American Cinematographer - December 2015 - 18

Left: The winner (Dave Renken, left) and the dad (Art Kennedy) play a high-stakes game of Chutes and Ladders in this frame from The Defeat (x3).
Right: Holloway lines up a frame with a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera.

Wave and Film Noir.
"It was one of those projects that
kept building into more and more," says
Holloway. "I did a lot of visualization, especially when it came to emulating the different eras. I spent a lot of time researching the
mise-en-scène of each period, how people
dressed, how much audio was used or
perhaps not used, and a great deal of time
studying the lighting." He says he paid careful attention to "knowing what camera
angles and focal lengths to use, and the
different types of lighting that would be
needed. Making those sorts of decisions
helped me better represent each particular
era."
The biggest challenge, he says, was
that he only had a single day to shoot. "The
set and lighting needed to be significantly
and quickly changed between each
vignette," he says. "To keep the production
moving, the set was prelit for each vignette
the day before. Sometimes relighting the
set was just a matter of turning lights off or
on, and blocking or unblocking windows."
Holloway's lighting package
included an array of tungsten fixtures, such
as 650-watt Arri and 150-watt Dedolight
Fresnels - with a small Chimera Pancake
Lantern soft box - and a Colortran Ellipsoidal for the background shadow patterning, as well as ambient daylight. Holloway
says that Gordon Willis' lighting particularly
influenced his work as a cinematographer.
"I don't think there were many doing the
kind of toplighting he did at the time in The
Godfather," he says. "His lighting inspired
me early on, and I was able to employ some
of those techniques in my film and still keep
18

December 2015

it true to the era."
Holloway shot with a Blackmagic
Pocket Cinema Camera, using Arri/Zeiss
Ultra 16 prime lenses, maintaining an ISO
setting of 400 and a shooting stop between
T1.3 and T2.0. He recorded to a Video
Devices Pix 240 in the ProRes HQ codec. He
shot in color but then, in postproduction,
desaturated the image to black-and-white
to fit all three eras. Shooting for black-andwhite made lighting easier and faster, says
Holloway. "Dimmers could be used on
tungsten lights or mixed with daylight without having to be concerned about color
shifts or balancing the color of one light
source to another."
Similarly, shooting for black-andwhite made the Pocket Cinema Camera a
good choice, Holloway opines, because it
offers less IR protection than many other
cameras. "This, I believe, enables the
camera to capture a broader tonal range by
filtering out less of the visible portion of the
red spectrum," he says. "Without color, IR
contamination of the image is eliminated."
This, along with prelighting the sets, "benefited the shoot and the final film," says
Holloway. "It gave the production more
time to focus on the camerawork and the
actors' performances."
Holloway edited the short himself on
Avid Media Composer. "I graded the
finished picture in Final Cut Pro X, after
exporting it from Media Composer in the
native ProRes HQ codec," he says. "I did so
because I determined that an FCPX export
would more closely match the graded
picture, and I wouldn't have problems with
the levels being raised or lowered while
American Cinematographer

making the H.264 deliverable."
Holloway's daughter Brooklyn served
as makeup artist and costumer. Dave
Renken, who portrays the winner, gaffed;
both he and Art Kennedy (the dad) were
first-time actors. Bailey Parater, a friend of
Holloway's daughter, played the girl.
Run
Director: Trevor Stevens
Cinematographer: Nicolas Aguilar
Nicolas Aguilar met Trevor Stevens in
a screenwriting class, and the two immediately felt a kinship. So it was natural for
Aguilar to shoot the senior thesis project
Run, directed and co-written by Stevens. The
gritty story begins with reluctant gang
member Marcus (Jordan Mosley), who has
always sheltered his younger brother Martell
(Erick Bowman), promising to take him away
from the neighborhood and gang life.
Marcus' life intersects with that of Dean
(Heston Horwin), a young recruit with a rival
motorcycle gang known as the Riders Under
Naberius M.C. When RUN takes Marcus
captive, Dean is left to guard him. Marcus
convinces Dean to let him go, and the two
try to escape the warring gangs through a
nighttime industrial landscape.
Aguilar shot mainly with a Red Epic
Mysterium-X, recording 5K full frame at 8:1
compression to 240GB RedMag SSD cards,
but used a Canon EOS 5D Mark II for three
specific shots: the opening sequence on a
motorcycle, Marcus in a car with a gun, and
Martell drawing on Marcus' arm. "We put
Technicolor's CineStyle color profile on the
5D Mark II and photographed half a stop

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - December 2015