American Cinematographer - March 2012 - 24

TECHNICAL SPECS
2.40:1 Anamorphic 35mm Moviecam Compact; Panaflex Platinum, Millennium XL2; Arri 535, 435 Hawk C-Series; Panavision Primo, C-Series Kodak Plus-X 5231, Double-X 5222

March 2012

American Cinematographer

Project X photos by Beth Dubber, courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.

ate member] Bill Hansard Jr. did an amazing job supervising the rear-screen projection. Another old trick we used was to smear Vaseline on the lens for a sequence that called for a dreamy feel.” For another scene, “I wanted to shoot a candlelit scene with only the candle and a single 650-watt light,” he continues. “The idea was to create a sort of flicker or twinkle by having someone wiggle his fingers in front of the light, a very organic way of achieving the effect. The exposure was so low I knew I was going to have very little density on the negative. I ended up pushing the Plus-X one stop and shooting almost wide open. I think it worked really well, because the image has a very distinct, unique quality.” Although most of The Ghastly Love of Johnny X was shot using pre-digital techniques, there were a number of visual effects that required a digital assist. For this work, FotoKem scanned the negative at 2K; visual-effects composites were then created by Glenn Campbell and Tim McHugh at Area 51 and transferred back to film. These shots were intercut with the original camera negative and conformed into six A/B printing rolls by Magic Film Works. The composite show print was struck on Eastman 2302 directly from the original negative. The movie will premiere this month at the Cinequest Film Festival in San Jose, Calif. “Before we started shooting Johnny X, Paul and I looked at various films for reference, specifically The Elephant Man , Bride of Frankenstein and Touch of Evil,” says Bulgarelli. “But Johnny X is a very unique film, and Paul had a really good idea of what he wanted to achieve. He cares infinitely about the image and was always very supportive of my ideas. In all, this was a dream come true for a cinematographer.”

J.B. (Jonathan Daniel Brown, left), Costa (Oliver Cooper, center) and Thomas (Thomas Mann) set out to make a name for themselves by throwing a party for the ages in Project X.

Documenting Teen Debauchery By David E. Williams

In the new comedy Project X, a small birthday celebration planned for a nebbish teen explodes into a nocturnal rave fueled by booze and drugs, and the hosts and guests document the action vérité style with a variety of personal digital devices. “It’s a reflection of today’s youth culture, which expects everything to be photographed,” says director Nima Nourizadeh, whose music-video and commercial work landed him the job, his feature debut. “Our goal was to invite the audience into that party on the screen.” “Nima and I wanted to push the POV film into new territory, including fashion, drugged-out states and high action,” says Project X cinematographer Ken Seng (Quarantine). “We decided the way to do that was through a progression of looks that paralleled the mental states of our lead characters. The film starts out beautiful and sunny and degrades to a very dark and seedy look as it progresses. “Some of the references we discussed were actually our own experiences from when we were in our twenties,” continues the cinematographer. “We both love a documentary-style aesthetic, even the look of using an on-camera hard light with little or no diffusion; it reminds me of flash photography and creates this dark-edged vignette that draws your eye right to the subject. It creates a feeling that you’re spying

on things you’re not supposed to see.” Though many POV films present the perspective of a lone character, the Project X team wanted to literally “crowd source” their images, with units distributed to multiple performer/operators. “We’d frequently hand 10 Flip cameras out to the party crowd and just tell them to shoot whatever they saw and try to keep our production cameras and movie lights out of the frame,” Seng says. “The prospect of having their footage get into the film excited people, and that sort of rough, messy operating gives the film a lot of its character. Most of it was unusable, but the small bits that did work were crucial to the texture of the movie.” During prep, Seng tested an array of cameras, including the Red One; Sony’s F23, F35 and PMW-EX3; Canon’s 5D Mark II and 7D DSLRs; Silicon Imaging’s SI-2K Mini; Blackberries; iPhones; two kinds of Flip cameras; the Iconix Studio 2K; and the GoPro HD. “We wanted dynamic lighting in the dance areas, which involved strobe lights, and we wanted to avoid the rollingshutter artifacts you get with CMOS-sensor cameras,” he notes. “We liked the depthof-field and zoom-lens choices we could get with a 2⁄3-inch camera, so we chose the F23, which we got from Panavision Hollywood, as our main camera. That added depth-of-field made it just a little easier to use the Canon [HJ11x4.7B KLL-SC] 11x zooms. If we’d shot full sensor with full-

American Cinematographer - March 2012

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