American Cinematographer - October 2014 - 14

Short Takes

Left to right: ASC President Richard Crudo poses with ASC Linwood Dunn
Student Heritage Award winners Guy Pooles, Matthew Blake
and Harper Alexander.

ASC Salutes Heritage Award Recipients
By Debra Kaufman

The ASC's Linwood Dunn Student Heritage Awards honored
three young cinematographers: Harper Alexander (University of
North Carolina School of Filmmaking), for Starlight; Matthew Blake
(Chapman University's Dodge College of Film and Media Arts), for
Forest Keepers; and Guy Pooles (American Film Institute), for Dirty
Laundry. To be eligible, students must be in an undergraduate or
graduate program or have graduated within the past year.
The ASC Student Heritage Awards were established to
inspire the next generation of cinematographers and are renamed
annually in memory of an extraordinary ASC member. Dunn served
two terms as ASC president and was governor of the Academy of
Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in two different branches: cinematography and visual effects. He was an effects pioneer whose
early work included King Kong (1933) and Citizen Kane (1941), and
he developed one of the first zoom lenses. Dunn also co-designed
the breakthrough Acme-Dunn Optical Printer, for which he was
honored twice at the Academy Awards, and at age 93 he helped to
develop digital projection.

October 2014

A sci-fi/fantasy film, Starlight is about a mother and daughter with supernatural powers who are jeopardized by a deadly astrological event. Written by Jordan Dee Crabtree, the movie was
directed by Alex Thompson and shot by Harper Alexander primarily
on an original Arri Alexa, which recorded in 2K to SxS cards in
ProRes 4:4:4:4, with a set of Cooke Panchro primes.
As visual effects feature prominently in Starlight, preproduction was an important part of the process. "With so many technical
challenges, many meetings focused on that," says Alexander, who
notes the contributions of visual-effects supervisor Daniel Berkowitz
and production designer Emily Leising. The short film also offers a
dramatic shift in look, as a colorful fantasy environment gives way
to a dark, sinister world.
"Starlight was an ambitious movie for a very small budget,"
the cinematographer says. "We wanted visual effects, we wanted
to build a spaceship set, we wanted to shoot miniatures and to use
a crane. All that combined was pretty overwhelming considering the
minimal resources we had."
The team made a crucial decision not to use a digital spaceship. "We wanted to shoot it practically, as a miniature, [which was]
a new skill for the team," says Alexander. The miniature work was
shot at 4K resolution with a Red Scarlet camera, recording to SSD
RedMags.
One of the most challenging miniature shots shows the
spaceship flying very close to the camera and then flying away.
Alexander and Berkowitz conducted tests to determine how to best
position the model within a greenscreen environment for the shot.
"We solved the problem by hanging a coved greenscreen from a
grid in a large half-circle," Alexander says. "The spaceship was positioned in the center of that and we dollied past it. The miniature was
lit by a 5K Fresnel to simulate direct sunlight and a 12-by-12 bounce
to add soft ambiance from 'Earth.'"
Alexander worked with Leising to incorporate practical lights
into the spaceship-interior set. For ambient light, the cinematographer bounced 5Ks into large Ultrabounce overheads, and he used a
single Kino Flo tube to create a reflection in the helmet and light the
actress' face. Litepanels 1x1 LED fixtures created a soft backlight.
The movie lent itself to a fluid look, says Alexander, and he
credits operator Joseph Blankinship for keeping the camera moving
- a sentiment shared by the Society of Camera Operators, which
awarded Blankinship first place for his work on Starlight in their
2014 National Student Operator competition. This impulse for
movement also inspired the filmmakers to use a 43' CamMate crane
with an HD head, which was operated by Rob Fleeger. "Having a
bird's-eye view over Earth as it's being threatened by this event in

American Cinematographer

Awards ceremony photographs by Alex Lopez. Additional images and screen grabs courtesy of the filmmakers.

Starlight
Director: Alex Thompson
Cinematographer: Harper Alexander

American Cinematographer - October 2014

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