American Cinematographer - April 2013 - 86

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6 Sundance Standouts
aspect ratio — Fruitvale is a really intimate portrait, and we wanted to be close
to our subject — so we went back-andforth in a very constructive, deliberate
way right up to the last day we could
order the film stock.”
Arri “really championed the
project and took us under their wing,”
she continues, noting that Arri CSC
provided an Arri 416 and Zeiss Ultra 16
primes and charged only for shipping. “I
chose the [T1.3] Ultra 16s because I
wanted to shoot relatively wide open to
help mitigate depth-of-field, and they
stay sharper at wider apertures than
Zeiss Superspeeds,” says the cinematographer.
She shot the entire picture on
Kodak Vision3 500T 7219 rated at a
base EI of 320. “Super 16 exposed properly and developed normally felt like the
right amount of grain,” she says, adding,
“I knew we’d be working with a lot of
mixed lighting, and I think 7219
handles that exceptionally well.”
Morrison’s work in the nonfiction
arena has honed her skill and instincts
as a camera operator, and this was especially useful on Fruitvale, which
Coogler wanted to shoot entirely handheld. “My most important tool for
working handheld is my hip — resting
my elbow on my hip creates a third
point that’s very steadying,” Morrison
says. “Ryan had so much trust in me
that he hardly ever looked at the monitor, but we weren’t seeing dailies till
weeks later, so I finally asked him to
[look at some footage] to make sure
what I was doing was what he had in
mind. His only note to me was to make
it feel ‘a little more handheld,’ a little
rougher.”
“Because I learned on the Arri
16-S, which doesn’t have a video out, I
don’t look at the monitors much during
takes,” Coogler acknowledges. “I was
taught to really be there for the actor, so
it was important to get a cinematographer I trusted as an operator. Rachel is a
strong operator, and her instincts are
very good. I like to use long takes, so it
was important for her to be able to feel
out where to go. Sometimes I was close

86

April 2013

enough that I could tap her on the
shoulder and talk to her, but often, I let
her feel it out while I watched the
actors.”
Morrison credits her years of
working fast on small budgets with
teaching her something else that proved
useful on Fruitvale: how to walk into a
new location and quickly determine
where to hide small fixtures to augment
the existing light. “For better or for
worse, I know every unit under 1,200
watts like the back of my hand,” she says
wryly.
“On Fruitvale, our locations were
either dictated by where the actual
events took place, or they were generously donated by Ryan’s family,” she
continues. “In smaller spaces, the challenge was finding ways to augment the
practical lighting and make it evocative
when there wasn’t much room to hide
our units. This meant pushing as much
from windows as possible and then
using polecats, wall spreaders, mogul
adapters, scissor clamps and a host of
other grip tools to hide lights just out of
shot. I always ask production designers
to give me options for architectural and
under-cabinet lighting because that can
be a motivating source more often than
you think.”
A birthday dinner for Grant’s
mother, Wanda (Octavia Spencer), was
shot in a ground-floor location
Morrison describes as “about the size of
my pinky,” and it involved seven characters who move around in the small
kitchen and the adjacent living room.
She recalls, “There were eight to 10 of
us dancing around each other, and just
outside every frame was a light wedged
into a very small space. There’s a [4-foot
2-bank] Kino Flo overhead on a wall
spreader flaring the lens occasionally;
another Kino behind [me] on a wall
spreader; a tungsten source pushing
through the window visible at the back
of the house; a color-corrected M18
bouncing into a 12-by UltraBounce
outside the living-room window; and a
daylight Kino through 216 cheating for
a TV in the living room, with a grip
doing the grip dance with two nets to
American Cinematographer

simulate a subtle flicker from the screen.
“On bigger, institutional locations, we didn’t have the time or
manpower to change out every bulb, so
it was often about figuring out what
color the existing light was and gelling
our lights to match. My color-temp
meter saved my ass on this show.”
Three days were devoted to filming on the BART platform and at
Fruitvale station, “but they were fourhour days because BART didn’t want
anyone to know what we were doing —
we could only shoot from 1:15 to 5:15
a.m.,” notes Morrison. Action on the
train was filmed in a stationary car
surrounded by greenscreen in the
BART maintenance facility; Bay Area
footage and moving lights were
composited in later.
Visual effects were finished just
two days before Fruitvale’s premiere,
and time for the color correction was
short. (FotoKem processed the Super
16 negative and transferred it to
HDCam-SR, and the picture stayed in
that format through color correction at
Spy Post. The Sundance deliverable was
HDCam.) “Our colorist, Chris Martin,
was lovely — his instincts were excellent, and we had a really open dialogue,”
says Morrison. “We didn’t have much
time, and we spent a lot of it navigating
bigger concepts, like how to ride that
line between ‘real’ and ‘cinematic,’ than
we did on shot-to-shot matching.”
“When I researched this movie, I
went to the actual locations, including
the hospital where Oscar died and the
morgue where Wanda identified his
body, and what was most unnerving to
me was how banal those places looked,”
says Coogler. “People go there for terrible reasons, but they don’t look dramatic
at all. I thought we’d impact the audience more on a gut level if we stayed
true to that.”
“Ultimately,” says Morrison, “the
challenge was finding a delicate balance,
creating imagery that had an air of
cinema but at the same time felt very
raw and real.”
— Rachael K. Bosley

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American Cinematographer - April 2013

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