Scenes No. 001: La Nina del Desierto

I'm starting a series of posts, "Scenes," about scenes that I feel like I end up talking about a lot, exchanging stories with work buddies and debating ways to approach certain problems. Big shoots, small shoots, whatever's an interesting enough situation to talk about.


For my first Scenes post I wanted to talk about what we did back in 2009 for the climax of La Nina del Desierto, with director Malachi Rempen. This is old news to a lot of people but it's come up a couple times this week and it's old so I thought it'd make a good start.

The short's about a man who digs graves in the desert for the mob encountering a little girl who's found his dig site; in this scene the girl disappears and the gravedigger discovers that she was the ghost of the body he's burying. It's the crux of the short, the emotional core of the movie.

Stylistically, the sequence was to be subtle and simple; Malachi didn't want any eye-catching trick or fundamental change in the visual design when the moment comes in the scene. The style of the movie was to present the world from a strongly objective perspective: we used lots of proscenium blocking and simple geometry combined with simple, straightforward camera work to imply a place for the audience outside the emotional point-of-view of any particular character; the goal was to make the reveal that a ghost is a part of this world affect the audience in the way it affects the character.

The plan going into it was to only bend that objective perspective for this key scene: the dolly in and out was a decision that not only accomplished the disappearance of the ghost, it's the only move in the film up to this point that's not physically motivated: any other pan, tilt, crane, or dolly has been a move expressly necessary to continue following action in the shot; now, so late in the film, we have this move motivated only by the gravedigger's building emotions. It was critical to keep it subtle; attention is only called to the movement when the dolly starts to move back. It was our way to try and surprise the audience with how drawn in they and the character have gotten.

The team did a great job building the plan on set and Joaquin Garrido gave Malachi an enthralling performance. There was an especially hard working group digging a 24 foot truck out of melted permafrost while we took the scene; by the time they could wedge wood ramps underneath the tires of the truck they'd dug a four foot deep impression of the entire truck, which had started the day with its chassis resting on the ground.

The effect was taken further when we got to post; it turned overcast for us as we shot on set, and editor Dan McLellan ended up assembling the short with the implication that a storm was building as the gravedigger spends more time in the desert. It was easy enough to take the scenes anywhere from a warmer arid look to the cold before a coming storm; Malachi and I dialed in a color progression for each scene the gravedigger spends in the desert, starting warmer and cooling off. Finally in this scene we make the full transition to the storm look over the course of the dolly in, trying to sneak in a starkly different mood for the moment without drawing any attention until it's already happened. The look ends up changing quite a bit:

So that's this Scene! Check out the whole short, La Nina del Desierto here!

Mando Fresko for MTV's 2012 EMAs

Just wrapped up a little shoot using the 3ROUNDBURST office as a living room set and a kitchen set for MTV Tr3s host and Power 106 DJ Mando Fresko in an integrated marketing spot for MTV's EMAs this year, Samsung, and T-Mobile, showcasing that new Galaxy SIII.  We shot a Skype call with using the phone with a remote team, putting Mando's real-life mother on the other end of the line; it'll always be a hassle when you need to rely on technology that wasn't built for production, but we got through the hurdles and made the day.

Manhattan Film Institute

July saw Jenny and I working at the Manhattan Film Institute for its inaugural year. Established by Tony Spiridakis & Jeff McCracken, MFI is a new approach to the entertainment workshop format: along with master-class style programs for writers and actors with Chazz Palminteri & Larry Moss, respectively, Tony & Jeff lead a two week production workshop: twenty directors meticulously prepared the twenty films with which they had applied to the program, and twenty actors worked tirelessly with those directors and the faculty to get the films working.

Each short was faced with a maximum five hours on set and an absolutely minimal equipment package and a crew composed only of the other students in the program, so only the most painstaking planning could guarantee the production quality for which we were aiming. Here's a quick showreel of the shorts I shot for directors at MFI:

3RB in NY

Just got back from New York City, shooting again with 3ROUNDBURST for an upcoming MTV property. It was a great little weekend show; I was pleased to meet and work with Cam Op Jason Krangel and Gaffer Adam Barbay for the show. We carried an F3 rig from Adorama Rentals as well as Jason's FS100 kit; although I didn't work directly with Adorama I was told they were very accommodating, especially given how young their department is. I'm looking forward to seeing the project put together!

College Comedy on Canon's C300: "Resident Advisor"

I've spent this March and April holed up with a tiny, tightknit crew burning its way across southern California to shoot “Resident Advisor”, a college comedy feature that lives somewhere between a feel-good Jack Black “School of Rock” and a rollicking “Animal House”. A band of impressionable freshman are left alone in the desert when their stick-in-the-mud resident advisor Chip is picked up by the Mexican Border Patrol, and find themselves under the care of Chip's older brother, Dean. It's a fateful pairing, as it turns out that Dean is a living legend of SCSU, now returned to coax these freshmen into becoming the ultimate college students. The film is a first feature for company Pensé Productuons, as well as a first feature for director Colin Sander. The company is built around a core philosophy of self-containment, and some unorthodox production methodology was set in stone long before I was brought on to the project: specifically, gaffer Jimmy Lu and I were restricted to lighting the film with six 1x1 Lite Panels, (four Bi-Colors, two 5600K Super-Spots) a single 5600K MiniPlus Lite Panel, and whatever practicals Production Designer Susanna Lowber and I could work into the scene. Needless to say there were some difficulties, but we always managed to work out way out of the jam.

1st Assistant Robyn Buchanan and I started early preparing the C300 for its first feature film. Canon didn't particularly impress me with the physical presentation of the camera; the fact that they're in good company for poor ergonomics these days (pick any of Red's offerings) is no excuse when a company looks to build a new brand in a targeted market. I don't want any more small cameras, plain and simple. Canon announced their newest flavor of 1D along with their C300; it's the perfect camera to cover that one or two shots a week that can't physically accomodate production's primary camera. Regardless, we get another camera where the key guideline for the design is clearly the tightest configuration of circuitry around the sensor mount. This generated a variety of complications building the kit, starting with the lack of real estate on the camera body to mount accessories; we generated a web of electronics on the rods between the camera and our IDX battery plate. No power adapter was available at the time to allow the camera to run on our IDX batteries, so we had two batteries on our rig at all times. Again, these issues aren't really unique these days, just disappointing when a design team might have had the time to provide a solution.


What was disappointing with the camera was the EF mount. Pensé ordered their C300 with an EF mount to fit their company plans beyond “Resident Advisor”, (I've also heard it wasn't much of a choice: the PL mount option has only recently started shipping) so that's what we had to work with for the show. EF is a perfectly fit mount for its primary still photography purposes, but from the first shot that required remote focus we knew we had a problem. Our CP2s would travel up and down in the mount with every pull, affecting both framing and flange calibration: 1st Asst Robyn Buchanan found her marks would drift with varying inaccuracies. We had the camera looked at by Canon and our lenses by Zeiss; everything was in working order, but we were taxing the EF mount beyond its design tolerances. Of course compromising such basics for the equipment's incapabilities wasn't an option, so Robyn jammed a couple camera wedges in the rig to keep the half-pound lens from traveling and remarked her focus. It wasn't the prettiest solution, but it kept things running.

The image itself is great; although the C300's recording format is immediately disadvantaged in its 8-bit color space and burnt-in image control settings, the Bayer pattern that Canon has designed for this camera yields notably filmic results. With a healthy exposure and healthy color balance, this camera gives handsome images: delicate rendering of detail and fine gradients across its dynamic range are some of the fineries this camera affords. We shot using Canon's Cinelog gamma setting, affording us the camera's full dynamic range and color sensitivity. Much like the Cinestyle picture style designed by Technicolor for Canon's DSLR line, produces images are flat and desaturated, intended for a full color correction workflow; unfortunately, much like with the DSLRs, there is no way to monitor anything but the Cinelog image. Perhaps I've been spoiled dialing in LUTs for my directors and producers to look at with the Red cameras I've come accustomed to, but keep in mind that a perfectly workable tweak toward this functionality was written by the Magic Lantern team for the 5D, T2i, and 60D: the Magic Lantern firmware allows the user to choose a viewing picture style (a refined out created in the picture style editor or a very rough picture style made on the fly in camera) which will automatically switch out for a shooting picture style (typically the Cinestyle). In an ideal world I'd have loved to see the C300 allow me to dial in a “viewing gamma” to send to the monitors and package along as metadata next to the clean Cinelog image recorded to the CF card; at the very least I'd have liked to see the hack-solution available in the $600 camera I had as a scouting viewfinder. (Note that the C300 does have a “View Assist” function, for the purpose of viewing a more palatable image whe shooting Cinelog. Even if this function sent its results out through any of the camera's monitoring ports rather than keeping it bottled between the EVF and C300 LCD, the slightly contrastier and slightly yellower image created by “View Assist” is unlikely to assist anyone)

On the lighting side, I'm as excited as everyone else is about the future of high-efficiency lighting. It took only a couple hours on the set of the commercial spot I shot early this week for Scott Sullivan to remind me that the Tungsten standard is for energy efficiency loses ~98% of input wattage to heat radiation. Of course, it took only a couple minutes to remind me that the tungsten halogen filament generates a spectrum broad and complete enough to render human skin very favorably. It was great being able to quickly place a fixture that weighed less than 5 pounds, toss on a battery, and see it on without anyone having to bother routing power. It was disheartening to see the sickly color tone that the bi-colors took on at 3200K. It was liberating to be able to stuff a fixture into a tight space and not have to worry about burning down our location. It was terribly restricting to know that there were long distance luminances and hard shadows that couldn't be accomplished with these fixtures. High efficiency lighting is changing the way we build our sets and plan our shoots; fixture design workarounds and supplements required from the art department for this show made it clear that LED isn't yet a complete solution. Moving forward I'm particularly excited about Hive's Light Emitting Plasma technology: high energy efficiency bulbs with a spectrum which matches natural daylight, designed with fixtures that fall right in line with the traditional array of lighting instruments (the fresnel, the par, the open face, the ellipsoidal).


Of course, this is all nerd words; the fact of the matter is that we accomplished a great deal with “Resident Advisor” and I'm eagerly looking forward to seeing a cut of the film soon.

Canon C300 EF

Zeiss CP2 Primes, Canon L Series Primes, Canon L Series Zooms

Co. Pensé Productions

Dir. Colin Sander

1st AC Robyn Buchanan

2nd AC Melissa Fisher

2nd AC Matt LaRoche

Gaffer Jimmy Lu

"The Lookout": Shooting with Scarlet

We've just wrapped "The Lookout", a cop drama feature I lensed for first time director Gustavo Morales. We shot throughout Los Angeles with a bare-bones crew on Red's brand new Scarlet, in a package provided by Digital Film Studios. Breaking in a new camera always has its ups and downs and the fragile infrastructure of a micro-budget independent feature can certainly be a scary place to discover all those little quirks that we've come to know and love with modern technology, but with Red's Scarlet we were fortunate enough to find a familiar workflow and reliable functionality.

If you've worked with Red's Epic you are already on familiar ground when you get the Scarlet in your hands. You've got the same touchscreen interface with Red's on-board monitor, or the option to control the camer with the Redmote or DSMC handle. We decided to forgo the DSMC handle, as in practice with the Epic I've come to recognize the DSMC as a glorified battery holder: my assistants rarely use it to handle the menus, and the hot swap convenience here is mitigated by the need to carry and maintain entire separate battery format apart from the Anton Bauer bricks we were using to power the rig. We found it easier to use the Redmote whenever the touchscreen wasn't the easiest option; I have to admit that I've really come to love that stupid thing. It doesn't have a ton of range and the correspondence between its buttons and their function in the menu system is cryptic at best, but it put a smile on my face to be able to quietly dial in a rough look-up-table at video village, yards away from the camera.

The images from the camera were everything I was hoping for. This camera captures all the resolution and color depth of the MX camera for that bulk of narrative work which doesn't demand hi-speed. It's also a very fast camera; shadows look fantastic and the broad dynamic range makes for a very pleasant curve in the higher-contrast, noir style that this film was looking for. Highlights are of course much more the danger here; with a little testing Gaffer Coco Moore and I lit for a 640 ASA exposure, but monitored at 800 ASA, with an eye on the RAW waveform. As I mentioned earlier I love finding a moment to rough in a look for monitoring on set; Red's onboard controls for the metadata color, although rudimentary, provide just the controls I want. I find it's important to me to keep from staring at that low-contrast image that the RAW can provide; of course your meters and your eyes are your best tools to judge exposure and contrast, but having a higher contrast image on monitor means to me that if I'm happy here it'll be achievable in the color bay plus a little wiggle room.

Check out a whole collection of frame grabs from our Scarlet footage here!

 

 

 

 

RED Scarlet

Zeiss CP2 Prime Set, Focus Optics Ruby Zoom

Rentals from Digital Film Studios

Co. Merkurio Pictures

Dir. Gustavo Morales

1st AC Jenny Hou

2nd AC Jocelyn RC

Gaffer Coco Moore

Key Grip Joe Chavez

 

"The Lookout" & JAG Jeans

Posting real quick to share this spot I shot with 3RoundBurst's just come down; turned out great! "The Lookout" is going well; working with the Scarlet (by way of Digital Film Studios) has been easy and the results have been great. Just a couple frame grabs as a teaser: