American Cinematographer - May 2009 - 74

Post Focus able with the way the HVX200 fit into our existing post workflow; we edit in Apple Final Cut Pro and do our effects using primarily Adobe Photoshop and After Effects. We were lucky to have an extraordinarily resourceful production designer, Mel Horan, who took the minuscule resources we had for the art department, applied his encyclopedic knowledge of both 1930s style and Japanese art and culture, and created sets that included the offices of U.S. Naval Intelligence, a Tokyo geisha bar, and a cigar-store hideout in Washington. Once we reached the post phase, we began to do what we hope are invisible fixes, including painting out booms that dipped into frame and eliminating anachronistic details such as lightswitches. We also digitally repainted doors and altered windows, added foliage to some exteriors, and erased a fly that had landed on an actor’s lip during a shot. Matte paintings we created for exteriors included a jewelry store at night, a listening post in the South Pacific, the exterior of the Japanese Embassy, the front gate of the Washington Zoo, and the apartment building where the Japanese officer lives and keeps his code machine. And because this is a movie about cryptography, we hid ciphers and clues in some matte paintings. During post, we used the HVX200 constantly, shooting elements such as flags, clouds, storefronts, trees, and even our cat, who makes a cameo appearance as an alley cat. Two very generous artists helped us with our visual effects: Matte painter Mark Sullivan created the exterior of the Office of Naval Intelligence, and visual-effects supervisor Ted Rae gave us advice all along the way. Alec, the co-director and cine- Thief Eddie Doyle (Donal ThomsCappello) breaks into a jewelrystore safe in The Red Machine. Crafting a Stylized Caper by Stephanie Argy In the years leading up to World War II, cryptographers devised increasingly difficult-to-crack codes for secret military and government messages. Eventually, they created machines that could produce codes almost impossible for humans to decipher. In accounts of the era, there are rumors of dangerous and illegal “black-bag” missions, in which military operatives would secretly sneak peeks at other countries’ machines to figure out exactly how they worked. The adventure film The Red Machine imagines one of those missions: the breaching of Japan’s first code machine by a U.S. Navy spy (Lee Perkins) and a rambunctious professional thief (Donal Thoms-Cappello), who is forced to help the spy break into a Japanese officer’s apartment in Washington, D.C. I co-directed The Red Machine with Alec Boehm, who was also the cinematographer. Though we had cowritten and co-directed several shorts and collaborated on others’ projects, this was our first feature as co-directors. In hindsight, making The Red Machine was almost as impossible as our heroes’ mission — on a very low budget, we had to depict Washington in 1935 and, through flashbacks, Tokyo in 1928; and we had 32 actors in period costumes, 36 separate locations and a 27-day shoot. Our goal was to create something stylized not only in the narrative and the performances, but also in the visuals and the audio. We realized from the beginning that postproduction was going to be very important, and many of the decisions we made about methods and equipment were informed by the workflow we had in mind. For example, we knew we would need to shoot extra elements all through post to help us do visual effects and matte paintings, so we decided early on that we should buy the production camera; that way, we could avoid paying for a rental every time we had to shoot another pickup. After testing several cameras, we settled on a Panasonic AG-HVX200, largely because it gave us the look we wanted: a period feel reminiscent of movies that were made in the 1970s but set in the 1930s, such as Hard Times or The Sting. We were also very comfort- 74 May 2009 The Red Machine photos by Kameran Kashani, courtesy of the filmmakers.

American Cinematographer - May 2009

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