Cinematography

The cinematographer is directly responsible for the image.  Light and shadow and framing are the core essentials of  any image:  lens choice, filters, lighting instruments, scrims, reflectors, shades are just some of the tools to paint those essentials… And each camera has different capabilities, weaknesses and strengths to be adapted to.  In Chicken’s case, our main camera was a Canon C100 augmented by  an Atomos Ninja Recorder.

Matt Cooper at the camera - photo by Swati Srivastava

Matt Cooper at the camera – photo by Swati Srivastava

Additionally is the camera active or passive… or more specifically, is the camera using a fixed prime lens or a zoom and/or is the camera body moving or not?   And of course, focus changes with movement… and that’s not just about staying in focus, but choosing what is in focus, i.e shallow or deep focus.  Different choices about the same content changes both how the content is perceived and how the viewer feels.

Why bring up such basic concepts?

Why to reinforce the accomplishments of Matt Cooper, who under rather imperfect conditions – sometimes what is commonly called “guerrilla” filmmaking – pulled the proverbial rabbit out of the magician’s hat.  As producer, I made sure to rent Cooper the lighting and grip equipment that he absolutely, minimally needed, for after all, we had interiors and outdoor night shooting to accomplish.  BUT the budget simply didn’t allow for the full wish list that would make things easy, let alone easier.  A hundred dollars here, a hundred dollar there, suddenly that added up to “real” money.  While I relatively splurged by agreeing to rent the Cineped Rotational Slider, I dearly would have wanted to give Cooper another gaffer for faster set-ups and an assistant  camera person so he could have a focus puller, and especially rent a Steadicam instead of the simple shoulder rig he used for his hand-held shots, and so on.

But Cooper found solutions to the limitations:  an example of Cooper’s ingenuity was how to shoot the “road trip” dialogue in a moving  car.  A studio production or even an indie with a sizable budget would have put the car on a trailer, a flat bed truck  or used a large crane like apparatus attached to the outside of the car.  Alternately, I could have bought a small GoPro camera, but he saved me money and kept our equipment – and thus the image – more consistent, by using a suction cup rig to attach the camera upside down into the corner of the car window. (* see note below)

In regards to that road trip footage, in the script, it’s a continuous scene occurring at dusk during cloudy weather.  In real life, because of pragmatic reasons, it was shot in 5 different locations, all at different times of the day, and only once truly at dusk, and never under cloudy conditions.  Cooper had to shoot all of these knowing they would be edited together as a whole, and thus had to use all of the tools mentioned above to create a coherent visual narrative.  Furthermore, as he also acted as the film’s Colorist too, he completed the process by grading all of this disparate footage to match together.   (Note:  there were some brief coverage shots taken during cloudy skies filmed after principle photography that I did with a Nikon 7000 DSLR, and also added in one short piece of licensed footage, which of course, he also had to make seamless.)

Most people don’t realize that movies shot digitally are in Log Format, which basically means that the footage is initially in a gray scale, dull image, but (hopefully if shot well) there is a range of digital information inherent in the image where dynamic values of color, as well as whites and blacks, can be brought out in post-production processing.  Here is an example of before and after:

moments after Scene 16, Take A-1 ended.pctmoments after Scene 16, Take A-1 ended - color graded

 

 

 

 

Another example of the cinematographer planning the look of the film:   I discussed with Cooper my idea that each of the main characters had their own environmental, symbolic, color scheme: amber for Ray, red for Dave (so clearly seen in the split screen shot in the banner above), a balanced look for the nature scenes (which is the film is thematically are the location of possibility and redemption) with specialty looks for the movie theatre, the memory bunny hopping scene and fantasy bunny hopping scene.

Each of these looks had their own challenge to both film and to color grade. For instance, red is a particularly difficult environment to film in, especially when one’s lead actors are both very fair skinned… so getting a vibrant red, red background while maintaining a healthy looking skin tone on those two actors is an unsung accomplishment of subtlety.
ANGEL - welcome to Bob's - compressedHere is a full array of screen shots from the film:

Cinematography

(* That upside down image in the car was flipped right side up in the editing process.   I was the only person in the car with the actors, hidden and scrunched up a back aching ball in the backseat looking at the monitor.  Camera and sound rolled continuously for 20 minutes twice, without separating action and cuts for re-takes;  the car wash scene was handled completely differently – in that case, Cooper was alone in the back of the station wagon filming the actors from behind as I wanted the suds in the image.  Because the best acting take was actually a rehearsal before the camera rolled, that was sound editor magic getting that unsync’ed sound to match the image. )