American Cinematographer - May 2008 - (Page 22)

Right: In one murder tableau, the victim lies next to a giant pantograph, a dual-pen system used for making copies. Below: Aubray and his partner (Scott Speedman) search an abandoned funhouse in Coney Island. “I decided to go all the way and flood the space with screaming daylight,” says Murphy. simply and photographed with 21mm and 50mm spherical Primos and 40mm, 50mm and 100mm anamorphic Primos. For the exterior, Murphy shot a stand-in on a Manhattan street corner (35th Street and 9th Avenue) at night from different angles, swapping cameras equipped with spherical and anamorphic Primos. “I used a small HMI Sun Gun bounced off a card as an eyelight and nothing else,” he notes. “I pushed [Kodak Vision2 500T] 5218 1 stop in the anamorphic camera, which I set at T3.2, and left the Super 35 camera unpushed and shot at T2.” Murphy anticipated that ana- morphic lenses would provide a richer negative and greater color intensity, but what surprised him was the extent to which “they made everyone look so much better! It never occurred to me, but obviously, they’re longer lenses, so there is less feeling of perspective. Everyone looked much more attractive. It was really surprising.” Ninth Avenue looked better as well: “In the backgrounds, there were a few footcandles of light on the street, but we were seeing everything, and anamorphic was much more interesting. The flatness and slight distortion created by the anamorphic elements created a differ- ent New York than the one seen on all the New York police shows. When they saw the test, everyone in the theater went, ‘Wow!’ “Also,” he notes, “one of the ideas in the film is that memory is selective, and the extreme nature of the focus, the separation of the characters from their backgrounds, plays into the depiction of a protagonist who is confronting a traumatic incident in his past.” Miller and co-writer Tom Phelan conceived of Anamorph as a Hollywood thriller fused with 1970s French policiers. Inspired by the “gunmetal-cool world” of films such as Army of Shadows and Dirty Money, the palette the filmmakers created for Anamorph was mostly shades of blue and violet offset by earth tones. “We used blue gels, mostly 1⁄2 and Full CTB, and we also mixed HMIs and tungsten lights,” says Murphy. “I sometimes used Kino Flos with 5200°K bulbs to get a strong blue and then mixed it with warmer lights.” This mix can be seen in the antique shop Aubray frequents. “The outside is full daylight, and the inside is lit with HMIs, Kino Flos gelled with 1⁄2 CTO, and some tungsten lights, so the outside is around 5000ºK, the interior around 3800ºK, and some of the interior down below 2800ºK. The sources are mixed together in such a way that you get a sense of warm and cool light falling on the same person.” ¢ 22 May 2008

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - May 2008

American Cinematographer - May 2008 Contents Editor’s Note Global Village: The Fall Short Takes: ASC Laszlo Kovacs Short Takes: Heritage Award Winners Production Slate: Anamorph Production Slate: Fugitive Pieces Heavy-Metal Hero A Need for Speed Kink and the City Beautiful Minds A Hollywood Homecoming Post Focus: Paramount Restores The Godfather Filmmakers’ Forum: Levie Isaacks, ASC Teaches Marines to Shoot Movies New Products & Services International Marketplace Classified Ads Ad Index Clubhouse News ASC Close-Up: Antonio Calvache

American Cinematographer - May 2008

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