American Cinematographer - April 2020 - 48

Ardent Supporters
In 2013, Sharon Calahan became
the first cinematographer to be inducted
into the ASC for work in animation. AC
recently spoke with some of the ASC cinematographers who championed her for
membership.

Dennis Muren, ASC: I was really
pleased that the Society chose to bring her
in. I saw a real parallel between the work
she was doing in animation and the work I
was doing in miniatures, stop-motion and
full-size effects. Looking at her work, it's
clear she's dealing with the same problems we deal with in real-world photography; we're both trying to tell stories in
visual media.
One of the things I find interesting
is that Sharon is dealing with synthetic
lighting and creating looks not exclusively
[based] on where lighting would be in the
photographic world. She starts off with a
black-and-white image of a frame that
represents the look she's going to light,
and then she colors it in to what looks
right to her sensibility, and within certain
ranges there's a lot of cheating she can do
that would be impossible in actual
photography. Adding her sensibility to it,
she's looking for the emotional impact,
just like traditional cinematographers.
And what she ends up doing is just so darn
beautiful!
I wanted to get her into the ASC
because the work she's doing is at the
forefront of where a lot of our techniques
are going, and we need artists with her
skills to make digital characters indecipherable from real ones. I stopped giving
predictions on the future because it's
always the public that decides - not us -
but what Sharon is doing is certainly in the
category of the future of cinematography.

Steven Poster, ASC: I was introduced to Sharon on a kind of field trip to
the Pixar campus, and as I sat with her, I
realized that what she does is every bit as
photographic as what we do. She also has
a deep knowledge of color and of the
mechanics of workflow; at the time, she
was working on designing [how to] transfer color from linear to log in the digitalApril 2020

animation system so it would look much
more like motion-picture film.
It dawned on me that this was
what's next - this was what we're going
to be calling cinematography and the
director of photography. I just thought
this was a great opportunity for [the ASC]
to move into a new phase and recognize
the expanding realm of the cinematographer. Her work is not too far from the kind
of work Chivo [Lubezki, ASC, AMC] did on
Gravity.
Sharon is a painter; she's got a
fabulous eye and an amazing eye for
composition, light and texture.

Stephen Goldblatt, ASC, BSC: One
fall I was going to Pixar for screenings, and
at one of them, I was asked to meet
Sharon, look at the work and go through
her workflow. Pixar was of the opinion
that she should be credited as a director
of photography, and I agreed. She was the
cinematographer on Ratatouille in every
way. The work I saw her doing was in
essence the same kind of work I had been
doing all my career. She's responsible for
the look of a film from beginning to end,
and it absolutely makes sense to me that
she be recognized as a cinematographer.
It really comes down to how you
define cinematography. If you don't
confine it to the traditional crew and traditional photography, then the definition
becomes a lot looser to cover those individuals who combine artistry and mechanics to create images, and animation
therefore is definitely included. The cinematographer could be broadly defined as
a visualizer. That's what Sharon does, and
that's good enough for me!
In the end, the job of filmmaking is
a puzzle, and cinematography is central to
the look of the film. Her films all have very
specific looks to them. That's her job;
that's what she does. I was very impressed
by her talent and subsequently found that
there was definite support for her to
become an ASC member.

Daryn Okada, ASC: I met Sharon in
the mid-2000s, and spent time learning
and recognizing that her creative
American Cinematographer - 100 Years

approaches and responsibilities were similar to the challenges and artistic partnerships of live-action cinematographers.
Many times in animation, a person may
have screen credit as "director of photography," but their duties may not be [those
of] a cinematographer. Sharon
approaches every project from a truly
creative place that arrives from visual
storytelling. She takes a story, researches
it, and scouts locations to get their
essence, colors and textures in [service of
creating] the movie's image.
During production, Sharon supervises her crew like a live-action cinematographer. She works closely with the
director to visually interpret the story. She
does everything a cinematographer does,
only it takes longer! In some cases, what
she does is harder because she's literally
starting from a blank page, whereas we
might have sets or locations to begin
from. Sharon also has to consider the
different characters, their skin tones and
facial features, and figure out the best
way to light and photograph them in every
scene - exactly the way we do with realworld actors.
From doing visual-effects movies as
a cinematographer, I never took it for
granted that images added later would
just fit in with what I shot on set, so I
stayed involved in postproduction to work
with the digital lighting process. When
Sharon was proposed for ASC membership, I was able to communicate with
other ASC members the parallels between
what she does and what we do. She was
also able to transfer from the animation
branch to the cinematography branch of
the Academy.
The cinematographer's job is to
interpret the story visually, and that's
exactly what she does, with similar tools,
approaches and concepts. She's a perfect
match for the ASC.
- Jay Holben

American Cinematographer - April 2020

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