American Cinematographer - September 1968 - 65

FILMING "THE REDWOODS"
Continued from Page 681

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AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER, SEPTEMBER 1968

up in sync cables or get the cables
hung up in the brush. So our guide,
Dave Van de Mark, ran wild sound
with the Nagra. We found that re¬
cording the sound of the falling tree
close-up was more effective for our
purposes than at a distance. At a dis¬
tance you get the sound of the rush¬
ing air but nothing of the wood groan¬
ing under the stress of its weight, and
what we wanted was a sound like an
old man's last gasping, groaning
breath."
The film-makers first thought of
shooting the stripped valley in a low
drizzle under an overcast sky to cre¬
ate a mood of sullen unreality that
would support the narrator's likening
of the valley to a moonscape. How¬
ever, in the wide shots, under such
conditions, the image was too flat.
One did not have a sense of the size
or shape of the ground. "We had to
have definition of the valley's con¬
tours," says Greenwood, "because we
also wanted to show the expansive¬
ness of the barren ground. If we shot
in bright daylight, the low brush along
the ground would make the area seem
too green. What we did was compro¬
mise by shooting under a low over¬
cast early in the day. The low sun¬
light penetrates just a little to bring
out definition but the sky and the
ground still appear to be grey and
bleak, which is what we wanted. We
thought of shooting EFB in a drizzle,
but the film went blue and wouldn't
match the color of the stuff we shot
ECO, so we stayed with ECO all the
way."
"We were a small crew working
with a limited budget and a tight
schedule," says Greenwood. "We
were also inexperienced in forest
shooting. When we returned to the
shop in Seattle, we were a little dis¬
couraged. Somehow all the trees just
looked the same. But like most films,
THE REDWOODS came to life at the
editing bench."
For the King Screen Productions
film-makers, it was business as usual
even during the period of anticipa¬
tion leading up to Academy Awards
night. At the very moment directorproducer Greenwood was bringing
Seattle's first "Oscar" home, co-pro¬
ducer Mark Harris and photographer
Richard Chew were deep in the wilder¬
ness of Colombia, South America,
shooting a film for the Peace Corps. ■

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695
American Cinematographer - September 1968

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - September 1968
