What I learned Today

Zeiss 40mm Super Speed

2012-02-03T01:52:00.000-08:00

Rumor has it, a few were made and exist in the wild. If you find one, please let me know. This might be the loch ness monster of the lens world.

It's a new year!

2012-01-01T18:59:00.000-08:00

I've neglected this blog very much.

Infact, I stopped updating this blog for about 7 months. Enough is enough. I've learned something everyday, and it's about time I start writing again.

I promise to keep it updated throughout the year. Much more to come!

-rpo

William Stull: Lens Coatings, 1940

2011-04-28T13:59:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, Non-Glare Coating Makes Lenses One Stop Faster by William Stull, A.S.C (March 1940)

For many years photographers have accepted the fact that a considerable proportion of the light that enters a lens never reaches the film. The greater part of this loss is occasioned by reflections from the various polished glass surfaces- inside and out- that make up the lens, and it increases with the increase in the complexity of the lens' design.

Thus the loss is considerably greater in many of the modern, complex high-speed lenses than in the simpler, older objectives. But since lenses depend for their action upon the use of many highly polished- and therefore reflective- glass surfaces, it has seemed that nothing could be done to avoid these losses.

Almost exactly a year ago, two Eastern research groups, working quite independently of each other, separately announced the development of methods of treating glass to eliminate surface reflections. That this created a sensation in photographic circles would be to put it mildly.

Here was the development so radically advantageous that it would practically revolutionize photography! But the excitement subsided when it was learned that in both cases the project was still in the experimental stage: that while lenses could be treated, the treatment was extremely delicate and not at all lasting.

Paramount Pioneers

Today the subject takes on renewed interest when it is learned that the stage of commercial practicability that the Paramount Studio has been using a set of treated lenses on actual production, with such excellent results that treatment of all the studio's lenses is being contemplated.

The process used is that developed by Dr. John Strong of the California Institute of Technology. Essentially, this consists of depositing upon each of the glass surfaces treated an ultra-microscopically thin chemical film. This film measures but four millionths of an inch (0.000004 inches) in thickness- exactly one-quarter the length of a light-wave.

As light falls upon this film, rays are reflected from both its upper and lower surfaces. Since the coating is exactly one-quarter wave-length in thickness, these reflections from the upper and lower surfaces are equal in intensity, and opposite in phase. What follows is similar to the well known interference effect in that these oppositely phased reflections cancel each other out. However, classic scientific theory does not account for the fact that with this treatment there is an increase in overall light transmission, which would occur if these reflections merely offset each other.

Some of the processes announced a year ago, produced this coating by immersing the glass surface to be treated in a tank of liquid on the surface of which was an infinitely think film (one molecule thick) of an insoluble soap.

Forms Permanent Coating

Repeated immersions or dippings, approximately 22- built up the desired quarter-wave-length coating. It was still, however, a delicate, soapy film, with all the inevitable drawbacks of a soap-film.

Dr. Strong's method, however, is different. In this, the desired surface coating is deposited by evaporation in a vacuum. Instead of a soap-film the coating is a metallic fluoride. While the details of the Strong process cannot, of course, be given as yet, it may be stated that the present treatment produces a coating sufficiently durable to withstand any normal handling.

Some of the lenses used at Paramount have been washed to remove accidental fingerprints, without in the least disturbing the non-glare coating.

In addition, exhaustive tests by the optical experts of the studio's engineering staff indicate that the treatment is in no way harmful to the normal optical qualities of the lens. It is non-corrosive, non-tarnishing, and does not pit or scratch the glass surface. It is further stated that the expense of treating lenses is not prohibitive.

The practical advantage gained from using treated lenses are many. Probably the most startling is the increase in effective speed. Normally there is an average light-loss of 5.22 percent from reflection for each air-to-glass surface inside or outside the lens: thus with a typical high-speed motion picture anastigmat like the Astro "PanTachar," which has eight such glass-air surfaces, the loss of light from reflections is in excess of 41 percent.

If such a lens is treated on all its external and internal glass-air surfaces, this loss is reduced to negligible proportions.

Increased Shadow Detail

But this accounts for only part of the actual gain in speed. Much of this reflected light finds its way back to the film as scattered, fog-producing light which tends to veil the shadowed areas. With this scattered light eliminated, it is possible with a given exposure to record a great deal of shadow detail which is normally lost.

Conversely, it is possible to obtain a given effect, as measured by shadow detail, with considerably less light than would be needed to give the same effect with an untreated lens.

These two gains are cumulative, and add up to a practical increase in speed of virtually one full stop, or between five and six printer-light settings in the Paramount laboratory. Thus a normal f/2.3 lens, when treated is the equivalent in speed of an f/1.6 objective, but still retaining the depth of field, definition, and optical quality of the f/2.3 design!

The elimination of the internal reflections gives a marked increase in the apparent definition of scenes photographed with treated lenses. The effect may be compared to that seen when using a fast lens with and without an adequate sunshade. The picture as a whole is visibly more crisp, and details not previously evident are suddenly revealed.

In the same way, depth of field is apparently considerably increased by the treated lens. It is quite possible that the circle of confusion is affected, since the resolving power is known to be increased.

Shooting Into Lights

Every photographer is familiar with the lens-flare which ordinarily results from shooting directly into strong sources of light, such as the sun or a studio lamp. The reflections from the several glass-air surfaces of the lens produce multiple, distorted images of the light-source or the iris diaphragm, usually with strong secondary halation streaks.

Comparative scenes filmed though treated lenses show an almost complete absence of these effects. Instead, a surprisingly clear image of the scene and the light source is obtained: such halation as is present is obviously photographic rather than optical, and attributable to photographic overexposure and to reflections from the film base itself.

The practical advantages which this treatment offers to cinematography can be well imagined. The increased speed can be of tremendous value in simplifying lighting. The increases in depth and definition should be of almost equal benefit under modern conditions, especially in the case of "follow focus" and dolly shots.

It may be mentioned, too, that insofar as can be determined as yet, the use of treated lenses should be equally feasible in natural color cinematography, in Technicolor or an other process. While a treated lens, if examined in the hand, by reflected light, appears to have an iridescent magenta sheen, the coating does not appear to have the slightest effect upon the actual color transmission of the lens, nor upon its color correction.

Other Uses

The visual image viewed on the focusing screen of a camera shows no trace of color alteration, and monochrome tests of standard color charts made under identical conditions with treated and untreated lenses show no difference in color rendition. It may therefore be assumed that the treated lenses may be used equally well in color photography; and due to the inherent limitations in speed and definition of all color processes, they could be used to even greater advantage in color than in monochrome.

Naturally , this non-glare treatment need not be confined solely to motion picture camera lenses. It will be equally beneficial when applied to the lenses of still cameras, optical printers, projection lenses, and the like, while the advantages to be gained from applying the treatment to the optical systems used in recording and reproducing sound, where speed and extreme resolving power are so necessary, should be equally revolutionary.

Wide Exterior Night Lighting in 1923

2011-04-28T13:29:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, Startling Electrical Comparisons in 'Hunchback' 1923 and 1939 by Earl Miller (February 1940)

No Inkies in 1923

In 1923, incandescent lights were not used for motion pictures. The street set was a few feet longer and wider than the one used in the 1939 production. There were only fifty-six 24-inch sun arcs in the entire industry in Hollywood.

We needed every one for our night shots, and Universal arranged to rent all but one. Every night for seven long weeks all the sets in other studios were stripped of 24-inch sun arcs. They were loaded on trucks and hauled to Universal. We used them until 5am, but had to return them to the proper studio and have them set and ready to burn by 8am.

Whenever possible, we left the lights on the trucks all night instead of building parallels. This accounts for the number of trucks showing in the panoramic picture accompanying this story.

Every light used in the 1923 production was an arc. Some of the 24 inch had automatic feed, but in addition to these there were more than 450 other arcs, all of which were hand fed. All lights had to be trimmed at least twice every night and some three times.

Yes, we actually shot every night, all night, for forty-nine straight nights. At one time (and it would be the time it rained the hardest) my crew and I worked five days and six nights straight, rigged all day and shot all night; never took our shoes off; cat-napped between shots.

Six Months' Work

Finally on June 3, 1923, the last reel was in the can, and in spite of all the work and worry everyone who worked on or in that picture will tell you that we had lots of fun making it.

Here are a few of the electrical statistics:
(8) portable generators
(2) 300kw stationary generators
(6) 150kw transformers

The peak load was approximately 37,500 amperes.

Good Advice Never Gets Old

2011-04-28T13:12:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, Camera Technique Dominates Filming Results by Claude W. Cadarette (January 1940)

Every movement of the camera must have a definite purpose behind it, and if it is done without a good reason you are just retarding the tempo of the picture.

_________________
note from ryan: This is not something I learned today, but a truth that was retold from an article written over 70+ years ago! It's quite frustrating that such advice and wisdom has been around for so long, yet legions of new filmmakers and directors insist on camera moves with no motivation or justification. What Claude failed to mention, is unjustified camera moves not only slow the tempo of the picture, but the tempo of the production. Elaborate dolly shots can cause longer set-up and execution times.

Good Stuff on the Way

2011-04-28T00:14:00.000-07:00

I promise! Today (on set.... shhhhhh) I read all the American Cinematographer issues from 1940. Most was dribble, as the articles back then were aimed at either super technical or complete amateur.... nothing like it is now.

However there was an interesting invention that was supposed to eliminate the clapper slate... obviously it didn't take. I'll post soon!

Nestor Almendros: Locusts, Peanut Shells, & Helicopters

2011-04-17T14:59:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, Photographing "Days of Heaven" by Nestor Almendros (June 1979)

When the plague of locusts descends on the fields of wheat, Terry's atmosphere of daring and essential simplicity made me suggest a simple technique that would allow us to maintain optimum image quality (without resorting to an optical), and allow us to obtain the maximum dramatic effect.

For our foreground, we used live locusts supplied to us by the Canadian Department of Agriculture, but for the wide panoramics, silhouetted tractors and blackened workers, we used a technique used in The Good Earth: running the camera in reverse and dropping peanut shells from helicopters.

When the film was projected forward the "locusts" would appear to be flying up. Of course, this meant everything had to act or perform in reverse, specifically the actors and the tractors.

Virtually everyone said "No, it will never work." But the few believers convinced them to let us try-- again, special thanks to Terry's daring. And when they saw the rushes, they were astounded.

Maryse Alberti: HMI's

2011-04-17T11:28:00.000-07:00

From ICG Magazine, A Way With Words by Holly Willis (May 2000)

"One of the biggest challenges of the shot was lighting it, and somehow still keeping it dark and moody," she offers. "We lit it mainly from the outside with big lights-- 20Ks-- on a couple of Condors with very small lights inside." One of Alberti's visual quirks is to light night scenes with tungsten balanced lamps. "It looks more like nighttime. HMIs have this hard-edged, shiny white that I don't like for night, unless that's what you're looking for. But Joe Gould's Secret has a very strong feel of realism-- there is nothing surreal or fable-like or otherworldly, so the lighting was designed to be real. The biggest lights we had were a couple of 20ks and Nightlights. For the rest, we just went with the range of a regular tungsten package."

Oliver Wood: Water, Water, and More Water.

2011-04-17T11:13:00.000-07:00

From ICG Magazine, Watership Down by Pauline Rogers (May 2000)

Compressed Nitrogen:
"The set piece was hung over an area with a drain," says Wood. "We would pour water into the set-- and I mean pour-- and shoot. The water would then be drained away and we would go again. To protect the fronts of the lenses, we used Nitrogen air blowers like the ones we used on Face/Off. These blowers were so effective, we could literally walk the cameras through a wall of water-- moving with the actors, to get the intensity of the action."

Mag change!
Off the island of Malta, production constructed a 100 percent scale duplicate of a U-boat, weighing in at some 600 tons. Additionally, two full sized, tops of subs were floated in giant water tanks. "These were two 220-foot long 'subs,' surrounded by gigantic towers that poured salt water rain on the action all the time," confirms Wood. ... "The cameras had to be completely covered in plastic. That meant it took about 15 minutes to change the 400-foot mags. Although well-protected, the cameras kept breaking down from the abuse."

Peter Donan on the miniatures:
"When doing underwater shooting, the miniatures were shot using available light, as we were working about 15 to 20 feet underwater," describes Donan. "In order to control the quality of the light on these boats, we had silks made that were almost 180-feet long by 150-feet wide. They were created out of sailboat spinnaker cloth. We used this material because of its superior resistance to UV [light] and saltwater... At one point, we even had to paint the tank's bottom black to cut down on bounce reflection. That way, we could get additional shape from the hull and prevent it from looking too lit."

Oliver Wood: Flashlights and Sparks

2011-04-17T11:05:00.000-07:00

From ICG Magazine, Watership Down by Pauline Rogers (May 2000)

As the American sailors make the perilous voyage home, the captured U-boat gets rocked by explosive depth charges, which knock out its power source and plunge its innards into darkness. Here, the cinematographer did his best to exploit the limited throw of a portable, practical source. "We faced the challenge of lighting so the audience could see, but not so that we interfered with the reality of the situation. So we lit the rest of the picture with flashlights," declares Wood. "It became a progression of lights breaking down as the sub got more and more water inside-- that made the shots darker and darker. For a while, we could use 'sparks'-- created by special effects-- to illuminate some of the shots. We would cue the lights or sparks by punctuation in the dialogue.

Oliver Wood: Black Wrap Submarine

2011-04-17T00:31:00.000-07:00

From ICG Magazine, Watership Down by Pauline Rogers (May 2000)

All submarine interiors-- both American S-boats and German U-boats-- were photographed on sets constructed on Soundstage Five at the reputed Cinecitta studios in Rome, Italy. "We divided the first-unit shots up into sections," divulges Wood. "We had a sub on set at Cinecitta, created 20 percent bigger than normal size, which didn't feel any bigger, since we still had to stoop to get through the doors. Because it was going to be filled with water most of the time, we had to go 110-volt DC [in terms of electricity]. To light it, we cut hundreds of holes over the top to focus tiny little [150-watt] Pepper lights inside. The biggest light on this set was a 300-watt bulb. There was nowhere to hang the lights.

"We took the studs out of some of the loud speakers and put magnets in, so we could stick the lights to the metal. That worked fine, when we were level. However, when the set 'shook' they would fall out. So we tried finding ways to screw things in. Whenever we saw a light in the frame, we struck a bit of black in front of it. Simple, but it worked. I really think this picture was made with Black Wrap. It was an integral part of lighting this whole project!"

Oliver Wood: Anamorphic Close Focus

2011-04-17T00:21:00.000-07:00

From ICG Magazine, Watership Down by Pauline Rogers (May 2000)

With most of U-571 planned for two cameras-- handheld, with occasional use of Steadicam-- Wood opted for Cooke S4 lenses and Arri cameras...

... Although known as an ardent supporter of filming features in the anamorphic format, Wood quickly realized that Super 35 would better serve this waterbound picture. "It was logical," he proclaims. "When it says 'close focus' in anamorphic you are usually at two or three feet-- try that in a submarine. We needed the one-foot distance for the confinements of the subs."

Conrad Hall: Making it Rain

2011-04-16T23:44:00.000-07:00

From ICG Magazine, Smells Like Suburban Spirit by David Geffner (May 2000)

... As if returning full circle to the shadowy imagery of In Cold Blood, Hall utilized shadowplay through various set windows for the movie's waterlogged final act. "I had rain boxes built," the cinematographer declares, "which were approximately eight inches thick by four feet-by-four feet. They look like big fishtanks and each one sits on an easel at an angle, with a rain bar at the top to drive water down the Plexiglas surface. You can shine a light through each rainbox, and control sharpness and focus according to how the light is positioned and what type of intensity light is used."

Hall got innovative with the rain in one of the climax's key dramatic moments. Angela has just run from her best friend's bedroom, despairing at the truths hurled at her by Jane and Ricky. As the teary-eyed girl curls up on the stairwell, Hall introduces softly lit shadows of the rain outside as texture on the balustrade and walls behind her. It's a sad, yet ominous moment, and a prelude to the pending tragedy as Lester finds the distraught girl in the rainy darkness of his own living room.

..."We were all on the same page as to how long this driving rain would go on and exactly where in the film it would start. Obviously, my challenge is to make sure it's raining in every single shot- interior or exterior. The rain allowed for great stylization with lighting and composition. I could place shadows of the rain on people's faces, or behind them on walls and such in every scene. The effect was a build-up of tension and drama-- it can't rain that long without all the animals eventually getting aboard the Ark!"

Conrad Hall: Rose Pedal Wrangler

2011-04-16T22:49:00.000-07:00

From ICG Magazine, Smells Like Suburban Spirit by David Geffner (May 2000)

Wild Roses and Gothic Guises

Nearly all of the special effects were executed in-camera, except a potent, computerized image of roses bursting from the teenaged bosom of Angela Hayes (Mena Suvari). Most of the truly provocative floral images occur during Lester Burnham's fantasy sequences. One mesmerizing shot featured roses tumbling down onto actor Kevin Spacey, who is gazing up from his bed at the object of his forbidden desire. As shot, actress Suvari lies on the floor amidst a bed of roses- some real, some artificial- with the forced perspective walls rising up on each side to camera. "We dropped roses from above and reversed the footage," Hall notes. "I was up behind the lens with a small paint bucket filled with rose pedals. My AC [Clyde E. Bryan] was sitting on the crane next to me, with a bucket of rose pedals as well. We had a Condor to the right and one to the left of camera, and the prop folks had large garbage bags filled to the top with rose pedals. Because it was a fixed camera, I had both hands free to drop pedals above and below the lens so the flowers would land right on Kevin. We used something like 250,000 rose pedals for that effect."

Conrad Hall, Sam Mendes, and...Tom Cruise?!

2011-04-16T20:03:00.000-07:00

From ICG Magazine, Smells Like Suburban Spirit by David Geffner (May 2000)

Hall was initially reticent to tackle the dark subject matter in American Beauty (actor Tom Cruise actually recommended him to director Sam Mendes). But, in retrospect, the 70-something cinematographer seems like the perfect creative fit.

I Am Back

2011-04-14T16:44:00.000-07:00

I am back. This means the glory of W.I.L.T, has returned. I read, discuss, and discover new things about cinematography everyday. Most of it, I consider incredibly interesting. Everyday I will share one of those things, maybe more if I have time.

Karl Walter Lindenlaub: Frosted Glass Alternatives

2009-08-05T06:03:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, This Old House by David E. Williams (August 1999)

"Jan and I were both against frosting the glass, because then the room would feel like the inside of a giant ping-pong ball," Lindenlaub details. The glass panels in the Greenhouse were therefore painted and then scraped to look dirty yet transparent, allowing the camera to see just beyond them.

Karl Walter Lindenlaub: Lighting Stages

2009-08-05T05:59:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, This Old House by David E. Williams (August 1999)

"I generally try to light stages to look like locations, but because time was such an issue on this film, having all of those lights burning was a bit of a trap sometimes. At certain points I got nervous, and when that happens, a cinematographer will start to play it too safe and maybe overlight things. In retrospect, I wish I’d had five extra minutes on each shot to stand back, study the lighting and figure out how to make it look more natural. Nature never looks overlit; movies do. I think the film turned out well, but everyone always wants to do better. Hopefully, it will also be believable and scary for the audience we’ll see!"

- Karl Walter Lindedlaub, ASC, BVK

Karl Walter Lindenlaub: Adapting for New Film Stocks

2009-08-03T08:51:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, This Old House by David E. Williams (August 1999)

Dailies and prints for The Haunting were handled by Technicolor, and like some other cinematographers who have now used Vision negative and print stocks in combination, Lindenlaub found that their increased contrast compelled him to rethink his lighting methods.

"The 79 is more contrasty than [EXR] 5298 was—with the newer stock, the blacks fill up and grain disappears, but latitude disappears as well. To my surprise, the Vision print stocks became the only option for release prints after April [of this year]. Between that factor and our dark sets, I had to reevaluate all of my lighting ratios, especially for moonlight effects—and those were methods that I had been using for 20 years! For moonlight, I would normally go two stops under on the faces, and the backlight would be the moonlight at key. On this film, though, two stops under was almost too dark, because everything just under that would drop to black. With 98, you would have had a stop or so left, and you’d get some shadow detail, but that’s not the case now unless you use more fill. The amount of fill determines the look of the movie much more than any other factor, but on this picture I was adding a lot more fill than my eye was used to seeing, which meant that I had to depend on my meter much more. My exposures had to be precise as well, because the 79 doesn’t handle under- or overexposure very well—it gets too milky. Grain isn’t a problem, but milky blacks look wrong to me."

Asked if using other stocks were an option, Lindenlaub replies,

"No, we needed the speed because of our big sets, but because we were using so much smoke in the film, the grain in 5298 would be too apparent. Before this, I’d used the Vision 5277 320T, which has much lower contrast, but I overexposed it to get good blacks. I liked it because it took the contrast out of faces and was more flattering, but it was too slow. I also looked at Vision 800T 5289, but I wasn’t too happy with the grain. The 89 would be a great stock for a gritty big-city thriller, but not for The Haunting .

I know that some people’s use of lab processes like ENR to get better blacks prompted Kodak to add contrast to their stocks, but not everybody wants it. If I ever wanted more contrast, I could do it with my lighting. Now, lighting for 79—in combination with the Vision print stocks— is like lighting 5247 or 45 in the studio, and it will take time to get used to that. Of course, the blacks we got with 79 were great for the atmosphere of our film, since it’s a dark movie."

- Karl Winston Lindenlaub, ASC, BVK

Karl Walter Lindenlaub: Vista Vision & Nikon Lenses

2009-08-03T08:45:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, This Old House by David E. Williams (August 1999)

"My main concern about using VistaVision was that we had to use Nikon lenses, which I wasn’t happy about. Unfortunately, tests were already done and the decision to use them had already been made, so there was no choice. Personally, I don’t see the point of going to the trouble of shooting in VistaVision if you’re going to use a consumer-grade Nikon lens. The lens calibration was a joke. The difference between a T2 and a T2.8 on these lenses is very unspecific when compared to what you get with motion picture lenses, which are very accurate. There is a VistaVision system that is set up for Leica lenses, and I would have preferred that; however, the resulting footage does look great. You can’t tell the difference between the original VistaVision footage and the digitized and then filmed-out reduction prints, so our effects shots can be successfully intercut with our standard footage. The effects work looks great partially because Phil Tippett not only has technical ability, but also a strong artistic sensibility."

- Karl Walter Lindenlaub, ASC, BVK

Note from RPO:
The decision to use Nikon lenses and his inability to change the circumstance (in my opinion) was most likely because Lindenlaub had taken over production from Caleb Deschanel, ASC after the first week of production.

Karl Walter Lindenlaub: Curved Walls

2009-08-03T08:28:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, This Old House by David E. Williams (August 1999)

"One of the most unusual aspects of all of our sets was that every room was circular, usually octagonal, which created some tough lighting situations. I first experienced that type of thing when I lit the Oval Office scenes for Independence Day . It’s hard to cut things properly because the light falls differently on curved wall surfaces."

- Karl Walter Lindenlaub, ASC, BVK

Karl Walter Lindenlaub: Speed & Pre-Rigging

2009-08-03T07:25:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, This Old House by David E. Williams (August 1999)

"My general lighting approach for the entire film was to be relatively soft on the front of the faces, and then use backlight to give things shape and direction. That method helped quite a bit, given what we were doing with the camera. It would have been interesting to try more dramatic techniques with the lighting— using higher, more frontal lighting and cutting more—but we didn’t have the time to do it. Jan wanted between 18 and 20 setups a day, with one camera, while constantly switching between Steadicam, cranes, normal 35mm cameras on dollies, and VistaVision for effects work. With that many setups, we had about 20 minutes to light each shot, so we ended up doing much more pre-rigging than I normally would."

- Karl Walter Lindenlaub, ASC, BVK

Karl Walter Lindenlaub: Motivating a Bird's-Eye-View

2009-08-03T06:58:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, This Old House by David E. Williams (August 1999)

After a few takes, the crew quickly reset and a Lenny Arm 2 Plus mounted with a Hothead II was wheeled into position. While the lighting was adjusted, a new shot was blocked out: a bird’s-eye view beginning at about 40’ that swooped down through a cluster of practical chandeliers into a close-up on actress Lili Taylor, isolating her from the others. This would represent the film’s second distinct POV, that of Hill House and the twisted soul of Hugh Crain.

"This is the first film I’ve done in which such high-angle shots are used to good effect. Other directors have suggested them, but there was never a reason to do such shots, because they can actually take the audience out of the story by being so subjective. In this case, Hill House is a major character, and it watches the other characters very closely as they get lost in its maze of rooms. Cutting to that second point of view helps remind the audience that there is danger always looming over everything. These shots were generally done with a crane and a wide lens, usually a 35mm, which distorted things correctly and emphasized camera movement if there was any."

- Karl Walter Lindenlaub, ASC, BVK

Karl Walter Lindenlaub: Emotional Lighting Contrast

2009-08-03T06:53:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, This Old House by David E. Williams (August 1999)

Shadows and darkness were definitely going to be key components in the film’s visual plan, but strong daylight sources were also important in order to create emotional contrast in certain scenes.

"We didn’t want the audience to feel as if they had been sucked into two hours of darkness. Psychologically, people don’t like to be in the dark, and 120 minutes of darkness can become depressing to watch. Also, the impact of any extreme lighting effect will wear off after a certain point. For example, if an entire film is shot with green-tinted lighting, the effect may seem imposing at first, but the eye will adapt, and after a while the audience won’t even see the green anymore. The same thing happens with light and dark. If there is no alternation between light and dark, there is no relief, so the dramatic tension of being in the dark is gone."

- Karl Walter Lindenlaub, ASC, BVK

Karl Walter Lindenlaub: Deeeep DoF

2009-08-02T15:53:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, This Old House by David E. Williams (August 1999)

The filmmakers did draw inspiration from another ghostly classic of the same era: The Innocents (1961), which was shot by Freddie Francis, BSC.

"It was beautifully photographed in black-and-white anamorphic, and has amazing depth of field. They lit everything very hard, shooting at T11, so they didn’t often have to use diopters. We couldn’t do that today, because of the way we use soft light. I later spoke to Freddie Francis’s operator on that film, Ronnie Taylor [BSC], who was our B-camera operator when we shot our exteriors in England. He explained how Freddie had used graduated filters on both sides of the frame to keep the walls dark, and how the actors even wore sunglasses between takes"

- Karl Walter Lindenlaub, ASC, BVK

Ellen Kuras: 'Bob Richardson' Hard Light

2009-08-02T15:14:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, Psycho Killer by Andrew O. Thompson (June 1999)

Another technique carried over from Lee’s prior movies is the use of hot, overhead sources that envelop actors in halos of glowing light (a style popularized by Robert Richardson, ASC). Used in counterpoint to the cross-processed reversal’s unusual tonalities, these "auras" often signify the comfort of a familiar environment. In Marie’s Salon, for instance, a narrow spot Par can was used to provide a flattering accent amid the space’s warm, egg-cream-like haze. The technique is particularly apparent during a raunchy sex scene involving Vinny and hairstylist Gloria (Bebe Neuwirth); during the duo’s tryst, hot light traces the contours of the beautician’s milky skin, lending literal meaning to the phrase "sexual afterglow."...

..."That ’Bob Richardson hard light’—downlight from overhead that’s four to five stops overexposed—is something that Spike called for specifically. Because it’s non-motivated, there were times when I wouldn’t even have thought to put it in. Spike likes to use these particular hotspots to punctuate a dramatic effect. There’s definitely an emotional impact as a person walks through this very hot light, burns out and loses detail. Theoretically, one might not be able to explain it. When I was studying in France, I took a lot of classes about the ’theory’ and ’meaning’ of the image, but one can’t always provide a theoretical basis for everything."

- Ellen Kuras, ASC

Ellen Kuras: Kodak 5017

2009-08-02T08:57:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, Psycho Killer by Andrew O. Thompson (June 1999)

For all intents and purposes, 5017 is a still photographers’ stock; the emulsion therefore had to be reperforated so that it could be run through Kuras’s Arriflex cameras. In order to do this work, Kodak required a month’s worth of advance notice, along with a minimum order of 14,000’.

"I really like what Malik Sayeed did with 5017 in He Got Game—he’s a very innovative cinematographer. There was one beautifully shot scene where some guys dressed in fluorescent orange and yellow came into a green room and threw a pair of red dice on the floor. The colors were supersaturated and had a lot of black in the shadow areas. I was struck by the way the colors were rendered, particularly the greens... 5017 is a stock to be reckoned with. The shadow areas will go very black unless there is enough fill. Without the ability to hide big lights in a small location, 5017 is a struggle because of the extreme contrast and slow ASA, especially for night exteriors. We tried to use it effectively, as in the scene where Vinny and Dionna are dancing in the Virgo Club. We used [strobing] Lightning Strikes units as our keys, along with some backlights and a couple of hard sidelights. A few years ago, I did something similar on a music video for the band Lush with director Mark Pellington, but I was using 5245, which is a very slow [50 ASA] stock. I just put in a few effects lights and then used the Lightning Strikes units to reveal what was in the shadow areas."

- Ellen Kuras, ASC

Ellen Kuras: Filtration & Lighitng for Hot NYC 70's Summer

2009-08-02T08:43:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, Psycho Killer by Andrew O. Thompson (June 1999)

Much of The Summer of Sam transpires during the sweltering summer of 1977. As a result, Lee wanted the imagery to indicate the intense heat of a New York city summer—which, as any resident of the Big Apple knows, is marked by a muggy, humidity-filled atmosphere. As a visual guide, Lee asked Kuras to view his 1989 film Do the Right Thing (photographed by Ernest Dickerson, ASC). Kuras also watched Natural Born Killers and two versions of the Jack the Ripper story as a primer on serial-killer films. After conducting several tests on emulsions and exposures, Kuras opted to use antique suede filters in front of the lens during day shooting. This tactic lent the colors a more monochromatic look, as well as a period Seventies feel.

"Spike wanted a ’hot’ look, so I tried to give him as many hard backlight and sidelight edges as possible. Those [highlights] had to hug the edge of the frame. I also advised the grips not to dull down the cars or do wetdowns so that the kicks, highlights and glares would play as much as possible, and so the streets would have a blown-out look. While we were shooting, the weather changed quite a bit from hour to hour—in the morning we would have sunshine, and in the afternoon it would cloud over and sometimes rain. Trying to keep consistency throughout a scene was difficult without a lot of available room to put lights or Condors out of shot. We were often on a dead-end street, and we sometimes were backed up right to its end."

- Ellen Kuras, ASC

To convey the sense of humidity and atmosphere at night, Kuras employed pre-exposure flashing. During preproduction, she experimented with filters and a Lightflex, but found the effect somewhat confining.

"The Lightflex gave a haze to the film that was very similar to New York’s hot, humid nights, during which the blacks aren’t really quite black. However, we would have faced the problem of double reflections from headlights playing off the filters in front of the lens. We often had cars driving straight at camera, so I would have had a lot of double lights going through frame. We sandwiched filters as much as we could, and used a tilting matte box, but we just couldn’t avoid the reflections in certain situations because the camera was moving so much. Flashing was a viable way to achieve the same effect while keeping the image clear of double reflections."

- Ellen Kuras, ASC

Ellen Kuras: On Projected Dailies

2009-08-02T08:31:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, Psycho Killer by Andrew O. Thompson (June 1999)

"Today, it’s a luxury for cinematographers to see projected dailies. I really respect Spike’s dedication to projected dailies. He knows it’s important for the director of photography, assistant cameraman and production designer to see what’s really happening on film. Film-to-tape dailies can be inconsistent and inaccurate. The person operating the film-to-tape machine could make a change that affects the way you light the film: if the blacks become a little bit crushed, you might think that you don’t have enough exposure in the shadow areas and you might start adding more fill, even if there is a grey scale or Macbeth chart at the head of the roll. That’s especially true with reversal—it could be rendered very differently on video than on a print stock."

- Ellen Kuras, ASC

Robert Primes: Shadows & Darkness

2009-07-24T17:32:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, Big City Girl by Stephanie Argy (February 1999)

"The reason why most cinematographers like things to be dark is that if you show everything there's no mystery. And if there's no mystery, you're not compelling your audience to be curious. If a face is dark and rim-lit, except for a little gleam off the lips, your eyes are going to be looking at the lips. A lot of the art of cinematography is what you hide and what you reveal. Without shadows, you can't hide."

- Robert Primes, ASC

Robert Primes: A Quick Word on Source 4's

2009-07-24T17:22:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, Big City Girl by Stephanie Argy (February 1999)

"The Source Fours are a very hard light that you can bounce into a card, and then contain the spill. They're just 575 watts, but they're 95 percent efficient, so sometimes they'll do the work of a 5K light."

- Robert Primes, ASC

Robert Primes: Chimera Soft Light

2009-07-24T05:27:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, Big City Girl by Stephanie Argy (February 1999)

In spite of these difficulties, Primes has managed to carefully maintain the photographic approach that Reeves wants for the show.

"Almost all of the light is soft, and it's very often shining through Chimeras, or frames of 1000H, Chimera cloth, 216, 250 or opal. Those are the diffusion materials we use... One of the nice things about hard light is that you can really shape it. But how do you cut soft light?"

In recent years, the cinematographer has found the answer in Chimera's honeycomb grids, which attach in front of the company's flexible softboxes to concentrate the light, rather than letting it scatter. The grids come in 30-, 60- and 90-degree increments, referring to the angles to which the light is allowed to spread.

"In the past, I was using the 60s most of the time, the 90s some of the time, and the 30s not very much. Marshall [gaffer Marshall Adams] started using the 30-degree grid, which takes a tremendous amount of light. You need 10,000 watts to get anything out of it, and by golly, there it is, just a soft little spotlight. You can have someone in a little glow, and light nowhere else... Our extra smallest Chimeras use 650W tweenies, while our largest use 20Ks."

- Robert Primes, ASC

Jim Frazier: Frazier Lens Swivil Tip and Image Rotator

2009-07-24T05:08:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, Seeing is Believing by Christopher Probst (February 1999)

Perhaps the most useful aspect of the Frazier lens is its dual swivel-tip design, which allows for unlimited 360-degree global orientation of the taking lenses. Simply put, the lens can be pointed in any direction, even back at the camera operator. The swivel tip incorporates heavy-duty bearings, which make the system extremely rugged and mechanically precise, and consists of two right-angle pivot points which can be turned independently and continuously in either direction. Internally, the image is relayed through the swivel via a mirror and an amici roof-edge prism.

"On any piece of optics with a roof-edge. The roof has to be made very accurately. Otherwise, you can end up with a double image on the film. The roof angle should be 90 degree plus or minus three seconds of arc, which is very small. Normally, these types of prisms are used in binoculars and other types of instruments that are used by eye. And the eye is actually quite forgiving. In the case of the Frazier lens, however, the amici's roof-edge images to film, so it has to be very accurate...

...There are obvious situations in tabletop work where it can be a difficult matter to even look through the viewfinder. But with the swivel tip, it's easy to leave the camera in a conventional setup and put the lens where you need it. Additionally, if you imagine the lens to be like your hand and arm, you can get the lens wherever you can put your hand. I've seen some extra-ordinary things done with the lens just for the comfort of the cameraman!

You also have added freedom in that the camera itself doesn't have to be level. For example, you can even get a level image if the camera is turned on its side under a car, simply by adjusting the image rotator. This system was designed to free up the difficult aspects of cinematography that are either too expensive or time-consuming. You don't want to have a jackhammer cutting holes in the floor to get a lens in a certain position. You can also save the costs of renting additional equipment like Panatates, dutch heads, low-angle prisms and hotheads. I have gotten reports back from other cinematographers that by using the Frazier lens, they've been able to literally chop days off their shooting schedules...

...Rotating an image with a prism is not a new thing. But by putting that function in this system with its large depth of field and a fully adjustable swivel tip, you create a new range of options. The image rotator is actually what is called a pechan prism. A pechan prism is common in other optical instruments, but in this case it had to be made to very tight tolerances. One reason for that, of course, is image quality, but another is that we have to keep the boresight constant. If you rotate the prism, you don't want the picture to spiral around too much...

...Every lens has to have some sort of filtering capability. However, if you put a filter in front of the Frazier's taking lens, you have to be careful about dust. I'm talking about things like tiny carpet filaments flying in the air that are attracted to the glass due to static charge. Therefore, with the Frazier lens, the best place to put a filter is inside the system, within the relay optics. The Frazier's filter slot is also a sealed unit — there are two glass windows inside to prevent dust from traveling up or down the tube — so you can have dust go into the filter compartment without producing spots on the film."

-Iain Neil (Then Panavision Executive VP of R&D/Optics)

Jim Frazier: Frazier Lens Origin

2009-07-24T04:51:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, Seeing is Believing by Christopher Probst (February 1999)

"When I started shooting wildlife documentaries for the BBC," relates Frazier, "I didn't realize that I had immersed myself in a field that was so difficult. Not only was macro and micro photography a difficult area of cinematography, but my subjects were often completely unpredictable, which made it difficult to even keep them in focus! The photographic techniques used on those films often required a lot of special optical equipment, so I spent a lot of time devising equipment and unique apparatus...

...I have found myself lying on the ground for most of my career. I was always looking for unusual angles. But in filming those low angles, I wanted to move the camera away from my subjects. I wasn't content to look down at their world; I really wanted to see that world from their point of view. Toward that end, my first foray into optics literally involved gluing a mirror onto the end of a stick that was taped to a lens. Of course, the problem with that technique was that the insect would then go one way, and I'd pan the other!

To me, optics were absolutely essential to get me where I wanted to go. I literally pulled hundreds of lenses to pieces to get the elements out, and began playing with different combinations. My initial system of lens design consisted of a board with some modeling clay on it that I would stick the various lenses in while looking through with a viewfinder. I spent many months and countless thousands of hours knee-deep in optics.

By trial and error, I eventually came upon the system of optics that ultimately produced the Frazier lens. I'll never forget it the moment I came upon that [optical configuration]. I was doing what I normally did — swapping optics around — and then I suddenly saw what I was looking for. That was it! I literally did somersaults and had to look again. At that point, I knew that I was close to what I had envisioned."

- Jim Frazier, ACS

Jim Frazier: Frazier Lens Advantages & Build

2009-07-24T03:27:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, Seeing is Believing by Christopher Probst (February 1999)

"This device does have a very large depth of field, but it is not infinite. The depth that is created does not break the laws of physics; it occurs because of the design of the optical relay system that is used. If you were to take a 10mm fixed-focal-length lens and put it on a camera, you'd get a certain field of view and depth of field at, say a T8 aperture. If you were to put the equivalent lens on the Frazier — which in this case would be the 14mm, which delivers about a 9.9mm field of view — you would actually have a similar depth of field. Now you may say, 'Wait a minute! If that's so, why do people talk so much about the depth of field with this lens? Why wouldn't they just rent a 10mm instead?' The reason is that with a 10mm lens, the diameter of the front element is about six inches. If you were to take a bumblebee and put it on that lens's front glass, it would only fill about five percent of your frame. Because of the Frazier system's optical configuration, when you put the bumblebee on the front of the 14mm taking lens — which is about an inch and a half in diameter — the bee will fill about half of your frame. Yes, you'd have a large depth of field, but more importantly, you're able to get objects really close to the front of the taking lens to get into macro magnifications. So in a practical sense, the Frazier system's depth of field is more available and useful.

Another problem with other lenses has to do with the entrance pupil of the lens. With a lens that has a six-inch diameter, the entrance pupil is actually some distance inside the lens. So as you bring your face in close to the lens, your nose will start to bulge and your ears do something weird with perspective distortion. With a smaller-diameter lens, the entrance pupil is still inside the lens, but at a much smaller distance [from the front]. If you look at the mathematics, it turns out that you could then bring someone's face all the way up to the lens and not see any perspective distortion. This relationship has a lot to do with how the taking lenses, the field lenses and the system have been optimized, which in this case is in the area between six inches and three feet. When you can't see the perspective, you can't tell the size of an object or the distance it's at, so a sort of optical illusion is created."

-Iain Neil (Then Panavision Executive VP of R&D/Optics)

"With the Frazier lens, macro work has never been easier. A cinematographer now has an unparalleled freedom of movement in the macro range. In fact, unlike conventional macro lenses, there is no pull-focus necessary. The camera can simply float in and out on the subjects without any loss of focus and without any distortion or curvature of field — even when the subject is almost touching the lens. This is particularly invaluable for scale model and tabletop work, where both depth and distortion are major issues. I knew from my commercial work that when you put a product close to the lens, you don't want to see this great curved field. I love playing with perspectives [and the perception of perspectives,] so I concentrated on building these units without any distortion. In my earlier prototype units, the illusion — which I knew was there — was ruined because of distortion. In commercials, clients usually don't like to see their products distorted. If the product has straight lines in it, they want to see it [photographed] with straight lines."

- Jim Frazier, ACS

"One significant aspect of the Frazier lens which may not be obvious is that the taking lenses — which also house some field lenses — are designed as sealed units. With the Frazier taking lenses, you're actually getting a taking lens plus part of what really goes in the tube of the main system. In other systems, if you stop down to a T8 or T11, or all the way down to T32, you can have a major problem with dust. If there's one little particle near an intermediate image, you could end up seeing that speck on the film. But with a sealed taking unit, you can pretty much avoid dust. Of course, you still have to keep the optical instrument clean, but at least we have avoided the most likely cause of dust showing up on the final image...

...The longer focal lengths illustrate why increased depth of field, in itself, is not the only selling point of the Frazier lens system — it's a combination of features. For situations where you may not want the object right up to the lens, but you still want the flexibility of the swivel tip, the image rotator and the larger depth of field, we've added the 85mm, a 105mm and a 135mm, which respectively deliver 60mm, 75mm and 95mm cine fields of view. These longer lenses still offer a large depth of field, but it will start at perhaps 2 to 4 feet and then go to infinity."

-Iain Neil (Then Panavision Executive VP of R&D/Optics)

Lisa Rinzler: Rough Terrain & Camera Cars

2009-07-24T03:02:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, Culture Clash by Vincent LoBrutto (February 1999)

"The Dry Season took place predominately on a moving cyclo, but in Vietnam there's no such thing as a Shotmaker truck. Instead, we used a Jeep with bad shocks — or seemingly no shocks at all — as a camera car. The streets of Ho Chi Minh City can be potholed and bumpy. A cyclo is approximately 8' long, and the camera lens on our Jeep was approximately 12' from the actors. As a result, we were forced to use a 75mm or 100mm lens for close-ups — lenses that are, quite frankly, too long for unsteady moving-vehicle shots with dialogue. Bumpy footage would have distracted from the story, so we brought in Will Arnot on Steadicam to minimize the bumpiness of the roads. Another time, we used the Steadicam to create a makeshift crane, since the only one available to us was ancient, unsafe, and too heavy to move onto location. We created a rig which allowed the operator to simply walk down a ladder, creating a cranelike effect."

- Lisa Rinzler

Vilmos Zsigmond: Students, Passion & Regret

2009-07-20T17:27:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, A Transcendent Career Foretold by Bob Fisher (February '99)

"I encourage film students who are interested in cinematography to study sculpture, paintings, music, writing and other arts. Filmmaking consists of all the arts combined. Students are always asking me for advice, and I tell them that they have to be enthusiastic, because it's hard work. The only way to enjoy it is to be totally immersed. If you don't get involved on that level, it could be a very miserable job. I only have one regret about my career: I'm sorry that we are not making silent movies any more. That is the purest art form I can imagine."

- Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC

Vilmos Zsigmond: Lighting

2009-07-20T17:24:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, A Transcendent Career Foretold by Bob Fisher (February '99)

"I think the most important thing about cinematography is lighting. That's how you create the mood that matches the story. The ability to light artistically is a gift from the gods. If you have the ability, you shouldn't waste it. You should be looking for ways to improve and grow."

- Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC

Vilmos Zsigmond: Art of Film

2009-07-20T02:25:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, A Transcendent Career Foretold by Bob Fisher (February '99)

Zsigmond spent four years at film school, putting in many 14-hour days and six-day weeks. While he deplored living under the tyranny of the communist government, he learned some great truths from the head of the department, György Illes, and other faculty members.

"They taught us that a movie is only art if it has something important to say. It should be more than entertainment. It should have social value...

...My rule is that if a movie doesn't say something of value for the audience, I don't think it's worth making. You only have time to make so many pictures in your life. Maybe 75 percent of the time, you can tell if a film will be worthwhile when you read the script, but I've been fooled on occasion. There were times when I thought something was going to be a good movie, but it didn't turn out that way. There are so many things that have to come together — the actors, the director, the script."

- Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC

Vilmos Zsigmond: Character & Visual Signatures

2009-07-20T01:58:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, A Transcendent Career Foretold by Bob Fisher (February '99)

In The Witches of Eastwick, Zsigmond used colors to create a romantic and slightly surrealistic look. Jack Nicholson portrays the devil, who sets up house with three beautiful witches. Zsigmond manipulated color temperatures with the use of gels to bathe the devil in reddish tones, which were always motivated by identifiable sources. He contrasted those tones with cool, blue lighting that provided a visual signature for the witches.

John Toll: Jungles & Daylight Exteriors

2009-07-15T16:29:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, The War Within by Stephen Pizzello (February 1999)

"In those situations [jungle], scouting is everything. We would basically clear out a path to get the gear in, and then take the actors in another 100' and let them struggle. [Laughs.]

We did haul some lights into the jungle, but when we turned them on, they completely changed the character and nuances of the natural light. It was beautiful in there, but we were dealing with extremely low light levels. There were subtleties in the colors and gradations of the natural light that completely disappeared when we mixed in any artificial fill. There was plenty of contrast, though, because the sunlight that did filter in created great hot highlights. I decided to just expose into the shadows as much as possible and go for the natural falloff of the shadows to compensate for lack of detail. It worked out okay.

This became a general approach to lighting most of the exteriors. I started out using some amounts of fill, but I became less and less interested in controlling contrast; I would expose for the shadow detail that I wanted and then usually let highlights go. At times, we would use indirect light bounced from muslin or beadboard to lift faces, and maybe use black for negative, but when we were working in heavy contrast, I was quite a bit overexposed from what a more normal exposure would be in those situations. When it was sunny, it was extremely contrasty, but rather than trying to balance everything by adding fill, I just ignored the highlights.

I thought the film actually started looking much better when we lost the details in the highlights; it seemed more appropriate for the story. The more contrasty things got, the better, because it felt as if things were out of control — just as they were in the story.

There's a sequence that I like between Nick Nolte, who plays this mad colonel, and John Cusack, who's his adjutant. In the scene, which occurs about halfway through the battle, Nolte tells Cusack not to worry about the men and to focus on the charge up the hill. We were on top of a hill in an area with all of these burned-out tree trunks. It was extremely contrasty, but we really wanted to get into the faces and show the actors' expressions. We chose to shoot in a direction that would allow us to take advantage of the light. We put them in areas where they were in direct sunlight that was broken up by the trees, and we also added smoke to soften the sunlight. We wanted to show the environment, but we also chose angles that were good for close-ups and dialogue. We used some white fill and black negative to give the characters some shape and contrast, but choosing the right angles was the most important consideration...

...It's amazing to me how often I hear cinematographers say that they think shooting good-looking day exterior movies is all about sitting around and waiting for the right light to happen, and then just pointing your camera at it and shooting 'pretty pictures.' Doing good work in day exterior situations means that you must be able to make great images all day long, even when the light isn't ideal for pretty pictures. You must make choices that will allow you to take advantage of natural light in existing conditions. Even when the light is 'bad' it is possible to do good work by making wise choices.

The predominant day exterior lighting conditions on this film were either sunny high-contrast or soft contrast resulting from overcast conditions. Because we were shooting all day long and didn't have the luxury of waiting for ideal light, we had to decide how to make existing light work for the scenes we were schedule to do on a given day. It was impossible to entirely control all of the light in our shots because we were using wider-angle anamorphic lenses and constantly moving the camera. None of the traditional methods of light control, such as putting up silks, were possible, because of the terrain and the nature of the shots. Sometimes, if we were doing extended dialogue and didn't like the way the contrast was affecting the actors' faces, we would try to create an artificial 'overcast' look by staging scenes under trees or in the shadow of a hill. At other times, we would stay in the open and go with the existing high contrast, exposing the faces and letting the contrast go. There were also days when we had both overcast and high-contrast sun happening simultaneously because of low clouds moving quickly and causing severe light changes. We had some days when the light changes happened so quickly that we just shot through them. It could be blistering hot one moment, and completely dark the next — sometimes in the same shot. But that represented the reality of the situation, and we just went with it. We didn't fight the conditions; we just tried to make them part of the story. In fact, for one Akela shot of the soldiers climbing up the hills, we waited specifically for a light change to happen. The scene starts out in heavy cloud cover, but the sun comes out and reveals these guys sneaking through the grass. That particular light change worked well for us.

The point I'm trying to make is that good daytime exterior cinematography is not comprised solely of making 'pretty pictures' at magic hour; it's about being knowledgeable about your craft and being able to create interesting images in all of the various daylight conditions."

-John Toll, ASC

John Toll: Akela Crane...Uhhh 'Dolly'?

2009-07-15T16:25:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, The War Within by Stephen Pizzello (February 1999)

"The Akela was a great asset. One of our biggest challenges was a daytime battle sequence in these grassy hills. The Japanese were in the hills, and the Americans had to go up there, find them, and kill them. To deal with those scenes, we brought in the Akela, which came with two American technicians. The terrain was very uneven; the grass was about waist-high, and underneath it there were a lot of rocks and holes. We spent weeks climbing up and falling down these hills. At times we could use the Steadicam really well out there, but at other times it became impossible because we wanted to see the soldiers actually going up the hills. One of the tougher challenges we faced was preserving the look of this waist-high grass. You couldn't walk through the grass more than a couple of times without leaving these huge paths. It was like working in snow, where you've got to cover your tracks. There's only so much you can do before you destroy the look of the location.

I was contemplating this problem long before we got to the location, because I knew what we were up against with the grass and the steep hills. I began thinking about using the Akela crane, which has an extremely long, 72' arm that would allow us to get the camera into places where we couldn't walk or lay dolly track. The only problem was that I wanted to install the crane on the sides of hills, which involved building some fairly substantial platforms, because the Akela weighs about 6,000 pounds. It worked out fabulously, though. The Akela's arm does have a slight arc, but it's a much more minimal arc than any conventional crane arm. Because of that, we could make shots that had the appearance of a dolly shot. That was the whole reason for bringing in the Akela, and we constantly had it at very low angles; I don't think we used it more than once or twice for a high-angled shot. Our expert technicians, Michael Gough and Mark Willard, kept wanting to show off how high it would go, but I kept hammering them with my mantra: 'It's a dolly, not a crane.' We basically turned our crane technicians into dolly grips, but they did a fantastic job.

There are some great Akela crane shots in the film where we follow the soldiers over really long distances. We did have to train the actors to stay with the crane arm, because it doesn't move in a perfectly straight line. If we were ahead of them, they could just follow the lens, but if we were shooting from behind, we would trace out the arc so the actors could follow it. But using the Akela really allowed us to get down in the grass and get shots that just wouldn't have been possible with a dolly or even a Steadicam because of the uneven terrain."

- John Toll, ASC

John Toll: Story, Camera Movement & Steadicam

2009-07-15T16:14:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, The War Within by Stephen Pizzello (February 1999)

"Terry and I talked extensively about creating a sense of movement throughout the whole picture. He loves to speak in metaphors, and he kept saying, 'It's like moving down a river, and the picture should have that same kind of flow'... During prep, we had talked about various ways to create that kind of style, but we never settled on a single approach. On the first couple of days of the schedule, we shot some scenes with a moving camera on a dolly, and some with stationary cameras incorporating conventional coverage and angles. It was all technically correct, and there was nothing wrong with the scenes, but when we viewed the footage, it sometimes felt very 'staged' and overly structured for the camera.

We knew we wanted something more, so we decided to loosen up our approach a bit. As a result, there's a lot of Steadicam and handheld work in the picture. We had a great Australian Steadicam operator named Brad Shields. We allowed the camera to explore a bit, and Terry encouraged the actors to try something different if they felt like it. At times, the camera would drift from one actor to another; we might not get conventional masters or coverage, but it didn't seem that important. Every scene became a unique situation, and we just shot what seemed to be most appropriate for a particular sequence. We allowed the camera to follow the emotional thread of a scene without worrying about much else. What seemed to emerge from that was a feeling of unpredictability which completely supported the idea that Guadalcanal was a strange and dangerous place that these characters suddenly found themselves in.

Terry got into that style of shooting immediately; he has a rather spontaneous and unpredictable personality, so the idea made a lot of sense to him. Using Steadicam and handheld camera certainly isn't a new idea, but the challenge was in shooting scenes that way without drawing unnecessary attention to the techniques themselves. I wanted to use the fluid, mobile camera movement as part of the overall style of the film, but in a way that supported the story."

- John Toll, ASC

Example in Interview:

Those techniques are very effective during a key sequence in which the Americans finally overtake the Japanese in a bivouac area.

"That scene is basically the Japanese soldiers' last stand. Some of them are dying of starvation, some commit suicide, some surrender and others decide to fight to the last man. I think we really captured the chaos and tragedy of that type of battle. No one really wants to be there, but they have to follow orders, and whether given individuals survive or get killed is really just a matter of chance.

The whole sequence was done with either a handheld camera and/or the Steadicam — primarily the Steadicam — and Brad Shields did a great job on it. The Americans are running into the area and the Japanese are all around them, so you don't know if the guy next to you is friend or foe. Once we set up for that scene, we had the actors go in and improvise action. We then kept repeating the sequence over and over, following different characters through this nightmarish situation. It was semi-controlled chaos, and it wasn't over-rehearsed to the point where everyone always knew what they were going to do. There were many extras in the scene, a lot of people firing at each other, and various guys taking some predetermined hits. We just let the camerawork be as free-form as possible"

- John Toll, ASC

John Toll: Super35 vs Anamorphic

2009-07-15T16:13:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, The War Within by Stephen Pizzello (February 1999)

"We chose straight anamorphic over Super 35 because I don't really like the idea of having an optical step at the end of the answer-print process. I want to know that what we're seeing during dailies is definitely what we're going to get in our original neg prints. Terry and I had always planned that this would be a widescreen picture because we wanted to see the characters within their environments; after all, that's the major focus of the story. "

- John Toll, ASC

John Toll: The Thin Red Line of Image Manipulation

2009-07-15T16:10:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, The War Within by Stephen Pizzello (February 1999)

"Terry and I agreed that this film really needed to feel as realistic as possible. Naturally, there is a certain amount of visual stylization in the film, but we tried to lend the images an integrity so that viewers could believe that they were watching a real event — without feeling as if they were being overly manipulated by a great filmmaker. I sometimes see great visual films that are obviously so well-stylized and well-controlled that I feel slightly overmanipulated; it might be fantastic, beautiful work, but in my mind I don't feel as if I'm watching reality."

- John Toll, ASC

John Toll: Inspiration from Painting

2009-07-15T15:59:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, The War Within by Stephen Pizzello (February 1999)

"During the shoot, Jack Fisk brought us this book called Images of War: The Artist's Vision of World War II [1992, edited by Ken McCormick and Hamilton Darby Perry], which presents 200 paintings by many different artists. These were artists who spent time in the front lines and came back with this fantastic artwork depicting the scenes they had witnessed, including many combat situations. All of the artists had different and unique styles. We didn't necessarily try to reproduce these pieces of art, but they did give us good ideas about color schemes and so on. The illustrations basically served as a guide to the kind of atmosphere we were after.

We'd looked at many photographs from the war, but they seemed too detailed somehow, and I wanted the imagery of our film to be a bit less clearly defined. The paintings were great because they were much more impressionistic and abstract in a way that I found more interesting than the photographs. For example, there was one drawing of Japanese prisoners sitting on the ground, and the light they were drawn in — bright contrasty sunlight which left their faces in shadow — looked very similar to the light conditions we were shooting in. There was detail in the prisoners' faces, but the highlights of the background were bright and burned-out. I thought it looked fantastic.

In some scenes [that I'd shot to that point], I had lit the actors' faces or had used fill in situations with heavy contrast, but I'd begun doing it less and less because I started to like the way the film looked when I didn't use fill — overexposing quite a bit, getting detail in the shadows and letting the highlights burn out. It looked much less controlled in an interesting way. After seeing the drawing, which was a much more exaggerated version of what we'd been doing photographically, I went with less and less added light."

- John Toll, ASC

Jean-Marc Fabre: Lengthy Sunset Scene

2009-07-15T15:47:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, Sword Pen & Family by Eric Rudolph (October 1998)

Trying to capture the setting sun in a series of shots that included dialogue was, of course, a challenge for Fabre. Additionally, the crew had only a few hours spread over two days to shoot the scenes. Only a third of the scene used real sunsets; the rest was re-created with gelled lights and filtration.

"When Channe was in the house putting on the record, it was actually raining. To simulate the setting sun, I used a 6K HMI outside with a 1/2 orange gel. I cheated by closing a curtain on the window. When the characters are on the porch, the sunset you see through the windows is real. Naturally, the sunset did not last nearly long enough for the dialogue scenes, so for those we used gelled lights and an orange lens filter. The orange filter was also used for the film's final shot."

- Jean-Marc Fabre

Jean-Marc Fabre: Observations of American vs French Crews

2009-07-15T15:42:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, Sword Pen & Family by Eric Rudolph (October 1998)

Fabre had never worked in the States before and found the American crew

"...very skillful and professional, but less emotionally involved with the film than a typical French crew. I think I prefer the French approach, but we had a good experience. They taught me a lot and I think I taught them some things as well... In France we do not have a key grip who works with flags and diffusion; the electricians handle that. Having the extra pair of hands enabled me to have greater control over the light."

- Jean-Marc Fabre

Jean-Marc Fabre: Evolving Light with Character

2009-07-14T09:46:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, Sword Pen & Family by Eric Rudolph (October 1998)

Another challenge for the cinematographer was the fact that lead actress Leelee Sobieski, 15 years old at the time of production, had to span an age range that took her from pre-adolescent to mature high-schooler. While the filmmakers employed the standard tactics which enable young actresses to age onscreen (such as adjusting makeup, hair and wardrobe), Fabre also played an important role in Sobieski's gradual transformation.

"When she is a young adolescent, the age when girls haven't yet started looking at themselves much, I took no special care with her lighting at all. She would get into the lighting that was there and I paid no particular attention to her. As she becomes interested in boys, we took a bit more care with her lighting."

Later, while shooting scenes that took place after the family moved to the States, Fabre had his cue to start "making Leelee prettier, lighting her like an actress, in a more sophisticated way."

- Jean-Marc Fabre

Constantine Makris: Natural Light Look vs. No Lighting

2009-07-14T04:19:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, Legal Eagle by Eric Rudolph (October 1998)

Makris is clearly passionate about his work, which he says is sometimes misunderstood. While the realistic lighting for Law & Order bolsters the show's credibility as much as the use of actual New York City locations does, the lighting is so authentic that some people outside of the industry think Makris's modus operandi involves simply showing up and filming with available light. In fact, the cinematographer was once asked to shoot some commercials for a politician because one of the media advisors was a fan of his Law & Order work.

"This advisor said to me, 'I love the way your show looks, because you don't light it.' Well, that 'non-light' look probably involved four 10Ks!... I'd say that was one of the greatest compliments I've ever received."

- Constantine Makris, ASC

Constantine Makris: Image Control & Post Production

2009-07-14T04:08:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, Legal Eagle by Eric Rudolph (October 1998)

While the show is closely identified with its New York setting and production base, it is produced by Universal Television, which is based in Los Angeles. This means that postproduction is done 3,000 miles away. The long-distance marriage has created some problems that Makris has recently taken steps to solve.

"They literally take our unprocessed 35mm negative and put it on a plane to Deluxe in Los Angeles! The postproduction staff began getting a bit creative, changing things I'd done. The squad room walls are green — not blue, as they have appeared to be in some shows. If I say an actor should have an orange half-shadow on his face, well, he should, because I'm the person being paid to light this show. Sometimes I want to warm up a scene with a one-quarter CTO. But when I see the show, the scene is not warm — it's white. For that reason, I started using a 1/2 CTO where I previously might have used a 1/4... Steve Garfinkle, our Kodak rep, suggested using their Grey Card Plus system. Up to that point, I had only been giving post a gray scale. With Kodak's system, with its calibration of the telecine, the colorists' job is to simply match his copy of the Grey Card Plus card to the card we film. If they do that, the show should look the way it was intended to when it reaches the home screen."

- Constantine Makris, ASC

Constantine Makris: Separation & Rim Light

2009-07-14T04:03:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, Legal Eagle by Eric Rudolph (October 1998)

"I don't like to rim-light. We do it when we need to — for example, if we have [series star] Sam Waterston in a gray suit against a brown wall — but I prefer to separate the actors using the background. I try to light and shadow the background in an interesting way that will contrast with the actors. To me, that approach is more like a feature and less like 80 percent of television, where everyone seems to have a halo."

- Constantine Makris, ASC

Constantine Makris: Windows & Shafts of Light

2009-07-14T03:39:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, Legal Eagle by Eric Rudolph (October 1998)

Makris's basic lighting approach for day interiors is to bring the key light in through a window and then fill around the actors.

"If the window is approachable on a location, that's usually where we start. However, if the location is more than a few stories up and there is only one scene, we'll try to avoid putting the window in the frame, or else gel it with ND. But if I've got three scenes to do, we'll put up a Condor and light through the window. We routinely block and light windows that are 40 to 70 feet up! On our studio sets, shining the key through the window is very common. It's not a rule, but I think the window light suits the somber tone of our stories.

If there is something interesting on somebody's desk, in their wardrobe or on their face, I'll often hit it with a shaft of light. I have mixed feelings about doing that, because I feel as if I'm 'lighting' when I do it. So I'll stop doing it for a while, and then I'll see a strong shaft of light in real life and say 'Well, maybe it's okay. These tight, strong shafts of light happen in New York City, where you will get the ambient window light and then a small, oddly shaped shaft from a reflection off another building... We use Fresnels, HMI Pars and mirrors to make our shafts. We'll cut a Fresnel or Par with diffusion or a flag, and we have different sizes of mirrors which we use to make really tight beams of light. Sometimes, in the interrogation room, we'll hit a subject with a shaft from a mirror if they have an interesting face or a tattoo. We just try to make sure it doesn't look like a spotlight!"

- Constantine Makris, ASC

Constantine Makris: Changing the Light as Actors Move

2009-07-14T03:36:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, Legal Eagle by Eric Rudolph (October 1998)

What are Makris's secrets?

"I use dimmers and cross-fading more often. We also walk lights, with electricians doing things like dipping under the frame-line to move a handheld light to the actor's new position. I read an interview with Allen Daviau [ASC] in American Cinematographer where he said, 'I don't know how to do things without walking lights or moving nets and flags as the characters move.' That comment really stuck with me and has greatly influenced how I light now, along with the revelations that came from directing. The dance between the actors and the camera is one of the most interesting facets of this show — in addition to the fact that the writing, acting and directing are so good...

...If we can just use a board to bounce the light back to their faces, we will, but often we end up using a Griffolyn — anything from a 4' by 4' to a 12' by 12' — and hit it with a nine-light, from which we'll add or subtract light as the actors move closer and farther away. It's another example of how you can dramatically change the lighting during a scene. We'll bring down a single in front of some of the nine-light's bulbs as the actors get closer to the Griffolyn. We've found that you can change the lighting during a scene a great deal. As long as you have a moving camera and moving actors, the changes are invisible."

- Constantine Makris, ASC

Constantine Makris: Creative Limitations on Location

2009-07-14T03:32:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, Legal Eagle by Eric Rudolph (October 1998)

"The fun of doing this show is working on location in New York City. I think my work may be better on location than in the studio. I like to deal with real problems. Since I've figured that out, I've started imagining, when I'm in the studio, that I'm on location and that I can't pull this wall out or clamp a light to this fancy molding. Having those types of limitations seems to spur my creativity. When every accent is right and every actor is perfectly backlit, I'm not that happy. I often do my best work when there are accidents. For example, when my gaffer is moving a light to the position I gave him and I see how it hits an actor as he's moving it, I'll often say 'Stop!'; Or sometimes a lamp will go out and I'll think, 'Gee, that looks better; let's leave it out.'"

- Constantine Makris, ASC

Aaron Schneider: Power Windows

2009-07-14T03:26:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, Swanky Modes by Bob Fisher (October 1998)

Schneider: I learned a lot from him about da Vinci's Power Windows. There's a scene where I wanted to cast the shot with a blue-green kind of ugly fluorescent vibe. But a platinum blonde was supposed to be part of the scene in a sort of Marilyn Monroe kind of way. We ended up putting a Power Window over her hair and saved the yellow-blonde in her hair as a striking contrast to the scenes over-all hue. It made her otherwise ordinary blonde hair stand out as a visual icon.

Overton: When you isolate a face or object in a window, you can change colors, contrast and other details. You can solve problems and fine-tune images."

It sounds as if Power Windows was a really useful tool.

Schneider: Yes, and there are many examples. There is a scene in a boat when the characters are leaving Mexico, and it's a transition from night to sunrise. Buddy is looking over the edge of the boat. I needed Dennis Farina to pick his chin up over the threshold, so the light would hit his face. He didn't quite make it, so we lit his face in post.

Overton: When we put his face in that window, we could gradually build the light on it. We have control in the window over color, density, and brightness.

You can do that without affecting the rest of the image?

Overton: The secret to hiding Power Windows is learning to think like Aaron does on the set. You have to look at the scene and see where is the light coming from or where should it be coming from. It has to be a collaborative process.

How long have you been doing this type of work?

Overton: I got into the business about 18 years ago, starting in the electronic labs. I was the first telecine operator here [at Laser Pacific].

What's changing in your world?

Overton: There is a lot of interesting new technology, but there is also an important change in relationships with cinematographers like Aaron. More of them are becoming more knowledgeable. They see digital post as an extension of their work.

- Aaron Schneider, ASC & Colorist Tom Overton

Aaron Schneider: 1.33 to 16:9

2009-07-14T03:19:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, Swanky Modes by Bob Fisher (October 1998)

"I composed with a common top line and sides, and framed the images for 1.33:1. That's the way the program will be seen by the vast majority of people. You can't do a good job of composing for two formats at the same time. If they decide in the future to release this film in HDTV format, I'll be happy to supervise extracting a 16 by 9 image by cutting off part of the bottom of the frame. "

- Aaron Schneider, ASC

Aaron Schneider: Reversal Film

2009-07-13T17:26:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, Swanky Modes by Bob Fisher (October 1998)

"We used two Kodak Ektachrome films in 35mm format. One is a 125-speed film [5240] balanced for tungsten, and the other is a 160-speed film [5239] balanced for daylight. My friends at Kodak were very helpful in quickly generating these two stocks for our production. An entire section of their manufacturing plant had to be converted to reversal production. I think everyone in the company and at the network looked at a print of Clockers [shot by Malik Sayeed, see AC Sept. '95] to see what Ektachrome film looks like onscreen, but I was doing something different. They used a cross-processing technique on Clockers, which gives you a negative that intercuts with the rest of the footage. The side effect of the latter is very strange and peculiar color rendition. I processed normal because I wanted to use reversal for its sort of "newsreel" quality with rich blacks and all the trimmings of a positive print.

I remembered how beautiful and grainless it looked. The grain structure looks equivalent to [Eastman EXR] 5248 or 5245. It has a fluttery quality. The film's density varies in areas of middle gray and mid-tones. The film kind of breathes as if it's alive. I also did some research and found out which lenses cinematographers used 20 years ago on shows like Mannix, Cannon and MacMillan and Wife. I told my assistant cameraman that I wanted a decent set of [Panavision] Ultraspeeds that were functional, but not too functional, if you know what I mean....

Yale is the only lab that is presently processing 35mm reversal film on the West Coast, and it runs about four times slower through the soup. They could only turn out approximately 8,000 feet a day, and would need 24 hours to begin the turnaround. We ultimately convinced those concerned that a one-day delay wasn't going to be the end of the world. We actually came in under budget for exposed film too. At one point on the set Charlie blurted out, 'When I work with you, Aaron, I'm in my minimalist period.' I took it as a compliment. You know, quality over quantity.

I shot my standard exposure test using a gray-scale card with a human face and colorful fruit in the frame. I find using real objects of color we can readily identify with is more telling than a color chart. I over- and underexposed five stops in 1/2-stop increments. It's a test that shows not only the shape of the curve but the over- and underexposure latitude, as well as the [equivalent] ASA that makes the film look the way I want it. By "correcting" each over- and underexposure, I can see what the film looks like at different ASA interpretations. Leon Silverman at Laser Pacific, set up a room for studying the developed film on the telecine. From what I learned, I decided to underexpose both films by a half-stop, because it makes the images a little more saturated with deeper blacks — the exact opposite of how negative film behaves.

Two terrific cinematographers, [ASC members] Paul Ryan and Bob Primes, worked with me on the tests. We spent 12 hours shooting at Panavision — Phil Radin was kind enough to set us up with a camera and their shooting stage — and a large part of a day analyzing the results at Laser Pacific. I wanted to find the shape of the [sensitometric] curve. You only have about 3/4 of a stop less under- and overexposure with reversal film, but the shape of the curve is radically different. Negative has a more gradual curve. You lose information a lot faster with reversal film."

- Aaron Schneider, ASC

Jean Yves Escoffier: Pools of Light & Night Exteriors

2009-07-13T17:24:00.001-07:00

From American Cinematographer, Card Sharks by Jean Oppenheimer (October 1998)

For night exteriors, he used a Lee 104 deep amber gel to suggest the warm sodium-vapor lights now being used in the Big Apple (the city formerly used mercury-vapor streetlamps, which weren't as warm). "The night stuff was beautiful," marvels New York-based gaffer Ramsey. "Some of the streets where we shot were very mundane, junky little lower East Side streets. But the way Jean Yves shot them, with the contrasts and pools of light, really brought them to life."

Night street scenes are Escoffier's favorite milieu. "I love to do the city by night," he says in a reverential tone. "It is like a painting." With a laugh, he adds, "I am a happy person by night."

The cinematographer sought to make the film's exterior night scenes more dramatic and expressionistic. "People who are addicted to playing cards are like night birds," he suggests. "They have strange minds. They are alone in the world. I didn't want them to appear in the normal light of the city by night, so I completely changed the light."

Escoffier created his dramatic nighttime exteriors partially through the use of Dino lights, which were aimed through custom-made cookies to create strong pools of light, so that people walking down the streets would travel in and out of the illuminated areas. The characters' faces were almost always highlighted with eyelights, which were either attached to the camera or held by a crew member walking beside the actor.

Jean Yves Escoffier: Filtration vs Gels

2009-07-13T17:06:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, Card Sharks by Jean Oppenheimer (October 1998)

Whereas many cinematographers would turn to filters to achieve a warm feel, Escoffier prefers gels.

"We did it all in the lighting. Jean Yves uses theatrical gels extensively, as opposed to the normal, color-temperatured correction. If you have a white light and you make it a bit warmer or cooler, that is a color-temperature correction. If you use a theatrical gel, which is a color, then that is coloring the light."

- Scott Ramsey, Gaffer for Escoffier

"There is a tension between opposite colors. And when actors go from one area to another, it's as if they're crossing into a different world."

- Jean Yves Escoffier

Jean Yves Escoffier: Dark Walls & Set Lighting

2009-07-13T16:55:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, Card Sharks by Jean Oppenheimer (October 1998)

"I like dark walls because film is about people; each time you have a bright wall, the wall is stronger than the character. I like the reverse [situation]. I also like the lighting to be in intimate relationship with the set. I don't like anything artificial. The ideal situation would be if we could shoot the way the light is naturally, but obviously, if you do that, you would have too many cosmetic problems, and it would be impossible to read the subtle expressions in the actors' eyes. However, I like to go as close to natural as possible. I like to design the tension, the darkness and the brightness the way life would give it to you."

- Jean Yves Escoffier

Robert Fraisse: Lens, Light & Expose Car Chases

2009-07-13T16:02:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, Samurai Tactics by Ron Magid (October 1998)

"Most of the time, we used three or four normal cameras, plus one or two remote crash-box cameras, which were cheap cameras with cheap lenses inside very heavy and resistant metal blimp. With that kind of camera, we got very brief but incredible shots. When you shoot car chases with long focal lengths, you can shoot for 20 seconds, because you see the car far into the depth and you can let it come toward camera. But with very short focal lengths, the cars cross the frame very fast, which I think is a very strong effect. We also shot in Nice, which is an old city in the South of France with very narrow streets, so the shots automatically didn't last a long time. We needed to shoot many setups to have the continuity of the cars going from one street to another.

It was the first time in my career I worked with cars going so fast. John said, 'When I shot Grand Prix, I never cheated on the speed, so I don't want to cheat the speed now.' Sometimes, but not very often, we did shoot at 22 frames per second, or 21. The secret was using very good race-car drivers, who were used to driving at 300 kilometers [186 miles] per hour. It was amazing how fast those cars went — sometimes 160 kilometers [roughly 100 miles] per hour, even though the roads were narrow with a lot of curves.

Generally, there are devices you use when actors are supposed to be driving. For instance, you might have a moving car, with the camera and a small generator to feed your lights, towing the car with the actors. When John told me, 'I don't want to tow the cars; I want the actors to really drive the cars,' I said, 'Oh my God, how am I going to light them?' The cars were going very fast, so I couldn't put any gear on the roof, and it would've been a nightmare to put a generator in the hood. Instead, I decided to go with small 200-watt HMIs, which were fed by batteries in the trunk and fixed onto the hood or in different places outside the [actors'] car. Inside the car, I used small 2' or 1 1/2' Kino Flo daylight fluorescent lights, which now run very well on batteries.

The problem with car chases like these, is that most of the time, you are not in the car. You equip the car with cameras and lights and just let it go. When the sky is blue and the sun is bright, it's no problem — you set the f-stop and you know, more or less, that it will be the right one for the whole shot. Sometimes, though, the sun is going in and out of the clouds. In those situations, you set the stop, the car pulls away, the camera is shooting without you, and the sun comes out. You know you're going to be overexposed, but you can't do anything about it. Quite often, the cars would go from one street to another, and the light was to tally different from one to the next. I therefore had to change the f-stop while it happened. Fortunately, the high speeds of the cars helped. When I had a three-stop difference between two streets, I didn't open the iris three stops; I opened it only two stops, so the second street would still look darker than the first, which was better for the ambiance of the movie."

- Robert Fraisse

John Frankenheimer: Stunt Drivers & Actors

2009-07-13T15:42:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, Samurai Tactics by Ron Magid (October 1998)

"We had great drivers, and we did some shots with the actors in the real cars during the scenes. I got the English right-hand-drive versions of the cars we were going to shoot. That way, we could have the stunt driver on the right, driving the car, and a phony steering wheel on the left for the actors, so we could photograph the actors driving' the cars in a lot of cases. We picked Jean-Claude Lagniez as the stunt coordinator and driver, and he brought in two colleagues, Michel Neugarten and Jean-Pierre Jarrier. Together, Lagniez and Neugarten had won their category at Le Mans the year before, and Jarrier was a Formula-One driver. Those guys were really fabulous. I'd tell Lagniez what I wanted to do, and he'd figure out how to do it."

- John Frankenheimer

Robert Fraisse: Photochemical Desaturation

2009-07-13T15:05:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, Samurai Tactics by Ron Magid (October 1998)

"Since John didn't want any color, I suggested that we do a special process using Kodak's Vision 500T 5279. After rating the stock at 250 ASA, which overexposed it one stop, we then underdeveloped it, reducing the contrast and desaturating the colors. I also knew that we were going to shoot in France during the winter, when it gets dark at 5 o'clock. I needed to be able to shoot as late as possible, so I made the decision to use the 500 ASA stock for the whole movie. I generally use 5279 only for interiors on stages and on location, or when I shoot exterior night scenes. When I shoot outside, I use a slower stock. For instance, on Seven Years in Tibet, I shot all the exteriors with 5245, which is a very nice, very fine-grain stock. But I chose to shoot Ronin on the 500T stock because I knew that with the process we were using, the stock would be only 250 ASA, which is not a lot when it gets dark early and the weather is very gray during the day. Very often, I was shooting at almost full aperture — T2.3 or 2.5. At those moments, I thought I had been very wise to choose a fast stock that normally isn't used for daylight exterior scenes."

- Robert Fraisse

Stephen H. Burum: Self-Expectations

2009-07-12T04:18:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, Ringside Riddle by Stephen Pizzello (August 2008)

"An 11-year-old child could learn the mechanical craft of cinematography. The difference between cinematographers who do great work and those who just do okay work is some gift you have, some sense of taste. I think you’re always frustrated when you’re doing it, because you have this idea in your head and you can’t quite get there, even though everyone else says that what you’re doing is great. You’re always dissatisfied because you want more from the cinematography than you’re capable of giving. You can look at [fellow ASC member] Connie Hall’s films and say, ’This is just fabulous, I could never approach that’... But Connie Hall is tearing himself apart! Cinematography isn’t easy for anybody, and the more you do, the harder it gets."

- Stephen H. Burum, ASC

Owen Roizman: SFX Words Appear on Skin

2009-07-12T04:11:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, Demonic Convergence by David E. Williams (August 2008)

One particular special makeup effect relied on a simple camera trick. After opening Regan’s nightshirt, Karras is shocked to see the words "Help Me" appear as raised letters on her heaving stomach. Roizman reveals that the girl’s belly was actually a foam latex prosthetic; prior to shooting, a reactive chemical was painted onto it to create the raised letters. With his camera running in reverse, the cinematographer shot a close-up on the two words, which gradually receded as the chemical evaporated. When the footage was cut into the final film, the plea seemed to mysteriously arise from the girl’s flesh.

Owen Roizman: Breath Vapor in Cold & Light Heat

2009-07-12T03:56:00.001-07:00

From American Cinematographer, Demonic Convergence by David E. Williams (August 2008)

Heat and lighting became key issues throughout the exorcism sequence. In the story, the paranormal activities leave the bedroom frighteningly frigid, and since the authenticity-obsessed Friedkin wanted to see the performers’ breath vapor, the set was built in a refrigerated room ironically dubbed "The Cocoon." The crew kept the room at a temperature of about -20°F, making heavy coats a necessity for anyone working in the space.

"We did some tests with the temperature at about 25 degrees, and you could see some breath, but it wasn’t really enough," Roizman says. "When the lights were turned on, their heat warmed the room so quickly that we couldn’t even get a single take. The breath showed up fine at zero, but Friedkin wanted the actors to really feel the cold because he thought it would help their acting. An actor on his knees for 20 minutes at minus 20 degrees is really going to feel the cold."

[The room was ostensibly illuminated by a pair of small table lamps set on either side of Regan’s four-poster bed. To ensure that the breath vapor would read correctly, Roizman painstakingly created a backlight effect for each actor while trying to stay true to his source-lighting approach.]

"This created a problem because our sources were right next to the bed, and [the priests] were always facing the light. The challenge was to get the backlight on the breath while keeping it off everything else. With the actors moving all the time, it became difficult to hide the backlight and keep it off them; my gaffer, Dick Quinlan, was usually sitting on the floor behind Max and Jason, handholding an inky-dink with a snoot on it and just getting the light on the vapor. He did an amazing job."

- Owen Roizman, ASC

Owen Roizman: Candle Light Strategies

2009-07-12T03:43:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, Demonic Convergence by David E. Williams (August 1998)

A sudden change in lighting strategies made a scene set in the home’s attic unexpectedly difficult. As staged, Chris was to search the spooky space by candlelight, seeking out the source of some strange and disturbing sounds. Suddenly, her candle erupts in a burst of flame.

"In preproduction, we hollowed out a candle and built in a little gas flame that would create that effect. Inside, near the top, we cut out a space for a little peanut bulb, which we would control on a dimmer for a nicely fluctuating light on Ellen’s face. By holding the candle correctly, she would be lighting her own face. Well, we got ready to do the shot, running a wire down the sleeve of her nightgown, and I said to Billy, ’Please just ask Ellen not to turn the candle, so we won’t see the bulb in there.’ He said, ’I can’t ask the actor to do that! We have to light the scene in some different way.’ We were just about to roll, but he insisted, although I knew Ellen would have done it. Besides her wonderful acting talent, she was very good about the technical side of filmmaking."

As a result, Roizman and his crew began quickly rigging the attic set with inky-dinks on dimmers, setting up a choreography to simulate the traveling candlelight effect.

"Every time I’d seen that technique used in a movie I thought it looked phony and I hated it... I hated it in this picture too. But I was caught by surprise and we had to do it in a hurry."

- Owen Roizman, ASC

Janusz Kaminski: Directors & Taking Risks

2009-07-11T16:46:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, The Last Great War by Christopher Probst (August 1998)

“I’m learning more and more about lighting...But you have to be encouraged by the directors. They allow you make the choices that take the movies to a different level. Directors can allow cinematographers to advance to another level, because we all have that capability in us. Some are so scared of taking risks that they won’t allow their cinematographers to try something new. But you can create such powerful and meaningful images by taking chances. I’m talking about things like what Robbie MŸller [BVK, NSC] did on Breaking the Waves. Bob Richardson [ASC], Vittorio Storaro [ASC, AIC] and Malik Sayeed are also very experimental. Newton Thomas Sigel did some great work on Fallen. And what Harris Savides did on The Game was fantastic; I can’t wait to see what he did for [actor/director John Turturro’s upcoming film] Illuminata. We’ve all got the ability to do groundbreaking work, and nothing is stopping us from using very experimental techniques in a major Hollywood movie if the subject matter allows it and the director is willing to go there.”

- Janusz Kaminski

Janusz Kaminski: Painting Tonal Separation (for Depth)

2009-07-11T16:32:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, The Last Great War by Christopher Probst (August 1998)

“Tom Sanders did a great job with the coloring and in making the buildings distressed and dark, but the one thing that really made the look of the movie was working with the standby painter, Joe Monks. When we started working in Ramelle, if we felt a building was too bright, and that bringing in flags and cutters for a simple day exterior shot would involve too much work, we’d have Joe come in and make the building darker. We’d give him a 10’ by 40’ wall and in five to 10 minutes he’d be done. That gave the sets much more depth and separation.”

-David Devlin (Gaffer for Janusz Kaminski on Saving Private Ryan)

Janusz Kaminski: Candle Light & China Balls

2009-07-11T16:12:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, The Last Great War by Christopher Probst (August 1998)

As the soldiers continue their quest for Private Ryan, they take shelter for the night in a bombed-out church. Illuminated by candlelight, the...

"soldiers are sitting and analyzing what has happened and what is ahead of them. It’s a very beautiful, underlit scene about three stops underexposed that has a painterly feel, as if it was lit only by the candles. There’s a very nice section of dialogue between Tom Sizemore and Tom Hanks. I wanted to create the sense that the light was coming from the candles below them, but I didn’t want to get big shadows. I ended up lighting them with China balls fitted with 1/2 CTO and 1/2 CTS. I then used a flag just outside of frame to take a little of that soft light off Sizemore, so his face was a little brighter on the bottom and then dropped off. I don’t like candle flicker effects very much, so the key was a normal [non-flickering] light, but I did have a little flicker on the fill to give it some movement. I’d tested China balls in the past and never liked their effect, but I’m learning more about how to use them now. The key is to underexpose by 11/2 stops. You also have to keep them just outside of frame but away from the walls, so you get that nice falloff in the light. Philippe Rousselot [AFC] has been using them for years, but if you look at his films, you’ll notice that the people are always positioned away from any walls. He may have a very soft China ball a few feet away from the actors, but everything falls dark behind them. Because there no other light reference in the frame, their faces still glow even if the shot is 11/2 to 21/2 stops underexposed."

- Janusz Kaminski

Janusz Kaminski: Directional & Diffused Exterior Lighting

2009-07-11T16:01:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, The Last Great War by Christopher Probst (August 1998)

Kaminski was also able to modify the sunlight to his liking for some shots by utilizing Rosco #3004 Half Soft Frost diffusion in place of an overhead silk.

"For some of the exteriors, we chose to use Half Soft because it allows the light to have some direction while still softening it," Devlin explains. "Whereas with a silk, you create an overall soft ambiance, but you then have to compete with the much-brighter backgrounds. A lot of times there’s really no difference between having a silk or a solid up. One nice thing about Half Soft Frost is that it allows the sun to have a strong direction, and yet the light will wrap enough to fill people’s eyes."

- David Devlin (Gaffer for Janusz Kaminski on Saving Private Ryan)

Janusz Kaminski: Exterior Lighting, Negative Fill & Smoke

2009-07-11T15:06:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, The Last Great War by Christopher Probst (August '98)

"For the most part, we really didn’t light much on the invasion. When the actors were in the Higgins boats, we did add some light with white and silver bounce cards to up-light the actors a little so we could see their eyes under their helmets. The ’lighting’ was more about how the negative was being exposed, the lenses and the use of the ENR. The great thing about war movies is that almost everything is drab, dark and dirty, so we weren’t fighting those elements. In fact, the actors’ eyes become [comparatively] bright because their faces are so dark and dirtied."

- David Devlin, Gaffer on Saving Private Ryan.

Kaminski determined that with constant overcast light, he could suitably control the film’s look with the aid of the Panaflasher and the ENR process. Additionally, he incorporated the heavy use of smoke which obviously was a key component in selling the "war" visually as an essential ingredient in his photography. Dense black smoke also offered the added benefit of blocking out any unwanted sunlight that might have sneaked through the cloud cover.

"One of the most amazing and awful things I’ve ever seen were these big drums of diesel fuel that the special effects guys were burning to create huge clouds of black smoke. They also designed a system for making white smoke that was mounted in the bed of a pickup, which was attached to a trailer with a 200-gallon tank of diesel fuel. They had about six of these pickup trucks that could drive up and down the beach as a self-contained unit. The lighting for that whole sequence was more about taking the light away, and when they turned those smoke machines on, it would cut down three or four stops of exposure."

"For closer shots, we’d sometimes bring in a bounce card or solid for negative fill. One of the things I’ve learned over the years while working outside is that if the cinematographer wants to control the sunlight — and the production can afford it — you should have a crane and a large frame standing by. That way you can cover a large area and get the lines [of the overhead’s coverage] out of the shot. Because we used a 30’ by 30’ silk and smoke on Private Ryan, the smoke would cover any of the lines made by the silk. Between those two elements, the ’lighting’ was consistent and it worked great."

-Key grip Jim Kwiatkowski

Janusz Kaminski: Lens Coatings, Camera Shake, High Speed & Offset Shutter

2009-07-11T12:45:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, The Last Great War by Christopher Probst (August '98)

Saving Private Ryan begins with a truly harrowing 25-minute depiction of the carnage and chaos experienced by the soldiers storming Omaha Beach. Both Spielberg and Kaminski sought to infuse the sequence with a high degree of realism, and studied newsreels and documentaries shot by combat cameramen in order to capture a true sense of the insanity and frenetic panic of war.

"We wanted to create the illusion that there were several combat cameramen landing with the troops at Normandy. I think we succeeded in emulating the look of that footage for the invasion scenes, which we achieved with both in-camera tricks and other technological means. First off, I thought about the lenses they had back in the 1940s. Obviously, those lenses were inferior compared to what we have today, so I had Panavision strip the protective coatings off a set of older Ultraspeeds. Interestingly, when we analyzed the lenses, the focus and sharpness didn’t change very much, though there was some deterioration; what really changed was the contrast and color rendering. The contrast became much flatter. Without the coatings, the light enters the lens and then bounces all around, so the image becomes kind of foggy but still sharp. Also, it’s much easier to get flares, which automatically diffuses the light and the colors to a degree and lands a little haze to the image.

If I had two cameras running on a scene, I’d mismatch the lenses on purpose, using one with coated Ultraspeeds and one without coatings. That gave us a certain lack of continuity in picture quality, which suggested the feeling of things being disjointed.

Next, we shot a lot of the film with the camera’s shutter set at 45 or 90 degrees. The 45-degree shutter was especially effective while filming explosions. When the sand is blasted into the air, you can see every particle, almost every grain, coming down. That idea was born out of our tests, and it created a definite sense of reality and urgency."

- Janusz Kaminski

"During the tests on the backlot at Universal, Steven was talking about this one shot in Empire of the Sun in which he shook the camera to get the effect he wanted. With that in mind, the best boy, Bob Anderson, attached an electric drill to the pan handle of a fluid head and locked an oblong bolt with an eccentric washer in the chuck. When activated, it created a wobbling movement and the camera shake we wanted."

- Jim Kwiatkowski (Key Grip)

"It’s a great effect, but you certainly can’t handhold the camera with a drill attached to it. Plus, your eye is constantly bopping against the viewfinder. So for handheld work, we used Clairmont Camera’s Image Shaker, which is an ingenious device. You can dial in the degree of vibration you want with vertical and horizontal settings, and mount it to a handheld camera, a crane, whatever. It’s heavy, but my camera operator, Mitch Dubin, did some amazing handheld work with it. At first we used it very conservatively, like when there was an explosion or a tank rolling by, but after seeing dailies, we just dialed it in and out as Mitch ran with the camera"

- Janusz Kaminski

"I also used another technique that Doug Milsome [BSC] utilized on Full Metal Jacket [see AC Sept. 1987] where you throw the camera’s shutter out of sync to create a streaking effect from the top to the bottom of the frame. It’s a very interesting effect, but it’s also scary because there’s no way back [once you shoot with it]. It looked great when there were highlights on the soldier’s helmets or epaulets because they streaked just a little bit. The amount of streaking depended on the lighting contrast. If it was really sunny, for instance, the streaking became too much. However, if it was overcast with some little highlights, it looked really beautiful. The streaking also looks fantastic with fire, and that’s what Milsome primarily used it for in Full Metal Jacket... "

- Janusz Kaminski

Kaminski employed Panavision Platinum and Panastar cameras throughout the Private Ryan shoot, and had Samuelson Film Services in London prepare one unit with a purposely mistimed shutter in order to create the described streaking effect. Used in combination with a narrow shutter, however, the effect was negated as the shortened shutter interval fell within the moment that the film was in its stationary position. Due to this anomaly, however, the "streaking" camera could also be used for normal shooting provided that the shutter was set between 45 and 90 degrees.

Janusz Kaminski: ENR, Blood, Texture & Panaflasher

2009-07-11T07:01:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, The Last Great War by Christopher Probst (August '98)

"We also wanted to shoot this picture in color because there is some blood in the film and we wanted to play with the reds, even though we did desaturate the colors through the use of ENR. I knew the movie would have more of a bluish tone to it, and with 70 percent ENR, the color of the blood on the uniforms and the ground was a primary concern. For scenes in which the characters got wounded, we wanted to know how the blood would look on the uniforms and how it would look after they wore those uniforms for a couple of days. Because we were dealing with a World War II drama, the wardrobe was already muted, and since we were shooting in England and Ireland, we had day after day of foggy, rainy climate, which automatically made the light more diffused and the colors more pastel. We therefore compared various levels of ENR, and based on those tests, the special effects department mixed a certain amount of blue into the blood to make it a bit darker than they’d normally use... I think the biggest mis-conception about ENR that everyone talks about is what the process does to the shadows to make them deeper and richer. Yes, that is one aspect of the process, but the biggest thing about ENR that no one seems to be talking about is what it does to the highlights and colors. If you shoot a test and compare a shot with ENR and without, the clothing will look much sharper and you will see the texture and pattern of the fabric in the ENR print. This was especially true on Amistad, on which we used about 40 to 50 percent ENR. As a result, all of the Africans’ clothing had much more texture. On Saving Private Ryan, the uniforms benefited as well. The edges of the shirts and the helmets were sharper, and the process also worked magic on metallic surfaces and water reflections, which become like mercury. It’s so gorgeous... Additionally, I again used a Panaflasher in conjunction with the ENR process, as I had on Amistad. Because of the contrast that you get with the ENR, I was flashing at about 15 percent so that I didn’t get totally sharp blacks. I was looking for a slightly flatter look. The Panaflasher also contributed greatly to the color being more desaturated. You gain the contrast back with the ENR, but you’ve desaturated the color already with the Panaflasher."

- Janusz Kaminski

Brian Reynolds: How Buildings Effect Light

2009-07-10T19:44:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, Policing A New Beat by Bob Fisher (July, 1998)

The milieu of NYPD Blue is Manhattan, where tall buildings diffuse and filter the warmth out of sunlight before it reaches ground level. Though Brooklyn South occurs in an adjacent metropolitan area, its setting might as well be a different universe.

"Brooklyn doesn’t have a lot of really high structures, so you see more of the sky, and the light is a bit warmer and more direct. It’s more of a natural look, with a more exposed daylight source and less light bouncing around." In addition, the scripts are not about detectives, but about cops in uniform who live with the unexpected every day.

- Brian Reynolds (DP for NYPD Blue 1st 4 seasons, and Brooklyn South Pilot_

Phil Parmet: Color Photography

2009-05-31T12:43:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, Still Lives, Distant Vistas by Andrew O. Thompson (Dec. 1998)

"There's something very compelling about the graphic quality of black-and-white photography. Color is very difficult to control and can be very distracting. Just look at great works of art that use color selectively. Accenting a huge canvas with a small piece of primary color-- like a red or blue-- against a field of pastels can exert an extraordinarily powerful pull on the eye. In cinema, you can control the palette with art direction, but there's no control over that in the real world for the documentarian and the still photographer. I have seen color photography that I love, but the idea of an image made up of silver on paper speaks more directly to me."

- Phil Parmet, Photographer

Joe Viskocil: Fire, Explosions & Miniatures

2009-05-31T12:34:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, Tearing up the Town by Ron Magid (December 1998)

"Originally, [ID4's visual effects supervisor] Volker Engle wanted to do teh Wall of Fire with a cloud tank effect coming toward camera, which looked good but not real. [Director] Roland Emmerich was adamant about having a tidal wave of fire going down the city blocks. I said, 'The only way that fire is going to do that is if we fudge the set.' Fire has only one way to go, and that's up. So we locked the camera onto the ceiling and just tipped the street set sideways so this fireball would come right at the camera."

- Joe Viskocil, Miniature Special Effects Supervisor on Godzilla

"If it's really flimsy, you're going to get a lot more information on film, because you can use a small charge-- small in the sense that it's not a really fast explosion. The slower the explosion, the more information you're going to get on film and the more detail you're going to see. You also have to keep it all in frame!"

- Joe Viskocil, Miniature Special Effects Supervisor on Godzilla

Roger Guyett: In-Camera vs. Post

2009-05-30T21:02:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, Blood on the Beach by Ron Magid (December 1998)

"I think Steven [Spielberg] had the right idea, which was basically to film everything in-camera if possible. But you can't shoot something that is potentially dangerous near your principal actors. That's where we can do things that add an extra level of drama or, to a certain extent, shock value."

- Roger Guyett, Visual Effects Supervisor on Saving Private Ryan

Alar Kivilo: Beveled Mirrors

2009-05-30T20:39:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, The Root of All Evil by Jay Holben (December 1998)

For moodier moments, Kivilo used hard light reflected into the sets using beveled mirrors.

"I'd pick a dead corner of the set and have Joey black it out so no light was there. I'd then aim Par cans or sometimes HMI Pars into the mirrors and splash light into random spots on the set. I'm always searching for the best kinds of slashes, which have an organic feel, and these beveled mirrors provided that. It was perhaps the only slightly stylized addition I made to our otherwise simplistic regime, in that there was no logical source for that kind of light; my thinking was that it was perhaps coming from a streetlight outside or something. Those scenes were about mood, and it was great to use the mirrors rather than backlight an actor. I'd just bounce a slash into the background and silhouette them against the set."

- Alar Kivilo, CSC

Alar Kivilo: Helium Balloons

2009-05-30T20:19:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, The Root of All Evil by Jay Holben (December 1998)

"We used a helium balloon light for the night exteriors on the roadside. It was logistically tricky location because we were on a small road with two snow fields on either side, so there was no place to drive in a crane or a Condor. The balloon seemed to be a perfect solution. We could fly it up so that it would hover just above the road, and then hide the black cable in the night sky. What I didn't expect was that it got really windy during the night we were shooting. I was operating the second camera, looking at the wide shot of the sheriff's truck approaching, and as the wind was gusting I kept seeing the balloon getting lower and lower in the frame. It never quite dropped into the picture area, but it made me very nervous. Then, at one point in the middle of the first take, the wind blew the balloon into a power line and it made a huge spark. Thank God no one was hurt and there was no damage, but we did lose quite a bit of time. We really hadn't factored the wind into the equation, and because of the white snow surrounding the area, we really couldn't attach extra lines. I thought the light that the balloon provided was perfect-- a nice ambient glow and a beautiful night softness-- but I was very uncomfortable with it after that first night. On the second night, when we returned to shoot the reverses, I went with a more traditional approach."

- Alar Kivilo, CSC

Alar Kivilo: Snow, Exposure & Contrast

2009-05-30T20:11:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, The Root of All Evil by Jay Holben (December 1998)

"I was letting the snow go about three stops over. I was usually exposing at about an f5.6 outside, but the snow would be reflecting back an f16 or more. By overexposing it that much, the snow gave us really blinding whites and we'd lose detail, which for most applications was great. However, there were a couple of scenes in the film in which footprints in the snow were an important element of the story. Because of the overcast conditions and the contrast created by the way I was exposing, we would occasionally have to paint in the footprints to make them readable. Someone from the art department would walk backward through the footprints with water-based spray-paint and darken in the shadow side of the prints so they would read better."

- Alar Kivilo, CSC

Alar Kivilo: Snow & Contrast

2009-05-30T20:01:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, The Root of All Evil by Jay Holben (December 1998)

"We wanted to avoid blue skies and sun, and we were lucky for the most part. On overcast days, I would simply employ some negative fill so that the light wouldn't bounce around as much from the white snow. We covered the ground with solids and brought in more solids on one side to give the light more direction. Then, for close-ups, we'd shape and refine the light slightly with a bit of bounce fill off a card. During the few days when the sun did come out, I wanted to bring in a big crane with a huge silk to take care of the situation, but again, budgetary factors didn't allow it."

- Alar Kivilo, CSC

Alar Kivilo: Shooting in the Snow

2009-05-30T19:56:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, The Root of All Evil by Jay Holben (December 1998)

"Of course, another difficulty of shooting in the snow is that every time you do a take, you have to get rid of the footprints. To do that, the 'snow unit' marched around armed with gasoline-powered blowers, rakes and whatnot to erase footprints and make the snow look virgin again."

- Alar Kivilo, CSC

Alar Kivilo: Photography Arc & Lens Selection

2009-05-30T19:35:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, The Root of All Evil by Jay Holben (December 1998)

"This whole project was kind of an exception to my normal style. I usually like the photography to have an arc of its own, where it starts off one way and you discreetly increase the drama. For example, as a character becomes more evil, I'll move to wider lenses or spookier lighting or something. However, the changes that the characters [in this film] go through are extreme, so I decided to keep the photography very neutral and never comment on what was going on in the scene. I approached the whole project in a very naturalistic way. I picked relatively neutral lenses, gravitating toward the middle range. As a rule, we kept away from the really long or wide lenses. Our real workhorse was the 40mm, which happens to be my favorite. It's great for moments of drama, and for doing close-ups. It's wide enough for master shots, but it doesn't distort even if you get close to the subject. It's the last lens going toward the wide end in which the lines of the architecture remain straight. Again, we were constantly trying to hew to that simplicity."

- Alar Kivilo, CSC

Willard Carroll: Film Dailies

2009-05-30T18:56:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, A Poignant Pas de Deux by Bob Fisher (December 1998)

"We looked at film every day, because I believe you need to see shots on a big screen to judge whether or not they work. There are a lot of long takes in the picture, so we probably spent 60 to 90 minutes a day looking at dailies. It made all the difference in the world."

- Willard Carroll, Director of Playing by Heart

Vilmos Zsigmond: Freedom on Set

2009-05-30T18:51:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, A Poignant Pas de Deux by Bob Fisher (December 1998)

"It's important to have the freedom to alter compositions and camera moves and take advantage of things that happen on the set. In order to do that, you need to plan for motivated light sources. Lamps, windows, open doors and mirrors are great because you can put them anyplace. This is especially important when you're working in the anamorphic format, because you can see more of the background behind people."

- Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC

Vilmos Zsigmond: Character Lighting

2009-05-30T18:40:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, A Poignant Pas de Deux by Bob Fisher (December 1998)

AC: Did the different characters have visual signatures in terms of the way you lit them?

Zsigmond: Hugh is kind of suspenseful in the beginning. You don't know who he is or where he's from, but he shows up in a bar and claims he's killed his wife and child. We shot that scene film-noir style, like an old black-and-white mystery. Other characters, like Meredith, are lit more romantically with lots of backlight. However, these were subtle differences, because we didn't want it to look like six different movies.

Vilmos Zsigmond: Classical Painters

2009-05-30T18:35:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, A Poignant Pas de Deux by Bob Fisher (December 1998)

"If you are doing a Frankenstein movie or Star Wars, it doesn't have to be realistic-- in fact, it should be more impressionistic or surrealistic. If you are telling a story about real people, the classical painters gave us a good model. They never lit anyone badly, and they never used soft light. They always had nice modeling light on the faces and darker backgrounds so the people would stand out."

- Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC

Soup de Jour: Custom Processes Defined

2009-05-28T22:25:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, Soup de Jour by Christopher Probst (November 1998)

{This article is quite possibly the BEST resource and introduction to these processes, which at the time of this article's publication were relatively new and widely used throughout the industry. The following is the entire article for my personal reference in the future.}

------------------------------------------------ Soup de Jour (Nov. 98)-----------------------------------------------

Given the number of images bombarding viewers daily via feature films, television shows, commercials and music videos, the desire to create a distinguishing visual style has become a paramount concern among today's cinematographers. Aiding in this quest for diversity, motion picture laboratories now offer a variety of custom processes to enhance and modify a director of photography's work. Cinematographers have myriad methods at their disposal, from silver-retention processes to more esoteric ideas, such as stripping the anti-halation backing off an original camera negative. Readers should also be aware that Eastman Kodak is now offering two new color print films — Vision 2383 and Vision Premier 2393 (formerly code-named "Clipper I and II") — which may be used as alternatives to some of the contrast-affecting processes explained in the following pages.

What follows is a comprehensive survey of the options currently available to directors of photography. Bear in mind that we've interviewed representatives of the companies that have developed these processes, and that divergent opinions about their relative merits do exist in Hollywood's technical community. The ultimate purpose of this article is to present an overview that will hopefully make the laboratory landscape a bit less mystifying.

SILVER RETENTION

A forerunner of the seemingly endless image-enhancement techniques offered today are the various silver-retention processes designed to affect the contrast, color saturation, grain, and level of black density in print images. The use of silver-retention processes has gained great popularity among filmmakers worldwide over the last five years. In fact, scores of labs in both the United States and Europe have developed several competing methods to achieve the subtle — or sometimes pronounced — effect of retaining silver in the print, or, in some cases, in the intermediates or camera negative itself. However, even though each lab-s methods may differ slightly, the end results of each technique are very similar.

Technicolor's ENR

One of the most popular of the silver-retention processes is ENR, which was named for its inventor, Ernesto Novelli Rimo, a former control department operator at Technicolor Rome who designed the technique for Vittorio Storaro, ASC, AIC to use on Warren Beatty's 1981 film Reds. The cameraman has utilized the process on all of his subsequent films, including Ladyhawke, Tucker, Dick Tracy, The Last Emperor, Little Buddha and Bulworth. Additionally, cinematographers such as Janusz Kaminski, ASC (Amistad and Saving Private Ryan), Darius Khondji, ASC, AFC (Evita), Jack Green, ASC (The Rookie, Bird), Harris Savides (The Game), Chris Menges, BSC (Michael Collins) and Newton Thomas Sigel (Fallen) have each embraced the technique as a way of enhancing their visual palettes.

ENR is a proprietary color-positive developing technique which utilizes an additional black-and-white developing bath inserted at an appropriate stage of a print's processing in order to retain silver. After the film has been bleached, but prior to the silver being fixed out of the film, this extra bath allows for a controlled amount of silver to be redeveloped, adding density in the areas with the most exposure — primarily the blacks. Frank Ricotta, senior vice president of worldwide technical and engineering operations at Technicolor Hollywood, elaborates, "By retaining silver density in the image, you will increase the contrast by making the blacks blacker, and, since you have increased contrast in the shadows, you can see more detail. The images will appear slightly sharper because of the increased contrast and, because there is silver in the film physically, it gives you a little bit of an edge-effect around the image. Finally, by virtue of having silver in the print, it will slightly desaturate the colors, depending upon the level of ENR used."

It is a common mistake to refer to all of the various silver-retention processes as bleach-bypassing. Although bypassing the bleaching step may yield a similar result to ENR, the two processes differ radically in their approach to silver retention. "Bleach-bypass will tend to create an effect similar to that achieved with ENR," Ricotta submits, "because when you develop the print stock, you haven-t developed a lot of silver in the highlight areas where you didn-t have a lot of exposure. But as you get into the shadows, where the majority of the exposure density is on the print, you start to develop a lot of silver and dye. So whether you do a bleach-bypass or ENR, when you leave silver in the film, it is retained with less silver in the highlights than in the shadows. The two processes are not too different in that regard.

"However, we feel that ENR is much more finite a process because we can infinitely adjust the intensity of the effect by simply varying the concentration of the chemistry. Bleach-bypass means that you either bypass most or all of the bleaching function, so it's inherently less finite. This is an important factor for those films that want just a touch of ENR to make the blacks blacker. Jade is a perfect example of a film where William Friedkin and director of photography Andrzej Bartkowiak [ASC] wanted just a little bit of ENR to make the blacks nice and firm and rich, without measurably desaturating the colors.

"Conversely," Ricotta expands, "on a film like Saving Private Ryan, Janusz Kaminski and Steven Spielberg were interested in a higher contrast and a very desaturated look, so we employed one of the highest levels of ENR used to date. That especially desaturated the faces, which was something that Janusz was very interested in doing."

Another frequent misconception that occurs in discussions about ENR is the assignment of "percentage" values as a way of labeling the nearly infinite doses of ENR available to filmmakers. In an effort to quantify — not to mention establish a method to control — the levels of ENR, Technicolor utilizes an infrared (IR) densitometer to measure the level of silver retained in a print. By targeting a specific IR reading for the filmmaker-s desired effect, the laboratory can then set out to produce as many prints as required by the distributor with the exact level of ENR applied to each print.

"Many times, people are interested in knowing what "percentage- of ENR was used on a film," Ricotta relates. "When we read a number off a densitometer — say "60 IR- [a .60 density at 1000nm] — people who are less familiar with this type of measurement may refer to that as "60 percent ENR."Well, we haven-t necessarily left 60 percent of the silver in the film. It is simply a reading of optical density in the infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum. At Technicolor, when we show a customer an ENR print we say, "This is a 40, this a 60, or this is an 80." Then based on their reaction, we can determine whether they want a little more or a little less effect. We never really talk in terms of what "percentage- of silver is retained, because it is really immaterial to their decision. When we set an ENR value with the client, we then control to that densitometer value of .40, .60, .80 or whatever.

"It's like when people talk about a percentage of flashing," he elaborates. "A client may ask for a 10 percent flash. Well, what does that mean? In the lab, a 10 percent flash is the addition of a .10 density over a simple D-min [or clear reading] in each color. For instance, if you have a D-min reading of .06, .06, .12 [R-G-B], then a "10 percent flash- would result in subsequent readings of .16, .16, .22 respectively."

It should also be noted that since ENR is applied to the positive release print, the shortest increment of film that the process can be applied to is one lab reel. Although ENR is typically utilized on an entire picture, some films have employed the effect only on selected sequences to visually distinguish them from the rest of the movie.

Deluxe's CCE/ACE

Although mainstream audiences may not be consciously aware of the use of special processes when they watch a film in a theater, they certainly felt the effect while watching David Fincher's horrific thriller Seven (AC Oct. '95), which was photographed by Darius Khondji. A number of the film's release prints were treated with Deluxe's Color Contrast Enhancement (CCE) process to heighten the film's blacks and add a palpable texture and tonality.

Designed by vice president of technical services Beverly Wood and executive vice president of engineering Colin Mossman, CCE is one of three silver-retention processes offered at Deluxe. Shortly after the release of Seven, the laboratory introduced its Adjustable Contrast Enhancement (ACE) process, which shares many of the same features of CCE, but is also scalable, like its Technicolor cousin, ENR. "I can tell you that ENR and ACE are similar processes," Wood submits. "In fact, Alien: Resurrection [AC Nov. '97] had its dailies and answer print done by Technicolor, but the release prints were done by Deluxe because of a contractual situation with the studio. The director, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, compared our ACE check-print with his ENR answer print and was quite happy with the result. And with the recent advancements in both our chemical and mechanical technology, we were able to meet the film's large print demand on time.

"CCE, however, is something very different from ACE," she notes. "CCE is a proprietary process that produces a much higher contrast and adds more grain. When you have more silver, you have a more grainy look and blacker blacks. However, your blacks can also plug up more. With a bleach-bypass, the tones are much duller and more muted, and you have a lot less detail in the shadows. The blacks are very black, but the nuances in the gray are diminished. We do get some clients who want that look, but most of the time people say, 'I want the blacks to be black, but I still want some shadow detail.' This is why they are usually more interested in [silver-retention] processes such as CCE, ACE or ENR.

"These tools are nothing in hands of those who are not sure of what they're doing," she adds. "I've had a lot of people come in and consider using silver retention as an afterthought. They'll say, 'Take my negative and give me a CCE print because I want the look of Seven.' We will do the print for them of course, but when they say, "It doesn't look the same!' it is because the look of a film is truly a collaborative effort between the director, the cinematographer, the gaffer, the production designer and the costumer. The choices that are made in the art direction, the colors and the lighting really do make a difference. Now, I am by no means an expert on all of the things that the true experts do in order to create a certain look, but I know from working with cinematographers that it's important to shoot tests and actually go through the IP, IN and release-print stages to be sure about the look that they want."

Just as Technicolor controls their ENR process, Deluxe monitors the levels of silver retained by CCE and ACE at 1000nm. Wood notes that when Deluxe monitors the D-max reading on a normally processed 21-step wedge, the print yields an IR number between 58 and 60. "When you skip the bleach completely on a piece of print film and retain 100 percent of the silver in the film," she distinguishes, "that IR number goes up to 240 — effectively four times as much silver in the film than there should be.

"When you keep 100 percent of the silver in, the blacks look great in the dark parts of the room, but the faces now also have a lot of silver in them as well, so their contrast is all messed up. The fleshtones may look old and hard; therefore, you may say, "Can I back off on the amount silver in my print and still keep some of the normal nuances of the curve?' What this basically means is that you should try to make only the top part of the curve increase, while you keep the toe area the same. To do that, we back off from skip bleach and go to CCE. When we set up our proprietary set of events in terms of printing and processing, we end up with a D-max IR reading of 180 to 190. We now have about 75 percent silver in the print. What you will then see on the screen is that you now have some nice desaturation in the color; there's still a little bit of grittiness and grain to it, but you'll have more detail in the blacks than if you just skipped the bleach. For a movie like Seven, where the lighting was predominately on the upper part of the curve because the whole movie was so dark, going with CCE was one of the reasons that film looked so good.

"[Director] John Frankenheimer fell in love with the CCE process with the few prints we did for him on George Wallace," she adds. "Now, he just released Ronin with a select number of CCE show prints, while the majority of the release had normal prints. But since Robert Fraisse [AFC] did a fantastic job on the photography, providing a solid, rich negative, you may not notice the difference unless you distinctly know the look of CCE and compare the two types of prints side by side."

Finally, in the hierarchy of silver-retention techniques available at Deluxe, the lab offers its ACE process. "When we're presented with films like Alien: Resurrection or The X-Files — where the filmmakers want deep blacks, but still want the colors to look true and have a good level of chroma and texture in the mid-scale regions — we'll back off from CCE and give them ACE," Wood explains. "With ACE, we can give them 30, 40 or 60 percent, or whatever level they want. We can make those specific nuances by making chemical changes in the process. We did about 3,000 prints for both Alien: Resurrection and The X-Files, and both were released with about a 50 percent level of ACE."

LTC's NEC

On the opposite side of the Atlantic, Paris-based LTC Laboratories offers a unique twist to the black-and-white additive system of silver retention. Their process, which is called NEC — noir en couleur, the French phrase for "black in color" — allows filmmakers to perform the silver-retention function on the interpositive and have the effect match the look of a print that was processed directly. This somewhat baffling feat is, of course, of utmost interest to distributors — who would like to avoid the additional costs incurred while performing a special process on each release print — and cinematographers, who desire consistency in the presentation of their work regardless of the region or country the film is distributed.

Designed by Jean-Pierre Poggi with the aid of color-timing consultants Yvan Lucas and Georges Roch, NEC was created for Darius Khondji to use on the 1995 film The City of Lost Children. Since the highly-regarded release of that film, the Parisian laboratory has utilized its proprietary technique on such films as Mathieu Kassovitz's Assassins, Un Frére (directed by Sylvie Verheyde and photographed by Antoine Roch) and K (directed by Alexandre Arcady and photographed by Gerry Fisher, BSC).

"We do the NEC treatment on the interpositive, and yet the results will be identical as if we do the treatment directly on the positive [print]," Poggi attests. "We will have a higher density on the interpositive, but since we're using normal processing on the print, the density will be the same [D-max] that the film is capable of. However, we have already created the look on the interpositive, so we don't need a special treatment for the print. The NEC process is less about blacker blacks [than about] affecting the contrast and [tonal reproduction] in the image."

BLEACH-BYPASS

The procedure of bleach bypass entails either the partial or complete skipping of the bleaching function during the processing of a film. Roger Deakins, ASC, BSC utilized this technique to stunning effect on 1984 — which was processed at Britain's Kays Laboratory — while Denis Lenoir, AFC incorporated bleach bypass on Désordre (1986) and Monsieur Hire (1989) at France's renown Eclair Labs (see Benjamin Bergery's coverage in AC March and May '93), which also applied the technique on the 1991 release of Delicatessen for Darius Khondji.

While the majority of laboratories in Hollywood are capable of offering bleach-bypassing to their clients, both Fotokem and CFI have introduced some custom modifications to the technique. Fotokem offers bleach-bypassing not only on prints, but also on original camera negative as well as intermediate films. CFI's bleach-bypassing system, dubbed Silver Tint, may also be utilized at a specific stage and is offered in two different levels: Standard Silver Tint and Enhanced Silver Tint.

CFI's Silver Tint

Richard Smith, technical director at CFI, explains, "Both CFI and Fotokem have what you would call an 'alternative ENR process.' Because of the constraints of our existing processing tank setup, we are unable to put a true ENR tank inline. We would do that if we had the tank availability, but [as it stands] we'd have to reconfigure the entire processor. In normal processing, the film travels through the prebath, color developer, stop, first fix, bleach, soundtrack application, wash, second fix, wash, stabilizer and then to the dry-box. In an ENR-type resilvering process, the black-and-white developer is introduced after the sound application [or after the bleach] and before the second fix.

"To differentiate the two, with the Enhanced process, we leave 100 percent of the silver in the print, resulting in an IR reading near 240. But with Standard Silver Tint, we can remove a portion of the silver, yielding an IR value between 165 and 175. Standard Silver Tint has higher contrast, blacker blacks and desaturated colors compared to a normal print, but not to the same degree as the Enhanced Silver Tint."

CFI first utilized Enhanced Silver Tint for the Robert Altman film Kansas City (see AC Sept. '96), which was shot by Oliver Stapleton. "This process produces a very harsh, high-contrast, hard look," Smith describes. "The contrast of the print film increases dramatically and it significantly desaturates colors. Robert Altman wanted a harsh look for Kansas City. He wanted bland, muted fleshtones and heightened contrast, so he elected to use the Enhanced Silver Tint on approximately 50 of the film's show prints."

The lab incorporated Standard Silver Tint on such films as She's So Lovely (photographed by Thierry Arbogast, AFC) and Joyride (Stephen Douglas Smith), as well as more recently on the Brazilian feature Un Embruyo (Marcello Durst). "For She's So Lovely, Thierry wanted CFI to emulate the NEC process done in France by LTC. For a period of time we tried experimenting with flashing and special developing on the interpositive to achieve similar results, but ultimately we released the film with Standard Silver Tint prints."

Fotokem's Skip-Bleach

"On any developing machine that has a bleach tank, the bleach can be bypassed," suggests Mark Van Horne, manager of production services at Fotokem. "However, bypassing the bleach has a different effect at each step that you do it. Fortunately, since bleach-bypass is basically incomplete processing, it is a reversible process. If you decide at a later date that you don't like the look of your bypassed negative, you could always go back and just put it through the bleach and the fixer to turn it back into a normal negative."

Van Horne cautions that if you intend to bypass the bleach of your original camera negative, you should perform exposure tests to safeguard the photography from the possibility that it might later be processed normally. "When bypassing the bleach on your negative, we recommend that you actually underexpose, which is a scary idea because in all other instances we would never recommend that," he explains. "But when you bypass the bleach and leave that silver on the negative, the added density basically acts like added exposure, and makes the whites much whiter. [Doing the skip-bleach processes on the print, as opposed to the negative or intermediates] obviously creates a very different look. ENR or skip-bleach on the print is a more subtle look that we tend to see more in features, while the individuals who skip the bleach on the negative tend to be working on music videos or commercials where they want to create a look that gets your attention. It's a much more pronounced effect." Additionally, he reveals that Fotokem will be offering a scalable black-and-white additive bath — like ENR or ACE — by the end of this year.

Van Horne also points out that due to the additional setup costs required to incorporate silver-retention processes, when utilizing special process on a film, it may be too expensive to perform the required testing, so Fotokem has therefore created a detailed photographic demonstration which they screen every Wednesday at 10:30 a.m. "We currently show footage with skip-bleach on the negative, the interpositive, the internegative and the print, as well as skip bleach on the interpositive and internegative with flashing. We tried flashing — from 5 percent to 30 percent — to get the look of the skip-bleach print, but do it on the intermediate."

The advantage of utilizing the process at the interneg stage is dramatic in terms of expense. "Ordinarily, the lab reclaims the silver from the prints and sells it, [which offsets operating costs,]" Van Horne describes. "But when you leave the silver in the prints, the lab charges a few cents per foot of film for the lost silver reclamation. If you're making 2,000 10,000' prints, that's going to be a big expense for the distributor. If you can build that look into the interpositive/internegative, then you won't have to pay anything extra for all of those prints."

CROSS-PROCESSING

Another technique that filmmakers have occasionally asked the lab to perform in order to radically alter the look of a picture is cross-processing reversal film. This method has recently been utilized by such cinematographers as Robert Richardson, ASC (on Oliver Stone's U-Turn, see AC Oct. '97), Elliot Davis (on Steven Soderbergh's The Underneath, and for portions of Spike Lee's Get on the Bus, see AC Nov. '96), Malik Sayeed (also for Lee on Clockers, see AC Sept. '95), and Newton Thomas Sigel (for the "Demon-Vision" sequences in Fallen).

The use of cross-processed film has become something of a taboo subject matter for laboratories, film manufacturers and distributors. In fact, very few labs even offer the service due to the inherent conflict of interest the technique represents. Duart in New York is one of the few labs currently servicing cross-processing clients, and dailies manager Al Pierce states, "Cross-processing in the motion picture lab is when an exposed image shot on Ektachrome reversal film is developed through a color negative process. While Ektachrome was not manufactured to be processed as a negative film, this technique will allow you to obtain a negative image on a clear-based original reversal film. The effect on the screen, either by a workprint or video transfer, is usually a higher-contrast and increased-grain image. We've found that a normal to slightly underexposed image gives the best results for lab timing and printing equipment; too much exposure will not allow for the use of an orange-based filter in the timing and printing of the negative. Use of this filter will help match the cross-processed film with the color negative film, and thus enable the lab to better time and correct the images."

The effect of cross-processing on the image varies greatly, with even the most minute changes of the nearly infinite factors affecting the exposure, handling, processing and storage of the film. "A serious problem associated with such cross-processing is the need to use formaldehyde, or a formaldehyde derivative, to stabilize the film's magenta dye," states Frank Ricotta of Technicolor. He adds that "such chemicals carry with them significant ecological and health concerns that may preclude their use. If you don't stabilize the film and just protect the image with an interpositive, the magenta dye in the camera original is going to fade fairly quickly. Since Technicolor will not use the noted stabilizers, the lab's policy is not to accept film for cross-processing since it will not have a stable image. However, if someone chooses to use cross-processing for a commercial or a music video, they're probably going take that negative and go straight to transfer, so maybe the long-term stability of the negative is not a concern for them."

Some labs have concerns about the chemicals that could be released into their processors' tanks by cross-processing reversal stocks, but this has not been a problem at Duart. "We have not had any problems in processing Ektachrome in our color negative bath while using the existing chemistry," Pierce submits. "However, there are important environmental concerns connected with some chemicals used in the stabilizing process of Ektachrome film. We have found a suitable substitute which has been shown to considerably slow down the fading problem associated with this film when cross-processed. However, there still is no total guarantee for the long-term stability of this product after it is cross-processed. Also, it is my understanding that Kodak will not guarantee the stability of Ektachrome when used in this processing procedure."

Despite all of these logistical headaches, the resulting imagery can be stunning. Depending on all of the aforementioned variables, the effect on the footage can range from a subtle increase in contrast and grain, to a truly bizarre skewing of tonality throughout the picture, particularly in the highlights and shadows, which can radically shift to magenta and cyan respectively.

Given the associated risks of cross-processing, French cinematographer Denis Lenoir, AFC has utilized a lesser-known laboratory printing technique to achieve similar results. Developed by fellow countryman Éƒric Gautier, AFC (Personne ne m'aime and Love, ect.), the technique entails printing a normally-shot camera negative onto standard print film as an interpositive. Print film is a much higher-contrast stock, and Lenoir notes that when this IP is subsequently printed onto a 5244 internegative, the resulting imagery will be much more contrasty, with amplified grain and skewed colors.

"We know effects in grain and deepened blacks can be achieved by other processes like bleach-bypass and ENR," says Lenoir, "but those techniques mute colors. This technique yields colors that are quite strong and shifted in the highlights and shadows."

STRIPPING THE ANTI-HALATION BACKING

An even more exotic lab technique, which is nonetheless noteworthy, is one in which the anti-halation backing is stripped off an original camera negative prior to photography. This method has only been used once in recent history on a major motion picture, for a small flashback sequence in the film Virtuosity, which was photographed by Gale Tattersall (see AC Oct. '95). Tattersall had Vancouver-based Gastown Labs remove the anti-halation backing by running the his raw stock through their processor's first bath, bypassing the rest of the developing steps, and going directly into a completely blacked-out drying box. The unexposed negative was then recanned and shipped back to the production for photography.

The removal of the anti-halation backing allows light passing through the negative during photography to bounce off the rear pressure plate — which Tattersall replaced in his camera with a custom mirror-surfaced plate — and cause halation on the film around the highlights. Tattersall likened the effect to the look of old turn-of-the-century photographs. Interestingly, David Watkin, BSC wanted to use this process on the period film Yentl, but it was deemed too risky.

REBIRTH OF DYE TRANSFER

Another potentially exciting development in printing technology is the attempted resurrection of Technicolor's dye-transfer printing technique. First utilized with three-strip black-and-white camera negatives, and later adopted for single-strip color negative films, the process hasn't been used in Hollywood since the 1974 release of The Godfather Part II.

With all of the recent advancements in film technology, Technicolor's new focus on the dye-transfer process is intended to improve the revered old system. Some industry experts have adopted a "wait-and-see" attitude toward the firm's goal, but Technicolor's experts remain optimistic. "What we point out to our customers is that dye transfer will give you blacker blacks than standard color positive print film, with more detail and higher color saturation," explains Frank Ricotta. "Additionally, one of the major advantages of dye-transfer printing is that we can alter the contrast of the printing elements that we make. From the original negative, we manufacture printing elements called matrices, which are the complimentary [Y-C-M] records of the blue, red and green imagery recorded on the original negative. If you have an original negative that was shot normally, but want a bit more or less contrast, you can now adjust those levels in the print by utilizing dye-transfer printing."

One boon to Technicolor's efforts is the staggering progress made by Kodak in emulsion technology. "Kodak has essentially made four new stocks for us," Ricotta says. "There are the three different black-and-white matrix stocks for the red, green and blue separations, and then what we call a receiver stock. In the dye-transfer process, we start with the original color negative and then, on an optical printer, separate the red, green and blue information onto these first three stocks, which make up your complimentary color matrices. Then, by virtue of the way you print and develop these matrices, in addition to having a silver image, they have a relief image on them.

"Dye transfer is very much like an offset printing process that has a drum with raised and lowered lettering on it," he continues. "In offset printing, you flood that drum with ink and then print that ink onto a piece of paper. By doing four passes — with cyan, magenta, yellow and black ink — you create a color image. Dye-transfer printing isn't all that different. When the matrices come off the developing machine, they also have a relief image like a printing plate. When these matrices are then loaded on the dye-transfer machine, the three separate records are, in turn, saturated with the appropriate dyes and then sequentially put into contact with a receiver film, onto which the dyes are transferred. Of course, the three dye images must be transferred in perfect registration with one another to avoid color fringing in the print."

An added benefit from printing each color layer separately is the ability to individually select the quality of each dye used. "The dyes in a standard color print film are actually manufactured in the positive film as a result of chemical reactions," Ricotta details. "Those dyes are very good, but they restrict your freedom in terms of what dyes you are going to use because they are formed by the chemicals that are already in the film. With the dye-transfer process, you select the dyes that you want based on their actual color rendition.

"Color positive prints will never look exactly like dye-transfer prints," notes Ricotta. "While we believe the overall quality of dye-transfer prints to be superior, we recognize that the "dye-transfer look' may not be proper for every picture. In that regard, it may considered yet another option in the arsenal of the creative community."

SOME TIME-TESTED ALTERNATIVES

All of the special processes detailed here also come with additional charges to the filmmakers, so it should be noted that there still are some inexpensive alternatives, several of which can be performed in-camera.

A less extreme way to manipulate contrast may be achieved not only through lighting and exposure, but also by means of pushing and pulling the film (usually up to two stops with no deleterious effects on grain), which can subtly change the film's contrast response and color saturation. Pulling the film — overexposing (by underrating the film's ASA) and then underdeveloping the negative — will slightly decrease the contrast and color saturation. Pushing the film — underexposing (rating the film faster) and then increasing the developing time — produces the opposite effect, yielding a slightly more contrasty image with a subtle increase in color saturation.

The process of flashing the camera negative — through the use of devices like the Panaflasher or Varicon (see AC July '90), or by flashing in the lab — can be used to both decrease contrast and desaturate colors. However, it should also be noted that both pulling and flashing are often used in tandem with the utilization of a silver-retention process to further control the behavior of the effect; usually to soften the contrast of the mid-scale fleshtones.

And finally, there is also the long-used color desaturation technique which involves striking both color and black-and-white interpositives of the color footage. These are then A/B-printed onto the same print in varying degrees to mute the colors.

Gary Ross: Color Manipulation & Meaning

2009-05-28T21:58:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, Black-and-White in Color by Bob Fisher (November 1998)

Ross believes the possibilities offered by color manipulation are virtually limitless. For example, early in Pleasantville, one of the characters wears an electric blue dress that draws the eyes of the audience like a magnet. That wasn't the result he wanted, so he toned down the blue. Technically, he says, there is no reason why the dress couldn't be red in China where that color has a different symbolic meaning than it does in Western countries.

John Lindley: Shooting Color and B&W

2009-05-28T21:31:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, Black-and-White in Color by Bob Fisher (November 1998)

Lindley made several accommodations to shooting color film for conversion to black-and-white. He used hard light to get crisp separations in scenes with monochrome characters. He also used a dimmer control board for lighting transitions when a black-and-white person left an area and a color character moved in.

"The black-and-white characters would be hard-lit, even though they were occupying the same space where we had soft light on a color character. Almost every light was wired to a dimmer board. The operator watched a monitor with a live video feed from the tap on the camera. We did a lot of cues on the fly as people moved around sets.

Your eye naturally goes to color in a black-and-white world. If you pick up a newspaper that has one color photograph and a bunch of other black-and-white ones, everybody looks at the color one first. It's human nature."

- John Lindley, ASC

He further explains that the same dynamic applies when there are color and black-and-white characters in the same shot.

"That was great if [the black-and-white person] was the character Gary wanted to highlight. But if it was a two-shot and he wanted to feature both characters, I sometimes adjusted the composition to give the black-and-white person a little more prominence."

- John Lindley, ASC

Eduardo Serra: Softlight & Contrast

2009-05-28T21:18:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, Dream Weavers by Ron Magid (November 1998)

"I do want modeling and contrast in the image, so my main goal is always to reconcile these two things that people might think are contradictory: softlight and contrast. That's my obsession."

- Eduardo Serra, AFC

Eduardo Serra: Exposure Approach

2009-05-28T20:35:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, Dream Weavers by Ron Magid (November 1998)

"Eduardo is very methodical and particular about light. He can create what I call 'exotic experiences,' particularly in smaller environments. He paints in tones photographically, so he'll underexpose a background element in a very measured way — by two or three stops — but he's very conscious that that element is an important part of the shot, which creates this very layered, European effect. He uses a scale of grays to measure each part of the frame. And even though some elements are underexposed, they're all part of the painting, so to speak. Sometimes the objects that are two stops under are actually the most important aspects of the shot. That [technique] creates a kind of unity of emphasis."

- Vincent Ward, Director of What Dreams May Come

Maryse Alberti: Technique & Instinct

2009-05-28T20:11:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, Glitter Gulch by Chris Pizzello (November 1998)

"... Why these colors? They just felt right. I once went to see a talk by Vittorio Storaro [ASC, AIC] where a group of young-by-experience cinematographers were all trying to ask him, 'Which gel, which filter?' And Vittorio just started talking about the moon, the sun, the conscious, and the unconscious! The message I got from that was to learn your technique but don't let it be the driving force. Instead, trust your intuition and instincts."

- Maryse Alberti

Todd Haynes: Zooms

2009-05-28T19:52:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, Glitter Gulch by Chris Pizzello (November 1998)

Particulary inspiring to Haynes was the jarring use of zoom lenses in Performance and other films of the period, a technique now generally considered to be dated and passé.

"Today, you have the constant movement in and penetration of the camera into physical space, with swooping tracks and pyrotechnics of all kinds. The camera of the late Sixties and early Seventies seemed to really hold back — it didn't physically enter space, it would instead zoom, pan, or swish through space. It would rack-focus suddenly, identifying one part of the frame to the other. The difference is that you really got a sense of surface, this beautiful, almost caressing of the surface of the screen. In Performance or early Robert Altman films, like McCabe and Mrs. Miller, the camera searches for and finds the subject in a fog of blurry haze and grain, then finds focus on one thing and follows it somewhere else. It's a more voyeuristic way of seeing, because you're not physically entering the space — you're staying outside and using the technology to scan the surface and isolate certain parts of the screen."

- Todd Haynes, Director of Velvet Goldmine

John Mathieson: Film Destruction Techniques

2009-05-28T16:32:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, Brush With the Gutter by Holly Willis (Sept. 1998)

Mathieson tried to toy with his equipment and lights in order to alter or distort the images he was getting much in the manner that Bacon warped and stretched his own imagery. His description of techniques is a tour through the don’ts of filmmaking, and yet the results are extraordinary.

Mathieson shot some scenes using a 5x4 Sinar plate camera, which he would place in front of the Arri without its plate. Where the plate would normally go, he positioned a piece of tracing paper. "The image would be soft, sort of blurred," he attests, and this effect not only framed the subject like a still camera would, but made images that approximated the blurriness of many of Bacon’s paintings. Another technique involved removing the shutter from the Arri 435.

"We disconnected the shutter, keeping it open. Then we’d use a domestic drill with a handmade shutter in front of the camera. It would run asynchronously, and we’d rev it at different speeds to make the image flutter. If you moved it away from the camera, you’d get these great flash-frames that would stretch and tear from top to bottom, creating images that jumped at you. We did our own fogging in the camera as well, using the Arri VariCon, which enables one to fog the film using different colors. We also tried putting red gel on the side of the camera, then opening up while we were shooting to make a more ’brutal’ fogging effect."

- John Mathieson, BSC

Mathieson also did a lot of double exposures in the camera. One of the film’s final scenes shows Bacon in a bathroom, where Dyer appears as a ghostlike presence. Similar images abound throughout the film, and while budget may have been one of the reasons for doing this and many of the other effects in the camera, Mathieson and Maybury felt that the old-fashioned technique lent the film a certain ambiance.

"When you double-expose [a shot], there’s something about the way it sits on the negative, with the light passing through and hitting the emulsion it just sits better than if you mix it or do CGI to it. It’s also a lot more fun, and you can relight things for different exposures or use different colors. Anyway, John would get so excited about the rushes you’d see the shot right away."

- John Mathieson, BSC

Yet another approach utilized to distort images was to shoot through large chunks of glass. "I’ve been dragging bits of glass around for years," concedes the cameraman. "Alan [Macdonald] would find these lovely pieces of glass to shoot through." Some of the glass pieces were old, heavy ashtrays, but all were simply held in front of the camera for the shot. Mathieson also used an assortment of old lenses.

"We had this odd collection. We had an old Angenieux, for example, which we did terrible things to with Vaseline. We also took the elements out of some of the lenses, and we also used a Frazier lens once. With the Frazier you have to use the Panavision camera, but the lens system has its own peculiar kind of optics. It does extreme close-ups."

- John Mathieson, BSC

Mathieson also used a boroscope lens for close-ups.

"The optical quality of a boroscope is terrible, really. But what you can do with them is amazing. They are very good for doing close-ups of things like white mice building nests they’re used by natural history people for studying nature. But we used them for snooping around and looking at bad skin or stained fingers."

- John Mathieson, BSC

The boroscope is unusual in that it can both do close-ups and wide-angle shots; the image is distorted at either setting, and Mathieson used this warping effect to lend a repulsive quality to the faces of the people who hung around Bacon, making them appear as they would have had they been rendered by the artist on canvas.

The cinematographer also employed an array of gels to augment his subjects’ more hideous qualities.

"We got that Bacon dead-flesh look using old gels. They were strange correction gels for lamps that people don’t use anymore. They have very weird colors, and most have been discontinued. We also used a lot of cosmetic gels, but in a very uncosmetic way. There’s an LCT Yellow, for example, which is a weird, horrible color that makes everyone look ill or dead. Usually when you put a gel in front of a light, it looks very intense and strong, and we didn’t want that. We wanted something more subtle, something dirty, and we found that these old gels really gave us the desired waxy, dead-meat look."

- John Mathieson, BSC

Conrad Hall: Preston Light Ranger

2009-05-28T15:59:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, Speed and Sharpness by David E. Williams (Sept. 1998)

... While not a replacement for a good first A.C., Preston Cinema Systems' unique Light Ranger follow-focus device has proven itself invaluable under certain conditions. This tool can automatically focus the lens through the use of an operator-controlled infrared laser and a geometric triangulation system, which determines the distance between a subject and the camera focal plane and drives a focus motor. The unit is normally mounted on its own tripod, separated from the camera by a convenient distance. An encoder head provides pan and tilt angle data so that parallax effects may be canceled out. In cases where parallax effects aren't significant, the unit may be mounted on a conventional head.

"I'd never heard of the Light Ranger before making this film. But everybody started talking about it once we began doing some tests."

- Conrad Hall, ASC on Without Limits

Both cinematographer and director Robert Towne decided to utilize extremely long lenses and high frame rates to shoot key portions of the film's many running sequences. This would allow them to compress the space between central character Steve Prefontaine and his competitors, and also separate individual athletes from the field while analyzing their movements and expressions in slow motion.

"There are shots done with 800mm lenses where you can see an entire 220-yard or longer run as Pre comes directly toward the camera, perfectly in focus as we tilt from his face to his shoes and back. Without this device, it would have been a nightmare for us to get those shots the traditional way, with follow focus marks. Also, there are only so many times that performers can repeat action like that, so doing fewer takes was a benefit."

- Conrad Hall, ASC

The Light Ranger offers four modes of operation:

- Manual: In which the focus is controlled by a manual-control knob and the focus setting is displayed on a digital readout.
- Automatic: Where the lens is automatically adjusted to the measured subject distance in the readout.
- Offset: In which the focus is still automatically adjusted but offset by a distance manually set in the readout.
- Split: Which allows focus 'pulls' to be manually controlled by the operator.

Despite the Light Ranger's capabilities, Hall notes that the device can have operational problems under specific shooting situations, such as while trying to follow focus on someone driving a car ( a situation in which the windshield or other glass surfaces may deflect the distance-measuring laser and create false readings). Also, having the camera and Light Ranger at differing elevations can affect accuracy unless such variations are accounted for.

Conrad Hall: Tech. Names & Approach to Set Lighting

2009-05-28T15:45:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, Leader of the Pack interview by Caleb Deschanel, ASC & edited by David E. Williams (September 1998)

Deschanel: Having watched you work a number of times, I know you have a tendency to ignore certain technical aspects of the craft. I’ve heard you say, ’Oh, bring me a light that’s about this big.’ [Both laugh.] Now, I know you’re talking about a 10K, but do you deliberately just want to free your mind of all of those details?

Hall: Should I know all the names of all the lights? There’s just so much new equipment coming out all the time. In terms of lights, I basically work with big lights and tiny lights. I simplify. I’m loathe to take walls out to shoot a scene. A production designer I recently worked with said to me, ’Conrad, when you shoot, you have a circle around your subject and you work within that circle. When Piotr Sobocinski shoots, he peels the circle back, leaving just a wall here behind his subject. When Emmanuel Lubezki [ASC, AMC] shoots, he does the same thing, but then he kicks a hole in the wall to make space for a backlight.’ Well, I like the reality of shooting in a room with set dimensions. I’m not used to tearing out a wall and pushing back 40 feet so I can use long lenses. I’ve just never thought about working that way. I like to live in this kind of formal reality, in the same way that a painter lives with a canvas of a certain size. That sets up certain rules and suggests an approach without creating the possibility of the viewer being somewhere he or she cannot be.

Conrad Hall: Lighting to Draw Attention

2009-05-28T15:40:00.000-07:00

From American Cinematographer, Leader of the Pack interview by Caleb Deschanel and edited by David E. Williams (September 1998)

Deschanel: Your lighting always feels real, but in many shots, there’s often light in a particular place that draws the eye to the key element in the story. It’s as if you’re using light to make the audience understand where to look in the frame.

Hall: Again, it’s like working on a canvas. I look through the ground glass and when I’m putting things together, I’m filling in the important aspects of the story which have to be told in that shot. Whether that means keeping the characters dark and lighting the background, or whatever else, the story is telling me to hide or illuminate something.