American Cinematographer.2012 10

OCTOBER 2012
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The International Journal of Motion Imaging
34 Dead Mans Hand
Greig Fraser lends high style to lowlife crime for
Killing Them Softly
50 A Very Tough Beat
Roman Vasyanov captures unique perspectives for
the cop drama End of Watch
64 Payback Time
Steve Yedlin tracks time-traveling killers through Looper
76 Hitchcock Blonde
John Pardue emulates directors classic style in The Girl
DEPARTMENTS
FEATURES
VISIT WWW.THEASC.COM TO ENJOY THESE WEB EXCLUSIVES
Podcast: Mikael Salomon, ASC and Ben Nott, ACS on Coma
DVD Playback: Jaws Singin in the Rain Les Vampires
On Our Cover: Jackie Cogan (Brad Pitt) is summoned to clean up a mob problem in
Killing Them Softly, shot by Greig Fraser. (Photo by Melinda Sue Gordon, SMPSP,
courtesy of The Weinstein Co.)
8 Editors Note
10 Presidents Desk
12 Short Takes: ASC Andrew Laszlo Heritage Awards
20 Production Slate: Chasing Ice Arbitrage
86 Post Focus: Blinding
90 New Products & Services
94 International Marketplace
95 Classified Ads
96 Ad Index
98 Clubhouse News
100 ASC Close-Up: Robert Primes
O C T O B E R 2 0 1 2 V O L . 9 3 N O . 1 0
50
64
76
O c t o b e r 2 0 1 2 V o l . 9 3 , N o . 1 0
T h e I n t e r n a t i o n a l J o u r n a l o f M o t i o n I m a g i n g
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PUBLISHER Martha Winterhalter
EDITORIAL
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American Cinematographer (ISSN 0002-7928), established 1920 and in its 92nd year of publication, is published
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Stephen Lighthill
President
Daryn Okada
Vice President
Richard Crudo
Vice President
Kees Van Oostrum
Vice President
Victor J. Kemper
Treasurer
Frederic Goodich
Secretary
Steven Fierberg
Sergeant At Arms
MEMBERS OF THE
BOARD
John Bailey
Stephen H. Burum
Curtis Clark
Richard Crudo
Dean Cundey
Fred Elmes
Michael Goi
Victor J. Kemper
Francis Kenny
Matthew Leonetti
Stephen Lighthill
Michael O'Shea
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ALTERNATES
Ron Garcia
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MUSEUM CURATOR
Steve Gainer
American Society of Cine ma tog ra phers
The ASC is not a labor union or a guild, but
an educational, cultural and pro fes sion al
or ga ni za tion. Membership is by invitation
to those who are actively en gaged as
di rec tors of photography and have
dem on strated out stand ing ability. ASC
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This months special focus is lighting, but in the productions
were showcasing, most of the characters slink through the
shadows. Hit men run rampant in Killing Them Softly and
Looper; brutal gangbangers target LAPD cops in End of
Watch; a famous film director torments his leading lady in The
Girl; and in Arbitrage, a wealthy hedge-fund manager cooks
the company books, commits adultery and then compounds
his problems with a fatal car crash. Family fare its not, but all
of these stories are told with visual flair.
For the mob saga Killing Them Softly, Greig Fraser and
director Andrew Dominik carefully stylized their storys lowlife
settings. Although we shot on location in New Orleans, we
were aiming for something generic, a little town between New Orleans, Boston and D.C. that
we called Shitsville, Fraser tells Benjamin B (Dead Mans Hand, page 34). We wanted the
place to look like its on the down-and-down, on the way out. We wanted viewers to feel
just how smelly and grimy and horrible it was, but at the same time, we didnt want to alien-
ate them visually. That was the challenge!
The police drama End of Watch, shot by Roman Vasyanov and directed by David Ayer,
takes place amid similarly bleak areas of Los Angeles. Their approach involved capturing
dynamic footage with a variety of small digital cameras, some of which were attached to lead
actors Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Pea to provide kinetic perspectives. Its difficult to
always motivate POV camerawork and make it feel real, so I suggested we incorporate some
slightly more traditional coverage by shooting a little handheld in a very energetic style,
Vasyanov explains to Jay Holben (A Very Tough Beat, page 50). I shot a lot of the hand-
held very wide and very close to the actors, often with an 8mm lens just 10mm from their
faces! It creates the feeling that youre always waiting for something to happen, and thats
really the life of a police officer: theyre always on edge, waiting to spring into action at a
moments notice.
On the sci-fi crime thriller Looper, which takes place in the Near Future of 2042 and
the Far Future of 2072, Steve Yedlin used the 35mm anamorphic format to cleverly enhance
the visual strategies of director Rian Johnson. Rian described the overall look he wanted as
on-the-ground science fiction, Yedlin tells Iain Stasukevich (Payback Time, page 64).
Instead of everything looking futuristic and fancy, things look a little more realistic and
junky.
More glamorous images were required for the HBO telefilm The Girl, shot by John
Pardue. In chronicling director Alfred Hitchcocks obsession with actress Tippi Hedren, Pardue
and director Julian Jarrold found themselves emulating looks created for The Birds and
Marnie by cinematographer Robert Burks, ASC. The overall style of The Girl is quite natu-
ralistic, but when I shot scenes that were homages to Burks, I tried to light them the way he
would have, Pardue says (Hitchcock Blonde, page 76). This is very evident in our depic-
tions of Hedrens screen tests, the Birds attic scene and the Marnie seduction scene. I looked
at many photographs from the sets of those two movies to try to get into the mindset that
existed back then.
Stephen Pizzello
Executive Editor
Editors Note
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Bob Primes, ASC reveals his inner child playing with the cool
toys and other kids at Clairmont Camera; a fun place to play.
I've played in some great camera rental houses.
The best constantly innovate and create awesome
new tools, toys and widgets to make our work more
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Denny & Terry Clairmont, Alan Albert, Tom Boelens
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But that's old news. Everyone in the biz knows that!
I want to talk about how much fun I have at Clairmont.
The sign of a well managed team is the morale and
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Clairmont is a busy place, yet somehow, miraculously,
everyone seems relaxed, delighted to see you, help you
create solutions and are just as crazy about the latest
toys and widgets as you are.
It is this uncanny ability of everyone you encounter to
share the joy and enthusiasm of our art form that kicks
the Clairmont experience into another dimension. Those
old-fashioned virtues of integrity, involvement, caring,
warmth and joy are really what it's all about.
Robert Primes, ASC
The major finding of a recently released 2011 Writers Guild of America
survey was that screenwriters believe their status in the industry has
significantly deteriorated over the past several years. We are not
surprised. Im sure writers know that soon, there will be more drones in
the U.S. Air Force fighting fleet than real planes with real pilots (the kind
that can wear scarves around their necks), and that in some cases, pilots
no longer pilot passenger jets, but input their instructions through
phony levers to computers that actually do the flying.
In the world we live in, computers are seen by many as a
democratizing force, but computers are also changing traditional crafts.
What about the craft of cinematographers? Well, some upsetting
stories came across my desk over the summer. One concerned a cine-
matographer who was not informed when a studio feature that he shot
for a director he had worked with many times before was to be color-
corrected; the director, not the cinematographer, was in the DI suite.
Another story told of a big-budget TV movie that was re-timed by the
director and editor over the protests of the cinematographer and the
network.
It is upsetting that those two directors did not respect their on-
set collaborators enough to continue collaborating through postpro-
duction. But we are more concerned with the notion that cinematog-
raphers are merely pilots (with or without scarves), camera guys and gals whose job begins and ends with on-set cine-
matography.
In fact, cinematographers learn a tremendous amount by staying with a production through color correction and all
the other stages of the DI. We learn not only what worked in our imagining of the film, but also how we can make produc-
tion better by making post better, faster and cheaper. In the coolness of the DI suite computers like it chilly there is
time to look at the image closely, and to consider with our director what we might have done differently. With the help of
the colorist, the cinematographer also learns how the image is altered as it goes to various display devices.
Anyone can enter a DI suite and say, I know what I like, just as anyone can tour a museum and say the same
thing. But color correction is not just about deciding on a look you like, just as exposing a digital image is not only about
lighting and calculating exposure while watching a monitor. Color correction is about scene-to-scene consistency of skin
tones, of props and locations no matter what time of day they were captured, and, of course, of noise levels.
Directors who do not collaborate with their cinematographers through post seem shortsighted to us. They do a
disservice to their films, their producers and their profession, and a disservice to the notion that our community of film-
makers makes better films when all of us are well informed throughout the process.
Stephen Lighthill
ASC President
Presidents Desk
10 October 2012 American Cinematographer
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ASC Honors 3 with Andrew Laszlo Heritage Awards
By David Heuring
The ASC presented Andrew Laszlo Heritage Awards to three
outstanding student cinematographers during an awards ceremony
at the Clubhouse in June. Damian Horan of the University of South-
ern California won the graduate competition for Josephine and the
Roach; H.R. McDonald of the Art Center College of Design won the
undergraduate competition for Aexis; and Travis LaBella of North-
western University won the documentary competition, a new cate-
gory this year, for Language of the Unheard. (Also nominated in the
graduate category were Benjamin Kitchens of the American Film
Institute for Narcocorrido and John Walstad MacDonald of Chap-
man University for The Bullet Catcher. The other nominees in the
undergraduate category were Nicholas Wiesnet of Chapman
University for The Drop and Adam Lee of Loyola Marymount Univer-
sity for Reclamation. LaBella was the sole nominee in the documen-
tary competition.)
Short Takes
The ASC
Andrew Laszlo
Heritage
Award-winning
student films
are Josephine
and the Roach,
shot by Damian
Horan (top);
Aexis, shot by
H.R. McDonald
(middle); and
Language of
the Unheard,
shot by Travis
LaBella
(bottom).
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Josephine and the Roach
Cinematographer:
Damian Horan
Directed by Jonathan Langager, the
dialogue-free Josephine and the Roach is a
surreal short film about a cockroach that
falls in love with the woman whose apart-
ment he infests. The roach shares
Josephines appreciation for early 20th-
century French classical music, and when
she practices her accordion, he accompa-
nies her on the violin (unbeknownst to her)
from his little hole in the wall. They are
perfect for each other, but, alas, Josephine
has approximately 45,000 times as much
body mass, and their reproductive systems
are totally incompatible. Complicating
matters further is the fact that Josephine is
already married to a brutish exterminator
named Moe.
Langagers goal was to create a
magical world where one could imagine
such a romance existing, and he and Horan
sought inspiration in the bold visuals of Deli-
catessen (shot by Darius Khondji, ASC, AFC)
and Amlie (shot by Bruno Delbonnel, ASC,
AFC). Jon loves to take risks, which is why
hes so wonderful to work with, says
Horan, who hails from Houston, Texas. We
wanted to make strong choices.
The primary photographic chal-
lenge, according to Horan, was the roach,
which was portrayed by two puppets, one
2" tall and one 2' tall. Maneuvering the
latter required as many as six puppeteers.
Finding a way to sneak in a light or two for
that greenscreen work was a difficult chal-
lenge at times, says Horan.
Most of Josephine and the Roach
was shot with a Panavision Genesis and
Primo lenses, and Horan used a Primo
Macro Zoom for very close shots of the
roach that maintain shallow depth-of-field.
Framing for 2.40:1, he used focal lengths
that were either very wide or very long. To
photograph the miniature set depicting the
world of the roach, Horan used a Red One
MX, shooting 4K for 24-fps material and
3K for higher frame rates, which he used to
lend additional weight to the bugs move-
ments. Innovision Optics Probe II Plus
helped get roach POV shots from within the
apartment.
In the script, the world outside
Josephines drab quarters was described as
bustling and romantic, and Horan hinted at
this by hanging a variety of gelled bulbs at
different distances beyond the windows. In
the main room of her apartment, he used
very saturated blue light to suggest her
isolation and often keyed from her TV set,
her only connection to the outside world.
By contrast, the kitchen, where she falls in
love with the roach, appears warm and
inviting.
Camera moves were especially
important in the visual design. For a shot
that shows Josephine finding a miniature
box of chocolates left for her by the roach,
we used a Primo Macro Zoom, which
allowed us to put the miniature box in the
foreground, making it look rather large,
says Horan. As she reaches out and picks
up the box, we boom up to her eye level
and rack to her, revealing how small the
box actually is. I think the shot links the
Left (top to
bottom):
Josephine
(Jenna Augen)
practices her
accordion and
faces off with
her husband,
Moe; roach
puppeteers
(from left)
Damon Stea,
Stu Hirsch, Lino
Stavole, David
Agnew and
Christian Hall.
Right: Damian
Horan lines up
a shot.
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miniature and real worlds together in a very
romantic way.
Horan wasnt entirely satisfied with
the battery-powered miniature lights he
used in the miniature set, but a remote
slider from Innovision helped him create a
clean plate for the visual-effects team,
which had to remove rods from the roach
puppet. Working with puppeteers in such
a tight miniature set was definitely a big
learning curve, says Horan. Shooting at
T5.6 on a miniature set and being able to
control the light in a believable way was a
lot harder than I thought it would be.
Aexis
Cinematographer:
H.R. McDonald
The main character in Aexis, directed
by Eric Chang, recalls a succession of enig-
matic memories as he tries to figure out
how he died. The possibility of separate real-
ities is indicated, and an advanced technol-
ogy, along with an assassin in pursuit of it, is
hinted at. Throughout the film, the main
character jumps around in time, and the
filmmakers designed the images to reflect
his confusion and paranoia.
The script had a temporal ambigu-
ity that suggested the story could be taking
place in the future, says McDonald, a
native of New Orleans, La. To suggest this,
I arranged my compositions to give the
architecture a knife-like sharpness, putting
the character in a hostile environment. I was
always looking for a composition that
would further that idea and suggest a kind
of fascist control. We limited camera moves
to keep the emphasis on the compositions.
We also used reflections in mirrors to
suggest the multiple lives this character
seems to be living.
The script included a sequence in
which the actors had to perform a scene
and then play it again while reversing their
actions. A subsequent scene then presents
vaguely similar actions but a different
outcome. Similarly, the camera move, a
slow dolly combined with a pan/tilt, had to
be performed three times: once normally,
once in reverse, and once forward again but
slightly different.
McDonald shot with a Red One MX
in 4.5K 2.40:1 Widescreen mode, using Red
Pro primes and an Angenieux 12-120mm
zoom. I usually prefer to use older zooms
on the Red to soften the image a bit, but we
wanted sharpness for this film, so the
primes were appropriate, he says. I also
used a Canon [EOS] 5D Mark II for the
underwater shots and a brief shot with a
Lensbaby. Ive found that the 5D intercuts
pretty well with the Red on close-ups, but I
wouldnt use that camera on wide shots.
With one exception, the entire
picture was lit with Kino Flos, including 4-
bank systems and Single Selects, all with
daylight-balanced tubes. The exception was
a 1K tungsten-balanced accent light. The
environment was so sharp, rigid and angu-
lar that I felt it would have been a poor deci-
sion to use hard light, says McDonald.
The soft light balances out the look and
keeps it from becoming too theatrical.
McDonald says that all of his cine-
matographic decisions are informed by the
available time and gear. I typically work
with rushed schedules, limited crew and
only as much equipment as will fit in my
Subaru Forester, he says. I guess you
could say that at the moment, my specialty
is doing a lot with a little, and Aexis was no
exception. Fortunately, Eric gave me near
total freedom in crafting the look and find-
ing the shots that worked best.
Language of the Unheard
Cinematographer: Travis LaBella
Directed by Jacqueline Reyno and
Matthew Litwiller, the documentary
Language of the Unheard focuses on four
members of the Oglala Sioux Nation who
live on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation,
which borders the Badlands in South A
e
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.
Clockwise from
top left:
Reflections play
a key role in
Aexis; H.R.
McDonald (left)
talks over a shot
with director Eric
Chang (center)
and 2nd AC Lei
Tao; McDonald
sets up a shot.
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observes LaBella, who shot 16x9. I was
able to dial in some custom scene files to
get the most dynamic range. The cameras
stock lens gave us good range, but on the
1
3-inch sensor, it was difficult to get shallow
depth-of-field for interviews and other
shots. For everything other than wide shots,
I tried to be on the longest possible focal
length while staying as wide open on the
lens as I could.
LaBellas strategy for exteriors some-
times included an ND grad filter taped to
the front of the lens. I knew going in that
I would ultimately color correct the images
in Apple Color, so for landscapes, I made
sure to retain as many highlights as possible,
knowing I could bring up the shadows
later, he says.
Some interviews shot indoors were
lit with existing window light, and others
were lit with a China ball and a Kino Flo
Diva 400 for eyelight.
I learned that its important on a
documentary to try to get to know your
subjects really well and engage them in
conversation without the camera, says
LaBella. We participated in a sweat lodge
with one of our subjects, for example, and
we often spent hours talking with them
before shooting. I think this helped when
we eventually turned the camera on, and it
made it a pleasant experience for every-
one.
The Heritage Award is named for a
different ASC cinematographer each year.
This years honoree, Andrew Laszlo, ASC,
came to the United States as a refugee from
Hungary in 1947, after escaping forced-
labor army units and serving time in two
concentration camps. His cinematography
credits included the TV series Naked City,
the TV miniseries Shogun, and the features
Streets of Fire, Rambo: First Blood, The
Warriors, The Night They Raided Minskys
and Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. He was
the author of Every Frame A Rembrandt and
Its a Wrap! He died in 2011.
Dakota. The filmmakers wanted to repro-
duce for audiences the isolated feeling that
envelops visitors to the vast reservation.
The landscapes there are truly breathtak-
ing, notes LaBella, who hails from Rye,
N.Y. I used long, slow pans in most wide
shots to try to show the expanse of the
space. When we filmed the people of the
reservation, we tried our best to be flies on
the wall.
The productions main camera, a
Panasonic AG-HVX200, was chosen
because it was readily available from North-
western Universitys equipment cage over
the course of the eight-month shoot, which
the filmmakers arranged so they could
capture different seasons. LaBella also used
a Canon EOS 5D Mark II to get additional
coverage of the Lakota Invitational basket-
ball tournament. Gear was chosen carefully,
as everything had to fit in one vehicle for
the 14-hour drive from Chicago to Pine
Ridge.
Even though the HVX only shoots
720p, I think its an underrated camera,
Clockwise from top left: Travis LaBella and director
Jacqueline Reyno at work; landscape shots of Pine
Ridge Indian Reservation and the neighboring
Badlands; interviewee Bill Quijos.
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An Award-Winning Document of Climate Change
By Patricia Thomson
Growing up on Staten Island, Jeff Orlowski turned the shed
out back into a bouldering wall, making endless loops on climbing
grips he had fastened. When he wasnt climbing there or in Central
Park, he was in his basement darkroom, printing photographs under
his fathers tutelage. Little did he know that these hobbies would
mesh years later and lead him to a cinematography prize at the
Sundance Film Festival.
His winning film, Chasing Ice, which he also directed, was
originally intended to be a portrait of an obsessed photographer,
James Balog of National Geographic. However, it offers convincing
evidence of climate change, featuring time-lapse images of disap-
pearing glaciers that are so irrefutable even skeptics cant shrug them
off.
Twenty years ago, one of those skeptics was Balog. Trained as
a geomorphologist, the Colorado-based photographer began his
career leery of global-warming claims. But a New Yorker assignment
shooting glaciers in Iceland altered his thinking. He pitched a larger
story to National Geographic, and it was while shooting The Big
Thaw, one of the magazines most popular cover stories, that he
started to think time-lapse photography would be the best way to
record these dwindling glaciers. He subsequently launched the
Extreme Ice Survey, whose mission was to deploy 30 cameras on 18
glaciers in Greenland, Iceland, Alaska and Montana and create a
three-year time-lapse record.
He thought it would be easy, Orlowski says with a laugh,
but he quickly discovered that the equipment didnt exist for a
long-term endeavor.
Orlowski joined the project while he was finishing an anthro-
pology degree at Stanford University, where he also took some film-
making classes. A friend had introduced him to Balog, and in March
2007, Orlowski began volunteering. Initially, his job was to help
Balog set up field cameras and shoot video on the side. He bought
a Panasonic AG-HVX200 to take to Iceland.
We had no real plan, Orlowski says. We knew nobody
had ever done time-lapse work on this scale before. There are scien-
tists who did time-lapse 20 or 30 years ago, but only for a couple of
months in the summer, and only one photograph a day. It seemed
obvious that we needed to record this, so for the first two years, I
followed James and shot video for the sake of documentation, not
really knowing what would come of it. We werent planning on
making a documentary. (Chasing Ice includes additional footage
shot by Balog, David Breashears, Michael Brown, Adam LeWinter,
Svavar Jonatansson and others.)
Prior to their first outing, Balog spent months in his garage
working out a time-lapse system that could survive years unat-
tended. Nikon donated 25 D200s. Balog had to customize every-
thing else, including the solar-panel system that would keep the
Production Slate
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National Geographic photographer James Balog shoots by a moulin on the Greenland Ice Sheet.
I
batteries charged, and the camera housings
(Pelican cases outfitted with a Plexiglas
window and weather hood).
Balog, Orlowski and field assistant
Svavar Jonatansson started with the Solheim
Glacier in Iceland. They immediately realized
that the cameras mounting system
Bogen tripods bolted down and stabilized
with guy wires wouldnt work. The
ground was too soft to keep the shot stable
over time, especially in Icelands weather and
wind. After a trip to the nearest hardware
store, which was 50 miles away, they affixed
a wood frame with tripod head to a cliff
wall. Trying to find pressure-treated wood
in Iceland, where there are no trees, was
virtually impossible, Orlowski notes. They
also devised a new post mount that was
usable when bedrock was at hand.
The documentary shows the team
returning six months later and finding their
work a complete failure. Cameras had been
felled by falling rocks, cables had been eaten
through by foxes, and Plexiglas had been
sandblasted till it was opaque. But, most
troubling, the cameras werent firing.
The system Balog had devised was
clever enough. It avoided the pitfall of stan-
dard intervalometers, which never switch off
and thus constantly drain power. Balog
found a scientist to design and build an
intervalometer that would turn off at night
based on the cameras GPS coordinates and
between hourly daytime shots. It had an
internal calendar and knew the number of
pictures it was supposed to take on a given
day, because it knew when the sun came up
and set, says Orlowski. Conceptually, that
made sense. The problem was when youre
out in the field and a timer isnt working, you
cant just grab one from Alaska and use it in
Iceland because theyre programmed differ-
ently. And when youre out in the field and
the screen stops working and you dont
know why, thats a problem! Wed see this
LCD screen with no data, just a solid line
going across.
It took months to troubleshoot. A
scientist on one expedition disassembled the
whole system and measured the electrical
pathways within the circuit board. He identi-
fied a surprising culprit: the double-stick tape
used to mount the timer. When the
temperature changed, the tapes thickness
changed, so the contacts between circuit
board and screen didnt click, says
Orlowski. Ultimately, engineer Adam LeWin-
ter worked with National Geographic engi-
neers to devise a simpler timer that used a
light sensor to determine if there was
enough light to shoot, then powered down
the whole system between shots.
Meanwhile, Orlowskis Panasonic had
its own issues. Sub-zero temperatures
decreased battery life and made the LCD
screen flicker. (He remedied both problems
with rip-and-shake handwarmers.) Unable
to afford P2 cards, he purchased a 60GB
Firestore hard drive that had to be tethered
to the camera. Logistically, that was the
most nightmarish part of production, says
Orlowski. I tried to keep the camera and
drive inside my jacket so the batteries would
last longer. I was sometimes standing there
in terrible wind and snow, trying to peek in
and see if the hard drive was on so we could
roll! At some point, Panasonic came aboard
Top: Balog climbs
a section of
ancient ice at the
Columbia Glacier
in Alaska. Middle:
Adam LeWinter
on a month-long
glacier-watching
trip at the
Ilulissat Glacier,
Greenland.
Bottom: Chasing
Ice director/
cinematographer
Jeff Orlowski
shoots in a
canyon on the
Greenland Ice
Sheet.
John de Borman, BSC President
What a fabulous light the TruColor HS is. I have just
been working with it in Africa on a flm called Half of
a Yellow Sun. What was so surprising is that against
the harsh Nigerian sun it worked very well in car
interiors, even on exteriors to lift the very dark
complexions of the Nigerians. It converts easily from
tungsten to daylight and has its own dimmer that
doesnt efect the colour temperature. Doesnt need a
lot of power and for us ideal as we were shooting a
lot in small rooms on location. It could be hidden
easily and doesnt seem to heat up in the searing
heat of Africa. A great piece of kit to have when you
are in a tight spot and needing some soft, directional
punch out of your light. Well done.
Darran Webb: X-Factor, American Idol, America's
Got Talent
"From my experience with HS lights so far, these
are major improvements on anything that is
already out there. The enthusiasm I was getting
from the producer and director was very positive."
Patrick A. Stewart: Runnin Down a Dream,
The League
"The PRG Trucolor HS lights are the most versatile
instruments I've ever used on a set. It has 4k
punch, a 400 watt draw, and is evenly dimmable.
That combined with the ability to change color
temperature from 3.2k, to 4.3k, to 5.6k and
beyond makes it unparalleled. Small size, and a
comparatively low price tag make for a perfect
solution. I'm looking forward to all of PRG's
advancements in this phosphor technology.
Shane Hurlbut, ASC
"The HS is a great light for really soft, punchy
applications. What I like is the size and versatility.
Its compact nature gives me the ability to hide the
lights or hang them as toplights and still get
plenty of output. Ive also put the fxtures in the
shot: they look very high-tech and innovative.
Bob Finley III: MIB3, The Matrix Revolutions,
Spider-Man 2 & 3
"The HS light has performed very well on set. We have
found it to be a very versatile piece of lighting
equipment both in night and day interiors. I have
been using one now for four weeks now I wish I had
four fxtures."
To learn more about TruColor HS and other TruColor fxtures,
including TruColor Foton, please visit
www.trucolorlighting.com.
What theyre saying about TruColor HS
HS
and gave us P2 cards. That made my life a lot
easier.
For the last two years of the three-
year shoot, Orlowski switched to a Sony
PMW-EX1, which recorded to SxS Pro
memory cards. No hand warmers were
necessary, but a pen was required to press
buttons because Orlowskis fingers were
often buried inside three layers of gloves.
In 2009, Orlowski officially started
down the documentary-feature path after
convincing Balog of its feasibility. He started
working with producers Paula DePr Pesmen
and Jerry Aronson, and he began conduct-
ing interviews with EIS participants and
scientists using a Sony PMW-F3 (with Sony
50mm and 85mm prime lenses, or a Nikon
adapter with a Nikon 135mm lens).
Orlowski interweaves shots of stun-
ning beauty throughout Chasing Ice, not just
Balogs stills, but also his own video images,
which make the most of the exquisite light-
ing conditions and ideal camera positions
that Balog sought out. Orlowski also
includes his own shorter time-lapse
segments, which depict such things as ice
circling in the current and the Northern
Lights.
All of these beauty shots take Chas-
ing Ice out of the realm of everyday doc. So
much of climate change is described in
charts and graphs and numbers, but thats
not how we wanted to approach it, says
Orlowski. We didnt want the film to be
science-y. I wanted just enough science to
understand the context of what James is
doing, and no more.
Chasing Ice includes awesome
footage of the thunderous calving of various
glaciers. The first was captured at Stone
Glacier in Greenland, when the team was
still unloading gear from the helicopter.
Wed all noticed that one of the [glacial]
peninsulas looked really weird, and just on a
whim, I set the Panasonic to roll, recalls
Orlowski. Suddenly, people started to yell.
The peninsula the length of roughly five
football fields was starting to crack and
roll on its side, like a log. The only reason
we caught that at all was because of the
Panasonic and the P2 cards, says Orlowski.
The special Loop feature allows it to roll
forever. When you hit stop, it saves the last
x-minutes of footage, based on the card.
Orlowski had about 50 minutes in
the loop. Because glacial calving can start so
slowly, and the cracking sound takes several
seconds to reach the viewer, its virtually
impossible to catch the beginning of such
an event based on ones eyes or ears.
Orlowskis foresight got that indelible
moment recorded.
That success was dwarfed, however,
by the calving at Ilulissat Glacier in Green-
land, an event the filmmakers stalked like
wild prey. An ice fjord 5 miles wide, it is one
of the worlds most productive glaciers.
With Balog temporarily sidelined by a bad
knee, Orlowski and LeWinter set up camp
and prepared four video cameras and five
time-lapse systems. The EX1 had two hours
capacity, and during weeks of waiting,
Orlowski let it roll continuously. If nothing
noteworthy occurred after an hour, hed
delete the clip and start recording again.
That gave us an ability similar to [the Pana-
sonic Loop function] in terms of long record-
ing times, he says. If anything happened,
we knew we had it. If nothing happened,
we could delete the clip easily and restart.
After three weeks, they hit pay dirt. An ice
block the size of Lower Manhattan and
3 times taller began calving. It lasted 75
minutes, the largest calving event ever
captured on tape.
Data management and camera
maintenance were the toughest part of that
trip, consuming two to three hours every
night. Youve got to swap memory cards,
swap camera batteries, charge batteries
constantly, download all the memory cards,
backup all the footage, and make sure the
laptop batteries are always charged, says
Orlowski, who used eight 500GB hard
drives, one generator and a 50' extension
cord in Greenland. Setting up a complete
digital-download and backup station in a
little tent thats being pounded by wind is
not the most convenient thing.
Nor was reaching the locations.
Greenlands most accessible glacier, for
instance, required flights from Colorado to
the East Coast to Copenhagen to Kanger-
lussuaq to Ilulissat, and then a helicopter to
base camp. Baggage fees topped $40,000
by Orlowskis estimate, even though gear
was winnowed down mercilessly before
each trip. He notes that he was a bit
surprised by the film worlds approach to
packing gear. Theres a Pelican case for
everything. One camera body gets its own
large case with lots of padding, and that
gets tossed around [in transit]. In the photo
world, you have a backpack with your
camera body and dozens of lenses, all with
divider foam. Everything is safe, padded and
on your back, so its not getting tossed
around. Even though theres a lot of
customized gear out there for filmmakers, I
found there wasnt a camera case that func-
tioned this way.
Orlowski therefore devised a back-
pack system based on these principles. I
lined a cheap, plastic garbage can with
foam padding. The EX1 fit right in, and that
whole thing fit into the main compartment
of my hiking pack. The camera had struc-
tural support, and it was easy to pack and
remove. I had extra compartments for all
the climbing gear, camera accessories,
batteries, and extra layers of clothes and
goggles.
At press time, Orlowski was mulling
over ideas for his next film. Whatever it is,
he muses, I hope the locations are
warmer!
TECHNICAL SPECS
1.78:1
Digital Capture
Sony PMW-EX1, PMW-F3;
Panasonic AG-HVX200
Sony and Nikon
Balog installs a time-lapse camera at the
Columbia Glacier in Alaska.
Changing Fortunes
By Jean Oppenheimer
Part thriller, part cautionary tale, Arbi-
trage presents a man, Robert Miller (Richard
Gere), who seems to have the perfect life.
Handsome, charming and respected, he
runs a successful hedge-fund company,
donates millions to charity and has a loving
family. Behind the scenes, however, he faces
financial ruin and possible prosecution. A
risky investment proved a disaster, forcing
him to borrow to cover his losses and then
cook the company books to conceal the
mistake. If he can sell his trading empire to
an interested banker in time, nobody will be
the wiser, but the banker is stalling, and
Roberts creditors are losing patience.
The financial mess is only one of
Roberts looming troubles. He is also carrying
on an affair, and one night, he falls asleep at
the wheel, crashing the car and killing his
mistress. He flees the scene and tries to
cover his tracks.
The films early scenes, such as
Roberts birthday dinner at home and his
conversations with his daughter (Brit
Marling), are bathed in warm light. It
suggests a feeling of emotional intimacy
and closeness, and yellow is also associated
with wealth and power, says French direc-
tor of photography Yorick Le Saux, who
teamed with director Nicholas Jarecki for his
U.S. feature debut.
Yellow remains a signature color
throughout the film, especially in terms of
lighting. Working with gaffer Shawn
Greene, Le Saux developed a plan that
relied mainly on tungsten lights, most of
which were gelled with CTS. We
tended toward 1Ks for edgelight and back-
light and China balls for keylight, and we
used a lot of natural muslin on everything,
Greene recalls.
Although the car accident marks a
particularly dark point in the story, it, too, is
bathed in yellow light, courtesy of sodium-
vapor streetlamps that the filmmakers had
rigged with their own bulbs. For this
sequence, Le Saux shot Kodak Vision2
Expression 500T 5229. (He shot some other
night scenes on Vision3 500T 5219.)
Greenes crew retrofitted the street-
lamp casings to accept 1K, 400-watt and
100-watt sodium bulbs. My crew also built
a few custom China balls using muslin and
a variety of sodium bulbs, adds the gaffer.
The lights are small and really powerful
they pull 10 amps and you can place two
on a putt-putt and position them way
down the road or in the woods nearby. You
dont need a big generator, and you dont
have to run all that cable. A few Par cans
gelled with CTO and Magenta were
used to create hot points of light in the
trees that played out-of-focus behind the
actors, says Le Saux.
Greene laughs as he recounts the
producers reaction when they noticed how
few lights were set for the crash scene.
They didnt think it was sufficient and
asked me to put up a Condor. When Yorick
saw the Condor, he said, Whats that for? I
said, Nothing. We never needed it.
To capture the action, a process
trailer holding two Arricam Lites (one on a
75mm prime, the other on a 135mm prime)
preceded the car, and Le Saux, who served
as the A-camera operator, stood in the trees
on the passenger side, handholding another
Lite and using the long end of a zoom lens.
Two Eyemos were buried in the dirt close to
him, and another Eyemo was rigged inside
the car. (Because the car didnt move as
planned, the buried Eyemos got nothing;
meanwhile, the Eyemo inside the car
jammed.)
After the car came to rest, Le Saux
moved around it, continuing to shoot.
Smoke was pumped in, and additional
sodium lights were lined up along the road,
hidden behind bushes and edging trees to
help create depth. The idea was more to
light the trees and the road, not necessarily
the actors or the car, explains Le Saux.
After fleeing the scene, Robert
reaches a gas station and phones Jimmy
(Nate Parker), a young man with whom he
has a mysterious connection. Jimmy picks
him up and drives him home, unaware of
the trouble Miller has gotten himself into. Le
Saux continued to use 5229 for this scene,
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Hedge-fund
manager Robert
Miller (Richard
Gere) meets with
his daughter (Brit
Marling) as his
troubles deepen
in the drama
Arbitrage.
I
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pushing it 1 stop for a grittier look.
To light Robert and Jimmys conversa-
tion in the car, says Greene, we found a
well-lit route that had a lot of practical street-
lamps. On the process trailer, we encircled
the car with 650-watt Tweenies and dimmed
them up and down to suggest the passing
streetlamps. We positioned 1K Mickey
bounces in front as the key. I think we used
them through 2-by-3-foot frames of 250.
Rosco Litepads softened with muslin and
gelled with CTB simulated dashboard lights.
We only corrected them halfway, so they
were still a little blue and green, notes
Greene.
The productions many locations
included an elegant house near Gramercy
Park that served as Roberts home. Lighting
the master bedroom for a key day-interior
scene required some ingenuity. We needed
to push a lot of daylight through those
windows, and trees lined the street that the
windows faced, so we couldnt get any lifts
in there, explains Greene. We rigged 10
Joker Bug 800s above the windows and
bounced them into white showcard coves
that the grips built. That gave us a directional
bounce. Every HMI was gelled with CTO.
Arbitrage, which is Jareckis second
feature (following the documentary The
Outsider), promised to be a demanding
shoot: 60 practical locations spread across
New York City, and a 31-day schedule. Nick
and I spent a week putting ideas down on
paper, recalls Le Saux. Working with a
novice director is different than working with
a director who has made a lot of films, and
that time was a way for me to learn what
Nick had in his head. It was less about
making a shot list than about discovering the
movie together.
When designing shots, they talked in
terms of feelings. Each morning, Nick had
to bring me five words about what the
emotions or sensations of the sequence
would be, says Le Saux.
As for camera moves, Le Saux is not a
fan of the Steadicam. I prefer having a
good dolly grip and making my own moves.
Our dolly grip, Joe Doughan, was fantastic.
Whenever possible, I suggested to Nick that
we use a dolly rather than a Steadicam. He
describes Jareckis visual approach as classi-
cal, noting that this differs from his own,
more intuitive approach. I think I was hired
Top: A car
accident makes
matters
significantly
worse for Miller.
Middle: After
fleeing the scene,
he is aided by a
friend (Nate
Parker). Bottom:
Cinematographer
Yorick Le Saux
(left) and 1st AC
Ludovic Littee
prepare to shoot.
to bring some energy to the camerawork, to
bring it alive, he observes. Jarecki concurs,
noting, Yorick was always saying, We stay
loose. We stay loose. He has that jazz-musi-
cian quality, and I would come back with
more of the classical approach. Something
very nice came out of the mix.
We never marked an actor, and
they would change their [moves] from take
to take and Yorick would adjust accord-
ingly, recalls 1st AC Ludovic Littee.
Although a good 85 percent of this picture
was filmed with Yorick sitting on the dolly,
the shots have almost a handheld feel. We
werent locked into any position. Yorick
usually was on a zoom, and hed find his
focal length on the fly.
Dance floors, the absence of marks,
a preference for low T-stops (T2.8-T4), and
shooting scenes in long masters are all typi-
cal of Le Sauxs method. The cinematogra-
pher points to a scene late in Arbitrage that
shows Robert and his wife (Susan Sarandon)
arguing in the master bedroom. Le Saux
was seated on the dolly. Susan and Richard
were constantly moving around the
bedroom, and the lead kept changing
one moment Susan had the power, and
then Richard did. They were crossing each
other, unaware of who would be in frame.
The shot was five minutes long, and each
take was different.
Le Sauxs camera package came
from Arri CSC and included Cooke S4 prime
lenses ranging from 18mm to 135mm, and
Angenieux Optimo 28-76mm and 24-
290mm zoom lenses. The productions
negative was processed by Deluxe New
York, and most of the digital-intermediate
process was carried out at EFilm in Holly-
wood, where Le Saux worked with colorist
Natasha Leonnet. (Polish facility Alvernia
Studios, which created some of the visual
effects, also did the 4K scan of the nega-
tive.)
Leonnet says she learned a lot from
working with Le Saux in the DI suite. Yorick
would often play the color against the
emotion. For example, the car accident is
visually beautiful, even magical, yet it is
showing death and destruction. The
confrontation between Robert and his
daughter in Central Park is very soft and
beautiful, but really we are seeing the family
disintegrate before our eyes. There is this
beauty playing against whats happening
onscreen, and its a little destabilizing for the
viewer. We arent sure if Robert is a good
person or not, and our sense of unease is
another layer of the film.
TECHNICAL SPECS
Super 1.85:1
3-perf Super 35mm
Arricam Lite
Cooke S4, Angenieux Optimo
Kodak Vision3 200T 5213, 500T 5219;
Vision2 Expression 500T 5229
Digital Intermediate
Director Nicholas Jarecki and Le Saux assess a setup.

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U
pon its world premiere at this years Cannes Film
Festival, Killing Them Softly attracted attention for its
powerful performances and stylish filmmaking. Its
cinematographer, Greig Fraser, recalls, Watching
James Gandolfini and Brad Pitt act together was one of the
highlights of my career so far. Thats the part of the job that
really amazes me not shooting out of helicopters, but
watching these actors do their thing.
Directed by Andrew Dominik, Killing Them Softly
follows several small-time criminals whose fates become
intertwined with the armed robbery of a high-stakes poker
game run by Markie (Ray Liotta). The robbers are Frankie
(Scoot McNairy) and his junkie friend, Russell (Ben
Mendelsohn), who have been hired for the job by Johnny
Amato (Vincent Curatola). The robbery brings the mobs
activities to a temporary halt, and a dispassionate hit man,
Jackie Cogan (Pitt), is brought in to investigate the crime.
He subcontracts a fellow hit man, Mickey (Gandolfini), to
help him restore order.
Speaking to AC a few months after Cannes, Dominik
recalls that in developing the look of the picture, he and
Fraser spent several weeks exchanging ideas and shooting
tests in Los Angeles. I was very interested in doing some-
thing that didnt look lit, and Greigs attitude about that was
really good his [approach] is very much about reacting to
whats there at a location and supplementing it, says the
director. Our basic idea was a low-con image, a kind of
creaminess, that harked back to a look that might have
Dead
Mans
Hand
Dead
Mans
Hand
Greig Fraser captures a
gritty milieu with
cinematic lan for
Andrew Dominiks
Killing Them Softly.
By Benjamin B
|
www.theasc.com October 2012 35
existed in the Seventies. Greig
suggested that Panavision anamorphic
lenses in tandem with the kind of
lighting style we wanted would
produce a really creamy image, and we
shot a lot of tests with Panavision
lenses on his [Canon EOS 5D Mark
II] DSLR. Then it was a matter of
coming up with a look [on film] that
would match what we were getting on
the 5D, because we loved that. It was a
very shallow depth-of-field with
layered grays there were no real
blacks in it. That look is pretty impos-
sible to duplicate on film, I think,
because once you get down to the
release print, moving away from
contrasty images is kind of tough.
A new film stock, Kodak 500T
5230, proved to be key, according to
Fraser. We were the first feature to use
it, and it has a beautiful creamy qual-
ity, he says. I didnt test much of it,
mind you, because we didnt have
enough time. We shot some as we
drove around L.A., printed it, and
thought the results looked amazing.
We then put in an order for about
200,000 feet of it, which gave them a
little shock up there in Rochester! But
they came through.
We shot most of the movie on
that stock, all the night interiors and
exteriors, he continues. Its not as
contrasty as [Kodak Vision3 500T]
5219. Comparing 5219 to 5230 is like
comparing photo prints on glossy
paper and matte paper. 5219 is glossy,
and 5230 is matte. 5219 zings; its
sharp. With 5230, the blacks absorb
you a bit more; they take a little more
effort to welcome you in. You can
almost feel the textures and touch the
tones.
Some of the images in Killing U
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Opposite: Jackie Cogan (Brad Pitt) finishes off a hit in a unit still from Killing Them Softly. This page: A
nervous Frankie (Scoot McNairy) tries to keep it together while robbing a high-stakes poker game with
an unreliable pal. The images on this page are frame grabs from EFilm.
Them Softly possess a strange soft qual-
ity, with slightly blurred backgrounds
and bright flares. These moments were
partly fashioned by the HS50, an
older-generation lens customized by
Panavision optical engineer Dan
Sasaki. Fraser explains, We asked Dan
to shift some of the lens elements to
help throw the background crazily out
of focus, with a slight doubling of the
out-of-focus elements. He made the
bokeh even more elongated than it
usually is; the falloff was fantastic, and
we also got a great flare at the bottom
of frame. It was a very interesting and
exciting effect. This optical magic is
particularly noticeable toward the end
of the film, in a shot of Jackie walking
at night with fireworks going off in the
background.
Throughout the shoot, for
which he also employed G-Series and
Super High Speed lenses, Fraser
emphasized the bokeh by maintaining
a shallow depth-of-field, shooting
between T2 and T2.5 even in day exte-
riors with the help of ND filters.
Everyones been trying to get the
anamorphic image as sharp and clean
as possible, and there we were, trying
to mess it up, he notes wryly.
When defining the look of
Killing Them Softlys nameless town,
Dominik and Fraser used a choice
geographical phrase: Shitsville. Fraser
explains, Although we shot on loca-
tion in New Orleans, we were aiming
for something generic, a little town
between New Orleans, Boston and
D.C. that we called Shitsville. We
wanted the place to look like its on the
down-and-down, on the way out. We
wanted viewers to feel just how smelly
and grimy and horrible it was, but at
the same time, we didnt want to alien-
ate them visually. That was the chal-
lenge!
The bleak, often violent world
Dead Mans Hand

Top to bottom (all frame grabs): Cogan consults with a mob contact (Richard Jenkins) about his
instructions; Markie (Ray Liotta, back to camera) prepares for punishment from the Caprios (Trevor Long,
left, and Max Casella); in a shot whose bokeh was enhanced by a customized Panavision HS50 lens,
Cogan ignores some nearby fireworks as he heads to a meeting.
presented in the film is often suffused
with a low-contrast softness. Thats a
combination of stock, lenses and
lighting, says Fraser. Where possible,
I always used soft lighting.
Cinematographers sometimes use hard
backlight to give the appearance of
sharpness, but I tried to avoid that. We
were going with soft lenses and soft
lighting, and often with soft faces.
Creaminess is what Andrew and I
wanted, not milkiness, which is differ-
ent. Creaminess is something you feel
you can enter into, like a bath; you
want to be absorbed and encompassed
by it. These were our lofty expecta-
tions. It wasnt always completely
obtainable, but we did our best.
Desaturation was another key to
the look, and one of the filmmakers
criteria for locations was that they not
be too colorful. In prep, Fraser tested
flashing 5219 (because 5230 was not
yet available) with a Panaflasher to
reduce contrast, but he finally opted to
obtain some of that feeling in the digi-
tal grade, which the filmmakers
conducted with colorists Olivier
Fontenay and Mitch Paulson at EFilm
in Hollywood. Throughout the DI,
we were always trying to pull down the
highlights, pull up the mids and have
everything kind of meet in the
middle, Dominik recalls.
Frasers approach to a location is
to start with the existing lighting. I
wont say we shot with natural light
because we controlled everything, says
the cinematographer. The Kodak
5230 helped us blend [our lighting] in
with the locations. We tried to just
augment what was there with approxi-
mately the same color, and to end up
with something beautiful.
To get more perspective on his
technical approach to the picture,
Fraser suggested we speak to two of his
collaborators, gaffer Jay Kemp and key
grip Kurt Kornemann, who also
worked with him on Let Me In (AC
Oct. 10). Kemp notes that Frasers
approach to lighting locations in
Killing Them Softly involved matching
the spectrum of urban lighting and
Top: Cinematographer Greig Fraser and director Andrew Dominik prep a scene with Ben Mendelsohn
(seated), who portrays Frankies partner-in-crime Russell. Middle: A frame grab from the scene wherein
Russells luck runs out. Bottom: Fraser discusses a setup with Steadicam operator A.J. Johnson and 1st AC
Eric Swanek (left) as 1st AD Scott Robertson (far right) and other crew stand by. Fraser and Johnson
shared A-camera-operating duties on the picture.
fluorescents, much as they did on Let
Me In. On this movie, we tended to
embrace the green world, says Kemp.
We balanced mostly to an urban
metal-halide and cool-white environ-
ment, which is a hyper-blue with a
green spike. Then it was a matter of
incremental balancing to try and get
the sources even closer in color.
Depending on the scene, we either
addition to shots of the nervous
robbers. We could have made that
scene moody and smoky, but we chose
to deglamorize it and make it look
more like a supermarket, says Fraser.
Part of the reasoning, he adds, was to
differentiate this heist from an earlier
one that is shown in flashback.
At first I was a bit unsure about
the restaurant location, but Andrew has
a bloody great eye, and he liked it,
continues Fraser. I had to struggle a
bit. It was all toplight, but I did add
some fill for the eyes. We added green-
ish fluorescent practicals above instead
of Kino Flos. We corrected some of the
green, but kept a little bit. Ive never
had much success making Kino Flos
look green; I get better results running
green tubes and pulling the green.
Putting most of the lighting
overhead allowed the crew to move
quickly as they grabbed shots below.
We had just one day to get this scene,
and there were a lot of shots, so we had
to move through it, says Kemp. We
had to cover 10 actors, and Greig
wanted a fast solution [for lighting] so
Andrew could concentrate on perfor-
embraced the green or timed it out. In
general, green enhances urban stories
like this one because its true to the
environment.
This approach is evident in the
lighting of Frankie and Russells
robbery of the poker game, a scene that
was shot in a restaurant with yellow-
tiled walls. The scene includes many
reaction shots of the card players, in
Dead Mans Hand

Top: Liotta stands
ready to take a
fall for the scene
in which his
character is
savagely beaten
by two
colleagues.
Johnson and
Swanek prepare
to capture the
close coverage,
which is keyed by
an Image 85
softbox. Bottom:
The team films
Russell and
Frankie breaking
into the game.
The need to
capture many
shots quickly was
a factor in Frasers
toplight approach
to the scene.
mances. The location was pre-rigged

by our rigging department, and then
we came in and pre-lit. There was a
front room and a back room, and we
rigged both to give Andrew and Greig
some choices. They chose the back
room on the day.
We quadrupled the Cool
White fixtures overhead by adding
industrial fluorescents with a switch
bay to turn individual units on and off,
continues Kemp. We created a blue-
green environment with a bed of Cool
White fluorescents above and used
black teasers to keep light off the walls.
Greigs work on these kinds of scenes
was often a mix of toplight and
eyelight, and we added very little
below; we kept the camera side darker
and lit from the top or backlight zones.
Wed steal some toplight with bead-
board bounces or maybe add a 2-by-2
Kino Flo with Cool White fluorescent
tubes, and for close work we used a
Litepanels Mini corrected to Cool
White fluorescent.
Because the yellow-tile walls
were so reflective, Fraser also employed
some negative fill. On the tighter
shots, Kemp explains, we brought in
4-by-4 floppies to get unwanted
[bounce] off the actors faces.
Top: 2'x3' LED
DogPads were
integral to the
lighting of
numerous
nighttime car
interiors, including
this process-trailer
coverage of Pitt
for Jackies car-to-
car shooting of
Markie. Preparing
to film at right
(front to back) are
Swanek, Fraser
and Johnson.
Middle: A
Creamsource
Classic keys Pitt as
a Phantom Flex
captures high-
speed coverage of
the shooting.
Bottom: A frame
grab from the
final sequence.
The film includes a number of
dialogue scenes between Jackie and a
mob contact (Richard Jenkins) in the
latters parked car. Fraser recalls shoot-
ing a quick test in Dominiks own car in
Los Angeles during prep: We liked
the feeling of a light-colored car you
feel enveloped, safe and warm. In the
scene, the bright interior acts as a
source of reflected light. It was like
putting the characters inside a softbox,
says Fraser.
Long day-exterior scenes are a
challenge for cinematographers
because of the suns movement and
changing cloud patterns. To minimize
varying light conditions over the two
days they spent shooting Pitt and
Jenkins car scenes, the filmmakers
positioned the vehicle in the shade
under a bridge, and Fraser supple-
mented the natural light with two 220-
watt daylight-balanced Creamsource
Classic LED lights from Outsight.
There were no lights inside the
car, says Fraser. We used negative fill
from behind camera mostly to elimi-
nate camera shadows, but it also gave
their faces some shape. We added one
Creamsource, and then another, to add
a little bit of oomph. To manage the
natural daylight in the background of
some shots, he added a single or double
net far enough from the car to be invis-
ible. Because we shot on film, we had
the ability to pull the background in a
little in the DI if it wasnt quite right,
he notes.
Pitt and Jenkins were solely lit
with the two Creamsources for those
scenes, which is pretty remarkable,
adds Kemp. The lights were punched
through a 4-by-8 frame of Lee 250
[Half White Diffusion], mostly above
the windshield. They required some
correction to be true 5,600K without
the green spike that can be typical of
LEDs.
Though the lighting was simple,
the car interior was a big grip job
because of the black solids used to
create negative fill, according to
Kornemann. We had multiple 20-by-
20 solids flying in the air, and we were
dancing those around the car all day
long, he recalls. Two of them were on
stands, and one was on a flyswatter
hanging off a Condor. We had four to
six lines going back to the crane and to
the ground for stability in the wind.
Although Killing Them Softly
features very little hard light, Frasers
soft light can be very strong indeed, as
Dead Mans Hand

Top: Fraser
shoots reference
stills as Dominik
watches Pitt run
through a scene
with McNairys
stand-in.
A 100K SoftSun
outside the
windows provides
a strong soft key.
Bottom: A frame
grab from the
final scene.
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in a daytime scene in which Jackie
intimidates Frankie in a bar. We
wanted a strong source outside, so the
front of the room was very soft, says
the cinematographer. The idea was to
create as soft a light as possible and
also give the actors quick resets. We
didnt have to do a big lighting change
every time we changed shots. Pitt and
McNairy were backlit by a 100K
SoftSun positioned to hit the windows
of the location. It wasnt a specular
source; it was a nuclear ambient source,
directional without being harsh, says
Kemp. We used the SoftSun to create
explosive ambience and supplemented
that with three Arrimax 18Ks for more
directional pushes. We filled and
shaped the faces inside with the
Creamsource Classics and Litepanels
LED 1-by-1s and Minis on the bar.
We played the Creamsources very low
and very diffused, as if daylight was
bouncing back at the actors.
Kornemann recalls blocking sunlight
with 20-by solids on stands in the
street outside.
Another striking use of strong
soft light occurs in a hotel room where
Jackie confronts Mickey about his
performance on the job. Fraser had
three 18K Arrimaxes shooting down
directly into the windows from across a
courtyard, and not much else. The
sheer curtains on the window trans-
form the 18Ks into a powerful soft
source. When the window was off
camera, we let hard light hit the sheers
to create a soft ambience, and when it
was on camera, we softened the 18Ks,
says Kemp. There was very little
[lighting] inside the room, just a
Litepanels 1-by-1 or Mini for
eyelight. Fraser notes that Dominiks
angles were simple: We shot two sizes
of Gandolfini and Pitt, a mid and a
tight. Andrew was just concentrating
on the actors.
I knew going into this film that
we werent going to go in for a whole
lot of coverage we were just going to
have each character have his shot, says
Dominik. The idea was to simply sit
Dead Mans Hand

Top and middle:
Strong soft light
keys the hotel
room where
Jackie confronts
fellow hit man
Mickey (James
Gandolfini) about
his dubious work
ethic. Both of
these images are
frame grabs.
Bottom: Dominik,
Pitt and Fraser
discuss the setup.
there and let the characters do the
work. I had so many really good actors
on this movie that it was kind of point-
less to direct. I mean, you could, but
they knew who those characters were
and what they were doing.
Frasers treatment of night exte-
riors in the film is notable for the
absence of strong visible sources.
Instead, a distinctive, low-contrast pall
is sprinkled with bright glints of light.
I love sourceless night, he says.
When you go out in the middle of
nowhere, you dont see backlights and
frontlights. Ever since I started shoot-
ing, its been my passion to create
sourceless nights. I wanted the nights
in this film to have an enveloping
ambience.
Greigs night lighting is trans-
parent, affirms Kemp. He gives the
scene a coating of toplight, but without
you feeling the source. Sometimes Ill
want to add another light, and hell say,
No, its about putting one light in the
right place. Sometimes that one light
is a Condor with a huge softbox, and
well make 2-foot incremental moves
with it until we find the sweet spot
and Greig is pretty masterful at
finding the sweet spot that doesnt give
the source away. Then he might add an
LED eyelight and fortify the back-
ground with on-camera practical
industrial fluorescents and metal-
halide or high-pressure sodium-vapor
light fixtures. All of that combines to
create a very realistic look.
The toplight coating in Killing
Them Softly was provided by two types
of softboxes suspended from Condor
cranes. One comprised Arri X HMIs,
the other Kino Flo Image 85s, and
both were modified with Diving Bells,
tall cones of Full Black Grid and
Duvetyn with a wide base that can
accommodate gels or diffusion.
(Created by Kornemann, Diving Bells
were also used extensively by the team
on Let Me In.) The HMI configuration
included four 4Ks in a grid pointing
through a 12-by with controllable
siders, says Kemp. We added blue
and green gels to them to match metal-
halide, and we used DMX ballasts so
Dead Mans Hand

Top: LED DogPads
are rigged to key
a free-driving car
scene featuring
Pitt and McNairy.
Bottom: Fraser
films another of
Jackies hits as
gaffer Jay Kemp
holds the 1'x18"
pad of LiteRibbon
LEDs that will be
actuated by the
firing of the gun.
Frasers crew
worked closely
with LiteGear to
engineer the LED
gunshot effect.
we could control them from the
ground wirelessly with Luminaire soft-
ware that was set up by [best boy elec-
tric] Theo Bott. That saved us from
putting a man in the Condor.
The Image 85 softbox was less
powerful, comprising six eight-tube
units of 600 watts each that were fitted
with daylight tubes with green and
blue [gels] added to match metal-
halide, says Kemp. The X-Light soft-
box was used for most of the
high-speed photography, but the
Image 85 variant was used for close-
ups because it was cool enough to be
positioned fairly close to the actors and
offered a more appealing quality of
light.
In one striking night-exterior
scene, a reluctant Markie is invited to
get into a car by two fellow mobsters
(played by Max Casella and Trevor
Long) on a deserted residential street.
Rain begins to fall, and the image is
both poetic and realistic, with various
points of light in the distance giving
depth to the frame. Fraser used the
Image 85 softbox for toplight and
augmented it with dozens of small
background lights, including industrial
metal-halide units on tall Mombo
Combo stands and 8' industrial fluo-
rescents. (All of these were powered by
small putt-putt generators.)
We put commercially available
compact fluorescents on C-stands or
on buildings in the distance to create
specular points of light, Kemp recalls.
They were only 13 to 27 watts apiece,
but they read as background street-
lights or any type of source, really.
We hung them everywhere; they just
float in space and give depth to the
scene. We used metal-halides either in
frame or as crosslight to create those
pools of light you typically see on city
streets. We dressed all this to shot. If
we had a frame that included a large
area of black information, wed fly
these units in the background to give
some depth. If we were shooting in a
residential neighborhood, wed often
ask residents to turn their porch lights
on to achieve a similar effect.
Many cinematographers would
have used five Condors to light a scene
like that, but Greigs approach created
natural depth with great efficiency,
adds Kemp. It wasnt in our budget to
have layers of Condors lighting the
background, and in any case, that
wasnt the aesthetic Greig wanted.
For a sequence that shows
Markie being brutally beaten by the
two men, Fraser shot the action with a
PanArri 235 at a 45-degree shutter
angle. Dominik notes that this was a
Dead Mans Hand

Top: A large
softbox modified
with a Diving Bell
keys the stage
component of
Markies death
scene. Bottom:
Frasers grip and
electric crews
devised this
helicopter rig
for poor-mans-
process work. It
comprised
LiteRibbon LED
panels of
various color
temperatures,
DogPads, a
wireless DMX
receiver and a
large battery cell
(on the platform
atop the
central pivot).
departure from his original idea, which
was to shoot high speed with a
Phantom Flex. We tried to maintain a
certain ironic distance in some
sequences, and the beating was going
to be done in that style, but when I saw
the Phantom footage, I decided not to
use any of it, says the director. The
images were so beautiful, so extraordi-
nary, that cutting them into the picture
would have completely undercut all the
violence, which I wanted to be rude
and shocking. Greigs video footage of
the stunt rehearsal of the beating had
this real sense of spontaneity and ugli-
ness to it that felt more appropriate.
For wide shots of the beating,
the main source was the X-Light soft-
box diffused with Soft Frost. Close
work was keyed by the Image 85 soft-
box, which was hung very low, literally
2 feet above Ray Liottas head, says
Kornemann. It was a not an easy scene
to shoot. We were in wetsuits for two
nights while they dumped rain on us
continuously! Ray and the other two
actors were terrific sports about it.
Fraser had an 800-watt HMI Joker
Bug mounted to the camera for part of
the scene to achieve what Kemp
describes as a front-lit photojournalis-
tic effect. Dominik notes, Im a big
fan of front lighting, and I wanted the
beating to look horrible but just slightly
glam in a way.
The filmmakers did make exten-
sive use of the Phantom Flex for
another nighttime attack, Jackies car-
to-car shooting of Markie. This
sequence inspired one of the more
unusual lighting effects designed for
the production: a remote-trigger LED
gunshot effect, which Frasers crew
created in close collaboration with Al
DeMayo and Lee Parker at LiteGear.
The LED gunshot effect was origi-
nally designed for the scene in which
Jackie shoots Markie, but when we
talked to Al and Lee about engineering
the effect processor, we asked them to
make something that would be univer-
sally applicable, recalls Bott. The
effect was actuated by a Piezo trigger
attached to the grip of the gun, and the
WE CREATE
STORYTELLERS.
animation cinematography directing
film music composition (MFA)
picture editing & sound design producing
production design screenwriting
www.uncsa.edu
Alumni Danny McBride and
David Gordon Green at the UNCSA
School of Filmmaking Studio Village
Other notable alumni include cinematographer Tim Orr,
writer/director Jeff Nichols, producer/director Jody Hill,
editor Zene Baker, writer/director Craig Zobel, and
sound designer Will Files.
Susan Ruskin, Interim Dean
School of Filmmaking
WE CR
STORY RRY

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trigger was tuned by the LiteGear
effects processor to respond to the
vibration of the hammer striking the
firing pin. By attaching the Piezo trig-
ger to the handle and having the sensor
remotely tuned, we had the flexibility
to use the effect with whichever
firearm was used in the close-up. It was
intended to be enhanced in post, and
was conceived in part as a visual-effects
reference.
Al and Lee also offered us the
ability to plug any lighting fixture
utilizing 12-volt barrel connectors into
the effects processor [up to 15 amps
12-volt DC], so we designed and built
a variety of LED LiteRibbon fixtures
to accommodate the needs of specific
scenes, Bott continues. The effects
processor and trigger device worked
both AC and DC, and were small
enough that the actors could conceal
them in their wardrobe much like a
wireless lav microphone. Because of
this flexibility, the effect worked in
almost every scene in which Jackie kills
someone on camera.
For extreme-high-speed close-
ups of bullets flying from the barrel of
Jackies gun, the filmmakers shot at
12,000 fps with a rotating-drum
Millisecond High Speed Camera from
Cordin Co. The Phantom is great for
Dead Mans Hand

48
Fraser lines up a shot on location in Louisiana.
recording details like droplets of water
and ricocheting shells at high speed,
but we needed a camera even faster
than that to capture those bullet close-
ups, notes Fraser. We could set the
Millisecond to spin at X revolutions
per second [and sync it] to expose the
film when the gun was fired.
Looking back at his work on the
picture, the cinematographer muses, A
lot of directors would have been a little
anxious about filming a seven-minute
dialogue scene without any unusual
framing or a lot of camera moves, but
thats where Andrew is great: he knew
this film was about the performances
and that with actors like these, we
didnt need any gags or tricks to make
those scenes feel more exciting. Its
about great dialogue performed by
great actors, and thats really what
every cinematographer hopes for, isnt
it?
Dominik notes that the films
roster of strong performances did
complicate the edit, however. When
youre young and new to filmmaking
and only 10 percent of what you shoot
works, that tends to be alarming till
you get to the cutting room and find
out that you only need 10 percent of it
to work, and actually, the fact that only
10 percent works makes life easy
because you can just throw 90 percent
away, he says. On this film, the edit
was difficult because the rushes were of
such high quality performance-wise
that it was impossible to choose. It was
really a nightmare trying to decide
which take was better.
Additional reporting by Rachael
Bosley.
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TECHNICAL SPECS
2.40:1
Anamorphic 35mm and
Digital Capture
Panaflex Millennium XL,
PanArri 235;
Vision Research Phantom Flex;
Cordin Co. Millisecond
Panavision G-Series,
Super High Speed
Kodak 500T 5230,
Vision2 50D 5201,
Vision3 250D 5207
49
W
ith a population of 3.7 million patrolled by fewer than
10,000 police officers, Los Angeles has long been ripe
terrain for police dramas. The latest entry in the genre,
End of Watch, offers a novel visual conceit: Officer
Taylor ( Jake Gyllenhaal) is making a short film about a day-
in-the-life of an LAPD patrolman for one of his night-school
classes, and most of the action is captured by his small Canon
camcorder and by the lapel cameras he rigs to himself and his
partner, Officer Zavala (Michael Pea).
The story follows Taylor and Zavala, who are solid cops
and good friends, for about eight months as they patrol South
Central L.A. and make a series of busts that inflame a danger-
ous drug cartel. Contributing to the voyeuristic POV is
footage captured by various other cameras around the city:
surveillance and security cameras, police dashboard cameras,
and even criminals cell-phone cameras.
To help him create the movies diverse visuals, direc-
tor/writer David Ayer chose Roman Vasyanov, a young
Russian cinematographer who had never lived or worked in
the United States. A graduate of the Gerasimov VGIK cine-
matography school in Moscow, Vasyanov has shot commer-
cials and four features (Nochnoy Prodavets, Okhota na Piranyu,
Tiski and the musical Hipsters) in Russia, and his work caught
the eye of the United Talent Agency, whose reps brought him
to Los Angeles and introduced him to Ayer.
In my interview with David, he told me he wanted to
shoot this movie in a handheld POV style, recalls the cine-
matographer. He showed me videos captured by police dash-
board cams and lapel cams, and videos taken by soldiers in
Afghanistan who had cameras taped to their helmets. It was
all very real, very raw and very immediate. Some of it felt like
a first-person-shooter video game and was very engaging in
End of Watch, shot by Roman
Vasyanov, puts viewers in the shoes
of two tenacious Los Angeles cops.
By Jay Holben
|
A Very
Tough
Beat
A Very
Tough
Beat
that way. It was a great meeting, but
then I left for Moscow and thought that
was the end of it. Three weeks later, he
called said, I want you to do my movie!
This shoot was quite different
for me, he muses. I had just finished
Hipsters, a big, Chicago-style musical
that involved Technocranes and careful
lighting, and my first Hollywood movie
was going to be very down-and-dirty!
End of Watch was shot in 22 days
entirely on location in South Central
L.A. Ayer had a strict directive that the
film be as accurate and realistic as possi-
ble. He didnt want to change reality at
all, says Vasyanov. When we went into
the [LAPD] Newton Division to shoot,
we didnt change anything; we shot the
real station exactly as it was. If we
needed a crack house, we went to a
crack house no kidding! We had a
scene in a crack house, and we used a
crack house that the police had busted
two weeks earlier.
We had a great location
manager, Earl West, who has worked
with David since Training Day [which
Ayer wrote and co-produced] and
knows all these places, continues
Vasyanov. Wed be shooting a location,
and just two blocks over, real LAPD
officers would be blocking off streets to
take down a gangster. You can re-create
that kind of realism, but it takes a lot of
money and a lot of time, and we didnt
have either.
The primary camera was the
Canon XA10 HD camcorder
Gyllenhaal carried throughout the
shoot. The XA10 is a
1
3" CMOS
1920x1080 camera that records in 24
Mb/s AVCHD format to an internal
flash drive. David is very knowledge-
able about video cameras, and he came
in one day, very excited, and asked if I
knew about the Canon XA10,
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Opposite: LAPD
officers Taylor
(Jake Gyllenhaal,
left) and Zavala
(Michael Pea)
prepare for a
house call. This
page, top:
Camera operator
Mick Froehlich
captures a shot
of Pea for the
sequence with
the help of an
EasyRig4 Vario
camera-support
system. Bottom:
Director of
photography
Roman
Vasyanov
exploits the
EasyRig for a
shot of Taylor
videotaping his
friends.
Vasyanov recalls. I didnt. In my world,
cameras are the Arri Alexa or the Red
Epic or the Sony F65! I dont know all
the consumer cameras out there, but
David does, and that helped a lot.
To create footage that was osten-
sibly captured by Taylor and Zavalas
lapel cams, Ayer worked with Michael
Mansouri of Radiant Images to create a
pared-down version of Silicon
Imagings SI-2K Mini that could be
mounted to a custom-designed vest
worn by Gyllenhaal and Pea.
Mansouri and Ayer stripped the Mini
down to something that was essentially
a sensor with a lens mount, dubbing the
result the Nano. The Mini is a
2
3"
2048x1152 camera that shoots in
CineForm raw format. The Nano was
roughly
1
3 the size of the Mini and
featured a C-mount instead of a PL
lens mount.
The actors custom vests facili-
tated not only a mounting point for the
Nano, but also, when necessary, a moni-
tor that enabled the actors to see their
framing. Cabling around the back of
the vest led to a battery system and a
Cinedeck EX portable recorder, and the
footage was fed wirelessly via IDX
transmitter to Ayers monitors. The vest
was its own complete system and left
the actors untethered.
With those vests, Jake and
Michael acted as their own operators
most of the time, says Vasyanov.
Sometimes I would grab Jakes shoul-
ders and twist him left or right, panning
him like a tripod. It was really a bit of
madness, but it worked!
Ayer was keen to capture sponta-
neous, imperfect visuals. Vasyanov
recalls, The first day of the shoot, we
mounted the camera on Jake for a scene
in an apartment where a big fight
A Very Tough Beat

A custom-
designed vest
allowed the
filmmakers to
attach monitors
to the actors so
they could check
their framing
while
simultaneously
performing and
shooting with a
stripped-down
SI-2K Mini the
production
dubbed the
Nano. In this
sequence,
Zavala and a
gangster (Cle
Shaheed Sloan)
engage in a
brutal fistfight
while Taylor
stands by,
rooting for his
partner.
and when the guys were running and
jumping over fences, he was there with
them, flying right along, Vasyanov
marvels. It got so that none of us were
impressed with Jake and Michaels
physical abilities any more, but we were
all impressed with how well Arthur kept
up with them!
Although the action in End of
breaks out between Zavala and a
suspect, and Taylor stands back and
watches it unfold. The producers were
all there on set, and Jake was bent over
just a little, so the camera was tilted
down a bit, and the heads of both the
actors involved in the fight were
cropped off! I was really scared for a
moment, but when I looked at David,
he said, That was great! Lets keep
going! Thats when I realized this visual
style would give us a considerable
amount of freedom, and we had to be
really brave and just go with it.
The vest rigs allowed Gyllenhaal
and Pea total freedom to flow with the
action of the scene in a very organic way.
If their characters were in foot pursuit,
they would run at full speed, jump over
walls, and go in and out of houses with-
out being encumbered by a trailing
camera crew. Jake and Michael trained
for two months for this film, and they
were in incredible shape, says
Vasyanov. In fact, we sometimes had to
beg them to slow down! Finally, we got
an electric golf cart so we could keep up
with them!
One person who didnt have the
comfort of the golf cart was digital-
imaging technician Arthur To, who was
aptly nicknamed the Stunt DIT. Tos
usual domain the Cinedecks
became a moving target because the
decks were mounted to the actors
backs. To had to keep up with them and
make adjustments to the camera
controls on the fly. Arthur always had
to be near the cameras and the drives,
Top: While
breaking up a
party, Taylor
confronts
remorseless
gangbanger Big
Evil (Maurice
Compte).
Bottom:
Overhead
fluorescent tubes
and a boom-
mounted fixture
illuminate
the scene.
Watch plays out mostly from the
perspective of the officers cameras,
there are some departures, which
Vasyanov believed were important to
include. When I came aboard the
project, I suggested we needed a little
more than just pure POV camerawork
to get the coverage, he recalls. I love
Soy Cuba [I Am Cuba, shot by Sergei
Urusevsky], and that was the best refer-
ence for me in terms of camera move-
ment and storytelling. After some tests,
we realized the POV worked great, but
we needed something else to help create
an emotional connection to the charac-
ters. What happens when theyre not in
uniform? What happens when it isnt
logical that they would have a camera
filming?
Its difficult to always motivate
POV camerawork and make it feel real,
so I suggested we incorporate some
slightly more traditional coverage by
shooting a little handheld in a very ener-
getic style, he continues. I shot a lot of
the handheld very wide and very close
to the actors, often with an 8mm lens
just 10mm from their faces! We keep
this energy all throughout the film, even
when there isnt action going on. It
creates the feeling that youre always
waiting for something to happen, and
thats really the life of a police officer:
theyre always on edge, waiting to spring
into action at a moments notice.
For this handheld work,
Vasyanov used SI-2K Minis with PL
mounts to work with cine-style Super
16mm lenses and Preston remote
follow-focus rigs for both A and B
cameras. (Mick Froehlich operated the
latter.) To maintain the feel of the
cameras mounted to the officers chests,
Vasyanov and Froehlich each wore an
EasyRig, a body harness with a boom
arm that comes over the operators
shoulder and supports the camera from
above on a cable.
The SI-2K Mini reacts very
differently in different lighting Id
find one exposure in mercury lights, one
exposure in sodium and another in
A Very Tough Beat

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tungsten, recalls Vasyanov. The red
channel is surprisingly noisy, and we had
to black balance a lot to keep that clean.
During a take, sometimes our blacks
would turn a bit red, and wed have to
black balance again to get rid of it. We
always had IR cut filters on the camera,
but corruption was still a problem
especially with the black police
uniforms and we had to stay on top
of it. The technology is not easy to work
with. The ISO is bad, and its got gain
noise and no latitude. The good side is
that you get this kind of 16mm
Ektachrome look, with milky blacks
and bad resolution in the highlights. It
really creates some mood! And I think
these limitations can work for you
because now, thanks to YouTube, this is
part of how we see the world.
One particular sequence in End
of Watch makes memorable use of the
limitations Vasyanov describes. In the
scene, Taylor and Zavala respond to a
call and find a hysterical woman
running out of a burning house,
screaming that her children are still
inside. The two officers are the first on
the scene, and Zavala immediately runs
into the house to look for the children,
with Taylor close behind. The filmmak-
ers shot two takes of the sequence, one
with the actors vest cams, and the other
with the Nano mounted on a stick
Vasyanov held very close to the actors.
The house was a practical loca-
tion on a South Central street, and the
fire department forbade the filmmakers
from creating real flames. We had to
find a way to do a fire without real fire,
A Very Tough Beat

Top: While searching a suspicious house, Taylor and Zavala discover the victims of a slavery ring.
Bottom: Zavala takes one of the ringleaders into custody.
without CG, and without even a flame
bar! recalls Vasyanov. This was one
instance where the SI-2Ks limited lati-
tude really worked to our advantage,
because anything that was really bright
just burned out white. The lenses are old
C-mounts, and they flare a lot, which
was really good. David and I looked at a
lot of footage of real fires on YouTube,
and we noticed there isnt any texture in
the flames theyre pure white. Most
cinematographers want to add texture
and color to fire, but thats not what it
looks like on the news! So we found we
could get away with a lot. We filled the
place with smoke and then lined up a lot
of bounce reflectors to create the fire-
light.
The trick was to create a burning
house with no actual fire anywhere,
which we did, almost literally, with
smoke and mirrors, recalls gaffer Chris
Culliton with a laugh. Outside the
house, we used a series of 12-light
Maxi-Brutes that were Socopexed back
to a dimmer board, with each lamp
independent. Then we made a checker-
board of gels in a frame that alternated
between amber and yellow so that each
lamp got its own color. We created a
chase sequence that would pulse the
lights in a somewhat random pattern to
create the fire flicker. I dont like these
lights direct for a fire effect; Id rather
bounce them, so we used a bunch of 12-
by and 8-by silver lam bounces and
bounced the Maxis into those. Then Id
have one of my crew stand behind the
lam and poke, flick or push on it from
the back. Ive used this technique a
couple of times now, and I call this
person the fire dancer. It takes a bit of
finesse to feel the chase pattern coming
from the light and make it an organic-
feeling thing. When the operator is
pressing on the lam, disturbing the
plane of the reflector from the back, it
creates hot points and softer points that
dance around a bit, very much like real
firelight.
Inside the house, Culliton used a
scaled-down version of the technique,
employing Nine-light Mini-Brutes with
varying-focus lamps and the same
A Very Tough Beat

Top: The officers
rescue children
from a house fire.
Middle and
bottom: After
responding to an
emergency call,
the pair take
control of a
grisly scene.
checkerboard amber/yellow gel with
silver lam reflectors. We also used
some warm LEDs taped to the ceiling
for toplight in a couple of places, and we
used some old batten strips that were
each about 8 feet long with 12 bulbs
wired in separate circuits, he adds. We
Socopexed those back to the dimmer
and kept them down, never above 50
percent, with a chase. We taped the
strips up in small spaces and stuck them
to walls.
Because the SI-2Ks dont hold
the latitude very well and the C-mount
lenses flare quite a bit, you really cant
tell its reflectors bouncing light, notes
Vasyanov. Its a very realistic flame-free
fire effect!
LEDs played a strong role in the
productions lighting package. Culliton
always carries a variety of custom LED
fixtures that he designed with Al
DeMayo of LiteGear. These fixtures are
various sizes of coroplast onto which
several strips of LiteRibbon LEDs are
mounted. They are lightweight and can
be easily taped to surfaces, and they
work off 12-volt power.
One location wherein these
LEDs played a significant role is the
dark house where Zavala brawls with a
suspect, Mr. Tre (Cle Shaheed Sloan),
while Taylor stands watch. Its a day
scene, but the houses windows are all
A Very Tough Beat

Top and middle:
Big Evils crew
ambushes the
officers in an
apartment
complex. Bottom:
Taylor finds himself
trapped in an
alley by an
oncoming car.
covered. Outside the windows, Culliton
positioned 12K HMI Pars, but inside,
he merely taped 4' sections of his
LiteRibbon LED fixtures (along with
their battery power supply) to the ceiling
and dimmed them down. Roman was
interested in using a lot of toplight
throughout this movie, not just so we
could shoot 360 degrees, which David
wanted to do, but also because he really
liked that look, says Culliton. He liked
them a little green, so to warm them up
a bit we often added
1
4 Plus Green
along with, at times,
1
4 CTO.
I didnt want a really contrasty
image, says the cinematographer.
Instead, I liked milky blacks and keep-
ing the feel gritty and raw.
Vasyanov liked to put his camera
in the middle of the action literally.
For the fistfight between Zavala and the
gangster, the cinematographer taped an
SI-2K Nano to the end of a microphone
boom pole and thrust the camera
between the actors while they brawled.
Id just twist it one way and then the
other to get the shot, he recalls. We
did that quite a bit in action sequences,
actually. I liked to get the camera in very
close, sometimes too close, as I think I
must have smacked into Jake or Michael
at least a dozen times during the course
of shooting! But they were both very
cool about it.
For the sequences that show
Taylor and Zavala in their patrol car,
Ayer wanted the car to be free driving,
with no towing or process trailer
involved. This posed a fairly significant
challenge for Vasyanov and his crew,
given that the actors often had to drive
through South Central neighborhoods
that were not well lit. The filmmakers
needed a lighting scheme that would
roll with the car, be self-contained, and
still allow the actors full freedom to
drive the vehicle. Given the low ISO of
the camera systems and the frenetic
visual style of the film, one of the biggest
challenges was how to light these night-
interior police-car sequences, recalls
Culliton. As it turns out, we used a
process/tow trailer for most of the
coverage. We used a series of LiteGear
RGB LED strips attached to small
coroplast cards rigged off the top of the
car roof and running down both sides of
the police car; this allowed us to chase
the light from the front of the car to the
back, sometimes at the same time,
Zavala rushes to help his fallen partner after Taylor catches a bullet.
sometimes offset by a few seconds.
Most importantly, by creating preset
mixtures of color temperature with the
RGBs, we could shift the chase sodium
to mercury and even to white at the
touch of a button. We designed it to run
with wireless DMX so that the car
could free drive and the programmer,
David Slodki, could shift the chase from
a follow vehicle. We also used a small
Blonde through Full Grid Cloth on the
back of the trailer to put a little more
ambient light on their faces.
David didnt want the film to
look lit at all, notes Vasyanov. He
wanted to be able to shoot 360 degrees
nearly all the time, and there were no
marks for the actors. There was no wait-
ing on lighting or camera; it was pretty
much non-stop shooting. This was the
first time in my career that I had to
figure out how to light with no light. It
had to look ugly, it had to look real and
it had to look unlit. It was a big psycho-
logical switch for me. I grew up reading
A Very Tough Beat

62
Special car rigs were used to capture shots of the cops on patrol.
American Cinematographer, which I
translated into Russian for my cine-
matography school, and watching
Tarkovskys movies, which my teacher,
Vadim Yusov, had shot, so I always had
the idea that a cinematographers job
was to make beautiful pictures. This
film was the complete opposite; it was
not about beauty, but about truth and
the energy of real life. You have to be
really brave to cross the borders, and I
wouldnt have been able to make it
without Davids trust.
I was doing very crazy things on
this shoot, all of them things Ill proba-
bly never do in my career again
putting a camera on a stick and
thrusting it between fighting actors,
using tiny digital cameras just centime-
ters from the actors face, mounting
cameras on the ends of guns, mounting
cameras on actors arms when they were
throwing punches. But if you really
want to do something new, you have to
break a lot of rules. Jake and Michael
were so into it that by the end of the
shoot, they didnt want us to shoot at all!
They were both beautiful camera oper-
ators, and they were so open and excited
about working in this style. Jake would
sometimes get into an awkward posi-
tion to make sure he got the best shot,
even though it was very difficult for his
performance.
Davids unique vision inspired
all of us, and because of that and his
trust in me, I was able to embrace the
many challenges of this production,
concludes Vasyanov. You dont always
need five trucks of lighting; you can be
very minimalistic and get visuals that
are right for your story. In the end, you
do the best you can to bring the direc-
tors vision to life.
63
TECHNICAL SPECS
1.85:1
Digital Capture
Silicon Imaging SI-2K Mini,
SI-2K Nano;
Canon EOS 5D, EOS 7D, XA10;
GoPro Hero
Fujinon, Zeiss Ultra Prime and
Canon EF
Cinematographer Steve Yedlin
lends a surreal edge to
Rian Johnsons sci-fi thriller
Looper.
By Iain Stasukevich
|
Payback Time
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.
I
n the futuristic world of Looper, time
travel is possible, but it is illegal and
only available on the black market.
The technology is secretly used by
large criminal organizations that devise
a system in which getting rid of some-
one means sending the target 30 years
into the past, where a looper is waiting
to kill him or her. The loopers only rule
is to never let a target escape. For Joe
( Joseph Gordon-Levitt), the work is
easy, the pay is good, and life is sweet
until the day his future self (Bruce
Willis) is sent back to be assassinated.
Looper is the third feature collab-
oration between director Rian Johnson
and cinematographer Steve Yedlin,
following Brick (AC May 05) and The
Brothers Bloom. It is Johnsons first
anamorphic picture, and the director
says shooting in the format was always
on my bucket list. He and Yedlin
considered anamorphic for Brothers
Bloom, but we chickened out because of
some of the restrictions with minimum
focus and the speed of the lenses, says
the director. Afterwards, though, we
realized those restrictions rarely came
into play, so for Looper, we decided to
roll the dice.
Yedlin had shot one anamorphic
feature previously, The Other Woman
(2009), but he notes that the camera
style in Looper is totally different. The
Other Woman was fairly normal in terms
of focal lengths, whereas on Looper we
were doing close-ups with wide lenses
right in peoples faces, he says.
1st AC Bob Hall and 2nd AC
Dan Schroer assembled the camera
package at Panavision, working with
branches in Woodland Hills, Dallas and
New Orleans. The gear comprised a
Panaflex Millennium XL; a Panaflex
Gold 2; prime lenses in the C-Series, E-
Series and G-Series lines; a 40-80mm
Anamorphic Wide Zoom, and a 70-
200mm Anamorphic Tight Zoom. I
knew I was going to use a lot of those
lenses with Wally Pfister [ASC] on The
Dark Knight Rises [AC Aug. 12], Hall
notes. Taking them out on Looper was
a good excuse to keep them together
Opposite: Joe (Joseph
Gordon-Levitt), a
hired gun known as
a looper, awaits his
next target. This
page, top to bottom:
Joe commiserates
with his friend Seth
(Paul Dano); Joes
future self (Bruce
Willis) takes drastic
action;
cinematographer
Steve Yedlin on set.
Payback Time
and make sure they were operating
well.
On Brick and Brothers Bloom,
Johnson and Yedlin made heavy use of
the spherical 14.5-50mm Primo Macro
Zoom, taking advantage of its close
minimum focus to bring the lens right
up to the actors faces. With no anamor-
phic equivalent for the PMZ, they
employed close-focus diopters to
achieve a comparable effect in Looper.
We had to use diopters even with the
primes, says Yedlin. We did our close-
ups on a 50mm or 60mm, and they were
really tight close-ups, not head-and-
shoulder medium close-ups. Without
the diopter, we would have had to be
farther away with a longer lens.
Its such a strong look to be up in
somebodys face with an anamorphic
lens, he adds. Straight lines are
rendered as curves, the edges are never
in focus, and there are all these odd
flares.
Poor Bob Hall! Johnson
remarks. Steve was shooting wide open
most of the time with diopters, so there
were some tricky focus situations. I was
really thankful we had someone as skill-
ful as Bob.
Two time periods are represented
in Looper: the Near Future, which is the
year 2042, and the Far Future, or 2072.
Far Future scenes are set and were shot
in Shanghai, but they are shown only
briefly in a hazy montage. The rest of
the story takes place in the Near Future
in Kansas City, Mo.; these scenes were
shot on stages and on location in New
Orleans, La., and the surrounding area.
Rian described the overall look
he wanted as on-the-ground science
fiction, recalls Yedlin. Instead of
Top: An
uneasy Seth
unmasks his
next target.
Bottom:
Crewmembers
prepare to
reset the dolly
for another
take.
correct HMIs to mercury vapor, they
used Lee
1
2 CTS; to correct tungsten to
mercury vapor, they used either Mist
Blue (for an approximate color match)
or a combination of Lee
1
2 CTB and
Lee No Color Straw (for a precise color
match).
everything looking futuristic and fancy,

things look a little more realistic and
junky. For instance, all the cars in the
movie are old, but theyve been retrofit-
ted with Near Future technology.
With Johnsons mandate in
mind, Yedlin developed a lighting
approach he describes as based in real-
ity, but not vrit or unlit. Johnson calls
it theatrical realism, explaining, All of
the light is motivated and makes sense
in the world of the movie, but its beau-
tiful in this slightly heightened way. I
think thats much closer to real-world
lighting than any kind of dim, flat light-
ing that supposedly looks real.
After discussing how practical
lights might be used in the Near Future,
the filmmakers decided that all of the
light in Kansas City should be a
uniform white. To neutralize all of the
color temperatures in a scene, Yedlin
and gaffer Andy Ryan employed
corrective gels on their lamps and on
practicals with the idea that they would
pull everything back to white in post,
says Ryan.
For example, the gaffer contin-
ues, if we were shooting a night exte-
rior on a street where the lighting was
predominantly mercury vapor, wed use
a correction for our tungsten heads and
a different correction for car headlights,
so everything would have that greenish-
blue mercury-vapor tint to it. To
Top: Gordon-
Levitt awaits the
next take for one
of the movies key
sequences, in
which Joe and his
future self hash
out their
differences at an
isolated diner.
Bottom: Multiple
cameras capture
the scene amid
ambience
provided by a
bank of
fluorescents.
The gel pack they devised also
included:
Tungsten to High Household (over
60 watts) or Envelope: Rosco
1
4 CTO
High Household or Envelope to
Tungsten: Rosco
1
4 CTB
Tungsten to Low Household
(under 60 watts): Rosco
1
2 CTS
Low Household to Tungsten:
Rosco
1
2 CTB
Tungsten to Linestra: Lee
3
4 CTO
and Lee
1
8 Minus Green
Linestra to Tungsten: Lee
3
4 CTB
and Lee
1
8 Plus Green
Tungsten to Sodium: Rosco Full
CTO and Lee Medium Yellow
It was impossible to execute the
idea perfectly, says Yedlin. For
instance, if some of the mercury lights
on a given street were older than others,
they had a slightly different color.
Another street would have sodium
lights that were different colors, and
another street might have mercury and
sodium lights mixed together. We
couldnt go around changing every
single streetlight. As the shoot
progressed, the filmmakers came to
embrace the slight variations in color
temperatures, and they decided to
incorporate that look for their interior
locations and stage work.
Johnson and Looper production
designer Ed Virreaux were drawn to the
aged textures and architecture of New
Orleans downtown district, where the
productions locations included the 15th
floor of the derelict Rault Center and
the State Palace Theatre. Virreaux and
his crew transformed the latter into the
burlesque club La Belle Aurore, the
main hangout for loopers and mobsters.
Joes boss, Abe ( Jeff Daniels), has his
office at the club.
The front of the house became
the club floor and stage. Yedlins crew
blacked out the walls with Duvetyn and
uplit them with about 60 1K Par cans.
Above the stage, a 20'x20' frame of
1
2
Grid diffused 16 6K tungsten space
lights; only a few of these units were
used at the same time. A row of 25-watt
Payback Time
After the mob
threatens to
close his
loop, Joe
sneaks back to
his apartment
to retrieve a
stash of gold
bullion.
footlights ran along the edge of the
stage, and two CTO-corrected 1.2K
Lyceum follow spots were used on the
dancers. Patrons seated at tables were
warmed by the glow from 75-watt
envelope lamps ensconced in Milk Plex
cones.
A maze of corridors leads to
Abes office and war room behind the
stage, and all of the lights in the maze
were practicals. Some were hanging
fluorescents and some were bare 75-
watt tungsten envelope globes, and we
put them right in the shot to get those
great anamorphic flare effects, says
Ryan.
On the second floor of the
theater, Virreaux built the Clean
Room, a long, empty anteroom outside
Abes office that features drop-ceiling
Milk Plex panels. 1'x3' batten strips
with 75-watt household globes lit the
panels from above, providing soft, even
light.
Abes office and war room were
built at New Orleans Second Line
Stages. We were trying to create a
sense of claustrophobia in his office, and
Abes desk takes up almost the entire
space, says Yedlin. Ed incorporated a
long fluorescent lamp over the desk, and
thats the only thing lighting the scene.
Its right there in the shot, next to the
actors heads. For certain shots, Yedlin
paired the practical fixture with
Joe pays a visit to the nightclub headquarters of his mob boss, Abe.
All of the light is
motivated and
makes sense in the
world of the movie,
but its beautiful
in this slightly
heightened way.
Payback Time
Chimeras on socket speed rings with
medium screw bases for 500-watt and
1,000-watt bulbs. He also brought in
Smith-Victor scoop lights with 60-watt
bulbs,
1
4 CTB and 129 diffusion to put
extra light into the actors eyes for close-
ups.
The largest set built at Second
Line was Joes apartment, where practi-
cals and household bulbs were also inte-
gral to the lighting scheme. In one
scene, Joes friend and fellow looper,
Seth (Paul Dano), arrives at Joes
window in the middle of the night,
pleading for help after he fails to termi-
nate his future self. The prevailing
light was a 20K with 250 diffusion
outside the window, like a streetlight,
says Ryan. When we shot the apart-
ment exteriors on location, we put the
same light in the same position outside
the window, so you completely buy that
lamp on the stage interiors.
Not wanting to draw attention to
Seths presence, Joe brings his friend
inside and turns out all the lights. Steve
went really dark with it, and its beauti-
ful, Johnson enthuses. Its not movie
dark, but real dark, where your eye is
searching for something to hold onto.
Ryan adds, We had to have a little bit
of exposure in there, so we bounced a
1K Leko or a 1K Par can into the ceil-
ing and just let that be our fill.
Moving deep into the apartment,
Joe and Seth hunker down next to the
refrigerator. Joe opens the refrigerator
door, allowing a 100-watt tungsten
envelope globe to backlight him as he
talks to his friend. Theres a flare that
obscures Joes face and puts him in a
position of power, notes Johnson.
When we shoot the reverse on Seth,
the light coming from the fridge is a
stark white, like an interrogation light.
Its theatrical realism in that its an obvi-
ous source that also has an emotional
payoff.
Seths predicament foreshadows
Joes conflict with his own future self,
Abe (Jeff
Daniels) and his
bodyguards
fend off a
surprise attack
in their
underground
bunker.
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Payback Time
and when Younger Joe fails to dispatch
Older Joe, his mob employers come
calling. Younger Joe manages to escape
his pursuers and flee the city for the
outlying farmland, where he meets Sara
(Emily Blunt), a tough country girl
who becomes entangled in Joes busi-
ness.
The production moved to
Thibodaux, La., for the farm scenes,
where Yedlins lighting strategy became
less electric, in his words, and more
focused on sunlight. As an example, the
cinematographer describes an intri-
cately plotted sunset scene: Joe and
Sara are sitting on the front porch while
the sun is setting behind the house. Its
a long scene, so we shot it earlier in the
day and lit all of their two-shot and
single coverage to make it feel like
theyre facing away from the sunset.
During the real sunset, we shot behind
them with the camera facing east. In
the next scene, they go inside the house,
and now the camera is looking west,
toward the back of the house, and a
sunset we created is coming in through
the back windows. The artificial source
was a 6K gelled with CTO pointed
straight at a window covered with
1000H tracing paper; the paper had a
little hole cut into it, allowing the hard
light to strike the lens and flare it out.
For other day-interior scenes at
Top: Sara (Emily
Blunt) is
determined to
protect her son
from a
predetermined
fate. Middle: An
assassin (Garret
Dillahunt) reacts to
an unexpected
levitation. Bottom:
Blunt is hoisted
aloft for a
climactic scene.
the farmhouse, Yedlin wanted to be
able to shoot at any time of day while
maintaining a consistent look. Rather
than skinning all the windows with
diffusion and rolling a large daylight
source up close, he asked Ryan, key grip
Danny Brazen, rigging gaffer Andre
Green and rigging key grip Duane
Cooper to box the sides of the farm-
house with 12'x20' frames of
1
2 Grid.
Additionally, the front porch, which ran
the width of the house, was tented with
1
2 Grid curtains. Depending on the
time of day, the filmmakers could either
use direct sunlight or 18K HMIs to
maintain a consistent effect.
Inside the farmhouse, Yedlin
keyed with 4K or 6K Arri X daylight
floods shining through a 12'x12' muslin
draped over an 8'x8' frame. Ive never
seen anyone else use those lights, Ryan
observes. The fact that the muslin isnt
stretched out adds to the unique beauty
of the light.
Like all of Johnsons films, Looper
was conceived as a single-camera
production. The Millennium XL was
in studio mode for most of the shoot,
and Yedlins preferred configuration
placed it on a two-axis Carbon Head at
the end of an Aerocrane jib mounted to
a Chapman Hustler dolly. (The remote
head was controlled by camera operator
Dale Myrond, the jib was operated by
A-camera dolly grip Rob Morrison,
and the Hustler was operated by B-
camera dolly grip Kevin Carlysle.) This
was Yedlin and Johnsons way of
Our goal was
to make the dailies
and the DI look
100-percent
photochemical.
circumventing the use of a Steadicam.
Rian and I like our camera moves to
have a strong intentionality, says
Yedlin. A Steadicam softens the preci-
sion of the moves, which makes them
seem less deliberate.
Some situations, however, actu-
ally called for slightly less deliberate
moves. After Younger and Older Joes
first confrontation, the two meet again
at a roadside diner. A scuffle breaks out
between them, and just as Older Joe gets
his younger self by the neck, a gang of
mobsters walks through the door. The
camera is low to the ground at an
extreme Dutch angle, so Older Joe is
long in the frame, says Yedlin. He
pulls his gun and drops Younger Joe to
the ground, which is now on the side
and out of frame. Then we un-Dutch
and quickly track to the side to reveal
that Younger Joe has scampered around
the corner to another row of seats.
Yedlin had the Millennium XL
mounted on a hi-hat and twisted 90
degrees on the OConnor head so that
tilting would actually Dutch the camera.
To make the fast lateral move, the crew
spread shuffleboard wax on the floor
and placed the hi-hat directly on top of
it. Shuffleboard wax is actually
composed of tiny silicone beads,
explains Hall. Its dangerous as hell
because you will slip on it, but it allowed
us to move on all axes so we could be
Payback Time
74
Gordon-Levitt tests out a flying motorbike while a crewmember positions a jib arm.
that low and Dutch and pan. We might
have accomplished the same thing with
a low-angle prism and a three-axis head,
but that would have been a lot more
complicated.
Its a pretty smooth move, Hall
continues. The shot was moving really
fast, with a wide lens. You wouldnt want
to try it with a subtle move on a long
lens!
HD dailies for Looper were
processed and transferred at Cineworks
New Orleans, where colorist Bradley
Greer collaborated with Yedlin on the
timing. The 2K digital intermediate was
performed at EFilm in Hollywood
under the supervision of colorist
Andrew Francis. Our goal was to make
the dailies and the DI look 100-percent
photochemical, the way a movie would
look without all the post effects, says
Yedlin. Sometimes that calls for a lot of
finessing.
If I had my druthers, we would
have done a photochemical finish, but it
just wasnt practical, says Johnson.
Still, the best way for me to engage
with the DI is to treat it like it is a
photochemical process. I dont sit in the
room with the colorist the whole time.
Ill come in, give notes, go away, and
then come back and watch the next
pass.
Yedlin and Johnson profess a
deep affection for the aesthetic and the
reliability of the film workflow. Kodak
has spent 100 years developing a color
science that produces an incredible
beauty, says the cinematographer.
When I shoot digitally, every choice I
make in terms of color science and
transforms for digital acquisition is
geared toward achieving a film-like
response. Rian wants to shoot his
movies on film for as long as he can.
I bristle a little when the argu-
ment for film gets put into the nostalgia
ghetto, says Johnson. Film is still the
highest quality and best-looking image-
capture medium available. I dont think
it always will be. The digital image will
get better, and it will eventually surpass
the quality of the film image, but it isnt
there yet.
75
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2.40:1
Anamorphic 35mm
Panaflex Millennium XL,
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Panavision C-Series, E-Series,
G-Series, AWZ, ATZ
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The director channeled his muse through many of the
industrys most striking fair-haired beauties, but according to
HBOs telefilm The Girl, which begins airing this month, his
compulsion took a troubling turn when he discovered Tippi
Hedren.
Hitchcock and his wife, Alma, spotted Hedren in a TV
commercial in the fall of 1961. The auteur immediately
summoned her for a meeting and soon cast her as the lead in
his next feature, The Birds (1963). Their collaboration began
cordially but allegedly turned sour when Hitchcock began
making romantic overtures that Hedren rebuffed. Frustrated,
Hitchcock reportedly forced her to endure sadistic treatment
on the sets of The Birds and his next film, Marnie (1964).
Hedren refused to work with him after that.
For The Girl, which was directed by Julian Jarrold, cine-
matographer John Pardue was tasked with creating a classic-
cinema look that would dramatize the conflict between the
director (played by Toby Jones) and the actress (played by
Sienna Miller). Born in New York, Pardue holds dual citizen-
ship in the U.S. and U.K. and has worked on projects all over
the world, including some in South Africa, where HBOs
production was based. The Girl was a great opportunity for
me as a director of photography, and it gave us all wonderful
insights into the period of those great Hitchcock movies, he
enthuses. Julian embraced the Hitchcock style in his direct-
ing, just as I did with the cinematography.
A
lfred Hitchcock famously preferred blondes. The
perfect woman of mystery, he once declared, is one
who is blonde, subtle and Nordic. His fixation on this
ideal has been well documented by critics such as Roger
Ebert, who noted that the directors female characters
reflected the same qualities over and over again: They were
blonde. They were icy and remote. They were imprisoned in
costumes that subtly combined fashion with fetishism. They
mesmerized the men, who often had physical or psychologi-
cal handicaps. Hitchcock once wryly observed that his preoc-
cupation was entirely justifiable aesthetically: Blondes make
the best victims. Theyre like virgin snow that shows up the
bloody footprints.
Hitchcock
Blonde
John Pardue lends a classic-cinema
look to The Girl, which explores
Alfred Hitchcocks obsession with
Tippi Hedren.
By Stephen Pizzello
|
During prep, Pardue carefully
studied the photographic strategies
employed on The Birds and Marnie by
Robert Burks, ASC (portrayed in The
Girl by Sean Cameron Michael).
Hitchcocks fascination with Hedren is
certainly reflected in the cinematogra-
phy of both movies. The camera seems
voyeuristically complicit in the travails
she faces throughout The Birds, and
Hitchcock biographer Donald Spoto
reported that on Marnie, the director
gave Burks unusual instructions about
photographing her face the camera
was to come as close as possible, the
lenses were almost to make love to her.
For a scene in which she is kissed by
Sean Connery, the close-up is so tight,
the frame filled so fully with pressing
lips, that the tone is virtually porno-
graphic.
The overall style of The Girl is
quite naturalistic, but when I shot
scenes that were homages to Burks, I
tried to light them the way he would
have, says Pardue. This is very evident
in our depictions of Hedrens screen
tests, the Birds attic scene and the
Marnie seduction scene. I looked at
many photographs from the sets of
those two movies to try to get into the
mindset that existed back then. We even
sourced some old lights, old stands and
other vintage lighting gear. The older
lights had softer Fresnel lenses, which
really helped. I used a lot of 10Ks, some
20Ks and quarter Wendys to create a
big-source feel for our studio scenes.
Pardue took particular pains
while re-creating Hedrens screen test
for The Birds. In the original test,
Hitchcock paired her with actor Martin
Balsam for a series of playful exchanges
the duo performed on a wood-paneled
set. I really studied that footage, and I
think we got our scene very close to the
look of the original test, Pardue says.
We shot our test in a restaurant, copy-
ing the furniture arrangement and the
positioning of the two lamps against a
wood wall. We used half of the restau-
rant for the test and the other half for
the first part of the sequence, when
Tippi walks in to meet Hitchcock. We
also had to find a contemporary lens
that would match the look of the test.
We chose a 32mm Cooke S2, which
enabled us to capture the essence of the
original perspective.
Burks lighting for the screen test
was quite simple, continues Pardue.
He lit Hedren with a classic, frontal,
slightly off-camera key that was quite
directional, probably with a softener in
front of the lens. Then, he had an
eyelight right next to the camera and
some backlight, of course. That was the
basis for our approach. Sienna walks all
over the set in the test, so she was walk-
ing into a couple of preset backlights
and keys.
Pardue shot most of The Girl
digitally with an Arri Alexa, but for the
screen test and all footage replicating
scenes from Hitchcocks movies, he shot
Fujifilm Eterna Vivid 500 with an
Arricam Lite. The idea was that when-
ever we cut to a shot that re-created a
scene from The Birds or Marnie, we
would go a little bit further into the
texture of those films, he explains. We
thought the color saturation in the Fuji
stock might help us approximate the
look Burks got from the negatives of
that period. Because we were shooting
those scenes on film, I was able to use
heavy Mitchell Pancro filters to emulate
the heavy diffusion Hitchcock and
Burks used on their close-ups. With the
Alexa, we used Pancro filters on our S2
primes, but they werent as heavy as the
filters we used for our film scenes. The U
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B
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.
Opposite: Tippi
Hedren (Sienna Miller)
auditions for Alfred
Hitchcock after he
selects her to star in
The Birds.
Cinematographer
John Pardue went to
great lengths to
emulate the look of
the original screen
test. This page, top:
Hitchcock (Toby Jones)
and his wife, Alma
(Imelda Staunton),
study Hedrens test.
Bottom: Pardue (right)
frames a shot for
director Julian Jarrold.
Alexa has a lot of latitude, but digital
will only take so much diffusion before
it starts to break up.
Julian was very worried about
the digital footage looking too sharp to
be true to that era, so we decided to use
the S2s for the entire show, he contin-
ues. They gave us a slightly softer look,
but their resolution was still quite good.
The problem was that S2 lenses are in
limited supply. To supplement, I added
some S4s because I felt they were the
nearest match. I used a 14mm S4 for
our opening shot of the movie studios
car park. I also had a 100mm S4 on
hand, because our S2 100mm looked a
little cloudy. Then, I had to find a 10:1
zoom and a compatible doubler for
exteriors. It was difficult to find one that
matched the S2s, but in the end I went
with an older Angenieux lens. It
matched our S2s fairly well for exterior
shots, but we used it a few times in our
Birds attic scene and it was colder,
sharper and a bit more contrasty than
our S2s. Thats one of the compromises
of using an older, unusual prime-lens
package, but we were able to adjust the
look in the grade. We also had a 200mm
Leitz in our arsenal that matched very
well with the S2s.
Pardues approach to Millers
close-ups was calibrated to reflect classic
Hollywood lighting. Sienna looked
fantastic in that Hitchcock-style beauty
light, and I used a more frontal key on
many of her close-ups throughout the
film. Directional light really suits her
features. For those classic glamour shots,
I used one of our older Fresnels as the
front key. I dimmed it down and then
brought back some of the color with
CTB. I sometimes added a small diffu-
sion frame if I felt she required more
wrap.
Early on, we did a quick test to
see how that classic front key would
work on her, and we added a little
eyelight by the matte box after noticing
that it was always present in set photos
from The Birds. Whenever I used an
eyelight, whether it was a 650-watt unit
or an older period 1K, Id put some
Depron foam right in front of the barn
doors. It gave the eye reflections a really
nice falloff.
In other situations, Pardue used
more modern fixtures for Millers close-
ups. To create a low ambient light for
some of her close-ups, I used Kino Flos
fitted with Depron, which softened the
tubes to create a more shadowless soft
light. The Depron allowed us to use the
smaller Kino systems closer to Sienna in
more intimate locations without it look-
ing like wed added too many sources. I
also used the Kinos and Depron for
close-ups in night interiors, but my main
source in those situations was a China
ball; I could raise or lower it very quickly
to create the appropriate look. We also
had some covered wagons containing
Top: While rehearsing dialogue from The Birds, Hitchcock instructs Hedren on how to calibrate
her voice for maximum dramatic impact. Pardue observes, We kept their early scenes together
very bright and optimistic, with the feel of sunny California outside the windows. The look of our
interiors gradually gets darker as Hitchcocks mood grows darker. Bottom: Pardue sourced vintage
equipment for shots of Hitchcock on his sets.

Hitchcock Blonde
100-watt Photofloods with Depron
attached over a wire mesh. We normally
had three of those sitting on the floor;
they were wired to dimmers, which
allowed me to dim them down to match
table practicals.
Close-ups of Jones also required
meticulous work because of the elabo-
rate prosthetics he wore to transform
into Hitchcock. Tobys prosthetics took
4 hours to apply every day, which was
a tough turnaround on a 26-day shoot,
Pardue observes. The makeup artists
did a great job with the prosthetics, but
it's still something a cinematographer
has to light very carefully. Digital, even
on the Alexa, shows a lot of skin detail,
but the softer S2 lenses and diffusion
filters helped. Julian wanted big close-
ups of Toby, and thats where you start
seeing blemishes in a prosthetic. I used
soft light on him as much as I could. In
the studio scenes I lit him with a strong,
hard, three-quarter backlight, but I soft-
ened this considerably for the corre-
sponding close-ups.
The Mitchell filters were recom-
mended to Pardue by Joe Dunton,
BSC, who also provided him with some
vintage film equipment (including the
original process camera used on The
Birds), invaluable advice on period light-
ing, and insights about the ambience
that prevailed on early-1960s film sets,
where arc lights created a smoky atmos-
phere. Joe shipped the process camera
to South Africa, and we actually used it
as a prop for studio scenes that show
process photography against sodium-lit
screens, recalls Pardue. Panavision
U.K. sent over some mag belts so we
could get the mags running. Its worth
mentioning that all of this was mobi-
lized very quickly. I feel very lucky that
Joe helped us sort everything out.
I got very involved in obtaining
the correct film props for our studio
sets, the cinematographer notes. In
South Africa, we sourced an old
Mitchell camera that still had its blimp
and all of its accessories. We built a dolly
based on a set photo from Sons and
Lovers, which was shot in 1963, the
same year as The Birds. The jib dollies
we use nowadays, I discovered, werent
invented till much later.
The productions main location
was Cape Towns 3 Arts Theatre, which
the filmmakers transformed into the
movie studio where much of The Girl
takes place. The location actually func-
tioned as a real studio after we built a
lighting grid in the roof, and it was also
a great location for our period backlot.
The corridors, Hitchs office and Tippis
dressing room were all linked together
as one huge set, and it had a projection
room at the top that we used as Hitchs
screening room. The space was big
enough for our production designer,
Darryl Hammer, to also build all the
sets we needed from The Birds and
Marnie. She did a fantastic job, and
everything connected in a useful way.
Our assistant director, Sebastian
Ballhaus, also deserves a lot of credit for
coordinating our very tight schedule.
It was an interesting situation,
because we were shooting period sets
within our period soundstage. We lit the
Hitchcock sets with vintage lights that
we kept in shot; meanwhile, we lit the
soundstage with modern lighting rigs
kept out of shot. Our functioning period
One of the productions most ambitious undertakings was to create a large exterior set that could
double for Bodega Bay, the California coastal town where Hitchcock had shot The Birds. South Africa
was a perfect match for California, and Julian sourced some great locations, Pardue says. We turned
an old crayfish factory into Bodega Bay. Our first day of shooting was a big exterior rain scene, which
was very tricky. The problem with the rain in South Africa is that you have this really bright sun, so if
you shoot out to sea, youre not going to see any rain its that old conundrum. We managed to
contain the rain between two buildings, and I just screened off the sunlight as best I could.
lights consisted of a 10K, two 5Ks, three
2Ks and a couple of smaller Fresnel
fixtures. We also had two Brutes that
were not functional, but our gaffer,
Gilles Boisacq, put 500-watt bulbs in
them to make them look like they were
on. We had old period stands for all of
these units, and I also provided Gilles
with photos of old diffusion frames he
and his boys could copy.
We had to black out some of our
modern lighting rigs with drapes so
they wouldnt be visible in our wide
shots. The crew rigged various trusses
and trapeze bars in all the areas of the
studio where we thought wed need
lighting. I think I had about 15 5Ks,
eight 10Ks, a 20K, some follow spots,
20 space lights, some Source Fours and
even some Par cans with spot bulbs, in
addition to the usual array of smaller
units. Panavision South Africa gave us
everything they could.
One of the most ambitious studio
setups was the re-creation of a climactic
sequence from The Birds in which
Hedrens character ventures into an attic
and is attacked by a swarm of vicious
birds. Thats the pivotal sequence in
our film, Pardue says. Hitchcock shot
his sequence over five days, but we had
to do our version in one! We therefore
had to shoot enough footage to create
the impression that time was passing;
we needed to create some sense of the
ordeal Tippi endured while filming the
original sequence.
Burks lit the attic scene very
differently than we would do it today,
he continues. He made Tippis keylight
part of his mottled night look. There
was enough dapple in the scene that
Tippis flashlight is brighter than the
overall light. Its not a naturalistic
approach, but the illusion works. In
studying his approach, I finally sussed
out what he did: he used one three-
quarter key and placed an ulcer [a.k.a.
cucoloris] in front of the light fixture to
create all the dappled light.
Pardue also tried to determine
where Burks crew had hung the nets

Hitchcock Blonde
To re-create the relentless
bird attack Hedren
suffered during production
of The Birds, Pardue
consulted with production
designer Darryl Hammer
on the construction of the
attic set and the
positioning of the bird
netting. All of our
research really paid off,
he says. While we were
doing that sequence, I
really felt like we were
shooting The Birds. The
squawking birds created
an eerie feeling when
Sienna walked onto this
very austere set. We filmed
enough great footage to
create a 10-minute
assembly of the sequence.
Like Tippi Hedren, Sienna
was forced to endure a
couple of live birds
crashing into her it was
a strange case of
accidental moments
imitating the real story.
that contained the live birds during film-
ing. Darryl and I had quite a few discus-
sions about that I was trying to light
through the nets while hoping that the
shadows they created would be soft
enough, he says. Obviously, the closer
the nets were, the more I started feeling
their shadows on the set. With looser
nets, the birds were too sparse, and they
would just fly off toward the top of the
set. In the end, the nets had to be very
close to Sienna so the birds could fly
around her and still fill the frame. I found
myself wondering if Burks had to deal
with similar issues when he lit the origi-
nal attic set.
In many ways, the nets offered a
visual opportunity for the whole scene
and the lighting. Our frontal key was a
very old 5K Fresnel that was really soft
and dirty; it was one of my period lights,
and it created a very nice direct light. I
positioned it to the left of the set through
an ulcer. Darryl really helped me by
creating a dogleg in the roof of our attic
so the set itself wouldnt flag or cut our
key. Hitchcock and his team created the
idea that the roof of the house was a bit
broken up so they could pop some addi-
tional light in; our set had a little space
cut into the slanted roof that allowed us
to throw some extra light down and
create a bit of kick from one side. Then
we put the bird nets in place, and we
made sure the main 5K was close enough
that it wouldnt throw net shadows all
over the set. For the illusion to work,
Siennas flashlight had to feel brighter
than the set, so we dimmed the 5K down
a bit. That gave it a softer edge that
looked very nice on her skin.
We then had to light the rest of
the attic set and the surrounding sound-
stage, because we were essentially shoot-
ing a set within a set. I backlit the entire
set with two 5Ks, and we had a 20K up
on a Genie boom to sidelight everything.
We placed some Source Four [Lekos]
above the nets to pick out the pattern of
the nets in a very theatrical way and
throw the right kinds of shadows on
Sienna. We also used Source Fours and
some snooted, dimmed-down 5Ks to
create pools of light on the stage floor in
areas where Hitchcocks crewmembers
would stand. As a final touch, we posi-
tioned two vintage Brutes to create the
illusion that they were somehow involved
in the lighting design. Because we had so
many shots of Hitch and Tippi entering
the soundstage, I also backlit the pathway
from the studio door with snooted 5Ks.
Another key scene the filmmakers
re-created was the notorious rape
sequence from Marnie, in which the
heroines husband, Mark (Sean
Connery), forcibly makes love to her
while the two are honeymooning aboard
a cruise ship. The sequence includes an
unusual over-the-shoulder close-up of
Hedren in which she seems to float
downward onto the bed. That shot is
one of those Hitchcock moments,
Pardue says. Its much trickier than you
think to emulate some of those famous
shots, and we spent ages trying to figure
out how they did that one.
Key grip Rob Fischer solved the
problem by designing a rig that would
support both Miller and the camera in a
fixed position, allowing the crew to pivot
both the actress and camera 90 degrees
backwards and down toward the bed.
Fischer explains, When I watched the
sequence in prep, it occurred to me that
Hitchcock must have used some form of
rig, like a tilting bed or a camera that
Hedren was attached to, in order to keep
the frame and focus constant. The shot
starts a bit behind Connerys shoulder,
and it tracks forward into a close-up of
Hedren before she starts descending. I

Hitchcock Blonde
Top: Hedren
recuperates at home
after suffering a
nervous breakdown
on The Birds. She
escapes into this
world after her
ordeal on the attic
set, says Pardue.
Tippis house is her
retreat, so we gave
it a dreamy feel. The
light often reflects
this ambience, with
low sunlight
flickering through
the curtains; we
made the light for
these scenes much
more naturalistic,
with less of the
classic Hitchcock
lighting. Middle:
Miller prepares to
duplicate the
controversial rape
scene from Marnie.
Bottom: To re-create
a unique shot from
the sequence, key
grip Rob Fischer
designed a special
tilting rig that was
built by best boy
Allan Gray. The
camera was
attached to a 2'
slider (top left) and
Miller stood with
her back against the
vertical platform,
which was then
lowered onto
the bed.
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still have no idea how they managed
that, but we came up with our own
method.
The day before we did the shot,
I sent our best boy, Allan Gray, off to the
parking lot to build a rig that could take
Sienna from a standing position and
then lower her onto the bed, Fischer
continues. We built a speed-rail frame
that pivoted at the same height as the
bed, adding a backboard to support
Sienna. The track-in move was achieved
with a 2-foot slider positioned so that
the camera could slide into position for
the close-up before we started tilting the
entire rig. Gravity did the rest by keep-
ing the camera in place, and a few
lengths of bungee cord helped us
control the speed.
The lighting for the sequence also
required some homework. As Hedren
is moving down onto the bed, you can
see the reflection of a keylight moving
through her eyes, and that helped me
work out how Burks did it, says Pardue.

Hitchcock Blonde
Pardue feels that the sequence depicting the Birds premiere really captures the period. The original
premiere looked quite bright with all the flashes from those old camera bulbs. The location we chose
had these great, graphic-looking doors with lots of lightbulbs above them; those bulbs justified the light
source of the entire scene, but I had to keep them from blowing out and looking too bright in our
digital footage. To augment the bulbs, I positioned four quarter Wendys on the buildings rooftop. I just
kept them out of frame, placing them at various angles so I could turn them on and off when shooting
in different directions. Quarter Wendys are very nice keys; the light on Sienna looks really beautiful and
period when she steps out of the car.
84
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He seems to have lit her from the side
with a couple of small sources in an
attempt to keep his beauty light constant;
he probably had to do that because the
camera was in the way and very close to
Tippi. I imagine that the focus was tricky,
so they would have had to build the stop
up to maintain good focus. I tried to copy
what Burks did, using three small sources
positioned on Siennas right side at three-
quarter angles, but I ended up using more
diffusion frames so the light would wrap
a bit more on Sienna. Our version has the
same sort of feel as the original, though. I
used the heaviest Mitchell Pancro diffu-
sion filter, because Burks had some very
heavy diffusion on the shot that made it
feel slightly out of focus.
Because we couldnt really show
the actor who was playing Connery in
our film, we shot in one direction,
continues Pardue. Theres a sense of
moonlight coming from the porthole in
the room, and we gave it more of a
theatrical feel with a small unit that we
blued up and bounced back to create a
subtle, cold edge. Sienna has a strong
cosmetic backlight that we kept low so it
would seem to be coming from the
bedside practical lamp. I also added a
12-by-12 top bounce with a colder light
to blend things in with a bit of the
moonlight. Hitchcocks crew would not
have done that, but I wanted to add
some coldness to the shadows.
Pardue graded The Girl at
Molinare in London with colorist Tim
Waller, who helped him add finishing
touches that approximate the
Technicolor look of both Hitchcock
films. We all felt that the grade should
be colorful and should mimic the feel of
a film made in the early Sixties, and Tim
was very committed to getting the
correct look, says the cinematographer.
It was quite interesting to grade shots
from the Alexa and the same shots
made on film. To my eye, the Alexa
prefers a low-contrast grade, so we
needed to add more contrast to get
those Technicolor hues we wanted. The
problem is that when you add contrast
to digital footage, the blacks start to
block up a bit. The 35mm absorbed
more contrast, so it was easier to find the
right colors without pushing too much
contrast into the grade. The Fuji 500
Vivid has vibrant colors, especially the
reds, that worked well to emulate that
Technicolor look. To get even closer to
it, we added a bit of red to our blacks.
That seemed to do the trick.
TECHNICAL SPECS
1.78:1
Digital Capture and
3-perf Super 35mm
Arri Alexa, Arricam Lite
Cooke S2, Cooke S4;
Angenieux; Leitz
Fujifilm Eterna Vivid 500 8547
85
An Eye for New Forms
By David Heuring
In the final analysis, filmmaking has more to do with who is
behind the camera than who is in front of it, says Steve
Sanguedolce, who blends the rhythms of editing, images and music
to create unique experimental films.
With each project, the Toronto-based filmmaker tinkers with
the tools of film emulsion and chemical development. He has
learned development techniques that todays aspiring filmmakers will
probably never know. He often shoots on film stocks manufactured
for other purposes, like optical soundtrack stocks. He develops his
own negative in 5-gallon buckets and sometimes dries it in a clothes
dryer (on the delicate setting). He does his own contact printing
on a modified Steenbeck, and he uses hand-tinting and hand-toning
techniques.
The results are films that strain at the boundaries of such cate-
gories as documentary, home movie and narrative. In the
early 1990s, his films Rhythms of the Heart, Mexico, Sweetblood,
Away and Smack garnered a dozen international prizes.
Sanguedolce is considered a member of the Escarpment School,
Canadas third generation of avant-garde filmmakers, but he thinks
of himself as a documentarian. Ultimately, I think Im making films
about people, he says. Theyre called experimental because
formally theyre very different.
His feature Blinding, which earned an honorable mention at
the 2011 Plus Camerimage Festival in Poland, is a meditation on
losing ones sight, but also an examination of blindness as a disease
of modern civilization. Voices in the film include a writer, an ex-cop
and a former military pilot. Situations staged and filmed by
Sanguedolce are mixed with archival materials and photographs.
Some characters address the trauma and burden of having seen
things they wish they hadnt. The images are extensively treated,
sometimes adding subtext by partially obscuring the vision of the
viewer.
Sanguedolces process begins with a journal and collections
of images and footage he has shot over the years with an old CP-16
camera and an Angenieux 12-120mm zoom lens. I only begin to
know exactly what the film is about when Im halfway through, he
says.
Most of the exterior shots in Blinding were shot on 16mm on
high-contrast 7378 Sound Recording Film. He says the negative has
Post Focus
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an ISO of 10 or 12 and gives him about 2
stops of latitude. You pretty much need to
detonate a grenade to get an exposure
indoors! he says. If youre off by a stop,
everything can go completely black or
completely white, so we tend toward high-
contrast subjects, like trees against sky. If we
shoot faces, we have to be very careful
about it. The amount of moisture in the air,
and which wavelengths of light are
stronger, also seem to factor in.
Sanguedolce hand-processes about
300' of film at once and varies processing as
negative or reversal depending on the effect
he seeks. By controlling the concentration of
developer, the temperature of the bath and
the development time, he can make his
images extremely high contrast, almost like
a lithograph, or relatively panchromatic, like
a harsher version of Eastman Plus-X or
Double-X, with fuller mid-tones and an
array of tonality. He notes he can sometimes
coax as many as 6 stops out of the film by
controlling development.
Then, I always use non-hardening
fixer to lock in the image, he says. The
hardener acts as a waxy coating that
protects the film. Without it, the film is still
absorbent, which makes it easier for toners
to penetrate. The non-hardening fixer also
results in more scratches and abrasions,
which are part of Sanguedolces aesthetic.
Toning adds pigment to the black-
and-white image. With negative film, the
highlights absorb toner first, and shadows
stay clear and colorless longer. You could
use pomegranate juice or red wine, he
observes. Its very easy to put a piece of
negative into a toning bath. The color
youre using is absorbed into the emulsion.
You almost cant overdo it. Its only going to
go to a certain density. The trick comes with
split- or cross-toning, where you have multi-
ple colors, which you see a lot in Blinding.
After the first toning stage, the film
is pulled out and washed. Next comes a
toning bleach stage. Berg Sepia toner
comes with a toning bleach that coats the
film, giving it a milky color and protecting it
from taking on any more color. I often only
bleach for a minute after toning it for four
or five minutes. Then, I put it back in very
diluted, weak, used developer. That
removes some of the toner and parts of the
bleach. After washing it again, I put it in a
second color, which is absorbed into differ-
ent areas. Highlights might assume one
color, and shadow or dark areas another.
The process works more intensely on
black-and-white negative treated as color
negative, because black-and-white emul-
sion lacks the color couplers that help
control hues on color reversal. The result can
be almost psychedelic, super-saturated
colors, a key part of Sanguedolces expres-
sionistic style.
He currently shoots interiors on East-
man Double-X 7222 and uses highly
concentrated developer for a contrasty
negative. That way, he doesnt have to
melt the subject.
If I wanted uniformity, Id go to a
lab, he says with a laugh. Some of the
scratches I get are phenomenal. Sometimes
the chemicals stick the film together, giving
it sprocket lines running through. Occasion-
ally Ill flip the lights on for half a second
while the film is in the developer, so the film
is casting shadows on itself. This creates a
kind of solarized or sabbatier effect,
wherein the tonalities invert in places going
from negative to reversal and back to nega-
tive again.
He delights in the unexpected. At
times, with a really high-con image, you get
this kind of reticulation around outlines, and
its a beautiful, golden glow. It almost looks
like someone did a rotoscope drawing of
the image. There are probably ways to
execute these effects to perfection, but Im
working with randomness. I am very careful
about times and temperatures, but every
batch of coloring is different, and if I dont
get something nice, I put that batch back in
the developer, and it all goes back to black-
and-white. It might be a little more
scratched, but I could start over with the
toning.
A Steenbeck flatbed was not exempt
from Sanguedolces passion for bending
technology to his needs. I have a small
library of 16mm that Ive collected since I
began shooting in the early 70s, he
explains. I might find a piece of color
footage that I want to reshoot, process and
Opposite page and above: Frame grabs from Steve Sanguedolces experimental film Blinding illustrate the extensive treatment his images
undergo through unusual photochemical processing.
tone to make it totally different from the
original color negative I shot. So I managed
to modify my Steenbeck flatbed into a
contact printer. It was quite simple: I
removed the prism and built a little foam-
core box. I ran the original film in the front
sound track plates, ran the film to be
copied to behind it in a bi-pack through the
gate, and shined a 7-watt bulb [on it]. I can
vary the speed depending on the density of
the images to alter the result. I can also use
neutral-density filters in there. It works!
For Blinding, Sanguedolce trans-
ferred his images to Apple ProRes files,
edited on Final Cut Pro, and finished with
an HDCam copy. He tried importing the
toned negative into the computer, thinking
he could invert the images digitally, but he
decided the work just didnt look the same
as when copied from a timed work print
he missed a certain luminosity and pulsing
quality. So he conformed a work print
frame-by-frame to the edit he made in Final
Cut Pro. A high-quality surround-sound mix
was also important to him.
Sanguedolce has taught filmmaking
at York University for 30 years, and he
recently began teaching sound design at
Humber College. Between classes, he
works on his next project.
He has always seen his job as invent-
ing a new way of telling stories. We all
dream differently. Why not try to find the
particular way that you tell stories? I know I
can never compete with multi-million-dollar
films, but I can try to find a way of telling
stories that is all my own.
Shooting is not just capturing; its a
way of perceiving and a discipline, like writ-
ing or dance or music. You have to work at
finding your voice and a way that you
belong in the medium.
Sanguedolce discusses his work at the 2011 Plus Camerimage Festival, where Blinding
earned an honorable mention.
88
Arri Unveils M90/60 Daylight Fixture
At last months International Broadcasting Convention in
Amsterdam, Arri unveiled the latest addition to its ArriMax/M-Series
of fixtures, the M90/60, which completes the range between 1,200
and 18,000 watts. At 9,000 watts exactly half the wattage of the
ArriMax and just over double the wattage of the M40/25 the
M90/60 introduces a new power class for daylight fixtures.
Like all M-Series lamp heads, the M90/60 is equipped with
Max Technology, Arris unique, patented reflector technology that
unifies the advantages of a Fresnel and a Par fixture. As a result of
being open-faced, the unit is comparable in output to some 12K
Pars. The fixture is also focusable from 17-55 degrees by means of
a focus knob, and it produces a remarkably even light field and a
crisp, clear shadow. The elimination of spread lenses speeds up the
workflow on set and reduces the risk of lost production time due to
glass breakage.
The M90/60 utilizes a new 9K lamp developed by Osram
according to Arris specifications; the lamp is similar in size to the 6K
lamp. Arri designed the M90/60 in a very compact housing, close to
the dimensions of the ArriSun 60. Since the accompanying EB
6000/9000 ballast uses the housing of the existing EB6000 and 6K
head-to-ballast cables, the entire system is highly efficient.
The new EB 6000/9000 ballast operates on a supply voltage
of 100 and 230 volts, and sports Active Line Filter and CCL, which
compensates for power losses even in very long head-to-ballast
cables. This incredibly small ballast will also be available in a 1,000
Hz version for high-speed shooting with minimized flicker.
The M90/60 fixture and its accompanying EB 6000/9000
ballast are scheduled to be available in spring 2013. For more infor-
mation, visit www.arri.com.
Aadyn Hits with Jab, Eco Series LEDs
Developed, engineered and assembled in the United States,
Aadyn Technologys Eco and Jab series LED lights provide single-
source lighting with low power consumption.
New Products & Services
SUBMISSION INFORMATION
Please e-mail New Products/Services releases to:
newproducts@ascmag.com and include full contact
information and product images. Photos must be
TIFF or JPEG files of at least 300dpi.
The Eco Punch Plus produces more than 4,000 foot candles
at 10' while consuming less than 5 amps of power. The Jab Daylight
consumes 1.78 amps of power and outputs 1,864 foot candles at
10'; this unit can also run for 1.5 hours on a single 30-volt DC
battery. All Aadyn lights provide an even field of light, adjustable
from narrow to medium to wide by means of quick-change lenses.
Aadyn Tech also offers Eco Tungsten and Jab Tungsten LED
fixtures, which boast a high CRI of 91+. Additionally, the Jab Vari-
able fixture allows users to adjust color temperature in small incre-
ments from 3,000K to 6,000K. All Aadyn lights are fitted with
universal power supplies that operate from 100 to 277 VAC, and all
Aadyn units can be dimmed with no flicker and no change in color
temperature; the fixtures can be controlled via DMX, Aadyns propri-
etary User Interface or a simple on/off switch.
Aadyn Techs specialty lights include the Eco Bullet and Jab
Bullet; both are designed to be flicker free up to 100,000 fps. The
Eco Mega Bullet will operate at speeds up to 1 million fps. Addi-
tionally, the Jab Hurricane, scheduled to be released in December,
has an outdoor weatherproof rating of IP66.
For additional information, visit www.aadyntech.com.
Nila Illuminates SL LED
Nila, Inc. has introduced the SL LED light-
ing fixture, which is available in either a daylight
(6,000K) or tungsten (3,400K) configuration.
The unit boasts an output comparable to a
2,500-watt HMI or a 6K tungsten fixture while
demonstrating low power draw of only 500
watts and a very low operating temperature.
The Nila SL can be used close to the
subjects as a soft source, and it is also capable
of illuminating subjects up to 400' away; at 40',
the light (with no lens) produces 500 foot candles with an 8' spread.
Nilas holographic film lenses allow users to specify the precise beam
angle and minimize the need for diffusion material, barn doors or
flags. The SL can also be rigged as a space light and is available in a
kit that includes its own diffusion bag and rigging hardware.
With an on-board power supply and integrated dimmer, the
DMX-controllable SL is the first Nila product to utilize firmware that
allows for flicker-free operation across its entire dimming range
while shooting between 0-1,500 fps; the fixture is flicker-free at any
frame rate when the light output is set to 100 percent. (Nila plans
to add this firmware across its entire product line.)
The SL also incorporates the Hidden Disc braking system, Nila
Engineerings latest yoke innovation. The HD brake provides for
rock-solid positioning without any slippage no matter how the
fixture is rigged.
For additional information, visit www.nila.tv.
Zacuto Unveils Plazma Light
Zacuto has introduced the Plazma
Light, which boasts more than 30 patents
regarding Micro Plasma technology. The
production-grade super-soft light source
measures less than 1" thick and is dimma-
ble, lightweight and portable.
According to Zacutos photometrics,
the 1x1 Plazma Light emits 2,000 lumens.
The tungsten-balanced Plazma Light
features a characteristic incandescent curve
without the green spike that is inherent in
many LED sources, and the daylight-
balanced (5,800K) Plazma Light features
an unwavering curve that mixes well with
HMIs. The Plazma fixtures also boast a wide
light pattern similar to traditional soft lights.
The Plazma Light can be powered by
110-240-volt 50-60 Hz AC or 11-18-volt
DC with a 3-Stud Anton Bauer or Sony V-
Lock battery. The power box incorporates a
dimmer, and the control box connects to
the light via weatherproof 10' or 25' head
cable.
Zacutos Plazma lights will be avail-
able in a variety of shapes and sizes; the first
1x1 tungsten and 1x1 daylight units are
expected to be available this year. The
company also plans to release accessories
such as barn doors and an expandable
snoot. All Zacuto products are made in the
United States.
For additional information, visit
www.zacuto.com.
Litepanels Expands
LED Offerings
Litepanels has introduced the 1x1 LS
and the Luma daylight-balanced on-camera
light.
The 1x1 LS is the latest addition to
the companys 1x1 LED Panel Series, and it
offers many of the features found in the
touch, heat-free operation. The 1x1 LS
boasts flicker-free output at any frame rate
or shutter angle, and it can dim from 100
percent to 0 without color shift. The unit is
available in daylight-balanced flood (50-
degree beam) or spot (30-degree beam),
and it can be powered by an included AC
adapter or any Gold Mount or V-Mount
professional battery.
The small Luma on-camera light is
hot-shoe mountable, weighs only 10
ounces and draws only 12-watts of power
while providing the equivalent daylight illu-
mination of a 50-watt HMI. The Luma
represents Litepanels commitment to the
on-camera LED lighting market, says Chris
Marchitelli, Litepanels vice president of
global marketing. It builds off our new,
sleek and ergonomic Croma design, and
provides a high-output version for profes-
sionals [who] only need a daylight-balanced
light. The unit can be powered with 6 AA
batteries (standard or rechargeable), an AC
adapter, or off the D-Tap of a professional
camera battery pack.
Like all Litepanels LED fixtures, the
Luma is designed and assembled in the
United States and features full-spectrum
soft-light output with visually accurate color
temperatures. The fixture can be dimmed
from 100 percent to 0 with no color shift,
and it is flicker free at any frame rate or
shutter angle. Additionally, it features a
smooth, modern design with soft-touch
rubberized housing, and has a conveniently
located on-fixture dimming knob.
www.litepanels.com.
Four Pin Plugs In
Light Source Pro App
Four Pin Plug Ltd. has introduced
Light Source Pro, an iPhone, iPod Touch and
iPad app that offers a fully functional
photometric calculator, eliminates the
guesswork and makes it easier for cine-
matographers and gaffers to select the
correct lighting units for a given situation.
Light Source Pro incorporates two
search engines, Light Search and Light
Library. Light Search allows users to search
the complete database and offers a list of
fixtures that will meet the requirements
based on acquisition data: required T-stop,
ISO, frame rate, shutter angle, throw
distance to the source and required beam
spread. Light Library allows users to enter
the list of manufacturers and select a specific
lighting unit to see if that fixture will meet
the acquisition requirements. Each search
engine features three calculators: Movie
allows users to input film-specific data and
returns information in T-stops; DSLR allows
users to enter data for stills
shoots and returns infor-
mation in T-stops; and
Stage offers a basic foot-
candle calculator for non-
shooting requirements and
returns data in foot
candles.
The Four Pin Plug
team boasts extensive
industry experience and
includes gaffer James McGuire, whose cred-
its include Breakfast on Pluto, Harry Potter
and the Order of the Phoenix, The Tempest
(2010) and Albert Nobbs.
Light Source Pro is available in the
iTunes App Store for $29.99. The current
version has more than doubled the data-
base information contained in the apps
initial release, and at press time, another
update was planned for later this year.
For more information, visit
www.fourpinplug.com.
ToughGaff Gets Tough on Gloves
ToughGaff has introduced Tough-
Glove working gloves, which incorporate
magnets to hold them in place
on a strap that can affix
to any belt up to 2"
wide. The Tough-
Gloves magnets
enable quick, one-
handed detach-
ment from the
users belt. When
working near deli-
cate equipment,
the magnets can be
easily removed from the gloves, and the
gloves can then be held in place via an addi-
tional glove clip.
ToughGlove working gloves are avail-
able for $35. For more information, visit
www.toughgaff.com.
popular 1x1
Mono fixtures,
but at an entry-
level price. The
1x1 LS maintains
the same high-
quality full-spec-
trum soft light as
Litepanels other
1x1 LED panels
while removing
the more studio-
specific compo-
nents to focus
instead on the
needs of location
productions.
The 1x1 LS
is compatible
with all other
Litepanels 1x1 units and uses the same
accessories, gels and travel cases. Addition-
ally, the fixture retains such characteristics as
low power draw (45 watts) and cool-to-the-
Ikan Adds 6 Fixtures
Ikan recently introduced six LED light-
ing fixtures: the IB500 Dual-Color, ID508,
IB508 Dual-Color, IB1000 Dual-Color,
ID1500 and IB1500 Dual-
Color. The new lineup
accommodates a
wide range of appli-
cations, and the
choice of single color
(5,600K) or Dual-
Color (3,200K-5,600K)
units allows users to find the
right light for their particular needs.
The IB500 Dual-Color and IB1000
Dual-Color feature a touch-screen digital
readout, built-in dimmer, remote control,
wide-angle beam pattern, integrated barn-
door intensifiers and pro battery options. The
ID508 and IB508 Dual-Color feature a wide-
angle beam pattern, built-in dimmer and on-
board battery-life indicator. The ID1500 and
IB1500 Dual-Color feature a built-in dimmer,
ultra-wide-angle beam pattern and inte-
grated barn-door intensifiers. Ikan also offers
an array of accessory options for all of the
fixtures.
www.ikancorp.com.
International Marketplace
OppCam Grip Systems
INTRODUCING THE GR-2,
AN AFFORDABLE
MASTER CLOCK
DENECKE, INC.
25209 Avenue Tibbitts
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Phone (661) 607-0206 Fax (661) 257-2236
www.denecke.com Email: info@denecke.com
CLASSIFIED AD RATES
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AC COM PA NY ORDER. VISA, Mastercard, AmEx and
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in the office by 15th of second month preceding
pub li ca tion. Sub ject mat ter is lim it ed to items and
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Classifieds
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Copyright 2012 Matthews Studio Equipment, Inc. All rights reserved.
Technology That Complements Your Imagination.
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Advertisers Index
16x9, Inc. 94
Aadyn Technology 61
AC 1
Adorama 17, 45
AJA Video Systems, Inc. 43
Arri 11
AZGrip 94
Backstage Equipment, Inc.
91
Barger-Lite 47, 95
Birns & Sawyer 94
Blackmagic Design, Inc. 13
Camera Image 93
Cavision Enterprises 57
Chapman/Leonard Studio
Equipment Inc. 55
Chemical Wedding 83
Chimera 31
Cinematography
Electronics 6
Cinekinetic 94
Clairmont Film & Digital 9
Codex Digital Ltd. 29
Cooke Optics 27
Ceatasphere 71
Dadco LLC 73
Deluxe C2
Denecke 95
Eastman Kodak C4
EFD USA, Inc. 59
Film Gear 81
Filmotechnic USA 74
Filmtools 88
Glidecam Industries 21
Hasselblad Bron Inc. 85
Hertz Corporation 41
Hive Lighting 62
J.L. Fisher 75
Kino Flo 63
Lee Filters 49
Lights! Action! Co. 94
Litepanels 5
Maccam 4
Manfrotto Distribution C3
Manios Optical 94
Matthews Studio Equipment
95
M. M. Mukhi & Sons 94
Movie Tech AG 94, 95
NBC/Universal 19
New York Film Academy 25
Nila Inc. 48
No Subtitles Necessary 84
Oppenheimer Camera Prod.
94
PC&E 91
Pille Film Gmbh 94
Powermills 95
Pro8mm 94
Production Resource Group
23
Red Digital Cinema 32-33
Schneider Optics 2
Slamdance Film Festival 97
Super16 Inc. 94
Thales Angenieux 7
Tiffen Company 15
University of North Carolina
School of the Arts 47
VF Gadgets, Inc. 95
Visionary Forces 6
Visual Products 6
Welch Integrated 89
Willys Widgets 94
www.theasc.com 30, 73
81, 96
96
Smith Becomes Associate
New associate member Tim Smith
joined Canon U.S.A. in 1990 with a back-
ground in photography and a love of elec-
tronics. During his time with the company,
Smith has worked closely with Canons
design and engineering teams. He has also
been active with filmmakers and students,
and he regularly teaches at Film Independent
and Independent Filmmaker Project events
around the country.
Smith is an adviser to Canons Film
and Television Group, where he works to
ensure that the company is building digital-
cinema products that fulfill the creative
needs of filmmakers.
ASC Members Participate at LAFF
The 2012 Los Angeles Film Festival
played host to several ASC members this
summer. Nancy Schreiber, ASC served on
the jury for the festivals short-film competi-
tion alongside critic and author Ernest Hardy
and writer/director Javier Fuentes Leon.
Canons reception for cinematographers,
hosted by ASC members Shane Hurlbut
and Richard Crudo, attracted a crowd of
established and emerging industry profes-
sionals. At a later festival-related event,
Canon screened the short film Man and
Beast, which Jeff Cronenweth, ASC shot
with Canons 4K Cinema EOS C500 digital
camera; the screening was preceded by a
panel discussion moderated by ASC associ-
ate Tim Smith.
Additionally, Wally Pfister, ASC,
BSC headlined the annual Kodak Focus
program at the festival. He screened and
discussed scenes from the features Insomnia,
Laurel Canyon and Inception.
Palm Springs ShortFest
Welcomes Elswit
Robert Elswit, ASC gave a master
class on cinematography at the Palm Springs
International ShortFest in June. Moderated
by film critic John Anderson, the discussion
detailed several of Elswits films, and the
cinematographer shared anecdotes from the
sets of Good Night, and Good Luck; There
Will Be Blood; and The Town, among others.
The festival also featured a directing
master class by Gus Van Sant, panels by
producers and agents, and industry roundta-
bles.
McGarvey, Menges Converse
at EIFF
During the 2012 Edinburgh Interna-
tional Film Festival, Seamus McGarvey,
ASC, BSCpresented an entertaining and illu-
minating In Conversation session with
Chris Menges, ASC, BSC. In front of the
rapt audience in the Filmhouse, the official
home of EIFF, the two cinematographers
discussed Menges career in depth and
screened clips from Menges work.
BSC Hosts Summer Luncheon
The British Society of Cinematogra-
phers recently hosted its annual Summer
Luncheon at Pinewood Studios. BSC Presi-
dent John de Borman was working abroad,
so past president Sue Gibson, BSC stood in
to welcome the 170 guests. Among those in
attendance was BSC Friend (a title akin to
the ASCs associate member) George Spiro
Dibie, ASC.
The Summer Luncheon has become
an important gathering of cinematogra-
phers, operators, patrons and friends, and it
also serves as the venue for the presentation
of the BSC Best Cinematography and Life-
time Achievement awards. Billy Williams,
BSC, OBE presented the Best Cinematogra-
phy Award to Guillaume Schiffman, AFC for
his work on The Artist. The Lifetime Award
was presented to Chris Menges, ASC, BSC
in recognition of his consistently outstanding
work over more than four decades. Menges
friend Roger Deakins, ASC, BSC was
unable to attend, but recorded a message of
introduction and congratulations for
Menges.
It is rare that any cinematographer
can create work that is so perceptive and
Clubhouse News
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Top to bottom: Associate member Tim Smith; ASC
members (left to right) Shane Hurlbut, Nancy
Schreiber and Richard Crudo; Chris Menges, ASC, BSC
(left) and Seamus McGarvey, ASC, BSC; from left:
Guillaume Schiffman, AFC; Chris Menges, ASC, BSC;
George Spiro Dibie, ASC; Sue Gibson, BSC; Wolfgang
Suschitzky, BSC; Ben Seresin, ASC, BSC; and
Billy Williams, BSC, OBE.
honest, so elegantly simple and seemingly
so effortless, Deakins said in his taped
remarks. Effortless, that is, until you try to
do it yourself. But it would be a fools errand
to try to emulate Chris work or his career.
He is a rare talent and a rare individual, and
to say that his career path has been uncon-
ventional would be an understatement.
Guests also paid tribute to Wolfgang
Suschitzky, BSC, in celebration of his 100th
birthday.
Farrar Visits Final Frontier
Scott Farrar, ASC recently partici-
pated in the Academy of Motion Picture
Arts & Sciences event Capturing the Final
Frontier: NASA Animation and the Movies,
a presentation by the Academy Sci-Tech
Council.
Producer Frank Marshall moderated
the discussion, which offered a look at the
animations NASA prepared in anticipation
of the Mars rover Curiositys arrival on the
Red Planet in August, and examined the
collaboration between NASA animators and
Hollywood image specialists. The events
participants included Eric De Jong, Bobbie
Faye Ferguson, Tom Jacobson, Dave Lavery,
Dan Maas, Lisa Malone, Toni Myers, Dr.
Frank Summers and Bert Ulrich.
Among those in attendance were
Academy Governor Bill Taylor, ASC and
ASC associate Andy Maltz, director of the
Sci-Tech Council.
Lezotte Joins Bexel
ASC associate member Suzanne
Lezotte has been named marketing direc-
tor of Bexel, a unit of the Vitec Groups
Services Division. She will take the lead in
creating and deploying cohesive marketing
strategies while identifying new avenues for
company recognition and exposure. Prior to
joining Bexel, Lezotte served as worldwide
marketing communications director for
Panavision.
Top, from left: Producer Frank Marshall;
Scott Farrar, ASC; and NASAs Lisa Malone.
Bottom: Associate member Suzanne Lezotte.
Tolands Daughter Donates
to ASC
Lothian Skelton, daughter of the late
Gregg Toland, ASC, recently visited the
Clubhouse and made a generous donation
to the ASC Building Fund. She also donated
a box full of newspaper and magazine clip-
pings pertaining to several of her fathers
projects.
Toland began his career in the silent
era and went on to shoot such classic sound
films as John Fords The Grapes of Wrath
(1940), William Wylers The Little Foxes
(1941), Orson Welles Citizen Kane (1941)
and Henry Kosters The Bishops Wife
(1947). He received Oscar nominations for
Les Misrables (1935), Dead End (1937),
Intermezzo: A Love Story (1939), The Long
Voyage Home (1940) and Citizen Kane, and
he won the award for his work on Wuther-
ing Heights (1939). He died in 1948 at the
age of 44.
George Spiro Dibie, ASC, chair-
man of the ASC Fundraising Committee,
notes that during her visit, Skelton had a
camera with her, and she took pictures of
every corner [of the Clubhouse] inside and
out. She was like a little girl in a candy store!
When she saw the letters ASC, she was
home.
An artist in her own right, actively
engaged in drawing, painting and photog-
raphy, Skelton is the widow of comedian
Red Skelton. She is currently preparing for
the 2013 opening of the Red Skelton
Museum and Education Center in the late
comedians hometown of Vincennes, Ind.
Left: Lothian Skelton (center) shows a box of clippings to George Spiro Dibie, ASC (left) and ASC General Manager Brett Grauman.
Right: Skelton with Society members (from left) Michael Goi, Steve Gainer and Dibie.
When you were a child, what film made the strongest
impression on you?
Fantasia (1940). The graphics and classical music transported me to
an ecstatic mind state I hadnt known existed.
Which cinematographers, past or present, do
you most admire?
Conrad Hall, ASC, for the humanity that sparked
his genius; Vittorio Storaro, ASC, AIC, for his
profound intensity; and Robert Richardson, ASC,
for creating a bridge between classical perfection
and contemporary sensibilities.
What sparked your interest in photography?
Life magazine and Edward Steichens The Family
of Man.
Where did you train and/or study?
I proclaimed myself a filmmaker in the hippie days of San Francisco.
I bought a Bolex, then an clair, and learned while I earned. It wasnt
until I came to Hollywood that I realized how little I knew.
Who were your early teachers or mentors?
The Life magazine photographers, and the filmmakers of the 1940s,
50s and 60s.
What are some of your key artistic influences?
Beethoven; Chopin; Bartok; Bach; Brahms; Rembrandt; Van Gogh;
Renoir; Monet; Chaim Potok; Gilbert & Sullivan; Modern Jazz Quar-
tet; Jacques Tati; Alain Resnais; Ingmar Bergman; Sven Nykvist, ASC;
Franois Truffaut; Raoul Coutard; Fellini; Ken Kesey; Allen Ginsberg;
Lawrence Ferlinghetti; Jack Kerouac; Ezra Pound; Toscanini;
Horowitz; Helmut Walcha; Pablo Casals; Brecht; Ansel Adams;
Edward Weston; Henri Cartier-Bresson; Margaret Bourke-White;
Edward Steichen; Harold Edgerton; Jordan Belson; and Liv Ullmann.
How did you get your first break in the business?
The reel from my hippie-filmmaker days got me a job as a direc-
tor/cameraman at a big TV commercial house. It only lasted six
months, but it brought me to L.A. Later, I was hired to shoot the TV
show thirtysomething, probably because Id never set foot on a TV
set. The show won the Emmy for Best Drama, and I was launched
(at least for a while).
What has been your most satisfying moment on a project?
Shooting an 11-minute ballet sequence in a single take from a dolly
on a dance floor. Without touching the zoom, we shot a kinetic,
boldly framed take that was, miraculously, absolutely perfect. Unfor-
tunately, the prima ballerina chopped it up with freeze frames and
jump cuts to cover perceived imperfections in her form. Also, during
the first week of my first big feature, Bird on a Wire, we had to blow
up an entire gas station at night using about a dozen cameras. I had
no idea how to expose for the gas flames and couldnt find anyone
to offer advice. There could not be a Take 2, and the special-effects
supervisor was terrified by my uncertainty. I made
my best guess and hoped for the best. My satis-
fying moment came the next day, when the
special-effects man came onto the set and
proclaimed it the best-exposed explosion hed
ever seen!
Have you made any memorable blunders?
I inadvertently turned on a hot plate that
happened to have the shows supply of smoke
cookies resting on it. The entire Hotel Bel Air was
evacuated, and the fire department arrived in
force to deal with the dense cloud of smoke.
What is the best professional advice youve ever received?
After hearing complaints from an actor that I was putting too much
light in his eyes, an executive producer called me into his office to
remind me that I could be fired and he could be fired, but the actor
could not be fired. It was a great lesson in political reality.
What recent books, films or artworks have inspired you?
Pina, Tree of Life, Midnight in Paris, Black Swan and the progress of
my cinematography students at the AFI.
Do you have any favorite genres, or genres you would like to
try?
I have not sufficiently plumbed the depths or beauty of extreme low-
light cinematography. I hope to find natural painterly abstractions
near the edge of visibility.
If you werent a cinematographer, what might you be doing
instead?
Nothing too scholarly or requiring much discipline. Im either
passionately involved or pretty lazy. I need to always have something
in my life to be obsessive about.
Which ASC cinematographers recommended you for
membership?
Conrad Hall, Haskell Wexler and Vilmos Zsigmond.
How has ASC membership impacted your life and career?
Instead of looking toward what I havent yet accomplished, Ive
learned to look more levelly and enjoy the comfort and camaraderie
of friends, all of us driven by the same inspiration.
Robert Primes, ASC Close-up
P
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Film Matters. Tell the world why
at www.kodak.com/go/filmmatters

Film. No Compromise.

American Cinematographer.2012 10

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