American Cinematographer - March 2009 - (Page 62) Post Focus Aiming for a theatrical release on 35mm, the filmmakers initially explored high-definition video and 35mm as potential acquisition formats, dismissing Super 16mm because of its pronounced grain. “I’ve worked with a lot of HD in television, but I was against it for this project from the start because it felt like the wrong aesthetic and emotion for a 1950s picture,” says Moxness. “We needed the image to have a noticeable texture, so I really pushed for film. However, 35mm was stretching the overall budget a bit too far.” During prep in Vancouver, Digital Film Central introduced Moxness to a process called Emulsion-Specific Grain Reduction. “It’s a remarkable proprietary recipe they use after the film is scanned for the digital intermediate,” explains the cinematographer. “They showed us a demo, shot on 16mm, of a hallway filled with smoke. After ESGR was applied, the grain was gone, but you could still see all the detail and the smoke. It looked like a perfect solution — we would be able to shoot on Super 16 and deliver a solid 35mm print.” Alien Trespass was filmed over 15 days on stages and locations around Vancouver. Moxness and his team used two Arri 416s and worked almost exclusively with 35mm Zeiss Ultra Primes, favoring the 12mm, 20mm and 28mm. “I brought along a whole box of lenses, but I tried to shoot the whole picture on those three primes to give the film a rigid, 1950s consistency,” says Moxness, who tapped Clairmont Camera for the package. He shot most of the picture on Kodak Vision2 200T 7217 and 50D 7201. “I ended up making one shot on [Vision2 500T] 7218 one day, when the schedule got away from us a bit, but apart from that, we used the slower stocks. I wanted to go with older EXR stocks, but Kodak told us they just “Before” and “after” versions of a scene from Alien Trespass (featuring Jody Thompson) illustrate the effect of Digital Film Central’s EmulsionSpecific Grain Reduction process. 62 March 2009 Degraining Super 16 for Alien Trespass by Noah Kadner Alien Trespass, an independent feature that was recently given its premiere at the 2009 Palm Springs International Film Festival, presents a classic 1950s sci-fi plot with a unique twist: it was designed to look as though it was actually shot in 1957 rather than simply set in that era. Depicting an accidental alien invasion of a small American town, the movie was directed by Robert Goodwin and shot by David Moxness, CSC. “This had been Bob’s passion project for a long while, and I was really into the idea,” says Moxness. “It’s one thing to shoot a period piece and another to actually be one.” Frame grabs courtesy of Digital Film Central.
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