American Cinematographer - August 2008 - (Page 20) 20 August 2008 Frozen River photos by Jory Sutton, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics. says Orr. “Different strains of marijuana would be tested under different kinds of bulbs, and I tried to use a certain amount of color contrast to make things interesting; I’d use warm tungsten next to coolwhite fluorescents and some deep amber bulbs. I also worked with [production designer] Chris Spellman to use different kinds of bare bulbs along the periphery of the set. I had to light the entire space in a fairly broad way to cover the action sequences; we could shoot almost 360 degrees at any time.” Orr shot the picture on two Kodak Vision2 stocks, 100T 5212 for day exteriors and 500T 5218 for everything else. For the 1930s sequence, “we decided to shoot color stock and desaturate it in the digital intermediate [DI]. I tested blackand-white stock, and while it looks amazing, the contrast is much higher, and it’s extraordinarily grainy. We wanted a cleaner look; Dr. Strangelove was our template in terms of a crisp, clean blackand-white.” Throughout the production, Deluxe handled processing and Modern VideoFilm provided standard-definition dailies. The DI was carried out at Technicolor’s facility on the Sony lot with colorist Mike Underwood, who also worked with Orr on Green’s film Undertow (AC Oct. ’04). Aside from the black-and-white sequence, Orr says, the DI “was fairly straightforward. We wanted the color to be reasonably naturalistic, and at times we gave it a warmer, golden tone, which David and I have done in several movies. “It certainly affects the way I expose when I know I’m going to do a DI,” he notes. “I know I don’t have to build in as much overexposure, if any. If the negative’s too thick, it actually seems to create a bit of noise, particularly in day exteriors.” (The film will be printed on Kodak Vision 2383.) Still high from the experience of making Pineapple Express and looking forward to future collaborations with Orr, Green muses, “Tim is a working partner that I look to and trust. I feel like we’ve grown up together, and in many ways, we have. We never lose the enthusiasm for what we do.” Ray (Melissa Leo) squares off against Trooper Finnerty (Michael O’Keefe) in a scene from Frozen River. A Dangerous Business by Jean Oppenheimer It was below zero before factoring in the wind chill. The cold was so intense that ice formed on the backs of the bulbs burning in the Maxi-Brutes. The monitor wouldn’t work for the first two weeks; some crewmembers had icicles dangling from their beards and mustaches; and on the most brutal days, the morning news warned listeners not to venture outdoors. “We just kept working,” reports cinematographer Reed Dawson Morano matter-of-factly. Only once did the camera refuse to cooperate: a night exterior on a snow-and-ice-covered field. Morano recalls, “Kate Larose and Kristian Maynard, my camera assistants that night, took the camera to a house where they massaged it until it started working again. Miraculously, we only lost a few hours.” Frozen River, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, tells the story of Ray Eddy (Melissa Leo), a struggling mother who, in desperation, turns to smuggling illegal immigrants across the Canadian border into the United States. Her partner in the venture is Lila (Misty Upham), a sullen Native American who lives on the nearby Mohawk Indian Reservation. When she first read the script, Morano (Off the Grid: Life on the Mesa) envisaged shooting Super 16mm, but the producers and director had already decided to shoot high-definition (HD) video. “I love the [Panasonic] VariCam and the [Sony] CineAlta, and in the end, I chose the VariCam AJ-HDC27H because of its slightly lower rental cost,” says the cinematographer. “Although it’s 720p, not 1080i, I knew it would yield great results.” She had a full set of Zeiss DigiPrimes and a 17112mm DigiZoom. “I wanted to stay on longer primes as much as possible for the intimate scenes to get shallow depth-of-field and a more filmic image.” Morano saw the story as a mix of intimate character moments and wide, desolate landscapes. For the latter, she favored the 10mm lens. “Between using a lens that wide and all the light bouncing around off the snow, we were able to get some really nice deep-focus shots.” Frozen River was shot in Plattsburgh, N.Y., near the Canadian border, with Lake Champlain standing in for the St. Lawrence River, the immigrants’ crossing point. The shooting schedule, which ran from early March to early April, was timed to take advantage of
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