American Cinematographer - October 2007 - (Page 26)

Benton and Morgenthau plot their next move. “The beauty of Kramer’s work is that you see the film, you don’t see the shot,” says the director. perfectly at eye level and blast everyone on the side of the face. It usually comes in at imperfect angles and bounces off a couch, creating fill, and then maybe just lights the person from the neck down with hard light. Of course, when it comes time to do a close-up, great care is taken in lighting the actor, but that, too, is based on this organic approach.” A favorite scene of both Benton and Morgenthau’s shows Diana (Mitchell) and David (Billy Burke) lying in Diana’s bed, having just made love. Morgenthau details, “The camera starts on her face and then begins to pull back. They’re completely nude, and they’re sitting in bed drinking wine. It’s night, and the windows have sort of a cyan glow coming through, and then there’s a hot streak that looks like it’s coming from a fixture outside the house. That light hits the sheets, and that’s what lights the actors. They’re 2 or 3 stops down, and the sheets at that slice of light are 5 or 6 stops over.” Morgenthau created the hot streak with one of his workhorse units, a Source Four Leko, and used gelled 2K Baby Juniors to create the cool ambient light coming through the windows. “We shot that scene day for night, so the window was tented in,” he reveals. “There were some other hot pieces of light coming through and hitting the curtains, and those were more Source Fours. If any ambience was needed in the room, we’d bounce a Source Four into the ceiling or off the floor just out of frame.” As the scene progresses, Diana reveals to David — who is married to another woman — that she intends to marry Bradley (Kinnear), and this news sparks a quarrel. The actors move about the room as they argue, drifting in and out of shadow, illuminated only by light bounced off various surfaces in the shot. “Kramer shifted gears in such a beautiful little way in the shooting of that scene,” says Benton. “I thought it was extraordinary. The architecture of the cinematography in that scene is flawless.” Feast of Love was shot on two Fuji Eterna emulsions, 500T 8573 and 250D 8563, both of which Morgenthau rated at their recommended ISOs. Using the tungsten-balanced stock, he extended his day-for-night wizardry into a sunlit, open-air football stadium, turning it into a moonlit, intimate environment for two scenes that involve lovers intertwined on the field. To create nighttime ambience, Morgenthau eschewed an 85 filter and underexposed the negative by 2 stops. Additionally, he used “huge, white overheads and large blacks that would create tremendous amounts of contrast and give it an intense night feeling. I always kept things in shadow and tried pointing toward backgrounds that were dark versus backgrounds that had hot sun on them. When we did see the sun, we just played it as moonlight.” The overheads, suspended by Condors and rolled onto the field, included a 20-by and a 40-by. One of the production’s most challenging locations was a coffeehouse that appears several times. Owned and operated by Bradley, “Jitters” was a redressed coffeehouse featuring two glass walls that offered a view of the neighborhood and the evershifting Portland weather. “It was kind of like shooting a day interior and a day exterior at the same time,” says Morgenthau. “We were using hard gels on the windows, a couple of different varieties of ND.6 and .9 sandwiched together, and there were banks of Kino Flos everywhere in the ceiling. We also had 18Ks coming through the windows off of Condors, and we sometimes underslung those units so we could get them even closer to the frame. I wound up using the lights through the windows more than the lights from above, which were built in as fill that could be switched on as needed.” The production’s footage was processed by Deluxe Laboratories in Hollywood, and over the course of the shoot Morgenthau was able to print select dailies. “The rest of the time we watched dailies off a hard drive on a hidef monitor from Company 3,” he notes. “Benton, the producers, and my camera department and I were there every night in the office, watching dailies together. It was a nice communal experience.” Morgenthau finished the film with a digital intermediate (DI) at Company 3, where he worked with colorist Siggy Ferstl. “I didn’t radically alter [the image] in terms of color or contrast,” he notes. “I was able to do some very subtle softening of the image, which is something you can’t do in a photochemical lab; I actually added diffusion to the entire picture using some wizardry Siggy came up with.” On set, Morgenthau almost always used a 1⁄8 or 1⁄4 Schneider B&W Classic Soft filter on the lens. Feast of Love marked Benton’s first feature in the Super 35mm 2.40:1 format. Morgenthau notes, “He understood that the big screen was the canvas we were painting.” Benton concludes, “The beauty of Kramer’s work is that you see the film, you don’t see the shot.” I Erratum In our August coverage of 1408 (“Ghost Writer,” p. 54), we incorrectly identified the show’s unit photographer as Melinda Sue Gordon, SMPSP. The unit photographer was actually David Appleby. However, most of the shots featured in our layout were frame grabs or photos provided by the show’s cinematographer, Benoît Delhomme, AFC. 26 October 2007

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American Cinematographer - October 2007

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