorded to MiniDV tape. In fact, there is almost no way to get higher than, or better than, HDV footage from this camera. There is an HD-SDI output from the camera, and in studio configuration (with additional hardware) it can be used as a “live” 1080 4:2:2 camera, but only in 60p through an internal crossconversion. I would like to have been able to connect my own deck or drive to the camera and record a non-MPEG2 HD image in 1080 or 720 in 24p. JVC has an optional mount for the back of the camera to hold the FireStore drive, but I found this configuration awkward, especially because the advantages the FireStore presents are limited. In fact, there is one: you don’t have to capture footage to a hard drive because it’s ready for instant access in an NLE program (which, of course, is able to work with JVC ProHD). That benefit was not worth the extra weight and technical complication. The camera records HDV in 24p, 25p, 30p, 50p and 60p at 720 resolution in 4:2:0. Audio in HDV mode is MPEG1 Audio Layer II. In DV mode, the camera records 24p or 60i in 480-line resolution with 16-bit 48kHz PCM encoding. JVC offers several packages. The GY-HD250U with Anton-Bauer battery configuration without lens sells for $11,085. With a Fujinon 16x lens, it is $12,085. The Fujinon 18x lens sells for $10,800 by itself, and the HZ-CA13U Cine Adapter is $4,395. All in all, the GY-HD250U’s physical design is excellent, comfortable and ergonomically sound. The camera’s 90 July 2007
biggest disadvantage is its exclusive and inflexible format: ProHD HDV. The addition of an uncompressed 720p output would improve it considerably. For more information, visit www.pro.jvc.com or call (973) 317-5000. PERA Celebrates Anniversary by Jon D. Witmer In 1992, a group of rental companies in Southern California banded together to address concerns ranging from standards and safety to education and insurance policies. Adopting the name Production Equipment Rental Association (PERA), this group has since grown to embrace rental companies nationwide and is currently in the midst of celebrating its 15th anniversary. Richard Hart, formerly of Xenotech, is an ASC associate member and one of PERA’s founders. He recounts the state of the industry when the group was conceived: “Rental companies were losing money through what felt like competition but really wasn’t. Companies were being played against each other for the lowest prices, and some of the major companies would get the job they wanted no matter what price. So we got together to … exchange ideas. We weren’t there to try to control the pricing, but we wanted [our members to] offer quality product at fair prices. And there was kind of an unwritten rule that you shouldn’t badmouth the other companies just to try and get the job.” PERA’s membership quickly expanded well beyond the confines of Southern California, thanks to the leadership of longtime executive director Ed Clare. According to PERA President Kay Baker (of Film/Video Equipment Supply Co.), the organization’s early years went a long way toward “improving the economic growth of the member companies and promoting trade for the industry and the rental members.” However, Baker goes on to explain that in the pre-9/11 marketplace, “some of the original reasons PERA was organized began to fall by the wayside. Everybody was making great money and everybody was busy. The Internet hadn’t
yet become a place where production companies and production managers would go trolling for the best price.” When the industry went into a recession in late 2001, PERA decided to reinvent itself. “It brought us back full circle,” recalls Baker. “We really needed to work together and re-educate the production community about why a PERA rental house is so important to the overall success of a production.” PERA drew up a code of conduct, drawing on and adding to the “unwritten rules” to which the member companies had already subscribed. Baker muses, “The code put some enthusiasm back into being a member. It got people energized and encouraged them to participate in their organization.” The updated code was launched in conjunction with PERA’s revamped Web site, which has grown into a hub for members to share information and find technical bulletins. Baker emphasizes the cooperation between members: “If we aren’t respectful of our fellow members, and if we don’t try to work out our problems or concerns, then we’re not doing anybody any good. We become self-serving instead of industry-serving.” Particularly with the abundance of sub-rentals between companies, PERA members benefit from the dissemination of information, ensuring that products are maintained to the same high standards across all of its rental houses. “PERA members are known for being the first and early adopters of new technology and new tools,” notes Baker. “We’re the collectors of data and information when something’s not right, and we’re able to get that information back to the manufacturer.” PERA recently expanded its relationships with manufacturers by welcoming Russ Walker of Panasonic as a board member emeritus. “We really appreciate our friends at American Cinematographer and the ASC for recognizing the value PERA offers the industry,” says Baker. “We’re professionals who work very hard to provide the best service, support and tools to the production industry.” To learn more, visit www.peraon line.org.
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Battery Advisory by Jon D. Witmer Although accidents involving batteries and battery-powered electronic devices are few and far between, the Department of Transportation (DOT) recently issued an advisory about how to properly transport batteries on airlines. Working with the DOT on this issue is the Portable Rechargeable Battery Association (PRBA), a nonprofit trade organization whose members are rechargeable-battery manufacturers and consumer-products companies that use such batteries. George Kerchner, the executive director of PRBA, notes, “Spare batteries should be carried onboard, not placed in checked luggage. It’s also important that spare batteries have the correct packaging or insulation. Otherwise, they can contact other batteries or metals, increasing the risk of shortcircuiting. Most battery-transportation incidents could have been avoided had shippers or passengers followed the required regulations.” Kerchner points out that these guidelines fall under the DOT’s “hazardous materials regulations,” making them enforceable by agencies operating under the DOT’s umbrella, such as the Federal Aviation Administration. “Airline passengers are responsible for ensuring that the appropriate steps are taken to protect their batteries and battery-powered equipment,” he says. “There are significant civil penalties for failing to comply with the regulations. “PRBA members are committed to … educating consumers on the safe use and handling of these products, and working with U.S. and international transportation agencies and organizations to further these goals.” For more information, or to download the DOT advisory, visit www.prba.org.
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Points East A Terrorist Targets Times Square by Patricia Thomson
S
yndicated sex columnist Dan Savage has legions of readers who track his advice, but director Julia Loktev was probably the first filmmaker to use “Savage Love” for guidance when choosing a cinematographer. “Dan Savage has a term for what makes a good lover: GGG, which means good, giving and game,” says Loktev. “That’s what we wanted for a director of photography. ‘Game’ was super-important, because 40 minutes of the film was going to be shot in Times Square without crowd management! A lot of cinematographers we talked to panicked at the idea, but Benoît Debie was fearless.” Loktev’s project, Day Night Day Night, was Debie’s first U.S. feature. (Shortly afterward, the Belgian cinematographer returned to the States to shoot Joshua [see AC April ’07] and Carriers.) For Loktev, Debie’s unfamiliarity with the key location was an asset. “The film is about a girl who comes to 92 July 2007
Times Square for the first time, and I had joked that it would be nice to see the place through fresh eyes,” she says. When she met Debie in Brussels, she showed him photos of Times Square on her cell phone. “He said, ‘Where is
this?’” she recalls with a laugh. “So it was perfect.” The central character in Day Night Day Night is a seemingly normal 19-year-old American (Luisa Williams) who is a suicide bomber. She arrives in New York intending to detonate a bomb in her backpack in one of the city’s busiest and most famous intersections. There are no details about her background, nor are there clues about her masked handlers, who equip her with a fake ID and the explosives. With minimal, largely improvised dialogue and long takes, the film follows the logistics of this enterprise in minute detail. Day Night Day Night was conceived in two parts. The first takes place mostly in a motel room in New Jersey, and the second follows the girl in Times Square. “From the very first treatment, we knew the film would be shot like two different movies,” says Loktev. “The first half would be desatu-
Photo and frame grabs courtesy of IFC Films.
Right: A young American (Luisa Williams) meets with her handlers in a motel room to prepare for a suicide bombing in Manhattan. Below: Director of photography Benoît Debie on location in New York.
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The woman heads into the human traffic of Times Square.
rated and feature a lot of geometric compositions, and the second half would be oversaturated and looser.” For the first half, the filmmakers referenced 19th-century Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershoi; for the second, Loktev showed Debie a book of photos of Shanghai at night. Different camera packages enhanced the contrast. Debie shot the first half of the story with a Sony CineAlta HDW-F900R and Zeiss DigiPrimes, recording at 25p to more easily integrate with the second half of the picture, which was shot with a Sony HDR-FX1 at 50i. The FX1 permitted mobility on crowded sidewalks and attracted no attention. Debie maintained all factory settings but increased gain by +3 in the motel and +9 in Times Square; he wanted additional sensitivity in low light and the added grain. On the F900R, he also worked with the sharpness setting, increasing it on close-ups and decreasing it on wide shots. Though the logistics of shooting in Times Square might seem the greater challenge, Debie says the tightly composed first half of the story was actually a bigger stretch. “The second part was more like my style,” he says. “Usually I like to work with a lot of contrast, a lot of color, and the first part
of the story is completely different, soft and monochromatic.” Debie created soft ambient light in the motel room by rigging a China ball on the ceiling and replacing bulbs in practical fixtures with standard incandescents purchased at Home Depot. “For me, the frame was more difficult than the light,” he notes. “Julia asked me not to use a tripod but at the same time to be very stable — to shoot pictures, not a movie. I had to be static but at the same time very flexible about moving the camera.” To stabilize the camera, he sometimes used an Easyrig support. “By the end of the day, it was hard to keep the camera on my shoulder all the time. The Easyrig helps you maintain stability and move the camera without bearing all the weight of it.” Shooting in Times Square, he continues, “was fun because there were just three of us: Julia, the actress and me. The sound guy was on the other side of the street. You know, when you shoot a feature with huge equipment and lights, it can be very difficult. But in this case, I was like a tourist who was filming his girlfriend.” If Debie had to move backwards through the throng, Lektov grabbed his jacket and guided him. “We worked very fluidly, like a dance,” says the director.
Working with existing light in Times Square fit well with Debie’s approach to his craft. “I don’t like to use too much light when I work. I prefer to have a good feeling about the location or the city and see exactly what we can do with natural light.” Only once did he supplement light, and then only with two flashlights, one red and one white. The scene was the final close-up of the girl, when the city lights are reflected on her weary features. “At 4 a.m. there were sometimes no cars in the street, so I just panned a flashlight on her face to create a traffic effect,” he recalls. Such tactics pleased Loktev. “Benoît was able to use the look of the street to create something very, very visual yet totally real. He’s incredible.”
Erratum In our May coverage of The Nanny Diaries, Steve Scammell was incorrectly identified as the visualeffects supervisor for RhinoFX. This work was shared by Arman Matin and Harry Dorrington. Scammell was the owner/operator of the MoSys motion-control system used on the show.
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Clubhouse News and he is also the associate chair of Cinematographers Day at the Palm Springs International Film Festival.
New Member Frederic Goodich, ASC, was recently welcomed into active membership by the Society. Goodich’s affinity for the visual arts began with an interest in drawing and painting, and soon carried over into still photography. When it came time to enroll in college, he embraced cinematography as the perfect combination of all his interests, which also included science and technology. At the City College of New York’s Hans Richter/Robert Flaherty Institute, Goodich formed an appreciation for avant-garde and documentary films, and a part-time job as a film handler at the Museum of Modern Art enabled him to study works in both fields. Some of Goodich’s post-college adventures found him working in Washington, D.C., for a magazine-style show; shooting travelogues aboard a four-mast windjammer; and assisting Isidore Mankofsky, ASC at Encyclopedia Brittanica Films, where he soon became a staff director/cameraman. Goodich’s cinematography credits include features, documentaries, telefilms, short films, music and fashion videos, and commercials. Some of his recent features are GI Jesus, Surviving Eden and The Affair. He is a lecturer in the cinematography program at the American Film Institute, 98 July 2007
Kodak Contest For the second year in a row, Peter James, ASC, ACS will judge the finalists in the Kodak Filmschool Competition, a duty previously carried out by ASC members Caleb Deschanel, Frederick Elmes and Laszlo Kovacs, among others. Now in its eighth year, the contest provides an opportunity for students to showcase their best work in three regions: Latin America, Asia Pacific and U.S./Canada. Films compete first at the national level, where local judges select the projects that will go on to vie for top honors in the regional competitions, which will be judged by James. The grand prizes include screening of the winning entries at the Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival in France, where the filmmakers will participate in a number of activities hosted by Kodak. More information about the competition can be found at www.kodak.com/go/filmschoolcom petition. Burum on Campus Stephen H. Burum, ASC spent the spring of 2007 as the Kodak Cinematographer in Residence at the University of California-Los Angeles School of Theater, Film and Television. An alumnus of UCLA’s undergraduate and graduate theater arts programs, Burum kicked off his engagement by screening a 70mm print of Casualties of War, the third of his eight collaborations with director Brian De Palma. Burum also hosted eight lighting workshops and held weekly office hours, during which he met with students to discuss their work and answer questions.
AC Contributors Win Awards At the Music Video Production Association Awards in May, AC contributor and technical editor Christopher Probst was feted with the top honor in the cinematography category for his work on Muse’s “Knights of Cydonia” music video. Filmed on location in the Romanian desert, “Knights” lays on the camp as it blends Spaghetti Westerns with kungfu action and retro 1980s sci-fi. Meanwhile, across the Pacific, AC ’s Australian correspondent, Simon Gray, took home the trophy for best cinematography in the student section of the National Australian Cinematographers Society Awards. Working with digital video, Gray photographed the short film Afterlife during his first year in the cinematography course at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School. Lubezki Travels to Vietnam Emmanuel Lubezki, ASC, AMC, recently participated in a delegation from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, traveling to Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam for the country’s first-ever “American Film Week.” Lubezki and fellow Academy members contributed to a series of screenings, workshops and seminars, sharing their experiences of working in the American film industry and learning from their Vietnamese counterparts. This marked the first time that such a group from the U.S. has been officially invited to Vietnam, and the first time in over 25 years that an Academy delegation has been hosted by another nation’s governmental film agency. — Jon D. Witmer
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ASC CLOSE-UP David Stump, ASC When you were a child, what film made the strongest impression on you? It was probably House on Haunted Hill, which scared the living crap out of me. I didn’t sleep at all afterward; I was wide-awake all night, imagining what creatures were waiting to come pouring out of my closet the moment I went to sleep. Which cinematographers, past or present, do you most admire? I was always a great admirer of James Wong Howe, ASC. He did so much beautiful black-and-white cinematography with hard light. I have always loved the work of my first mentor, Phil Lathrop, ASC, who shot The Pink Panther, which fueled my interest in comedy, and Vittorio Storaro, ASC, AIC’s work on The Conformist and The Spider’s Stratagem, which was startlingly different and way ahead of its time. What sparked your interest in photography? I’ve been taking pictures since childhood, so it’s always been one of my passions. I’ve always liked anything mechanical or technical: cameras, chemistry sets, old TV sets, record players — anything that was fair game for me to take apart. At age 10, I built my own very, very lowpower radio station in my garage, and I went door to door throughout my neighborhood begging the neighbors to listen! When I visited Hollywood as a kid, I realized that it was actually a real place where real people made movies. Suddenly, it seemed possible to become involved in film. Where did you study and/or train? My only training in film has come from actually working on films. Until I made my way into the business, I had been studying and working in engineering. Who were your early teachers or mentors? I learned a lot from Phil Lathrop. He gave me advice and guidance every time I asked. What are some of your key artistic influences? I’ve always been a student of Monet and the Impressionists. The first time I saw the giant Water Lilies in the galleries of Paris, I was awestruck. I have also always been a student of Rembrandt. He was the acknowledged master of light, and anyone who aspires to beautiful lighting begins by studying his work. How did you get your first break in the business? I was working with a comedy group that got a pilot deal. Overnight, I went from being out of work to producing a TV show. What has been your most satisfying moment on a project? I worked on the visual effects for the TV miniseries The Day After, a very frightening story about a nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia. After the last night of the show, there was a panel show on ABC with Henry Kissinger and others of equal stature discussing the implications of the story. Watching that made me feel the VFX atomic-bomb clouds I had photographed for the miniseries had actually had an effect on the American public, a sobering effect. It was very gratifying to see a TV show I had worked on affect so many people so profoundly. Have you made any memorable blunders? When I first became a director of photography, I was setting up a table100 July 2007
David Stump (left) with actor Robert Englund.
top credit-card shot for a commercial on a beach in Malibu. About an hour into the shoot, as I was setting up an HMI backlight, I didn’t notice the tide was coming in. The tripod was grip-chained to several apple boxes, and when a wave suddenly washed a lot farther up the beach than any previous wave had traveled, the whole camera and tripod began to float away! I grabbed the sticks and held on for dear life until my AC and a grip joined in to help. That taught me to always check the tide charts and weather reports. What’s the best professional advice you’ve ever received? The thing that makes you a filmmaker is the act of making a film. What recent books, films or artworks have inspired you? I found it amazing that someone could take such an enormous volume of work as The Lord of the Rings trilogy and try to put it on film. Peter Jackson’s trilogy was an ambitious and daunting task that stands as a milestone in filmmaking. As for literature, I’m not surprised at the effect comic books and graphic novels are having on our industry. There is some amazingly creative stuff being published these days that redefines the meaning of the word “literature.” In terms of artwork, I love to spend evenings and weekends looking at photo exhibits in galleries and museums. It’s inspiring to see so many fresh new ideas in photography. Every time The Getty Center changes its photo exhibit, I have to go for a visit! Do you have any favorite genres, or genres you would like to try? I love shooting comedy, because people are telling stories with the intent of making other people laugh. Making people laugh is a noble pursuit, and if you can entertain and distract an audience for an hour or two and really make them laugh, then you have helped increase the amount of collective joy on the planet. If you weren’t a cinematographer, what might you be doing instead? I would probably be an engineer of some kind, or perhaps an art photographer. Which ASC cinematographers recommended you for membership? Bill Taylor, Bing Sokolsky and Kees Van Oostrum, with help from Steven Poster. Thank you all! How has ASC membership impacted your life and career? I have become much more community-oriented. My work with the Technology Committee’s Camera Subcommittee and Metadata Subcommittee has made me a more social participant in the industry. I now give a lot of my time to the ASC for committee work.
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ONFILM ROBERTO SCHAEFER, ASC
“Most of us who work on movies do it because we have a passion for the art. I began by creating images for installation art. My life’s experiences led me to become a cinematographer. I can’t imagine doing anything else. I think that everything you do in life is an experience that you bring to your work. When I was in college, I traveled to Europe and Africa and took pictures of people and places. Later, I shot documentaries in Italy, Egypt, Peru, New Guinea and other countries. I learned to look for the moment when unplanned things happen that I wanted to catch on film… The rules are constantly changing. It is all about taking the audience into somebody else’s world.” Roberto Schaefer’s narrative film credits include Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, Monster’s Ball, Finding Neverland, Stay, Stranger Than Fiction, For Your Consideration, and the upcoming release of The Kite Runner. He has also shot documentaries and hundreds of commercials and music videos around the world. [All these films were shot on Kodak motion picture film.]
For an extended interview with Roberto Schaefer, ASC visit www.kodak.com/go/onfilm. To order Kodak motion picture film, call (800) 621 - film. www.kodak.com/go/motion © Eastman Kodak Company, 2007. Photography: © 2007 Douglas Kirkland
