Digital Video - October 2007 - (Page 33)

Donnelly’s 16mm processing was done at The Lab at Moving Images—now part of the NYC finishing facility PostWorks—with all the footage then one-light transferred to DVCAM. “This worked in two ways,” Donnelly says. “We could use [the DV footage] for dailies—which were actually more like ‘weeklies’—and we could use it for import into Final Cut Pro. My editor, Robert Mead, and I both own Sony DVCAM decks, so that would be easy. We knew we were going to do a high-def finish, but the DVCAM worked as our digital workprint.” After importing and logging their footage, Mead began cutting. “Robert worked on it for two months,” says Donnelly, “and then I took over to get a fine cut on my Mac Pro desktop with a LaCie 1.2TB drive for the media. It’s got the FireWire 800 ports, so it was very fast. I used to be a Media 100 guy, but you get a lot of bang for your buck with Apple. I also did some rough mixing and music work in Soundtrack and temp graphics with Motion. We then took our EDL back to Moving Images and then looped up our Super 16 on a Philips Spirit DataCine to begin the transfer to D5. But even after conforming in D5, we still just had a one-pass, uncorrected image, so we got into the color timing.” Donnelly and Moving Images colorist Micah Kirz, with whom he’d worked on numerous commercials and projects for MTV. “We used a Pogle to do the tape-totape correction work, which tied in closely to the drama and the arc of the characters,” Donnelly says. “The beginning of the film is very contrasty, blue and cool, and we then gradually warm up the image and even out the contrast as the relationship between our characters grows. I had some of this in the negative, but Micah enhanced it in subtle ways that took it further, and that helped build the emotion of this story.” Asked of the biggest lesson learned while shooting Divergence—which has won top narrative honors at the G.I. Film Festival, the Staten Island Film Festival and the Long Island International Film Expo, and screened at the Avignon Film Festival— Donnelly says with a wry laugh, “I’d do it all again if I had a bigger budget, more support and somebody else’s money. ” www.dv.com Interview director/star Steve Buscemi rehearsed action with co-star Sienna Miller for three weeks before shooting entirely in sequence in a New York loft. SECOND CHANCES THOMAS KIST RE-SHOOTS INTERVIEW WITH STEVE BUSCEMI. BY JON SILBERG F or cinematographer Thomas Kist, shooting Interview, directed by and starring Steve Buscemi, was a case of déjà vu. Shot in nine days with standard-def Sony XDCAM equipment, Interview is a remake of a Dutch film of the same name directed by Theo Van Gogh and also shot by Kist, in 2003, just a year before Van Gogh’s murder. “It was something I wanted to do,” says Kist of the remake. “Theo was working on doing an American remake himself, and I was eager to fulfill his dream. There were no sad thoughts.” The story concerns a nihilist journalist (Buscemi) interviewing pop-cultural flavor of the month (Sienna Miller). What follows is a back-and-forth drama between two damaged people. Shot in a loft in New York City, the action was carefully rehearsed—”like a play,” says Kist. Shooting then proceeded over a nine-night period, entirely in sequence, as Van Gogh and Kist had created the original. “We mostly had two or three of the XDCAM cameras handheld, following [Steve and Sienna] around. It would be nice for the actors if we just shot 360 degrees, but we’d often go for something like 270 degrees so we could hide some lights.” Kist’s PAL XDCAM units were fitted with Canon 17x zooms. “I really like that camera,” he says. “It offers a great contrast range, especially with the film gammas. And it’s great at low light levels, which is why you could see the New York skyline out our windows all the time.” Kist started out lighting with a meter but soon gave up on it. “The meter didn’t work out, especially with the very low light levels we were working at.” Instead, he relied on the image on his 20-inch Sony CRT monitor, which he also used to confirm focus, and on the zebras in the viewfinders as his exposure guide. Kist says the film’s premiere at this past Sundance Film Fest was an emotional experience. “People stood in line, freezing, for six hours to see it,” he recalls, “and they went crazy for it. This was why Steve went to the trouble of doing this remake: to give Theo the recognition he deserves.” Film producer and writer Jon Silberg is a frequent contributor to DV’s sister magazine, Videography. dv october 2007 JOJO WHILDEN © 2007 CINEMAVAULT, COURTESY SONY PICTURES CLASSICS. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 33 http://www.dv.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Digital Video - October 2007

Cover Contents Letters DV Update R&D Fest Circuit Light Brigade Follow Focus Shootout Image Conscious Instant Expert Close-Ups Eastern Europe Exploit Call of the Wild Four Principles of Storage Storage Media Production Diary

Digital Video - October 2007

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