AMERICAN CINEMA T OGRAPHER • APRIL 2010

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A M E R I C A N C I N E M ATO G R A P H E R • A P R I L 2 0 1 0 • A L I C E I N W O N D E R L A N D - G R E E N Z O N E - H U B B L E 3 - D - S U N DA N C E F I L M F E S T I VA L • V O L . 9 1 N O. 4
APRIL 2010
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The International Journal of Motion Imaging
On Our Cover: Alice (Mia Wasikowska) returns to the magical world of her childhood
adventure in Alice in Wonderland, shot by Dariusz Wolski, ASC. (Photo by Leah Gallo,
courtesy of Disney Enterprises, Inc.)
FEATURES
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48
60
72
Down the Rabbit Hole
Dariusz Wolski, ASC crafts whimsical images for
Alice in Wonderland
Weapons of Deception
Barry Ackroyd, BSC takes aim on Green Zone
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The Final Frontier in 3 Dimensions
James Neihouse trains astronauts to shoot in
Imax for Hubble 3-D
Sundance 2010: Expanded Palettes
This year’s artful indies employed a variety of formats
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DEPARTMENTS
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10
12
14
20
88
92
98
100
100
102
104
Editor’s Note
President’s Desk
Letters
Short Takes: The History of Aviation
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Production Slate: Lebanon • Brooklyn’s Finest
Filmmakers’ Forum: Michael Goi, ASC and Jeff Okun, VES
New Products & Services
International Marketplace
Classified Ads
Ad Index
Clubhouse News
ASC Close-Up: Rene Ohashi
— VISIT WWW.THEASC.COM TO ENJOY THESE WEB EXCLUSIVES —
DVD Playback: Boogie Nights • GoodFellas • Ran
Book Reviews: Federico Fellini: The Films • Akira Kurosawa: Master of Cinema
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Sundance 2010: Expanded Palettes
Southern District (Zona Sur)
Cinematographer:
Paul de Lumen
Director: Juan Carlos Valdivia
The camera remains indoors throughout His & Hers, often catching glimpses of
interviewees through windows.
notes, Wardrop would edit ultra-lowresolution copies of the day’s footage,
shot off of a clamshell monitor on set by
a Sony HVR-Z1U camcorder, which
Freedman used to record the audio. The
crew would watch the edited footage
each night after dinner and discuss their
plans for the next day.
As the filmmakers watched the
edited footage, Lavelle recalls, “We
found our choices of shots were becoming more limited, because we were
trying to build a flow and create a sense
of unity over the film.” Serendipitously,
the homes the filmmakers shot in
offered a naturally unifying color palette.
McCullough explains, “The women had
their walls painted in such a way that
you would think someone had done
production design. Pastels were a motif,
and what the women wore was often
matched to their environment.”
Throughout His & Hers, the
camera remains indoors; if an interviewee steps outside, the camera watches
through a window. “These ladies were
welcoming us into their homes, and it
felt like we should stay in their homes
for the whole film,” says Lavelle. “That
visual motif became very strong in the
film.
“At the very end, we take the
camera outside and see a woman inside,”
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April 2010
he continues. As the nonagenarian sits
alone in a nursing home, Lavelle says,
the audience is “left with a sense of
inevitability, which says enough, I think.
We thought about putting in moments
like marriage, birth and death, but in
the end, those are just hinted at. We
don’t show a wedding, but we do show
a girl who’s just getting her wedding
dress washed. After a screening of the
film, a woman commented that we
think our lives are made up of really
momentous events, but it’s actually
these small moments that define our
lives. It was Ken’s vision to come up
with that type of stuff.”
The production’s negative was
processed at Film Lab North in Leeds.
Later, the digital grade was done with
colorist Angela McLellan at Screen
Scene in Dublin, and a 35mm festival
print was made on Kodak Vision
Premier 2393 at LipSync Post in
London.
Thrilled with the success of their
collaborations to date, Lavelle and
McCullough are currently preparing to
tackle a narrative feature as director and
cinematographer, respectively. “It’s good
fun to work together,” says Lavelle.
“Long may it continue!”
— Jon D. Witmer
American Cinematographer
One of the riskiest entries in the
World Cinema Dramatic Competition
was Southern District (Zona Sur), a
Bolivian film about a wealthy family in
suburban La Paz and their indigenous
Aymaran servants. Politically loaded and
stylistically unique, the film went out on
a limb, and the risk paid off: director/writer Juan Carlos Valdivia won the
festival’s directing and screenwriting
awards in the World Cinema category.
Additionally, Bolivia submitted the film
for Academy Awards consideration.
Bolivia is undergoing cultural
realignments as wealth slips from the
upper class and indigenous people gain
power. This became clear with the election of President Evo Morales, the first
Aymaran to hold the office. Valdivia put
his finger squarely in the wound during
a heated election year, addressing race
and class in a polarized culture, but
choosing a style that withholds judgment.
In the film, a matriarch lords over
her three children in a beautifully
appointed home, where a loyal indigenous butler and gardener take care of the
children’s needs and whims. However,
money is running out because of the
parents’ divorce. When the butler learns
of his son’s death, he leaves to attend the
funeral against the matriarch’s wishes.
This is followed by other turns of
fortune that disrupt established power
dynamics.
Valdivia describes the plot as
“minimal,” noting that the storyline “is
subverted for other elements, like
atmosphere. In fact, during the first
two-thirds of the movie, you could put
the scenes in different order and it
wouldn’t matter.”
What’s most striking is the design
Valdivia worked out with the film’s cinematographer, Paul de Lumen: Each
scene is a single shot lasting two to five
minutes, and each shot utilizes a slowly
rotating camera that makes up to four
360-degree turns per scene. The moves
are independent of the actors, who walk
in and out of frame. Because the characters are onscreen only 60 percent of the
time, viewers wind up observing the
house, which becomes a character as the
camera reveals its luxurious décor and
layers of family history.
This radical approach was motivated by several ideas. One was German
philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s theory of
human individualism, which utilizes the
metaphor of spheres. “We create
spheres, or bubbles of existence,” says
Valdivia. “These bubbles can be like
foam, a conglomeration of individual
spheres, but they are also individual
bubbles.” The family embodies this
social dynamic, while the circular
camerawork suggests the spheres they
each construct and are trapped within.
The moves also express an
Andean view of cyclical time. “Juan
Carlos wanted the feel of a clock, and he
wanted it to be unforgiving, like time,”
says de Lumen. “Using a remote head
facilitated that feel.”
De Lumen shot Southern District
with a Red One (Build 16), “the first in
South America,” according to Valdivia,
who acquired it in June 2008. He and de
Lumen, who is based in Los Angeles,
spent a year shooting commercials with
the camera before Southern District
came together. Valdivia wanted to shoot
his feature with the Red mainly because
he “wanted to prove you could make a
very well-made movie with digital
capture. It was a personal mission.”
For Southern District, they
captured at 4K Redcode Raw, the maximum resolution possible. Because some
scenes ran nearly five minutes, the
Compact Flash cards didn’t offer sufficient storage space, so de Lumen
recorded to the 320GB Red Drive.
(The production carried two.) “We were
able to shoot all the coverage of one
scene on that,” says de Lumen. “It was
about a half-day’s worth of shooting.”
Camera movement was performed in two basic ways: rotating on its
axis, or circling around a scene. Valdivia
used the architectural program
Sundance 2010: Expanded Palettes
Clockwise from above:
A frame from
Southern District;
cinematographer Paul
de Lumen (second
from left) checks the
rig, a Pelé Remote
Head underslung on a
custom hi-hat, which
was then mounted on
skateboard wheels;
director Juan Carlos
Valdivia (second from
left) and the cast
prepare for a shot at
the dinner table. The
dinner-table rig
includes a Kino Kamio
Ring-Light, which
helped with faces as
the rig revolved.
SketchUp, which even enabled lens
choices, to plan shots. He had an
architect render a 3-D model of the
practical location, then moved a
camera eye through it. These decisions
became a springboard for what de
Lumen calls a “jam session” on set.
Choreographing actors and camera
and finding the right speed for both
were time-consuming challenges.
They averaged 15 takes, sometimes
going up to 30. In effect, says de
Lumen, “that was our coverage: the
speed of the camera, size of the lens
and the blocking of actors. Those were
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April 2010
the ways we provided options for the
editor.”
De Lumen shot most of the
movie on a 24mm Arri Ultra Prime,
which was “wide enough to capture the
room without distorting the actors
when they got close to it. It was the
perfect lens for multiple coverage within
one shot.”
Key grip Rosendo Ticona created
a couple of rigs to achieve the clock-like
camera motion Valdivia wanted.
“Rosendo’s custom rigs enabled us to
take an ABC Products Pelé RemoteHead XL35 off the 10-meter jib and
American Cinematographer
apply it to other supports,” says de
Lumen. “One rig was a special hi-hat, so
we could mount the remote head onto a
dolly or baby legs. This allowed us to not
only rotate 360 degrees on its axis, but
also slide on dolly track to accommodate blocking and framing in tight situations.” Dolly grip Walter Achu was
often lying on the floor, inches out of
range of the camera’s view.
“Another custom rig was a jib arm
attached to the ceiling,” continues the
cinematographer. “We were able to
mount the remote head onto it to get a
circular floating feel that I could control
remotely. The dolly grip would gently
coast the camera around, and I would
control the pan and tilt. It created a
really unique feel that’s unlike
Steadicam, dolly or crane.” This was
utilized for the film’s sex scenes and the
penultimate “godmother” scene, in
which the mother is offered cash for the
house.
Gaffer Raul Hernandez worked
closely with Ticona to create special
rigging for the lights. “There’s not an
abundance of normal rigging material
[in Bolivia] like C-clamps, gobo-heads,
C-stands or spreaders,” notes de
Lumen. “This was important because
we were shooting in a practical location
where there was very little room to hide
lights.”
De Lumen and Valdivia supervised the 2K digital intermediate at
Filmosonido in Santiago, Chile. (The
goal was a 35mm print at 1.85:1.) In the
Southern District frame grab and photos courtesy of Cinenomada. Photos by Martin Jordan and Paul de Lumen.
◗
color-correction, de Lumen smoothed
out uneven lamp temperatures, finessed
varying skin tones, and fine-tuned white
walls, which predominate in the house.
The festival print was struck on Fuji
Eterna-CP 3513DI.
As significant as Southern
District’s technical challenges were, the
project’s biggest challenge was devising
a whole new visual language and trusting that the audience would “get it,” says
de Lumen. “I’d been shooting commercials, where you need to get something
across in 30 seconds. You tell viewers
what they want to feel. Southern District
does the opposite.” He acknowledges
that there were moments when he
feared the movie’s style might seem
pretentious, boring or even dizzying. It
wasn’t until several scenes were cut
together that he and Valdivia were
completely convinced of the rightness of
their approach. “The more I watch the
film, the more I respect Juan Carlos for
having the guts to stick with it,” says de
Lumen.
— Patricia Thomson
“It’s an extraordinary thing to teach
film without reducing it to techniques
and rules, and yet teach the rigour
and effort that is necessary to
improve your work .”
Cane Toads: The Conquest 3-D
Cinematographers:
Toby Oliver, ACS;
Kathryn Milliss; and
Paul Nichola
Director: Mark Lewis
1935 marks Year Zero for one of
Australia’s biggest environmental disasters: 102 cane toads were introduced
into the country as the solution to the
Greyback Cane Beetle, which was decimating the Queensland sugar-cane
industry. Despite their reputation as
voracious devourers of living and dead
matter, the toads had other ideas.
Instead of eliminating the beetle, they
utilized their other voracious appetite
— breeding — and today, an estimated
1.5 billion toads have migrated across
Northern Australia, with no end in sight
to their continental conquest.
Mark Lewis’ Cane Toads: The
Conquest was the first 3-D feature to
screen at Sundance, and the first
Australian feature to shoot in 3-D.
Paz Fabrega, 2006 MA Filmmaking graduate.
Paz's first feature Agua fría de mar won the
Tiger Award at the Rotterdam Film Festival
2010. She was selected for the 2009 Cannes
Cinefondation Residence programme.
THE LFS TWO-YEAR
MA FILMMAKING
PROGRAMME
STARTS IN JANUARY,
MAY AND SEPTEMBER.
To find out more about training in all
departments, on a minimum of six film
exercises, including two 35mm projects,
in a working studio with students from
30 countries visit
lfs.org.uk
THE LONDON FILM SCHOOL
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