American Cinematographer - May 2013 - 22

Top and middle: Dod Mantle used a mix of cameras during a preshoot with McAvoy in a
Citroën 2CV in France. The top frame was shot with his Canon DSLR. The middle frame was shot with
Indiecam’s IndiePOV camera. Bottom: The production’s Indiecam workflow.

Indiecam’s 1080p IndiePOV camera
came into the mix because my initial idea
for achieving the slipping-into-trance effect
was to strap two Indiecams together and
create a morph between the two parallel
images. (I suspect this was an idea I had
started developing for a 3-D film that never
materialized. The idea lingered, waiting to
rear its head at an appropriate moment.)
But late in prep, Danny clarified that he did
not want to overstate the slipping-intotrance moment, and he wanted to make
graphically clear the slipping-out-of-trance
22

May 2013

moment. (We decided to use lens flares for
the latter.) So the idea of using the dualIndiecam rig faded, but I was still keen to
find a use for them.
Danny always likes a “preshoot,”
and I always endeavor (at big risk) to add to
what is usually too short a prep time by
extending my technical explorations into the
preshoot. This has sometimes given us
frightening moments, as we are so often on
the edge of breaking camera technology
(and happily so). On all our films, we’ve had
to troubleshoot a little into the shooting
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period, and Danny embraces this as part of
our process.
Our preshoot on Trance was a car
sequence we shot with James in a little 2CV
in the French countryside. We had to travel
light and keep the filming down low, so I
had to find some kind of solution that I
hoped could then develop as part of the
palette of the film. I brought along the
Indiecam, and we clamped it to the car
window, adding double-layer reflective
surfaces between James and the Indiecam
in-camera. From that point on, throughout
the shoot, the Indiecams were always near
at hand for me to use to appropriate effect;
this was often related to a degree of framing or particularly intense close work.
I used three or four Indiecams as in
situ placed cameras, always in situations
where I knew exactly what the shot was
and where the focus had to be. I could
often very easily camouflage them in shot
while working with other formats simultaneously, and to achieve this I worked incredibly tightly with my key grip, Rupert LloydParry; my digital-imaging technician, Dan
Carling; and my ever-supportive gaffer,
Thomas Nievelt. I used only Indiecam’s Cmount lenses with their cameras, mainly the
8mm, 12mm, 16mm and 25mm, because
the joy for me was keeping it small. But
with C-mounts, you really have to select the
right focal lengths, fully comprehend their
restricted capabilities and then work
creatively within those limitations. (Ed.
Note: Dod Mantle captured in Indiecam’s
12-bit raw format to SSDs via Blackmagic
Design’s HyperDeck Shuttle. See diagram at
left.)
I shot the main body of Trance with
the Arri Alexa Plus and Alexa M, capturing
in ArriRaw to Codex recorders. In fact, Arri
sent us the very first prototype of the M,
and I would say that it and the Indiecam
were equally important on this film. We
used the M a bit in the 2CV car scene, but
it truly came to the fore in the film’s final car
sequence, where Simon, Elizabeth (Rosario
Dawson) and Franck (Vincent Cassel) drive
to the waterfront at night in the rain. The
scene involved 6-8 pages of dialogue, and
we shot it all onstage at 3 Mills Studios. We
elevated the car and removed its bottom
half, surrounded it with colored LEDs
programmed on a chase pattern, and, in

American Cinematographer - May 2013

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