American Cinematographer - April 2009 - (Page 44) Sum of Fears Simon Duggan, ACS employs Red One cameras on the big-budget thriller Knowing, about a professor who foresees the end of the world. by Simon Gray Unit photography by Vince Valitutti nowing, the third collaboration between director Alex Proyas and cinematographer Simon Duggan, ACS, is a thriller that explores the cycle of life and questions whether our future is All K indeed preordained. “It is centered around a mystery, the solving of which takes the audience in an unexpected direction, but it is a character-based story, with the themes being represented through the characters’ relationships,” says Duggan. The film begins in 1959, with pupils at a Massachusetts elementary school being asked to illustrate their versions of the future. One of the children covers the page in seemingly random numbers. The pictures are then placed in a time capsule. Fifty years later, the capsule is removed, and the pictures are handed out to the current pupils. When the boy who receives the page of numbers takes it home, his father, Prof. John Koestler (Nicolas Cage), soon realizes the numbers represent a series of past and future dates of disasters. Koestler comes to believe the world is ending, and when mysterious figures threaten his son (Chandler Canterbury), he knows he is inextricably linked to the coming apocalypse. Knowing was one of the first high-profile feature films to be shot with the Red One 4K digital camera, and it was Duggan’s first outing on a digital format. According to the cinematographer, the initial impetus to use the One came from Proyas’ interest in photography. “Alex is an avid photographer and uses a digital stills camera with the same type of chip as the Red, a CMOS,” says Duggan. “He is very impressed with the quality of the images, and consequently, he suggested we test the Red as an acquisition format. The 44 April 2009
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