AC Feb 2013

F EBRUARY 2013
$5.95 Canada $6.95

CONGRATULATIONS TO
DEAN SEMLER
Rodney Charters, Robby Mller, Curtis Clark
And To All This Years Nominees

f o f d n a
e n h c S

r o l y g o l o n h c e f r e f l l l
w s r e h p a r g o f a m e n l c e h f
f l u l e f a r g s l s c l f p C r e d l e
A H T

f c l p n o l f o m l a f l g l d r l e h f r
d l e n h c S n e s o h c e v a h o h
l v e l e TTe l o y m e d a c A e h f o
. C Y K N A

s a r e m a c e r u f
D N R l m u n l f a l F ' s c l f p C r e
s e c n e l c S d n a s f r A n o l s l
.

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0 8 5 1 7 3 - 7 - 8 1 8

r o l y g o l o n h c e f r e f l l l
f p o r e d l e n h c s 4 5 2 1 - 8 2 2 - 0 0

f c l p n o l f o m l a f l g l d r l e h f r
m o c . s c l f

. s a r e m a c e r u f

The International Journal of Motion Imaging
32 The Worlds Most Wanted Man
Greig Fraser, ACS tracks Osama bin Laden for
Zero Dark Thirty
42 War on Crime
Dion Beebe, ASC, ACS revisits 1949 L.A. for
Gangster Squad
54 Crumbling Pillars
Mike Eley, BSC evokes World War I England for
Parades End
62 Vision and Verve
Dean Semler, ASC, ACS receives the ASC Lifetime
Achievement Award
72 Postcards from Poland
Highlights from 2012 Plus Camerimage
DEPARTMENTS
FEATURES
VISIT WWW.THEASC.COM
On Our Cover: A CIA analyst ( Jessica Chastain) awaits the launch of a top-secret mission
in Zero Dark Thirty, shot by Greig Fraser, ACS. (Photo by Jonathan Olley, courtesy of
Columbia Pictures/Sony Pictures Entertainment.)
8 Editors Note
10 Presidents Desk
12 Short Takes: Marilyn Mansons Slo-Mo-Tion
18 Production Slate: House of Cards Caesar Must Die
76 New Products & Services
82 International Marketplace
83 Classified Ads
84 Ad Index
86 Clubhouse News
88 ASC Close-Up: Stephen Goldblatt
F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 3 V O L . 9 4 N O . 2
42
54
62
F e b r u a r y 2 0 1 3 V o l . 9 4 , N o . 2
T h e I n t e r n a t i o n a l J o u r n a l o f M o t i o n I m a g i n g
Visit us online at
www.theasc.com

PUBLISHER Martha Winterhalter
EDITORIAL
EXECUTIVE EDITOR Stephen Pizzello
SENIOR EDITOR Rachael K. Bosley
ASSOCIATE EDITOR Jon D. Witmer
TECHNICAL EDITOR Christopher Probst
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
Benjamin B, Douglas Bankston, Robert S. Birchard,
John Calhoun, Michael Goldman, Simon Gray,
David Heuring, Jay Holben, Mark Hope-Jones, Noah Kadner,
Jean Oppenheimer, Jon Silberg, Iain Stasukevich,
Patricia Thomson
ART DEPARTMENT
CREATIVE DIRECTOR Marion Gore
ADVERTISING
ADVERTISING SALES DIRECTOR Angie Gollmann
323-936-3769 FAX 323-936-9188
e-mail: gollmann@pacbell.net
ADVERTISING SALES DIRECTOR Sanja Pearce
323-952-2114 FAX 323-876-4973
e-mail: sanja@ascmag.com
ADVERTISING SALES DIRECTOR Scott Burnell
323-936-0672 FAX 323-936-9188
e-mail: sburnell@earthlink.net
CLASSIFIEDS/ADVERTISING COORDINATOR Diella Nepomuceno
323-952-2124 FAX 323-876-4973
e-mail: diella@ascmag.com
CIRCULATION, BOOKS & PRODUCTS

CIRCULATION DIRECTOR Saul Molina
CIRCULATION MANAGER Alex Lopez
SHIPPING MANAGER Miguel Madrigal
ASC GENERAL MANAGER Brett Grauman

ASC EVENTS COORDINATOR Patricia Armacost
ASC PRESIDENTS ASSISTANT Delphine Figueras
ASC ACCOUNTING MANAGER Mila Basely
ASC ACCOUNTS RECEIVABLE Corey Clark
American Cinematographer (ISSN 0002-7928), established 1920 and in its 93rd 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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Sheridan Reprints at (800) 635-7181 ext. 8065 or by e-mail hrobinson@tsp.sheridan.com.
Copyright 2013 ASC Holding Corp. (All rights reserved.) Periodicals postage paid at Los Angeles, CA
and at additional mailing offices. Printed in the USA.
POSTMASTER: Send address change to American Cinematographer, P.O. Box 2230, Hollywood, CA 90078.
4
2012 Sony Electronics Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited.
Features and specications are subject to change without notice. Sony, CineAlta, and the make.believe logo are trademarks of Sony.
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OFFICERS - 2012/2013
Stephen Lighthill
President
Daryn Okada
Vice President
Richard Crudo
Vice President
Kees Van Oostrum
Vice President
Victor J. Kemper
Treasurer
Frederic Goodich
Secretary
Steven Fierberg
Sergeant At Arms
MEMBERS OF THE
BOARD
John Bailey
Stephen H. Burum
Curtis Clark
Richard Crudo
Dean Cundey
Fred Elmes
Michael Goi
Victor J. Kemper
Francis Kenny
Matthew Leonetti
Stephen Lighthill
Michael O'Shea
Robert Primes
Owen Roizman
Kees Van Oostrum
ALTERNATES
Ron Garcia
Julio Macat
Kenneth Zunder
Steven Fierberg
Karl Walter Lindenlaub
MUSEUM CURATOR
Steve Gainer
American Society of Cine ma tog ra phers
The ASC is not a labor union or a guild, but
an educational, cultural and pro fes sion al
or ga ni za tion. Membership is by invitation
to those who are actively en gaged as
di rec tors of photography and have
dem on strated out stand ing ability. ASC
membership has be come one of the highest
honors that can be bestowed upon a
pro fes sional cin e ma tog ra pher a mark
of prestige and excellence.
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This issue has a decidedly Australian flavor, spotlighting a
trio of cinematographers who hail from Down Under. First
and foremost is Dean Semler, ASC, ACS, who will receive
the Societys Lifetime Achievement Award on Feb. 10.
During a long and prosperous career, Semler has amassed
dozens of credits on a wide variety of popular movies. In
1991, he earned Academy and ASC awards for Dances
with Wolves, and he earned a second ASC nomination in
2007 for Apocalypto. A member of the Australian Cine-
matographers Societys Hall of Fame who has received the
Queens Medal (one of Australias highest honors), Semler
has also won an Australian Film Institute Award (for the
thriller Razorback) and earned five additional AFI nominations. Youd think every film
was his first film, camera operator Mark Goellnicht tells Jean Oppenheimer in her
entertaining profile of Semler (Vision and Verve, page 62). He still has that excite-
ment in him.
Zero Dark Thirty, a gritty procedural that dramatizes the CIAs hunt for Osama bin
Laden, was shot by another Australian with keen eyes and a hot hand: Greig Fraser,
ACS, who joined the project after lending his talents to the recent features Let Me In,
Snow White and the Huntsman and Killing Them Softly. In Michael Goldmans piece
about the production (The Worlds Most Wanted Man, page 32), director Kathryn
Bigelow says she wanted to work with a cinematographer who possessed enormous
confidence to go along with his skill. Mission accomplished, as the saying goes.
The period drama Gangster Squad benefits from cinematography by Dion Beebe,
ASC, ACS, who has also enjoyed big success in Hollywood. Beebes experience on
major productions served him well alongside director Ruben Fleischer, who was helm-
ing his third feature. Im a young filmmaker, Fleischer tells associate editor Jon
Witmer (War on Crime, page 42). Dion is such a maestro and so experienced, and
he taught me so much. I value his opinion and respect everything he did.
This months issue also covers the TV miniseries Parades End, which Mike Eley,
BSC shot at locations in England and Belgium. London correspondent Mark Hope-Jones
visited the production while the filmmakers were staging battlefield scenes in the latter
country (Crumbling Pillars, page 54). Eley notes that he and director Susanna White
were inspired by an exhibition of Vorticist paintings at the Tate Modern museum in
London: Parades End is thought of as one of the first modernist novels, and Vorticism
hit the world around 1914, slap-bang in the middle of our story. In particular, we were
struck by the vortographs, which are photographs taken through a fractured mirror,
and we decided to borrow that technique.
Rounding out this issue is a pictorial recap of the 2012 Plus Camerimage festival,
which lived up to its billing as a premiere showcase for the art of cinematography
(Postcards from Poland, page 72).
Stephen Pizzello
Executive Editor
Editors Note
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As you read this, know that you are probably one of many who will
become People Without A History. Why? Because almost everything you
write and every photo you save things that have traditionally informed
historians about previous generations exist only in the digital domain,
on hard drives or SSD devices. The half-life of a mechanical hard drive is
about five years. That means the magnetic particles on the surface of the
drive lose 50 percent of their strength in five years, and that makes your
magnetically stored data vulnerable to corruption.
There is also the question of digital medias obsolescence. What tech-
nology will your grandchildren use to access your letters and photos? In
50 years, a LaCie drive will probably be an unfamiliar object.
If you back up your hard drive with another, and maybe another, and
leave them all at your home, you have broken Rule 2 of archiving:
Geographically separate your master copies. Whats Rule 1? Your master
should last 100 years and be readable with the naked eye. Okay, they are
not rules, but they are among archivists 10 commandments, I guarantee
you. So, unless we all start saving our pictures and correspondence on
good old paper, we will pass nothing of our own history to our grand-
children, or possibly even to our children.
And what of our collective cultural heritage? As motion-picture labs
close, moving images are more and more likely to be preserved on
formats that cannot rival the universality of motion-picture film. There is
no universally agreed-upon or proven archival storage method for digital
media.
Hollywood studios have announced they will soon stop making 35mm release prints for new movies, and that they
intend to stop striking new prints of existing films. This is terrible news for revival houses, small film festivals, movie theaters
that cannot afford to buy or maintain digital projectors, and museums or archives that occasionally want to screen a movie
with a film projector, as it was originally intended to be shown. It is amazing to us that Hollywood has no plan to facilitate
the screening of films in their original formats.
It is also amazing that in the industrys transition to digital exhibition, little thought has been given to the sizable
educational market. At some colleges and universities, cinematography students mainly screen film prints, seldom Blu-rays
or DVDs. Cinematography students need to build a comprehensive mental library that includes the wondrous artifacts of
grain, gate weave, motion blur, and the other imaging glories of film.
Well, this is awards season, and the magazine you are reading recently won four Folio Awards for Editorial Excel-
lence, or Eddies. In the category of Business to Business: Media/Entertainment/Publishing, the magazines June 12 and
Dec. 11 editions won the Gold and Silver Eddies, respectively, for Best Full Issue. And AC associate editor Jon Witmer won
the Gold Eddie for Best Single Article for his piece on The Avengers (June 12), while contributing writer Benjamin Bergery
won the Silver Eddie for Best Single Article for his piece on The Tree of Life (Aug. 11). Congratulations to our publisher,
Martha Winterhalter, and executive editor, Stephen Pizzello, as well as their colleagues! Onward with paper!
Stephen Lighthill
ASC President
Presidents Desk
10 February 2013 American Cinematographer
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2012 Canon U.S.A., Inc. All rights reserved. Canon and EOS are registered trademarks of Canon Inc. in the United States and may also be registered trademarks or trademarks in other countries.
Pushing Boundaries with Marilyn Manson
By Jennifer Wolfe
The music video for Marilyn Mansons Slo-Mo-Tion,
directed by Manson and shot by Alan Lasky, utilizes motion effects
captured in-camera to create a dynamic look that pushes the bound-
aries of digital cinematography. Shot primarily on P+S Techniks PS-
Cam X35, the video is a literal realization of the songs refrain,
wherein Manson chants, This is my beautiful show, and everything
is shot in slo-mo-tion. Manson worked closely with Lasky, who also
served as the visual-effects supervisor, to create the complex motion
effects, many of which depended on sophisticated motion-vector
analysis and complex mathematical algorithms.
With an undergraduate degree in film from New York Univer-
sity and a masters in media technology from the Massachusetts Insti-
tute of Technology, Lasky has consulted for a number of camera
companies over the years, including P+S Technik and Dalsa. A veteran
of music-video cinematography, he first collaborated with Manson
on No Reflection, the first video from Born Villain. The great thing
about working with Manson is that he is not afraid to utilize all of a
cameras potential functionality, Lasky says. Whats more, hell
always say, I want to push it way, way, way, way further. Once we
decoupled ourselves from the standard model of rock-video produc-
tion, we were able to push the technology and get into an experi-
mental side of filmmaking that is fun and exciting and kind of
dangerous, too.
Whats really cool about the X35 is that not only does it allow
you to capture up to 500 fps with a full-frame sensor and global shut-
ter, but it also enables you to shoot time-lapse, alter frame rates, do
speed ramping, and change and manipulate the shutter in really
interesting ways, Lasky continues. He notes that Manson dislikes
using greenscreen and common compositing techniques. He loves
image processing and would much rather get it in-camera. Hes
about manipulating images, not assembling them.
Using a style known as glitch art, a technique related to data
moshing, Lasky and editor/visual-effects artist Richard Piedra applied
optical-flow analysis techniques to material captured with the PS-
Cam X35 in order to create artifacts within the footage. Basically,
you take an image-processing algorithm and destabilize it in order
for it to do something that it was never designed to do, says Lasky.
Once you knock the foundation out from under the fundamental
algorithm, the resulting imagery is the embodiment of what we call
the glitch. The visual artifacts that result from the destabilization of
the algorithm can be very interesting, and theyre something you
couldnt get any other way. We wanted to fundamentally destabilize
the optical-flow analysis and the timing interpolation in such a way
that we could get these artifacts that might look really cool.
Lasky shot the material at 6 fps with a 360-degree shutter,
capturing the footage to solid-state drives as uncompressed Quick-
Time 10-bit files using Blackmagic Designs Hyperdeck recorder. The
images began to blur, becoming jerky and strange looking, he
says. The camera was essentially allowing us to manipulate time.
We shot the material and then brought that footage in for some
fairly sophisticated motion-vector analysis. Then we took that
output, the underlying motion-vector map in other words, a
mathematically derived vector map of the motion of the pixels in the
Short Takes
Shot by Alan
Lasky, the music
video for
Marilyn
Mansons
Slo-Mo-Tion
features a
variety of
motion effects
that were
created
in-camera using
a P+S Technik
PS-Cam X35.
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Your film isnt finished until its up on screen.
We know how important that final look is, so we
designed and built digital Technology into
our lenses.
Frame-by-frame Data Capture
Technology is a metadata system that enables film
and digital cameras to automatically record key lens
data for every frame shot. Metadata recording takes
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so normal operations on set are not affected. No
specialists required. And, manual entries in camera
log books will be unnecessary, so youll save time in
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Effects artists will save hours of time when they have
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This technology represents
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David Stump
ASC, DP/VFX Supervisor
frame and started experimenting.
When Manson saw the results, he
suggested shooting some of the images
using ultraviolet light. We had no idea if
that would work at all, Lasky recalls. We
didnt know the UV cutoff point of the
sensor or the phosphor levels, so we had to
go in and run some tests. The first thing we
did was shut off all the cameras internal
processing, but I wish we could have
removed the internal filters on the sensor as
well. If wed had enough time, I probably
would have removed the UV-cutoff filter.
We ended up having to boost the gain on
the back end, but it came out looking
great, like this strange, smeared, moving
painting.
Lasky had shot with ultraviolet light
before, but Slo-Mo-Tion marked his most
extensive use of it. The potential is there
for some very interesting imagery, both
ultraviolet and infrared, he observes. Ive
been researching how to shoot without the
infrared-cutoff filters and without the UV-
cutoff filters, and learning what it takes to
excite the photosites on sensors using those
kinds of light rather than the visible light
spectrum.
Lasky used Kino Flo Diva-Lites to light
the UV sequences. If we were to do it
again, I would probably look for a little bit
more brightness value so we could get a
little more depth-of-field. The Kinos gave us
the right amount of exposure, and we were
also able to get very good range using the
cameras extra-sized sensor. It took a bit of
tweaking in color correction because, of
course, the standard sensors are not
designed to work with UV light. Its an
entirely different spectrum.
Preparing the highly processed
images for editing was the next crucial step.
Its important to note that we did a huge
amount of image processing before moving
into the edit bay, says Lasky. Its also
important to remember that we did an
enormous amount of image processing
with the motion-analysis vector tool as
well.
A variety of de-noising tools were
applied to the 1920x1080-resolution
footage, which was then transcoded into
ProRes 4:4:4 and 4:2:2 formats using
Adobe After Effects and treated with color
look-up tables designed by Lasky, Manson
Top and middle: A portion of the music video was shot using ultraviolet light,
resulting in images that looked like this strange, smeared, moving painting, says Lasky.
Bottom: Manson and Lasky frame up the X35.
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and Piedra. Depending upon the nature of
the shot, we would utilize completely differ-
ent de-noising applications, Lasky notes,
adding that five separate tools were
employed. Some of them are better at
fixed-pattern noise, and some are better at
high-gain noise, so it really depended on the
shot content.
Lasky and Piedra set up a robust post
pipeline at Sturmgruppe, creating fully
rendered and approved pre-comp elements
sorted into a detailed bin structure for edit-
ing within Adobe After Effects CS6. Mater-
ial from the PS-Cam X35 was intercut with
footage captured with Canon EOS 5D Mark
III and Mark II DSLRs; the Canon material
was acquired primarily in the native Canon
codec, although the new, higher quality IPB
codec available on the Mark III was also
used for certain elements shot vrit style on
the streets of Los Angeles.
For this type of experimental
project, with multiple levels of image
processing, its important to have a solid
background in visual effects, notes Lasky.
We needed to develop a complex post
pipeline with sophisticated process trees
that would allow us to get back to the orig-
inal footage and change something in it if
we needed to.
As is the case for so many cine-
matographers, image capture, visual effects
and post all blend into one for Lasky. Its a
difficult thing for some people to metabo-
lize, but the way Ive worked throughout my
career has led me in this direction for a long
time now, he says. I dont consider myself
a cinematographer, a visual-effects artist, an
editor or a post person, but I certainly
consider myself whatever the word is for all
of those things.
Lasky worked with editor/visual-effects artist Richard Piedra to fundamentally
destabilize the optical-flow analysis and the timing interpolation in such a way that we
could get these artifacts, Lasky explains.
Power Plays
By John Calhoun
The Netflix series House of Cards exists in the bubble of Wash-
ington, D.C., politics, but it isnt a seat of government that connects
with the populace at large its more like a viper pit with no views
in. Says director of photography Eigil Bryld, Most of the windows in
the show are either burned or black. The idea was that the outside
world doesnt really matter. What matters is whats in the room, not
whats beyond it.
Whats in the room connivers, manipulators and schemers
is not pretty. The master manipulator is Southern Congressman
Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey), the House of Representatives
Majority Whip, who vows to get revenge after he is passed over for
a cabinet post by the incoming president.
Spacey is an executive producer on the series, as is David
Fincher, who directed the first two episodes and largely created its
aesthetic. Bryld, a Danish cinematographer who is based in New
York, says Fincher and Spaceys involvement was among the factors
that attracted him to his first episodic TV drama. I dont watch a
lot of TV series, and Ive always had the rule that I would only do
projects that I would watch myself, explains the cinematographer,
whose credits include the features Not Fade Away and In Bruges (AC
April 08). But, he adds, Ive always sort of been a political animal,
and the combination of the source material (a novel by Michael
Dobbs), the script, and the participation of Fincher and Spacey led
him to sign on.
Shooting in a slightly cropped 2:1 aspect ratio with two Red
Epic cameras simultaneously was the cornerstone of the visual
approach. Fincher has worked with Red Digital Cinema since The
Social Network and has a strong relationship with the brand. He
loves the look and the cameras design, says Bryld. He works very
closely with the company to get what he needs. Hes very technically
clued up, much more than I am!
Images were shot at 6:1 compression and recorded to SSD
cards. One option on the Epic that proved especially useful on House
of Cards was the HDRx option, which we used to control the sky
and windows, and to reduce contrast if there was a harsh sun,
adds Bryld.
Fincher, Bryld and other key collaborators spent 10 weeks
prepping the series in Baltimore, where most of it was shot. Much
of this time was devoted to designing the camera package, which
Fincher continually pared down. David doesnt want a huge
camera truck, and he kept an eye on how much gear we were
using, says Bryld. We didnt carry a lot of big lights. We had a van
custom-built so we could roll out our dollies and cameras very
quickly. We didnt have a DIT [digital-imaging technician]. We basi-
cally shot everything around 4,000K and then adjusted our lighting
as opposed to tweaking the camera or building complicated looks.
The general idea was, keep it simple so we can stay open and add
layers upon layers of ideas, thereby creating something very complex
and dynamic.
Finchers ground rules included no Steadicam, no handheld
and no zoom lenses, the cinematographer continues. The first two
techniques were avoided for stylistic reasons. If people were walk-
ing down a corridor, we werent interested in using a Steadicam or
tracking in a close-up, says Bryld, who cites A-camera operator
Gary W. Jay as a major collaborator on the show. To a great extent,
Production Slate
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Rep. Frank
Underwood
(Kevin Spacey,
right) establishes
a secret
relationship with
an ambitious
reporter, Zoe
(Kate Mara), in
the Netflix series
House of Cards.
I
moves are on the dolly or the boom. We
wanted to use the space more so people
would grow larger in the frame or move away
and get smaller. We went for a more
composed look; even though we had very
shallow focus, we tried to create deep compo-
sitions all the time to add a sense of drama and
power, and the 2:1 aspect ratio really helped
with that.
The rule about no zoom lenses had to
do not only with Finchers preference, but also
with the need to work at very low light levels,
and with concerns of time and efficiency. Bryld
explains, When we walked into a location, it
had to either be pre-lit or have an ambient
light level we could work with. A lot of the
design came from picking the right locations
and designing the sets in a specific way so we
had an ambience. Obviously, the difficult thing
with that was giving it character and atmos-
phere as well. Darkness is a very important
element in the story; Frank is often disappear-
ing into darkness or emerging from darkness.
The entire show was shot on Arri/Zeiss
Master Primes, mostly the 27mm and 35mm.
We used longer lenses at times for close-ups,
but we never wanted the sense of space to
disappear, says Bryld.
Standing sets built in a Baltimore ware-
house included the Underwood residence, a
shadowy townhouse where Frank and his
equally ambitious wife, Claire (Robin Wright),
often conspire over a shared cigarette late at
night; the considerably more modest apart-
ment of Zoe (Kate Mara), a young reporter
who uses Frank as an anonymous source; and
various settings in the corridors of power,
including the Oval Office. Locations included
the offices of The Baltimore Sun, which
provided a set for Zoes newspaper, The Wash-
ington Herald; and Baltimores War Memorial
Building, where the new presidents inaugural
ball was shot.
In general, mixed light sources give way
to a more uniform color temperature and
brighter sources the closer we get to power,
says Bryld. We worked with the art depart-
ment to design practicals, and to make sure
the wall color was right for the ambient light-
ing so we would always get separation. We
often used laptop screens and practical fixtures
as sources. We were on our toes all the time,
trying to find the light.
In Franks office, the Oval Office and on
other sets, bleached muslin was installed in the
Top: Underwood confers with his wife, Claire (Robin Wright). Middle: Zoe collates information
for a scoop that will land her in the national spotlight. Bottom: Rep. Patrick Russo (Corey Stoll)
gets a call he has been dreading.
ceilings for soft ambience. Kino Flos wired to
dimmer boards were used in mixed color
temperatures. We tried to balance every-
thing as close to daylight as possible because
of Reds daylight-balanced sensor, notes
Bryld. We used the 1-stop polarizer, which
cools the image in a way that works well
with the Red. We would typically try to cool
off the practical bulbs with either CTB or
CTB. In the newspaper office, we changed
all the fluorescent tubes to drive the color
towards the cooler spectrum. Compact
fluorescents were used in many practicals,
and we werent too worried about the
green. The White House and other settings
closer to the source of power are less cont-
aminated with green; they have a warmer,
cleaner, more contrasty look.
In two sequences in the second
episode the inauguration and the inau-
gural ball power is very close indeed. The
inauguration was shot in a warehouse
doubling as an exterior. We wanted to use
real footage of crowds from Obamas 2009
inauguration, so we had to match that
light, says Bryld. We created the sun with
12-light Maxi-Brutes through 20-by-20
frames of Soft Frost, and we hung a 20-
by-20 of blue-tinted fabric in the ceiling and
bounced 10Ks into it to create ambient
skylight. In addition, we had to light a
number of greenscreens to allow for set
extensions and crowd replication in post.
For the inaugural ball, existing chan-
deliers in the War Memorial were used,
along with Kino Flos and China balls on
boomed-in Menace Arms. We were using a
lot of flags as well, basically taking away and
then adding a little bit of separation, Bryld
says. That scene is a really good example of
how we worked: we looked at what was
there and augmented it with either lighting
or the set design. We built a frosted-Plexi-
glas bar lit from inside by Kino tubes that
helped define that space, and we had prac-
tical lamps on the tables and greenscreens
around the stage that were replaced by
images of the American flag in post. This
sequence features a Technocrane shot of
Spacey crossing the floor, a move that was
typically methodical in its planning, with
measured-out, taped-down space, and as
soon as we were done with the shot, we
came off the Technocrane and moved on.
Whatever the setting in House of
Cards, darkness is never far away. We shot
at incredibly low light levels, says Bryld.
The Master Primes are very fast, and
Fincher is not afraid to shoot at T1.4, even
though thats challenging for the first assis-
tants. With the combination of Master
Primes and the Red, you can never say there
isnt enough light, because there pretty
much always is! But Fincher knows his craft
well, so he always fully understands what
hes asking the camera crew to do.
Because Fincher is so specific about
what he wants the image to contain, you
light specifically for that. Also, the A and B
cameras are usually kept very close, often
stacked one on top of the other. We typi-
cally had one camera doing a low-angle
wide over and the other doing a tight over,
says Bryld. Continuity is key. If you have
perfect continuity, I think it creates a
hypnotic universe, like youre almost experi-
encing something in real time. In Finchers
world, you have to respect space and time,
and two cameras help with that.
After the first two episodes, the
world of the show expanded to include
other directors, such as James Foley, Joel
Schumacher, Carl Franklin and Allen Coul-
ter. After shooting the first 11 episodes,
Bryld moved on, making way for Tim Ives to
shoot the last two. (Bryld returned toward
the end of the shoot to do some second-
unit work with Fincher.) I did 130 days
pretty much back-to-back, says Bryld. We
had 15 days per episode on the first two,
and then the rest of the episodes were 10
days each. I didnt have much time to
prepare with the incoming director other
than location scouting after a long days
work. This, he notes, was one reason the
10-week prep period was vital: We knew
we werent only prepping the first two
episodes.
However challenging it was for him
to shoot with one director on a Thursday
and another on a Friday, Bryld notes that
House of Cards presented some challenges
for the directors as well. We had to try to
accommodate the new directors ideas but
at the same time stick to the rules. A lot of
the directors were used to working with
Steadicam, and sometimes they would ask
for a shot that would be a natural
Steadicam shot, but wed go to great
lengths to track it or design it differently.
There also was very little time for
Bryld to be involved in post, which Fincher
supervised at A52 in Santa Monica, Calif.
During the shoot, David did a preliminary
grade using the Pix HD system, viewing
images in ProRes 4:4:4 on a Boland monitor
and sending his notes to [colorist] Paul
Yacono, says Bryld. I was sent the first
two episodes for comments, but David
followed through on every detail.
Netflix will make all 13 episodes of
House of Cards available for streaming on
Feb. 1. The company has committed to two
more seasons of the show, but Bryld says his
involvement will most likely be limited. In
order for me to take a project, it has to scare
me in some way, and having done 11
episodes of the show, Im not sure it scares
me enough anymore. But it is my baby, so
well see!
TECHNICAL SPECS
2.0:1
Digital Capture
Red Epic
Arri/Zeiss Master Prime
At the A and B
cameras are
(from left)
B-camera 1st AC
Kurt Parlow,
B-camera
operator
Peter Gulla,
cinematographer
Eigil Bryld, and
A-camera
operator Gary
Jay. The camera
at left is a prop.
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The Bard Behind Bars
By Patricia Thomson
Friends, Romans, countrymen
might be the most famous line in Shake-
speares Julius Caesar, but there is a line
that follows in Paolo and Vittorio Tavianis
Caesar Must Die (Cesare Deve Morire), an
adaptation featuring prison inmates, that
resonates more deeply: These are men of
honor, uomini donore, Marc Anthony
says with veiled sarcasm about Caesars
friend Brutus and his fellow assassins.
Little did Shakespeare know that
uomini donore would become slang for
Mafiosi in the 20th century. Certainly, he
couldnt anticipate how his lines would
sound when spoken by members of the
Mafia, Camorra and Ndrangheta, Italys
organized-crime networks. But, as the
Taviani brothers intuited, its a perfect fit.
The themes of Shakespeares tragedy
friendship and loyalty, ambition and
betrayal are at home in Rebibbia, a high-
security prison for murderers, drug traffick-
ers and other federal offenders.
Caesar Must Die is the 22nd film by
the Tavianis, who are best known for Padre
Padrone (1977) and Night of the Shooting
Stars (1982), and it is their first digital
production. Shooting with a Red One MX
was a financial decision, and almost a
curiosity, says Paolo Taviani. I have to say,
we werent disappointed.
It was also the first digital feature for
cinematographer Simone Zampagni, as well
as his first job as a director of photography.
To debut with two masters like them was
a great fortune, Zampagni says.
Taviani notes, Even though Simone
is just 40, he has long experience in film. He
comes from a film dynasty. In his fathers
garden are benches from a Fellini film.
Indeed, Zampagnis grandfather was a
gaffer, his father a grip-equipment designer,
and his uncle a focus puller.
Zampagni began as a loader on
Ricky Tognazzis La Scorta (1992) and
worked his way up to camera operator. But
he calls the Tavianis films his true training
ground. In 1998, he started as second
camera assistant on You Laugh. He then
moved on to Resurrection (2001), Luisa
Sanfelice (2004) and The Lark Farm (2007);
on those projects, he worked under Tavianis
longtime cinematographers, Giuseppe
Lanci and Franco Di Giacomo. Franco Di
Giacomo was in essence my teacher
because I worked with him for 13 years,
starting as loader and ending up as opera-
tor, says Zampagni. He left his stamp on
my photography and approach to lighting.
On The Lark Farm, says Taviani,
Simone was on B camera and often filmed
autonomously, and he filmed well. You can
recognize immediately someone who has
good, strong taste in setting the frame. He
is the padrone, the owner of the image.
When we started gathering crew for
Caesar, we said, Lets give it a try! Simone
is young and enthusiastic, and he knew we
didnt have much money. We shot the
picture in 22 days.
Working with a budget equivalent
to $1 million, we felt like kids again! says
Taviani. (Their preceding film, The Lark
Farm, cost $12 million.) Shooting with
such little money unleashed an energy, an
enthusiasm wed forgotten we had.
The crew was bare bones
Zampagni operated the B camera and
Steadicam, Andrea Fastella operated the A
camera, and there were two focus pullers, a
gaffer, a key grip and a data manager. All
other crew roles were filled by prisoners.
Like the convicts who perform in the
film, some of Zampagnis crew had prior
experience from the prisons theater lab.
Since 2002, theater director Fabio Cavalli
has worked inside Ribibbia, getting the
convicts to adapt the works of Shakespeare
and Dante and other classics into their own
dialects. Over time, a troupe of actors has
emerged. It was seeing them recite Dantes
Inferno that got the Taviani brothers think-
ing about a film. Ultimately, Caesar Must
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Julius Caesar
(Giovanni Arcuri)
makes his fateful
entrance in a
rehearsal scene
from Caesar
Must Die,
directed by
Paolo and
Vittorio Taviani
and shot by
Simone
Zampagni.
I
Die was made in collaboration with Cavalli,
who plays himself staging Julius Caesar
inside Ribibbia.
Zampagni recalls the first few days of
the shoot: The prison guards put us on
guard, saying, Dont trust the prisoners too
much. It was the prisoners who broke the
ice. What struck me most was that they
werent ashamed of what theyd done, and
these were grave crimes. They were quite
ready to recount them, almost boasting. Its
a powerful thing to put yourself before
these assassins. It has a certain effect! But
then, theyre closed inside these walls 24/7,
and thats painful to imagine. The film-
makers struggled with these conflicting
emotions, he adds, but after a week, the
rapport was almost like a friendship.
In keeping with previous Taviani
films, two cameras were run simultaneously
throughout the shoot, and only prime
lenses were used. 4K footage from the
cameras was recorded in Reds proprietary
Redcode raw format to onboard Compact
Flash cards. Zampagni used T2.1 Zeiss
Compact Primes, favoring the 40mm and
the 85mm. Shot composition was simple,
spare and often static. Thats our style,
says Taviani. We use a fixed camera in
almost all our films. We like to make the
scene live within the frame, without requir-
ing the camera to go looking for the
actors. This time, however, the camera
was a bit more dynamic, occasionally
moving via a dolly or Steadicam.
However, the most unusual aspect
of Caesars visual design is its alternation
between color and black-and-white
photography: the performance of Julius
Caesar that begins and ends the film is in
color, whereas the flashbacks to auditions
and rehearsals are black-and-white. The
Tavianis decided to do this to make the
passage of time clear, but it was also an
expressive choice. We chose black-and-
white as a way of doing violence to reality,
says Taviani, noting that the goal was a
harsh, dramatic monochrome look with
screaming whites and bottomless blacks.
The Red helped me with this
because it exacerbates the highlights,
Zampagni says. The data manager and I
created a LUT that extracted all the color
and put contrast to the maximum. Then, in
color correction, we upped the contrast
even more, bringing up the whites and
blacks to their maximum and trying to
remove the mid tones. This was done
together with a system of lighting that was
very cutting, relying on strong sources with-
out diffusion.
Zampagni also finessed the satura-
tion of the color scenes, choosing a slightly
desaturated look for the initial sequence in
the theater and bolder hues, especially a
strong red, for the final one. The color red
makes me think of ancient Rome, he
explains. I accentuated it because it also
represents a moment of liberation and
happiness for the prisoners when they
receive applause. Taviani adds, For one
minute, they are free, and the color exalts
this.
Very little of Caesar Must Die
happens onstage, however. Most of it
occurs in Ribibbias cells, corridors and
courtyards. It was important to present
Shakespeare in these places where the pris-
oners live, says Taviani. When Brutus is
Top: The prisoners performance of the play is rendered in color. Bottom: The inmates
rehearse another scene in the prison courtyard, where the metal grid overhead helped
facilitate lighting control.
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optimo
talking about whether to kill Caesar, for
instance, shooting inside a real prison cell
becomes, for the actor, more true. Its not a
stage, its his home, and we feel the force of
what hes saying.
Tech scouts and pre-rigging were out
of the question in the prison, so every morn-
ing, the crew would arrive an hour before
the directors to set up. Shooting in a prison
is like shooting in a hospital: its hallways
and rooms, says Taviani. Fortunately, the
production was granted access to the prison
chapel, a large, adaptable space on the
ground floor that featured three windows.
The filmmakers set four scenes there.
The first scene is when Cavalli
announces auditions. Because there was
nothing dramatic to convey in that scene, I
lit it simply, using a 4K ArriSun through one
of the windows and augmenting that with a
bit of diffused light inside, a 1.2K ArriSun
bounced into a small reflector, says
Zampagni. This, he adds, was the only
instance of diffused light in an interior.
For the audition scene that followed,
Zampagni played up the prison setting. We
closed all the windows and made the room
completely dark. Then, I lit the prisoner who
spoke with a single Kino Flo overhead. On
the background wall, I projected prison bars,
using a lamp without its front lens and
some bars constructed by us.
A third look was created for the
script read-through, when actors seated on
benches stand one by one to recite lines. I
closed the windows and set two 650-watt
incandescents coming from the left, says
the cinematographer. In addition, the
Tavianis wanted a spotlight lighting each
actor as he spoke; as in a theater, its a circle
of light thats frontal and flat. In the script,
Cavalli wants to habituate his actors to situ-
ations theyll encounter onstage. Therefore,
you see a couple of film lights in the frame.
The fourth scene shows the prison-
ers deep into rehearsals. Brutus and Cassius
are at a window, watching Caesar reject the
crown while speculating about his lust for
power. Again, Zampagni darkened the
room, but this time he used the window as
the sole source of illumination, placing both
ArriSuns outside. He was pleased with the
Reds rendering of the extreme contrast. As
always, we were very attentive not to burn
the highlights, he says.
Exteriors come into play for the
assassination scene. The production made
dramatic use of a narrow exterior corridor
for Caesars arrival at the senate. Zampagni
climbed a spiral staircase to a guards over-
look to grab a high-angle wide shot, then
captured close-ups of Caesar walking
through a gauntlet of admirers with a low-
angle Steadicam.
The assassination played out in a
small courtyard topped by a metal grid.
Zampagni laid a white silk on top of the grid
to control the sunlight for most of the shots,
but for high-angle shots, we had to use
color-correction tools to compensate for
movement of the sun, he says. If you pay
attention, youll notice a wall in the back-
ground thats sometimes in the sun, some-
times in shade. We had to work to minimize
that.
Special care also had to be taken
with 35mm release prints, which were
necessary because many Italian theaters
lack digital projectors. The picture features
several dissolves from black-and-white to
color, so the filmmakers decided to print the
entire movie on Kodak Vision 2383 color
stock and use digital tools to try to approxi-
mate black-and-white for those scenes.
With time and the bravura of the lab staff
at Technicolor Rome, the problem was
resolved, says Zampagni.
This experience was very powerful
on a human level, he concludes. When
we left the prison for the last time, everyone
broke out in tears. The prisoners had just
had four weeks of contact with people
from the outside after many years [without
it], and for us, just knowing these people
was a powerful experience. It left a mark.
TECHNICAL SPECS
1.85:1
Digital Capture
Red One MX
Zeiss Compact Prime
Paolo Taviani (left), Zampagni (second from left) and other crew prepare to shoot.
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C
inematographer Greig Fraser, ACS emphasizes that
director Kathryn Bigelow really excels at the run-and-
gun method of filmmaking, and he experienced this
firsthand on Zero Dark Thirty, which documents the
decade-long manhunt for Osama bin Laden and the 2011
covert op in Pakistan that successfully ended it.
Bigelow says she knew early on that accurately re-creat-
ing the events, particularly the nighttime raid on bin Ladens
compound, would be no easy feat, and she wanted a cine-
matographer who possessed enormous confidence to go
along with his skill. She found that in Fraser, whose recent
credits include Killing Them Softly (AC Oct. 12), Snow White
and the Huntsman (AC June 12) and Let Me In (AC Oct. 10).
Greig was a real lifeline on a difficult production, says
Bigelow, adding that their collaboration had a spirited,
wonderful, giving and generous quality to it.
Bigelows last film, The Hurt Locker, was shot documen-
tary style, mostly on Super 16mm, by Barry Ackroyd, BSC
(AC July 09). When she and Fraser began discussing Zero
Dark Thirty, the director said she once again wanted a hand-
held, guerrilla-filmmaking feel to the production, and she was
open to whatever format would work best. I think the only
format we didnt talk about was Super 8, recalls Fraser. We
even discussed prosumer cameras. I had tested various digital
formats for Snow White and had a good idea about the pros
and cons of each for a show like this one. Production was not
going to be a linear affair; we would be shooting in India and
Jordan largely without local support staff or a studio system
The Worlds
Most
WantedMan
Zero Dark Thirty, directed by
Kathryn Bigelow and shot by
Greig Fraser, ACS, dramatizes the
hunt for Osama bin Laden with a
run-and-gun style.
By Michael Goldman
|
www.theasc.com February 2013 33
was neither feasible nor conducive to
the cracking pace the production
required. He therefore asked Codex,
Digilab Services of London, and video-
assist company Video Hawks of Los
Angeles to help devise a methodology
that would allow Bigelow to view what
was being shot in the least invasive way
possible.
Video Hawks had just come off
World War Z (shot by Robert
Richardson, ASC), another Alexa show
that also needed to work light and tight
and fast, says Video Hawks co-owner
Glenn Derry, and the company sent one
of the custom backpacks developed for
World War Z to Frasers camera crew in
the U.K. so they could try it out. The
pack was attached to a diving vest and
held a Codex recorder, camera batteries,
video transmitters and other accessories,
with only one lightweight cable running
to the camera head. We decided that
backpack was too heavy for our film, as
it was going to be mainly handheld, so
we had to come up with a lighter
version, recalls 1st AC Jake Marcuson.
After trying quite a few different packs,
we decided on lightweight running
packs. Each held a small plywood frame
on which we mounted the Codex, two
Gold Mount batteries and the trans-
mitter. The transmitter was either a
short-range wireless unit or a longer-
range Cobham Technical Services unit
that could transmit the camera image to
handheld Sound Devices Pix 240
monitors.
The running packs made it possi-
ble for the production to record
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In these frames from Zero Dark Thirty, Navy SEALs fly into action and land
at a walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, that is believed to house
Osama bin Laden. Low-light and no-light/night-vision looks differentiate
objective and subjective perspectives during the raid. Far right: Director of
photography Greig Fraser, ACS.
harsh light of the Middle East for many
scenes that are set in Afghanistan and
Pakistan, so we had to be sure our
format would work suitably well with
highlights, he adds. The Alexa just
made the most sense for this show
because it works so well in both
extremes.
In choosing a format, Fraser had
another important requirement: an
idiot-proof workflow that would not
impede the filmmakers during the
shoot. He planned to run four handheld
cameras for many scenes, and he
believed a sophisticated video village
Greig was a real
lifeline on a difficult
production.
nearby in fact, we would be as far
from technical support as we could get!
So I wanted a tried and tested system
that would be simple to use on location
in a run-and-gun situation. Film is
tried and tested, of course, but we were
going to be in heat and dust and far
from labs, often shooting in locations
we hadnt been able to scout, and often
in very low light.
These considerations led the
filmmakers to opt for digital capture
with Arri Alexa Plus and M cameras,
which they rented from Panavision
U.K. In testing, we found the low-light
capabilities of the Alexa to be quite
amazing, Fraser says. The camera has
a reach into shadows that film does not
have, and a key portion of this movie
takes place in the dead of night, with no
motivation for light whatsoever. The
raid on the bin Laden compound actu-
ally took place on a moonless night.
We also had to deal with the
ArriRaw while providing a wireless
image for Bigelow and Fraser to view on
handheld monitors. On World War Z,
we learned we could remove our camera
operators from the video assist and do
without an engineering village, and Zero
Dark Thirty just took the idea to the
next level, says Derry. They had four
and sometimes five or six cameras going
at a time, and Kathryn was able to have
a wireless image in front of her at all
times without worrying about the tradi-
tional video village. She didnt need a
video-assist operator; she could use the
monitor in her hand to view [footage
from] any of the cameras while she was
running around with Greig.
Marcuson says the running
packs, which were worn by the grips
and the first assistants, and sometimes
by the camera operators, facilitated an
impressive degree of mobility. It was a
pretty easy arrangement, he says.
Keeping the cameras as light as possi-
ble was the main thing because the
operators had them on their shoulders
all day long, often for very long takes.
The Worlds Most Wanted Man

Clockwise from
top: CIA analyst
Maya (Jessica
Chastain, left)
works with a
colleague
(Jennifer Ehle) to
pursue a lead;
lightweight
backpacks
outfitted by
Frasers camera
team held a data
recorder, two
batteries and a
wireless
transmitter; Maya
observes a
detainee.
Considering that the story covers
over a decade and unfolds in several
different countries, Bigelow was keen
to keep the aesthetic realistic and
rigorous in terms of the journalistic
imperative, she says. Im drawn to
material that tends to be journalistic,
anyway, but in this instance, we also
had the weight of reality imposed upon
us. So, Greig and I and [production
designer] Jeremy Hindle worked
closely to find or create environments
that were correct and respectful to story,
reality and authenticity. To service the
story and still maintain a kind of
aesthetic coherence was a pretty tall
order.
To help accomplish that,
Bigelow and Fraser decided early on to
shoot with spherical lenses, mainly
Cooke S4 primes. Because the material
is so firmly rooted in reality, it would-
nt help, says Fraser, if they went too
wide or epic with the frame. He notes,
Anamorphic might have shown too
much at times. This movie isnt just the
raid; theres a narrative that leads up to
the raid, and our lensing decisions had
to consider both aspects of the story.
Panavision U.K. supplied the Cookes
and an Optica Elite 150-520mm zoom
lens, and Fraser rounded out the pack-
age with his own Optica Elite primes
and Angenieux 25-250mm HP zoom.
Overall, says Fraser, his first digi-
tal feature was less complicated than I
expected it to be. We had the wireless
system going all the time, Kathryn had
the video feed all the time, and there
was no recabling necessary. It was a
simple system: when I had a picture up
on the camera, so did the director.
On the set, images were moni-
tored in Rec 709 color space, and the
filmmakers decided against choosing or
creating look-up tables for the shoot.
We had other fish to fry! says Fraser.
We had a lot of setups to get each day,
quite a few cameras going, and lots of
locations to tackle. Getting an image to
the monitor was the priority rather
than worrying about whether it was
perfect color. Rec 709 gave us a nice
image to broadcast, which was all we
Top: An informant leads to the apprehension of a key player. Middle: Director Kathryn Bigelow
(right) discusses a scene with Ehle and another actor. Bottom: Key grip Kurt Kornemann (second
from right) spots Fraser as the cinematographer captures a shot with 1st AC Jake Marcuson.
Fraser is wearing the running pack in this instance.
needed at that stage. Using the camera
settings, we made a couple of small
tweaks, like dialing out some of the
green color temperature, but [Rec 709]
formed the basis of the exposure and the
look that was applied to the dailies.
For the dailies, Digilab Services
downloaded, processed and backed up
protected storage) and direct-attached
SAS storage. Data packs were cleared
and returned to set twice a day, and
Fraser and colorist Rob May used
Colorfront On-Set Dailies to view and
grade the original 2880x1620 ArriRaw
images each night. (May then trans-
formed them to 1920x1080 Avid
DNxHD MXF files for editorial.)
Fraser was particularly pleased by the
workflow because it was a very hands-
off digital department, which was
important for how we were working.
He notes that the movie, from a
technical standpoint, is essentially two
parts: the raid on the bin Laden
compound, and all things not the raid.
The latter include scenes set in CIA
offices, at military bases, in interroga-
tion facilities and in various public
spaces around the world. For much of
this work, the goal with lighting was
simplicity. We didnt always know
what lights we could acquire when we
arrived at a location, so we wanted to
keep it basic, Fraser explains. We trav-
eled with our base set, mainly a
Creamsource LED package [from
Australias Outsight Lighting] that I
the raw data each day in a mobile Codex
Data Lab set up at a hotel near each
location. During the course of principal
photography, which lasted 63 days,
three data-lab technicians collated
almost 24 million raw images into two
separate storage systems, a Codex
Storage-10 Diskpack (10TB Raid-3

Top: The
filmmakers
prepare to shoot
one of Mayas
meetings with a
CIA station chief
(Daniel Lapaine).
Bottom: Two
40'x40' Kino Flo
Image 80 light
boxes were
suspended over
the compound
set to provide
night ambience
for the raid.
really like. They are LEDs with a lot of
punch in my opinion, a 2-by-1
Creamsource is as strong as a 1.2K
HMI and they can run off battery
power.
We carried six of those units,
and I could just about guarantee that in
almost any location, they would give us
the light we needed even if no other
lights were available. Depending on
where we were, we could occasionally
get lights from local rental companies
to augment what we had, but in
general, we used the LEDs quite a bit
for those portions of the movie.
For the raid on the compound,
says Bigelow, the goal was to create the
illusion of zero-light conditions for the
objective camera, which shows the
action to the audience, and contrast
that with the green-hued night vision
of the Navy SEALs goggles. Thus,
Fraser had to first design general night
lighting for the exterior and interior of
the compound, a set built to scale on
location in Amman, Jordan, and then
determine how to light and shoot the
raid, which is shown mainly from the
SEALs point of view.
The team shot most elements of
the raid twice on location. First, Greig
created very low-light illumination to
give the general idea of a moonless
night, and that was the objective

Top to bottom: The SEALs go into action at the compound; dolly grip Ian J. Hanna (right) helps 2nd-unit cinematographer/operator Simon Tindall (left) and
operator Duraid Munajim capture the action; a closer angle on the SEALs; Tindall goes handheld, assisted by 1st AC John Watters (right) and Hanna.
camerawork, says Bigelow. Then,
when we switch to the night-vision
view, we go to an almost-no-light
configuration. Thats why we had to
shoot it twice.
The low-light work was keyed by
two 40'x40' light boxes suspended over
the compound courtyard by cranes.
Each box held 24 [Kino Flo] Image
80s, which had to be shipped to us by
Warner Bros. Lighting in the U.K.,
says gaffer Perry Evans. We rigged
them on a scaffold hung from the
cranes with Half Grid Cloth under-
neath them. We flew them about 70
feet above the set, with only four bulbs
on most heads. We wanted to get
enough of a glow that you wouldnt
think of it as full moonlight, but you
would still be able to see. That allowed
Greig to play with the temperature and
crush it down a bit more, and he could
tweak it even more later [in the DI].
The goal was some kind of
toplight that would imitate a night
ambience, as if there were stars provid-
ing a very dull glow, says Fraser, who
rated the Alexas at 160 ASA and 800
ASA for this work. Cinematographers
can create nighttime a number of ways,
and we considered all of them, he
continues. We tested a lot of things,
and we looked at many references for
low moonlight as well as references for
day-for-night. None of it gave us the
look we had in mind, so we instead
settled on something that was more
abstract. Our night ended up being on
the dim side, and very impressionistic.
He maintained a stop of T2 on these
exteriors.
The interior of the compound
also presented challenges because the
occupants kill their lights when they
realize they are under assault. Yet some
kind of minimal light was needed to
illuminate the action for the audience.
The compound was re-created to scale,
foot by foot, without any higher ceilings
or wider walls [to accommodate film-
ing], Fraser says. Its hard to put crew
and lighting into those places, but Perry
and his crew built thin LED sources
that we could easily attach to ceilings
just out of frame. Most of the time, that
was all we used.
We built 8-by-4-foot screens of
LEDs, frames that were really just
chicken wire with LEDs stapled to it,
explains Evans. There were eight LED
Cinematographers
can create nighttime
a number of ways,
and we considered
all of them.
strips, and 3 inches under them we
added some Lee 216 diffusion so the
light would seem directionless. It just
sort of glowed. It was enough to give us
a small hue in the room, it worked well
with the Alexa, and we could dim it
down enough that it didnt look too
bright with the night-vision lenses.
Fraser and his team went to great
lengths to devise a night-vision lensing
system that would replicate the look
and feel of military-issue night-vision
goggles. We tested a few different
setups before we managed to source
some night-vision devices and convert
them to accept a PL mount, says
Fraser. We werent allowed to use
exactly what Navy SEALs use, of
course, because thats classified, but this
was something similar. The image looks
dirty, like theres a bit of muck in the
lens, and that makes the sequence feel
quite real.
The night vision was achieved
with a combination of two image

40
The SEALs return to base with their target in hand.
enhancers from Panavision and two
scopes adapted from rifle night scopes
Fraser sourced in Jordan; these were
mounted between the camera and the
lens. Infrared lights taken from some of
the productions prop security cameras
were mounted on the cameras to
provide what Fraser calls invisible light
that the Alexa sensor could read in the
dark with the addition of the adapted
night-vision technology. The infrared
lights on those prop cameras were real,
and we used them as little sources, he
says. On film, you could not get an
exposure rating on that because light
meters can only read visible light, but in
this format, they worked great. Kathryn
and I did not want faux night vision, and
this gave us a good image.
Given the nature and style of the
shoot, the DI process, handled by
colorist Stephen Nakamura at
Company 3, was particularly helpful to
Fraser. In fact, he calls it a lighting part-
ner. He notes, We wanted the night-
raid footage to be dark but balanced, to
feel natural, unlit and moody. Stephen
contributed a lot in helping us achieve
the right balance for that footage, espe-
cially for the wide shots, where we had
limited control. Although we had two
big 40-bys over the house, they had to
cover a very large surface area. In those
wide shots, putting big cutters in to take
light off entire walls would have been
impossible, and getting a scenic artist to
paint the wall a few tones darker wasnt
feasible on our schedule. By windowing
in the DI, I was able to complete the
lighting job Id started months earlier in
Jordan. Often, this was the final few
percent needed to cap off the job.
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TECHNICAL SPECS
1.85:1
Digital Capture
Arri Alexa Plus, M
Cooke S4, Optica Elite,
Angenieux HP
41
I
ts 1949 in the City of Angels. With a mountain of corpses
and a river of bribes in his wake, mob boss Mickey Cohen
(Sean Penn) rules with a closed fist and a loaded Tommy
gun. But Los Angeles Police Chief Bill Parker (Nick Nolte)
cant abide the rule of crime, so he taps Sgt. John OMara
( Josh Brolin) to handpick a team of cops who will leave their
badges behind and wage an unsanctioned war on Cohens
empire. OMaras Gangster Squad includes Coleman Harris
(Anthony Mackie), an ace with a blade; electronics wizard
Conwell Keeler (Giovanni Ribisi); the mustachioed cowboy
Max Kennard (Robert Patrick) and his sidekick, Navidad
Ramirez (Michael Pea); and Jerry Wooters (Ryan Gosling),
who complicates matters by falling for Cohens moll, Grace
Faraday (Emma Stone).
Based on the book by Paul Lieberman, Gangster Squad
marks the third feature outing for director Ruben Fleischer
(Zombieland, 30 Minutes or Less), and his first with cine-
matographer Dion Beebe, ASC, ACS. Beebe recalls that their
collaboration began fairly traditionally. In our first meeting, I
think Ruben wanted some assurance that he was going to have
the support visually and technically to do what he had to do.
The genre was a bit of a shift for him, and he was going to be
dealing with a big cast. He brought a lot of references to the
discussion, a lot of clips that had in some way inspired him.
What excited me was that Ruben really wanted to push things
and take chances with the material thats something a cine-
matographer loves to hear. Because of the 1940s era, one of the
things we discussed early on was film noir. Although we
wanted a stylized feel, we were both nervous about classic noir
being too forceful a stylistic choice; we thought it might
War on
Crime
Dion Beebe, ASC, ACS and
director Ruben Fleischer bring
Gangster Squads tough justice
to the screen.
By Jon D. Witmer
|
distance us from the reality these char-
acters were in.
I only had a six-week prep
period, which is pretty tight for an
action movie that takes place in 55 loca-
tions [with a 70-day shooting sched-
ule], the cinematographer continues.
He and Fleischer had very specific,
pointed meetings with production
designer Maher Ahmad and costume
designer Mary Zophres. There was
definitely a shared aesthetic, and we all
quickly agreed on the approach toward
color, wardrobe and practical-lighting
elements, says Beebe.
The filmmakers decided to shoot
Gangster Squad with an Arri Alexa
camera package rented from Panavision
Woodland Hills. I grew up shooting
digital, says Fleischer, so Ive always
enjoyed the what-you-see-is-what-you-
get experience. We also had a lot of
night exteriors on this movie, and we
wanted to be able to capitalize on [the
Alexas] low-light capabilities.
Fleischer and Beebe both
believed shooting 2.40:1 would be a
sort of homage to the big-screen nature
of the subject, says Beebe. I was also
very interested in combining the Alexa
with anamorphic lenses. I was a little
nervous because the 4:3 sensor was not
yet available on the Alexa; we dealt with
the 16:9 sensor and ended up cropping
[the sides of ] the sensor as opposed to
utilizing the entire frame.
Because we were cropping the
sensor, [Panavision optical engineer]
Dan Sasaki helped us by optimizing all
of our anamorphic primes for the
middle of the lens, notes A-camera 1st
AC E.J. Misisco. The primes comprised
Panavision G-, C- and E-series lenses,
and Beebe also used a 40-80mm AWZ
anamorphic wide zoom. Beebe adds,
When we went wider than a 35mm
anamorphic on the 16:9 sensor, we saw a
loss of image resolution at the edges of
the frame. So whenever we needed a
wider lens, we switched to a spherical
Primo.
Beebe set the Alexas to 160 ASA
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Opposite: In Gangster
Squad, Sgt. John OMara
(Josh Brolin, right) leads
an unorthodox police unit
that includes (from left)
Navidad Ramirez (Michael
Pea), Jerry Wooters
(Ryan Gosling), Max
Kennard (Robert Patrick)
and Coleman Harris
(Anthony Mackie). This
page, top: With Grace
Faraday (Emma Stone) on
his arm, mob boss Mickey
Cohen (Sean Penn) pays a
visit to his rival, Dragna
(Jon Polito). Bottom:
Cinematographer Dion
Beebe, ASC, ACS.
for day exteriors and 800 ASA for all
other situations. We shot day-exterior
tests at 800, 400, 200 and 160 ASA, and
there is a difference, he notes. You
dont quite get the same dynamic range
that you do when youre rating it at 800,
but for our day work, I quite liked how
it responded at 160. The lower ASA
also allowed Beebe to keep lens filtra-
tion to a minimum. We didnt do any
sort of softening or cosmetic [filtra-
tion], he says. We just used NDs and
polarizers to control light levels and
reflections.
Much to the horror of the first
assistants, Ive always liked being at the
wider end of the lens, Beebe continues.
On Gangster Squad, the shooting stop
tended to be between T2.8 and T4. In
shooting anamorphic, I wanted to try to
take the edge and the sharpness off the
digital image. Softer backgrounds and
that familiar depth of focus was some-
thing we all wanted. It sort of put the
anamorphics through their paces, but I
wasnt afraid of that. With the HD
monitor, you can really scrutinize [the
shot] and know whether youve got it.
And E.J. and [B-camera 1st AC] Paul
Santoni did an amazing job.
Reference monitors were also
crucial in setting the exposure through-
out the production. Beebe tends to keep
his meter holstered on a digital shoot. I
check the waveform and the HD
War onCrime
Top and middle: A
Phantom Flex high-
speed camera was
used to capture an
early scene of Cohen
battering a punching
bag. Bottom: Director
Ruben Fleischer works
through a scene with
Nick Nolte, who plays
Police Chief Bill
Parker, in Los
Angeles City Hall; the
office was primarily
lit by 18K HMIs
through the
windows,
supplemented by
covered wagons
gelled with
1
2 Blue.
Bellflower, Calif. Because of scheduling
constraints, Beebe recounts, We had to
fit this inside an existing location, so we
found an area in an old department
store that we were using [for other
scenes]. The art department built the
window and layered on paper and paint
to create a patina on the window and
the existing walls. We had an 18K
streaming in through the window, and
we had a 4K bouncing off unbleached
muslin on the floor.
Much of Gangster Squad takes
place in night exteriors. When working
away from city lights, Beebe typically
created a moonlight source with HMI
fixtures. I take some of the blue out of
them, usually with or CTO, and
add a little Plus Green. We used 18Ks
display at the color station, he says. It
can be frustrating because it often takes
me off the set, but Ive also tried to train
myself to make decisions off the
camera-mounted monitor so that Im
not completely tied to the DIT tent.
[The Alexa presents] a different latitude
than film, but the more you use it, the
more you understand it, and the more
you can respond intuitively to what
youre shooting, just as cinematogra-
phers have always done while shooting
on film.
Beebe adds that he and DIT
Gregson Gabrio worked with
Technicolors DP Lights to set our
look-up tables in prep, and we kept the
DP Lights system with us through
production. When shooting digital, and
particularly when shooting raw, the time
spent defining your look in prep is criti-
cal. The LUTs you create determine the
color palette and affect the dynamic
range youre going to be working in, and
that, in turn, affects your lighting ratios
and whole approach to the project.
The Alexas ArriRaw footage was
captured to Codex Onboard S
recorders. It was standard throughout
the shoot to run two cameras simulta-
neously, with Peter Rosenfeld serving as
the A-camera/Steadicam operator and
John Skotchdopole operating the B
camera. Coming from comedy, Im a
huge fan of using two cameras, says
Fleischer. Most of the time, both
would shoot in the same direction, like a
wide and a tight or a three-quarter and
a straight-on, but occasionally, wed do
opposing angles. I dont know if its
necessarily any cinematographers pref-
erence, but Dion accommodated that
having worked with Michael Mann,
I think hes used to it!
The filmmakers occasionally ran
the Alexas above 24 fps, but for certain
sequences that required especially high
frame rates, a Vision Research Phantom
Flex was brought in for the day, accom-
panied by Phantom technician Jamie
Alac. Gangster Squad opens with some
Phantom footage that shows Cohen
battering a punching bag in super-slow
motion as daylight filters in through a
nearby window. The scene was shot at
1,000 fps in a set built on location in
Top: The squad
takes aim in an
impromptu firing
range beneath the
California sun.
Bottom: Conwell
Keeler (Giovanni
Ribisi, far right)
and the squad
discuss what
theyve learned
from a wiretap;
this garage interior
was lit with 1,200-
watt Pars through
the windows, with
Kinos, Dedos and
covered wagons
supplementing the
practicals inside.
in Condors, and we also had a couple of
nights with Bebee Night Lights.
One of the challenges we had in
the more urban settings was that all of
L.A.s street lighting is now mercury
vapor or sodium vapor, which were not
used in the 1940s, Beebe continues. I
wanted to avoid the modern mixed-
lighting scenario, so we had to disable
the existing streetlights that were in our
shots and then attach our own heads to
those lamps. Inevitably, we arrived at
some locations and the streetlights were
still on; in those cases, it was a matter of
black-wrapping certain heads and trying
to avoid others This sounds simple
enough, but when you have 10 street-
lights down half a mile of street, its a big
task. My key grip, Don Reynolds, and
his team always got it done. The
productions streetlights were goose-
neck fixtures with incandescent heads
that were fitted with 1K Pars or 2K
Nooks; all of these were run off a
dimmer board.
Bryan Booth was the dimmer-
board operator, and all fixtures, interior
and exterior, were run through his
system, which included a High End
Systems Hog 3PC connected via Wi-
Fi to a tablet. With the tablet, Buckley
says, Bryan could stand right by me
and Dion, and we could control every
light. It was awesome!
Once OMara assembles his
Gangster Squad, the team gathers at
War onCrime
This lighting plot illustrates the filmmakers approach to the interior of Slapsy Maxies nightclub.
what Beebe describes as an impromptu
firing range. They were literally standing
in an open field in the blazing sun!
My general approach to day
exteriors is to keep the sun on the actors
backs, he continues. When you do
that, you can utilize a lot of grip lighting,
like big UltraBounces. But the challenge
is planning out the day, because youve
got to try to follow the sun without
interfering with the way the scene is
playing out. Thankfully, everyone
understood what we were doing, and we
were able to shift as the sun moved and
cheat backgrounds and actors positions.
If you look closely, youll notice that the
sun, despite any logic, is behind every-
body an old trick!
For its first mission, the squad
tries to take down one of Cohens illegal
casinos in Burbank. Things go awry
when OMaras force bursts in and finds
a group of Burbank police who frequent
the establishment and arent keen to see
it closed. To light the interior of the
casino, Buckley details, we used 200-
watt globes in the practicals on the
tables, and we augmented those with
Dedos [rigged overhead]. There were
also covered wagons fitted with 100-
or 200-watt tungsten bulbs on batten
strips all over the place.
Trying to evade the Burbank
police, the squad members run back
outside toward their car. This is all
meant to be out in an undeveloped part
of Burbank, so it was very dark, and we
primarily utilized a moonlight [source],
says Beebe. Buckley elaborates, We
used two Bebee lights. One was placed
almost a quarter-mile away and backlit
the officers as they reached their car, and
the other was a sidelight when we were
looking toward the casino. We also used
some 18Ks through double-diffused
Full and Light Grid 12-by-12s with egg
crate.
Despite its ignominious start, the
Gangster Squad soon finds success in its
operations, which include placing a
wiretap in Cohens home. Having a
limited range, the tap has to be moni-
tored from a nearby garage that doubles
as a sort of headquarters for the team.
That was a real garage in Sylmar, says
Fleischer. It was cramped, crummy,
smoky and less than ideal for lighting
and shooting, but it had a real quality we
couldnt get on a stage.
To light the garage interior,
Buckley explains, We used 1,200-watt
Pars through the windows and covered
wagons. We also used a couple of 2-foot
Kinos we couldnt really fit anything
bigger and we bounced some Dedos
into pieces of white paper so they looked
like they were practicals bouncing off a
table.
Coming off projects like Land of
the Lost and Green Lantern (ACJuly 11),
Beebe says, it was refreshing to do so
much of the movie on location. It was
really interesting going around and
identifying the parts of Los Angeles that
still have those period elements we could
utilize. When we couldnt simply avoid
parts of the surrounding views, we used
visual effects [supervised by Ariel
Velasco-Shaw] to clean things up.
Fleisher adds, We were lucky to
benefit from the California tax incen-
tive, which allowed us to keep the whole
production in Los Angeles. One of the
things Im proudest of is that we only
built a few sets in the whole movie.
Almost everything was practical or built
on location.
The biggest location build was in
Bellflower: Slapsy Maxies, the night-
club that serves as the center of Cohens
criminal operations. That was built in
an existing location, a big shopping
complex from the 1930s or 40s, says
Beebe. Almost the whole street is still
period and intact, so we were able to use
that great exterior, and then Maher
created the interior of the nightclub.
For the scene that introduces the
club, the filmmakers sought to under-
score the locations importance with a
long, fluid take. From a high angle
looking down at the street, the camera
cranes down and finds Wooters, and
proceeds to follow him through the
crowd outside the club and into the
lobby. Then, in the main room of the
club, Wooters steps out of frame while
the camera continues forward toward
the stage, wending through the revelers
before finding Wooters once again.
When Wooters takes a seat at a table
with his friend, Jack (Sullivan
Stapleton), the camera finally cuts.
Getting the introductory shot
required Rosenfeld to ride the crane
with his Steadicam rig. When the crane
reached the ground, he was unhooked
and stepped off to follow Gosling. Its a
fantastic shot, Buckley enthuses, but
the amount of work that went into it
was enormous. It took about a week and
a half to get all the rigging done. Eddie
Cox, the rigging gaffer, did a fantastic
job, as did Bryan Booth.
Having decided on this approach
to introducing the club in preproduc-
tion, we devised a scheme where we
could integrate practical lighting, know-
ing that wed be walking into the club
with the camera looking 360 degrees
from the get-go, says Beebe. Maher
built large, deco-type chandeliers that
were hung around the room, and we
used a lot of neon inside and on the
faade of the building. There were 30 or
so tables spread out around the room,
each with a Perspex top and a linen
tablecloth, and we underlit each of the
tables [with 40-watt globes in cleat
sockets] so they would glow.
Because it wasnt on a stage, Don
Reynolds and his crew had to devise
systems to rig our light sources to pillars
and existing structures in the room, the
cinematographer continues. That loca-
tion presented a big challenge to every-
one. Fortunately, we had a great team
and it was scheduled toward the end of
production, so we had some time to
figure things out.
As the introduction of Slapsy
Maxies illustrates, the filmmakers
sought to give a fluidity to the action
and to the drama, says Beebe. We
wanted to keep up the energy of the
camera and utilize camera movement to
War onCrime
Top: The crew shoots a scene in which Wooters offers to help Faraday get out of town. Bottom: After
Faraday agrees to testify, Wooters and OMara procure an arrest warrant for Cohen.

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tell the story. We used Technocrane,
Steadicam, handheld and a lot of tradi-
tional dolly moves. We had one of the
best dolly grips, if not the best Brad
Rea and great operators. We often
put down dance floor so we were able to
do complex, multi-axis dolly moves
amongst the actors without track.
In planning the action pieces,
Fleischer and Beebe worked with story-
board artist Gary Thomas, but one
sequence a nighttime car chase across
a massive, dusty field also required
some previsualization. The sequence
finds the squad in hot pursuit of a cara-
van of cars that is transporting Cohens
drugs. Naturally, gunfire and explosions
ensue. The location work with all of the
stunt driving was tackled by the second
unit, headed by director Terry Leonard
and cinematographer Paul Hughen,
while the main unit shot close-ups of
the principal cast against greenscreen
onstage at Sony Studios in Culver City.
Paul and I went out to the loca-
tion together and talked through a light-
ing plan, says Beebe. He did a great
job capturing the main elements of the
action. We then went onto the stage to
fill in some of the dialogue and connect-
ing pieces. We utilized camera moves to
keep it alive, and we also had guys with
2-by-4s shaking the cars. Low tech!
Because second unit had shot the
action footage first, matching the close-
ups onstage came down to trying to
figure out which side they had keyed
from, and then trying to augment that
with passing lights, says Buckley. We
used Dedos and Kino Flos on wands
and moved them around as if they were
headlights bouncing around. It worked
well simple is easy.
When the squad finally moves to
take down Cohen himself, they confront
him and his thugs at the Park Plaza
Hotel. Despite the action and pyrotech-
nics of the climactic gunfight, the actual
hotel lobby was used. It was prohibited
to rig anything to the building, says
Beebe, so we used a large hybrid
balloon as fill, and for part of the scene
had a small Genie boom parked in the
lobby, covered with set dressing. The rest
War onCrime
Top: The squad arrives at the Park Plaza Hotel to arrest Cohen. Middle: Cohen shoots his way through
the lobby. Bottom: Cohen and OMara go their final round in the nearby MacArthur Park, where Beebe
had his crew position 18Ks in Condors for broad strokes and Par cans for specific accents.
of the lighting was achieved from the
floor, using MR16 strip lights, covered
wagons and, when we had to get up to
500 to 1,000 fps for some high-speed
Phantom work, 10Ks through 12-by-
12 frames. Additionally, Buckley notes,
there were some beams up in the ceil-
ing, and we put 2-foot Kino Flos
behind them to give a bit of fill. Of
course, that didnt work too well because
[the actors] were all wearing fedoras!
The wonderful things of the
1940s gangster movies are the trench
coats, Tommy guns and fedoras, but all
those hats at night were a bane to us
throughout the shoot, Beebe notes
wryly. We used a lot of different things
to try to send light into peoples faces,
like walking alongside them with low
bounces or small Kino Flos, a lot of skip
lighting, and covered wagons placed on
the floor.
After OMara and Wooters elim-
inate Cohens gunmen, Cohen steps
into the lobby with his Tommy gun
blazing. As Cohen and OMara shoot
their way across the room, a Christmas
tree and other holiday decorations get
caught in the crossfire and blow apart in
slow motion. Fleischer recalls, Id seen a
YouTube video of a Tommy gun firing
in slow motion and thought it was the
coolest thing ever. That was the seed for
this scene. Then, I thought that if there
was a ton of stuff for them to blow up,
too, that would look awesome!
Gangster Squad originally
included a gunfight in Graumans
historic Chinese Theatre, but after the
July 2012 shooting inside a movie
theater in Aurora, Colo., Warner Bros.
and the filmmakers decided to replace
the sequence, requiring the cast and
crew be brought back months after prin-
cipal photography had wrapped. By that
War onCrime
52
Neon
practicals and
Chinese
lanterns
provide a base
ambience
around
Gosling and
Brolin on
location in
Chinatown.
time, Beebe was busy shooting All You
Need is Kill. Our line producer, Mike
Tadross, was prepping a movie with
Caleb Deschanel [ASC], says
Fleischer, so we asked Caleb to watch
our movie, and then Caleb and Dion
talked a lot about the look. We were also
able to bring back John Buckley and
Don Reynolds, who made it really easy
to maintain continuity.
Seeking an iconic Los Angeles
backdrop for the new scene, the film-
makers chose Chinatown. In the scene,
the squad walks into an ambush orches-
trated by Cohen, whose goons explode a
truck and open fire in a large public
square. The location was rigged with
neon practicals and hundreds of multi-
colored Chinese lanterns fitted with 40-
watt globes. The lanterns provided the
base exposure, which Buckleys crew
augmented with 20Ks through
Chimeras.
Reflecting on the scene, Fleischer
offers, At the time, it seemed insur-
mountable, but Im really proud of the
way everyone rallied together to figure it
out. The new scene seamlessly inte-
grates with the rest of the material. I was
also incredibly excited and grateful to
get to work with Caleb; he was a great
collaborator and a real team player.
When Fleischer spoke with AC,
he had just completed the final digital
grade with colorist/ASC associate
member Michael Hatzer at Technicolor
in Hollywood. As Beebe was shooting
in London during the grade,
Technicolor coordinated a Tech-2-Tech
live grade between the companys
London and Hollywood facilities.
While I was in London, we managed
to run four separate grading sessions
with all of us in the room, Beebe
notes. The system worked incredibly
well.
Sounding relaxed as the release
date approached, Fleischer enthused,
Dion and I were always on the same
page, and we shared a common passion
and commitment to making the
absolute best movie we could. Im a
young filmmaker, and Dion is such
a maestro and so experienced, and
he taught me so much. I value his
opinion and respect everything he did. I
also love the crew he brought to the
table. Everyone put so much into each
shot, and they were always hustling to
make things better. The film is a testa-
ment to their hard work, talent and
perfectionism.
53
TECHNICAL SPECS
2.40:1
Digital Capture
Arri Alexa,
Vision Research Phantom Flex
Panavision G-series,
C-series, E-series, AWZ,
Primo (spherical)
Mike Eley, BSC captures
World War Is impact on
Englands aristocracy for the
television miniseries Parades End.
By Mark Hope-Jones
|
P
arades End, by Ford Madox Ford, is not one novel but
four, a tetralogy published sequentially in the 1920s and
only brought together in a single volume after the
authors death. It chronicles the disintegration of
English society around the time of the First World War and
centers on the character of Christopher Tietjens, an intel-
lectual aristocrat whose outdated Tory values leave him ill
equipped to deal with the modern world.
Tasked with adapting the story for a five-part
BBC/HBO miniseries, screenwriter Tom Stoppard focused
on the triangle of relationships between Tietjens (Benedict
Cumberbatch); his adulterous, cruel wife, Sylvia (Rebecca
Hall); and a young suffragette with whom he falls in love,
Valentine Wannop (Adelaide Clemens). To bring the
project to the screen, director Susanna White tapped cine-
matographer Mike Eley, BSC, her collaborator of some 20
years. Together they have worked on TV shows such as Jane
Eyre (2006) and Generation Kill (2008), as well as the
feature film Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang (2010).
White began researching Ford and the period in
which Parades End is set, a time that saw cataclysmic
change to almost every facet of society and culture. I
thought a way to be really true to the spirit of Ford as a
Crumbling
Pillars
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writer was to draw on the modernist
movement that was going on in the
visual arts, she notes. He was very
close to painters like Picasso, Juan Gris
and the Cubists, and the Vorticist
movement.
Early in prep, White and Eley
visited an exhibition of Vorticism at the
Tate Modern. It was quite inspiring,
says Eley. Parades End is thought of as
one of the first modernist novels, and
Vorticism hit the world around 1914,
slap-bang in the middle of our story.
In particular, we were struck by the
vortographs, which are photographs
taken through a fractured mirror, and
we decided to borrow that technique.
We wanted to create it in-camera, so
we experimented and decided to use
three lengths of mirror, each about 6-
by-4 inches, taped together to create a
triangular tube that we simply placed
in front of the lens and adjusted by eye
through the viewfinder.
The mirror rig split the image
into triangular shards and was put to
use for flashbacks, memories and time
transitions. White explains, I didnt
want to get too tricksy in my overall
visual approach, but this device added
another layer without any kind of
confusion. The use of three mirrors
also seemed so appropriate for this
story of a love triangle.
Parades End was shot with Arri
Alexa cameras and Cooke S4 lenses,
Opposite page (from
left): Christopher
Tietjens (Benedict
Cumberbatch),
Valentine Wannop
(Adelaide Clemens)
and Sylvia Tietjens
(Rebecca Hall) form
an unhappy
romantic triangle in
Parades End.
This page: At
MacMasters parties
for artists and
writers, Sylvia turns
on the charm (top)
and flirts with other
men (bottom right).
Bottom left:
Christopher is
smitten with
Valentine, a young
suffragette.
Crumbling Pillars
with the majority of the shoot taking
place at locations in England and
Belgium. Neither Eley nor his gaffer,
Paul Murphy, had worked with the
Alexa before, and with about 150
different sets to squeeze into a tight
schedule, they had very few pre-light
days. Our producer, Selwyn Roberts,
gave us four full days of camera tests at
the start of prep, Murphy recalls. On
a stage, we played with smoke effects,
practical bulbs and various types of
candles supplemented with minimal
lighting, exploring what the Alexa
could do. It was double the time we
might normally have [to test], which
was really beneficial; we knew the
extremities we could go to before we
went out to shoot properly.
Eley decided to hand over
camera-operating duties to Ian Adrian
so he could give his full attention to
the lighting and spend time at the
monitor with White. It was an inter-
esting experience to be at the monitor
through the shoot and see something
that pretty much represented the final
image, says Eley. Prior to shooting, I
worked with our colorist, Peter
Bernaers, to establish about six differ-
ent look-up tables, which I had on an
SD card. I ended up using just two,
and, like all LUTs, they were just a
working model, but it was good for us
to see them on the monitor and have
something to stay true to.
It is extraordinary to see that
level of precision in what youre
getting, and I completely loved it,
says White. The images had so much
more latitude than I expected. I had
been nervous about whether it would
hold the skies, which were very impor-
tant to me. Having the monitor
certainly eased communication,
although we couldnt spend a huge
amount of time looking at it we
had to shoot five hours in 15 weeks at
multiple locations!
For the early section of the story,
portraying the dying days of the
Edwardian era, the filmmakers agreed
on a saturated look inspired by Pre-
Raphaelite art. White recalls, I talked
with our production designer, Martin
Childs, about achieving a general feel-
ing of richness for this privileged
world, with crystal and gilt and a
jewel-like palette of blues and greens.
Later, we see things blown apart by
the war, and those jewel colors give
way to the mud of the trenches.
Color was important through-
out the narrative, which spans a
decade. It was central to a pivotal
scene, frequently revisited through
flashbacks, in which Christopher and
Valentine realize they are in love
during an all-night journey down
country lanes by horse and cart.
Starting in total darkness, the scene
progresses to pre-dawn and dawn,
with the characters increasingly
engulfed by a silvery mist that rises
until they can barely see each other.
That scene was a huge opportunity to
A carriage ride that begins in the evening and lasts through the next morning marks a pivotal moment
in Christopher and Valentines relationship. In the top photo, the actors prepare to shoot the beginning
of the scene in a studio in Brussels.
where the sensitivity of the Alexa
revealed itself, especially when
Tietjens lamp fails and we were down
to just one. I was looking down the
length of this huge studio, and I liter-
ally couldnt see the horse and cart.
Every instinct in my body told me it
was wrong, but it looked perfect on the
monitor.
For the sunrise, Eley used a 24K
Maxi-Brute gelled with Full CTO on
do something special, and it really
excited me when I read it, says
White. I wanted to use shades of
white and silver to contrast Valentines
freshness with Sylvia and the jewel-
like palette of Edwardian England. I
was inspired by a picture I found of
Emmeline Pankhurst in which shes
wearing a white lace dress and a hat
trimmed with white flowers, so I made
sure we got a dapple-gray horse and all
the costumes were whites and grays.
We even put white flowers into the
hedgerows.
Eley says this scene was, for
me, the most challenging of the whole
production. It had to be supremely
romantic and iconic, and it soon
became clear that doing it as a real
night exterior wasnt going to work.
Its seven or eight pages of dialogue, so
we needed to find a studio in which
we could ride a horse and cart far
enough to do at least a page of
dialogue before we had to stop and
reset. We eventually found a space a
few miles outside Brussels that was
part of a TV studio and more than 200
feet long. I walked the length of it,
holding the script and reading the
dialogue as slowly as I could, and
decided we could get a least a page in
before we had to turn around.
Though long enough, the studio
had no overhead grid for the required
lights. We hired a Belgian firm that
does a lot of rock concerts to do the
truss work for the 108 space lights we
used, says Murphy. They put them
on one main three-phase hoist so
everything was lifted together, and we
could pick the height that suited us.
We had to transition from moonlight
to dawn, so every third light had a bit
of CTB for moonlight, and in
between we had one clean space light
and one with a bit of CTO for dawn.
That gave us a lot of options on the
dimmer board, and we did many
different variations as the journey
went on, slowly bringing up the over-
all level.
During the initial part of the
journey, the couple is ostensibly lit by
nothing more than faint moonlight
and two carriage lamps mounted to
the cart. We had the lamps in shot,
but we supplemented them with a 19-
inch Spring Ball on a boom pole, says
Eley. One of the electricians tried it in
various positions, tracking back with
the cart, but it always looked too
much. Eventually, he just let it drop to
the floor, and that looked perfect on
the monitor! That was a situation
A misty dawn turns to morning toward the end of the sequence, which Mike Eley, BSC calls the most
challenging of the whole production, noting that it called for several pages of dialogue and had to be
supremely romantic and iconic.
an Easylift stand that could be pushed
behind the horse and cart. He
explains, We gradually brought it up
on a dimmer for the light to pierce
through the fog as a glow that grows
on their faces. Valentine turns around
and says, Look, the sun, which was
helpful characters should do that
more often! Having used that warm
light in the studio, I was praying for
some sunlight when we shot the last
bit of that sequence on location some
time later.
In this final part of the journey,
the horse collides with a car and bolts
out of the mist, bringing the two char-
acters back into the real world with a
jolt. White notes, The magic is shat-
tered, and were back to our old
palette, with the addition of bright red
in the uniform of General Campion
[the owner of the car] and the blood of
the horses wound, representing the
blood that will come later in the
trenches.
AC visited the set in Belgium to
see some of the battlefield action being
filmed. A small system of trenches was
dug into low-lying farmland, and
Cumberbatch was rolling around in
the mud in order to appear sufficiently
disheveled for a scene in which
Tietjens witnesses his drunk, shell-
shocked commanding officer throw-
ing whiskey bottles and strolling
brazenly across No Mans Land. Three
cameras were set up to cover the
action, including one on a
Technocrane that could be armed
down into the relatively shallow
trenches. Using the crane was a very
quick way of working for that whole
[sequence], says White. It was a
blessing that we made that decision,
especially with all the mud. It also gave
the scene movement and a different
quality from the earlier scenes, where
we wanted to give the feeling that the
characters are prisoners of their class
and environment.
Despite the late hour, not a
single light was used on the set during
ACs visit. We knew we wanted extras
and other actors coming down the
Crumbling Pillars
Top (foreground,
from left):
A-camera operator
Ian Adrian,
A-camera 1st AC
Ian Coffey,
A-camera 2nd AC
Adam Dorney and
an unidentified
crewmember
prepare to shoot
on location in
North Yorkshire.
Middle and
bottom: The
trench warfare of
World War I adds
another dimension
to the pictures
palette.
trench, so I thought it would be freer
and quicker to keep it clear of lighting
equipment, says Eley. All we used
were some 12-by-12 UltraBounces
and large blacks to shape the light.
That scene was done half-an-hour
after sunset with no lights! When we
got to the DI, we could see that it was
on the edge of what we could do, but I
think we got away with it.
For night scenes in the trenches,
when lights had to be used, Eley used
Lee 728 Steel Green filters to give the
images a distinct hue. Murphy notes,
We had time to test various filters in
prep, and we decided Steel Green
coming through a tungsten source
looked fantastic. The Belgian lighting
company we were working with made
me a Wendy Light, which they dont
have in Belgium they tend to light
their nights with Maxi-Brutes. It was
such a large area that getting a Wendy
up on a crane or cherry picker was a
Crumbling Pillars
The crew prepares to capture one of Christophers visits home from the front.
60
cost-effective way of lighting it.
We basically lit the night
scenes with that Wendy Light and a
couple of 12K Maxi-Brutes for fill,
because there were some quite wide
shots, continues the gaffer. When we
got in a bit tighter, we had the Maxi-
Brutes on little Genie booms with
tank track that could traverse the
battlefield really well. If the Wendy
was dropping off, wed use one just to
continue that look, or, if the camera
was looking down a trench, we could
have one at the end to get some light
going through the trench. We had
Steel Green on all the lamps.
In the final grade, Eley worked
with Bernaers to fine-tune the color
decisions made on set, as well as the
LUTs that had been applied to moni-
tors and dailies. Thanks to the time I
had with Peter during prep to test how
far we could push and pull the mater-
ial, I was pretty confident in situations
where I might otherwise have been
concerned, says the cinematographer.
We were mainly balancing material
out and refining the looks in the final
grade. We had a very long discussion
about the look of the trenches; I
wanted there to be humanity to it. It
was quite an interesting process to
arrive at a look that feels dirty and
grim, yet still has color. Although the
trenches feel like a colorless world,
there is actually a lot of color there.
TECHNICAL SPECS
1.78:1
Digital Capture
Arri Alexa
Cooke S4, Angenieux Optimo
61
Vision
and
Verve
Dean Semler, ASC, ACS adds
the ASC Lifetime Achievement Award
to his crowded mantel of
career triumphs.
By Jean Oppenheimer
|
H
es a directors secret weapon,
says Angelina Jolie of Dean
Semler, ASC, ACS, who will
receive the ASC Lifetime
Achievement Award this month. With
some 60 films under his belt, Semler has
a special affinity for working with first-
time directors like Jolie, for whom he
shot In the Land of Blood and Honey
(2011).
Another such collaboration that
won Semler considerable acclaim was
Kevin Costners Dances with Wolves (AC
May 91), whose seven Academy
Awards included statuettes for best
picture, directing and cinematography. I
knew it was going to be tough out there,
and I knew I would make some
mistakes, says Costner, explaining his
decision to hire Semler for his directing
debut. I wanted somebody who could
roll with the punches and not be afraid
of the dirt. I didnt know what my own
learning curve was going to be, and I
needed somebody who was going to
help me. Plus, Deans got that great
Australian mentality.
Semler is an Aussie through and
through. He was born in 1943 in the
small town of Renmark, on the Mighty
River Murray in South Australia. It
was semi-arid but on a beautiful river,
he says. I used to love getting on my
bike and just going, feeling the space,
feeling infinity. His parents were strict
Lutherans and had no car, no telephone
and no television set. Every Sunday, the
family would don their best clothes and
bicycle to church. P
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Opposite: Dean Semler,
ASC, ACS points the way
on location for
Apocalypto. This page,
top: At work on Dances
with Wolves, Semler and
1st AC Lee Blasingame
line up an over-the-
shoulder involving Lt.
Dunbar (Kevin Costner,
third from left), Kicking
Bird (Graham Greene,
fourth from left) and
other members of the
tribe. Bottom: One of
Semlers adventures as a
young TV-news
cameraman in Australia
in 1964. I was on my
way to cover a bush fire
for the TV news, and a
fire engine came
screaming over the hill. I
swerved to avoid it and
flipped over. The
firemen all got out. I
was fine, and between
the six of us, we righted
the vehicle, and I got
the footage and made it
back in time to get it on
the 6 oclock news.
His parents gave him a camera

when he was 14. It was a tiny Coronet
with a flash that opened up like a
flower. I still have the first picture I ever
took with it. Its on my computer as a
screen saver!
Although Semler excelled in
school, he never graduated. I discov-
ered girls in my last year of high
school, he says with a laugh. I had a
few girlfriends, and my mind was just
elsewhere. He took a job as a junior
clerk at the nearby railway station, but
his older sister urged him to get
involved in a profession where he could
utilize his sense of humor and wit. A
few months later, a TV station in
Adelaide [advertised] for a props boy,
he recalls. I had no idea what a props
boy was I had never even seen a tele-
vision!
He got the job. The first time I
walked around the studio, it was like
being on the moon. I was 16 and
nervous as hell. He started out floor
managing for live variety shows and
commercials, and soon he was operat-
ing one of the big studio cameras. The
news cameramen used to walk through
the studio with their Bell & Howells,
and Id look at them and think,
Wouldnt it be the bees knees to do
what theyre doing, going out and
shooting film?
He got his chance when the
news director sent him out the door
with an assignment and said, Youll
learn. Semler was 19. It was fabu-
lous, he recalls. I loved telling a story
with moving pictures and took great
Clockwise from
top left: Semler
(left) works on a
documentary in
Fiji; the young
cameraman
takes a break to
pose with his
future wife,
Annie, while
shooting a
drama for ABC
TV in Adelaide;
bringing cameras
for nearly every
occasion, Semler
heads to work
on a tourist film
in Hong Kong.

Vision and Verve
pride in using film efficiently. With
the Bell & Howell, every time you cut
the camera, the shutter would stay
closed, so there were no flash frames.
I could edit in the camera. We had
100-foot rolls of 16mm black-and-
white reversal stock, and I could fit
three stories on one roll of film.
He eventually left the station
for a job at ABC television, the
government-run national network
that produced dramas and documen-
taries in addition to news. He was the
assistant cameraman to three senior
cameramen, who each had a months
vacation every year. When they were
off, Semler would eagerly fill in, and
his work made an impression. Zoom
lenses had just come in, he recalls. I
did a story on the city skyline chang-
ing and used a lot of double zooms.
That got me a job at the ABC head-
quarters in Sydney.
Semler was asked to shoot a
documentary called The Infinite
Pacific, which celebrated the 200th
anniversary of Australias founding by
retracing the voyage of Capt. James
Cook. That was the first time I shot
color, and I dont know why I got the
job over senior cameramen who had a
lot more experience, but I wasnt going
to say no!
When Don McAlpine, a friend
and future ASC and ACS colleague,
became chief cameraman at the
Commonwealth Film Unit, he asked
Semler to join him. Those were nine
of the best years of my life, says
Semler. He traveled the world, shoot-
ing documentaries. My favorite expe-
riences were working with ethno-
graphic filmmaker Ian Dunlop,
recording traditional Aboriginal
lifestyle and charting the changes in
their community. I had an NPR clair.
I worked without an assistant; a small
unit was much better.
Director Phillip Noyce was at
Film Australia during the same period,
and he and Semler made a series of
Top: On location
in Borneo for
John Milius
adaptation of
Farewell to the
King, Semler
captures a dolly
shot of U.S.
soldier Learoyd
(Nick Nolte) and
the local tribe
that adopts him
as a leader.
Bottom: Milius
and Semler at
work.
documentaries together. Dean was a
master of cinma vrit I had never
seen anybody like him, and I still
havent, says Noyce. He handheld
that camera like he was a human
tripod. He knew how to make himself
invisible, yet he was so attuned to the
human psyche. He just had this instinct
for humanity. You see it throughout his
work.
Semler began shooting short
films that played before a theaters
main attraction. One was A Steam
Train Passes (1974), which took a jour-
ney back in time on a restored locomo-
tive that had been built in 1943.
Semlers eyes light up at the memory
of that big, green, thundering
machine. The film brought Semler
accolades, awards and offers to shoot
commercials, which he turned down
repeatedly before finally agreeing to
the new, more lucrative lifestyle.
When McAlpine asked Semler
to shoot second unit on The Earthling,
a feature starring William Holden,
Semler jumped at the chance. He
worked as a freelance cinematographer
for the next several years. Then, out of
the blue, he got a call from director
George Miller, who was prepping Mad
Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981).
Miller had just seen A Steam Train
Passes and offered Semler the job. A
very strong bond developed between
Dean and me, says Miller. When
Dean came off the viewfinder, you
could tell by his body language
whether he thought the shot had gone
well. If he came off with a little twin-
kle in his eye, I knew we had the shot.
If he came off a little hesitant, Id say,
Lets go again.
The Road Warrior proved to be a C
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Top: Semler takes
a familiar seat
while prepping a
shot for George
Millers action
adventure Mad
Max Beyond
Thunderdome.
Bottom: The
cinematographer
(center, at
camera) enjoys
the opposite
extreme while
filming the
comedy City
Slickers. With
Semler in the
background are
grip Paul Iski
(left) and 1st AC
Mark Davison
(right). In the
foreground are
(from left)
director Ron
Underwood, key
grip William
Bear Paul, actor
Billy Crystal and
2nd AD Jeffrey
Wetzel.

Vision and Verve
turning point for Semler. It also
changed the way action films were
made. It was so raw and visceral, he
observes. George told me to be bold.
There I was, strapped to the front of
the truck, facing Mel Gibson, who was
driving. The camera was on a bungee
cord. The villain smashed the side
window and attacked Mel. It was
violently bumpy, and my eye started to
bleed, so I closed the eyepiece and just
aimed the camera toward the action
and crossed my fingers. George loved
it so much he added shaking to the rest
of the sequence.
Gibson recalls how helpful
Semler was to him on the set. I wasnt
very experienced as an actor, so I had a
lot of questions about the camera and
how things work. Dean would always
take time to explain what he was
doing. Hed say, Im going to tilt the
camera this way, or, Im going to run
it at this frame rate or from this low
angle. It made me feel so much more
secure.
In 1984, between shooting Road
Warrior and Mad Max Beyond
Thunderdome (1985), Semler shot
Razorback, a thriller about a giant pig
that terrorizes an Outback town. It
became a cult hit and brought the cine-
matographer his first Australian Film
Institute Award.
The open-water thriller Dead
Calm (1989) reunited him with both
Noyce, who directed, and Miller, who
produced the project and directed
second unit. During the shoot, Miller
told Semler he had just bought the
rights to a book called The Sheep Pig
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Top: Semler
and director
Geoff Murphy
plot their
strategy on
location in
White Sands
National
Monument,
New Mexico,
for Young
Guns II.
Bottom:
Checking the
light in
Whistler,
British
Columbia, for
the serial-killer
drama Eye See
You.
(a.k.a. Babe, the Gallant Pig), and that
he thought Semler was well suited to
develop and direct it for the screen.
Many months later, the two got
together in Los Angeles, where they
hammered out the first draft of the
script. Animatronics and computer
graphics werent advanced enough to
make the movie at that time, however.
The two friends were working
on the script when, according to
Miller, one day, apropos of nothing,
Deans wife, Annie, said, Indians.
Dean has to make a film about
Indians. Within a year, Dean was
making Dances with Wolves! But he
always kept an eye on Babe, calling me
periodically to find out where the
project stood. Ultimately, Babe was
directed by Miller and shot by Andrew
Lesnie, ASC, ACS, but one of
Semlers fondest memories is his
thanks to credit on the picture.
Semler is largely self-taught, but
he says he learned a great deal from
gaffers, directors and other collabora-
tors he met along the way. He consid-
ers Russell Boyd, ASC, ACS his
mentor, although the two have never
worked together. Russell paved the
way for all of us, he declares. Boyd
observes, Dean is a very straight-up-
and-down guy and very honest. He is
gregarious and innovative. He has a
great sense of humor, and he doesnt
bullshit. He wont flatter anybody.
In an e-mail to AC, Jolie echoes
Boyds comment: I dont think Dean is
capable of a lie. If he thinks something
is crap, hell tell you. She says he also
provided valuable emotional support
on set. Many times, in the middle of a
difficult scene, I would look over at
Dean, and he would smile and nod as if
to say, Go on, youre doing just fine.
Ive got your back. And he always did.
Semler worked with Ed Harris
on the Western drama Appaloosa
(2008), the actors second film as a
director. Dean is a real trooper, a hard
worker and just a lot of fun, says
Harris. It was a tough shoot.
So was Gibsons Apocalypto (AC
Jan. 07), which was shot in the jungles
of Mexico. Though Semler is enthusi-
astic about every project he works on,
he confesses that Apocalypto was prob-
ably my most enjoyable film ever. I
loved where it was and what it was. I
was shooting on the [Panavision]
Genesis and could see dailies at the
end of every day and know we had it in
the can. Gibson recalls with a laugh,
Dean was like a kid in a candy store.
He has been at this game a long time,
and to still have that childlike enthusi-
asm is fantastic and its infectious!
Semlers only major complaint
about digital is, You have to sit in that

Vision and Verve
Semler preps a shot of members of the Yanomami tribe in Venezuela for Tom Shadyacs drama Dragonfly.
bloody little black [DIT] tent. I hate it,
but thats the price you have to pay.
Andrew Rowlands, SOC, the
A-camera operator on Apocalypto,
recalls an occasion when Semler
wanted to keep shooting after the sun
had set: Dean was in the DIT tent,
and over headphones, I told him, Its
awfully dark out here. He said, Dont
worry. Keep shooting. After a few
minutes, I couldnt see my hand in
front of my face, so I tried again.
Dean, its really dark out here. He
said, Dont worry about it, just bloody
shoot! Ten minutes later, he comes out
of the tent and says, Holy shit, its dark
out here!
Though he has embraced digital
cinematography he shot his latest
feature, the 2014 release Maleficent, on
the Arri Alexa Semler still loves
film. Recently, he was sitting in a
screening room at Deluxe Laboratories
in Hollywood with Beverly Wood, an
ASC associate and the executive vice
president of technical services and
customer relations at Deluxe and
EFilm. We could hear the projector
purring through the wall, he says. Its
going to be a sad day when we dont
hear that anymore.
A self-professed Panavision
man, Semler has counted Bob Harvey,
the companys senior vice president of
worldwide sales, among his friends and
colleagues since Young Guns (1998).
Dean is the best there is, maintains
Harvey. Nobody has to panic over
anything when he is there because they
know he will take care of them. Its an
honor to be considered one of his
friends.
Semler is always conscious of the
budget, making him a production
managers dream. He never asks for
anything unless he can really use it,
says producer/production manager
James Brubaker, who has made several
films with Semler.
Noyce, who reteamed with
Semler on the thriller The Bone
Collector (1999), notes that Semler is
always sensitive to the directors needs
in the editing room. He knows exactly
how to get all the shots that will allow
me to cut a sequence into a fluid real-
ity. That goes back to his documentary
training.
Semlers crew clearly worships
him. He has the patience of Job,
claims gaffer Jim Gilson, a longtime
collaborator. Once you work with
him, you inevitably compare everybody
else to him. Its unavoidable.
According to Rowlands, The first
week of a shoot, Dean learns every-
bodys names on set not just the
electricians and camera crews names,
but everybodys.
A year after making Dragonfly, Semler reteamed with Shadyac for a movie at the opposite end of the tonal spectrum, the
visual-effects-heavy comedy Bruce Almighty.
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supportive. Hell make you feel relaxed
no matter how difficult the shot. With
a laugh, he adds, He also gives a
bloody good hug.
Key grip William Bear Paul
Camera operator Mark
Goellnicht cites Semlers youthfulness
and vitality, noting, Youd think every
film was his first film; he still has that
excitement in him. And hes so

Vision and Verve
recalls one of Semlers improvisations
while shooting the comedy Bruce
Almighty (2003): In one scene, a dog is
sitting on a toilet reading a newspaper,
and Jennifer Aniston had to open the
bathroom door and look surprised. We
did several takes, and then Dean had
an idea for the next one: he asked me to
sit on the toilet with my pants down to
my ankles. Nothing was exposed, mind
you, but, boy, was Jennifer surprised
when she opened that door!
Miller thinks there is a quality in
Australian culture that helps explain
Semlers disposition and approach:
Australians are very resourceful; they
can do a lot with very little. They are
also very strong team players and look
out for one another. Its that hardy,
rural ethos, what we call the digger
spirit.
One thing that impressed
Costner on both Dances with Wolves
and Waterworld (AC Aug. 95) was that
Dean isnt boastful, and he never lets
Director
Angelina Jolie
works out a
shot with
Semler for the
Bosnian War
drama In the
Land of Blood
and Honey.
70
his ego get in the way. I got lucky with
him because in addition to being a great
cinematographer, he is a really good
man. There are a lot of talented assholes
out there. The thing that really matters
in life is what kind of person you are.
He had a tremendous influence
on what Dances with Wolves came to
be, continues Costner. He coaxed me
through some things that were not my
idea, but he did it gently, and I was
smart enough to realize he was right.
Semler reacts to such praise by
stressing how lucky he feels to be
doing what Im doing. How and why it
ever happened, I dont know.
Semler joined the ASC in 1998
after being proposed for membership
by Society fellows Jack Cooperman,
Harry Wolf and John Alonzo. He won
an ASC Award for Dances with Wolves
and earned another nomination from
the Society for Apocalypto. Of the
Lifetime Achievement honor, he says
he is thrilled to bits. Im shocked,
surprised, and, well, its just fabulous.
In 2002, Semler was named to
the Order of Australia and received the
Queens Medal for his service to the
arts. He recalls, Annie and I went to
Government House in Sydney, the guv
pinned the shiny, gold medal and
ribbons on, and the event was filled
with wonderful pomp and circum-
stance. It was fantastic. A year later, he
received another honor from the
Australian government, a Centenary
Medal, for his service to international
cinematography.
I love telling stories visually, he
says. Its all about making people feel.
Perhaps his wife, Annie, expresses it
best: Dean can shoot the feeling of
what he sees.
Semler receives the Queens Medal, one of Australias
highest honors, in 2002.
71
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and the Bronze Frog was awarded to Rhino Season cinematog-
rapher Touraj Aslani.
In the student competition, the Laszlo Kovacs Student
Award (a.k.a. the Golden Tadpole) was awarded to Blackstory
cinematographer Robert Oberrainer, a student at Institut fr
Film und Fernsehen Filmakademie in Vienna. The Silver
Tadpole went to The Zone cinematographer Mikko Kamunen,
a student at the University of Art and Design in Finland, and
the Bronze Tadpole was given to Without Snow cinematogra-
pher Magnus Borge, of the Polish National Film School in
Lodz. A special prize was given to All Souls Day cinematogra-
pher Bartosz Bieniek.
In the feature documentary competition, the Golden
Frog was awarded to Planet of Snails cinematographer Seung-
Jun Yi, and co-cinematographers Ester Martin Bergsmark and
Minki Jakerson were given a special mention for She Male
Snails. In the short documentary competition, co-cinematog-
raphers Lorenzo Castore and Adam Cohen received the
Golden Frog for No Peace Without War, and co-cinematogra-
phers Jacek Blawut and Pawel Chorzepa received a special
mention for Loneliness of Sound.
The Best Music Video Award was given for Die
Antwoords I Fink U Freeky, directed by Roger Ballena and
shot by Melle Van Essen. Matthew J. Lloyd won the award for
T
he Plus Camerimage International Festival of the Art of
Cinematography celebrated its 20th edition in December,
and the unique gathering of cinematography practitioners
and aficionados included a large contingent of ASC
members, including Andrzej Bartkowiak, Paul Cameron,
Stuart Dryburgh, Stephen Goldblatt, Frederic Goodich,
Robbie Greenberg, Adam Holender, Ed Lachman, Stephen
Lighthill, Karl Walter Lindenlaub, Claudio Miranda, Yuri
Neyman, Daniel Pearl, Roberto Schaefer, Vittorio Storaro,
Rodney Taylor, Jerzy Zielinski and Vilmos Zsigmond, all of
whom participated in panel discussions or workshops or served
on juries.
AC executive editor Stephen Pizzello joined contribut-
ing writers David Heuring and Iain Stasukevich for a panel
focused on writing about cinematography, and AC European
correspondent Benjamin B led two Panavision seminars.
More than 250 movies were screened during the week-
long festival. Between screenings, there was plenty of opportu-
nity for socializing. Lavish parties were hosted by Arri, Kodak,
Panavision and Vantage Film, among others.
The week culminated in the awards presentation. In the
main competition, the Golden Frog was awarded to War Witch
cinematographer Nicolas Bolduc; the Silver Frog was awarded
to Holy Motors cinematographer Caroline Champetier, AFC;
Postcards from
Poland
1. Roberto Schaefer, ASC, AIC tests out the Vantage One T1 spherical prime lens;
2. Dana Ross and Bob Hoffman of Technicolor catch up with Rodney Taylor, ASC;
3. War Witch cinematographer Nicolas Bolduc socializes with Stuart Dryburgh,
ASC at the Arri banquet; 4. Stephen Goldblatt, ASC, BSC shares a laugh with
fellow cinematographer Beth Cloutier; 5. Franz Wieser of Arri poses with an
Alexa; 6. The Opera Nova served as the festivals headquarters; 7. AC European
correspondent Benjamin B (far left) moderates a panel with participants Vilmos
Zsigmond, ASC; Jim Plannette; Michel Abramowicz, AFC; Reuben Garrett; and
Matthew Butler; 8. Karl Walter Lindenlaub, ASC, BVK takes five with Oliver
Stapleton, BSC; 9. ASC members Rodney Taylor, Ed Lachman and Claudio
Miranda trade some gripping tales; 10. Denny Clairmont enjoys the European
ambience during the Panavision party; 11. The How to Teach Cinematography
panel included Jerzy Zielinski, ASC, PSC of the Polish Film School; Larra Anderson
of the Northern Film School in Leeds, England; ASC President Stephen Lighthill
of the American Film Institute; Mariusz Grzegorzek, rector of the Polish National
Film School; moderator Filip Kovcin of FilmPro magazine; and Rolf Coulanges,
BVK, of the International School of Film and Television in San Antonio, Cuba.
1
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history of international cinema.
When I screened Ivans
Childhood, I felt like I knew this man,
said Pearl. Those angles, the composi-
tions and the light all felt so familiar, and
I sensed that even though our paths have
been so different, he must be a kindred
spirit.
Our members returned from the
20th edition of Camerimage buzzing
about the many films screened in
competition, said Lighthill, president of
the ASC. And, of course, the festival
and the Society have many goals in
common. The ASC delegation partici-
pated in many aspects of the festival,
including representation on all the juries.
We always appreciate the opportunity to
see and discuss the work of our
colleagues from around the world, and to
exchange ideas in an atmosphere of
warm hospitality. It is indeed worth the
journey to find a place where cinematog-
raphy is the star of the show.

Postcards from Poland
1. Alexander Schwartz of Vantage Film confers with Stuart Dryburgh, ASC; 2. Oliver Stapleton, BSC chats with Robbie Greenberg, ASC; 3. Frank Kay and
Warwick Hempleman of J.L. Fisher display their companys wares; 4. ASC members Frederic Goodich (far left), Vilmos Zsigmond and Yuri Neyman await the
start of a screening; 5. Benjamin B enjoys a convivial moment with AC publisher Martha Winterhalter; 6. PSC members Piotr Sliskowski and Witold Sobocinski
take a coffee break.
Best Cinematography in a Music Video
for his work on Flying Lotus Until the
Quiet Comes.
The award for Best Polish Film
honored To Kill a Beaver, directed by Jan
Jakub Kolski and shot by Michal
Pakulski. The Best Directors Debut and
Best Cinematographers Debut awards
went to Miguel Angel Jimenez and
Gorka Gmez Andreu, respectively, for
their work on the film Chaika.
The festival presented its
Cinematographer/Director Duo Award
to director Gus Van Sant and the late
Harris Savides, ASC. Two separate trib-
utes to Savides, who died in October,
offered friends and colleagues the
opportunity to share warm remem-
brances.
Among those presented with life-
time accolades and retrospectives were
director David Lynch, editor Alan
Heim (All That Jazz, American Psycho,
Billy Bathgate, Introducing Dorothy
Dandridge) and documentarian Steven
Okazaki (White Light/Black Rain: The
Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
Black Tar Heroin: The Dark End of the
Street).
Russian cinematographer Vadim
Yusov, best known for his early collabo-
rations with Andrei Tarkovsky (Solaris,
Andrei Rublev, Ivans Childhood), was
presented with the festivals Lifetime
Achievement Award.
As always, the festival was a
reminder that cinematography is a
global language. Taking place in
Bydgoszcz, Poland, the fests invaluable
role as a bridge between cultures was
especially apparent in the interactions
with Yusov, known previously by most
ASC members only through his images.
Mr. Yusov is certainly one of the worlds
great cinematographers, even though he
is relatively unknown in Hollywood,
said Schaefer. The films he made with
Tarkovsky are important works in the
1
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2
3
1. Lifetime Achievement honoree Vadim Yusov
hefts his award; 2. Lifetime Achievement
honoree David Lynch with actor Keanu Reeves;
3. Plus Camerimage festival director Marek
Zydowicz with most of the years
cinematography honorees; 4. Christopher Doyle,
HKSC and Anthony Dod Mantle, ASC, BSC, DFF
join director Gus Van Sant, who shared the
Cinematographer/Director Duo Award with the
late Harris Savides, ASC; 5. AC contributor David
Heuring listens to a response from Mihai
Malaimare Jr. during a panel discussion; 6. Lynch
receives the key to the city; 7. Caroline
Champetier, AFC; Nicolas Bolduc; and Touraj
Aslani hold the Silver, Golden and Bronze Frogs,
respectively; 8. Stephen Lighthill, ASC takes a
break; 9. Vittorio Storaro, ASC, AIC addresses
the crowd; 10. Paul Cameron, ASC (right)
conducts a seminar; 11. During the panel
Writing About Cinematography, AC
contributor Iain Stasukevich, executive editor
Stephen Pizzello and Heuring listen to Yusov as
he discusses his collaborations with director
Andrei Tarkovsky; 12. Zydowicz acknowledges
all of the festivals volunteers for their
contributions.
1
2
3 4
5 6
7
8 9
10
11
12
Miller Soars with
Skyline 70
Miller Camera
Support Equipment has
introduced the Skyline
70, a 150mm ball-level-
ing fluid head. Suited for
digital cinematography
achieved with DSLRs, the
Red Epic, the Sony F65,
the Arri Alexa and other
cameras, the Skyline 70
incorporates precision drag and counterbalance systems that
support an array of camera configurations with payloads from 4.5
kg (10 pounds) to 37.5 kg (82.6 pounds).
The Skyline 70 features an illuminated rear-mounted control
panel; a new counterbalance system with eight positions of adjust-
ment to enable payloads to be perfectly balanced at various centers
of gravity; smooth, selectable pan and tilt fluid drag, with distinct
levels of repeatable drag resistance even when operating in extreme
temperatures (from -40F to 149F); a caliper disc-brake system and
safety tilt-lock mechanism; an industry-standard 120mm quick-
release camera platform; and an optional accessory-mounting-block
adapter.
A variety of system packages are available, including the
Heavy Duty 2-Stage Carbon Fiber tripod, the Heavy Duty Single-
Stage Alloy tripod and the studio-based Heavy Duty Studio Alloy
tripod.
For additional information, visit www.millertripods.com.
Redrock Micro Enhances Support
Redrock Micro has released enhanced camera-support rigs
that improve performance, comfort and reliability for camera oper-
ators. Among the upgrades are the MicroShoulderPad with Field-
Tech tool-less MicroBalance QR counterweights and improved
handgrips. The improvements are standard on all new Redrock rigs
and are available as upgrades to existing ones.
The completely redesigned MicroShoulderPad improves
comfort and balance, and
promotes proper alignment and
better stability with balanced
pressure distribution. The pad
uses Cordura and breathable 3D
mesh and is filled with soft, free-
forming MicroPoly beads that
actively adapt to the shoulders
shape and slope.
Building on the success of
New Products & Services
SUBMISSION INFORMATION
Please e-mail New Products/Services releases to:
newproducts@ascmag.com and include full contact
information and product images. Photos must be
TIFF or JPEG files of at least 300dpi.
Redrocks MicroBalance weights, the MicroBalance QR rig counter-
weight speeds rig balance and stability. Weights can be added or
removed just by pushing a button, without any tools. Multiple
weights can be added or removed at once. Battery mounting
patterns on each weight enable brick batteries (such as
Anton/Bauer, Switronix, Sony, etc.) to be attached directly to the
MicroBalance QR, making the battery mount quick-release as well.
Additionally, MicroBalance QR can be set up horizontally or vertically,
and can be adjusted for left-right balance in the vertical setup.
Redrocks handgrips have been updated with a diamond
pattern that reduces potential for moisture buildup, while the
rubber surface keeps things comfortable. The added double lock on
each grip end offers another option for mounting points or rig
extensions.
For additional information, visit www.redrockmicro.com.
Induro Gets Low with Hi-Hat
Designed by filmmak-
ers, Induros 100mm Hi-Hat
offers a new take on a classic
filmmaking tool. Rubber
pivoting feet and adjustable,
extendable legs provide exact
positioning for low-angle
shots. Additionally, the Hi-Hat
includes a 100mm ball
adapter with a
3
8" mount for
ball heads and camera sliders.
The Induro Hi-Hat is sturdy enough to hold 220 pounds. Each
leg has three positions for super-low shots as well as uneven
surfaces, and each leg can also extend an additional 2" for fine
adjustment. Equipped with rubber pivoting feet, the Hi-Hat can be
placed on any surface without causing damage, and reinforced
mounting holes can be used for mounting to a wooden board. The
Hi-Hat can also be folded for easy travel.
For additional information, visit www.indurogear.com.
MovieTech Launches G-Force Master
ABC-Products, a division of MovieTech that
delivers a range of lightweight, quality equipment
for the video, HD and broadcast sectors, has intro-
duced the G-Force Master camera-support rig,
which fills the gap between G-Force Pro and G-
Force Advanced and boasts an 11 kg (24.25
pounds) payload.
The G-Force Masters size-adjustable vest,
which can be adjusted to the individual body shape
of the operator, has been taken from the G-Force
Advanced sys-
tem. Additionally,
the lightweight
post has been
adopted from the
G-Force Pro rig
and has a V-
mount double
adapter for the
camera and
display power
supply.
The high-
light of the G-
Force Master is
the newly developed spring arm, which is
equipped with a horizontal and vertical
adjustment. Both the vest and the spring
arm provide standard connectors. Three
padded soft bags allow for safe and easy
transport of the rig.
For additional information, visit
www.movietech.de.
Schneider Adds to
Optical Accessories
Schneider Optics has introduced the
Sunshade Filter Holder and the True-Cut IR
Tuner Kit.
The Sunshade Filter Holder features
a sunshade that rotates independently of
the 4" filter holder, enabling easy use of
polarizing or graduated filters. The 4" filter
holder is designed to hold Schneider MPTV
4mm-thick water-white Schott glass filters,
which are available in 4"x4" and 4"x5.65"
sizes. The holder rotates a full 360 degrees
and can accommodate up to two glass
filters.
The filter holder/lens shade assembly
attaches to the camera lens via a 77mm
wide-angle adapter ring, which can be
easily removed from the holder and
replaced with other available sizes. The
included 77mm wide-angle adapter ring
can also be used with conventional step
rings to quickly accommodate smaller-
diameter lens filters.
Schneiders True-Cut IR filters are
designed to prevent light in the infrared
spectrum from contaminating the image
captured on CMOS or CCD sensors. IR
contamination can become troublesome
when large-sensor cameras are used with
ND filtration to achieve shallow-depth-of-
field images captured with a wide-open iris.
Schneiders Platinum IRND filters address
this issue, but with the True-Cut IR filters,
filmmakers can use existing standard ND or
other filters (such as 85, 81EF or color
effects) and select just the right amount of
IR cut for any situation.
The three filters in the True-Cut IR
Tuner Kit are set to the various nanometer
cut requirements of popular sensors
currently on the market, allowing the direc-
tor of photography to select the appropri-
ate cut level for the sensor of the camera
being used, and put the corresponding
True-Cut IR filter in front of all other filters
mounted in front of the lens. The True-Cut
IR Tuner Kit comprises 680 (IR680), 715
(IR715) and 750 (IR750) IR cut-strength
filters, as well as a protective pouch. The
filters are available in 4"x5.65" and
6.6"x6.6" sizes.
www.schneideroptics.com.
Hollywood Camera Work
Designs Shots
Hollywood Camera Work has
released Shot Designer, a camera-blocking
app for iPad, iPhone, Android, Mac and PC
platforms.
Shot Designer gives directors and
cinematographers the ability to quickly
previsualize shots and scenes by combining
a number of useful features into a compre-
hensive app. Camera Diagram enables
users to block entire scenes; the integrated
Shot List communicates with the Camera
Diagram to write itself while the user
works; Animation allows users to previsual-
ize the rhythm of a scene; Storyboards can
be used inside the Camera Diagram to
better illustrate camera angles; and an inte-
grated Directors Viewfinder allows users to
build their scene blocking on location.
Shot Designer is free for use on a
single scene at a time, and a $19.99 Pro
Upgrade gives users full file management,
sharing and export as well as a free Desktop
Pro license. To download the mobile version,
search for Shot Designer in the Apple App
Store, Google Play or the Amazon Appstore;
the Mac/PC version can be downloaded
from the Hollywood Camera Work website,
www.hollywoodcamerwork.us.
Rokinon Unveils
Cine Video
DSLR Lenses
Rokinon has intro-
duced a line of Cine
Video Digital SLR
lenses: an 8mm T3.8 Fish-
eye, a 14mm T3.1 Aspherical Wide
Angle, a 24mm T1.5 Wide Angle, a
35mm T1.5 Aspherical Wide Angle and an
85mm T1.5 Aspherical.
Each Cine Video Digital SLR lens is
produced with outstanding optical glass.
Features include de-clicked apertures and
gears for follow focus. The 8mm Fisheye is
made for APS-C sensors, while all others are
compatible with full-frame cameras and are
available for popular mounts such as
Canon, Sony Alpha and Nikon.
www.rokinon.com.
Technicolor Releases
CineStyle Software
Technicolor has launched CineStyle
Color Assist, the companys first video color-
correction and grading software. Designed
by the companys
renowned color
experts and based
on Technicolors
award-winning DP
Lights system,
CineStyle Color
Assist features high
quality, easy to use,
real-time color
correction for
videographers of all
skill levels.
CineStyle
Color Assist gives
any video-produc-
tion enthusiast easy-to-use, professional-
quality color-correction tools, says Alejan-
dro Guerrero, senior vice president and
general manager for CineStyle at Techni-
color. We adapted the technology we use
for blockbuster films and TV shows to
create an affordable tool with an intuitive
user interface, time-saving features and
extensive color library.
The software allows users to select
from 25 custom-designed CineStyle Looks
created by Technicolors world-class
colorists, or create new looks that can be
previewed in real time across an entire video
clip without having to render. Users can also
save up to nine Color Compositions per
video file for instant review and ultimate
creative flexibility. The tool also speeds up
workflows by allowing users to quickly and
easily apply, preview and modify CineStyle
Looks during production and in the editing
process.
Additional premium CineStyle Look
packages can be purchased for $19. Each
package includes 10 custom-created Looks.
Packages currently available include Movie
Looks and Extreme Looks.
CineStyle Color Assist is compatible
with Mac and PC platforms and works in
conjunction with popular editing software
such as Final Cut Pro 7 and Adobe Premiere
Pro CS5.5 and CS6. Additional features
include non-destructive color correction
and grading via MetaColor files; a three-
way color corrector, key selector and curves
adjustments for advanced control; support
for popular codecs in SD, HD and 2K reso-
lutions; scopes for easy monitoring of color
information; and secondary monitor
support for full-screen playback.
CineStyle Color Assist can be
purchased for $99 from www.technicol
orcinestyle.com, where a free 7-day trial
version can also be downloaded.
Assimilate Shipping Scratch v7
Assimilate is shipping Version 7 of its
Scratch and Scratch Lab products, which
feature a suite of enhanced 3-D composit-
ing tools that integrate seamlessly into the
color-grading, data-management and
finishing systems to allow faster, more fluid
and more cost-effective digital grading
sessions.
Scratch v7 is a real-time, client-
attended toolset that delivers a consistent,
integrated user-interface across both
production dailies and the DI. The
enhanced creative tools within Scratch v7
include an expanded compositing toolset
with a new 3-D camera model and an
improved OFX plug-in environment and
plug-in workflow; full peer interactivity
between all Scratch features and critical
visual-effects plug-ins, such as Sapphire,
Neat Video, ReelSmart Motion Blur, Beauty
Box and Mocha Pro; the ability to nest layers
and apply color grades to groups of layers;
planar tracking data import from Imagineer
Systems Mocha Pro v3; and new rendering
features, including directional
and motion blur, multi-
sampling, and bit-map filtering.
Scratch v7 also boasts
an entirely new, flexible viewing
model that displays content in a
more intuitive manner, and
extended native camera
support for Phantom Miro,
Canon C500 and C300, Black-
magic Cinema Camera, Sony
F55 and F65 native high frame
rate, Red 5K, and the latest Arri de-Bayer
algorithm. Scratch v7 also includes full
support for the entire ACES specification,
including the file format, color space, and
device and rendering transforms.
Scratch Lab v7 offers a robust on- or
near-set dailies solution. Scratch Lab v7
meets the complex challenges of managing
media and metadata from any number of
different cameras into a single timeline,
quickly syncing audio with or without accu-
rate time code, color correcting and creating
looks in real time, and providing fast render-
ing simultaneously for multiple deliverable
formats.
Scratch v7 is a huge time-saver for
me, says Julio Macat, ASC, who used the
system for the digital grade on the feature
Pitch Perfect. I found the Scratch DI session
to be far more fluid and much faster than
anything Ive experienced before. With the
savvy hands of [colorist] Leandro Marini at
the helm, we were able to do color timing
side-by-side with items like object replace-
ment, beauty work on womens faces, and
even some [visual effects] such as chang-
ing skies, adding assorted lens flares and
creating or extending light beams from
lighting instruments that couldnt be practi-
cally photographed right inside of
Scratch. This was all quickly achieved with-
out time delays, which can interrupt the
creative process. The faster you go, the
more DI work you can do. It was an eye-
opening experience for me.
www.assimilateinc.com.
Boris FX Expands Continuum
Boris FX, a developer of integrated
visual-effects and workflow technology for
motion pictures, has introduced Boris
Continuum Complete 8 FxPlug, which deliv-
ers more than 200 comprehensive visual-
Backstage Equipment, nc. 8052 Lankershim Bl. North Hollywood, CA 91605 (818) 504-6026 Fax (818) 504-6180 backstaged@aol.com www.backstageweb.com
Come visit our showroom or call for our latest Magliner product catalog
We are the largest retailer specializing in Magliner customized products and accessories for the Film and Television Industry in the world
New York Showroom C.W..H. 364 W. 36th St. New York, NY 10018 (877)-Mr-CASTER (877-672-2783) backstage@cwih.com www.cwih.com
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effects filters to Apples Final Cut Pro 7, Final
Cut Pro X and Motion 5.
Boris Continuum Complete gives
editors and motion-graphics artists the
power to create high-quality broadcast
graphics and perform project-saving image
restorations within Final Cut Pro. The expan-
sive filter set includes extruded text, 3-D
particle effects, image restoration and
touchup tools, true 3-D lens flares and volu-
metric lighting effects, keys and mattes,
color-grading tools, time-based effects,
blurs, glows, stylish auto-animating transi-
tions and cinematic effects such as film
glow, film grain, and film-process looks.
Highlights of BCC 8 FxPlug include
new Final Cut Pro X templates and transi-
tions; extrusions for Final Cut Pro X that
make it easy to create 3-D objects using text
and shapes; Beat Reactor technology, which
enables easy generation of audio-driven
effects; a built-in masking system and built-
in motion tracking for Final Cut Pro X; lens-
blur effects for Final Cut Pro X; and versatile,
high-quality glow effects. Other all-new
BCC 8 FxPlug filters include BCC Flicker
Fixer, BCC Lens Flare 3D, BCC Particle Emit-
ter 3D, BCC Organic Strands, BCC Wild
Cards and BCC Stage Light.
www.borisfx.com.
Stargate Opens Middle
East Studio
Stargate Studios, a production
company that specializes in virtual produc-
tion and visual effects, has partnered with
the Middle East Broadcasting Center Group
to open Stargate Middle East.
The companys first two full-service
virtual production studios will be located in
Dubai Studio City, U.A.E., and Cairo, Egypt.
Both will be equipped with the latest digital
camera technologies, LED lighting, motion
tracking, real-time compositing, 3-D imag-
ing and virtual sets. Both Stargate Dubai and
Stargate Cairo will employ multiple visual-
effects supervisors, producers and local
graphic-artist talent and will feature exten-
sive soundstages.
According to Stargate CEO Sam
Nicholson, ASC, the partnership with MBC
will further strengthen Stargates interna-
tional presence and will bring the companys
proprietary Virtual Backlot technology to the
Middle East. MBC has given us the oppor-
tunity to dramatically change the face of
the television industry throughout the
Middle East, says Nicholson. This part-
nership connects MBC to the entire Star-
gate global digital network, effectively
combining our production expertise and
advanced technologies with MBCs creative
artistry and local programming.
Founded in 1989, Stargate has
offices in Los Angeles, Atlanta, Berlin,
Vancouver, Toronto, Mumbai and Malta.
The companys global network allows
clients to access more than 250 visual-
effects artists and supervisors all over the
world, as well as high-speed data transfer
and simultaneous international rendering
and delivery. Stargates Virtual Backlot
provides an alternative to shooting on loca-
tion, offering fully immersive environments
to shoot establishing shots, multiple-angle
coverage, walk-and-talks and driving.
www.stargatestudios.net.
Company 3 Plays Games
Company 3, a subsidiary of Deluxe
Entertainment Services Group Inc., recently
provided a variety of post services to its first
video-game project, Call of Duty: Black Ops
II. Concurrently, the company announced
the opening of Company 3 Games, a new
division dedicated to offering high-end
post services for game production.
The creation of Company 3 Games
represents a new level of collaboration
between game developers as well as
publishers and providers of feature-film-
level post services, says ASC associate
member Stefan Sonnenfeld, president and
founder of Company 3. Malte Wagener,
vice president of Games, adds, With the
amazing level of sophistication in games
and the immense talent pool in the feature
film world, a tight collaboration [between]
the two spheres is a natural development.
Wagener, who oversees Games
from the divisions offices in Company 3s
Santa Monica, Calif. headquarters, comes
to the position following an extensive
career in video-game business with compa-
nies such as Koch Media in Germany and
WEG, a division of CJ Media, in South
Korea. Im very excited to be leading
Company 3 Games, he says. With the
talent and resources of Company 3 and its
affiliated companies, we plan to set the
new standard for game postproduction.
For additional information,
visit www.company3.com and
www.bydeluxe.com.
Visual Data Relocates
Visual Data Media Services, a
provider of integrated end-to-end post
solutions and distribution for all media
outlets, has opened a new facility in
Burbank, Calif. The location was designed
from scratch to support 21st-century work-
flows and accommodate the needs of a
changing industry.
The 30,000-square-foot facility
features 20 suites for editing, QC, color
correction and captioning built around a
highly secure Data Center, a large Digital
Machine Room and an Encoding Center.
The Data Center was built to support the
companys proprietary Asset Management
System, which will simplify distribution and
archival tasks for Visual Datas clients. The
new space also offers two mix stages, an
ADR stage and a Foley stage.
The increased capacity afforded by
the new facility will support Visual Datas
wide-ranging services dedicated to the
creation, management, repurposing and
distribution of content. These offerings
include subtitling and localization, closed
captioning, DVD services, syndication
services, asset management, encoding,
digital cinema DCP and digital delivery. To
support these workflows, the facility has
been installed with the latest products from
a number of vendors, including DVS-SAN,
Aspera, Isilon, Avascent, Miranda and
Blackmagic Designs DaVinci.
Visual Data Media Services, 610
North Hollywood Way, Burbank, Calif.,
91505. For more information, visit
www.visualdatainc.com.
Siren Digital Employs
Digital Vision
Siren Digital, a film, television and
new-media production group, has turned
to Digital Vision for a number of solutions
to power its new facility in Hollywood.
We have a significant comfort level
and familiarity with Digital Visions
outstanding toolset, support and R&D
group built upon years of experience at
another facility we designed and operated
in Los Angeles and global projects weve
managed, says Kyle Jackson, co-founder
of Siren Digital. Over the past five years,
Digital Vision has been the backbone of
many of our endeavors. Their software
proves time and again to be able to handle
the real-world challenges of changing post-
production workflows.
Siren Digital has chosen Digital
Visions Nucoda color-grading system with
the Digital Vision Optics toolset and Preci-
sion control panel to sustain its DI and tech-
nological operations. The Nucoda grading
and mastering solutions offer a powerful
color toolset that integrates easily with
customized workflows; it supports ACES
and all of the major digital camera formats
on the market. The Precision panel adds a
high level of control for colorists with its
combination of tactile controls and inte-
grated touch-sensitive panels. Additionally,
the DVO image-processing software
provides a comprehensive solution for
image repair, restoration, enhancement and
format conversion, whether originating
from film or video.
Together, Siren Studios, an emerging
360-degree production studio, and Siren
Digital offer a broad base of services to the
industry, from creative to advanced produc-
tion, visual effects, post audio, film finance
and international distribution. We are
engaged in a number of traditional and
emerging processes globally, and it is crucial
that our tools work now and evolve with
the way our colleagues want to collaborate
in the future, says Jackson. While we are
involved in some very technologically
advanced work, we are also working daily
on digital intermediates, designing post
workflows and delivering projects. We
believe that Digital Vision is with us today
and for the long run.
Siren Digital, 6500 Sunset Blvd.,
Hollywood, Calif., 90028. For more infor-
mation, visit www.siren6500.com and
www.digitalvision.tv.

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25209 Avenue Tibbitts
Valencia, CA 91355
Phone (661) 607-0206 Fax (661) 257-2236
www.denecke.com Email: info@denecke.com
CLASSIFIED AD RATES
All classifications are $4.50 per word. Words set in bold
face or all capitals are $5.00 per word. First word of ad
and advertisers name can be set in capitals without extra
charge. No agency commission or discounts on clas si fied
advertising.PAYMENT MUST AC COM PA NY ORDER. VISA,
Mastercard, AmEx and Discover card are ac cept ed. Send
ad to Clas si fied Ad ver tis ing, Amer i can Cin e ma tog -
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the office by 15th of second month preceding pub li ca tion.
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CLASSIFIEDS ON-LINE
Ads may now also be placed in the on-line Classifieds
at the ASC web site.
Internet ads are seen around the world at the
same great rate as in print, or for slightly more you
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For more information please visit
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Advertisers Index
16x9, Inc. 6
AC 6, 77, 83
Adorama 7, 29
AJA Video Systems, Inc. 71
Alan Gordon Enterprises 82
Arri 9
ASC 1
AZGrip 82
Backstage Equipment, Inc.
79
Barger-Lite 83
Birns & Sawyer 82
Blackmagic Design, Inc. 15
Brain Emo 82
Camerimage 59
Canon USA Video 11
Cavision Enterprises 21
Chapman/Leonard Studio
Equipment Inc. 23
Cinematography
Electronics 79
Cinekinetic 82
Codex Digital Ltd. 37
Cooke Optics 13
Deluxe C2
Denecke 82
Doggicam 17
Eastman Kodak C4
Film Gear 81
Filmotechnic USA 40
Filmtools 77
Glidecam Industries C3
J.L. Fisher 53
K5600 19
Kino Flo 41
Lights! Action! Co. 82
Manios Optical 82
M. M. Mukhi & Sons 83
Movie Tech AG 82, 83
NAB 85
NBC Universal 39
Nevada Film Commission 61
New York Film Academy 25
Oppenheimer Camera Prod.
82
Outsight 49
Pille Film Gmbh 82
Pro8mm 82
Red Digital Cinema 30-31
Schneider Optics 2,
Sony Electronics, Inc. 5
Super16 Inc. 83
SXSW 51
Thales Angenieux 27
VF Gadgets, Inc. 83
Visual Products 79
Welch Integrated 87
Willys Widgets 83
www.theasc.com 4, 52, 60
70, 83, 84
84
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CONFERENCES April 611, 2013 / EXHIBITS April 811
Las Vegas Convention Center / Las Vegas, Nevada USA
Its all about ME, and how the Mobile Experience is energizing the transformation of Media & Entertainment.
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Society Welcomes Chomyn
New active member Christopher
Chomyn, ASC was first entranced by the
filmmaking process when he visited the
Edison Museum in East Orange, N.J., on his
7th birthday. He later joined a photography
club at school. After graduating from Fairfield
University with a degree in history, Chomyn
took a trip to California. While visiting Carmel
Valley, he landed a job as a production assis-
tant on the series Doris Days Best Friends, and
when the series wrapped, he stayed in
Carmel and worked as an electrician and grip.
Two years later, he moved to Los Angeles and
earned an MFA with honors from UCLAs
School of Theater, Film and Television.
Chomyn is currently an associate
professor of practice on the cinematography
faculty at the University of Southern Califor-
nias School of Cinematic Arts, where he has
taught for 15 years. While teaching, he has
continued to shoot features, documentaries
and commercials. At the 2010 Cine Gear
Expo, he was awarded the Best Cinematog-
raphy prize for his work on Wild About Harry.
Chomyn has also led cinematography work-
shops and seminars for Walt Disney Feature
Animation, Eastman Kodak and the Interna-
tional Film and Video Workshops, among
others, and in 2010, he redesigned the cine-
matography curriculum for the Vancouver
Film School. He is a Film Independent Project
Involve mentor and an alternate on the
national executive board of the International
Cinematographers Guild.
Reisner Becomes
Associate Member
New associate member David Reis-
ner, the owner of D-Cinema Consulting, has
served as secretary of the ASC Technology
Committee since its founding, and he
performs the same function for three of its
subcommittees: DI, Workflow and Advanced
Imaging. He helped to design and create the
ASC CDL, the ASC-PGA Camera Assessment
Series and Image Control Assessment Series,
the ASC-DCI Stem test, the InterSociety Digi-
tal Cinema Forum 3-D projection-luminance
demonstration, the ACES Look Management
Transform, and the log ACES definition. For
the forthcoming 10th edition of the Ameri-
can Cinematographer Manual, he co-
authored the chapter about the ASC CDL
and contributed to the chapter about ACES.
Reisner was the vice chairman of the
SMPTE groups that drafted the standards for
digital-cinema imaging. His work in other
industries has included still photography for
magazines and book jackets, early technical
and business plans for Web-based music and
movie distribution, and computer hardware
and software architecture.
Band Pro Honors Zsigmond
Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC was the
guest of honor during the recent Band Pro
One World Open House, which was held in
the companys Burbank facility. For the event,
Band Pro created an interactive workflow
environment to showcase the latest technol-
ogy from 16x9, 1Beyond, 3ality Technica,
AJA, Angenieux, Atomos, Bertone Visuals,
Canare, Canon, Cinoflex, Codex, Colorfront,
Convergent Design, DeepX, Focus Optics,
For-A, Fujinon, IDX, K5600, Leader, Leica,
Manios Digital, Marshall, NextoDI, Nila,
Oppenheimer, Red, Sony, Tiffen, TruColor-
PRG, TrueND, Vitec and Zeiss.
Nicholson, Okada Share
Sony Footage
Sony recently hosted The Future:
Ahead of Schedule, a screening of footage
captured with the companys F5, F55 and F65
CineAlta 4K digital cameras. ASC associate
members Peter Crithary and Alec Shapiro
joined Phil Molyneux, president and COO of
Sony Electronics, in representing Sony, and
Jon Fauer, ASC moderated the discussions
with the filmmakers. Sam Nicholson, ASC
screened the short Mahout, which he
directed and co-shot with Dana Christiaansen
using the F55; and Daryn Okada, ASC
shared scenes from the series Made in Jersey,
which he shot with the F65.
Clubhouse News
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From top: Christopher Chomyn, ASC;
associate member David Reisner;
Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC.
Never Stop Learning.
Never Stop Networking.
Guarantee your seat by
Registering Online Now
at www.studentfilmmakers.com/workshops
Intensive
Filmmaking Workshops 2013
Presented and hosted by
Venue: StudentFilmmakers.com Workshop Studio Manhattan, New York City.
StudentFilmmakers.com & HDProGuide.com 1123 Broadway #307, New York, NY 10010 TEL: +1 212.255.5454
t HDSLR 2- Day Workshops:
3/23~24, 5/25~26, 7/13~14, 8/31~9/1, 10/5~6, 11/9~10.
tNAB Classes: April 8 through 11, 2013 at the show.
t3-Date RED Production Workshops: TBA.
t Private Team Training: Call us to arrange for a group of 15 or more.
+'

When you were a child, what film made the strongest impres-
sion on you?
As a boy in London, the Bond films were a thrill. The Magnificent
Seven (1960) also made a big impression on me. Then came French
film, Truffaut and Godard particularly.
Which cinematographers,
past or present, do you most
admire?
Geoffrey Unsworth [BSC] came
from very conventional black-
and-white movies yet somehow
evolved into a magnificent color
cinematographer; Cabaret and
Tess are extraordinary. I can
watch [BSC member] Guy
Greens work in Oliver Twist
again and again, as well as Bob
Kraskers unforgettable work in
the The Third Man. Recently, I
watched an original print of Max
Ophls La Ronde, with magnificent cinematography by Christian
Matras. So many films, so little time.
What sparked your interest in photography?
I seem to have been born with it. I remember, as a child of maybe 5,
watching in dismay as my father tried to load an 8mm camera.
Where did you train and/or study?
Guildford School of Photography, but I dropped out to work as a
photographer on Fleet Street. Later, I studied film at the Royal
College of Art London.
Who were your early teachers or mentors?
Karel Reisz gave me wonderful advice in which he enjoined me to
spend more time lighting the actors than the sets.
What are some of your key artistic influences?
The photography of Irving Penn, Robert Capa and Edward Steichen;
the reportage photography of Life Magazine and Paris Match from
1935 to 1975; the landscapes of Joseph Turner; and, of course, the
Post-Impressionists. douard Manets A Bar at the Folies-Bergre is
the painting Id most like to steal.
How did you get your first break in the business?
I was smuggled into an animation company in London by a friend
who got me into the British union as a Rostrum cameraman.
What has been your most satisfying moment on a project?
Being kissed on both cheeks by Mike Nichols after rather good
dailies on Angels in America.
Have you made any memo-
rable blunders?
Many. They never seem to stop.
What is the best profes-
sional advice youve ever
received?
My gaffer in England, Martin
Evans, advised me to say noth-
ing during the first three weeks
of production, to just watch
and listen. I wish I had followed
his advice more closely.
What recent books, films or
artworks have inspired you?
Book: Matterhorn by Karl
Malantes. Film: Although not recent, Casque dOr (1952) by Jacques
Becker, which I saw for the first time two weeks ago at the Pacific
Film Archive. Artwork: Man Ray and Lee Miller: Partners in Surreal-
ism, an exhibition in San Francisco.
Do you have any favorite genres, or genres you would like to
try?
I would like to shoot a documentary again. I havent shot one in
decades.
If you werent a cinematographer, what might you be doing
instead?
I would be an emergency-room physician.
Which ASC cinematographers recommended you for
membership?
Howard Schwartz, Jordan Cronenweth and Vilmos Zsigmond.
How has ASC membership impacted your life and career?
I have always been something of a loner, and ASC membership has
brought me into the company of many fine cinematographers
whom I greatly admire.
Stephen Goldblatt, ASC, BSC Close-up
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