OCTOBER 2011

$5.95Canada $6.95
 M E M B E R P O R T R A I T

Thomas Ackerman, ASC

“M
y dad worked at the Times
Theater in Cedar Rapids,
Iowa, and I saw every
movie that came to town from the
projection booth. The smell of
machine oil and a carbon arc
was part of it, but what really got
me was the magic on the screen.
“Then I landed a summer
job at the Collins Radio photo
lab. When things were slow, I
plowed through stacks of
American Cinematographer. It
changed my life.
“Technical methods are
evolving much faster than they
did in the past, but the aesthetics
of making pictures remain much
the same. AC is far more than a
trade journal; it’s the voice of
artists around the world. No
matter how busy I am, it’s my
way of keeping in touch.”

— Thomas Ackerman, ASC

©photo by Owen Roizman, ASC

TO SUBSCRIBE BY PHONE:
Call (800) 448-0145 (U.S. only)
(323) 969-4333 or visit the ASC Web site

W W W . T H E A S C . C O M
 Photographer: John Hayden Busch
“I spend most of my working hours on
location so I need to know that I’m carrying
the most reliable equipment. That’s why
I always travel with Schneider 4x5 and
6x6 filters. They give me the highest
quality look across all formats.
Recently, I did a shoot at 9000’ in the
Poudre River Valley of Colorado. I found
that the ND Soft Grads, combined with the
Circular True Pols worked particularly
well. The Grads helped blend the dynamic
range in the sky, allowing our camera’s
sensor to see what it needed. The Schneider
filters helped me create the crisp, contrasty,
artsy images that we were going for.”

Cinematographer Eric Schmidt was videos for everyone from Bruce Springsteen to
nominated for an ASC Award for his work Foo Fighters and shot over 500 commercials
on Cold Case and has shot several features, including the distinctive The World’s Most
including The Mechanic and I Melt With You. Interesting Man spots for Dos Equis.
He has created striking imagery for music
B+W • Century
Century • S
Schneider
chneider

www.schneideroptics.com
w ww
w w.schneideroptics.com •  



  



 It Starts with the Glass tm
O C T O B E R 2 0 1 1 V O L . 9 2 N O . 1 0

The International Journal of Motion Imaging

On Our Cover: Driver (Ryan Gosling) is a stunt man by day and criminal accomplice
by night in Drive, shot by Newton Thomas Sigel, ASC.
(Photo by Richard Foreman Jr., SMPSP, courtesy of Film District.)

FEATURES
28 Road Warriors
Newton Thomas Sigel, ASC envisions a modern noir
for Drive

44 Man of Action
44

Roberto Schaefer, ASC, AIC taps Super 16mm

anamorphic for Machine Gun Preacher

52 Home Invasion
Alik Sakharov, ASC re-imagines a 1970s classic
with Straw Dogs

62 King of New York 52

Filmmakers recall the heyday of General Camera Corp.

DEPARTMENTS
8 Editor’s Note
10 President’s Desk
12 Short Takes: Woolite “Torture” 62
16 Production Slate: The Skin I Live In • Margin Call
68 Post Focus: Restoring A Trip to the Moon
74 Filmmakers’ Forum: Karl Walter Lindenlaub, ASC, BVK
78 New Products & Services
82 International Marketplace
83 Classified Ads
84 Ad Index
86 In Memoriam: Takuo “Tak” Miyagishima
87 Clubhouse News
88 ASC Close-Up: Xavier Grobet

— VISIT WWW.THEASC.COM TO ENJOY THESE WEB EXCLUSIVES —

DVD Playback: Party Girl • Cul-de-Sac • Insignificance
 O c t o b e r 2 0 1 1 V o l . 9 2 , N o . 1 0
The International Journal ofMotion Imaging

Visit us online at
www.theasc.com
————————————————————————————————————
PUBLISHER Martha Winterhalter
————————————————————————————————————
EDITORIAL
EXECUTIVE EDITOR Stephen Pizzello
SENIOR EDITOR Rachael K. Bosley
ASSOCIATE EDITOR Jon D. Witmer
TECHNICAL EDITOR Christopher Probst

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
Stephanie Argy, Benjamin B, Douglas Bankston, Robert S. Birchard,
John Calhoun, Michael Goldman, Simon Gray, Jim Hemphill, David Heuring,
Jay Holben, Mark Hope-Jones, Noah Kadner, Jean Oppenheimer,
John Pavlus, Chris Pizzello, Jon Silberg, Iain Stasukevich,
Kenneth Sweeney, Patricia Thomson
————————————————————————————————————
ART DEPARTMENT
CREATIVE DIRECTOR Marion Gore
————————————————————————————————————
ADVERTISING
ADVERTISING SALES DIRECTOR Angie Gollmann
323-936-3769 FAX 323-936-9188
e-mail: gollmann@pacbell.net
ADVERTISING SALES DIRECTOR Sanja Pearce
323-952-2114 FAX 323-876-4973
e-mail: sanja@ascmag.com
ADVERTISING SALES DIRECTOR Scott Burnell
323-936-0672 FAX 323-936-9188
e-mail: sburnell@earthlink.net
CLASSIFIEDS/ADVERTISING COORDINATOR Diella Nepomuceno
323-952-2124 FAX 323-876-4973
e-mail: diella@ascmag.com
————————————————————————————————————
CIRCULATION, BOOKS & PRODUCTS
CIRCULATION DIRECTOR Saul Molina
CIRCULATION MANAGER Alex Lopez
SHIPPING MANAGER Miguel Madrigal
————————————————————————————————————
ASC GENERAL MANAGER Brett Grauman
ASC EVENTS COORDINATOR Patricia Armacost
ASC PRESIDENT’S ASSISTANT Kim Weston
ASC ACCOUNTING MANAGER Mila Basely
ASC ACCOUNTS RECEIVABLE Corey Clark
————————————————————————————————————
American Cinematographer (ISSN 0002-7928), established 1920 and in its 91st year of publication, is published
monthly in Hollywood by ASC Holding Corp., 1782 N. Orange Dr., Hollywood, CA 90028, U.S.A.,
(800) 448-0145, (323) 969-4333, Fax (323) 876-4973, direct line for subscription inquiries (323) 969-4344.
Subscriptions: U.S. $50; Canada/Mexico $70; all other foreign countries $95 a year (remit international
Money Order or other exchange payable in U.S. $). Advertising: Rate card upon request from Hollywood
office. Article Reprints: Requests for high-quality article reprints (or electronic reprints) should be made to
Sheridan Reprints at (800) 635-7181 ext. 8065 or by e-mail hrobinson@tsp.sheridan.com.
Copyright 2011 ASC Holding Corp. (All rights reserved.) Periodicals postage paid at Los Angeles, CA
and at additional mailing offices. Printed in the USA.
POSTMASTER: Send address change to American Cinematographer, P.O. Box 2230, Hollywood, CA 90078.
4 ————————————————————————————————————
 © Bill Frakes
INTRODUCING THE CHIMERA LED LIGHTBANK.
(No wonder lighting professionals are celebrating from coast to coast.)
The innovators at Chimera have done it again! We’re introducing our new line of Chimera
LED Lightbanks—the perfect way to get the most out of your LED technology, and still create
beautiful, diffused light. It also turns a harsh LED light environment into a talent-friendly
light source. And the more comfortable your talent is, the more you’ll get out of them!
Chimera LED Lightbanks include:
• LED Lightbank body
• LED Speed Ring
• LED standard front screen, made with a unique and revolutionary material that enhances
the light source
• LED screens also available in a variety of beam angles!
The Chimera LED Lightbank is lightweight, collapsible, easy to use and long lasting. And since
it’s made by Chimera, you know you’re getting the kind of high quality that will last year after
year, scene after beautiful scene.

www.chimeralighting.com / 888.444.1812 / Made in the USA

lightbanks / birdcages / lanterns / systems / speed rings / essentials / accessories
 American Society of Cinematographers
The ASC is not a labor union or a guild, but
an educational, cultural and pro fes sion al
orga ni za tion. Membership is by invitation
to those who are actively en gaged as
di rec tors of photography and have
demon strated out stand ing ability. ASC
membership has be come one of the highest
honors that can be bestowed upon a
profes sional cin e ma tog ra pher — a mark
of prestige and excellence.

OFFICERS - 2011/2012
Michael Goi
President
Richard Crudo
Vice President
Owen Roizman
Vice President
John C. Flinn III
Vice President
Victor J. Kemper
Treasurer
Frederic Goodich
Secretary
Stephen Lighthill
Sergeant At Arms

MEMBERS OF THE
BOARD
John Bailey
Stephen H. Burum
Richard Crudo
George Spiro Dibie
Richard Edlund
Fred Elmes
Michael Goi
Victor J. Kemper
Francis Kenny
Isidore Mankofsky
Robert Primes
Owen Roizman
Kees Van Oostrum
Haskell Wexler
Vilmos Zsigmond

ALTERNATES
Michael D. O’Shea
Rodney Taylor
Ron Garcia
Sol Negrin
Kenneth Zunder

MUSEUM CURATOR
Steve Gainer
6
 Editor’s Note
A few years ago, I drifted into a screening of Bronson at
the Sundance Film Festival and was blown away by its
audacious style. Caught off guard by the director’s chops,
I did my homework and discovered that I had somehow
overlooked the early works of Danish filmmaker Nicolas
Winding Refn, known in Europe for his gritty Pusher tril-
ogy, which brings viewers face to face with a rogue’s
gallery of Copenhagen drug peddlers.
During an interview about Bronson, Refn and I
bonded over our fetish for avant-garde cinema, engaging
in a truly monastic discussion of filmmakers like Kenneth
Anger and Alejandro Jodorowsky. Echoes of their inspira-
tion are evident in Refn’s latest film, Drive, for which he
won the Cannes Film Festival’s Best Director prize this year. Riding shotgun on Drive was
Newton Thomas Sigel, ASC, whose early work on Anger’s Lucifer Rising gave him extra cred
with Refn.
In a fully loaded piece by associate editor Jon Witmer (“Road Warriors,” page 28),
Sigel says Refn used his intellect and creativity to create exciting car chases on an indie
budget: “[He] wanted the film’s three main driving sequences to each have its own charac-
ter and not be a traditional car chase. It wasn’t so much about being loud and noisy as it was
about having a defined tonality.”
Life-or-death confrontations also amp up the drama in Machine Gun Preacher, shot
by Roberto Schaefer, ASC, AIC, and a remake of Straw Dogs, which Rod Lurie modernized
with the help of Alik Sakharov, ASC.
Schaefer and director Marc Forster had to balance scenes shot in the States with
sequences staged in and around Johannesburg, South Africa (standing in for Sudan and
Uganda). Schaefer tells David Heuring (“Man of Action,” page 44) that the project “seemed
to want an epic feel, but without gloss. We were after an immediate, down-and-dirty feel
that people could relate to, but we also wanted to do justice to the sequences in Africa,
which have landscapes and a lot of big action sequences.”
As a cinematographer on the HBO series The Sopranos, Rome and Game of Thrones,
Sakharov has shot his share of memorable showdowns, but on Straw Dogs he and Lurie
were tangling with the ghost of the ultimate tough-guy auteur: Sam Peckinpah. As Michael
Goldman reveals (“Home Invasion,” page 52), the filmmakers opted for visual restraint while
staging the story’s brutal violence. “We didn’t want the photography to feel like it was call-
ing attention to itself,” says Sakharov. “We wanted it to feel like a camera just happened to
be there, quiet and subdued, while these events were taking place.”
The glory days of Manhattan’s General Camera Corp. are recalled in a piece by New
York correspondent Iain Stasukevich (“King of New York,” page 62). The company thrived in
the 1960s and ’70s, when it was a second home for current and future ASC members,
Photo by Owen Roizman, ASC.

including Gordon Willis, Owen Roizman, Victor J. Kemper and Fred Schuler. “General
Camera was like a home,” says camera assistant Gary Muller. “There was truly no other place
where you could get that kind of knowledge and honesty.”

Stephen Pizzello
Executive Editor
8
 ACQUIRE
Acquire with AJA.
From Lens to Post, capture edit-ready
Apple ProRes 422 footage direct from your camera.
Ki Pro Mini. Lens to Post...in a Flash.
Portable 10-bit 4:2:2 Flash Disk Recorder
Designed as a miniature field recorder for
creating ‘ready-to-edit’ professional digital
video, Ki Pro Mini records Apple ProRes 422
(including HQ, LT and Proxy) direct from any
SDI or HDMI camera. Mounted and
connected to your camera, Ki Pro Mini
records the ProRes footage to affordable
Compact Flash media, instantly ready to
edit when connected to a Mac.
Find out about our latest Acquire products at www.aja.com
B e c a u s e i t m a t t e r s .
www.aja.com
Ki Pro. Unify Cameras and Formats.
10-bit Recorder with Conversion
Designed to unify the
different formats employed
by broadcast cameras, Ki Pro
features AJA’s powerful
hardware up/down/cross-
conversion and captures ProRes
direct to removable Storage Module media.
Extensive I/O ensures integration with all
your other production gear is seamless.
 President’s Desk
Within the ASC there are two basic forms of membership: active and associate. Active members
are cinematographers, and everyone knows what we represent to the ASC, but there is some
mystery about the role of the associate member.
According to the ASC’s constitution, an associate member is a person who is not a direc-
tor of photography, but is engaged in work that contributes to cinematography through either
technical expertise or the rendering of services or products directly related to cinematography.
That captures the gist of it, but in practice associates do much more. They come from all corners
of the industry; they include camera manufacturers, post supervisors, color timers, company exec-
utives, lighting-equipment designers and many others. The contributions of one legendary East
Coast associate, General Camera co-founder Dick DiBona, are detailed in this issue.
Regardless of their business affiliations, ASC associates leave those agendas at the door
when they enter the Clubhouse. They participate selflessly on committees and contribute a life-
time of knowledge and expertise toward the common goal of making our craft the best it can
be. They are a vital part of the Society.
Associate members understand what motivates us to do what we do, and they support
that vision in ways that go beyond mere tech advice or equipment discounts. They are collabo-
rators for the ASC the way our crews are on set. They are an integral part of our major functions,
such as the ASC Awards, and major contributors to publications such as the American Cine-
matographer Manual. They challenge the Technology Committee to forge the way toward new frontiers, and join in the preserva-
tion push to guarantee that our work will be seen for generations to come.
Three associates, Bob Fisher, Larry Parker and Brian Spruill, have proven so valuable and committed to the ASC that we made
them honorary members, a distinction we bestow upon a very select few.
The ASC is a small family, so the loss of any member, active or associate, is felt by us all. We recently lost Tak Miyagishima,
who epitomized the character and importance of an associate member. The innovations he brought to motion-picture camera tech-
nology became an indelible part of our craft. He was present at our events and contributed ideas toward our goals. He used his
considerable influence to open doors for our members when it mattered most. And he did all this with the grace and easy famil-
iarity of a friend.
The ASC would not exist were it not for the dedication and commitment of our associates. You know the names of our active

Goi photo by Owen Roizman, ASC. Miyagishima photo by Larry Hezzelwood.

members — they’ve shot some of your favorite films. The next time you glance at the membership roster in this magazine or on our
website, take note of the names of our associates. They are our unsung heroes. If we are able to reach for the stars, it’s beca use
they build the platform that enables us to get there.

Michael Goi, ASC

President

10 October 2011 American Cinematographer

 Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts
is proud to announce that Johnny E. Jensen, ASC (Lost in
Yonkers, Rambling Rose), has joined our world-class faculty in
our distinguished cinematography department which includes
Jürg Walther (Carol King and James Taylor: Live at the
Troubador), headed by Bill Dill, ASC (Sidewalk Stories).

Jensen, Dill and Walther lead the cinematographers of

tomorrow through a curriculum that emphasizes
hands-on practical application in our state of the art
facilities with industry-standard equipment.
L-R: Walther, Jensen, Dill
Jensen’s photograph courtesy of Owen Roizman, ASC

Robert Bassett, Dean

ftv.chapman.edu
 Short Takes shot it like we would a movie,” says Trost.
Zombie says the style he and Trost have
worked out is predicated on speed and variety.
“When we’re doing coverage of a scene, unless
there’s a problem, I don’t like to do multiple takes
with the same lenses because then you get into
editing, and you have the same setup and the same
lens over and over,” says Zombie.
The duo managed about 75 setups a day on
Halloween II. “Brandon gets the way I like to
shoot,” says Zombie. “And we usually don’t have
the time to do it any other way.”
One way to achieve that kind of quantity and
still craft a high-quality image is to shoot with two
cameras and minimal lighting. “On ‘Torture,’” Trost
explains, “we shot all the spooky stuff in broad
A burly sadist puts clothing through its paces in “Torture,” a Woolite commercial shot by daylight. I didn’t use anything except for some
Brandon Trost and directed by Rob Zombie. negative fill.”
The “fade” sequence in the commercial

I On-the-Rack Fashion
By Iain Stasukevich
employs some practical tungsten fixtures provided by the art depart-
ment, and Trost punched them up with a couple of 1K Par cans.
“Rob and I tend to use practicals or nothing at all,” he says.
Rob Zombie might seem an unlikely choice to direct a Woolite “Torture” was not only Zombie’s first commercial, but also his
commercial, but ad agency Euro RSCG Worldwide actually tailored a first experience with a digital-cinema camera; Trost convinced him to
spot to him. It’s called “Torture.” experiment with a Red One (upgraded with the Mysterium-X
“The concept is that there’s a mysterious figure out in the sensor). “Rob and I both like the texture of film because we can
woods called The Torturer, and he’s torturing clothes,” says Zombie. degrade it,” notes Trost. “But you can do that with digital, too, and
At first Zombie had to turn the project down because of tour- I wanted to show him those possibilities.”
ing commitments, but the agency kept changing the dates and loca- Based on some tests he’d done with the Red for the feature
tions to fit his schedule. When they finally locked a date in Vancou- Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance , Trost decided to shoot all scenes
ver, Zombie called in cinematographer Brandon Trost. involving The Torturer at 3,200 ASA — even though they’re all day
The Woolite gig marks the third collaboration between Trost exteriors. “It brings out noise in the image, so it starts to feel like
and Zombie, after Halloween II (2009) and music videos for the grain and starts to look a little more analog,” he says. “When you
Zombie tracks “Sick Bubblegum” and “Mars Needs Women.” add a little contrast, the digital grain starts to stand out. When Rob
“I really like working with Rob, and we work really well saw that, he got really interested.”
together,” says Trost. “The key is that we both know what we want, “Cinematography matters to me, but I don’t share this new
but we’re not so committed [to those ideas] that it’s at the expense obsession with higher resolution,” notes Zombie. “I think things are
of doing what’s best for the project.” becoming so high resolution that they look like shit. People look
“Brandon is open-minded,” Zombie remarks. “I’m never at a weird. You can see the makeup in the actors’ pores. I’ve always shied
loss for what I want on set, but I’m always hoping that he’ll have an away from that.” In fact, he tends to lean in the opposite direction:
idea of how to take things a step further. Sometimes he’ll make for Halloween II, he and Trost chose to originate on Super 16mm,
suggestions and I’ll stick to the original plan, but that’s okay because and they pushed the stock so hard that shots sometimes came out
there’s no ego between us.” too dark or out of focus.
Filming took place over two days in and around Vancouver, Being able to see the image immediately on set is what finally
with the first day set on a derelict farmland just south of the city. The convinced Zombie to take the digital plunge. “That’s something that
Torturer does his worst — stretching out a cardigan on a medieval I like about it as well,” says Trost. “It makes us a little more comfort-
rack, shrinking a pretty top before using it to strangle a mannequin, able and allows us to work a little more quickly. It’s especially good
and fading a pair of jeans under the brutal heat of electric lamps. for focus, because we do a lot of handheld work with no marks. If
The agency only produced six panels of storyboards, but “we we can see right away that we’re sharp, it makes a big difference in

12 October 2011 American Cinematographer

We are Super 35mm.
A camera for every price and production.
What do film school students, masters of videography, a Pulitzer Prize winning photographer and honored members
of the ASC all have in common? 35mm cameras from Sony®. From motion pictures to stills, nobody has more ways to
shoot 35mm. Award-winning breakthroughs in color palette, exposure latitude, low-light sensitivity and sharpness will
upgrade your imagery. While Sony affordability, ergonomics and workflow help make you more productive than ever.
So the choice is no longer which 35mm camera. It’s which Sony camera.

Top row, left to right: Curtis Clark, ASC; Richard Crudo, ASC; Daryn Okada, ASC; Dennis Dillon, DP; Francis Kenny, ASC
Bottom row, left to right: Cassie Brooksbank, Senior, USC School of Cinematic Arts; Cameron Combe, Student Filmmaker, Cal State Long Beach;
Brian Smith, Award-winning Photographer; Brooke Mailhiot, Cinematographer

Visit sony.com/35mm

© 2011 Sony Electronics Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. Sony, make.believe and their respective logos are trademarks of Sony.
 how quickly we can work.”
With Zombie, Trost prefers to shoot
wide open, narrowing his depth-of-field as
much as possible. At 3,200 ASA, even stack-
ing multiple filters and narrowing the
camera’s shutter down to 45 degrees only
afforded him a stop of T2.8. (He used Zeiss
Ultra Prime T1.9 lenses.)
If the first half of the spot is classic
Zombie, the second half is a complete shift.
“We also did the ‘Look how bright and clean
and glossy and gorgeous the world is when
you use Woolite’ part of the commercial,”
says Trost. This segment features pretty girls
walking down a peaceful street, trying on
new clothes in a sunny bedroom, and relax-
ing in a yoga studio by a lake.
The shots in these scenes — captured
at 800 ASA in single-camera setups on loca-
tion around Vancouver — are smooth and
stabilized. Strong, high-key illumination is
provided by 6K and 18K HMIs. “It looks like
standard commercial fare, which is
awesome because it’s Rob Zombie behind
the camera,” says Trost. “I was really happy
to see him do something totally outside his
wheelhouse.”
For his part, Zombie shrugs off the
suggestion that dabbling in conventionality
might pose a challenge. “How hard can it be
to light two 20-year-old girls nicely and ask
them to pretend that they’re shopping?”
The challenge, if there was one, was
in the commercial medium itself. There was
little time for preparation leading into the
production, and once the shoot wrapped, all
of the footage was turned over to the post
team. (Technicolor Vancouver handled the
color correction.)
“I don’t know if this is normal, but
I’ve never been involved with color correc-
tion on a commercial,” says Trost. “But I’ve
always been happy with the way they’ve
turned out. That’s no surprise, because the
agencies usually pump a lot of money into
the grade.”
On “Torture,” Trost did his best to
bake in a look that couldn’t be undone. “I
knew my involvement [in post] would be
little to zero, and I figured that if I made it
look the way we wanted it to on the day we
shot it, then everybody would be happy with
Top: A woman admires her freshly laundered blouse. Middle: The hooded fiend hunts for unsuspecting it later.” ●
apparel in a Gothic landscape. Bottom: Zombie (left) and Trost take a break from the mayhem.

14 October 2011 American Cinematographer

 Production Slate
Plastic surgeon
Robert Ledgard,
M.D. (Antonio
Banderas)
proceeds with an
unorthodox
experiment in a
scene from The
Skin I Live In,
shot by José Luis
Alcaine, AEC.
I Bad Medicine
By Jean Oppenheimer
The Skin I Live In (La Piel Que Habito), the latest collaboration
between iconoclastic Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar and cine-
matographer José Luis Alcaine, AEC, resists easy classification.
“From one moment to the next it is a melodrama, a thriller, a horror
film and a love story,” observes Alcaine. In contemplating a visual
design for such a hybrid, Almodóvar initially considered an expres-
sionistic approach, but he eventually opted for a style that assidu-
ously avoids any visual clues that might influence viewers’ percep-
tion of the characters or hint at where the story is going. Essentially,
the look “doesn’t emphasize anything,” says Alcaine, who
answered AC’s questions via e-mail with the aid of translator Deidre
MacCloskey.
Based on Thierry Jonquet’s novel Mygale, the film concerns
a brilliant plastic surgeon, Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas), who
becomes obsessed with creating an artificial human skin after his
wife is horribly disfigured in a fire and takes her own life. Robert
lives and works in a secluded mansion, where he has two compan-
ions: the housekeeper, Marilia (Marisa Paredes), and a beautiful
patient named Vera (Elena Anaya), who wears a skin-tight body
stocking that covers her from head to toe. Vera has been a captive
for six years, and cameras in her room allow Robert and Marilia to
track her every move via monitors positioned around the house.
16 October 2011 American Cinematographer
The Skin I Live In photos by Lucìa Faraig and José Haro, courtesy of El Deseo and Sony Pictures Classics.
The film was shot entirely at practical locations. Most of the
action takes place indoors, with day interiors relying almost exclu-
sively on simulated sunshine. Working with a single camera (an
Arricam Studio), the filmmakers made decisions about blocking,
camera placement and camera moves on set. The only calculations
Alcaine worked out beforehand concerned the hue and angle of
the simulated sunlight. He recalls, “I asked our script supervisor to
draw up a shooting schedule for me with the actual times of each
sequence. Instead of ‘daytime,’ it would say ‘18:00 [6 p.m.].’ That
allowed me to plan the color and angle of the HMIs coming
through the windows.”
To light Vera’s room, which was located on the second floor
and had trees and a swimming pool directly outside the windows,
Alcaine’s crew positioned three 12K HMIs and a mix of Osram fluo-
rescents on scaffolding outside. The cinematographer has relied
almost exclusively on Osram tubes for the past 25 years. “They are
inexpensive and they don’t take up a lot of space,” he told AC in
2006 while discussing Volver (Dec. ’06). “They have dimmers that
can be interconnected, they cause practically no variation in the
color of the light emission anywhere in the dimming range, and
you can shoot at any shutter setting.”
Alcaine’s lighting package, which came from Iluminaciones
Cinetel, where owner Rafael Martos helps him design many of the
housings for the Osram tubes, included 10-banks with 20 55-watt
Dulux tubes, 20-banks with eight 36-watt Dulux tubes, 15-banks
 Top: Ledgard’s
daughter (Blanca
Suárez) escapes
his watchful eye
at a party to
take a fateful
walk with Vicente
(Jan Cornet).
Bottom: Director
Pedro Almodóvar
(right) looks on as
Banderas and
Elena Anaya run
through a scene
involving Ledgard
and his captive
patient, Vera.
This large
fluorescent source
was typical of
Alcaine’s approach
to Vera’s room.

had to be precisely synchronized. At one

of four 36-watt Lumilux tubes, 8-banks of
two 36-watt Lumilux tubes, and a variety
of 18-watt Lumilux tubes. “We had
3,200°K tubes and 5,500°K tubes, and if
we needed to get an in-between color
temperature, we mixed them on the
banks,” says Alcaine.
Among the film’s most inspired
sequences, from both a conceptual and
technical standpoint, are scenes of Robert
in his bedroom at night, watching Vera on
a giant monitor that covers one wall. Vera
knows Robert watches her, and she often
stares straight into the camera, as if meet-
ing his gaze. “We shot Vera in her room
and Robert looking at her on the monitor
at the same time, and the actors were, of
course, in two separate spaces, so Pedro
had to coordinate their performances
perfectly,” says Alcaine. For the smaller
monitors in the kitchen, he adds, “we shot
the video footage first and then played it
when we were filming the kitchen scenes.”
The camerawork in each space also
point, the video camera (a Panasonic AG-
HVX200) pushes in on Vera until her face
fills the frame while the Arri pushes in from
behind Robert, who is standing in front of
the screen. In another scene, Robert
watches as Vera sits with her back against
the arm of her divan, her legs stretched out
in front of her; Robert also has a divan in his
room, and the camera remains behind him
as he sits down in a position that mirrors
hers, except that he is on the opposite side
of the frame. The two characters appear to
be facing one another.
Vera is almost always lit with fluo-
rescents placed at the edge of the frame
and usually aligned with her eyes. Lighting
Robert’s bedroom required ingenuity
because of the blue cast emitted by the
massive monitor. “To make it work, I had to
make all of the lighting [in the room] that
same color,” reports Alcaine. “[I did this] by
lighting with 5,500°K [tubes] placed behind
Antonio and at his sides. That way we
didn’t have light all over the room, which
also helped [eliminate] reflections. The crew
dressed in black for the filming of these
scenes.”
Alcaine notes that The Skin I Live In
marks his first digital intermediate with
Almodóvar. Their four previous collabora-
tions — Volver, Bad Education, Tie Me Up!

18 October 2011 American Cinematographer

 A half-century of service, mentorship,
friendship, innovation, brilliance and passion.
Your legacy will live on.

Takuo “Tak” Miyagishima

1928-2011

Top: Ledgard admires his handiwork after Vera returns from a trip to town.
Bottom: Alcaine (left) and gaffer Fernando Beltran confer on location.
Tie Me Down! and Women on the Verge of
a Nervous Breakdown — were timed
photochemically. “The DI allowed us to
suppress the tiny imperfections in Elena’s
skin, befitting Ledgard’s ‘perfect creation,’”
notes the cinematographer. All of the
negative processing, scanning, color correc-
tion and filmout was handled by Fotofilm
Deluxe in Madrid. “I found the work of the
entire laboratory to be of a very high stan-
dard,” says Alcaine.
The Skin I Live In marked a few other
firsts for the Almodóvar/Alcaine team.
“Our previous four films were shot
20 October 2011
anamorphic, but Pedro decided this one
should be 1.85:1,” says Alcaine. “I was
grateful because that meant I could use my
favorite lenses, [Arri/Zeiss] Master Primes.”
The camera package came from EPC in
Madrid.
Another distinct difference was the
color scheme. Almodóvar’s films are
renowned for their rich, bold colors, with a
special emphasis on red. “By Pedro’s own
design, however, this movie looks very
neutral,” says Alcaine. “The tones are
beige, white, gray, black and metallic. Only
occasionally is there an explosion of red:
American Cinematographer
crimson drapes in a couple of settings, a red
dress in a shop window, or fresh blood on
the floor.”
Alcaine remembers a mildly trouble-
some night exterior at a location in Galicia,
where Robert and his teenaged daughter,
Norma (Blanca Suárez), attend a wedding.
Norma wanders into the garden with
Vicente (Jan Cornet), a young man she has
just met. When Robert can’t find his daugh-
ter, he goes outside to look for her. “The
vegetation was very thick, and light could
barely penetrate it,” recalls Alcaine. “My
source of inspiration was the great French
artist Henri Rousseau, in particular his 1910
painting The Dream. Even though it was
night, I tried to make the greens very strong
and bright, just as in the painting.”
The film’s biggest lighting setup was
a nighttime car chase along an isolated,
winding road deep in a forest. Robert
pursues Vicente, who is on a motorcycle,
because he believes Vicente has raped his
daughter. The filmmakers had to light
almost a full mile of road to capture the
action. “We had two 18K HMIs, three 12K
HMIs and a crane truck with six 12K HMIs,”
says Alcaine.
Alcaine praises his crew for their
“enormous contributions.” He notes, “My
gaffer, Fernando Beltran, works with me a
lot, and on this film, as always, he did a
superb job. Our camera operator was the
excellent Joaquin Manchado, who, though
a fine cinematographer himself, offered to
serve as operator in order to be part of the
production.”
Contemplating the five films he has
made with Almodóvar, Alcaine observes,
“It’s strange. Pedro and I understand each
other very well, but we hardly ever talk. Our
intuitions about the images are almost
always the same, and only occasionally do
they need any clarification. This shoot was a
real delight for me, and I think for him, too.”
TECHNICAL SPECS
1.85:1
35mm and Digital Capture
Arricam Studio; Panasonic AG-HVX200
Arri/Zeiss Master Prime
Kodak Vision3 500T 5219;
Fujifilm Eterna Vivid 160
Digital Intermediate ➣
Why am I having so much fun?
Bob Primes,ASC reveals his inner child playing with the cool
toys and other kids at Clairmont Camera; a fun place to play.

I've played in some great camera rental houses.

The best constantly innovate and create awesome
new tools,toys and widgets to make our work more
beautiful,faster,easier and more fun.

Denny & Terry Clairmont,Alan Albert,Tom Boelens

and crew set fanatically high standards of quality,
service,innovation and integrity.

But that's old news. Everyone in the biz knows that!

I want to talk about how much fun I have at Clairmont.

The sign of a well managed team is the morale and

happiness of the players.

Clairmont is a busy place,yet somehow,miraculously,

everyone seems relaxed,delighted to see you,help you
create solutions and are just as crazy about the latest
toys and widgets as you are.

It is this uncanny ability of everyone you encounter to

share the joy and enthusiasm of our art form that kicks
the Clairmont experience into another dimension. Those
old-fashioned virtues of integrity,involvement,caring,
warmth and joy are really what it's all about.

Robert Primes,ASC

www.clairmont.com

Hollywood Vancouver Toronto Albuquerque Montreal

818-761-4440 604-984-4563 416-467-1700 505-227-2525 514-525-6556
 Will (Paul Bettany, right) consults with Sam (Kevin Spacey) as a crisis looms at their firm in Margin Call.
I Capturing a Financial Freefall
By Patricia Thomson
“The longer I work in films, the
more I find I need less lighting,” says
New York-based cinematographer Frank
DeMarco. A pianist since age 6, he offers
a musical analogy: “I remember listening
to jazz saxophonist Wayne Shorter when
he was in Weather Report. He was a
virtuoso; he’d be playing a thousand
notes a second. I saw him again about 15
years later at the Blue Note, and he was
an older, mellow guy, and everyone in his
young, hot group was playing a million
notes a minute. Wayne was just playing
one note, but everybody was listening to
him, because he was doing something
interesting with that note. It’s similar with
lighting: once you find the one light or
the minimum number of lights that work,
you make it work, really bend it. That’s
what people are going to see and feel.”
DeMarco had ample occasion to
bend a few notes on Margin Call, an
ensemble drama written and directed by
J.C. Chandor, whose characters — a
group of Wall Street analysts — are the
first to foresee the 2008 financial melt-
down. The cinematographer had 10 days
of prep for the 17-day shoot, which took
place mainly in a high-rise office building
in Manhattan. After principal photogra-
22 October 2011
phy wrapped, the producers approved an
18th day to shoot real trading floors
downtown and some nighttime heli-
copter shots of the hero high-rise.
The story, which takes place over
36 hours, is a pressure-cooker workplace
drama. When one analyst, Eric (Stanley
Tucci), gets sacked, he passes a jump
drive to an entry-level colleague, Peter
(Zachary Quinto), warning him to “be
careful” as the elevator door closes. Peter
extrapolates the drive’s financial formula
to its logical conclusion and sees immi-
nent disaster for the firm. He alerts his
boss, who in turn calls his boss, and so on
up the chain. The movie examines the
response of each character to the firm’s
likely meltdown as they race to resolve
the situation before “The Street” finds
out. “It’s not panic if you’re the first one
out the door,” says CEO John Tuld
(Jeremy Irons), as he greenlights a fire sale
of worthless stocks.
Most of the movie was shot on the
42nd floor of 1 Penn Plaza. As luck would
have it, the floor’s previous occupant was
a hedge fund. “That was a gift,” says
Chandor. “Everything we might need
was there: boardrooms, a 200-person
trading floor, corner offices, hallways.”
Even the trading-room desks had been
left in place.
Another boon was the involve-
American Cinematographer
ment of Bloomberg Trading Systems,
which not only loaned and wired up 150
trading stations, but also created a loop
of screen shots showing financial graphs
that any Wall Street trader would recog-
nize as authentic. “That really helped
bring things to life,” says Chandor.
Those monitors were both motifs
and practical sources. “From the minute I
wrote the first couple of scenes, I decided
those screens should be a recurring visual
theme,” says the director. Always loom-
ing over analysts’ heads and active even
during the dead of night, “they’re repre-
sentative of the outside market pressure
Margin Call photos courtesy of Roadside Attractions and the filmmakers.
and the paranoia in these crisis situa-
tions,” he says. “The screens let you
know that the market never sleeps.”
Another motif is Manhattan, a
living, pulsating presence outside the
office windows. “We had beautiful floor-
to-ceiling windows, and the breathtaking
view of Manhattan is definitely one of the
characters,” says DeMarco. “It’s always
there, looming and glowing in the back-
ground.”
To ensure that the windows
wouldn’t blow out during day scenes,
DeMarco had his crew cover the windows
with 4'x8' sheets of ND.3, ND.6 and
ND.9. Upon doing so, they discovered a
problem: though the windows looked
identical, each had a slightly different

Top: This shot of
cast and crew
preparing a scene
in Sam’s office
shows the
neutral-density
panels used for
day interiors at
the location.
Bottom: Seth
(Penn Badgley)
receives a
worrisome call at
a nightclub.
width ranging from 50"-52". The 48" ND
panels therefore left a gap. DeMarco’s
solution was to ask production designer
John Paino to make removable pilasters to
act as vertical window dividers. “Once we
installed the ND panels, we could take
these pilasters and Velcro them against
the window,” says DeMarco. “They not
only hid the gaps, but they also looked
great. As exterior lighting changed, partic-
ularly at the end of the day, it was a
breeze for [key grip] Caswell Cooke and
his crew to quickly change the panels.
“Our limited budget made it a
tough choice for the producers, but they
recognized that even though the ND
panels cost a little money up front, they
saved a ton of time and aggravation,
because we didn’t have to add big HMIs
inside to balance with the outside light,”
adds the cinematographer.
Because most of Margin Call takes
place at night, DeMarco knew he needed
to shoot at around 800 ASA. He explains,
“Shooting film wasn’t possible on our
budget because J.C. wanted to capture
the dialogue-heavy drama with two
cameras, so we decided to go digital.”
(Footage of the real trading floors and the
nighttime aerial work was shot on film,
Kodak Vision3 500T 5219.)
DeMarco chose two Red Ones
(upgraded with Mysterium-X sensors) as
his main cameras. However, he found the
daylight-balanced sensor to be closer to
400 ASA. “Maybe it’s 800 ASA in HMI
light,” he allows, “but I was shooting
mostly in tungsten or mixed light, and I
found the sensor wasn’t as sensitive as its
specs claimed.”
Nevertheless, the camera’s sensitiv-
ity was sufficient to allow DeMarco to
make the onscreen monitors work for
him. “I balanced the overall lighting on
the set so the monitors were always legi-
ble,” he says. “Even with overhead light-
ing, you could still very much see the
content on the monitors. In really dark
scenes, the monitors often become the
light source.”
DeMarco’s minimalist lighting is on
display in a shot that tracks through the
empty office after the firm’s bigwigs have
set the wheels of fate in motion. The
camera dollies past trading stations with
glowing monitors, and then continues
into an office belonging to Sam (Kevin
Spacey). “That was a dead-of-night
scene,” says DeMarco. “We kept the
other rooms dark, so the monitors are
doing a lot of the lighting. We left on
some of the small tungsten practicals on
the desks, enhancing them with stronger

24 October 2011 American Cinematographer


Cinematographer
Frankie DeMarco
takes a break on
the roof of the
production’s
primary location.
bulbs on dimmers, and we hid some Kino
Flos on the floor to enhance particular
pieces of architecture.
“We changed out the bulbs in the
ceiling lights to work with our color
temperatures,” he continues. “Once
gaffer Radium Cheung and I figured out
our night and day lighting schemes, it
26
was pretty simple. We used Kino Flo
Image 80s on rolling stands for big wide
shots to give everybody a little edge or
open up an area, and we used Arri
Pocket Par 200-watt and 800-watt Jokers
to put hot hits here and there for day
scenes.” For close-ups, he cranked up the
computers’ brightness levels and
augmented that with small Rosco LED
LitePads that were balanced to match the
monitors’ cool hue.
Although the movie’s subject is
grim, Chandor’s goal was a handsome
film. “I didn’t ever want this to have a
gritty, down-in-the-pits feel,” he says.
“The audience has to spend an hour and
a half in this room, so I wanted it [to look]
as beautiful as possible.” DeMarco strove
for smooth dolly moves and used older
Zeiss T2.1 Standard Speed primes as his
main lenses. (He also used Angenieux
Optimo 17-80mm zooms.) “The older
lenses have a wonderful way of maintain-
ing a handsome image while smoothing
out the harsh look of these new large-
chip digital cameras without requiring
filters,” he observes.
At times, however, the drama
called for lighting that was intentionally
brutal. DeMarco notes, “The night exteri-
ors of Peter wandering the city streets in
a pensive daze were lit with a mix of
ambient city light and a little fill; the mix
reflects the character’s moral ambiguity.”
In another example, Sam and an assistant
wait to conduct colleagues to a bigwig
meeting. “They’re standing right under a
recessed ceiling light, and it gives them
both hideous raccoon eyes. It’s a severe
moment, but the look is appropriate for
the story and the emotion of the scene.”
For the toplit conference-room
scenes, DeMarco’s crew hung skirted
China balls on a “suicide arm,” which he
describes as “a hefty stand with a long
pole. Then, to brighten someone’s face or
put a little glint in his or her eyes, I used
an altered-snoot Mole Baby Soft. It’s
called a Néstor, after Néstor Almendros
[ASC]. You can shoot soft, concentrated
light 6 to 8 feet out without it spilling all
over everything. Apart from that, we just
had a few practicals in the background.”
DeMarco used a Canon EOS 5D
Mark II in tandem with the Red cameras
for a couple of driving scenes. In one, two
junior analysts scour the city for Eric, their
fired boss. The Canon was suction-
cupped to the limo’s untinted windows.
“Inside the vehicle, we positioned a
cookeoptics.com
Rosco LED LitePad so you could simulta- TECHNICAL SPECS
neously see the actors in the car and
Manhattan reflected in the curve of the 1.85:1
limo window,” says DeMarco. Digital Capture and 35mm
Fortunately, the technical needs Red One, Canon EOS 5D Mark II, Arri 435
and the emotional dynamics of Margin Zeiss Standard Speed, Angenieux Optimo
Call neatly converged. “Using minimal Kodak Vision3 500T 5219
lighting allowed us to move quickly, Digital Intermediate ●
which was extremely important on a
movie with such a short shooting sched-
ule,” says DeMarco. “Using minimal
lighting also means you’re not going to
have a lot of f-stop; a 40mm lens at a T2
gives you about 8 inches of depth-of-
field, so you essentially hold the face.
Thus, while Manhattan shimmers out-of-
focus in the background, the characters
are visually isolated in their own respec-
tive spaces, which perfectly reflects their
mental and emotional states.”
“People like this pride themselves ERRATUM
on being able to stay calm on their worst
day, so at key moments in the drama, In last month’s print edition, Dante
these characters just pull back,” says Spinotti’s first name was misspelled in the
Chandor. “Frankie’s cinematography ASC Close-Up (page 104).
does a beautiful job of [conveying] that.”
The Cooke Look
One Look. All Speeds
CookeOpticsLimited T: +44 (0)116 264 0700
British Optical Innovation and Canada, South America, USA:
Quality Since 1893. T: +1-973-335-4460
27
 Road
Warriors
Newton Thomas Sigel, ASC and
director Nicolas Winding Refn
revolves around the unnamed Driver (Ryan Gosling), who
spends his days as a Hollywood stunt driver and his nights
behind the wheel of getaway cars for members of the Los
craft a violent fairytale on the Angeles underworld. In order to protect his neighbor, Irene
streets of Los Angeles. (Carey Mulligan), he agrees to help her ex-con husband,
Standard (Oscar Isaac), pull off an easy heist. But when the
job goes horribly wrong, Driver has to cut a bloody swath to
By Jon D. Witmer guide Irene to safety.
“It’s almost a mythological story, not a story about
•|• today or yesterday or tomorrow, so it was important that the
movie have an almost indefinable time period,” says director
of photography Newton Thomas Sigel, ASC. After Drive

I
t’sday 11 on the shooting schedule for Drive, the first
Hollywood movie from Danish director Nicolas Winding
Refn, who made his name on the international stage with
such projects as the Pusher trilogy, Bronson (AC Oct. ’09)
and Valhalla Rising. Refn has invited AC to the set, built on
the fourth floor of Los Angeles’ Park Plaza Hotel. With a
blanket wrapped snugly around his waist, the director leads
the way down a faux-brick hallway that opens into a room
featuring four mirrored walls outlined with vanity bulbs —
the dressing room of a strip club. It’s time, Refn says, “to
place the girls.”
Based on the crime novel by James Sallis, Drive
was in the can, Sigel spoke with AC by phone from the U.K.,
where he was shooting Jack the Giant Killer for Bryan Singer.
Drive marks Sigel’s first collaboration with Refn, and
the cinematographer recalls that when he was approached
about the project, “I took a look at Bronson and was really
impressed. It was clearly a film with a limited budget and
limited resources, but it had a very strong vision from the
director.”
“I met with a lot of wonderful cinematographers —
that’s the good thing about Hollywood, they’re all out here,”
says Refn. “But when I met Tom, I really dug his energy, and
his background as a documentary filmmaker made me confi-

28 October 2011 American Cinematographer

 dent we could make our seven-week
Unit photography by Richard Foreman Jr., SMPSP. Photos and frame grabs courtesy of Film District.

shooting schedule work. Plus, his first

film as a cameraman was Kenneth
Anger’s Lucifer Rising!”
Refn often cites avant-garde
filmmaker Anger as an influence. “The
first visual reference I showed Ryan in
regards to Drive was [Anger’s] Scorpio
Rising,” he says. “Ryan asked, ‘Why are
you showing me a movie with a lot of
guys working on motorcycles?’ And I
said, ‘It’s how it’s shot — the sensual,
sexual nature of it, the fetish, the objec-
tification. That’s what we should try to
go for.’”
In addition to Anger’s oeuvre,
Refn and Sigel were inspired by the
look of location-scout photos Sigel
snapped using the Hipstamatic app on
his iPhone. “There are some color
palettes in that program that reference
retro photographic looks, like Koda-
chrome or Ektrachrome,” says Sigel. “I
showed Nicolas some of the photos, Opposite: The unnamed Driver (Ryan Gosling) takes the wheel in Drive, directed by
Nicolas Winding Refn and photographed by Newton Thomas Sigel, ASC. This page, top: Driver
and he wasn’t certain of the strange becomes a thorn in the side of mob boss Bernie Rose (Albert Brooks). Bottom: Sigel plans a
tonalities, but he really responded to shot of Driver and Irene (Carey Mulligan).
the vibrancy of the colors. We designed

ww.theasc.com
w October 2011 29
◗ Road Warriors
a lot of sets and costumes to make use
of that kind of vibrant palette.”
Early in his month-long prep,
Sigel decided to shoot with Arri’s
Alexa digital camera. “We had a tight
budget and very little time, and I was
intrigued by the look I could get
shooting available light downtown,” he
explains. “I did some driving tests with
the Alexa, and it blew me away in
terms of what it could do with existing
light.
“I rated the camera at 800
[ASA],” he continues. “I think the
myth of digital is that you underexpose
because it can’t hold the highlights like
film. I find that when you underexpose
digital more than a little bit, very often
you increase your noise level signifi-
cantly. What’s extraordinary about the
Alexa is that even if I pushed the
sensor to 1,600 [ASA] there was very
little noise, and I could actually under-
expose quite a bit without introducing
noise in the blacks. The dynamic range
was mind-boggling.”
Top: Driver and The cinematographer adds that
Shannon (Bryan he typically shot nights and interiors
Cranston) talk
inside Shannon’s
around T2.8, and day exteriors around
garage. The T8.
location is Clairmont Camera in North
actually a
Hollywood
Hollywood provided the camera pack-
picture-car age. Sigel shot most of the picture
garage; the warm using the 15-40mm Angenieux
backlight was
provided by a 5K
Optimo zoom lens. “I also used Cooke
gelled with Rosco S4 primes for the daytime car interiors,
Urban Color. and Zeiss Master Primes for the night-
Middle: Refn
(left) talks
time car interiors.”
Gosling and He kept filtration to a mini-
Cranston through mum, although he occasionally
a scene that
shows Driver in
employed a Tiffen Soft/FX filter (in
his day job as a either 1⁄2 or 1 density) for diffusion.
Hollywood stunt “Nicolas really loves wide lenses,
driver. Bottom:
Driver flips a
like the 18mm and 21mm,” says Sigel.
police car for the “That’s a challenge when you’re trying
movie within the to get a lot of work done in a short
movie.
period of time. You tend to want to set
up multiple cameras and have the tele-
photo lens pick off close-ups while
you’re getting a two-shot, but we
limited that approach as much as we
could.
“Whenever there was a fight or
an act of violence, we’d get two

30 October 2011 American Cinematographer

cameras on it so we didn’t have to
repeat that action over and over,” adds Irene and
Driver’s
the cinematographer. apartments were
Sigel operated the A camera, built inside the
and Greg Lundsgaard served as B- Park Plaza Hotel,
and they were
camera/Steadicam operator. “I’d designed to
worked with Greg before,” says Sigel. function like a
“He’s got a good eye, and I’m very practical
location. The
confident in what he does.” common corridor
By the time Sigel joined the (top and
production, it was a given that the bottom) was lit
with 250-watt
entire shoot would happen in and Photofloods
around L.A. The Park Plaza Hotel fitted inside wall
became one of the production’s hubs. sconces.
The location provided ample space to
build the strip club’s dressing room, the
design of which grew out of Sigel’s
preproduction discussions with Refn
and production designer Beth Mickle.
Sigel recalls, “I mentioned that on
Frankie & Alice,we created a dressing
room that had tables at different
angles, so when we shot we got layers
and layers of detail in the mirrors.
Nicolas took that idea one step further
and said, ‘Let’s make it all mirrors.’ So
we basically made a mirror box — it
reminded me of a Lucas Samaras
sculpture — and it was just lit with
practical light.
“We had one shot where we had
to do a 360-degree camera move,”

ww.theasc.com
w October 2011 31
 •|• “Pretty in Pink With a Head Smash”
I ’d come down with the flu and had
taken some anti-flu drugs before
meeting with Ryan Gosling about
Drive, and I was high as a kite through
dinner. Halfway through the meal, I
asked if he could take me home,
because I needed to lie down. It was like
a blind date gone bad. In the car, Ryan
turned on the radio, and REO
Speedwagon’s “Can’t Fight This
Feeling” started to play. I was so out of
it I started crying, turned the radio up
and began singing. Then I turned to
Ryan and screamed, “I know what
Drive is! It’s about a man who drives
around at night listening to pop music
because that’s his emotional release!”
Ryan said, “Okay,” and that’s how
the film was born.
I loved James Sallis’ book. It’s an
existential story about a stuntman who’s
also a getaway driver. He lives in
Hollywood, he can’t quite deal with
reality, and he goes a bit psychotic at the
end. Driver is two people: by day he
works in Hollywood, and at night he
drives in an almost armored suit. I
wanted him to be like a superhero in
the making.
I wanted to make Drive an L.A.
fairytale, which is what Sallis’ book is.
To make the violence feel extreme, I
had to make the first half of the movie
very pure and sentimental, almost like a
John Hughes movie. Then it goes really
violent. It’s like Pretty in Pink with a
head smash.
I spent a lot of time redesigning
the script with Hoss Amini, who
adapted the book, and Ryan. We had
the whole movie on index cards, and
we’d move things around on the living-
room table. Then, at night, Ryan drove
me around and showed me Los
Angeles. We were almost living the
movie as we were writing it.
I felt I would benefit from work-
ing with a Hollywood cinematogra-
pher. While talking with Tom Sigel
[ASC], it quickly became clear that we
had similar tastes and understandings. I
32 October 2011
explained to him that I don’t do a lot of
coverage, and I like wide-angle lenses
because I want depth. I wanted to go
with a classical style, which I felt would
give the film its own identity. Also, I’m
colorblind, so I told Tom and Beth
Mickle, the production designer, “I
need contrasting colors, and I like a lot
of red.” It was a wonderful collabora-
tion.
There are so many movies where
you see cars spin and fly. With our
budget, we couldn’t even get close to
that kind of action, so I wanted to see if
I could define each driving scene specif-
ically. I did something similar on
Bronson, in which each of the three
fight scenes had a different feel. I don’t
have a driver’s license, but I’ve always
been fascinated by speed, and I also
have a fetish for curves, so I wanted to
shoot the cars how I would see them
sexually. I’m very much a fetish film-
maker; I make films out of what I
would like to see.
Visually and technically, I try to
make every film different. We shot a lot
of Drive in slow motion because I love
that language.
Shooting with the Alexa was a
blessing. I don’t see it as a replacement
for 35mm negative, which is a unique
thing we’ll never find a substitute for,
American Cinematographer
•|•
but as another canvas.
I stipulated in my contract that
my editor, Matt Newman, would edit
the film with me. When we make the
first cut, we make the movie incoherent
just to see what it is not. By doing that,
you can see if there might be other ways
of putting the movie together. Then we
start cutting it more as planned. It’s a
constant discovery process, which I like.
Showing Drive at Cannes was
very joyful because I’d been able to make
the movie I wanted to make, which in
itself is always a battle. I’d been nervous
that working in Hollywood would
mean I might not have the control I
usually have. But Ryan had director
approval, and he protected me — it was
a similar situation to when Lee Marvin
insisted on John Boorman directing
Point Blank — and producers Adam
Siegel and Marc Platt were also very
respectful. There are a lot of smart
people in Hollywood. I was in good
hands.
Coming from Europe to make
films in Hollywood, it’s almost like
you’re living the dreams of all the
European filmmakers who came to
Hollywood from the very beginning.
You can make your film within the
system. There’s still hope.
— Nicolas Winding Refn
 Sigel continues. To avoid seeing the
camera’s reflection in the mirrors, “key
grip Alex Klabukov created a rig from
the ceiling that was almost like a heli-
copter blade — the camera sat on it
and spun around above the actors, just
barely out of shot.”
As the crew prepares to shoot in
the dressing room, Refn places the
extras playing the strippers and gives
them directions. In the scene, Driver
enters the dressing room and takes a
hammer to the hand of Cook (James
Biberi), the club’s proprietor, and then
throws him to the ground, demanding
information about the heist that went
bad. As the violence erupts, some of
the strippers make a speedy exit, while
others stay seated around the perime-
ter, waiting for the outburst to subside.
For much of the scene, Sigel and
Lundsgaard sit tucked in a corner of
the set, rolling two cameras.
Lundsgaard keeps his camera trained
on Cook, Sigel follows Driver, and as
the actors move through the frame, the
bare bulbs positioned around the
mirrored walls occasionally flare the
lenses. “The globes were 40 or 60
watts, and they had a sort of mauve
color,” says gaffer Anthony “Nako”
Nakonechnyj, one of Sigel’s longtime
collaborators. “We would turn off
globes we didn’t see to increase the
Top: In this frame
contrast, and we could dim them down grab, Driver
if they were too bright or were flaring navigates Los
the lens.” Angeles'
nighttime streets.
The Park Plaza also housed Middle: Sigel
Driver’s and Irene’s apartments, which checks the lights
were designed to function like practi- rigged to Driver's
car for the
cal locations. A common corridor was nighttime driving
constructed, and doors along the corri- sequences.
dor opened into the actual apartment Bottom: An Arri
Alexa was rigged
sets. Additionally, the set’s windows
Bottom photo by Newton Thomas Sigel.

off the front of a

lined up with the Park Plaza’s real stock car to
windows, providing a view of down- capture action
around a
town L.A. racetrack. Sigel
Sigel recalls that the floor used took this photo
for the apartments was “way up, using the
Hipstamatic app,
beyond where you can reach with and he notes that
Condors for exterior lighting. The Refn "responded
challenge was balancing the light to the vibrancy of
the colors."
inside in a quick and efficient way, and
that’s where the Alexa was great. We

ww.theasc.com
w October 2011 33
◗ Road Warriors
Right: Driver
demands
information from
Blanche (Christina
Hendricks) after a
heist goes awry. In
the background,
Refn and Sigel
discuss the frame
while 1st AC Nino
Neuboeck stands
at the ready.
Below: When
armed thugs storm
the motel, Driver
responds with a
shocking burst of
violence. He
surveys the
resulting carnage
in this frame grab;
the light coming
through the
window behind
him was provided
by an Arrimax 18K.

Los Angeles Center Studios.

had a lot of plans about how to gel the
windows, but once we got in there, I
didn’t need to use all of those tricks
because the camera had more dynamic
range than I expected.”
To supplement the practicals
inside the apartments, the crew regu-
larly employed Kino Flo 4' two-bank
fixtures fitted with K32 3,200°K tubes,
as well as several varieties of small,
homemade instruments that housed
dimmable Photofloods. The common
corridor was lit primarily with 250-
watt Photofloods fitted inside sconces
and “dimmed down as needed,” says
Nako. Sigel adds, “We always go
through a dimmer system. It’s faster
and gives you more control.”
At one end of the corridor, the
crew also constructed an elevator set.
To sell the impression that the elevator
was moving from one floor to another,
the art department would redress the
hallway just outside the elevator to
appear as different floors. For shots in
which the doors open to reveal the
parking garage, the crew actually
rebuilt the elevator set in a garage at
There, Nako explains, “we
changed out all the globes and
replaced them with 4-foot
Kino Flo 3200s. We also
added kicks and sheens with
some 10Ks, and we did some
raking with Mole Baby 2Ks
with Small Quartz Plus
Chimeras; the Chimeras
usually wore a Quarter Grid
Front and a 40-degree
Lighttools LCD [light-
control device].”
The elevator is the setting for a
crucial scene in which Driver and
Irene find themselves sharing a ride
with a hit man (Christian Cage) who’s
been sent to kill them. Glimpsing the
killer’s holstered gun, Driver gently
pushes Irene toward the back corner;
the lights dim, and, in slow motion,
Driver turns and kisses Irene. Nako
explains, “The units in the elevator
were recessed can lights with 75-watt
JDR Spot Globes. We also added what
I call a ‘Mini Space Light,’ a variation
on the covered wagon. All the lights in

34 October 2011 American Cinematographer

 CUT. SHAPE. FOCUS. TUNE.

ARRI introduces the first LED-based lights to truly match the versatility and homogeneity
of conventional tungsten Fresnels: a new generation of focusable, tuneable lights that offers complete
control, combining breakthrough performance with incredible efficiency.

www.arri.com/l-series
◗ Road Warriors
the elevator were controlled by a
dimmer board.”
The lights come back up to their
normal level, and then, with the camera
again rolling at 24 fps, Driver spins and
smashes the man’s face into the eleva-
tor’s controls. A brief struggle ensues,
ending when Driver literally kicks in
the man’s face. “It’s the ultimate irony,
going into this act of violence from his
36 October 2011
one good moment of love,” Sigel
muses. “When Irene walks out of the
elevator and looks back at Driver, this
wild animal, you realize it’s over
between them.”
“There’s a scene in every one of
my films that is the heart of the movie,
and in Drive it’s the elevator scene,”
says Refn. “It was a way to tip the
viewer to Driver’s essential dilemma.
American Cinematographer
This strip-club set was also constructed inside the Park
Plaza Hotel. The hallway (top left) was lit primarily
with 75-watt quartz-halogen globes inside the wall
sconces, while the dressing room (top right) was lit
with the practical vanity bulbs visible in frame. To
capture a 360-degree camera move without seeing the
camera in the mirrored walls, the crew suspended a
circular rig above the set (bottom left).
You don’t know if it’s his fantasy or his
reality, and he doesn’t quite know
himself.”
The head smash “was very much
inspired by Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible
[AC April ’03],” adds Refn. “Gaspar
talked me through how he did it.”
For Drive, visual-effects supervi-
sor Jerry Spivack oversaw the digital
compositing of the actor’s body with a
prosthetic head. Similar work was also
done for an earlier scene in which
Bottom photo by Newton Thomas Sigel.
Driver and Blanche (Christina
Hendricks), an accomplice in the ill-
fated heist, hole up in a tiny motel
room. When armed thugs break into
the room, one shoots Blanche in the
head. Sigel explains that the special-
effects department “built a prosthetic
head and blew it up, and we
photographed it at high speed [using a
Weisscam HS-2 recording at 250 fps].
◗ Road Warriors
We also photographed Christina at
high speed, and then the visual-effects
team combined the heads to create the
effect of her head being blown off.
“Trying to light someone in a
practical bathroom not big enough to
fit two people was a challenge,” Sigel
Top: Driver and
continues. “Fortunately, there was a
Irene find window we could light from, but we
themselves in needed to add 2 1⁄2 more stops to
an elevator
with a hit man
accommodate the high speed. To make
(Christian matters worse, there was a tree right
Gage) sent to outside the window. Nonetheless, the
kill them.
Middle: Sigel
judicious use of an 18K Arrimax did
frames the the trick.
action while “Nicolas wanted the moments of
Refn confabs
with the
violence to be incredibly visceral,” the
actors. “There’s cinematographer continues. “He
a scene in wanted to go for the gore. The bulk of
every one of
my films that
the film is not violent, but when it does
is the heart of turn to violence, it really is horrific.”
the movie, and Refn says his approach to the
in Drive it’s the
elevator
film’s violence was in keeping with the
scene,” says fairytale elements he saw in the story,
Refn. Bottom: with Gosling playing “the knight, and
Sigel preps a
shot that looks
Carey as the innocent girl whose purity
outside the needs to be protected. When violence
elevator. comes in a fairytale, it’s always very
brutal, in very short sentences, and
characters die very violently.”
“Nicolas talks metaphorically
about character,” notes Sigel. “Even
when he was describing the tone of the
car sequences, it was as if the car was an
extension of Driver, like he was part
man, part machine.”
Finding the character within the
driving sequences was crucial for Refn,
who doesn’t have a driver’s license. “I
have no interest in driving and no inter-
est in cars,” says the director. “But this is
a movie about a man who happens to
drive a car, not a movie about cars.”
Sigel says Refn “wanted the film’s
three main driving sequences to each
have its own character and not be a
traditional car chase. It wasn’t so much
about being loud and noisy as it was
about having a defined tonality.”
Those three sequences were all
shot during the final two weeks of
production. In the first sequence,
Driver navigates a silver Chevy Impala
through downtown L.A. at night, evad-

38 October 2011 American Cinematographer

◗ Road Warriors

ing the police and delivering two

thieves to the parking lot of the Staples
Center, where they and Driver disap-
pear into the crowd.
“That first chase is meant to be
very subjective,” says Sigel. “For the
bulk of it, [we] don’t even leave the car
— the whole sequence is from Driver’s
point of view.” To position cameras in
and around the car, Klabukov and his
crew rigged high hats inside and
speed-rail rigs along the outside.
“As part of my test, I took Ryan
out in a car, and Tony and I rigged the
car with a rack overhead with all differ-
ent kinds of tiny lights, such as LEDs
and 150-watt [Arri Fresnels],” says
Sigel. “We wired them all into
dimmers in the trunk that could be
wirelessly controlled, so we could turn
lights off and on or dim them up and
down. The lights were all so small and
unobtrusive that they were never in
shot, so Ryan could just drive around
while Tony played the roof rack like a
musical instrument. There were also
times when we’d kill all of our lights —
we’d pull up to a stoplight, and you
could see the light on Ryan’s face go
from red to green.”
For the shoot, the filmmakers
refined the system they had utilized for
Driver hunts Nino (Ron Perlman, in frame grab above) at night in the film’s final the test and continued to light primar-
chase sequence, which culminates in a crash that sends Nino’s car hurtling onto the
beach. The sequence was filmed at Malibu’s Point Mugu, where the production set up
ily from the roof-mounted speed-rail
the sodium-vapor streetlamps shown here. rig, which sat like a halo atop the car.
Off of the rig, the crew positioned Arri

40 October 2011 American Cinematographer

150-watt tungsten units, some gelled
with Rosco Urban Color #3152 or Lee
Fluorescent 5,700°K #241, to supple-
ment the output of sodium-vapor and
mercury-vapor practicals. Nako also
employed what he calls “D-Lights. Josh
Stern, my best boy, and I designed these
housings that look like an iPhone and
[fitted them with] LiteRibbon LEDs
from LiteGear.” Some of the D-Lights
contained hybrid LiteRibbons, which
allowed Nako to switch between tung-
sten and daylight color temperatures,
and others contained RGB strips, which
allowed for a wider array of colors.
Nako and his crew also placed D-
Lights inside the car, along with what
the gaffer calls “LED Sticks,” strips of
Hybrid or RGB LiteRibbon fitted
inside 3", 6" or 12" lengths of aluminum
channel. “We used the 12-inch on the
windshield [to supplement] the red-
light/green-light effect, and we used a
3-inch LED Stick in the instrument-
panel area to provide some glow,” says
Nako.
To power all the lights in and
around the car, the crew placed a 12-
volt 150AH MF Truck battery in the
Impala’s trunk. “They put a bigger alter-
nator in the motor, so the battery was
being charged by the engine of the car
as we drove,” explains Nako. “The
battery pushed 32 channels of 12-volt.
Each D-Light was either two or
three channels — the RGB had three
channels and the hybrids had two chan-
nels. I also had two 6-by-1.2K
Lightronics dimmer packs on top of the
car for the Arri 150s, and the whole
system was being controlled by wireless
DMX, so we could chase the car with
the follow van, where I had the ETC
Smart Fade ML dimmer board.”
The second car chase takes place
during the day and begins with the heist
gone wrong, which leaves Standard
dead at the scene. As Driver and
Blanche speed away in a black Ford
Mustang, a Chrysler 300 sedan with
tinted windows begins its pursuit. “I
loved the idea of this strange extra car,”
says Refn. “My reference was when
Cary Grant runs in the crop field in
North by Northwest. The plane comes,
and you don’t really know why it’s
there; it’s a dreamlike situation.” The
director was equally inspired by Claude
Lelouch’s short film Rendezvous, in
which a car tears through the streets of
Paris while the revving engine fills the
soundtrack. Refn recalls, “I said, ‘What
if I did a chase that’s all about the
sound of the cars?’”
In terms of coverage, says Sigel,
“the second car chase is meant to be the
most traditional. The twist at the end is
that Driver’s ability to overcome the car
that’s chasing him is done by a bit of
trickery: spinning his car around and
driving backwards. It’s almost like a
tongue-in-cheek play on the climactic
moment of a traditional car chase.”
The sequence was shot over two
days around the Templin Highway exit
off of Interstate 5. AC visited the loca-
tion on the second day and found the
crew busy prepping the climax of the
chase, when Driver puts his Mustang
through a 270-degree spin to separate
himself from the Chrysler, which then
caroms off a guardrail. The Chrysler’s
crash is seen through the rear wind-
shield of the Mustang as Hendricks
“freaks out in the foreground,” says
Sigel; the shot was captured with an
Alexa locked down where the front
passenger seat would normally be, next
to the precision driver who took the
wheel for the stunt.
Despite the heat, Refn was again
wearing a blanket around his waist as
he oversaw the proceedings on loca-
tion. In addition to the Alexa in the
Mustang, the crew was prepping a
number of other cameras to ensure the
crash would not require more than one
take; the other cameras included an
Alexa on a remote head positioned
along the side of the road, another on a
Mercedes SUV-mounted Ultimate
Arm, and an Iconix HD-RH1 on the
Mustang’s dashboard.
Sigel notes that he also “set up
my [Canon EOS] 5D in a fixed-
camera position to get more coverage.
Every time I pulled out my 5D, it
ended up being used, just because you
41
 ◗ Road Warriors
hunts Nino at night and runs the gang-
Driver ster’s car off the road. Driver then drives
approaches his
ride along one straight into the side of Nino’s car with
of Los Angeles’ enough force to send it toppling over a
seedier cliff.
backstreets.
Sigel says that The sequence was filmed at
Drive is “almost Malibu’s Point Mugu, where the
a mythological production occupied a parking lot that
story, not a
story about overlooked the stretch of beach where
today or Nino’s car lands. To backlight the crash,
yesterday or Sigel and Nako employed a 16-head
tomorrow, so it
was important and a 9-head Bebee Night Light, and
that the movie for fill they utilized 4' tungsten spheres
have an almost rented from Skylight Lighting
indefinable
time period.” Balloons. Additionally, the crew
brought in “cobra head” sodium-vapor
streetlamps, which play in frame behind
can put that camera where you would- far, we kept them to an absolute mini- Driver as he walks onto the beach and
n’t dare put an Alexa.” However, the mum.” chases Nino into the crashing surf. The
cinematographer adds, “in prep, focus Sigel describes Drive’s third and streetlamps’ warm backlight was further
puller Nino Neuboeck and I tested the final chase sequence as “the most supplemented by “what I call Light
5D, 7D and Iconix cameras, thinking predatory.” Having traced his problems Grenades, bare sodium-vapor globes
they would come in handy for the car since the heist back to crime boss that we could easily move around and
work, but the quality of the Alexa Bernie Rose (Albert Brooks) and his flag off, depending on what effect was
outdistanced the other cameras by so associate, Nino (Ron Perlman), Driver needed,” says Nako.

42
 “Another big effect we had on
the beach was a searchlight, which was
actually a 7K Xenon bounced into a
spinning 4-by-4 mirror,” the gaffer
continues. “Then, when the camera
looks at the ocean, we turned the 16-
head Bebee toward the water and lit the
atmosphere above it, so we could actu-
ally see the ocean.”
Throughout the shoot, the film-
makers recorded out from the Alexa to
HDCam-SR tape. The camera was
also monitored through a FilmLight
Trulight On-Set system, which was
overseen by digital-imaging technician
Ryan Nguyen. Sigel explains that the
Trulight system allowed the filmmak-
ers to do “real-time color correction on
the set. We didn’t do anything radical,
but we’d add some contrast and a little
bit of saturation. All of the [metadata]
would be recorded on a Flash drive
that would go to FotoKem, where
[colorist/ASC associate member]
Mark Van Horne, whom I’ve known
for many years, was kind enough to sit
in during the transfer. Mark knew the
look I was going for, and if he saw
something going in the wrong direc-
tion, he’d make some corrections and
give me a call. It was a very simple and
easy system.
“Because of all the work we did
with the Trulight, the DI was pretty
simple,” continues Sigel. The final
digital grade was carried out at
Company 3’s New York facility with
colorist Tom Poole; Sigel also did some
preliminary work with colorist Stephen
Nakamura.
Drive had its premiere at this
year’s Cannes Film Festival, where
Refn received the award for Best
Director. In a conversation with the
director a few months later, AC at last
asked the pressing question: What’s
the deal with that blanket he wears
on set?
“It’s a ritual I’ve had since my
first movie,” says Refn. “On all my
films, I find a blanket in the costume
department, and I wrap it around my
stomach to keep the energy within me.
I only take it off if I’m very, very angry
or very, very hot. It keeps my stomach
warm, which centers me and gives
me peace. Filmmaking is a stressful
experience.” ●
TECHNICAL SPECS
2.40:1
Digital Capture
Arri Alexa,
Weisscam HS-2 MK2,
Canon EOS 5D Mark II,
Iconix HD-RH1
Angenieux Optimo, Cooke S4,
Arri/Zeiss Master Prime

WORLD CLASS HMI

COME SEE THE LIGHT

BRILLIANT HMI LIGHTING SOLUTIONS AVAILABLE FOR RENTAL AT THESE PREFERRED LOCATIONS:

ADORAMA RENTAL CO

distributed by www.bronimaging.com (800) 456-0203

43
 Man
of
Action
Roberto Schaefer, ASC, AIC takes
aim at Machine Gun Preacher, his
ninth feature collaboration with
director Marc Forster.
By David Heuring
•|•
T
he new drama Machine Gun Preacher is loosely based on
the life of Sam Childers (played by Gerard Butler), a
biker and ex-con in Pittsburgh who experienced a reli-
gious conversion and subsequently dedicated himself to
helping war orphans in Sudan. He and his wife, Lynn, oper-
ate Angels of East Africa, the Children’s Village Orphanage
in Nimule, Sudan.
When director Marc Forster began discussing the film
44 October 2011 American Cinematographer
with longtime collaborator Roberto Schaefer, ASC, AIC,
they agreed that the story, whose locations encompass urban
and suburban Pittsburgh and various sites in Africa, presented
a stylistic conundrum. “It seemed to want an epic feel, but
without gloss,” says Schaefer. “We were after an immediate,
down-and-dirty feel that people could relate to, but we also
wanted to do justice to the sequences in Africa, which have
landscapes and a lot of big action sequences.”
They decided to shoot Super 16mm with the new
Hawk 1.3x anamorphic lenses from Vantage Film in
Germany. “We felt that would make the most of the horizon-
tal landscapes and also deliver the intimacy that anamorphic
can bring,” says Schaefer. “We chose the format for aesthetic
reasons, but we also knew we’d be able to move a lot faster
because the cameras are small. Marc wanted to shoot a lot of
material handheld with two cameras, and I think handheld
has a more natural feel with Super 16. We also felt the smaller
cameras would be less intimidating for the many children in
our cast.
“Shooting film helped in difficult circumstances —
 bright daylight, high-contrast situations
and dark nights,” he adds. “As for the
grain, we embraced it!”
The 52-day schedule involved
locations in Detroit, standing in for
Pittsburgh, and the area around
Johannesburg, South Africa, standing in
for Sudan and Uganda.
After Schaefer tested Hawk V-
Series anamorphic lenses and experi-
mented with Arri Relativity, a software
package that facilitates grain manage-
ment, he and Forster decided to shoot a
few large-scale wide shots in Africa and
Michigan on 35mm. “When you shoot
very-wide-angle shots in Super 16, shots
with a lot of distance and depth and
small objects deep in the frame, you
sometimes lose a bit of the detail because
the resolution isn’t the same as with
35mm film,” explains the cinematogra-
pher. “So we shot some of the very big
wide shots on 35mm, and we went
spherical because I knew I wouldn’t use
the full negative. I knew I could cut into
those images and use Relativity to fine-
tune the grain so it would match the
Unit photography by Phil Bray and Ilze Kitshoff, courtesy of Relativity Media and MGP Productions, LLC.

16mm material.”
Schaefer’s prep also included test-
ing every 16mm negative available. “I
took everything into account — look,
grain structure, color rendition,” he says.
“We decided to use Kodak [Vision3
250D] 7207 for day exteriors and most
day interiors, and [Vision3 500T] 7219
for night scenes and some darker day
interiors.”
Over the course of their collabo-
rations, which have included Quantum
of Solace (AC Nov. ’08), The Kite Runner
(AC Nov. ’07) and Monster’s Ball,
Schaefer and Forster have refined their
planning method. “We come up with a
plan book that includes every location or
set drawing,” says Schaefer, “and we
spend weeks going over it. Marc tells me
where he wants the actors and how the
action should happen. I’ll take notes and
make diagrams with arrows that indicate
movement based on how I feel the scene Opposite page: Sam Childers (Gerard Butler) prepares to confront the Lord’s Resistance
should be represented and shot. I’ll make Army in Sudan. This page, top: After robbing a crack house, Childers and a friend
(Michael Shannon, right) make a fateful decision to give a stranger a ride. Middle: Childers
camera positions and lens notations, and embarks on a new path by choosing to be baptized. Bottom: Roberto Schaefer, ASC, AIC (left)
say when there should be a crane, a confers with director Marc Forster.
Steadicam, dolly or handheld. The

ww.theasc.com
w October 2011 45
◗ ManofAction

Top: Children who

have taken
refuge at
Childers’
orphanage
welcome their
hero back to
Sudan. Bottom:
Burning trees
illuminate the
action as the
Lord’s Resistance
Army attacks a
village.

and execute the shot.”

results look like football-play diagrams.
“We don’t hold to it 100 percent
because we want to be creative when we
are out there on set,” he continues. “If
something better or more exciting
comes up, great. But our prep moves us
a lot closer to a feeling and a look, and
the plan book helps us stay true to the
story points. It keeps us from jumping
all over the place and saying, ‘This will
look really cool here,’ when that idea
won’t work in the cut or the arc of the
story.
“I liken it to a story I heard about
Minor White, the nature photogra-
pher,” he adds. “He did what he called
Zen photography, where he would walk
through nature without a camera, just
seeing things. Then he would plan
everything in his head and then go back
One early scene shot in Michigan
shows Childers and a friend (played by
Michael Shannon) robbing a crack
house and then partying in their car.
The production found a real crack
house in downtown Detroit that was so
convincing the art department actually
had to clean it up a bit for the shoot.
“We used two cameras for most of that
scene,” Schaefer recalls. “We tried to
light it very craftily with practicalsso it
would feel real.”
His collaborations with Forster
have made him well versed in how to
light and shoot in tiny locations, he
notes. The Detroit crack house had a 7'-
high ceiling, and the main room
measured about 8'x6'. “We had to bring
in some light from outside, mostly
mercury-vapor streetlight through the
windows,” he says. “We were trying to
fit all the actors and two cameras in
there while keeping our angles and
maintaining a dramatic look. I don’t like
overly shaky handheld, especially on the
big screen — I think it alienates the
audience. So we had to plan our shots
very well.”
Schaefer usually operated the B

46 October 2011 American Cinematographer

 Top: Childers
takes the pulpit
to welcome
congregates to
his own church.
Bottom: The
preacher’s wife
(Michelle
Monaghan) and
daughter
(Madeline Carroll)
see him off at
the airport.

camera, working with A-camera/

Steadicam operator Jim McConkey.
The A and B cameras were Arri 416s,
and if additional cameras were needed
the team turned to Arri 16SR-2s. The
416s were equipped with 1.3x “de-
squeeze” viewfinders provided by
Vantage Film. Other cameras had regu-
lar finders, meaning that the image in
the finder was squeezed. “Honestly, the
1.3x squeeze is not all that difficult to
work with,” says Schaefer. “We had no
complaints.
“The biggest challenge presented
by the format, as is often the case with
anamorphic, was close focus,” he
continues. “You can’t really get any
closer than about 3 feet. Sometimes you
want to get in the actor’s face, but you
just can’t do it. Vantage has a beautiful
rectangular diopter that slides right into
the matte box, and we used it on about
half a dozen close-up detail shots, but ors and exteriors, requiring 12K HMIs At the beginning of the film,
you’re still limited in how much you can through windows to create balance. One Childers is released from prison, and it
move. Otherwise, shooting anamorphic house location had extensive greenery isn’t long before he gets into trouble
did not slow us down at all in either that the crew covered with muslin to again. Out of desperation, he agrees to
Michigan or South Africa.” prevent a green cast from reflecting into attend church with his wife, Lynn
Most of the scenes shot in interior scenes. For night exteriors in (Michelle Monaghan), a former strip-
Michigan didn’t require a big lighting Detroit, Schaefer mostly went with per who changed her ways while he was
package. Some day scenes mixed interi- existing streetlight. incarcerated. After his religious conver-

ww.theasc.com
w October 2011 47
◗ ManofAction
Childers happily
returns to Africa
to check on
progress at the
orphanage.
sion, Childers is inspired by a visiting
preacher who describes his experiences
in Africa, and he decides to go there to
help out. Soon he is carrying an AK-47
and trying to rescue children who have
been rounded up to serve as soldiers. He
decides to raise money to build an
orphanage in the middle of the war
zone.
Night action in Africa was essen-
tially lit by a pale moonlight source, a
100K SoftSun that was usually 400'
away on a construction crane, and prac-
tical sources such as gas lamps, camp-
fires and, in one instance, burning huts.
“The SoftSun was 1 1⁄2 to 2 stops
under,” says Schaefer. “I was happy
because material we shot in very dark
conditions came out brilliantly, so tight
and beautiful. I pushed 7219 by 1 stop,
and it actually came out less grainy than
I wanted it to be. The stock held up so
well that if I ever do another 16mm
anamorphic film, I might shoot regular
16mm with a 2x anamorphic lens,
which would give me more of that
anamorphic feel.”
Although the lighting was often
minimal, Schaefer emphasizes that the
coverage style was cinematic. “We didn’t
want this to feel like a documentary,” he
48 October 2011
says. “We wanted it to feel like a ‘major
motion picture,’ if you will, with almost
classic Western imaging at times, heroic
stances. It’s not super smooth, but it
feels like something very big and excit-
ing is happening.”
One night scene that challenged
Schaefer called for three pages of
dialogue and near-total darkness.
Childers and some of his African
friends are driving on a remote road at
night when a vehicle approaches them
and suddenly explodes. A shootout
ensues. “You have to make your choices
for a scene like that,” says Schaefer. “At
first, in close shots in Sam’s jeep, there’s
a little bit of dashboard light on their
faces. The truck exploding gives us
something to use — it gives us a glimpse
of their surroundings. Once Sam and
the others get out of the jeep, they’re lit
by their own headlights. Then they start
shooting at the guys running away and
are only lit by their gunfire bursts. Our
lighting was that minimalistic for much
of the shoot.”
If the lighting aspect of the shoot
was relatively small, the grip logistics
were major. “I was amazed by the South
African crew, especially our key grip,
Guy Micheletti, who was recom-
American Cinematographer
mended to me by Daniel Craig,”
Schaefer says. “Guy is unbelievably
resourceful; he could devise any gag or
gimmick to mount the camera at a
moment’s notice, including motor
mounts that allowed the operator to
wobble or shake the camera in a
controlled way. He has developed a lot
of stuff of his own, including these great
20-foot-long, single-piece dolly-track
sections called Dragon Precision Tracks.
They stay perfectly aligned and level
very quickly, and actors or operators can
run right down the middle.”
Micheletti says he designed the
Dragon Precision Tracks out of frustra-
tion. “I was seeking a design that would
make laying track easier,” he says. “I
wanted a smooth ride and a more imag-
inative, versatile configuration. There
are no cross joiners. You can lay them in
any width that works. They accept most
cranes and dollies. On a number of
occasions, we set up an 8-foot-wide
steel deck with skate wheels, creating
the ability to put two dollies on the track
at the same time.”
Micheletti says the prevailing
weather conditions in and around Cape
Town, where he is based, have
prompted him to develop a variety of
 ◗ ManofAction
Gaffer Scott Spencer joins Schaefer behind the camera.
strategies and equipment for controlling
wind. Some of these were used on
Machine Gun Preacher, including screens
as large as 60'x20' constructed of shade
cloth, which stops 80 percent of the
50
wind but allows 50 percent of the light
to pass through. The screens were
staked and allowed to fly without a
frame, like a sail. The same material was
used to reduce wind around day-for-
night sets to minimize extraneous
sound. In walk-and-talk situations, two
15'x20' frames were held by grips in a V
shape and carried along, thus reducing
the wind’s impact on Steadicam opera-
tor McConkey while improving sound
conditions.
During the shoot, Schaefer used
Gamma & Density’s 3cP System to
send color-corrected stills to the
production’s dailies timers. “For the
most part, we had very good dailies,” he
says. “I pretty much shot the negative
for where I wanted it to sit, the sweet
spot. In the final digital grade, which we
did at Company 3 with Stephen
Nakamura, we crushed a few scenes
slightly or opened it up a bit here and
there. We also did some reframing of
the 35mm shots and some aerial shots.
Stephen is a brilliant colorist who
knows what I need and want.”
Visual-effects house Buf, which
created the visual effects for the show,
also did the final scanning of the 16mm
and 35mm negatives. The Super 16
footage was scanned at 2K, and the
“unsqueeze” was done digitally. Schaefer
found Buf’s willingness to work with
the unusual format was refreshing. “In
the past, I’ve encountered resistance
from visual-effects companies about
shooting Super 16 anamorphic,” he
says. “In some instances, I wasn’t able to
shoot anamorphic because they said
they didn’t have the time or money to
achieve the desired quality, because each
lens would have to be tracked separately,
making it a much more difficult process.
With the advent of auto-tracking, I
believe that has changed. Still, there
were some concerns about shooting
Super 16 — some [effects facilities] said
it would be too grainy, and that there
would be weave. Fortunately, Buf said,
‘No problem,’ and we forged straight
ahead.”
Once the digital grade was
completed, FotoKem took care of the
grain management, but Schaefer notes
that this work was not extensive. “In Childers was in. Grain creates a visceral
general, we felt the grain was right response; it’s difficult to say exactly how
where it should be on much of the film. it works or what it does. Making those
The producers agreed from the begin- aesthetic choices is what makes the
ning to use Estar-based Kodak [Vision3 cinematographer’s job so interesting.”
2254] intermediate film, which can be ●
used to make close to 2,000 direct
prints. That eliminates three generations
in the post path, which is where most of
the grain gets introduced.”
Schaefer has given a lot of TECHNICAL SPECS
thought to the way grain impacts an
2.40:1
audience. “If there’s no grain or no noise
in the image, I think it can feel too real Super 16mm and
to people, and that takes away some of 4-perf Super 35mm
the magic of being in a cinema,” he
observes. “On the other hand, if you Arri 416, 16SR-2, 435
have a whole lot of grain bobbling all Hawk V-Series, Angenieux,
over the place, it can feel like bad late- Zeiss Distagon
night TV or extreme documentary stuff
shot undercover. For this film, we Kodak Vision3 500T 7219,
wanted just enough grain to have a cine- 250D 7207/5207
matic quality, and to provoke a kind of Digital Intermediate
nostalgia in the viewer. We wanted the
image to have a touch of the dirt that

w ww.panther.tv
www.panther.tv

Pa nt h e r
Panther D olly
Dolly
new dolly
The new dolly generation
g e n e rat i o n
• LLowest
owest ccolumn
olumn dolly due ttoo 3-stage ccolumn
olumn
• EEquipped
quipped with the new H igh-Low TTurnstile
High-Low urnstile
3-stage ccolumn
olu • New Limit pr ogramming
programming
• New ccombined
ombined high-lo w-platform cconcept
high-low-platform oncept
• C rab, FFront
Crab, ront and R ear st
Rear eering
steering

3 steering modes
steering

TTo
o get flexibility
flexibility and speed on set
set,, a low camer
low cameraa position on dolly is the crucial fac tor.
factor.
TThe
he TTristar
ristar in ccomparison
omparison to
to other dollies:
Magnum
PeeWee 4

Classic
PeeWee
Tristar
Tristar

Primo

TThe
he ccomparison
omparison is the height
height of bo
bowl/mitchell
wl/mitchell moun enter position aatt lo
mountt in ccenter west ccolumn/arm
lowest olumn/arm position.
PANTHER GmbH
PANTHER GmbH Camadeus
Camadeus FilmFilm Technologies
Technologies
R aiffeisenallee 33 | | 882041
Raiffeisenallee 2041 MMunich
unich | |GGermany
e r m a ny 7358 R a d fo r d A
7358 Radford ve. | N
Ave. or th H
North o l l y wo o d, C
Hollywood, CAA 91605
91605
+49.89.613 900–01
T +49.89.613 900–01 | F +49.89.61
+49.89.61 3
31100000 +818-764-1234 ccontact@panther.us
T +818-764-1234 ontac t@panther.us
contac t@panther.tv | w
contact@panther.tv w w.panther.tv
www.panther.tv w w w.panther.us
www.panther.us

51
 Home
Invasion
W
Alik Sakharov, ASC helps
Rod Lurie remake the 1970s
classic Straw Dogs.
hen director Rod Lurie phoned Alik Sakharov, ASC a
couple of years ago and asked if he wanted to shoot a
remake of Sam Peckinpah’s violent drama Straw Dogs
(1971), the cinematographer told him, “Rob, you got
some balls. That’s not something everyone would take on.”
But Sakharov had worked with Lurie before (on
By Michael Goldman Nothing But the Truth) and had dealt with lots of controversial
subject matter in his own work, which has included The
Sopranos (AC Sept. ’07, March ’01) , Rome (AC Sept. ’05)and
•|• Game of Thrones. He agreed with Lurie’s intent to follow the

52 October 2011 American Cinematographer

 Opposite page:
Amy (Kate
Bosworth) and
David (James
Marsden) discover
their property is
under attack. This
page, top: Charlie
(Alexander
Skarsgård)
introduces himself
to the couple in a
bid to land a job.
Middle: The actors
stand by as
director Rod Lurie
(center) discusses
a setup with Alik
Sakharov, ASC.
Bottom: With a
large diffusion
frame at the
ready, cast and
crew prepare a
scene depicting
Charlie’s first day
on the job.

overall path of the original story but give

the remake a different visual style. So he
signed on to shoot the movie in 2009 in
Unit photography by Steve Dietl. Additional photos by Alik Sakharov. Photos and frame grabs courtesy of Screen Gems.

Shreveport, La.
Among the first decisions he and
Lurie tackled was whether to accede to
the studio’s suggestion that they shoot
digitally using Panavision’s Genesis.
Sakharov felt the camera would not
provide the latitude he and Lurie would
need, so he insisted on shooting film
instead. The producers agreed, but
mandated that he shoot 2-perf (Super
35mm) to help keep costs down. Three
weeks into the shoot, after gate-hair
issues arose in several shots that had to
be cleaned up in post, the production
switched to 3-perf.
The filmmakers used a Panavision
package comprising a Panaflex
Millennium XL2 (A camera), a
Platinum (B camera) and a Lightweight
(Steadicam work); Primo prime lenses;
Primo 4:1 17.5-75mm and 11:1 24-
275mm zoomlenses, and Angenieux
Optimo 15-40mm and 28-76mm
zooms. Sakharov shot the picture on two
Kodak Vision3 stocks, 500T 5219
(which he used for all interior locations,
stage work and night exteriors) and
250D 5207 (all day exteriors).
Sakharov maintains that his
biggest challenge revolved around how
to light the movie. Teaming with

ww.theasc.com
w October 2011 53
◗ Home Invasion
Shreveport-based gaffer Bob Bates, he
ended up making some choices about
both the “what” and the “how” of the
lighting scheme in order to make the
movie stand on its own visually, rather
than walk in the photographic footsteps
of its predecessor (shot by John
Coquillon).
Like Peckinpah’s film, however,
the new Straw Dogs features extensive
brutality. The protagonist, David (James
Marsden), is driven to the brink of great
violence, and eventually beyond, by local
thugs who harass and eventually assault
him and his wife, Amy (Kate Bosworth).
The film contains a disturbing rape
scene, as the original film did, and a
major pyro sequence that marks a depar-
ture from the original.
In general, says Sakharov, his goal
was a contemporary aesthetic, but a
Top: The filmmakers capture a scene in which David and Amy chat with a member of Charlie’s crew. subtle one. “We didn’t want the photog-
Bottom: Lighting in another room in the couple’s house included Whities (angled overhead at left and at raphy to feel like it was calling attention
right), fixtures that Sakharov created with gaffer Kevin Janicelli years ago. Louisiana gaffer Bob Bates
embraced and helped to evolve the lights on Straw Dogs. to itself,” he says. “We wanted it to feel
like a camera just happened to be there,

54 October 2011 American Cinematographer

 Top: This diagram shows Whities in
play for a nighttime car interior depicting
David and Amy’s reaction to a strange
sight in the road. Bottom: Sakharov’s
photo of the setup with the actors’
lighting stand-ins.
quiet and subdued, while these events
were taking place.”
Diagram and photo courtesy of Alik Sakharov.
Bates, who was working with
Sakharov for the first time, says he was
amazed by the cinematographer’s metic-
ulous planning of camera and light
placement. That effort included layering
lighting and camera information on top
of aerial photos Sakharov had created of
key locations, giving Bates a detailed
reference template. “Alik almost always
knew exactly where he wanted the
camera to be and how he wanted to light
[a location] before we started shooting,”
recalls Bates. “For all the big scenes, he
had printouts with notes about what we
needed where. He broke down the
script, as many cinematographers do, but
he went a lot further than that. Those
aerial pictures, which had details about
where the camera would be, what lights
were needed where and much more,
were pretty impressive!”
The foundation of Sakharov’s
lighting plan was an instrument he calls
Whities, which he and gaffer Kevin
Janicelli created for The Sopranos years
ago. They’re essentially simple work-
ww.theasc.com
w October 2011
horse lights on a dimmer system that are
easy and fast to erect and move around
horizontally or vertically on a set without
having to place them on the ground.
The goal, says Sakharov, was to speed up
the batten-strip concept so he could
light fairly sizable areas more efficiently.
“Batten strips almost touch each other,
and they generate a single shadow when
you turn them on,” says Sakharov. “If
you put two or three of them together,
you suddenly can light a good 12-to-14-
foot area quickly and be really flexible,
providing a long throw that actors can
55
◗ Home Invasion

Top: David and

Amy encounter
Charlie at the
church in town.
Bottom:
Sakharov directs
his crew as the
filmmakers prep
a scene at a
high-school
football game.

1'x4' boxes measuring 1' deep and hous-

walk through. What I wanted was to
control them better, and after talking to
Kevin, we decided to encase them in
some sort of box. His team built a box
that was a prototype for what Whities
would become later on — a box built
around a batten strip, and then an egg
crate to control the spill. It became a
transportable and repeatedly usable unit,
but after seeing it take some bangs, we
eventually put them in metal boxes.
“We built more than 200 of them
for The Sopranos, and I still carry two
dozen with me on every show,” he
continues. “I use them on everything. It’s
just a great way to work fast and get my
lights off the floor and up in a grid
quickly.”
By the time he began prepping
Straw Dogs, Whities had evolved into
ing strips of 100-watt bulbs that could
be mounted quickly above a set flap or a
grid, or vertically on an apple box or
stand. Sakharov says they allowed him to
light perimeters on set, and because they
are dimmer controlled, he could easily
choose which side of the set would be lit
at a given moment. The units also accept
gel frames and egg crates. They became
the primary lighting instrument for
most of the interior work on Straw Dogs.
Bates acknowledges that the
Whities initially presented him with a
bit of a learning curve, but he eventually
became very impressed with the tool
and, in fact, helped Sakharov evolve it
further. “Alik is devoted to the concept,
and he even told me at the start what
bulbs to buy for the sockets,” says the
gaffer. “He asked me to use them all the
time, but I realized that because of the
way some of our sets were laid out, we
would need smaller versions that were
basically 2 feet long instead of 4 feet
long. So we made up some 2-foot
versions, ‘Little Whities,’ and we ended
up using them extensively.
“I came to really like using them,”

56 October 2011 American Cinematographer

 TM

G e m n 4:4:4

Award Winning Uncompressed Recorder!

-4:4:4 RGB S-Log 10-bit
-Low Power, Weight, Size, Cost
-$5995 with transfer-station,
hard case

3D (Option) and/or ARRIRAW (Planned) Support via paid upgrades

www.convergent-design.com www.gemini444.com ++720-221-3861 ++803-278-0941
◗ Home Invasion
Bates continues. “Each fixture can
receive up to three gel frames. We ended
up having several more gel frames made
to keep them pre-gelled for quick access,
and we also skinned them with Opal
and 250 diffusion in addition to 1⁄4 or
1⁄2 CTB frames, depending on the setup.
Alik always knew exactly what kind of
light he would get out of them. I now
own a couple of Little Whities myself,
and to be honest, I’ve used them on
every show since Straw Dogs!”
Sakharov says Whities gave him
not only more flexibility in his lighting
options, but also a certain “realistic
imperfection” and mix of color tempera-
tures that suited the subtle approach he
was pursuing. For example, during the
film’s climax, all hell breaks loose as
David finds himself defending his wife
and his home from assault. In that situa-
tion, says Sakharov, he was able to use
Whities for a subtle backlight effect.
“The story calls for the lighting in the
house to be out, because David doesn’t
want to be seen from the outside,”
explains the cinematographer. “He’s
attempting to move around in the house
without being detected. In those shots,
we basically used Whities to outline the
figures in the shot, and then used a mini-
mal amount of fill light from the camera
side. That was our only lighting.”
Eventually, a fire is set in a nearby
barn, and Sakharov had to determine
how to create this lighting effect through
David and Amy’s windows. The
bedroom from which they see flames
was a set built onstage, so extensive light
was required. Bates’ crew bounced six
12-light Maxi-Brutes with either 1⁄2 or
Full CTO gels into muslin or
UltraBounce through the bedroom
windows. “That was the keylight coming
through the windows, and it gave the
sense of fire flickering nicely,” says Bates.
“We couldn’t use flame bars because we
needed control over the whole thing. It’s

Top: David joins

Charlie and his
crew for a
hunting
expedition.
Bottom: The
filmmakers
prepare to
augment natural
light at the
location with
Sourcemaker
HMI Lighting
Balloons and two
bounced 18Ks.
“The grips also
flew 12-by silks
from the trees to
help diffuse the
sun,” adds Bates.

58 October 2011 American Cinematographer

 ◗ Home Invasion
The film’s grim finale plays out in the couple’s home in almost total darkness.
meant to be extremely dramatic, because
through that light you see silhouettes of
the men attacking the house.”
Exterior lighting was typically the
“big lighting” part of the job, notes
Sakharov, and his approach was to go for
“large, broad, soft sources.” He adds,
“Sunlight is prominent in this movie,
and we had a range of big frames, such
as 20-by-20s and 12-by-20s, and
flyswatters to control it, and an array of
60
18Ks to mimic it. We usually had the
18Ks on a 60-foot crane, so we could
adjust or extract the arm to cover the
area where [the sun] needed to be. It was
an efficient way to do it, but we had to
plan carefully where to shoot and how to
position all the equipment around the
set so it would be out of frame.
“For night exteriors, we joined 12-
by-20 frames to create a 24-foot or 40-
foot run of light. We had an array of
20Ks behind them on dimmers to
provide either sidelight or three-quarter
backlight. Then I’d have a hard light —
like a 20K and a Dino or Super Dino
— on the direct opposite lens, raised up
on a 100-foot or 120-foot lift. That gave
me a backlight to isolate figures against
the blackness of night. On the camera
side, I’d have minimal fill light to open
blacks and shadows, which was very
important on this film.”
 “We often used the 12-by-20s
along with the fabric grids from
Lighttools, and we’d use anywhere from
one to three 18Ks through it [for day
scenes],” adds Bates. “Sometimes we’d
even go to three 18Ks and two 12K Pars.
There’s one scene in particular — a band
is playing outside, and several characters
are interacting — where we lined up two
12-by-20s next to each other to create a
12-by-40, and we pushed three 18Ks
and two 12Ks through them. We were
trying hard to push light in because the
actors are under a canopy in the scene,
and the background is raw sun.”
One of the most delicate aspects
of Sakharov’s job was filming the rape
sequence. He and Lurie wanted to avoid
breaking into handheld mode to empha-
size the chaos of the moment. Instead,
they adhered to their philosophy for the
movie as a whole and kept the cameras
stationary and unobtrusive.
Sakharov had planned to shoot
the scene with his usual two cameras, but
A discovery.
An apology.
To forgive…
or not?
126
Please visit us at: LDI
Booth No. 1220
Think LEE
www.leefilters.com
Lurie asked him to use three in order to visual storytelling, so I was not easy on
get adequate coverage more quickly. “I them, but I had glowing discussions
didn’t want to do three cameras at first, with them after the project, so I think
but once I understood how rough the they appreciated the input. I think Straw
scene was for Kate, I said, ‘Of course, Dogs gave all of us a chance to grow.”
we’ll figure it out,’” recalls the cine- ●
matographer. “I lit more broadly to
accommodate all three cameras, and, as
is always the case when you light for
multiple cameras, some angles suffer.
But it was necessary, and Rod had a
good plan to edit it all together.” TECHNICAL SPECS
Sakharov credits A-camera/ 2.40:1
Steadicam operator Henry Tirl and B-
camera operator Bob Foster for their 3-perf and 2-perf Super
sensitivity during that scene. Tirl had 35mm
worked on Nothing But the Truth and
Panaflex Millennium XL2,
was requested by Lurie, and Foster was a Platinum, Lightweight
local operator new to the filmmakers.
Sakharov calls himself “a frame Panavision Primo,
fanatic,” and says he was particularly Angenieux Optimo
demanding of his cameramen during
Kodak Vision3 500T 5219,
production. “I work very closely with my 250D 5207
operators,” he says. “Building the frame
is one of the most important elements in Digital Intermediate
61
 King of
NewYork
Richard DiBona and others recall As the smiling face of General Camera Corp., DiBona
became a benevolent father figure to nearly every cameraman
the glory days of General Camera, working in New York between 1962 and 1992. During those
which helped a number of great three decades, General Camera supplied equipment and
support to almost 90 percent of productions filmed on the
cinematographers make their names. Eastern seaboard. Those familiar with the company say the
secret of its success was DiBona’s business acumen, but they
By Iain Stasukevich are also quick to emphasize his deep knowledge of camera
technology and his unwavering dedication to filmmakers of
every level.
•|•
“Cameras are my love,” says DiBona. “I was a film-
maker, a camera designer. I was born with the movies inside
me.”

ASC
associate member Richard DiBona’s living
room on Manhattan’s Upper East Side is filled
with dozens of photos depicting friends, family
and collaborators. For DiBona, there’s practi-
cally no distinguishing among them.
Born in Brooklyn in 1922, DiBona exhibited talents for
photography, machinery and music in his youth. In 1941,
shortly after the United States joined World War II, he
enlisted in the army, entering the Signal Corps as a non-
commissioned officer at its Photographic Center in Queens.

62 October 2011 American Cinematographer

 He was selected to staff the machine
shop, where he spent the next four years
converting 35mm wind-up Eyemos and
16mm Filmos and Auricons for hand-
held use on the battlefield.
The Signal Corps station served
as a school whose faculty included some
of the most prestigious names in
cinema. “Stanley Cortez [ASC] prided
himself on teaching those soldiers the
craft,” DiBona recalls. “He finally made
it to PFC, and a lot of the guys who
worked with him were officers. He was
always yelling at them, telling them
what to do with the camera. They
listened, of course!”
During his time at the
Photographic Center, DiBona also met
fellow soldier and future ASC cine-
matographer Gerald Hirschfeld. After Opposite: General Camera co-founder Richard DiBona (second from left) poses with
the war, DiBona and Hirschfeld Panavision executives (from left) Egon Stephan Sr., founder of CineVideoTech Inc., which
represented Panavision in Florida; Sydney Samuelson, founder of England’s Samuelson Film Service,
accepted civilian positions in the Signal which represented Panavision in Europe and Australia; Robert Gottschalk, who co-founded
Corps. When the U.S. ramped up its Panavision in 1953; and Mel Hoppenheim, founder of Panavision Canada. Following General Camera’s
atomic-bomb program, DiBona was success in the 1960s, Panavision offered the company exclusive distribution of Panaflex cameras on
the East Coast. Above: DiBona (fourth from left) is surrounded by a group of Signal Corps enlisted
one of the cameramen present in men at the U.S. Army’s Photographic Center in Queens.
Nevada for the first tests. He and others
photographed the explosions from his father, Sol, who was a cinematogra- give them whatever they wanted for the
“News Knob,” a mesa about 7 miles pher for Fox Movietone News, and year. We took their camera, and they
from ground zero. “I went out there DiBona. “Dick has such a dynamic took our money and immediately
twice,” DiBona recalls. “We didn’t get personality, and he’s fantastic with bought another Mitchell.”
too close, although we were close cameras,” Roizman says. “Whenever General Camera’s first office was
enough to get knocked off our feet.” there was a tough technical question at the corner of 7th Avenue and 48th
DiBona left the Signal Corps in about cameras, even the pros turned to Street, above the legendary Cafe
1955 to take a position as a camera tech- him.” Metropolé. In 1962, the company’s staff
nician with Camera Equipment Co. CECO founder Frank Zucker comprised DiBona and Keslow, along
(known as CECO) in Manhattan. “It left the company to his son, Burt, who with DiBona’s wife, Anne Marie, who
Photos courtesy of Owen Roizman, Richard DiBona and Craig DiBona.

was the biggest camera company in
New York,” he says. CECO introduced
DiBona to the world of Hollywood
filmmaking. Commercials were also
making money in New York, and
CECO did big business with the
companies producing content for the ad
agencies on Madison Avenue. One of
these companies was MPO, a commer-
cial production house that had a staff of
cinematographers and its own cameras,
mainly 35mm Mitchell NCs and
BNCs.
Future ASC member Owen
Roizman worked at CECO as a techni-
cian for two summers, in 1955-56, and
then later assisted Hirschfeld at MPO.
He recalls sitting in on breakfasts with
died in a plane crash in 1961. This
prompted the sale of CECO’s assets to
another New York camera house,
Florman & Babb, which renamed itself
F&B CECO. Without the Zuckers in
charge, DiBona decided it was time to
strike out on his own, and at the invita-
tion of CECO salesman Milton
Keslow, he helped start up General
Camera.
“In the beginning,” says Keslow,
“all we had was a name and a dream.”
The company’s first customer was
Hirschfeld. “Dick and Milton bought a
Mitchell NC and were trying to rent it
out,” he recalls. “I was then the vice pres-
ident at MPO, and I told them I’d rent
the camera, leave it at the studio and
handled the books, and Joe Malavenda,
a young machinist. One year later,
DiBona hired a young German engi-
neer named Fred Schuler (future ASC).
Schuler had started out working
for Arri in Munich, and he was 24 when
he joined General Camera. One of his
first tasks was to build a noiseless
mirror-reflex viewing system. Some
35mm cameras used a prism to direct
the image through a viewfinder, but the
glass would absorb and refract precious
light before it reached the film plane.
The Arri 35IIC, an old camera by that
time, used a reflex viewing system, but
the gear-driven rotating shutter was too
loud for sync-sound production.
Most of the 35mm motion-

ww.theasc.com
w October 2011 63
◗ King of New York
DiBona (left) greets an associate at a nuclear-test site in Nevada. DiBona was among the
cameramen who photographed the first atomic-bomb explosions from “News Knob,” a mesa
about 7 miles from ground zero.
picture cameras in use were Mitchell
NCs and BNCs, which had a rack-over
design. The camera box housed the
movement, motor, magazine, controls
and viewing system. There were two
viewing positions for the cameraman:
focusing and framing. To focus, the
cameraman would “rack over” the
camera box laterally on its base so the
focusing tube was directly behind the
taking lens (mounted on a turret
attached to the base), then rack back to
align the aperture with the lens. An
offset viewfinder allowed the camera-
man to frame the shot while the camera
was rolling.
There was nothing inherently
lacking in the rack-over design, but
DiBona wanted to improve it so the
cameraman only had to look through
one viewfinder to operate the camera.
He asked Schuler to modify a BNC. “I
didn’t want to do it because I wasn’t
even sure I could do it,” says Schuler.
“Plus, I thought it was a great camera
just the way it was. But about six
months later, one of our BNCs was
dropped and damaged. That gave us a
camera to convert, and it became the
64 October 2011
first reflex-mirror camera produced in
the States.”
The design called for the modi-
fied BNC’s single-blade focal-plane
shutter to rotate at a 2:1 ratio with the
butterfly reflex mirror. This meant that
for every exposure taken, the mirror
made half a revolution. DiBona had the
idea to use beveled-spiral gears, which
were relatively quiet compared to their
straight-toothed counterparts. “I used a
lot of Arriflex parts to make that
camera, particularly the mirror,” says
Schuler. “Because the mirror in the
35IIC is also the shutter, we had to
grind it down. We only needed it to
reflect an image to the viewfinder.”
The first feature to use General
Camera’s reflexed BNC was The
Swimmer (1968), shot by David L.
Quaid, ASC, whom DiBona describes
as “a very adventurous cameraman.” Not
surprisingly, the new technology was
met with some skepticism. “Some
cameramen wouldn’t look through the
eyepiece,” says DiBona. “They didn’t
want to keep their eye there, so they’d
put the finder on the side and use that.
They thought when they looked
American Cinematographer
through the eyepiece they weren’t seeing
what was going on the film, because it
was a reflection off the shutter.”
About nine months later, Schuler
left General Camera to become a
camera assistant. On one of his first
jobs, he assisted Haskell Wexler, ASC
on The Thomas Crown Affair (AC Oct.
’68). “When I got hired, I had no idea
they were shooting with my reflex
BNC,” Schuler recalls. “The operator
complained all the time because he had
a stiff neck. He said it was a pain in the
ass. I wasn’t about to tell him I was the
one who’d converted it!”
By the mid-1960s, New York’s
film and television industry had started
to change. Filmmakers began taking
advantage of smaller cameras, shooting
on locations all over the city with mini-
mal crew and minimal gear. “The
cameras we’d used during the war really
changed the industry — equipment
became very portable,” says DiBona.
16mm cameras were particularly
popular with news cameramen, who
favored the lightweight Bach-Auricon
sound-on-film cameras, but 16mm
camera bodies and magazines were part
of a single, solid cast and could only
accept 100' loads. DiBona reflexed a
batch of Auricons and chopped off the
fused magazines, replacing them with
Mitchell magazine mounts, which
allowed the cameras to run loads rang-
ing from 400'-1,200'. The cameras were
a hit with the networks, but the
Auricon’s motors and gears weren’t
strong enough to pull the larger loads at
proper sync speeds, so DiBona designed
an entirely new camera based on the
Auricon movement: the SS3 (Single
System, third design).
As General Camera’s reputation
and customer base grew, the company
expanded to include lighting and grip
rentals, as well as three soundstages on
19th Street. In the late 1960s the
company moved to 321 West 44th St.,
which became Technicolor’s headquar-
ters when General Camera moved
again, this time to 38th Street and 11th
Avenue. “It was like a supermarket —
we supplied everything,” says DiBona’s
son, Craig, now an ASC member. “We
had two camera floors complete with
our own machine shop, a stock floor,
and lighting and grip on the bottom two
floors.”
General Camera’s position was
bolstered further when Panavision
offered DiBona exclusive distribution of
Panaflex cameras on the East Coast.
“After that, we handled almost all the
films that were shot in the East,” says
DiBona, who also held the exclusive
license for Chapman dollies and cranes
for a time.
What Panavision got in return
was DiBona. Hirschfeld remembers
renting a Panavision package from
General Camera for a job in Chicago:

“I wouldn’t go
to any other
rental company
in New York.”

“Our zoom lens wasn’t calibrated, so we

sent it back to Dick in New York for
recalibration. After that, I wrote a letter
to Robert Gottschalk, the president of
Panavision, and said Dick could cali-
brate a Panavision lens better than the
guys at Panavision. I went to see
Gottschalk in Hollywood some years
later, and he had the letter posted on a
board in the office. He wanted all of his
employees to see it.”
In addition to knowledge and
equipment, DiBona stockpiled loyalty.
“I wouldn’t go to any other rental
company in New York,” says Victor J.
Kemper, ASC, whose East Coast
features included The Friends of Eddie
Coyle (1973)and Dog Day Afternoon
(1975). “Dick went out of his way to
make cinematographers comfortable
 ◗ King of New York
and make whatever idea we had work. If
there was a problem you couldn’t solve,
he’d come to the set in the middle of the
night.”
Like many camera houses,
General Camera bred cameramen from
its rosters of technicians and clients.
Veteran camera assistant Gary Muller
spent a couple of summers on the
General Camera prep floor in the mid-
1960s. He recalls, “I was a young kid
amongst all these adults, but Dick took
me under his wing and showed me the
importance of having a good technical
foundation. His knowledge was our
guiding light.”
Some of the best-known films in
the American New Wave were shot in
New York during General Camera’s
reign, among them Klute (1971), The
French Connection (1971),The Godfather
(1972), Taxi Driver (1976) and Annie
DiBona (left) and a colleague service equipment in the camera shop at Camera Hall (1977). DiBona might be too
Equipment Co. (known as CECO) in Manhattan. “It was the biggest camera company humble to admit it, but if it wasn’t for
in New York,” DiBona notes.
General Camera, many of these classics

66
might not even exist as we know them.
Roizman appreciates this better
than anyone. In 1970, he was working at
MPO as a commercial cinematographer
and looking for a way to break into
features. One day a young director
named Billy Friedkin was at General
Camera having lunch with DiBona, and
he mentioned he’d just fired the cine-
matographer slated to shoot his next
feature, The French Connection. DiBona
recommended Roizman for the job,
even though the young cinematogra-
pher had just one (unreleased) feature
under his belt.
“The rest is history,” Roizman
says. “Dick’s always been a great cham-
pion of cinematographers. He pushed
for Gordy, too.”
“Gordy” is, of course, Gordon
Willis, ASC, who also worked at MPO
as an assistant before moving up the
ranks. “Dick made working in New
York great,” says Willis. “One of the
more outstanding stories I have about
him involves a picture I’d rather not
name. I was working with one of his
Panaflex cameras, and one day we
tipped the camera down on the gear-
head and it started making noise. We
had to stop shooting, take the A camera
off and put the B camera on. This took
20 or 30 minutes, and by that time the
cast was breaking down and the crew
started going for coffee.
“I sent the camera back to Dick.
He turned it around and brought it
back, but it started making the same
noise. We lost another hour. The third
time the camera came back, the same
thing happened. I was livid that this
thing was taking up all of our time.
Without saying a word, I pulled the
camera off the head and threw it into
the middle of the street. Dick never said
a word to me about it. He just sent over
a camera that was so quiet I kept it for
the rest of my career.”
DiBona retired in 1992 and sold
General Camera’s camera, lighting and
grip departments to Panavision.
Although General Camera is gone, the
company’s name and legacy remain
sharp in the memories of the camera-
men who called it home.
“General Camera was like a
home,” emphasizes Muller. “When you
were there, you were part of the DiBona
family. There was truly no other place
where you could get that kind of knowl-
edge and honesty.”
“Dick is bigger than life,” says
Roizman. “I love the man so much.”
“Like a brother,” adds Kemper.
“It’s very hard to be all things to
all men,” Willis observes, “but Dick
DiBona comes very close.” ●
67
 Post Focus

Frame grabs and photos courtesy of Lobster Films, Groupama-Gan and Technicolor.
An iconic frame from George Méliès Le voyage dans la lune, recently restored to its original hand-colored glory at Technicolor.
The restoration premiered at Cannes and made its U.S. debut at the Telluride Film Festival.

I Restoring Méliès’ Marvel

By Robert S. Birchard
Anyone who edited films in the days before Avid and Final
Cut Pro will remember the nightmare: There’s a screening in 10
minutes for the head of the studio, and all the changes have been
made except for extending that one crucial shot, the “beauty shot”
with the moving camera and fluid motion. You find the trim hang-
ing in the bin and splice it into the work picture, only to discover a
jump cut. A frame is missing. You can slug it with black leader for the
negative cutter, but the “suits” at the screening will demand to
know what that black frame was, and the carefully spun mood will
be broken. So you pull all the film hanging on hooks and search the
bottom of the bin for that elusive frame, and the clock is ticking.
Now imagine a whole film made up of one- and two-frame
trims, and some of those frames are in pieces, exponentially
compounding the challenge. And that clock you hear ticking is the
doomsday clock — if you can’t put these pieces back together again,
a unique treasure will be lost forever.
It was just such a nightmare that confronted Serge Bromberg
and Eric Lange of Paris-based Lobster Films when they acquired a
hand-colored print of the century-old fantasy-film milestone by
Georges Méliès, Levoyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon) , in a
swap with Anton Gimenez, who was then director of the Filmoteca
de Catalunya in Spain. This was the sort of bargain a slick horse
trader might make. The Spanish archive received a previously lost
film by Segundo de Chomón, and the French got a unique color
print of an otherwise common French film, only the print was
shrunken, brittle and fused together into a rigid mass that made it
resemble a hockey puck. It certainly couldn’t be projected, nor was
it in any kind of shape to be fed into an optical printer for copying.
More than one film lab told Bromberg and Lang their print
was a total loss. There was, however, a bit of a silver lining: for the
most part, the film was fused only along the perforated edges of the
film, and with infinite patience and a small, flexible card it was possi-
ble to peel the film apart from itself. Then Haghefilm Conservation

68 October 2011 American Cinematographer


Here is an example of a damaged frame from the hand-colored
print and the same frame fully restored.
B.V. in Amsterdam was able to rejuvenate
the film by placing it under a bell jar and
giving it the gas — suspending it in a chem-
ical vapor originally formulated by Archives
Française du Film.
“The film was put in the chemicals at
the end of 2001, and it took about two
years to have all the images photographed
70 October 2011
with the best digital still camera available at
the time,” recalls Bromberg, adding that
Lange supervised this work. “Every time a
few images were recovered, we’d photo-
graph them before they turned to dust,
which is a consequence of using the chem-
icals. Basically, there were only a few days to
photograph the stills, which can be consid-
American Cinematographer
ered the ‘scan’ of the original source.”
In October 2002, to celebrate the
movie’s centennial (and the 10th anniver-
sary of Lobster’s famous Retour de Flamme
shows), Lobster publicly screened a Beta SP
tape of the available color images — unsta-
bilized and unrestored — with about half
the film in color and the rest in black-and-
white from a fine-grain master positive. At
the time, much of the original hand-colored
print was still in the chemical vapors. It
would be nearly a decade before anything
more could be done with these digital
snapshots.
“Reconstructing the entire film was
our Holy Grail,” says Bromberg, “but we
never thought we could do it when we
started photographing the color frames. We
only realized it might be possible when 2K
and 4K digital technologies emerged, but
even then it seemed like a dream, because
the puzzle we were starting with was in so
many pieces.”
First released in France on Sept. 1,
1902, Le voyage dans la lune was a world-
wide event movie in its day. Méliès had a
background in theater, and he was never
able to shake his reliance on stage tech-
nique — he shot his films from a front-row-
center perspective against painted trompe
l’oeil backdrops. But he was also one of the
first to utilize jump cuts, stop-motion anima-
tion, reverse action and other camera tricks
that made his films breathtaking in their
time. Ever the showman, Méliès often
presented his films with live narration that
would flesh out character and story for
audiences, and he offered his films for sale
in both black-and-white and color.
A 1905 American catalogue for
Méliès’ Star Films (in the collection of the
Museum of Modern Art) lists the pictureat
845' in length with a sale price of $126.75,
or 15 cents per foot, for a black-and-white
print. Color, which was hand-painted on
each of the 13,375 frames, was consider-
ably more expensive, and it was therefore
far less common for exhibitors who were
interested in turning a fast buck to pony up
the extra money for a color print.
Probably because of its subject
matter, Le voyage dans la lune never
completely disappeared from public
consciousness and continued to elicit curios-
ity as Man began to dream of venturing into
space for real. It was even seen in the
prologue to Mike Todd’s adaptation of Jules
Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days(1956)
as a pale, small-screen, monochrome
comparison by which to judge the modern
wonders of 70mm Todd-AO and Eastman
Color.
Was it possible to fully resurrect the
hand-colored marvel of 1902?
“It became clear that there was
a possibility when Gilles Duval of the
Groupama-Gan Foundation and Severine
Wemaere of the Technicolor Foundation for
Film Heritage decided to be part of the
venture,” says Bromberg. “They were real
partners, not only financial backers. The
final restoration work was made at Techni-
color in Hollywood.”
It may be only a coincidence, but
with his curled mustache, pointed beard
and cheerful demeanor, Tom Burton, Tech-
nicolor’s executive director of restoration
services, bears a striking resemblance to
Méliès. Burton oversaw the restoration of
the picture, supervising a team that included
lead restoration artist Danny Albano;
producer Karen Krause; restoration artists
Trey Freeman, Joe Zarceno and John Healy;
and colorist Mike Underwood.
“What we received from Lobster
Films were digital files in various formats
and in several different resolutions,” Burton
recalls. “Some frames were captured via
digital camera, frame by frame, and some
were captured on a digital scanner from
short sections of the 1902 original that
could be copied on Haghefilm’s step printer
in Holland. Because the initial digitization
took place over a period of years in different
locations and with different equipment, the
material was not organized in any sort of
sequence; each digitization session gener-
ated its own naming convention and frame-
numbering protocol. So, for example, there
were numerous ‘Frame Ones’ from different
parts of the film.
“Much of the image data repre-
sented broken frames and shattered pieces
of frames, and there were even several
versions of some shots, with the files differ-
ing greatly in color, density, size, sharpness
and position,” he continues. “It was not
possible to play back a continuous image
stream.”
Using an HDCam telecine of a black-

These photos
reveal the sorry
state of the
original print,
which was
shrunken, brittle
and fused
together when
it was first
turned over to
Lobster Films.
and-white version transferred from a 1929
nitrate dupe negative, which also contained
the final three seconds that were missing
from the hand-tinted print, “we eye-
matched individual color frames and short
frame sequences, which we’d reformatted
as DPX files, to the dupe neg in a digital
editing environment,” says Burton. “In this
editorial conform we were able to see for
the first time exactly what original color
material existed, what condition it was in
and which material was missing entirely.
“The next step was a stabilization
pass, adjusting the relative position relation-
ships of all individual frames. Then de-flicker
processing was used to balance frame-to-
frame and intra-frame density variations.
Following these steps, we used Resolve’s
color-correction platform to do a ‘pre-
timing’ to bring the widely diverse colors
and densities of the various capture sources
72 October 2011
into reasonable proximity with one
another.”
The archival dupe neg provided the
scaffolding on which the color elements
were built, but to replace most of the mate-
rial missing in the color footage, the team
turned to a black-and-white nitrate print
owned by Madeleine Malthete-Méliès,
granddaughter of the pioneering film-
maker. This print was scanned at the French
Film Archives of the Centre National du
Cinema on a Sasha scanner, which outputs
frames as vertically oriented TIFF files. This
scan was reformatted to match horizontally
oriented DPX files, and then the scenes
were digitally graded to approximate the
tinted look of the color print.
“Then the serious image reconstruc-
tion began,” says Burton. “We used a
palette of restoration and visual-effects-
specific digital platforms, including Digital
American Cinematographer
Vision Phoenix/DVO, MTI and After Effects.
Our restoration team rebuilt shattered
frames into new, full-frame re-creations of
their original state. The black-and-white
material was then digitally painted to repli-
cate the original color frames where the
original colors had not survived.”
Today such colorization can be done
with such precision that it can look like the
footage was originally shot in color, but this
would not match the look of Méliès’ hand-
painted original. In an effort to replicate the
workspace the hand-painters worked with
more than a century ago, Technicolor’s digi-
tal painters experimented with small-screen
images approximating the size of a 35mm
frame as they applied their electronic
brushes. This helped them establish, for the
final painting process, the look of the hand-
painted colors sometimes overflowing and
sometimes not quite filling the image.
“The black-and-white replacement
sequences did not match the color material
in size, position, grain structure or density
because of the differing conditions of the
source elements,” says Burton. “Each indi-
vidual frame was carefully resized and repo-
sitioned as necessary. The grain structure
was also tweaked to match the original
source in order for it to intercut more seam-
lessly with the original. Once the recon-
struction was complete, another stabiliza-
tion and de-flicker pass was applied to
further integrate the disparate sources. A
final color-timing pass balanced the overall
color integrity of the various elements, and
then separate color-space grades were
completed for 35mm, DCP and HD release
formats.”
“When Technicolor showed me a
side-by-side comparison of the black-and-
white material and the original surviving
color frames in January of this year, only
then were we certain the restoration would
be possible,” says Bromberg. “But we had
no idea how long it would take — three
months, a year? As it turned out, the work
was completed on May 2, and the film, in
its original colors, opened the Cannes Film
Festival.” ●
 entertainment
technology
exposition

NOVEMBER 2-3, 2011 | BURBANK MARRIOTT | BURBANK, CA

Createasphere’s Entertainment TTechnology

echnology Expo
A world where entertainment technology and creative vision converrgge.

LLaunched
aunched iinn 22001,
001, oour
ur llargest
argest aannual
nnual ggathering
athering • wo
w full days of panels, presentations
TTwo pre
ffeatures
eatures iindustry
ndustry rrenowned
enowned ddecision
ecision mmakers
akers and keynotes
aand
nd tthought
hought lleaders.
eaders. • Hundred of exhibits so you can get your
Scan the code with your hands on the gear
mobile device to receive a
free gift when you register. EExplore
xplore w where
here ffuture echnology aand
uture ttechnology nd ccreative
reative • A long list of U
USS product releases
re
vvision
ision cconverge. eaturing eeducational
onverge. FFeaturing ducational ssessions,
essions, • OOver
ver 75+ hours of education
iinteractive
nteractive ppanels,
anels, aand ands-on aaccess
nd hhands-on ccess ttoo ggear,
ear, • Hosted evening reception and industry
tthe
he EExpo
xpo ooffers
ffers tthe nowledge aand
he kknowledge nd ttools
ools yyouou meet ups
nneed
eed ttoo ccompete he eever-changing
ompete iinn tthe ver-changing w orld ooff
world • Gear
Gear Alley
Alley demonstrations
demonstrations showing
showing hhow
ow to
to
ccontent
ontent ccreation.
reation. move
move it,
it, mount
mount iitt aand
nd m
master
aster iitt

November 2-3,
November 2-3, 2011
2011 TTo
o rregister
egister ffor
or FFREE
REE aand
nd ffor
or tthe
he ffull
ull sschedule,
chedule,
Burbank Marriott,
Burbank Marriott, Burbank,
Burbank, CA
CA log
log oon
n tto:
o: ccreateasphere.com/expo
reateasphere.com/expo

the future in hand | createasphere.com/expo

 Filmmakers’ Forum
system. I was concerned about the Red’s reliability and
ergonomics, and at that time it still had a lot of trouble
A young boy in low-light tungsten situations — I felt the skin tones
(Nathan
Gamble)
never looked real. On the plus side, Max had some very
bonds with a nice Zeiss Master Primes and short Angenieux zoom
rudderless sea lenses that I knew would help.
creature in
Dolphin Tale,
Camera weight was another concern. The
shot by Karl Paradise rig weighed almost 100 pounds in studio
Walter mode, and we also needed an underwater housing.
Lindenlaub,
ASC, BVK.
I was able to hire several of my longtime Los
Angeles crewmembers, including 1st AC Tommy Klines,
2nd AC Miki Janicin and key grip Loren Corl. The gaffer,
Pat Murray, had just moved to our location in Clearwa-
ter, Fla., and came highly recommended by Russell

I Shooting Dolphin Tale in 3-D

By Karl Walter Lindenlaub, ASC, BVK
Boyd, ASC.
I wanted to operate one camera myself, and for the second
camera we were lucky to get Michael St. Hilaire, who had also recently
Last summer I had packed for a six-month, once-in-a-lifetime moved to Florida. The underwater photography would be operated by
adventure in India — shooting a movie about the life of Buddha — Pete Zuccarini, one of the most experienced underwater cameramen
when the producer called with the bad news that the financing had in the country.
collapsed. Since the plane tickets had already been purchased, I took Paradise offered an underwater rig that used Silicon Imaging’s
my family for a short trip to Germany, but I still really needed a job! SI-2K cameras, but I wasn’t happy about the prospect of shooting the
Luckily, when I got back to Los Angeles, my agent arranged for very important underwater sequences at a lower resolution than the
me to interview for a movie about a boy and a dolphin without a tail. above-water scenes. In prep Pete suggested he could build a new
The director, Charles Martin Smith, had helmed some nice indepen- housing for the 4K Red 3-D rig, and he and his engineer designed a
dent films and had also starred in Carroll Ballard’s Never Cry Wolf, a shiny, silver housing that we called the Volkswagen. It could work as
fabulous picture about men and nature. I felt that if we could an underwater housing and as a splash box at water level.
approach that movie’s quality on Dolphin Tale, we would be just fine. I decided not to use the Steadicam, which I usually like to use,
Then Charles said, “We’ll be shooting in 3-D.” I was a little and instead shoot everything from cranes and dollies. The 3-D camera
shocked. The project involved child actors, a dolphin who had no rig was so big it reminded me of my early days in film school, when
double, a location-based shoot in Florida during hurricane season and the only way for us students to shoot sound was to use an old Arri
lots of underwater work. Capturing in 3-D would add to an already blimp that had to be carried by two people. This was progress?
tall order. The production had also struck a deal with Scott Howell at
However, I also felt Dolphin Tale might be a great opportunity Cinemoves, which provided various Technocranes with image-stabi-
to use 3-D differently. The technology was being used mostly for big, lized heads for the entire shoot. These gave us great freedom to move
action-packed blockbusters, and our story was a family-oriented the camera a lot, which helps bring the 3-D space to life. We were able
Photos by Jon Farmer, courtesy of Warner Bros.

drama. to reach almost everywhere over the dolphin pools, and for the final
I would have liked to compare various 3-D systems, but the scene in the lagoon we used a 50' Technocrane on a pontoon boat.
production worked out a deal with Paradise FX before I was hired. So My biggest concern was how to deal with all of the day-exte-
I began learning what I could about the format. After a great intro- rior shots. Going digital means less highlight retention, and the expo-
ductory 3-D seminar conducted by Sony and arranged through our sure curves just don’t roll off as nicely as film does, especially when
union, Local 600, I asked for a camera test. The Paradise system, scenes involve harsh contrast and bright skies in backlight situations.
designed by Max Penner, uses Preston motors for all of the focus, lens- Most of the story takes place at a marine hospital and aquarium that
conversion and interaxial adjustments. Max also works as the stereo- serves as home to our dolphin, Winter, but the main location wasn’t
grapher on his movies, and he brings with him a lot of knowledge and exactly pretty. It was a former sewage plant that had been converted,
confidence. so everything was built out of concrete and painted toilet blue!
Arri’s Alexa was not available at the time, and I wasn’t too The production designer, Michael Corenblith, had designed an
happy about shooting on the Red One, which came with the Paradise additional outdoor pool area, but there was no sun cover for the

74 October 2011 American Cinematographer

actors. The typical solution — flying a big silk
over the set for every scene — didn’t seem
very promising because the location was close
to the sea, and we had to anticipate strong
winds and heavy weather.
I knew nobody would want to wait for
the light, given that we had a six-hour on-set
schedule with child actors and a dolphin who
was making her first movie. Inspired by the
architecture of Frei-Otto, who designed
Munich’s Olympic Stadium, I thought about
hanging sails over the outdoor set. I worried
that I’d be stepping on Michael’s toes if I
suggested this to him, but fortunately, he was
incredibly supportive. He came up with great
designs for sails and masts that would help us
deal with the harsh Florida sun and add
another layer to the 3-D photography. Our
very supportive producers (Alcon Entertain-
ment) agreed to cover the extra costs, so after
a tough process of static engineering, local sail
makers helped us add 10 masts and lots of
different sails in various colors and translucen-
cies to the set.
Because a lot of the show’s gear had to
be specially built, our test period was short.
Once principal photography began, we
learned pretty quickly how to deal with four
different video-playback stations and all of the
extra cable! To keep things moving quickly
while we were capturing shots of the kids and
our dolphin, I decided to use the Angenieux
short zooms for all of the day-exterior work,
and the Master Primes for all the interiors and
night shoots. One rig was designated for
wider lenses, one for longer lenses (this one
had a smaller mirror), and one for primes or
the underwater housing.
Every lens change took time and
became a bit of an adventure, and the process
of reloading the cameras with the small SD
cards looked like a miniature science project.
Placing two cameras next to each other to
shoot A/B coverage was almost impossible
because of the size of the mirrors and the
necessary lens shades, which my assistant,
Tommy, had to make himself.
I was fortunate that our director was
very patient with the technical limitations and
hiccups we experienced. We were also lucky
to have a great first assistant director, Phil
Patterson, who had weathered many storms
on Terry Gilliam’s movies. With his help, I could
plan our shooting directions for each day,
keeping the sun mostly where I wanted it. ➣
 Top: Lindenlaub surveys a Our two child actors, Nathan Gamble
location while working and Cozi Zuehlsdorff, were extremely gifted
with a 4K Red 3-D rig. and professional. Harry Connick Jr., who
Middle: To create sun
cover for the actors on an plays the marine doctor and father, and
outdoor pool set, Morgan Freeman, who plays the inventor of
Lindenlaub drew the dolphin’s prosthetic tail, kept things light
inspiration from the
design of Munich’s on the set. Winter was always happy to
Olympic Stadium and perform a trick as long as she received some
asked production food as an incentive, and the weather stayed
designer Michael
Corenblith to add masts pretty consistent throughout the entire
and sails to the structure. shoot. I only had a hard time when we shot
Bottom: Underwater a hurricane sequence during the only three
cameraman Pete Zuccarini
designed an underwater hours of bad weather we encountered.
housing for the cameras Some sky replacement and DI work will help
that the crew dubbed that sequence.
the Volkswagen.
Pete finished his Volkswagen just in
time for principal photography. Once
lowered into the water with a crane arm, the
600-pound rig enabled him to capture great
footage of the boy and the dolphin. We
wanted to keep rolling once Pete was under-
water, so we recorded those sequences to a
hard drive inside the housing.
My main lighting instruments were
18K ArriSuns, which gave me a great sun
effect underwater and helped soften the
contrast in almost every daylight situation
where we bounced them or extended the
sunlight. Together with the new Arri 1.8K
M18s, they almost eliminate the need for
any other HMIs.
One major set built inside a ware-
house was a big aquarium exhibition space
with six large, square windows looking into
the tanks and lots of round windows on the
second floor. I was told the objects in the
tanks would have to be all CG because we
were shooting 3-D. This required me to
devise lighting that would accommodate
several large bluescreens, interactive lighting
for the underwater world, and a lighting
scheme for the visitors’ space — lots of fun
stuff. Best boy/rigging gaffer Marc Wostak
helped us come up with a nice solution:
bouncing our whole daylight package into
Mylar to create water reflections, and
accomplishing the rest with lots of tungsten
lights (gelled with various levels of CTB) on
dimmers.
We finished Dolphin Tale almost on
schedule, and I really enjoyed the experi-
ence. I hope the movie will help the audi-
ence feel that they can actually change
things and move forward, just as the pros-
thetic tail helps our dolphin to survive. ●

76 October 2011 American Cinematographer

New Products & Services
Arri Unveils L-Series
LED Fresnels
Arri has introduced the L-
Series of LED Fresnel
fixtures. The L7-T, L7-D and
L7-C fixtures incorporate
Fresnel characteristics of
continuous focusing from
spot to flood and a
smooth, homogenous
light field.
The “L” in L-Series
stands for LED, and the “7” correlates to the 7" Fresnel-like lens
shared by all three models. The L7-T is tungsten balanced at
3,200°K, the L7-D is daylight balanced at 5,600°K, and the L7-C is
color-controllable. All three can be operated in identical manner.
As with a conventional Fresnel, precise light-field control can
be achieved with barn doors and flags, permitting the same cutting
and shaping of the beam that lighting designers depend on. All
three L-Series fixtures draw 220 watts of power, and the L7-T and
L7-D both produce a light output comparable to a conventional 1K
tungsten Fresnel. The white light of the L7-C can be adjusted for
different skin tones, camera sensors and mixed-light environments,
and specific color shades can be matched through full-gamut color
mixing without compromising the quality of the light field; the L-
Series combines uniform light and single-shadow rendition with
absolute control of color temperature.
In addition to RDM-enabled DMX, L-Series fixtures can be
supplied with on-board manual controls. For the color-tunable L7-C,
this enables rapid and precise adjustment of intensity, color temper-
ature, green/magenta point, hue and saturation.
The L-Series also offers a completely passive cooling system
in a high-intensity LED fixture, resulting in truly silent operation. Like
all Arri products, the L-Series Fresnels utilize durable components
designed for high-impact handling. They feature IP54 weather resis-
tance and are built to withstand the rigors of modern production.
For additional information, visit www.arri.com.
LEDZ Fires Up Superspot
LEDZ has introduced the LEDZ Superspot, a
robust LED luminaire. Similar in style to the
company’s Brute products, the Superspot produces
a sharp, powerful, circular beam. Boasting 5,500°K
color temperature and a throw in excess of 40', the
Superspot is comparable to a 575-watt HMI fixture
and draws only a single amp.
According to LEDZ’s photometrics, the
78 October 2011 American Cinematographer
• SUBMISSION INFORMATION •
Please e-mail New Products/Services releases to:
newproducts@ascmag.com and include full contact
information and product images. Photos must be
TIFF or JPEG files of at least 300dpi.
Superspot boasts an output of 3,650 foot candles at 3', 1,300 foot
candles at 6', 550 foot candles at 9', 345 foot candles at 12', 225
foot candles at 15', 110 foot candles at 21', 68 foot candles at 27',
45 foot candles at 33', and 29 foot candles at 39'.
The Superspot features an all-aluminum housing and yoke
system with a junior mounting pin. It has a slim profile and produces
no sound and minimal heat. The fixture also incorporates two built-
in dimmers, which allow for 0-100-percent output control with mini-
mal color shifting.
The Superspot comes complete with a switchable power
supply unit (110-volt to 240-volt AC) and an extension cable with
on/off switch. Additional accessories are available, including the
LEDZ speed frame, filter frame, DMX capabilities and 12-volt battery
options for mobile applications.
For additional information, visit www.led-z.com.
Gekko Expands Karess Range
Gekko Technology has expanded its Karesslite LED soft-light
range with the Karess 6012 Blendable and Karesslite 6012 FX.
Whereas the standard Karesslite is switchable between
daylight and tungsten color temperatures, the Karess 6012 Blend-
able can be adjusted to any intermediate color temperature between
3,200°K and 5,600°K. “Lighting-system designers, lighting directors
and cinematographers appreciate the precise control this new option
provides,” says Ian Muir, Gekko Technology’s business-development
manager. “They now have the ability to select the color temperature
they require by adjustment on the back of the unit, or remotely via
DMX. Like all Karesslites, the blendable version delivers consistent
color temperature throughout its full range of intensity variation. It
delivers an output color quality that is consistent
with more traditional technologies, as well as
providing the many benefits that LEDs offer.”
Designed for visual effects and chroma-key
work, the Karesslite 6012 FX is switchable
between blue and green outputs for both blue-
screen and greenscreen applications. The unit
features on-board dimming and switching in
addition to integrated DMX.
Both the Karess 6012 Blendable and the

Karesslite 6012 FX incorporate a 6x12 emit-
ter format in a 23.6"x11.8" panel with a
front-to-back depth of 6.5" and a weight of
15.4 pounds. Power consumption is 85
watts, allowing more than 90 minutes of
continuous operation from two rear-mount-
able V-lock batteries. Power can also be
supplied from a 12-40-volt DC feed via an
XLR 4 connector, or from a mains supply.
Each Karesslite comes complete with
an integral diffusion grating, providing a
single-source output with minimal light loss.
Egg-crate options can also be deployed to
make the source more directional. Other
available accessories include the Gekko
swivel mount, yoke, encapsulated color-
correction gel sets, removable barn doors,
honeycomb louvers, remote dimmer and
soft transit case.
For additional information, visit
www.gekkotechnology.com.
Litepanels Upgrades Sola ENG
Litepanels, a Vitec Group brand, has
added more versatility to its on-camera Sola
ENG LED Fresnel light. The upgraded Sola
ENG operates on battery or AC power
thanks to a new AC/DC adapter, and the
Sola ENG Kit includes a detachable D-Tap
power cable and Stand Adapter Bracket,
making the fixture easy to mount on either
a camera or light stand.
Litepanels’ daylight-balanced Sola
fixtures provide great controllability and
light-shaping properties, including variable
beam control from 10-70 degrees while
utilizing just a fraction of the power of stan-
dard fixtures. Employing a 3" proprietary
Fresnel lens, the Sola ENG draws just 30
watts but produces light levels equivalent to
a 250-watt tungsten unit.
Sola Fresnels feature instant
dimming from 0-100 percent with no
noticeable color shift. The Sola ENG
provides ergonomic manual focus and
dimming via lens-style rotating control.
Output is flicker free and remains consistent
even as the battery voltage goes down.
The Sola ENG fixture measures
4"x4"x5" and weighs 10 ounces. The Sola
ENG Kit comes with the fixture, two-leaf
barn doors, three gels ( 1⁄4 correction, full
correction and diffusion), an AC power
supply with power cord, a Stand Adapter
Bracket, a detachable D-Tap DC power
cable, and a shoe-ball mount and adapter.
For additional information, visit
www.litepanels.com.
3-Point Lighting
With Ikan iLEDs
Ikan has introduced the iLED 312
Three-Point Light Kit, which includes a
durable carrying case, three iLED 312 LED
fixtures, three light stands, three light
diffusers, three AC power adapters, six
Sony L-series DV batteries, three dual-
battery chargers and three iLED 312 soft
carrying cases.
The iLED 312 boasts a bright (6,580
lux at 50cm) wide-angle beam pattern,
tungsten-to-daylight (3,200°K-6,500°K)
blending, dimming, on-board battery-life
indicator, and dual battery-life capabilities.
The kit’s suggested retail price is
$1,799. For more information, visit
www.ikancorp.com.
Elation Professional Zooms
With Platinum Wash
Elation Professional has introduced
the Platinum Wash LED Zoom, a compact,
energy-efficient LED color wash with a
built-in zoom and integrated DMX. Featur-
ing a 300-watt Quad Color LED system and
 DMX signals from up to 3,000' away. The
fixture also features an electronic dimmer
and strobe and can pan 540 degrees and tilt
265 degrees. It can be run in three DMX
modes (12, 14, or 15 channels) with a
three- or five-pin DMX input. A convenient
touch-screen display on the rear of the base
makes it easy to scroll through DMX
settings. The unit also offers multi-voltage
operation.
For additional information, visit
www.elationlighting.com.
built on Elation’s space-saving Platinum High End Systems Breaks
base, the Platinum Wash LED Zoom offers out Technospot
brilliant RGBW colors in a trimmed-down High End Systems, a Barco company,
fixture. has introduced the Technospot, a compact,
Powered by 30 10-watt RGBW CREE hard-edged fixture designed for a wide vari-
LEDs, the fixture produces an output ety of applications.
comparable to a 575-watt discharge The Technospot features smooth
moving head but draws only 360 watts at CMY color mixing and a fixed color wheel
maximum use. The LED source produces with eight replaceable positions plus open.
155 foot candles at 16'. Two rotating Lithopattern wheels, each
Measuring 14" long, 13.2" wide with six patterns plus open, provide a large
and 19" high, the Platinum Wash LED number of output patterns and images. The
Zoom is ideal for tight spaces. Weighing output can be further enhanced with a
35.5 pounds, the fixture is also easy to rotating four-facet prism and an animation
handle and transport. wheel.
The fixture’s built-in, motorized, 11- The Technospot also features a
50-degree zooming capability gives design- prominent 5.3" lens, 11-34-degree zoom
ers fast beam control, allowing them to and more than 12,000 lumens of output
produce a smaller wash with a longer throw from its 575-watt mini-fast-fit lamp. With its
or wider coverage with a shorter throw. incredibly efficient optics, the Technospot
Additionally, the unit’s built-in EWDMX projects clean, crisp images that cut through
receiver allows the fixture to receive wireless any wash. Additionally, an indigo high-
Prism Projection Reveals LED Profile
Prism Projection has unveiled the Reveal Profile, a high-CRI LED profile spot with high
lumen output. The fixture’s debut follows the successful launch of Prism’s Reveal Color Wash
and Reveal Studio units.
The 16,000-lumen Reveal Profile features a variable color-temperature range from
2,800°K to 6,500°K, adjustable focus from hard to soft edge, changeable lenses for beam
angles from 14 to 70 degrees, and a flat field. The fixture also offers four shutters on a tri-
plane; an M-size gobo; DMX, Artnet and local
control; and universal AC input.
Reveal products from Prism Projection
are professional-grade solutions that offer
exceptional color rendering, palette, repeata-
bility and beam quality. Reveal-series products
incorporate energy-efficient, long-lasting
solid-state light sources applied with propri-
etary control algorithms and projection optics.
For additional information, visit
www.prismprojection.com.
80 October 2011 American Cinematographer
lighter provides light output from four 1-
watt indigo LEDs, thus increasing the layer-
ing abilities of the large-aperture fixture.
Other features include mechanical
strobe, a fast mechanical iris, a color LCD
menu with battery operation, low ambient
noise, RDM and DMX compatibility via
three- and five-pin XLR connectors, and an
included road case. The Technospot also
boasts high-resolution micro-stepping
motor control for smooth motion at all
speeds; fast, smooth and quiet yoke move-
ment; an exterior design that prevents stray
light scatter; a low-noise, high-efficiency
electronic cooling system; and pan and tilt
locks for easy transportation.
For additional information, visit
www.highend.com and www.barco.com.
Hive Lighting Illuminates
Plasma Line
Hive Lighting has announced plans
for a line of plasma luminaires for the enter-
tainment industry. Incorporating Luxim
light-emitting-plasma technology, the
fixtures boast flicker-free, silent operation
while generating little heat and producing
full-spectrum daylight-balanced light.
The Hive Lighting plasma range was
the brainchild of cinematographer Jon
Edward Miller and energy consultant Robert
Rutherford. “These beautiful, daylight-
balanced lights are high output, have great
color quality, and are ready for the rigors of
production,” says Miller. “I started building
these lights for my own use and quickly real-
ized that their amazing color and power
were something I needed to share with the
industry.”
Hive’s Hornet180 Fresnel is the first in
the product line. Using a 180-watt lamp and
pulling just 275 total system watts, a
Hornet180 Fresnel puts out more light than
400-watt HMIs and 1K tungsten Fresnels.
Additionally, Hive’s lamps last 10,000 hours.
Hive’s lights are compatible with all
standard lighting accessories. No new
scrims, barn doors or Fresnel lenses are
needed. The lights are also controllable
through DMX, laptops and a wireless
iPhone app.
Hive also plans to release the
BumbleBee540 SpaceLight and Honey-
Bee180 Softlight by the end of this year.
For additional information, visit
www.hivelighting.com.

Photon Beard Goes Nova

Photon Beard has introduced the
Nova 270 flicker-free, low-heat, energy-effi-
cient lighting fixture.
“Nova is a completely new concept
in location lighting,” says Peter Daffarn,
Photon Beard’s managing director. “The
fixture’s exceptionally low power consump-
tion and ultra-cool beam provides a light
output equivalent to a 2,000-watt tungsten
Fresnel. Users will have all the light they
need without breaking a sweat.”
The Nova 270 utilizes what Photon
Beard describes as a new type of light
source. The unit runs cool, so no fans are
required. Additionally, the daylight-
balanced fixture is focusable from 12 to 15
degrees.
For additional information, visit
www.photonbeard.com. ●
International Marketplace

OppCam Grip Systems

DENECKE, INC...
Celebrating
35 Years of Precision!

DENECKE, INC.
25030 Avenue Stanford, Suite 240  Valencia,
CA 91355
Phone (661) 607-0206  Fax (661) 257-2236
www.denecke.com  Email: info@denecke.

82 October 2011 American Cinematographer

 SUPER16INC.COM
Top-notch camera and lens servicing
Ask about Ultra 16!
T: 607-642-3352bernie@super16inc.com
Toll-free: 877-376-6582FREE ESTIMATES
Classifieds
CLASSIFIED AD RATES
All classifications are $4.50 per word. Words set in
bold face or all capitals are $5.00 per word. First
word of ad and advertiser’s name can be set in capitals
without extra charge. No agency commission or
discounts on clas si fied advertising.PAYMENTMUSTAC -
COMPA NYORDER. VISA, Mastercard, AmEx and Discover
card are ac cept ed. Send ad to Classi fied Ad ver tis -
ing,Amer i can Cin e ma tog ra pher, P.O. Box 2230,
Holly wood, CA 90078. Or FAX (323) 876-4973. Dead -
line for payment and copy must be in the office by 15th
of second month preceding pub li ca tion. Sub ject mat ter
islim it ed to items and ser vic es per tain ing to film mak -
ing and vid eo pro duc tion. Words used are sub ject to
maga zine style ab bre vi a tion.Mini mum amount per
ad: $45
CLASSIFIEDS ON-LINE
Ads may now also be placed in the on-line Classi-
fieds at the ASC web site.
Internet ads are seen around the world at the
same great rate as in print, or for slightly more you
can appear both online and in print.
For more information please visit
www.theasc.com/advertiser, or e-mail: classi-
fieds@theasc.com.
ww.theasc.com
w October 2011
EQUIPMENT FOR SALE
Arri 435ES very complete package plus 18-100 Zoom lens,
Arri Varicon. Excellent prices Contact
rmclachlan@mac.com
14,000+ USED EQUIPMENT ITEMS. PRO VIDEO &
FILM EQUIPMENT COMPANY. 50 YEARS EXPERI-
ENCE. New: iLLUMiFLEX LIGHTS & FluidFlex
TRIPODS.
www.UsedEquipmentNewsletter.com AND
www.ProVideoFilm.com
EMAIL: ProVidFilm@aol.com
CALL BILL 972 869 9990, 888 869 9998.
World’s SUPERMARKET of USED MOTION PICTURE
EQUIPMENT! Buy, Sell, Trade. CAMERAS, LENSES,
SUPPORT, AKS & MORE! Visual Products, Inc.
www.visualproducts.com Call 440.647.4999
SERVICES AVAILABLE
4X5 85 Glass Filters, Diffusion, Polas etc. Good
Rentals price 818-763-8547
STEADICAM ARM QUALITY SERVICE OVERHAUL AND
UPDATES. QUICK TURNAROUND. ROBERT LUNA
(323) 938-5659.
83
 Advertiser’s Index
16x9, Inc. 82 Deluxe C2 P+S Technik 83
AC 1, Denecke 82 Panavision, Inc 19
Aja Video Systems, Inc. 9 Eastman Kodak C4 Panther Gmbh 51
Alan Gordon Enterprises 82 EFD USA, Inc 17 PC&E 42
Arri 35 Pille Film Gmbh 83
Film Gear 65 Pro8mm 82
AZGrip 83 Filmtools 81 Production Resource Group
Backstage Equipment, Inc. Fletcher Chicago 49 71
6 Fujifilm 37
Bardwell & McAlister, Inc 69 Schneider Optics 2
Gekko Technology 60 Sony Electronics 13
Barger-Lite 71, 82 Glidecam Industries 23
Bron Imaging Group - US 43 Super16 Inc. 83
Burrell Enterprises 82 Hive Lighting 6 Tessive LLC 6
Hollywood Post Alliance 75 Tiffen 15
Cavision Enterprises 59
Chapman/Leonard Studio Innovision 83 VF Gadgets, Inc. 82
Equipment Inc. 39 J.L. Fisher 26 Visual Products 65
Chapman University 11 Welch Integrated 85
Chimera 5 K5600 C3
Kino Flo 50 Willy’s Widgets 82
Cinematography www.theasc.com 4, 66,
Electronics 75 Kobold 43
77, 81, 84
Cinekinetic 82 Lee Filters 61
Clairmont Film & Digital 21 Lights! Action! Co. 82 Zacuto Films 83
Codex Digital Ltd., 25
Maccam 41
Convergent Design 57
M.M. Muhki & Sons 83
Cooke Optics 27
Movie Tech AG 83
Createsphere 73
NBC Universal 69
New York Film Academy 67
Nila, Inc. 79
Oppenheimer Camera Prod.
82
Osram 7

84
New Hands-On Workshops
Sign Up Today at www.studentfilmmakers.com/workshops/
p
INTENSIVE FILMMAKING WORKSHOPS
• 3D • Digital Filmmaking • Documentary • HDSLR Cameras • 16mm • 35mm • HD • RED One Filmmaking
• Production • Screenwriting • Directing • Acting for Film • Digital Editing • Production Sound
• Broadcast Journalism • Cinematography • Image Control • Film Business • Distribution • And More

Learn more in the exciting world of filmmaking in NYC at our New Studio
1123 Broadway #307, New York, New York, 10010

Never Stop Learning. Never Stop Networking.

 In Memoriam
Takuo “Tak” Miyagishima,1928-2011
Associate member Takuo “Tak”
Miyagishima died Aug. 4 following an
extended fight with pneumonia. He was 83.
Miyagishima was born on March 15,
1928, in Gardena, Calif. He served in the U.S.
Army during the Korean War, and during his
service he occasionally worked as a projec-
tionist of training films.
Miyagishima attended East Los Ange-
les Junior College and the University of Cali-
fornia-Los Angeles with the hope of design-
ing bridges. In 1954, he joined a small manu-
facturing company as an engineer/designer.
Among the company’s clients was Panavi-
sion, which had been founded that year by
Robert Gottschalk and future ASC member
Richard Moore. Gottschalk quickly recog-
nized Miyagishima’s talents, and by the end
of the year Miyagishima was one of Panavi-
sion’s first full-time employees.
Among Miyagishima’s early projects
were the Super Panatar projection lens and
the Micro Panatar printing lens. As Panavision
turned its focus toward camera systems and
taking lenses, Miyagishima contributed to
such advancements as the 65mm Ultra and
Super Panavision camera systems, the Panav-
ision Silent Reflex Camera, and several series
of 35mm spherical and anamorphic lenses.
Over his decades of service at Panavi-
sion, Miyagishima moved up from draftsman
to senior vice president of engineering, and
he remained a constant force behind the
company’s technological advances, including
86 October 2011
its push into digital capture. In 2004, reflect-
ing on his 50 years with Panavision, Miyag-
ishima told AC, “If a director of photography
wanted a certain focal-length lens, we would
look into it. For Lawrence of Arabia, all the
mechanical parts of those lenses came off my
table. George Kraemer and I actually cali-
brated the ‘mirage lens’ in the alleyway right
outside Panavision!”
Miyagishima also designed the
company’s “three-format” logo.
Miyagishima became an ASC associ-
ate in April 1995, after being proposed by
Society members Woody Omens and Kees
Van Oostrum.
“Tak was the most terrific engineer,”
says Van Oostrum. “I could go to him and
say, ‘This doesn’t feel right. Somehow it does-
n’t merge with what we do every day.’ And
he would listen, nod and come back with a
solution. As cinematographers, we deal with
feelings and ideas that don’t necessarily
translate into engineering, but Tak had the
ability to translate those ideas so eloquently,
beautifully and effectively. It’s a trait I’ve never
really found in another engineer.”
“There was a synergy effect when Tak
and Panavision came together,” notes
Omens. “It was a relationship made in
heaven. He was a friend to the industry and
to the people in it.”
Miyagishima was also active in such
organizations as the Academy’s Science &
Technology Council, the SMPTE Projection
American Cinematographer
Technology Committee and the Interna-
tional Standards Organization.
At the ASC Awards in 1999, in recog-
nition of their exceptional contributions to
the art of filmmaking, Miyagishima and
Panavision colleague Albert Mayer Sr.
received the Presidents Award. Miyag-
ishima’s other honors included a Fuji Gold
Medal, for his contributions to anamorphic
lens design; the Academy’s John A. Bonner
Medal of Commendation, for his service to
the Academy; and the Academy’s Gordon E.
Sawyer Award, for his overall technical
contributions to the motion-picture industry.
During Miyagishima’s tenure at
Panavision, the company was honored with
more than 20 Academy Sci-Tech Awards.
“He was a pioneer,” says Stephen H.
Burum, ASC. “He was there at the very first.
He was the living spirit of Panavision, and he
reflected Panavision’s ethic of being a
forward-looking, progressive company.
Besides that, he was a great guy.”
“Tak was that rare person in our
industry who made you feel like family,” says
Daryn Okada, ASC. “I’ll always remember
the gleam in his eyes when he saw how to
make an idea reality and help all of us create
images in the demanding framework of
production. And as much as I will miss him,
I feel he’ll be right there every time I look in
the eyepiece and roll the camera.”
Miyagishima retired in 2009, but he
remained active in the industry. Early this
year, the Academy named him one of the
first three Academy Science Fellows.
“My dream of building bridges never
materialized, but my luck at being in the
right place at the right time certainly proved
right,” Miyagishima reflected in 1994.
“Images being an international language
without boundaries assisted me in achieving
my goals of being able to build bridges of
Photo courtesy of AMPAS.
understanding. I would not have had the
opportunities to achieve my dreams had it
not been for Panavision.”
Miyagishima is survived by his wife,
three sons and three grandsons.
— Jon D. Witmer
●
 Clubhouse News
Dod Mantle, Geddes, Silver,
WalkerJoin Society
The Society has welcomed
Anthony Dod Mantle, David Geddes,
Steven V. Silver and Mandy Walker to its
ranks of active members.
Anthony Dod Mantle, ASC,
BSC, DFF grew up in Oxford, England. In
1985, he moved to Denmark and enrolled
in the National Film School.His first
feature as a cinematographer was the
German film Terrorists, which went on to
achieve cult status after being banned in
Germany. His credits since then have
included The Celebration, Julien Donkey-
Boy, Dear Wendy (AC Oct. ’05) and The
Last King of Scotland . Hehas enjoyed
multiple collaborations with Lars von Trier
on such films as Dogville (AC May ’04),
Manderlay and Antichrist (AC Nov. ’09),
and with Danny Boyle on such features as
28 Days Later… (AC July ’03), Millions,
Slumdog Millionaire (AC Dec. ’08)and
127 Hours (AC Dec. ’10). Dod Mantle
won ASC, Academy and BAFTA awards
and the Camerimage Golden Frog for
Slumdog Millionaire.
Photo of Clubhouse by Isidore Mankofsky, ASC; lighting by Donald M. Morgan, ASC.
David Geddes, ASC, CSC was
born in Vancouver, and he developed a
love of storytelling while working in British
Columbia’s lumber mills and logging
camps, where spoken yarns provided the
only entertainment. Geddes studied
photography at the Banff Centre School
of Fine Arts and the Northern Alberta
Institute of Technology, and then partici-
pated in the Simon Fraser University Film
Workshop. He earned his first cinematog-
raphy credits on documentaries, shorts,
corporate films and investigative journal-
ism pieces before moving into 35mm tele-
Silver photo by Douglas Kirkland.
vision production with the series 21 Jump
Street. He has since shot more than 70
projects, including the series Beverly Hills,
90210, Dark Angel, Sanctuary (AC Nov.
’08) and Lie to Me , and the features
Here’s to Life! and Tucker & Dale vs. Evil.
Steven V. Silver, ASCwas born in
Illinois and grew up in Southern Califor-
nia’s San Fernando Valley. He began
shooting with his father’s Super 8 cameras
when he was 8 years old. At age 19, he
set the cameras aside to hitchhike across
Asia. Upon returning to the States, he
rekindled his passion for cinematography
during his studies at San Fernando Valley
College. Silvergot his start in the industry
with jobs at Hill Production Service and
the Howard A. Anderson Co. He joined
the union and climbed the ranks, starting
as an assistant. His cinematography cred-
its include themulti-camera series Still
Standing, Dharma & Greg, The Big Bang
Theory and Two and a Half Men . For his
work on the latter, he earned six Emmy
nominations, taking home the award in
2007.
Mandy Walker, ASC, ACS was
born in Melbourne, Australia, where she
developed an early love for art in general
and film in particular. When she was 12,
she began developing her own photos in
a darkroom her father set up in the
family’s shed, and in high school she
began studyingfilm history. While study-
ing film at the university level, Walker met
a producer who hired her as a production
assistant on the feature Dusty. She then
made her way up through the camera
department, notching her first cinematog-
raphy credits on music videos and student
films. Her first feature credit was Return
Home. Since thenshe has photographed
such features as Lantana (AC Feb. ’02),
Australia (AC Nov. ’08)and Red Riding
Hood (AC April ’11). Her commercial cred-
its include spots for Chanel, American
Express, Mercedes, Nike and Gatorade.
●
From Top: Anthony Dod Mantle, ASC, BSC,
DFF; David Geddes, ASC, CSC; Steven V.
Silver, ASC; Mandy Walker, ASC, ACS.
ww.theasc.com
w October 2011 87
 Close-up Xavier Grobet, ASC, AMC

When you were a child, what film made the strongest impres- Have you made any memorable blunders?
sion on you? Many. I once tried to play the piano in front of Sir Anthony Hopkins,
The Czech movie Jumping Over Puddles (1972), which I now know and he kindly asked, ‘Can you play Far Away?’
was directed by Karel Kachyna. I haven’t seen it since. Also, I’ve
always loved Miracle in Milan (1951)by Vittorio De Sica. What is the best professional advice you’ve ever received?
Life is like an airplane: you either get onboard, or you don’t. It’s up
Which cinematographers, past or present, do you most to you.
admire?
Sven Nykvist, ASC, for his What recent books, films or
understanding of simplicity; artworks have inspired
Gabriel Figueroa, for his ability you?
to create strong, meaningful Julius Shulman’s photographs,
images; and Vittorio Storaro, Richard Neutra’s architecture
ASC, AIC, for being the and F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise,
Renaissance Man of cine- one of the most beautiful
matography. movies of all time.

What sparked your interest Do you have any favorite

in photography? genres, or genres you
My mother was a photogra- would like to try?
pher, and that planted the Science fiction and Westerns. I
seed in me. I grew up in the had the chance to shoot
darkroom (in more ways than science fiction on Gil Kenan’s
one). City of Ember , and I loved
doing it. I also enjoyed shoot-
Where did you train and/or ing Deadwood.
study?
I studied at Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica in Mexico City. If you weren’t a cinematographer, what might you be doing
instead?
Who were your early teachers or mentors? I’m not sure. Maybe I’d have a taco stand on Broadway in down-
Eduardo Maldonado, a documentarian who was the director of our town L.A.
film school; Santiago Navarrete, who put me on the right track in my
early days; and David Watkin, BSC. Fortunately, I was able to tell Which ASC cinematographers recommended you for
David he had been my teacher before he died. membership?
Emmanuel Lubezki, Henner Hofmann and Gabriel Beristain — in
What are some of your key artistic influences? other words, the Mexican Mafia!
Motion, rhythm, light, shadows, volume, space, shapes and
humans. How has ASC membership impacted your life and career?
It feels great to be part of the community. Being able to exchange
How did you get your first break in the business? ideas and share our work with each other helps make us better cine-
I shot La Mujer de Benjamin , produced by our film school, and it matographers. ●
earned a bunch of awards worldwide. And working with Julian
Schnabel on Before Night Falls definitely put me on the map.
Photo by Tiger Munson.

What has been your most satisfying moment on a project?

Having fun with my crews, creating an environment where we all
want to go to work. Also, watching a film I shot and being proud of
it is always satisfying.

88 October 2011 American Cinematographer

ONFILM
DAN MINDEL, ASC, BSC

“What first drew me to photography was

the ability to freeze time. Once you had the
image, you discovered things that the naked
eye never saw. Now, telling stories with
motion pictures is what really interests me.
We cinematographers live and breathe it. The
idea of having a 35 mm frame with chemicals
that react to a focused beam of light, and
turning that into a picture – that is one of the
most incredible things I can imagine. I try to
excite and stimulate the film with light so
that it does something that it’s not supposed
to do. Those imperfections can give the
images an unquantifiable magic. They put
another layer of illusion onto something that
is already artificial, tricking the audience into
thinking it’s real. Film is a handmade art form
that comes with a set of emotional tools. I
like to use these subtleties and variations as
part of the emotional landscape of the story.
To me, the film medium is irreplaceable.”

Dan Mindel was born in South Africa

and educated in London, where he began
his career as a loader at a commercial
production house. He moved up to director
of photography and segued into the feature
film world, eventually shooting Enemy of the
State with Tony Scott. Since then, his credits
include Shanghai Noon, Skeleton Key, Spy
Game, Mission: Impossible III, Domino, and
Star Trek. He is currently filming the feature
film Savages with Oliver Stone, using a wide
variety of film formats.

All these productions were photographed on

Kodak motion picture film.

For an extended interview with Dan Mindel,

visit www.kodak.com/go/onfilm.

To order Kodak motion picture film,

call (800) 621-film.
© Eastman Kodak Company, 2011.
Photography: © 2011 Douglas Kirkland