American Cinematographer - April 2012 - 26

Top: Skye talks Cisco down from the couple’s patio ledge in a scene shot at magic hour over four days. Bottom: Ferrara (center) studies the scene as the production’s Red One, upgraded with a Mysterium-X sensor, is put into place.

shots, but half of the cinematographer’s job is taking care of the actress. I want to make women beautiful when they’re supposed to be beautiful, and when they’re not supposed to be beautiful, I want to have control over making them look less attractive.” The loft that served as the production’s primary location proved to be just as important to the story as Cisco and Skye. When asked if it was difficult to pull off a feature film with so little real estate, Ferrara replies: “You know what Hitchcock said about shooting in a telephone booth, right? ‘It’s great! There are so many things you can cut to!’” The filmmakers turned to television, iPads and even Skype to offer glimpses of the outside world. “I was directing actors in other countries over the telephone,” Ferrara recalls, referring to a scene in which a Vietnamese delivery boy (Trung N guyen)
26 April 2012

video-chats with his family in Vietnam. “What am I going to do, build a room and cast those people? [N guyen] had a family sitting right there!” At one point, Cisco leaves the loft to walk to a friend’s apartment in another part of the East Village. For the exterior shots, Kelsch relied mostly on ambient streetlight, sometimes using a single N ine-lightMaxiBrute to enhance the exposure. The Red’s ASA was set to 640 or 800, depending on the shot, with the aperture “wide open and hopin’,” says Kelsch. In the loft, Kelsch worked with Ferrara to lay down some concrete visual guidelines. They saw the last day on Earth unfolding over a series of chapters, each with its own look. On set, digital-imaging technician Charlie Anderson created lookup tables to complement the different lighting schemes.
American Cinematographer

“The morning look has light coming in through the windows where Skye is painting,” Kelsch explains. “We were very restricted in terms of placing lights outside; we had no cranes or Muscos to bring up the exposure inside.” Instead, he and gaffer Dan Gartner used 4x4 Kino Flos and an Arri 6K Par to raise the interior exposure, sometimes adding N D.6 or N D1.2 to the windows to match exterior light levels. When Cisco steps onto the patio, a series of nets helped reduce the exposure outside, allowing Kelsch to move from interior to exterior without an iris pull. In the late afternoon, Cisco awakes from a nap in a panic and runs back onto the patio just as the sun sets. Magic hour descends, and after watching a neighbor jump to his death from a nearby fire escape, Cisco contemplates his own suicide. “We shot that scene over four different magic hours, with incredible variations in the day and night sky,” recalls Kelsch. “That sort of light exists at the ideal conditions for maybe 20 minutes.” But Ferrara pushed Kelsch to roll the camera even before the sun started to set. “You wouldn’t believe the mismatched exposures,” Kelsch continues. “In post at Offhollywood, it took us all day [to match the shots] in Scratch with windows and mattes. It was a slow and difficult process, but we shot raw and had a really dedicated colorist, Milan Boncich, so we were able to pull it off.” ➣

American Cinematographer - April 2012

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - April 2012