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Jennifer's Body


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Looks great david. I especially dig the night work. Always a challenge to work at night and it looks like your doing a great job.

 

it was jammed and then suddenly popped out as I yanked on it, smacking me in the face just below my eye. It was exactly like being poked hard in the face by the end of a wooden rolling pin.

 

So now I have a small cut and a big black eye (which Kevin Zanit can attest to).

 

Lesson is, don't rush and don't do someone else's job.

 

I can attest to that. A couple of weeks ago I helping my crew rush through a setup and was putting away dolly track wheels (we were switching to pnematic tires) and as I bent over to set them down I slammed head-first into the handle of a hand-cart. Lucky for me the rubber handle was missing. I had a good bruise/cut on my forehead for the next three days.

 

I suppose accidents on set happen, but only when your rushing.

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Looks great david. I especially dig the night work. Always a challenge to work at night and it looks like your doing a great job.

 

 

 

I can attest to that. A couple of weeks ago I helping my crew rush through a setup and was putting away dolly track wheels (we were switching to pnematic tires) and as I bent over to set them down I slammed head-first into the handle of a hand-cart. Lucky for me the rubber handle was missing. I had a good bruise/cut on my forehead for the next three days.

 

I suppose accidents on set happen, but only when your rushing.

 

I bent over for something and whacked my eye socket on an arri follow focus wheel. They sure are solid... :unsure:

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Karyn Kusama has been great to work with -- very smart, calm, creative. It has been a good collaboration. I've had to embrace her preference for wider-angle lenses and I think in this case, it works very well for creating strong, graphic compositions. But that style of shooting

 

I'm really glad to see Karyn working on a new movie. I felt that she was really unfairly treated over Aeon Flux which I thought was actually okay and I've met a few people who really like it. The film was quite lambasted in reviews in a way I thought was extreme. Aeon Flux was originally an anarchic cartoon on MTV which even fans admit made little narrative sense. Karyn and the gang managed to create something somewhat intresting out of it all. Compare this to another comic book movie "daredevil". Here was an opportunity to make a real movie that was actually about something, however the pointless drivel that ended up on screen had nothing to say and as I remember, even managed to make you dislike the hero character of the movie! I don't remember the film being attacked in quite the same way, or at least not being attacked as much as it should have been.

 

I was thus quite worried that people would hold it against her and she would find it difficult to make more films despite the fact that I felt that she had done a good job on Aeon Flux, so it's great to see her working on this movie, even if I'm a little worried that it is a comedy, (if a comedy goes bad it tends to go really bad). If nothing else, at least it's going to have great cinematography, and the horror aspect could come to the rescue if it does go bad.

 

It's good that it's all working out for you David (well obviously other than the eye thing). I had a feeling it would.

 

love

 

Freya

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"I've been under a lot of pressure to move fast."

 

Why? Did you make the schedule? Does the DP get to explain during dailies - or when the film is released - that we had to rush certain shots? (No.) You work pretty quick anyway, do you find that productions get spoiled and expect every set-up to happen lickety-split?

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"I've been under a lot of pressure to move fast."

 

Why? Did you make the schedule? Does the DP get to explain during dailies - or when the film is released - that we had to rush certain shots? (No.) You work pretty quick anyway, do you find that productions get spoiled and expect every set-up to happen lickety-split?

 

That is the biggest catch 22 for DP's and directors these days. Production desn't care how things look so much as long as they are there on film/video and there is something for the director to work with, or whether the director really got his take. All they care ultimately is that they are burning several hundred or thousand dollar bills by the minute and so if they need to move to something else, they need to move and that is the end of that.

 

So the DP can't quite fight Production without getting a reputation with UPM's. I have heard that more than enough on Hollywood features: The UPM is talking about finding a DP for the show to his producer buddies and one of the first questions he will have when a name is brought up is "yeah, but how does he get along with Production?" The worse a rep a DP gets, the harder it will be to get work unless the awards keep coming in and there is not denying his/ her genius (and even then), which is hardly the case for most DP's out there.

 

So if the DP is left with no time to light and it looks like shite later, he may or may not be able to blame prodution for rushing him through, or even say "I was rushed through". If he wants to work again with the producers he will be very careful about how he says something like that, or whether he even goes there. One thing about working on big features is that is one of the most political jobs you can ever get, AT EVERY LEVEL . . . Ultimately, everyone works FOR Production, the UPM authorizes any and every expense, including paychecks. So one must play ball or else.

 

In a case like that one makes the best of the good and the bad, and roll with the punches, taking a beating for the team if need be. In David's case, this time quite literally! :(

Edited by Saul Rodgar
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Week Seven is over – just two more weeks to go, nine more shooting days. And then the Monday after I get back, I have only one week of prep for the next Polish Brothers movie and begin shooting the Tuesday after that. Only two days really to learn the RED camera before production begins.

 

Monday and Tuesday were spent in the bedroom set that we shot on Thursday and Friday, shooting the most complicated sequence I have ever done. In this small bedroom, the lights go out, there is only moonlight through a small window in the background, and a fight happens on a bed, that for reasons I can’t explain, involve the characters levitating to the ceiling of the bed canopy and then falling back to the bed.

 

Monday had all the most complex elements to shoot. We had a hydraulic rig to lift the two characters four feet off of the bed and then flip them end to end. That had to come up through a hole in the floor on the opposite side of the bed. Then we had to saw a hole in the wall of the headboard end for another rig that rotated them lengthwise in mid-air like. Then the characters had to drop separately, one after the other, back onto the bed. And that portion had to be shot at 1000 fps on the Phantom.

 

We had the Phantom on a Technocrane over the top of the set looking down at the first character dropping away from the lens in a close-up to a near full-figure shot of them hitting the bed below. The actress held onto a pipe rig we built near the lens and then let go and fell directly away. So basically our 1st AC, Stephen Maier, had to follow focus as someone moved from a close-up to a medium, an event that took a little more than a second in real time but was stretched out to a minute or so of screen time. Kevin Zanit, our Phantom tech, would call out “action” as soon as he triggered the camera, the actress would let go of the pipe, and Stephen basically cranked the Preston knob as fast as he could from near to far focus. Then we’d play back the shot (the main reason I wanted to use the Phantom instead of a Photosonics) and analyze when the focus would be out of sync with the fall and try again, until we basically got lucky. Because in a one second interval, there was no way Stephen could adjust the speed of the rack, think “oh, two-thirds into the rack I need to slow down, etc.” It was basically hearing “action!” and then turning the focus knob as fast as possible! We had some takes where Stephen nailed it for 80% to 90% of the take, which was a miracle. We were intercutting the shot with the reverse angle looking up as the next actress fell towards lens (even harder to pull in some ways) so we had some leeway – we didn’t need it to be 100% perfect. (By the end of the night, Stephen's remote focus more or less had a nervous breakdown, the gears stripped or loosened from all the fast focus racks. At this point the camera was still under the floors of the set looking up through a hole sawed in the floor and mattress, with no way to manually turn the focus knob, so Stephen spent some time trying to fix the Preston and then had to borrow 2nd Unit's remote focus and attach it to the Phantom. Since the Phantom uses Arri accessories and we are using Panavision cameras, it took a little more time to reset it all.)

 

I should mention that I lit the bedroom to f/16-22 split more or less just to give Stephen an f/2.8 at 1000 fps to work with, otherwise I would have given him more stop. I had two 20K’s pointed at the actress for the high and low portion of the fall, blended with some Opal frames, and 5K’s through 250 diffusion for fill. And this was just to get a dark moonlit look. It was roasting in there. I wished I had a way of getting an eyelight in there next to the lens, but I couldn’t use any unit smaller than a 5K due to flickering at 1000 fps.

 

And the high angles required the big wooden beam roof of the set be removed and then the low angles required that it go back, plus we had to cut a hole in the bed mattress and floor so that the other actress could fall from the ceiling (released by a trip harness) and fall right at lens and hit the bed under the lens.

 

All of this, plus normal speed stuff, on one long shooting day. How can you rush stuff like that? I’m pulling ceilings, putting them back in, cutting holes in beds and floors and walls, then repairing them, shooting high angles from a Technocrane and Libra head on both a film camera and then putting the Phantom on it, and dealing with the focus problems of falling away and towards camera at 1000 fps. Plus dealing with hydraulic rigs being moved from one part of the set to another. And dealing with seeing floor to ceiling and side to side, in a small bedroom where supposedly the lights are all out – but having to see all the emotions going on in their faces because this is a dramatic moment, not just a fight scene. Plus dealing with a lot of white furniture…

 

When I first saw the storyboards back in prep, drawn before I was hired, and noticed the super slow-motion shots listed, my first thought was to use the Phantom, so we could play the shots back on set and look for performance issues plus focus. With fast action only taking a second to play in reality, all sorts of weird things happen at extreme slow-motion, especially with two actresses with long hair falling away or towards the camera. A few strands of hair can slowly twist and twirl in bizarre ways right across their eyes, for example. An odd expression can seem locked on their faces forever. On the other hand, the action is so fast that the emotion captured is “real” – there’s no time to go through emotional changes in one second as you fall onto a bed. What emotion you had on your face when you let go and fell more or less is what you see throughout the shot.

 

Anyway, we first looked into renting the only Phantom we could get locally, though it actually came from Toronto. But our first test, which I shot, did not go so well due to not having an experienced tech there to show me all the little things you have to do, like black balance regularly. But even so, we shot a second test with an experienced tech, and still had problems with the footage in terms of debayering artifacts and other pixel weirdness. That Phantom had been used a lot on commercial spots, but the artifacts, which were small enough to not be an issue for TV broadcast, were more problematic for D.I. work in a theatrical film. And our efx supervisor, Eric Norby, is quite picky about picture quality.

 

So I contacted Mitch Gross at Abel Cine Tech and we arranged to rent one of their Phantoms, with Kevin Zanit flying in from Los Angeles to be our tech. They had just installed a new OPLF just before it sent to us. Kevin and Karl (2nd Unit DP) did some test shots of a gold locket bouncing off of a floor, plus some charts, the Friday before we used the camera on Monday, and Eric spent the weekend trying different debayering software to see which worked best (apparently the Adobe RAW software works quite well.) We got the thumbs up on Monday and proceeded to shoot with it.

 

One thing I can say is Thank God that they developed the Cinemags for the Phantom. When I did my test, every time I wanted to save a shot, it took ten minutes or so to save it. Which is fine for a test or a commercial doing a few shots, but we did take after take of these falling shots, for focus reasons and whatnot, and we could put it all onto the Cinemag and save it at the end of the day. Luckily, Kevin was smart enough to save a few early takes as a test and discovered that the Cinemag had to be reformatted, because the saved files had a glitch in them, but after the reformatting, the Cinemags worked great.

 

I’m still rather concerned in general about the whole idea of digital cameras recording to hard drives, etc. for feature work because it was a little less seamless on set compared to shooting film. Looking at Kevin’s workstation and the whole issue of file labeling and saving, it seems a bit awkward compared to the traditional ways of shooting. I assume it’s just something you get used to.

 

Looking at the final conversions in my DVD dailies, I probably should have lit a bit flatter – I was looking at a LOG image on set I guess and seeing the extra shadow detail there on the monitor that sort of gets “crushed” out by the typical color-correction in Rec 709 space for dailies. Doesn’t look bad or anything, since I was planning on color-correcting the film footage for a similar look, just that I probably should have given myself some more flexibility in post later by lighting even flatter than normal for the Phantom.

 

So that was my Monday.

 

Tuesday was spent cleaning up a few shots in the sequence and then shooting the aftermath, sans action and effects, and where the room lights come back on. After three days of shooting in half-blue moonlight, it was strange to see the real colors of the set (pink and white) “pop” in normal lighting.

 

Wednesday through Friday were spent at a high school out near UBC. One shot that was on the storyboards was sort of a fast move across the lawn of a football field up to a player standing alone. I figured that a cable cam rig was out of our budget, plus dealing with digitally erasing a tower for the cables that would be right behind the actor. We explored solutions like running with a Steadicam across a field, putting the Steadicam on a golf cart, using a really long crane arm on a dolly, etc. But nothing seemed to quite get the effect the director wanted without compromise. Plus we couldn’t find an Akela-type crane out here, something well over 60’. Finally our Key Grip Dave Askey figured that a cable cam rig was going to end up being similar in cost to these other ideas, and we could tie the cable to a tall tree behind the actor and not deal with a tower in that direction of the shot. Production spent the money to have it all rigged and tested the day before, so we just walked onto the field in the morning and shot it quickly. I put a 14mm on the camera to increase the sense of speed and movement – it was cool, especially when we put some benches and other football equipment for the camera to fly over. The sun came out when we were shooting, now requiring some digital erasing of the shadow of the cable on the ground (but not the camera, luckily.) It’s just a black line.

 

The next shot in the scene required a super deep focus effect of someone’s face up close to the camera as someone in the far background walks towards him. A split-diopter wasn’t going to work because the background person gets closer and closer, requiring a focus pull. So I used a 24mm slant-focus lens stopped down to f/16 – between the deep stop and the slanted focus, everything fell into focus and stayed there throughout the walk. My main problem during that day was the sun going in and out of clouds, plus most of the sequence ended up being shot in very toppy light, so I had to fly some diffusion and flags to knock some of it down and light from the sides, which never looks completely convincing to me, but at least is not horribly unattractive for the faces.

 

The last scene took place at sunset. Luckily it was hazing up and the real sun was weak, so I could put up a large black flag to knock out the sun and light with orange-gelled 18K HMI’s coming from the direction where the real sun would be in two hours. As we covered the sequence, the real light and the fake sunset light sort of merged so the final shot – which was the wide shot, saving it for last – was going to be shot in the perfect real sunset light. Except that just at that moment, the real sun went behind the tall gymnasium building so my orange-gelled HMI’s, backed way off, kept the same effect going.

 

We ended the day with a night exterior scene which had to be broken up over two nights because our permit only allowed us to shoot until 10PM, which is now only about an hour of darkness. So we shot the wide shot one night and the close-ups the next night, which worked out well since the wide-shot was quite far away compared to the close-ups, so there was no duplication in lighting set-ups anyway and I had some time the next night to light the close-ups and not be rushed.

 

We started out the wide shot by looking at a lit wall with the silhouette of our main character staggering past it, then tracking over with her as she walks and then turns to walk away from the lens, showing the rest of the building in the far background. I lit the foreground wall with tungsten spots and some practicals built over it, and the far background building had some Cool White tubes in fixtures attached under the eaves of the building, so the final area she lands in has that cyan cast to it before she goes inside.

 

We had a big day interior scene inside the gym, mostly lit by the windows. I filled in when necessary by bouncing a 6K HMI off of a 12’x12’ UltraBounce. Otherwise it was mostly natural light. In fact, the sunlight coming in was a bit much at times, but luckily Dave Askey quickly got outside with two lifts and lowered a 20’x20’ Half Soft Front over the windows to soften the light for some angles. I was amazed that he did such a difficult rigging job so quickly. This has been his week to show off – from the cable cam rig, to rigging the gym, even outside when I did the wide shot at sunset… I wanted to get it quickly so rather than deal with renting a crane, etc. I set-up the wide shot from the top of the ladder. Then the director looked through the lens and asked if we could slowly dolly in during the shot – my look was something like “we’re on a 12-step ladder… you can’t dolly a ladder across a lawn…” but Dave quickly said “sure, I have a rig to dolly a ladder across a lawn…” and he and Dave Kershaw, our dolly grip, threw something together quickly. So I have to learn to stop underestimating what these guys can do.

 

Meanwhile, our Gaffer John Dekker has been organizing the pre-rig of the gym for a dance & concert scene on Friday (and next Monday). Luckily he spent some years working as a roadie for some concerts had set-up a concert stage with truss, parcans, Mac lights, follow spots, all tied to a dimmer system. I’ve only done some small band scenes in jazz and karaoke clubs before, nothing this big, so I was grateful for his experience. We ran three cameras on the band performing, one on a simple crane as our operator, John Clothier, and our dolly grip, Dave Kershaw (who is also a musician) improvised some great crane shots. This was using the GF8 crane with a single-man platform on it, not a remote head (to give us more range of motion on Monday, though, we’ve decided to get a Libra head so we can fly lower and farther over the heads of band members and audiences.)

 

The EPK people want to interview me on Monday so I have to come up with a good story as to how I got this black eye…

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A photo of the levitation rig, which rises up on a pipe with a greenscreen cloth covering it. The Kino on the floor was one way of lighting the actresses once they levitated from the bed to the ceiling and the camera looked up at them, all in one shot:

jb28.jpg

 

A wide shot of the bedroom lit for moonlight before the lights come on, with our stand-in Tiffany on the bed:

jb29.jpg

 

The same set-up once the room lights switch on (with set dec asst. Kevin straighten up the room in the b.g.). Mostly lit with a Chinese Lantern hanging next to the chandelier:

jb30.jpg

 

A wide shot of the gym, mostly lit by the sunlight coming through the windows, with a 6K HMI bounce off from one side for fill. The same windows became a major problem for diffusing the sunlight for the reverse angle, partly to hide the shadow of a camera on a crane arm moving across the windows down towards the gym floor:

jb31.jpg

 

The cablecam rig:

jb32.jpg

 

My camera assistant Sara Mather standing in front of the wall at night where we did the same thing with our actress walking past the wall in silhouette:

jb33.jpg

 

In the same shot as the wall, we tracked and revealed the whole school as the actress walks towards it:

jb34.jpg

 

John Clothier on the crane directing the grip crew in working out movements during the musical number. Dave Askey (in the jean jacket) stands with his back to camera watching from below:

jb35.jpg

 

Reverse angle on our stand-in Katia (with 1st AD Jason Bloomfield behind her) watching the band on stage:

jb36.jpg

 

The end result of Week Seven:

jb37.jpg

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Week Eight is over, four more days left.

 

Monday was spent shooting the second scene in the gym at night during a prom dance. Similar lighting but we changed the cues & gels during the other musical number for a warmer color scheme, more reds and yellows rather than blues and greens. John Dekker also added a few more MAC lights on the floor behind the drummer shining up, which looked cool.

 

Tuesday through Friday was spent at the Burnaby Youth Correctional facility, shooting a few prison yard scenes and then a climatic confrontation scene in an abandoned swimming pool at night. Originally we were going to shoot this scene outdoors in a pool at a park, but the cold temperatures at night, plus the fact that we have less than eleven hours of darkness each night, made it seem like an insane idea for such a complex sequence (with more levitation rigs, three actors in a pool all night long, etc.) So we changed locations to an interior pool. Arv Greywal, our production designer, did a fantastic job of making this all-white room into something visually striking, with blue walls with faded murals of sea life painted on, and old fluorescent fixtures on the walls. Plus broken windows with large vines growing in and talking over the pool, filled with mucky water and ivy and moss floating on it. The row of vertical windows provided a moonlight source, plus the old fluorescents and the metal halide pool lights built into the sides of the pool. We sort of cheated that these old lights would be switched on by the characters even though in an abandoned building like this, it would probably have no lights in it that worked. But I wanted more options for creating where the light was coming from.

 

There was only one major problem with this location, visually-striking as it turned out to be once the art department was finished painting and dressing it: the long sides were only four feet wide, and one of those sides was more or less covered with mountains of vines and ivy added. So the only place for equipment like the crane was on the ends of the pool, which were seven feet wide. But all the action happens at one of these ends, and the other end across was quite far away. So we constantly found ourselves crushed for working space. We had a technocrane so we could arm out over the water, but it was on the same platform as the actors when they were standing or were in the water near that end -- so we had to arm out and then point the camera back at the crane and try and frame out the crane base from the shots. The opposite end of the pool was too far away for the crane plus it was a major effort to get it into that end of the room. After the second day, we wrapped the crane and got into the water with the camera handheld to cover the action, giving us more freedom to pan around and see that end of the room, but losing some possibility of moving the camera over the waters. However, we had the crane for the first two days and began the scene with a cool shot when the characters enter the room from the opposite end – we telescoped the crane over the water, floating over the water towards the actors as they entered the room.

 

Stunt rigging and rehearsing action in the water took so much time that I found myself sitting around a lot more than usual after lighting the space. And the days were very long all week, a number of 14 to 16-hour days. My hat is off to the operator John Clothier and 1st AC Stephen Maier for spending so much time handholding the camera in the mucky water, not to mention the actors for putting up with such miserable conditions. I had John take meter readings for me and snap some photos from the water for my stills. It’s hard to light faces of actors out in the middle of a pool.

 

Besides the moonlight and a few hanging fluorescents, I played a lot with rippling patterns of water on the walls. We had two methods for this. One was this water pan gag that was built, a metal pan with a glass bottom and a mirrored lid underneath that would swing open at a 45 degree under the pan, then a lensless 5K fresnel above pointing down into the pan. Then a bag of water with an IV drip was attached to the stand to drip water into the pan to cause the ripples. The other method, which produced longer, sharper waves of rippling light, was done by skipping PAR’s off of the surface of the pool and then stirring the water slowly with a pole.

 

I can’t imagine how slowly a major water movie must take to shoot…

 

Here is a shot of the set, the angle we pushed in on using the Technocrane:

jb38.jpg

 

This is the water pan / IV drip rig:

jb39.jpg

 

Shooting from a ladder in the water:

jb40.jpg

 

Shooting handheld in the water:

jb41.jpg

 

Shooting with a Steadicam on some deck put into the water. Since John Clothier’s initials are “J.C.” we thought it would be funny to put the deck just below water level so it looked like J.C. was walking on water with his Steadicam rig. It would have made a great photo…

jb42.jpg

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I hope to print it way down in post so that a lot falls off into darkness, but I exposed it fairly conservatively, the faces were generally only one stop under, the far walls maybe 2.5 stops under, the moonlight was a little bright, but I felt that if I let the window light be the brightest thing in the room, it would make the interior sources seem dimmer in comparison. I found that when I scrimmed the windowlight way down, I lost the beams of light effect and the room became very low in contrast, so I decided to let the windows play as the dominant source in the room.

 

The Cool White tubes in the hanging fixtures lit the wall mural to about a T/2.0 at 400 ASA. I shot at T/2.8 generally, sometimes T/2.8-4 split when looking more at the "hot" moonlight to play the room a little more silhouette in comparison.

 

I could have lit the room with more contrast and darkness, but I wanted more shadow detail so I could print everything down later in post yet retain some depth and ambient detail in the darkness.

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Perhaps you mentioned in the post and I missed it, but were the window lights natural sunlight allowed to stream through, or did you tent those and punch HMIs through? Looks really good. Very atmospheric (It looks as though there was some smoke throughout this location?)

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Dave Askey built quite a huge tent outside the windows, and we had a row of 4K HMI PAR's, one for each window (they were tall and narrow). As I said, it was a bit bright for "moonlight" (maybe it was from security lights) but the bright slashes of light help, conversely, make the interior seem darker in comparison. When I scrimmed the light down, the room seemed to look flat and lit more from the inside rather than the outside.

 

Yes, we used some atmosphere.

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Hi David,

 

So you're almost through another feature film and I'm quite curious about the experience. I'll try and distill that curiosity down to two questions (or maybe 2.5 questions):

 

1. Given everything that you've gone through on 'Jennifer's Body' is there anything about your approach that you would have reconsidered? Or more precisely, what is the thing you could have done that would have made the most positive difference in the cinematography on the film?

 

2. What is the most valuable thing that you learned as a DP on 'Jennifer's Body'?

 

I realize that there may be some serious overlap in your answers to the two questions and if you have the time to answer even one it'd be appreciated.

 

All best,

 

Evan W.

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