American Cinematographer - April 2010 - 88

Filmmakers’ Forum
I
Strengthening Crucial Ties With Collaborators Interview by Stephanie Argy The Visual Effects Society recently presented its first Production Summit, an event designed to give people from all areas of the motion-picture industry the opportunity to interact and discuss the problems that challenge all the crafts. As a follow-up to that event, AC asked ASC President Michael Goi to sit down with VES Chairman Jeffrey Okun (The Day the Earth Stood Still, Blood Diamond, The Last Samurai) to discuss some of their organizations’ shared concerns. What follows are excerpts from their conversation. Jeffrey Okun: The point of the Production Summit was to start conversations, to get all the verticals within the entertainment business in the same room and say, ‘Where are we going? What’s it going to look like? And how are we going to get there as a cohesive whole?’ We’re collaborating to tell a story. We can make it so much more fun and so much more artistically satisfying by learning how to work with each other. Michael Goi, ASC: Over the last few years, cinematographers have certainly become more involved in the postproduction end than we were previously, back in the days when we just did color timing straight to print and then tweaked the video transfer. I find myself being involved much more heavily on the preproduction end as well. So it is necessary to have a better understanding of what each of the crafts does. It’s a popular concept among cinematographers to think of the cinematographer as the ‘author of the image,’ but when you look back through the history of the industry, you see that the greatest images have always come through a spirit of collaboration. If you look at a great shot and say the cinematographer was the author of the image, where was the costume designer? Where was the makeup person? Where was the production designer? All those elements helped to create that great shot. That’s what we need to recognize: that personal stamp is the personal stamp of everybody working toward the same goal. Okun: It should be that way, but instead it’s fractionating, and I lay the blame squarely on how visual effects are perceived. I trace all our problems back to 1978, when Star Wars came out on VHS, and it had the very first this-is-how-we-did-it [featurette] that anyone paid attention to. Let’s say you were 10 years old in 1978. You’re 42 today, and you’ve been raised on a diet of these added-value things that are not quite true. And we visual-effects people are the ones who propagated the mistruths because we were so excited to be invited to share a table with the above-the-line group. We said, ‘These computers are awesome, and my guy hasn’t been home in
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“We’ve sold the technology, not the art.”

three days but he’s happy as a clam— we just get him pizzas and Diet Cokes.’ It’s not the computer; it’s the artist. If I sit there with the elements, you’re going to get a piece of crap, but if [compositor] Ken Stranahan sits there with the same elements, you’re going to get a piece of artwork. We’ve sold the technology, not the art, and now we’re all shocked that people say, ‘Well, my son has a Mac. He can do that.’ Goi: The drive of a lot of the prosumer market is to convince people that anybody can make movies, and you can do it all yourself. You can shoot it, direct it, write it, edit it, do the visual effects and do all the sound work. That is damaging to the concept that collaboration produces great results. There has to be a change, and it has to start with the young people, because they’re the ones who adopt all these tools the fastest and figure out new ways to use them. They have to learn how to recognize that artistic collaboration is the key to getting what they want. I’ve always prided myself on hiring crew people who know how to do their jobs better than I know how to do their jobs. I never want to do a second-rate job; I’d rather hire the person who does a first-rate job and then capitalize on his or her experience and knowledge. Okun: I’ve found that by sacrificing my own ego, I get more accolades. I present the elements and a temp version of a shot to my team and tell them the intention of the shot, and I give them the bottom line that they have to move up to for it to be acceptable. Then I say, ‘If you have a better idea, I’d love to hear it or see it.’ And nine times out of 10, I go back to the director and say, ‘Here’s what you asked for, and here’s what the team came up with. It’s a change of a concept, but what do you think?’ The director doesn’t say, ‘You’re fired.’ He says, ‘Great. Get this guy more work down the road. We need more of those people.’ So it only helps. Goi: I recently did a series of Webisodes for Breyers for which we inserted an actress into footage from Gone With the Wind and King Kong, so we had to duplicate exactly those shots’ lighting style, in addition to the dress and makeup. Working with the visual-effects team was a tremendous amount of fun, because I filled in the holes in their education as far as what it took to get those images, and they filled in holes in my knowledge about what they could do with it. So it was a really great collaboration. Okun: It’s great when that happens. There’s nothing more exhilarating and satisfying. Goi: I was speaking at a conference in Florida recently, and a young guy stood up and said, ‘Don’t you think your job is obsolete?’ I said, ‘What do you mean by that?’ He said, ‘Well, anybody who picks up a digital camera today is a cinematographer.’ I responded,

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American Cinematographer - April 2010

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