American Cinematographer - April 2012 - 52

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Back to School

Top: The main characters serve time in detention. Bottom: Kahn lines up a shot in the set with camera operator Dan Ming and dolly grip Johnny Segal (center, partially visible behind Kahn).

the audience starts to settle into an expectation of what the film will be, but that expectation is shattered when Taylor is suddenly brutally dispatched by a masked killer. To maximize the scene’s shock value, Joseph wanted the camera to follow Taylor in a single shot as she is thrown out of her second-floor bedroom and lands on the hood of a waiting car, and then pull out to reveal a wider view of the scene. “If we were to break that scene into a series of shots, we’d lose the element of surprise — we’ve seen that sort of staging and editing so many times that it’s become a cliché,” says Kahn. “I wanted to see her fall, land and get bloodied all in one shot. But we’ve even seen all that before, so to add an extra layer to the shot, I
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wanted to spin around above and then pull out to reveal the wide shot of the scene, all in the same move.” The trickiest aspect of this scene was that the exterior was one of the first scenes shot, whereas her dialogue and murder was one of the last scenes on the schedule. To execute Joseph’s vision of Taylor’s fall, we started by shooting the final bird’s-eye angle down on her impact on the hood, using a remote head on a crane. We then rotated the camera before pulling out to reveal the wide of the scene. Also shot during this time were plate elements from Taylor’s window perspective, which tilted down and craned in toward the hood. A second plate element was achieved weeks later on the stage where
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Taylor’s bedroom set was constructed. We placed a greenscreen outside her window, and a makeshift gobo-arm battering-ram rig was attached to the dolly and set to the height of the lens to allow the camera to be dollied through and shatter the window. The final ingredient involved capturing the foreground element of Taylor falling backward out the window and making a landing motion that would allow for a quick morph with the live shot of her mimicking landing on the hood from the bird’s-eye angle. “The great thing about Detention was that we never backed away from doing shots like that, even though we didn’t have much money,” says Kahn. “In fact, I think our approach stemmed from the fact that I was trying to find a cheap way of doing that shot!” Santa Monica High School’s auditorium was dressed to serve as the interior of a movie theater for a scene in which Riley tags along with the object of her obsession, Clapton Davis (Josh Hutcherson), and his date, Ione (Spencer Locke), Riley’s former best friend, to see Cinderhella, a Saw-like horror film that Detention’s killer is copying. Creating a realistic feel for both the interactive lighting on the characters’ faces and the projector’s beam of light in the background was of paramount importance. The location had light beige walls, which I wanted to fall off into as much shadow as possible without losing

American Cinematographer - April 2012

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