Digital Video - February 2008 - (Page 36) THE BETTER THE IMAGE, THE MORE CHOICE YOU HAVE FOR DEGRADING IT. IF IT’S ALREADY DEGRADED, YOU’VE PAINTED YOURSELF INTO A CORNER. know what we would do in certain situations. We didn’t do a lot of setups. We would run a scene with just two cameras 10 or 15 times, but that was all they had to cut to. There was no cutting to a close-up. It was a whole different approach than normal moviemaking.” The idea of using actual surveillance cameras did come up, however, the idea of being locked to a particular degraded look didn’t sit well. “The better the image, the more choice you have for degrading it,” Billups says. “If it’s already degraded, you’ve painted yourself into a corner.” So Forsythe captured pristine hi-def imagery with a two-camera setup as much as possible. “I rented an old motion-control head and mounted that on top of a junior stand,” says the DP. “We used it to put the camera way up in the air and then make critical adjustments using mo-co head. A lot of times my cameras were on lighting stands to get that high angle. People in general don’t pay attention, so when you hoist a camera in the air and put some crap around it that makes it look like a construction site, nobody notices.” This surreptitious filmmaking style actually freed the production from having to control the location backgrounds or shoot extensive coverage of scenes. Rifkin explains: “We didn’t rehearse at all, which was intentional. When these actors were in the middle of a mall or department store, they had radio mikes on and all the extras were real people who didn’t even know a movie was being made. In no time, the actors weren’t acting; they were just having a conversation. They were having a script36 dv january 2008 ed conversation, but nobody around them knew that. When you are shooting where you have to use only one take all the way through, it doesn’t matter what the background is doing.” For legal reasons, signs were posted warning citizens that they were about to enter a filming area, but again, who pays attention to those? If the actors interacted with anyone during the shot, naturally that person had to sign a release after the fact. Those that didn’t had their faces blurred in post, much like what is found on the typical surveillance or reality footage seen on TV. The production was permitted to shoot — for the most part www.dv.com http://www.dv.com
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