American Cinematographer - July 2012 - 10

Short Takes
A man and woman (Julien Borno and Meghan Edwards) embark on a journey of discovery in the music video for Keane’s “Silenced by the Night,” shot by Alejandro Lalinde and directed by Chris Sims.

Road-Trip Romance By Iain Stasukevich

The music video for Keane’s “Silenced by the Night” tells the story of a man and a woman on a journey of discovery across the American Southwest. “They’re free spirits willing to take chances,” says cinematographer Alejandro Lalinde. “During their travels they fall in and out of love, not knowing where their road or their lives will take them.” For the improvisational six-day shoot, director Chris Sims and his small crew took the actors, Meghan Edwards and Julien Borno, on a road trip from Los Angeles to Austin, Texas, where Keane was scheduled to play the 2012 South by Southwest Music Festival, and then back again. “Music videos are usually shot in one 14-hour day, and you’re doing a lot of fast work at an extreme pace,” says Lalinde. “This was more like shooting six music videos. Whether it was 10 at night or 11 in the morning, we were rolling the camera.” In addition to Sims and Lalinde, the crew comprised 1st AC Robby Hart, a production coordinator and a producer. A chase van followed the lovers in their ’80s-era Volvo while Lalinde and Sims traded operator duties in the back seat. To get the camera into such tight quarters, Panavision Hollywood’s Guy McVicker streamlined the Panavised Red Epic-M to the stripped-down camera body, a 5" touch-screen LCD monitor, an anamorphic lens and a battery. The operator pulled his own focus with a lightweight follow-focus attachment, leaving Hart to concentrate on maintaining the camera, lenses and accessories. “It was unconventional for all of us, including Robby,” says Lalinde. “It was like working with a photo assistant.” The camera’s reduced size allowed the operator to shoot more easily from the chest or lap. That suited the documentary aesthetic Sims had in mind. “When I was putting the Epic together, I thought, ‘We need to treat this like a 16mm camera: small, self10 July 2012

contained and mobile,’” says Lalinde. He and Sims sought out the older C-Series optics for their softening effect on the digital image and the irregular qualities of their anti-reflective coatings. They used 30mm, 50mm, 75mm and 100mm lenses in the C-Series line, as well as a 40mm E-Series lens “that was very close to the look of the C-Series,” says Lalinde. Depending on the lens, Lalinde could only come as close as 30" to his subjects before needing a diopter to maintain focus. The longer the lens, the farther out from the film plane its close focus is. When necessary, he used full or split Tiffen diopters. At Panavision, McVicker removed the diopters from their 138mm retaining rings to make them easier for the filmmakers to manipulate by hand in front of the lens. The handheld glass elements allowed Lalinde to smear sunlight across the frame and bend the focus, giving the image an ethereal quality. “We did anything to distort the foreground,” he says. “We shot into the sun and other sources to create flares. Depending on the source and the angle of light coming into the lens, you can create all sorts of artifacts. It’s just something that happened while we were shooting, and the effect was different every time.” A mattebox was occasionally employed to facilitate Tiffen IRNDs, which Lalinde used to maintain a shallow-focus T-stop (between T2.3 and T2.8) at all times. He also utilized a Schneider Pola for some shots. McVicker provided Lalinde with a spreadsheet describing the anamorphic-compatibility issues inherent in various digital cameras. “You will usually have cropping issues shooting 2:1 anamorphic with a digital format,” the cinematographer explains. “The Red MX horizontally crops the image about 49 percent, and the Arri Alexa [with the 16x9 Alev-III sensor] horizontally crops it about 39 percent, so your field-of-view is not what it would be with a full-frame

American Cinematographer

Photos by Christian Heuer. Photos and frame grabs courtesy of the filmmakers.

American Cinematographer - July 2012

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