American Cinematographer - December 2008 - (Page 12)

The sacred and the profane comprise one of the juxtapositions presented in the sequence. beneath the murky surface of a Louisiana swamp. A weird-looking fish loiters as the camera booms up and out of the mire like a sinister creature rising from its watery lair. The camera then floats past rows of stately but dilapidated homes, drawing closer to civilization. Flashframes of naked bodies writhing on a floor segue into scenes of religious fervor, civil unrest and roadkill. The news and wildlife footage was pulled from stock archives, but Allen, creative director Matt Mulder, producer Morgan Henry and cine12 December 2008 matographers Trevor Fife and Matt Clark shot the bulk of the material. “Our collective experience ranges from amateur to professional,” notes Mulder. “We purposefully set it up that way to create a sort of unmannered, unvarnished view of these areas and happenings. And we didn’t have a lot of money to play with — it was literally the four of us driving through the heart of Louisiana in a Winnebago.” The camera package comprised a Sankyo Super Cm300 Super 8mm camera, two 16mm Bolex Rex-5s and a Panasonic AGHVX200. One of the Bolex cameras didn’t have a shutter, and this produced some “freaky footage,” according to Henry. (An example is the neon cross that appears as a flash cut toward the end of the titles.) “We basically got ourselves into trouble — drinking with Cajuns, firing rifles, eating interesting stuff off a grill — and filmed as much as we could,” adds Mulder. “We would drive along and jump out when we saw something cool,” recalls Allen. “I saw a wrecked school bus in somebody’s yard, so we knocked on the door and ended up getting approval to shoot all over the guy’s property, even inside his home. There’s a shot of a man in a rocking chair, and he was just a guy who invited us over for beers!” The team returned to Seattle with more than a dozen Super 8 reels (cut from Kodak Vision2 50D 5201 and 500T 5218), about 1,000' of 16mm footage (Vision2 7201 and 7218), and at least two hours of hi-def footage. (Pro8mm in Burbank processed the film footage.) “We probably could have shot a lot of this on 35mm and just dirtied things up, but there’s a certain authenticity to handling a Super 8 camera that you can’t get with a larger camera or the latest digital technology,” says Mulder. “We just got into the spirit of being un-academic in our approach, and that even affected how we composed frames. Sometimes we were trying to artfully compose, and sometimes we were just running through fields and tossing the camera around to get some motion.” Even when the footage looked good, Allen and Fedorchuk did their best to roughen it up. The 35mm footage was heavily altered in post through methods of desaturation and dynamic-range compression. Some 16mm footage of a Pentecostal church service in Chicago was dubbed to VHS tape and then transferred to HD. (The online version was laid off at 1080p to HDCam-SR). ¢

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

American Cinematographer - December 2008 Contents Editor’s Note Short Takes: True Blood Titles Tomorrow’s Technology Production Slate: Closer to Truth A High Price for Progress Rags to Riches 1-Man Riot Squad The State of the Art: An Update Post Focus: Deluxe New York New Products & Services International Marketplace Classified Ads Ad Index 2008 AC Index ASC Membership Roster Clubhouse News ASC Close-Up: Donald McAlpine

American Cinematographer - December 2008

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