American Cinematographer - July 2016 - 12

Short Takes

Beast Hunters
By Debra Kaufman

When Michael Helenek moved to Los Angeles five years ago,
he posted fliers at film schools, offering to work as a cinematographer on graduate-student projects. Christiano Dias, who was attending New York Film Academy, gave him a call, and the two worked
together on Dias' first graduate film, King Eternal. So it was a natural
next step for Helenek to shoot Dias' thesis, Monster in a House,
about a young girl named Miah (Kitana Turnbull) who embarks on a
journey through her home to track down the monster that appears
when her parents fight.
Dias had two specific visual ideas for the project: The audience
would never see the monster, and the movie would at least appear
to comprise one continuous shot. "My jaw dropped," recalls
Helenek. "But then I thought, 'He's the director and my job is to
make this work for him.' It became an amazing challenge." Dias'
rationale was that a seemingly continuous shot would support the
idea that Miah can't run away from the monster and the family can't
run away from their problems - so why should the audience be able
to cut away from a shot? "Chris is a really talented storyteller, and
very imaginative, which is exciting for me," says Helenek. "His ideas
are fantastical, which lets me experiment a bit."
Setting out to attempt one continuous shot required meticulous preproduction planning, beginning with the location; the filmmakers ultimately found the ideal two-story house in Chino Hills, east
of Los Angeles. "The doors were definitely wide enough for the
Steadicam operator, [Orlando Duguay]," Helenek notes, "and there
12

July 2016

was enough space for the actress and the operator following her to
run." Once they had the location, Helenek and Dias blocked camera
and actors into the storyboarding that was already underway. "We
had every single composition storyboarded," says Helenek.
Early on, he sent the storyboards to Duguay, who would use
the Red Epic Mysterium-X camera package from Dias' school. "I was
happy to have a high-quality motion-picture camera with a substantial dynamic range that could capture the range of light and dark
that we put in front of the lens," says Helenek, who notes that they
shot in 4K to RedMag SSD cards at a 5:1 compression ratio.
When determining the right lens for the project, "weight
was a consideration," Helenek says. "A very large zoom lens would
have been too taxing for the operator." In the end, he picked an
Angenieux Optimo DP 16-42mm (T2.8). "The focal range seemed
to be most appropriate, and it ended up working well," he notes.
To shoot Monster in a House in real time, Helenek knew
lighting would be the chief challenge. "We needed to light and rig
for every single storyboarded shot, throughout the house, ahead of
time," he explains. The production had the location for five days,
but, the cinematographer adds, "there was so much real estate [to
light] that we needed three full days for rigging and electrical."
Because the camera would cover 360 degrees, Helenek
planned to rig almost all the lighting on the ceiling. Neither Eddie
Rubio nor the late James "Slim Jim" Ballard - who served as key
grips on the production - had yet been hired when the tech scout
took place, so Helenek created architectural drawings with length
and width dimensions for every room. "That enabled us to order the
proper speed rail and wall spreaders to support the overhead light-

American Cinematographer

Unit photography by Sam Zhang, courtesy of the filmmakers.

Miah (Kitana Turnbull) embarks on a journey through her home to track down a monster fueled by her parents' arguments in the short film
Monster in a House.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - July 2016