American Cinematographer - November 2008 - (Page 24)

Above left: In another split-screen conversation, Megan, Kathy (Kara Wang, center) and Lexie (Jael Elizabeth Steinmeyer) chat with Ben (Rudy Galvan) about his upcoming party. Above right: Cocinematographer Joshua Harrison films the girls’ side of the conversation as Goi (far left) and Galvan look on. Below: Amy records a segment for her video diary. “I wanted the home-video sections of the movie to look like everyone’s home videos, so no color-correction was employed, and in most cases, the cameras were set to auto-focus so they would search for focus realistically,” notes Goi. lights apart from the ones in the TV studio, no grip equipment and no filters, and most of the time, I wanted the cameras left on auto-focus and autoexposure. It’s difficult for a trained cameraperson to let things go like that; it goes against every instinct you have.” Harrison acknowledges that Goi’s directive “was one of the tougher things for an operator to do: make it look like it was shot by a 14-year-old but not make it look bad. That’s a fine line.” Eisberg observes, “We were breaking the rules, but breaking them in a way that fit the project. Michael wanted to tell this story in a certain way, and he took the bull by the horns and did it.” Both sides of the Web-chat and phone-camera conversations, which are shown in split-screen, were shot simultaneously with the participants, who were usually in separate locations, addressing the lens and listening to each other via ear buds. “Some of the chats are five to seven minutes long, and because they weren’t going to have coverage, we needed the people talking to be able to hear each other,” notes Goi. “I wore headphones that mixed all the dialogue. The kids were performing to the lens, and they really sold the idea that they were looking at each other. “Although I could hear both sides of the conversation, I couldn’t see both cameras — we had no video village,” he continues. “In every scene, I had to choose which camera to stay with, and I needed the person on the other camera to not only monitor the technical aspects but also tell me if the performance was what we needed. Having Josh and Keith made it work.” Band Pro Digital in Burbank provided the production’s main cameras, a Canon XH-A1 and a Canon XH-G1, along with 16x9 Inc.’s EX 0.75x Wide Converter and 1.5x Tele Converter. Panavision Hollywood supplied the Sony HDW-F900 used for the newscast material, and Bogen Imaging provided support equipment and matte boxes. The shoot ran 81⁄2 days and took place almost entirely at locations in the San Fernando Valley. Most of the Web chats showing characters at home were actually shot in a single day at the producers’ home, where several rooms were dressed to look like different locations. “We had to do 32 pages that day, and we got it all done in 101⁄2 hours,” recalls Goi. “I credit that entirely to the fact that those kids were prepared.” For the first few days of the shoot, Eisberg turned up on set with a small lighting kit. “Keith figured I would need something, but I didn’t want to use any of that,” says Goi. “We mostly shot with the practicals that were there and covered windows with garbage bags to darken backgrounds. In two instances, we tipped a [practical] lamp over offcamera to get exposure on a face, but I think it would have been interesting to not even do that. “I think it was a little frustrating for Keith at first,” he muses. “For one chat, he was shooting Amber in the house, and I was out on the street with Josh and Rachel, shooting the other side of the conversation. I’d gone through Amber’s blocking inside, and when we got back to the house, I noticed Keith had moved some of the floor lamps around to help with her lighting during the shot. I said, ‘You cheated!’ But he just wanted to make sure I was covered. In the same vein, he also suggested recording sound on DAT as backup; I was going to just use the camera mics, and in the end, about 80 percent of the audio came from that, but there were instances where the DAT track was helpful.” The production’s “biggest setup,” he notes wryly, was a rave-style house party Megan and Amy attend early in the story. Ostensibly shot by an unidentified teen wandering through the party with a camcorder, these scenes were lit with a couple of 1,000-watt floodlights from Home Depot and flashlights held by some of the partygoers. “We didn’t swap out any bulbs — the flashlights were more than enough light for those cameras,” says Harrison. “I found some 24 November 2008

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American Cinematographer - November 2008

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