American Cinematographer - April 2008 - (Page 69)

cars had to come in at the right time. In theory, it sounds fantastic, but the first time you try it, it looks like shit! But that’s the great thing about Jens — he expects this and stays calm, and we try again. After a bit of rehearsing, everybody suddenly falls into the same rhythm, it works, and you’ve just shot three pages of script.” The bully scene was a night exterior, so Edvardsen had to light the actors and create fill in the surrounding woods. “When you’re trying to achieve such a soft image, you can’t let anything be pitch black,” he notes. “You have to get the luminance up.” A 10K softbox on a crane provided ambient lighting and Kino Flos were positioned around the grounds. “Because we were shooting so wide, it was always a challenge to hide lamps,” says Edvardsen. “When it wasn’t windy, we were trying to fill the area with smoke to give it a magical atmosphere. It sounds strange, but it’s so cold there that this phenomenon happens naturally — you can drive by a frozen lake and see steam rising from it. It has to do with the different temperatures of the water and air.” Given that temperatures often plummeted to -22ºF, the production stored its cameras and film stock in a large refrigerator to mitigate problems caused by temperature swings. “Everything worked well,” Edvardsen recalls, “but sometimes we had to shoot something inside and then go outside, and we’d have to wait an hour for the equipment to chill down!” When the time came to discuss post, Jonsson and Edvardsen proposed timing the film photochemically rather than doing a digital intermediate (DI). “When you’re working at the top of the negative, you need all the color information you can get,” says Edvardsen, who worked with color timer Sten Lindberg at Nordisk Film Post. “Jens and I wanted to cut the negative and do a direct print to get all that color information out of the negative.” In the end, the filmmakers did a 2K scan to create versions for TV and DVD, and during that process, “we found in the telecine that if we really pushed the digital file to make it bright and soft, there were no colors left,” says the cinematographer. “We had to fill in with colors that weren’t really there, and suddenly, we were struggling with strange, invented colors. But the photochemical timing was a dream.” Noting that King of Ping Pong was projected on 35mm at Sundance, Edvardsen concludes, “There are no plans to make digital prints of our movie as long as theaters are projecting film.” — Patricia Thomson ¢ 69 http://www.universalstudios.com/studio http://www.universalstudios.com/studio

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

American Cinematographer - April 2008 Contents Editor's Note Global Village: The Counterfeiters Short Takes: Milia Production Slate: Paranoid Park Production Slate: All the Boys Love Mandy Lane Card Sharks Temple of Doom 3-D Cinematography Sundance 2008: Mining for Movies Post Focus: Digital Film Tree Gets into Peyote Post Focus: FotoKem’s 3-D Workflow Post Focus: Technicolor Digs in at Pinewood Filmmakers’ Forum: Steven Fierberg, ASC on Searchers 2.0 New Products & Services International Marketplace Classified Ads Ad Index Clubhouse News ASC Close-Up: Rodney Taylor

American Cinematographer - April 2008

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