American Cinematographer - January 2019 - 36

Power & Glory

making it, and I couldn't understand
that - until I saw the film, and it was
brilliant.
"Adam takes complex, dry
stories and injects elements of humor
and great storytelling, and they become
palatable to an audience," Fraser attests.

"Dick Cheney himself is a very dry individual. It really takes someone with
Adam's vision to tell this kind of story. I
was excited to read this script, and it
certainly didn't disappoint. Also,
Christian Bale was a huge factor for me.
I had never worked with Christian

before, but I had heard amazing things
from a lot of my crew who had."
The story of Vice, Fraser says, is
"a complex one. Cheney was a brilliant
gamesman, and Adam constructed an
intricate and complexly interwoven
story. We chose 35mm anamorphic as

36

Vice covers nearly 50 years
in the life of Dick Cheney
(Christian Bale), and in
conveying those shifting times,
director Adam McKay and
cinematographer Greig Fraser,
ASC, ACS strove to incorporate an array of periodcorrect camera systems, with
formats including Super
16mm, Super 8mm, high-definition video, and digital and
analog standard-definition
video.
"I've done a lot of
movies and I've had to schedule a lot of equipment, but it was quite
different to suddenly be seeking out a
1970s tube video camera for an upcoming scene," says 1st AC William Coe. "We
worked with equipment from the 1950s
to modern day, [including] Super 8mm,
JVC camcorders, Ikegami tube television
cameras, and modern HD news cameras.
"Keslow Camera in California
supplied the show with our primary
cameras and lenses and some of the
more esoteric vintage cameras, but
sourcing old video cameras in working
condition was not easy!" Coe continues.
"These weren't just props for an actor to
walk around with - we were actually
shooting on these vintage cameras. We
ended up turning to Steve Irwin from
Playback Technologies, who had much of
what we were looking for in good working order. Another gentleman, Randy
Wedick, supplied us with some other
cameras."
"We really tried hard to match the
look of existing archival footage, even if
we weren't cutting directly against it,"
January 2019

Fraser offers. "But that [archival footage]
isn't fresh out of a camera. It's been
around a while. It's been bounced off
satellites, and dubbed, and digitized, and
compressed - and that's what we're
used to seeing.
"We had a few shots of Colin
Powell [played by Tyler Perry] speaking at
the United Nations about the war in
Iraq," Fraser adds. "I wanted to shoot this
with the same cameras that they shot
the actual speech on - this was the
time of early digital video, MiniDV and
early HD cameras - but the problem
was our footage [with those cameras]
just looked too good. It was pretty clean
out of the camera and didn't match any
of the archival footage we had."
Working with FotoKem senior
colorist and ASC associate Dave Cole,
Fraser says, "We beat up the footage a
bit. We sent it through a few different
dubbing machines, uploaded it to
YouTube and then downloaded it from
YouTube - and then we had something
that looked right! There was always a
ASC 100th Anniversary

background discussion that
we could use a modern
camera and just degrade the
footage in post, but I've found
in life that I generally have the
most success when I'm as
honest as I can be. In this
case, sticking with what was
period-accurate just seemed
like the right thing to do."
Cole did still use the
tools at his disposal in the
digital grade to further finesse
the footage captured with
these vintage cameras. "In
one scene," Cole notes,
"there's a flashback of Richard Nixon
having an off-the-record discussion with
Henry Kissinger. It's voyeuristic - you
never see their faces in the scene - and
Greig wanted it to have a dreamlike
feel." Fraser shot the argument using
Todd-AO anamorphic lenses, and then,
Cole adds, "I isolated small areas of the
frame to focus on, such as the tops of
Kissinger's fingers holding a cigarette, and
caused chromatic aberrations to extend
from those regions, zooming them a little
bit to add an 'aged lens' effect.
"For some of the 16mm footage
that Greig shot that was supposed to go
next to some archival footage of
President Jimmy Carter, that, too, was
just too clean compared to the old digitized footage," Cole continues. "So I had
to clip the signal, causing the highlights to
bleed a bit, add in some chromatic
distortion and simulate interlace artifacts. Once we added those effects, you
really couldn't tell the [archival] footage
from the new stuff."
- Jay Holben

Photo courtesy of Michael Bauman.

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