American Cinematographer - August 2015 - 14

Short Takes

I

Alien Encounter
By Phil Rhodes

From the highest of high-end feature filmmaking to the rough
and tumble of newsgathering in some of the world's least salubrious
locations, making on-camera talent look good is a common challenge
among camera crews. This is no less true in the case of Benjamin
Kitchens' work on the puppet-starring short film Myrna the Monster,
written and directed by Ian Samuels. The film was produced by
Nonetheless Productions as part of a program funded by MTV's Other
initiative, something the company describes as "totally original,
occasionally random [and] often weird." Kitchens confirms that in no
sense did the requisite degree of originality, randomness and
weirdness mitigate his responsibility to the titular star - an alien from
the moon living in modern-day Los Angeles. As Kitchens notes with
staggering understatement, Myrna "has quite a nose on her."
Kitchens' course toward Myrna the Monster began at Drexel
University in Philadelphia. "My girlfriend - now wife - was going
to school in the film program," he remembers. "I was going to
community college to be an engineer, and I ended up transferring
there to do music and be a recording engineer." The move to
filmmaking came via music, after Kitchens had "scored a couple of
short films and ended up working on the sets. I really liked it [and]
ended up working on commercials in Philadelphia, in the electrical
department, while I was in school and after I graduated.
"I'd been gaffing maybe three or four years, and I was working
in Philly, New York, Connecticut," he continues. "I reached this point
where I wanted to shoot." In pursuit of this ambition, Kitchens applied
to the American Film Institute and was accepted. His thesis project,
14

August 2015

Narcocorrido, was one of seven nominees for the 2012 ASC Andrew
Laszlo Student Heritage Award. After graduating in 2011, he says,
"it's been music videos, commercials, and a decent number of short
films."
Myrna director Samuels was, in one sense, an old collaborator,
though the two had not worked together for some time. "A good
friend of mine, Callie Andreadis, [Myrna's] production designer,
introduced us. [Samuels] was shooting a spec spot for Pez with no
money, trying to do something. I shot that for him maybe four years
ago, and when Myrna came about, he asked me to do it." Kitchens
confirms that the choice of subject was no surprise. "Ian's always
liked stuff with puppets. Basically, MTV had given him a small amount
of money and he wanted to make sure he could make a short film
out of it."
The 15-minute short was shot over six days in April 2014, with
one additional day of pickups for the credit sequence. The intention
to create an almost documentary-style montage structure demanded
a hectic schedule. "There must have been 15 or 16 locations, two or
three locations a day," Kitchens says. "The script was very much
written in vignettes, a sort of wandering process through Myrna's
experiences in Los Angeles. It's very much a montage, jumping in
time and going in and out of her backstory."
The film's puppetry in effect turned most setups into a
physical-effects shot, with the need to avoid giving the game away
by showing puppeteer Victor Yerrid or any of the necessary rigging.
"I'd done visual-effects work, but I'd never shot a puppet before,"
says Kitchens. There was a temptation to shoot unadventurous
material that would alleviate the potential complexity, but Kitchens
insists this was not the director's intent. "This was a location-based

American Cinematographer

All images courtesy of the filmmakers.

A heartbroken
alien from the
moon tries to
make her way
in Los Angeles
in the short
film Myrna the
Monster.
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - August 2015
