American Cinematographer - November 2008 - (Page 22)

Right: In an early scene in Megan is Missing, Megan (Rachel Quinn, right) uses her cell-phone camera to check her makeup as she chats with her best friend, Amy (Amber Perkins). “I wanted to establish early on that the kids use new technology in innovative ways so as to remove any doubt later on that something was ‘possible,’” says Michael Goi, ASC, the film’s director. Below: One of the girls’ many cellphone chats depicted in split screen. A Fateful Connection by Rachael K. Bosley The independent film Megan is Missing tells of two 14-year-old friends, Megan (Rachel Quinn) and Amy (Amber Perkins), who fall victim to a sexual predator that Megan, the more outgoing of the two, meets in an online chat room. Masquerading as a teenager named Josh, the predator sets up a date with Megan from which she never returns. Three weeks later, after sharing her suspicions about “Josh” with the police, Amy disappears, too. The movie is fictional, but its writer/director, Michael Goi, ASC, culled all of the plot details from seven real cases of child abduction, and in designing the picture, he was determined to craft a presentation unadorned by many of the devices fictional films employ. Featuring only diegetic sound, and designed to resemble footage captured mainly with the characters’ Web-chat cameras, cell-phone cameras and camcorders, Megan achieves a degree of intimacy and verisimilitude 22 November 2008 Megan is Missing frame grabs and photos courtesy of Trio Pictures. that even documentary filmmakers might envy, qualities that serve to magnify the suspense and horror as the story progresses. “I wanted the film to have such an air of reality that you can’t help feeling you’re watching something happening now,” says Goi. A combination of creative and practical considerations led Goi, who also co-produced and edited the movie, to restrict the visuals to images that could conceivably be captured by the characters with their own cameras or, in a few instances, shown on a local TV newscast. He explains, “[Producers] Mark Gragnani and Melanie Harrison came in with a budget parameter that would enable them to finance the movie themselves, and the challenge was how to tell this story within that budget. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that in order to get the kind of personal perspective I wanted the movie to have, I would need to create a point of view privileged only to the characters in those situations. I decided we wouldn’t really venture beyond that structure; we wouldn’t, for example, jump outside of the Web-chat camera and show the girl in front of her computer. That style fit within our budget and time parameters — I only had two weeks off between shows to do this — so it became the style of the movie.” The only departure from this style is the TV-news coverage that appears in the latter half of the film; Megan’s disappearance is an instant local sensation, prompting news bulletins and a special edition of the melodramatic segment “My Child is Missing!” It was, in fact, the media’s treatment of child abductions that motivated Goi to tackle the subject in the first place. “There was a long period where I was coming home from shooting and seeing all these reports about abducted children turned into reality TV, complete with teasers advertising exclusive footage,” he recalls. “I’m not against the media — I think they can sometimes be genuinely helpful — but I felt angry and frustrated that such a serious subject was being turned into a homogenized product. I wanted to present the media in a believable way in this movie, and Lauren Leah Mitchell, who plays our news anchor, does a great job of coming across as just sincere enough.” Goi, a two-time ASC Award nominee (for the telefilms Judas and The Fixer) and a recent Emmy nominee (for the series My Name is Earl ), originally planned to serve as Megan’s cinematographer, too, but as planning progressed, he realized he would need to run two cameras most of the time, so he asked Keith Eisberg and Joshua Harrison, who had assisted and operated for him on a number of shows, to share cinematographer duties. “I wanted to give Keith and Josh an opportunity to take on more responsibility than I’d been able to give them on other projects, and they both seemed like the right fit for what I wanted to do,” says Goi. “This movie wasn’t easy for them because conceptually, I didn’t want it to be ‘everything perfect,’” continues the director. “I wanted a feel of ultra-realism. We used no movie

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American Cinematographer - November 2008 Contents Editor’s Note Letters Short Takes Production Slate Forging a Bond The Making of a President Thunder Down Under Habitat for Inhumanity Saluting Television’s Top Talents Post Focus New Products & Services International Marketplace Classified Ads Ad Index Clubhouse News ASC Close-Up

American Cinematographer - November 2008

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