Digital Video - April 2008 - (Page 30) Q& A A WESTERN STATE OF MIND with the camera. The focus is horrific; the only way to check manual focus is by defocusing it. And it seems to me that you can’t really pull focus on it nor is it repeatable. To set exposure, we had a portable Panasonic 7" monitor, which was fantastic, and my gaffer would put his face in the hood and I would open up or close down. I did not do the 70-percent zebra, which most people use for skin tone. I had the zebra set at 105 percent, and I would make it as light as I could before burning out. I did a lot of low angles so I’d see a lot of sky. I tried to hold as much of the sky as I could without having it go pure white. I also used a Polarizer, which helped. And we were shooting in December — it was the best thing because the sun is low, and the light is beautiful all day long. If it were summer, you’d have a longer day but 90 percent of it would look like shit. Why did you shoot in PAL? The BBC was one of the financiers of the project, and they wanted a PAL HD master. Also, the Z1 will not go 24 frames per second. It either does 30 or 25 fps. I hate 30 fps. Twenty-five frames per second was fine; it still gave me a very filmic motion. This being a road movie, there are lots of driving scenes. How were you able to shoot car interiors while maintaining excellent detail outside the windows? Because so much of the movie would be done in a car and we weren’t towing the car, the small camera was an essential part of what we did. In many cases, I was holding the camera against the windshield. I also had bought for $20 a little beanbag with a screw in it for a still camera and put that on the dashboard. We didn’t even need to use the wide-angle adapter 90 percent of the time. I mostly shot the movie wide so there is a lot of space around the actors, which I think is different from a lot of movies. Kino Flo gave us some prototype Barfly lights. We had one plugged into the cigarette lighter up front and one into the utility plug in the back. We’d use those for fill. If I were shooting the driver, the light would be suction-cupped below the rearview mirror aimed at the actor as bright as it could be and sometimes we’d put one on the hood in front of the driver, but it had to be low. The driver is really driving. In setting the exposure, I’d use the zebra to look at the exterior and I would darken it but still see enough detail in the actor’s face. In advance, we got a rental car with tinted windows. The tint helped us keep the outside down. We’d sometimes tape 216 diffusion onto a window that we couldn’t see in the shot. The sun would hit that, and it would light up the whole car. These are very low-tech solutions, and we designed the movie and picked our lights with the idea of plugging into what resources we had. On exteriors, how did you compete with the low winter sun for a decent lighting ratio? We had the Sunbounce. It’s a soft, white 4x6 that’s very rigid. We had tremendous wind, and one person could hold this Sunbounce even in the wind. Mostly, that’s all we used. There were some scenes toward the end of the movie during the showdown with the villain, played by Sy Richardson, where I wished I had a bit more because his skin tone is quite dark. The www.dv.com A large Sunbounce served Fierberg well throughout the location-heavy shoot. DV: Searchers 2.0 seems designed to keep the audience off balance. How would you describe the movie? Steven Fierberg, ASC: In dramatic works the journey to seek revenge is usually a tragic one. However, the movies that have been presented to us, especially recently, have mythic ideas that are false, like the idea of the revenge quest where the character who thinks he is morally right can achieve revenge and benefit from it. In [John Ford’s] The Searchers, they do go on a revenge quest, but they do not truly find glory. These characters [in Searchers 2.0] never achieve enlightenment. Theoretically, their journey is one to truth of some kind, but they don’t ever seek truth nor do they recognize it when it’s staring them in the face. They are disconnected from anything that has deeper meaning. The movie is completely ironic — the filmmaker is saying one thing while the characters are saying the exact opposite. Why was the Sony HDV HVR-Z1U selected for duty? Basically, the camera was chosen on the basis of postproduction, not on image quality whatsoever. Alex [Cox] wanted to shoot this in 25-fps PAL with a Sony Z1. I didn’t want to use the Z1. But the truth is: It’s great. That was my shock. When it came time to look at the final result projected, I was blown away. So, I was wrong and I have a new respect for Sony. There are only two problems Cox (kneeling) and Fierberg plan their coverage on black-clad actor Sy Richardson. 30 dv april 2008 http://www.dv.com
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