American Cinematographer - April 2012 - 56

◗

Back to School

Top: In a flashback scene, young Billy Nolan suffers his father’s disapproval. Bottom: One of the movie’s more fantastic sequences shows Billy discovering a smoldering meteorite in a mistfilled forest.

I selected angles toward one hero-angle side of the field. Unfortunately, the existing mercury-vapor stadium lighting at the location was in very short supply. Also, I decided to selectively turn off stadium lights behind camera to avoid multiple camera shadows. In order to raise the ambient level on the field, I again brought in a 20'x20' Flyswatter Condor toplight and bounced two 18K HMIs gelled with ½ Plus Green into it. Edgelighting implied by the background stadium lights was enhanced by ½ Plus Greengelled Arri M18 HMIs mounted to Max Menace arms placed 20' from the foreground talent in shot. Additional in-shot practicals and some still-photo flashes from the bleachers added outof-focus interest to the sparsely populated stands. Finally, 12'x20' pushes of two 250-diffused 4K HMIs provided the half-light key. Detention takes a radical turn toward the surreal about halfway through the film, when school bully Billy Nolan (Parker Bagley) reveals an outlandish story from his past (told in a flashback). It was this sequence that gave me the most trouble when I read the script, and it’s actually the one I’m proudest of now. Kahn observes, “That sequence is so ‘out there’ that I made sure Billy [ended with], ‘And that’s exactly how I remember it!’ to cast doubt on the validity of his memory. We also made the sequence as dreamlike as possible without going over56 April 2012 American Cinematographer

board. It’s a forest exterior, and we gave it a quasi-Tim Burton quality with heavy fog on the ground, over-designed art direction, and a sort of studio-lit feel.” The sequence starts with a younger Billy getting yelled at by his father and then taking his dog for a walk in the dark forest. We built the forest set in a large warehouse in Canoga Park, Calif. Production designer Marcelle Gravel rented dozens of trees and bushes and built up an uneven burlap ground that she covered in dirt, twigs and leaves. I asked key grip Eric Budlong to black out two of the studio walls with 20'x60' and 20'x30' solids to make the background beyond the trees fall off into blackness. Gaffer Russell Griffith achieved overhead “moonlight” by bouncing Arri T12s gelled with Full CTB and ½ Plus Green into a 20'x30' UltraBounce hung from the ceiling. A continuous strip of mixed-tube (half daylight, half tungsten) 4' 4-bank Kino Flos uplit the black Duvatyn backdrops and created a subtle horizon-line glow beyond the trees. Finally, Source Four Lekos and 2K BJs gelled with 1⁄2 CTB were placed sporadically and aimed directly at camera to provide backlight glows and shafts through the trees. With this theatrical lighting in place, on-set CO2 was used to fog the floor, and a copious amount of atmospheric haze added depth to the small set. The final element in the scene is an alien meteorite that crashes through the

American Cinematographer - April 2012

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