American Cinematographer - June 2020 - 16

Making Shots in Quarantine

16

To sustain his creative output
during quarantine, Lawrence Sher, ASC is
re-creating film shots available on Shotdeck and posting them to his Instagram
account. Shotdeck is a film-image database tool created by Sher as a way for
cinematographers, directors and other
crew people to talk about images. In the
images shown above, he has re-created
shots of Dorothy (Judy Garland) from The
June 2020

Wizard of Oz (shot by Harold Rosson,
ASC); Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis)
from There Will Be Blood (Robert Elswit,
ASC); and a scene between Gertie (Drew
Barrymore) and E.T. from E.T. the ExtraTerrestrial (Allen Daviau, ASC). A video of
how Sher and his family/crew accomplished the latter shot will be available on
our website (ascmag.com).
About the project, Sher says: "My
wife, Hema Patel - who's a creative
director - was already doing some recreations of great works of art for the
challenge #betweenartandquarantine, so
it was natural for me to want to do that
with our works of art - our movies. We
started with a shot from The Pianist, with
me in bed, because it seemed appropriate to quarantine. Since then, we've
done There Will Be Blood, O Brother,
Where Art Thou?, and then brought the
family into it with Hema as Dorothy from
The Wizard of Oz; my older son Max as
Napoleon Dynamite and our six-monthold son as the baby from The Hangover.
Our daughter as Drew Barrymore from
E.T. was the one that nearly broke us. We
used a floor lamp as the key light, and my
son Max was lighting a 6-inch maquette
of an alien from the movie Paul, which I
American Cinematographer - 100 Years

shot in 2011, as E.T. in the
foreground. At 30 months
old, she was like a ticking
bomb, so it was a race
against time between
naps and lunch before we
knew we'd lose her to a
complete meltdown. Not
too different than a regular workday.
"Since I created Shotdeck, finding the stills to
re-create was easy. Recreating other cinematographers' works isn't just a
great challenge and naturally educational, but, as a
professional cameraperson, we often are asked to
reshoot other people's
work, and we need to
reverse-engineer a shot to
determine what went into
its result. So, trying to do that at home
felt like the perfect way to be creative
during these trying times and a nice way
to keep the cinematography muscles
sharp. We searched for shots we thought
would be fun, and that we could pull off
with limited resources. We have no lighting at home except table, floor and desk
lamps. And to further extend the limitations, we shot them all on my iPhone (an
11 Pro Max). We did use Photoshop to
help match color and finesse a bit, and, in
the case of the E.T. photo, to change the
color of our daughter's baseball cap.
With two creatives at home, there was
certainly plenty of bickering, differences
of opinion, compromises and laughs, so it
felt just like set life again."
Sher's project has also inspired
others to participate. To his Instagram
followers, he wrote, "I love the people
around the world picking up the challenge and sending in their re-creations.
Keep them coming."
You can follow Sher's photo
series on his Instagram: www.instagram.com/lawrencesherdp
- Samantha Dillard
http://www.ascmag.com https://www.instagram.com/lawrencesherdp https://www.instagram.com/lawrencesherdp
American Cinematographer - June 2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - June 2020
