American Cinematographer - September 2008 - (Page 46) A Frightening Fable Top: A Japanese man (Yusuke Iseya) is the first to go blind. Middle: Using a rig built by Brazilian key grip “Cezhina” Coelho, Charlone (sitting at camera) and Asunçao prepare to film the Japanese man and his wife in a cab on their way to the doctor’s office. At right is assistant director Tomas Portella. Below: The man and his wife (Yoshino Kimura) confer in the taxi. lenses, and when her sight suddenly goes, the camera zooms in until the white spot fills the frame. “We had a 1½-meter-square section of the ceiling built, and as I was zooming into her glasses, a grip was standing above me and bringing that piece down toward her face,” recalls Charlone. “We improvised that on the day of shooting.” Almost half of Blindness takes place at the asylum where the blind are quarantined. These scenes were shot at an abandoned prison in Guelph, Ontario, and Charlone says he was impressed by the location. “In Brazil, we have overcrowded prisons, and inmates have to take shifts to sleep, but this was definitely a ‘First World’ prison — individual cells that featured a sink and an aluminum toilet,” he notes, adding wryly, “It was beautiful.” The cinematographer achieved the washed-out look for day interiors at the asylum primarily through lighting, and then tweaked the effect in the digital intermediate (DI). “Sometimes I wanted to wash out the image but keep the skin tones [normal] so the actors didn’t appear to be phantoms, and I was able to do that in the grading.” To give himself a neutral starting point, he lit day interiors as flatly as possible. His longtime gaffer in Brazil, Sérgio Isidoro, built two huge fluorescent banks and shipped them to Canada for use in the asylum scenes. Bob Davidson, the gaffer on the seven-week Canadian leg of the 13-week production, describes the units: “They consisted of individual electronic ballasts and wiring for 24 8-foot fluorescent tubes and a soft silver reflector on a metal frame with mounting hardware. Steve Roberts, one of our electrics, modified them so they’d work with the North American power system.” Charlone adds, “We used these units, which we christened ‘Sérgios’ in honor of their designer, as full frontal lighting in conjunction with dozens of 4-foot 46 September 2008
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