Digital Video - February 2009 - (Page 15)

From left, cinematographer A.J. Rickert-Epstein, 2nd AC Noah Applebaum and 1st AC Steve Murray shoot The Lost Skeleton Returns Again. er on both these movies, did these great 1930s mansion sets for us on a soundstage and also did a miniature house. All the exteriors are miniatures.” With a budget of just over $1 million, Dark and Stormy Night was the opposite of the Skeleton production. “Being on stage was completely different,” recalls Rickert-Epstein. “There was so much more control available to me. I could pull out walls when I needed to, put the camera on a scissor-lift, all kinds of stuff.” It also entailed an entirely different shooting approach with much larger Panavised Sony HDW-F900 cameras. Explains Blamire, “When you shoot a film that is potentially talky and static — people trapped in a house, there’s not a lot of action — we tried to make up for that with camera movement. You don’t want to zoom because that takes you out of the 1930s. We did a lot of dolly. One shot was of all 16 subjects in the living room listening to the reading of the will. We set up what we called the ‘two-headed monster,’ which was two full camera crews on a dolly, and we did a slow track along every suspect in the 30” room. One camera is getting the close-ups, and the other is getting the wide. It’s fantastic!” “We came up with a name for whenever we moved the camera,” adds Rickert-Epstein. “We called it ‘pulling an Archie,’ because it seemed like every time we were on the Archie character, we’d be moving the camera.” The lighting techniques in those classic “dark house” movies of the 1930s were, it can be argued, rather sloppy and utilitarian. Not wanting to emulate that look entirely, Rickert-Epstein chose a middle ground. “They didn’t care about shadows back in those days,” he says. “There would be five or six shadows from one person due to unmotivated light. That distracted me. I split the difference between soft lighting and hard lighting to get a hint of that look but with less unmotivated light. I usually used 2Ks and below. The only thing bigger than that was a 10K, which we used for lightning.” DV You’ll find an extended version of this story on our site. Visit DV online. Epson Discproducer A big performer in a small package. Introducing the innovative, new desktop disc publisher from Epson that does it all. “Discproducer’s high reliability, superb print quality and costeffectiveness make it the ideal system. Epson’s compact Discproducer has all the features you need to print and burn up to 100 customized CDs or DVDs at a time. From its vibrant six-color inkjet printing and precision AcuGrip™ robotic arm to its easy-to-use software and unmatched reliability, you’ll get the high quality results you’re looking for every time. So don’t wait. Find out more today at discproducer.epson.com. ” Chris Randall, EventDV 2008 ©2008 Epson America, Inc. Epson is a registered trademark, Epson Exceed Your Vision is a registered logomark and AcuGrip is a trademark of Seiko Epson Corporation. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. http://www.dv.com http://discproducer.epson.com http://discproducer.epson.com

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Digital Video - February 2009 Contents Stasis Flex Black Diamond Essentials Instant Expert Close-Up: Larry Blamire They Like to Rock the Party Close-Up: Gregg Kita Click to Play DV101 Production Diary

Digital Video - February 2009

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