American Cinematographer - October 2016 - 20

Production Slate

Questioning Reality
By Michael Goldman

Los Angeles, 1947. People have been disappearing - three,
to be exact, and all on the same stretch of road along the Malibu
coast. A witness saw the last guy literally vanish during a freak lightning storm, and LAPD detective Mack Foster [Kevin Kilner] has a feeling there's more at play than mob hits or cliff jumpers. The hardboiled cop sends his street-wise protégé, Jake Sullivan (Reid Scott), to
check it out, and this time we get a glimpse of the particulars. A lightning storm, a mysterious woman (Elyse Levesque) in Sullivan's rearview mirror, then he's gone too. Foster himself steps in to investigate,
venturing through an ominous opening in a rock formation not far
from Sullivan's abandoned car, and soon finds himself in a place
where the rules of conventional time and space do not apply.
Meridian is a noir, short-form, suspense-driven and enigmatic
science-fiction project directed and co-written by ASC Technology
Committee chairman Curtis Clark and shot by Markus Förderer, BVK.
The endeavor was spawned at a meeting as Clark was discussing
developments in high dynamic range with Chris Fetner - now an
ASC associate - and other Netflix executives. Clark recalls, "They
proposed that I make a short film for them" - a project specifically
designed to illustrate how the convergence of 4K, HDR, wide color
gamut, and other high-end image acquisition advancements might
enhance the viewer experience for the Web-based streaming service.
"Later, we were asked to work at 60 fps," Clark says. "And
we also decided it should be an ACES-compliant workflow. Those
were the kinds of key issues that needed to be taken into account.
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October 2016

The idea was that I would write the story with my writing partner
[James Harmon Brown], and see how those [attributes] could
provide expanded creative freedom to the filmmaker."
The majority of Meridian was shot on Sony's CineAlta F65,
recording in the Sony Raw format at 3:1 compression to 256GB
SRMemory cards. For one sequence, however, the production used
Red's Weapon 6K system, recording in Redcode Raw format at 6:1
compression to 512GB Red Mini-Mags. On set, footage was
ingested using Pomfort Silverstack, and an LMT and RRT/1,000-nit
ODT combination were created within the ACES system and applied
with Fujifilm's IS-Mini LUT box and IS-Manager software. The
production primarily employed Leica Summilux-C lenses - mainly
21mm, 29mm, 35mm and 40mm - but for one key sequence they
switched to 24mm and 32mm Cooke Speed Panchro lenses. The
filmmakers shot the entire movie at 60 fps and monitored on-set
with a Sony BVM-X300 high-dynamic-range monitor. The project
was framed for a 1.78:1 aspect ratio.
Clark had previously shot and directed a couple of short films
in partnership with Sony to assess the 4K F65 digital-cinema camera
system. This time, however, Clark - in partnership with Netflix -
recruited Förderer, who was fresh off his Independence Day: Resurgence shoot (AC July '16). The production then brought on Bill
Taylor, ASC to handle about a dozen visual-effects shots - mostly
composites of live-action background elements and greenscreen
foreground actors. Adding clouds sweetened with lightning animation to clear skies was accomplished by Nuke artist Nathan Strong.
"I thought it was really interesting when I heard it was a
period film set in the 1940s and that Curtis had a vision of shooting

American Cinematographer

Meridian images courtesy of the filmmakers.

Detectives
Mack Foster
(Kevin Kilner,
left) and Jake
Sullivan (Reid
Scott) set out
to investigate
a string of
mysterious
disappearances
in the
metaphysical
short Meridian.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - October 2016