American Cinematographer - December 2008 - 24

Director Peter Getzels (standing) gleans the secrets of the universe as Stanford physicist Leonard Susskind and Kuhn talk shop. Zarchy’s lighting rig was facilitated by decorative, wrought-iron rails built into the ceiling of Susskind’s living room. and position. For most of our shoot, the jib is rigged with a 6-foot arm, though it expands to 9 or 12 feet when we have larger locations. Even with the shortest arm, Barcelona can place the camera close to the ground or 9 or 10 feet in the air. We monitor each other’s shots to make certain they are complementary. Getzels, an Emmy winner who lived in Britain for many years, has many credentials at National Geographic Films, the Discovery Channel and the BBC. Closer to Truth arrives in the Bay Area nearly a year after the start of production; Getzels by now has developed a distinctive look for the series, adding more and more camera movement to the interviews as time goes on. He exploits our visually lush locations and pushes for more sculpting of the lighting on our subjects’ faces — dramatic, directional and contrasty, yet motivated, if possible, by natural sources in the frame. “Since we put a lot of energy into locations,” Getzels says, “we want to be able to shoot as wide as we can and get a reasonable amount of movement. So we have to fly the keys to avoid seeing stands. All the stands are on the same side of the axis as the cameras so they can be out of shot. But you can see these big, huge, sweeping backgrounds with a good amount of separation.” “Flying the keys” requires us to place each key light upstage, or behind the subject, in a 3⁄4-back cross-angle. As few rooms provide rafters or ceilings conducive to hanging lights, gaffer Darrell Flowers and key grip Johnson rig two 12' menace arms from 1¼-inch aluminum Speed-Rail pipes, each anchored to two steel combo stands, placed outside of either camera’s view. At the end of each menace arm, a 4' crossbar holds a 400-watt Joker HMI with an extra-small Chimera softbox as a key light for one participant, and a 2' 2-bank Kino Flo, usually fitted with daylight tubes and diffusion, as a backlight for the other. In environments with tungsten practical lights, we sometimes clip warm gel to the Jokers and use tungsten tubes in the Kinos. Later in the shoot, in larger locations, we expand to 16' and 20' menace arms (with extra bracing) and 6' crossbars. This lighting scheme enables Flowers and Johnson and grip Oskar Ness to fly the upstage keys with fine control and adjustability. We need the control. We’re always working to splash light into our subjects’ eyes — the windows to the soul — while avoiding reflections in their eyeglasses, despite constantly varying our viewing angle as each camera plods through its full range of movement. The days are long and sometimes difficult. With tongue firmly in 24 December 2008

American Cinematographer - December 2008

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