American Cinematographer - October 2014 - 18

Blake did most of the cinematography, Kohl
produced, and Laroche did sound. Every
night, they'd play back the day's footage on
a [MacBook Pro] laptop. Once they returned
stateside, Fagan and Laroche edited with
Adobe Premiere Pro, Laroche did sound
design in Pro Tools, and the project was
color corrected in DaVinci Resolve 10. Blake
reflects, "It was a long process, always
trying to picture how the film would come
together. In the end, I am thrilled we were
able to capture the heart of a family and
stunning wildlife - well beyond our original hopes - leaving us with a film that we
hope both pulls in and inspires the audience."
Dirty Laundry
Director: Aaron Martinez
Cinematographer: Guy Pooles

Crudo and Stephen Lighthill, ASC present Blake with his award for the
short documentary Forest Keepers.

time frame, Blake says, "we really had to
work as a team to pull this off." On the
heavier days of shooting, the team would
split into two to cover as much material as
possible. Upon arriving in Uganda, they had
an arduous 14-hour drive - which ended
at 2 a.m. - from the country's capital,
Kampala. The plan was to spend the first
four days figuring out which family they
would focus on, and then to follow those
main characters through a normal few days
in their lives, as well as through their participation in the culture-preserving Batwa
Experience. After just a few hours' sleep,
however, they learned that their carefully
planned schedule had been upended: They
had 30 minutes to get ready for the trek to
the forest.
"That first morning, we still weren't
unpacked," recalls Blake. "But they had
pulled all the kids out of school for the experience, so there was no going back." As
they began their challenging hike up the
mountain, Blake and the rest of the team
were thankful they hadn't brought more
gear.
One piece of gear Blake insisted on
bringing was a tripod. "I wanted a very
clean, neat aesthetic," he says, noting that
18

October 2014

he's "very influenced by the National
Geographic look.
"Another influence was interning at
[production company] Brain Farm, which is
very commercial, very cinematic, with cleanlooking images," he notes. "I tried to keep
the camera on the sticks as much as possible." Blake's aim with this approach was to
both immerse the audience in the subject,
and make the forest feel like a main character, not just a backdrop. As such, he
explains, he chose not to distract the viewer
with handheld or shaky camera techniques.
Half-a-dozen elder Batwa led the
Batwa Experience, and as fortune would
have it, the filmmakers found that the
perfect central figure was already at the
center of the story. "Eliphaz was the main
communicator, showing what Batwa did in
the past, how they'd hunt and build
things," says Blake. "He'd made it his life's
work to show young people and children
what Batwa life was like. He and his
parents, wife and children became the focus
of the film."
Over the course of the production,
the crewmembers found themselves gravitating toward more specific roles. Although
the entire team is credited with directing,
American Cinematographer

In Dirty Laundry, a young boy, Sam
(Zander Faden), deals with a father who's
left and a mother who's too depressed to
pay attention to him. Needing clean clothes,
he dares to tackle the ominous mound of
laundry in the cellar - but the laundry
fights back. This whimsical story was the AFI
graduate thesis of cinematographer Guy
Pooles, who also wrote the screenplay (with
the help of story editor Joseph Pellegrino). "I
liked the idea of a supernatural element,
with the parents' separation being the
source of it," says Pooles. "The laundry is
the manifestation of all his fears."
A Sony F65 had just been donated
to AFI, and Pooles got the chance to use it
when the school greenlit his script. He studied the work of one of his classmates who
had also used the camera. "He pushed it
quite significantly with underexposure, and
I learned you can really mistreat that camera
and still have quite a bit of detail," the cinematographer says. "By underexposing and
bringing it back up, you bring in noise that
is so fine, it's almost like emulsion grain and
quite beautiful." The camera recorded 12bit 1080p SR-HQ files onto Sony SRMemory
cards.
Concerned that the F65 might look
too sharp, Pooles elected to shoot with Zeiss
Super Speed MK II T1.3 lenses. "I shot
pretty much wide open on those lenses to
add a natural softness to the look," he says.
To establish Sam's melancholic
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