American Cinematographer - February 2015 - 14

Short Takes

High-Tech Protection
By Noah Kadner

Bastiaan Koch is a visual-effects designer and modeler at
Lucasfilm's Industrial Light and Magic in San Francisco. Originally
from the Netherlands, his ILM portfolio includes the design and 3D
character modeling for Bumblebee and Galvatron in the Transformers series, Gipsy Danger in Pacific Rim, and Iron Man in Avengers:
Age of Ultron. In his limited spare time, Koch recently wrote, shot,
produced, directed and edited Follow the Camera, a short sciencefiction film set approximately 30 years in the future, in the Bay Area,
where domestic-service robots and camera surveillance have become
ubiquitous.
Koch began to envision the story while watching news coverage of the Iraq War. Having just moved to the U.S. from England, he
was struck by the financial stake that corporations had in the conflict,
and became particularly interested in the role of private-security
contractors. He began to imagine one of these operations putting
down roots in a tech-friendly city like San Francisco. "What extent
would they go to if their company was in major financial trouble?"
he asks. "The company conceives of an attack on the Golden Gate
Bridge in order to justify popular support for its military robots to help
quell the terror."
Koch developed his idea into a feature-length screenplay and
decided to shoot a portion of the script independently as a proof of
concept. He began shooting Follow the Camera over a foggy weekend in October 2013 at Crissy Field in San Francisco, with his sister
Elizabeth in the starring role. "We had just two days to shoot every
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February 2015

performance-specific bit," he recalls. "If I didn't see her face in my
storyboards, I didn't shoot it with my sister, because she was flying
out on Monday. For every shot without her face, it's a body double
with whom I worked shot-by-shot whenever I had time over the
next three months or so."
Koch operated the camera himself, opting for a Canon EOS
5D Mark II DSLR in its native 1080/24p H.264 format, using vintage
Nikon Nikkor manual lenses. "I found the lenses on eBay at really
good prices," he says. "You can get a solid-metal 35mm f1.4 Nikkor
lens from the 1970s for around $60. I added one to a Canon EFmount adapter, and on some of the older ones I had to file down
the flange a bit in the back to get them to fit inside the 5D. It was
the most do-it-yourself level of filmmaking you could imagine. I
didn't know if it would really work out, but it did!
"There's something special about the manual operation of
those Nikkors," he continues. "When you change the f-stop you get
a nice click. There's not the worry that the exposure is going to
change on its own, which you have with automatic lenses. I wanted
something old and clunky; if I'd had to shoot 16mm with an old
Russian camera, I would have been more than happy."
Koch and his crew selected the 5D after testing several DSLR
models on ILM's insert stages over a period of about six months.
"Many people using DSLRs shoot with far too low a shutter speed
- maybe 1⁄30 or 1⁄48, which makes it look like you're watching an
episode of Oprah," he opines. "You've got to overcompensate to
1⁄ 80 or 1⁄ 90, and then you get a bit of that Saving Private Ryan strobing effect, which makes it look a lot more like film." Koch framed
for the widescreen 2.40:1 aspect ratio, and in order to leave wider

American Cinematographer

All images courtesy of the filmmakers.

Robots stand in position at Immutech Robotics in the science-fiction short Follow the Camera, set in San Francisco in the year 2066.

American Cinematographer - February 2015

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