American Cinematographer - March 2012 - 12

Short Takes
Sisters Lisle (Devon Woods, left) and Aurora (Karley Scott Collins) struggle to understand their mother’s death in When You Find Me, directed by Bryce Dallas Howard and shot by Andre Lascaris. The short was inspired by the eight winning photographs in the Canonsponsored Project Imagin8ion competition.

Moving Pictures By Iain Stasukevich

Shot by Andre Lascaris and directed by Bryce Dallas Howard, the short film When You Find Me is the culmination of producer Ron Howard’s Project Imagin8ion, a Canon-sponsored, crowd-sourced competition wherein photographers from all over the world were asked to submit a photo in one of eight categories: character, mood, relationship, time, setting, goal, obstacle and the unknown. After choosing eight finalists, Howard developed a story for the short with Bryce, his daughter, and screenwriter Dane Charbeneau. When You Find Me tells the story of sisters Aurora and Lisle (played as children by Karley Collins and Devon Woods, and as adults by Jacy King and Erin Way), whose bond is tested by their mother’s death. The narrative alternates between past and present while blurring the line between dreams and consciousness. The creative team initially assumed that Lascaris would shoot When You Find Mewith Canon’s EOS 5D Mark II DSLR, but when the cinematographer signed onto the project, rumors of a new Canon camera began to surface. After making some inquiries, Lascaris was given access to a prototype of the Cinema EOS C300, Canon’s first cinema camera. “I like the 5D, but the C300 is more cinematographer-friendly,” he notes. “It’s small and lightweight, but what really sold me on it were its color space and dynamic range.” The camera’s Canon Log gamma setting offers up to 12 stops of latitude. Also attractive were the two EF-mount Cinema EOS lenses that came with the C300, a 14.5-60mm T2.6 and a 30-300mm T2.95-3.7, which Lascaris describes as “proper cine lenses.” He notes, “They have that Canon crispness; they breathe very little; and
12 March 2012

they’re well-machined, with big barrels that are easy to pull focus on.” One of the project’s key creative challenges was incorporating the winning still photos into the story in an organic way. “Often that meant reinterpreting the photos and the photographer’s intent,” Lascaris explains. An example of this comes early in the film, when young Aurora and Lisle arrive at a hospital mere seconds after their mother’s death. The original black-and-white photo, “Too Much” by photographer Lexia Frank, depicts an embrace between a man and a sick woman in a gloomy hospital room. “The goal was to create a feeling of trauma that suited the scene, but we didn’t want a broody look, so we flipped it and made the scene brighter and the mother more angelic-looking,” says Lascaris. The original photo features a strong window source, but Lascaris and gaffer Evan Pesses lit the scene primarily with daylightbalanced fluorescent tubes they swapped into the location’s existing ceiling fixtures. Outside a heavily ND’d window, an Opal-gelled 12K HMI created a halo of daylight around the mother’s lifeless form. “‘Running from Wind’ is one of my favorite photos,” Lascaris says of Brooke Shaden’s still, which shows two girls in their nightgowns dashing through a field of tall grass in the pale half-light of magic hour. “Because it’s a magic-hour shot, we needed to set the camera up and then wait for the right moment to get it,” he says. “I had to shoot the scene where Lisle sneaks out of the house at the tail end of magic hour so it would blend better into the nighttime shots that follow.” One of the main challenges posed by the night shoots was the limited time the filmmakers had with the child actors: three hours per night during the week, five per night on weekends. ➣

American Cinematographer

Images courtesy of Canon.

American Cinematographer - March 2012

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