American Cinematographer - August 2008 - (Page 24) Right: Venturing onto the frozen St. Lawrence River, Ray and Lila transport the immigrants across the border. During filming, Lake Champlain stood in for the river in some scenes. Below: Cinematographer Reed Morano settles in for a ride with the Panasonic VariCam. There were at least two company moves on most days, and Morano realized early on that the only way to make the schedule was to light 360 degrees. “My crew was a welloiled machine,” she notes. “They knew that whenever we went to a location, we had to light 360 and do it quickly. Time was our biggest enemy.” One of the toughest scenes in this regard was a night scene in which Ray and Lila pick up two illegal immi- grants outside a strip club owned by the ruthless Jacques (Mark Boone Junior). When Jacques forks over only half the money he owes them, Ray pulls a gun on him. “I decided we first needed to get a master of the whole scene, then go in closer and follow each character,” says Morano. “We got a high-angle wide shot and then jumped in for coverage. The assistant, sound guy and boom guy trailed right behind me, a whole caravan of people trying not to get in the way of the action! “There were some practical lights on the roof of the strip club, and I think we rigged an additional MolePar there,” she continues. “We also put one of the Maxis in the Condor off to the side in a parking lot; we gelled it with Lee 232 to give it a sodium-vapor-streetlight look.” At their first meeting, director Courtney Hunt told Morano she wanted Frozen River to have an almost documentary style, so the cinematographer mainly shot handheld. “It was very much a run-and-gun shoot,” says Morano. “We’d rehearse a scene maybe once. On a longer lens, you have to anticipate where the actors are going to go, and I was really lucky because all the performers were pretty consistent with what they did from take to take.” She points to a scene in which Ray and her eldest son, T.J. (Charlie McDermott), argue outside their trailer. The camera is tight on their faces. “We were very close to wide open in many scenes, which is a big pain when pulling focus on a long lens, especially when you’re handheld. A lot of the conversational scenes were like that. I kind of improvised the camerawork; I didn’t maintain the same distance between them.” A happy accident occurred on the night the production was scheduled to film Ray running through the woods to escape arrest. The scene was scheduled for the third week of the shoot, when the temperature was starting to rise. Morano recalls, “The snow was melting that day, and this natural fog just started coming off the snow. We put a MolePar way in the back of the forest behind Ray to backlight her, and she just ran past the camera. It was a really nice effect.” Morano credits her crew with doing an outstanding job of maintaining the equipment in frigid conditions, and she is equally appreciative of the teams at Liman Video Rental (LVR) and Eastern Effects, two rental houses she describes as “extraordinarily generous. Jesse Chertoff and the rest of the gang at LVR gave us a great deal on the camera package, and Christine Fazio at Eastern Effects did the same with the lighting. They really added to the production value of the film.” Morano supervised the colorcorrection of Frozen River at OffHollywood Digital in New York. “Colorist Yohance Brown did an amazing job matching the scenes,” she enthuses. “Because we had to accommodate the actors’ schedules, a single scene could span several days of shooting. We had to match bright, sunny days to snowy, overcast days. Yohance used Scratch to grade in 4K and dropped in the effects shots [primarily CG snow]. I’m very happy with the way the color-correction turned out.” When Sony Pictures Classics bought the film, it financed a transfer to 35mm, which was handled at Alpha Cine Lab in Seattle. The digital files were recorded to film via an Arrilaser, and color timer Bill Scott did the answerprint timing. (Morano was not able to supervise that work because of the project’s limited budget.) Release prints were made on Kodak Vision 2383. I 24 August 2008
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