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director/writer Diane Bell. A voracious cineaste with particular affection for the French New Wave, Bell eschewed a contemporary approach to coverage, relying instead on wide shots and long takes — a style that paired well with the short shooting schedule. Mulligan offers, “I had [ Jean-Pierre] Melville in my head because of his long takes and limited coverage.” Bell and Mulligan considered various formats, including Super 16mm and 2-perf 35mm, before settling on digital capture and choosing the Red One. “Shooting Super 16 would have been doable, but it would have meant less coverage,” notes the cinematographer. “Diane was a first-time director, and we thought shooting film would give us less room for error.” Mulligan brought his own Red camera (Build 17) to California, along with a small set of Zeiss ZF prime lenses. Framing for a final aspect ratio of 1.85:1, the 28mm and 50mm were his workhorses, while the 21mm was used for high-speed work. He had a 1/8 Tiffen Black Pro-Mist on the lens throughout the shoot. Noting that he uses that filtration with every digital camera, he observes, “That touch [of diffusion] rounds out the highlights just enough and rolls off that sharp [video] focus, making it look more filmic.” Despite being a small, characterdriven film, Obselidia put the Red through its paces, offering an obstacle course of extreme heat, low light and vibrations on set. The factor that concerned Mulligan the most was heat: almost half of the movie was shot in Death Valley, where temperatures soared to 115°F even in April. Furthermore, the tight schedule necessitated shooting throughout the day. Mulligan considered various ways to keep the camera cool, including ice packs and putting the camera in a cooler. “My first assistant, Jeff Nolde, was concerned that ice-packing would create condensation, so we nixed that idea,” he recalls. They decided to simply forge ahead. “We just did very basic, common-sense stuff,” says Mulligan.

Opposite and this page: A librarian’s encounter with a comely film projectionist leads to Death Valley in Obselidia. Below: Director of photography Zak Mulligan lines up a shot with the Red One.

“We always made sure we had a flag covering the camera, and sometimes we’d put a whole tent over it.” During two days of testing and eight days of photography in Death Valley, “it never gave me problems,” he says. The Red didn’t fare quite as well with another Death Valley challenge: bumpy roads. With budget in mind, Mulligan decided to record to the Red Drive rather than the costlier, solid-state RedRAM drive. He brought three 320GB Red Drives, some Compact Flash cards, and 4x LaCie external hard drives that were rotated with the editor. (2x LaCie drives were always on set for redundant backup.) “It’s critical to have good, professional hard drives like LaCies or G-Techs,” notes the cinematographer. “I’ve used some brandnew drives that were $100 less expensive, and they crapped out after an
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hour of use.” Obselidia’s driving scenes were mostly on paved roads, but one Death Valley dirt road proved to be the Red’s undoing. “I wanted all the dust kicking up behind the car,” says Mulligan. The crew put the camera on a shock-absorbing hood mount and crossed their fingers. “It barely recorded, it dropped so many frames,” says Mulligan. They subsequently switched to CF cards, which required them to return to home base every four minutes to switch out cards. Desert exteriors created fewer blown-out whites than Mulligan anticipated. Without a budget for big units to control the fierce sunlight, the production relied on 12'x12' and 20'x20' frames of silver lamé. But the desert provided additional assistance. “Because there aren’t a lot of plants to soak up the light,
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Obselidia photos courtesy of Sundance Film Festival.

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American Cinematographer - April 2010

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - April 2010