American Cinematographer - July 2016 - 16

Top, from left:
Second AC David
Mori, Bottoms,
Steadicam
operator Orlando
Duguay,
Helenek, director
Christiano Dias,
art director
Becky Hughes
and Turnbull
prepare to
rehearse the
kitchen-jungle
scene. Bottom:
Turnbull stands
beneath the
overhead soft
box rigged inside
the garage.

large overhead soft box to light the entire
space. "This time, however, the light level
needed to fluctuate, so instead of Kinos, we
opted for a tungsten book light," he says.
Gaffer Chris Ford and his team rigged four
2K open-face nook lights - fitted with
Waterfront Green gels and routed into a
12K dimmer to generate a pulsing effect -
off the center beam of the garage, and
aimed them straight into the white ceiling.
Turnbull would then pass under an 8'x12'
Light Grid frame, and Helenek further
tweaked the lighting by adding "a
makeshift control grid out of strips of
Duvetyne in the direction Miah walked to
increase contrast on her face," he says.
On the fourth day, after lights had
been rigged, the team put in significant
hours running blocking for the actors and
the Steadicam - and that's when they
discovered that doing a single continuous
shot wasn't going to work. "We realized we
16

July 2016

had to transition from high mode to low
mode to get the camera angles we
needed," says Helenek, who notes that
they ended up with five cuts. "I had already
thought about cut points, just to be wellprepared. I had prepped Chris for the possibility that we might need to do that, and in
the end he was fine with it. He knew if we
hid the cuts well, they wouldn't be apparent
to the ordinary viewer."
One of Helenek's favorite images on
the project is when Miah hides under a
table. "Since she stops momentarily, it was
really the only chance we had to bring the
camera up close to her face," he says. "We
were on the 42mm end of the lens, fairly
close to our minimum 2-foot focus." The
cinematographer thus had the chance to
create more "intimate" lighting, placing a
5,500K Mini-Flo under the lip of the table,
just above her head, and covering it with
layers of bleached muslin. "We expanded
American Cinematographer

the excess muslin past the light, so it doubled
as a bounce when Miah shone her flashlight
up into the bottom of the table," he says.
Ford also rigged an MR16 with Pale Yellow
gel to the back end of the table, in order to
backlight Turnbull's hair. A yellow-gelled 1K
tungsten unit was aimed through the
window behind the table to light the background chair, and to provide motivation for
the light of the MR16. "The final lighting
element was the LED flashlight that grazes
Miah's cheek," the cinematographer says.
Helenek recalls that colorist Eric
Schrecongost - who performed the grade
with Blackmagic Design's DaVinci Resolve 11
- asked Dias and the cinematographer if
they wanted him to dial out the green light
of the flashlight, "but we opted to keep the
green in," Helenek says. The cinematographer further reports that color correction on
Monster in a House was fairly simple. He
notes that Schrecongost was able to darken
the garage and increase the saturation of the
turquoise gels, "but we didn't have any
major color corrections. We played with the
contrast a bit and Chris wanted to add some
glow to the highlights, but most of the exposure choices were native to the original
footage."
Monster in a House has played at
more than 20 festivals, garnering honors
including the Best Cinematography award at
the 2015 Los Angeles Independent Film
Festival.
To watch Monster in a House, visit
www.monsterinahouse.com.
●

http://www.monsterinahouse.com

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