American Cinematographer - August 1987 - 84

ARE VOU EARNING YOUR CINEMA DEGREE
BY JUST WATCHING FILMS?

At Columbia

College our students produce 40 films
Studg in Hollywood and learn from the professionals
while earning gour Bachelor of Arts degree.

and fullness to the myriad fish we saw.
"I think a little light gives things more

a gear.

movement

underwater," Hall

com¬

mented. "It

picks up the action a bit."
Obtaining a white balance un¬
derwater was problematic. Below 20

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feet, the divers found that the white
began to lose its red spectrum
color. As Bob Sloan said, "When you
can't find white, when the color spec¬

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won't give it to you, you sure
aren't going to get a white balance."
The cameras ended up reading an overly
blue card. The solution was to start
with a clear filter in the camera, store a
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working white balance

at or near the
surface, then when the cameras came
aboard, Sloan and technician Jeff Mes¬
senger would put them on a chip
and match them with a scope.

chart
"This
allowed us to get a color balance
closely matched to true whites at the
surface and

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Both recorder inputs have bass roll off below I00 Hz to reduce
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The left input has internally derived switchable T powering for con¬
denser mikes such as Sennheiser or Schoeps.
The TCD 5 has a push button test tone oscillator.

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ex¬

plained. Also, the homemade fill lighting
was
as

it

cooled down in color temperature
passed through the water from

subject. This gave additional
to the picture.
After a month of shooting
sharks, whales, marine iguanas, pen¬
guins, and countless schooling fish in
100 degree heat, we left Ecuador to off¬

camera to

color balance

line the show

THE AMSYNC SONY STEREO CASSETTE SYSTEM

has been

CC30R filter," Sloan

on

Beta machines before

transferring to one-inch tape for the final
edit. The one-hour show aired

on

14; the total turn-around time

was

weeks

by

-

certainly

no means

an

June
five

remarkable, but

improvement over the

prospect of a lengthy film edit.
In all likelihood, adventure
documentaries and outdoor entertain¬

specials will continue to be the
domain of 16mm filmmakers. The film
look is especially well suited to captur¬
ment

ing the

sense

mains in the
world. "I'm

of majesty that still
remotest

corners

re¬

of the

not turning in my film
gear," Stan Waterman said before leav¬
ing the boat in Ecuador, "there's some¬
thing irreplaceable about it all." He
appeared not to have finished his
thought, pulled on his pipe, and said
wistfully, "I just wish there was some
way, on film, to get the kind of penetra¬
tion and light these tape cameras pick
up. I've never seen anything like it."

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(The author is a producer and writer
documentaries.)

of adventure
American Cinematographer - August 1987

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