As we light a night shot, a UFO lands on set.

Shooting in small places can drive a production a little batty. We’ve put the camera in every crevice of the apartment: in closets, stairwells, doorways. A fair number of scenes are set in one unreasonably small bathroom. Shooting there was a tile puzzle where we slide crew, lights, actors, and equipment around to get everything and everybody into the right place. The one thing about small locations is that it can be tough to use long lenses, which I favor even in wide shots. Having trained in New York, I’ve certainly become skilled at lighting tiny apartments. For daylight or dim nighttime ambient scenes, I love lighting through windows whenever possible. Bringing a light into the room requires a lot of control to make it look natural. As a result, my key grip, Holly, my gaffer, “Beasely” and I were always looking for ways to bounce or hang lights outside from the roof or other windows.

Our glorious crew.

I love using cloth diffusion especially, muslin. Bouncing off of it or lighting through it softens the light beautifully with great falloff. I’ll toss it on the floors to catch some bounce from the sun. I recently made a couple of batten strips using porcelain sockets and lumber, and am breaking them in on set. Cover them in muz and it gives a fantastic soft wrap around light. It’s my favorite light on set right now. When shooting on film, I especially love using unbleached muslin to help warm the light but with the Red, I feel like it introduces a yellow/slightly green hue that I don’t like in the light so I was favoring bleached muslin with 1/8^th or ¼ CTO.

Me and the AD, Aaron working out the schedule with a baseball bat.

The pace of our shooting was intense. Banging out six to seven pages a day was not uncommon. Without a great crew with a great sense of humor, it would not have been impossible. Someone else gets credit for this metaphor but if you’ve made a short before, it’s a mad sprint for the week or weekend that you shoot. A feature is a marathon where you find a rhythm and have time to think about what you are doing and process things as you watch and discuss dailies. NANCY PLEASE’s schedule made me feel like we are sprinting a marathon. No feature ever has enough money or time as the nature of the process is to maximize your resources. But, with this schedule, every day was an accelerated push and the only rhythm we found was to move fast. We did a 7 7/8 page day with a company move and our record is a 9 page day with a big day interior scene, a night for day scene and a quick exterior shot. The page count may sound scary but we kept our setups to a minimum and were able to accomplish a lot. I tried to keep my lighting small and flexible so that we could move fast. Ideally on days where we were shooting daylight with a huge page count, I tried to shoot all natural light. But, with these short autumn days, we lose sunlight fast. Within our first week of production alone, we had already lost twenty minutes of daylight and there were times I needed to figure out a consistent look across scenes that were over five-pages long.  We were always playing a bit of scheduling tetris to shoot scenes at the right time of day. One side of our house faced east and the other west. I tried to schedule scenes on certain sides of the house to get the right light but with varying degrees of success.

One location we shot at with long scenes was a school. Ideally I would light everything from outside so we wouldn’t have to move a jungle of equipment to turn around but we were on the second floor of a schoolhouse and weren’t able to bring our lights high enough outside the windows. So using HMIs inside became the plan, which can be hard to control. But we had a large classroom with room to spare, so we bounced them around off beadboard to augment what the sun would do.  I like to think I’m not slow but on this film, I learned to light quicker and more efficiently but still get the look I want. Without time to think and with some locations coming in at the last second, lighting became instinctual.

Our ACs getting focus marks for a dolly shot.

The Cooke Speed Panchros are gorgeous. Each lens in the set has it’s own idiosyncrasies. I’ve fallen in love with their look. Our set is a little mismatched color wise with the 75mm being super warm, almost like shooting with an 85 filter.

Time to sleep and do some laundry.

Until next month, here is a clip from one of my favorite films, La Haine, directed by Matthieu Kassovitz. This shot in particular kills me, with the blocking and the camera move. The choreography of it is so simple but so effective, it always impresses me. Sorry, I could only find a French version without subtitles of the clip online.

La Haine, gun clip

In the initial stages of trying to figure out how to approach shooting a film, I will usually cull a host of visual references from films to art, and create a visual reference book. In drawing the style for Nancy, Please, Andrew and I discussed Paper Chase, shot by Gordon Willis, Harris Savides’ work on Birth (one of my favorite cinematographers!) as well as the works of photographers such as William Eggleston, Saul Leiter, and Robert Frank. All these works serve as guidelines to start talking about camera movement, framing, lighting, color palette. This is one of my favorite parts in working on films: the process of finding the language of the film with the director. You learn very quickly that no one thinks about filmmaking the same way. I’ve worked with directors who don’t like to move the camera, not even a pan, but I’ve also worked with directors who love to dolly, love handheld, love silhouettes, hate the color purple, the list goes on. I learn with every film because every film is a different creative process and stepping into new processes expands my sensibilities as an artist.

William Eggleston, Huntsville, Alabama, 1971. We were drawn to the color palette and the composition (lens choice and framing) which strongly conveys the man’s isolation.

The cinematography I enjoy the most is when blocking and camera movement tell the story of the scene. I love working with the director and developing blocking that can allow the shot to stay alive for an entire scene. I always try to show Days of Being Wild in preproduction because I think that film is simple and yet masterful in its use of blocking and camera work. Brad and I really explored that in the Al and Ivy scenes walking through the city and at home with the dancing robot in The Exploding Girl. We planted the camera and let the camera describe the scene sometimes leaving the actor’s faces to catch their gesture. Kit and I also did something similar in her feature, Fog (currently on the festival circuit after premiering at Edinburg and Singapore). We tried to mesh Dardene brothers with Hou Hsiao Hsien, doing long choreographed handheld takes yet keeping it very still. I think we achieved a really interesting aesthetic, and I found that I love dollying while hand holding, it gives a great floating feeling. I’m so glad those two films were the first two features I shot because, through those films I feel like I learned how to see with the camera, how a long take can engage a viewer to really observe and discover things on screen. If the moment and the story is right, you don’t have to resort to cutting to new angels. Let’s find a way to let the camera do the talking, to let the camera show you the world. I try to remind directors when on set we get lost in coverage, shot reverse shot this and that, that we should be trying to cover the experience, not just dialogue. But that can be hard to remember especially if you are getting swallowed by the logistics and rushing to meet your page count every day, which comes to my next point below.

Shooting on an overpass in Hong Kong, on the set of Fog directed by Kit Hui. Photo by Ivy Lam.

Days of Being Wild. I think it’s one of the best films Chris Doyle ever shot.

Nancy Please, like many independent features, has an ambitious schedule. This will be my fifth feature as cinematographer and if I’ve learned anything through practice and working with good producers, it is how to better manage the schedule in order to protect the process. Again with The Exploding Girl, there would be times me and Brad would be brain dead at the end of a long shoot day, but we would take the time and energy to dig through the next day’s schedule because we wanted to allow enough time to for the creative process to happen. Now, whenever I look at a schedule and see that we are changing lighting setups, I try to find a way to steal scenes. I look for simple things we can break away and shoot quickly while the G&E team turns things around. Or, similarly, I try to start the day with scenes that don’t require a lot of lighting or rigging just so the lighting crew can get stuff going while we shoot. It’s common sense but it helps establish and maintain a momentum. I shot a short, Three Prayers for June directed by Inna Braude, that was scheduled almost eight pages a day (all night interior, one location), Law & Order speed shooting. I took this as a personal challenge to see if we could do it. It wasn’t easy with scenes that required a live chicken and a live fire, but we made it after even without the eighty person crew of Law & Order, though we did pull two fourteen hour days.

Shooting in Tompkins Square Park for The Exploding Girl directed by Bradley Rust Gray.

Lastly, to geek out about the gear a bit: We are shooting Nancy, Please on the Red with the MX upgrade and Cooke S2/S3 lenses. I am really excited to be shooting this project with the Cooke Speed Panchros. In general, I enjoy putting older lenses in front of digital sensors like shooting with Zeiss Superspeeds on the Red. I find that modern lenses, especially on digital sensors, can sometimes feel very cold and maybe too sharp. The Cooke lenses are sharp but have a rounder, warmer look, with more flare, gentle focus fall off and great bokeh. The idea to use the Speed Panchros came about when Andrew and I talked about the look and feel of the film. It was clear that since the film is essentially about a man who is emotionally impotent and we wanted the film to have a lower contrast, muted look that matches his own lack of clarity and direction. Some films I like that were shot with Cooke Speed Panchros: An Education, Delicatessen, and Virgin Suicides. So much of digital cinema discussion is centered around pixel-peeping (e.g., codec, MB/s, resolution) and having enough information or latitude on the sensor to get the right look in post, what gets lost in the conversation is how much the lenses itself have to do with the personality of the image. I was tempted to try the Bausch & Lamb Super Baltars on the Red but they are hard to find and surprisingly not as cheap as I had hoped, putting it out of our reach—sadly. Harris Savides used them on both Birth and Margot at the Wedding, among others. Someday soon.

Until next month, here’s a little scene I love:

Godard’s Band of Outsiders has a similar tale of a legless bird that never lands. I think that’s where WKW got it. This shot of Leslie dancing kills me.