American Cinematographer - January 2014 - 20

AMC_0114_p016_p020_00 short takes 11/23/13 4:44 PM Page 20

Top and middle:
Lu is moved by a
meeting with
Mila (Saye
Yabandeh),
whose family he
killed in Iraq.
Bottom:
Cinematographer
Kay Madsen at
work on location.

where we started on a close-up, with him
punching the wall out of frame, and then
panned down to show him pulling his fist
back from one of the holes."
Lu switches to its other main location
for a sequence in which Lu seeks a measure
of relief by visiting an Iraqi woman who
survived the incident. Having relocated to
the United States, the woman hosts Lu in
20

January 2014

her bright, airy home.
Prior to Lu's visit, as the woman
contemplates a Webcam message he has
sent, she walks outside to dip a foot in her
pool, where the water is a strange shade of
green. "The pool had turned green a few
days earlier, after the pump went bad," says
Madsen. Instead of despairing, he and
Vandiver considered the emotional subtext
American Cinematographer

the hue could lend to their story. "Green is
the color of hope," muses the cinematographer. "At the same time, a green pool is
something that's been sitting there without
seeing a lot of care."
The filmmakers were constantly on
the lookout for small moments they could
weave into their narrative. "The story is
compressed into 10 minutes, so we
wondered how to give it a bit of breathing
room," says Madsen. He cites a seemingly
unremarkable shot of the woman taking a
teapot off her stove just before she receives
Lu's message. To subtly suggest that the
woman's routine is about to be disrupted,
Madsen framed the teapot more prominently in the foreground, making it the only
object in sharp focus.
Madsen pulled focus himself most of
the time, and he used shallow depth-of-field
selectively. "Sometimes it's great to isolate
certain elements," he says. "There's one shot
in the motel room that starts from a
distance, and it's completely out of focus as
we walk in. Then we find Lu leaning on the
wall, smoking a cigarette. We basically walk
into focus."
Madsen also served as the project's
editor, loading the 5K files into Final Cut
Pro X. "With the help of a Red Rocket card,
we were able to do real-time editing, but it's
not always easy to wear two hats." The
mandated running time of 10 minutes
forced him to be ruthless with the footage,
and on the final day of editing, the cut had
to be reduced from a length of 17½
minutes. "We had some shots in there that
we really liked," he laments, "but there was
just no room for them."
Color correction was performed
using a built-in FCPX tool "to crush the
blacks a little bit, and to play with the saturation," he says. "Apart from small adjustments, the final look is pretty much how it
came out of the camera."
Madsen and Vandiver managed to
beat their deadline, but the cinematographer says they essentially turned seven days
into 14 by working well into the night.
Reflecting upon the experience, he says he
doesn't regret his leap of faith. "If the conditions are right, you can achieve great results
with very little means. I like that lean
●
approach to filmmaking."

American Cinematographer - January 2014

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