American Cinematographer - September 1968 - 33

fast moving and loud logging truck.
In the most placid and majestic im¬
ages there is a suggestion of violence,
a faint tarnish, an element of threat
that by the end of the film has be¬
come more than a threat. "What we
wanted audiences to sense was what
we felt. . . that each of these trees
was a living thing that has lived for
five hundred, maybe a thousand
years, or more . . . How many earth¬
quakes and floods and lightning
storms and fires and . . . we can't
even begin to imagine what just one
of these trees has survived, not mere¬
ly survived but has somehow con¬
tained inside it. Its size and height
isn't just wood. It's sheer energy
reaching for the sky through so much
pressure and disaster. It's a living
memory of time itself. That's what we
tried to make of the trees in our open¬
ing where they are only touched by
the voice of man. And in the felling
sequence, we wanted people to feel
how ironic it was that one man with
a chain saw, in a matter of a few
hours, can cut down a thousand
years." To this, Harris adds, "Before
we could do that we had to make
people feel the presence of the
thousands and thousands of years of
life the trees represent. And we had
to do it with film. Just saying it
wouldn't do. I think Dick and Trevor
are to be credited for giving the trees
the right 'look' and 'feel.' "
Filming THE REDWOODS posed
many artistic as well as technical
problems
for
photographer
Dick
Chew. "King Screen Productions al¬
ready has a reputation for producing
quality documentaries," says Chew,
"but all of our work has focused on
people and personalities. Our first
problem was to find a photographic
approach that would make the trees
dramatic. They don't move, you know.

Because the trees themselves were
our subject, we decided not to use
human figures, which although they
would have given the trees scale
would have been out of keeping with
the mood we wanted to create." From
studying still pictures of the redwoods
that had been shot over the period
of a hundred years, Chew and Green¬
wood realized how difficult it was to
get good quality stills, much less a
motion picture.
From the stills and as a result of a
week's scouting trip, they felt the best
way to shoot the trees was either in
a light fog or from the edge of a for¬
est with, says Chew, "sidelight strik¬
ing the trunks and bringing out the
texture of the foreground trees." Ac¬
cording to Chew, the problem in
shooting trees is that they all tend to
blend in with each other. Shot in fron¬
tal light they look like a wall. One
doesn't have a sense of individual
size or depth. In a light fog with soft/
diffused backlighting, the trees in the
foreground are well defined silhou¬
ettes and stand out, and the trees in
mid-ground are shapes of soft sha¬
dow and the background trees almost
blend into the texture of the fog . . .
like Japanese prints. "Also," Chew
says, "with fog, you not only get a
nice sense of mystery, but if the fog
is moving, you really have a sense of
the forest being alive."
Before shooting began, Mark Har¬
ris organized their ideas into a script
design that outlined the dramatic
structure, and the emotional and fac¬
tual content of the film's visual and
audio aspects. "Because of Mark's
rough script, we all had the same
film in mind," says director Green¬
wood. "While Mark gathered inter¬
views with the townspeople, Dick and
I went into the forest to gather foot¬
age for fog sequences. In the finished

Aerial shots were taken from a Cessna 185.
To diminish the effect of the plane's speed
over the treetops, Chew filmed at 48 framesper-second, when shooting out to the side,
and 32 frames-per-second, when shooting to¬
ward the front.

- -*

"Getting there is half the fun!" Trevor Green¬
wood changes into light shoes before wading
up Redwood Creek. Bolex camera, light meter
and film were wrapped in foam rubber and
carried in his rucksack.

(LEFT) Writer-producer Mark Harris, Producer-director Trevor Greenwood and Photographer-editor Dick Chew discuss an editing problem
Moviola. (RIGHT) Greenwood measures footage and selects takes over the light-box, while running film slowly through the synchronizer.

the

American Cinematographer - September 1968

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