Local 600 Cinematographers Take Sundance By Storm

Consider that for this year’s Sundance Film Festival, 118 feature-length films were selected including 87 world premieres, 19 North American premieres, and four U.S. premieres representing 21 different countries. These films were selected from 3,661 feature-length film submissions, composed of 1,905 U.S. and 1,756 international films. For us here at Local 600, that translates into a bumper crop for the New Year: nearly 40 percent of all the features selected for the 2009 Sundance Film Festival were shot by Local 600 cinematographers. That’s the largest number of Guild cinematographers with projects since the festival’s inception, offering even more proof that Local 600 members have penetrated every level of filmmaking in the industry, from the mega-budget Hollywood tent pole flicks we’ve always been known for, on down to the micro-budget indies that created the Sundance brand. Read more

Sundance Focus: Innovision Probe II

With the INNOVISION PROBE II, a tubular lens that offsets from the camera, I can put my lens anywhere in a car without being restricted - on the dashboard, through the steering wheel, or even overhead - and set up is quick. I can also move the camera in ways that are impossible with conventional lenses. On the movie Staten Island I did a shot that started on the New York skyline. The camera pulls back to reveal the interior of a car with Ethan Hawke staring out the passenger’s window. The camera continues to pull back to reveal the driver and then pulls out through the driver’s window to reveal that they are in a truck at a red light. The truck pulls away and we end on the skyline again. With creative options like that, the Probe II gives my films a competitive edge at festivals like Sundance. I’m always looking for opportunities to use it.  –DP Chris Norr

Credits: What Doesn’t Kill You, Staten Island, The Hottest State, Second Best, One Last Thing…, Into the Fire, Timeless

www.innovision-optics.com

Surviving Sundance

FOUR Park City publicity pros offer SEVEN tips to the 10 craziest days in January.

By Margot Carmichael Lester

PARK CITY IN JANUARY … To indie filmmakers and their crews, those four simple words are akin to winning the lottery. To the Local 600 publicists who represent Sundance movies (or those heading up to the mountains to promote the filmmakers), the phrase can send a lightning strike of anxiety and stress searing right through their Blackberries. What began as a “casual” little film festival has become the hot industry ticket, and nothing screams that more loudly than the marketing avalanche cascading down Main Street every winter. Linda Brown-Salomone, owner of Indie PR in Studio City, Calif., has been representing films at Sundance for 15 years. She says the festival has become a media frenzy like none other. Now, “the biggest star names and quirkiest of campaigns [are the ones] most often winning press time and space over a truly magical film that may deserve it more,” the Sundance regular observes. So let’s say you have a film that got in and it’s your first time down the slopes. How can you keep from getting buried alive? Here are seven tips to surviving the Sundance publicity game:
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Exposure: James Gray

New York City-native James Gray studied filmmaking at the University of Southern California and made his first commercial film, Little Odessa, in 1994, when he was just 25 years old. That film (photographed by Tom Richmond) earned the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival. Since then, Gray has written and directed The Yards (2000, photographed by Harris Savides, ASC), We Own the Night (2007), and the forthcoming Two Lovers (both photographed by Joaquin Baca-Asay), all of which were each nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes.

Gray’s cinematic turf is Brooklyn, where Two Lovers is set. But unlike past forays into the borough’s criminal underworld, the romantic drama features Joaquin Phoenix as a downhearted man, driven to connect with a dangerous woman (Gwyneth Paltrow). According to his colleagues, Gray is well versed in cinematic history and often describes his ideas by referring to specific scenes and shots from older movies.  David Heuring caught up with this fiercely independent, regional filmmaker to get at the heart of his fascination with Brooklyn, and his working relationships with creative partners like Baca-Asay and Phoenix.

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A Most Excellent Adventure

Trains, planes, and ocean liners! Cinematographer Steve Yedlin employs sleight-of-hand for the world’s biggest low-budget movie, The Brothers Bloom

by Nic Gardner

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Exposure: David Fincher

Since his debut feature, Alien3, in 1992, David Fincher has been a fearless “first adopter” of new technologies and production methodologies to change the face of genre films; using bleach-bypass to evoke the bleak and nameless urban metropolis in the crime drama Se7en or employing a virtual cinematography workflow to achieve otherwise impossible camera fly-throughs in his gripping modernization of the home invasion film, Panic Room.

Fight Club, made in 1999 was the second of Fincher’s three collaborations with Brad Pitt, and the film seems ageless, still reflecting the zeitgeist nearly ten years after its debut; likewise for his first teaming with Pitt, Se7en, which blew apart the conventions of the serial killer movie and sparked a slew of stylistic imitators. Of course predicting being ahead of the curve isn’t anything new for Fincher, who began his career as an assistant cameraman at ILM shooting miniatures for the Star Wars and Indian Jones franchises. His trend-setting music video work made him an early star with Propaganda Films, which went on to launch some of the industry’s most original talents – Michel Gondry, Neil LaBute, Spike Jonze, and Gore Verbinski to name just a few. Talk about prescient: Fincher’s commercial spot for AT&T (You Will) gave consumers a “peek” into their own wireless, Web-obsessed future way back in 1993; ditto ten years later with his all-digital spot for HP (Constant Change).

Early word on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (see cover story), shot by Fincher’s one-time gaffer and more recently, his commercial DP, Claudio Miranda (and again featuring Brad Pitt in the title role), indicates an odds-on favorite at next year’s Oscars. A morality play and love story that covers more than nine decades in American History, Button puts visual styling and special effects in the service of character and story like no other David Fincher film before.

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ICG December 2008

FEATURES

THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON
DP Claudio Miranda
By Kevin H. Martin

HURRICANE SEASON
DP Larry Blanford
By Phillip Williams

FRINGE
DP Michael Bonvillain, ASC
By Matt Hurwitz

DEPARTMENTS

FLASH FRAME
Eric Steelberg
Craig Haagesen

EXPOSURE
David Fincher

GEAR GUIDE
Indie Tools

SPECIALS

ANYWHERE, USA
By Nic Gardner

OY VEY!
By Pauline Rogers

REGIONAL FILM SCHOOLS PROFILED

Fountain of Youth

Cinematographer Claudio Miranda climbs into the way-back machine to help visualize David Fincher’s stunning adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ageless short story.
By Kevin H. Martin
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Operation Imperative – Part I

Riddle me this: what do Touch of Evil’s three-and-one-half minute opening crane shot, Saving Private Ryan’s Normandy beach invasion, or Bound For Glory’s dusty ramble through a California migrant camp all have in common? If you said they’re among the most famous shots in movie history you’re only half right. What they all shared, lest we forget, were four extremely gifted craftsmen - Phillip Lathrop, Mitch Dubin, Chris Haaroff, and Garrett Brown - operating the cameras.

Memorable shots, indeed entire movies, are canonized down through the ages, but how often are the hands behind the matte boxes, the ones actually guiding the magic box ever linked with their creations? Not nearly enough. That’s why we’re presenting Operation Imperative, our three-part exploration into one of this industry’s least acknowledged yet perhaps its most essential craft. We begin with a Q & A comprised of Dan Kneece, President of the Society of Camera Operators (SOC) whose most recent film is the highly anticipated adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s best-seller The Road, Cleve Landsberg, producer and UPM, who has worked on features from Bruce Almighty and Weekend At Bernie’s to long-form television, and Academy Award winning cinematographer John Toll, ASC, who began his storied career as an operator on films like Scarface and Urban Cowboy. Together this trio has more than 75 years of experience on movie and television sets. In Part I of our series, they chew over the recent contract provision that allows a director of photography to operate, and share their perspectives on why not using an operator may well be a disadvantage to producers in cost and quality.

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Still Photography: LitePanels Micro

This little LED unit, which offers continuous output and runs on AA batteries, is attachable to both Nikon and Canon stills cameras. Litepanels Micro for Stills can be dialed up to supply just the right amount of light to fill unflattering shadows and bring the subject’s face and eyes to life. No more red-eye or flash fill.
The Micro for Stills features an integrated dimmer 100% to 0 and runs 1.5 hours on 4 AA cells (Alkaline) and 7-8 hours on E2 Lithium AA batteries. It works with stills and camcorders, as focusing aid in low light, close ups, and can use warming and diffusion filters.
“I recently was able to use this light source in a setting having nothing to do with a film set,” says Barry Wetcher, the first unit stills photographer to use the new Litepanels Micro for stills. “I think it can be a great tool to have attached to a camera for those moments when you need to just have a little more light to make an exposure.”
Wetcher says he likes that the Litepanels allow him to dial in the intensity of the light. “We’ve all seen DP’s hand hold LED bricks just to get a little ‘something’ on the face,” he explains. “Now in some situations, we can do the same. For example, when the cameras aren’t rolling and it’s too dark to capture a candid moment without using a flash. I also like that this unit has a built-in filter holder to help match the color temperature of source lights on the set.”    www.litepanels.com

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