American Cinematographer - June 2010 - 29

rated the camera at 500 ASA and used an 85 filter. To be honest, in tests, I couldn’t see any difference between using an 85 and resetting the camera to 5,600°K.” The onboard monitor Battersby used for pulling focus was an Astro, which Ruhe also used extensively. “Probably the most useful thing was the waveform display on the Astro — I used it more than my light meter,” says Ruhe. Supplementing this was a 17" monitor that showed live images in HD, though playback was only available as a composite picture. Ruhe usually operated the F35 himself, and single-camera setups were the norm. “We shot most of the movie on dollies or legs,” he says. “There’s a riot scene and a shootout that we did handheld, but with Harry, the camera only really starts to move when he does. At the beginning, it’s very static, and we tried to find frames within the frame so he appears locked in. We wanted a claustrophobic feel for those early scenes.” Brown finally discovers exactly how his friend died when he sees footage of the killing that one of the gang members captured on his cell phone. These images

echo the movie’s opening sequence, in which two hooligans on a motorcycle film their shooting of a young mother and are then hit by a truck. For these shots, Ruhe needed to find an appropriately low-resolution video camera that would still work on the big screen. “We tested a couple of cameras, including the SI-2K [Mini], but the quality was too good,” he says. “We also tested real mobile phones, but in the end we used a Sony DCR-PC2E, a slightly older Mini DV camera. They were provided by Take 2, who supplied all of our camera gear. We gave a camera to the two guys on the bike and let them ride around to give the footage an authentic feel. That scene and the killing of Harry’s friend were a mix of actors operating shots and second-unit work [directed by Ben and Joe Dempsey].” Harry Brown’s desaturated color palette was achieved mainly in the digital grade, carried out on a Baselight system at Framestore in London. “We desaturated the image a bit and worked on the contrast levels — with HD, it’s tricky to keep detail in the blacks at low light levels, and we had tons of those,” says Ruhe. He and Barber

also utilized sharpening tools. “It wasn’t really needed on long-lens shots, but on wider shots,” notes Ruhe. “For example, there’s a wide shot of Harry sitting beside his wife in the hospital, and it was nice to add a bit of sharpness to his face so your eye was drawn to him.”

TECHNICAL SPECS
2.40:1 Digital Capture Sony F35, DCR-PC2E Arri and Angenieux lenses Digital Intermediate Printed on Fuji Eterna-CP 3513DI

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ERRATUM In our coverage of Lebanon (April ’10, p. 20), colorist Andreas Froehlich was incorrectly identified as an employee of Geyer Cologne. He is the manager/senior colorist at Head Quarter GmbH, also in Cologne.

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American Cinematographer - June 2010

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - June 2010