American Cinematographer - August 2008 - 22

Above: Facing desperate circumstances in their respective lives, Lila (Misty Upham) and Ray partner to smuggle illegal immigrants from Canada to the United States. Below: Guy Versailles (Jay Klaitz) and Ray fail to see eyeto-eye. the changing seasons; the rising temperature suggests the thawing relationship between Ray and Lila, who start out highly distrustful of one another. “We actually only shot one day on the surface of Lake Champlain, although we shot many days around it,” recalls Morano. “One of the shots we did there shows Lila and Ray driving onto the river for the first time; we shot it from the bucket of a Condor, our makeshift crane. The production could only afford an ice scientist for that day [to measure the thickness of the ice and determine that it was safe]. Key grip Adam Lukens refused to let us onto the lake again without the expert’s advice.” Over the course of the shoot, snowcovered fields, a snowy airport runway, and even a beach ended up doubling for the frozen river. Ray and Lila make their first smuggling run in the middle of the day. (Other runs take place at night.) The scene is a car interior, with the two women conversing as they drive to and from the pickup point. “It had to look like we were on a frozen river,” notes Morano, “and we wanted to see out both the driver’s and passenger’s windows in the scene, so I suggested we drive along the beach, turning the car around for each side of the conversation. All you see out the windows is an expanse of frozen water.” Although the view wasn’t a problem for the night runs, getting enough exposure inside the car proved tricky. “Neither the gaffer, Matt Walker, nor I believe in the ‘dashboard lights’ theory for car interiors, and on the middle of a frozen river, there are no practicals to motivate light — just moonlight bouncing off the snow,” says Morano. “Matt had designed a roof-mount lighting rig when he was key grip on Half Nelson, and he and Adam built something similar for us. It consisted of a speed-rail frame that held two 18-inch Kinos — one coming through the passenger-side window, the other through the driverside window — and a single 4-foot Kino Flo tube that was coming through the front windshield.” All bulbs were 3200°K, gelled with 1⁄4 CTB and connected to dimmable ballasts. “To provide fill, we used Litepanels Minis [daylight-balanced LED lights] gelled with 3⁄4 CTO. Sometimes we bounced them off strategically placed showcards taped inside the car.” Most of the car interiors were filmed while the vehicle was driving down the road. On one day when the weather was just too cold, the vehicle was stationary in a garage that served as an ad-hoc studio, and the grips would rock it to suggest movement. For night exteriors, Morano stuck with a low-level moonlight fill — coming from a high bounce source several stops under exposure — and a hard rim light from the back/side. To create a broad, subtle fill source, Walker and Lukens built an 8'x8'x4' speed-rail frame and put 10 1K Nooks gelled with 1⁄4 CTB on it; the Nooks bounced off bleached muslin and then back through a sheet of 1⁄4 CTB and another panel of bleached muslin. The “moonbox” was rigged to a Condor on nights where the wind wasn’t too strong. On medium-wide and wide shots, Walker used the moonbox with MolePars providing kicks. For less expansive night exteriors, small tungsten lights were substituted; these were sometimes as simple as a 150-watt Dedo and a 650-watt Mickey bouncing into beadboard. When they needed the light to carry across wide swaths of snow and ice, they switched to Ninelight Maxi-Brutes. “The first time we used the Maxis was a night scene at Lila’s camper,” says Morano. “There was so much reflection off the snow that we didn’t need all that light, and we ended up with only a single bulb on each one. As long as we had a lot of snow, we could get away with much smaller units. Our biggest light was a 6K, and we never even pulled it off the truck. On day exteriors, we relied on natural light, occasionally supplementing it with ¢ bounces.” 22 August 2008

American Cinematographer - August 2008

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - August 2008