American Cinematographer - November 2007 - (Page 30)

30 November 2007 Sarah Landon photos and frames courtesy of Andrew Kuepper. Above: In Sarah Landon and the Paranormal Hour, the titular teen character probes the darker side of Pine Valley, a small California town with ghostly secrets. Cinematographer Andrew Kuepper, who utilized the Panasonic HVX200 HDV camera with Redrock Microsystems’ M2 cinema lens adapter, chose open-face lights at full spot in night exteriors to light bits of the background. Right: An unsettled Landon investigates a strange occurrence outside. “The scary world was built around two colors, steel green and steel blue,” Keupper notes. Ghost Town by Jim Hemphill Cinematographer Andrew Kuepper was shooting film before he could write. Exposed to photography at a very young age in his father’s camera-repair shop, Kuepper made his first film at the age of 7. “I remember going to school between day one and two of shooting, and I was worried all day because I didn’t want to forget what the next scene was,” he recalls. “I wasn’t old enough to write yet, and the script was all in my head!” Kuepper was hooked, and he ended up studying film at San Diego State, where he learned how to make the most of minimal resources. “We had to deal with aging and poorly maintained equipment. That gave everyone a MacGyver edge, where a bit of tape and spit could make anything work.” Kuepper’s training in on-the-fly filmmaking served him well on the digital production Sarah Landon and the Paranormal Hour, his first feature as director of photography. The supernatural tale follows the adventures of the titular character, a teenager who arrives in the small town of Pine Valley, California, only to discover that the village has many secrets — and, apparently, its share of ghosts. As Sarah investigates a local mystery that involves two brothers, an area psychic and an evil spirit, she learns that Pine Valley has a dark side. Kuepper took full advantage of the town’s dual nature when conceptualizing his visual style. The vision he and director Lisa Comrie shared for the film entailed creating two distinct looks for the worlds Sarah inhabits. “There’s the happy world, where I went for a rich, saturated, almost Technicolor look with nice rims and good fill,” he explains. Then, for the “scary” world, the filmmakers called upon two influences that might seem unusual for a family film: Saw and The Matrix. “The scary world was built around two colors, steel green and steel blue,” Kuepper elaborates. “That world lost a lot of fill to make things more contrasty and unnerving.” The notion of two separate worlds within the drama was also the guiding principle for the lighting. “The choices made for daytime were based on a commercial model, with soft light on the actors and environments. We used large HMI units either bounced or turned into book lights, and planned many of the shots around using the sun. The diffusion we used most was bleached muslin, and on day interiors we used scaled-down versions of the same lighting style: book light for the actors and bounce light for the backgrounds. “For night exteriors, we used many open-face lights at full spot to light bits of the background,” he continues. “To light the actors, we set up a few 8-foot bounces overhead for them to walk into.” As with the day scenes, night interiors were lit in a modified version of the exterior approach: “We balanced both light and dark spots in each set,” says Kuepper. “If the actor was lit, the background wasn’t, and as they moved around, the opposite would be true. We were conscious to have some spot of light at exposure in every night shot so we

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - November 2007

American Cinematographer - November 2007 Contents Editor’s Note Global Village DVD Playback Production Slate Deconstructing Bob Dylan Honoring a Lost Friend Night Terrors Losing Control TV’s Top-Rated Short Takes Post Focus New Products & Services Points East International Marketplace Classified Ads Ad Index Clubhouse News ASC Close-Up

American Cinematographer - November 2007

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