American Cinematographer - November 2012 - 22

Top: Ruby visits her incarcerated husband, Derek (Omari Hardwick). Bottom: Director Ava DuVernay (foreground left) and unidentified crewmembers monitor the shot as Young films one of Ruby’s prison visits.

11:1 24-275mm zoom lens. “Marni Zimmerman was our patron saint,” notes Young. “This was my first experience working with Panavision, and she gave us a great package deal.” While the emphasis is always placed on characters and faces, landscapes and environments also play an important role in the story. “Ava and I were very conscious about space and how we could situate the characters within it, and framing for 2.40:1 was part of that,” says Young. “The 40mm gives you a nice balance between being conscious of [both] the body and the space. Most of the time, we were working with a very low f-stop so we could get soft, out-offocus backgrounds and help viewers focus in on the emotional arc of the character in a more intense way. “We always wanted the landscape to
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be present, however. We didn’t want audiences to forget they were in South Central Los Angeles.” Ruby’s environment is also prominent in the scene where she encounters Brian on the beach one evening, and in shots of her waiting in flat, arid terrain for the bus that will shuttle her to prison to see her husband. Achieving two nighttime driving sequences on the production’s modest budget called for some ingenuity. The first, which finds Ruby in the back seat of a taxi heading out to meet Brian, was shot as a oner. Young explains, “We mounted the camera on a hostess tray attached to the car and picked a street that had a lot of practical lights that would give us a playful, jazzy background — street lamps, porch lights, brightly lit shops. I was trailing the cab in a car with the high beams on, so I could posiAmerican Cinematographer

tion the headlights to create a little more flare or a more washed-out look. We never swallowed the frames in blackness; there was always some play of lights. It gave us a kind of ramp into the club scene, which is even more colorful.” The only source used inside the taxi was a single Kino Flo Mini tube rigged above the actress’s head. The nightclub was the biggest lighting setup in the film. The set was built, top to bottom, inside a warehouse. Fixtures included two coop lights skirted and gelled with lavender, and 650s that were placed around the coops. “They were really raw — no gels, just straight white light coming down hard-edged,” says Young. “We also positioned warm lamps out of frame so that Ruby would walk through lavender, then shadow, then through white light and into warm light.” Young notes that cyan and lavender are his “signature” colors in most of his work. The second night driving sequence finds Ruby and Brian inside his car after leaving the club. Again, the hostess tray was used, but this time it was moved from one side of the car to the other to get reverses. Once again, the scene was lit mainly by the passing practicals and the Kino Flo tube, which was placed in the dashboard. “I’m always challenged by night driving sequences,” Young confesses. “I feel that Gordon Willis [ASC] did it best. I’m not as brave as he is, but I am definitely one of his students!” Young sometimes encountered too much available light at a location, including

American Cinematographer - November 2012

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