Digital Video - August 2008 - (Page 24)

HIGH SCHOOL ONFIDENTIAL C THE HD FEATURE DOC AMERICAN TEEN EXAMINES ADOLESCENT LIFE IN STUNNING DETAIL. BY JON SILBERG f you happened to spend much time in Warsaw, Indiana, during the 2005-06 school year, you were probably aware that documentarian Nanette Burstein and a small video crew were following various high school seniors around for a movie. Burstein, best known as co-director (with Brett Morgen) of The Kid Stays in the Picture — the feature-film companion to former Hollywood mogul Robert Evans — set about documenting the lives of a group of high school students for the feature American Teen, soon to be released by Paramount Vantage. Burstein, cinematographer Laela Kilbourn, sound mixer Anna Rieke, a field producer and a PA captured more than 1,000 hours in the lives of the students as they attended school and interacted with friends and family. The New York-based Kilbourn had devoted more than a year at a time to several previous projects , including Word Wars about the world of competitive Scrabble and the synchronized swimming documentary, Sync or Swim, but her commitment for American Teen was a bit more immersive. “This was really the first time I just packed up and moved into a new community like this,” she says. The filmmakers initially chose 16 kids to “star” in the film though by the time it had gone through the editing process that would be whittled down to the five with the most interesting story arcs. With the exception of a few large events (such as the school’s prom), everything was covered single-camera style to avoid making the roving crew even more prominent than it was. Kilbourn (who was, at different points, supported by videographers Wolfgang Hend and Bob Hanna), shot the majority of the piece on the Panasonic SDX900 in standard definition onto DVCPRO 50 tapes. The 2⁄3" camera, she says, gave her a good trade-off between image quality and simplicity; a bigger, higherend HD camera could have distracted Kilbourn and her subjects while something lower-end could have compromised the images she and the director intended to play well even in theaters. Kilbourn left a Canon 7-168mm zoom lens on the camera for the duration of the shoot. The cinematographer also made use of the smaller, 1⁄3" DVX100 in the rare instances, such as the prom, when a second camera was used and in tight spaces such as car interiors, where I the SDX900 would be challenged for space. Kilbourn used color bars as a reference and then exposed and focused manually. Since lighting was minimal — “If there was a lamp in the room, we might turn it on,” she says, “but that’s about it” — she was primarily concerned about the very low-light situations she would find her subjects in. She reports that she was pleased with the DVX100’s ability to hold detail in contrasty situations. “I was most comfortable with the day exterior material,” she says. “The camera could handle that very well. But the low light situations always made me worry about resolution and detail. There were scenes where I just crossed my fingers and hoped we got it, and I was generally very happy with how it all ended up looking.” The camera recorded in Panasonic’s 24pA format (24p Advanced — Panasonic’s method of dealing with the 3-2 pulldown issue). Kilbourn set it up to keep the images as clean as possible so there would be room in post to work with them. “I set it up for a color palette I like and avoided going too far down into the blacks,” she explains. “On a digital show, I try to not go too far in any direction. You want to preserve highlight and shadow information and to [process] the image in camera as little as possible.” After Burstein, Thomas Haneke and Mary Manhardt got through with their offline edit of the show, the EDL and original DVCPRO, MiniDV tapes and a small number of computer animations were sent to Post Logic in LA for finishing. Editor and visual effects artist Matthew Johnson used Autodesk Smoke 2007 (with Service Pack 4) on an HP workstation running Linux and input the portions of the tapes included in the EDL at their native resolutions. Digital animations, which were created to help visualize abstract concepts the students discuss on camera — depression, the wonders of college life — came in from various sources. One of the subjects, a girl intent on working in the film business, created her own animated version of her state of depression. All this material came to Johnson in the form of 1920x1080 DPX files. Johnson then used Smoke’s proprietary systems to remove the 3-2 pulldown sequences (created in the cameras for recording 24p to tape) and up-converting all that material to a real 24p format at www.dv.com 24 dv august 2008 http://www.dv.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Digital Video - August 2008

Digital Video - August 2008 Contents DV Update My Studio Close-Up Wristshot HV30 Camcorder Tiffen DFX Bench Test PCM-D50 & R-09HR Recorders Camera Cradle Instant Expert My Passport Elite High School Confidential The Ultimate DIY Raid DV101 Click to Play Production Diary

Digital Video - August 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.