April 2021 The International Publication of the American Society of Cinematographers

WandaVision ASC Inspirations I

The Art of Light

p.Cover 1 AC Cover April 2021.indd 1 3/9/21 1:28 PM
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 APRIL 2021 VOL. 102 NO. 4

On Our Cover:
A striking 2014 photograph taken by ASC
member Phedon Papamichael shows his wife,

Contents
Ekaterina, posed in a shaft of light amid the
unrestored frescoes of the 6th-century
Georgian Orthodox Jvari Monastery, located
near Mtskheta in eastern Georgia.
Papamichael used a Panasonic Lumix GX1.

Features
24 Sitcom Limbo
Jess Hall, ASC, BSC pays homage to classic sitcom lighting
for WandaVision.

38
38 ASC Inspirations
Four Society members reveal lighting and creative influences.

46 Casual Comedy
John Simmons, ASC shoots a Kevin Hart special amid
Covid protocols.

52 Domestic Discord
Marcell Rév, HCA renders a fraught relationship in
black-and-white for Malcolm & Marie.

58 Forging a Path Forward

The ASC Future Practices Committee addresses
industry challenges.

Departments
8 Letter From the President
10 Shot Craft: Camera and Lens Testing
18 Picture Partners: Joe “Jody” Williams and Craig Brewer
36 World View Map

46
61 New Products and Services
64 ASC Membership Roster
66 Classified Ads/Ad Index
67 In Memoriam: Gerald Feil, ASC
68 In Memoriam: Giuseppe Rotunno, ASC, AIC
70 Clubhouse News
72 Wrap Shot

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 EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Stephen Pizzello

WEB DIRECTOR and ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER

David E. Williams

EDITORIAL
SENIOR EDITOR Andrew Fish
SHOT CRAFT and TECHNICAL EDITOR Jay Holben
CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER and WEB PRODUCER Mat Newman
DIGITAL CONTENT CREATOR Samantha Dillard
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CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
Benjamin B, Rachael K. Bosley, John Calhoun, Mark Dillon, Michael Goldman, Jim Hemphill,
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Matt Mulcahey, Jean Oppenheimer, Phil Rhodes, Patricia Thomson, Peter Tonguette
PODCASTS
Michael Goldman • Jim Hemphill • Iain Marcks
BLOGS
Benjamin B • John Bailey, ASC • David Heuring

CREATIVE DIRECTION and DESIGN

Edwin Alpanian

ADVERTISING
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323-936-3769 Fax 323-952-2140 e-mail: angiegollmann@gmail.com
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SUBSCRIPTIONS, BOOKS and PRODUCTS

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ASC SPONSORSHIP and EVENTS DIRECTOR Patricia Armacost
CHIEF OPERATIONS OFFICER Alex Lopez
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DIRECTOR OF FINANCE and ACCOUNTING Thanh Lai
ACCOUNTING Kim Pallares
American Cinematographer (ISSN 0002-7928), established 1920 and in its 101st 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.
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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.

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 CUSTOM COLLECTION
OF STILL PHOTOGRAPHY BY American Society of Cinematographers

MEMBERS OF THE ASC The ASC is not a labor union or a guild,

but an educational, cultural and
professional organization. Membership is
by invitation to those who are actively en-
gaged as directors of photography and have
demonstrated outstanding ability. ASC
membership has become one of the highest
honors that can be bestowed upon a
professional cinematographer — a mark
of prestige and excellence.

OFFICERS 2020/2021
Stephen Lighthill
President
Amelia Vincent
Vice President
Steven Fierberg
Vice President
John Simmons
Vice President
Steven Poster
Treasurer
Gregg Heschong
Secretary
Christopher Chomyn
Sergeant-at-Arms

MEMBERS
OF THE BOARD
John Bailey
Christopher Chomyn
Curtis Clark
Richard Crudo
Dean Cundey
Frederick Elmes
Larry Fong
Edward Lachman
Stephen Lighthill
IMAGES BY Lowell Peterson
Steven Poster
RUSSELL CARPENTER • JAMES CHRESSANTHIS Lawrence Sher
FREDERICK ELMES • STEPHEN GOLDBLATT • EDWARD LACHMAN Rodney Taylor
Mandy Walker
JACEK LASKUS • PHEDON PAPAMICHAEL • JOHN SIMMONS
Robert Yeoman
JOHN TOLL and MORE
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store.ascmag.com/collections/asc-photo-gallery Steve Gainer

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 APRIL 2021 / 7

p.4-7 Masthead and ASC Board DONE.indd 7 3/9/21 12:23 PM

 Letter From the President

PHOTO BY MICHAEL M.
PESSAH, ASC.

IN THIS ISSUE, we celebrate lighting. We begin with a photograph on our cover by Phedon Papamichael, ASC, GSC — a
picture in which light is a main character. The light transports us to our own imaginary place; and after all, that is what light
in a photo or a movie or a TV show should do. Light transports us from our own world that we inhabit in our own reality,
or in our imagination, and into another world: the world of the story being told.
In this issue, you will find reference to artists that have inspired many of us, including Robert Frank and Gregory Crewd-
son. Another, for me, is Edward Hopper. Many of us have used Hopper’s paintings as inspiration. Personally, I “discovered”
Hopper on a trip to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art bookstore while looking for inspiration for the first narrative
feature I filmed. In the end, the movie looked nothing like a Hopper painting, but that was and is not the point. The point,
I believe, of cinematographers studying painters and photographs, is to transport us — in our minds — to a dreamscape
where anything is possible in lighting, with no regard for budgets nor technical limitations. This is a centering, or focusing
(sorry), on light itself, which prepares me to tackle the interpretation of the story I am beginning to help tell.
In this issue, the master still photographer Gregory Crewdson is referenced for the lighting of his images. If you haven’t
watched the documentary Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters, do so to understand the precision with which his images
are created. I use Crewdson to make the point that every object in a frame carries narrative meaning, and so filmmakers
should carefully study the objects in a frame for what they imply about the story. (Note the details in the 2007 Crewdson
photo shown here, Untitled (Birth), including the motel key that’s still in the door handle.)
In this issue, we discuss lighting at a time when the very practice is actually threatened by some who believe turning
on a camera and filming whatever is lit by the light available is all that is necessary in professional image-making. It’s the
plug-and-play generation hard at work, I guess, but nothing could be further from the truth.
I am reminded of an old cinematographers’ joke. Question: “Do you ever work with available light?” Answer: “Yes, I work
with every light available.”
Light is at the center of what we do. Read on and see in the words of ASC masters how to light for dramatic intent: how
light transports viewers into those imaginary worlds they know do not exist but believe in anyway.

Stephen Lighthill
President, ASC

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 JULY 2020 / 9

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 Shot Craft By Jay Holben
The Generic Lens Test
The Importance of Testing
The process of testing is a major component of
the cinematographer’s trade. It is a never-end-
ing task of examining the latest equipment and
revisiting older tools with a fresh perspective.
In most cases, there are two types of tests:
generic and specific. One provides an overall
evaluation of a new tool (new to the marketplace
or new to you) and the other identifies a specific
creative or technical application for a project.
This installment of Shot Craft discusses a
generic lens evaluation that you may use when
you are trying to understand a lens’ characteris-
tics and performance. This approach familiarizes
the tester with the attributes of a particular lens,
agnostic of any specific application for a project.
Testing of this kind — which is adaptable to
10 / APRIL 2021
p.10-17 Shot Craft V3 DONE.indd 10
many different types of equipment — is part of
how you build your mental Rolodex of tools you
can refer to when needed, because you have a
better understanding of how those tools work
and how they may be applied to solve a problem
or realize a creative vision.
Many cinematographers at the beginning
of their career are intimidated by testing and
often lament that they don’t have access to the
required equipment due to their typically low
budgets. But nearly every equipment rental facili-
ty will allow a cinematographer to come in and
test equipment on their premises. It’s the nature
of the business, and it helps them meet potential
clients. It may not be possible to test if your local
rental house is busy or the equipment is rented
to another project, but if they’re having a slow
day, they typically won’t refuse a test request. It
doesn’t cost you anything but time.
Some cinematographers approach testing by
simply trying out the equipment — taking it into
the field and shooting something, or examining
it at the rental house. While this approach can
teach you something about the new tool, a more
scientific and methodical approach will reveal ex-
ponentially more. There’s little use, for example,
in merely taking a lens out to shoot a sunset or
a model if you’re not testing variations in each
shoot — to learn the different characteristics of
performance along the range of the lens. When
testing any piece of equipment, you should have
a plan for what you want to learn. You can get
in a car and test-drive it around the block, but
that won’t tell you how the car will perform on
3/9/21 1:01 PM

Opposite: Nicole Starrett poses for a lens test. Below: A Carl Zeiss Distagon Ultra Prime f/1.7 / T1.9 28mm lens.
the freeway, or how the brakes will perform in
an emergency. If you really want to test that car,
PHOTO THIS PAGE COURTESY OF CHRISTOPHER PROBST, ASC.
you’ve got to spend some time testing it with a
variety of specific tasks.
ALL OTHER PHOTOS COURTESY OF JAY HOLBEN.
The Generic Approach
When you’re performing a generic/agnostic test
— on any piece of equipment — it’s critical to
take as scientific an approach as possible. While
the “scientific method” involves the formulation
and testing of hypotheses, a variation of this
strategy is recommended. A cinematographer
should not go into a test with a preconceived
notion of how the tool might perform, but should
instead begin testing with questions: What is the
dynamic range of this camera? How well is this
lens corrected for spherical aberration? What is
p.10-17 Shot Craft V3 DONE.indd 11
the usable viewing angle of this monitor? How
accurate is the color fidelity of this light fixture?
Having specific questions enables you to per-
form specialized tasks to find those answers.
Note Everything
This cannot be stressed enough: Take copious
notes, detail everything you do in your testing,
and err on the side of creating more ridiculously
detailed notes than you might ever need.
You might also consider including the notes
in the frame when testing a camera, lighting or a
lens. This can generally be accomplished with a
slate in the shot, or even Post-It notes attached
to elements in the shot. Taking such steps en-
sures that the information never gets separated.
A slate at the top of a clip is helpful (and in some
AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER ASCMAG.COM
cases the only choice), but that doesn’t follow
through if you cut the footage or take still frames
later.
Detailed written notes are crucial. They’re
tedious and time-consuming, but they should be
done. Never, ever think, “I’ll remember this later.”
You won’t.
Think Long-Term
While you can learn a great deal just by per-
forming the test and looking at the results in
the moment, it is beyond invaluable to examine
the results after the fact. Even just the following
night or a day later, you can spend more time
scrutinizing the results and comparing them
side-by-side. It can be especially useful to
compare frame grabs of different iterations of
APRIL 2021 / 11
3/9/21 1:01 PM
 Shot Craft

the test. This is also where detailed note-taking

becomes crucial. While reviewing the test imme-
diately after doing it is helpful, you may need to
refer to this test a week, a month or even a year
later.

Step-By-Step
After performing innumerable lens tests in my
career, and especially in the last decade, I’ve es-
tablished a generic test that incorporates a num-
ber of easily isolated variables in a single frame
to economize time and maximize the number of
lens attributes that are being examined. Each
iteration of the test looks at these attributes at a
different aperture.
The test starts with a model. Since human
faces are a key focus for cinematographers, it’s
good to have one in frame.
In front of the model, I’ll use one arm of
an 8'x8' frame, securing it on both ends with
C-stands. This provides a place to put a slate,
gray card, color chart and resolution card. All of
these get grip-clipped to the square tube of the
frame arm, and the model sits directly behind
them so that the cards align with the plane of the
model’s face.

It’s always best to test more

than one lens. If you’re only
interested in the performance
of one lens, pick another that
you know well to compare it to.
Behind the model, stretch out a large piece
of duvetyne or a 20x solid across the back wall.
These should be a fair distance away from the
model — about 6'-10'. In front of the black, basi-
cally right on top of it, stretch three or four nets
of holiday twinkle lights. Ideally, the black and
twinkle lights should span the entire field of view
of the lens you’re testing, allowing for enough
width for the widest lens that will be tested. (For
lighting details, see sidebar, page 14.)
Then place a 150-watt Fresnel in front of the
holiday lights, off to one side near the top of the
frame, but still in the shot. This lamp should be
pointed directly at the lens, in order to reveal
how the lens will handle spot/ghosting flare. It
will be switched on and off during the test. Ad-
ditionally, another 150-watt Fresnel is positioned
just outside the field of view of the lens, off to
one side. Both of these lamps are cabled back to Tests of Canon and Arri/Zeiss lenses, with Anne-Michael Huntley Smith.

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 AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER WWW.ASCMAG.COM

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 Shot Craft

switches near the camera. Tests of direct flare (top) and veiling
I generally choose a large, broad light as a glare (bottom) for Arriflex/Zeiss Super
key source to evenly illuminate the charts and Speed 50mm, with Chanel Marriott.
the model. This shot isn’t about creativity in
lighting — it’s a technical test. The fixture can be
any kind of your choice, but it should be soft, it
should evenly light the model and all the charts,
and it should provide a minimum of 50fc (538
lux) of illumination on the model’s face and the
charts (that’s a 5.6 at 800 ISO at 24 fps).

Testing of this kind — which is

adaptable to many different
types of equipment — is part
of how you build your mental
Rolodex of tools.
Focus is set on the model with the lens at its
widest aperture and is not changed during the
main body of the test. If you set focus with the
lens at any deeper stop, it’s possible you will not
have critical focus on the model, as depth of
field makes it difficult to see the critical-focus
plane; then when you open up the aperture, the
model may be soft, which will bias the test. Once
the focus is set, don’t refocus for each iteration,
since that can also bias the test.

During each iteration:

• Start rolling with only the key light and holiday
lights on.
• Turn on the rear flare light, directly striking the
lens at an oblique angle. It remains on for a
second or two and then is turned off.
• Turn on the side (veiling) flare light, striking the
lens from out of frame. It remains on for a few
seconds and then is turned off.
• The camera cuts.
• Change the iris.
• Change shutter speed and frame rate
accordingly.
• Change the slate.
During the final iteration, before you cut,
roll from close focus to infinity to check focus
breathing. This tactic is generally best kept to
the end of the process so that focus variation
between iterations is not a factor.
Testing a lens at multiple stops is essen-
tial because the behavior of many aberrations
changes at different iris settings. I prefer to test
a lens at every stop to gain as much information
as possible, but that method can be tedious and
time-consuming if you know you’ll only be using
the lens within a particular range of stops.
Note that after each iteration, you change
the iris as well as the shutter angle and/or frame
rate.
When the aperture changes, we must
compensate for the difference in exposure by
adjusting other variables to maintain consis-
tent exposure. Altering the lighting can bias the
results of the test, and it can cause inconsis-
tencies. You therefore do not want to introduce
any scrims, nets or gels, or any dimming of the
lights. (LED lights can be dimmed, but this can
still introduce inconsistent results, since the
dimming is not always precise). Likewise, you
also don’t want to add any form of filtration on
the lens or behind it, because additional glass
Lighting for a Test
It’s absolutely crucial to use tungsten fila-
ment holiday lights — not LEDs, which will
cause flicker problems as you change shut-
ter angle. I also prefer to use the “net” va-
riety of these lights, which are designed to
drape over bushes, as you’ll get a 4'x6' area
of lights in a single unit and you can easily
cover the entire field of view of most lenses
with just a couple of nets. Many times you’ll
see individuals using a single strand of
holiday lights somewhere in the frame, but
I prefer them to cover the entire frame; the
nature of the lens’ bokeh changes from the
center to the edges, and the holiday lights
will reveal this instantly.

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 AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER WWW.ASCMAG.COM

F UJ I N O N .CO M
APRIL 2021 / 15

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 Shot Craft

Adjusting for Exposure Variations Aperture Frame Rate Shutter Angle

The following chart is provided as a guideline for exposure compensa-
tion via shutter angle and frame rate, with a base starting at T5.6, with a T1 24 fps (48 fps*) 5.125o (11.25o*)
180-degree shutter at 24 fps (noted in red). This base is chosen so that T1.1 24 fps (48 fps*) 6.5o (14o*)
you may reach all of the common stops on most lenses without altering T1.2 24 fps (48 fps )
*
7.75o (17o*)
lighting. Bolded apertures are full common stops; non-bolded are fractional
T1.3 24 fps (48 fps*) 9.5o (20o*)
stops, allowing for lenses whose maximum speed is a fractional stop (i.e.,
T1.3 or T1.9 as opposed to T1.4 or T2). When testing on some cameras, not T1.4 24 fps 11.25o
all of these shutter angles or frame rates may be possible. In those circum- T1.5 24 fps 13o
stances, you may need to compensate exposure via lighting.
T1.6 24 fps 15o
T1.7 24 fps 17o
T1.8 24 fps 19o
T1.9 24 fps 21o
T2 24 fps 22.5o
T2.1 24 fps 25.3o
T2.2 24 fps 28o
T2.3 24 fps 31o
T2.4 24 fps 33.75o
Large Format Directors Viewfinder

Full Format
T2.5 24 fps 36.5o
T2.6 24 fps 39.3o

in all its Glory T2.7

T2.8
24 fps
24 fps
42.2o
45o
T2.9 24 fps 48.75o
T3 24 fps 52.5o
T3.1 24 fps 56.25o
T3.2 24 fps 60o
T3.3 24 fps 63.75o
T3.4 24 fps 67.5o
T3.5 24 fps 71.25o

“While recently shooting

The Pursuit of Love on the Alexa
T3.6
T3.7
24 fps
24 fps
75o
78.75o
LF with Signature Primes, I was T3.8 24 fps 82.5o
able to view the full scope of this
T3.9 24 fps 86.25o
beautiful format in all its glory.
Light and easy to handle, the T4 24 fps 90o
Lindsey Optics Large Format T5.6 24 fps 180o
Directors Finder was a great tool T8 24 fps 360o
on set when it came to
T11 12 fps 360o
discussing framing options

”
T16 6 fps 360o
with the director.
Zac Nicholson, BSC T22 3 fps 360o

*If your camera is not capable of the shutter angles specially noted,
switch to 48 fps and the angle indicated in parentheses.

www.lindseyoptics.com • +1.661.522.7101

16 / APRIL 2021

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can add aberrations that are not in the lens. You
should not alter the camera’s ISO settings, either,
since this can add noise and affect the resolution
of the image — and possibly bias the results.
The idea is to eliminate as many variables in the
test iterations as possible, except what you’re
examining.
Instead, you’re best served by adopting an
exposure-compensation methodology that does
not adversely affect any parameters of the lens.
Personally, I have found that altering the shutter
angle and/or frame rate is best for this test when
the model remains stationary.
My protocol for exposures:
• The key light is lit to a level of T5.6 at 800 ISO
at 24 fps (about 50fc).
• Exposure variations will be handled through
changes in shutter angle and frame rates only,
which you can apply based on the chart on
page 16.
HorizHalf 2021.indd 1
p.10-17 Shot Craft V3 DONE.indd 17
On the chart, note that when you change
frame rate, the duration of time and speed of
movement also changes. If you switch to 12 fps,
you should roll for twice as long at each stage of
the test — including the length of time that you
turn on your spot-flare and veiling-glare lamps.
When you switch to 6 fps, you need to roll for
four times as long. Inversely, if you switch to 48
fps, you should roll for half the amount of time.
For zoom lenses, at the very minimum, you
should test the widest and longest focal lengths
possible within the testing environment, along
with one or two positions between those points.
For the most exacting results, test the zoom lens
at every marked focal length on the barrel.
Best Practices
The generic lens-testing setup described here
provides a great deal of information overall:
how the lens handles skin tones; the sense of
dimensionality it presents; the bokeh, color
and sharpness it produces; and how the glass
HMI LED
JOKER ALPHA SLICE
AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER ASCMAG.COM
handles flares. It’s a lot of information packed
into a single frame.
It’s always best to test more than one lens. If
you’re only interested in the performance of one
lens, pick another that you know well to compare
it to, or one that’s generally considered to be a
high-performance professional lens.
It’s also important to note that lens character-
istics differ when shooting film versus digital, and
when shooting with one particular digital camera
versus another. It’s best to test with a camera
that you will be using — or if you’re inclined to
add iterations to your testing, you can use multi-
ple cameras and widen your knowledge base.
Future installments of Shot Craft will discuss
additional methodologies for camera and lighting
tests.
APRIL 2021 / 17
1/6/21 9:25 PM
3/9/21 1:01 PM
 Picture Partners By David Heuring
Cinematographer Joe “Jody” Williams reteams with
director Craig Brewer on Coming 2 America.
This page: Cinematographer
Joe “Jody” Williams (right)
discusses a setup with Eddie
Murphy (center) and director
Craig Brewer (left). Opposite
page: Murphy and Arsenio
Hall as King Akeem and
Semmi.
18 / APRIL 2021
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Cinematographer Joe “Jody” Wil-
liams and director Craig Brewer first
met on the set of the Fox drama
Empire, developing a rapport that
would eventually lead to their most
recent project, Coming 2 America.
The feature serves as a sequel to
the 1988 romantic comedy Coming
to America (AC Aug. ’88), directed
by John Landis and photographed
by Woody Omens, ASC. Brewer’s
directorial credits include Hustle &
Flow, Black Snake Moan, Footloose
(2011) and Dolemite Is My Name.
Williams gained extensive expe-
rience as an operator on Empire
before moving to director of pho-
tography on the series. AC spoke
with Williams and Brewer about why
their collaboration clicks, and how
it translated from the hit television
show to a major motion picture.
American Cinematographer: UNIT PHOTOGRAPHY BY QUANTRELL D. COLBERT. PHOTOS COURTESY OF AMAZON STUDIOS.
Tell us about your creative part-
nership on Empire, and how it
brought you to Coming 2 America.
Craig Brewer: One of the great-
est learning experiences I’ve had in
my career was working on Empire.
After working as a producer and
writing and directing about 10 epi-
sodes, I felt like I was learning how
to be a director for the first time.
3/9/21 1:02 PM

I applied what I learned there on
Dolemite Is My Name and Coming
2 America, and I can point a direct
arrow from that to working with
Jody on Empire.
On Empire, we had actors who
weren’t just standing on their marks
— they were bringing something
unique. It could be an intense set.
It’s not for people who aren’t strong.
You have to understand that your
p.18-23 Picture Partners Coming 2 America V3 DONE.indd 19
job as director is to be cool and
to provide a comfortable zone for
artists to be artists. That was em-
braced from the top down. You’ve
got to harness the actors’ energy.
Don’t bend them to you — you’ve
got to bend around them.
I found that when things got
tough, Jody had a coolness about
him that I responded to, and I
wanted my directing to be that way,
AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER ASCMAG.COM
too. It was an attitude that Jody “Sets require empathy
and I had cultivated on Empire that
really worked when we got to the
so people feel
feature-film environment. comfortable bringing
Joe “Jody” Williams: Empire was their best.”
a training ground for me, too. I had
worked on quite a few big features
as an assistant or an operator, but
I hadn’t [served as a] DP on any
major features. On Empire, there
was a lot of repetition from day
APRIL 2021 / 19
3/9/21 1:02 PM
 Picture Partners
Garcelle Beauvais reprises her role from the first film.
to day, so I got a lot of ‘exercise.’
I was able to build those muscles
and learn how to navigate with so
many amazing talents in front of the
camera.
[Cinematographer] Paul Som-
mers came in on the second year
of Empire. He always supported
me and gave me the opportunity to
shoot 2nd unit and eventually move
to DP. When Craig showed up, he
had this presence — a certain ease
about him, and I connected with
him. He had an open mind and an
understanding that this wasn’t just
TV; we were doing something for
the culture, and he always tries to
20 / APRIL 2021
p.18-23 Picture Partners Coming 2 America V3 DONE.indd 20
have a sensitivity for that. He has
this humanistic approach, and I
speak that language.
You can have all the best plans
and preproduction, but things hap-
pen. You have to be able to adapt. I
think early on we saw that ability in
each other. A director has to nav-
igate the studio, showrunner and
crew. Craig has likability, but he also
has the skills. He doesn’t worry too
much, or at least he doesn’t show it.
It’s part of what we do as illusionists
in this game. A director needs that
uncanny ability, and because of
that, anything Craig ever asks me
to do, I will do. When he called to
ask if I was interested in Coming 2
America, I had just finished Season
5 of Empire, where I was the only
DP on 18 episodes. I had never
missed a day — I was in that Cal
Ripken Jr. zone! I was still feeling
really burned out, but the next day I
got a call from the studio, and I was
like, ‘Okay, here we go!’
Brewer: The reason I wanted
Jody for Coming 2 America is that
there are a lot of traps you can fall
in when you’re making a ‘big movie.’
And no doubt about it, we were
making a big movie. The original
Coming to America meant so much
to people, and it had a big impact
on culture and entertainment, so we
knew the scrutiny would be intense.
Jody and I were fighting every day
to make sure that the sequel stayed
at that level of grandeur and quality.
I didn’t know if I would have the time
to deal with the details of the color
palette or ensure the right approach
for every shot. I needed what Jody
gave me on Empire — the ability
to move fast and do dramatic se-
quences, comedy, action, dance
and music performances. Luckily,
we already had a shorthand. I
could look over at him and nod, and
he could nod back, and a whole
conversation just happened. I knew
3/9/21 1:02 PM ASC
 AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER ASCMAG.COM

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APRIL 2021 / 21

ASC Studio
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1 2 America V3 DONE.indd 21 1/27/211:02
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 Picture Partners

Honoring a Luminary
“We did something on our set that I wish
would become standard in the industry. John
Singleton was one of the most instrumen-
tal figures in my life. He bankrolled Hustle &
Flow. He taught me how to work a crew. Jody
worked with him on Shaft. When John
passed tragically [on April 28, 2019], I was
really sad that he wouldn’t be able to visit the
set or see Coming 2 America. So we started
a new tradition. At the end of a scene, the AD
[typically] announces, ‘new deal’ — which was
the name of John’s production company, New
Deal Productions. When a scene
was over and we were ready to move on,
our AD, Mark Little, would [instead] call,
‘Singleton!’ Hopefully, that will become a new
tradition.”
— Craig Brewer

Left: The cinematographer on set. Right: Akeem spars

with daughter Meeka (KiKi Layne).

I could put trust and support into
Jody’s vision of it. I knew I could
trust him to film the actors, which
requires craft given the spectrum of
skin tones.
Were there differences in your
collaborative process when you
moved from a series to a feature?
Williams: The process is the pro-
cess — it’s still an actor, a camera, a
light, and how to tell a story. Com-
ing 2 America was such a big movie,
but it still had constraints. In some
ways, it was almost like TV, because
the schedule shrank repeatedly. The
logistics were at times a challenge
for one’s patience to have to scale
back camera and design once a
week in the preproduction process.
We had a few sequences where we
had to comp actors in like James
Earl Jones, and scenes where the
actors were playing multiple roles.
Every day, things were changing
and evolving, and I think you need
certain personalities to navigate
those kinds of challenges.
Did you make efforts to pay
homage to the look of the original
film?
Williams: I hold the original
Coming to America in great rev-
erence, and I respect the work of
Woody Omens. There are a few
moments where we pay homage to
the original, but our take needed
to be different. Coming to America
was shot with Panavision cameras
and original Primo lenses. We used
Panavision Primo Artiste lenses, and
[ASC associate] Dan Sasaki made
modifications on some zooms for
us, but we shot large-format [with
Millennium DXL2 cameras] for a 2:1
aspect ratio. We used Primo Clas-
sics for the flashback scenes — so,
we did a little here and there, but
we knew it couldn’t be just like the
first one.
To what do you owe the suc-
cess of your collaboration?
Brewer: Our collaboration
works because Jody and I have
love not just for each other, but
for the people working with us. It
may sound simple, but sets require
empathy so people feel comfort-
able bringing their best and being
vulnerable.
Williams: Craig and I share some
of the same cultural sensibilities,
being of the same generation — as
well as being Southern and Mid-
western cats, respectively. We also
have enough humility to allow each
other room to take the baton and
orchestrate when necessary. In this
business, which can be filled with
ego, power and narcissism, we both
know that the ability to shift on the
dime and have a thick skin are key
to survival and “success.”

22 / APRIL 2021

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 AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER ASCMAG.COM

APRIL 2021 / 23

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 24 / APRIL 2021

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 AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER ASCMAG.COM

Sitcom
Limbo
Jess Hall, ASC, BSC and
director Matt Shakman
draw lighting inspiration
from TV history for Marvel’s
WandaVision.
By Mark Dillon

T
UNIT PHOTOGRAPHY BY CHUCK ZLOTNICK. ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF MARVEL STUDIOS.
he plot of WandaVision unfolds in a highly unconven-
tional environment. Its two main characters, a superhe-
ro couple, live a seemingly carefree life within a world
of television situation-comedy tropes whose visual aes-
thetics change in line with the genre’s evolution through
the decades — recalling, as the episodes progress, the
looks of I Love Lucy and (even more so) The Dick Van
Dyke Show, as well as Bewitched, The Brady Bunch, Family Ties and more.
Though the first three episodes of Marvel Studios’ inaugural series on
Disney Plus — which this article will focus upon — show no intention of
quickly answering the questions posed by its premise, fans of the fran-
chise might deduce that WandaVision is employing the American sit-
com as a device to tell a story about grief. The show opens to find titular
characters Wanda Maximoff (played by Elizabeth Olsen, and known as
Scarlet Witch in the comics) and her synthezoid significant other, Vision
(Paul Bettany), living as newlyweds within the jaunty black-and-white
world of Westview, N.J. — yet those familiar with the Marvel Cinematic
Universe (MCU) know that supervillain Thanos killed Vision in Avengers:
Infinity War (AC June ’18), leaving Wanda devastated. Within its first mo-
ments, WandaVision sets itself up to be rife with intrigue.

APRIL 2021 / 25

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 SITCOM LIMBO

Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) and Vision (Paul Bettany,

here sans prosthetics) find themselves in a vintage-sitcom world.

Vintage Perspectives
Serving as a de facto micro-history of television
production, the show’s unorthodox narrative
and stylistic perspective challenged the film-
makers to create distinct visuals and lighting
approaches, authentic to each era, for nearly
each installment.
Director Matt Shakman — whose work in-
cludes the FX series It’s Always Sunny in Phila-
delphia — wanted to collaborate with Jess Hall,
ASC, BSC, for the range the cinematographer
demonstrated with credits such as the action
comedy Hot Fuzz and the sci-fi movies Tran-
scendence and Ghost in the Shell. “Early on we
talked about re-creating the sitcoms as authen-
tically as possible,” Shakman says. Rather than
“parody” or “spoof,” he adds, the styles would
be presented simply as the main characters’
reality.
The visual strategy, Hall says, focused on
exploring “a parallel reality emanating from
the nostalgic memory of classic sitcoms, rather
than simply a replication of them. The process
included an intense analysis of the originals
and their context within their eras, blended
with our own aesthetic sensibility and instincts
as to what was appropriate to our narrative.”
For primary references, the filmmakers
studied their chosen sitcoms’ source materials
— along with the feature Pleasantville (AC Nov.
’98), which explores the artifice of television.
(Hall says he also kept in mind The Truman
Show [AC June ’98] for similar reasons.) They
also examined the 2015 Marvel comic series
The Vision, written by Tom King and illustrated
by Gabriel Hernández Walta, in which the char-
acter, who longs to be human, moves to a small
town to experience family life. “That [comic]
was important to me in understanding [Wanda
and Vision’s] landing in American suburbia,”
Hall says. “But I was also interested in the use
of color and how much of a stylistic tool it is
in the comics, particularly House of M and Scar-
let Witch Vol. 3: The Final Hex. I wanted to use
the opportunity inherent in the expanded color
gamut of the HDR [environment] to integrate
some of that richness and complexity into our
MCU work.”

26 / APRIL 2021

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offer a simple and elegant solution to a complex and inelegant
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APRIL 2021 / 27

p.24-35 Wandavision V5 DONE.indd 27 3/9/21 1:03 PM

 SITCOM LIMBO
“The quality of the 8K Super-Softlite is somewhat unique
— with characteristics somewhere between a hard and a
soft source — and provided the right balance.”
In his quest for veracity, Shakman challenged cast and crew to shoot
Episode 1 in front of a live studio audience, as I Love Lucy and The Dick
Van Dyke Show did, and encouraged the crew and audience to dress in
period-appropriate attire. (The episode is, in fact, titled “Filmed Before
a Live Studio Audience.”) “I’m a theater person,” the director says. “I love
the adrenaline and preshow jitters, and I know that extended to my
whole crew. You just don’t have a lot of time to work out your camera
blocking and all your lighting cues, and the crew was just getting used to
Evolving Ratios
WandaVision begins with the period-appropriate 1.33:1 aspect ratio,
and ultimately progresses to the current TV-standard 1.78:1. When the
28 / APRIL 2021
p.24-35 Wandavision V5 DONE.indd 28
the show. It was the first thing we did.”
Shakman gave Hall books detailing production on Dick Van Dyke
before mapping out the live three-camera shoot, which was recorded
in November 2019 at Pinewood Atlanta Studios (now known as Trilith
Studios). The crew’s camera package included two Arri Alexa LFs and
one Alexa Mini LF, capturing in 4.5K to accommodate Disney Plus’ pre-
sentation of WandaVision in 4K, and in ArriRaw to meet the streaming
service’s HDR requirement.
show’s sitcom-style environment is intercut with scenes in the “real
world,” it is presented in 2.39:1 — a framing viewers may recognize
from the MCU movies.
3/9/21 1:03 PM
 FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION

AMERICAN SOCIETY OF
CINEMATOGRAPHERS NOMINEE

FEATURE FILM
Erik Messerschmidt, ASC

10 6
A C A D E M Y A W A R D® N O M I N A T I O N S B A F T A N O M I N A T I O N S
INCLUDING INCLUDING

B E S T C I N E M ATO G R A PH Y BEST CINEMATOGR APHY

“Every second of it, every frame is itself

A MASTERWORK.” AWARDS DAILY

“IT IS THE MOST GORGEOUS PIECE OF CINEMA YOU’LL SEE ANYWHERE.

Brilliantly shot by Erik Messerschmidt.”
ABC NEWS

AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER (ASC)

ISSUE: LIGHTING TOOLS & TECHNIQUES
NETFLIX: MANK
PUB DATE: 03/26/21
TRIM: 9” X 10.875” BLEED: 9.25” X 11.125”
 6 ACADEMY AWARD
BEST PICTURE
®

INCLUDING
N O M I N AT I O N S
BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY PHEDON PAPAMICHAEL, ASC, GSC

AMERICAN SOCIETY OF
CINEMATOGRAPHERS AWARD
NOMINEE
OUTSTANDING ACHIE VEMENT IN CINEMATOGR APHY
(THE ATRICAL RELE ASE)
P H E D O N PA PA M I C H A E L , ASC, GSC

“BURNS WITH
TIMELY
RELEVANCE.
A GENUINE MOVIE EVENT.”
“PHEDON PAPAMICHAEL’S
CINEMATOGRAPHY
IS EXCELLENT.”

FILM.NETFLIXAWARDS.COM TOGETHER WE TRIUMPH

AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER (ASC) - REVISION 1

ISSUE: LIGHTING TOOLS & TECHNIQUES
NETFLIX: THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7
PUB DATE 03/26/21
TRIM: 9” X 10.875” BLEED: 9.25” X 11.125”
 AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER ASCMAG.COM

Top: Jess Hall, ASC, BSC (right) and director Matt Shakman.
Bottom: The “real world” intrudes into the artifice.

Lighting the Eras

Seeking authenticity in lighting the production,
the cinematographer sought out gaffer John
Vecchio, who has experience both in film and in
vintage fixtures — particularly on Tim Burton’s
black-and-white feature Ed Wood.
From referencing production stills of Dick
Van Dyke (see page 72 for a vintage shot from
the AC Archive), they discerned some of the
original lighting sources. The question then be-
came, “How could I respect what they did and
build [an early-1960s] film look on set, while
using sophisticated 4K HDR mastering quali-
ty?” Hall says. “The two are so far apart that it
would never be a case of replicating the original
lighting and getting the same result.
“Because of the robustness of emulsion film
stock, it can absorb harder light without feel-
ing brittle or harsh like a digital sensor,” the
cinematographer continues. “My research of
Dick Van Dyke showed they used mostly harder
Fresnel sources with the occasional 5K skypan
softened with Tough Spun. However, in order
to accommodate the multi-camera approach,
they used light coming from multiple angles,
so the lighting inevitably became quite flat.
Achieving this look on a digital sensor required
a modified approach.”
Vecchio perused his old Mole-Richardson
catalog (which he’s had for “at least 20 years,”
he says), and suggested the 8K Super-Softlite,
which was tested along with several other pe-
riod fixtures. “The quality of the 8K Softlite is
somewhat unique,” Hall says, “exhibiting char-
acteristics somewhere between a hard and a
soft source, and provided the right balance.”
Key grip Jim Kwiatkowski built an extensive
overhead rig with greenbeds that would allow
easy access to the fixtures even during the live
show. From this, the crew suspended 10 of the
8Ks along with 15 of its 4K equivalent and a
dozen 2Ks. Jared Talbot at MBS Equipment
doggedly tracked down the units all over the
East Coast.
The 8K, Hall says, “is a large soft light with
an egg crate on the front. We used layers of
them because, since we were shooting live, we
had to accommodate the actors moving across
a set measuring approximately 40-by-22 feet.

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 SITCOM LIMBO

Tech Specs: 1.33:1, 1.78:1 and 2.39:1

Cameras: Arri Alexa LF, Mini LF; Blackmagic Design Pocket Cinema Camera 6K
(handheld for the sitcom opening of Episode 5 and for surveillance footage on monitors);
DJI Inspire 2 (drone work).
Lenses: Panavision PVintage primes, Ultra Panatar Prism 1.25x
Anamorphic, Panaspeed; Cooke/Panavision Super Panazoom 28-140mm T4.5;
Fujinon Premista 28-100mm T2.9, Premista 80-250 T2.9

Lighting diagram for The Dick Van Dyke Show-inspired set.

Lighting for Retro Hues
To help achieve the vibrant colors desired for the Brady Bunch-style
Episode 3, Hall keyed using the Mole-Richardson 10K Big Eye with
Quarter, Light or Full Tough Spun, and Cosmetic Peach and Cos-
metic Burgundy gels for the correct hue, saturation and high-key
quality of light on the skin tones, with contrasting, cool shadows.
While the cinematographer wanted to avoid modern LEDs when
creating the retro looks for the show, in this case the crew built
12'x12', 8'x8' and 4'x8' light boxes outfitted with Arri SkyPanels
adjusted to 5,500-6,000 Kelvin — for fill and to evoke the cool
reflective sheen of a film print. More fill was provided by 2K and 4K
Mole Softlite units with Cosmetic Rouge.
[The lights were also] good directly on skin. The egg crates enabled me
to create separation, so they could walk out of one source and into an-
other and remain evenly lit, even from one room to another.”
Above the back of the set, the crew lined up a series of Mole Junior
2K Fresnels for edge lighting that Hall could easily turn on and off. The
filmmakers used period-correct Rosco Cinegel Tough Frost and Spun
diffusion. “The purpose of the edge light,” Vecchio says, “is to bring some
contrast and accent to the soft front key light.” Adds Hall, “A subtle edge
light was an essential component of the look, as it created separation
in the classical tradition typical of black-and-white photography of the
period, but also because it provided reflective sheen on the actors’ hair
— and a subtle halation on Elizabeth Olsen, at times.”
The stressful job of handling the live lighting cues fell to lighting

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Hall found the look of Episode 3, which was inspired
by the vibrancy of The Brady Bunch, to be one of
the most difficult to achieve.
programmer Chris Chalk.
At Vecchio’s recommendation, Hall used a scoop light — a theatrical
fixture with a lamp in the middle of a reflective metallic casing. “It was
from Ed Wood,” Vecchio says. “We used it in its old form with a big 1K or
500-watt globe and Tough Spun in front. It’s a marvelous portrait tool
providing a beautiful eye light that illuminates the iris. It became our
featured eye light, especially in the earlier episodes where we wanted to
have the look of Hollywood glamour photographers, with backlight and
sculpted light.”
In each of the retro sitcom episodes, the frivolity is interrupted by a
disturbing moment that alters the tone and reminds audiences that all
is not right in this world. “We take those sitcoms into The Twilight Zone,”
Shakman says. “We go from a three-wall set to four walls. Suddenly
p.24-35 Wandavision V5 DONE.indd 31
AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER ASCMAG.COM
we’re turning around and looking toward Vision at the head of the table,
and rather than seeing the audience behind him as we should, we see
another wall we haven’t seen before. We’re moving from the objectivity
of a multi-cam sitcom to the subjective, where suddenly we’re in [the
characters’] personal space. We planned how to accomplish that transi-
tion with the lighting.”
For this sequence, the crew mostly turned off the overhead fixtures
in favor of more dynamic lighting. “Now we’re dealing with more tradi-
tional lighting on the floor: key, fill and potentially backlight,” Hall says.
“I used a more pronounced chiaroscuro featuring a modeled key light.
I was putting my shadows 2.5 to 3.5 stops under, letting the walls fall
off and creating a decent contrast curve compared to the flatter curve
with more expanded midtones [seen thus far]. Most of the lighting was
APRIL 2021 / 31
3/9/21 1:03 PM
 SITCOM LIMBO

Shakman, Olsen and Bettany at work.

provided from fixtures that were not rigged, and more light control was
introduced to create contrast and areas of shadow.”
Episode 2 (“Don’t Touch That Dial”) follows Wanda and Vision as they
prepare a magic act for a town talent show in a bid to fit in with the
community. It was also shot for black-and-white, but with a one-camera
approach and four-wall sets in the style of Bewitched (which transitioned
to color in its third season). Shakman describes the lighting difference
between Dick Van Dyke and Bewitched as “dramatic,” especially since Be-
witched star Elizabeth Montgomery was married to series producer and
director William Asher, “and he made sure she looked awesome in every
shot. Asher did not spare any time on her close-ups — they’re gorgeous-
ly lit, like Garbo’s. So we made sure we were doing that, too, using a lot

Blue Tones
The crew took its lead from The Dick Van
Dyke Show in emphasizing blue tones in the
set design for this black-and-white section
of the series. Says Hall, “The decision to
paint the set in hues of cool blue-green, in
contrast to the warm skin tones, enabled me
to simulate a characteristic evident in some
black-and-white film stock — its increased
sensitivity to red over blue. This color sepa-
ration allowed me to apply custom matrices
to the RGB image at the digital-intermediate
stage, and therefore to enhance the lumi-
nance or shift the tonal value of the skin tones
in relation to their backgrounds. By using
this process, I achieved greater flexibility in
rendering a balanced grayscale with a full
range of midtones — one that I could subtly
manipulate.”
WandaVision’s final color grade was
performed with colorist Matt Watson at
Marvel’s new facility, located on the Walt
Disney Studios lot in Burbank, Calif.

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of front light versus the more theatrical lighting style of The Dick Van
Dyke Show.”
Hall studied 35mm prints of Bewitched, which pushed him toward
a warm D58 white point for the black-and-white work. Shooting with
custom-made lenses, including specific portrait lenses adapted from
PVintage primes by ASC associate Dan Sasaki of Panavision, Hall used
the Mole-Richardson 10K Big Eye Fresnel for stronger, more direction-
al lighting. “It’s a big light that felt authentic as the key for [Olsen], in
keeping with what they were doing on Bewitched,” he says. “It gets so hot
that John replaced the 10K bulb with a 2K, which was fine since we’re
working at 800 ASA, not the lower ASA stocks typical of early black-and-
white film stock. That kept the actors and sets a bit cooler. I used Quarter
or Light Tough Spun in the circular scrim frame right next to the Fresnel
because it gave the light a wonderful quality, and the direct hard light
was too extreme.”
The cinematographer found the look of Episode 3 — aptly titled “Now
in Color” and inspired by the vibrancy of The Brady Bunch — one of the
most difficult to achieve. He analyzed the RGB values in Brady Bunch
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reference stills that he selected, and which were approved by production
designer Mark Worthington. This data was subsequently shared across
departments for a coherent color palette. “The color was complex, and I
couldn’t achieve it simply with a combination of lighting and LUT,” Hall
says, adding that he also used lighting gels. (See sidebar, page 30.)
The episode also marks the first transition to the recognizable MCU,
when a Westview neighbor — played by Teyonah Parris, and who be-
comes quite important later on — is physically ejected from the sitcom
world through a forcefield and lands in the “real” world outside a pop-up
base set up by an intelligence agency investigating the situation. In ad-
dition to a mid-shot expansion of the aspect ratio to 2.39:1 and a switch
to modified Panavision Ultra Panatar 1.25x anamorphic lenses — which
offered Marvel fans a look they’re familiar with from the MCU movies —
there is further contrast to the sitcom look in the cold night exterior and
a more modern lighting approach. Says Hall, “We shifted from high-key
studio lighting to cinematic location work, embracing amongst other
things the vérité style emerging in the 1970s, demonstrated by Gordon
Willis [ASC], Owen Roizman [ASC], and other greats of that era, who
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APRIL 2021 / 33
3/9/21 1:03 PM
 SITCOM LIMBO

Hall at work on the Brady Bunch-inspired set.

would frequently use practicals as key lighting. Matt was looking for a
patina of gritty realism to permeate these sequences, whilst maintaining
precise color control and achieving the T2.81/2-T4 shooting stop that was
optimal for the Ultra Panatar lenses.”
They surrounded the pop-up base with 19 elevated Digital Sputnik
DS6 units dressed to look like emergency-assistance lights, which cre-
ated pools of hot light. Bebee Night Light trucks were positioned at the
west and south ends of the base with the HMIs gelled with Rosco CalColor
30 Cyan to make them look like mercury-vapor fixtures one might find
at a military setup in a disaster zone. Low-key practical sources inside
the base included large visual-display monitors, as well as hanging LED
Astera Titan Tubes, smaller Helios Tubes and LiteGear hybrid ribbon.
All of these fixtures were housed in practical light fixtures that could
be photographed in-camera, and that Hall developed with Worthington.
“It was a long conversation among Jess, Mark Worthington, John Vec-
chio and me to make sure whatever we had in [terms of] design would

Inside the Look
The Dick Van Dyke Show was shot on East-
man Plus-X 5231 stock, which, Hall says,
“influenced some of the characteristics I was
aiming for, including a lower contrast curve,
softer grayscale, and an expanded range of
midtones.” This look was ultimately achieved
through a combination of lighting, color sci-
ence and LUTs, Mark Worthington’s produc-
tion design, and Mayes C. Rubeo’s costume
design. Says Worthington, “Jess spent days
with me in the art department reviewing
every detail of the color palette, textures and
layout of the sets to make sure our intentions
were realized in the final product.”
Tests began well in advance, with Hall
devising LUTs for WandaVision’s various
television eras alongside ASC associate Josh
Pines of Technicolor. Prep was 12 weeks,
with color-science work, camera and lens
testing commencing immediately. They
kept in mind that the full highlight range of
4K HDR would not be period-correct for
the retro segments. “We put the 4K HDR
signal within a kind of envelope,” Hall says,
“capping out the highlights around 100 nits
and doing that with a soft roll-off curve so
we never got into the kind of white highlights
that wouldn’t have existed on film. Highlights
for the modern MCU material were placed
between 400 to 800 nits.”

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 AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER ASCMAG.COM

The filmmakers focused on exploring “a parallel reality

emanating from the nostalgic memory of classic sitcoms,
rather than simply a replication of them.”

work for the cinematography,” Shakman says. “Jess would often ask for
things he needed to help build an environment, because he wanted it to
feel real, especially inside the control room where we thought hard about
what the monitors would be — and giving just enough tech and illumi-
nation, but still feeling believable and [that it was] assembled quickly.”
For this MCU-world work, Hall embraced LEDs’ color-changing func-
tionality, which enabled him to realize his customized palette, aspects of
which were inspired by saturated comic-book hues. Balancing these cut-
ting-edge techniques with the vintage styles he created, Hall welcomed
the challenge of introducing new looks to the MCU while still giving fans
some of what they’ve come to expect.
“It’s all about the integration of the streaming and cinematic work,
and those lines start to blur,” he says. “We’re taking things into a new era,
so I had to respect what’s been done before. We have been traveling with
these characters across multiple films, and if we want to benefit from
the dramatic tension emerging from that, we needed to honor the lin-
eage. On the other hand, I had to do so much to build looks for the early
episodes. I really wanted to do my own twist on ‘Marvel cinematic.’”

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APRIL 2021 / 35

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 World View Event Updates and International News
Las Vegas, United States Amsterdam, Netherlands
NAB Show rescheduled from April, to Oct. 9-13. IBC: Sept. 10-13.

IBC
Los Angeles, United States
Cine Gear Expo rescheduled from
June, to Sept. 23-26.

Cannes, France
Cannes Film Festival
rescheduled from May,
to July 6-17.

Barcelona, Spain
CineEurope rescheduled
from June, to Oct. 4-7.

CANNES
NAB

36 / APRIL 2021

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 AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER ASCMAG.COM

Venice, Italy Budapest, Hungary

Venice Film Festival: Sept. 1-11.
A new Hungarian Cinematographers Association (HCA) has
been formed, marking a split from the Hungarian Society of
Cinematographers (HSC). The new group was motivated by
a dispute over government involvement in Budapest’s famed
University of Theatre and Film Arts (SZFE).

Busan, South Korea

Busan International Film
Festival: Oct. 6-15.

Beijing, China
Led by Detective Chinatown 3,
Chinese New Year box office
hit a new record of $1.2 billion,
despite movie-theater capacity
being limited to 50-75% around
the country.

DETECTIVE CHINATOWN 3

Durban, South Africa

Durban International Film Festival:
July 22 - Aug. 1.
DURBAN

• All festival and show dates are subject to change, depending on pandemic conditions.

APRIL 2021 / 37

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 ASC Inspirations
Society members discuss the art and
experiences that have influenced their
lighting and creative perspectives.

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Sparking Emotions
By Michael Goi, ASC, ISC
One of the primary factors that defines a cinematographer is inspira-
tion: finding what inspires you, analyzing how it makes you feel, match-
ing that feeling with how a character in the film you’re working on feels,
and determining how to use cameras, lenses and lighting to impart that
feeling to the audience. How we process a momentary spark of inspira-
tion through that deliberate approach helps to determine the style and
tone of a film. And that spark can come from anywhere.
Sometimes we’re inspired by other films, or sometimes by a painting
or a still photograph. The ASC is currently working on a project that asks
members to record short videos about particular movies that inspired
them. My own career was deeply influenced by The Graduate, because it
was the first film I’d seen with cinematography that made me feel how
the main character did. In my “ASC Inspirations” video, I note that in
the opening party scene, instead of shooting a wide shot to show all
the guests, director Mike Nichols and cinematographer Robert Surtees,
p.38-45 ASC Inspirations V6 DONE.indd 39
AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER ASCMAG.COM
This scene from The Town That Dreaded Sundown (2014),
shot by Michael Goi, ASC, ISC, was inspired by a Gregory
Crewdson photo. (See following page.)
ASC chose to shoot only an uncomfortably tight close-up of Benjamin
Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) as he maneuvers around the party, getting
pulled into conversations with various people. We never get a clear view
of who he’s talking to, because it doesn’t matter — what matters is that
he feels disconnected from all of these people, and the way the scene is
shot conveys this emotional state to the audience. The filmmakers made
the viewer feel as if he or she is the character.
In 1998, while I was filming the Showtime original movie The Fixer,
starring Jon Voight, one of the sets — a simple apartment room where
Voight’s character confesses his sins to a priest — reminded me of the
living room of the small Chicago apartment where I grew up as a child.
I remembered how, when I was four years old, I walked into the living
room on Christmas morning while my family was still asleep. It was be-
fore sunrise and the space was lit by the dim glow of the small Christmas
tree in the middle of the room. The tiny white lights gave off a soft glow
compared to the blast of streetlights coming through the window behind
the tree. The cumulative effects of the lighting had a spiritual, magical
APRIL 2021 / 39
3/9/21 1:09 PM
 ASC INSPIRATIONS

Tech Specs:

The Graduate has been a key inspiration for Goi,

as has the photo Untitled (Beer Dreams) by Crewdson.

“Inspiration can be found anywhere.”
feel that I’d always remembered, so for the Fixer scene I set out to rep-
licate how that lighting had made me feel. I chose a 2K open-face light
for the streetlight outside the window, and for the glow of the Christ-
mas-tree lights I set up a scattering of six small paper China lanterns,
each wrapped with muslin cloth and affixed to short C-stands around
each side of the camera.
I never mentioned my inspiration for lighting the scene that way, but
when The Fixer was in post, editor Marc Leif commented that the look
reminded him of the scent of his apartment in the dead of winter, when
the interior’s warmth stood in contrast with the biting cold outside.
What’s more, director Charles Robert Carner said when he watched the
scene, he could hear the clicking sound of steam radiators in his mind.
By adapting a real-life moment of personal inspiration, I was able to
spark memories within others, which gets to the heart of how and why
we should use images we remember, or emotional experiences, in our
work: We don’t seek to replicate the look of something else; we seek to
make the audience feel the way we felt when we first experienced a very
particular and personal moment.
The work of photographer Gregory Crewdson was a primary inspi-
ration for the approach director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon and I took on the
2014 remake of The Town That Dreaded Sundown. When I joined the pro-
duction during the latter stages of prep, Alfonso showed me Crewdson’s
images as a starting point for discussions about what the look and feel of
our movie could be like. I understood immediately why he was drawn to
the photographer’s work: It had a distinctly “faux Hollywood” look that
didn’t feel like reality, but that generated memories of similar tableaux

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 AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER ASCMAG.COM

Artist Bill Viola’s video-and-sound installation Ocean Without a Shore

(top) inspired ASC member Natasha Braier, whose credits include the
2016 feature The Neon Demon and the 2012 short Swimmer (bottom).

in motion pictures of the past. At the very least, our discussion told me
that the movie should not take on the expected look of a modern horror
movie, but instead give the viewer a retro feeling of nostalgia, filtered
through the lens of movies we all remembered.
Although most of the film only vaguely resembles the inspirations
we drew from Crewdson’s work, one scene in particular stands out as a
direct homage from me to the photographer. Crewdson’s photograph of
a man standing on a street at night, illuminated by a single beam of light,
had the feeling of non-reality, spirituality and isolation that I wanted
to convey for a scene where Addison Timlin’s and Travis Tope’s char-
acters say goodbye because she’s leaving town the next morning. This
interaction leads them to make love for the first time, so Alfonso and I
wanted the scene to convey the magic of momentary human connec-
tions — when we try to absorb the emotion of a moment with another
person, amid a world that doesn’t understand.
Working on the roof of a house, I set up a 1,200-watt HMI light with
a spot lens on a stand, creating a blue beam that accented the couple
below. It was the only movie light I used for the entire scene; all of the
other lighting came from practical lights that existed in the house. We
dressed Travis in a red jacket so that the light that bounced off him onto
Addison would be the proper color temperature for her face, but we put
her in a blue jacket so that the light that reflected off her, and onto Tra-
vis, would be more intensely blue — alluding to the idea that his char-
acter might actually be the killer. The resulting scene fulfills the goal of
removing this couple from the rest of the world’s reality, while also en-
hancing the unrequited romance they must endure. When speaking to
students about my cinematography in The Town That Dreaded Sundown,
I’ve always pointed out the immeasurably important contribution of
Gregory Crewdson’s work as an initial point of inspiration.
On the following pages are some comments from fellow ASC mem-
bers on art that has inspired them, particularly in terms of lighting. The
message in their reflections is that inspiration can be found anywhere.
As a cinematographer, you just need to be open enough to see it, em-
brace it, and apply what you observe to your creative process.

Heightening Reality
By Natasha Braier, ASC, ADF
I initially encountered Bill Viola’s work while I was at my first film school
in Argentina, in a class on visual arts. All of his work was extremely per-
sonal, but also very visual. He was using visual language in a very exis-
tential, poetic, metaphorical and symbolic way, addressing his thoughts
about life and death.
He worked in the avant-garde of visual arts, so he was always getting
new equipment to test. In the early 2000s, I was studying in London, and
he had an installation at an art gallery there. In an entirely dark room,
there were these huge screens, and all of a sudden the darkness started
breaking and you were seeing footage taken underwater at very slow
motion — at least 1,000 if not 2,000 frames per second — revealing a
person falling through the water. For the first minute, the image was

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 ASC INSPIRATIONS
quite abstract, so you couldn’t really tell what it was, but the super-slow
motion was captivating. It was sort of a sacred moment, and it really
made an impression on me. I had seen super-slow motion before, but
not in the poetic way he was using it. During the golden age of music
videos, Viola’s use of slow motion was very influential.
His influence on my work is not very obvious or literal, but his work
is always trying to transcend reality; I don’t know if I always manage to
achieve that, but it’s always at the core of what I’m trying to do. Some-
times an artist touches you in a deep way that’s hard to explain. The
simplicity of Bill Viola’s lighting and his work is really amazing. In 2007,
I was at the Venice Biennale with one of my early features, In the City
The Inner Life of the Image
My earliest childhood memory of being enthralled by images was
when my mother took me to the Museum of Modern Art in New York
City. The artist I found most compelling at that time, for his technique
and style, was Georges Seurat, a pointillist/post-Impressionist French
painter who created images with small dots of color from the tip of his
brush to create gradations of light and darkness, and an interaction
of disparate colors to create the complexity of a color that you are
perceiving. In a way, I now realize film grain in RGB, and pixels in digital
imagery, have similar effects in the way he created his paintings.
When I was a teenager I liked to read biographies, and I picked up
a book, The Camera and I, by the social documentarian Joris Ivens. I
wasn’t thinking about filmmaking or cinematography at the time, but
his ideas about authenticity and point of view in his documentary
42 / APRIL 2021
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Below, left: Ed Lachman, ASC has found inspiration in the photography
book The Americans by Robert Frank. Right: Lachman (left) with
Frank, in a stylized selfie taken by the former.
of Sylvia, and I saw another of his installations, Ocean Without a Shore.
There’s something about the minimalism in his work, how he can create
an image that’s very transcendent with almost nothing — one light and
one face.
I’m drawn to that kind of purity and simplicity. One of the directors
I’ve always admired is Robert Bresson. He’s very minimal with his sto-
rytelling and framing, and his films always go straight to the essence.
Maybe I relate to that kind of asceticism because I come from a poor
country and started out working from nothing, doing short films with
no money but trying to make something special. Whenever I teach at a
film school or a seminar, I always make the exercise something minimal
storytelling, and how they could be affected by the way he used his
camera and his use of light, left a real impression on me.
When I was at university, I discovered the seminal photographic
book The Americans by Robert Frank. He created a poetic language
with the immediacy of the moment, and with the experience he was
able to partake in with his camera.
An image isn’t only about the technical stylization — more
importantly, it is about the experience and subjectivity of the
photographer, the soul of what the photographer feels and sees. I
realized even in a narrative or documentary form, one looks for the
inner life of the image for the story you’re telling, be it in light or
framing.
— Ed Lachman, ASC
3/9/21 1:09 PM
 AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER ASCMAG.COM

“Everyone whose work influences me is on a quest

to bring realism to a higher plane of poetry.”

like that, to show the students that you can still — especially earlier in my career, when I was stylized approaches. During that same period, I
be inventive and creative without all the toys. perhaps trying to prove myself with more was also doing a deep study of Vittorio Storaro
In specific regard to lighting, my main early
influences were probably the photographers
William Eggleston and Nan Goldin, who bring
poetry to everyday subjects, and cinematogra-
phers Christopher Doyle, Slawomir Idziak and
Jean-Yves Escoffier, whose work also goes be-
yond realism. But another visual artist who’s
had a big effect on me is James Turrell. His in-
fluence is more abstract, because he lights en-
vironments instead of people or scenes; when
you go to one of his exhibitions, it’s almost like
you’re entering a sacred space. I just find his
work a fascinating experience, even if I’m not
sure how it might directly influence the light-
ing that I do. As a person and an artist, it touch-
es me.
When I first started looking at the work of
Bill Viola and James Turrell, I was still in my
20s, and I wasn’t fully formed as a person yet.
I didn’t have a spiritual side because I came
from a very agnostic family — my parents are
shrinks, and they’re totally anti-religion. In
those years I didn’t even have a connection
with nature; that didn’t happen until my 30s,
when I did a lot of work in the jungle. Speak-
ing from my perspective now, as an adult with
more life experience, I can see more clearly how
spiritual their work really is.
I think everyone whose work influences me
is on a quest to bring realism to a higher plane
of poetry — with some magical moment of the
light, or a special angle. In a way, that’s what I’m
always trying to do — to find that heightened
moment of emotional reality that still feels real
and relatable for the audience.

Exploring Shadows and Light

By Kramer Morgenthau, ASC
I’ve been lucky to work on a variety of produc-
tions during my career — ranging from indies
and documentaries to fantasy series and su-
perhero action films — and different artists
have influenced my cinematography, always in
a project-based way.
Many of my fellow cinematographers fre-
quently reference Caravaggio, and his work
has had a huge influence on my work as well

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 ASC INSPIRATIONS

Kramer Morgenthau, ASC, whose credits include Fahrenheit 451 (2018),

cites Caravaggio — whose 1608 painting Portrait of a Maltese Knight is
pictured here — as an influence he shares with many cinematographers.

[ASC, AIC]’s work, particularly The Conformist.

What I took away from Caravaggio and the Caravaggisti — other
prominent artists who were influenced by him, such as the French
painter Georges de La Tour — was the chiaroscuro school of lighting,
exemplified by bold, luscious, expressive uses of shadow and light —
lots of darkness, lots of negative fill, perhaps more shadow than light.
Shafts of light and “God rays” also began to appear in my work in
humble homage to ASC masters such as Storaro, Gregg Toland, Conrad
Hall, Robert Richardson, Darius Khondji and Jordan Cronenweth. I ex-
plored this strategy on a number of features I shot, including Fracture
and Thor: The Dark World, and went even further with it on my episodes
of Boardwalk Empire and Game of Thrones.
To this day, while traveling, I still search throughout Europe and the
U.S. to seek out those rarer Caravaggio paintings hidden in some unas-
suming church or museum. The violence and drama of Caravaggio’s life
spills onto his canvasses. There is something so expressive and jolting
about his graphic use of shadow and light, and I also relate to his outsid-
er’s alienated, nonconformist perspective. Although his work is widely
canonized today, it really shocked the mainstream art circles of his era.
He distinguished himself from his baroque contemporaries by using or-
dinary, real-life subjects with austere, minimalist backgrounds to depict
subjects as sacred as Jesus.
As my career has progressed, I’ve gravitated toward softer, gentler,
more natural light and a more “invisible” style of cinematography. I’ve
moved away from stronger, more obvious key lighting, employing more
ambient sources and, in particular, the kind of toplight strategies pio-
neered by ASC greats like Gordon Willis and Harris Savides. Painters
of the natural-light school have also spoken to me, including Andrew
Wyeth, J.M.W. Turner, George Bellows and the O.G. master of soft yet

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 “I feel it’s important to find a part of your LIGHTING
artistry that gives voice to your ancestry.”

directional light, Vermeer. My own approaches to these techniques can

NETWORKS SOLVED
be seen in the features Chef and Creed II, and I’ve continued to explore
them on my more recent projects The Many Saints of Newark and Respect.
Chiaroscuro still is part of my dialogue — it really comes down to the
story and what kind of approach the narrative dictates.
I find that the cinematographers whose work with natural light
stands the test of time include ASC members Sven Nykvist, Haskell
Wexler, Néstor Almendros, Harris Savides and Roger Deakins, as well as
Subratra Mitra, Raoul Coutard, Robby Müller and newer-generation ASC
cinematographers Rodrigo Prieto, Emmanuel Lubezki, Bradford Young,
Reed Morano and Matthew Libatique. The documentary photographers
from this school who have always inspired me are Joel Meyerowitz, Lee OPTO-SPLITTERS
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As a child of a Holocaust refugee, I’m one generation away from the
shtetl where my grandparents grew up, located in an area that was once
part of Poland. My mother escaped Nazi-occupied Vienna in 1939, when
she was 6. I feel it’s important to find a part of your artistry that gives
voice to your ancestry; it will work its way into who you are, and what
your photography looks like, no matter what. It’s one reason I’ve always
been attracted to the magical-realist Expressionism of Marc Chagall. His
mysticism and soulful use of color speak to a more whimsical, playful
side of my work, and addresses some of the trauma my family and peo-
ple have endured.
On a related note, I explored a deep use of color in my work on the
HBO project Fahrenheit 451, and I plan to tap into that element again
for a musical I’m prepping right now. Colored light was something I
was afraid of in my early years, because it’s such a powerful gesture that
can quickly turn vulgar. But time and maturity have given me the tools I
needed to break it down and weave it carefully into my process.
Society members who would like to participate in the ASC Inspirations video
project should contact the ASC office.
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p.38-45 ASC Inspirations V6 DONE.indd 45 3/9/21 1:09 PM

 Casual
Comedy
John Simmons, ASC
captures live-comedy
laughs for Kevin Hart’s
intimate standup special.

T
By Samantha Dillard

he basic anatomy of a joke is a setup plus punchline.

In more sophisticated comedy, joke structure is more
complex, and includes acting out parts of the story
and the ever-important callback. But dissecting how to
make a joke work on camera is even more intricate. A
televised comedy special needs to bring the energy, at-
mosphere and humor of live comedy into an audience’s
living room through carefully crafted shots, lighting and camera move-
ment. In his latest Netflix comedy special, Kevin Hart: Zero F***s Given,
the comedian wanted to emphasize this communal home-viewing expe-
rience by actually bringing an audience into his own living room.
That was the idea, at least. In reality, the comedy set was photo-
graphed at a studio in Burbank, Calif., over three days and six perfor-
mances. “Kevin’s intention was to have the place feel cozy, as if it were
his house,” says director of photography John Simmons, ASC. “He ac-
tually wanted to make it look like his living room, but the problem was
that we wanted the place to be moody. That would have been impossi-
ble, because his living room is bright white with big windows. So, we
made it look as much like a living room as we could while still making
everything dark. We put a 30-foot LED screen out the window and used
UNIT PHOTOGRAPHY BY GLEN WILSON, COURTESY OF NETFLIX.

footage of Kevin’s backyard with a swimming pool and water moving in

the shot.”
Though the cinematographer had worked on live comedy shows with
such famed comedians as Richard Pryor — and on a documentary with
Jerry Lewis for French TV — Zero F***s Given marked Simmons’ first gig
as the director of photography on a standup special. The project came to
him through director Leslie Small, who has been one of Simmons’ close
collaborators since 1995, when the two made music videos together.
Small’s directorial credits include a number of Hart’s comedy specials,
including Laugh at My Pain, Let Me Explain and Irresponsible. Simmons
had just finished a pilot for NBC’s upcoming comedy series Night School,
which is executive-produced by Hart and based on his 2018 feature of
the same name. “Leslie said, ‘I’m going to go out to Kevin’s house today
and pitch you to him for the special,’” Simmons says. “He called me back
two or three hours later and said, ‘Well, I really didn’t have to pitch much
because when I got there, Kevin was watching the dailies from the [Night

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 AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER ASCMAG.COM

APRIL 2021 / 47

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 CASUAL COMEDY
School] pilot and he said, “Oh, this guy? Yeah, let’s use him.”’”
In assembling the crew, Hart requested that Simmons hire his fre-
quent lighting designer, Jeff Ravitz. “Kevin has loyalty to his crew, which
I totally respect,” Simmons says, “and I also had my own gaffer, Brad
Draper. It was really cool because having the two gaffers on set made a
lot of difference. Jeff has a wonderful relationship with Kevin and with
the producers; he was very easy to get along with, a pleasure to work
with, and he came to the table with lots of ideas and worked well with
Brad, whom I’ve worked with for close to 20 years. That combination,
everyone working together, really helped in designing an environment
that was both moody and comfortable, and at the same time lived on the
fringes of being a performance space.” His other key collaborators in-
cluded production designer Justin Collie and Simmons’ key grip — also
of 20 years — Otis Burkes.
Simmons captured the performance with six Sony Venice cameras.
For the show’s opener, which sees Hart talking with his wife and chil-
dren inside their actual home, Simmons shot with only one camera, a
C-stand, a flag, a 4'x4' bounce and a LitePanels Astra. Hart and his wife
did not want a lot of equipment or people in their bedroom, and Covid-
19 considerations were also in effect. “To use that camera with the ex-
treme latitude and clean images at 2,500 ISO was amazing. It’s been a
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p.46-51 Kevin Hart V3 DONE.indd 48
long time since I fell in love with a piece of equipment, but that camera
was something to write home about. It’s an amazing bit of technology.”
The first major challenge the collaborators faced was photographing
multiple performances, with live audiences at each show, while follow-
ing strict social-distancing protocols. “Kevin wanted to be able to press
the very edges of social distancing because he has an intimate relation-
ship with his audiences, and that’s how he’s always done it,” Simmons
explains. But, as Hart mentions at the top of the show, he and his wife
contracted Covid-19 in early 2020, and his wife was pregnant during
production, so safety was paramount for everyone involved. Rehearsals
took place on the roof of the 1 Hotel in West Hollywood. All of the audi-
ence seating was in place while Hart performed.
“You’re locked into a certain kind of real estate when you’re doing
a live performance,” he continues. “You establish the environment, and
you also have other cameras to avoid, so you can’t go everyplace. You
want to tell the story from the camera positions you have. Our approach
was further motivated by everything that Kevin can do physically — not
to mention that Covid is in charge of so much of what we do.”
As an example, Simmons cites one of the biggest hurdles the film-
makers faced: All of the audience members had to wear a mask. “When
you watch a comedy special at home, part of the ambience is that you
3/9/21 1:10 PM
 CLASSIC STYLE FROM THE ASC
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APRIL 2021 / 49

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 CASUAL COMEDY
Left: Kevin Hart signs off. Right: John Simmons, ASC and his camera arsenal.
watch people with their mouths open, just cracking up,” Simmons says.
“Leslie had to ask the audience to be as animated as possible because we
couldn’t see their full faces. We stayed behind the audience a lot, so you
just had to feel how animated they were.”
Other obstacles included impediments to everyday production in-
teractions. “Working with masks on is difficult because you can’t have
intimate conversations — you have to maintain social distance,” he says.
“The camera assistants are pulling focus remotely because they can’t
be next to the cameras. You can’t walk around with a handheld camera
and get people’s expressions, because they have masks on. And all day
long you have a Covid compliance officer telling you to back up, and you
sometimes forget, because we’re all accustomed to just being able to do
what we do.
“Usually, live events happen on a stage with performance lighting
and very active LED screens in the background,” Simmons explains. “But
Kevin wanted this show to feel as if he’d just left his wife and kids in the
bedroom and run downstairs, and all these people were there. Because
of the coziness of the performance, we wanted to put the audience in the
dark, and light Kevin so it wouldn’t totally look like he had a spotlight on
him, but that he shared a certain kind of ambience that permeated the
environment. It never really felt like he had this performance thing going
on; it just felt like he was in a brighter part of the room.”
The production went smoothly, Simmons says, in large part due to
the close working relationship and frequent collaborations between
Hart and Small. “Kevin is the nicest guy,” Simmons says. “He’s really a
pleasure to work with, because you don’t have to cut through any kind
of celebrity madness — you’re just dealing with a normal guy. He’s also
very knowledgeable about what the cameras do — the close ones and
the wide ones — and he knows where he wants them. Other than the
crane and the Steadicam, Kevin likes all the cameras at eye level. He’s
done so many shows that he knows exactly what he likes and what
works for him, and he knows how he wants it cut. He and Leslie are
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p.46-51 Kevin Hart V3 DONE.indd 50
Tech Specs: 1.78:1
Cameras: Sony Venice
Lenses: Angénieux EZ and Optimo zooms
always on the same page.”
In terms of how the crew worked with Hart to emphasize and punc-
tuate the structure of his comedy, Simmons says, “We shot six perfor-
mances, so we had six opportunities to fall in or out of love with what
we did — to find the best performance. The final show is created with
elements of different performance nights. We had a full rehearsal, which
we actually shot, and then we talked about it. A lot of things were dis-
cussed at that time about what the approach should actually be. Les-
lie is very seasoned in calling shots. Because we were working with a
switcher, we were cutting as we went — and Leslie was making those
decisions based on past experiences. After we did our first rehearsal, we
decided which days we would have the Steadicam working, which days
we would lay down dolly track, and which days we would actually use
a crane, because all of those things interfere with our other cameras.
And we decided what parts of the performance Leslie thought should be
covered in different ways, and to always be able to include the audience
during certain parts of the performance. I had a short jib arm and I had a
slider on my wing cameras, so there was continual movement going on.
In one performance, we had a 25-foot Techno-Jib from Camera Support.”
One of the best aspects of the collaboration, Simmons says, was the
mutual respect everyone shared for the importance of inclusion. “Kevin
and Leslie, as well as the producers, have that in their hearts, that inclu-
sivity is important. It was a very diverse, inclusive environment with the
crew, other experienced professionals, and even the Covid-safety team
members. I brought up my need to hire a balanced crew when I start-
ed putting one together, because they have people they always want to
work with, and there’s a lot of loyalty to those people. And the producers
looked at me like I was crazy — because they’ve always hired a balanced
crew. I was so glad to see that everyone Kevin suggested fit that criterion.
I always say I want my sets to feel like anybody could find their place
on them, and that’s the kind of set we had. It’s got to be that way, every
single time. It’s so important.”
3/9/21 1:10 PM
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 Domestic
Discord
Marcell Rév, HCA
recalls classic
cinema for modern
chamber drama
Malcolm & Marie.
By Iain Marcks

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 A
mong the
first features
to start and
wrap produc-
tion during
the pandem-
ic, Malcolm
& Marie marked the early stages
of Hollywood’s reopening. It was
June of 2020, and writer-director
Sam Levinson and cinematogra-
pher Marcell Rév, HCA’s collabora-
tion on Season 2 of the acclaimed
HBO drama Euphoria had been
halted — but with one of the se-
ries’ breakouts, Zendaya, on board
as a star and executive producer,
the movie became their quarantine
project.
Now streaming on Netflix,
Malcolm & Marie is a black-and-
white, shot-on-film “two-hander”
that charts the relationship ex-
tremes between up-and-coming
film director Malcolm (John David
Washington), and his muse, Marie
(Zendaya). The story unfolds over

UNIT PHOTOGRAPHY BY DOMINIC MILLER. ALL PHOTOS COURTESY OF NETFLIX.

the course of a single night, in a
single location, where the two em-
battled lovers swarm and circle
each other like scorpions in a ter-
rarium. As “a love letter to cinema,”
as it’s referred to in the production
notes, the film wears its cinematic
influences on its sleeve, with visual
references including Mike Nichols’
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and
Joseph Losey’s The Servant.
The choice to shoot on black-
and-white film, says Rév, came be-
fore the script was even finished.
Conscious of the live-theater feel
that setting a dialogue-heavy,
two-person drama in one location
would create, he and the director
concluded that shooting on film
stock would make the final product

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 DOMESTIC DISCORD
Lighting Specs
Rév and chief lighting technician Danny Durr used hard tungsten
spotlights; Rifa 44, 55 and 66 lights; and LiteGear LiteMats to
augment LiteTile soft boxes, hung from the ceiling by rigging gaffer
Joseph Moran, which were diffused with heavy diffusion “equivalent
to Magic Cloth,” Rév says, and kept directional with control grids
by rigging key grip Joe Chouchanian. For exteriors, everything was
lit from the ground — hidden behind hills and trees, and around the
house — with 12-light Maxi Brutes, two 20K Fresnels through Half
Grid, two Arri M18s, as well as 2K Blondes and Malibu uplights with
75-watt JDR bulbs.
In regard to additional harder lighting, “For certain situations, we
used open-face 750-watt Redheads coming through the windows,”
Rév says, “and small 300-watt and 650-watt spotlights in longer,
more complicated shots where we needed something we could
shape and get enough exposure out of. For exteriors, we sometimes
used 1K spots and 2K Blondes as edge lights.”
54 / APRIL 2021
p.52-57 Malcolm and Marie V3 DONE.indd 54
Tech Specs: 1.85:1
3-perf Super 35
Kodak Double-X 5222 250D/200T
Cameras: Arricam LT
Lenses: Arriflex/Zeiss Super Speed MKIII
John David Washington and Zendaya as Malcolm and Marie.
“feel more like a movie.” The cinematographer adds that they wanted to
add a layer of stylistic abstraction to the image. “Putting something into
black-and-white immediately creates opportunity for a more analytic
perspective,” he says.
Rév opted for Arricam LTs — “one full package and a backup body,”
he notes, for a single-camera shoot throughout — paired with Arriflex/
Zeiss Super Speed prime lenses. The filmmakers captured 3-perf Super
35 on Kodak Double-X 5222 250D/200T film stock.
It helped that the cinematographer had recently tested Double-X
against Kodak’s Vision3 5219 500T color stock for Euphoria. “It imme-
diately clicked that [Double-X] would be perfect just by the nature of its
contrast and grain structure,” he says. “Of course, 5219 is great — but
the gamma curve of Double-X and the way it renders certain colors into
grayscale is just different than color stock.”
Following newly minted Covid-19 restrictions, Malcolm & Marie’s
22-person crew (many of whom also worked on Euphoria, including 1st
AC Norris Fox, chief lighting technician Danny Durr, key grip Jeff Kunkel
3/9/21 1:12 PM
 AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER ASCMAG.COM

Marcell Rév, HCA served as cinematographer and

operator on the feature.

and production designer Michael Grasley) quarantined themselves for

two weeks in bungalows on the grounds surrounding their location —
Feldman Architecture’s “Caterpillar House” in Carmel, Calif., a sprawling
ranch-style home with outer walls made predominantly of glass. During
this time, Levinson wrote and workshopped the last third of the script
with Washington and Zendaya, and started to develop the film’s visual
language with Rév. “We got to spend a lot of time with the script, with
the two actors, blocking and rehearsing,” says Rév. “It’s an opportunity
you don’t really get on a normal production.”
As a touchstone for photographing the house, Rév referenced the
structurally conscious camerawork by Gianni Di Venanzo, AIC in Mi-
chelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte — with the rectilinear angles and frame
edges of Malcolm & Marie’s 1.85:1 aspect ratio boxing-in the emotional
combatants, especially when shooting from the outside. The Caterpillar
House was an ideal location, Rév notes, as its numerous floor-to-ceiling
windows offer a 270-degree view of the surrounding terrain. “The other
advantage of the house is that the interior, bedrooms and bathrooms
contradict this openness and create a maze-like back part of the house
where you can get lost with the actors,” he adds.
For camera movement, the filmmakers drew inspiration from the
formal compositions of Otto Preminger’s Bunny Lake Is Missing, with
the intent of connecting rooms in the house with smooth dolly shots
and peppering scenes with unconventional camerawork. The film be-
gins with the characters entering the house and gliding between rooms,
establishing the stark oppositions of their moods — Malcolm riding
high after his latest film premiere, and Marie concealing resentment. He
mixes a celebratory drink at the mini bar and victory-dances to the liv-
ing room, while she moves from the bathroom to the attached kitchen,
putting a pot of water on the stove before crossing to a glass door and
lighting a cigarette while her partner does laps around the furniture.
The majority of the film was shot in script order — “something we
don’t usually get to do,” says Rév — and this opening scene took three
days and different approaches to get right.
“Our original intention was simply to connect the bathroom to the
living room,” says the cinematographer, who also served as operator. At
the end of the first day, Rév and Levinson agreed that their first instinct
wasn’t working. “On the second day, we shot the same scene over again
from scratch — this time, handheld. A little less rigid, less commercial,
less smooth, but we felt it was missing a kind of elegance and style.
“On the third day, we went to shoot it again, thinking that if we just
kept moving forward, we’d find the rhythm. That’s when we set up a shot
of the scene from the outside.”
The introductory sequence now features a six-and-a-half-minute
tracking shot along one windowed side of the house, starting in the
bathroom before settling into a gentle volley — left, right and repeat —
between the kitchen and the living room. The camera is in sync with
the characters’ rival energy, either holding on Marie’s quiet indifference
or getting sucked into the gravitational pull of Malcolm’s post-premiere
jubilance.

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 DOMESTIC DISCORD
“That three days of searching gave us a better sense of what this
movie could be,” says Rév. “From then on, we found our rhythm, some-
times jumping out to more objective perspectives when we want to feel
a little bit of a distance from [the characters].”
The film’s visual rhythm largely follows the characters’ emotional
states. The camera pulls back for long shots that isolate Malcolm and
Marie, whether they’re sharing the frame or trading barbs with the other
offscreen. Shallow depth of field is often used to bring one character into
“Sam’s intention was to reclaim the Hollywood
Golden Age aesthetic for Black actors.”
56 / APRIL 2021
p.52-57 Malcolm and Marie V3 DONE.indd 56
focus at a time, emphasizing the tension between the two. Close-ups
punctuate the drama, coming closest when the combatants are at their
most hostile or vulnerable.
Rév and Levinson aimed to break up this rhythm with specially de-
signed shots, which the cinematographer calls “cornerstones.” Says
the cinematographer, “These are shots we had in mind before we even
started to talk about how to cover the scenes. Many of them were the
wordless parts of the movie: a backlit tree on a hill; Malcolm throwing a
Film Details
The film stock was processed, and scanned at
4K, by FotoKem, which also provided the dailies.
Dan Garsha performed the dailies color grade, and
Rév completed the final grade at Company 3 with
senior colorist and ASC associate Tom Poole (also
of Euphoria). “[Double-X] is a very contrasty stock,”
Rév says. “Tom balanced the toe of the curve, so you
still have a little detail in the shadows. We wanted
it to look like an old black-and-white movie, not a
grayscale movie.”
3/9/21 1:12 PM

tantrum in the dust; Marie in the tub, up to her neck in sorrow and milky
bath water. Cornerstones gave us breathing room from all the close-ups
and the dialogue.”
Even through a bitter fight, Malcolm and Marie look classically cine-
matic and beautiful, with a dramatic quality to the way they’re lit. When
asked about the influence of the Golden Age of Hollywood and the work
of photographer George Hurrell, Rév notes, “George Hurrell’s work is a
great example of the world we were trying to pay homage to. Sam’s in-
tention was to reclaim that Hollywood Golden Age aesthetic for Black
actors.”
This visual style is another distancing effect, as much an artistic
choice as a requirement of the Double-X stock’s slower film speed. “If
you’re shooting something with a digital camera, the most common ap-
proach is to light the space to give the actors freedom to move wherever
they want to,” says Rév. “What I really enjoy about working with film —
especially less-sensitive film — is that you have to design each image.
It forces you to take a less natural approach [in regard to lighting].”
(See sidebar, page 54.) At night, the house’s brightly lit interior causes
p.52-57 Malcolm and Marie V3 DONE.indd 57
AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER ASCMAG.COM
it to stand out like a beacon against the dark. In the film’s early-morn-
ing coda, the house is filled with shadows. Outside, Malcolm and Marie
stand together atop the crest of a low ridge, viewing the same world in
a different light.
Reflecting on the experience of making Malcolm & Marie, Rév notes
that the restrictive circumstances of the pandemic forced him to strip
the filmmaking process down to its essential elements. “It gave us a clear
view of what’s important and what’s superficial in the common practice
of filmmaking,” he says.
He is looking forward to the day when the film industry is freed from
these creative and practical restrictions, but he’s also grateful for having
had the opportunity to experiment and collaborate with a small, close-
knit group of peers he trusts and cares for. “A film set is usually a very
busy place, kind of like a construction site,” he says. “With Malcolm &
Marie, we were trying to create something very intimate onscreen, so it
was to everyone’s advantage that we minimize the size of our crew and
maximize our empathy.”
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3/9/21 1:12 PM
 Forging a Path Forward

I
The ASC Future Practices Committee n spring of 2020, shortly after the global
Covid-19 pandemic forced an industry
helps the industry navigate the pandemic. shutdown, the ASC formed its Future
Practices Committee with several goals
By Stephen Pizzello and Tara Jenkins in mind: to survey the situation, discuss
how to manage the unprecedented chal-
lenges it presented, and to suggest pos-
sible strategies and solutions that would help
cinematographers and their collaborators cope
with this new set of issues — and, ideally, get
back to work under safe conditions.
The committee is co-chaired by ASC

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members Amelia Vincent, Erik Messerschmidt
and Craig Kief; Vincent and Messerschmidt of-
fered an overview of their goals in the August
2020 AC article “The Future of Cinematogra-
phy.” Since then, the Future Practices group
has served as a sounding board for its mem-
bers to share experiences, fostered enlighten-
ing discussions on burgeoning technologies
in various areas (including advancements in
remote digital-intermediate workflows, re-
mote-camera systems and virtual-production
techniques), and taken the initiative to address
some of the practical difficulties faced by film-
makers everywhere.
“We’re in uncharted territory,” says ASC
President Stephen Lighthill. “The commit-
tee’s role in the future is going to be to keep an
eye out for the challenges that lie ahead, and
to work with other committees to provide a
source of information about the technologies
that have emerged during this time.”
Now that nearly all members of the Future
Practices Committee are back at work, Light-
hill suggests that “the big challenge going for-
BLADE RUNNER 2049 PHOTO COURTESY OF ALCON ENTERTAINMENT AND WARNER BROS. PICTURES.
ward is how this moment in time is going to
affect filmmaking in general. When we come
out of this moment of danger, what will we
have learned that will be good to keep? There
are certain developments, especially in terms
of equipment, that will be really helpful for us
to continue to use after the pandemic. We’re
going to have to help the conversation along
to find our way through all of that. I think the
great thing about the committee is that it puts
the Society at the forefront of the general con-
versation on how to deal with the pandemic.”
Fostering Communication
During the early stages of the Covid-19 crisis,
Future Practices focused on communication
with the global cinematography community
and began offering recommendations on safe
working conditions and technological solu-
tions. Vincent notes that the group’s members
bring diverse backgrounds, production experi-
ence and technical savvy to each meeting. “We
purposefully put together a committee of cur-
rently working members in a range of forms,
ranging from episodic network television to
p.58-60 Future Practices V2 DONE.indd 59
“There are certain developments, especially in
terms of equipment, that will be really helpful
for us to continue to use after the pandemic.”
the biggest features being made. We’ve been
able to share what works across all mediums,
and we’ve had international and independent
representation.”
She adds, “I came out of our early meetings
newly inspired by my friends and colleagues.
They are just such amazing problem-solvers,
and that quality is at the root of cinematogra-
phy.” Lighthill also feels that communication
has been a key aspect of the committee’s work.
“Future Practices has created a really great ser-
vice for our members and for the community
in general, including vendors, because every-
body needed to just have someone listening to
them,” he says. “We have all been confronted by
the unknown, and the committee’s value as a
sounding board [cannot be overstated].”
As Lighthill notes, various companies have
also participated in the committee’s mission.
A key example, he says, is the Remote Camera
Movement Technologies Roundtable hosted by
the committee last year. This gathering brought
together representatives from various leading
companies to discuss, in detail, the kind of gear
that has enabled cinematographers to keep
working safely during the pandemic. (See side-
bar, page 60.)
Exploring Atmosphere
One of the most significant initiatives the ASC’s
Future Practices Committee has undertaken is
a comprehensive report on a situation that has
generated both concern and controversy with-
in the industry: the use of atmospheric smoke,
fog or haze in production facilities and on sets
during the pandemic.
As production began ramping up again, sev-
eral major studios banned the use of the sub-
stances used to create atmosphere for fear they
could carry and transmit the virus. On June
9, 2020, the International Cinematographers
Guild released an updated safety recommenda-
tion on the use of these substances during this
period, which included a general recommenda-
tion that “the use of atmospheric smoke, haze
and fog be limited in all enclosed spaces, until
such time that we can validate that it is safe.”
By June 12, Los Angeles County had pub-
lished its own protocols, along with additional
AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER ASCMAG.COM
guidelines from DGA, SAG-AFTRA, IATSE and
Teamsters’ Committees (titled The Safe Way
Forward) and from the AMPTP’s Industry-Wide
Labor Management Safety Committee Task
Force, though none of these latter groups
banned the use of atmosphere on set, nor did
they recommend a curtailment of its use —
only that safety protocols be supervised by a
health safety supervisor.
Recognizing the many unanswered ques-
tions, the ASC committee began to further
examine the issue. Since ASC member Dave
Perkal sits on both the ICG Safety Committee
and the ASC Future Practices Committee, ICG
leadership suggested that Future Practices host
a meeting to explore the science behind mod-
ern haze compounds, and what experts knew
at that point about its effects on the virus. On
June 17, the committee convened a panel of ex-
perts for an in-depth discussion of the subject.
Based on the group’s discussion and further
research, the Future Practices report — “The
Future of Atmospheric Effects in Filmmaking,”
co-authored by Perkal and Mark Doering-Pow-
ell, ASC, with significant editing contributions
from Kief — states that “to date, there is no sci-
entific evidence the experts consulted for this
report have seen that indicates, nor do they
have any reason to believe, that atmospheric
effects from the approved list of atmospheric
substances increases the airborne transmis-
sion of a respiratory virus.” In fact, the report
adds, the EPA has stated that certain approved
substances such as viricidal air-treatment
product Grignard Pure, whose active ingredient
is triethylene glycol — a common ingredient in
glycol-based fog and haze fluids — could ac-
tually serve as positive deterrents in the fight
against Covid-19. (Grignard Pure, according to
the EPA, is capable of killing 98 percent of air-
borne SARS-CoV-2.)
The report thus notes that atmospheric fog
— which was already regulated by the indus-
try prior to the Covid-19 outbreak — seems to
pose no threat of increasing the spread of the
virus, and may in fact serve to help decrease its
spread. And further, that the industry might do
well to adopt the use of Grignard Pure as its at-
mosphere of choice.
APRIL 2021 / 59
3/9/21 1:14 PM
 FORGING A PATH FORWARD
Safety in Remote Movement
The Remote Camera Movement Technologies Roundtable hosted
by the ASC Future Practices Committee in October 2020 featured a
series of presentations by technical experts, who demonstrated gear
that can help filmmakers achieve their coverage strategies effectively
— and more safely — during the pandemic.
Scott Howell from Cinemoves kicked off the event by previewing
the TechnoDolly and the Oculus and Matrix remote heads, highlighting
the ability to record camera moves in a way that requires no one to
be near actors during a take, while maintaining precision. Alan Lennox
from Arri exhibited the compact but powerful SRH-3 and SRH-360 re-
mote heads, as well as wireless control for the Trinity. Pro-Cam’s Brian
Breithaupt demonstrated new techniques using the Libra stabilized
head and a breakout box to adjust the equipment on the fly but from
farther away, allowing greater distancing on set.
DJI Ronin technician and Local 600 camera operator Dave Anglin
showcased the versatile capabilities of the Ronin 2, which can be
rigged on a dolly or crane, all wirelessly connected. With a two-mile
remote range, the system can easily and swiftly shift from handheld
60 / APRIL 2021
p.58-60 Future Practices V2 DONE.indd 60
Top: Junior Lucano maneuvers the Arri Trinity.
Bottom: A TechnoDolly on a greenscreen stage
at Pacific Motion Control.
“It would stand to reason that cinematographers and special-effects
technicians should also be permitted to use [Grignard Pure] to create
atmospheric effects,” the report reads. “The EPA has confirmed that the
Grignard Pure product can reduce the spread of the coronavirus and is
effective at levels low enough to be considered barely visible. The benefit
to filmmakers is that it can also provide the desired atmospheric lighting
effects synonymous with cinema.”
Beyond the Pandemic
The Future Practices Committee has pledged to continue its work even
after the pandemic is brought under control. In a post-vaccine world,
Vincent — who was recently invited to join the Academy’s Science and
Technology Council — believes that the new frontier will be virtual pro-
duction and AI. Asserting that Future Practices stands ready to address
changes in the industry and is committed to collaborating with the
cinematography community to problem-solve and find creative ways
forward, she concludes, “I think we can continue to share ideas while
advocating for the best of all the technologies we’ve been using in order
to take them forward. We’re going to see a lot of virtual production, and
Future Practices will gradually shift out of ‘Covid mode’ to assess new
technologies at the forefront of production. It’s important for cinema-
tographers’ voices to stay in the room.”
Information about current safety regulations and protocols can be found
on the Future Practices Committee webpage at theasc.com/asc/committees/
asc-future-practices. The full report on atmospheric effects can be found at
TOP PHOTO COURTESY OF ARRI. BOTTOM PHOTO COURTESY OF PACIFIC MOTION CONTROL.
theasc.com/future-practices/atmosphere-report
to remote control. Operator Richard Moriarty also highlighted the
speed of such transitions using the Freefly Systems Movi, which he
has been using recently on small telescopic camera cranes without
dolly track in order to move quickly and with freedom.
James Razo from Chapman-Leonard spoke on coupling the
company’s compact systems with remote heads in order to shoot
safely, using lightweight but robust dollies such as the Cobra. Meh-
ran Salamati from Hot Gears spoke about his six-channel wireless
controller, which uses fiber optics. Connected through cellular data
and internet point-to-point, the camera can be controlled from
anywhere in the world. Craig Shumard and Ron Tatham from Pacific
Motion Control examined how the TechnoDolly can be used to allow
actors to shoot a scene separately while still allowing for consis-
tent precision upon multiple takes. The event wrapped up with a
presentation by Derek Heidt from RVRD Cinema, who demonstrated
a series of innovative remotely operated systems, including drone
rigs for cameras as well as lighting.
3/9/21 1:14 PM
 New Products and Services
For more of our latest tech reports, visit
ascmag.com/articles/new-products

Creamsource
Accessorizes
Vortex8
Creamsource has unveiled
several accessories for its
Vortex8 LED, which was
introduced last summer. The
company has also announced
it has tripled manufacturing
capabilities for the Vortex8 and
made hardware and software
improvements to the fixture
to enhance the customer
experience.
The first native accessories
for the Vortex8 include Dome
for Vortex8, DoPchoice Snapgrid
40° for Dome, DoPchoice
Snapbag, DoPchoice 40°
Snapgrid for Snapbag90X60, a
hard case, and a honeycomb.
Creamsource will announce
additional Vortex8 accessories
at a later date.

To learn more, visit

creamsource.com.

Airstar Illuminates Neo Film

Airstar has released Neo Film, the
latest addition to its LED range
of lighting for film, video and
photography applications. Similar
in concept to the company’s
other lighting products, Neo Film
is also inflated with air; however,
it utilizes a contained-pressure
system to maintain its tube shape
and 240-degree diffusion angle.
The balloon can be filled and
capped in seconds, saving time
during production.
The smallest Neo Film weighs
1.4 pounds and the largest weighs
3.9 pounds, making it easy to
carry or hold for extended periods
of time during operation. Optional
lithium-ion battery packs make
the unit fully portable.
Available in lengths of 3.9',
7.2' and 14.4', Neo Film can be
handheld, ground-supported
or suspended. Removable
Velcro-backed patches make
the standard mounting hardware
simple to change and reposition.
Mounting options include durable
woven handles, Velcro loops and
carabiner-style rigging clips.
The balloon is illuminated
by removable, interchangeable
bi-color or single-color LED
patches. Light temperature and
intensity can be controlled with
an Exalux LEDMaster Pulse
controller or via wireless DMX
transmitter. Luminous flux ranges
from 2,500 lumens to 10,000
lumens (depending on unit size
and light temperature) can
be digitally configured to
precise readings ranging from
tungsten (2,200K) to daylight
(6,500K). Nominal power for
the smallest unit is 30 watts,
and the largest unit needs just
120 watts to operate.
Neo Film is available
for rental and purchase.
Components and accessories
can be purchased separately
or in all-in-one-kits.
To learn more, visit airstar-
light.us.

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 NEW PRODUCTS AND SERVICES

Storaros Unveil Muses of Light

The Muses of Light are a series of 10 LED lighting
fixtures conceived by Vittorio Storaro, ASC, AIC and his
daughter — lighting designer Arch. Francesca Storaro,
IALD and CLD — and manufactured by De Sisti Lighting.
When AC conducted a Zoom interview with the two
Storaros, who currently reside in Rome, Francesca
explained that the idea for the fixtures began in 2015,
after she collaborated with her cinematographer father
to light the Imperial Forums in Rome. “We were able to
pass our knowledge of cinema and architecture to each
other, and my father fell in love with LED luminaries,”
she says. Vittorio adds that he was impressed by the
low energy consumption of the LEDs, the variety of
optics, the dimming, and the ease with which he could
create changing light levels and color temperatures.
The Muses offer a range of light qualities that
evoke both architectural and cinematic tools; they
can go from the hard shadows of a point source to the
beams of spots and the swath of wide floods. Color
temperature is defined by mixing pairs of tungsten and
daylight LEDs via DMX.
The elder Storaro decided to poetically name the
fixtures after the nine Greek muses — adding a 10th
invented muse, Aurea, to represent the art of cinema.
Distinct geometric shapes, inspired by the treatise De
Divina Proportione written by Friar Luca Pacioli and
illustrated by Leonardo da Vinci, define each Muse
fixture, ranging from a point source to a triangle —
Melpomene, pictured here — to a square and several
polygons, as well as a half-moon and a circle.
Vittorio concedes that the muses and shapes are
a matter of interpretation, although it’s fitting that the
muse of tragedy is a hard light, and the “comic muse”
a flood. He adds that, like aspect ratios, the shapes
of the light source can create different moods and
meanings, “if you let them.”
The cinematographer concludes by noting that he
has given up tungsten sources for good, and that “from
now on, I will only use the Muses of Light.” He hopes
“young cinematographers will do the same.” Storaro’s
next project is Stars and Scars, a collaboration with
writer-director Yi Zhou.

To learn more, visit themusesoflight.com or desisti.

it. To watch our full video interview with the Storaros
regarding their new system, visit ascmag.com/blog/
the-film-book.

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 AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER ASCMAG.COM

Aputure Expands Light Storm, Adds Fresnel

Aputure has introduced the LS 600d
Pro, the latest addition to its Light Storm
COB product line, and the F10 Fresnel, a
Bowens Mount Fresnel made to match the
size of traditional 10" Fresnel lights. When
combined with the LS 600d Pro, the F10
Fresnel can output more than 29,300 lux at
9.8'.
With only a 720-watt maximum power
draw, the LS 600d Pro approaches the
brightness of 1,200-watt HMIs at a fraction
Rosco Launches of their total energy consumption, allowing
users to power more than one from a single
to optimize it for the front Fresnel element,
further enhancing the fixture’s illuminance.
To ergonomically and precisely adjust
its variable 15-45-degree beam angle,
the F10 Fresnel uses Aputure’s helicoid
focus design from the Fresnel 2X. The F10
also incorporates a ventilation design that
prevents the COB from overheating, while
also minimizing light leaks. The drop-in
accessory slot is compatible with Aputure’s
F10 Barn Doors, which provide eight leaves
to cut light from the large Fresnel.

DMG Dash
Rosco Laboratories has introduced the DMG
Dash, a fully accessorized, broad-color-
spectrum LED fixture that presents Mix
technology in a handheld (5"x3.1"x1.1") form
factor. Featuring the same six-chip LED set
found in all of Rosco’s Mix lights, the DMG
Dash can create more than 130 True Rosco
Color gel matches and light output with high
95+ CRI and 90+ TLCI values.
A Boost Mode feature allows for 380
Lux at 3'4". Rated for use in all weather
conditions, the DMG Dash can be controlled
via onboard menu options and preset dial, or
via Bluetooth using the MyMix app. Modes
include Gel, White, Color, Effects and Source
Match. The optional DMG Dot accessory, a
silicone half-globe diffuser that envelops the
DMG Dash to create a round light, is ideal for
an eye light, for adding a dash of color into
a tabletop spot, or for use as an on-screen
practical.
Scheduled for delivery this spring,
the DMG Dash will be available in two
configurations: A Pocket Kit includes a set
of magnetized beam-shaping accessories,
including flat diffuser panel, dome diffuser,
eggcrate, and a gel holder for additional
Rosco gel or diffusion; also included are a
USB-C cable, light-stand mount, a magnet
mount and a carrying case. A Quad Kit
includes four Pocket Kits, a case and a Link
accessory to configure and mount the four
lights together.
To learn more, visit rosco.com.
household circuit. In addition, the fixture To learn more, visit aputure.com.
draws power from both V and Gold Mount
cinema batteries; its multi-voltage battery
plates make it compatible with 14.4-, 26-
and 28.8-volt batteries. The battery plates
also enable the LS 600d Pro to recharge
batteries when plugged into AC power
between scenes. The control box can
accept 48-volt (15A) DC power via 3-pin
XLR, allowing it to be powered via external
battery power stations or block batteries.
Featuring a 250mm-diameter lens made
of real glass, the F10 Fresnel enables
users to achieve punchy hard light that
maintains a subtle soft quality. Its dual-lens
optical design utilizes a condenser lens to
refocus the light from a flat-chip COB LED
Chaos Announces Cosmos
Chaos has launched Chaos Cosmos, a (furniture and accessories for interior
3D-content library featuring more than design), Hum3D (vehicle maker), Maxtree
650 free models and HDRIs that address (plants, trees, vegetation and foliage),
the most common-use cases found NoEmotion (HDR skies and environments),
in architecture and design, including Renderpeople (scanned 3D people) and
furniture, trees, cars and people. Vizpark (trees and plants).
“Cosmos assets are designed to work
across the Chaos ecosystem, giving users To learn more, visit chaosgroup.com.
a central way to add context and realism
to any 3D visualization,” says Phillip Miller,
vice president of product management at
Chaos.
Cosmos assets can be found online or
via a new button within V-Ray 5 for Revit,
3ds Max, SketchUp and Rhino. They are
also optimized for Chaos’ real-time tools,
including Vantage and V-Ray Vision;
because of these optimizations, the assets
adapt to any tool they are in, increasing
viewport speed without the need for
setup.
The initial batch of essential assets
will always be free of charge and were
created with the help of Design Connected

APRIL 2021 / 63

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 MEMBERSHIP Dean R. Cundey Shana Hagan Karl-Walter John Newby
ROSTER Stefan Czapsky
David Darby
Rob Hahn
Jess Hall
Lindenlaub
John Lindley
Yuri Neyman
Sam Nicholson
April 2021 Roger Deakins
Jan de Bont
Gregg Heschong
Henner Hofmann
Jimmy Lindsey
Matthew Lloyd
Vern Nobles Jr.
Crescenzo Notarile
Bruno Delbonnel Adam Holender Walt Lloyd David B. Nowell
OFFICERS — Paul Atkins Thomas Del Ruth Ernie Holzman Bruce Logan Rene Ohashi
2020-’21 Christopher Baffa Frank DeMarco Tom Houghton Gordon Lonsdale Daryn Okada
Stephen Lighthill James Bagdonas Peter Deming Gil Hubbs Emmanuel Lubezki Jules O’Loughlin
President King Baggot Jim Denault Paul Hughen Pan Luo Thomas Olgeirsson
Amelia Vincent John Bailey Caleb Deschanel Shane Hurlbut Julio G. Macat Woody Omens
1st Vice President Florian Ballhaus Ron Dexter Tom Hurwitz Glen MacPherson Michael D. O’Shea
Steven Fierberg Michael Barrett Craig DiBona John G. Inwood Tommy Vince Pace
2nd Vice President Andrzej Bartkowiak George Spiro Dibie Chayse Irvin Maddox-Upshaw Anthony Palmieri
John Simmons John Bartley Ernest Dickerson Mark Irwin Paul Maibaum Phedon Papamichael
3rd Vice President Gary Baum Billy Dickson Levie Isaacks Constantine Makris Andrij Parekh
Steven Poster Bojan Bazelli Bill Dill Tim Ives Denis Maloney Daniel Pearl
Treasurer Affonso Beato P.J. Dillon Peter James Isidore Mankofsky Brian Pearson
Gregg Heschong Mat Beck Anthony Dod Mantle Johnny E. Jensen Christopher Manley Edward J. Pei
Secretary Dion Beebe Mark Doering-Powell Matthew Jensen Michael D. Margulies James Pergola
Christopher Chomyn Bill Bennett Todd A. Dos Reis Jon Joffin Barry Markowitz Dave Perkal
Sergeant-at-Arms Andres Berenguer Stuart Dryburgh Frank Johnson Steve Mason Michael M. Pessah
Gabriel Beristain Bert Dunk Kirsten Johnson Clark Mathis Lowell Peterson
MEMBERS Steven Bernstein Lex duPont Shelly Johnson Don McAlpine Wally Pfister
OF THE BOARD Ross Berryman John Dykstra Ben Joiner Bruce McCleery Sean MacLeod
John Bailey Josh Bleibtreu Richard Edlund Jeffrey Jur Don McCuaig Phillips
Christopher Chomyn Oliver Bokelberg Eagle Egilsson Adam Kane Michael McDonough Steven Poster
Curtis Clark Michael Bonvillain Frederick Elmes Stephen M. Katz Seamus McGarvey Jaron Presant
Richard Crudo Richard Bowen Robert Elswit Kira Kelly Kevin McKnight Michael A. Price
Dean Cundey David Boyd Scott Farrar Ken Kelsch Robert McLachlan Tom Priestley Jr.
Frederick Elmes Russell Boyd Jon Fauer Victor J. Kemper Geary McLeod Rodrigo Prieto
Larry Fong Natasha Braier Don E. FauntLeRoy Wayne Kennan Greg McMurry Robert Primes
Edward Lachman Uta Briesewitz Cort Fey Francis Kenny Steve McNutt Frank Prinzi
Stephen Lighthill Jonathan Brown Steven Fierberg Glenn Kershaw Terry K. Meade Christopher Probst
Lowell Peterson Don Burgess Mauro Fiore Darius Khondji Suki Medencevic Cynthia Pusheck
Steven Poster Stephen H. Burum John C. Flinn III Neville Kidd Chris Menges Richard Quinlan
Lawrence Sher Bill Butler Anna Foerster Craig Kief Erik Messerschmidt Declan Quinn
Rodney Taylor Frank B. Byers Larry Fong Jan Kiesser Rexford Metz Earl Rath
Mandy Walker Patrick Cady Markus Forderer Jeffrey L. Kimball Paul Meyers Richard Rawlings Jr.
Robert Yeoman Sharon Calahan Ron Fortunato Alar Kivilo Anastas Michos Frank Raymond
Antonio Calvache Greig Fraser David Klein Gregory Middleton Tami Reiker
ALTERNATES Paul Cameron Jonathan Freeman George Koblasa C. Kim Miles Ben Richardson
Michael Goi Gary Capo James Friend Lajos Koltai David Miller Robert Richardson
Buddy Squires Russell P. Carpenter Tak Fujimoto Pete Kozachik Douglas Milsome Anthony B. Richmond
Steven Fierberg James L. Carter Alex Funke Neil Krepela Dan Mindel Tom Richmond
Charlie Lieberman Lula Carvalho Steve Gainer Willy Kurant Charles Minsky Antonio Riestra
Denis Lenoir Alan Caso Robert Gantz Ellen M. Kuras Claudio Miranda Bill Roe
Yu Cao Ron Garcia Christian La George Mooradian Owen Roizman
MUSEUM CURATOR Vanja Černjul David Geddes Fountaine Reed Morano Pete Romano
Steve Gainer Rodney Charters Darren Genet George La Fountaine Donald A. Morgan Philippe Rousselot
Enrique Chediak Dejan Georgevich Joe Labisi Donald M. Morgan Mauricio Rubinstein
ACTIVE MEMBERS Christopher Chomyn Michael Goi Edward Lachman Polly Morgan Martin Ruhe
Thomas Ackerman James A. Chressanthis Stephen Goldblatt Jacek Laskus Kramer Morgenthau Juan Ruiz-Anchia
Lance Acord Charlotte Bruus Adriano Goldman Dan Laustsen Rachel Morrison Marvin Rush
Marshall Adams Christensen Paul Goldsmith James Laxton Peter Moss Richard Rutkowski
Javier Aguirresarobe T.C. Christensen Dana Gonzales Patti Lee David Moxness Paul Ryan
Lloyd Ahern II Joan Churchill Nathaniel Goodman Rob Legato M. David Mullen Eric Saarinen
Martin Ahlgren Curtis Clark Victor Goss Denis Lenoir Dennis Muren Alik Sakharov
Russ Alsobrook Matthew Clark Edu Grau John R. Leonetti Fred Murphy Armando Salas
Gonzalo Amat Peter L. Collister Jack Green Matthew Leonetti Hiro Narita Mikael Salomon
Howard A. Jack Cooperman Adam Greenberg Philippe LeSourd Guillermo Navarro Linus Sandgren
Anderson III Jack Couffer Robbie Greenberg Peter Levy Michael B. Negrin Paul Sarossy
James Anderson Nelson Cragg David Greene Matthew Libatique James Neihouse Giorgio Scali
Peter Anderson Jeff Cronenweth Xavier Grobet Charlie Lieberman Bill Neil Roberto Schaefer
Fernando Arguelles Richard Crudo Alexander Gruszynski Stephen Lighthill Alex Nepomniaschy Tobias Schliessler

64 / APRIL 2021

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 AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER ASCMAG.COM

Aaron Schneider Fabian Wagner Elisabetta Cartoni Christine Mike Mimaki Marc Shipman-
Nancy Schreiber Roy H. Wagner Martin Cayzer Huenergardt Michael Morelli Mueller
Fred Schuler Mandy Walker Leonard Chapman Nichole Huenergardt Dash Morrison Leon Silverman
John Schwartzman Michael Watkins Mark Chiolis Robert C. Hummel Nolan Murdock Rob Sim
John Seale Colin Watkinson Greg Ciaccio David Inglish Nancy Murray Joseph Slomka
Christian Sebaldt Cathal Watters Michael Cioni Zoë Iltsopoulos-Borys Iain A. Neil Garrett Smith
Joaquin Sedillo Michael Weaver Adam Clark Alan Ipakchian Otto Nemenz Timothy E. Smith
Dean Semler William “Billy” Webb Cary Clayton Tom Jacob Ernst Nettmann Kimberly Snyder
Lorenzo Senatore Mark Weingartner Al Cleland Jim Jannard Tony Ngai Stefan Sonnenfeld
Ben Seresin Jonathan West Dave Cole George Joblove Jeffrey A. Okun Michael Sowa
Eduardo Serra James Whitaker Michael Condon Tor Johansen Marty Oppenheimer John L. Sprung
Steven Shaw Jack Whitman Grover Crisp Joel Johnson Walt Ordway Joseph N. Tawil
Lawrence Sher Lisa Wiegand Peter Crithary Eric Johnston Ahmad Ouri Andrew Tiffen
Brad Shield Jo Willems Daniel Curry John Johnston Michael Parker Ira Tiffen
Richard Shore Stephen F. Windon Scott Dale Mike Kanfer Dhanendra Patel Steve Tiffen
Sidney Sidell Alexander Witt Tony D’Amore Andreas Kaufmann Snehal Patel Matthew Tomlinson
Newton Thomas Sigel Dariusz Wolski Marc Dando Marker Karahadian Mitch Paulson Arthur Tostado
Steven V. Silver Peter Wunstorf Ross Danielson Frank Kay Gary Paz Jeffrey Treanor
John Simmons Tom Yatsko John DeBoer Dan Keaton Eliott Peck Bill Turner
Peter Simonite Steve Yedlin Carlos D. DeMattos Michael Keegan Dan Perry Stephan Ukas-Bradley
Sandi Sissel Robert Yeoman Albert DeMayo David Keighley Kristin Petrovich JD Vandenberg
Santosh Sivan Bradford Young Steve Demeter Patricia Keighley Nick Phillips Arthur Van Dover
Michael Slovis Richard Yuricich Gary Demos Debbie Kennard Tyler Phillips Mark van Horne
Dennis L. Smith Alexis Zabe Mato Der Avanessian Glenn Kennel Anna Piffl Jannie van Wyk
Reed Smoot Peter Zeitlinger Kevin Dillon Robert Keslow Joshua Pines Phil Vigeant
Bing Sokolsky Xiaoding Zhao David Dodson Lori Killam Jorg Pohlman Rhonda Vigeant
Glynn Speeckaert Jerzy Zielinski Judith Doherty Douglas Kirkland Tom Poole Dedo Weigert
Dante Spinotti Kenneth Zunder Peter Doyle Mark Kirkland Sherri Potter Marc Weigert
Buddy Squires Cyril Drabinsky Scott Klein Howard Preston Steve Weiss
Terry Stacey ASSOCIATE Matthew Duclos Timothy J. Knapp Sarah Priestnall Alex Wengert
Eric Steelberg MEMBERS Jesse Dylan Franz Kraus David Pringle Evans Wetmore
Ueli Steiger Pete Abel Kavon Elhami Karl Kresser Doug Pruss Beverly Wood
Peter Stein Rich Abel Seth Emmons Ross La Manna David Reisner Jan Yarbrough
Tom Stern Alan Albert Jonathan Erland Jarred Land Jeffrey Reyes Hoyt Yeatman
Robert M. Stevens Richard Aschman Per D. Fasmer Chuck Lee Christopher Reyna Irwin M. Young
David Stockton Gerhard Baier Laura Jans Fazio Doug Leighton Colin Ritchie Michael Zacharia
Rogier Stoffers Kay Baker Ray Feeney Lou Levinson Eric G. Rodli Bob Zahn
Vittorio Storaro Joseph J. Ball William Feightner Suzanne Lezotte Robert Rodriguez Nazir Zaidi
Gavin Struthers Amnon Band Chris Fetner Forest Liu Chris Rogers Michael Zakula
David Stump Carly M. Barber Jimmy Fisher Joe Lomba Domenic Rom Joachim Zell
Tim Suhrstedt Craig Barron Thomas Fletcher Grant Loucks Andy Romanoff Les Zellan
Peter Suschitzky Thomas M. Barron Claude Gagnon Wayne Loucks Frederic Rose
Attila Szalay Larry Barton Benjamin Gervais Howard Lukk Daniel Rosen HONORARY
Masanobu Wolfgang Baumler Salvatore Giarratano Andy Maltz Dana Ross MEMBERS
Takayanagi Bob Beitcher John A. Gresch Gary Mandle Jim Roudebush Col. Edwin E.
Jonathan Taylor Mark Bender Dan Hammond Steven E. Manios Jr. Bill Russell Aldrin Jr.
Rodney Taylor Bruce Berke Jim Hannafin Chris Mankofsky Barry Russo Patty Armacost
William Taylor Jaymie Bickford Bill Hansard Jr. Michael Mansouri Chris Russo Col. Michael Collins
Romeo Tirone Steven A. Blakely Lisa Harp Gray Marshall Kish Sadhvani Bob Fisher
John Toll Joseph Bogacz Richard Hart Frank Marsico Peter Santoro David MacDonald
Mario Tosi Jill Bogdanowicz Robert Harvey James Martin Dan Sasaki Larry Mole Parker
Salvatore Totino Mitchell Bogdanowicz Michael Hatzer Peter Martin Stephan Schenk D. Brian Spruill
Luciano Tovoli Jens Bogehegn Josh Haynie Marko Massinger Erik Schietinger Marek Zydowicz
Jost Vacano Jean-Marc Bouchut Fritz Heinzle Robert Mastronardi Oliver Schietinger
Stijn van der Veken Michael Bravin Radlein Henning Mel Mathis Steve Schklair For the most current
Theo van de Sande Simon Broad Rainer Hercher Joe Matza Peter K. Schnitzler ASC roster, go to
Eric van Haren Michael Brodersen Charles Herzfeld Albert Mayer Jr. Walter Schonfeld theasc.com/asc/
Noman William Brodersen Larry Hezzelwood Bill McDonald Wayne Schulman members
Hoyte van Hoytema Garrett Brown Sean Hise Dennis McDonald Alexander Schwarz
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APRIL 2021 / 65

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 Classifieds

66 / APRIL 2021

p.66-67 In Memoriam Feil V3.indd 66 3/9/21 1:20 PM


In Memoriam
Gerald Feil, ASC (1933-2021)
Gerald Feil, ASC, who was known
for helping to create “direct cine-
ma” and for contributing camera-
work to the 1963 feature Lord of
the Flies, died Feb. 9 at the age
of 87.
Born in New York City on May
1, 1933, Feil earned a B.A. in
theater arts from Antioch College
in Ohio, where he and another
student founded, constructed
and programmed the campus
radio station, which later became
an NPR affiliate. As a student,
he served as lighting designer
for four summer seasons of the
Antioch Shakespeare Festival
and for the Cincinnati Symphony
Orchestra. He became a principal
stringer for the NBC regional
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE FEIL FAMILY.
Feil’s big break into station WLWD (now WDTN) in
Dayton after it carried his filmed
narrative production coverage of a devastating tor-
came with theater nado. After college, he returned
to New York, where he designed
director Peter Brook’s the lighting for several Broadway
harrowing screen musical and dramatic produc-
tions until being drafted into the
adaptation of Lord of U.S. Army. Assigned to the Army
the Flies. Pictorial Center in Queens, N.Y.,
p.66-67 In Memoriam Feil V3.indd 67
AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER ASCMAG.COM
Feil worked as an apprentice on
large-scale, Hollywood-style
studio productions and complex
shoots in distant locations.
After his discharge, Feil joined
the new “cinéma vérité” group
of Drew Associates, which was
formed by pioneering documen-
tarians Robert Drew, Richard Lea-
cock, D.A. Pennebaker and Albert
Maysles. As technical director for
the filmmakers, Feil worked with
Leacock and Pennebaker on the
design of a radical new technol-
ogy; this resulted in lightweight,
autonomous, self-contained
camera systems, which incorpo-
rated wireless sync, ergonomic
handheld design and high-quality
zoom optics. Their observation-
al approach became known as
“direct cinema.” One result of this
collaboration was the innovative
documentary Adventures on the
New Frontier (1961), a candid cin-
ematic portrait of then-presiden-
tial candidate John F. Kennedy.
Such off-the-cuff shooting with
sync sound was cutting-edge at
the time.
Feil’s big break into narrative
production came with theater
director Peter Brook’s harrowing
screen adaptation of Lord of
the Flies, as he wanted to apply
the direct-cinema approach to
the project, which had minimal
scripting and was shot entirely
on location (and in sequence)
in Puerto Rico with non-actor
children. Brought aboard as an
associate producer, Feil worked
closely with director of photogra-
phy Tom Hollyman, photographed
significant portions of the picture
as a secondary cinematographer,
and also worked in the editing
room with Brook. His subsequent
projects included the features
He Knows You’re Alone, Savage
Dawn, Silent Madness and the
Rolling Stones concert film Let’s
Spend the Night Together (direct-
ed by Hal Ashby).
Having heavily researched 3D
camera technology for a Mike
Nichols feature project that fell
through, Feil was able to apply
what he’d learned to the Para-
mount feature Friday the 13th
Part III, for which he helped refine
the “Arrivision” 3D camera system
and aided in designing specialized
lighting and framing techniques
to best exploit the stereoscopic
presentation.
Starting in 1993, Feil served
as a faculty member in the film
department of New York Univer-
sity’s Tisch School of the Arts.
He received the Excellence in
Teaching Award in 1994 and the
Distinguished Service Award in
1996.
Feil was invited to join the ASC
as an active member in 1998,
and was personally recommend-
ed by Society members Haskell
Wexler, Richard Shore and Caleb
Deschanel.
He is survived by his wife, Hila,
and daughter, Anna.
APRIL 2021 / 67
3/9/21 1:20 PM
 In Memoriam
Giuseppe Rotunno, ASC, AIC (1923-2021)
Above: Giuseppe Rotunno, ASC, AIC
on set. Opposite, top: Rotunno and
Fellini. Opposite, bottom: Rotunno
(atop lower ladder) with Terry Gilliam
(wearing hat) on location for The
Adventures of Baron Munchausen.
PHOTOS FROM THE ASC ARCHIVE.
“De Sica, Visconti and
Fellini always put very
different and unique
moods into their films.”
68 / APRIL 2021
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Giuseppe Rotunno, ASC, AIC, who
shot some of Italy’s most cele-
brated films during five decades
behind the camera, died Feb. 7 at
the age of 97.
An Academy Award nominee
for Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz,
Rotunno was perhaps best known
for his multiple collaborations with
Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti
and Federico Fellini. “You know,
I am just one of the people who
has worked with those great
directors,” Rotunno told AC in
1999, when he was honored with
the ASC International Award. “De
Sica, Visconti and Fellini always
put very different and unique
moods into their films; they were
also different in terms of [their
approach to] the acting, the
makeup and everything else. I
simply tried to follow all of those
things with my light and put
them in the best condition to be
received by the audience.”
The cinematographer also
frequently traveled to the United
States for Hollywood productions,
working with such directors as
Mike Nichols, John Huston and
Stanley Kramer.
Born in Rome on March 19,
1923, Rotunno entered the film
business at age 17, when his
father’s death sent him looking for
work. He landed a job in the pho-
tography lab at Cinecittà Studios,
and one of his supervisors quickly
recognized his talent and gave
him a Leica stills camera with
which to experiment. “I started to
learn about what was happening
with the light, the film and other
things, and I began to love it,” he
recalled.
Within months, Rotunno
became one of Cinecittà’s set
photographers, and then moved
to the camera department, work-
ing as an assistant and operator
and shooting documentaries on
the side. When World War II in-
tervened, he was drafted into the
Italian army, serving as a combat
photographer and newsreel
cameraperson in Greece. He told
AC, “I was in the service, shooting
alongside reporters, from 1942
until April 11, 1945, when I was
liberated by the American Army in
Germany, where I was a prisoner.
I never left my work!”
Upon returning to Rome,
Rotunno spent three years trying
to pick up where he had left off
professionally. One of his first
jobs was Henry King’s 1949 epic
Prince of Foxes, shot by Leon
3/9/21 1:25 PM

Shamroy, ASC. “The shoot was
very long, and Shamroy and I
worked very closely together,”
noted Rotunno. “It was my first
chance to work on a big produc-
tion, and it was a spectacular film.
I had never seen something so
complicated for a cameraman.
Shamroy was admired by all of
the artists there; he could light so
beautifully. He was also a great
man with a big heart, and he gave
me the opportunity to stay close
to him and watch everything he
was doing. That set, for me, was
really a university.”
In 1966, when Rotunno be-
came a member of the ASC, it
was Shamroy who recommended
him for membership.
Rotunno worked on more than
25 films as a camera operator
before moving up to director of
photography on Visconti’s Senso.
Brought onto the production as
an operator for cinematographer
Aldo Graziati (aka G.R. Aldo),
Rotunno was abruptly moved up
after Graziati died in a car acci-
dent during a company move.
In 1955, De Sica asked Rotunno
to shoot Pane, Amore e ... (Scan-
dal in Sorrento), which starred
Sophia Loren and De Sica. The
project was shot almost entirely
on location and was one of Italy’s
first CinemaScope productions
— two challenges for the young
cinematographer. During that
same period, Rotunno shot The
Monte Carlo Story, which starred
De Sica and Marlene Dietrich.
Rotunno had to work with another
new widescreen format, Techni-
rama, but his greatest challenge
was working with Dietrich, who by
then was in her 50s and had been
absent from the screen for some
time. Rotunno recalled, “When
she could not feel the warmth of
the light on her face, she believed
she wasn’t getting enough light.
p.68-69 In Memoriam Rotunno V3 DONE.indd 69
AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER ASCMAG.COM
To gain her confidence, I did
some tests alone with her before
we started shooting. I tried for a
simple crosslight on her face be-
cause she needed it then. When
I showed her the tests, she was
very happy, and she made big
publicity for me. She said, ‘He is
a genius!’ Then everybody looked
for the genius.”
In 1963, Rotunno shot De Sica’s
Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow,
which won the Oscar for Best For-
eign Film. Then he teamed with
John Huston on The Bible, work-
ing in the Dimension 150 65mm
format. On the 1967 anthology
film The Witches, he shot the
segments for directors Visconti,
De Sica and Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Of Visconti, for whom he also
shot White Nights, Rocco and His
Brothers, The Leopard and The
Stranger, Rotunno said, “In certain
ways, he was my father in my job.
I did many films with him, first as
a camera operator and later as
a director of photography. I had
that relationship for work, for life,
forever.”
Rotunno also forged a famous
creative partnership with Federico
Fellini. They first collaborated on
the “Toby Dammit” segment of
Spirits of the Dead, and Rotunno
subsequently shot Satyricon,
Roma, Amarcord, Casanova,
Orchestra Rehearsal, City of
Women, And the Ship Sails On,
and some sequences in The
Clowns for the director.
Rotunno’s credits also included
Mike Nichols’ Carnal Knowledge,
Regarding Henry and Wolf; Lina
Wertmüller’s Love and Anarchy,
All Screwed Up and A Night Full
of Rain; Stanley Kramer’s On the
Beach; Robert Altman’s Popeye;
Arthur Hiller’s Man of La Mancha;
and Terry Gilliam’s The Adven-
tures of Baron Munchausen.
APRIL 2021 / 69
3/9/21 1:25 PM
 Clubhouse News
Latest Bulletins From the Society
Society Welcomes Irvin
Born in Canada, new member Chayse Irvin, ASC, CSC shot commer-
cials for clients including Apple, Google, Gatorade, Heineken, Sephora,
Samsung and Ford. His short-form work also includes music videos for
In Memoriam: Hora, Irola
The American Society of Cinematographers is saddened to report that
members John C. Hora and Judy Irola have died. AC will publish a full
remembrance on each of their inspiring careers in an upcoming issue.
For additional ASC news, visit theasc.com/asc/news.
70 / APRIL 2021
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Jay-Z, Leon Bridges, The xx, Porter Robinson, Just Blaze and more. His
camerawork on the Kan Wakan music video “Like I Need You” earned him a
Camerimage nomination for Best Cinematography in a Music Video.
His debut feature as a cinematographer, the 2013 drama Medeas,
earned him a Camerimage award in the Cinematographer’s Debut competi-
tion. Irvin then began collaborating with filmmaker Kahlil Joseph, including
short-form projects m.A.A.d., Fly Paper and Sampha: Process, the latter
earning him the Gold Lion for Cinematography from the Cannes Lions
International Festival of Creativity. That same year, he also won Silver and
Bronze Lion awards, for his work on “Squarespace: Who Is JohnMalkovich.
com?” and “Apple Watch Series 2: Go Time,” respectively.
In 2016, Irvin and Joseph teamed up on HBO’s critically acclaimed
film Beyoncé: Lemonade, a 65-minute “visual album” that serves as a
companion to the singer’s album Lemonade. The cinematographer’s feature
work also includes the 2017 drama Hannah, as well as director Spike Lee’s
Oscar-winning drama BlacKkKlansman. Irvin’s upcoming credits include the
Netflix drama Blonde, about the life of Marilyn Monroe.
Simmons’ Photos Spotlighted by Getty, Casa 0101
Still-photographic work from John Simmons, ASC was recently fea-
tured on the Getty Museum’s “Art Stories,” which offer perspectives
on artists and their work. In a Q&A titled “A Photograph Has to Be Like
Music,” Simmons was asked “about his lifelong investment in Black vis-
ibility and his early days of capturing everyday moments on the streets
of Chicago,” as well as in Los Angeles and the U.S. South.
He shared such celebrated photos as Shoes, Girl Eating Ice Cream
and Fight Like a Girl (pictured). About his work, Simmons said, “One
thing that injustice has done to me is it hasn’t made me bitter, but it [has
made me] want to create a better picture.”
Simmons’ photos, as well as never-before-seen multi-layered paper
collage cartographies, are also on view at Casa 0101’s Jean Deleage Art
Gallery. The exhibition, Capturing Beauty: The Artwork and Photog-
raphy of John Simmons, runs through June 5, 2021. Casa 0101 notes,
“Simmons’ paper collage cartographies are mappings that zoom in and
out of political and social narratives [to showcase] the harsh reality and
struggles of Black American history without losing a sense of hope.”
Adds Simmons, “I like to look at them as documentaries.” HORA PORTRAIT BY OWEN ROIZMAN, ASC.
IROLA PORTRAIT BY DOUGLAS KIRKLAND.
3/9/21 1:26 PM
 APRIL 2021 / 71

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 Wrap Shot
The Dick Van Dyke Show
Robert De Grasse, ASC photographed more
than 150 episodes of the classic sitcom —
virtually the entire series run.
72 / APRIL 2021
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The classic show recently became a visual touchstone for the
Marvel series WandaVision, covered in this issue.
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AC ARCHIVE.
In this month’s coverage of WandaVision (see page 24), AC spoke with
Jess Hall, ASC, BSC and director Matt Shakman about their research
into the lighting of The Dick Van Dyke Show, upon which the look of
Episode 1 of the hit Marvel series is based.
Pictured here is a moment behind the scenes on Dick Van Dyke
— which ran from 1961-’66 — with costars Van Dyke and Mary Tyler
Moore playing before a live studio audience (as did lead actors Eliz-
abeth Olsen and Paul Bettany in WandaVision’s inaugural episode,
six decades later). In the background of this shot are director and
frequent series co-star Jerry Paris (just left of Van Dyke) and the crack
camera team.
Dick Van Dyke greatly benefited from crisp cinematography by
Robert De Grasse, ASC. After shooting more than 100 features, includ-
ing his Academy Award-nominated work on Vivacious Lady (1938),
De Grasse moved into television work in the 1950s, and contributed
to such shows as I Love Lucy (1951-’57), Make Room for Daddy/The
Danny Thomas Show (1953-’64) — for which he earned an Emmy
nomination — and Good Morning, World (1967-’68).
De Grasse photographed more than 150 episodes of Dick Van Dyke
— virtually the entire series run.
3/9/21 1:26 PM
p.Cover 3 Panavision.indd 3 3/9/21 1:33 PM
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