American Cinematographer - September 2012 - 16

Top: Practical sources and a handmade top light provide eerie ambience for a scene in the project’s main location. Bottom: A corresponding frame from the short.

ral reasons: we were shooting during the cold winter in the middle of nowhere, we needed shots inside and outside of a moving car, we wanted to use a lot of smoke, and we had mechanical special effects created by Colin Arthur (who has worked on such films as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Ryan’s Daughter, Barry Lyndon, Alien and The NeverEnding Story.) Colin gave us advice on how to smoke our interiors and instructed technician Luis de las Heras on how to do it properly, but his real on-set involvement was with our night-exterior work, creating and controlling the fog effects himself with a machine he had originally devised for Conan the Barbarian. He and his assistant, Sarah Pooley, also created a wire-controlled puppet to stand in for actor Julio Vélez during the shooting of an accident scene toward the end of the film. We needed so much smoke around the car that we decided to shoot that portion of the night exterior on a soundstage. After shooting in the cold for two
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nights, being onstage was a relief. I strove to maintain the direction and intensity of the light from the location exteriors, and I feel the shots fit together seamlessly. For night-exterior work I set the Red One to 5,000°K and rated it at 160 ASA, lighting with HMI Par lights. (Later, in post, I added blue to the image.) Despite having to light a large area, I could only afford a few lights: one 2.5K, two 1.2Ks and one 575watt unit. Most of the time I used them as hard lights — to create higher contrast and a rougher-edged look on Julio as he was driving the car and to differentiate these scenes from those inside the house — but we also carried a large frame of Light Grid Cloth for when we needed to light a big area with softer ambient light. We did the final color correction in 2K resolution, creating 16-bit TIFF files for colorist Juan Ignacio Cabrera at Filmbakers. During the grade, we made the blacks a bit blacker (but not crushed) to make the inteAmerican Cinematographer

riors look warmer and darker. We also added blue to the night exteriors. Alejandro Pérez provided our digital effects, erasing cables and booms and helping us hide continuity problems. He also digitally added some out-of-focus points of light in the background of our driving shots to help create a sense of motion. (Pablo Gotor and Alberto Díaz from Mordisco Films also contributed some wonderful digitalmanipulation work.) Finally, we tested the finished film twice, digitally projecting it at 2K in two different theaters. After discussing the results, we decided to digitally add “film grain” to the final master; even with all of the smoke, diffusion and underexposure, the image was still too clear, and the grain helped enhance the 1970s look we wanted. Javier Gallén helped us add the grain, as well as some more vignetting in our wide shots, and Antonio Casado from Timelapses.es created our final DCP master. As 8’s co-producer (with both Raúl and Javier González Manso), I’d like to thank everybody involved with this short film, and as the director of photography, I especially want to thank my grip, electric and camera crews. Most of all, I want to thank Raúl, whose passion for filmmaking, vision, sense of composition and interest in cinematography has allowed me to work at my most effective. ●

http://www.Timelapses.es

American Cinematographer - September 2012

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - September 2012