HARRIS SAVIDES, ASC USES A NEW WORKFLOW FOR ZODIAC

By David Geffner
Photos by Merrick Morton

From late December 1968 until early October 1969, a man who called himself “Zodiac” accounted for a brutal series of attacks and murders that baffled the combined police efforts in four Northern California counties. The perpetrator sent letters and ciphers to at least three Bay Area newspapers, brazenly taunting police and reporters like no other serial killer had since the infamous Jack The Ripper terrified Victorian London nearly a century before. As in the Ripper killings, the Zodiac was never caught. In his wake, careers were made and undone, and the lives of those obsessed with the notorious murders were dramatically changed, forever.

The movie, Zodiac, takes an unusual approach to a genre that its director, David Fincher, had already revolutionized a decade ago with the brilliantly dark-hearted Se7en. Based on two bestselling books (Zodiac and Zodiac Unmasked) by Robert Graysmith, a one-time political cartoonist at the San Francisco Chronicle who personally resurrected the investigation when the trail went cold, Zodiac is more about the living victims left in the wake of the most puzzling group of serial killings in American history than those done in by the mysterious sociopath. Fincher’s story covers several decades as it follows Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) and his street-wise colleague at the Chronicle, crime reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey, Jr.). It also tracks the San Francisco Police Department’s main detectives on the Zodiac case, Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) and Bill Armstrong (Anthony Edwards). The lives of these men, all obsessed with solving the Zodiac crimes, intersect and spin off in surprising directions: Avery became undone by personal addictions and left the paper; Graysmith transformed his love for puzzles and ciphers into a new life as a true crime writer; Toschi (whose character inspired the films Dirty Harry, The Streets of San Francisco and Bullitt) fell from public grace when he was accused of authoring a Zodiac letter to revive his career; Armstrong left homicide detail when the evidence against the prime suspect, a Vallejo refinery worker named Arthur Leigh Allen, was never quite enough to procure a search warrant and arrest.

Inevitably, Zodiac will be compared to Se7en. But a search for a serial killer is the only thing the two films share in common. Where Fincher’s earlier, fictional effort was set in an unnamed metropolis dripping with atmosphere and style, Zodiac’s palette is total restraint. Camera movement is kept to a minimum, and the wide-screen frame is filled with scrupulous attention to duplicating the real San Francisco Bay locations of thirty-plus years ago. As cinematographer Harris Savides, ASC, who shot the landmark credits for Se7en, notes about Zodiac’s clean and lean approach: “the story had so much expository information to get across. At every point in the process, we thought about clarity. How does this angle make the

dual-link 4:4:4 monitor. Through pre-production testing, Savides and Fincher arrived at a series of magenta filters to place in front of the Viper’s sensors, which made the image look “semi- normal,” in the words of Mavromates. “Not one hundred percent, but not nearly as flat and green as typical RAW digital capture.” Look-up tables were created from Savides’ pre-production testing, and used by Fincher to view dailies for roughly half the production. The DP says he never felt look-up tables were applicable for his goals with lighting. “I became very comfortable with the appearance of the RAW capture and began to really like it,” he chuckles.

Savides did rigorous pre-production testing on the Viper for highlight clippings and tolerance with deep blacks, much of Zodiac takes place outdoors at night, including many of the key murder scenes. Fully conversant with 35mm’s broad range (Kodak touts 10-12 stops for selected stocks), Savides was thrown off-balance by the Viper’s enigmatic qualities. Other than problems handling backlight, the Viper’s range was inconsistent and subject to experimentation. The DP used the proprietary Zeiss DigiPrimes. His complement ranged from a 5mm-T1.9 to a 70mm-T1.6 close focus. According to Savides, all the lenses performed well, looked great, and avoided flaring. But he was particularly impressed with the super-fast Zeiss 6-24mm-T1.9 digital zoom lens. Given the Viper’s anomalies during testing, Savides tossed aside his light meter once shooting began and worked from instinct. “The HD monitors were incredible. You’d see shadow and chromatic detail that you’d never see in NTSC or PAL,” he recounts. “But they tended to overcompensate in low light. Sometimes I felt like a Hazeltine operator trying to interpret how the digital technology saw what I had lit on the set.” Savides says that in retrospect, he may have gone too far in low-level lighting. “The Viper’s chip needs to be tickled and kept happy,” he laughs, “and some of the things I tried may have been better left to the full range of color manipulation available in digital post.” One example was a scene where Toschi and Armstrong go to interview famed personal injury attorney, Melvin Belli, who had received a hand-written Christmas card from the Zodiac in late December, 1969. Savides used separate close-ups on each investigator that were, in his words, “extremely dark.” He says because the location was crammed tight with equipment, he had to use bounced light off the dark-wood ceiling. “I was concerned we’d gone too far for the Viper and needed to see the scene projected,” he recalls. “I recently saw a finished digital screening, and I was happy with it. It’s hard to put into words, but the imagery is evocative, and makes you feel something.”

One location that was challenging for the Viper was the San Francisco Chronicle newsroom, built as a set in the old Post Office in the Terminal Annex Building in downtown Los Angeles. Given the location’s large expanse and need for wide-angle coverage, lighting had to be done from above. Savides did tests with various fluorescent bulbs to use inside of the existing fixtures. Shooting from mostly low angles, the Viper tended to “bloom” more than expected, but it wasn’t, as Savides noted, “a bad thing at all.” Other scenes, like when Graysmith visits possible suspect Rick Marshall’s basement at night, were filled with the type of creepiness we’ve come to expect from David Fincher. Savides says the scene was lit with practicals, augmented with incandescent bulbs in the back of the anamorphic frame to avoid spilling off into total blackness. Speaking of the wide-screen aspect ratio, one of the Viper’s strengths, according to a recent Web interview with Fincher, is the camera’s native ability with the 16 x 9 pixel array to give full use of the 1920/1080p across the 2:37:1 anamorphic aspect ratio. In his comments for Digital Content Producer.com, Fincher says he wanted to get as much resolution as possible, and did not want to crop the frame top to bottom. “Why start out with a 2K image, and then throw a third of the frame away?” asks the filmmaker.

Savides says his working relationship with the notoriously meticulous director was more “facilitator than collaborator.” Although the DP admits he was “slightly in awe” of Fincher’s methods, his philosophy of lighting didn’t change for Zodiac. In fact, Savides’ less-is-more lighting schemes were a good match for a story that is so packed with exposition; the volume of pre-production research material alone could have filled ten times the 40 terabytes of hard drive space that occupied Zodiac’s post-production unit, led by editor Angus Wall. Savides says he prefers to light spaces that the characters can inhabit, rather than pick out actors within the frame. I always kept the instruments on Zodiac very simple, even for the exteriors.”

A case in point was the film’s first deadly attack, on Darlene Ferrin and Michael Mageau in a Vallejo park, shortly after midnight on the fourth of July. Ferrin died on the way to the hospital. But Mageau survived the shootings, later identifying the man Robert Graysmith becomes convinced was the true Zodiac killer. “Once we had scouted the location and knew how the scene was going to develop,” Savides describes, “with the boy and girl parked in the car, and the killer driving in toward them, I asked for a single lamp post that would help motivate the lighting. It’s dark, it’s late, and the spot is known as a place for kids to go make out, so there wasn’t any need to push the motivation beyond what existed. We did have to bring the light down when we did some of the closer shots on the girl in the car. But otherwise it was mostly just using open-faced fixtures, like blondes and redheads with 1/4 CTO that was enough to do the trick.” Savides says his minimal use of instruments, for a scene in Arthur Leigh Allen’s trailer, he lit through the windows using HMIs bounced into gryflon as skylight, and smaller HMI units, which were used as a hard, directional light, would occasionally raise eyebrows with the Viper’s imaging technicians. “But I just kept doing what came naturally until I got called into the principal’s office,” he laughs. (One point of note: Fincher wanted to extend the emotional time of the Blue Rock Springs murder scene with high-speed VFX. Digital high speed without compression was not yet available, so Savides tested the VFX with both the Viper and 35mm, taking the two formats through the pipeline and getting a 98% match. The VFX took up 10 seconds of screen time, and was ultimately shot by Savides on Kodak 5229. Mavromates delivered negative to Digital Domain, which sent back DPX files that dropped in seamlessly to the tapeless post flow.)

The last killing attributed to the Zodiac was the murder of a San Francisco cabdriver in a wealthy neighborhood near the Presidio. The murder was actually witnessed by three teenage siblings from their 2nd floor window directly across the street from the cab. They saw the Zodiac cut away a swath of the victim’s bloody shirt, wipe down parts of the cab’s interior and exterior, and then casually saunter away. Amazingly, the same family still lives in the Presidio Heights brownstone, and they wanted no part of reliving the tragic events. So the Zodiac team recreated the Washington and Cherry exterior in Los Angeles as a built location. The scene begins with Toschi and Armstrong approaching in their squad car, accounting for the only two shots that don’t have a digital effects component: one side of the street was shot by Savides in San Francisco, the remainder was recreated as a massive multi-block artificial set. Curbs were built with the taxicab nearby, and building facades, one for behind the cab, the other, for where the children gaze out of their window, were constructed. Complicating matters was Fincher’s desire to have the scene shot handheld. “We used blue screens as the actors moved around the cab,” Savides recalls. “The effects people from Digital Domain went up to San Francisco and used photo mapping to replace the other side of the street and both intersections. It was an amazing way to execute a night exterior where an entire street location is shown in frame, and the camera is moving. I’m sure most other filmmakers would have just locked off the camera to allow for the digital replacement.”

Amazing, complex, unprecedented, these terms have been bandied about when describing David Fincher’s use of the Viper’s media-free workflow on Zodiac. In truth, what made the process so unique was the amount of talented creative people used to harness a technology that has, up until this point, been mostly the domain of engineers. Still, it is ironic to note that the Zodiac’s claim to fame was his obsession with intricate strings of ciphers and codes, only one of which was ever cracked (within a week of its publication by a Salinas high school teacher); much of Fincher’s methodology in using the Viper’s raw data capture has been considered equally mystifying, those unable to “crack the code,” consider the workflow overly convoluted when compared to 35mm.

Harris Savides says the rewards about working with the Viper have to be put into perspective. “The benchmark for me has always been film, and this was a more challenging way to make a movie,” Savides concludes. “I feel like we’re still experiencing digital cinematography in its infancy, and there are a lot of growing pains. We’re basically replacing large, cumbersome film cameras and crews with even more complex and cumbersome digital technology, with results that are roughly equal to, or in some cases, not as good as film. If this technology leads to the creation of a more flexible and streamlined shooting process, then that would be great. If I was part of that change with Zodiac then that would be great.”