Shooting Gallery 2009
All photographs, by definition, are “period” images. They capture a time and place that is ephemeral, and, in essence, gone the moment the shutter is snapped. Never again will what that shooter saw through the frame be exactly the way it was when he or she pushed the button on the camera. The same can be said for unit stills captured on period movies; even if the production has the ability to re-create a place, a time, a feeling over and again on a set or location, that moment captured through the lens by a Local 600 photographer – an actress warming herself under a big HMI light, a group of young background actors playing in a Slovakian square, an old Chevy Impala speeding mysteriously off into the night - is fleeting and one-of-a-kind. For our annual Shooting Gallery spread, featuring the very best of our members’ work-for-hire, we turn back the clock (and occasionally push it all the way forward) to highlight imagery captured during the production of features or television with period content. Diane Arbus once noted, “The more specific you are (with an image), the more general it will be,” and what is most surprising about the following photographs is not only their specificity for a lost time and place, but the energy and life contained within. As William Faulkner wrote, “Time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.”
Gear Guide: Digital Filmmaking
As digital cinematography becomes the rule instead of the exception for filmmakers in the documentary, news, television and even increasingly in the feature world, there is a hunger for more diverse and lightly encumbered, i.e., tether-free, technology. Every entertainment-oriented manufacturer and distributor is getting on the bandwagon, and a few that have serviced other industries, too.
This month, ICG features some exciting new products or processes that make digital cinema a smart, creative, and production-friendly choice. Once a “film only” company, Panavision, with their Genesis camera and other HD technology, has stepped up to the plate and found a way for cinematographers to view their HD footage on set in a way that cuts time, cost, and boosts creativity. Silicon Imaging, once a source for equipment only tangential to the movie industry, has exploded onto the scene with the camera that made quite an impact on the Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire.
And, of course, there are recorders, wireless transmitters and even peripherals. Let’s hope that one of this month’s offerings can help make your job, whether it is a no-budget HD documentary or a mega-budget feature film, easier, faster, and more creative.
Exposure: Nathan Crowley
Born in London, production designer Nathan Crowley began his career working as a set designer on Hook and has actually worked far more in the U.S. than in the U.K. He’s been involved on a wide range of projects, moving up the ranks through action, period epic and comedic films like Braveheart, John Carpenter’s Escape from L.A., Mystery Men, and Mission Impossible II. Crowley is probably best known for his four film collaborations with fellow Londoner, Christopher Nolan; those include Insomnia, Batman Begins, The Prestige and The Dark Knight, the latter two earning Oscar nominations for Best Achievement in Art Direction. Clearly, the versatile and talented designer has a way with period movies, whether it’s travelling back hundreds of years in the past to create a peat and fire village in the Scottish Highlands, or decades into the future for the wildly techno-noir Gotham City. It’s no wonder detail freak Michael Mann selected Crowley to recreate 1930’s gangland Middle America: his inventive approach to Public Enemies’ set design included fabricating a removable rubberized cobblestone street and re-welding the steel bars in the dilapidated Indiana jail from which Dillinger made his epic escape.
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Exposure: Chris Lebenzon
Any catalogue of major action films of the ’80s, ’90s or the current decade would be seriously lacking if it didn’t include more than a handful of titles edited or co-edited by Chris Lebenzon. The editor just completed work with director Tony Scott on The Taking of Pelham 123 but the pair first partnered up in 1986 on what was their mutual entrée to the world of studio action pictures, Top Gun. That film became an enormous hit and in many ways the template for today’s modern big-budget actioner. It also marked the beginning of the editor’s ongoing professional relationship with producer Jerry Bruckheimer, Scott, and other A-list directors, like Tim Burton and Michael Bay.
While Lebenzon’s resume has plenty of impressive credits outside the action genre -Ed Wood, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Burton’s Sweeney Todd adaptation to name a few - he keeps returning to the kind of edge-of-your seat kinetic filmmaking that he’s been so successful with. Days of Thunder, Armageddon, Con Air, xXx, Pearl Harbor, Crimson Tide, Batman Returns and Beverly Hills Cop II is but a partial listing.
“I never said, ‘I’m going to make action movies my career,’” Lebenzon explains. “It just happened as things do with our lives, especially in the movie business. It’s where my instincts and the people I worked with have taken me.”
Shooting Star
ICG July 2009
FEATURES
PUBLIC ENEMIES
DP Dante Spinotti, ASC, AIC
By Ted Elrick
SHOOTING GALLERY 2009
“Period” Theme
(500) DAYS OF SUMMER
DP Eric Steelberg
By Phillip Williams
DEPARTMENTS
DEPTH OF FIELD
Publicist Cheri Warner
FLASH FRAME
JoJo Whilden
Rudi Simpson
EXPOSURE
Production Designer Nathan Crowley
GEAR GUIDE
Still Photography
SPECIALS
UNIT PUBLICITY ROUND TABLE
David Fulton, Carol Green, and Peter Silbermann
By Pauline Rogers
SHOOTING ACTION SPORTS
By David Auerbach
OPERATION IMPERATIVE PART 3
By Francis James
Hitching A Ride
July 10, 2009 by editor
Filed under Web Exclusive
Pauline Rogers enters the fast lane of today’s “moving camera” super-highway.
