American Cinematographer - February 2008 - (Page 20) 20 February 2008 Frame grabs courtesy of Daft Arts and Vice. Pope shot Honeydripper with his preferred package: an Arricam Studio and Lite and Cooke S4 prime lenses. “I was very fortunate to hire Matthew Clark, a very good operator from New York who also happens to be a director of photography, and 1st AC Larry Huston, with whom I’d briefly worked on Man of The Year,” he notes. “Both did a brilliant job.” Though Sayles rarely uses two cameras, the tight schedule prompted the production to budget 10 days with a second; for that work, Pope brought in New York–based operator/cinematographer David Dunlap. “Dave originally helped me crew the picture, including recommending Tom Percarpio, my excellent gaffer,” says Pope. “Dave has shot a lot of music and worked with John on his Bruce Springsteen music videos. He loves the blues and R&B and put himself up for the second camera gig. I was very pleased he did; he was the perfect choice.” Using a Phoenix crane as a rideon or with a Power Pod, the filmmakers created long tracking shots of drilling soldiers, Sonny’s arrival in town, and a big dolly push into Ty’s face as he waits at the railroad depot, among other elaborate moves. The crane was also used for a shot of a group leaving a graveside funeral. The shot starts high, looking down on the mourners, then cranes down and follows two for some dialogue and finally arcs around to show Ty’s daughter eyeing Sonny, who’s picking cotton in the adjacent field. “That was probably the biggest move we did,” says Pope. “We lucked out with beautiful light at sunset. I managed to get it in and also shoot the coverage around it before dusk.” For Pope, who is based in London, filming in Alabama was “something completely new, a real pleasure.” So, too, was the opportunity to finally work with Sayles. “John is a true director and leads from the front. He’s great with actors, and I think he did a great job in bringing the script, which I loved, off the page and onto the screen. I was proud to be part of it.” After watching his companion self-destruct following a failed attempt to become human, a robot attempts to commit “suicide” by setting himself ablaze in Electroma. Daft Punk’s Sci-Fi Vision by Iain Stasukevich “We’ve always been interested in technology and the relationship between humans and machines, working the way we do with drum machines, synthesizers and amplifiers,” says Thomas Bangalter, one-half of the French electronic-music duo Daft Punk and director of photography for Electroma, their feature-film debut. “In movies, it’s the same.” Not coincidentally, it was a love of movies that led a young Bangalter and future bandmate Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo to become fast friends. The two met in elementary school and bonded over the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick and Brian De Palma. Although the duo’s résumé includes a number of music videos and an animated feature, Electroma was designed to prove their skills as legitimate filmmakers. It was during the filming of the music videos for Electroma’s first album, Homework, that Bangalter and Homem-Christo began to learn the ins and outs of filmmaking. Taking the knowledge they’d gleaned from directors Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry and Roman Coppola, the duo directed the video for their track “Fresh.” In 2005, while filming the videos for the Human After All album, they hatched a plan for a feature-length, live-action movie. Electroma tells the tale of two robots (played by Peter Hurteau and Michael Reich) on a journey to become human. Over the course of 74 minutes, the story unfolds like an avant-garde mash-up of Easy Rider (shot by Laszlo Kovacs, ASC) and THX-1138 (photographed by Albert Kihn and David Myers). No dialogue is spoken; the viewer must glean many of the ambiguous plot points through subtle and notso-subtle visual cues. “We just wanted to make something experimental and weird,” says Homem-Christo. “We felt we needed to create an open door for interpretation, so from the beginning, it was a matter of working more with emotions, images and symbols than words.” Bangalter adds, “Because the film is so visual, the direction and cinematography merged. We wanted to focus on cinematography as a storytelling device, so we had to convey emotion with textures and images instead of words.” In the years preceding Electroma, Bangalter studied intently to learn the cinematographer’s craft. He had worked closely with the camera departments on the group’s videos, but on Electroma, he would take everything on his shoulders. At one point, he purchased more than 200 back issues of
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