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JUNE 2010 $5.95 Canada $6.95 See and be seen. Introducing Sony’s VideON™ online network, a video site designed by pr...

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JUNE 2010

$5.95

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See and be seen. Introducing Sony’s VideON™ online network, a video site designed by professionals for professionals. View creative content from DPs and producers, sample reels, tips and tricks, interviews, tech updates, product tutorials, and much, much more. If you’re an indie or documentary moviemaker; a commercial, feature or TV director; a videographer or anyone else using Sony pro gear, you should be a part of this site. See and share great work, learn new techniques and connect with others in the Sony professional community. Be inspired, inspire others… believe that anything you imagine, you can make real.

NOW PLAYING click: sony.com/videon to see and be seen.

© 2010 Sony Electronics Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. Features and specifications are subject to change without notice. Sony, “make.believe” and their respective logos, and VideON are trademarks of Sony.

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“On ‘The Office,’ our shots must appear real – documentary style – as if we are capturing the moment. That real feel grounds the subject matter for our audience. But ‘real’ implies an imperfect look like blown-out windows. And, when you’re working in HD, ‘blow out’ can look horrible. That’s where Schneider HD Classic Softs™ are my go-to tool. They turn a blow out into a nice bloom. And because HD is so unforgiving, I always use a quarter or a half HD Classic Soft on our actors. This takes the edge off the HD and gives them a look that is both real and attractive at the same time. I use filters to help with things I can’t control so I choose the matchless quality of Schneider glass. Whether I’m the Director or the Cinematographer, Schneider filters make the good things great and the bad things better.”

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The International Journal of Motion Imaging

On Our Cover: Rabble-rousing archer Robin Longstride (Russell Crowe) leads an uprising in Robin Hood, shot by John Mathieson, BSC. (Photo by David Appleby, courtesy of Universal Studios.)

FEATURES 30 42 52 64

Slings and Arrows John Mathieson, BSC sets up camp in Sherwood Forest on Robin Hood

Desert Storm John Seale, ASC, ACS faces epic undertaking with Prince of Persia

Very French Revenge Tetsuo Nagata, AFC leads crack team on Micmacs

Painting Towns White Giles Dunning captures rock tour for The White Stripes Under Great White Northern Lights

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DEPARTMENTS 8 10 12 18 72 78 80 92 94 96 98 100

Editor’s Note President’s Desk Short Takes: Land and Bread Production Slate: Winter’s Bone • Harry Brown Post Focus: Frozen Tricks of the Trade: Red’s False Color New Products & Services International Marketplace Classified Ads/Ad Index ASC Membership Roster Clubhouse News ASC Close-Up: John Schwartzman

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— VISIT WWW.THEASC.COM TO ENJOY THESE WEB EXCLUSIVES — DVD Playback: The Natural • Rock ’n’ Roll High School/Suburbia • Bigger Than Life

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The International Journal of Motion Imaging

Visit us online at

www.theasc.com ———————————————————————————————————— PUBLISHER Martha Winterhalter ————————————————————————————————————

EDITORIAL EXECUTIVE EDITOR Stephen Pizzello SENIOR EDITOR Rachael K. Bosley ASSOCIATE EDITOR Jon D. Witmer TECHNICAL EDITOR Christopher Probst CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Stephanie Argy, Benjamin B, Douglas Bankston, Robert S. Birchard, John Calhoun, Bob Fisher, 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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CIRCULATION, BOOKS & PRODUCTS CIRCULATION DIRECTOR Saul Molina CIRCULATION MANAGER Alex Lopez SHIPPING MANAGER Miguel Madrigal ———————————————————————————————————— ASC GENERAL MANAGER Brett Grauman ASC EVENTS COORDINATOR Patricia Armacost ASC PRESIDENT’S ASSISTANT Kim Weston ASC ACCOUNTING MANAGER Mila Basely ASC ACCOUNTS RECEIVABLE Corey Clark ————————————————————————————————————

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American Cinematographer (ISSN 0002-7928), established 1920 and in its 90th year of publication, is published monthly in Hollywood by ASC Holding Corp., 1782 N. Orange Dr., Hollywood, CA 90028, U.S.A., (800) 448-0145, (323) 969-4333, Fax (323) 876-4973, direct line for subscription inquiries (323) 969-4344. Subscriptions: U.S. $50; Canada/Mexico $70; all other foreign countries $95 a year (remit international Money Order or other exchange payable in U.S. $). Advertising: Rate card upon request from Hollywood office. Article Reprints: Requests for high-quality article reprints (or electronic reprints) should be made to Sheridan Reprints at (800) 635-7181 ext. 8065 or by e-mail [email protected]. Copyright 2007 ASC Holding Corp. (All rights reserved.) Periodicals postage paid at Los Angeles, CA and at additional mailing offices. Printed in the USA. POSTMASTER: Send address change to American Cinematographer, P.O. Box 2230, Hollywood, CA 90078.

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American Society of Cinematographers The ASC is not a labor union or a guild, but an educational, cultural and professional organization. Membership is by invitation to those who are actively engaged as directors of photography and have demonstrated outstanding ability. ASC membership has become one of the highest honors that can be bestowed upon a professional cinematographer — a mark of prestige and excellence.

OFFICERS - 2009/2010 Michael Goi President

Richard Crudo Vice President

Owen Roizman Vice President

Victor J. Kemper Vice President

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For a summer action movie, Robin Hood addresses some surprisingly substantial themes. “This story is about a country in crisis and big social upheavals,” cinematographer John Mathieson, BSC tells London correspondent Mark Hope-Jones (“Slings and Arrows,” page 30). “This Robin Hood has far more of a political vision — he actually starts a revolution and brings the country together. The film isn’t a romp in the woods.” Call it the thinking man’s blockbuster. Well aware that Robin Hood’s tale has been told many times, the filmmakers sought to distinguish their version not only thematically, but also aesthetically; Mathieson and director Ridley Scott referenced the work of Brueghel-dynasty painters for the film’s bleak landscapes, and deliberately shifted their palette away from the bright hues of Michael Curtiz’s 1938 Technicolor classic The Adventures of Robin Hood. “There are a lot of burned browns and dark colors in our costumes and sets,” says Mathieson. “It’s a pretty mucky-looking film.” John Seale, ASC, ACS found himself at the opposite climatic extreme on Prince of Persia, an expansive desert adventure adapted from the popular video game. Although portions of the picture were shot onstage at England’s Pinewood Studios, the production also deployed multiple units at various “hot spots” amid the shifting sands of Morocco. Seale had his hands full with shooting, coordinating the various units, integrating his images with extensive visual effects, and supervising elaborate digital-intermediate work. “I left particular finessing for the DI, and I’m not ashamed of that,” he tells Michael Goldman (“Desert Storm,” page 42). “I really feel you have to honor the schedule, even on something this big and complicated, and the DI lets you leave some simple problems alone on the set, things that might take 30 minutes or longer to fix.” On Micmacs, Tetsuo Nagata, AFC teamed with French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, a filmmaker with a firmly established flair for stylized visuals. Described by European correspondent Benjamin B as a “quirky mélange of slapstick, fantasy and broad comedy” (“Very French Revenge,” page 52), the project confirms Jeunet’s reputation for elaborate imagery. “We shot for 80 days, doing 10 shots a day — but it was never 10 simple shots!” Nagata says. Offbeat visual strategies also pay off in the concert film The White Stripes Under Great White Northern Lights, which required director of photography Giles Dunning and his team to trail a pair of indie-rock icons across Canada as they performed a series of shows at standard concert halls and more unusual venues (“Painting Towns White,” page 64). Along the way, Dunning and his cohorts captured compelling footage of the White Stripes in action. Director Emmett Malloy observes, “Their dynamic onstage is like nothing I’ve seen before … Meg really is waiting to see where Jack’s going next, and that’s completely fascinating to watch through a lens. It’s as rock ’n’ roll and as punk rock as anything I’ve ever seen.”

Stephen Pizzello Executive Editor

8

Photo by Owen Roizman, ASC.

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A few months ago, a firestorm of controversy erupted as a result of Avatar’s cinematography win (for Mauro Fiore, ASC) at the Academy Awards. Almost overnight, it seemed cinematographers and cinematography societies all over the world were calling for some voice of reason as to what was in store for the future of “traditional” cinematography, and what our place was in the emerging virtual-production world. I researched some trade periodicals dating as far back as the 1920s to get a sense of how the industry reacted to major changes in the way we practice our craft. What I found were some colorful comments that indicated how the onslaught of new technology was worrying devotees of cinematography: “Vulgar!” “Completely lacking in artistic relevance!” “Does not deserve to be considered cinematography!” “The death of true artistry!” “Technology run amok!” These words were used to describe such horrifying events as the birth of the sound motion picture, the introduction of three-strip Technicolor, television broadcasting, widescreen formats and 3-D filmmaking. It was amusing to see how the same words or sentiments were recycled and repurposed in response to every major technological shift that had occurred in our profession since the dawn of the motion picture. I think there’s a kind of chaos of perception at work in these shifts, a chaos born from the belief that because a technology is capable of expediting an artistic vision with more clarity and precision than was previously possible, that technology must inherently be a threat to the human elements of collaboration and artistry. As we’ve seen with all of the innovations I mentioned, the nature of how we use these tools might change, but the spirit of collaboration and creativity is actually enhanced in the process. Above all, the artistry must drive the technology. In the newly refurbished ASC Clubhouse, there is a plaque with some illuminating words about our craft from none other than Cecil B. DeMille. I think they bear repeating here. (Please note that “he” and “his” are used as universal pronouns and are not intended to exclude women from the ranks.) The missive is entitled “He Is A True Artist”: “Amid the strange ingredients of Hollywood — a world typified by the human swarm and the artistic abstraction — there is a figure unknown to the chants of promoters and glorifiers. His hand has rarely held the scepter of public acclaim, his brow is not crowned with the envied olive leaf which so often settles upon the lordly producer and queens of beauty. This figure, a giant in his industry, is the cameraman — the sine qua non of a profession which often boasts that no one in its ranks is indispensable. No one, I say, save the cameraman. I believe this is why: He is the custodian of the heart of filmmaking as the writers are of its soul … His tool is a box with a glass window, lifeless until he breathes into it his creative spirit and injects into its steel veins the plasma of his imagination … The product of his camera, and therefore of his magic, means many things to many persons — fulfillment of an idea, an ambition ... realization of dreams … He is the judge who applies the laws of dramatic effect in complete coordination and fellowship with the director who interprets those laws … Light, composition, treatment are his instruments of power, which he wields with intelligence and sensitiveness to bring to full bloom the meaning of his art … His versatile management of an intricate mechanism yields astonishing results in mood, emotion, dramatic effect … A slanting shadow becomes a shattering portent of doom … A lifeless chair instills the feeling of infinite sorrow … A dead wall awakens a foreboding of plunging terror … A flash of a man’s face rises to the grandeur of drama, inspiring and ennobling … Before his wizardry, wrinkles fade from the faces of Hollywood’s ageless, imperishable beauties … chins take on lovely contours … years melt away …. Yes, the technique of the cameraman is the technique of artistic vivisection that lays bare the inner workings of our profession. If art can be said to be the expression of beauty in form, color, sound, shape or movement, then it must be said that same art is the art of the cameraman — expressed in the boundless reaches of his imagination. For his patience and singleness of purpose in a most arduous work, he is eminently deserving of that which is justly said of few men: ‘He is a true artist.’”

Michael Goi, ASC President 10

June 2010

American Cinematographer

Photo by Owen Roizman, ASC.

President’s Desk

Short Takes

Land and Bread’s eight-minute narrative, which plays out as a slow, seemingly continuous pullback move, actually required cinematographer Isi Sarfati to deftly combine a series of zoom shots that he operated manually.

12

June 2010

Land and Bread Shines on the Festival Circuit By David Heuring

Carlos Armella and Isi Sarfati were born within a few months of each other in Mexico City, but they met many years later, when they were both students at the London Film School. Admirers of each other’s work, they became collaborators when Armella asked Sarfati to shoot a short film he had written called Land and Bread (Tierra y pan). The film went on to win the Golden Lion for Best Short at the 2008 Venice Film Festival, and it has since collected a number of prizes, including several for cinematography. The eight-minute film has no dialogue or music, and appears to consist of a very slow zoom out from an extreme close-up of a barking dog to an extremely wide shot; the camera’s position never changes. A mysterious drama involving the dog, a doctor, a bleeding woman and a crying baby plays out before the camera, but most of the action is heard, not seen, as it takes place inside a corrugatedmetal shack. There are seven subtle dissolves throughout the film, and a shocking ending punctuates the tale. “I found the script quite confusing at first,” says Sarfati, “and I didn’t immediately realize the full extent of the artistic and technical challenges it posed. Little by little, I began to see the complications of achieving Carlos’ vision. The film was very clear in his mind, and my job was to understand that and translate it into cinematographic techniques.” There was no time or budget for preproduction testing. However, Sarfati did have photographs of the location — a dry lakebed — and a calculation of the sun’s position and path in relation to the shack, which was built the night before the shoot. The shot begins in full daylight and ends at dusk; natural light was augmented only by two shiny boards. “I knew the story had to be shot correctly exposed and with a natural feel — no overexposed skies or underexposed ground,” says Sarfati. “The cinematography had to be subtle exposure-wise so as not to take your attention away from the story, but aggressive framing-wise in order to create the mood the film required.” He used an Arri 435 Xtreme and an Angenieux Optimo 24290mm zoom lens. (EFD in Mexico City provided all the equipment.) The camera was on a tripod loaded down with sandbags and strapped down to prevent the slightest movement. Sarfati brought a number of zoom controls to the set and quickly realized that none of them was slow enough to cover eight minutes of constant, steady movement. To compensate, script supervisor Leny Iñiguez counted time while Sarfati manually operated the zoom control at varying speeds. “It was moving so slowly that I had to watch the edge of the frame or track a rock to be sure it was moving,” recalls the cinematographer. “We had about 45 seconds for each segment. At the beginning and end of each


Frame grabs and photo courtesy of the filmmakers.

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Sarfati takes a meter reading on location at a dry lakebed, where he worked with natural light.

segment, I would hold the zoom control all the way down so that the transitions would happen smoothly at the same constant rate. It was like being a human motion-control unit.” Sarfati worried that the changes in zoom speed would detract from the story, but he found that the variation was so minimal, even when the film was projected, that audiences didn’t appear to notice it. “It is amazing that some viewers are so drawn into the story they don’t even realize the frame has changed from the close-up to the wide shot,” he says. To keep the skies contrasty, Sarfati used a range of ND grad filters as well as a polarizer. “We didn’t know what the weather would do,” he says. “If a cloud came by in the middle of a shot, well, then a cloud came by. We wrote down the focal lengths at which each segment ended so that we could do another take if necessary. We ended up doing one scene three times because the dog caused a problem. There were two other segments we did twice, but the rest were single takes.” Land and Bread was shot on 1,400' of short ends of Kodak Vision2 250D 5205. “We knew shooting film was the right choice because so many of the other elements were uncontrollable,” notes Sarfati. “Clouds did come in and out, but when it’s overcast, you see great detail in the earth. Then, when the sun comes out,

the film holds beautiful details in the sky.” The footage was developed at Laboratory Ormaco, and the rest of the project’s post was handled at Churubusco Studios in Mexico City. Armella assembled the shots in Apple Final Cut Pro using a one-light transfer. The negative was then scanned to match the EDL, graded and recorded out to 35mm. “Very little color correction was required,” notes Sarfati. “The idea was to color-correct to the color chart and see how it looked, and it looked and felt the way we intended from the beginning.” For his work on the picture, Sarfati won the Cecilio Paniagua prize at the Almeria en Corto short-film festival in Spain, and the jury prize for cinematography at Expresion en Corto in Mexico. He also won a cinematography award at the Miami International Film Festival. “Some projects require rigid technical control, and some require me to improvise as I go,” says Sarfati. “I can’t say which approach is better; it really depends on the project. On this film, we had one setup, one lens and usually one take. Because it was a good script and we made the right cinematographic choices, it turned out great. Sometimes simplicity is the best approach.” ●

Photo by Leny Iñiguez.

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Production Slate

I

An Odyssey in the Ozarks By Patricia Thomson

“Authenticity” was the watchword for Winter’s Bone, a harrowing drama set in the Ozark Mountains about a daughter’s hunt for her scofflaw father. Director Debra Granik is a native New Yorker, and director of photography Michael McDonough hails from Glasgow, Scotland, so neither was familiar with Missouri’s remote mountain region. The longtime collaborators therefore embarked on a journey of their own, devoting two years to researching and scouting the Ozarks, then shooting on practical locations with a mix of professional actors and local nonprofessionals. Their efforts were handsomely rewarded at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, where the film won both the Grand Jury Prize and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. Winter’s Bone is Granik and McDonough’s second feature, after Down to the Bone (2004), but the two have collaborated since 1994, when they began graduate film studies at New York University at the same time. “Debra and I started the same day, same class,” recalls McDonough. “We went from doing class exercises to making the short Snake Feed, then Down to the Bone, and then Winter’s Bone.” When he wasn’t working with Granik, McDonough 16

June 2010

shot Bowling for Columbine, Diggers and Quid Pro Quo, among other projects. Based on a novel by Daniel Woodrell, Winter’s Bone tells the story of 17-year-old Ree (Jennifer Lawrence), who tends her younger siblings and catatonic mother. Ree faces the prospect of losing the family home after her drug-addicted father posts it as bond and then disappears. Her quest to find him takes her from one ramshackle house to another, where she confronts tight-lipped kin and a self-protective meth culture that turns ugly when cornered. “I love the book — I think it’s Annie Proulx with a male voice,” says McDonough. He encouraged Granik and producer Anne Rosellini to purchase the rights, and he signed onto the project as an associate producer. “Michael was the first person who said, ‘I’m not having one more discussion about whether we should option this. I’m coming with my paycheck tomorrow, and everyone will throw in a third,” recalls Granik. Because of tax incentives, proximity to New York City, and the greater likelihood of encountering snow, the producers flirted with the idea of shooting in the Catskills, but the Ozarks ultimately won out. “Debra wanted to have the local flavor, local people and correct accents,” says McDonough. The duo made six scouting trips, working closely with Richard Michaels, a local guide in Branson,


Winter’s Bone photos by Sebastian Mlynarski, courtesy of Roadside Attractions.

17-year-old Ree (Jennifer Lawrence, center) struggles to take care of her younger siblings (Ashlee Thompson, left, and Isaiah Stone) in the drama Winter’s Bone, which won the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

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Right: The filmmakers work on close shots for the climactic scene, in which two women take Dee to a pond to retrieve a body. Below: A shot from the final scene, which begins at dusk and lasts into the night.

Mo., who broke the ice with the local inhabitants. Michaels introduced the filmmakers to the Laysons, an extended family with several homes in one holler; the properties were all within a half-mile radius and became the production’s key locations. “We used it much like a set,” says Granik. “We could park our vehicles long-term and become very familiar with the terrain.” The Laysons’ daughter wound up playing Dee’s little sister, “and their dogs are in every frame,” adds Granik. “There were no less 18

June 2010

than 11 of them!” The filmmakers planned to shoot in winter, true to the novel’s setting. “Winter makes any journey more arduous,” Granik observes. “When it’s cold, the idea of not having enough food becomes direr, the state of the woodpile becomes direr, and the stakes are higher for survival. There’s a kind of tenacity that winter calls upon.” Tenacity was also required of the producers — two months before principal photography was to begin, in 2008, their American Cinematographer

financier backed out. The team managed to refinance, but had to wait until the following winter to shoot. “We were 50 percent poorer but 100 percent freer,” says Granik. The filmmakers’ visual anthropology deepened during the intervening year. “We took thousands of photographs,” says McDonough. Selections went into a “look book” alongside stills from Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County USA, Justin Hunt’s American Meth, Jane Campion’s The Piano, and Bruno Dumont’s La vie de Jésus. McDonough studied The Piano and The Duellists for their use of natural light; Dumont for his desaturated, lyrical landscapes; and the early films of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne for their handheld camera movement. “Debra loves handheld, but she doesn’t like shaky-cam,” he notes. Granik describes her goal as “a handheld camera in service to a gentle swiftness, without gratuitous movement.” Framing at 1.85:1, McDonough shot Winter’s Bone with a Red One, using Arri Master Primes and 24-290mm and 1540mm Angenieux Optimo zoom lenses. “We had great lenses, and that was important,” says McDonough. “The Red’s an inexpensive camera, but if you’re going to do it properly, you’ve got to get $200,000 worth of accessories. We were very lucky to

Right: Director Debra Granik and cinematographer Michael McDonough work out their approach to an interior. Below: With 1st AC Michael Burke standing by in the background, McDonough prepares to take a reading.

get a reasonably priced rental from Abel Cine Tech [in New York].” The filmmakers used three Red Drives, whose 320GB capacity allowed Granik to run multiple takes without breaking. “During Down to the Bone, we had a saying, ‘Still rolling,’ printed on T-shirts,” says McDonough, “and we applied the same shooting philosophy to this movie. The risk is that if a drive goes down, you lose a lot of material!” Shooting single camera, the cinematographer had a second Red for backup and occasional B-unit work. Halfway through the shoot, the A camera began inexplicably shutting down about 10 hours into the day. “I think it was the hard drive — it just gets tired,” muses McDonough. A different problem affected the backup camera. “We plugged in the same settings, but across the board, it had noise issues,” he says. McDonough decided to tap camera 20

June 2010

operator Alan Pierce for the project. “I believe that as the director of photography on a digital feature, I have to be watching the monitor and assessing the image, more so than on a film feature,” says McDonough. “The image I see through the digital camera’s viewfinder is not sufficient, I believe, to allow me to do my job properly; I’d be handing off a massive amount of my responsibility to someone else. When you’ve got a long, close relationship with a director and handheld operating is important, the trick is to find an operator who can keep the visual language consistent. I’ve worked with Al for years and knew he would get the style Debra and I have developed on our collaborations.” McDonough lit day interiors through windows using an 18K or 4Ks, supplementing inside with small tungsten units, Kino Flos or China balls. “I worked as a gaffer for years, so I know where to put lights, and we American Cinematographer

don’t move them around much once we start,” he says. That helped keep the tempo up. “Debra likes actors to feel it’s not just a series of shots. She wants them to feel like they’re in a real environment so they can stay in character for long periods of time.” In low-light interiors, McDonough dealt with the Red’s native 320 ASA by shooting without filtration and lighting as if he were using 250-ASA film and fast lenses. “The camera’s sensor is balanced for daylight, so once you get into tungsten, it’s less sensitive. With digital, I always want to get a healthy ‘negative,’ so I light up more and crush it later.” Consistent with the backwoods settings, fall-off and darkness were common in night scenes. “Through watching films like The Duellists, I got comfortable with half the actor’s face being dark,” Granik says. “For swiftness, China balls and Kino Flos are my best friends, and Michael will swing that way. He can do ornate lighting, of course, but he’s willing to strip it down to collaborate with me.” Grip equipment was also lean. An EasyRig occasionally came into play, and the crew devised some poor-man’s tracking devices. For shots of Dee walking down the road, McDonough put a Matthews bungee mount inside a van and shot through the open side door. At a cattle auction, he saw the potential of the catwalk railing to act as dolly track and fitted an adjustable CamTranSystem to ride the handrails. This tracked with Dee as she walked down the catwalk and provided some POV shots when she chased another character. For the climactic night scene, in which Dee is taken to a pond to retrieve a body, Condors were not an option. McDonough’s solution was to divide the scene into dusk, day-for-night and night-fornight, shooting the entire scene in one day. The filmmakers arrived at noon under an uncharacteristically blazing sun, donned wading gaiters, and went into the water to capture wide shots with a classic day-fornight approach: “Shoot in the daytime, avoid seeing the sky, crush it and make it a cooler color in post.” Next, they waited until dusk to shoot the scene’s opening, when Dee and two older women arrive, park and walk down to the lake. “We had about a 20-

Gail (Lauren Sweetser) is one of the friends Ree calls upon in her quest to locate her father.

minute window to shoot all of that,” says McDonough. “We had maybe two takes.” With the light nearly gone, the second, slightly zoomed-in take required them to switch off the electronic shutter for extra exposure. “Debra and the editor loved the tighter shot, but to me, it’s the one shot in the movie that looks like video,” admits McDonough. “Because there’s no shutter, there’s a smearing effect.” Night-for-night was trickier still. Filming on dry land, with the camera angled low, the filmmakers shot close-ups of the women in the boat, retrieving their gruesome catch. “We used 4-by-4 Kino Flos with 250 diffusion in the foreground, and bounced a 2K Fresnel into a trough of water to create the ripple effect of moonlight on the pond,” says McDonough. The difficult part was matching the day’s earlier footage. “The background was lit with our 4K HMI Pars because we needed some extra intensity, some edgelight on the branches and trees, to mimic the intensity of the sunlight we’d encountered in the day-for-night shoot. We also back-/edgelit the actors with a couple of 2K Blondes. We were able to minimize the color difference between the tungsten and HMI lights in the digital intermediate, as the whole palette was shifted quite dramatically.” After RAW data was converted to 10-bit DPX files, McDonough spent six days on the digital grade at Technicolor New York, where he worked with colorist Tim Stipan on an Autodesk Lustre Incinerator platform. The finalized files were recorded 22

out to 35mm, and a festival print was struck on Fuji Eterna-CP 3513DI. “Once the prints went through the IN/IP stage, I found the Fuji print stock too low-contrast, so our general-release prints will be done on Kodak Vision Premier [2393],” notes McDonough. Granik was pleased when she saw Winter’s Bone projected on the big screens at the Sundance and Berlin film festivals this year. “I wanted the Red reps in there so I could say, ‘Baby, it held up well!’” she says. McDonough also gives the Red positive reviews, but with qualifications: “Even though it’s a beautiful image, it’s a frustrating workflow.” With Panavision’s Genesis, he explains, you can shoot tests, colorcorrect them and then plug those look-up tables back into the camera to have that metadata ride with the dailies. But with the Red, “you can only affect the image coming out of the Red on the monitor, not in the camera. So you have to go back to zero in post, and that’s frustrating. But I believe digital cinema is the future, and it’s going to get better.”

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England’s “Dirty Harry” By Mark Hope-Jones

To younger audiences who think of Michael Caine as Bruce Wayne’s affable butler, Alfred, in recent Batman films, his turn as the ruthless title character in Harry Brown might come as something of a shock. But to those familiar with Caine’s work in such classics as Get Carter (1971) and the Harry Palmer series, it is a welcome return to darker territory. Harry Brown, which focuses on a retired military serviceman who lives in a terrifyingly lawless housing project in a nameless English city, is the feature-directing debut of Daniel Barber, who earned an Academy Award nomination for the 2007 live-action short film The Tonto Woman (codirected with Matthew Brown). The film is the third feature credit for cinematographer Martin Ruhe, following Control (AC Nov. ’07) and The Countess (2009). 24

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Ruhe and Barber first collaborated on a commercial for British television. “We were talking about the commercial, but even then Daniel told me he was prepping this feature and that he’d send me the screenplay,” recalls the cinematographer. “The commercial went well, and from then on I was sure I wanted to do the feature. Daniel is a very visual director, it was a chance to work with Michael Caine, it would be a challenge to make, and I liked the screenplay.” Harry Brown was the first British feature production to shoot with the Sony F35, a decision influenced both by budget and the script’s high quotient of night scenes. “I didn’t have a lot of experience with digital, and we tested the F35 alongside Arri’s D-21 and Panavision’s Genesis,” says Ruhe. “We didn’t consider the Red [One] because of its compression levels and because it isn’t very sensitive. For a short time, we considered shooting real anamorAmerican Cinematographer

Harry Brown photos by Dean Rogers, courtesy of Harry Brown Productions Ltd./Samuel Goldwyn Films.

Above: Retired soldier Harry Brown (Michael Caine) takes the safety of his neighborhood into his own hands in Harry Brown. Right: One of the local hoodlums (Sean Harris) gets too close for comfort when Brown turns up to buy some guns.

phic in Mscope with the D-21, but in the end, it came down to the Genesis and the F35, and I felt the F35 was a bit more advanced in its image quality. “After shooting night tests, I decided to rate the camera at 1,000 ASA, add some gain and shoot in HQ mode for night scenes,” he continues. “That, combined with [T1.3] Arri Master Primes, allowed us to go very low-light for night scenes, which meant our sets blended into the surroundings and looked very real.” Aside from two weeks at Elstree Studios, Harry Brown was shot on location in some of the least charming neighborhoods London and the surrounding area has to offer. “We went to all the glamorous places,” jokes Ruhe. “Hackney for the drug den, Romford for the hospital, Woolwich for the cemetery, and Elephant and Castle for the estate [housing project]. Michael Caine actually grew up near Elephant and Castle; the estate wasn’t there when he was young, but he’s in a mural on one of its walls!” Estates in the U.K. are associated with welfare housing, drugs, poverty and crime. This is the environment in which Brown lives peacefully, until a gang of disaffected youngsters savagely murders his best friend. The lackluster police response stretches Brown’s patience, and when he is mugged at knifepoint after drowning his sorrows at the local pub, his old military training kicks in — he turns the blade on his assailant, and then becomes a vigilante determined to avenge his friend’s death and clean up the estate. To establish a lighting approach for the location night exteriors, Ruhe and gaffer Julian White shot tests at the Elephant and Castle estate. “We liked how stills taken with long exposures in the real locations looked, so in terms of lighting, we tried to take it from there,” recalls Ruhe. “When you take stills on these estates at night, they actually look very aesthetic and nice, with mixes of greens and oranges.” This encouraged the filmmakers to develop a fairly relaxed approach to matching light sources. White notes, “Practically all the sodium lights on that estate have a slightly different color temperature — some are old, some are discolored, and some burn brighter than others. After the first recces, I suggested to

Right: Cast and crew prepare to shoot one of the film’s many low-light scenes. This one, featuring Brown’s interrogation of another young miscreant, was lit with a single 100-watt bulb (visible at right). Below: In a shot from the scene, Brown gets tough.

Martin that we should try to be dirty with it. Often cinematographers try to keep a look consistent, but the nature of the location and the story meant we didn’t have to worry too much about consistency. “Originally, we thought of using normal fixtures, like Arri X lights,” continues White. “But cost was an issue, and there were also concerns about how we’d rig and hide everything. When we did the camera tests, we brought in two lamps: a 400-watt sodium-vapor Atlas and a 400-watt mercury-vapor floodlight. They’re fairly 26

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brutal, but they do the job, and you can even have them in shot. A tungsten lamp with Full CTO would almost match the sodium, so if we did use tungsten, we didn’t stress about tweaking things or changing gels all the time. For the low light levels we wanted, the output of the Arri X lights was actually far too much, so we ended up turning those off and using the sodium-vapor and mercury-vapor lights. Daniel wanted to see all the streetlights in the backgrounds, so we had to try and keep everything around the camera quite low. We were kind American Cinematographer

of testing as we went along, but it worked very well.” This gritty look was continued into many interior scenes, including one in which Brown interrogates a gang member in the burned-out apartment of his dead friend. “I wanted that to be as raw as possible,” says Ruhe. “I considered what might actually be in a burned-out apartment, and thought there could be one lamp with a broken shade — essentially a naked bulb. It wouldn’t be enough to let you see everything in the room, and there would only be a little bit of light coming in from outside. I suggested that to Daniel, and he was daring enough to go with it.” One of the few scenes to be shot on a studio set, the interrogation was lit with a single 100-watt domestic light bulb dimmed down to about 80 percent. Outside the windows, a mixture of fluorescents and sodium-vapor units provided a slight glow and the suggestion of streetlight. Repeating a technique they successfully used on Control, Ruhe and White positioned the bare tubes and bulbs behind the window and diffused them with bubble wrap; the bubble wrap broke up and softened the light, making the sources look much farther away. For focus puller Tim Battersby, this was one of many scenes shot at T1.3 that

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Above: The production films in the tunnel where some of the bloodiest action occurs. Right: Cinematographer Martin Ruhe at work in the film’s key location, a grim housing project.

required all his skill to keep sharp. “It is very difficult, and with HD, you’re either bang-on or bang-off focus-wise,” he says. “With film, you’ve got that little bit of latitude within the depth of the film stock, but with HD, it’s almost like focusing onto a piece of glass. You can’t have both the character’s eyes in focus if he turns his head; you have

28

to go for one or the other. I was using an onboard monitor and had a Cine Tape on, but they only go down by the inch, and we were working at fractions of an inch. A lot of it was tape measures and keeping my fingers crossed!” Ruhe adds, “It was a hell of a job for Tim because the Master Primes go up to 150mm, and we were so often at

T1.3. I don’t know anybody else who could have done it. With focal lengths, Daniel would always want to go as long as the scene would allow, so we were often at around 75mm. “We also used an Angenieux Optimo 24-290mm for day exteriors,” says the cinematographer. “For day scenes, I

rated the camera at 500 ASA and used an 85 filter. To be honest, in tests, I couldn’t see any difference between using an 85 and resetting the camera to 5,600°K.” The onboard monitor Battersby used for pulling focus was an Astro, which Ruhe also used extensively. “Probably the most useful thing was the waveform display on the Astro — I used it more than my light meter,” says Ruhe. Supplementing this was a 17" monitor that showed live images in HD, though playback was only available as a composite picture. Ruhe usually operated the F35 himself, and single-camera setups were the norm. “We shot most of the movie on dollies or legs,” he says. “There’s a riot scene and a shootout that we did handheld, but with Harry, the camera only really starts to move when he does. At the beginning, it’s very static, and we tried to find frames within the frame so he appears locked in. We wanted a claustrophobic feel for those early scenes.” Brown finally discovers exactly how his friend died when he sees footage of the killing that one of the gang members captured on his cell phone. These images

echo the movie’s opening sequence, in which two hooligans on a motorcycle film their shooting of a young mother and are then hit by a truck. For these shots, Ruhe needed to find an appropriately low-resolution video camera that would still work on the big screen. “We tested a couple of cameras, including the SI-2K [Mini], but the quality was too good,” he says. “We also tested real mobile phones, but in the end we used a Sony DCR-PC2E, a slightly older Mini DV camera. They were provided by Take 2, who supplied all of our camera gear. We gave a camera to the two guys on the bike and let them ride around to give the footage an authentic feel. That scene and the killing of Harry’s friend were a mix of actors operating shots and second-unit work [directed by Ben and Joe Dempsey].” Harry Brown’s desaturated color palette was achieved mainly in the digital grade, carried out on a Baselight system at Framestore in London. “We desaturated the image a bit and worked on the contrast levels — with HD, it’s tricky to keep detail in the blacks at low light levels, and we had tons of those,” says Ruhe. He and Barber

also utilized sharpening tools. “It wasn’t really needed on long-lens shots, but on wider shots,” notes Ruhe. “For example, there’s a wide shot of Harry sitting beside his wife in the hospital, and it was nice to add a bit of sharpness to his face so your eye was drawn to him.”

TECHNICAL SPECS 2.40:1 Digital Capture Sony F35, DCR-PC2E Arri and Angenieux lenses Digital Intermediate Printed on Fuji Eterna-CP 3513DI

●

ERRATUM In our coverage of Lebanon (April ’10, p. 20), colorist Andreas Froehlich was incorrectly identified as an employee of Geyer Cologne. He is the manager/senior colorist at Head Quarter GmbH, also in Cologne.

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John Mathieson, BSC brings a brawny aesthetic to Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood. By Mark Hope-Jones •|•

Slings and

Arrows T he fable of Robin Hood, the archetypal philanthropist outlaw with a hands-on approach to redistributing wealth, is one of the oldest in English folklore. Literary depictions of him and his band of merry men as popular heroes first emerged in narrative ballads of the 14th century, and continue to this day. Motion pictures took up the mantle from their earliest beginnings; cinematic adaptations of the story number in the dozens and now have a history that spans more than a century. The latest adaptation is the current release Robin Hood, directed by Ridley Scott and shot by regular collaborator John Mathieson, BSC. “I think it’s great for England’s biggest director to make

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June 2010

this quintessential English tale, set in an English landscape,” says Mathieson. “It seems natural and logical that Ridley should make Robin Hood — and do it his way. This story is about a country in crisis and big social upheavals. This Robin Hood has far more of a political vision; he actually starts a revolution and brings the country together. The events bring about the Magna Carta, which was the beginning of all of our democracies, in a way. The film isn’t a romp in the woods.” Scott and Mathieson have worked together several times since their first film together, Gladiator (AC May ’00). Most recently, they paired up for Kingdom of Heaven (AC June ’05), a medieval saga set just a short time before the


Photos by David Appleby, Kerry Brown and Greg Williams, courtesy of Universal Studios.

Opposite: Royal archer Robin Longstride (Russell Crowe) aims to spark a revolution in Robin Hood. This page, top: Robin leads his key men on horseback: Allan A’Dayle (Alan Doyle), Will Scarlet (Scott Grimes) and Little John (Kevin Durand). Middle: John Mathieson, BSC gets medieval with his light meter. Bottom: the newly crowned King John (Oscar Isaac) confers with a key adviser, Sir William Marshal (William Hurt).

historical period covered in Robin Hood. This meant that various elements of their visual approach to a story based around the Crusades had already been established, although the two films take place against quite different backdrops. Whereas Kingdom of Heaven incorporates dramatic desert landscapes in the Holy Land, Robin Hood plays out entirely in northern France and England. Scott brought up the work of the Brueghel dynasty of painters as a www.theasc.com

June 2010

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Slings and Arrows

visual reference for European winter landscapes, and Mathieson traveled to Brussels to view some of their work. “Ridley wanted to shoot the pastoral English countryside — he wanted that kind of Brueghel landscape,” recalls the cinematographer. “We had two fantastically harsh winters, but unfortunately, we kind of missed them both [because of production delays]. That look of black trees against a hilly, snow-covered landscape was something we were after.” In terms of a color palette, Mathieson says he and Scott wanted to avoid the rich greens and reds that characterize one of the most famous Robin Hood adaptations, Michael Curtiz’s early Technicolor production The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). “There are a lot of burned browns and dark colors in our costumes and the sets,” says Mathieson. “It’s a pretty mucky-looking film, but we did shoot in the summer, and our ideal would have been to shoot right through the winter. I just love the winter light in the U.K. — the slow, long sun. It was a very wet summer, so we did get a lot of overcast skies, but an overcast sky in summer is not very interesting because there’s no movement in it. It’s often just a flat white, and you want more gray.” Robin Hood was shot in Super 35mm rather than anamorphic for a

Top: Robin takes aim during a forest battle. Middle: Our hero seeks the counsel of Sir Walter Loxley (Max von Sydow). Bottom: After being relieved of his duties by the king, Marshal is taunted by his replacement, Godfrey (Mark Strong). Top right: Godfrey musters his troops.

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June 2010


number of practical reasons, according to Mathieson. “Everyone thinks Ridley is a purist in his photography, and he is, but he loves a zoom lens,” says the cinematographer. “If you’re doing a tracking shot, you can strengthen the composition throughout without it feeling like a zoom. It’s just more convenient to zoom in a bit and go again than to spend time changing the lens while everyone’s waiting. And if you’ve got to climb a hill, you’d rather take one zoom than a whole box of lenses. “Another consideration was that anamorphic zooms start at around a T5.6 and only look good at T11, and in the woods, you want to be at T2.8 or less,” he continues. “Also, ’Scope lenses aren’t that long, and you want long lenses when you’re shooting horses and landscapes. We were up to a 1,000mm and longer. We had an [Optica] Elite [T2.8] 120-520mm with a doubler on it. We also used a [Panavision] Primo 3:1 135-420mm, often with a doubler. It’s a good device if you’ve got a big stunt and a lot of horses; it gives you a nice, thick shot of the melee of battle, creating a documentary look that makes you feel like you’re right in it. We also had the new 19-90mm Panavision Compact Zoom, which was very good,

Top: Isabella of Angoulême (Léa Seydoux) informs John of Godfrey’s duplicity when he is still a prince with aspirations to the throne. Fireplaces and candles had to justify the light in some fairly cavernous sets built at Shepperton Studios, so the crew employed single-wick, double-wick and triple-wick candles on chandeliers and candelabras to create a strong impression of source lighting. However, as Mathieson notes, “You also have to put some ambience in the room. For that, we’d often use space lights very low down or simple batten strips with household bulbs hanging overhead.” Bottom: Isabella and John share a more intimate moment.

and some [Angenieux] Optimos — the 15-40mm and 28-76mm both have a very useful range. Every time we could use a zoom lens, we did. You need a good range of lenses and a lot of telephoto when you’re shooting with so many cameras, because you’ve got to stay out of each other’s way.” The production often had up to a dozen Arri cameras — Arricam Studios and Lites and Arri 235s — running at once. The principal camera operators were Peter Taylor, Martin Hume and Paul Edwards. “Chris Plevin did a lot of www.theasc.com

operating as well, and Paul and I both did some Steadicam work,” adds Mathieson. “We only limited ourselves to two cameras when we were onstage at Shepperton. The rest of the time, we seemed to have hundreds of them. I think every camera technician I know turned up at some point during the shoot!” The second unit, led by director/cinematographer Alexander Witt, was also extremely large. “Sometimes it was bigger than we were,” notes Mathieson. “I’ve done three or four films with Alex, and he knows what June 2010

33

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Slings and Arrows

Right: Marion (Cate Blanchett) pours the wine while having dinner with Robin and Loxley. Below: The fair maiden’s feelings for Robin grow stronger with each encounter.

he’s doing. We’d talk about our work, but they were very quick conversations.” The film’s titular character, played by Russell Crowe, begins the story as Robin Longstride, an archer in King Richard’s army. Returning from the Third Crusade, the army stops to lay siege to a castle in France and reclaim monies previously paid as ransom to the French monarch. This sequence was filmed at Bourne Woods 34

June 2010

in Surrey, England, where Mathieson and Scott also shot the opening scenes of Gladiator. A huge set of the French castle was built for exterior scenes. Key grip Gary Hymns recalls, “The castle was 60 feet high, and we lifted a 30foot Technocrane onto the top with a Lee Lifting crane. We also had a Strada crane parked by the castle and swung it in as the horses charged, then lifted it 60 feet in the air.” All-terrain vehicles proved espeAmerican Cinematographer

cially useful at the location, as the castle was built atop a hill, with a village set positioned below it. In particular, the Raptor, a self-leveling vehicle supplied by Chapman, was in almost constant use. “We could put a 30-foot Technocrane on the Raptor, drive it in and push a button, and it would level itself,” says Hymns. “With a 30-foot arm, you’ve instantly got a 60-foot track that you can put anywhere you want in no time at all, so it’s incredibly versatile.” Other vehicles included quad bikes and a six-wheeled Gator supporting a hard-mounted Steadicam (for traveling shots of galloping horses). The trickiest problem for Mathieson at this and other woodland locations was the heavy summer foliage. “The woods were an absolute pain,” he says. “When a beech tree throws its leaves out in high summer, no light comes down to the ground. Nothing grows under them because there’s no light. Your light meter reads nothing at all. I was underexposed, even when I was pushing [Kodak Vision3 500T] 5219 one stop, sometimes more, and shooting wide open. I can deal with underexposure, but the quality of the light was very flat because the trees covered everything. When you put a

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Slings and Arrows

Right: Director Ridley Scott blocks out a scene in the woods. Bottom left: The crew deploys bounce cards amid the trees. Bottom right: Scott, enthroned in his director’s chair, concentrates on a shot.

long lens on, the background went mushy green. It was very difficult to get good contrast and separation. We used smoke and did what we could.” In combination with the smoke, large lights were used to provide dappled backlight, though getting them into position was quite a challenge. “We got a woodsman in with a huge saw, and he swung about from tree to tree, cutting down limbs for us,” says Alan 36

June 2010

Martin, the film’s gaffer. That cleared paths for light to reach the forest floor, but left the problem of how to get the fixtures into position. “It’s difficult, because if you’re doing a fast-moving sequence and you start putting up towers, they just get in the way, and then you spend even more time taking them down.” The solution was to lift the lights into place with a crane. “We used 18Ks and 100K SoftSuns,” American Cinematographer

continues Mathieson. “The good thing about the SoftSuns was that if we stacked one on top of another, we could look straight at them, because they formed a single round source up in the trees — that was our low sun. They were great. They didn’t actually light the scene that much, but they gave us a bit of light and depth in the distance, something bright in the background.” Though some of the difficulties

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Slings and Arrows created by the summertime shoot were addressed in the digital intermediate, carried out at Company 3 with colorist Stephen Nakamura, Mathieson maintains that “a lot of the timing could have been done photochemically were it not for the 800-plus visual effects shots. CGI was often used to complement and extend landscape shots, allowing us to bolster the number of horses and soldiers to make it look like an army. You used to have to lock the camera off for shots like that, but you can do a surprising amount of movement now, and that’s good, because it makes the CGI less obvious.” Maintaining an authentic feel to action scenes was important to the cinematographer. “It’s a down-and-dirty action film, so we didn’t want our visual-effects shots sticking out. A lot of those shots are very real, with multiple cameras and a lot of stunt men, riders and extras, so it was a matter of supplementing them. Arrows were put in [digitally] because with CGI, you don’t have to cheat the direction the archers are pointing. But we still shot some arrows on set. My father came down one day, and he used to be a professional soldier and wasn’t too worried about arrows raining down on him. He had experience marching right through them!” One important advantage that visual effects brought the production was the ability to position camera operators in shot. Mathieson explains, “For a lot of the CG material, Ridley would stick a camera right in the middle of the action, so we’d all have to dress up in silly outfits and try to disguise the camera. We looked embarrassingly awful, but Ridley could put us right in there and then remove the camera [in post]. There was a lot of camera removal! We could go for the shot and worry about it later.” The closing battle in Robin Hood takes place on a vast beach where French invaders are met by the English forces. Filmed over two difficult weeks at Freshwater West in Wales, the sequence involved 1,500 cast and crew

Top: In an English camp, Robin challenges Little John to a sleight-of-hand game. Middle: Robin and his steed gallop into battle against French invaders in a major sequence shot at Freshwater West in Wales. Bottom: A determined Robin won’t let water slow him down.

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Clods of dirt fly through the air amid the heat of battle. As he did on Gladiator, Mathieson used different frame rates and shutter angles to lend extra impact to action scenes.

members shooting action both on land and in the water, and called for more than 10 cameras. “The tide was our biggest problem because it was coming in so quickly,” recalls Hymns. “All the grip equipment and cranes were mobile, so we’d form a line, and as the sea came in, we’d retreat 50 yards, line up again and shoot until we had to go back another 50 yards. We had various tracking vehicles with cranes and remote heads, and a helicopter for the widest shots. Gary ‘Gizza’ Smith, our best boy grip, did a fantastic job rigging a Libra head onto a jet ski, which chased around all the landing craft coming in. I was with Paul Hymns on the Giraffe crane, which was mounted on a 25-foot trailer behind a tractor that backed us as far into the sea as we could go. We stayed out there in wetsuits and shot from the crane, pulling out at the last moment.” Continuing an approach he used

on Gladiator, Mathieson utilized different frame rates and shutter angles (most often 60-degree, and occasionally 45-degree) for this battle sequence and others. “Ridley likes that visceral stuff, especially for fights,” says the cinematographer. “If you narrow the shutter on a guy who’s wearing chainmail and armor and is soaked from fighting in the sea, he’s going to look a lot more agile than if you shoot with normal speed and shutter angle. There isn’t much slow motion, but we did go for a hard, crisp look — arrows are visible in the air, and you see the highlights on swinging swords. If you take away motion blur, you make everything crisper, and it gives action more adrenaline.” For studio night interiors at Shepperton, fireplaces and candles had to justify the light in some fairly cavernous rooms. “I think that candles should look as though they’re actually

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Slings and Arrows

Left: Mathieson mans an Arricam on location. Right: Robin and his men encounter the enemy.

lighting a ‘candlelit’ scene,” says Mathieson. “I like candles to give a bit of exposure to the area they’re in, so I tried to shoot as wide as I possibly could with the zoom. Obviously, you could shoot on primes, but for speed, we really had to use zoom lenses, and pushing the 5219 helped.” Using large numbers of single-wick, double-wick and triple-wick candles on chandeliers and candelabras gave a strong impres-

sion of source lighting, but Mathieson notes that “you also have to put some ambience in the room. For that, we’d often use space lights very low down or simple batten strips with household bulbs hanging overhead. You can’t be too noir about it. Candlelight is actually quite soft, and it does fill a room.” Fireplaces were a useful source, particularly in King John’s sizeable throne room. “[Production designer]

Arthur Max put a huge fireplace in that set, and John asked him to make the back and the sides removable, so if we weren’t looking directly at the fire, we could put in a lighting rig,” says Martin. “We had a row of Six-light Maxi-Brutes behind the fire that we wired to a dimmer so we could pulse each individual bulb. That, with a combination of gels, gave us the desired effect. We could make it as

fierce or as low as we wanted.” A menu of gels that Martin and Mathieson selected in advance helped create unique looks for different times of day and night on the interior sets. Blue gels in windows were often combined with warm gels inside to create contrast between interior and exterior light. Mathieson notes, “You can mix color temperatures in the frame more now, especially because of the control you have in the DI. That said, I did try to gel [lights] and shoot as though we’d be doing a photochemical finish, because if you expose the negative properly with the right colors at the right temperatures, you get a head start on the final timing.” Though he used many different gels, Mathieson avoided putting filters in front of the cameras whenever he could. “I’m always putting lights really close to the edges [of the frame], so if you put a piece of glass in front of the lens, you’re basically pushing the lens element forward, and you can get more flares. Also, with nine

cameras, you’re not going to stop and say, ‘Let’s all change filters!’” Scheduling conflicts prevented Mathieson from participating in most of the digital grade, so Nakamura worked with Scott instead. Several looks had been created when the visual-effects plates were graded, so Nakamura had a reference for the majority of scenes. Color correction was done on a DaVinci Resolve using 2K proxies; the final filmout was at 4K. “We tested a 2K filmout and a 4K filmout with the same grade to show Ridley how they looked, and he preferred the grain structure of the 4K version,” recalls Nakamura. Mathieson joined Nakamura for an intense few days toward the end of the grade. “I spent what time I could with it, and then I had to let it go, and that was fine,” says the cinematographer. “I think a lot of films look the same these days because there’s too much fiddling around in the DI. A scene might be slightly underexposed

or overexposed, and if you leave it the way it is, there’s a visual rhythm when all the scenes are cut together. If you fiddle with every frame in every single scene, there’s no journey in the film photographically.” ●

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Desert

John Seale, ASC, ACS and his collaborators conquer daunting logistics on the period adventure film Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.

Storm

By Michael Goldman •|•

A

dapted from a video game created by Jordan Mechner, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time follows an adventurous prince, Dastan ( Jake Gyllenhaal), who joins forces with a princess, Tamina (Gemma Arterton), to prevent an ancient dagger with magical powers from falling into villainous hands. The project, which director Mike Newell calls “a gigantic undertaking,” was in production throughout much of 2008, incorporating, at times, four or five separate units working on four desert locations in Morocco and on 10 stages at 42

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England’s Pinewood Studios. According to the film’s director of photography, John Seale, ASC, ACS, Kristian Davies’ book The Orientalist, which features paintings of life in Persia and other parts of ancient Arabia, was the primary inspiration for the movie’s visuals. “The book is a beautiful collection of visual material, and we based the [look] and a lot of the lighting on that — knowing, of course, that we could finesse many of the details in the digital intermediate,” says Seale. “In particular, we wanted very dramatic skies, the kind you could spend a year looking for and never actually film for real. [Visual-effects supervisor] Tom Wood worked hard on lots of sky replacements. We also used the DI to focus attention on certain parts of the frame, like those painters did when they focused light on what they wanted you to concentrate on.” In addition to helping the filmmakers achieve a painterly aesthetic, Prince of Persia’s 1,400 or so visual-effects shots often required extensive set extensions and the blending of practical photography with CGI, making the acquisition of plates on location and onstage equally complicated. Thus, the nuances of lighting were a central issue throughout the shoot.


Unit photography by Andrew Cooper, SMPSP. Images courtesy of Disney Enterprises, Inc. and Jerry Bruckheimer, Inc.

Opposite: Prince Dastan (Jake Gyllenhaal) takes up arms against a lethal Hassansin (Thomas DuPont) in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. This page, top: Dansan partners with Princess Tamina (Gemma Arterton) to safeguard a magical dagger. Bottom left: The nefarious Nizam (Ben Kingsley) has his own plans for the dagger, which can turn back time. Bottom right: Cinematographer John Seale, ASC, ACS prepares for action.

It all started in Morocco, where 2nd-unit director/cinematographer Alexander Witt and his crew filmed particularly challenging stunts and captured hundreds of plates for visualeffects shots. Key grip Tommaso Mele recalls that his crew continually found themselves maneuvering Fisher 10 and 11 dollies, a 30' Technocrane mounted on a Raptor utility vehicle, a variety of diffusion materials, and dozens of bluescreens and greenscreens around the desert to film horse stunts, hand-to-

hand combat, armies on the march and other action. For the look in Morocco, the filmmakers referenced exterior scenes in Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven (AC June ’05), which Tom Wood had also worked on, and which was also partly shot in Morocco. “Morocco has such a pitiless blue sky at that time of year — almost no weather changes,” says Newell. “Tom was well aware of this, and he showed John and me several panoramic shots in Kingdom of Heaven www.theasc.com

so we could see the progression of visual-effects passes they’d done with cloud and sun manipulations. We decided to [emulate] some of that.” The sky-replacement work on Prince of Persia was achieved sometimes with 3-D effects, and other times with CG matte paintings that incorporated stills Wood had shot with his Canon 5D. (Some of these stills were actually captured in London, just outside Pinewood Studios.) “We all understood that the digiJune 2010

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Desert Storm

tal grade would be absolutely vital for achieving what we wanted to achieve, and we decided to do a lot of the color composition at that end stage,” continues Newell. “John Seale then figured out how to produce a negative that would suit that.” Newell and Seale agree that the extensive DI work, carried out at Ascent 142 in London with Company 3 colorist/ASC associate member Stefan Sonnenfeld, was practical and necessary for a production that simply couldn’t dot every “i” and cross every “t” as it swept across the world on a constricted timeline. “I left particular finessing for the DI, and I’m not ashamed of that,” says Seale. “I really feel you have to honor the schedule, even on something this big and complicated, and the DI lets you

Top left: Dastan scales a castle wall, a set built onstage at Pinewood Studios. Top right: The castle set came within feet of the lighting grid, requiring bluescreen to hide the ceiling and equipment. Middle: The Pinewood sets were used to film a massive castlestorming sequence. Bottom: Space lights provide ambience as Kino Flo Image 80s illuminate the bluescreen.

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leave some simple problems alone on the set, things that might take 30 minutes or longer to fix. So part of my job during the shoot was to determine what we could leave to the DI process while we maintained our schedule.” Prince of Persia was shot in 4-perf Super 35mm, and Seale took his customary approach, shooting a single, high-speed film stock (Kodak Vision2 500T 5218), using multiple cameras, and relying almost exclusively on zoom lenses — in this case, Panavision’s 11:1 24-275mm Primo, 3:1 135-420mm Primo, and new T2.8 19-90mm Compact. “Phil Radin at Panavision, our ‘camera angel,’ gave us two of the very first Compact zooms, and great little weapons they are!” says Seale. (The production also used a variety of Primo prime lenses.) “500-ASA negative does a lot for you, and it will handle midday [scenes] if you just haul it back — you put a whole lot of 85ND filters in front of the lens,” continues Seale. “As the light expires, you start pulling the NDs out to increase the ASA. And if the color temperature shifts toward the warmth of a late afternoon, you start pulling the 85 out in small quantities as well. I developed this whole filter system on The Mosquito Coast (AC Feb. ’87), and I haven’t used a slow-speed stock since then. “I shot first unit [on Persia] with four cameras, trying to get performances without having to spend five hours on it. We were using four cameras all the time,

cross shooting, and the actors and the editors loved it because it’s more organic. The main challenge, of course, is lighting for so many cameras, but that’s solved by lighting 360 degrees — at least, it is when you have a gaffer like Mo Flam. The bigger challenge is lighting a bigger background, especially if there are lots of visual effects. But I’m finding there are little things you learn when cross shooting, like how to use one person’s backlight as another person’s fill. The bottom line is, if you use multiple cameras and cross shoot, it’s going to work out if you know what you are doing, light ahead in your mind, and make sure each of those cameras is productive.” Prince of Persia’s technical requirements grew even more complicated once the project landed at Pinewood, because enormous sets were built on those stages. Newell calls that leg of the shoot “a huge circus and a colossal shebang,” noting that multiple stages and units were active almost constantly. At the center of the madness was a crucial action sequence, Prince Dastan’s storming of an ancient Indian castle. Originally, the filmmakers hoped to build the castle set in Morocco, but early in production, they realized that was impractical — the most suitable location was in a windy region, close to some mountains. “We were very worried the set might blow over,” says Newell. Therefore, the sequence was moved to Pinewood and changed from daytime to nighttime to make it more logistically feasible. On Pinewood’s James Bond Stage, production designer Wolf Kroeger and his crew created a massive set piece representing the fortified Eastern gate of the castle, and the top of the set was just a few feet from the large lighting grid that was required for the sequence, which starts at night and finishes in morning light. “The lighting rig was a problem,” concedes Witt, whose second unit filmed much of the action at the castle. Extensive bluescreen was required to hide the grid and lighting equipment, but in some areas,

The film’s 1,400-plus visual-effects shots, supervised by Tom Wood, often called for sky replacements and the seamless blending of practical photography with CGI.

the set was too close to the grid to utilize bluescreen adequately. “It’s a big action scene that involves a lot of actors, stuntmen, horses and fire,” says Witt. “Most of the lights hanging from the ceiling were skirted space lights, and we dimmed them or turned some on or off to suggest changes in time of day. For sunlight and highlights, we used about 10 20K Molebeams and 15 20K lights on scissor lifts, adding CTO as necessary. In the www.theasc.com

end, they had to do more work in post than they originally intended to take out the rig and clean up some shots. In that sense, almost every shot in the sequence is an effects shot.” Seale notes that the nature of the set made it virtually impossible to correctly light all of the bluescreens, and occasionally the bluescreens proved useless. “The set, in places, was within 2 meters of the grid; it was a nightmare to light and fully cover the actors’ backJune 2010

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A wall of 144 Martin Stagebar LED fixtures was constructed behind a giant “crystal” setpiece and controlled by Chris Gilbertson’s Light by Numbers system to create interactive lighting effects that served as a template for the visual-effects team.

ground with blue,” says the cinematographer. “It would have been a hell of a schedule and money-burner if Tom had demanded perfect, even light for that. Fortunately, he wasn’t too finicky about that as long as he could cut a good edge. The software and the artists’ skill level has improved so much that they can work around such problems so we can 46

June 2010

keep the whole thing moving along. That saved me a lot of angst.” Meanwhile, the production had eight other stages going at Pinewood much of the time. Confronted with the challenge of maintaining a brisk shooting pace despite the logistics, detail and interaction those separate shoots required, particularly where lighting was American Cinematographer

concerned, the filmmakers essentially “threw the kitchen sink at the problem,” says Flam, the key gaffer. More specifically, he credits Chris Gilbertson’s Light by Numbers system for enabling the filmmakers to have as many dimmers and moving lights as they needed across multiple stages, with efficient control and a detailed data record. “With Light by Numbers, all the lighting changes are recorded and repeatable, so if we had to come back to a scene, we had all the details about how it was lit,” says Flam. “In addition to the first and second units, we had a few visual-effects units going, and they all used the system. The first unit could establish a look that could easily be repeated by other units.” Gilbertson served as key dimmerboard operator at Pinewood, managing a team of three operators who moved from stage to stage. “Our control desks are easy to physically maneuver, with pneumatic tires, handles, rain covers and so on, so we could move them whenever

Lighting diagram courtesy of Light by Numbers.

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Desert Storm we needed to, which meant the production didn’t have to pay to have desks all over the place. We could load all the stage files into each of the four systems we had and simply move them around. This did, of course, require some careful file management, but it saved the production a lot of money.” Among the reams of visual effects in the film, there are two sequences that serve as particularly effective illustrations of the cooperation between the camera department and the visualeffects team on set. The first is the “dagger-time” effect that appears several times in the film. A riff on The Matrix’s famous “bullet-time” effect (AC April ’99), which stops or visually slows down time, “dagger time” relates to a key story point: the dagger Prince Dastan seeks to protect can literally turn back time. Portions of the effect were shot by Wood’s crew with a specially cabled nine-camera rig from Panavision that was configured at Double Negative, one of the visual-effects houses on the project. According to Wood, Panavision technicians designed a cable combination that would sync each of nine PanArri 435s, with eight of them slaved to a master so that their shutters opened and closed at exactly the same time. Wood explains, “We shot it on a bluescreen stage using the nine-camera array, which was similar to the Matrix array but used motion-picture cameras instead of still cameras. Each camera was running at 48 fps with a 90-degree shutter angle; that gave us crisp, clean stills of the action that we could run backward in post. In the computer, we could put a virtual camera any place at any time within the sequence and see everything compressed into one frame, like a long exposure image. Then, through that frame, we could travel around the whole scene.” Seale adds, “The light level for this high-speed work had to be T16, and the first unit had shot the original scenes at T2.8. Mo kept records of our lighting and then replaced those lamps with larger units, or sometimes used two lamps instead of one, in the same basic spots to get the

Top: An aerial camera rig captures a daring rooftop chase. Middle: The crew captures a Steadicam shot on location in Morocco. Bottom: Seale regularly rolled up to four cameras simultaneously throughout the production. “If you use multiple cameras and cross shoot, it’s going to work out if you know what you are doing, light ahead in your mind, and make sure each of those cameras is productive,” he says.

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Desert Storm

Seale prepares to film some of the local talent in one of the four desert locations the production visited in Morocco.

increased stop that was necessary. The success of a complicated shoot like this depends on the crew’s ability to understand and execute what’s needed, and the camera, grip and electric crews were a great group of very keen and coordinated guys and girls.” The second unusual effect that required on-set solutions was a giant,

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light-emitting crystal, “about the size of a redwood tree, but with sand swirling around inside of it, depicting moments of certain characters’ pasts,” says Wood. The effect is triggered when a character plugs the magic dagger into the crystal to rewind time, giving him great power. Wood estimates that about half of the light and image projections are CGI,

but he credits Seale’s lighting team for creating a unique production solution to allow real-world light to meld with the effect, and for creating an on-set template for the visual-effects team to follow. Flam, Gilbertson and U.K. gaffer Steve Costello worked with the visualeffects team and the art department for months on various options for creating a close approximation of the final interactive lighting effect, with the goal of mapping lights to a video image of similar color and intensity. They finally settled on a specially designed LED wall. “We decided to create a wall of LEDs and run video content through it, sort of like a big TV,” says Gilbertson. “This was the most expensive option, but it meant we could actually run the visual-effects element live on set, while still getting the stop that John and Mo needed. We used 144 Martin Stagebars to create the LED wall, which measured approximately 14 feet by 10 feet. This

totaled more than 5,000 DMX channels, which were then driven by 10 DMX universes [signal streams] from a [Maxedia] media server. The server was loaded up with lots of different versions of the visual-effects element that would be added later. We then drove the media server with the normal lighting desk and controlled brightness, speed and other aspects of that content.” Flam suggests that these kinds of solutions have been in use for years in the theater world, but are now being incorporated more seamlessly into motion-picture production. “They use color changers and moving lights on Broadway and in rock ’n’ roll shows all the time, but we don’t in film unless there is a specific challenge,” says Flam. “We’re starting to find out that there are lots of interesting things we can do with this technology!” More generally, Seale observes that cinematography and visual effects on epics such as Prince of Persia are

evolving together into one interconnected whole. “For shows like this, cameramen should go hand-in-hand with the visual-effects guys to accept their awards,” says Seale. “What Tom and his team contributed to the cinematography on this picture is massive.” Newell is even more effusive on this point, noting that traditional divisions between departments have little meaning in the modern filmmaking landscape. “If you’re a cinematographer and you think you can just shoot a scene, deliver it to the visual-effects team and then step aside so they can do their magic, you are badly deceived,” declares the director. “On Prince of Persia, I felt there were actually three directors: me, John Seale and Tom Wood,” continues Newell. “Alex Witt and his second unit also made great contributions to figuring out the look and executing it. Directing a film like this is like being chairman of the board of the Ford

Motor Company: what you’re trying to achieve is so huge that all departments have to be interlocked.” ●

TECHNICAL SPECS 2.40:1 4-perf Super 35mm Panaflex Platinum, Lightweight; PanArri 235, 435 Panavision lenses Kodak Vision2 500T 5218 Digital Intermediate

51

Very French

Revenge Tetsuo Nagata, AFC films the whimsical thriller Micmacs for director Jean-Pierre Jeunet. By Benjamin B •|•

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irector Jean-Pierre Jeunet has imprinted a strong visual style on all his films, and he has been associated with top French directors of photography and with the pioneering of cinematography techniques. He began by collaborating with Darius Khondji, ASC, AFC, on two films co-directed with Marc Caro, Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children, which launched a renaissance of the ENR photochemical process in France. With Bruno Delbonnel, ASC, AFC, Jeunet made Amélie (AC Sept. ’01), which helped pioneer the use of the digital-intermediate to create a distinctive look, and A Very Long Engagement (AC

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Dec. ’04), which brought Delbonnel the first ASC Award ever given to a foreign-language film, as well as an Oscar nomination. For his latest picture, Micmacs (French slang for “muddles” or “intrigues”), Jeunet teamed with Tetsuo Nagata, AFC, who has won Cesar awards for Officer’s Ward and La Vie en Rose (AC June ’07). Nagata’s other feature credits include Blueberry, Narco, Until the Lights Come Back and Splice. He is also known for his commercial work, and before shooting Micmacs, he worked with Jeunet on a number of commercials, including a lavish spot for Chanel No. 5. Micmacs begins when a soldier dies by stepping on a mine. His young son, Bazil (Noé Boon), becomes obsessed with the mine’s French manufacturer. The film cuts to the adult Bazil (Dany Boon), a gentle dreamer who works in a video store. When a shootout goes wrong outside the shop, Bazil is shot in the head, and the doctors decide to leave the bullet where it is. After he loses his job and his home, Bazil is adopted by a group of oddball scavengers who live in a junkyard. One day, while scavenging, he comes upon two neighboring weapons firms and realizes that one of them built the mine that killed his father, while the other made the bullet that is lodged in his brain. Bazil decides to


Frame grabs and unit photography (by Bruno Calvo) courtesy of Epithète Films/Tapioca Films and Sony Pictures Classics. Additional photos courtesy of the filmmakers.

Opposite: Bazil (Dany Boon, left) listens in as fellow Micmac Remington (Omar Sy) helps him set a trap for a pair of arms dealers. This page, top: Young Bazil (Noé Boon) sees his mother (Lara Guirao) receive word of his father’s death. Bottom: An arms dealer’s security guards mock Bazil when he turns up to request compensation.

take his revenge upon the heads of both companies, and, with his friends’ help, devises a series of far-fetched strategies to sabotage the weapons factories. Micmacs is a quirky mélange of slapstick, fantasy and broad comedy. As is often the case with Jeunet’s films, it presents a world filled with Rube Goldberg devices interspersed with poetic, childlike epiphanies. Upon meeting with AC in Montmartre, Jeunet acknowledges that Micmacs is a genre-mixing collage from his cinematic “idea box.” He explains, “I wanted to do a film about vengeance, a film with strange, original characters — a bit like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs — and also wanted to do a story about arms dealers. I knew that it was a little risky to do a cartoon with a serious theme behind it, but I didn’t hold back. “I put everything I had in it,”

continues the director. “There are many very different references that the viewer might or might not see, including the films of Sergio Leone,

“I knew it was a little risky to do a cartoon with a serious theme, but I didn’t hold back.”

Mission: Impossible, classic cartoons and the films of Buster Keaton.” The director even confesses to borrowing an idea from the Fox television series www.theasc.com

Prison Break, joking that “they stole two or three ideas from me, so I stole one of theirs.” Sitting down with AC in Paris, Nagata recalls that during prep, Jeunet asked him to do all he could to “to shoot very quickly.” The cinematographer fulfilled this request. “We shot for 80 days, doing 10 shots a day — but it was never 10 simple shots!” Like many of Jeunet’s films, Micmacs is dense, peppered with short shots and laced with complex camera moves. On top of its fast-paced schedule, the production encountered bad weather throughout the shoot, which called for many exterior locations. “Of course, all the storyboards called for sun, and we had mostly rotten weather,” says Nagata. In fact, exteriors, with changing weather, posed the greatest challenge to Nagata. “It was often a race against time, so I went for simplicity,” he says. June 2010

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Very French Revenge “I tried to eliminate the unnecessary and only use the essential.” Sometimes, as for a scene outside the St. Eustache church, it was a matter of just using reflectors and bounce boards on one of the rare sunny days. While shooting a friendly encounter between the junkyard crew and some drug dealers on a street on a gray day, Nagata added contrast to the flat natural light by using negative fill, setting up a 20'x40' wall of black butterflies. “I blocked the whole street,” he says. “It made the foreground darker than the background. If I had tried to add lighting instead, it would have quickly become absurd.” The production spent a week shooting a sequence that takes place by a canal, where the Micmacs gang uses a cannon to shoot two of their own across the water to sabotage a munitions dump. For day exteriors like this one, Nagata used three or four Jumbo Dino lights (with 16 narrow-beam 1K bulbs), which he left uncorrected. “I put them far away, and they got mixed with daylight,” he says. “It looks like a setting sun, warming up the scene the way Jean-Pierre likes it. Of course, this doesn’t work when the lights are too close to the actors.” Nagata often added a small, handheld HMI (800-watt or 1.2K Cine Par) with a Chimera made of 1⁄4

Right: Director of photography Tetsuo Nagata, AFC risks his soul to work with one of the film’s more unusual set pieces. Bottom: Director JeanPierre Jeunet lines up a slightly high angle on his main characters.

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Left: Bazil eavesdrops as Remington, pretending to represent an African dictator, meets with arms dealer Nicolas Thibault De Fenouillet (André Dussollier, left). Below: A closer shot from the scene.

Medium Grid Cloth diffusion to bring out the actors’ faces. “I usually like to light from the back or the side, but on this film, I was more generous with the light and brought the source more to the front.” A day-interior meeting between one of the weapons manufacturers, Nicolas Thibault De Fenouillet (André Dussollier), and Remington (Omar Sy), a Micmac disguised as a revolutionary in search of arms, takes place in the ornate Train Bleu restaurant, a Belle Epoque landmark, as Bazil eavesdrops. The characters sit at a table sidelit by a giant window. Nagata positioned 6 12K HMIs outside, creating a powerful sidelight. He complemented this with a tungsten source bounced on a 12'x12' frame of Full Grid Cloth for fill. Nagata notes that he sometimes modulates the color of bounced light with different materials. “I go shopping for fabrics in an open-air market with my gaffer, Patrick Contesse, and I have a good collection of tissues and papers,” says the cinematographer. “Beige is a classic for skin, and a little pink works well with women.” Nagata was not very involved with the camera moves or the framing on Micmacs, as Jeunet considers composition to be an essential part of the director’s job. “I like what Kurosawa said: if you take a frame

from a film and put it on a wall, it should look like a painting,” says Jeunet. “I give a lot of importance to the graphic quality of each shot, prob-

“I give a lot of importance to the graphic quality of each shot.”

ably because I started in animation.” The director is known for his meticulous preparation, which culminates in a shooting script that features precise storyboards alongside the text. The process of découpage (shot breakwww.theasc.com

down) starts with Jeunet’s rough sketches, which are rendered by a storyboard artist. “The second step is to reproduce the storyboard on location with interns or real stand-ins who resemble the actors,” says the director. “I may change or find new things, and I take stills. Then I go back home and edit the stills to create a sequence [that leads to a definitive storyboard].” On the set, Jeunet will further refine his shooting plan by setting up the shots with a video viewfinder mounted with 35mm lenses. “I always use video viewfinders because with the screen, you can easily put the lens on the ground or high up,” he explains. “When I see directors using old-fashioned optical viewfinders, I tell myself they’re not going to lie on the ground because it’s wet or dirty, so they may end up with banal frames because they have limited themselves.” ➣ June 2010

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On a Paris rooftop, Bazil gathers intelligence on an arms dealer by dropping a microphone down his chimney.

Nagata reveals that the filmmakers tested the Red One for Micmacs but found the latitude “reduced,” so they instead opted to shoot 35mm, mainly with a Panaflex Millennium XL. The cinematographer suggested shooting with Panavision Primo Classics and an Angenieux Optimo 14-50mm zoom. “Jean-Pierre likes the sharpest possible image, and he always shoots with a wide angle,” he notes. Micmacs was mostly shot with 21mm, 24mm, 27mm, 30mm and 35mm Primo Classics, whose close-focus capabilities suited Jeunet’s camera placement, which is typically very near the actors. According to Jeunet, the main lens on the production was the 21mm. “My telephoto lens is a 35mm!” he jokes. He finds long focal lengths “boring because they compress everything. Wide-angle lenses create something stronger; they give expressiveness to the eyes, to the look, to the set, and you get more depth of field. It’s a real style. Look at the films of Orson Welles, Sergio Leone and Stanley Kubrick.” Many directors avoid wide angles when doing close-ups because they can distort a face, but “because I use actors with interesting faces, that’s not a problem — on the contrary, it makes them even more graphic,” says Jeunet. “But it’s a more delicate matter with women, so I always do tests with them.” He selects a focal length and 56

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lens height to suit each actress, and he notes that wide-angle lenses can actually flatter some female faces. “I’m often shooting down, and because short focal lengths work well with big eyes, they give a doe-eye effect because the eyes look bigger from above. From below, it becomes ugly.” Many of the shots of Bazil are

“Long focal lengths compress everything. Wide-angle lenses create something stronger.”

from below. “A man can take an angle from below,” states Jeunet. “Micmacs is a story of a man who grows as he takes his vengeance, so we wanted to see Bazil grow; we didn’t want to crush him. The camera is never at eye level; I find that boring.” Nagata shot Micmacs on a single film stock, Kodak’s Vision3 500T 5219. “On almost every film, American Cinematographer

you end up at the end of the day with the sun setting, and sometimes you’re even shooting close-ups with night falling,” says the cinematographer. “On one of my projects, I used three stocks, and I had to go from 50-ASA to 250-ASA and then to 500-ASA for one scene. It was all mixed up, and it was terrible when I did the timing.” He adds that he has found the grain of 5219 “the same” as that of slower stocks. Color is a distinctive element of Jeunet’s style, and all of his films are dominated by warm colors. Micmacs, however, also contains less typical gleams of cyan, blue, green and even mauve, especially in the night footage. “I go more toward warm colors than cold ones,” acknowledges the director. “I’d like to try other colors, but it’s also true that when the sky is gray and you’re shooting the gray buildings of Paris, the only way to save the image is to go toward warm colors.” Nevertheless, he continues, “with Tetsuo, we made some other color choices.” Nagata recalls that he and Jeunet “spoke about using complementary colors.” In many of the night scenes, Nagata added strong, cold colors to the warm palette. A good example occurs early in the film, when Bazil is shot in the video store. Nagata lit the video-store interior with a mixture of cyan-, green- and orange-gelled Kino Flos, replacing the existing fluores-

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Very French Revenge

Right: This frame grab of the accident that sends a stray bullet into Bazil’s head illustrates Nagata’s effort to mix cold colors into the warm palette Jeunet favors. Below: Bazil lies critically wounded in the video store.

cents with practicals, and added warm ceiling light through diffusion on Bazil. During the exchange of gunfire outside, the bikers slide down sodium-yellow streets in a garish landscape featuring green and mauve façades and blue neons set up on a bridge. “It’s cruel lighting, with a dirty feel to it,” says Nagata. Later, when Bazil tucks in under a cardboard cover alongside the river, there is a similar mix of green practical fluorescents, colorful lamps in the background, and an orange streetlight on the hero. Some night scenes are set on a rooftop where Bazil does a crude form of wiretapping by dropping microphones down chimneys. Nagata’s crew suspended 6K helium balloons just outside frame to create a blue moonlight cast, and lit Bazil’s face with an orange wash. “That’s intentional,” 58

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says Jeunet. “I wanted the feeling to stay warm. It’s that simple.” The film’s main interior set is the junkyard “cave” where the

“It’s cruel lighting with a dirty feel to it.”

Micmacs live and work. The production shot for some 10 days in the set, created by production designer Aline Bonetto. Nagata lit the cave with warm pools of light using suspended American Cinematographer

250-watt and 500-watt practicals. Hidden Kino Flo tubes added small alcoves of other hues: gold, green and orange. Nagata added an underexposed toplight by shining space lights gelled with cyan through a Grid Cloth ceiling above the open parts of the set. The final effect is an image made of warm highlights and subtle, cooler darks. “If the tungsten bulbs were 2,700°K, then I had, say, 3,600°K to 4,000°K coming from above,” says the cinematographer. One of the most elegant lighting setups is the stylish, dark-walled apartment of arms dealer Marconi (Nicolas Marie). Nagata says he asked Bonetto to cover the set with a translucent ceiling made of “a material used for lampshades, like a plastic resin.” Nagata hung space lights above, creating a very soft toplight, which he complemented with practicals and a soft fill — “very little, almost nothing” — to bring out the eyes of the armed Africans who take Marconi prisoner. Nagata created the fill with one of his favorite fixtures, a Source Four Leko, through a Chimera. Jeunet notes that the lighting setup was “very practical because we could shoot extremely quickly. The metal of the guns, the gangsters’ black skin, and the set are magnifique. It’s a very beautiful light.” ➣

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Right: African rebels (from left: Laurant Mendy, Doudou Masta and Marc Stussy) show up at Marconi’s apartment to take him prisoner. Below: The Micmacs’ junkyard cave mixes warm highlights and subtle, cooler darks.

Visual-effects supervisor Alain Carsoux was often on the set. Although Micmacs’ visual effects are not elaborate, they are key to the poetic feel of the film. Carsoux and his team at Duran Duboi are responsible, for example, for Jeunet’s trademark inserts of images inside the frame to represent thought balloons, as when Bazil’s bullet acts up and he calms himself with rote memories. Carsoux observes that CGI is sometimes done in “2½-D,” not quite 3-D. He explains that a true 3-D virtual 60

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object is expensive and time-consuming to create, so he often opts for digital effects that mix 3-D CGI objects with 2-D photographic plates. As an example, he cites a crane move at the end of Micmacs that cranes up to reveal a canal and a Parisian landscape behind sand dunes created to look like Morocco. The final image, he says, is “a series of layers, not continual like real 3-D.” In this example, the challenge was to make the 2-D elements — the trucks, the barge and the Paris cityscape — move relative to the foreground dunes in a American Cinematographer

convincing way as the crane moved up. “It’s a bit like what we do now to convert 2-D movies to 3-D [in post] — you break the image up into layers and move them relative to each other.” Carsoux adds that the 2½-D technique can only be done with objects that are in the distance, because close objects change too much with movement and therefore require full 3-D rendering. Another key collaborator on Micmacs was colorist Didier Lefouest, who has worked on many commercials with both Nagata and Jeunet. Lefouest explains that the color timing of Micmacs began with tests during prep and continued with graded dailies throughout production, so the look was pretty well defined by the time the filmmakers began the DI. Like Carsoux, Lefouest was often present during the shoot. The dailies footage was telecined on a Spirit, and Lefouest timed the footage every day using a DaVinci. Jeunet viewed HD dailies with his crew using a projection setup in a trailer. Whenever there was a major change in location, or another grading issue, Lefouest would go to the set to review his timed dailies with Jeunet and Nagata. ➣

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For the film’s climax, 2-D plates and 3-D CGI mingle in a crane shot that reveals a Parisian cityscape behind some sand dunes that the Micmacs are trying to pass off as Morocco.

During post, select footage was scanned at 4K using an Arriscan at Digimage Cinema in Paris. Lefouest then did a preliminary timing of the scanned material. “Because I did the dailies for six months, I knew the images by heart,” he says. “With JeanPierre and Tetsuo, we knew exactly

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where we were going, and we had the work print as a reference. After production wrapped, we did one more week of artistic research together, and then I worked for two weeks on my own, redoing the timing and also preparing my windows, knowing that Jean-Pierre would have certain

requests.” The DI, he notes, often involved isolating portions of the graded image with windows and refining them over time. Lefouest describes his work as similar to that of a cabinetmaker: “I sand, then varnish, then sand again, then varnish again, until it’s perfect.” (Ed. Note: The DI

TECHNICAL SPECS 2.40: 1 3-perf Super 35mm Panaflex Millennium XL; Arri 435 Panavision and Angenieux lenses Kodak Vision3 500T 5219 Digital Intermediate Printed on Kodak Vision 2383

workflow comprised 4K scanning, 2K color correction and a 4K filmout.) Summing up his collaboration with Nagata, Carsoux, Lefouest and the others in his cinematic family, Jeunet notes, “We’re all craftsmen. The production designer will look at a set and bring things to it that perhaps

no one will ever notice, but which she needs to tell the story. Likewise, the cinematographer will tell his own version of the story with his lighting. Each person has his own version of the story, and the director is the one who combines them.” ●

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The White Stripes Under Great White Northern Lights follows indie-rock icons on a unique tour of Canada. By Iain Stasukevich •|•

Painting Towns “R

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ock documentaries are easy to make,” says director Emmett Malloy. “Put 10 video cameras onstage and get some talking backstage.” But Malloy, an experienced music-video director, recognized that The White Stripes’ first tour of Canada presented an opportunity to do something different. The result is The White Stripes Under Great White Northern Lights, a compelling twist on the “rockumentary” format that offers dynamic performance footage shot at both standard concert halls and smaller, eccentric venues boasting lots of local flavor. While directing the video for the band’s song “Icky Thump” in 2007, Malloy spent some time between setups with front man Jack White, who confided that the itinerary for the duo’s first Canadian tour, which would celebrate their 10th anniversary, was filled with secret shows and stops in remote locations. Malloy was intrigued and urged White to consider filming the tour. “Jack liked the idea,” says Malloy, “so we formed a small crew and hit the road with them — but not with the intent of making a film. In our minds, we were documenting a moment, and that allowed everyone to just let things be. Nobody was overthinking it. There was no deadline and no pressure. We weren’t sure how the footage would be used.” The crew comprised Malloy, director of photography 64

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Giles Dunning, camera operator/editor Tim Wheeler, camera assistants Hassan Abdul-wahid and Jeremiah Pittman (who doubled as a sound recordist) and producer Mike Sarkissian. (Camera assistant Vincent Foeillet took Hassan’s position during the second leg of filming.) “Working with musicians is a very visceral experience because you’re reacting to something live,” notes Dunning, who has shot concerts for such acts as David Bowie, The Rolling Stones and Ben Harper. The White Stripes’ process was especially spontaneous. With little more than an inkling of what town they’d land in next, the filmmakers spent their two weeks on the tour racing to keep up with White and his bandmate and former wife, drummer/vocalist Meg White. Dunning recalls, “We shot all of the most unique cities on the tour, ending at their last date, which was their 10th anniversary show. They were doing two shows a day, a matinee and a showcase. We’d fly overnight from one town to the next, maybe get two hours of sleep on the way, go out with cameras and start scouting the towns, then go to the main venue and check out the lighting conditions.” After filming the show, they’d jump back on the plane and do it all over again. Jack White’s boundless energy and focus quickly set the bar for the filmmakers, according to the cinematographer. “The first day of our first stop, in Whitehorse, we got up early


Photos by Autumn de Wilde. Frame grabs and photos courtesy of Three Foot Giant and Giles Dunning.

and went out to scout the town, thinking Jack would be asleep, and then we ran into him walking around — he was also scouting the town, just as intrigued to be there as we were,” recalls Dunning. There was a short learning curve when it came to figuring out how closely the filmmakers could follow Jack and Meg. “After the first show, Lalo Medina, their road manager, slammed the door in our faces because it was his job to preserve their privacy,” says Dunning. “When they come offstage after a show, they need their moment. But a few days later, they started letting us in [on that moment].” Malloy adds, “Our biggest advantage was that Jack and Meg already knew us from the music-video shoots. They understood that we would take care of them. This isn’t my film; a lot of my personality is in it, but it’s a film for The White Stripes.” Most of Under Great White Northern Lights was shot on Super 16mm, whose imagery Malloy describes as “romantic and more in tune with the band” than digital formats. ( Jack White has always been a vocal proponent of “old school” musical instruments and technologies.) The main cameras were two 16mm Bolexes and two Aaton XTR-Prods, and the production carried two Canon zoom lenses, an 11.5165mm and a 7-63mm; this gear was provided by Panavision Hollywood. “The Aatons were perfect for this job because they’re so light,” says Dunning. “That’s especially important when you’re shooting for 21⁄2 hours straight.” (Additionally, some backstage footage was captured with a Panasonic AGHVX200.) During prep, the filmmakers bought all the Eastman Tri-X 7266, Plus-X 7265 and Ektachrome 7285 they could find. “In the end, we used most of it,” says Dunning. “It’s rare that people go out and shoot this much reversal, but one of the things people respond to when they see the film is the look of the reversal stock.” Shooting reversal poses its share of obstacles, chiefly the extremely narrow latitude of 6 or 7 stops. “In a

Opposite: The White Stripes — lead singer/guitarist/ keyboardist Jack White and drummer/ vocalist Meg White — slowdance onstage after wowing the audience with their 10th anniversary concert. This page, top to bottom: Onstage cameras capture the Stripes’ intuitive musical interplay; Jack attacks his keyboard with characteristic abandon; director of photography Giles Dunning observes an outdoor show.

www.theasc.com

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PaintingTownsWhite concert setting, the lighting range can be very wide, and you’d typically choose a stock that’s more forgiving,” says Dunning. “We only had two cameras onstage at a time, and there was no radio contact. It’s not the ideal way to shoot a concert documentary, but the payoff is the beautiful image; you get really dense blacks and a slight vintage look.” The cinematographer emphasizes that a good rapport with the show’s lighting director, in this case Susanne Sasic, is key when shooting a live event. Most of the lighting tweaks for the Stripes’ tour were worked out a few hours before each show, during the sound check. “I tried to spot the things that might make the show difficult to shoot,” says Dunning. “A lot of the work is balancing what’s already there. One of the first steps you have to take when you’re shooting in color is working out the different color temperatures, particularly the spotlights. You just have to be careful to not destroy the look of a rock ’n’ roll show. “We were going for a somewhat naturalistic feel on this,” he continues. “I usually have at least six cameras onstage for concert films, but I wanted to pare it down this time. We also wanted to avoid swooping cranes and dollies, which feel very contrived to me.” Malloy notes, “I

Top: Dunning films Meg as the band prepares to “showboat” with an impromptu concert staged on the water. Middle: The Whites share a tender moment at the piano while reflecting on their lives and career. Bottom: The musicians admire nature’s handiwork while inspecting an ice floe during some downtime.

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wanted to give the film a single-camera feel. I like those moments where you can tell [the operators] are finding their footing.” There are a lot of moments when the shot goes out of focus, or Jack does something unexpected and the operator has to reposition himself quickly. “Even if you’ve worked with Jack before, that doesn’t give you the ammunition to keep up with him!” says Malloy. “We didn’t have a set list, headphones or a video village. These venues were small enough that we could give each other hand signals! “I was fortunate to be working with cameramen who knew the music well, and when one angle got cut off, they’d find another angle,” continues the director. “They’d let the shot go out of focus if it worked for the song, and they usually knew where the performers would be at just the right moment.” “The beautiful thing about operating with musicians is that you’re responding to the music, and your work is very intuitive,” says Dunning. “It’s also good to be familiar with your camera because you’re pulling your own focus while your second AC is across the way, shooting with a Bolex!” To keep things visually interesting, Dunning approached each show in a different way; he shot one on blackand-white reversal, the next on color reversal, one with a tripod, the next handheld, and so on. “You don’t feel like

Top left and right: The filmmakers capture evocative images of a humble cemetery. Middle: Inspired by the sartorial elegance of the White Stripes’ entourage, director Emmett Malloy dons a snazzy tie and fedora. Bottom: Meg offers a Mona Lisa smile as she’s captured on the move.

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Left: Color footage highlights the band’s signature use of red as part of their visual image. Right: Jack proves he can fill a big niche in rock.

you have to play it safe with Jack and Meg. You can push the limits with them and you’ll get something very unique-looking,” he says. Under Great White Northern Lights crackles with energy, owing as much of its intensity to Dunning’s cinematography as it does to the relationship between the Whites onstage. The

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cameras get so close to them it feels as though each performance is under a microscope. “Certainly, their dynamic onstage is like nothing I’ve seen before,” says Malloy. “The way they read each other and the way they stare each other down is remarkable. Meg really is waiting to see where Jack’s going next, and that’s completely fascinating to watch

through a lens. It’s as rock ’n’ roll and as punk rock as anything I’ve ever seen.” On top of their grueling showcase schedule, the Stripes played “secret” matinees in each town at unusual venues — a bowling alley, a retirement home, on a boat, and even on a city bus. One of Dunning’s favorite locations was Iqaluit, the capital of Canada’s Nunavut

province, where the production shot “You Don’t Know What Love Is.” He recalls, “It was dusk for one hour there. Jack and Meg played their showcase at 11 p.m., and when we left the club it was still daylight, and kids were running around and playing. We shot Jack and Meg walking across some rocks on the shore by these red and white houses, and that black-and-white footage is some of the most beautiful stuff in the movie.” Dunning wanted to get a timelapse shot of the tide going out (using a Bolex and a Norris intervalometer), but because of the band’s schedule, no one on the crew could stay with the camera. He ended up leaving it with one of the locals and came back the next day to retrieve it. Under Great White Northern Lights was recently released on DVD and exhibited on HDCam-SR at festivals, including South by Southwest. In the final telecine transfer, carried out at New Hat Post in Santa Monica by

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colorist Beau Leon, some additional color effects were applied, and some grain was added to the HD footage to help it blend better with the Super 16mm material. Leon also helped Dunning increase the saturation and contrast in a bit of footage shot with Vision2 500T 7218, which was used for locations where Dunning needed to squeeze a few extra stops out of the ambient light. Dunning and Malloy had free reign to film whatever they pleased, but Jack was given final cut. “There were some specific angles he didn’t want us to include, and he was always asking us to crush the black in the telecine,” says Dunning. “The band always had editorial control, and knowing that made them feel freer with us. “The real beauty of this documentary is that we got to do things the way we did,” he adds. “The way these specialty film stocks keep disappearing on us, they’re becoming more special

and more unique. No matter how many thousands of feet you shoot, there’s nothing like the beauty of film and the surprises that come with it.” ●

TECHNICAL SPECS 1.78:1 Super 16mm and Digital Capture Aaton XTR-Prod; Bolex; Panasonic AG-HVX200 Canon lenses Eastman Plus-X 7265, Tri-X 7266, Ektachrome 100D 7285, Kodak Vision2 500T 7218

New LEE

Urban effect filters Create a Sodium effect with tungsten or daylight

Think LEE www.leefilters.com 71

I

Adding Chills to Frozen By Michael Goldman

The recent release Frozen typifies how the independent film world is evolving, with traditional and digital techniques coming together to make complicated productions affordable. On the production side, the filmmakers adopted a traditional approach, shooting 3-perf Super 35mm for a final aspect ratio of 2.40:1. On the post side, they adopted a digital workflow that enabled much of their visual-effects work to be done during the digital-intermediate process. Directed by Adam Green and shot by Will Barratt, Frozen tells the tale of three skiers trapped on a chairlift on an isolated mountain. Principal photography, which took place at a ski resort near Ogden, Utah, over five weeks, was “the hardest shoot I will ever have,” says Barratt. Working largely at night in sub-zero tempera-

Nearly half of the 260 visual-effects shots in the indie thriller Frozen are snow effects created during the digital-intermediate process at Lit Post.

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tures, the crew battled to maneuver a 50' Super Technocrane, various lighting rigs and other equipment up the mountain and into position to film actors suspended 48' in the air for hours at a time. “The decision to shoot practically was easy,” says Barratt. “We’ve all seen big-budget films where the greenscreen effects look fake, and for another thing, Adam and I felt we could get better performances from our actors if we actually stuck them on a chairlift. And they really were stuck — they came down for lunch and for a bathroom break. Plus, budget-wise, shooting on the mountain was more affordable than getting a large greenscreen.” For night scenes, which dominate the film, “we wanted a moon-glow feeling, soft lighting, so we had to have moonlight bouncing off the snow back up to the actors,” says the cinematographer. “To do that, we put Nine-light Maxi-Brutes under the actors and basically pounded the light into the mountain. That gave us a soft bounce that resembled moonlight reflecting off snow.” Visual-effects supervisor/colorist Tyler Hawes and his team at Lit Post in Los Angeles devised an affordable method for digitally transforming the snow flurries captured in camera into a blizzard that pervades the film and becomes, in essence, a character in the drama. They accomplished this entirely within a DI pipeline built on the foundation of Digital Vision’s Nucoda Film Master system. There are 260 visual-effects shots in the film, and Hawes created half of them, almost all snow effects, while color-timing the picture. He explains that although the production captured lots of snowy footage on location, the look of those scenes varied widely, and a consistent, dramatic blizzard was required to fulfill the story’s needs. “Ironically, after they went to great lengths for realism by filming on a remote mountain, the footage looked like it had been shot onstage because you [couldn’t] see the weather and environment around the actors — there was just blackness,” says Hawes. “Naturally, they couldn’t sit around waiting for the clouds and moonlight to be just right so that the background would show up. Also, the script calls at certain points for certain weather hits, making weather a supporting character. So we had to finesse the snow and light to bring more realism and authenticity to the scenes.” The filmmakers decided not to attempt to do any of the snow effects with CGI; Green wanted to avoid artificially generated elements for the sake of realism, and the production didn’t have the time or money for 3-D effects work. Hawes’ team had successfully added rain and fog to Green and Barratt’s previous collaborations, the features Hatchet and Spiral, and Hawes believed a similar approach would work for snow in Frozen. His team used both real snow and snow machines to shoot additional snow plates using both 35mm and digital (Red One) cameras, and then brought them into the DI session to stitch it all together. “Originally, we talked about me just doing the color correction, and making effects separate,” Hawes explains. “Then, we


Images courtesy of Lit Post.

Post Focus

added simple effects like wire removals and things I could easily do with the Nucoda system. But there was this bigger challenge of how we could create, with a limited budget, about 20 minutes of snow and other weather effects. Ultimately, the plan we came up with deeply involved the DI process. The Nucoda system allows you to do respectable compositing, where you can take multiple layers or clips, composite them together, and then grade them in the context of a final composite. I figured that with my experience as a compositor, I could put together convincing snow elements and combine them with the original photography. If we’d done this same thing with CGI and a desktop-based visual-effects pipeline, it would have taken longer to get it right, because everyone would have been viewing it separately, on different monitors, apart from the main photography.” Hawes calls this a “converged workflow,” noting that other effects in the film did incorporate some CGI, and says the strategy “paid off once we got a rhythm” because, in the DI suite, it took “an average of about 20 minutes a shot to get it all done. We got all the weather stuff done in less than a week.” Hawes suggests that keeping the snow effects in the DI suite increased creative opportunities for the filmmakers, particularly for Barratt, who could be more involved than he might otherwise be in the visual-effects pipeline. “Artists prefer to move quickly, and if you’ve got 130 weather shots going out to separate facilities and then coming back to you, you’ve got to remember what you were thinking some time ago,” says Hawes. “On Frozen, we all sat down together and built the effect we wanted. Integrating so many of the effects into the DI was great for Will, because it gave him back some of the control the cinematographer often loses with CGI.” In the end, Hawes believes this workflow saved the production weeks of time and offered “about 75-percent cost savings compared to a traditional approach.” He presumes, like most industry professionals, that CGI will always require a separate pipeline, separate tools and separate artists. However, for 2-D effects involving certain kinds of compositing work, Frozen was, perhaps, ahead of a rising curve. 74

June 2010

Autodesk Unveils 2011 Lineup Autodesk has introduced the 2011 versions of its Digital Entertainment Creation Software for 3-D modeling, animation, effects, rendering, compositing, digital sculpting and 3-D painting, as well as the 2011 releases of its creative finishing products for visual effects, editorial finishing and color grading. The complete line offers users improved interoperability, new creative tools and accelerated workflows, while the creative finishing products introduce an end-to-end stereoscopic finishing workflow for film and television productions. Of the Digital Entertainment Creation Software releases — comprising Maya, 3ds Max, Softimage, Mudbox, MotionBuilder, FBX asset-exchange technology, HumanIK 4.5 middleware and Kynapse 7 middleware — Maya 2011 is a particular standout. Marc Petit, Autodesk’s senior vice president of Media & Entertainment, notes, “Autodesk Maya 2011 takes Digital Entertainment Creation workflows to new heights with a new customizable user interface, new high-performance viewports and a new 3-D editorial interface.” Now available for Snow Leopard, Maya 2011 also boasts enhanced tools for character animation, including non-destructive live targeting; integrated color management; asset structures for pipeline connectivity; and improved rotoscoping. Augmenting Maya’s stereo computer graphics capabilities, the 2011 releases of Flame, Flare, Smoke and Lustre offer stereoscopic capabilities designed to


help implement 3-D finishing with minimal disruption to existing creative workflows. “3-D is core to what we do at Autodesk, so being a leader in end-to-end stereo workflow capabilities is a natural extension for us,” says Stig Gruman, Autodesk’s vice president of digital entertainment. Key new stereoscopic features include cross-product support for the FBX 2011 software; a stereoscopic camera rig and object support in Action, Flame and Smoke’s 3-D compositing environment; concurrent stereoscopic visual effects, editorial finishing and grading workflow; and stereoscopic monitoring and preview modes. Launched in December 2009, Smoke for Mac OS X has rapidly gained ground in Mac-based creative workflows by offering an all-in-one editorial finishing solution. Also available as a turnkey solution for the Linux operating system, Smoke 2011 boasts new tools for editing, viewing and compositing stereoscopic content; drag-and-drop conform of AAF or XML files from Apple Final Cut Pro or Avid Media Composer; and native in-application support for Red RAW and H.264 QuickTime media. The 2011 releases of Flame and Flare help further integrate advanced 3-D capabilities with the addition of new creative tools such as a GPU-based pixel-shader rendering pipeline, which improves the quality of rendered results and enables support for new texture mapping and lighting effects; a new Substance procedural texture library with over 100 near-photorealistic textures that can be applied to 3-D objects, 3-D text or surfaces; native in-appli-

cation support for Red RAW and H.264 QuickTime media; and support for individual rendering layers when soft-importing OpenEXR media files. Additionally, both products feature 3-D compositing enhancements such as support for multiple outputs in Action, including z-depth, normal and matte passes; and support for diffuse, parallax, reflection and specular mapping. Finally, Lustre 2011 gives colorists additional control over color and lighting effects in both stereoscopic and standard grading workflows. New features include support for grading of OpenEXR media files, Red workflow enhancements with support for Red Rocket through Mac Wiretap Gateway and open management of grading metadata. For additional information, visit www.autodesk.com.

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FilmLight Offers Low-Cost Baselight, Streamlines HDCam-SR Workflow FilmLight has announced a low entry price point addition to its Baselight range of nonlinear color-grading systems. Known simply as Baselight, the new system offers facilities a cost-effective way to benefit from the performance and feature set associated with the product line. Priced at $95,000, Baselight is a fully featured color-grading system capable of handling all inputs and delivering multiple output formats up to and including duallink RGB 4:4:4 HD. Configured to work as part of an integrated, file-based workflow with comprehensive support for industrystandard editorial systems, Baselight includes a GPU renderer, Blackboard control

surface, Baselight Kompressor and 12TB formatted RAID 5 storage. The system is fully upgradeable up through the top-ofthe-range Baselight Eight and benefits from FilmLight’s comprehensive range of global support, maintenance, training and specialist consultancy services. Additionally, during the recent National Association of Broadcasters conference in Las Vegas, FilmLight demonstrated an on-set workflow incorporating Truelight On-Set to apply 3-D LUTs to the output from a Sony F35 camera in real time. The Truelight system also allows pre-defined looks and primary color-correction conforming to the ASC Color Decision List to be applied near set after recording. The CDL information created on set can be easily embedded as auxiliary data and recorded on the HDCam-SR tape to be used as a starting point for the final grade in Baselight, or burned into shots to create digital dailies. FilmLight also demonstrated the Baselight’s native grading support for the standards-based high-quality 440Mb MPEG-4 SStP (Simple Studio Profile) codec, on which HDCam-SR recording is based. SStP is now available as MXF-wrapped media for near-real-time exchange over a GB Ethernet connection from the latest SRW-5800/2 VTR and can be decoded in real time within Baselight. “We are very pleased to be working in partnership with Sony to help develop and support these new HDCam-SR filebased workflows,” says Wolfgang Lempp, FilmLight’s founder and technical strategist. “The inclusion of SStP closes the gap between compressed and uncompressed high-end workflows, and will eventually lead to a cost-effective and efficient 4K workflow.” For additional information, visit www.filmlight.ltd.uk. ●

Tricks of the Trade I

Using Red’s False Color By Claire Walla

Like most cinematographers, Chase Bowman measures light for relative exposure values and adjusts his iris settings accordingly. But he doesn’t use a light meter. “I’m kind of embarrassed to say it because I was brought up on film, but I leave my light meter at home now,” he says. Instead, he uses False Color, a function on the Red One digital camera, which he has been using since 2007. With the click of a button, False Color covers the onscreen image with a multi-hued overlay, using a scale that ranges from Purple (1 IRE) to Red (108 IRE), with Green (44 IRE) balancing out the two extremes at 18-percent gray. The concept is not so different from other cameras’ built-in light meters, like the histogram (which displays temperature values via bar graph), or a zebra pattern (an overlay of slanted lines that lean left or right, depending on whether the image is over- or underexposed). However, Bowman maintains that color representation is more direct with False Color. “I’ve even had my script supervisor pick up on it and give me exposure advice,” he reports. “Really, it’s that easy.” While shooting the feature Second-Story Man in January, Bowman not only set all his exposures using False Color, but also communicated on set with color-coded instructions. “We were doing a lot of day-for-night shots, and we didn’t have enough money for [lighting] balloons or other nightexterior lighting tools, so it was all about exposure level,” he explains. “My gaffer and I came up with a [rubric] for how we were going to establish moonlight, and it was all color-coded: purple for things that didn’t need any detail [straight underexposed], light blue for the majority of the shots, and essentially no color [the midtones] for specific highlights.” If an actor was standing in the snow amid a cluster of trees, for example, Bowman set his exposure so that the leaves in the trees were purple, the snow was light blue, and the actor’s face was no color. “I knew that as long as there was ‘no color’ on the actor’s cheek at any given time, it wasn’t totally underexposed,” he notes. Bowman is quick to add that there’s nothing wrong with using a light meter with the Red. However, he believes it makes sense to follow a digital-specific method when shooting a digital format. Part of this has to do with the way digital technology has impacted the production process. In the same way that digital cameras allow filmmakers to maintain the momentum of a shot by

eliminating the frequent need to stop and reload, False Color allows the cinematographer to get an instantaneous light reading without venturing away from the camera. “I would do a quick flash [of False Color] during a take, and as soon as the director yelled ‘Cut,’ my gaffer would go right into fixing the problem because he knew exactly what I was referring to,” recalls Bowman. “It got to the point where we didn’t even have to talk about it, and that made production more fluid.” Another reason Bowman likes False Color has to do with its ability to quickly capture the whole scope of light within a frame. He points to a car-mount shot from Second-Story Man as an example. In a medium shot, the camera looks through the rear window of a car onto a young girl who’s peering back toward the camera. “The girl’s skin is very dark, but there was also the reflection of the trees and the glare of the sun to consider when setting the exposure,” explains Bowman. “A light meter wouldn’t do much to get an overall feel for exposure — the angle of incident of the reflected light would be one problem.” But False Color could capture everything within the frame at one time, allowing Bowman to see exactly how the character’s skin responded to the speckled veil of sun and shadow that complicated the shot. False Color also helps when motion is a factor. This is the case for settings overrun by intelligent lights that constantly move and change, but it’s also true for more basic action shots. If a scene calls for someone to throw a baseball, for instance, the cinematographer can set the camera to False Color, watch the ball move across the screen, and mark exactly where the light affects the object while it’s in motion. “You can take an instant reading with a light meter and get a feel for the space,” adds Bowman. “But you can’t spot-meter a moving baseball.” Bowman attributes the great benefit of False Color to the inherent differences between film and digital. “Film is a much more forgiving medium. If you blow out a highlight on a car, it looks great because it looks natural. But with digital, as soon as the highlight goes, you know you’re watching digital. “For me and a lot of the cinematographers I know, using the Red has been all about trying to create the illusion that it’s film,” he continues. “We’re trying to find something we can maybe call ‘Digital 35.’ Without question, the key to that [with the Red] is protecting highlights, and that’s a big part of what False Color does for me.” ●

False Color allows an instantaneous light reading without venturing away from the camera.

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June 2010


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