2014 04

APRIL 2014
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The International Journal of Motion Imaging
On Our Cover: Noah (Russell Crowe) prepares for an epic flood in Noah,
shot by Matthew Libatique, ASC. (Photo by Niko Tavernise, courtesy of
Paramount Pictures.)
FEATURES
36
50
62
76
Raging Waters
Matthew Libatique, ASC unleashes Gods wrath for Noah
50
Top Gear
Shane Hurlbut, ASC revs up Need for Speed
Outcast Power
Alwin Kchler, BSC dramatizes factions for Divergent
5 Park City Standouts

AC spotlights well-shot Sundance Film Festival entries
62
DEPARTMENTS
10
12
16
24
94
102
103
104
106
108
Editors Note
Presidents Desk
Short Takes: Neverlands
Production Slate: Dom Hemingway Scandal
New Products & Services
International Marketplace
Classified Ads
Ad Index
Clubhouse News
ASC Close-Up: Roger Deakins
VISIT WWW.THEASC.COM
76
SEE AND HEAR MORE CINEMATOGRAPHY COVERAGE AT WWW.THEASC.COM
In an exclusive podcast, cinematographer

Jost Vacano, ASC, BVK discusses his approach
to the original RoboCop, released in 1987.
Left: In Paul Verhoevens sci-fi classic RoboCop, Peter

Weller stars as a terminally wounded police officer who
returns to active duty after being transformed into a
powerful cyborg. Right: Jost Vacano, ASC, BVK.
(RoboCop photo courtesy of MGM. Vacano photo by
Douglas Kirkland.)
THIS MONTHS ONLINE QUESTION: Which science-fiction movies have the most fantastic cinematography?
Malia Campbell: Blade Runner!!!!
Iain Bruce: Blade Runner and its breathtakingly beautiful neon-noir. They made grime and dust
David Joshua Smith: 2001 is still at the top of look ethereal. Fantastic lighting, composition and
the list.
camera movement. A world fully realized
through wonderful cinematography.
Robbie Corcoran: Alien.
Kristian Nomedal: Metropolis by Fritz Lang.
J.T. Moreland: Close Encounters of the Third
Kind!!
Marla Porter: Inception.
Aaron William Peterson: I like that you used

the word fantastic instead of best or well
crafted. Fantastic cinematography has the ability
to push boundaries and to call forth questions of
the sublime. Fantastic isnt just great craftsmanship, it is capturing wonder. With that in mind I
would choose 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade
Runner and Metropolis.
Derrick Lafayette: 12 Monkeys, District 9, Star

Richard Davis: I love the look of Moon. Amaz- Henry Febles: The Matrix. Do not forget about Trek Into Darkness.
ingly well shot.
bullet time!
Dusty Clark: 2001, Sunshine and A.I., hands
Adam Ahmed: Dark City.
Philip Wheeler: Star Wars.
down!
Evan Halleck: Aliens is shot beautifully. It is rare Faisal-Azam Qureshi: Stalker, 2001, Blade
that a movie shot decades ago can still truly bring Runner and Dune.
you into a science-fiction world and scare the
crap out of you.
Derek Stettler: I think science fiction offers the
perfect opportunity for cinematography to fulfill
E.J. Enriques: Minority Report, for a future its highest purpose, because science fiction is all
[that is] not so out of reach.
about creating new worlds. Few films are more
successful in this regard than Blade Runner. Its
Jorge Corral: Gravity!
sheer beauty only elevates the achievement. Im
also fond of the cinematography of 2001, Alien,
Pete Von Tews: Blade Runner. Ive even had Oblivion and Tron: Legacy.
dreams with that look.
Giselle Ocasio Morales: The Fifth Element
Fernando Toscano: Blade Runner and Chil- does it for me.
dren of Men.
Adam Chambers: I like the work Karl Walter
Jorge Corral: The greatness of Gravity is its Lindenlaub [ASC, BVK] did on Stargate.
simplicity.
Jeremiah Bayani: Primer, The Fountain, Pi.

Fabio Pirovano: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star
Wars, Escape from New York, Outland, Alien 3,
Virtuosity, Event Horizon, Solaris (Steven Soderbergh, [shooting] as Peter Andrews), Sunshine,
Pandorum, Gravity.
Venusi Junior Taumoepeau: Allen Daviau
[ASC]s work on E.T. is memorable to me.
Bill Allan: I agree with the Blade Runner majority, but what about The Road Warrior?
Tanmay Toraskar: The Abyss, shot by [director
of photography] Mikael Salomon [ASC] and
[underwater director of photography] Al Giddings. Great underwater cinematography for a
very science-fiction adventure movie.
To read more replies, visit our Facebook page: www.facebook.com/AmericanCinematographer
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o v o c a m e r a.c o m
6
American Society of Cinematographers

The ASC is not a labor union or a guild, but
an educational, cultural and professional
organization. Membership is by invitation
to those who are actively engaged as
directors of photography and have
demonstrated outstanding ability. ASC
membership has become one of the highest
honors that can be bestowed upon a
professional cinematographer a mark
of prestige and excellence.
OFFICERS - 2013/2014
Richard Crudo
President
Owen Roizman
Vice President
Kees van Oostrum

Vice President
Lowell Peterson
Vice President
Victor J. Kemper
Treasurer
Frederic Goodich
Secretary
Isidore Mankofsky
Sergeant At Arms
MEMBERS OF THE
BOARD
Curtis Clark
Richard Crudo
Dean Cundey
George Spiro Dibie
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Matthew Leonetti
Stephen Lighthill
Michael OShea
Lowell Peterson
Owen Roizman
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ALTERNATES
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Adapting religious tales for the big screen is always a risky

undertaking. Controversy often follows, but from a filmmaking standpoint, the trickiest aspects include setting the
right tone for modern audiences and creating imagery that
will believably approximate the more fantastic elements of
narratives that have special resonance for many viewers.
With Noah, director Darren Aronofsky and cinematographer Matthew Libatique, ASC embraced a Biblical
saga fraught with logistical perils a story set in an ancient
era that required them to convincingly place characters in a
massive ark amid an apocalyptic flood. The job involved
tying together locations in Iceland and New York while also
integrating significant amounts of CGI into the live-action
footage. I was always conscious about how many visual-effects shots there were in a given
scene, Libatique says in his Q&A with Iain Stasukevich (Raging Waters, page 36). In
some cases, if I was reaching past the set, Id try something practical to try to make the shot
work with fewer visual-effects elements. He adds that the flood scenes, which were shot
amid a deluge every night for 3 weeks, made Noah probably the hardest shoot Ive ever
experienced because there were so many things that could go wrong.
On the cross-country car-chase adventure Need for Speed, Shane Hurlbut, ASC had to
find ways to rig cameras throughout souped-up vehicles traveling at extremely high speeds.
As Hurlbut concedes in his interview with Jay Holben (Top Gear, page 50), there were a
few casualties along the way: We ended up accidentally destroying two [Canon] C500s and
two 1DCs. One of the C500s got hit at 90 mph, and all that was left was the circuit board.
About an hour later, a homeless man brought us our 14mm Cooke lens, which had ricocheted two blocks down the street!
When Alwin Kchler, BSC signed on to shoot the sci-fi thriller Divergent for director
Neil Burger, he found himself collaborating with a filmmaker who truly appreciated his skill
set. Divergent presented a fantastic opportunity to create a future world, but a challenge to
create one that felt new and different, Burger tells Michael Goldman (Outcast Power,
page 62). I wanted a director of photography who could bring something different to it, a
real artistry, beauty and even intimacy. I have always been a fan of Alwins work; I particularly
loved Hanna, and I knew hed done some really offbeat things with Lynne Ramsay and
Michael Winterbottom. I loved the idea of filming a movie set in the future with someone
who has that kind of eye.
Our annual roundup of visually interesting films shown at the Sundance Film Festival
(5 Park City Standouts, page 76) spotlights the features Blue Ruin, The Lunchbox and A
Girl Walks Home Alone at Night and the documentaries Happiness and Rich Hill. These were
just a few of the standouts ACs delegation saw, however, and well be covering others
(including the feature Whiplash, which won a Grand Jury Prize and an Audience Award) as
they are released theatrically.
Stephen Pizzello
Executive Editor
10
Photo by Owen Roizman, ASC.
Editors Note
The long, hard winter has finally broken, and spring is once again at hand. Given the awful
slog so much of the country has just been put through, its no wonder that thoughts now
turn toward rebirth, renewal and fresh starts. At the same time, its critically important for
us to give good consideration to the past, more specifically in terms of preserving our work
for future generations.
Archiving and preservation refer to the saving of master elements or unique copies of
motion pictures by storing them in environmental conditions that prevent deterioration and
extend the life of the material. A couple of other relevant terms require clarification. Restoration is the process that returns the master elements to a condition as close to the original
as possible. Metadata, which is often confused with archiving and preservation, is information that goes into a catalog; in no way does it imply a moving image or recorded sound.
A quick Web search reveals just how much of our cinematic heritage has already been
lost. Right now, youre probably not too concerned about the fate of some obscure silent
short from 1914. Youre also probably not worried about whos saving a half-hour sitcom
from just a few years ago. But because no one can predict the future historical or cultural
significance of anything we photograph, there needs to be a bulletproof system in place for
saving, well, everything. The marvels of digital technology have led some to think this problem has already been solved. It hasnt, and thinking otherwise is sure to turn an already-bad
situation into a catastrophe.
Until now, and despite every effort to replace it, film has been the only effective medium for protecting and preserving the
physical embodiment of what we do. Its remarkable longevity is due in part to the standard of universal interoperability in other
words, everyone in the world can use the same tools and techniques to do the same processes. (This is sure to strike fear in the
hearts of digital-equipment manufacturers everywhere.) The problem is that the support needed to preserve on film is disappearing
just as quickly as the emulsions themselves.
Nonetheless, a genuine future-proof solution may be at hand: ASC associate members Rob Hummel and Dan Rosen have
spent the past few years developing the Digital Optical Technology System, or DOTS. All the requirements for long-term preservation are built in: it has a more-than-100-year life expectancy, it is not subject to deterioration, it is easier to store and protect than
film, it is easily accessible, it shows a lossless quality of reproduction, and it is cheaper overall than film.
DOTS records data, visible text and images visually at microscopic density on a patented phase-change metal-alloy tape. It is
non-magnetic, chemically inert and immune to electromagnetic fields (including electromagnetic pulses). The temperature range of
its storage is 16F-150F; it is tamper proof, so it cannot be erased; and it supports external compression and data encryption, making
it a secure and robust archival technology. Best of all, it is designed to ensure the saved information will be available and recoverable for as long as cameras and imaging devices are on hand, whatever their form. Finally, we might be back to where we started
with film: a universally interoperable system that will be available to everyone.
And a note to the bean counters: DOTS eliminates the need to migrate digital assets every three to five years. The cost savings
alone will make this system irresistible to even the lowest-budget productions.
I have always avoided endorsing any particular product or service in this column, and I am not endorsing DOTS. But because
archiving and preservation are seldom the first topic of conversation in our industry, its important to encourage innovations like it.
(More information about DOTS can be found at http://youtu.be/J-jAqdXdSx8.)
For an in-depth assessment of where we stand at the moment, I urge you to read The Digital Dilemma and The Digital
Dilemma 2, published by the Science & Technology Council of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. You can find them
at: http://www.oscars.org/science-technology/council/publications/index.html.
Richard P. Crudo
ASC President
12
April 2014
American Cinematographer
Photo by Douglas Kirkland.
Presidents Desk
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EDOARDO PONTI
DIRECTOR
// RODRIGO PRIETO, ASC, AMC
DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY
// ZORAN VESELIC
FIRST AC
Human Voice was born at the Tribeca Film Festival, where director
That was the rst step of a journey that soon landed the duo in
Edoardo Ponti rst met Rodrigo Prieto. The two clicked, and shortly
Rome with renowned AC, Zoran Veselic, and a Cinema EOS C500
thereafter, Ponti approached the celebrated cinematographer with
PL. With its dynamic range and 2K 12-bit color depth, the fully
a script for a 25-minute lm written for Pontis mother, Sophia Loren.
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switch from studio mode to handheld. Its just one more way
Canon can help you bring your story to life.
Watch the Human Voice crew discuss this configuration at:
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STORY TAKES YOU
Short Takes
Neverlands Showcases Arri Alexa XT B+W

By Iain Stasukevich
When I asked my cinematographer friend Alexander Galt to

shoot the music video for Night Flowers Neverlands, I described it
as an homage to the Kinetoscope films of Thomas Edison and
William K.L. Dickson, with dancing and performances and feats of
strength. Wed be shooting with the new Arri Alexa XT B+W
camera, and Arri wanted to screen the video at the 2014 Sundance
Film Festival, which meant we had about two weeks to pull it
together. There were two ways we could approach it: as a technical exercise for the camera, or as a film that used the cameras unique
abilities for the purpose of telling a story, says Alexander.
Like the Alexa Plus, the B+W is capable of recording ArriRaw
internally in 4:3 or 16:9 to 512GB Codex drives, but it uses a sensor
without a Bayer color filter, optical low-pass filter and infrared blocking filter. This means that each photosite on the sensor captures the
full spectrum of visible light as well as infrared, improving the
cameras spatial resolution, raising its native ISO to 2,000, and
extending its dynamic range to about 15 stops. The B+W also
features an Internal Filter Module, facilitating a BG39 shortwave pass
filter for black-and-white photography and an 87C infrared pass
filter for infrared photography. Our IFM kit also came with a set of
full spectrum NDs up to 2.4.
Alexander and I decided to prioritize black-and-white photography, and we wanted to find interesting ways to build contrast into
the costumes and art direction. Shooting color and converting to
black-and-white might give you more control over contrast, but
16
April 2014
when you shoot black-and-white, you have to commit to what

youre doing, and I like that, Alexander remarks.
The cameras increased spatial resolution was most helpful in
seeing the differences between our two main sets of lenses. The
Cooke S4 primes were sharp and contrasty, whereas the Uncoated
Classic set of Zeiss Superspeeds (so called because CSC is in the
process of chemically stripping their coatings) had a softer, flatter
look and produced ghostly reflections whenever a flaring source
entered the frame.
Our tight schedule gave us one day to shoot, two days to edit
and one day to grade the picture. Alexander and I created a shot list
of about 32 setups to get in a 12-hour day. We avoided coverage,
combining adjoining shots into single takes. By that time, the Kinetoscope concept had developed into a loose narrative: a Young
Witch (Leah Krauss) conjures a Black Knight (Cassandra Burrows) to
do battle with the Man in White (Quince Marcum).
We shot the first part of the video under gray, rainy skies in a
backyard in Brooklyns Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. In addition to Alexander, our crew consisted of focus puller Gary Bardizbanian, grip/electrician John Pyatt, media manager Cecilia Chien and art
director Claire Ensslin. These scenes were captured at 24 fps in both
visible and infrared light. We kept the camera rated at the optimum
ISO 2,000 and used a standard 1.8 ND to bring our exposure down
to a T4 our target for the whole film but still let the infrared
light through. Our original plan was to use the Uncoated Classics for
this scene, but because infrared light had a softening effect on the
image, and because we were also using a Tiffen 47 Blue filter to
bring the contrast down even more, we ultimately decided to get all
Unit photography by Aylon Ben-Ami. Photos and frame grabs courtesy of the filmmakers.
This frame grab

shows a scene
between the
Black Knight
(Cassandra
Burrows) and
the Man in
White (Quince
Marcum) in the
music video for
Night Flowers
Neverlands.
the shots of the Young Witch at her table with

the 50mm Cooke S4. In a single shot, she
walks to her table with a curio box and a fresh
bouquet of flowers. She opens the box and
finds a black knight chess piece.
Our next shots introduced the Black
Knight and the Man in White, which we
captured only in black-and-white using the
cameras BG39 IFM filter. To accentuate the
dreamlike quality of these scenes, we kept the
47 Blue filter in, changed our frame rate to 48
fps and switched to the Uncoated Classics.
48 fps is a good speed for capturing natural
movement, says Alexander. It still feels
natural, but with a subtly unreal quality. I
wanted to save the higher frame rates for the
harder-to-capture action.
Our first setup in black-and-white was
a wide, locked-off shot of the backyard with
the Man in White sitting in a chair. With the
actor sitting stock still, we cut the camera and
brought the Knight in, then rolled again, and
we crossfaded between the two shots in the
edit. Next, we T-boned a 12' length of rail and
hung a 12'x12' black rag off the top as a backdrop for the scenes where the Black Knight
struggles to tie up the Man in White. There
was a 1.2K HMI Fresnel on standby in case we
wanted separation between the actors and
the background, but we never used it; the
contrasting tones in the art direction made the
action easy to follow, and because Alexander
was shooting close up, we were able to
achieve a shallow depth-of-field on a 35mm
lens.
For interior scenes, we wanted to take
advantage of the cameras extra sensitivity and
use as few sources as possible. At ISO 3,200, a
single 60-watt light bulb and some candles
provided more than enough light for a T2.8/T4
split with the Uncoated Classic primes. Separation on the Man in Whites shoulders was
provided by a 1K Fresnel knocked down 2
stops and diffused through a 4'x4' silk. I think
its better to light enough so you have the
information, and then take it down later,
Alexander notes. The high ISO did yield some
distracting noise in the mid tones, but we were
able to control that by reducing our brightness
and gamma in the picture grade.
We rendered the conflict between the
two main characters more abstract by splashing the Black Knight with kefir and running the
film backward in the edit to make it look like
the liquid was flying away from them, cutting
Top to bottom: The

Young Witch (Leah
Krauss) carries a curio
box and a bouquet of
flowers; the Book Man
(Billy Schultz) is coated
with black liquid from the
Man in Whites stomach;
the Black Witch (Dixie Lee
Estes) performs a spell,
smearing paint on her
face; the Black Knight
and the Old Witch
(Genevieve Leloup) hold
hands in front of the fire.
18
April 2014
Top: The Black

Knight and the Man
in White compete
in this frame grab.
Middle: Director of
photography
Alexander Galt
(left) and focus
puller Gary
Bardizbanian film
Marcum in front of
the chess board.
Bottom: Galt (left)
and director Iain
Marcks (a.k.a. Iain
Stasukevich) on set.
it with reversed footage of the Man in

White spitting chocolate syrup, so that the
liquid changes color as he sucks it into his
mouth. (We did these shots outdoors
against a 12'x12' bleached muslin.) The
main characters both have a spirit living
inside them, and I thought it would look
interesting if the Book Man (Billy Schultz)
living in the Man in Whites stomach was
covered with the black liquid flowing from
his hosts gullet.
Alexander wanted to make the light
more contrasty for this setup, so we used an
20
April 2014
undiffused 1K Fresnel as our single source

and switched back to the Cooke 50mm. If
we were going to make the light more
contrasty, I felt we should make the lenses
more contrasty, he says. We wanted to
take all the detail out of the black liquid
except for the reflections on its surface.
We set the camera back to ISO 2,000 and
shot the action at 96 fps.
An Arri Swing and Tilt lens system
with a 60mm lens was used for the setup
with the Black Witch (Dixie Lee Estes), who
lives in the Black Knights stomach. AlexanAmerican Cinematographer
der snooted the 1K Fresnel with its own barn

doors and positioned it over the camera so it
was pointing straight down at Dixies face,
but still above her eyeline. Hard light on a
persons face can look beautiful, but it has to
be coming from the right place, says Alexander. It doesnt allow the actor a lot of head
turns, but its definitely a look.
The Black Knights assistance comes
with a price. Laughing, the Black Witch
performs a spell by smearing the black-andwhite paint on her face into a neutral gray,
and we come back to an infrared-enhanced
shot of the Young Witch walking through the
yard. In a crossfade, she ages into an older
black-and-white version of herself (Genevieve
Leloup), and the scene transforms from day
to night.
We knew it wouldnt match perfectly,
but we also knew the 50mm Cooke lens,
costume, makeup and props (the wooden
curio box and flowers), would be enough to
conceptually bridge the transition. All of the
night exteriors were shot at ISO 3,200 using
only a small wood fire for illumination, and
the increased contrast between the subject
and the source kept the camera noise at a
more pleasing level.
In the last scene, the Black Knight and
the Older Witch hold hands in front of the
fire. We used an 18mm Uncoated Classic
wide open at T1.3 and a Tiffen Glimmerglass
3 to create an intense glow around the fire
source. At the same time, an upside-down
reflection of the fire source from inside the
lens created an eerie effect of flames raining
down between the two characters. Our final
shot was a close-up of burning flowers shot
at 120 fps in the cameras native ISO with
a 100mm Cooke. Because the camera
doesnt sense color, theres virtually no clipping into the highlights, Alexander notes.
Detail just rolls off into white.
We used a Codex Vault to ingest our
ArriRaw footage and render 1080p and 2K
Log-C ProRes deliverables. The ArriRaw
Converter v3.0 is required to process the
black-and-white footage. Our picture grade
was performed by Emery Wells in Assimilate
Scratch at Katabatic Digital in New York City,
and the final master was rendered out to
1080p HD ProRes and 2K DPX just in time for
Arri to whisk the drives off to Park City, Utah.
25 32 40 50 75 100 135
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Production Slate
A Colorful Crook
By Mark Dillon
The title character of the comedic crime drama Dom Hemingway is a force of nature. A London safecracker fresh out of jail,
Hemingway (Jude Law) clings to a self-defeating ethical code and has
serious anger-management issues. After extracting bloody revenge
on the man who slept with his ex-wife, Hemingway reunites with his
sidekick, Dickie (Richard E. Grant), and heads to France to collect a
hoped-for reward from Mr. Fontaine (Demian Bichir), the mob boss
for whom Hemingway took the fall. However, things dont go as
planned.
Director of photography Giles Nuttgens, BSC, who hails from
the U.K. but calls Spain home, says he is still amazed that this very
British film was written and directed by Richard Shepard (The Matador), a New York-based filmmaker who had previously spent all of
five days in England. Richard came up with a version of this world
that was completely believable to anybody in the U.K., and he
wanted to visually translate to the screen the energy he imagined
someone like Hemingway would have, coming fresh out of prison,
says Nuttgens. That, for me, was the big kick.
I am a huge fan of British gangster movies, and that has
soaked into my DNA, explains Shepard, speaking to AC separately.
And when we started prepping in London, I was educated enor24
April 2014
mously in what the city had to offer visually.

Nuttgens recalls telling Shepard that the story felt like an
evening with Dom Hemingway. There is a plot and a character arc,
but thats less important than trying to explain the bubble in which
the character exists. Hes come out after 12 years in jail; hes out of
his time and period but still behaving the same way that landed him
in prison in the first place. This observation impressed Shepard,
who had admired Nuttgens work in the thrillers The Deep End (AC
April 01) and Young Adam. I immediately connected with Giles
idea about what was important in the movie, Shepard says.
Prep involved one week of scouting in France, followed by
three weeks in England. The plan was to shoot on film, which
seemed appropriate given the retro nature of the main character,
but the projects financing structure led the team to switch to the
Arri Alexa Studio a week before shooting began. Shepard, who has
directed a number of television projects shot digitally, observes, I
loved the idea of the Alexa because of the effortlessness of rolling
without worrying about cutting. And I didnt want to always be
reloading. Nuttgens, however, had doubts. I hadnt shot with the
Alexa at that point, and Richard and I watched three films shot with
it that we found sort of dull visually. The skin tones were desaturated
and looked gray, and that worried us. That wasnt the look we
wanted.
One Alexa feature that heartened them was the crime drama
Dom Hemingway photos and frame grabs courtesy of Fox Searchlight Pictures. Photos by Nick Wall.
London
safecracker Dom
Hemingway
(Jude Law), fresh
off a 12-year
prison sentence,
wastes no time
returning to
trouble in Dom
Hemingway,
shot by Giles
Nuttgens, BSC.
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Top: Hemingway and his sidekick Dickie (Richard E. Grant) travel to France in this frame grab.
Bottom: An Arri Alexa was mounted to each side of a Rolls Royce for a scene with Law
and Grant in the backseat.
Drive, shot by Newton Thomas Sigel, ASC

(AC Oct. 11). We watched a DCP of Drive
and thought it looked fantastic, recalls
Nuttgens. The flesh tones looked great,
and it was contrasty in the right places but
had all the detail in the other places. It
wasnt a huge-budget film, and neither was
ours, so we thought, We can do something
with the Alexa. We can make this work.
There were in-depth discussions
about specific shots and much rehearsing.
Nuttgens recorded much of the blocking,
nearly all of which was done on location.
We went in extremely prepared, Shepard
says. The shooting schedule was divided
among eight days in France, 15 in London
(including three at Pinewood Studios) and
26
April 2014
six days of interiors on the Isle of Man.

Shepard and Nuttgens devised a
bold color palette with production designer
Laurence Dorman and costume designer
Julian Day, one that encompassed limegreen walls in Hemingways prison mess
hall, an intense aquamarine in Fontaines
swimming pool, and vibrant London graffiti.
I told all my collaborators this wasnt a Ken
Loach kitchen-sink drama, Shepard says.
Dons a two-bit criminal, but in his mind
hes a superstar, so I wanted this to be a
bright, widescreen version of his life. Also,
when hes in France, there are 30 minutes in
which there are only four people onscreen,
so how do you keep an audiences senses
excited? Its not just the dialect and the
action; its also what theyre looking at, and

I felt color could give some energy.
Its one thing to capture vivid colors
when you can paint the walls of a set
onstage, and quite another when youre
shooting at Brompton Cemetery on a
cloudy day. That was the setting for a scene
in which a remorseful Hemingway breaks
down when visiting his ex-wifes grave.
Nuttgens crew shone an 18K Fresnel gelled
with 14 CTS through a 12'x12' Half Grid
Cloth as a soft, three-quarter-frontal key,
and another 18K direct as backlight for the
surrounding foliage. Theres no quality to
the daylight on dull November days in
London, Nuttgens observes, so we had to
do a lot of work on that scene in the DI. By
pushing a bit and accepting within the
image a certain amount of what I would call
texture others might call it noise we
created colors out of a dull day and made it
feel like the rest of the film.
Nuttgens, who does his own operating, shot the cemetery scene using an
Angenieux Optimo 24-290mm T2.8 zoom
lens, with the camera on a dolly operated by
key grip Peter Myslowski. But he estimates
that he shot 70 percent of the movie handheld. As long as you are accustomed to
lighting simply and quickly, the turnarounds
are fast [with handheld], says Nuttgens.
When the actors are ready to go, they can
lose their energy if you say, You have to sit
down for 20 minutes while I turn around.
A scene in which an unhinged
Hemingway threatens Fontaine in his villa as
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Nuttgens (in gray shirt) and director Richard Shepard (right) on location in a train station.
Dickie looks on combines dolly and handheld shots. The sequence opens with the
camera panning among giant ape portraits
that adorn the walls. I wanted a few
controlled shots, something we could come
back to that had solid framing relative to
those pictures, and then its a handheld
free-for-all when Dom goes crazy,
Nuttgens says. The room was lit by 18Ks
outside each of two windows, with Grant
directly in the light and the other two actors
illuminated by the bounce off the white
walls.
The confrontation scene was also
shot with a zoom, an Angenieux Optimo
28-76mm T2.6, but Nuttgens otherwise
stuck with Arri Master Primes, especially the
27mm, which proved to be Shepards preference. Nuttgens shot standard interiors in
the T3.4-T4 range. He went light on lens
filtration, using Tiffen White Pro-Mist 14
and sometimes 12, although he says of the
latter, If you get any highlights, it tends to
bleed out.
Jrme Carles operated Steadicam
for a tracking shot in an olive grove in
France. In the scene, Dickie chases after a
naked Hemingway, who is mortified by his
own behavior toward the powerful
Fontaine. Jrme framed really well,
Nuttgens says. He went up and down that
space the whole afternoon. The light was
dying, and we had to work fast. In
London, John Hembrough operated
Steadicam for a canal-side scene in which
Hemingway catches up with crime kingpin
Lestor (Jumayn Hunter) as he is out for a
jog.
28
April 2014
The crew took advantage of its train

travel to France by shooting an onboard
scene between Dickie and a hung-over
Hemingway on their way to see Fontaine.
The crew even had to change trains, quickly
moving their gear and resuming shooting
on the second leg. Nuttgens says the Alexa
performed as well as film in this situation.
It tolerated the mixed color temperatures
between daylight and the warm, slightly
green fluorescents on the train. The crew
used no additional fixtures, creating
contrast simply by putting up solids along
the opposing side of the carriage to block
the fill light coming through the windows.
The films most spectacular action
sequence is set on a French country road at
night. Hemingway, celebrating a cash gift
from Fontaine, drives a Rolls Royce standing
up, accompanied by Fontaine, Paolina,
Dickie and a pair of party girls. In his
drunken stupor, he crashes into an oncoming vehicle, and he and his ejected passengers fly through the air in slow motion in a
single shot.
To create the shot, the actors were
filmed individually at Pinewood against an
80' curved greenscreen. Most of them were
suspended by a Robomoco motion-control
flight system, but Grant was shot bouncing
on a trampoline. Nuttgens describes the
Robomoco as a reinforced harness that
goes around the center of the actor with a
pivot point coming out of the back thats
strong enough to hold their rib cage in one
place so you can twist them without hurting them. They had limited torso movement, but their arms and legs were free.
The actors were backlit by banks of

Mini-Brutes gelled with Deep Straw and put
through heavy Lee 129 diffusion. Only a
small amount of fill light, a 5K Fresnel
through Full Grid Cloth, was used on Law.
The shot eschews the laws of depth-offield, as Law, in the foreground, and everyone in the background are all in focus. But
the filmmakers were aiming for something
outside of reality, says Nuttgens. People
could accept this might actually happen,
but, on the other hand, we wanted it to
play as comedy.
Footage was captured in the ArriRaw format and recorded on 256GB and
512GB Codex datapacks. Digital-imaging
technician Mustafa Tyebkhan backed up
rushes in triplicate and transcoded the
dailies, which were handled at Pinewood.
Because of the productions last-minute
switch to digital, Tyebkhan had just one day
of prep. There was no time to create and
test a color-management pipeline for Giles,
so I suggested that he monitor mainly in Rec
709, he says. That provided him with a
consistent color space in which to paint
the movie.
Nuttgens and Shepard supervised
the final grade at Londons Dirty Looks,
working with colorist Tom Balkwill. Balkwill
says that in addition to keeping the colors
vibrant, they gave a nod towards the
debauchery of Doms narcotic and champagne habits. A few of the shots at Lestors
club even go into psychedelic pinks, purples
and emerald greens. The picture was
graded in 2K in P3 color space on a FilmLight Baselight. Dana Congdon edited the
picture on an Avid using DNxHD files, while
the online edit was also handled on Baselight.
Of Dom Hemingways striking color
palette, Nuttgens observes, Everybody was
keen to go for it, spurred on by Richard.
There were times when Id ask him, How
far do you want to go? And hed say, As
far as you want.
TECHNICAL SPECS
2.40:1
Digital Capture
Arri Alexa Studio
Arri Master Prime, Angenieux Optimo
A High-Profile Fixer
By Jean Oppenheimer
Do ends always justify means? If you

are in the business of cleaning up the indiscretions of high-profile clients, the answer is
yes. And in Washington, D.C., nobody
protects her clients more assiduously than
fixer Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington),
whose Rolodex bulges with the private
phone numbers of the most powerful
people in politics. Now in its third season,
the ABC series Scandal is one of many hit
primetime dramas in which right and
wrong are somewhat nebulous. Its not
as simple as being good or evil, says Oliver
Bokelberg, ASC, BVK, who shot Scandals
pilot and stayed on when the series got
picked up. All of our characters are flawed,
but we dont judge them. We want to like
them.
Everybody who works at Olivia Pope
& Associates carries dark secrets and bears
hidden scars. Each has chosen to operate in
a world of lies and deceit, manipulation and
cover-ups. That theme of moral compromise is echoed in the shows visual style,
most strikingly in its use of beveled glass.
Bokelberg likes to keep the camera moving,
mainly on a dolly, and some of the most
arresting images are achieved by dollies past
30
April 2014
bits of beveled glass, a strategy Bokelberg

credits to pilot director Paul McGuigan. I
initially saw it as a visually appealing
element, the cinematographer recalls.
What I didnt anticipate was the emotional
and psychological levels it would add.
Double and fragmented images,
distortions and lens flares are used to
suggest the duality of the characters, the
moral ambiguity of their actions and the
dark recesses of their minds. The psychology behind the images has become
stronger and stronger, says Bokelberg. I
think a lot happens in the viewers mind
when he sees them. No one can predict
the result when the camera dollies past the
beveled glass, a move that is frequently
coupled with a zoom. The effect is
random, which is the beauty of it, observes
Bokelberg. It cant be re-created in a
computer; it [happens naturally]. And we
have great editors who pick just the right
moments.
Plain glass also features prominently
in the architectural design of OPA, which is
built on a soundstage at Sunset Gower
Studios. The set was modeled on the practical location used for the pilot. Bokelberg
recalls that when he and McGuigan were
scouting locations, the director fell in love
with a huge corner wall of windows in an
Scandal photos by Danny Feld and Randy Holmes, courtesy of ABC.
Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington) is a high-powered Washington, D.C., consultant who specializes
in crisis management in Scandal.
empty loft on the seventh floor of an old

movie theater in downtown Los Angeles.
It was an enormous space, and line
producer Merri Howard and pilot production designer Marcia Hinds turned it into
the offices of OPA, says the cinematographer. When the show got picked up, our
walls came out from fold-and-hold, and
series production designer Corey Kaplan
added the window wall and shrank the set
to make it fit our stages.
The set consists of several rooms
divided by glass doors with strips of beveled
glass around the edges. The cameras typically peer into the conference room from
the foyer. I like the sense of peeking in on
things, remarks Bokelberg. It should all
feel a little loose, like we are accidentally
seeing something or capturing it out of the
corner of our eye.
In other areas of OPA, and on sets
built on other stages, beveled Plexiglas
panels are positioned in front of the
cameras. The panels are an inch thick and
come in two sizes, 13-by-8 inches and 6-by12 inches, says Bokelberg. We place the
panels as close to the lens as possible, about
8 inches away. This only works with a lens
75mm or longer, however. The panels are
on a wooden base, and we can change the
number of them and the distance between
them.
When AC visited the set, Cyrus (Jeff
Perry), the presidents chief of staff, was
engaged in a heated argument with his
husband, James (Dan Bucatinsky), in the
empty White House press bullpen. It was
the night of the Inaugural Ball. The upper
walls of the room consist of glass. Both
cameras are on a 10-foot stretch of dolly
track laid [outside the bullpen], explains
Bokelberg. One camera is shooting into
the room through Venetian blinds on one
of the panes of glass. We removed the glass
from another window, allowing the second
camera to shoot directly into the room. For
the last two takes, well set up our beveled
Plexi panels, which will give us some transitional moments and panel reflections.
A-camera operator Michael Woj
Wojciechowski steps up to director
of photography on double-up days,
tech-scout days, and on the episodes that
Bokelberg directs. Steve Fracol is the
B-camera/Steadicam operator. Oliver
Top: The staffers of Olivia Pope & Associates meet in the conference room. Bottom: Pope fusses over
President Fitzgerald Grant (Tony Goldwyn), her client and former lover.
approaches modern television in a very

different way than whats accepted as the
norm, declares Fracol. We chase dialogue
from off-axis eyelines and always through
some foreground object: a lampshade, a
book on a table, the Plexi panels.
Frequently, half the frame is out of focus
because of something in the foreground, or
the camera will dolly past a succession of
out-of-focus objects. Bokelberg explains
that he likes the sense that there is something between us and the characters. I think
it adds realism.
The cinematographer, who has
twice been nominated for ASC Awards (for
32
April 2014
the TV projects Raines and My Own Worst

Enemy), gives his camera operators a lot of
leeway in selecting focal lengths and timing
zooms. I want as much variation as possible, not the same coverage from take to
take, he says. Because we often have to
get through nine or 10 pages a day, we try
to cross-cover the scenes, [laying two sets of
dolly tracks] at between a 90- and 180degree angle. Its pretty free flowing.
We always shoot with zoom lenses,
and the operators are encouraged to zoom
within a certain range while the camera is
dollying sideways, he continues. Ideally,
[combining the two moves] masks the
zoom. We are trying to create a feeling of

wrapping around the actors, sucking viewers into the action. With a laugh, he adds,
We refer to this technique as the Scandal
Vortex.
B-camera 1st AC Emily Mackley
affirms, Oliver likes us to be constantly
reacting to and working with the action as
its happening. Although the actors generally repeat the same broad strokes of their
performances in each take, the camera
teams do not. The operators can be at any
focal length at any given time, which keeps
me and [A-camera 1st AC] Jon Zarkos on
our toes.
The beveled Plexi panels definitely
add a degree of difficulty for pulling focus,
continues Mackley. Often, the script will
call for the camera to go through a panel at
a certain cut point. The dolly grip is responsible for positioning the camera at the right
place and time so the operator can bury or
reveal the actor. As we pass through [the
panels], the image is heavily blurred by the
glass and the actor is temporarily hidden. It
can be tricky to know just where to have
the lens focused as we transition out of the
panel and begin to see a clear image again.
Jon and I may only have fractions of a
second to make corrections if were off.
The first assistants rely heavily on
camera monitors. One thing they and all
crewmembers have to constantly be
aware of is keeping their own reflections
out of shots, especially when shooting
through the beveled-glass doors at OPA.
Battens with black Duvatyn are placed
behind crewmembers to help with this.
A long-time Arri user, Bokelberg
shoots Scandal with two Alexa EVs, capturing in ProRes 4:2:2 HQ to SxS cards. When
shooting a large group of actors, or when
the schedule calls for a particularly heavy
page count, a third Alexa EV is employed. I
really enjoy putting together the puzzle of
multiple cameras, says Bokelberg. Ill try
to cover the scene from three different
directions at the same time.
The productions camera package is
provided by VER, which does an excellent
job of supporting us, says Bokelberg. The
main lenses are five Angenieux Optimo
zooms: two 24-290mm T2.8 (and 2x extenders), two 28-76mm T2.6 and one 1540mm T2.6. Also included are a 12mm
Cinematographer Oliver Bokelberg, ASC, BVK on set with Washington and Goldwyn.
Zeiss Ultra Prime and a PL-mounted Lensbaby 3G. VER also supplies a Canon 7D
DSLR, which we use mainly for subjective
Lensbaby shots, or in cramped spaces
where its hard to achieve angles with our
small zooms, says Bokelberg. We use the
Lensbaby when we want to get inside a
characters head. One example occurs in
episode 752, in which a homeless Huck is
reliving traumatic experiences from his past.
The distortion produced by the lens
suggested the dark, twisted place his mind
was in. We also tend toward close-ups for
those moments. Bokelberg also uses a
couple of GoPro Hero3s for specialty shots.
He rates the Alexas at ISO 800 for
most interiors, occasionally upping that to
1,280 or 1,600. Exteriors are generally shot
at ISO 200, and greenscreen work at ISO
400. Tiffen Glimmerglass 2 filters are always
on the lens unless greenscreen work is
being shot, and Bokelberg occasionally adds
a or Schneider Classic Soft for the
actresses.
Cinelease supplies the lighting, most
of which hangs from the greenbeds. They
take great care of us, remarks gaffer Roger
Sassen. Day-interior light is motivated
primarily from windows, and to give it an
East Coast feel, Bokelbergs crew adds
CTB to the 20Ks positioned outside the OPA
offices. We like mixing color temperatures, he says. Its what we would find on
location, and it helps our sets feel authentic.
34
April 2014
The two giant windows in the

conference room have frosted glass, primarily because we dont have an exterior
there is very limited space outside the set,
continues Bokelberg. The frost is one layer
of diffusion, and we usually add another,
like Opal 250 or 216, in front of the lights.
Its mostly direct light, not bounced.
Zip Lights, Source Four Lekos and
Kino Flos are favored for interiors. Nearly all
of the greenbed lights can be lowered right
to the top of frame. Ceilings show in a
number of sets, but not in Olivias office,
which has 20'-high walls. We add a snoot
to each Zip Light and put one layer of Opal
in it, says Bokelberg. Its a very soft light
and very directional, and [we often use
them] to supplement interior practicals.
Everything is on dimmers.
The Oval Office has a very different
look from the other sets. There is no beveled
glass, and the windows are covered with
sheer, white curtains. Sheers are a real pain
with digital capture, notes Bokelberg.
There are 10Ks outside the windows, and
as soon as we put a light on the sheers, they
start blossoming and blooming.
To suggest light coming from the
windows when the windows are not in
shot, well often light a large curtain of
bleached muslin from behind with Blondes
or 5Ks to create a big, glowing source, he
adds.
Bokelberg says the shows digitalAmerican Cinematographer
imaging technician, Andrew Lemon, is a

huge aid to me. We color correct live. Andy
also was a contributor in developing our
workflow, with great support from Technicolor. He and Lemon use Technicolors DP
Lights System. A new ASC CDL is created
for every setup, Bokelberg explains.
Often, I can save lighting time by dialing in
contrast. It may seem like a cheat, but to
me, its one of the big advantages of digital.
On an intense schedule like ours, a tool like
that is a big help.
While shooting, Andy and I are
constantly working our Color Wheels, and
we lock in our color correction by the end
of each setup, he continues. Those
numbers then get recorded to our ASC CDL
and saved on a USB stick that is sent to our
dailies colorist. With a laugh, he reveals,
Sometimes I just write Help! The dailies
colorists know me well enough to know my
intentions for each scene. Our final colorist,
Gareth Cook, then applies his magic. So far,
the system has worked flawlessly and given
us consistently great results.
Though Bokelberg has high praise
for all of his Scandal collaborators, he
reserves special credit for creator/executive
producer Shonda Rhimes. She has the
ability to write amazing storylines that are
believable, even though they are outrageous, and she has always encouraged us
to be cinematic and unconventional in how
we design and shoot the show.
TECHNICAL SPECS
1.78:1
Digital Capture
Arri Alexa EV, Canon EOS 7D,
GoPro Hero3
Angenieux Optimo, Zeiss Ultra Prime,
Lensbaby 3G
Matthew Libatique, ASC

reteams with director
Darren Aronofsky on the
Biblical drama Noah.
By Iain Stasukevich
|
Raging
Waters
36
April 2014
Photos by Niko Tavernise, courtesy of Paramount Pictures.
n Darren Aronofskys Noah, gone is

the plainly righteous and wholehearted man who walked with God.
As played by Russell Crowe, this
Noah is haunted by nightmarish visions
of the destruction of humanity. After
deciphering his visions with the help of
Methuselah (Anthony Hopkins), Noah
and his wife, Naameh ( Jennifer
Connelly), and children begin construction on a massive ark in which they and
others hope to survive the imminent
flood. Meanwhile, the Watchers, a tribe
led by Tubal Cain (Ray Winstone), are
determined to survive judgment at all
costs.
What I liked about the script
was its ambiguity, observes Matthew
Libatique, ASC, who also collaborated
with Aronofsky on Pi (AC April 98),
Requiem for a Dream (AC Oct. 00), The
Fountain (AC Nov. 06) and Black Swan
(AC Dec. 10). I dont know whether
Noah is a hero or an anti-hero, and I
think a lot of viewers will sympathize
with Tubal Cain. Something about
Cain speaks to who we are as humans.
Libatique recently invited AC to
Opposite: Noah
(Russell Crowe), is
given holy insight
into a flood that
will destroy
humankind in
Noah. This page,
top: Noah comforts
his wife, Naameh
(Jennifer Connelly).
Bottom: Director
Darren Aronofsky
climbs a ladder
behind
cinematographer
Matthew
Libatique, ASC.
www.theasc.com
April 2014
37
Raging Waters
The filmmakers at work on location in Iceland.
the DI suite at Technicolor-PostWorks

New York as he and colorist Tim Stipan
put the final touches on Noah, and the
cinematographer discussed the project
during breaks from that work.
American Cinematographer:
38
April 2014
With the exception of The Wrestler,

youve shot every one of Aronofskys
features. What has changed, and what
has stayed the same?
Matthew Libatique, ASC: I
know Im always going to stay true to
how Darren works, which is largely

single camera and with motivated
camera moves. We were handheld on
Noah, but it wasnt like we were floating
from character to character in a vrit
style. I think weve matured as filmmakers and can focus on whats important,
which is subjectivity and storytelling.
We dont use zooms when we work
together, and we used Zeiss Ultra
Primes on this film because they have a
lot of options in the range Darren likes
to use. We mostly used the 24mm, the
50mm and the 85mm something
wide, medium and long.
A handheld camera seems like
an unusual approach for an epic set in
that era.
Libatique: Darren is very particular about the camera. He wants something very controlled that also moves
fluidly and naturally. If the camera can
move with the actors performance
without a device like a crane or dolly,
thats what we do. Because we were
going handheld, I wanted a lightweight
camera, so I chose the Arri LT. I love it
because its simple to use in the
elements, which were, of course,
extreme. We could be in 30-mph winds,
20F or 70F and not have to worry
about electronics or cables.

What are some things that
differentiate Noah from your other
collaborations?
Libatique: Darren doesnt usually
work outside, so Iceland presented a
strange situation for him because we
had to worry about weather and light.
We were fortunate in that there were a
lot of opportunities for overcast light,
which is very favorable for photographing faces. When we did have sunlight
with more than one person in the scene,
we tried to block to backlight the actors.
As long as their faces were in a similar
realm, I could match them using a
polarizer to mitigate some of the
sunshine when it popped out, or to
create more reflectivity on a face when
the sunlight disappeared. Another challenge was fighting the urge to make
every image beautiful. The story begins
in a land devoid of trees and water a
barren, otherworldly place. There was
some moss, but depending on the light,
it sometimes just looked like part of the
ground, not necessarily a living thing.
What was your approach to
lighting in general?
Libatique: I try to keep things as
naturalistic as possible, so I dont typically light day exteriors unless its something I feel I can control. Fighting
nature to mimic nature is such a large
undertaking. We were very fortunate to
shoot in Iceland in July, when the sun
Top: Shem (Douglas Booth) and Noah pay a visit to Methuselah (Anthony Hopkins, seated).
Bottom: Crewmembers ready the scene between Crowe and Hopkins.
would just hang at the horizon for four

hours starting around 9 p.m. We were
able to shoot a seven-shot scene when
the light was low. Rarely do I get to
assess a situation like that without feeling complete and utter panic! Even
after the sun goes down, the sky never
gets dark it stays this deep blue. If we
were artificially creating daylight, then
Id ask my gaffer, John Velez, to bounce
the most powerful light sources we
could find, 18K Arrimax HMIs, off the
softest material we could find,
unbleached muslin or UltraBounce. We
www.theasc.com
would also use 4-by-4-foot pieces of

milk Plexiglas as sun catchers to help
bring out the actors eyes. Often, our
lighting was simply handheld disks
made of beadboard and covered with
unbleached muslin. I found that this
gave the passive return of light a color
consistent with the surroundings.
What were some of the ways in
which you used Icelands natural
terrain to create the storys environment?
Libatique: We started out not too
far from the volcano that erupted, in the
April 2014
39
Raging Waters
southeast part of the country, and then

we spent some time in the north. The
only thing that kept us from shooting
everywhere in Iceland was that we had a
company of 300 people to move around.
The Watchers land is a combination of
lava fields of different ages. We traveled
to the north to shoot plates on young,
scorched land, and then we shot our
night-exterior scenes with principal
talent in the older lava fields of the
south. We did our one night exterior in
Iceland, the scene in which Noah and
his family are captured by the Watchers
and put in a pit. Our pit was about 40
feet deep on one rock face and 20 feet
deep on the other. We had a couple of
18Ks on Condors for separation, but we
lit the scene predominantly with
daylight-balanced Lumapanels [28 4foot T8 fluorescent globes]. They were
the only lights I could see working
because I didnt want to use a lot of hard
backlight; I just needed some soft definition for the actors.
Methuselahs mountain and cave
were also natural locations. In the film,
Top: Noah makes

preparations
inside his ark.
Bottom: Libatique
in the ark set.
40
April 2014
the mountain is a symbol of life. Its

green and lush, and at its base are black
gravel and decrepit lava. The cave was
underground, and our production
designer, Mark Friedberg, made it more
accommodating for shooting by creating navigable walkways out of the rocks
that were there. I knew we could work
with natural light because there was a
giant aperture in the roof of the cave.
We put a 30-by-30 frame of Full Grid
over it, and above that we had four
Arrimax 18K Pars spaced out evenly to
cover different angles.
How did you handle the transition from a barren landscape to a
forest on the edge of the desert?
Libatique: Noah plants a seed
from Eden that was given to him by
Methuselah, and the very next morning, water starts gushing out of the
ground in front of Methuselahs mountain, and trees start popping up. We
shot all the exterior growing material on
a large plot of land at the Planting
Fields Arboretum in Oyster Bay, Long
Island. In addition to all the beautiful
plants and trees, the location had a
giant, open field that could accommodate the portion of the ark we built
practically, which was about one-third
Top: This photo shows the lighting used to illuminate the ark set. Bottom: Noah works inside the space.
of it.
How did you tie the Iceland and
New York locations together?
Libatique: In Iceland, the landscape is so vast and clear that its hard to
get a sense of depth. Initially, I was
worried that going from that vast landscape into a forest wouldnt be believwww.theasc.com
able, so I suggested we work at a more

shallow depth-of-field in the arboretum. But when I got there, I realized the
forest was quite beautiful and needed to
feel real, claustrophobic and rich with
life. I became less concerned with shallow depth-of-field and concentrated
more on composition.
April 2014
41
Raging Waters
Top: Cranes suspend rain bars above the ark while daylight-balanced helium balloons light the set.
Bottom: Noah walks with Ham (Logan Lerman) outside the ark.
The digital set extensions

helped bridge that gap as well.
Libatique: Yes. Methuselahs
mountain had to be digitally placed into
shots where we are looking back at the
ark, which was also partly CGI. The
funny thing is, the ark was so big that we
often didnt strive to reach past it. I was
always conscious about how many visual
42
April 2014
effects shots there were in a given scene,

and in some cases, if I was reaching past
the set, Id try something practical to try
to make the shot work with fewer
visual-effects elements. For instance, I
might add smoke to the deep background and then backlight the smoke to
create the impression that there was
something farther away.
How did you light the scenes in

the arboretum?
Libatique: I was still using a lot
of natural light. If it got dark or the
weather wasnt good, we would throw
helium weather balloons 20 or 30 feet
up into the trees and then bounce 4K or
6K Pars or Arrimax 18Ks off them.
That helped us maintain the direction
of natural light without bringing in too
much from the side. Sometimes we
used them as a sun blocker. The scene
where we used them the most is the
one where Tubal Cain first meets Ham,
Noahs middle son, in the forest.
Tell us how you approached the
flood.
Libatique: It was a deluge every
night for 312 weeks. It was probably
the hardest shoot Ive ever experienced
because there were so many things that
could go wrong, and every time something did, it brought the creative
process to a halt. Everybody knew it
was going to be hard, and we were as
well prepared as we could be, thanks to
my A-camera first AC, Aurelia
Winborn. We had four cameras on the
ground and two on Chapman
Hydrascope cranes with [Angenieux]
Optimo zooms. We had Air Knives
from HydroFlex on every lens and rain
bags on every camera. On top of that,
the first ACs still had to do their regu-
Raging Waters
Top: Noah stands

atop a hill with
young Ham (Nolan
Gross, left) and
Shem (Gavin
Casalegno, right).
Bottom: Libatique
and A-camera
operator Steve
Consentino line up
a high-angle shot
of Crowe.
lar job of keeping everything in focus!

The deluge takes place during
the day, so why did you shoot it at
night?
Libatique: One of the biggest
hurdles we faced was shooting a battle
scene in overcast weather in late August
in New York. That weather didnt naturally occur. We experimented with doing
44
April 2014
some type of cover set, but the expense

was insane because of the size we
needed. There was no avoiding shooting
at night. We ended up hanging 16 to 18
daylight-balanced helium balloons from
Condors, and then we had two 100-ton
cranes each carrying 100-foot rain bars,
and another 100-ton crane carrying an
80-foot rain bar, with two 32K balloons
on each rain bar. The challenge of shooting in artificial light in artificial rain is
the dead giveaway of how light reflects
off peoples faces. The only way to blend
that many reflections into one is with a
polarizer, and I needed a 2-stop polarizer because the 1-stop didnt have
enough juice. I was rating [Kodak
Vision3 500T] 5219 at 1,200 ASA,
lighting to about a T8 or T8.5, shooting
at a T4 and pushing 2 stops in the lab,
which got me to about 1,600 ASA. That
T4 gave me the depth-of-field to still
see the rain in front of my subjects.
Tell us about Tzohar, the supernatural light source in the story.
Libatique: Its a naturally occurring mineral with supernatural properties. Its used as an igniter and a warm
glow source. The few times you actually
see it, its glow is CGI, but the rest of the
time, you only see its practical effect. To
help us create that, the team at LiteGear
made battery-operated 1-by-1-inch
high-intensity LED panels for us in
daylight and tungsten, and we would
just drop them into little saucers or
bowls so the camera couldnt see them.
John Velez cut some small, wafer-sized
Raging Waters
Top: Noah rushes into battle against the Watchers as the deluge begins.
Bottom: Noah looks out before he seals off the ark.
gels, 14 CTS or 12 CTS, and put them

between the LED and a slice of milk
Plexi diffusion that was about a halfinch or a quarter-inch thick to warm up
the light based on the color balance of
the scene. Wed add a little smoke
element to diffuse the glow, and that was
46
April 2014
our gag.
Did you shoot the ark interiors
on location?
Libatique: Very little was shot
inside the practical ark. One shot we did
there shows Noah closing the ark door
during the battle against Tubal Cain
and telling Shem to protect the family.

However, we shot the reverse of Shem
at the Marcy Armory in Brooklyn,
where we built a three-level ark-interior
set, as well as part of the exterior ark
door. Many shots of Noah at the door
of the ark looking out were done
against a bluescreen. After the deluge
comes the part of the story we call 40
Days and 40 Nights, where the ark is
completely sealed up. We wanted it to
feel almost coffin-like, and from a lighting standpoint it was a challenge
because of the interesting but difficult
angles by which we had to bend the
light. Also, theres the conceit that all
the light is motivated by a furnace shaft
in the center of the ark and the main
furnace, which is located on the
mammal deck. We had a great specialeffects supervisor, Burt Dalton, who
provided us with practical fire effects as
a motivating source. To augment the
furnace, we used 12-bulb batten strips
built by Mike Bauman, the gaffer I
worked with on Cowboys & Aliens [AC
Aug. 11]. They work on independent
channels, with different rates of flicker
and modulation for the individual bulbs.

We call them John Fords because its a
batten strip with a wire around it to
accommodate diffusion, and it looks
like a covered wagon. We augmented
these main sources with 5K and 10K
bounced light that was usually placed at
the shaft on the floor directly above
where we were shooting.
How did you create the sense of
daylight outside the ark set?
Libatique: Production was still
working on the mammal deck, the first
floor of the ark, when my key grip,
Lamont Crawford, and rigging grip,
Craig Vaccaro, went into the armory
and started to build a giant white
ceiling bounce made up of smaller
UltraBounce surfaces. It covered not
only the ceiling but also headroom on
the north, east, west and south sides of
the set. Bouncing into it were 20 20Ks,
which we rigged on each side, underslung on the truss, and also 25 MoleRichardson 12-lights. I used every scene
before the completion of the ark to
suggest that part of the ceiling wasnt in,
but the bounced light from the ceiling
didnt reach all the way down to the
bottom deck. It just gave us a certain
level of ambience to work from, so we
used large tungsten units to create
strong shafts of daylight coming
through, and augmented the ambient
light with [Kino Flo] Image 80s
pointed down from the second floor.
After the ark is opened up again,
the quality of light is very different.
Libatique: We call that part of
the story 100 Days, and at that point,
direct sunlight is still nonexistent, so we
had a lot of freedom to bounce light. If
we wanted to augment the ambience
with something directional, wed
bounce Source Fours [Lekos] into a
card or some muslin. There were walkways on top of the ark where we could
put up a Baby or a fluorescent source,
but the light still had to be soft. There
is also a shift from a warm-source feel,
about 2,000K in 40 Days and 40
Nights, to a cool one, 3,200K-4,000K.
We didnt necessarily change the light;
its just that the 3,200K 20K toplight is
Raging Waters
Libatique eyes a setup alongside key grip Lamont Crawford.
white light. In the DI, Im timing 100

Days a little cooler and more neutral.
Is there an overarching narrative in terms of color and quality of
light?
48
Libatique: For me, the visual

language of the film was built around
the fact that I knew an entire reel of the
movie, 40 Days and 40 Nights, would
be in dark, warm light. 100 Days would
be a reprieve from that, and then,

finally, wed be in bright sunlight when
the ark finds land. But we didnt get sun
at the end of the shoot! We didnt get
any consistent weather at the beginning
of the shoot; we didnt get consistent
weather in the forest; and we didnt get
cloudy weather for the battle. So, we
reacted accordingly and did what we
could on the 85-day schedule that was
given to us.
You had to plan on almost all
the animals and Watchers being CGI.
How did you suggest their presence on
set?
Libatique: Ninety-nine percent
of the animals were CGI created by
Industrial Light & Magic. Our specialeffects-makeup artist, Adrien Morot,
made some prop creatures that we used
to create shapes and shadows in the ark.
Sometimes we used gags to move the
props, and sometimes we put smoke
behind them to make it look like they
were breathing. For the Watchers, we
used physical proxies for composition,

and we brought flags in to change the
light source, even in ambience. The
actors playing Samyaza and Og during
production [Mark Margolis and Kevin
Durand] wore backpacks with tall sticks
on them for height reference. Their
performances were the performances of
actors, but Russell had to look at a giant
disk above their heads instead of at their
faces. We shot all the scenes involving
visual effects in 4-perf [Super 35mm]
and everything else in 3-perf. I was
lucky to have a good relationship with
[visual-effects supervisors] Ben Snow
[of Industrial Light & Magic] and Dan
Shrecker [of Look Effects], and even
now, in post, they are doing a great job
of keeping me informed.
Did you use any digital cameras?
Libatique: We used an Arri
Alexa Plus for helicopter plates in
Iceland and for wide plate shots during
the battle sequence. I liked its clean
capture of low ambient light at the end
or beginning of a day. For the Creation

sequence, we used a Canon [EOS] 5D
Mark II to shoot a series of stills that
were later animated in a stop-motion
style to suggest the passing of centuries.
Is there anything different
about your DI process on this project?
Libatique: Yes. Whenever Ive
done 2K dailies and used that scan for
the final DI, Ive always regretted it,
because even though that gave us better
dailies, it gave us a worse finish. So, on
Noah, we used HD dailies and scanned
the negative at 3K for the DI, which
were doing at 2K. That gave us a
higher-resolution scan with better
detail, tonality and color. I dont want to
just acquire images and say Ill worry
about the quality later. Its important to
attend to every choice in the moment.
TECHNICAL SPECS
Super 1.85:1
Super 35mm (3-perf and 4-perf)
and Digital Capture
Arricam Lite,
Canon EOS 5D Mark II,
Arri Alexa Plus
Kodak Vision3 500T 5219,
250D 5207;
Vision2 100T 5212
Zeiss Ultra Prime,
Angenieux Optimo
Digital Intermediate
49
TopO Gear
Need for Speed, shot by

Shane Hurlbut, ASC, allows
viewers to ride shotgun
during a cross-country
car chase.
By Jay Holben
|
50
April 2014
n Act of Valor, cinematographer Shane Hurlbut, ASC

pushed the small-camera envelope, shooting the feature
almost entirely with Canon EOS 5D Mark II
HDSLRs (AC Feb. 12). For his latest project, the
video-game adaptation Need for Speed, Hurlbut combined the
latest in small-camera technology with a few established digital favorites to create a visceral action experience, putting
viewers in the drivers seat in cars traveling over 180 mph.
Directed by Scott Waugh (a co-director on Act of Valor),
Need for Speed follows Tobey Marshall (Aaron Paul), a
mechanic by day and racecar driver by night. After reluctantly
teaming with a former NASCAR driver, Dino Brewster
(Dominic Cooper), in an effort to save his struggling auto
shop, Marshall ends up being framed for the murder of his
Photos by Melinda Sue Gordon, SMPSP, courtesy of Walt Disney Pictures.
best friend. Two years later, out of prison

and hungry for revenge, Marshall lands a
spot in a super-secret, winner-takes-all
race against Brewster. To get to the race,
he must get across the country in 45
hours. Brewster doesnt make it easy,
however: he places a high bounty on
Marshalls head.
We did a slew of camera tests for
this movie because we wanted to make
sure to find the tools that would best tell
the story, attests Hurlbut. It was a fiveday test involving interiors, day exteriors,
night exteriors, night driving and a trip to
Willow Springs International Raceway,
where we took the cameras up to 180
mph to see how they held up. We put
nine cameras to the test: Red Epic, Sony
F65 and F55, the Black Magic Digital
Cinema Camera, Canon EOS 1DC and
C500, GoPro Hero3, Arri Alexa and an
Arri 435. We put them all through their
paces, including racing around the track
at full speed to look at rolling shutter and
the stresses of that kind of speed. We
assembled all the test footage and then
went to Technicolor, where we worked
with [colorist] Mike Sowa to create the
look we had in mind for the final.
Scott and I sat in the screening
room and watched all the footage, with
Opposite: Street
racer and car
mechanic Tobey
Marshall (Aaron
Paul) uses his
skills to gain glory
and then revenge
in Need for Speed.
This page, top:
Marshall teams up
with Julia (Imogen
Poots), a wealthy
businessmans
assistant, for a
grueling crosscountry journey.
Middle: Marshall
has a heated faceto-face with Dino
Brewster (Dominic
Cooper), a
hometown rival
and the man
responsible for
putting Marshall
in prison. Bottom:
Cinematographer
Shane Hurlbut,
ASC on set.
www.theasc.com
April 2014
51
Top Gear
no identification as to which camera

was which. At the end of the screening,
we agreed on Camera #6, which was the
Canon C500 an underdog in the test
for sure! The images just felt alive, very
real, and we all loved that. So, that
became our A camera for the entire
shoot.
The filmmakers also tapped
several other cameras, exploiting each
for its strengths. Hurlbut explains, The
Alexa has great latitude, so we used an
Alexa Plus for day exteriors and interiors that involved extreme contrast, often
putting it on a Russian Arm. I knew I
could put the Alexa on that and just let
it run, and it would handle the deep
shade and bright sunlight. The Canon
C500 requires much more precise exposure, and Ive found that its a lot like
exposing film. It energizes subtle colors
like film does, with great color depth; it
was perfect for our car interiors, when
we were often seeing deep-green grass
out the window, cyan sky ambience in
the chrome, or red bounce in the car
from sunlight kicks on the hood. I also
think skin tones on the C500 are
superb; the sensor sees flesh tones the
way Kodak film stock does.
A big concern to the cinematographer was the number of night
Top: Marshall
drives his Gran
Torino through
the Mt. Kisco
Drive-In for a
street race in his
hometown.
Middle: A 50'
Technocrane is
used to capture
the starting line
of the race.
Bottom: A
camera mounted
inside the car
captures Harrison
Gilbertson (as
Pete).
52
April 2014
Top: Brewster
approaches
Marshall and his
mechanics about
working on an
unfinished
Mustang.
Middle: The
custom Ford
Mustang built by
Marshalls crew
is unveiled to
potential buyers
in a special
ceremony.
Bottom: This
photo illustrates
one of the rigs
used to capture
the action in the
Mustang.
Director Scott
Waugh is
standing at
right.
sequences in the film. We wanted our

nights to have a very polished, urban
feel, and with the C500, we saw great
detail at night depth Ive never seen
before, actually. We were able to shoot a
race starting on the outskirts of town
and heading into the city center
about a 4-mile stretch of asphalt
without one Condor! In some spots
on the outskirts, we added Cobra-head
street lamps, but in most cases wed just
send our Bucket Truck team out with
cans of Streaks-n-Tips to spray down
existing streetlights or kill every other
one to increase contrast. I would crank
the C500 to ISO 2,500 or 4,000, which
had about the same noise as the Alexa at
800 ISO. That enabled us to shoot the
action like a sequence in a play, using
just a few additional lights to create
depth. Wed shoot the full 412-mile
stretch in one take, first pulling the cars,
then pushing them, bringing in the
helmet cams and other rigs. Here and
there Id add a touch of light, but that
was it.
I also knew we could use the
C500 for high-speed work, he adds. It
can do 120 fps, and when we shot that
material I didnt need to adjust my lighting; I just increased my ISO. To shoot
www.theasc.com
April 2014
53
Top Gear
Top: The crew
employs a Russian
Arm for a scene in
which Marshall must
refuel without
stopping. Middle:
Steadicam operator
Jodi Miller flies the
Canon C500 at the
Intercontinental
Hotel in San
Francisco while key
1st AC Darin
Necessary pulls
focus. Bottom: The
Mustang is mounted
to a ShotBuster
insert camera car in
Moab, Utah for
dialogue scenes. Jab
LED lights are
mounted to the front
of the car for
daylight fill.
high speed on film in the old days, we

had to light everything for 120 fps, scrim
down for 24 fps, and then pull out the
scrims to shoot high speed. But with the
C500, we lit it at 1,600 ISO at T2.5, and
when we went to 120 fps, I just increased
to 4,000 ISO.
Hurlbut notes that 4,000 ISO is a
little noisy for his taste, but he knew
Need for Speed s post work would include
Cinnafilms Dark Energy image processing, which he had used on Act of Valor.
Dark Energy just vaporizes digital noise
and compression artifacts in the image,
and it did a great job of cleaning up the
5D footage on Act of Valor, he observes.
We did a Dark Energy pass on the
entire movie this time, removing the digital noise and then going back and adding
film-grain texture that feels organic and
burned in.
No matter how good, every new
technology involves growing pains, and
using the C500 as the A camera on a
major feature production was no different, according to Hurlbut. The camera
was released about two months before we
tested it, he recalls. It looked like a
Hasselblad no electronic viewfinder to
speak of, and it was really not set up like
a film camera. We tested all the third54
April 2014
Top Gear
Top: Paul and Poots are strapped upside down on a circular rig in front of a greenscreen
to simulate one of the films crash scenes. Bottom: Marshall and Julia are struck by a
semi in San Francisco.
56
April 2014
party accessories available at the time,

and none of them worked flawlessly. But
we just loved the cameras size its only
4-5 inches long, which is phenomenal if
you want something you can embed in
tight spaces. So, two weeks before principal photography, I consulted with my
camera team. We realized specialized
gear would be necessary to turn this
camera platform into a system, and my
key first AC, Darin Necessary, led the
innovation at Revolution Cinema
Rentals with reps from Element
Technica. Element Technica really
stepped up and created custom hardware
for us, including a new cage, a power base
with p-tap power, four video outputs, a
top bracket and block-powered side
supports. And they did it all in two
weeks.
As a result, we were able to shoot
80 percent of Need for Speed on the
Canon C500, continues Hurlbut. The
Alexa was our B camera, a [Canon EOS]
1DC was our C camera, and our D
Up to 1000 fps in 4K, 2000 fps in 2K

10 Megapixel Super35 CMOS sensor
Full-featured on-camera control interface
Supports RAW and compressed recording formats
On-board battery capability
Supports sync-sound frame rates and ultra high-speed
New removable 1TB and 2TB CineMag IV media

www.abelcine.com
www.visionresearch.com
North American Agent
Manufacturer
Top Gear
Top: Police pursue the cars competing in the illegal DeLeon street race in California. Bottom: Hurlbut
and Necessary discuss the Cine Moves slider on the front of the Elemento Pod car with the C500 and
the Canon lightweight 30-105mm zoom. Hurlbut says this was the vehicle that put the actors in
the drivers seat during all stunt sequences.
58
April 2014
camera the one wed blow up, light

on fire or toss off a bridge was the
GoPro Hero3. Most people use GoPros
for 12-frame or 24-frame cuts, but we
used them for 4 to 6 seconds. Theres an
amazing shot where the GoPro is on a
car as it goes off a bridge and crashes
onto the rocks below; that was all real
and all GoPro.
Not everything went perfectly,
however. We ended up accidentally
destroying two C500s and two 1DCs,
Hurlbut admits. One of the C500s got
hit at 90 mph, and all that was left was
the circuit board. About an hour later, a
homeless man brought us our 14mm
Cooke lens, which had ricocheted two
blocks down the street!
Hurlbut estimates the productions final camera package comprised
15 C500s, four Alexas, 11 1DCs and 20
GoPros. (A Vision Research Phantom
Flex was brought in for a few 300-fps
shots.) Such an arsenal of cameras
required a camera crew the size of a

small army, but Hurlbut notes that the
production started with 13 camera
assistants and actually found that was
more than we needed, so we cut down
to 11. We basically had all of the
cameras pre-rigged for anything we
might need. We had cameras rigged for
handheld or crane or car mounts, all
ready to go at a moments notice. I
divvied the assistants up: one was
helmet cam and GoPros, one was
responsible for studio-mode rigs, one
dealt with all the crash cams, one was
assigned to action cameras on the
Russian Arm, and so on.
As with any production, stunt
sequences required more cameras to
cover the action. But on this production,
more typically meant 28 to 30 cameras
all rolling on a single stunt. There are no
computer-generated cars in Need for
Speed, no greenscreen process-car
driving shots, and no CGI stunts.
However, CGI was used to put the
actors behind the wheel in dangerous
sequences, and all of the camera rigging
on the cars involved in stunts had to be
painted out. We didnt do a stunt more
than once, recalls Hurlbut. We would
rig as many cameras as we could and
cover it from numerous positions. The
real CG work was painting out cameras
and rigs and occasionally us but
all the stunts and all the driving are real.
On a major stunt, Hurlbut
assigned the cameras that were to be
operated to A-camera action operator
Chris Moseley and A-camera/
Steadicam operator Jodi Miller, and
there were typically up to 30 more in
fixed positions. Second-unit cinematographer Michael Billy Goat Svitak was
the guy wed send up a hill or down the
road to get the bigger shots, says
Hurlbut. He had a splinter van, and
wed deploy him to get the more remote
coverage. They all did an amazing job.
Lead actor Paul did most of
his own driving stunts, after training
with professional performance-driving
instructor Rick Seaman at Willow
Springs International Speedway.
Seaman said Aaron was a natural, says
Hurlbut, and when our stunt coordinator, Lance Gilbert, saw Aarons driving,
he said, Okay, were putting him in the
car!
Because so many scenes take
place in cars, Hurlbut had specially
designed windows installed that did not
have a trace of tinting. These were all
very high-end cars, which meant that
custom windows had to be created by
hand there are no real third-party
parts for them, he says. We needed all

the natural light we could get in the cars
to really see the actor in the drivers
seat.
Though Hurlbut did all of his
camera tests with Panavision Primo
lenses, budgetary considerations led the
production to shoot with a mix of
Canon Cinema and Cooke S4 lenses.
The Canons were zooms, a 14.5-60mm
T2.6, a 30-300mm T2.95-3.7 and a
Top Gear
Hurlbut settles in behind Scott Mescudi (as Benny) inside a Cessna airplane.
15.5-47mm T2.8, and Hurlbut used

three full sets of Cooke S4 primes. I
wanted a prime set with as many focal
lengths as I could get, he says. With
the three sets of S4s, we could do six cars
at a time, and the variations in focal

lengths were the difference between
being able to do the camera position we
wanted or not. When youre in really
tight quarters, sometimes a shot will
work with a 21mm but not a 25mm, and

if Id had only a 25mm, I would have
had to move the camera to a different
position or go outside the windshield.
Scott and I really wanted to keep the
camera in the car.
If Id had to slide the camera to
the side for a longer focal length, it
would have taken the camera out of the
actors eyes, and that would have meant
less emotional connection, he adds.
Just 4mm can be all the difference in
the world between being right in the
actors eyes or in a three-quarter profile.
Wed embed three cameras in the car at
the same time so we could get close-up,
low angle and wheel-well shots all at
once.
The production recorded Canon
Raw and ArriRaw to Codex S recorders.
(The C500 doesnt have a built-in
recorder.) The 1DCs recorded 4K 7:1
compression motion-JPEG to Compact
Flash cards.
To get the audience even closer
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into the action, stunt drivers were able to

wear a helmet cam while driving at full
speed. This was a Canon EOS 1DC
mounted to the side of a helmet with a
15mm Zeiss ZE lens; counterweights
were mounted on the other side of the
helmet to keep a solid balance on the
drivers head.
Shooting at high ISOs meant
very little lighting, even inside the cars at
night. We actually did a lot of our carinterior lighting with an iPad! recalls
Hurlbut. The drivers use an iPad
embedded in their cars to communicate
and track their progress. For dash lights,
we used Rosco daylight-balanced
Litepads, which we greened up a little,
dimmed way down and diffused slightly,
adding egg crates to keep it from spilling
everywhere. I just wanted to fill in the
shadows a bit and allow the light from
outside to key the actors.
We were using natural light
most of the time when shooting car
interiors, and the result has a very real
feel, he continues. Theres a scene early

in the movie when Marshall is at a
drive-in theater, and we used a 2K
projector to put Bullitt on a big screen
about 150 feet away from his car, and
the bounce off the screen was enough to
key the actors with the C500 at 4,000
ISO!
This was a very different kind of
film, Hurlbut concludes. Scott wanted
to do as much of the action for real as we
could, and he wanted the actors to react
to what was really happening. So many
filmmakers approach action by panning
the camera around like mad and shaking it, but we didnt want to do that. We
wanted to immerse the audience in the
live action.
TECHNICAL SPECS
2.40:1
Digital Capture
Canon EOS C500, 1DC;
Arri Alexa Plus; GoPro Hero 3;
Vision Research Phantom Flex
Canon Cinema and Cooke S4
Stereoscopic Conversion
'(1=3UHPLXP3URGXFWV
3/0RXQW0RGLILFDWLRQIURP
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61
Outcast Power
Divergent, directed by
Neil Burger and shot by
Alwin Kchler, BSC, envisions a
polished, utopian future.
By Michael Goldman
|
62
April 2014
n taking the helm of the first entry in the sci-fi actionadventure franchise Divergent, director Neil Burger faced a
crucial choice about how to visualize the near-future
Chicago described in the story. Based on books by Veronica
Roth about a young woman who becomes embroiled in a
governments secret plans for maintaining its class-divided
society, Divergent explores the tale of Tris Prior (Shailene
Woodley) and what happens when she literally diverges from
established protocols for choosing what faction and life path
she is supposed to pursue.
Burger opted to depart from the dystopian future visualized in many films aimed at the same demographic, and
instead chose a brighter, cleaner, utopian future in which
natural and practical lighting dominate. He also decided to
informally institute an 80-percent rule, by which he meant
Photos by Jaap Buitendijk, SMPSP, courtesy of Summit Entertainment, LLC.
Opposite: Teenager
Tris Prior (Shailene
Woodley) finds
herself standing
out in a futuristic
society where
fitting in is a
matter of life or
death in Divergent.
This page, top:
Steadicam
operator David J.
Thompson films
Woodley and
Maggie Q for a
scene in the mirror
room. Bottom:
Cinematographer
Alwin Kchler, BSC
gestures on set.
that 80 percent of the elements in every

frame had to be captured in camera.
Thus, although Divergent includes
approximately 500 digital-effects shots,
most of them involve augmenting,
extending or finishing real photography.
To achieve this vision, Burger
turned to cinematographer Alwin
Kchler, BSC, with whom he had
never worked, but whom he had long
admired. Divergent presented a fantastic opportunity to create a future world,
but a challenge to create one that felt
new and different, Burger explains. I
wanted a director of photography who
could bring something different to it, a
real artistry, beauty and even intimacy. I
have always been a fan of Alwins work;
I particularly loved Hanna [AC April
11], and I knew hed done some really
offbeat things with Lynne Ramsay and
Michael Winterbottom. I loved the
idea of filming a movie set in the future
with someone who has that kind of
eye.
Burger used a series of stills
taken by street photographer Gary
Winnogram in and around New York
as touchstones for visualizing the people

and streets of Chicago. In particular, he
asked Kchler to concentrate on
Winnograms less well-known color
imagery. Most post-apocalyptic movies
are gray and blue and grim and gritty,
but this story takes place in a communal
utopia, a society that seems to be working, at least at first, Burger explains. So
we wanted a glow to it, the kind of illuwww.theasc.com
mination Winnogram had in his color

photos.
This is a big, almost abandoned
Chicago on a grand scale scale was
very important to Neil so it was
important to focus on the individual
people, says Kchler. That scale was a
challenge, and we wanted to shoot in a
way that would suggest what is sci-fiesque about whats in front of us right
April 2014
63
Outcast Power
now. Its almost a heightened version
of right now. For all of these reasons,
we both originally hoped to shoot on
film, but production decided that
would be too expensive. So, we shot
digitally, but that was the [aesthetic]
we were striving for.
Working with three Arri Alexa
Plus 4:3 cameras and one Alexa M,
the filmmakers shot primarily in the
2:40:1 aspect ratio and recorded
ArriRaw to Gemini 4:4:4 recorders
from Convergent Design. Camera
signals were cabled to digital-imaging
technician Nate Kalushners DIT cart,
and Kalushner used Live Grade software and HDLink Pro signal-monitoring hardware to apply an
ArriRaw-to-Rec 709 LUT created by
EFilm/Company 3s EC3 dailies
service as a baseline for on-set viewing,
which was facilitated by two Flanders
LM-2461W monitors. Data manager
Jonathan Mecenas then downloaded
everything from the Gemini recorders
and internal SxS media, backed up all
data, and sent it to the EC3 office set
up near the productions Chicago
headquarters. Maintaining close
contact with Kchler, dailies colorist
Marc Lulkin would apply CDL values
generated by Kalushner and fine-tune
scenes to Kchlers specifications, and
then turn them around using
Colorfront On Set Dailies each day.
Dailies were distributed to the filmmakers in different media. Kchler
reviewed them each night on a calibrated 50" plasma monitor via EFilms
proprietary EVue System.
Burger and Kchler decided to
use an almost continuously moving
camera to attain what Burger calls an
intimate and raw look, because the
director wanted to tell most of the
story directly from Tris point of view.
Kchler says Divergent became a very
kinetic film as a result, with lots of
Steadicam and handheld using longer
lenses. Our operators were fantastic;
they would harness themselves into a
doorframe and hang out of the El
[elevated train] to film a stunt where a
character is hanging off the train
Top: Tris surveys

her Dauntless
faction
instructor, Four
(Theo James).
Middle and
bottom: Tris
builds her
strength and
keeps her cool in
the Dauntless
training
warehouse.
64
April 2014
lots of things like that. The philosophy

in executing these shots was to embrace
the physicality rather than get bogged
down with tons of complicated equipment.
Equally crucial for maintaining
the aesthetic Burger wanted were some
unconventional lens, lighting and
rigging choices. First AC Trevor
Loomis introduced Kchler to
Panavisions PVintage Prime Lenses
during prep to help the cinematographer achieve diffusion effects, something hed found difficult to achieve
with digital camera systems. I have
always liked to use [Tiffen] Black ProMist [filters] to give highlights a kind of
diffused glow, but with digital cameras
that ends up looking like 1970s softcore
porn, Kchler says. The PVintage
lenses were great for creating the effect I
wanted with the Alexa. They are spherical, but they gave me that haze around
light sources that I had not been able to
create quite as well by filtering digital
cameras. That was quite useful, and we
used them extensively.
Loomis explains that the
PVintage primes are essentially reconstituted pieces of older Panavision glass
that the company has reengineered and
rehoused for todays digital systems. Its
really the best of Panavisions old glass,
made great for digital cameras, says
Loomis. With the DI, you can achieve
some diffusion in post, of course, but
that is not such a great process. Older
lenses are inherently softer and less
contrasty, so they automatically give you
a look that is closer to a film look. Its
not technically diffused, but its that
kind of effect.
Kchler shot a majority of
Divergent with the PVintage primes,
the notable exceptions being sequences
in which characters are given drug treatments and experience hallucinations, or
simulations of scenarios that they
endure as part of the rigorous selection
process that leads to their choice of
faction. These sequences were all shot
with Panavision E Series anamorphic
lenses and Plus 1 diopters. That gave
those scenes a slight disorientation and
Top: Four
watches a fight
within the
sparring ring.
Bottom: Director
Neil Burger
speaks with
James and Jai
Courtney (as
Eric). Over their
shoulders are
the LED-based
rigs used to
light the rings.
subtle differences without making them

the kind of conventional weird dreams
you see a lot in movies, Kchler says.
One of the most challenging of
these scenes was the mirror sequence,
in which Tris, after receiving an injection, wakes up in a room surrounded by
www.theasc.com
mirrors, disoriented by what Kchler

calls an infinity mirror scenario. This
required Woodley to be photographed
from 167 different camera angles using
six different cameras, and lit softly so
that no camera shadows were cast on
her on the 360-degree greenscreen
April 2014
65
Outcast Power
Top: In a
moment of
honor, Dauntless
faction members
lift Tris up and
pass her over
the crowd.
Bottom: This
photo shows
the Dauntless
Dining Hall,
which was shot
in an
abandoned,
two-story
building that
featured a glass
skylight.
set. Gaffer Len Levine lit the set with

Kino Flo Image 85s and dimmable
LumaPanels in multiple truss and
motor sections that permitted the crew
to move lights into different positions to
light Woodley and the screen while
staying out of shot.
But the question of how to insert
66
April 2014
and move the camera around the set

was complicated, particularly for shots
that required two cameras to look
directly at each other to create the illusion that Tris is seeing her own reflection. The challenge was that any
cameras or cranes would have put shadows on her, and we needed a rig that
could follow her from both sides and

also turn with her while interfering as
little as possible with the greenscreen,
Kchler explains. Having two cameras
opposite each other without interfering
with Shailenes outline was a major
concern. Jim Shelton, our key grip, and
his team helped us solve it by coming in
from the ceiling with a system that was
essentially like a giant ball bearing,
rigged sort of like a long tube, and we
attached the Alexa on the bottom of the
tube, so the cameras footprint was actually very small. It was an incredibly
complex affair.
It was a suspended, manually
rotating truss-and-bearing rig that
could be moved as Shailene went
through her paces, Shelton says. The
bearing came from a company that
makes them for big industrial applications. The rest of the mirror work
involved more than 100 camera positions that were set up on a grid designed
by our great visual-effects team, and for
those shots, we simply hid cameras
behind green duck blinds.
Kchler relied heavily on LED
Outcast Power
lighting throughout the shoot, which
involved a number of practical locations
that precluded standard rigging techniques to attach such lights to ceilings
and walls. An example of this is the
films sparring rings, training facilities
where young faction members hone
their skills. These scenes were shot in an
old steel mill, and Kchler wanted
defined lighting to contrast between
old and new. He wanted the fight areas
to be lit in a futuristic way without
negating the locations old, industrial
feel.
Complicating matters was the
fact that the steel mill could not accept
the weight of light rigs attached to the
ceiling. So, the grips instead ran highstrength aircraft cable attached to existing vertical and horizontal structural
supports to hold LED-based rigs built
by the electricians, creating the illusion
of lights hanging in free space. Levine
credits Kchler with the idea, and
describes the rigs as line lights created
with two-faceted LiteGear LiteRibbon
on a 14-foot-by-1-inch square tube, put
inside large Plexiglas tubes.
That was a great example of
defining a space with light, Levine
continues. In the background, we used
Mac Tech 960 fixtures stacked on top of
each other. Our rigging grip, Joe
Graham, built four towers of freestanding and rolling trusses with a five-unit,
30-foot-high stack of lights that we
could move. Then, over the sparring
rings, they suspended fixtures that were
14 feet square. That created an ambient
glow, but we needed something to
punch through. Alwin liked using
daylight-balanced fixtures, so we needed
dimmable daylight units that had lots of
punch and would be attractive to photograph. After doing some research, I
eventually picked Studio Force LEDs
from Chroma Q, which were the
brightest I could find. We got 20 of
them that was the minimum that
would work for the sparring set and
we recycled them throughout the show.
The inner squares had four Studio
Forces each, and inside that mini square
we added two True Color HS lights to
Top: Tris and

Christina (Zo
Kravitz), a fellow
Dauntless transfer,
leap from one of
the citys elevated
trains. Middle: Tris,
Christina and Will
(Ben Lloyd Hughes)
sit aboard a train.
Bottom: Tris and
Four embrace.
68
April 2014
Outcast Power
wash the inner ring. That gave us a
fantastic, beautiful daylight unit that was
also dimmable and had a great spread
a nice, even wash.
The lighting solution for the
sparring rings exemplified Kchlers
approach to the entire show: rely on
practicals built into sets whenever possible, including extensive use of LEDs.
This achieved Burgers desired aesthetic,
but also necessitated a strategic collaboration among the camera, grip, electric,
art, set-decoration and even transportation departments, according to the filmmakers. Creatively, it made sense for
this story, Kchler says. In the future
depicted in the film, large areas of the
city are abandoned, and the inhabitants
dont have as much electricity as we do
now. The practicals they use are the
direction were actually heading in: more
LED and plasma lights that consume
less power but can be as bright or
brighter.
Coming up with those kinds of
lighting solutions was exciting, the
cinematographer continues. We came
across a lot of interesting light sources,
and our grips built a lot of unique rigs.
Len Levine, Jim Shelton and their crews
did really great work. We also worked
extremely closely with [set decorator]
Anne Kuljian, who helped me design
round light fittings for LED strip lights
that we could mount on metal plates in
the Dauntless Dining Hall [set]. They
were Plexiglas tubes about 4 inches
wide, with Plexiglas square rods about
1 inches in diameter. It can be costly to
figure out how to mount, rig and recycle
things like that to accommodate the
schedule. Its high logistics to figure out
how to rig and de-rig practicals, how to
move them from one location to
another, and so on. Plus, this is a
science-fiction film, so we had to
develop examples and try them out.
Should they flicker? Can we dim them?
What is their true color spectrum? I
would advise any cinematographer
shooting a project like this to spend as
much prep time with the gaffer as
possible!
In fact, for me, probably the
Top: Tris pleads

with fellow
faction
members, led by
Al (Christian
Madsen, right),
as they threaten
to harm her.
Bottom: Tris and
Four, both
Divergents,
venture past the
Navy Pier Ferris
wheel.
70
April 2014
Outcast Power
Top: Four and Tris

prepare for a
violent
confrontation.
Bottom: Jeanine
Matthews (Kate
Winslet), the
leader of the
Erudite faction,
has plans to
manipulate
society.
most difficult aspect of Divergent was

selling my plan to [producers] Douglas
Wick and Lucy Fisher, and then finding the time to execute the plan, he
adds. Luckily, they liked the vision.
There was concern, of course, about
how much some of the practicals would
cost, but I emphasized how much light
72
April 2014
they could provide and how, in many

cases, they could do the work of two
lights. And you can see it in the movie:
practicals provide about 90 percent of
the lighting in many important scenes.
Sometimes, those practical solutions were extremely subtle. For example, for a scene that takes place in a
farmhouse inhabited by agrarian faction

members, the filmmakers wanted to
evoke the kind of rural lifestyle depicted
in old Dutch paintings, where farmers
sit at their kitchen tables, illuminated by
a single candle. Searching for the futuristic equivalent of a candle, Kchler
broke apart a small plasma light fitting
and became fascinated with the miniature bulb inside. He recalls, I had
become familiar with Hive Lightings
plasma lights, which are great for highspeed photography, and I asked them to
take one apart for me. The bulb in the
housing is tiny, about the size of a pin
needle, but it gives off this incredibly
bright light. If you hold dark, gray
contrast glass in front if it, you can
almost see the gas moving around like a
mini universe inside it. Without the
housing, it fluctuates much like candlelight, and I thought it would make a
great near-future version of a candle. So,
in that scene, we have an entire family
sitting around the dining table, and the
whole thing is lit with only a single, tiny
bulb built into the set!
Another example of the shoots
complexity involved scenes in the
Dauntless Dining Hall. These were shot

in an abandoned, two-story building
that featured a stunning glass skylight,
but when the filmmakers scouted the
location, the skylight was leaking and the
floor was filled with frozen water. The
crew had to thaw and pump the water
out before they could film in it, and
during filming, they had to take care to
push water off the UltraBounce rags
installed above the skylight in order to
keep water from entering the set.
The filmmakers also had to figure
out how to shoot beneath the skylight at
any time of the day or night in order to
stay on schedule. One of the interesting
steps they took was to repurpose the 14'
LED squares from the sparring rings to
Practicals
provide about
90 percent of the
lighting in many
important scenes.
help spruce up the space, whose interior

was mostly open. Levine recalls, We
recycled the 14-foot squares from the
sparring rings and made them long,
maybe 100 yards, to go around the
upstairs foot rail. Then, for the downstairs, we gutted 14 [SureLight] Atlas
Lights, installed in them two strips of
daylight ribbon and one strip of RGB,
and hung them like standard shop lights
over tables. We could control them as
practicals in the dining room, and also in
some of the dorm rooms and hallways.
On the ground-floor perimeter, facing
the camera, we used an extremely
punchy, high-watt LED striplight from
SureLight called the Arcus Light. So,
essentially, we used LEDs to spruce up a
dank room that was absolutely hideous
when we first showed up for the scout.
Outcast Power
A crane arm
assists in
filming
Woodley.
74
As a final touch, Kchler played

with color in interesting ways, Levine
adds. The grip department built a big
light-box tent above the skylight and
used M40s and 18Ks to bounce into
large UltraBounce rags for a soft downlight feel, says the gaffer. To keep it
from looking like an ordinary skylight,
Alwin did a really beautiful thing with
color that my crew called the Fruit
Rollup, basically creating a fiery orange
strip of color around the perimeter of
the skylight, leaving the center clean.
The orange material was custom made
by Kuljians department, according to
Kchler.
Another major structure in the
story, Kchler says, is a Maglev version
of Chicagos El that is used for some
important stunt sequences. In keeping
with Burgers desire to create and
capture as many real elements as possible, production designer Andy
Nicholson and his crew built about 100'
of track and a train mockup for staging
the train stunts, and Kchlers crew

rigged a dimmable lighting system to
help create the illusion of motion. (The
tricks used on set were augmented digitally in post under visual-effects supervisor Jim Berney.)
The idea was to film actors on the
train mockup as it was manipulated on a
gimbaled platform surrounded by a
360-degree greenscreen that permitted
filming from unlimited angles. Levine
and Shelton devised a system of
movable truss rigs that held an array of
different lighting units, including
Lumapanels for daylight ambience,
Kino Flo Image 80s for the greenscreen,
and two long strips of Chroma-Q Color
Force 72 LEDs that ran the length of
the train on either side. To control the
array of Color Forces and create the illusion of scenery flashing by, the team
employed pixel mapping of actual B-roll
footage shot throughout Chicago by the
visual-effects team. Using a Catalyst
media server and a Hog 4 lighting
console, along with what Levine calls

the wizardry of console programmer
Josh Thatcher, they were able to
impact the footage by adjusting speed
and color to achieve realistic lighting
effects that they could fine-tune along
the way to tailor movement of the light
for each scene. For hard shadow effects,
they used PRG Bad Boy Moving
Lights, along with an Arrimax
surrounded by small trees on a spinning
rig. Finally, they added simple tricks,
such as waving solids in front of various
fixtures at key moments.
At press time, Burger and
Kchler were preparing for the final
grade at EFilm, where they were set to
work with colorist Tom Reiser.
According to Kchler, the main goals
for the DI were to emphasize the colorful aesthetic that had been established
on set, and to strategically highlight the
colorful LED panel lighting used
throughout the piece.
TECHNICAL SPECS
2.40:1
Digital Capture
Arri Alexa Plus, M
Panavision PVintage, E Series
75
5
Park City Standouts
A diversified slate defines the
2014 Sundance Film Festival.
By Rachael K. Bosley, Patricia Thomson
and Jon D. Witmer
|
he independent films featured in our coverage of this

years Sundance Film Festival consist of two prizewinning documentaries, one shot in Bhutan, the other in
Americas heartland; an unusual thriller financed almost
entirely by its director/cinematographer; a drama set in India
that is already a big hit in that country; and a black-and-white
vampire film set in Iran, complete with Farsi dialogue. In
other words, it was business as usual in Park City, Utah.
76
April 2014
Happiness
Director/Cinematographer: Thomas Balms
Additional Cinematography: Nina Bernfeld
In presenting the World Cinema Documentary
Competition Cinematography Award to Happiness, which
documents a unique chapter in a young boys life in Laya,
Bhutan, juror Caspar Sonnen cited director/cinematographer
Thomas Balms for delivering a truly exquisite and striking
cinematic experience. Sonnen, who was joined on the jury by
filmmakers Andrea Nix Fine and Sally Riley, continued,
Through light and composition, the cinematographers eye
tenderly explores the visual extremes of the films young
protagonist and the harsh yet gorgeous landscape that
surrounds him.
Indeed, Happiness marks a striking stylistic departure
from most documentaries, privileging a static camera and
careful compositions and offering no cutaways to talking
heads. Balms stays close to his young subject, Peyangki, as
the boy and his fellow Laya anticipate the arrival of electricity
Happiness frame grabs and photos courtesy of TBC Productions.
Opposite
(clockwise from
top left): Images
from Happiness,
Blue Ruin, The
Lunchbox, Rich
Hill and A Girl
Walks Home
Alone at Night.
This page, top:
Peyangki and his
uncle begin their
journey to
Thimphu in a
frame from
Happiness.
Bottom: Director/
cinematographer
Thomas Balms
uses a Steadicam
Flyer to get closer
shots of their
journey.
and television in their isolated community. (Bhutan opened its doors to television in 1999, but Laya, perched high in
the mountains and requiring a two-day
walk from the nearest road, posed
significant logistical challenges to utilities companies.)
A French filmmaker who has
been making documentaries for 15
years, Balms is perhaps best known for
Babies (2010), a dialogue-free chronicle
of the first year in the lives of four children, one in San Francisco, one in
Tokyo, one in Mongolia and one in
Namibia. I learned a lot from Babies,
which took five years to make, and I was
fascinated by the universal aspect of a
nonverbal treatment, says Balms,
speaking to AC shortly after Sundance
wrapped. I wanted to do a film that
could potentially work without anyone
reading the [subtitles] or understanding
the language. Peyangki is super expressive in what he feels and what he thinks,
and I hope I have succeeded.
As for the subject, I think that
very few things have as much of an
impact on the planet as TV but are so
little studied, he continues. Nothing
changes us as much as TV or now,
with the Internet, screens in general.
When I researched doing a film on this
subject, at one stage I thought of
making it in the U.S., where TV and
other screens are omnipresent, but then
I decided that going somewhere where

there was no TV and being there when
it arrived would be much more interesting.
Balms and his small team of
collaborators subsequently spent three
years filming in Laya, dividing their
work among seven two-week shoots
from 2011-2013. First AC Nina
Bernfeld, who had also worked on
Babies, was instrumental in assembling
the camera package and necessary
accessories. As on all my previous
films, I framed the movie myself, but on
Happiness, I let Nina deal with all the
www.theasc.com
technical aspects, and I decided to share

the cinematography credit with her
because she did the work of five assistants in very difficult conditions, says
Balms. She even shot some images
herself.
When Balms began prepping in
2011, some fellow filmmakers recommended the Red Epic, which had just
been released, and the Arri Alexa, but
he quickly determined that neither was
suitable for Happiness. The Alexa was
reliable but much too heavy to carry at
an altitude of 4,000 meters [13,125'],
says Balms. The Red was fairly new
April 2014
77
After his mother

sends him to the
local monastery,
Peyangki (right)
gets a music
lesson from a
fellow pupil.
at that time, and many of my filmmaker

friends had had big problems with it,
and I knew we would be very far from
any technical assistance. I was also
discouraged by all of its small pieces. I
wanted something simple to use; Im
not the typical cinematographer in that
I go for long periods without touching a
camera, because I work on preproduction or the edit for months when Im not
filming.
In addition to needing a very
lightweight package, we needed a
camera that could deal with very highcontrast situations and also allow us to
shoot in very low light because homes in
the village did not have electricity, he
continues. I also wanted an image
texture that tended more toward film
than toward the usual documentary
video.
A Sony PMW-F3, along with a
set of Zeiss Superspeed T1.3 prime
lenses (18mm, 25mm, 35mm and
85mm) that he sourced in the United
States, gave him what he wanted. I
hadnt used an F3 before, and it was
great perfect for documentaries in
terms of size and reliability, he says. I
also liked the image texture, and an
important part of that was the
Superspeeds. Its very unusual to shoot a
78
April 2014
documentary almost entirely on prime

lenses. I hadnt done that before, and I
loved it. Its very interesting, the kind of
relationship it forces you to develop with
your subjects.
Changing lenses when he wanted
to move in for a close-up didnt impact
the flow of what he was filming, he adds.
I wouldnt do it in the first few minutes
of a conversation, of course, but when
there was a lull or break, I had no problem asking them to wait a minute while
I changed lenses.
He used just two other lenses,
each for a single day-exterior sequence:
an Angenieux Optimo 15-40mm T2.6,
which he used to film Peyangki playing
with his mothers loom while she
weaves, and a Leitz 280mm T2.8, which
he used for some distant shots of
Peyangki and his uncle making the hilly
trek to the road that will take them to
Thimphu so they can trade a yak for a
TV set. For closer shots of their walk,
Balms used the 18mm Zeiss and put
the F3 on a Steadicam Flyer. I am not
a big Steadicam user I tend to work
in a very still photographic way, he says.
I like the idea of having different tools,
and we had quite a few on this project,
but I feel they should be used when
theyre genuinely useful. The Steadicam
was ideal for shooting Uncle, the yak

and Peyangki going up that hill.
Day exterior was the most challenging environment to shoot, especially when the light was bouncing off
snow, and we used a lot of NDs to
maintain a stop of T1.4 to T2 outside,
he adds. We usually shot at -3dB/640
ISO for all exterior scenes.
Footage was recorded in S-Log
ProRes HQ 4:2:2 to an external
recorder, an AJA Ki Pro Mini on the
first shoot and then an Atomos
Samurai, which was more to Balms
liking, on subsequent shoots.
For the first shoot, the F3 was
modified by Panavision to include an
HD-900F monitor, but that was not
convenient for me because Im [6']
tall, and I was always shooting very low
to be at Peyangkis level the camera
was very rarely on my shoulder, says
Balms. A Sony F3 Top Mount
Accessory Cheese Plate from Berkey
System enabled us to attach an
adjustable handgrip to work at the right
height. The monitor on the Atomos, set
at the top of the handle, came in handy
in the low-mode handheld situations,
and on the bottom of the camera we
had a Denz baseplate to attach 15mm
rods for the mattebox and follow focus.
Balms films his

young subject on
the trails of Laya.
In some situations, we had a bit of a

heavier setup, with remote focus and iris
and a remote Transvideo [9"] monitor.
Even with the larger rig, Balms
never sensed that the filmmaking apparatus affected his subjects behavior.
Almost all of my films have been shot
in places where there is very little or no
technology, and, contrary to what you
would expect, Ive found these places are
the easiest to shoot, he observes. The
concern about how people might react
to cameras mainly applies to people who
are worried about what you will show
and what you will say. In Bhutan, they
might have trouble being natural [with
us] if we were from the same circle of
people, because they might have a
conversation in front of us that includes
some family problems. But we were
from another country, and we would
come and go.
Also, I think they understood
that I was not looking for anything
embarrassing, and that I was concentrating on what makes them similar to
people everywhere. I wasnt looking for
the exotic aspect of their culture. The
conversations between Peyangki and his
mother or between him and his friend
could happen almost anywhere in the
world. Its a universal story.

Using the Superspeeds wide
open, Balms was able to shoot most
interiors in available light, even night
scenes illuminated with butter candles
or cooking fires. We had a few LED
Litepanels, but I dont think we ever
used them, he recalls. We sometimes
supplemented [firelight] with some
candles of our own. We found we could
get an exposure inside in pure night
with just two candles, working at
+3dB/1,250 ISO and with the shutter
off. We shot other interiors at 0dB/800
ISO.
One memorable night interior
shows Peyangki and a fellow pupil
discussing their ideal mates as they bed
down at the monastery for the night.
As they talk, the camera holds a twoshot from directly above them. That
was lit with just the butter candles [on
the altar] in the background and a few
on the ground, recalls Balms. It was
great to be able to capture such a
natural moment. They were really
getting sleepy, and we werent obliged
to add any light to their faces.
Upon returning to France after
each shoot, Balms worked on the edit.
I didnt ever edit on location, but what
www.theasc.com
we did do locally, which was essential,

was work with two translators to translate word-by-word everything we had
shot, and then enter the subtitles in
Final Cut Pro, so all our dailies were
subtitled, he says. It would have been
impossible to read the energy of the film
without that.
The final color correction was
done on an Autodesk Lustre at Helsinki
facility Post Control, where Balms
worked with colorist Marko Terv. The
final output for Sundance was a 2K
DCP.
Happiness ends with a memorable
series of shots showing the faces of
Peyangki and his fellow Laya as they sit
in their homes watching TV, ostensibly
for the first time. That was a big question early on: how much would we see
the effects of TV in the village? says
Balms. I sensed among the financiers a
lot of expectations about that, but I
always felt the story should end when
they turn on the TV. Im interested in
the first moments someone lives something he has never lived; this is visual
and meaningful. I was fascinated by
those faces.
Rachael K. Bosley
April 2014
79
Blue Ruin
Director/Cinematographer:
Jeremy Saulnier
Building from a beach bums
existence on the Delaware coast to a
climactic volley of gunfire deep in the
woods of Virginia, Blue Ruin charts a
course thats darkly hilarious and bonechillingly suspenseful, with the occasional detour into shocking violence.
The action begins when the reclusive
Dwight (Macon Blair) sets out on a
mission of revenge as his parents
murderer is released from prison.
Directed, written and shot by
Brooklyn-based filmmaker Jeremy
Saulnier (Murder Party), Blue Ruin was
awarded the Fipresci International
Film Critics prize in the Directors
Fortnight section at the 2013 Cannes
Film Festival and has since been shown
at Toronto, Rotterdam and numerous
other festivals. It screened at Sundance
in the Spotlight category.
Asked about Blue Ruins varied
tonal landscape, Saulnier says, The
vibe I wanted was very much like No
Country for Old Men, but I wanted to
explore new territory by miscasting the
lead role. Instead of a stoic badass,
80
April 2014
[Dwight] is a very confused, frightened

person who is totally inept at these
masculine pursuits. I also referenced
Michael Manns Thief [for its] gritty
atmosphere and procedural detail; its so
grounded in realism, you buy it.
Saulnier notes that he didnt have
the luxury of a defined preproduction
period, but there was absolutely a
defined daddy-has-to-be-finishedmaking-his-movie period, and that was
before the birth of my third daughter. I
sought funding for a proper budget
with more sustainable wages, and I
failed, so this was primarily a selffunded film. We did some Kickstarter
crowd funding, but that was less than
10 percent of the budget.
Given his constraints, Saulnier
decided early on that he needed to own
the camera. Then, if I wanted to capture
a sunrise or a sunset, I could get in my
minivan and shoot it myself. I tested a
few cameras and was immediately
drawn to the Canon [Cinema EOS]
C300. We recorded 1080p HD to
onboard CF cards at 50Mbps [4:2:2]. I
didnt want to be tethered to an external
recorder. With a backpack kit, I could
go out for a weekend and just shoot.
I operate the camera as well,
which can take a toll on my ability to

function as a director, but thats why I
designed the script to compartmentalize production elements, he continues.
I wanted a very precise, active
approach to camera placement and
framing, where were telling the narrative through the shots and making
important revelations with the camera,
but when it gets to the intense dialogue
scenes, the camera takes a backseat and
we let the actors shine.
Framing for a final aspect ratio of
2.40:1, Saulnier eschewed filtration and
used a set of Canon L Series EF-mount
primes, a 24mm f1.4, 35mm f1.4,
50mm f1.2 and 85mm f1.2, as well as
an L Series 16-35mm f2.8 zoom. I
tested a few more cinema-friendly
lenses, but I decided that focus pulling
was not as important as the speed of the
lens. The C300s native EI is 850, and
we only rarely stopped down more than
T2. The ability to dig into waning available light helped us move incredibly
fast.
To balance the formal camera
techniques, I wanted a naturalistic
approach for the lighting, he adds. To
that end, Saulnier worked with gaffer
Rommel Genciana and key grip Carlos
Blue Ruin photos and frame grabs courtesy of Radius-TWC. Photos by Jolie Ruben.
Dwight Evans (Macon Blair) has been living out of his Pontiac Bonneville when he sets out on a quest for revenge in Blue Ruin.
Valdes-Lora to augment and shape the

available light. We used naturalistic keys
and backlights, and edged subjects with
small units. We used Litepanels 1x1
LEDs a lot, and some small Kino Flos.
Our biggest lamp was a 2.5K HMI, and
that only came out for big night exteriors.
Thanks in large part to a production plan that took advantage of locations and other resources he could access
for free, Saulnier was able to shoot Blue
Ruin in 30 days. The first four were
spent in Rehoboth Beach and Dewey
Beach, Del., where we had a skeleton
crew of 10 people and shot everything
we could, including the opening
sequences around the beach town and
the initial part of Dwights road trip.
The production then spent two
days at Fort Tilden in New York, where
five more people joined the crew to
shoot scenes in and around Dwights
seemingly fossilized baby-blue Pontiac
Bonneville, which rests in the sand near
the beach, as well as a scene at a police
station, where Dwight learns that his
parents murderer, Wade Cleland
(Sandy Barnett), will be released from
prison. The police officer bearing the
news finds Dwight sleeping in the
Bonnevilles backseat. The camera
pushes through the interior of the
parked car as the patrol car pulls up
alongside. Saulnier notes, I built into
Top: A Canon C300 was rigged atop the grip truck to get this high-angle shot following Dwights car.
Bottom: Dwights journey reunites him with his estranged sister, Sam (Amy Hargreaves).
the package a fantastic, 5-foot Medium

Glide camera slider from MYT Works.
With apple boxes and sandbags, we
were able to set up a 5-foot track inside
the car. Throughout the shoot, he adds,
he used the slider to quickly do lots of
camera moves on the fly.
After reinstalling the Bonnevilles
battery and inflating its tires, Dwight
drives toward the prison where Wade
will be released. Coverage inside the
Bonneville is punctuated by a highwww.theasc.com
angle traveling shot from behind as the

car heads into an increasingly dense fog.
We lucked out with the weather and
the atmosphere, says Saulnier. Our
production manager, Alex Orr, had the
idea to slap a suction rig on top of the
grip truck. It was made safe by Rommel
and Carlos, who did some very tricky
stuff without many resources. We did a
single 20-minute shot following the car.
What made it in the movie was the only
usable footage from the shaky ride, and
April 2014
81
From left: Key grip Carlos Valdes-Lora, director/cinematographer Jeremy Saulnier and
1st AC Ryan Dickie set up a shot with the C300 on a MYT Works Medium Glide slider.
we added a bit of stabilization in Final

Cut Pro.
After watching from a distance as
Wades family greets him outside the
prison, Dwight follows the Clelands to
a roadside bar, then sneaks in the back
and awaits his target in the restroom.
The bathroom interior was teeny, says
Saulnier. [First AC] Ryan Dickie and I
were doing yoga positions to get into
that stall with Macon. Shooting handheld and close up worked great for the
scene, but we did it because there was
no other choice! For lighting,
Rommel swapped out some practical
bulbs and skirted them with a bit of
black wrap, and then we just let it go.
Sometimes youre backed into a
corner and you have to live with it, but
its fun to utilize these constraints and
let them shape the story, Saulnier
continues. It became a very natural
process for us to not fight too hard, to
focus on the narrative and the characters and not worry about my cinematography reel.
Escaping from the bar with
Clelands kin in pursuit, Dwight sets off
to reconnect with his estranged sister,
Sam (Amy Hargreaves). His homecoming paralleled Saulniers own, as the
82
April 2014
director used his childhood home in

Alexandria, Va., as Sams house. Two
members of the Cleland clan arrive
there at night, with Dwight lying in
wait inside. Saulnier notes that the
ensuing confrontation called for the
most involved coverage in the entire
movie. Its a 10-minute sequence with
almost no dialogue.
We based the [interior] exposure
off the output from a small LED flashlight that we needed to work practically
and illuminate parts of the set, and then
we had our 1x1 LEDs and some small
units working inside. The widescreen
frame helped us because we could park
little things just above [the frame line].
We also fired up our 2.5K and a few
smaller HMIs on the front lawn, gelled
them for a sodium-vapor look, softened
them up and let that diffused light fall
naturally in the house.
As the stakes continue to escalate,
Dwight makes his way to the Clelands
secluded home, a practical location in
Charlottesville, Va. He finds the house
empty, and as he moves from one room
to the next, the camera follows in a long,
handheld take. I was operating and
pulling focus because the corridors were
just too narrow and we were seeing the
world, recalls Saulnier. There were a

couple of blind corners where we hid a
couple of Kinos and LEDs just out of
frame to give Dwight an edge. We had
to do five or six takes, and it was a minor
miracle that I didnt totally screw it up.
When the Clelands return, night
has fallen and the interior is lit with
warm tungsten practicals, which the
crew supplemented with a China ball
on a dimmer. With a nod to the films
title, Saulnier notes, One of the few
things I did by design was a shift in the
color palette. The opening has a cool
palette, with the beach and the sky and
the blue car. But as the film progresses,
Dwight regresses, and we introduce
more of these warmer tones. By the
finale, we were using mostly warm
practicals.
For the Virginia portion of the
production, the crew fluctuated
between 26 and 30 people. For the
bulk of the movie, we only had [one
person representing each department],
but they were all filmmakers first, notes
Saulnier. Some of my best script notes
came from my key grip! When you cant
afford to pay proper wages and the crew
comes aboard just for the passion of it,
you have to give them an experience
that seems worthwhile. We really had a
great time and gelled as a collective
filmmaking force.
After Blue Ruins HD edit was
completed in Final Cut, the files were
delivered to colorist Alex Bickel at
Color Collective for the final grade.
Bickel worked with a DaVinci Resolve
and output a 2K DCP.
The general look of Blue Ruin
was set in the camera, but when I put it
in Alexs hands, it became something
much more, enthuses Saulnier, who
had previously collaborated with Bickel
on features he had shot for other directors. We went through the film scene
by scene, and we added a little film
grain to counteract the little bit of digital noise. It was great to fully realize the
visual intentions I had going in.
Blue Ruin will be released on
April 25 by Radius-TWC.
Jon D. Witmer
Saajan (Irrfan Khan) conducts business at his desk in a scene from The Lunchbox.
The Lunchbox frame grabs and photo courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.
The Lunchbox
Director: Ritesh Batra
Cinematographer:
Michael Simmonds
For Western filmmakers, shooting in India can be full of surprises.
There is the heat, which can be overwhelming by 7 a.m. There is the
mandatory first shot of the day: a goodluck prayer to the elephant god Ganesh,
who gets a fresh coconut as an offering.
And then there is the traffic in Mumbai,
where simply crossing a street in a car
can take 30 minutes. Filmmaking is
based on ETAs, and in Mumbai, there
are none, says cinematographer
Michael Simmonds, who made his first
trip to India to shoot The Lunchbox.
Written and directed by Ritesh
Batra, The Lunchbox illuminates
Mumbais unique system for delivering
home-cooked lunches to office-bound
husbands. For the past 120 years, highly
organized collectives of illiterate Hindis
have used a graphic coding system to
deliver these meals, and according to a
Harvard University study, just one in a
million goes astray. Thats what happens
in the film: Ila (Nimrat Kaur), a
neglected housewife, tries to rekindle
her husbands interest through her
cooking, but the lunch she prepares for
him is mistakenly delivered to Saajan

(Irrfan Khan), a taciturn widower on the
verge of retirement. When Ila includes a
note the next day, the two begin to
exchange letters, which grow into
confessions about lifes unfulfilled
promises.
Its a fairytale that could have
happened, says Batra, a native of
Mumbai. But intertwined with that
fable is documentary footage of the
lunchbox system, which grounds the
story in reality. You couldnt re-create
that delivery system its just too many
people and too much atmosphere, says
Simmonds.
Perhaps its not surprising that
The Lunchbox originated as a documentary about the lunchbox deliverymen, or
Dabbawallahs. When I was growing
up, I always saw these Dabbawallahs as
a normal thing it seemed mundane,
says Batra. But after spending a decade
in the United States, he felt differently
upon his return. He embedded himself
with the Dabbawallahs, hoping to find
one to follow in a documentary. Instead,
he found another idea. He recalls, They
started telling me stories about every
house where theyd pick up a lunchbox:
This house takes too long, This wife
cooks something new every day, The
mother-in-law rules this house. I
83
Top: Ila (Nimrat Kaur) reads the latest correspondence from Saajan.
Bottom: Cinematographer Michael Simmonds at work on location.
decided this would make the great basis

for a story.
The interest in Mumbais vibrant
textures remained, however, and this led
Batra to decide not only to include real
footage of the Dabbawallahs, but also to
shoot the rest of the movie on location.
The latter choice might elicit a shrug in
84
April 2014
the West, but in India, its virtually

unheard of. Shooting on location is a
relatively new concept, something that
started happening in the last 10 to 15
years, says Batra. Consequently, obtaining film permits can be an adventure, as
can securing locations.
Also, Indians arent used to seeing
movie crews and actors on the street.

You can attract a mob of 5,000 people
in 30 minutes, says Simmonds. A
sizable security force had to therefore be
added to the crew of 50 a skeleton
crew by Indian standards. Having a
population of a billion has some side
effects, Batra explains. Its cheaper to
have a guy along with the equipment
than it is to get insurance. Simmonds
recalls, We had two people just watching the camera, on top of the first and
second ACs and the loader.
Interior locations became
crowded very quickly. When filming in
Ilas apartment, a tiny Mumbai flat, the
entire space had to be taken apart every
time we changed an angle, Simmonds
recalls. For scenes with bigger scope,
like in Saajans workplace canteen,
production grew to 150 people, including 60 extras. The team did manage to
conduct its documentary outings with
just the director, cinematographer and
first AC.
Simmonds shot scenes featuring
actors with an Arri Alexa and Zeiss
Superspeed primes, recording ProRes
4:2:2 to SxS Pro+ cards and extracting
to 2.40:1. He shot footage of Ilas green
lunchbox, which was implanted in the
dabbah system for a week, handheld

with a Sony PMW-F3. Chasing the
Dabbawallahs was difficult because they
were getting on and off trains, he notes.
We had to shoot one station one day
and then go to the next station the next
day to show them getting off. The
filmmakers broke this work down into
steps, but speed was always essential.
As Batra notes, In the mornings,
the Dabbawallahs are really in a hurry,
so wed have to be there with them
but stay out of their way at the same
time. Meanwhile, B-camera operator
Siddharth Diwan was getting additional shots with a Canon EOS C300.
(Some final pickups were shot with a
Canon EOS 5D Mark II.)
Batra was counting on
Simmonds to see the Dabbawallahs
with a fresh eye, and, in fact, the cinematographer was the only foreigner on
the crew. I wanted a cinematographer
who might see things I couldnt because
he was from the outside, says Batra,
who had taken note of Simmonds
naturalistic photography in Ramin
Bahranis Man Push Cart (AC May 06),
Chop Shop and Goodbye Solo. Michaels
work is so ingrained with the storytelling. Plus, he seemed very well traveled and up for experiencing India. And
he loves food! That was very helpful.
The visual strategies for the
scripted scenes grew out of discussions
about character. Ila is keen to change
her life, so her scenes were handheld.
Saajan is passive and stuck, so the
camera is stationary. Saajans scenes are
boxes within boxes, Simmonds says of
his framing. He goes home, goes to
work and sits in the sardine cans that are
trains and buses. Then, as he falls in
love, the camera starts to come alive.
Some of Saajans most emotional
scenes are also the quietest, as he is
simply sitting alone, reading Ilas letters.
These required careful shot listing. We
were trying to film each letter a different way, says Simmonds. Saajan reads
several letters in the canteen, but the
filmmakers had that location for only
one day. Thus, Simmonds planned
shots for the best sun direction and

then, he says, If we had five scenes in
the room, wed shoot out in one direction and keep changing the actors
wardrobe and background players.
The canteen, a second-floor location, was lit entirely with natural light
through the windows. In locations that
required supplemental light through
windows, including Ilas apartment, the
crew positioned 4Ks on tall stands
instead of Condors or scissor lifts, which
are costly to rent in India. The stands
go incredibly high much higher than
would be allowed in the West! says
Simmonds.
On most domestic interiors, he
used fluorescent fixtures. In reality, a
room in someones home might be lit
with a single fluorescent tube, but I used
more than that on any one angle, he
says.
By contrast, Saajans home
features tungsten practicals. Batra notes
that for Indians, this is meaningful:
Only Catholics use tungsten, whereas
upwardly mobile Hindus, like Ila, use
fluorescents. Simmonds strove to tease
out such cultural nuances. There is a lot
of subtle subtext in Riteshs script, and I
encouraged him to make some of that
more obvious to a Western audience,
he says.
Apart from giving feedback on
some screen shots that were emailed to
him, Simmonds was not involved in the
final grade, which took place at
Laboratoire Arane Gulliver in Paris.
Being present at the color correction on
an independent film means that you
happen to live in the city where its
being timed, and this was an international project, with a lot of elements
happening in different places, he notes.
By the time The Lunchbox was
released in the United States, in late
February, it was already a big hit in India
and abroad. Simmonds became aware of
this when he arrived at an Indian restaurant in Atlanta, Ga., to shoot a scene for
his next feature. I mentioned Id shot
The Lunchbox, and I was an instant
celebrity!
Patricia Thomson
86
April 2014
A young vampire on the streets in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

Director: Ana Lily Amirpour
Cinematographer: Lyle Vincent
Imagine hearing this elevator
pitch: Its an Iranian vampire Western,
shot in black-and-white, with a bomb
soundtrack. That was writer/director
Ana Lily Amirpours one-liner for A
Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, and
cinematographer Lyle Vincent recalls,
When I heard that, of course I wanted
to sign up!
He is glad he did. Collaborating
with Amirpour on her debut feature
allowed him to create a unique world,
one that channels a little David Lynch,
some film noir and the wide, empty
spaces of a Spaghetti Western. When
conjuring the Iranian ghost town Bad
City, home to a host of sordid souls and
one vampire, Vincent found himself
reveling in the distortions of vintage
Xtal Express anamorphic lenses, which
he paired with an Arri Alexa Studio.
Vincent and Amirpour are birds
of a feather, both coming from art backgrounds. Vincent, who won the 2006
ASC John A. Alonzo Heritage Award
for student cinematography, dabbled in
painting and fine-art photography
before heading to New York University,
where he earned an M.F.A. in film. His
feature credits include another 2014
Sundance Film Festival entry, Cooties.
Born in England to Iranian

immigrants, Amirpour was raised in the
United States. She attended art school
in San Francisco and eventually found
her way into UCLAs screenwriting
program. By the time she made A Girl
Walks Home, she had written 10 feature
scripts and created a graphic novel
based on her vampire film.
Amirpours film is a mash-up:
The actors are Iranian, the dialogue is
Farsi, and Bad City is a desolate Texas
oil town with Farsi street signs. (The
movie was shot in Southern California.)
The archetypical characters include a
Persian James Dean; his father, the
Gambler; a tattooed Pimp; a Prostitute,
and, of course, the Vampire. This
bloodsucker is a young pixie in full
chador, but underneath she wears a
striped sailor shirt, and she rides a
skateboard and grooves to British rock.
Of her inspirations, Amirpour writes,
Its like Sergio Leone and David
Lynch had an Iranian rock n roll baby,
and then Nosferatu came and babysat.
Specific inspirations included Once
Upon a Time in the West, Rumble Fish,
Blade Runner and all of Lynchs films.
The idea was to mold these
disparate parts into something timeless.
Black-and-white gave us a lot, notes
the director. So, too, does the gliding
camerawork, which was accomplished
chiefly with a Steadicam. We owe a lot
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night frame grabs courtesy of the Sundance Film Festival.
Photos by Sina Sayyah and Todd Kappelt, courtesy of the filmmakers.

Top:
Cinematographer
Lyle Vincent
(right) and
director Ana Lily
Amirpour assess
a shot. Bottom:
Preparing the
scene are
(clockwise from
foreground left)
1st AC Joey
Alvarado,
Vincent,
Amirpour, actress
Sheila Vand and
best boy electric
Jake Magee.
to our Steadicam operator, Scott

Dropkin, says Vincent. He came in for
a week and gave us everything we
needed.
Equally important to the look and
feel are the hard, noir-style lighting and
the 2.40:1 anamorphic image. Of the
latter, Vincent observes, Lily and I love
all the weird flaws of the lenses the
flares, the streaking, the breathing, the
distortions. The cinematographer originally hoped to use Panavision C Series
88
April 2014
anamorphics, but they were not available when it came time to shoot. (Some
test shots that he captured with them
made it into the film, however.)
So, he dug out some of his old
Zeiss Xtal Express lenses. They were
not in good shape, he says, but they
proved ideal for the part. Spherical
lenses adapted with a Shiga anamorphic
element, they had a fast aperture and a
vintage coating that gave a very expressive look. They were pretty close to the
Panavision Cs, but even funkier, says

Vincent.
His well-worn lenses were rebuilt by Panavision optical engineer
Dan Sasaki and Guy McVicker, the
camera service manager at Panavision
Hollywood. Panavision then supplemented Vincents lenses with some
Cooke and Zeiss Xtal Express anamorphics and added an Angenieux Optimo
25-250mm HR zoom and a 100mm
macro lens. Fortunately, color matching
wasnt an issue because the final image
would be monochrome. The lenses are
all over the place, and the contrast is
really low, so they dont look great in
color, but in black-and-white they really
shine, says Vincent. They gave us
more latitude, and the blacks came up a
little. Lily and I loved them.
Vincents go-to lenses were a
Cooke Xtal Express 25mm T.3 and a
Zeiss Xtal Express 35mm T1.3. The
25mm is a beautiful lens, and we used it
for POV shots and when the father is
sick and tripping out, he says. We
usually stopped that down. The 35mm
was a really funky lens. The edges are
very distorted, and thats particularly
noticeable in shots where the highlights
are really stretched, like right before the
Persian James Dean and the vampire

meet on the street. On the Alexa with a
full 4:3 frame, those distortions become
even more apparent. It was perfect for
the painterly, expressionistic tone we
wanted.
My lighting was basically all hard,
single-source light, he continues. We
only used tungsten lights that were available in the 1940s because we wanted the
noir look of that era; we had one 5K,
some 2Ks and smaller units. On the
haunted streets, he tended to use available light from the streetlights and then
position a 5K for backlight. In general, he
says, his approach was about keeping
deep, rich shadows. We always wanted a
black reference and a white reference to
make true black-and-white photography.
I dont like when black-and-white is all
gray tones. I like to see the full range of
tones.
The images were recorded in
ProRes 4:4:4:4 to SxS cards. We were
shooting available light in a little town at
night, and I pushed it to the max: 3,200
ISO and a 270-degree shutter, Vincent
recalls. In color, youd see more of the
noise and grain, but in black-and-white
it just blended in. There is some stoppeddown, deep-field focus on some exteriors
because we wanted more of that
Spaghetti Western feel. So on day exteriors wed get down to a T8 or T5.6. But
we were always at T2 or T2.8 at night.
Vincent used Arris Look Creator
to devise a black-and-white viewing
LUT, which he applied on set to a Sony
OLED monitor. It was a very deep
contrast, he says. In post, we transformed the color images into monochrome using the color channels in the
DaVinci Resolve, and then fine-tuned
from there. The color correction was
done at Los Angeles facility Runway
with colorist Zak Meadows.
While excited about the films
enthusiastic reception at Sundance,
Amirpour was especially thrilled by her
uncles reaction back in Iran. He loved
it, she says. He said, The kids are definitely going to get this on the black
market.
Patricia Thomson
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Rich Hill
Directors: Tracy Droz Tragos
and Andrew Droz Palermo
Cinematographer: Andrew
Droz Palermo
Rich Hill, which won the Grand
Jury Prize in the U.S. Documentary
Competition, is a finely observed
90
April 2014
portrait of three adolescent boys in Rich

Hill, Mo. Co-directed and co-produced
by cousins Tracy Droz Tragos and
Andrew Droz Palermo, and shot by
Droz Palermo, this portrait emerges
from a collection of small, quotidian
moments in the lives of its subjects, who
all live in poverty.
A lot of films out there lead
with the issue and throw in a few

people, but Rich Hill leads with its
people, says editor Jonathan
Oppenheim, who served on the jury
with filmmaker Morgan Neville, singer
Tracy Chapman, producer Kahane
Cooperman and film-festival programmer Charlotte Cook. Its also impressive that they were shooting with that
kind of intensity and endurance in a
situation where theres not a clear plot.
The filmmakers had to immerse themselves in their [subjects] lives, then
choose how to tell the story. And I think
they made great choices.
Both cousins had been nursing
the idea of a film about Rich Hill,
which was their parents childhood
home and is still home to many relatives. But it was on a shared ride to Los
Angeles International Airport that they
decided to join forces. Droz Palermo
had just finished color correcting a
feature (Youre Next) and was considering a movie about Rich Hill as his next
project. Droz Tragos, 16 years his senior,
wanted to get back into filmmaking
after taking a break to raise a family.
Rich Hill frame grabs courtesy of the Sundance Film Festival. Droz Palermo photo courtesy of the filmmakers.
Top: 14-yearold Andrew

plays with his
siblings in a
frame from the
documentary
Rich Hill.
Bottom: 15year-old Harley
is another
subject of the
film.
(Her first documentary was Be Good,

Smile Pretty, about her fathers death in
Vietnam.) She was interested in delving into her fathers hometown, but not
in repeating the personal-documentary
approach.
When the cousins met up a
month later to start discussing Rich
Hill, they discovered they were on the
same page with the theme and vrit
approach. We wanted to demystify
poverty, says Droz Palermo. Rich Hill
is very impoverished, and we knew
there were a lot of prejudices that come
with that. What they didnt know yet
was that they would focus on the kids.
On their first research trip, in
December 2011, they cast a wide net,
interviewing farmers, other citizens and
local political activists. They met the
lonely 13-year-old Appachey. On a
visit a few months later, Droz Palermo
approached a group of teens in the park
and met Andrew, a cheerful 14-yearold whose family was constantly losing
its home. The filmmakers also met 15year-old Harley, whose mother was in
prison. It really connected when we
went home with them, because their
families turned out to be so important
to the film, says Droz Palermo.
The filmmakers returned for a
week every month through 2012.
Typically, they would go together, and
Droz Tragos handled interviews and
lavaliers while Droz Palermo manned
the camera with a shotgun mic.
Sometimes, Droz Palermo shot on his
own.
Knowing there would be no B
camera, he saw the advantage of 4K
capture from the outset. Dynamic
range was important for achieving the
beautiful, lush treatment he wanted
to give the town, but more important
was the ability to punch in on a shot in
the edit without sacrificing resolution.
We do some sneaky punch-ins, where
it appears like a second camera on a
tighter lens but is really the same
camera, he says, citing the interview
with Harleys imprisoned mother as an
example. Sometimes that really saved
us in the edit.
Cinematographer/
co-director
Andrew Droz
Palermo prepares
to shoot.
During prep, the filmmakers

purchased a Red Scarlet-X, newly on
the market. Having used the Red One
and Red Epic on other projects, Droz
Palermo felt comfortable with the
Scarlet and liked its form factor. Plus, I
felt I could build it out in a way that
92
would make it easy to run by myself. I

needed something easily changeable
from the tripod, where I wouldnt need
an AC to help me get all the gear off
and onto a new rig. Because of an order
backlog, the team didnt get the Scarlet
in time for the research shoot, so Droz
Palermo borrowed a friends Red One.

That shoot was physically grueling
because we had giant Angenieux zoom
lenses I was shaking by the end of a
handheld scene, he recalls. Michael
Wilson was my AC and shared operating with me on that first shoot, and he
helped on two other shoots as well.
(None of the research-shoot material
appears in the final.)
Once the Scarlet arrived, Droz
Palermo assembled a lean package. He
chose Canon EF zooms, 16-35mm, 2470mm and 70-200mm, all T2.8. He
eschewed a matte box, instead using a
Singh-Ray Vari-ND filter that could be
screwed onto the lens. That was a real
time saver, he notes. There was a shotgun mic on top, a V-mount battery pack
on the back, sometimes a Clock-It Box,
and a Red Pro monitor on an articulating Israeli arm that kept it out in front
of me so I could see my surroundings
more easily. Droz Palermo usually had
the camera on an Element Technica
Mantis shoulder rig. I could pull the

whole thing off the Mantis with one
easy lock, he says. Everything would
slide off, and I could pop it on the tripod
and be ready to shoot without having to
unscrew a single thing.
Problems Droz Palermo encountered with the Scarlet included its
tendency to overheat on long takes
he worked with three 256GB cards
that each gave him about 45 minutes of
recording time in 4K Redcode Raw
and the sensors relative lack of light
sensitivity, which led to a lot of noise in
the image, particularly in rooms that
were lit with a single household bulb.
Droz Palermo used existing practicals almost exclusively, as is his preference. The only light he carried was a
Litepanels LED MiniPlus, which he
used for eyelight; only one of these
scenes made it into the final. To minimize noise in the numerous night
scenes, the highest we went was [ISO]
1,600, he says. I have to sing the
praises of our post house, Prehistoric

Digital in Santa Monica. We did a
pretty extensive noise-reduction workflow on a couple of key scenes. These
included Harleys nighttime walk,
when he first makes comments about
rape, and a night scene with Andrews
dad on the front porch.
The 400-plus hours of footage
captured over the 20-month shoot
created a data-management challenge.
We were sometimes averaging 1
terabyte a day, and we only had two 12terabyte RAIDs, he says. We couldnt
afford to buy a RAID every time we
needed to! A search for alternatives led
him to LTO tape, along with a CacheA deck with USB 3.0 connectivity. The
filmmakers bought enough 3TB tapes
to archive the rest of their raw data in
L.A., with backups in San Francisco.
These tapes were much cheaper, about
$60 each, he notes. In the end, I think
we had 60 to 70 terabytes of data.
Spending so much time with
their subjects, the filmmakers naturally

developed a bond with them. For me,
the greatest reward was and still is the
relationships we forged with the families, Droz Palermo states. Since wrapping the documentary, he and Droz
Tragos have launched an outreach
campaign with various youth and
poverty organizations nationwide. And
to the documentarys subjects, the
cousins have made it clear that theyre
just a phone call away. These kids need
a lot of things, but its not all material
stuff, says Droz Palermo. Often they
just need friendship and love, and thats
something Tracy and I can provide.
Patricia Thomson
93
New Products & Services
Canon Embraces Hi-Res Future

By Stephen Pizzello
Canon hosted a press tour in Japan last fall for a select group
of journalists from various trade publications and websites, including
American Cinematographer. The eight-day excursion included business briefings and interviews with the companys top executives at
Canon headquarters in Tokyo, a comprehensive tour of Canons
lens-manufacturing factory in Utsonomiya, a visit to the Inter BEE
trade show, and a series of dinners where top brass could discuss the
companys future in relaxed settings.
The company also provided a spotlight demonstration of its
new DP-V3010 4K Reference Display monitor, designed to provide
exceptional detail, color and gradation accuracy for color-grading
and postproduction professionals as motion picture, television and
commercial production continues its transition to higher-resolution
digital video and CGI formats. Hinting at Canons future plans to
produce more hi-res production and post tools, Yuichi Ishizuka, exec-
94
April 2014
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.
utive vice president and general manager of Canon USAs Imaging

Technologies & Communications Group, noted, These displays are
the result of the enthusiastic response we received to the Canon
Cinema EOS System of cameras and lenses, and we look forward to
continuing to demonstrate our commitment to these markets with
outstanding technology, quality and reliability to help creative professionals deliver and tell the stories as they envision them.
On Nov. 11, Canon executives outlined the companys history
and technical achievements in a series of briefings. In his presentation on the Cinema EOS System, Ken-Ichi Shimbori, a group executive of Canons Image Communication Products Operations (ICPO),
identified the 2008 unveiling of Reverie, a demonstration video shot
with the EOS 5D Mark II DSLR (co-directed by Yoni Brook and cinematographer Vincent Laforet), as a key moment in the development
of EOS technology. Shimbori identified high image quality, high ISO
speed, compact design and low production cost as some of the
primary reasons Canon was encouraged to develop higher-end EOS
cameras (specifically, the C300 and C500) for professional users. In
their separate presentation on the companys lens products, Shimboris colleagues Naoya Kaneda and Yasunori Imaoka added that
EOS users could also exploit the companys extensive arsenal of highquality lenses (87 models in all, including 73 in the EF Series and 14
in the EF Cinema Series), a competitive advantage Canon enjoys
over some of its rival camera manufacturers.
The following day, to underscore the companys in-house lens
production, Canon hosted a rare tour of its Utsunomiya facility,
which provides mass production of the companys optical instruments, as well as technical support. Canon began producing EOS
SLR cameras with interchangeable EF-mount lenses in 1987; since
then, the company has built more than 90 million EF lenses. The
growth of the companys lens production has been exponential. By
1995, 10 million EF lenses had been produced, but that number
doubled to 20 million in 2001, reached 30 million in 2006 and hit
40 million in 2008. Those numbers ramped up dramatically as digital EOS SLRs became predominant: 50 million lenses in 2009, 60
million by Jan. 2011, 70 million by Oct. 2011 and 80 million by Aug.
2012.
During the facility tour, the press visitors met the companys
lens meisters, observed the various stages of lens manufacturing
and quality control, and received an overview of Canons humanresources development program for students pursuing a career in
optics craftsmanship a 9-month-long mentorship program that
has produced 3,064 skilled workers since 1959.
Although Canon executives did not announce any new EOS
cameras during the press tour, they did detail a series of new technical developments. Hiroo Edakubo, another group executive from
Canons ICPO, reviewed some of the companys recent undertak-
ings, including firmware upgrades to

C-Series cameras that boost their maximum
ISO setting to 80,000. Edakubo also outlined
an optional upgrade to the EOS C100 to
support Dual Pixel CMOS AF autofocus technology, for continuous autofocusing with
Canons EF lenses. (In May, this upgrade will
be available for the C300 as well.) He touted
the improved signal-to-noise ratio in Canons
high-end cameras (made possible by the
companys second generation of chip-noise
reduction technology), as well as their wider
dynamic range (credited to the Dual Pixel
CMOS diode structure, which also helps to
reduce rolling shutter effect). Edakubo
added that while Canon launched its CSeries cameras mainly for motion-picture
use, the company has been pleasantly
surprised by their popularity for shooting
other types of projects, including commercials and sports events. (Most recently,
Canon was selected by NBC to provide more
than 70 HDTV portable, field and studio
lenses for the 2014 Olympic Winter Games
in Sochi, Russia.)
During the press briefings, Masaya
Maeda, managing director and chief executive of Canons ICPO, offered a general
overview of the companys business strategies, placing further emphasis on the
companys on-site development of image
processors, lenses, software and sensors. In
a one-on-one interview with AC, he
conceded, In the world of cinema, were
still in the process of learning [and gathering]
opinions and insights, [not only] from distinguished and great filmmakers but also independent filmmakers and students. I think
were still at the stage [where we are]
absorbing all of those insights so we can
learn from them and [reflect] those suggestions in new product designs and systems.
With regard to the Cinema Series cameras,
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he added that we anticipate that one day

we will be there to meet that challenge to
become the A camera, and foresaw that
any new technologies that the company
develops for its high-end cameras would
trickle down to the companys lower-end
camera models. He maintained that the
development of higher-end cameras would
require increased processing speed for semiconductors (in order to handle the sheer
volume of digital data funneling through
the workflow pipeline) and reasonable,
energy-efficient power-consumption standards.
In a separate group-interview
session, members of the companys EOS
team addressed a range of other topics,
including questions about the ergonomics
of Canons C-Series cameras and the ongoing need for productions to add third-party
accessories to these cameras in order to
meet the high-end requirements of cinematographers like Anthony Dod Mantle,
ASC, BSC, DFF (Rush; AC Oct. 13); Sofian El
Fani (who used the C300 on Blue is the
Telecine &
Color Grading
Jod is a true artist with
a great passion for his craft.
John W. Simmons, ASC
96
Contact Jod @ 310-713-8388

Jod@apt-4.com
Warmest Color, which won the

Palme dOr at the 2013 Cannes
Film Festival); and Shane Hurlbut,
ASC (who offers a detailed assessment of the C-Series cameras in this
issues coverage of the feature Need
for Speed).
During the group session, ASC
member Jon Fauer summarized the
desires of many top cinematographers by suggesting that the C500
should be adapted for easier handheld work, with adjustable handgrips and
shoulder mounts that would make the
camera less reliant upon third-party rigs.
Fauer praised the compact design of the
C500, but also suggested that the next
model should be more modular and offer
an adjustable viewfinder. It would be nice
if you could interchange the lens mounts
between Canon and PL mounts, or some
other neutral mount system, he added.
The EOS spokesmen conceded that
the company must be more flexible in the
design and engineering of future camera
models, but stressed that Canon was still in
the process of collecting a lot of feedback
from C-Series users. Our products are being
used by many people in different and
diverse manners, so compiling all of those
comments and reflecting [those suggestions] in a new model is going to be very
difficult. We knew from the beginning that
the C500 would not [occupy] the high end
[of the market] like the Alexa. For those
people who are very used to using [highend] A cameras and B cameras, this is not
[an ideal design], but people who have

been using the EOS system with DSLRs
say this is the form they would like to
see.
ASC associate Eliott Peck, senior
vice president and general manager of
Canon USA, firmly asserted the
companys commitment to research and
outreach, and its willingness to incorporate user suggestions into new camera
designs. We entered this business with a
thirst to learn and to listen. Every different
film and every setup is going to be a little
different. Weve sent our engineers and
our technical people on set. [When] Ron
Howard was shooting his film Rush, every
day there was something new. We
approach [those visits] to listen and to
learn, to make adjustments and changes,
[and to bring] that feedback on technical
concerns and issues back to Canon Inc.
Both Maeda and the EOS team
confirmed that Canon would still be striking deals with third-party manufacturers
to produce rigs and accessories for the CSeries cameras. Regarding accessories,
Maeda stated, of course if it is in the
domain where we have the expertise,
then we might produce them ourselves,
but currently we have [partnerships with]
a lot of dedicated, expert manufacturers
of such rigs and accessories, so we would
like to establish great working relationships with them to provide the best accessories [for our products].
One area of new exploration was
emphasized by Laurence J. Thorpe, a
senior fellow at Canon who supervises

professional engineering and solutions
within the companys Imaging Technologies
& Communications Group. Thorpe emphasized Canons commitment to the ACES
workflow standard, noting that the
company had developed a new ACESproxy
output that is now available via the C500
cameras 3G-SDI monitor terminal.
ACESproxy allows filmmakers to immediately grade raw footage using a compatible
ACES monitor (such as Canons DP-V3010)
and the ASC CDL system, providing an
accurate representation of how the footage
will look after being graded in the DI suite.
Thorpe added that Canons support for the
DCI-P3+ Color Gamut allows the C500 to
capture a far wider range of color in raw
mode than the current DCI-P3 industry standard for digital cinema projection, enabling
an increased ability to faithfully reproduce
more saturated elements. The DCI-P3+
gamut shares the same white point as DCIP3, but accommodates a much larger color
range that allows users to take full advantage of the large volume of color space
available in ACES. I think thats going to be
huge, he concluded. Weve immersed
ourselves in [the ACES] technical committee,
which includes all the major manufacturers,
and were way down the road in terms of
the ACESproxy. There are great exchanges,
we all understand each other, and were
also playing in that workspace of ACES. We
totally bought into it, we totally support it,
and its the workflow of the future.
97
Arri Announces
Amira Pricing, Details
Arri has announced the
pricing for the Amira, the
companys recently unveiled
documentary-style camera. Prices
for the camera with OLED
viewfinder start at $39,999, and
customers can choose from a wide range of
feature and accessory options to build their
preferred package.
There are three Amira configurations to choose from, differentiated by their
software feature sets. The entry-point
Amira camera allows Rec 709 ProRes 4:2:2
recording up to 100 fps. The Advanced
license adds features such as Log C, ProRes
4:2:2 (HQ) at 200 fps, in-camera grading
and a pre-record function. Finally, the
Premium license incorporates such features
as ProRes 4:4:4:4 and 2K up to 200 fps as
well as color control with custom 3-D LUTs;
the premium offerings make the Amira an
ideal companion to the Alexa for high-end
productions. Software upgrades which
can be purchased outright or rented on a
temporary basis will be available directly
through the Arri website, allowing Amira
owners to adapt to the particular needs of
the project at hand while extending the
return on their initial investment.
To complete the Amira camera
package, customers will also select a lens
mount, battery mount and bottom plate.
With various options for each, customers
have the option of changing these pieces
after their initial purchase. Lens-mount
options will include PL, PL-LDS, EF and B4;
each mount attaches to the front of the
camera body via four captive screws and
can be easily changed in the field.
The versatile Amira combines exceptional image quality it incorporates the
latest generation of the Alexa 16x9 sensor
technology with affordable CFast 2.0
workflows. With a projected startup time of
approximately 10 seconds, the Amira is
ready to roll straight out of the camera bag,
and its rugged design suits a wide range of
production types and shooting environments. The cameras ergonomic design is
optimized for the shoulder-mounted operating of run-and-gun-style documentary
shooting; the camera body weighs approximately 10 pounds on its own, and with
98
shoulder mount, handle and viewfinder

weighs approximately 14 pounds.
The Amira also boasts a unique cooling system: Air enters the front of the
camera via vents on both sides, cooling the
sensor, and then moves through the hollow
center of the chassis, which is completely
sealed from the circuit boards to protect
them from dust and the elements; the
boards are cooled as the air moves through
the chassis, and the air is finally pushed out
the back of the camera, on the right side, via
two small fans.
Arri has mitigated the need to navigate the camera menu by incorporating
user-assignable buttons on the operators
side of the camera body, as well as userassignable preset switches for white balance
and exposure index. (Additionally, a lock
button precludes any settings being accidentally bumped during a shoot.) The operators
side of the camera also features controls
over the cameras four-channel audio; slots
for two CFast 2.0 memory cards; two USB
inputs for importing looks, user settings or
software updates; and an Ethernet connection for remote service via network access.
The rear of the camera features two
wireless antennas, one for Bluetooth audio
monitoring and one for Wi-Fi to enable
third-party apps such as menu control via an
iPhone. Also included are two four-pin hirose
connectors, an eight-pin power connector,
two HD-SDI connections and a D-tap power
tap. Audio inputs on the camera-right side
comprise two three-pin and one five-pin that
can serve as a splitter; microphone line,
phantom power and AES are all assignable.
The camera body also boasts a bubble level
and tape hook, and a motorized magnetic
track for its built-in IR-ND filters (.6, 1.2, 2.1
and clear); eschewing a more traditional
filter wheel allows the camera its slimmer
profile when compared with the Alexa.
The top handle for the camera boasts
a vulcanized rubber, non-slip design that also

incorporates 38" threads and a hot shoe for
additional accessories. The handle attaches
to the camera body via dovetail, as does the
shoulder mount on the bottom; both dovetails lock on the camera-right side for quick,
easy balancing by the operator. Additionally,
the shoulder mount features Arri rosettes
and 15mm lightweight support rods.
The Amiras OLED viewfinder boasts a
+/-5 ocular and a proximity sensor to prevent
image burn in. The viewfinder also incorporates a monitor that doubles as access to the
cameras menu, which is arranged similarly
to the Alexas. The viewfinder can be
mounted on a wedge off of the top handle,
and it also features a 38" thread for attaching via an articulated arm.
Further pricing details are available
through Arri and its official sales channels.
Delivery of Amira cameras is due to begin in
the second quarter of this year.
For additional information, visit
www.arri.com.
manufactured in Southern California.

BriteShot selects a tight four-bin package of
Cree LEDs and blends them to target a
perfect balance on the green/magenta axis.
The Studio Tungsten works well with the
high-speed Phantom camera and has been
tested flicker-free at 1,500 fps. The solidstate system also boasts noiseless operation.
All BriteShot Luminators come with a
three-year/50,000-hour warranty. For more
information, visit www.briteshot.com.
MTI Carries Cortex on Set,

Location
MTI Film has introduced Cortex
CarryOn, a portable all-in-one on-set dailies
solution for cinematographers and DITs.
Compact, lightweight and rugged, Cortex
CarryOn comes equipped with MTIs Cortex
Dailies software and is capable of processing
dailies at any resolution up to 6K from all
popular digital cinema cameras, including
Arri, Sony, Canon and Red.
Loaded with a liquid-cooled Intel i7
10th International Trade Fair

for Cine Equipment and Technology
Munich MOC 21 23 September 2014
www.cinec.de
BriteShot Upgrades
Luminator Line
BriteShot has introduced the Luminator Studio Tungsten. The LED fixture is twice
as bright as the companys two earlier Luminators and draws 350 watts/3 amps of
power while delivering 27,000 Lux at a
distance of 10' in its spot setting, and 7,000
Lux at 10' in flood.
The Luminator Studio Tungsten
boasts a lighter instrument weight, a punchy
throw of more than 200 feet, and a simplified control panel. The units precision
dimmer control enables dimming down to 2
percent.
The Luminator Studio Tungsten is
99
processor, 12TB SSD RAID, GPU-accelerated

rendering and Thunderbolt 2 technology for
fast copying, Cortex CarryOn is ideal for onset production, whatever the location. We
designed Cortex CarryOn for producers and
rental houses seeking a plug-and-play dailies
appliance that is extremely portable and
does it all with maximum efficiency and reliability, says MTI Film product manager J.D.
Vandenberghe. Designed by users for
users, Cortex CarryOn handles every dailies
task with ease and keeps pace with production demand, even when processing 4K.
www.mtifilm.com.
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with countless accessories, INTERCHANGEABLE OPTICS
for 30, 60 and 120 beam angle, POWERFUL OUTPUT of
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100
P+S Technik Enhances Viewing

with Finder Loupe
P+S Technik has introduced the PSFinder Loupe, designed to work with TV
Logics VFM-058W 5.5" Full HD LCD monitor.
The PS-Finder Loupe consists of an
eyepiece, a lightweight metal tube and a
mount for the monitor. The eyepiece
features an integrated, high-quality +/-1.5
diopter for eyesight compensation. On
request, P+S Technik offers an eyepiece cup
with a mechanical
shutter to avoid sun
damage. The PS-Finder
Loupe is compatible
with standard Arri
eyepiece cups.
The PS-Finder
Loupe can be used
with either the right or
left eye, and an integrated quick-release
mechanism allows for
one-handed switching
between viewfinder and monitor viewing.

In addition to the VFM-058W, P+S
Technik offers mounts that make the PSFinder Loupe compatible with the TV Logic
VFM-056W/WP, Ikan D5W, Hamlet HDW5,
Marshall V-LCD56MD, Red 5" Touch LCD
and Convergent Design Gemini 4:4:4.
www.pstechnik.de.
International Marketplace
102
April 2014
DENECKE, INC.
HOME OF THE INDUSTRY STANDARD
ELECTRONIC TIMECODE SLATES
FOR
DENECKE, INC.
25209 Avenue Tibbitts
Valencia, CA 91355
Phone (661) 607-0206 Fax (661) 257-2236
www.denecke.com Email: info@denecke.com
CLASSIFIED AD RATES
All classifications are $4.50 per word. Words set in bold face or all
capitals are $5.00 per word. First word of ad and advertisers name
can be set in capitals without extra charge. No agency commission or
discounts on classified advertising.PAYMENT MUST ACCOMPANY ORDER.
VISA, Mastercard, AmEx and Discover card are accepted. Send ad to
Classified Advertising, American Cinematographer, P.O. Box
2230, Hollywood, CA 90078. Or FAX (323) 876-4973. Deadline for
payment and copy must be in the office by 15th of second month
preceding publication. Subject matter is limited to items and services
pertaining to filmmaking and video production. Words used are subject to magazine style abbreviation. Minimum amount per ad: $45
CLASSIFIEDS ON-LINE
Ads may now also be placed in the on-line Classifieds at the ASC
web site.
Internet ads are seen around the world at the same great rate
as in print, or for slightly more you can appear both online and in
print.
For more information please visit www.theasc.com/advertiser, or e-mail: classifieds@theasc.com.
Classifieds
EQUIPMENT FOR SALE
EQUIPMENT FOR SALE
4X5 85 Glass Filters, Diffusion, Polas etc. A Worlds SUPERMARKET of USED MOTION
Good Box Rental 818-763-8547
PICTURE EQUIPMENT! Buy, Sell, Trade.
CAMERAS, LENSES, SUPPORT, AKS &
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MORE! Visual Products, Inc. www.visual
VIDEO & FILM EQUIPMENT COMPANY. 50
products.com Call 440.647.4999
YEARS EXPERIENCE. New: iLLUMiFLEX
LIGHTS & FluidFlex TRIPODS.
www.UsedEquipmentNewsletter.com
AND www.ProVideoFilm.com
EMAIL: ProVidFilm@aol.com
CALL BILL 972 869 9990, 888 869 9998.
www.theasc.com
April 2014
103
Advertisers Index
Camblock 103
Cammate Systems 47
Canon USA Video 14-15
Cavision Enterprises 103
Chapman/Leonard Studio
Equipment Inc. 27
Chimera
89
Backstage Equipment, Inc. 98
Cinec/Albrecht
99
Birns & Sawyer 102
Cine
Gear
105
Blackmagic Design, Inc. 13
Cinematography
Electronics 89
Cinekinetic 102
Congo Films S.A. 45
Convergent Design 33
Cooke Optics 22-23
Covert Camera Bikes 49
CTT 104
Aadyn Technology 91
Abel Cine Tech 57
Adorama 9, 69
AJA Video Systems, Inc. 67
Alan Gordon 103
Arri 5
104
Deluxe Entertainment 21
Denecke 103
Maccam 83, 100

Mac Tech LED 59
Maine Media 95
Eastman Kodak 64a-l, C4
MAT Berlin 73
EZ FX Jibs, Inc. 102
Matthews Studio
Film Gear (International), Ltd.
Equipment/MSE 102
47
Movcam Tech Co. Ltd. 31
Filmotechnic USA 48
Movie Tech AG 102, 103
Filmtools 96
Next Shot 8
Freefly 101
Nila Inc. 85
General Dynamics Global
Ovide Broadcast Services 97
Imaging 19
Glidecam Industries 55
P+S Technik 103
Grip Factory Munich 95
Panther Gmbh 60
PED-Denz 61
Hollywood Rentals 74
Pille Filmgeraeteverleih
J.L. Fisher 92
Gmbh 103
Jod Soraci 96
Powermills 102
Pro8mm 102
K5600 17
Kino Flo 75
Radiant Images 6
Koerner Camera Systems 8 Rag Place, The 85
Red Digital Cinema C2-1
Leica 71
Reflex Technologies 29
Lights! Action! Co. 102
Samy's DV & Edit 7, 35

Sandisk Corporation 11
Scheimpflug Digital 91
Schneider Optics 2
Servicevision USA 93
Super16, Inc. 102
TCS Inc. 87
Technicolor Content &
Theatrical Services 43
Technocrane C3
Thales Angenieux 25
Toland App. 101
Visionary Forces 8
Willys Widgets 102
Clubhouse News
Top to bottom: Sharon Calahan, ASC;

Henning Rdlein (left), Phedon Papamichael,
ASC (center) and Stephan Schenk (right);
James Cressanthis, ASC.
Society Welcomes Calahan

New active member Sharon Calahan, ASC began her career as an art director
in broadcast television after studying illustration, graphic design and photography at a
small art school in Washington. She was
introduced to computer animation while
working at a production/post company, and
went on to pursue digital production, eventually landing a job as a lighting supervisor at
Pixar Animation Studios on the first
computer-animated feature, Toy Story.
Calahan has worked with Pixar for
106
April 2014
Arri Honors Papmichael In Berlin

Arri, in partnership with the Berlin
International Film Festival, recently honored
Phedon Papamichael, ASC at a special
event at the Hotel Adlon in Berlin. Stephan
Schenk, Arris general manager, business unit
camera systems, and Henning Rdlein, head
of Arris digital-workflow solutions, led the
discussion. Papamichael spoke about his use
of the Alexa and the Alexa M compact model
on Nebraska, which at press time was a
contender for an Academy Award for cinematography.
Papamichael also screened some of his
camera tests for The Monuments Men (AC
Feb. 14) for the crowd, explaining how and
why he combined Alexa digital cameras with
Arricam film cameras, and mixed anamorphic
lenses with Arri/Zeiss Master Primes, all of
which were provided by Arri Rental in
Germany.
Chressanthis Teaches
Master Class
The University of Cincinnatis CollegeConservatory of Music recently hosted a
master class taught by James Chressanthis,
ASC. The program featured a lecture by the
cinematographer as well as a question-andanswer session for the audience. Chressanthis

also screened the documentary No Subtitles
Necessary: Laszlo and Vilmos, which he
directed (AC Sept. 08).
Bailey Named Regents Lecturer
John Bailey, ASC was recently named a
Regents Lecturer at the University of CaliforniaLos Angeles. Over the course of four lectures
each of which was illustrated with numerous
film clips Bailey took students on a personal
journey through the historical, aesthetic and
technological developments of narrative and
non-narrative cinematic images. Along the way,
Bailey was joined by Matthias Stork, for a
comparison of chaos-, classical- and slowcinema styles; Christopher Horak, for a discussion of preservation and archiving; and ASC
associate Rob Hummel, for a survey of film
and digital formats. Baileys lectures also
explored the evolution of documentary style
and its impact on the grammar of fiction films.
McGarvey Receives
Honorary Degree
The University of Ulster recently
announced that Seamus McGarvey, ASC,
BSC will be one of 13 honorary graduates
honored during this summers graduation ceremonies. The honorees come from the worlds of
sport, the arts, public life, business and education. University Vice-Chancellor Prof. Richard
Barnett notes, The honorary-degree recipients
this year embody the very qualities that I know
will inspire Ulsters students to aim high and
realize the power they have to make a positive
difference in their future lives and careers.
Birns & Sawyer Hosts Schreiber
Birns & Sawyer recently welcomed
Nancy Schreiber, ASC for a Filmmakers Showcase event at the El Portal Theatre in North
Hollywood, Calif. The event included a screening of the TCM documentary And the Oscar
Goes To, which Schreiber photographed, as
well as a Q&A with the cinematographer.
Photo of Clubhouse by Isidore Mankofsky, ASC; lighting by Donald M. Morgan, ASC.

Papamichael photo courtesy of Arri. Cressanthis photo courtesy of CCM.
more than 19 years, serving as the director of

photography on multiple Academy Awardwinning features, including Finding Nemo
and Ratatouille. In her role as cinematographer, she works closely with the camera
layout, sets, characters and visual-effects
departments to ensure the overall look of the
film conforms to the lighting design, and she
supervises a team of 40-60 lighting artists
while working with the director through all
phases of the production. Additionally, she
supervises the digital imaging and final
mastering for all output formats.
Most recently, Calahan supervised the
remastering of six Pixar feature films while
mentoring new lighting cinematographers.
Her upcoming credits as director of photography include The Good Dinosaur (2014) and
Finding Dory (2015).
Roger Deakins, ASC, BSC
When you were a child, what film made the strongest impression on you?
At 16, I was hardly a child when I saw Peter Watkins The War Game
(1965) at a local Torquay film-society screening. Two women fainted
in the theater, and the film had such a powerful effect on audiences
elsewhere that it was subsequently banned for 25 years. I have never
forgotten seeing that film, nor Watkins Culloden (1964).
What has been your most satisfying moment on a project?

Probably just making it home after nine months on that yacht!
Have you made any memorable blunders?
I cant remember any, but that probably says most about the selective nature of my memory.
What is the best professional advice youve ever received?
A onetime producer and
studio head advised me to
forget my ambition of becoming a cinematographer. Luckily, for me at least, I am not
good at taking advice.
Which cinematographers,
past or present, do you
most admire?
Eduard Tisse, for the power of
his compositions, as in Ivan
the Terrible and Alexander
Nevsky; Vadim Yusov, for the
atmospheres he created for
Ivans Childhood and Solaris;
Kasuo Miyagawa, for the
sheer beauty of his lighting for
Ugetsu and Sansho; Haskell
Wexler [ASC], for his heart
and passion; and Conrad Hall
[ASC], for the subtlety and
diversity of everything he did.
What recent books, films or

artworks have inspired
you?
Always the photographs of
Alex Webb. All Is Lost inspired
me to revisit Bressons A Man
Escaped. I was lucky to see a
pristine archival print of The
Mirror at the Brisbane Film
Festival recently; Tarkovsky is a constant inspiration.
What sparked your interest in photography?

I imagine it was seeing the photography of Bill Brandt and Henri
Cartier-Bresson. I had wanted to be a painter, but I just painted life in
a naturalistic way, so photography seemed to be a better medium.
Where did you train and/or study?
I studied at Bath Academy of Art and, later, at the National Film
School.
Who were your early teachers or mentors?
Roger Mayne, famous for his London street photography, was a tutor
at Bath Academy.
What are some of your key artistic influences?
I think its hard to single out key influences. Surely we are all influenced by everything we see and come into contact with, be it an
exhibition by Edvard Munch, a film by Jean-Pierre Melville or the view
from my Sydney hotel window as I am typing this.
Do you have any favorite genres, or genres you would like to

try?
I would love to shoot a science-fiction film, something in the vein of
Stranger in a Strange Land, maybe, or The Man in the High Castle.
If you werent a cinematographer, what might you be doing
instead?
I applied for a job as a beach photographer once, during my school
summer holidays, but I was turned down. So I guess that would not
be an option.
Which ASC cinematographers recommended you for
membership?
John Bailey, Allen Daviau and Steven Poster.
How has ASC membership impacted your life and career?
For me, the ASC is foremost a group of good friends, and it is a great
help to have friends in this business.
How did you get your first break in the business?

I was a member of the crew and shot a documentary aboard a yacht
in an around-the-world race. To get the job, I exaggerated my experience of the sea, but as I am from Devon, I was never closely questioned.
108
April 2014
Photo by Franois Duhamel.
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APRIL 2014

THINKING 4K AND BEYOND?

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The International Journal of Motion Imaging

5 Park City Standouts

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SEE AND HEAR MORE CINEMATOGRAPHY COVERAGE AT WWW.THEASC.COM

In an exclusive podcast, cinematographer

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Derrick Lafayette: 12 Monkeys, District 9, Star

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The International Journal of Motion Imaging

PUBLISHER Martha Winterhalter

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