American Cinematographer - June 2017 - 30

Top: Bo finds himself an unwilling accomplice to the illicit affairs of drug dealer Angelo (Dulé
Hill, center). Above: The street magician is determined to change his life for the better after he
meets Holly (Seychelle Gabriel).

came up with a great solution - using pipe
and drapes to separate the large warehouse
space that we had. Then I suggested that
we use white drapes so that I could light
with bare Kino tubes - gelled with Steel
Blue - on the ground, so the drapes would
end up being blue on camera.
"We hazed up the room and used
Source Fours gelled with Steel Blue, with
spinners on [the lights]," the cinematographer continues. "In the spinners, we put
different patterned gobos spinning in
opposite directions to make a more abstract
pattern." When a production snafu led to
Wu being without the gobos on a day
when he needed them, gaffer Benji Dell
30

June 2017

rigged a makeshift gobo with a few pieces
of black wrap, "MacGyver-style," as Wu
puts it. "The funny part is that for those
shots, I had an operator on each Source
Four standing on a ladder physically
panning the lamp around the room. Benji
was on the radio calling out when to hit the
lens and where to pan the light - and the
haze hid it all!"
Wu shot the movie anamorphically
with Arri's Alexa XT Plus camera. "J.D.
knew from the start that he wanted to
shoot anamorphic, and I like how you can
use wider lenses with a shallower depth of
field," the cinematographer says. "I like the
compression of space and thought it would
American Cinematographer

work well for Sleight. I wanted to maximize
our resolution, so the 4:3 sensor was the
obvious choice.
"We shot ProRes 4:4:4:4 at 3.2K on
SxS cards," Wu continues. "I think raw
recording is overkill for indie movies where
you're fighting for budget. Shooting raw
means larger hard drives, more processing
time, and in turn more labor hours. ProRes
4:4:4:4 is a beefy-enough codec that I trust
to be able to pull around in post without
degradation."
In terms of lenses, Wu relied on
Kowa Prominar anamorphics. "We had a
40, 50, 75 and 100mm," Wu says. "Our
workhorses were the 50 and the 75; the 40
is pretty wonky with the lens distortion, and
the 100 makes faces too squished, but I
really like the look of the Kowas otherwise.
I think for the price, you can't get any other
anamorphic lenses that are better. We
could not have shot this movie without the
generosity of A.J. Crankshaw at The
Camera Division [formerly known as The
Camera House]."
Wu further notes that the production employed a Red Epic Dragon paired
with Arri/Zeiss Master Primes and Sony's
a7S with EF telephoto zoom lenses "for
some of the b-roll in the movie. We went
out after principal photography to grab L.A.
landscapes. The low light of the Sony a7S
was great for the nighttime b-roll."
The cinematographer eschewed the
standard Log C-to-Rec 709 LUT. "I had
heard about the VisionColor Impulz filmemulation LUT," Wu remembers. "I shot a
quick over-under test a day or two out from

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - June 2017