American Cinematographer - March 2011 - 14

Pahnl designed more than 200 stencils in Adobe Fireworks, whose basic animation component also helped him sequence the images.

painted black on both sides to prevent light spill. Sheets of plain white paper were used to diffuse the light shining through the stencils,which were also gelled for each character: blue for the hero dog, green for a second dog, pink for the cats and yellow for the birds. The light behind the stencils was supplied with either a high-powered flash module or flashlight. Pahnl photographed Nowhere Near Here with a Nikon D90 DSLR, using 35mm, 18-55mm and 55-200mm N ikkor lenses. “You get to think about things more creatively with these DSLRs,” he notes, citing the shallow depth-of-field and selective focus that’s possible with the cameras’ sensors and variety of lenses. “I know a lot of people who want to keep things separate — a still camera is a still camera,and a videocamera is a videocamera — but I think these cameras create new possibilities for artists and filmmakers.” Pahnl’s process for N owhere N ear Here was based on double-exposure photography. He shot each scene on location in Oxford, late at night on the streets, first using the light stencils and then capturing the background plates, merging the two in post. Photographing the stencils was a matter of composing the characters in the frame and setting the camera to only expose the backlit, brightly illuminated shape, which usually meant using a narrow f-stop and a slow ASA. Animating was as basic as taking a shot of a stencil in its place,
14 March 2011

replacing it with the next stencil,and then taking another shot. In order to avoid being exposed in the frame alongside the stencils, Pahnl wore black. “I was dressed like a ninja a lot of the time, and I think this is why the police stopped me so often,” he recalls wryly. “They’d see this blinking contraption on the ground, and there I was, lying maybe 3 meters away with a remote control, dressed all in black. I don’t blame them for stopping me,actually!” Because he shot characters and backgrounds separately, the camera settings tended to change with each setup to accommodate the desired effect. “I wanted the backgrounds to have a streaky, slowshutter look to them, so I normally used a 5or 10-second exposure for those,” he says. “It was a lot of work for every frame,” he adds. He made chalk outlines on the ground that lined up with registration marks on the backs of the stencil frames, on which he also scribbled notes regarding distances and positions. Scenes in which the stencil characters move behind objects in the frame — such as when the dog runs behind the wheel of a trash bin to get at some birds — proved to be some of the most challenging composites. To edit and composite the effects, Pahnl worked in Adobe Premiere, where “the environment shots would be on one layer and the stencil layer would be above it,” he explains. “I’d set the stencil layer to a screen-blend mode and hope it
American Cinematographer

would line up, which it did if my measurements were correct. It was easy when there was a stencil just standing in the middle of the shot, but when I did those shots where the characters interacted with their environment, they were usually misaligned the first time around, and I had to reshoot a couple of scenes.” Pahnl used looping animations whenever possible. Animation of the dog running, for instance, was always three stencils, looped. One of the most difficult animations was a tracking 360-degree shot of the running dog. Pahnl needed 24 stencils to get the full 360-degree move, but he ended up making only half that number and repeating the three-stencil loop for each angle on the opposite side of the subject. To help maintain a repeatable distance as he moved the shot down the sidewalk, he stretched a length of string between the stencil’s position and the camera tripod. The final scene of the video features a shallow-focus standoff between the dog and an elusive feline, who turns tail and runs at the last moment. As the dog gives chase, they both disappear out of focus into the far distance. To achieve this effect, Pahnl needed to shoot the separate elements — dog, cat and background — at the same fstop and successfully hand-repeat each focus pull to tie them all together. While he was at work on Nowhere Near Here,Pahnl was invited to contribute the piece to The Herbert Museum and Art Gallery’s exhibit of street art, which ran through mid-January. In addition to a daily loop of the film, the gallery displayed most of the actual stencils. More and more, Pahnl finds himself producing work for galleries. “As a street artist, it’s a bit strange working with galleries,” he muses. “Street art is painting on the street,and when you bring that into a neutral gallery environment,no matter what you do, it’s going to feel a little bit artificial. All media have strengths and weaknesses. In that respect, you certainly need to adapt, but it’s important that you bring your influences and the methods you’ve developed from one medium into the next.” ●

American Cinematographer - March 2011

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