American Cinematographer - May 2011 - 14

The Absence was photographed on location in New York City and eastern Long Island, including portions shot at Oheka Castle on Long Island’s Gold Coast.

and know what the other person needed.” Production on The Absence began in N ew York in N ovember 2008. WeaverMadsen spent the month leading up to the start of principal photography doing location scouts and tech scouts with DeMille. “We had terrible, freezing weather,” she recalls. “It had a beautiful, dreary look, so I was very happy for the photography, but it was hard on the crew. Luckily, we were so prepared that we were ready for any circumstance.” Primary locations included farms in Suffolk County and Oheka Castle on Long Island’s Gold Coast. The latter “was used as Xanadu in Citizen Kane ,” notes WeaverMadsen, who defers some of the credit for her award-winning work to the Olmsted brothers’ celebrated landscape architecture at the historic estate. The resourceful filmmakers made the most of every opportunity they were given. The script won the Deluxe Film Award, which took care of their negativeprocessing fees, and because WeaverMadsen assisted Fuji with some film tests, much of the stock (Fuji Eterna Vivid 500 8547 and the since-discontinued Super F125 8532) was provided at a discount, making it affordable to shoot 3-perf Super 35mm. The production rented an Arricam Lite and Moviecam Compact and a set of Arri Master Primes. “The film is really about isolation, and Alex and I both worked to make sure that came across visually,” says the cinematographer. “With the lighting, stock and lens choices, we really tried to underscore
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how the main character begins as a stranger to the world that he is exploring; for example, we used shallow depth-of-field for the first part of the story to underscore that he is separate from that world and alone. Later, after he decides to embrace this new world, he is no longer isolated from the backgrounds, and everything becomes sharp.” Above all, Weaver-Madsen regards her relationships with her instructors (Bill McDonald, Tom Denove and John Simmons, ASC), DeMille and crewmembers as the driving forces behind her work. Since graduating, she has maintained close ties to all of her collaborators on The Absence. “There’s a family feeling in the MFA program because it’s so small,” she explains. “It teaches you to navigate relationships and maintain communication and friendship. If you’re always open with your collaborators about what you want to accomplish, then you’ll have a very effective set.” Hobbs’ winning entry, Loves Me Not, takes place in an abandoned apartment building in Atlanta, where a woman lives with her lover. What starts out as a seemingly ordinary day begins to spin out of control when the woman has a flashback revealing she has been kidnapped and forced into sex slavery and is experiencing symptoms of Stockholm Syndrome. Hobbs dabbled in still photography before focusing on filmmaking as a course of study. He started at Georgia State before switching to Full Sail, which offers a 21month production-oriented program culminating with a B.S. degree. “It’s an extremely competitive
American Cinematographer

program,” says Hobbs. “In our class, there were only three 35mm films that were picked to go into production out of about 75 students.” Directing students have to pitch their final projects to a panel of instructors, so cinematography students need to get on board with as many directors and scripts as possible to improve their chances at shooting something. Hobbs says he was immediately comfortable working with motion-picture cameras, but the lighting aspects of cinematography were initially somewhat intimidating. “It didn’t really come naturally at first, so I challenged myself to figure it out,” he recalls. “You see pictures of sets where there are just a couple of lamps and a camera, and somehow through the lens it all looks right, and that’s what I wanted to learn: how the light comes together.” The script for Loves Me Not, written by student directors Rebecca Hodges and Ewa Pazera, offered Hobbs a variety of opportunities to develop a personal approach to lighting. Hodges, who had a background in production design, worked closely with him on the look of the film, which Hobbs shot in Super 35mm (framing for 2.40:1) with an Arricam Lite and Zeiss Super Speeds. “Visually it’s a dark film, but at the same time, light plays an important role,” says the cinematographer. “We wanted muted green colors that would fade into warmer yellows, and we wanted [the look] to go back-and-forth between something that’s really dark and something kind of happy. Most of the action takes place in the

American Cinematographer - May 2011

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