Digital Video - October 2007 - (Page 35)

ANY FILMMAKER WHO HAS PRODUCED THEIR OWN PROJECTS UNDERSTANDS THE COMPLEXITY OF STRETCHING DOLLARS AND RESOURCES AS FAR AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE. From left, actors Steve Nicolson and Joe Shaw are captured with a Panasonic AG-HVX200 camera. Despite logistical troubles with the camera’s P2 capture media, Louthan says he “got fantastic footage.” V Actors Jason Flemyng and Jennifer Tilly embrace for Romania’s moviewithin-a-movie footage, which Louthan shot in 35mm anamorphic. eteran producer Guy Louthan made a career of this arcane practice on over 40 feature films, but after 28 years of helping others make their movies, he decided to return to his passion for writing and directing. Louthan lampoons low-budget filmmaking in Made in Romania, a mockumentary that trails overly ambitious line producer Sebastian Grove (Joe Shaw) during the making of his first feature. With his project, an adaptation of an obscure Victorian English novel set to star actress Jennifer Tilly (playing herself), Sebastian soon finds himself at the mercy of a collection of colorful characters—including a sleazy Hollywood financier, a sociopath director and a strangely charming Mafioso. There’s one final catch: the financier insists Sebastian’s epic be shot entirely in Romania, under what can at best be called a suspicious tax deal. What follows is a seemingly endless series of horrible trials and tribulations that make Made in Romania a real Hollywood story. This painfully on-the-mark tale is told from the first-person perspective of Sebastian’s assistant, who Shooting with the HVX200, Louthan (center) says, “Lookie-loos are cut down to a minimum because the camera you’re using has a profile no bigger than a home video camera.” is shooting behind-the-scenes making-of footage “for the DVD.” This digital material is integrated with footage from the movie-within-the-movie. “We wanted to have two very distinct looks: one for the video footage, and a very solid look for the movie itself,” says Louthan. For his movie-within-a-movie footage, Louthan spared no expense on 35mm anamorphic gear, shooting at Castel Film Studios in Bucharest (where Louthan had worked several times before on other projects) as well as at practical locations in and around the city. “A lot of times these movies-withinmovies look cheap, but we went all out,” Louthan says. “We built a town set, and had days with 80 extras, cattle and carriages—the whole deal.” To capture his primary footage, ostensibly originating from the behind-the-scenes digital camera, Louthan investigated several options. “We wanted a system that was compact and gave us a great image, but that also made sense when we would occasionally see the actor playing the cameraman onscreen in reflections. That’s how we selected the Panasonic AG-HVX200. We built in lots of shots with reflected surfaces so that we could actually see the camera and cameraman and make him a more involved character in the film.” When Louthan set out for Romania in early 2007, the HVX200 was a fairly new release. “Researching it, we spoke in detail with Panasonic—and I talked with a good friend of mine, Stephen Campanelli, an operator who had become familiar with the HVX200 on Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. We were really sold on the convenience of the P2 system. In the end, it was a good decision because the material we got was really good—but getting there was a challenge for sure.” As the production was shooting and posting in Europe, Louthan shot 1080i in 25p. After purchasing the HVX in London, the production shot there for 10 days, then for another 20 days in Romania and, finally, 10 days in Los Angeles. One of the chief challenges with the HVX200 during production was the limited space available on the 8GB P2 cards. Because of their limited availability at dv october 2007 www.dv.com 35 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

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.