American Cinematographer - April 2010 - 74

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Sundance 2010: Expanded Palettes
the desert gives you this big, earthybrown bounce light that fills in everything,” says Mulligan. “It’s actually not as contrasty as you might think.” Obselidia’s nostalgic tone comes through most beautifully in the slowmotion bicycling scenes, which were inspired by Truffaut’s Jules & Jim. These were shot at 60 fps in 2K. Mulligan cycled through the Zeiss 21mm, 28mm and 50mm lenses, but his secret weapon for the dreamy visuals was a Sears Roebuck 80-200mm zoom from the 1970s that he found in his father’s dusty camera bag. “It was built like a tank, but it wasn’t precision at all, and there was no lens coating,” he says. Its patina matched the film’s mood. “The minute the lens had any light to it, it would flare out. It would get soft and milky and look super warm, with lots of oranges and golden tones,” says Mulligan. “Diane fell in love with it.” In low-light and nighttime situations, Mulligan exposed and lit just as he would a film camera, but refrained from pushing the Red’s ASA, which can create noise. In tungsten-lit scenes, he opted for an 80D Blue filter to correct the camera’s native 5000ºK balance. “It’s only a 1/3-stop loss of light,” he says, “and cleans it up enough that you can bring it the rest of the way in color correction without getting noise.” Throughout filming, Mulligan toggled between Raw and Look views to assess exposure, always checking the False Color Meter, which provides a color-coded reading of IRE values. “You push a button, and the whole image comes up with crazy colors, and each one means something. A face may be all pink, and pink is your 70 IRE range,” he says. “It’s like having a spot meter on every pixel.” Mulligan notes that the most complicated aspect of using the Red comes in postproduction, when its proprietary Redcode files are transposed to another format. “The minute you change color space, whatever your look was on set is totally negated, and you end up starting over,” says the cinematographer, who did the final color correction at Numb Robot in Burbank, Calif. “Currently, the Red look and metadata live in this world of Red-only standards. They need more partners with color-correction suites and more standardization. You need to be able to take that metadata and apply it all the way through the color-correction.” The key, he concludes, is “knowing the tool you’re working with and planning ahead.” Obselidia was screened on HDCam at the festival. — Patricia Thomson The Oath Cinematographers: Laura Poitras and Kirsten Johnson Director: Laura Poitras This year’s cinematography award in the U.S. Documentary Competition went to The Oath, a film with two stories, two styles and two cinematographers. Co-shot by director Laura Poitras and Kirsten Johnson, the film interweaves the sagas of Abu Jandal and Salim Hamdam, brothers-in-law who were associated with Al Qaeda in the late 1990s. The bodyguard and driver for Osama bin Laden, respectively, the men subsequently took divergent paths. Abu Jandal (the name is an alias), once an Al Qaeda recruiter, became a cab driver in Yemen after renouncing terrorism, while Hamdam wound up in isolation at Guantánamo

Director/ co-cinematographer Laura Poitras stays close to Yemeni cab driver Abu Jandal in The Oath, which brought Poitras and co-cinematographer Kirsten Johnson one of the festival’s cinematography awards.

April 2010

American Cinematographer

The Oath frame grab courtesy of Praxis Films. Filmmaker photo courtesy of Sundance Film Festival.

American Cinematographer - April 2010

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