American Cinematographer - February 2014 - 81

Cinematographer Nic Sadler frames up actress Alexis Knapp through a Kowa anamorphic lens
mounted on an Alexa Studio.

lenses, and then push the EI as far as I could.
The rationale boiled down to: the more
pixels, the less noise, the higher EI I could
get away with, and the less supplemental
light I would need.
Fortunately, Rufus agreed to supply
us with both the Kowas and the Alexa
Studio. We received another great favor
from Stephan Ukas-Bradley, who works for
Arri's Burbank office. With Stephan's help,
we secured a Codex Onboard S recorder,
which enabled us to shoot in ArriRaw.
A week before commencing principal cinematography, I shot some night-exterior tests in downtown L.A. with Chris Keth
and 2nd AC Vanessa Ward. I wanted to find
out where the line was between the highest sensitivity we could use and the most
acceptable level of picture noise we could
get away with. I also wanted to test some
new Digicon filters from Schneider Optics.
Herschel and I didn't want our locations to
look grainy or gritty; we wanted to lend
them a little glamour.
We viewed these tests via a Christie
4K projector, and the results were astonishing. After applying a Rec 709 LUT to the
ArriRaw files, bringing the exposure down a
little and adding a touch of additional noise
reduction, I felt confident we could push
the Alexa from its native 800 EI to 2,600 EI,
producing controllable noise levels while
maintaining good skin tones. The Digicon
filter helped lift the shadow detail without
making it feel at all muddy. In general, we
stuck with our T4 minimum stop, but we
broke the rule a few times when I thought
the situation warranted it. For interior

scenes, we kept the Digicon but returned to
the native 800 EI.
Our approach to lighting exterior
scenes was to control the ambient light in
the foregrounds, replacing it with our own
sources, and let the backgrounds look after
themselves - mainly because we didn't
have a hope in hell of controlling the backgrounds. Key grip Justin Lesch used flags
and butterflies to kill streetlight pollution,
while gaffer Jose Aguire lit the foregrounds
to the 9 footcandles we needed to produce
good skin tones. Not having to use powerful light sources opened up some interesting
possibilities. In fact, working with a high EI
completely changed our lighting approach.
At 2,600 EI, you can get a decent exposure
from just about anything that emits light;
the challenge becomes controlling light
pollution and working your keylight into the
exposures you need for the background.
In my still photography, I've used 7'
Octadome soft boxes made by Photoflex.
With a grid attached, the light is both
cosmetic and controllable. I'd used them
with photographic strobes, so I called
Photoflex and talked to Nadine Frush about
continuous-light options. Her recommendation was a Constellation 3, which allows
three E39 bulbs to be used together inside
each Octadome. (Photoflex has since
released the Northstar, a 100-watt LED
fixture that we would have used if it had
been available.)
For our night exteriors, we used a
mix of 150-watt and 75-watt Maxi Daylight
5,500K CFL bulbs and 17-watt domestic
Phillips LED bulbs rated at 2,700K. Using car
81

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American Cinematographer - February 2014

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