American Cinematographer 201111

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began readingAmericanCinematographer years

ago, while I was serving inthe U.S. Air Force as amotion-picture cameraman. Iwas assigned to shootgovernment films, newsreelsand documentaries, but whenI was not on an assignment, Iwas able to take advantage ofthe availability of cameras,film stock, laboratory andAC to create and shoot myown short films.

“After this wonderful,hands-on opportunity to learnthe art of cinematography, Iwas able to go to Hollywoodand begin a career in themotion-picture business. Tothis day, I read AC everymonth to keep up with thelatest technology andtechniques in the ever-evolving world of cinema.”

— Frank E. Johnson, ASC

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Lowell Peterson ASC received an Emmynomination for the series “Six FeetUnder”, and three ASC nominations for

his other television work. He is currentlyshooting the eighth and final season of“Desperate Housewives”.

B+W • Century • Schneider

We shot the first seven seasons of“Desperate Housewives” on filmbut this year I decided to take theshow HD, with Alexa. After a lotof testing, we ended up using thesame lenses and same SchneiderBlack Frost & True-Pol® filters thatgave us our look on film. The onlyissue we had was IR pollution whenshooting outdoors on Wisteria Lane.

Schneider came through for us withsome of the first sets of their great newPlatinum IRNDs, and all our colormatching problems disappeared.

The International Journal of Motion Imaging

32 Time BanditRoger Deakins, ASC, BSC opts for digital capture on sci-fithriller In Time

46 All for OneGlen MacPherson, ASC, CSC applies modern methods to 3-D remake of The Three Musketeers

60 3-D on a BudgetTips and tricks for shooting stereo affordably

68 Caught on TapeVilmos Zsigmond, ASC revisits his stylish work on the 1981 thriller Blow Out

78 Sharp ShootingSpotlighting this year’s Emmy nominees for cinematography

DEPARTMENTS

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— VISIT WWW.THEASC.COM TO ENJOY THESE WEB EXCLUSIVES —DVD Playback: Scarface • Blood Simple • The Complete Jean Vigo

On Our Cover: Young lovers (Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried) revoltagainst a dystopian society in the sci-fi thriller In Time, shot by Roger Deakins,ASC, BSC. (Photo by Nino Muñoz, courtesy of 20th Century Fox.)

8 Editor’s Note10 President’s Desk12 Short Takes: “The Candidate”18 Production Slate: Martha Marcy May Marlene • America in Primetime80 Filmmakers’ Forum: Juan-Ruiz Anchia, ASC86 New Products & Services90 International Marketplace91 Classified Ads92 Ad Index94 Clubhouse News96 ASC Close-Up: Dan Mindel

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EDITORIALEXECUTIVE EDITOR Stephen Pizzello

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

John Pavlus, Chris Pizzello, Jon Silberg, Iain Stasukevich, Kenneth Sweeney, Patricia Thomson

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————————————————————————————————————American Cinematographer (ISSN 0002-7928), established 1920 and in its 91st year of publication, is published

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

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OFFICERS - 2011/2012

Michael GoiPresident

Richard CrudoVice President

Owen RoizmanVice President

John C. Flinn IIIVice President

Victor J. KemperTreasurer

Frederic GoodichSecretary

Stephen LighthillSergeant At Arms

MEMBERS OF THEBOARDJohn Bailey

Stephen H. BurumRichard Crudo

George Spiro DibieRichard Edlund

Fred ElmesMichael Goi

Victor J. KemperFrancis Kenny

Isidore MankofskyRobert Primes

Owen Roizman Kees Van Oostrum

Haskell WexlerVilmos Zsigmond

ALTERNATESMichael D. O’Shea

Rodney TaylorRon GarciaSol Negrin

Kenneth Zunder

MUSEUM CURATORSteve Gainer

American Society of Cine ma tog ra phersThe ASC is not a labor union or a guild, but

an educational, cultural and pro fes sion al or ga ni za tion. Membership is by invitation

to those who are actively en gaged as di rec tors of photography and have

dem on strated out stand ing ability. ASC membership has be come one of the highest

honors that can be bestowed upon a pro fes sional cin e ma tog ra pher — a mark

of prestige and excellence.

6

Few of the movies we’ve covered this year have generatedas many queries as In Time, which marks the first timeRoger Deakins, ASC, BSC has shot a feature with digitalcameras. With nine Academy Award nominations, anASC Lifetime Achievement Award and many other honorsdecorating his résumé, Deakins has become the E.F.Hutton of cinematography circles: when he talks, peoplelisten. He certainly doesn’t mince words in Jay Holben’scoverage of the sci-fi thriller (“Time Bandit,” page 32),weighing in on Arri’s Alexa and where he stands in thedeathless “film vs. digital” debate.

Declaring the Alexa “a game-changer,” heobserves, “This moment has been coming for a long time,

really, but with the Alexa I believe digital has finally surpassed film in terms of quality.” Headds, “Sometimes I really get annoyed with the garbage I hear about film vs. digital. Most ofit is simply nostalgia and silly thinking…. In my opinion, there are now more advantages thandisadvantages to digital cinematography.”

If digital formats have become a prevailing trend, so, too, has 3-D cinematography.Continuing our ongoing coverage of this topic, we sought out Glen MacPherson, ASC, CSC,who used 3-D to amp up the action in director Paul W.S. Anderson’s energetic remake of TheThree Musketeers. MacPherson expresses his enthusiasm for the format emphatically, tellingNew York correspondent Iain Stasukevich (“All for One,” page 46) that he greatly prefers the3-D version of Musketeers to the 2-D version that will also be released: “I spent several weeksgrading the movie in 3-D, then I took a quick run up to the 2-D theater, and it was a hugedisappointment. It’s amazing how you sort of lose the scope of all those great locations.”

For those of you planning to shoot 3-D with more modest resources, Paris correspon-dent Benjamin B serves up a piece packed with tips and techniques he absorbed during aweek-long workshop supervised by cinematographer Geoff Boyle, FBKS (“3-D on a Budget,”page 60).

To learn how movies were shot when film was an unrivaled format, look no furtherthan Jon Silberg’s piece on Blow Out (1981), a thriller that teamed Vilmos Zsigmond, ASCwith one of his favorite directors, Brian De Palma (“Caught on Tape,” page 68). Zsigmondreveals how he compensated for film’s limitations with some radical strategies. “Brian is a styl-ist, and he’s very experimental,” the cinematographer observes. “He sticks his neck out onmovies that sometimes get bad reviews because the [critics] say he’s concentrating too muchon the visuals.” But, he adds, “Brian always wants to do the kinds of things cinematogra-phers love to do!”

This issue also offers a salute to this year’s Emmy-nominated cinematographers(“Sharp Shooting,” page 78), whose ranks include 10 ASC members.

Stephen PizzelloExecutive Editor

Editor’s Note

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Cinematography is driven by the desire to exercise one’s artistry. This is certainly true of prettymuch every position on a production, but whereas one might enter into a craft in the businessdriven by the desire to be famous or to get rich, you'd be hard pressed to find a cinematogra-pher whose motivation for pursuing this craft was primarily influenced by those desires. A cine-matographer whose work is enormously influential might be virtually unknown to most of theworld. A cinematographer becomes a cinematographer because he or she enjoys telling storieswith light, color and composition.

The ASC is composed of cinematographers who are masters of visual expression — everyone of them. There are those whose names are immediately recognizable, but every memberachieved the honor of membership by being the best in the field. They have enhanced anddefined motion pictures for almost 100 years. Allow me to mention a few of them.

When you watch the amazing mirror-room fight sequence in Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon,you are watching the work of Gil Hubbs, ASC. Stephen M. Katz, ASC was the cinematographerbehind the iconic comedy The Blues Brothers. Isidore Mankofsky, ASC gave life to Kermit the Frogfor The Muppet Movie. When Revenge of the Nerds took place, King Baggot, ASC was there tofilm it. (King also shot one of my favorite fantasy films, The Last Starfighter.)

The beautiful, moody images from The Inland Sea were photographed by the same manwho gave The Rocketeer flight, Hiro Narita, ASC. And when you watch just about any large-scale

effects movie, you are probably seeing the work of Mat Beck, ASC, whose credits include shots for Titanic, Spider-Man 2 and Intothe Wild. When Stephen King’s Pet Sematary was unleashed on audiences, they were thrilled by the work of Peter Stein, ASC. GeraldFeil, ASC was shooting exciting 3-D action years ago for Friday the 13th Part III. And when the Dixie Chicks were told to Shut Upand Sing, Joan Churchill, ASC was there to document their message.

One of the reasons Frasier ran for 151 episodes was that Ken Lamkin, ASC was behind the camera. George Mooradian, ASCmade Emmy nominations a regular occurrence for his work on According to Jim. And Wayne Kennan, ASC gave the world someof its funniest moments with Seinfeld.

Michael Negrin, ASC trained his camera on Billy Joel as he courted Christie Brinkley in the video for Uptown Girl. And whatdo Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean, Britney Spears’ Boys and Van Halen’s Hot for Teacher have in common? They were all shot by DanielPearl, ASC.

Members of the ASC are generally pretty humble about their accomplishments. When we enter the Clubhouse, we allbecome equals. It’s not about egos or awards; it’s about hanging out and recognizing that we all got into this craft because te llingvisual stories is what we love to do.

One of my prized possessions is an ASC mug that bears the name Carl Berger, ASC. If you believe the databases, Carl is stillalive, even though his first credit as a cinematographer was in 1932. His last documented film was 1967’s C’mon, Let’s Live A Little,a romp that I enjoyed as a youngster. According to the ASC’s records, Carl is well over 105 years old. Some think he might havedied years ago and we just didn’t receive word, but I like to believe that Carl is still out there, and that he might yet walk throughthe Clubhouse doors again. I think his name will continue to be on the ASC roster for many years to come, because ASC cine-matographers truly do live forever.

Michael Goi, ASCPresident

President’s Desk

10 November 2011 American Cinematographer

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Career OpportunitiesBy Iain Stasukevich

Based on a short story by Twilight Zone writer Henry Slesar,the short film The Candidate unfolds like a tale from Rod Serling’sclassic series: As Burton Grunzer (Tom Gulager) tensely narrates aninteroffice rivalry with his seemingly hapless coworker, WhitmanHayes (Thomas F. Duffy), the conflict evolves into an increasinglytwisted game of cat-and-mouse.

The script fell into cinematographer Brandon Cox’s lap in2009, while he was shooting the feature The Collector in Louisiana.That film’s visual-effects supervisor was David Karlak, who had beeninspired by Slesar’s story and asked Cox if he’d be interested in shoot-ing the short.

Karlak had directed a few shorts before undertaking TheCandidate, but this was his first project to originate on film. “Not alot of shorts are being done on film anymore,” says Cox, who grad-uated from AFI’s cinematography program in 2004, and whose cred-its include more than 150 music videos. “But David and I are bothlovers of film, and we really wanted to shoot and finish on film.”

The costs of shooting and finishing on film were alleviated bya FotoKem Student Filmmaker Grant, which covered the cost ofnegative processing, print dailies and answer printing (with a process-ing limit of 20,000' for 35mm). “We could have shot this project digi-tally, but there’s something exciting about shooting on film, andeverybody working on the project could feel that,” says Cox.

Citing the stock’s contrast and color rendition, Cox elected toshoot The Candidate on Kodak Vision3 500T 5219, working in the

anamorphic 2.40:1 format with Panavision Primo lenses. “I’ve shota tremendous amount of anamorphic, and I’m familiar with thePanavision C-, E- and G-Series anamorphic lenses,” says Cox. Thoseseries are more compact and lightweight than the Primos, makingthem especially well-suited to Steadicam and handheld work, butthe cinematographer envisioned The Candidate as a “studio mode”film, with the camera always on sticks or a dolly. “We wanted to bekind of old-school about our camera moves,” he says. “It was allabout using the dolly to reflect the way Burton reacts to the space.”

The Candidate was photographed on location inside thedowntown Los Angeles offices of an architectural firm. “It’s agorgeously designed office with concrete, steel and glass, and allthese different colors on plasma screens,” Cox describes.

Karlak had been especially inspired by David Fincher’s TheGame (shot by Harris Savides, ASC), so Cox prepared for The Candi-date by watching that film. He also studied Robert Elswit, ASC’swork in Michael Clayton and Wally Pfister, ASC’s work in The DarkKnight. “David Fincher’s films all have a really strong sense of move-ment, and I really love the way Robert Elswit and Wally Pfister coverscenes,” he explains.

One of Cox’s favorite moments in The Candidate comes afterthe bumbling Hayes accepts all the credit for landing a big client. Thefilm then cuts to the restroom; a tiled wall fills the frame untilBurton’s head rises in slow motion. He splashes water on his faceand then starts to scream, but no sound comes out. “We made thatshot at 120 fps with a Panavised Arri 435,” says Cox, whose camerapackage — which also included a Panavision G2 — came fromPanavision Hollywood. “There’s something about that scene that I

Short Takes

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Burton Grunzer (Tom Gulager) retreats to a restroom to vent his frustrations with his job in this frame grab from The Candidate, directed by David Karlak and shot by Brandon Cox.

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Top row, left to right: Curtis Clark, ASC; Richard Crudo, ASC; Daryn Okada, ASC; Dennis Dillon, DP; Francis Kenny, ASC

Bottom row, left to right: Cassie Brooksbank, Senior, USC School of Cinematic Arts; Cameron Combe, Student Filmmaker, Cal State Long Beach;

Brian Smith, Award-winning Photographer; Brooke Mailhiot, Cinematographer

love. It’s eerie and beautiful at the sametime.”

The location’s glassed-in designallowed the filmmakers to shoot manyscenes with the assistance of available light.“I had to know where the sun was going tobe at any given time,” Cox recalls. “Luckily,a lot of the windows in that building facenorth, but we had to get to certain sets at aspecific time.” The cinematographer usedthe Sun Seeker app for the iPhone to trackthe sun’s trajectory over the course of theday.

Cox and gaffer Kyle Bryson useddaylight-balanced Kino Flo Image 80s toaugment many of the scenes taking placenext to windows, diffusing the fixtures withLight or 1⁄4 Grid for added softness. Thestrongest light the production brought onset was an Arri 1.2K HMI; the rest of thelighting package comprised daylight-balanced 4x4 Kino Flos, tungsten Dedosand a selection of practical lamps with tung-sten bulbs.

The climax of the film involves asuspenseful exchange between Burton andthe mysterious Carl Tucker (Robert Picardo).Nearly five minutes in length — a quarter ofthe short’s running time — and rife withdetailed exposition, Cox remembers thisscene as being “a bit of a conundrum.Robert’s character has to tell a story. Wedidn’t have the time to shoot a flashback toillustrate what he’s talking about, so wedecided to go the other route, filming himas he talked. How would we keep the audi-ence interested?”

To find a solution, Cox referred backto Pfister’s work, studying how the cine-matographer would shoot two peoplecarrying on an extended conversation. “Hedoes very simple coverage, but he movesthe camera ever so slightly, so you don’tnotice it,” Cox observes. “You get grippedinto the conversation with the dolly moves,booming up and down, pushing in, goingback to wide. It’s so simple and effective.”

Cox employed those same slowpushes on Picardo and Gulager, and evenused a tracking shot behind Gulager tocross the 180-degree line, emphasizing ashift in tone between the two characters.For The Candidate’s final “gotcha”moment, Cox pushed in fast and close oneach of the actors, using a 100mm lens and

Grunzer meets with the mysterious Carl Tucker (Robert Picardo), who tells of a secret society that hasmet with great success in wishing people dead. The conversation takes the characters through different

areas of the downtown Los Angeles office building where the production filmed.


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dutching the frame with a Tango swinghead.

It was a critical moment not only forthe characters, but for Cox, who operatedthe camera while 1st AC Hiro Fukada pulledfocus. “Anamorphic depth of field is soshallow,” says Cox. “We were close-focus-ing on a long lens at T2.8, and Hiro madesure we got it.”

The crew shot for two days,watched film dailies at FotoKem in Burbank,returned to the location for two more daysof shooting, and then screened thosedailies. “Most of the features I’ve workedon can’t afford projected dailies, and there’snever any time for it,” says Cox. “NormallyI’ll see my digital dailies on a calibrated HDflatscreen or an iPad. Seeing your work ona 19-inch monitor is one thing, but seeing iton a big screen, on film, is something else.You truly see what you’re getting.”

After principal photography wrappedin September 2009, the film was transferredto standard-definition DVCam tapes atFotoKem. Karlak pieced together a coupleof rough cuts. Although he and Cox wereconfident in what they had in the can, bothagreed more could be done to flesh outsome of the scenes, so four months afterprincipal photography, the crew returned tothe location to shoot additional inserts forthe film’s opening scene, as well as a newend-credits sequence that amps up theeffect of the twist ending. “It’s very rare thatyou come away from a shoot with the feel-ing you’ve gotten everything you wanted atthe time,” Cox remarks.

The FotoKem grant afforded Cox theopportunity to work closely with color timerDan Muscarella on the film print master,which the cinematographer describes as “agreat experience.” A 4:4:4 HDCam-SR digi-

tal master was also assembled at SantaMonica-based New Hat with colorist BeauLeon, one of Cox’s frequent collaborators,at the dials.

Cox is part of the last generation offilmmakers who learned the craft of cine-matography by shooting film stock, justbefore many schools started switching todigital-dominated curricula and workflows.In the late 1990s, as nonlinear editing andhigh-definition video were gaining tractionwith students, Cox cut his early projects onreel-to-reel editing benches and wasinstructed on how to communicate with afilm lab. He believes the blend of digital andanalog curriculums has given him abalanced perspective on the “digital vs.film” argument. “I started out shootingfilm, but I also have to keep up with tech-nology,” he muses. “Every movie has itsformat. Some movies should be shot onfilm, and some should be shot digitally. Ithink there’s a place for both in this world.”

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Top, left and right: Cox lines up a shot with the production’s Panavision G2 camera. Below: Grunzer considers his halting rise up the corporate ladder.


Mind Control By Patricia Thomson

It isn’t often that brainwashing techniques influence thevisual design of a movie, but they proved to be a fitting inspirationfor Martha Marcy May Marlene . Written and directed by SeanDurkin, the film tells the story of Martha (Elizabeth Olsen), a youngwoman who flees a cult in upstate New York and attempts to readjust to the outside world with the help of her sister, Lucy (SarahPaulson).

As Martha struggles to process her experiences, the film cutsback and forth between two primary locations: the cult’s farmsteadand Lucy’s lakefront vacation home in Connecticut. On the farm, wesee Martha’s gradual assimilation into the cult’s communal lifestyle,and her discovery of the domination and violence that lurk beneathits bucolic veneer. At Lucy’s house, Martha’s mind frays, and shebecomes increasingly convinced that the cult is coming after her.

Durkin and cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes decided thatMartha’s present should not be visually differentiated from her past.“In some cults there’s this Buddhist-based philosophy to focus on themoment — there’s no future, no past, only the present,” explainsDurkin. “It’s a common brainwashing technique used by cults tomake people lose track of time. There are no calendars or clocksaround. It made sense that this would be a key component ofMartha’s psychology: she has no sense of time.”

Although the commune and Lucy’s home are very different interms of their architecture, lighting and palette, the filmmakers didnot strive to emphasize those differences through the cinematogra-phy. “It was important to keep the two locations as indistinguishableas possible because there are times when Martha is confused aboutwhere she is,” says Lipes.

For example, Martha looks over at someone during a conver-sation and suddenly, seamlessly, she’s talking with someone else ina different time and place. Or she walks down a dark hallway inLucy’s house and steps into a room that is revealed to be in the farm-house. “We didn’t want these transitions to have any sort of visualindicator,” says Durkin. “We wanted to make the viewer take asecond to orient himself.”

Martha is Durkin’s feature-directing debut, but it is not hisfirst collaboration with Lipes, who was named one of Variety’s “10Cinematographers to Watch” earlier this year. Durkin first called onLipes to shoot his senior film at New York University in 2006. Then,when Durkin and classmates Josh Mond and Antonio Campos co-founded Borderline Films, they hired Lipes, a fellow NYU alum, formost of their music videos, commercials and two previous features,including Campos’ Afterschool. Lipes’ other credits include TinyFurniture (AC Jan. ’11); NY Export: Opus Jazz, which he also wroteand directed (AC March ’10), and episodes of HBO’s Girls. (Lipes shotseven out of 10 episodes and directed two of the other episodes.)

With a budget of less than $1 million, Martha had 2½ weeksfor preproduction and 24 days for production. Ten days each weredevoted to the two main locations: a Catskills farm, which offeredthree barns, a rambling farmhouse and unlimited rusticity; and alakeside house in Connecticut, whose Ikea-style furnishings,recessed lighting and plate-glass windows provided a clear contrast.

It was the farm that set the photographic look, which Durkindescribes as “worn.” “We wanted to shoot on film and havetexture,” he elaborates. “We felt [the image] should accent the dry,overgrown dirtiness of the farm.”

To translate that objective into visual terms, Lipes aimed for agrainy, low-contrast, slightly desaturated look with milky blacks.Shooting 3-perf Super 35mm with an Arricam Lite, he chose

Production Slate

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Martha(Elizabeth Olsen)

falls prey to acharismatic cult

leader in theindie drama

Martha MarcyMay Marlene,

shot by Jody Lee Lipes.

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Arri/Zeiss Master Primes and an AngenieuxOptimo 24-290mm zoom lens. He initiallyconsidered using anamorphic or olderlenses, “but because we had so little testingtime, I decided to use lenses that I knewwere consistent and could open up a lotwithout any problems,” he says. “So wedecided to achieve the ‘worn’ look throughexposure and processing.”

Lipes considered pushing the film toachieve the desired look, but after doingsome tests and consulting with HarrisSavides, ASC, he decided against it. “I knewHarris had a lot of experience with under-exposing,” says Lipes, who screenedMargot at the Wedding during prep, alongwith Rosemary’s Baby, Klute, 3 Women andImages. “Harris said I would do better justto underexpose and not push, because youget too much contrast by pushing. And hewas totally right. So I ended up underex-posing the film — a lot.”

He underexposed Kodak Vision3500T 5219 and 250D 5207 by 2 stops, andVision2 50D 5201 by 12⁄3 stops. “It’s aboutthe blacks,” says Lipes. “It’s also about

making the high-quality, sharp images youget from Master Primes a little softer andmore degraded through a lack of resolutionand color. When you get underexposurejust right, there’s a bit of a veil over thewhole image; it’s like flashing, but withoutflashing.”

Lipes also used a considerableamount of ND filtration. “We were doingday exteriors and rating 5207 at [ISO]1,000, and sometimes I’d shoot at T1.3, sothe only way we could do that was with ahuge amount of ND. There’s one shot earlyin the film that epitomizes what that does. Iwas using a 40mm lens to get a pretty wideshot of one of the characters choppingwood, and the background is totally out offocus. It’s not the depth-of-field you typicallysee with that size shot on a day exterior.”

The filmmakers discovered that onemore factor was needed to “activate thelook,” says Lipes. “We always tried to putsomething dark in the frame, even if was aday exterior, because we found that reallytriggered the worn look in the blacks. I usethe word ‘activate’ because it really does

need a group of factors to materialize. Youhave to understand that the ratio of black inthe frame is going to directly relate to howmuch you should underexpose. If you’redoing a daylight scene that’s in direct sun,you can underexpose 21⁄2 stops and no onewill know the difference. But if it’s a shotwhere you see just a sliver through a door-way and everything else is black, you canunderexpose 1 or 1 1⁄2 stops and it will bevery apparent. So it’s understanding youhave further to go in one situation than inanother, or else you’ll have to compensatefor it digitally [in post], which never looksthe same.”

The project’s short prep periodmeant that Lipes was refining the look onthe fly. “It was hard — I was guessing alot,” he admits. But he benefited fromdetailed feedback from colorist Sam Daleyat Technicolor New York, who wasinvolved from day one. “I think it’s strangethat dailies colorists and finishing coloristare usually different people,” Lipes says. “I’ve had the luxury of working with Sam asa dailies colorist and a finishing coloristson several films, and all of Season 1 onGirls, and I think that continuity betweenus goes a long way. Sam knows my workso well, and is so involved from prepro-duction on, that he can infer a great dealwithout the need for a lot of communica-tion during production. He knows howthe film will look in the end, so he canmake more educated decisions aboutpotential issues with dailies as we shoot.Because Sam serves as both dailies andfinishing colorist, he is much more of acreative partner in the various projects we

Right: Cult leaderPatrick (John

Hawkes) offerscomfort to his

new recruit.Below: Martha

bonds with two of the group’s

other members,Zoe (Louisa

Krause, left) andSarah (Julie

Garner, right), onthe farm.


work on together. Finishing often getsrushed through on many of the productionsI work on, so it’s great to know that there issomeone behind the scenes who knowswhere things are going to end up, and thathe has the knowledge and ability to roughthings in very well before I get to the lab.

“On Martha, Sam was in close touchthe entire time, telling me if I went a littletoo far here or not far enough there,” Lipesadds, noting that he wasn’t always able to

glean such information from the ProResdailies. “When you’re rating 2 stops under,film can get very temperamental and unpre-dictable, so I was often surprised.”

In the digital timing, the mainconcern was maintaining consistency in theblacks. “That was tricky,” says the cine-matographer. “When you’re underexposingthat much, a slight difference in how muchyou underexpose can really affect the qual-ity of the image. If we were losing light and

I opened up by 1⁄3 when I shouldn’t have, itwas really hard to match between takes —just 1⁄3 of a difference in stop!

“With this degree of underexposure,black actually looks more gray than black,and it can look like a different film stock[from shot to shot], so you have to makethose shots come together. Sam did thatreally well, which took time.”

Lipes and Daley also worked to avoidclipping the highlights. “I think having ahuge latitude accentuates the film look, so Itry to emphasize that even further in thedigital realm,” says Lipes.

That latitude was particularly impor-tant in the lake-house interiors, where theobject was to create an environment thatwould underscore Martha’s vulnerabilityand paranoia. Balancing interiors and exte-riors in the predominantly glass house was apriority because the filmmakers wanted theoutside environment to be visible. HelpingLipes in that regard was the need to havesomething dark in the frame. “So if we’redoing day interiors and there werewindows, keeping the foreground subjectdark was a way to activate the smoky blacklook,” he says. “The Godfather Part II was areally important reference for those situa-tions. I’ve watched that movie over and overfor my entire life. Gordon Willis [ASC] is,without question, my favorite cinematogra-pher, and my approach to a lot of the lake-house stuff with the big windows comesdirectly from studying the feeling of hiswork, particularly the Godfather films.”

Lipes estimates that he shot morethan half of the film with no movie lightingat all. For the other half, he took pains tocontrast the lighting of the farm and thelake house. “I wanted the light at the farmto feel like [fixtures that] were rigged andimprovised by the cult members,” he says,“whereas at the lake house, I wanted it tofeel like high-end lighting integrated intothe home. I think there are two kinds of‘rich-people lighting’: the kind that’s classicand nice, with a lot of small lamps around,and the kind where the fixtures are recessedand bounced, with no visible bulbs or hardlight.” Lipes opted for the latter strategy.

“We didn’t know exactly what wewere shooting at the house,” he continues.“We had almost no prep time on the loca-tion, so almost none of it was planned

Top: Martha’s sister, Lucy (Sarah Paulson), and brother-in-law, Ted (Hugh Dancy), provide refugeafter Martha escapes from the cult. Middle: Martha’s fragile emotional state devolves into

paranoia as she adapts to her new surroundings. Bottom: Lipes (white shirt) and members ofthe crew block out a scene with director Sean Durkin (far right).

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ahead of time — whereas at the farm,generally speaking, we had more blockingor specific frames worked out. In thekitchen of the house, my longtime gaffer,Josh Allen, and longtime key grip, AlexEngel, rigged the ceiling so it was entirelycovered with paper lanterns that were cut inhalf; they were half spheres with 100-wattbulbs in them. Then Full Grid diffusion wasstretched across them to produce a veryindirect, soft, warm, glowing toplight. Thegreat thing was that you could just turn onany bulb you wanted out of dozens ofbulbs.”

By contrast, Lipes often limited light-ing at the farm to one standard bulb, asingle paper lantern, or, in the sexual-initia-tion scenes, actual fire from kerosene lamps.“Every once in awhile, we’d bounce an HMIthrough a window to add a bit of ambience.For the most part, it was pretty minimal,” hesays. ”It’s also important to note that wecould only use minimal lighting because wewere shooting as high as ISO 2,000 withT1.3 lenses.”

Lipes also served as camera operator,but he tips his hat to his longtime first assis-tant, Joe Anderson, who took over on anumber of shots. “Joe is indispensable,especially when we’re working at stops likethis,” says the cinematographer. “He takesrisks that some assistants wouldn’t take.He’s also an extremely talented cinematog-rapher, so he helps me make a lot of deci-sions and acts as a second set of eyes on ascene.”

As for his own contribution, Lipes iscontent. “I feel I had a bit more control ofthe craft and more awareness this timearound,” he says. “Of the five features I’veshot so far, this is definitely the one thatreflects my visual style the most.”

TECHNICAL SPECS

2.40:13-perf Super 35mm Arricam LiteArri/Zeiss Master Prime, Angenieux Optimo Kodak Vision3 500T 5219, 250D 5207;Vision2 50D 5201Digital Intermediate

Documentary TelevisionBy Jon D. Witmer

Cinematographer Logan Schneiderwas a junior at Montana State University-Bozeman when he was nominated for anASC Heritage Award in 2004. Followinggraduation, he worked as a camera assis-tant on a short project about presidential-hopeful Barack Obama directed by DavisGuggenheim and produced by LesleyChilcott. When Guggenheim and Chilcottset to work on the documentary Waitingfor “Superman,” shot by Robert Richmanand Erich Roland, Schneider again signedon as an AC, and along the way he wasafforded opportunities to operate and evenshoot.

Following “Superman,” Guggen-heim gave Schneider’s name to directorLloyd Kramer, who was looking for a cine-matographer for a four-part PBS documen-tary series. “I got a call from Lloyd, and wehad a wonderful conversation about all thethings we like in documentaries — we justclicked on the phone,” Schneider recalls.“But he was planning to start shooting theend of February [2010], when I was alreadycommitted to a 10-day shoot in the Repub-lic of Georgia for a skiing film. I told him, ‘Ifyou push for any reason, please let meknow, because I would love to do it.’ Fortu-nately, they did end up pushing a week and

it all worked out.”The series, America in Primetime ,

examines the history of television by focus-ing on four distinct character archetypes,which also serve as the four episodes’ titles:“Man of the House,” “The Crusader,”“Independent Woman” and “The Misfit.”In bringing the documentary to the smallscreen, Kramer and Schneider put morethan 100 television professionals — includ-ing actors, writers and series creators — infront of their camera, bouncing betweenLos Angeles and New York to accommo-date everyone’s schedules. With the last ofthe interviews in the can, Schneider satdown with AC to discuss the production.

American Cinematographer:Were there any particular influencesyou drew from for America in Prime-time?

Logan Schneider: Some of mymain influences in the documentary worldare Davis Guggenheim and Lesley Chilcott,who taught me about finding the story andits emotional heart through the people[being filmed], and all of Errol Morris’ films,which bring narrative form to the docu-mentary. Erich Roland, one of the cine-matographers on Waiting for ‘Superman,’ isanother big influence. He worked on studiomovies for a while and then went back todocumentaries, and he took all of thatexperience from Hollywood with him. I like

Danny DeVito prepares to be interviewed for the PBS documentary America in Primetime. Directed by Lloyd Kramer and photographed by Logan Schneider, the four-part

series traces the history of American television.

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trying to push the production value andreally make the documentary look cine-matic. I had a great talk with Lloyd abouthow to do that. We didn’t want this tobecome a clip show.

What camera system did youshoot with?

Schneider: The producers wanted atape backup, so they actually suggested theArri D-21. I said, ‘If I thought we could get aD-21, I’d have asked for it in a second!’ I feellike digital in general produces plastic skintones, but this camera feels very organic. It’sgorgeous. It’s big, but we didn’t have tomove it, so it was perfect.

In L.A., we got the camera throughThe Camera House. In New York, we wentthrough Arri CSC. Between CSC and TheCamera House, we were well supported.

What did your lens packagecomprise?

Schneider: All of the interviews

were done with an Angenieux Optimo 24-290mm zoom. On most of the doc workI’ve done, I don’t have a focus puller, but I’dnever shot a documentary on a big, 35mm-sized chip, and we were 8 feet away, wideopen — we were at a T2.8 the entire time. Ibrought in a camera assistant, MaryFunsten, for the setup day, to make sureeverything was dialed in, but I quickly real-ized we were going to need a focus pullerfor the entire shoot. I was so lucky to haveMary and a couple of other assistants whowere able to work over the course of theshoot.

My gaffer was Owen Hooker. I wentto film school with him, and he’s been mygaffer on everything. He really helped uscreate and re-create the lighting when wehad to move the set.

It wasn’t a hard grip job, so I didn’thave a designated key grip, but BrettCarleton was an electrician, and he also

gripped and ended up gaffing when Owencouldn’t. He wore several hats. It was areally good team.

The set for the interviews has avery distinct look. How did its designcome about?

Schneider: The production designerwas Max Biscoe. He was the art director onShutter Island, Old School and a number ofother films. He’s great. Max and I wantedthe background to be a nice accent, but notdistracting. We really wanted to make thepeople stand out. Max came in with allthese corrugated, clear plastic panels, andwe spent a day and a half arranging them,moving the lights and looking at all thesereflections, trying to create the look.

We put the panels at differentdistances to create layers with differentamounts of sharpness and some depthbetween them. Max also had these clearPlexiglas tubes, about four inches in diame-ter, that we used as out-of-focus fore-ground highlights along the edges of theframe. We chain-gripped them to beaverboards on both sides of the mattebox, andevery time we shifted the camera, it wouldcreate a new frame. They created evenmore depth and added a lot to the look.

Finally we got everything set up, andthen we found ourselves saying, ‘Oh, crap,how are we going to make this again?’ Re-creating the set and lighting it again wasthe single hardest thing about the shoot; ittook hours to line up every little thing. Wehad detailed diagrams, but it was still anightmare every time.

Top left: Larry David takes the hot seat.Bottom left: A frame grab from David’sinterview. Top right: Schneider worked withan Arri D-21 for the production.

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How did you light for the interviews?

Schneider: This wasn’t a grittydocumentary. These were glamorouspeople talking about television, so wewanted them to look great. The key lightwas a Kino Flo Image 80 with five or sixbulbs on through one layer of 1⁄2 Grid on a4-by-4 frame, and a layer of 1⁄2 Soft Froston another 4-by-4 frame. We put that righton the edge of the frame line, and it had areally beautiful wrapping quality.

On the other side from the key, tocreate contrast, we had a 4-by-4 floppyproviding negative fill, as close to the frameas we could get it. We also had two 4-footfour-bank Kinos as backlights and kicks,vertically oriented, with two or three globeson and different types of diffusion depend-ing on the skin tones. Above and below thecamera, we also had a 2-foot four-bankwith Grid Cloth that we could turn on ifsomeone needed them. When we didn’tneed them, we hid them so we wouldn’t beasked why they weren’t on.

There was a muslin backdrop in thebackground, behind everything. We placedTweenies and Source Four Lekos to createshapes, which produced nice glowsthrough the layers of corrugated plastic.The Image 80 created the primary reflection

Left, top to bottom: Among the more than100 interviewees featured in America in

Primetime are Norman Lear, Alec Baldwin,Michael Williams and Eva Longoria. Above:

Schneider catches his breath between setupswhile working on another project.

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B e c a u s e i t m a t t e r s .

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we manipulated behind people. We justtweaked everything until it all looked right.

Did you have to ship the setpieces back and forth between LosAngeles and New York?

Schneider: There were two copiesof the set, one in L.A. and one in New York.One thing that changed, though, was thetone of the different rooms. In L.A., westarted in a tiny little room at The Lot that

used to be a screening room; it had graywalls and a gray ceiling, which filled incertain parts of the set. Then Larry Parkerwas kind enough to let us use the Mole-Richardson stage [in Los Angeles], whichwas a much different space. In New York,we shot in the conference room of theproduction company, which was barely bigenough for the set. Trying to re-create thetone was almost impossible with theresources we had, so there’s a certainamount of color timing I’ll have to do tomatch everything. [Ed. Note: At press time,Schneider had not yet begun color-correct-ing the finished series.]

Was this strictly a single-camerashoot?

Schneider: It was all done with onecamera. One of the things Lloyd and I talkedabout was eyeline. We used an EyeLiner, amirror device that lets the interviewee lookdirectly down the lens and see the inter-viewer’s face — the interviewer sits rightnext to the camera. You only lose about halfa stop, and it creates a really nice relation-ship with the subject; it feels like they’re

Mike Judge takes a seat in front of the camera, which was fitted with an EyeLiner so the intervieweeswould speak directly to the lens. Also visible are the Plexiglas tubes Schneider utilized as out-of-focus

foreground highlights.

30

talking directly to the viewer. Since doingthat, I’ve looked at other documentarieswhere the interviewees look off-camera,and it kind of bugs me.

With only one camera, you have tocreate the edits in your frame. Lloyd didn’twant any camera movement in the shots,but unless you want a jumpy feeling, youcan’t leave the camera in one place and cut.So while I was operating, I was alwayslistening for any pauses or breaks — anychance to reframe. I was creating the cover-age in one shot with little snap-zooms andwhip-pans, and just trying not to ruinanything by stepping on a line.

You mentioned that the produc-ers wanted a tape backup. What wasyour recording workflow?

Schneider: We shot to [Sony] SRW-1s that recorded HDCam-SR, and weshot in 4:2:2 mode because there were somany hours that editorial needed to handle.Every day we’d send a stack of tapes off tobe converted to DVD dailies, and thenthey’d go to editorial.

Did you shoot any other material

in addition to the interviews?Schneider: We also shot B-roll,

which we called ‘visual poetry,’ a term thatcomes from when I worked on Waiting for‘Superman.’ Davis doesn’t like the term ‘B-roll,’ because it doesn’t reflect the impor-tance of the shots.

For the visual poetry in America inPrimetime, we wanted to deconstruct thedifferent crafts of filmmaking. We showedthings like someone moving the focuswheel on a remote focus, the number [onthe lens barrel] moving and an image snap-ping into focus; and someone filling up avial with fake blood, pumping the syringe,and then blood spurting onto a shirt. Wedid that with a lot of different departments.We spent a couple of days just exploringand shooting all sorts of stuff.

We also put old TV sets on a bigturntable and turned it really slowly. We litthat with a 20K aimed through a 12-bymuslin, as close as we could get it, to createa soft, wrapping light with lots of contrast.We also shot fingers on typewriters, so aspeople talk about [specific moments from

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31

various series], we can show those momentsin script form. We raked the paper with aPar can and shot with a 100mm Arri MasterMacro lens on the Revolution Lens Systemso we could see the texture of the pulp.

Lloyd really cares about the image,and he supported me through the entireshoot, helping me get what I needed, lettingme explore different things and workingwith me to get a very nice image. He knowswhat he likes but he’s also open. He’sdirected movies and he thinks in that world,and that’s why we got along so well, I think.We both love the idea of cinematic docu-mentaries, even though this one is for tele-vision and about television.

TECHNICAL SPECS

1.78:1Digital CaptureArri D-21Angenieux Optimo, Arri Master Macro,Revolution Lens System

●


Roger Deakins, ASC, BSC adopts digital capture on the sci-fi thriller In Time.

By Jay Holben

•|•

Time BanditTime Bandit

www.theasc.com November 2011 33

In Time presents a dystopian nearfuture where everyone lives, quiteliterally, on borrowed time. Sciencehas eliminated the aging gene, so no

human ages past 25 years old. After25, individuals must stave off death byearning time credits, rather thanmoney, for their labor. Since the richcan afford all the credits they want,they live on and never grow old, whilethe middle class and poor must toilevery day to earn enough credits tosurvive. Amid these desperate circum-stances, working-class Will Salas(Justin Timberlake) discovers the truevalue of time after transforminghimself into a futuristic Robin Hoodwho steals time from the rich andgives it to the poor.

This scenario paired directorAndrew Niccol ( Gattaca, S1m0ne)with cinematographer Roger Deakins,ASC, BSC, who has earned nineAcademy Award nominations for hiswork on a long list of admiredpictures, including The ShawshankRedemption (AC June ’95), The ManWho Wasn’t There (AC Oct. ’01), Fargo(AC March ’96), No Country for OldMen (AC Oct. ’07) and True Grit.“Over the years, Andrew and I hadPhot

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Opposite page: Ina future wherenobody agesbeyond 25 unlessthey earn extratime credits, WillSalas (JustinTimberlake)attempts todisrupt thesystem bystealing creditsfrom wealthytime hoarders.This page, top: Inthe control roomof theTimekeepersStation, largedisplays monitoractivity all overthe world.Middle:TimekeeperRaymond Leon(Cillian Murphy)becomes Will’sarch-nemesis.Bottom:CinematographerRoger Deakins,ASC, BSC assessesa setup.


talked a number of times aboutcollaborating on a picture, but ourschedules never worked out,” Deakinsreveals. “He first approached meabout In Time while I was shootingTrue Grit, and I loved the idea.”

Although the cinematographerhad never shot a feature with digitalcameras, he kept close tabs on theevolving technology, and after vettingthe Arri Alexa, he decided he hadfound a digital camera that suited hiscreative and technical needs. “WhenAndrew and I first started talkingabout In Time, he asked me, ‘You stillshoot film, right?’ And I replied, ‘Yes,of course.’ But after doing a prettycomprehensive series of tests with theAlexa, I thought it was the right toolto achieve the look we wanted. Icalled Andrew and said, ‘I’m not pres-suring you either way, but I think youshould see these tests.’ He came out,saw what I had done with the Alexa,and said, ‘Yeah. Why don’t we do itthat way?’”

Deakins confesses that he wasinitially “a little nervous about work-ing with a digital camera,” but foundthe Alexa to be “a very intuitive, film-based system — it really feels like afilm camera. The great thing aboutdigital is that you can see the resultson set while you’re shooting, whichmakes it easier to sleep at night. Weestablished the base look on set, andthat tracked through dailies, editingand final color timing. It’s great forthe director to really see what you’reshooting, because that makes yourcollaboration and conversations easierand more refined; you don’t have totry to explain how the image will looklater.

“The Alexa is a game-changer,”Deakins maintains. “This momenthas been coming for a long time,really, but with the Alexa I believedigital has finally surpassed film interms of quality. What is quality? It’sreally in the eye of the viewer, but tome, the Alexa’s tonal range, colorspace and latitude exceed the capabil-ities of film. This is not to say that I

◗ Time Bandit

Will, a factoryworker, shuffles

through his dailygrind on street

sets futurized inLos Angeles by

productiondesigner Alex

McDowell.


don’t still love film — I do. I love itstexture and grain, but in terms ofspeed, resolution and clarity ofimage, there is no question in mymind that the Alexa produces abetter image. There is a beautifulroll-off between highlights and shad-ows [on the Alexa] that I haven’t seenbefore. There’s a subtlety in colorrendition that is fantastic. I tested itin candlelight, and it was beautifulhow the camera picked up variationsin skin tones and texture. If you shotthat same scene with film, you’d get avery monochromatic feel — just acolor wash — but the Alexa can readsubtleties that film cannot.

“Sometimes I get annoyedwith the garbage I hear about film vs.digital,” the cinematographer contin-ues. “Most of it is simply nostalgiaand silly thinking. I love film, sure,but this camera has brought us to apoint where digital is simply better.In my opinion, there are now moreadvantages than disadvantages todigital cinematography.”

The Alexa features a3,392x2,200-pixel, Bayer-patternCMOS sensor with an active imag-ing area of 2,880x1,620 pixels(23.76mm x 13.37mm). In late 2009and early 2010, when Deakins beganwork on In Time, the camera was inits nascent stages. It was on Version 2of its software and not yet capable ofthe ArriRaw mode (a “3K” option for4:4:4 raw image capture), so the cine-matographer captured in 1920x10804:4:4 10-bit uncompressed mode toCodex recorders.

The digital footage was furthercropped to 1920x800 to fit within thedesired 2.40:1 aspect ratio. “We shotwidescreen, but not anamorphic,”Deakins explains. “You shoot on thewidth of the sensor and extract theimage, cropping off the top andbottom, to get 2.40. You’re losingsome of the image, of course, butfrankly, [with digital capture] you cansometimes have an image that is toosharp.”

Deakins says his switch from

Top: Will’s encounter with depressed aristocrat Henry Hamilton (Matthew Bomer) has fatefulconsequences for both men. Middle: Director Andrew Niccol (kneeling) sets up a scene in which Hamilton

transfers his wealth of credits to the time clock embedded in Will’s arm. Bottom: After waking up andrealizing what Hamilton has done, Will attempts to honor the final request his benefactor has scrawled

on a windowpane: “Don’t waste my time.”


film to digital technology did notsignificantly alter his working style. “Ireferred to the waveform monitor quitea bit in order to check my image, sothat was new for me, but I wassurprised at how quickly I took to it. Istill used a light meter, of course, butmostly I would check the waveform tosee that my highlights weren’t clippingtoo much. It’s really hard to blow outyour highlights with the Alexa,though. There’s a lot of range.

“As I was operating, I didn’tspend much time at the monitor, so Irelied on Joshua Gollish, our DIT, tomake sure everything was falling inokay,” he continues. “I’d dive back tothe monitor and watch the playback ofa scene, or play with the color of thefirst shot of a scene, but after that Iwouldn’t obsess about it at all. I just letthe rest of the scene fall in where itshould.”

With EFilm pre-selected forpost services, Deakins worked with thecompany’s proprietary Colorstreamsystem, which provided him with acustom-calibrated LCD screen andthe ability to color-correct the uncom-pressed HD signal on set.

◗ Time Bandit

Top: A waitressuses Will’s armclock to chargehim for a meal.

Middle: Eachindividual’s clock

serves as aconstant

reminder thattime is running

out. Bottom:Deakins used

bounce lightingto illuminate the

interior of theLos Angeles

location thatwas transformed

into the glass-walled

restaurant.


Gollish explains the project’sworkflow: “Each Codex magazine weshot contained 21 minutes of footage[in RAID 0]. Once a mag was filled,we would take it to the camera truck,where we had a Codex lab in place —a 12-rack unit with a few differentmodules. Our loader, Jessica Ramos,would copy the magazine to theCodex lab drives, verify the data andthen pack the drive to send to EFilmthat night. Each day’s drives would beaccompanied by a USB Flash drivecontaining the Colorstream metadata.Once EFilm got the magazine, copiedthe files and started their process, theywould inform us that it was safe todelete that day’s footage from ourCodex lab, and we would get themagazines back for recycling.”

In Time had a very fast shootingschedule of just 55 days, all on loca-tion in and around Los Angeles, withmany days requiring a company moveto a second location. Most of Deakins’lighting approach sprang from the useof practical lights with a bit ofaugmentation.

Deakins typically shot at 800ASA, but he also utilized 400 ASA forday exteriors to avoid the need forexcessive ND filters. His lenses wereArri/Zeiss Master Primes, and hisshooting stops were set to T1.4 orT2.5 for the majority of production.

He lauds the Master Primes as

“lightweight, compact and fast. Whenyou’ve got such a small camera, youwant primes and small lenses to takemaximum advantage of the compactsize.”

As the movie’s plot unfolds,Will is gifted with a century of extratime that’s added to the digital “clock”

An ornatemansionproved to be achallenginglocationbecause itsowners fearedmovieequipmentcould damagethe interior. Towork aroundthe safetyconcerns,Deakins and hiscrew employedone of theirfavorite tactics:ring-shapedlighting rigsmounted in theceiling, aroundthe existingchandeliers.

embedded in his arm. Intent on usinghis extended life for the greater good,he pledges to disrupt the world’s piti-less system so others can also livelonger. To that end, Will manages toinfiltrate a party thrown by PhilippeWeis (Vincent Kartheiser), a wealthypower broker with more than 10,000years on his arm timer and at least amillion more “banked.” At the party,Will meets Weis’ daughter, Sylvia(Amanda Seyfried), who has beenshielded from the public’s struggle tosurvive.

“The party location was a hardone,” Deakins says. “It was a veryexpensive mansion on SunsetBoulevard, and the owners didn’t wantus to touch anything. I might haveused a balloon [to light the interior],but the ceilings were very low andthere was simply no room. Besides,balloons are great in certain circum-stances, but they’re very broad sourcesthat don’t create the kind of soft, selec-tive wash I wanted.”

Chief lighting technician ChrisNapolitano (who had previouslyworked with Deakins on No Countryfor Old Men and True Grit) helped thecinematographer employ one of his


◗ Time Bandit

Moody lightinglends drama to

Will’s dangerousromance with

Sylvia (AmandaSeyfried), thedaughter of a

wealthy powerbroker. Many of

the film’s nighttimeexteriors were lit

with warm, stark,sodium-vapor

fixtures, as shownin the bottom

photo.

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favorite lighting solutions for thesequence. “It’s a technique that Rogerlikes to incorporate quite often,”Napolitano says. “We put clear, 60-watt globes into large ring lights fittedwith 40 to 60 standard, medium-basesockets, and then install those units upin the ceiling, around the existing

fixtures and rigging our ring lightsthrough the holes and into the ceilingsupports. That way, we never had todrill into the ceiling or alter the struc-ture at all.”

Deakins offers, “I knew Iwanted to be able to shoot 360 degreesin that location. I wanted nothing onthe floor at all — except when I had tolight the occasional close-up — so thering lights were the best solution. Weused the same technique for a casinoset that we shot downtown in the[historic] Los Angeles Theatre. Weput these ring lights of standard bulbsup around the actual chandeliers tobring up the overall exposure and giveus flexibility for the shooting.”

“Flexibility” became Deakins’mantra on the show, which involvedmany nighttime exterior locationswhere the filmmakers lit primarilywith warm, stark, sodium-vaporsources. “We wanted the night exteri-ors to have a very harsh, orange-sodium look, but we were careful notto make it feel like a concentrationcamp,” Deakins says. “We didn’t want

chandeliers. The ring lights create avery soft pool of light around theexisting fixtures. We often build therings ourselves, but this time we hadthe art department build them out ofmetal. Our rigging key, Ray Garcia,found a way to work them into theceilings by removing the existing

◗ Time Bandit

Top: Afterjoining Will on

his mission,Sylvia helps him

break into avault containing

a valuablestockpile of

time. Bottom:The relentless

Timekeepercatches up with

the couple.

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◗ Time Bandit

a lot of wire fences or searchlights inthe frame, but Andrew definitelywanted the night streets to have aharsh glare. We did a lot of shooting atnight with existing lighting, mainlysodium vapors, which required us tofind locations that suited our needs.We also augmented the existing light-

ing with our own sodium vapors. Or, ifI needed a little more directionality,we’d use a tungsten fixture gelled tolook like sodium.”

The production carried acomplement of standard industrialsodium-vapor fixtures in 250- and400-watt varieties. Napolitano notes,

“We also had a 1,000-watt fixture, butit was so bright and covered so mucharea that we never used it.” Whentungsten fixtures were required, thegaffer used a simple gel pack of Lee013 Straw Tint and 1⁄4 or 1⁄2 CTO.

During his adventures, Willmeets the enigmatic Henry Hamilton(Matthew Bomer), a time-wealthyaristocrat who is deeply depressed bythe emotional burden of his unearnedprivilege. Henry decides to make theultimate sacrifice by transferring hisadditional time to Will. Their meetingtakes place in an old warehouse loca-tion that was lit entirely through thedirty windows with the sickly sodium-vapor look.

“The characters are lit only bythe light coming through the big glasswindow on this large factory floor,”says Deakins. “I was very surprised bythe subtleties of the skin tones that theAlexa captured in that scene. Even inthis incredibly monochromatic andugly light, the actors’ faces haveincredible gradations of color andtexture that I simply couldn’t havegotten with film. The Alexa handledthat sequence superbly, producing anincredibly wonderful color separation.”

For other settings, the filmmak-ers created different looks that providecontrast to the sodium-vapor scenes.Will’s workplace, a factory in down-town Los Angeles, is lit with fluores-cents that produce a cooler, industrialfeel, and some of the road sequences,including a major car chase that wasshot around the 6th Street Bridge,feature a cool LED look.

During the chase sequence, Willand Sylvia tear up the road in a 1970sJaguar E-Type convertible. Intent onshowing his stars amid the mayhem,Niccol wanted to avoid using stuntperformers as much as possible. “Wedid a lot with the actors for real,”Deakins confirms, “and we shot thesequence without any lightingmounted to the car at all, something Icouldn’t have done with film unless Ireally pushed a fast stock to its limit.We picked the 6th Street Bridge as our

Top: A car crash puts Amanda at the mercy of Fortis (Alex Pettyfer, far right) and his gang of time thieves, known as the Minutemen. Bottom: Deakins and crewmembers ride along while

shooting car-chase footage.

location because Andrew and I bothliked the look of the LED streetlightsin that area.”

“To my knowledge, the 6thStreet Bridge is one of the first loca-tions downtown to be converted toLED streetlamps,” notes Napolitano.“We added Litepanels 1x1 fixtures tothe existing streetlights to boost theirintensity a bit, and they gave us a niceline of extended light into the street.We shot the whole action sequencewith just those 1x1s on the streetlamps— that was it.”

“I didn’t want to light up too

much during that sequence,” Deakinsexplains. “There was a good amount ofambient light, and the situation onlyrequired us to add a little bit more toget what we needed. I shot thesequence pretty close to wide open at aT1.8 at 800 ISO, and the Alexahandled it amazingly well.”

The production utilized AllenPadelford’s Biscuit Jr. driveable processtrailer to put the actors and the picturecar in the middle of traffic. The BiscuitJr. features a low-profile process trailerwith a detachable driving pod that canattach to the trailer in various posi-tions. “We used the Biscuit systemwith the Jaguar to really zig-zagthrough traffic and put the audienceand the actors right in the middle ofthe action,” says Deakins. “With no

external lighting and the actors behindthe wheel, you really get a sense of theaction. I’d never worked with that rigbefore, and it was great.”

Deakins is known for operatinghis own camera, and he continued thatpractice on In Time, which was almostcompletely a one-camera show. Thecinematographer prefers to operate offof a remote head on a jib arm, typicallya Power Pod Classic on an Aerocrane.

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“I like the fluidity you get workingwith that little jib arm,” he remarks.“It’s a really nice way to move thecamera, and I tend to use that approachquite a lot. I’ve shot that way for 10years or more, often on a dolly. WhenI’m shooting fast action work and theAerocrane is mounted on a golf cart oran ATV, we use a Libra stabilizinghead.”

Although he generally prefers to

“Whether I’m shootingon film or digital, my

job remains the same:to use the camera totell the story the best

way I can.”

operate remotely, for tight shots ofactors he moves closer and operatesfrom the camera’s eyepiece. Whiledoing this, he discovered one flaw inthe Alexa: its electronic viewfinder.

“For an electronic viewfinder, it’s avery good one,” Deakins allows, “butany electronic viewfinder isn’t as goodas [an optical] one. Your eye gets verytired looking at the screen inside the

eyepiece. I also can’t really judge light-ing or the image through an electronicviewfinder like I can through an opti-cal one.” (Ed. Note: Since In Time,Arri has announced the release of theAlexa Studio, a larger version of thecamera that will feature a rotatingmirror shutter and an opticalviewfinder.)

For Deakins, tracking the imagethrough postproduction and final colortiming proved to be just as satisfying asthe Alexa’s performance in the field. “Ittook me about half the time to color-time this movie as it would have takenif we had shot film,” he attests. “TheColorstream process is really, reallyprecise. Between the on-set calibratedmonitor and calibrated dailies, youalways know the image you’re going toget. So several months later, in thecolor suite, you don’t have to go backto scratch. That saved us a lot of time.”

Summing up his first digitalproduction, Deakins describes his

◗ Time Bandit

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The crew uses a Libra head mounted on an Aerocrane to capture shots on the run.

44

experience as “much more positivethan I’d imagined it could be. Mostly,I found shooting digital very freeing. IfI were shooting film, I would alwaystry to err on the side of safety when Iwas doing something risky, to makesure I didn’t lose my blacks or revealsomething I didn’t want to see. Withdigital, because I could basically seethe final image while I was shooting, Ifelt I could push myself a lot furthercreatively.

“Some cinematographers arethreatened by digital technology, butthat just doesn’t make sense to me,”Deakins concludes. “You do need to bea technician at a certain level; you needsome knowledge of the hardware andhow it performs. But when it comes tothe really technical stuff, you canalways find people who know moreabout it than you do. Joshua Gollishcan blind me with his knowledge — Icould never understand all of what hewas talking about, but fortunately, I

don’t have to! That’s not my strength,and that’s not why people hire me.

“Cinematographers are hired fortheir eyes, for their artistic ability asvisual storytellers, and for how theycan run a set. Whether I’m shootingon film or digital, my job remains thesame: to use the camera to tell thestory the best way I can.” ●

Sylvia’s father,wealthy powerbroker PhilippeWeis (VincentKartheiser,center), is well-stocked withtime — andwell-protectedby armedbodyguards.

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45


Director Paul W.S. Anderson’s The Three Musketeers ismodeled after the classic novel by Alexandre Dumas,but in this amped-up version the tale’s swashbucklingrogues are transposed to a parallel 17th century, where

they function as the French monarchy’s version of the A-Team. “This is not your father’s Three Musketeers,” cautionscinematographer Glen MacPherson, ASC, CSC.

Old and new plotlines converge as the heroic trio —Athos, Porthos and Aramis, played by Matthew Macfadyen,

Ray Stevenson, and Luke Evans — teams with aspiringMusketeer d’Artagnan (Logan Lerman) to avert a war byrecovering the royal jewelry of Queen Anne (Juno Temple)from England’s Lord Buckingham (Orlando Bloom). Thefilmmakers gild the rollicking tale with steampunk-inspireddesign flourishes and lend the action an extra dimension withthe latest digital stereoscopic tools.

To prepare for the adventure, MacPherson andAnderson pored over 17th-century paintings and scrutinizedother films set in and around that time period, with Andersonciting Ridley Scott’s 1977 feature debut, The Duellists (shot byFrank Tidy, BSC), as a particular inspiration. Their primaryphotographic reference, however, was MTV’s mock-realityshow The Hills. “[That reference] caught me off guard at first,but then I saw how The Hills makes Los Angeles look greenand lush when it’s actually brown and scorched,” MacPhersonoffers. “Paul didn’t want to do a gritty period movie, so in TheThree Musketeers everybody’s gorgeous and the image is brightand saturated.”

Additional inspiration was found on locations that

Glen MacPherson, ASC, CSChelps to retool The Three Musketeers

as a 3-D adventure with steampunk styling.

By Iain Stasukevich

•|•

All forOne


included impressive Bavarian castles,residences and towns, filling in for vari-ous sites in England, France and Italy.“In addition to Munich, Chiemsee andBamburg, we must have visited abouteight different towns, all with differentfeels and architecture,” says the cine-matographer, who marvels that many ofthe castles and residences seem to existin a time capsule, appearing just as theydid 200 years ago.

The filmmakers felt 3-D wouldallow them to fully exploit the locations’cavernous rooms and fine architecturaldetails. When MacPherson andAnderson collaborated on the 2010horror adventure Resident Evil: Afterlife,they shot with Sony F35 digital camerasand Pace/Cameron Fusion 3-D rigs; onThe Three Musketeers, they paired theFusion rigs with Arri’s digital Alexa,using the 3-D format to extend alreadydeep hallways and baroque parlors towarehouse-sized proportions. “It wasthe perfect format for our locations,”MacPherson attests. “From the begin-ning, we knew they would really shine in3-D.”

Despite the movie’s whimsicaltone, the filmmakers brought seriousintent to their 3-D strategies, attempt-ing to avoid what MacPherson calls“stupid 3-D tricks,” where elements inthe frame poke out at the audience.Anderson remarks, “I try to approach 3-D in a holistic way. You have to thinkabout 3-D when you choose all of yourlocations and design the sets.”

Working with the Alexa allowedMacPherson to shoot in these settingswith a minimum of additional lighting.The camera’s base ASA of 800 affordedhim the extra stop of sensitivity he lostshooting through the Fusion rig’smirror. Depending on the scene,MacPherson shot as low as 200 ASA forsome exteriors (using custom-cutSchneider ND filters attached directlyto the lens in low-profile retainers) andwas comfortable taking the camera ashigh as 1,600 ASA.

Officials in charge of some loca-tions, such as Herrenchiemsee Palace inChiemsee, Bavaria (a replica ofUni

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Opposite page:Athos (MatthewMacfadyen),D’Artagnan(Logan Lerman),Porthos (RayStevenson) andAramis (LukeEvans) joinforces in TheThreeMusketeers. Thispage, top tobottom: MiladyDe Winter (MillaJovovich) bowsbefore CardinalRichelieu(ChristophWaltz); the Dukeof Buckingham(Orlando Bloom)plays a key rolein the plot’stwists;cinematographerGlenMacPherson,ASC, CSCprepares toshoot a scenewith a 3-D rigequipped with apair of ArriAlexa cameras.


Versailles built by King Ludwig II,standing in for the real thing), forbadethe production from entering buildingsor even stepping onto their propertieswith large HMI and tungsten units, lestthey damage the delicate grounds andtapestries. “We had to modify all of ourequipment,” MacPherson explains. “Weput big rubber wheels on the dollies andwrapped felt around the wheels. To

avoid laying track, we worked with aSteadicam or used a Geo Alpha stabi-lized head on the dolly. Even bringingin a C-stand was dangerous. Everybodyon the crew had handlers watchingthem. We all moved very slowly.”(David Cornelius served as the show’sAlpha Head operator, while MichaelPraun handled Steadicam duties.)

For some sequences, including

one staged in Herrenchiemsee’s Hall ofMirrors, MacPherson had to rely onavailable daylight and little else to illu-minate the action. “The Hall of Mirrorsis just insane with detail,” he says,counting 23 ornate windows andmirrors standing 20' high and 12' wide.“It took a bit of planning. I decided wewould have to shoot after 2 p.m., and ifwe got a cloudy day, which happensfrequently in Bavaria, we’d just have topush the scene. Nobody was comfort-able with that idea, so I sat down withthe gaffer, Ronny Schwarz, and workedup an alternate plan involving 80 18Kswith generators and all the support.Then I got a call from the producer,who asked if I was insane!”

MacPherson ultimately got hiswish of working with natural light, andscheduled shooting in the Hall ofMirrors around the path of the sun. Hedid persuade the castle’s docents to lethim bring in small Jem Balls and KinoFlo units to model the actors’ faces. “Wedidn’t have a lot of light, but it still hadto come from the right place,” he notes.“This is where the Alexa really shined.The shadows and highlights lookedgreat, and we were seeing details in areas

◗ All for One

The filmmakersfaced stringent

restrictions whileshooting a variety

of ornatelocations,

including the Hallof Mirrors in

HerrenchiemseePalace (top) and

the WürzburgResidenz

(bottom). “Wehad to modify all

of ourequipment,”MacPherson

explains.“Everybody on

the crew hadhandlers watching

them. We allmoved very

slowly.”


of the frame that we could hardly seewith our own eyes.”

Other scenes also required someartificial lighting, such as daytime inte-riors in Queen Anne’s bedchamber, alsoshot at Herrenchiemsee. MacPhersonkeyed from the windows, using a largeCondor crane to boom three remote-operated 18K HMIs horizontally across125' of fragile, exterior marble tiling to

positions hovering outside the room,three stories off the ground. Thick,white muslin curtains on the windowsprotected the interior’s priceless decora-tions and also served to diffuse the addi-tional daylight.

Private access to the chamber wasspecially built for the crew: elevator-equipped exterior scaffolding that trans-ported their equipment directly to the

third floor. After alleviating the palacedocents’ concerns with low-level luxand temperature readings, MacPhersonwas permitted to enter the chamberwith Kino Flos and small, low-outputunits for the actors. 16K HMI and 7Ktungsten balloons were also allowed andhelped to boost ambient light levels.“There was never really a lack of light,unless we were shooting at night or

Clockwise fromtop: Theswordsmen aresurrounded;MacPherson blocksout a portion ofthe sequence withstunt double DonLee in thecobblestonedcourtyard of theWürzburgResidenz; thecinematographerand othercrewmembersattach Red camerasto a Cablecam rigso they can fly thecameras over thecourtyard.


dusk, and then we were just trying to getthe right quality of light coming fromthe right direction,” MacPherson notes.Using T1.3 Arri Master Primes on allfour of his 3-D Alexa rigs, the cine-matographer hovered around an aper-ture of T2.8, though he’d stop

down as far as T8 when necessary.MacPherson didn’t feel pushed to

conform to any generally acceptednotions of how one should photograph3-D. He even broke some of the typicalrules, like shooting with long lenses anda shallow depth of field. “Some people

want to make shooting 3-D into a bighassle, but it doesn’t have to be,” hemaintains. “When your scene calls for a100mm, you have to remember that thisisn’t a movie about 3-D — you’re justusing it to tell the story.” Accordingly,the filmmakers sometimes chose toreduce the 3-D effect to accommodatetheir handheld, Steadicam, aerial,Technocrane and Cablecam shots.

The cinematographer calls atten-tion to the one aspect of The ThreeMusketeers that was affected by shooting3-D: the fight choreography. “In 2-Dyou shoot a lot of long lenses, shake thecamera, do quick cuts,” he says. “Theactors don’t really hit or stab each other,so you use a lot of tricks to compress theaction.” Knowing that a wide, steadyframe and a slower pace in editing helpto alleviate eyestrain when viewing 3-D,the filmmakers worked within theseboundaries to create more elaboratelychoreographed fight scenes. “All of ouractors trained hard for the swordfight-ing scenes and got really good at it, so

A full-scale mockup ofBuckingham’s airship,

which did double dutyas the war vessel of

Cardinal Richelieu, wasconstructed on the

massive MarleneDietrich stage at Studio

Babelsberg. The setpiece measured 108'

long and the rest of thevessels were completed

with CGI. The lightingdiagram on the facing

page, provided bygaffer Ron Schwarz,

outlines MacPherson’sapproach to the airship

set. The top diagramshows the airship with

a sky backing around it;the second shows the

airship with agreenscreen backing.“We had to light the

heck out of the skybacking to make it lookreal, and we had all the10Ks on a sequencer tosimulate travel through

the clouds,” thecinematographer says.“We dialed down the

cyc strips for thegreenscreen.”

◗ All for One


we held the shots a lot longer and a lotwider than we would if we were shoot-ing 2-D,” MacPherson adds. “Onscreenyou can actually see the actors hittingeach other.”

MacPherson’s German cameracrew, from A-camera operator KlemensBecker down, needed some extra train-ing as well. Before joining The ThreeMusketeers, many of the operators andassistants had minimal experience with3-D rigs — and none with the Fusion— so it fell to 3-D systems tech JohnHarper (promoted from assisting andconvergence pulling on Resident Evil:Afterlife) to bring them up to speed.“The basics involve familiarizing oneselfwith the 3-D system, lining up the twocameras, and making the lens changesquickly,” Harper remarks. “After Pauland Glen choose their lenses, we can’tbe waiting around. We’d like to move asquickly as we would in 2-D.”

There’s some crossover betweenthe responsibilities of the camera assis-tant and the 3-D interocular/conver-gence puller. For example, on The ThreeMusketeers,the entire IO/convergence-pulling process was performed manu-ally. “The same muscle memory is there,but you have to just reset your mind,”says Harper. “As a focus puller you’reconcentrating on sharpness, and as anIO/convergence puller, you’re concen-trating on separation.”

Anderson, MacPherson, 2nd-unit director of photography VernNobles and Harper all share the show’sstereographer credit. They used cali-brated HD stereo monitors to rough intheir 3-D shots, calling for theIO/convergence pullers to push or pullthe depth toward or away from thescreen plane. However, the IO/conver-gence pullers judged the stereo imagewithout glasses, using an overlay thatshows the offset between the left- andright-eye images. “It’s very difficult tojudge separation with glasses on. Youreally can’t tell where the actual conver-gence is quickly,” Harper explains,adding that convergence may be judgedby looking for the one object in theoverlaid images that looks like a single

◗ All for One

Another diagram provided by Schwarz details the filmmakers’ approach to the Queen’s Chamber, also shot on location at Herrenchiemsee Palace.

image. “Anything in the foreground orbackground will be separated, andyour convergence can be either staticor dynamic depending on the actionwithin the frame.”

More than half of The ThreeMusketeers was shot on location, withthe rest of the production staged atBabelsberg Studios in Potsdam. Theshow occupied almost 270,000 squarefeet at the facility, including the enor-mous Marlene Dietrich Halle and thesatellite facilities Neue Film 1 and 2.

MacPherson and Schwarzprepared much of their stage lightingremotely from location, conferring via Skype with production designerPaul Austerberry in Babelsberg.Austerberry’s 3-dimensional CADdesigns included the dimensions ofMacPherson’s 3-D rigs and camerasupport, ensuring that the sets wouldaccommodate the cinematographer’sblocking and lighting. The studio setslargely comprised fictitious extensionsof the real-life locales, from the canalsof Venice to the rooftops of NotreDame.

The first of these fantasy/realitymashups can be seen in the film’sopening sequence. Accompanied bythe assassin Milady De Winter (Milla Jovovich), the Musketeers raidthe Venice Antiquarium (in reality theAntiquarium of the MunichResidenz), an ornately decoratedRenaissance hallway lined with marblebusts of ancient European emperors.

MacPherson shot the scene atnight, deploying 16 12K HMIs(reduced to 6K using ND.6 and 1⁄4 and1⁄2 White diffusion) outside windowslining one side of the long hallway.Eight 4K HMIs bounced light offfour 12'x12' muslin bounces throughthe windows on the other side. Inside,the production was permitted to placea dozen smokeless, odorless flamebowls.

The Musketeers locate a secretdoor in the floor (a visual effectachieved by laying out a greenscreenpatch on the floor of the hallway), anddescend a set of stairs leading to a vault

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CTB to create a low-key separation. “Ifeverything is orange, it doesn’t lookright,” he notes.

Austerberry designed the vaultset as a long corridor with repeatingarches, mirroring the architecturalrhythm of the Antiquarium. Within thevault, the marble busts are moregrotesque and conceal deadly traps. Inthe script, the vault is described as adungeon beneath the streets of Venice,but the filmmakers opted to give it a lesstraditional, stone-dungeon-like appear-ance, adopting the striped, green-whitemarble detailing of a cathedralAusterberry found in the Tuscan city ofSiena. “The stripes helped make our setlook longer than it is,” says the produc-tion designer. “We were trying to bevery graphic with the colors and style.”

By far, the biggest set was the full-scale airship constructed on the massiveMarlene Dietrich stage. Bristling withfearsome artillery, the ship doubled asthe respective war vessels of Lord


◗ All for One

containing the secret works of Leonardoda Vinci. As the Musketeers progressinto the pitch darkness of the vault,torches — recalling the smokeless flamebowls in the Antiquarium — spring tolife. MacPherson took advantage of the

Alexa’s increased sensitivity to light theset mostly with torches, candles andflame bars, even when overcranking to200 fps. He also applied a small amountof blue ambience from the top of the set,deploying rows of 2K Chimeras with 1⁄2

Top: The crewcaptures an

action close-up ofJovovich.

MacPhersonnotes that he

took extra care inphotographing

his lead actress:“We had a ‘Milla

kit’ whenever weshot her because

her makeup,which was

designed to giveher a period look,

made her skinpearl-white and

flawless. Millacalled them

‘glamour balls.’They’re

extendable poleswith a 150-wattor 400-watt Jem

Ball at the end oneach side of the

camera.” Bottom:Jovovich makes

her way throughthe subterranean

chamber thatleads to DaVinci’s

Vault.

A M E R I C A N F I L M I N S T I T U T E

This year, AFI FEST is celebrating

its 25th edition and Pedro Almodóvar

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NOVEMBER 3–10, 2011


Buckingham and the villainousCardinal Richelieu (Christoph Waltz).Anderson conceived Richelieu’s ship asa kind of 17th-century Death Star,measuring 280' from the bowsprit witha 35' beam width; the studio set piecemeasured 108' and the rest wascompleted with CGI. The tip of themain set piece reached to within 12' of

the stage’s 46' wood roof. “Paul wantedto look up at the ship. If we’d built theset any lower it would have eliminatedhis shots, so either the stage was toosmall or I built the ship too big!”Austerberry quips.

MacPherson and Schwarz riggedthe stage for daylight and nighttimeeffects. Mindful of protecting the stage’s

original wood ceiling from excessiveheat, they lit from overhead using morethan 100 banks of Image 80s skinnedwith 1⁄2 White diffusion. “It looked alittle bit like the ceiling of Home Depotin there,” says MacPherson. Cyc lightsilluminated the enormous greenscreencurtains that surrounded the stage.

For daytime shots, a white fabriccurtain was pulled across the green-screen to cheat the sky. “I had to lightthe bejesus out of that white cyc to makeit look like sky,” MacPherson recalls.Five 12'x20' frames of white muslinhung at angles around the upper reachesof the stage, concealing the 16 elec-tronic, dimmer-controlled 10K Fresnelsthat encircled the set. “Everything wason a chase sequence to make it look likethe ship was moving through theclouds,” the cinematographer adds.Artificial smoke was pumped in andblown through the set to create theimpression of additional depth.

The cameras themselves werealways moving. Between the first andsecond units, the production had three3-D rigs in studio mode and one builtfor use with a Steadicam. No matter

◗ All for OneTo light theinterior of a

vaulted chamberwithin the Munich

Residenz (theformer royal

palace of Bavaria’smonarchs), thecrew lined one

row of windowswith 12K fixtures,

supplementingwith bounce

lighting throughthe windows on

the opposite sideof the exterior.

Interior ambiencewas created with

1K Nuke lightsand 1.8Ks

positioned at bothends of the

chamber, Kino Flo4x4 units and a

Jem Ball “beautylight” forJovovich.

what, there was always one mounted ona Geo Alpha stabilized head at the endof a 30' Technocrane. “We’ll put thecamera on the Technocrane at the

beginning of production and leave itthere for the entire shoot,” saysAnderson. “It’s an incredibly useful toolfor us because we can get the camera

wherever we want really fast. The wayGlen and I work, if we don’t get 30-plussetups in a day we feel like we haven’tdone our job.”

Robert Hottarek served as theshow’s Technocrane operator. The cranewas employed extensively on the airshipset, booming the 3-D rigs up to the 17'deck with ease. When the camerasneeded to go higher, the crane was fork-lifted up to a 22' platform on a rollingbase that could be pushed around thestage with the help of about a dozengrips. Occasionally MacPherson posi-tioned a Chapman dolly with a studiorig on the platform next to the crane.

No matter where the cameraswent, they were always tethered to oneof three HDCam-SR recording towersoperated by video engineer MichaelTaylor. Footage was laid to tape at 10-bit 4:4:4 in 1080p/23.98fps. The stereoimage was checked for left/right eyelineup, color offsets, or disparity in theexposure, then delivered to Arri

◗ All for One

58

Donning 3-D glasses to experience the extra dimension are (from left) 1st AD Jamie Christopher,Jovovich, stunt coordinator and 2nd-unit director Nick Powell, director Paul W.S. Anderson

and script supervisor Doug Rotstein.

Munich, where MacPherson andcolorist Traudl Nicholson spent theeight months following productionapplying finishing touches to the 2Kmaster.

MacPherson and Nicholsondialed in the movie’s bright, saturatedcolors with Autodesk’s Lustre gradingsoftware, using the built-in Flame suiteto make a number of small adjustmentsto the stereo image, correcting align-ment and keystoning. “A lot of the workwe did involved making the depth ofthe shots more uniform from cut to cutso your eyes aren’t converging anddiverging too much within the scene,”says MacPherson.

The suite was built to accommo-date 3-D postproduction. A Barco 2Kdigital projector was calibrated throughRealD polarized glasses to reflectapproximately 41⁄2 foot-lamberts oflight off the screen, the level at whichmost 3-D films are viewed in a theater.(The suite is also equipped with the

Xpand active-shutter 3-D system.) Bycomparison, most 2-D films areprojected at approximately 16 foot-lamberts. MacPherson explains, “Rightnow, most commercial theaters can’tafford to spend the money on two digi-tal projectors, so they use a single-lensprojector with a stereo polarizer in frontof the lens, which knocks down light.Then you’re wearing the glasses, whichknocks the light down even more. It’snot ideal, but in the last year facilitieshave really started to figure out how toget the best-looking 3-D up on thescreen.”

There is a 2-D version of TheThree Musketeers, but for MacPhersonthere’s only one way to watch the film. “Ispent several weeks grading the movie in3-D, then I took a quick run up to the2-D theater, and it was a huge disap-pointment,” he laments. “It’s amazinghow you sort of lose the scope of allthose great locations.”

Neither MacPherson nor

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Anderson lends any credence to thenotion that 3-D is just a fad, at least asfar as international audiences areconcerned. The cinematographerconcludes, “The technology is gettingbetter with every movie I shoot, and itwill continue to do so as long as theaudiences continue to show up [for 3-D presentations]. I hope they do.” ●

59

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In the Swedish town of Gothenburg, AC has joined a dozenfilmmakers in front of a 42" video monitor displaying polar-ized 3-D images. Having donned polarized glasses, thegroup watches dailies of the footage shot earlier that day

with the guidance of cinematographer Geoff Boyle, FBKS.Post specialist Thomas Harbers is sitting at an Iridas

Speedgrade station, preparing the footage. Suddenly a stillimage comes onscreen and everyone’s glasses come off with acollective groan, the result of a sudden bout of eyestrain. Theleft and right views have been swapped, and the monitor imageis physically painful to watch as it forces our eyes to try to“diverge” — the technical term for going wall-eyed when linesof sight veer outwards rather than inwards. Like a good doctor,a stereographer must remember the golden rule: “first, do noharm” to the audience’s eyes.

This “ouch moment” is one of the important lessons ofa four-day 3-D workshop supervised by Boyle, known as thefounder of CML, the Cinematography Mailing List. CML isa lively online forum where professional cinematographersdiscuss their craft and the latest camera technologies. Boyle isalso an accomplished director of photography whose creditsinclude many commercials and one of the first digital 3-D

movies: Dark Country (shot in 2007 and released in 2009). Hehas led several 3-D courses for the Santa Fe Workshops,including the one AC attended at Gothenburg Film Studios,and his latest venture is a partnership in a new 3-D camerarental company called Electric Picture Company-3D.

Gothenburg Film Studios is a growing group ofproduction-related companies clustered around soundstages.Upon entering, visitors immediately notice a wall adorned witha motto touting the shipyard city’s evolution: “First we builtships, then we built cars, now we make films.” The 3-Dworkshop is the brainchild of Michael Petersen, who organizedprofessional courses about 3-D and lighting to accompany thecity’s annual Gokinema Film Festival. Petersen explains that hisgoal was “to share knowledge about new technologies amongfilmmakers.” He developed the workshops with the support ofRegion Västra Götaland and the North Sea Screen Partners(NSSP).

Boyle enlisted Harbers to provide 3-D post for theworkshop. Harbers is based in Munich, where he offers DI and“depth grade” services. He also designs and builds external 3-Drecording devices under the brand name DasRekorder. For theGothenburg workshop, he provided a prototype that recorded

3-D on a Budget3-D on a Budget

AC ’s Paris correspondent shares

affordable 3-Dstrategies gleanedfrom a hands-on

seminar in Sweden.

By Benjamin B

•|•


the dual streams from Silicon ImagingSI-2K cameras onto removable SolidState Drives. Harbers unveiled the firstline of DasRekorder products inSeptember during the IBC trade showin Amsterdam.

The workshop is hands-on,reflecting Boyle’s practical, no-nonsenseapproach to production. He offers aminimum of theory before encouragingus to jump in and try techniquesdesigned for lower-budget televisionand independent-film projects.

Boyle begins by explaining, “It’snot really 3-D, it’s stereo.” He frequentlyuses the phrase “lizard brain,” referringto the primitive part of the human mindthat reacts to movement and sensesdanger. He notes, “The brain knows 2-D isn’t real, so our lizard brain switchesoff and doesn’t look for threats.” Boylethen emphasizes that this is not the casewith 3-D: “All kinds of automaticreactions come in to play with 3-D,things that will disturb you. If I throwsomething at the cameras, you can’tavoid blinking or ducking.”

At the same time, the brain issmart enough to accommodate many 3-D anomalies. “Your brain oftencorrects what it sees as wrong,” Boylenotes. As examples, he citesminiaturization (when the cameras aretoo far apart) and gigantism (when theyare too close together). “You can getaway with a few shots like that,” henotes, “but not too many.”

One of Boyle’s oft-repeatedworkshop mantras is, “You cannotchange the IA in post.” IA is shorthandfor the interaxial distance between thetwo cameras during shooting. The IAdefines the depth of the image: more IAmeans more depth, whereas an IA ofzero means that the left eye and righteye image are identical, and the image isin 2-D. The “normal” IA is 6.5cm (2.5"),which is the average distance between aperson’s eyes. As stated above, when theIA is too big, there is a risk of seeing theworld through the eyes of an elephant;when it is too small, we see the world asa mouse would. Boyle explains that 3-Dfilmmakers vary the IA to suit the

requirements of the specific scenes theyare shooting.

Another key workshop concept isconvergence — the angle between thelines of sight of the two images. Our eyesare parallel when looking at distantobjects, but angle in toward our nose aswe look at closer objects. Similarly, theleft and right cameras in a 3-D rig can bepositioned with parallel lines of sight, orangled in to converge on an object.

When we are watching a movie,our eyelines converge on the screen; this

is why the angle of convergence defineswhich objects will appear to be in thescreen plane. The intersection of the leftand right images on the screen plane hasno offset, so the images of objectspositioned at screen distance areidentical. You can easily see this effectonscreen by removing a pair of 3-Dglasses: though objects in the foregroundand background appear as doubleimages, objects at the screen plane aresharp, single images.

Boyle stresses that one of the keyPhot

os b

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B a

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hris

tian

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st.

Opposite page: Two of the participants in the 3-D seminar carefully carry an Element Technica Quasar rigover icy ground. This page, top: A pair of Red One cameras mounted on a Stereotec rig. Bottom: As part

of the learning process, participants were encouraged to study the 3-D image without glasses.


◗ 3-D on a Budget

decisions in 3-D prep is the choice ofconvergence: which angle to adoptbetween the two cameras’ lines of sight.During the workshop we will try fourdifferent approaches to shooting 3-D:Parallel, Normal Converged, DerobeConverged and French Converged.

When the two cameras’ lines ofsight are parallel, the 3-D convergence isarranged in post by introducing aHorizontal Image Transformation. AHIT is simply shifting one of the imagesslightly to the left or right. HITs aremeasured in pixels, and will typically notexceed 40 pixels for a 2K image. On a setwith parallel cameras, filmmakers canpreview the HIT by using externalboxes, like the StereoBrain Processor weused, to create a horizontal offset thatcan be fed into a stereo-capable monitor.(The StereoBrain is a 3-D HD video-processing unit developed for use instereoscopic 3-D production, post andbroadcast.)

Boyle notes that “if you’re doingvisual-effects work, it’s better to shootparallel” because of the possible keystoneeffect in converged images, an artifactthat is especially evident with buildingsand other rectilinear shapes. Because

parallel shooting involves a HIT in post,the composite 3-D image will have blackbands on the edges. Harbers explains,“With parallel shooting you have to dothe HIT in post, so you get black borderson the sides, and you often have to zoominto the image. This means recalculatingthe whole image, and the image becomesless sharp.” Boyle adds, “If you finish inHD, you need to shoot at 2K or 4K,because you will need slop on the edges.”

When the two cameras are angledfor Normal Converged shooting, theirlines of sight will intersect at what willbecome the screen plane. Boyle saysconverged shooting requires more timeon the set, if only because of theinevitable discussions about where toconverge. One advantage of convergingon the set is that the director andcinematographer can preview the 3-Dwith glasses, without the need for anintermediary box.

Boyle adds, “The reason I stressIA in the workshop is that, along withpitch or tilt, it is the only thing thatcannot be changed in post. Convergenceis less important, because it can bechanged later. I’m teaching low-budget3-D, which has to be fast. Should I

discuss convergence on set, [where costscan run to] $25,000 per hour, or in post,at $500 per hour? The answer is quiteclear to me!”

“Theoretically, you have less workto do with converged footage in post,”Harbers says. “When you shootconverged I can take the image as it is,without scaling or interpolation.”However, he cautions that if you shootfootage converged, it’s difficult to make amajor change of the screen position inpost. “It won’t look right if you changethe screen plane a lot. The relative offsetsin the foregrounds and backgroundswon’t match anymore.”

A third approach is the methoddefined by French 3-D pioneer AlainDerobe. In Derobe Converged shooting,the cameras are angled so that the linesof sight to the farthest object in theframe are offset by the interoculardistance of 2.5". This fixed-convergenceangle is typically small, between 0.5 and1 degrees. The IA is then varied duringthe shot to follow the point of interest(for example, an important character inthe film). The Derobe Convergedmethod was used on Wim Wenders’documentary Pina (AC Sept. ’10). This

Left: Cinematographer Geoff Boyle, FBKS, who supervised the 3-D workshop, shows off a rig that combines two Arri Alexa cameras with a P+S Technik FreestyleRig. Right: Thomas Harbers, a Munich-based post specialist, provided 3-D post for the workshop.


method also allows for preview on setwithout external boxes, using Transvideoor other stereo-capable monitors.

Although initially skeptical of theDerobe Converged method, Boyle hasgradually come to accept a variation thathe refers to as French Converged.Rather than converging on a distantobject, Boyle simply sets theconvergence at 2 percent, the maximumbackground divergence allowed byBritain’s Sky Television, or 1 percent forproductions that will be shown intheaters. He explains, “You line up thetwo cameras at 0 degrees. Then youwind in 2 percent convergence if it’stelevision, 1 percent if it’s film, and justadjust the IA for the shot. And the IAwill never, ever go outside tolerance!

“For a low-budget feature or a TVseries, I recommend the FrenchConverged method, because you’regetting very acceptable results that aresafe and very quick. You don’t have toask yourself, ‘Is this going to work?’ or‘Am I going to be out of limits?”

Boyle refers to Sky Television’slimit of 3 percent total divergence of 3-D images as a practical rule for hiswork. On a 3-D monitor, this meansthat the total horizontal offset betweenthe left- and right-eye images cannotexceed 3 percent of the image width.Accordingly, this maximum distancevaries depending on the screen size: 3centimeters for a 1-meter televisionscreen, for example, or 15 centimetersfor a 5-meter cinema screen.

Boyle notes that the 3-percenttotal divergence “budget” is dividedbetween the spaces in front of andbehind the screen plane. For televisionwork, he will put up to 2 percent behindand 1 percent in front. For a cinemarelease, he will do the inverse: 1 percentbehind and 2 percent in front.

When shooting a production thatwill be shown on both cinema andtelevision screens, Boyle moves thescreen position backwards or forwardsin post for the different releases.(Harbers notes that this strategy issometimes difficult when shootingNormal Converged.)

Top: Yke Erkens of Cam-a-lot, a video-rental company based in Amsterdam, shows off the Quasar rigequipped with a stereo-capable Transvideo monitor. Middle: Derek Bateman and Luiz Perez-Bayas try

out the Freestyle rig in handheld configuration. Bottom: Another view of the Freestyle rig.

➣


The equipment for theGothenburg workshop is on loan fromvarious manufacturers and rental houses.The gear includes Arri Alexa, Red One(upgraded with Mysterium-X sensors),and SI-2K cameras (with 2⁄3" sensors); aCinedeck and DasRekorder externalSSD recorders; and the following 3-Drigs: Quasar and DC from ElementTechnica, P+S Technik’s Freestyle rig(designed with Philippe Bordelais), anda Stereotek side-by-side rig. Ancillaryequipment includes a Transvideo 3-Dmonitor and an Inition Stereo Brain.

The Red One MX material isrecorded onto Compact Flash memorycards at 4K resolution using Red’sRedcode wavelet-compressed rawformat. The SI-2K is recorded externallyin 2K in the proprietary SIVuncompressed format. The Alexafootage is recorded in 2K with ProRes444 compression onto SxS cards. Theworkshop footage is ingested by Harbersinto an Iridas Speedgrade station, whichis used to perform depth grading and toplay back dailies.

The workshop includes a series ofexercises to test different approaches,with participants sharing operating andassisting roles. One exercise involvesshooting handheld with a P+S TechnikFreestyle rig outfitted with SI-2Kcameras, a rig so light it is easily handledby everyone in the workshop.

Boyle feels that cameras with thesmaller 2⁄3" sensor are better-suited forlower-budget 3-D productions. Heexplains that they are cheaper, lighter,and will yield more depth of field thanequivalent large-sensor cameras. “I shotDark Country with an 8mm lens on a2⁄3-inch sensor,” he notes.

The initial setup of the 3-D rig isa laborious process that involves aligningthe images from the two lenses. Asimilar, briefer setup is needed whenchanging lenses. Boyle recommendsshooting low-budget projects with asingle pair of wide-angle lenses. “The 3-D will be better,” he asserts, “and youwill save time.”

Boyle confesses that he sometimeslets certain kinds of registration errors go

◗ 3-D on a Budget

Top: Chiel vanDongen tries

out a Stereotecrig supporting a

pair of SiliconImaging SI-2K

cameras set upin parallel.

Bottom: LucaCluti tries some

handheldoperating with

a DC rigsupporting two

SI-2Ks and aTransvideo

monitor.


unremarked-upon during shooting forpractical reasons, while others require animmediate fix. “I know we can fixvertical or horizontal misalignmenteasily in post, so I won’t say anything. IfI see a rotation error, I will ask to fix it,because fixing it in post takes time andmeans a loss in resolution.”

Another workshop exerciseinvolves shooting exteriors by the icywaters near the Gothenburg ferry. Boylehas us shoot parallel using a big IA witha Stereotec rig. The shot frames thenearby water and a bridge along a stretchof coastline, from a distance of a mile orso away. We try several big IAs,including 90cm, 50 percent longer thanthe 65cm norm. In dailies, the resultingfootage of the harbor does not look as ifit was shot through the eyes of a giant,but the distant objects resemble flattenedcutouts. The most convincing 3-Dresults are obtained with the continuousshoreline receding in the frame. “Thebridge and the buildings in the distancelook flattened,” Boyle comments, “butthat’s how our eyes see. Our 3-D visionfalls off with distance.”

When watching the monitors on-set, Boyle recommends taking off the 3-D glasses and getting into the habit ofevaluating depth by looking at thehorizontal fringes in the image. Oneoption is to use a special 3-D-capable

monitor like the Transvideo, whichoffers different ways of visualizing 3-D,including a variety of helpful displays toquickly match the images on a rig andcheck that they are properly registered.The monitor also features helpful gridsto measure the offsets in percentages orpixels.

Anaglyph (the process involvingbi-colored glasses) is the cheapest way tomonitor 3-D on the set because the blueand red signals can be displayed on anyordinary video monitor. Watchinganaglyph is tiring for the eyes, however;polarized glasses afford a far morecomfortable view but require specialmonitors.

According to Boyle, if a crewincludes experienced stereographers, thefilmmakers can sometimes workwithout any 3-D monitoring on-set tosave time and eyestrain. He feels there isa danger of filmmakers growing soaccustomed to 3-D that they maybecome desensitized to the eyestraininvolved with extreme 3-D shooting.

Another simple techniqueemployed during the workshop involvesusing a piece of tape as a maximumdivergence reference. “Our JVC monitoris about 1 meter across,” says Boyle.“Stick a 2cm red tape on the screen.That’s your 2 percent! If you’re shootingfor cinema, use a piece of 1cm tape. It’s

crude, but it works!” Time and again, Boyle

emphasizes the need for speed on a low-budget film. “You have to move fast, sodirectors and producers start to worry ifthey always see you with a calculator inyour hands. I don’t want people to beaware of me doing my job. I want it allto work seemingly by magic.”

As we prepare to set up shots,Boyle reminds us that we must decidewhere the screen position will be, andwhich IA to use. He notes that screenposition can vary in post, but IA cannot:“It’s safest and quickest to position mostobjects behind the screen, and thenadjust that if needed in post.”

Boyle raises the issue of what hecalls “Medical IA,” stating that it issometimes important to reduce the IAin order to avoid eyestrain whenshooting objects close to camera. “Asobjects move closer to camera, theconvergence angle on the foregroundincreases, but so does the divergence inthe background. In those cases, it’simportant to reduce the IA. This willreduce the overall depth and thereforereduce both the foreground convergenceand background divergence, and youwon’t hurt anyone.”

Boyle proposes a rule of thumb tocalculate the Medical IA of a shot: the“50 Rule,” which he uses for projects

The president ofthe SwedishSociety ofCinematographers,Håkan Holmberg,FSF, shows off hisamateur 3-Dsetup, comprisingtwo small camerasheld together.

that may end up both in theaters and ontelevision. “This rule assumes that youhave decided to put the screen plane atthe nearest object to camera. Anapproximate IA is really useful, because itmeans you can judge very quickly andshoot very quickly. The rule is simple:measure the distance of the nearest objectin frame and divide by 50. If you are

shooting convergence, set theconvergence for that object; if you’reshooting parallel, you’ll do it with a HITin post. Then, as you move backwardsand forwards, change focus.” He pointsout that 50 is simply a compromisenumber; for projects destined only fortelevision, you can divide by 30, and forthose headed exclusive to cinemas, you

can divide by 100. The 50 Rule is used throughout

the workshop, starting with a scene of aPing-Pong game, in which the distanceto the nearest table corner is divided by50 to get the IA. We then adjust theconvergence to position the corner at thescreen plane, with the table behind it.

As the workshop evolves, wejokingly refer to the nearest object inframe as “the G-spot,” in Boyle’s honor.While the 50 Rule assumes that the G-spot is at the screen plane, we sometimesopt for a convergence on a slightlyfarther object, placing the closest objectin front of the screen for dramatic effect.This tends to work best with movingobjects, like the Ping-Pong ball or thefront paddle.

In another exercise, we try match-cutting two people at a table withdifferent shots from different angles anddistances. Although setting screen at theG-spot works well, we can see that it alsoworks well when we decide to

◗ 3-D on a Budget

AC’s Pariscorrespondent,

Benjamin B,admires the

Quasar/Alexarig.

66

consistently position the same characterin the same position in depth relative tothe screen plane: “the C-spot.”

Boyle comments that settingconvergence and focus for the C-spot, orputting the important character at thescreen plane, “is by far the mostcomfortable way to do 3-D. It’s theapproach recommended by JamesCameron and Vince Pace. The problemis that as someone walks towards you,they’re getting bigger but they don’tmove toward you, and that’s just wrong.If they walk toward you and stay in thesame place, it’s a zoom.”

Boyle stresses that the IA shouldbe varied in a project, and he urges us tobe conservative with fast movement. Toamplify this point, he compliments thework in a recent big-budget film. “Ifyou’re doing an action sequence, go for asmaller IA. I loved Transformers: Dark ofthe Moon — the use of 3-D waswonderful. During the setup stages theygave you not deep 3-D, but reasonable

3-D. When the action got fast, themovie went almost 2-D, and as soon asit slowed down again, whoomph — thedepth came back. This stopped peoplefrom hurting their eyes.”

Boyle concludes with typicallypractical advice: “You shouldn’t establishthe definitive amount of depth on set;you have to give the director flexibility. Alarge IA fixes objects outside the screenin relation to the background, giving thedirector little leeway for adjustment inpost — and, as we know, directors neverever change their minds! If your IA gives100 percent of the depth you want, youwill be able to move the depth forwardin post, but you won’t be able to move itbackwards. If you use a larger IA, youcan’t move it at all; if you use smaller IA,you can move it both ways.

“So be conservative. For example,if I’m working with actors and I want toset the screen for 4 feet, I’ll probably setit at 3 feet to give the actor some roomto move. Get a feel for it. An entire film

shouldn’t be at the same depth. Youchange cinematography [techniques] ona normal, 2-D film, and in 3-D the IAalso needs to change with the story.”

Harbers adds his own postscriptfor posting low-budget 3-D: “Planningthe workflow is essential. Whether you shoot parallel or converged dependson the stereographer, but you canmanipulate more things in parallel. Let the stereographer make a storyboard with IA values for eachscene, so he can work quickly on set. Ifyou really want to save money, getexperienced postproduction peopleinvolved during preproduction toguarantee a smooth workflow!”

To see 3-D video examples from the workshop, visit www.theasc.com/asc_blog/thefilmbook. ●

67

When Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC first collaborated withdirector Brian De Palma in 1978 on the NewOrleans-based thriller Obsession, he immediatelyrecognized De Palma’s strong sense of filmmaking

style and his appreciation for visual storytelling. Zsigmondhad already shot many important films of the American NewWave, including McCabe & Mrs. Miller , Deliverance (AC,Aug. ’71)and The Deer Hunter (AC, Oct. ’78), all of whichadvanced cinema aesthetics in new and sometimes radicalways. In De Palma, however, he found a director who wasunapologetically excited about making the kinds of straight-forward genre pictures favored in earlier eras. De Palma wasn’tas gung-ho as many of his contemporaries about trying tostand convention on its head, but he still made bold choiceswhile paying loving homage to earlier films crafted by studiofilmmakers, especially Alfred Hitchcock.

Zsigmond and De Palma reteamed in 1981 for BlowOut, one of the director’s most successful films and a picturethat showcased his fascination with the processof filmmakingitself. (The two would continue their collaboration on Bonfireof the Vanities, in 1989, and TheBlack Dahlia , in 2006.)

Blow Out ’s story concerns Jack Terry (John Travolta), asound recordist capturing nighttime ambience for the sound-track of a low-budget horror quickie titled Coed Crazy. Jack issuddenly thrust into a dark world of conspiracy when his mic


CaughtonTape

Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC looks back at his collaboration with Brian De Palma on the stylish

1981 thriller Blow Out.

By Jon Silberg

•|•


picks up the sound of a gunshot aninstant before the car of a promisingsenator drives off a bridge, sending thepolitician and a call girl, Sally (NancyAllen), plunging into the river below.Jack manages to save Sally, but when hetries to inform the police and mediaabout the crucial gunshot sound, hedraws the attention of a murderousconspirator, Burke (John Lithgow),who targets him and the girl.

“Brian is really a stylist, and he’svery experimental,” Zsigmond says. “Hesticks his neck out on movies that some-times get bad reviews because thepeople who write the reviews say he’sconcentrating too much on the visuals.But that’s what I like so much abouthim: he knows about images. There areso many films that just consist of talkingheads, and they feel more like what youthink of as ‘TV coverage.’ Brian alwayswants to do something that has style.”

Blow Out’s opening scene sets thetone for the rest of the film with anextended Steadicam POV shot, placingthe audience in the shoes of a murdererstalking a group of sorority girls.Operated by Steadicam inventorGarrett Brown, the long take is eventu-ally revealed to be a scene from CoedCrazy, the film-within-the-film. In thissequence and others, De Palma remindsviewers that they are watching a movieand are subject to the medium’s manip-ulative techniques. Jack’s job as a soundrecordist also reveals another facet offilmmaking’s artifice, illustrating howmost of a movie’s soundtrack is piecedtogether from disparate sounds longafter the actual shooting is over. We firstmeet Jack on a dubbing stage, wherehe’s looping the footage from CoedCrazy and working with the film’smanic director to replace the scream ofthe onscreen actress with the voice of abetter screamer.

Later that evening, tasked withfinding night ambience for the track,Jack takes his Nagra tape recorder andshotgun mic to a spot nearPhiladelphia’s Wissahickon River,located by the park and bridge of thesame name. Zsigmond’s cameraPhot

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Opposite page:Sound recordistJack Terry (JohnTravolta) listensintently to anaudiotape thatmay containevidence of apolitician’smurder. Thispage, top: Adangerousconspirator,Burke (JohnLithgow), seeksto bury theevidence byeliminating Sally(Nancy Allen), acall girl whosurvived theassassination.Bottom,clockwise fromleft: Lithgow, 1stAD JoeNapolitano,director Brian De Palma andcinematographerVilmosZsigmond, ASCblock out a shot inPhiladelphia’s30th StreetStation.


captures Jack as he isolates individualsounds — the croak of a frog, the hootof an owl — that will be used in theslasher film’s sound mix. In strikingshots that keep foreground and back-ground in perfect focus, we see details ofJack’s face, his mic and the environment.“That night scene was difficult,”Zsigmond recalls. “The area we shot inwas immense, and we had to use a lot oflights and still work with the lens wideopen.” Compared to shooting methodsthe cinematographer would employtoday, the challenge was significantlygreater because Zsigmond was workingwith Kodak stock that had a “fast” ISOof just 100. “Today, we can shoot at 500,800 or more,” Zsigmond notes, “butback then we had a lot more limita-tions.”

He continues, “We brought inthe biggest lights we could get — 5Ks,10Ks. We had a crane with lightsmounted on it. We had planned aheadso we wouldn’t have to light whilepeople were standing around; you workout most of those logistics in preproduc-tion. Many times we’d go and [fine-tune] the lights the night beforeshooting, because you can’t really lightfor night during the daytime. If I wereshooting that same scene today, I wouldstill light it with big units, but nowadayswe have better, more efficient lights.These days I could get the scene up to astop of T2.8, T4 or even [deeper stops]because I’d be working at a faster ISO.”

A great deal of Blow Out is set atnight, but it was shot in widescreenanamorphic with Panavision lenses.Zsigmond’s camera truck on Blow Outwas generally equipped with twoPanavision zooms, but their maximumapertures — T4.5 and T5.6 — meantthey weren’t much use on a night shootat ISO 100. Instead, Zsigmond says,“we shot a lot of our night footage withprime lenses,” and he often foundhimself at a stop of T2 for night exteri-ors, despite the tight depth-of-field. “Ittook quite a bit of lighting just to get tothat stop,” he adds.

In order to accomplish a numberof shots that called for foreground and

◗ Caught on Tape

Top: In a signature split-diopter shot from the movie, Jack records nighttime sounds, including an owl’shoots. Middle: The politician’s car plunges off a nearby bridge and into the icy river. Bottom: Travolta

(left), Zsigmond (raising arms) and crewmembers prepare to capture underwater shots of Jack rescuingSally.


background elements to be kept insharp focus, Zsigmond utilized splitdiopters — accessory lens elementsplaced in front of the taking lens thatallow the cinematographer to divide theframe and keep separate objects in focuseven if they are at different distances.The use of split diopters requires preci-sion during setup, as well as some care-ful camouflage to hide the inevitableseam in the frame. “You have to planthese shots ahead of time and find a wayto hide the vertical line,” the cinematog-rapher says. “That’s the most importantthing. The actors cannot cross that line,

because it would look terrible.“Today,” he muses, “we might be

able to stop down to a T8 and get asimilar look. Or we could use a tilt/shiftlens to keep the foreground and back-ground in focus. You could also simplyadd a foreground element into the sceneas a visual effect. But those optionsweren’t available to us.”

To overcome the constraints ofthe era’s slower film stocks, Zsigmondalso exploited a technique he’d used on anumber of prior projects: flashing thefilm. The lab would use a printer to adda tiny bit of exposure to the originalcamera negative, which would primarilyaffect the least-dense portions of theimage (the shadow areas on the nega-tive). This had the effect of slightlyreducing the contrast in those portionsof the frame, yielding more shadowdetail and less overall contrast — in

essence, allowing Zsigmond to treat hisnegative as though it had a somewhathigher ISO.

The effects of flashing dependupon the degree to which the negative is

subjected to the process. Applied insmall amounts, the technique can openup the shadows a bit and subtly enhancethe exposure index; in greater amounts,it can lend scenes an almost foggy feel,

An overheadangle andseveral 360-degree cameramoves captureJack’s dismay ashe discoversthat someonehas broken intohis studio anderased his entirelibrary ofaudiotapes. Thecamera makesfive fullrevolutionsduring thecarefullychoreographedsequence.

“I flashed certainthings to get morespeed out of the

film, more shadowdetail.”


an effect Zsigmond sought for some ofhis films with Robert Altman. “I flashedcertain things to get more speed out ofthe film, more shadow detail,” he says.“If we had a big scene — like the fire-works at the end of Blow Out, where wehad to show a whole city block at theport — I would flash the film at least 10percent to get a good exposure and detailin the shadows.”

Today, a colorist in a DI suite canexert a great deal of control over specificportions of the negative, but in 1981, theonly way to alter these specific propertieswas to manipulate the film’s response tolight. To provide some context for those

not familiar with shooting and finishingin the photochemical realm, ASC asso-ciate member Rob Hummel addressesthe risks associated with the process:“Under normal circumstances, before itwas processed, exposed film would beinspected in a totally dark room. Glovedtechnicians would look for physicaltears, breaks or abrasions that couldcause a problem when the roll wassubsequently put through the develop-ing solutions and then loaded onto aprinter to strike dailies.

“If the film was going to beflashed, you would thread the exposed,unprocessed neg onto a printer,”Hummel continues. “The printer wouldthen run the unexposed film through at300 feet per minute, before it had evenbeen inspected! If there was any prob-lem with that negative, or any mistake in

◗ Caught on Tape

Top: De Palmaand Zsigmond

pose in front ofa Liberty Bell

prop whilesetting up the

film’s ambitiousclimax, set

duringPhiladelphia’s“Liberty Day”

celebration.Bottom: To cover

the action, thecrew exploited

the Little BigCrane, a clever

piece ofequipment

engineered bykey grip Richard

“Dicky” Deats,whose invention

earned him a1982 Academy

TechnicalAchievement

Award.

“Brian alwayswants to do thekinds of things

cinematographerslove to do!”


the flashing, you could lose an enormousamount of work. But somehow, it neverhappened! God always smiled on peopleflashing their negative.”

Cinematographer Jan Kiesser,ASC, CSC, who served as Zsigmond’soperator on Blow Out, recalls that heused a combination of the Panaflexcamera and a Panaflex X — a smaller,lighter body — on the film. Though theeyepiece on the X was fixed, Kiesser feltit had better optics. “I was better able tojudge the focus with the X,” he says. “Itwas nice to have the Panaflex as a fall-back for handheld work or if we requiredsome eyepiece adjustment, but other-wise, I preferred working with the X.”

Zsigmond and De Palma bothliked Panavision’s 30mm anamorphicprime lens — a significantly wide-anglefocal length for anamorphic work. “Ishot a lot of Blow Out with that lens,”Zsigmond recalls. “I love that lens forshooting locations and real interiors, oreven a set sometimes, because you canget everything into the shot. I love thedistortion. I never want to just shoot atalking head, and Brian was always thesame way. He liked the wide-anglelenses and the way they place you in themiddle of the action. He always wants todo the kinds of things cinematographerslove to do!”

Along with their preference forpacking more information into theframe (instead of relying more heavilyupon editing to determine what getsseen and when), De Palma andZsigmond enjoy shooting action in asingle take, often with virtuoso cameramovement. “We would sometimes doshots that lasted four or five minutes,”the cinematographer recalls. “Brian isvery good at that — he knows exactlywhat he wants. It’s very easy for me tolight those kinds of shots on his movies,because I know exactly where he wantsthe camera to go. And I know he’s goingto use it all because he loves using thoseshots — and there’s no way to cut away.Sometimes he’d go five, six, eight or even10 takes, knowing that the scene wouldplay out as one shot on the screen.”

Zsigmond finds this approach

rewarding: “The fewer cuts you have ina film, the more interesting it is to watchthe scene. It’s like watching real life —you get up close to people and to theaction and let the scene play out. LatelyI’ve enjoyed working with WoodyAllen, because he really is aiming forone shot with no coverage. No close-ups, no over-the-shoulders. He wants tomove the camera, and he does it in onecontinuous shot.”

For Kiesser, shots like this meanta significant amount of responsibility.“When we were making Blow Out,” hesays, “we didn’t have video playback. Itwas really on your shoulders as an oper-ator to critically judge compositionthroughout the shot. You had the bestseat in the house for all the critical deci-

sions, like eyelines and framing, butnobody else was going to see the shotuntil dailies! We were also shootingwide open, so we needed to be very crit-ical about focus.”

Michael Gershman was the firstAC on Blow Out and worked frequentlywith Kiesser. “Michael and I started ourcareers together in animation,” saysKiesser, “and we were on many crewstogether. Like all great focus pullers,Michael had an uncanny knack forfocus — it was like a sixth sense. OnBlow Out, he really had to multi-task,because some of those shots requiredzooming, focus-pulling and stopchanges all at once.”

Many of De Palma’s filmscontain at least one setup that spins the

Jack uses sophisticated audio equipment to monitor Sally’s meeting with Burke. After his frenziedpursuit of the pair leads him to crash his jeep through a department-store window, Jack awakens to

discover Sally is in great danger, and he frantically tries to reach her.


camera 360 degrees. In Blow Out, anexample of this signature piece ofcamerawork occurs when Jack realizessomeone has broken into his studio anderased all of his tapes in an attempt todelete the incriminating piece of audio.As the shot spins around the room, thecamera shows Travolta opening cans,then whooshes past him at an increasingspeed, picks up a few details of thestudio here and there, catches up to himplaying a tape machine, and moves pasthim again. The bravura move continuesaround the room this way for five

complete revolutions before settling ona receptionist who enters the studio.“The space wasn’t big enough to laydown tracks,” Keisser recalls. “We hadthe camera in the middle of the room,and we kept panning around andzooming to keep up with the action. Inthose days, the camera didn’t have abattery; it was powered from an externalsource, so we had to twist the powercable around the tripod and thenuntwist it during the shot.”

Jack and Sally’s troubles come toa head when they arrange to give their

audio evidence to a TV reporter. A dropis planned in a public place, with Sallywired for sound and Jack stationednearby so he can monitor the exchange.Neither of them realizes, however, thatthe reporter is actually Burke, who luresSally beyond audio range as Jackdesperately tries to catch up to the pair.

Jack’s pursuit leads him into theheart of Philadelphia’s enormous“Liberty Day” celebration, whichincludes a parade. The chase begins inthe daytime with Jack driving throughthe parade marchers. To cover theaction, the crew made use of a Little BigCrane, designed by key grip Richard“Dicky” Deats, who later earned anAcademy Technical AchievementAward for his invention. “The LittleBig Crane let us get into places wemight not have been able to access witha larger crane,” says Kiesser. “We hadalso used it a lot with Vilmos onHeaven’s Gate. This was before remoteheads, so I would ride the crane andtime the camera movement to the

◗ Caught on TapeA massive fireworks

display adds visualexcitement to the

movie’s climax, butfor logistical

reasons, portions ofthe sequence had to

be shot on asoundstage. To

capture thedramatic close-up of

Travolta and Allenframed against the

sky, Zsigmondplaced the actors ona turntable in front

of a bluescreen. Thecamera was placedin a static positionon one side of the

turntable, facing thebluescreen, as theactors were spun

360 degrees.“Because the

lighting was movingwith the actors, it

looked as if thecamera was circling

them,” Zsigmondexplains. “The

fireworks wereadded in post.”

76

crane’s position. My strongest memoryof [shooting Blow Out] is sitting upthere in the cold and wind.”

For close-ups of Travolta runningthrough the crowd, Zsigmondsuggested the fireworks’ effect withinteractive lighting. For wider shots, theproduction made use of real fireworks.

“I brought in as many big lights as Icould to bring up the darker areas,”Zsigmond says, noting that he still hadto shoot wide open, which left the fire-works more blown out than he wouldhave preferred. “I never liked the look ofsome of those shots as much as I did inthe Blu-ray that came out recently. I

wasn’t involved in timing it, but Brianmust have been, or somebody whounderstood what we were going for,because the colors are more intensethan we could get them [photochemi-cally]. Today, we would finish with aDI, and we would have more control.”

At the end of the chase, Jackcradles Sally in his arms as the cameraspins 360 degrees and reveals the fire-works above them. The shot was one ofthe film’s few optical effects. “Theproduction couldn’t possibly create realfireworks in the sky as we spun thecamera,” Zsigmond explains. “We putthe actors and their lighting on aturntable in front of a bluescreen, andwe positioned the camera on one sideof the turntable facing the bluescreen,where it remained static as we turnedthe actors around 360 degrees. Becausethe lighting was moving with theactors, it looked as if the camera wascircling them. The fireworks wereadded in post.”

◗ Caught on Tape

Another split-diopter shot shows Burke plotting his next murder in the train station.

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Adding a bizarre twist to theproduction of Blow Out — andexpanding the list of challenges thefilm posed its makers — the parade-sequence footage went missing.Hummel recalls, “All the negative forthe parade shoot — the B negative,circled takes, everything — was in avan on its way to JFK to be flown to anedit suite in L.A, where it would be cut.The driver stopped at a Dunkin’Donuts on his way to the airport andleft the van unattended, and while hewas in there somebody stole the van. Itwas unbelievable!”

The van was eventually located,but one crucial reel of film was missing,so Blow Out ’s climactic sequence hadto be painstakingly reshot byZsigmond’s friend and colleague,Laszlo Kovacs, ASC. “Laszlo had tocopy every shot exactly the way it hadbeen done,” says Zsigmond admiringly,noting that this can sometimes be evenmore difficult and frustrating than

doing the work originally.Zsigmond expresses a particular

fondness for the unabashedly stylishfilms he shot with De Palma. “I’veworked on so many films where weaimed to be ‘real,’ and we would neverhave done some of the shots I did with

Brian,” he says. “But in a movie by BrianDe Palma — or Hitchcock — it isn’timportant that what we’re watching is‘real.’ We’re telling a story, and the mostimportant thing is that the audience hasfun watching it.” ●

Zsigmond and1st AC MichaelGershman lineup a shot withAllen, who laterscribbled anaffectionatenote on thisphoto thatcaptures themoment: “ToVilmos — agreat artist anda truly gentleman. With loveand respect,Nancy.”

7


SharpShooters

Kodak salutes this year’s Emmy-nominatedcinematographers witha reception at the ASC

Clubhouse.•|•

Front row (left to right): Kramer Morgenthau,ASC; Kodak president and general manager

Kim Snyder; David Moxness, CSC; Ed Lachman,ASC; Fred Murphy, ASC; Paul Sarossy, CSC, BSC;

Kodak marketing director Judith Doherty.Second row: Christian La Fountaine; Kodak

executive Michael Zakula; Kodak accountmanager Aaron Saffa; Attila Szalay, CSC, HSC;

Kodak account manager Bruce Burke; Kodak account manager Michael Houser; and

Donald A. Morgan, ASC.

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.

Here is a list of all the nominees (*denotes winner):

�Outstanding Cinematography, Miniseries or Movie

David Katznelson, BSC, DFF*Downton Abbey, “Part 1”(BBC/PBS)

Ed Lachman, ASCMildred Pierce, “Part Five”(HBO)

Kramer Morgenthau, ASCToo Big to Fail(HBO)

David Moxness, CSCThe Kennedys, “Life Sentences”(ReelzChannel)

Attila Szalay, CSC, HSCThe Pillars of the Earth, “Legacy”(Starz)

To honor this year’s group of Emmy-nominatedcinematographers, the Eastman Kodak Co. hostedan evening reception at the ASC Clubhouse inHollywood on Sept. 9.

Guests were feted with cocktails and a catered buffet inan atmosphere of congenial fraternity that encouraged themto compare notes and talk shop. Kim Snyder, president andgeneral manager of Kodak’s Entertainment Imaging business,summed up the festivities by noting, “For 30 years, Kodak hashosted a celebration honoring cinematographers whose workand amazing images were recognized by the TV Academywith Emmy nominations. For the first time, this year’s dinnerwas hosted at the ASC Clubhouse, making it an even more[meaningful] evening for all the honorees and guests.”

This year’s Emmy winners included David Katznelson,BSC, DFF for the BBC miniseries Downton Abbey; Steven V.Silver, ASC for the CBS multi-camera series Two and a HalfMen; Jonathan Freeman, ASC for the HBO single-cameraseries Boardwalk Empire; Zach Zamboni and Todd Liebler forthe Travel Channel nonfiction series Anthony Bourdain: NoReservations; and the cinematography team for the DiscoveryChannel reality series Deadliest Catch.

ASC members earned a total of 11 nominations, and ofthose, Kramer Morgenthau notched two: for BoardwalkEmpire and Too Big to Fail, also an HBO production.


�Outstanding Cinematography, Multi-Camera Series

Rick F. Gunter, ASCWizards of Waverly Place, “Dancing with Angels”(Disney Channel)

Wayne Kennan, ASCRules of Engagement, “Uh Oh It’s Magic”(CBS)

Christian La FountaineHow I Met Your Mother, “Hopeless”(CBS)

Donald A. Morgan, ASCRetired at 35, “Rocket Man”(TV Land)

Steven V. Silver, ASC*Two and a Half Men, “Hookers, Hookers, Hookers”(CBS)

John Simmons, ASCPair of Kings, “Return of the Kings”(Disney XD)

�Outstanding Cinematography, Single-Camera Series

Stuart Dryburgh, ASCBoardwalk Empire, “Boardwalk Empire (Pilot)”(HBO)

Jonathan Freeman, ASC*Boardwalk Empire, “Home”(HBO)

Kramer Morgenthau, ASCBoardwalk Empire, “A Return To Normalcy”(HBO)

Fred Murphy, ASCThe Good Wife, “Double Jeopardy”(CBS)

Paul Sarossy, CSC, BSCThe Borgias, “The Poisoned Chalice/The Assassin”(Showtime)

�Outstanding Cinematography, Nonfiction Programming

Cinematography TeamWhale Wars, “To the Ends of the Earth”(Animal Planet)

Cliff CharlesIf God Is Willing and da Creek Don’t Rise(HBO)

Josh Fox (camera)GasLand(HBO)

Nicola Marsh, Arlene NelsonAmerican Masters, “Troubadors: Carol King, James Taylor & the Rise of the Singer-Songwriter”(PBS)

Michael SnymanGettysburg(History)

Zach Zamboni, Todd Liebler*Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, “Haiti”(Travel Channel)

�Outstanding Cinematography, Reality Programming

Cinematography TeamThe Amazing Race, “You Don’t Get Paid Unless You Win”(CBS)

Cinematography Team*Deadliest Catch, “Redemption Day”(Discovery Channel)

Cinematography TeamSurvivor, “Rice Wars”(CBS)

Joia SpecialeIntervention, “Rachel”(A&E)

Tim SpellmanTop Chef, “Give Me Your Huddled Masses”(Bravo)

●

Top: George LaFountaine, ASCenjoys the eveningwith his daughter-in-law, Shelley LaFountaine; his son,nominee Christian LaFountaine; andDonald A. Morgan,ASC. Bottom: KramerMorgenthau, ASCcelebrates his doublenomination with hisfiancée, TracyFleischman (left), and Snyder.


The Bunraku ExperienceBy Juan Ruiz-Anchia, ASC

When director Guy Moshe contacted me a few years ago andinvited me to serve as cinematographer on the feature Bunraku, I wassurprised and pleased to discover he had great knowledge of themovies I’d previously photographed. He was also glad that I’d alreadyworked with one of his lead actors, Josh Hartnett, but most impor-tantly, he was complimentary about my lighting skills, since lightingwould be a major element of Bunraku. I was intrigued and eager towork on the project, a very ambitious and experimental movie thataimed to combine real-world photography, sets and actors with anornately stylized virtual world and a color palette that was about asfar from routine as you can get.

Bunraku is an action-fantasy based on an ancient form ofJapanese puppet theater known as Bunraku, in which puppets,manipulated by onstage puppeteers who sometimes narrate or

comment on the action, act out a morality tale. Guy spent yearsbuilding a story around the concept — a stylized plot about a myste-rious stranger engaged in a blood feud with a crime lord. The result-ing tale blends themes, characters, colors and designs from Japan-ese Samurai legends, the Old West, classic movies, cartoons, theater,classical art and the circus, among other references. It’s an indepen-dently made film that, logistically and creatively, could only be madeas a hybrid of live action and CGI.

Building this world entirely on stages would have been fartoo expensive, so visual effects played an important part in creatingthe illusion. Guy therefore assembled a creative team that alsoincluded visual-effects supervisor Oliver Hotz; co-producer AlexMcDowell, an acclaimed production designer who designed themovie’s settings with fellow production designer Chris Farmer; andother talented people with visual-effects experience. Alex introducedus to innovative previsualization techniques that Guy used exten-sively to design Bunraku’s surreal world — a radical, mysticaluniverse that can fold and unfold itself, much like the structure ofpaper, and go on endlessly. The martial-arts sequences would befilmed like dance performances on stages, and the omniscientcamera would roam freely through 360 degrees most of the time,with transitions created in-frame rather than through a more stan-dard series of cuts. We added a unique palette of colors to thisworld, as well as different skies that constantly change and evolve.

It was a tall order on a modest budget, and I found myself atthe center of the whole enterprise, since camera movement andcolor were so crucial to the direction of the story. We ended upshooting with two units, seemingly around the clock, on more than30 sets at MediaPro Studios in Buftea, Romania. During the post-production phase, we collaborated with Oliver Hotz and his team atOrigami Digital, in Los Angeles, to create the environments andmake sure they matched up with the imagery we’d captured onstage.

Despite the movie’s virtual nature, we decided to shoot thelive-action components on film, in Super 35mm, using KodakVision2 500T 5218, utilizing Cooke S4 lenses and AngenieuxOptimo zooms with our Arriflex cameras. After tests, we selectedthe Vision2 stock because, for our purposes, we felt it demonstrateda superior ability to reproduce shadows compared to Vision3.

Filmmakers’ Forum

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Top: An assassin (Kevin McKidd, center) and a gang of thugs defend a crime lord in a scene from Bunraku, shot by Juan-Ruiz Anchia, ASC. Directed by Guy Moshe, the movie is inspired by an ancient Japanese form of puppet

theater. Bottom: A panoramic photo shows one of the production’s 30-plus sets, built on stages at MediaPro Studios in Buftea, Romania.

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However, during some post filming we didin California, we incorporated Vision3 500T5219 because of its superior grain structurefor visual-effects work.Bear in mind thatwe launched into production three yearsago, and we did not want to risk latitudeproblems with the lower ASA capabilities ofthe digital cameras available at the time. Ifwe were making this movie today, wemight well have considered using a digitalcamera system, but at that time, the bestavailable solution was to shoot film.

Lighting was a massive job, giventhe amount of greenscreen and visual-effects work we had to do. But the toolsthat most helped me achieve the look we

sought were a wide range of gels, repre-senting the many colors we chose duringour extensive research phase — colors thatchange and evolve from the beginning ofthe movie to the end. The film’s unusuallook was based on Alex’s designs, whichwere influenced by the paintings of LyonelFeininger. Guy, Chris and I shared thispalette with Oliver and his team, and theyused the color scheme I developed on set tobuild the story’s virtual world. This strategyallowed us to achieve, in-camera, much ofthe color you see on the big screen.

As we experimented with differentcolors, we had to keep in mind the post-production work that would be performed

on all the greenscreen footage we shot. Inparticular, we had to make sure the postteam could match or complement thecolors I had used on set as they built the CGelements and color-corrected the frames. Inother words, if I used a specific mix of pinkand blue in the foreground, then the back-ground would have to match. It wascomplicated work, but Oliver’s group atOrigami did a great job with it.

Guy and I decided to abandon thelogic of light directionality that you find inthe real world, since our story was not set inreality and we were making no pretensesthat it was. We both felt this strategy wouldbe the best way to achieve a theatrical lookbefitting Guy’s design for the movie.

Overall, the lighting in this film was aunique attempt to create graphical aesthet-ics with lighting. “I find our film to be lean-ing more on classical artworks, varying fromLyonel Feininger paintings to RobertWilson’s avant-garde theater,” Guy addedwhen he sent me his thoughts. “But inmixing all these influences with lightingschemes and in-camera light changes thatecho the theater and the circus, we actuallyended up with the cinematic equivalent ofgraphics, rather than a cinematic interpreta-tion of graphics. I find that the combinationof near-film-noir shadow and paintingimages with two or three colors in everyscene created the kind of beautiful experi-ence that one does not find so often in thenew days of the DI, where cinematogra-phers often leave the risk-taking to post.”

The most experimental aspect of thewhole venture was probably our cameramoves. As I mentioned above, the perspec-tive was “omniscient” — the camera roamsthrough space and travels from one sceneto another, switching perspectives and

Top right: Ruiz-Anchia searches for a frame. Left: The circus was one of the many influences for Bunraku, evidenced in these before-and-after frame grabs that highlight

the importance of visual effects.

reorienting geography. When the camerabreaks the horizon, speeding along at acertain distance from the ground, it essen-tially transforms the story’s universe. Wewere able to figure out such movement —and the lighting schemes necessary toaccommodate it — during the 3-D previsu-alization process.

At times, we needed particularly

elaborate lighting schemes, combined withunique lighting instruments and camerarigging, so that the camera could travel 360degrees. For example, for a crucial fightscene that takes place outside a bar in therain, we had to create the effect of a trainpassing by. To accomplish this, we rigged apowerful tungsten 12K Fresnel to movequickly across the set, producing strobo-


scopic shadows over the action of the fight.For another sequence set at a beach trainingcamp for fighters, we cabled the camera soit could fly across the large set toward themain actors, who were watching the actionover a hill. That kind of work was routine onthis production, and the execution of thesetechniques — by gaffer Florin Nicolae, keygrip Ian Bird, A-camera/Steadicam operatorBogdan Stanciu and 1st AC José RamónDelgado — was crucial to our success.

Making Bunraku was a particularlyfun and interesting challenge for all of us.The dichotomy involved in our work wasextreme: we were shooting film on an old-fashioned stage in Romania, with a limitedbudget, while also attempting to pull offsome truly state-of-the-art techniques.Indeed, there were no catwalks on thestages; lights were hung the old-fashionedway by Romanian crewmembers climbingwalls and ladders. The greenscreens wereoften as large as 60' by 60', and everythinghad tracking markers on it. The same guyswho climbed the screens to hang lights alsoadjusted the markers for us.

We constantly had our two unitsrotating around on the various stages we setup at MediaPro, working long hours tomaintain our schedule, but all the effortpaid off. It was a true team effort. 2nd-unitdirector of photography Guy Livneh did anexcellent job, along with crewmembersfrom the U.S., Romania, England, Spain andother countries. Arri Munich kept us wellsupplied, and Kodak Bucharest developedour negative and dailies.

In Los Angeles, Modern VideoFilm’sfine colorist, Joe Finley, helped us finish thelook; producer Keith Calder was also a greathelp during the post process. Our printswere struck at Deluxe, where ASC associatemember Beverly Wood, the company’sexecutive vice president of technicalservices, took very good care of us. ●

Top: Gelled space lights support Ruiz-Anchia’s colorful approach to the film’s lighting. Bottom: Moshe(holding finder) finds an angle on Woody Harrelson.

OConnor Offers Ultimate ControlOConnor, a Vitec Group brand, has introduced the Ultimate

1030 D and 1030 Ds fluid heads, which are designed especially foruse with lightweight, large-format-sensor cameras such as the RedEpic and Sony F3.

Updating and replacing OConnor’s popular Ultimate1030HD and HDs heads, the new line offers a sporty industrial

design and a range of featuresborrowed from larger OConnorfluid heads. Features include thestep-less, ultra-smooth pan-and-tilt fluid drag specifically enhancedto provide ultimate control andstability for digital cinematogra-phy shooting; the patentedOConnor Sinusoidal Counterbal-ance system, which providesaccurate balance at any point inthe tilt range; and the ability tocounterbalance down to zero.

The 1030 D series also features a new ergonomic crank-stylecounterbalance control that pulls out of the rear of the head, actionbrakes for pan-and-tilt unlock via a single-handed squeeze, and theOConnor drag system for constant control.

The 1030 D supports a payload of up to 30 pounds at a 6"center of gravity with a +/-90-degree tilt range. The 1030 Dssupports up to 41 pounds at a 6" center of gravity with a +/-60-degree tilt range.

Like the rest of the OConnor Ultimate heads, the 1030 D andDs have interchangeable bases, accept the same front-box mount aslarger heads and offer full compatibility with other OConnor 1030accessories.

For additional information, visit www.ocon.com.

Sachtler Steadies Lightweight TripodSachtler, a Vitec Group brand, has

introduced the TT 75/2 CF, a lightweight,two-stage carbon-fiber tripod ideally suitedto lightweight digital cameras, includingvideo-enabled DSLRs. The tripod features a75mm bowl and three-section singlecarbon-fiber tubes.

The TT 75/2 CF offers Sachtler’s hall-mark stability and easy setup. Varying legangles can be quickly deployed andadjusted. The tripod comes with Sachtler’s

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distinctive red footpads with retractable spikes.The lightweight tripod weighs only 5.1 pounds and offers a

height range from 10.6" to 67.3". The tripod is also available in asystem with a Sachtler FSB 4, Cine DSLR, FSB 6 or FSB 8 fluid headplus the convenient DV 75 L padded carrier.

For additional information, visit www.sachtler.com.

3ality Digital Acquires Element Technica3ality Digital has acquired Element Technica. The combined

company, which has been rebranded 3ality Technica, provides all ofthe control, accuracy, breadth, automation, modularity, accessoriesand design of both existing product lines.

In acquiring Element Technica, 3ality Digital gains an in-housemanufacturing and design capability, as well as the opportunity tofurther expand its already sizable R&D infrastructure. The companieswill combine in an expansion to the 3ality Digital headquarters inBurbank, Calif.

“We have always had great respect for Element Technica andtheir achievements,” says ASC associate member Steve Schklair,CEO of 3ality Technica. “The complete compatibility and lack ofredundancy between the companies has made this an ideal acquisi-tion, strengthening the company’s position to provide the mostadvanced and dependable [3-D] solutions to the market. Perhaps thegreatest benefit of this acquisition will be to the motion picture andbroadcast producers who will now have an unprecedented amountof tools and technology tailored to meet their specific needs.”

The combined expertise of 3ality Technica includes work forHollywood feature films and television, live-broadcast sports eventsand concert performances, and NASA. “We have already integratedsome of the best aspects of both companies’ product offerings, sothe market will see an immediate improvement in tool sets, compo-nent integration and customer service,” says Schklair.

Element Technica is also well known for its line of both 2-Dand 3-D accessories, and 3ality Technica plans to continue this prod-uct line under the existing Element Technica banner.

For additional information, visithttp://3alitytechnica.com.

Alan Gordon Cages DSLRsAlan Gordon Enterprises, Inc. has

introduced the Hollywood HDSLR Cage.Designed for Canon EOS 5D

Mark II and 7D DSLR cameras, the Holly-wood HDSLR Cage features an HDMIcable protector and multiple ¼"-20 and3⁄8"-16 threaded holes for mountingaccessories. The hard-anodized cage is


precision-machined and boasts lightweightconstruction. Alan Gordon offers a numberof accessories for the cage, including abattery mount and a mini rod adapter.

The Hollywood HDSLR Cage is avail-able through Alan Gordon for a recom-mended price of $489. For more informa-tion, visit www.alangordon.com.

Zacuto Upgrades Z-Finder FirmwareZacuto has released the free

firmware upgrade number 1.01.00 for thecompany’s popular Z-Finder EVF electronicviewfinder.

“With these frequent firmwareupgrades, we can constantly make improve-ments to our Z-Finder EVF,” says Patrick Fee,product designer for Zacuto. “Anytime wefind something that people want or a prob-lem that we can fix, we can just upgrade thefirmware and our clients can download itfrom the website.”

This firmware upgrade boasts newaudio meters and a battery meter that canbe positioned in any of the four corners ofthe EVF screen, an audio loop-throughfeature, implemented underscan, and RedOne and Sony FS100 scaling presets. Assuggested by customers, the firmwareupgrade also allows users to save and recallchroma, contrast and brightness settings aspresets; changes to color, brightness andcontrast will now save when the EVF ispowered down, and return when it is nextpowered up.

For additional information, and todownload the free upgrade, visitwww.zacuto.com.

Chrosziel’s Aladin Offers Lens ControlChrosziel has introduced the versatile

Aladin MK II remote lens control, which

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comprises a modular handset and a smallreceiver that can control up to eight motors.

The easy-to-use Aladin MK II cali-brates motors automatically, allowing usersto simply plug in and start shooting. Formore advanced setups, the receiver featuresa built-in display with a straightforwardoperating menu, so settings can be adjustedquickly and easily. Furthermore, the AladinMK II allows users to control and power theinternal zoom, focus and iris motors of digi-tal Canon and Fujinon lenses. Communica-tion and power run through the serial auxil-iary port of the Aladin’s control box.

The Aladin MK II’s eight channels ofcontrol make the system 3-D compatible,allowing simultaneous control over focus,zoom and aperture on two lenses while alsocontrolling the angles and distance betweenthe cameras.

The Aladin’s handheld modules areequipped with military-grade connectors formaximum reliability. An RF spectrumanalyzer can help identify sources of wirelessinterference and pick the best transmissionchannel at any particular location. TheAladin also allows users to cable to thecamera via the BNC connector.

At press time, Chrosziel was also inthe process of integrating an option torecord time code and metadata.

For additional information, visitwww.chrosziel.com.

Vocas Expands Accessory LineVocas Systems has introduced the

Flexible Gear Ring, the Pro Rail Support, theE-to-PL-Mount Adapter and the ShoulderSupport.

The Flexible Gear Ring can beattached directly to a lens, making the lenscompatible with a follow-focus system. ThePro Rail Support allows 15mm rods to bemounted beneath an array of cameras froma host of manufacturers. Attaching the Pro

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Rail Support further enables users toemploy such accessories as the E-to-PL-Mount Adapter; the Adapter allows PL-mount lenses to be mounted on cameraswith an E-mount. Finally, the ShoulderSupport distributes the camera’s weightand enables comfortable operating. TheSupport works with commonly used 15mmrails, and it can be quickly attached to orremoved from the rails without the need todisassemble the entire system.

For additional information, visitwww.vocas.com.

LevelJib Completes LevelCam KitThe LevelCam camera stabilizer is

now available in a LevelCam Complete kit,which connects to a tripod and turns thesystem into a jib. Each component isdetachable via a quick-release lock, makingthe system extremely versatile and portable.LevelCam works with most palm-sizedcameras and DSLRs weighing up to 9pounds.

“LevelCam started as a personalsolution for moving from a tripod directly tohandheld shooting without interruption,”says Tim Nixon, owner of Baughan Produc-tions, Inc. and the inventor of the LevelCam.“LevelCam evolved into LevelCamComplete, with a counter-weighted mono-pod called LevelPod. Connecting LevelPodto most any medium-sized tripod now turnsit into LevelJib.

“Producing video content is my dayjob, and LevelCam evolved out of my needto minimize handheld twitch in small videocameras,” Nixon continues. “The DSLRrevolution has made my job even more chal-lenging, as the camera is harder to hand-

hold than most camcorders. These camerasalso need extra equipment, like and audiorecorder and microphone, to be truly usefulfor a one-person crew. LevelCam’s designallows for plenty of space for these acces-sories.”

LevelCam is sold on its own for$79.95, or in the LevelCam Complete kit,which includes the LevelPod and LevelJibadapter, for $399.95. For more informa-tion, visit www.levelcam.com andwww.baughan.com. ●

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OVER 1400 GRIP & LIGHTING CONTROL PRODUCTS

Advertiser’s Index16x9, Inc. 90

Abel Cine Tech 9AC 1, 88AFI 55Aja Video Systems, Inc. 29Alan Gordon Enterprises 91Arri 39Assimilate 44AZGrip 91

Backstage Equipment, Inc. 87Barger-Lite 6, 90Blackmagic Design 11Burrell Enterprises 90

Cameraimage 85Cavision Enterprises 21Chapman/Leonard Studio Equipment Inc. 17Chemical Wedding 83Cinematography Electronics 88Cinekinetic 90Clairmont Film & Digital 41Codex Digital Ltd., 25Convergent Design 27Cooke Optics 31

Deluxe C2Digital Vision 58

Eastman Kodak C4EFD USA, Inc 19

Film Gear 53Filmotechnic 90Filmtools 6Friends of the ASC 57

Glidecam Industries 23Government Technology Expo 93Grip Factory Munich 6

Hive Lighting 87

Innovision 91

J.L. Fisher 45

Kino Flo 67

Lights! Action! Co. 90Lowel 7

Matthews Studio Equipment 91Movie Tech AG 91

NBC Universal 43Nevada Film Commission 76New York Film Academy 66

Oppenheimer Camera Prod. 53, 90

P+S Technik 91Panasonic Broadcast 5PED Denz 90, 91Pille Film Gmbh 90Pro8mm 90Production Resource Group 59

Regent University 77Rosco 30

Schneider Optics 2Sony Electronics 13Super16 Inc. 91Sundance Film Festival 81SXSW Film Festival 89

Tessive 87Thales Angenieux 15Tiffen 7, C3

VF Gadgets, Inc. 90

Willy’s Widgets 90www.theasc.com 4, 75, 95

Zacuto Films 91

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Perkal, Weaver JoinSocietyNew active member Dave Perkal,

ASC was born in Los Angeles. His fatherhelped spark his passion for visual story-telling by takinghim to see Akira Kuro-sawa’s Seven Samurai, and he honed hisunderstanding of moving images by study-ing at San Diego State University and theAmerican Film Institute. Perkal began hisprofessional career as a camera assistantand climbed the ladder to operator whilenotching cinematography creditsalong theway. He was promoted to full-time directorof photography on the series Entourage.Since then he has shotepisodes of Saman-tha Who?, Chuck, Scrubs and The VampireDiaries, as well as a variety of features andtelefilms, including Happy Campers,Preacher’s Kid and Teen Spirit. Perkal hasalso shot numerous music videos andcommercials.

Michael Weaver, ASC was born inKansas City, Mo., and studied filmmaking

and photography at San Jose State Univer-sity. After graduating, he began a three-year apprenticeship shooting documen-taries, industrials and commercials for Lock-heed Missiles and Space Co.’s film division.Weaver moved to Los Angeles in 1989 andfound work shooting local commercials andlow-budget features. To further hone hiscraft, he transitioned to chief lighting tech-nician, and by the end of the 1990s he wasworking as both a gaffer and second-unitcinematographer. He was promoted todirector of photography on the seriesMalcolm in the Middle , and he has sincephotographed a number of series, includingNotes from the Underbelly, Pushing Daisies(for which he earned an ASC nomination),Californication (for which he won an Emmy)and Parenthood. A member of the DirectorsGuild of America, Weaver has also directedepisodes of Californication and Parenthood.

New Associate Members Join RanksThe Society has welcomed David

Cole, Gilles Galerne, Joshua Haynie, KarenMcHugh and Ahmad Ouri to its ranks ofassociate members.

David Cole began his career inMelbourne, Australia, in the telecinedepartment of AAV Digital Pictures. In hisfive years with the company, his roleexpanded to technical director of digitalfilm. In 2001, Cole joined The Post HouseLtd. in Wellington, New Zealand,where heworked as lead digital colorist on The Lordof the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring .From there, he joined Weta Digital as super-vising and lead digital colorist, setting upand leading the company’s DI division forKing Kong. In 2006, he moved to Los Ange-les to join LaserPacific, where he continuesto serve as senior digital colorist.

Gilles Galerne was born inVincennes, France, and attended theUniversity of Sciences in Paris. He served forone year as a lighting technician in theCinematography Services of the Armed

Forces, and then joined the research-and-development department of lighting manu-facturer LTM. He moved into sales manage-ment at LTM and was then transferred to aU.S. subsidiary, where he assumed the titleof president in 1980. In 1992, he foundedK 5600, where he continues to serve aspresident.

Joshua Haynie currently serves asthe vice president of operations at EFilm,where he oversees more than 100 teammembers and has supervised more than300 digital intermediates for theatricalrelease. Haynie’s career began as a produc-tion assistant and editor, and he spent mostof the ‘90s as a director of operations forthree Los Angeles-area post houses:Composite Image Systems, The Post Groupand Sunset Post. In 1999, he joinedOctane/Lightning Dubs as an executiveproducer, and in 2001 he moved on toSunset Digital as a producer and projectmanager. He has been with EFilm since2003.

Karen McHugh was born in PaloAlto, Calif., and studied photography anddance at San Francisco State University.Following graduation, she brought herpassion for photography to Los Angeles,where she accepted a position with Samy’sCamera. She continues to work at Samy’sas the head of Pro Digital and Cinema Sales,and she also serves as the store’s personalshopper for professional photographersand cinematographers.

Ahmad Ouri currently serves asTechnicolor’s chief marketing officer. Hewas born in Lebanon and earned mastersdegrees in engineering and business fromthe University of Utah. He joined Techni-color in 2002 and has held a number ofroles within the company, including presi-dent of Technicolor Digital Cinema, chieftechnology officer and president of ContentServices. Before joining Technicolor, he wasCEO of Philips Electronics’ digital videoserver division. ●

Clubhouse News


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Top to bottom: Dave Perkal, ASC and Michael Weaver, ASC.


When you were a child, what film made the strongest impres-sion on you?Bullitt (1968). I was 10 years old, and it opened my eyes to Ameri-can action/thriller movies. We did not have television in South Africawhen I was a child, so all the movies we saw were in the cinema.

Which cinematographers, past or present, do you mostadmire?There are too many to listhere, but those who matter tome most are the ones that arechanging and bringing newstyle to the art form: ASCmembers Emmanuel Lubezki,Bob Richardson and RogerDeakins, to name a few.

What sparked your interestin photography?My father had an 8mm Bell &Howell with which he docu-mented our lives.

Where did you train and/orstudy?I got a job at BFCS, a commercial-production company in London,after I finished college. I began as a trainee in the camera depart-ment.

Who were your early teachers or mentors?Michael Seresin, BSC; Hugh Johnson, and Tony and Ridley Scott.

What are some of your key artistic influences?The classic film-noir movies I watched as a teenager in London, andthe work of Vermeer, Picasso, Helmut Newton, John Boorman, andTony and Ridley Scott.

How did you get your first break in the business?Hugh Johnson invited me to assist on the reshoots of Tony Scott’sThe Hunger.

What has been your most satisfying moment on a project?Finishing the DI for Star Trek (2009) at Company 3.

Have you made any memorable blunders?Sorry, none to speak of.

What is the best professional advice you’ve ever received?When I was a focus puller ona movie with Adrian Biddle,BSC, I told him I did not havefocus marks, and he said,‘Feel the Force.’ I use thatadvice all the time.

What recent books, filmsor artworks have inspiredyou?I just saw Frida whilst doingresearch, and the colorpalette is a great inspirationfor me at the moment.Rodrigo Prieto, ASC, AMC dida lovely job.

Do you have any favoritegenres, or genres you would like to try?As long as I am using film as a medium, I am inspired. Any genrewould be good.

If you weren’t a cinematographer, what might you be doinginstead?I might be a pizza chef.

Which ASC cinematographers recommended you formembership?Stephen Goldblatt, Allen Daviau and David B. Nowell.

How has ASC membership impacted your life and career?I’ve wanted the ASC credential ever since I started in the movieindustry as a student. Becoming a member is a huge accomplish-ment that I will always be proud of. ●

Dan Mindel, ASCClose-up

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