Digital Video - February 2008 - (Page 40) Cameraman and digital guru Scott Billups (left) sets up a shot within a cardboard box “blind” (bottom) in the back of a truck, used to capture undercover images. explaining that they were shooting a “documentary” on surveillance. Or, as Forsythe puts it: “Permits? We don’t need no stinking permits! Posted above the monitor in my office is my ticket I got in Beverly Hills for filming on the street without a permit. We pointed a camera out a window and another one in the back of a lift-gate truck with the lift gate all the way up but the door open so you could point the camera just over the top of the lift gate. Unless you were looking for it, you couldn’t see it.” But one eagle-eyed Beverly Hills officer sure did. The cinematographer also pointed out a few exceptions to the Look filmmaking credo. A scene at an ATM was lit with movie lights — well, one Kino Flo tube to be exact. And the convenience store interior scene was shot with four Panasonic HVX200s to emulate a multi-security camera setup. [Using four HDCAMs was cost prohibitive.] Though Look was shot in three weeks, posting the film took a year and a half, a schedule Billups described as “heinous,” but with good reason. “Every frame you look at is an effect,” he says, emphasizing the words “every” and “frame.” “We had a reference library of 100 looks that we liked,” he adds. “Each of them had a personality. I did some special tweakings with Magic Bullet. Tinderbox has a series — the Inferno plugins. They have one you can actually write in various permutations and channel distortions. You can play with the guns. You can tweak all the aspects that comprise a good signal and degrade them numerically. That one was very valuable. We also put a lot of analog effects on top of that — color timing, the grain and noise issues.” However, Billups’ effects had an arc to them. “That was the thing — to not go so far that it becomes painful to watch, because who likes to watch a bad image?” he asks. “There was artistic 40 dv february 2008 license involved with it. You’ll notice that we establish the degraded look and then back off a bit as the scene continues because we’ve already established the metaphor for that visual thread.” Billups also had high praise for the assist that Look composer B.T. lent with his stirring symphony of random electronic noise. “A lot of those effects sell because of B.T.’s brilliance. He really came up with the audio equivalent of our visual degradation.” Working in his home studio, Billups applied the effects and edited the scenes together with lengthy handles, then turned the material over to editor Martin Apelbaum, who also worked at home. “Martin put it into a useable form,” says Billups. Apelbaum cut on a Mac G4 with Final Cut Pro 5.5. Nearly 78 hours’ worth of MiniDV footage, down-converted for the offline from the HDCAM source material, filled his internal drives and external FireWire drives. Look presented the editor with a unique opportunity: designing camera moves for otherwise static footage using FCP’s built-in, keyframeable basic motion. “I got to pretend I was a director,” he says. “I could put a camera move here. It’s the equivalent of pausing for effect — I could push in for effect. Not only was I decided when and where a camera move would happen and how long it would take but I could do it as much as I wanted without worrying about image degradation because that was the point.” Because the majority of footage was static, Apelbaum could also combine different takes. “I did it most for the convenience store sequence because it had the most counter shots,” he explains. “It was really easy to do technically with a splitscreen in Final Cut, just another layer of video, crop it and feather the side and you’re done.” In the convenience store scene, a bird flies into the store while one of the main characters is dancing. “That bird was stolen from another take,” Apelbaum points out. “When the image is degraded, you can’t tell cheats like that.” DV www.dv.com http://www.dv.com
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