American Cinematographer - October 2008 - (Page 68)

Landmark Gains forehead — that’s how bright it is. But it’s organic to the moment, which involves extreme drama, anger and racial tension, as well as the stress of the football season.” Gaffer Brett Laumann, who also worked with Morgenthau on such features as Fracture (2007) and Havoc (2005), says, “I like working with Kramer because he tends to go more toward the extremes. If things seem a little too dark or a little too hot, that’s okay with him. His style is sometimes a little expressionistic, which I particularly enjoy.” On The Express, Laumann notes, large soft sources were the norm. For example, in a scene depicting young Ernie eating dinner with his family, “we couldn’t use spreaders or put anything in the ceiling at the location,” explains the gaffer, “so we suspended five China balls and ran a piece of Duvatyn skirting around the whole thing, [in effect] creating a large softbox. “Throughout the film, we used a lot of book lights, often a bounced 5K going through light grid or full grid,” continues Laumann. “And we used Source Four [Lekos] inside extensively. For a college dance, we hung 24 Source Fours up high, all with the same gobo pattern of small dots. With smoke in the room, it created hundreds of shafts of light and gave the scene a nice depth.” In other instances, the Source Fours were used without a gobo pattern to help balance the frame. Laumann observes, “Kramer gets very precise. He’ll say, ‘Give me a beam of light here that is 4 inches tall and 6 inches wide.’” Several important scenes depict bus rides that take Davis and his fellow Orangemen to their games in the South, where they encounter bigotry and catch glimpses of the growing civil-rights movement. For daytime bus rides, “we took a very minimalist, available-light approach,” says Above: The first unit used fairly traditional methods to cover football action, including dolly moves and telephoto lenses. Steadicam and an ATV were also employed for certain scenes. “The camera was not so much a participant as an observer, allowing the viewer to follow the game more objectively,” says Morgenthau. Below: A sudden shift in the production schedule left the crew with just five hours to rig a key sequence involving a nighttime bus ride. They opted to use the poor man’s process onstage at Chicago Studio City. silent voice. I like to lean toward reality, but at the same time, I express myself and extend the characters’ reach through the lighting. Things need to look true to what’s happening in the scenes and underscore the drama at the same time. I usually light to extreme levels of highlight and darkness, pushing beyond the limits of the film; to me, extreme highlights make for an emotional use of light. Those extremes of contrast exist in nature, but film handles them differently, and when it blows out, the light flames and glows and bounces off things in the room. In that way, film emulates reality and expresses the emotions of the scene.” The extreme contrast becomes especially pronounced during scenes that take place at Syracuse and in Texas. “There’s a scene where the Syracuse coach, Ben Schwartzwalder [Dennis Quaid], breaks up a fight between Ernie [Rob Brown] and one of his teammates,” says Morgenthau. “The coach is standing directly under a narrow-spot Par can pointed straight down, and the lens is flared by the light that’s kicking off his 68 October 2008

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - October 2008

American Cinematographer - October 2008 Contents Editor's Note Short Takes: DirecTV's "Fourth Wall" Campaign Production Slate: Prison Break Production Slate: Need for Speed: Undercover Middle East Intrigue Kingdom of Light Memoirs of a Spook Landmark Gains Post Focus: An Overview of the ASC CDL Filmmakers' Forum: Roger Deakins, ASC, BSC New Products & Services International Marketplace Classified Ads Clubhouse News ASC Close-Up: Ross Berryman

American Cinematographer - October 2008

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