American Cinematographer - August 2014 - 18

Pescasio (left) and Pellington (middle) each operate a camera on location in downtown Los Angeles.

two open-face Arri 2Ks through some diffusion, powering [the lights] with a 6,500watt generator. If there is a flickering edge
light in there, it's from 1K Par cans. The overall flicker, however, is from the sodium
vapors."
In fact, the potential for flicker from
the industrial lighting and lower-wattage
sources in downtown L.A. gave Pellington
the idea to add strobing throughout the
video, so three Martin Atomic 3000 DMX
strobe lights were rented for the shoot.
These 3,000-watt, 5,600K Xenon units
were wired to 20-amp DMX circuits and fed
to a small DMX controller operated by
gaffer Lou Ramos.
"Lou's a straightforward kind of guy,
and he's been around forever," says Pescasio. "They call him 'Studio Lou' because he
came up through the studio system. He was
beside himself, saying he'd never worked
on anything like this before!"
Shooting with the high-speed Phantom did require Pellington to adjust his
methodology and actually plan shots. "At
first, Mark was thinking he could just grab
the camera and get some high-speed
stuff," says Pescasio. "I had to explain that
he needed to tell the performers what to do
18

August 2014

because we could only shoot eight seconds
of real time at 800 fps. The Phantom work
was the most planned part of [the shoot]."
Indeed, a lot of shots were on-the-fly
discoveries. Roe, who also served as 2ndunit director of photography, says, "I would
grab my skateboard, grab a camera and go
off for 30 minutes or so and just shoot." He
was accompanied on these "visual walkabouts" by camera operator Erick Wilczynski,
whose three-second macro videos, captured
with an iPhone, Pellington discovered
through Instagram. "Erick and I would walk
around with his iPhone and the Hi8 and get
certain elements and different textures,"
Roe explains. "He came up with this technique to throttle the night vision on and off
on the Hi8. It looked like the image was
pulsing because the exposure would take
some time to catch up."
Pellington adds, "Some really beautiful mistakes come out of messing with the
exposure." The director says flashlight gags
were also used for in-camera flares. "I'm
most interested in the mistakes and the
noise."
"Mark gives you direction, but it is
very abstract," says Roe. "He won't tell you
what to shoot, but he'll tell you the emotion
American Cinematographer

he wants you to capture. I've worked with
him for so long that I have a pretty good
understanding of what he wants. It's interesting to see how fast new people can pick
up on his direction. It was the first time
Michael and Erick had worked with Mark,
and they took to it pretty quickly."
FotoKem processed the production's
negative, which was then scanned on a
Spirit DataCine at Ntropic, where Pescasio
and Pellington worked with colorist
Marshall Plante for the final color grade.
"We couldn't find anyone to process the
reversal film normally," Pescasio notes, "so
we had to cross-process it, which was too
bad. But it looked interesting anyway."
When it came to the edit, "I felt the
Epic stuff was the least interesting because
it was the cleanest," Pellington notes.
Working with editor Ben Redmond - who,
the director says, "is a great director in his
own right" - Pellington wanted the visuals
to come hard and fast during the verses to
match the song's driving lyrics and beats,
and then calm down during the chorus.
(Richmond worked with ProRes 4:2:2 HQ
files in Adobe Premiere and After Effects.)
"I was making videos like this, with
really fast cuts, in 1985, but I wanted someone younger to edit ["Giants"] because the
whole editing approach has changed," the
director explains. "Kids raised on desktops
are different from kids raised on [Sony] RM440s or on film. Ben's natural instinct wasn't
to cut fast, so I told him, 'This is an experiment. In the verses you have to be under 15
frames per shot and you can never repeat a
[capture] medium from cut to cut, like
cutting from one film shot to another film
shot.' The way things rub against each
other is the meaning and connection
between clips. Plus, it's really interesting to
see the texture of a person go from super
degraded to super high end. I love what he
did."
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American Cinematographer - August 2014

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