American Cinematographer - January 2009 - (Page 14)

Steadicam operator B.J. McDonnell maneuvers through the main house at Villa Vizcaya. tuan and the color completely shifted from one shot to the next. The emulsion was extremely degraded, but we ended up getting a really beautiful texture.” (Ben Hadden, Ben Kolak and Sean Tice provided additional Super 8 photography for the project.) The “Chicago” portion of the work is closer to the style of Sullivan and Germain’s earlier collaborations, which often featured extensive use of the Steadicam. When Sullivan was developing Five Economies, her goal was to capture long, meandering takes, and the same was true for Triangle, where the action in the Chicago tenement moved through hallways and followed characters in and out of apartments. For some shots, Steadicam operator B.J. McDonnel had to stand stock-still for three or four minutes before beginning a threeminute move across a 30' span of apartment while sidestepping actors in the wings and on the ground. Using Germain’s Aaton XTRprod, a Canon 11-165mm zoom and a set of Zeiss Super Speed primes, the filmmakers planned to photograph 360 degrees of the tenement location, meaning all lighting had to be off the floor or dressed as part of the set. Adding to the complexity, Sullivan worked out precise blocking for as many as 13 actors at a time, and if the actors missed their marks, they would end up in total darkness. Fortunately, the building they were shooting in was being renovated, 14 January 2009 leaving the crew free to knock out ceilings and walls. To speed the filmmakers’ progress from one room to the next, gaffer Andy Cook created a wood grid with 2-by-4s above the ceiling line and strung cables through holes in the ceiling and walls to other grids in adjacent rooms. Germain and Cook fitted the grids with a mix of 650-watt, 350-watt, 150-watt and 1K tungsten units on Variac dimmers, while a 1.2K HMI was stationed on a lift outside the secondstory window to push hard “daylight” into the rooms. All lights were left clean to produce hard shadows, and these scenes were also shot on Double-X 7222. As Triangle’s cycle concludes, the Chicago workers, Gypsies and French sovereigns find themselves transported to Vizcaya, where they engage in reconstructions of scenes from old Pathéscope films as a tribe of Neanderthals is forced by the villa’s lord to reproduce. (Deering ordered silent-film reels from Pathéscope for screening at Vizcaya.) Because Sullivan was working on a commission, she and her crew had unlimited access to the entire estate. “The villa drove a lot of the content,” she notes. For the exteriors, Germain planned to shoot Kodak EXR 50D 7245 with an Arri 16SR-3 and the same lenses he used in Chicago, but he and Sullivan hadn’t accounted for Miami’s unpredictable weather. On a clear day, the color stock provided vibrant, satu- rated shots of the blue skies and green gardens, but footage from hazy days was lackluster — unless it was shot in black-and-white. (Night exteriors, lit with 4K HMIs and 10K tungsten fixtures, were shot on 7222.) The main house at Vizcaya is part of the villa’s museum, which made shooting interiors problematic. An allseeing Steadicam was required for more than 90 percent of the camerawork, and everything in the house was a valuable antique, and no one was allowed to move or touch anything. To make matters worse, heavy storm grates outside every window acted as “huge scrims that just stopped down light,” says Germain. Unable to bring in big fixtures or rig anything to the walls or ceilings, he had to carefully strategize his lamp placement on the floor and shoot with a fast stock, in this case Kodak Vision2 500T 7218. “For some scenes, I had to simply shoot wide open [T1.3] and hope the film would saturate enough for our needs,” says the cinematographer. “Sometimes I’d bounce a single 1.2K HMI into the ceiling for fill. When we lost light, I had to place 2.5Ks outside windows that were dressed with 216 diffusion to simulate the blowout of bright daylight.” In post, all the Super 16 footage was mastered at 2K resolution by Nolo Digital Film in Chicago and down-rezzed to 1080p for digital projection. Nolo also handled the integration of Color Lab’s 1080p Super 8 transfer with the 2K footage of the figure skater for output to 16mm. Asked what the best way is to view the work, Sullivan pauses, then says, “A lot of it is about your judgment as a viewer — what you connect to. It really is an experience that’s ultimately driven by your own connection to the work.” For Germain, Triangle of Need was “a dream job. It isn’t often a cinematographer can create images simply for the sake of creating them, without any selling of products or movie stars. There were no producers telling us we needed more skin or action. It’s just pretty pictures.” I

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - January 2008

American Cinematographer - January 2009 Contents Editor’s Note Short Takes: Triangle of Need Production Slate: Frost/Nixon, The Wrestler Close Focus An Old Soul Brothers in Arms A Cut Above Post Focus: HPA Awards, Still Me New Products & Services International Marketplace Classified Ads Ad Index In Memoriam: Robert C. Jessup, ASC Clubhouse News ASC Close-Up: Gabriel Beristain

American Cinematographer - January 2008

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