MAY 2011

$5.95Canada $6.95
 M E M B E R P O R T R A I T

Denis Lenoir, ASC, AFC

“I
used to ride my 18-speed
race bike to the Librairie
Contact, a small bookshop
near the Champs Élysées, the
only place in Paris where I
could buy American
Cinematographer. The ride
had to be carefully planned —
too soon and the issue wouldn’t
have arrived, too late and the
copies would all be sold. It was
the only way to learn how the
images I was discovering
onscreen had been achieved.
“I still rely on AC for
information as well as
inspiration. One sentence in
an article will initiate a chain
of thoughts, which will then
lead me to try something
technically or stylistically
different on my next project.”

— Denis Lenoir, ASC, AFC

©photo by Owen Roizman, ASC

TO SUBSCRIBE BY PHONE:
Call (800) 448-0145 (U.S. only)
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M A Y 2 0 1 1 V O L . 9 2 N O . 5

The International Journal of Motion Imaging

On Our Cover: Bill and Pat Loud (Tim Robbins and Diane Lane) see their marriage and
family disintegrate on national television in Cinema Verite, shot by Affonso Beato, ASC,
ABC. (Photo by Doug Hyun, courtesy of HBO.)

FEATURES
28 Living Out Loud
Affonso Beato, ASC, ABC dramatizes television’s first reality
show for HBO’s Cinema Verite
40
40 A Saint and a Sinner
Gabriel Beristain, ASC, BSC explores spiritual conflict in
There Be Dragons

52 First Dance
Byron Shah assesses the Arri Alexa on Prom

60 Decoding Digital Imagers: Part 1 52

AC explains digital-imaging sensors

69 A Hollywood Affair
Snapshots from the ASC Awards weekend

DEPARTMENTS
69
8 Editor’s Note
10 President’s Desk
12 Short Takes: ASC William A. Fraker Heritage Award winners
16 Production Slate: Cameraman • Academy Sci-Tech Awards
82 Post Focus: The KB Workflow
84 New Products & Services
88 International Marketplace
89 Classified Ads
90 Ad Index
92 In Memoriam: Don Peterman, ASC
94 Clubhouse News
96 ASC Close-Up: Tobias Schliessler

— VISIT WWW.THEASC.COM TO ENJOY THESE WEB EXCLUSIVES —

D V D Playback:The Sweet Smell of Success • Network
 M a y 2 0 1 1 V o l . 9 2 , N o . 5
The International Journal ofMotion Imaging

Visit us online at
www.theasc.com
————————————————————————————————————
PUBLISHER Martha Winterhalter
————————————————————————————————————
EDITORIAL
EXECUTIVE EDITOR Stephen Pizzello
SENIOR EDITOR Rachael K. Bosley
ASSOCIATE EDITOR Jon D. Witmer
TECHNICAL EDITOR Christopher Probst

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
Stephanie Argy, Benjamin B, Douglas Bankston, Robert S. Birchard,
John Calhoun, Bob Fisher, Michael Goldman, Simon Gray, Jim Hemphill,
David Heuring, Jay Holben, Mark Hope-Jones, Noah Kadner, Jean Oppenheimer,
John Pavlus, Chris Pizzello, Jon Silberg, Iain Stasukevich,
Kenneth Sweeney, Patricia Thomson
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CREATIVE DIRECTOR Marion Gore
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CLASSIFIEDS/ADVERTISING COORDINATOR Diella Nepomuceno
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CIRCULATION, BOOKS & PRODUCTS
CIRCULATION DIRECTOR Saul Molina
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————————————————————————————————————
American Cinematographer (ISSN 0002-7928), established 1920 and in its 91st year of publication, is published
monthly in Hollywood by ASC Holding Corp., 1782 N. Orange Dr., Hollywood, CA 90028, U.S.A.,
(800) 448-0145, (323) 969-4333, Fax (323) 876-4973, direct line for subscription inquiries (323) 969-4344.
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g
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 &RPHYLVLWRXUVKRZURRPRUFDOOIRURXUODWHVW0DJOLQHUSURGXFWFDWDORJ
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American Society of Cine matographers

The ASC is not a labor union or a guild, but
an educational, cultural and pro fes sion al
or ga ni za tion. Membership is by invitation
to those who are actively en gaged as
di rec tors of photography and have
dem on strated out stand ing ability. ASC
membership has be come one of the highest
          
      honors that can be bestowed upon a
%DFNVWDJH(TXLSPHQW,QF‡/DQNHUVKLP%O‡1+ROO\ZRRG&$‡86$
%DFNVWDJH(TXLSPHQW,QF‡/DQNHUVKLP%O‡1+ROO\ZRRG&$‡86$ 1HZ<RUN6KRZURRP&:,+‡:WK6WUHHW‡1HZ<RUN1<‡86$
1 HZ<RUN6KRZURRP&:,+‡:WK6WUHHW‡1HZ<RUN1<‡86$ pro fes sional cin e ma tog ra pher — a mark
‡‡EDFNVWDJHG#DROFRP‡ZZZEDFNVWDJHZHEFRP
‡‡EDFNVWDJHG#DROFRP‡ZZZEDFNVWDJHZHEFRP 0U&$67(5‡EDFNVWDJH#FZLKFRP‡ZZZFZLKFRP
0U&$67(5‡EDFNVWDJH#FZLKFRP‡ZZZFZLKFRP
of prestige and excellence.

OFFICERS - 2010/2011
Michael Goi
President
Richard Crudo
Vice President
Owen Roizman
Vice President
John C. Flinn III
Vice President
Matthew Leonetti
Treasurer
Rodney Taylor
Secretary
Ron Garcia
Sergeant At Arms

MEMBERS OF THE
BOARD
John Bailey
Stephen Burum
Curtis Clark
George Spiro Dibie
Richard Edlund
John C. Flinn III
Michael Goi
Stephen Lighthill
Isidore Mankofsky
Daryn Okada
Robert Primes
Nancy Schreiber
Kees Van Oostrum
Haskell Wexler
Vilmos Zsigmond

ALTERNATES
Fred Elmes
Rodney Taylor
Michael D. O’Shea
Sol Negrin
Michael B. Negrin

MUSEUM CURATOR
Steve Gainer
6
 Editor’s Note
Today’s television landscape is so rife with reality shows that it
may be difficult for younger viewers to imagine an era when
the only celebrities on the tube were professional performers,
not the family down the block. Back in the early Seventies,
shows like The Real World, The Real Housewives of Orange
County and Jon & Kate Plus 8 were nonexistent. Although
England’s Up films, which have been tracking the progress of
14 British children since 1964, may have pioneered the form,
it was the 1973 PBS series An American Family that provided
a true template for later shows to follow. Comprising 12
episodes culled from around 300 hours of footage, the land-
mark documentary series followed the everyday lives of Cali-
fornia’s seemingly perfect Loud family, whose problems
became more and more evident as the show progressed.
The Louds’ saga is dramatized in the new HBO telefilm Cinema Verite, shot by Affonso
Beato, ASC, ABC for co-directors Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman. The project offered
Beato a wealth of visual possibilities. “We used Super 35mm, high-definition video that was digi-
tally manipulated to look like 16mm, Super 8mm, and clips from the original PBS series, which
was shot on 16mm,” he tells Jean Oppenheimer (“Living Out Loud,” page 28). “We differenti-
ated the formats by aligning them with certain points of view.”
The period religious drama There Be Dragons presented Gabriel Beristain, ASC, BSC with
a similarly rich palette on locations in Spain and Argentina. In helping director Roland Joffé tell the
tale of childhood friends who pursue distinctly different spiritual paths, Beristain was tasked with
presenting four time periods, including the Spanish Civil War era. “The war period, with all the
famous visual references, took place around the time that color photography was becoming more
common, and that was, of course, fascinating to me,” Beristain notes in a piece by David Heur-
ing (“A Saint and a Sinner,” page 40). “Also, our production design, by Eugenio Zanetti, was a
visual feast because of all the period details and textures. Added to that is the rich iconography
and symbolism of the Catholic Church. I knew we could make a great film from these elements.”
Prom, shot by Byron Shah, is the first U.S. feature shot with Arri’s digital Alexa camera.
Introduced in April 2010, the Alexa features a 3.5K CMOS sensor and records up to 60 fps at
1920x1080 high-definition internally to ProRes 422 or externally to Arri’s proprietary ArriRaw
format. The camera also outputs an uncompressed 1080PsF 4:4:4 RGB stream, suitable for
uncompressed capture using external recorders. In interviews with Noah Kadner (“First Dance,”
page 52), Shah, director Joe Nussbaum and members of their crew offer a full rundown of their
creative strategies and how the camera performed on set.
For those of you seeking a deeper understanding of how digital cameras actually capture
and process images, AC technical editor Christopher Probst explains it all in the first half of a
detailed two-part primer (“Decoding Digital Imagers: Part 1,” page 60).
Last but not least is our annual pictorial recap of the ASC Awards weekend (“A Hollywood
Photo by Owen Roizman, ASC.

Affair,” page 69). Our 25th-anniversary events were rousing, maximum-capacity successes that
drew raves from all who attended.

Stephen Pizzello
Executive Editor

8
 President’s Desk
What propels a cinematographer to step away from the camera and direct a movie? Is it the
desire to have more complete control over the artistic process, the opportunity to work directly
with talented actors and writers, dissatisfaction with the course of one’s career, or the need to
express a point of view about the world that no one else is addressing?
With their documentaries No Subtitles Necessary and The Betrayal (Nerakhoon) , James
Chressanthis, ASC and Ellen Kuras, ASC, respectively, brought dignity and awareness to the strug-
gles of individuals caught up in tumultuous world events. With his Oscar-winning short film, Two
Soldiers, Aaron Schneider, ASC used narrative form to express the bond between two brothers
during a time of war.
This month brings the DVD release of a feature I wrote and directed called Megan Is Miss-
ing. I did not think about why I decided to direct a film until just now, when the journey to
get it into distribution is almost over. I’ve realized that the film was born out of rage, an intense
dissatisfaction with many aspects of the ways in which child abductions and Internet predators
have been handled in the media and in the legal system. My goal in taking the director’s chair
was to make the most disturbing movie of all time using only factual occurrences as the basis of
the drama; to that end, I spent two years researching seven different cases with a forensics inves-
tigator.
I decided early on that the movie should feel like it was not filmed by anybody; it had to
feel like it was happening now. At my insistence, cinematographers Keith Eisberg and Joshua Harrison used no movie lights and no
grip equipment (except for what was necessary to create TV-news sequences), and the young actresses wore no makeup. All the
dialogue was based on recordings I’d made of my friends’ 14-year-old daughters. We shot the whole film in 81⁄2 days to both accom-
modate the number of children involved and give the unfolding drama a visceral pace.
When the film was completed, I became convinced I’d made an unreleasable movie. It was exactly the movie I wanted to
make — and how often do you get to say that? — but to what end, if no one would see it?
Then glimmers of validation emerged. My agent said it was not the film he expected from a cinematographer — there were
no sweeping crane shots, no beautiful lighting — but it had pure, realistic emotion. And Marc Klaas, whose daughter, Polly, was
abducted and murdered, said the movie was the only filmed depiction of the subject that he and his wife had ever seen that deal t
with the subject honestly, without concern for a “commercial” resolution.
So as the journey to tell this story has been fulfilled, has the rage that compelled me to make the movie been pacified?
My forensics-investigator friend recently called to ask if I would like to know any details of a case he was working on, a high-
profile child disappearance that had been reported on national TV. I told him no, I didn’t want to know anything. He said that was
because I already knew. He correctly surmised that I had done my own investigating using the online search tools now available to
everyone, and that I had pieced together a possible scenario based on background checks I’d done on the individuals who may hav e
been involved. Three days later, the authorities confirmed my conclusion: the child had perished at the hands of her uncle.
My forensics friend called again once that news was announced and said, “It’s in your blood now. You will never accept what
is told to you by the media as being the entire truth. You will always dig for the real story. And you will never look at the w orld the
same way again.”
I suppose looking at the world in a different way is ultimately what drives a cinematographer to direct. We’re always looking
for that new way of telling a compelling story, and that search never ends.
Portrait by Owen Roizman, ASC.

Michael Goi, ASC

President

10 May 2011 American Cinematographer

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 Short Takes
Cinematographer
Dagmar Weaver-
Madsen (below
right, holding
camera) won an
ASC William A.
Fraker Heritage
Award for her
work on the short
film The Absence,
which she
photographed as a
graduate student
at the University of
California-Los
Angeles. Next to
Weaver-Madsen is
1st AC Nate Slevin.

I
ASC William A. Fraker Heritage Award
Honors 2 Students
By Iain Stasukevich
ASC William A. Fraker Heritage Awards were given to two
student cinematographers, Dagmar Weaver-Madsen of the Univer-
sity of California-Los Angeles and Boyd Hobbs of Full Sail University,
in February. (Honorable mentions were Wesley Cardino of the Amer-
ican Film Institute, Michal Dabal of the American Film Institute,
Madeline Eberhard of Florida State University and Allen Liu of Chap-
man University.)
Weaver-Madsen’s winning entry, The Absence , charts the
path of an upwardly mobile assistant manager in the records depart-
ment of a mysterious company called Black House Securities. He is
sent on a mission to a rural town, where he uncovers the truth
behind Black House, and ultimately must choose between kowtow-
ing to the messianic upper management and calling it quits.
The Absence photos by Jon Cannon and Kyle Warmack. Photos and frame grabs courtesy of the filmmakers.
Weaver-Madsen entered UCLA’s graduate program in film,
television and digital media knowing she wanted to study cine-
matography. (She had already shot a comedy series on video and a
short film on 16mm.) In her first year, the MFA program’s three cine-
matography students and 18 directing students were rotated
through various crew positions over the course of multiple films;
someone served as camera operator on one film, then director on
another, then sound recordist on another, and so on. That way, no
matter what area a student finally focuses on, he or she knows what
the other departments are doing.
On her first project, Weaver-Madsen was assigned to be the
cinematographer for directing student Alex DeMille, and they
quickly discovered they worked well together. In their second year,
she shot DeMille’s advanced project, and by the time their thesis
projects were being prepped, they had already developed a tight
shorthand. “We could work together almost without even talking to
each other,” says Weaver-Madsen. “We’d just look at each other

12 May 2011 American Cinematographer

 The Absence
was
photographed
on location in
New York City
and eastern
Long Island,
including
portions shot at
Oheka Castle on
Long Island’s
Gold Coast.
and know what the other person needed.”
Production on The Absence began in
N ew York in N ovember 2008. Weaver-
Madsen spent the month leading up to the
start of principal photography doing loca-
tion scouts and tech scouts with DeMille.
“We had terrible, freezing weather,” she
recalls. “It had a beautiful, dreary look, so I
was very happy for the photography, but it
was hard on the crew. Luckily, we were so
prepared that we were ready for any
circumstance.”
Primary locations included farms in
Suffolk County and Oheka Castle on Long
Island’s Gold Coast. The latter “was used as
Xanadu in Citizen Kane ,” notes Weaver-
Madsen, who defers some of the credit for
her award-winning work to the Olmsted
brothers’ celebrated landscape architecture
at the historic estate.
The resourceful filmmakers made
the most of every opportunity they were
given. The script won the Deluxe Film
Award, which took care of their negative-
processing fees, and because Weaver-
Madsen assisted Fuji with some film tests,
much of the stock (Fuji Eterna Vivid 500
8547 and the since-discontinued Super F-
125 8532) was provided at a discount,
making it affordable to shoot 3-perf Super
35mm. The production rented an Arricam
Lite and Moviecam Compact and a set of
Arri Master Primes.
“The film is really about isolation,
and Alex and I both worked to make sure
that came across visually,” says the cine-
matographer. “With the lighting, stock and
lens choices, we really tried to underscore
14 May 2011
how the main character begins as a stranger
to the world that he is exploring; for exam-
ple, we used shallow depth-of-field for the
first part of the story to underscore that he
is separate from that world and alone. Later,
after he decides to embrace this new world,
he is no longer isolated from the back-
grounds, and everything becomes sharp.”
Above all, Weaver-Madsen regards
her relationships with her instructors (Bill
McDonald, Tom Denove and John
Simmons, ASC), DeMille and crewmembers
as the driving forces behind her work. Since
graduating, she has maintained close ties to
all of her collaborators on The Absence.
“There’s a family feeling in the MFA
program because it’s so small,” she explains.
“It teaches you to navigate relationships
and maintain communication and friend-
ship. If you’re always open with your collab-
orators about what you want to accom-
plish, then you’ll have a very effective set.”
Hobbs’ winning entry, Loves Me Not,
takes place in an abandoned apartment
building in Atlanta, where a woman lives
with her lover. What starts out as a seem-
ingly ordinary day begins to spin out of
control when the woman has a flashback
revealing she has been kidnapped and
forced into sex slavery and is experiencing
symptoms of Stockholm Syndrome.
Hobbs dabbled in still photography
before focusing on filmmaking as a course
of study. He started at Georgia State before
switching to Full Sail, which offers a 21-
month production-oriented program culmi-
nating with a B.S. degree.
“It’s an extremely competitive
American Cinematographer
program,” says Hobbs. “In our class, there
were only three 35mm films that were
picked to go into production out of about
75 students.” Directing students have to
pitch their final projects to a panel of
instructors, so cinematography students
need to get on board with as many direc-
tors and scripts as possible to improve their
chances at shooting something.
Hobbs says he was immediately
comfortable working with motion-picture
cameras, but the lighting aspects of cine-
matography were initially somewhat intimi-
dating. “It didn’t really come naturally at
first, so I challenged myself to figure it out,”
he recalls. “You see pictures of sets where
there are just a couple of lamps and a
camera, and somehow through the lens it
all looks right, and that’s what I wanted to
learn: how the light comes together.”
The script for Loves Me Not, written
by student directors Rebecca Hodges and
Ewa Pazera, offered Hobbs a variety of
opportunities to develop a personal
approach to lighting. Hodges, who had a
background in production design, worked
closely with him on the look of the film,
which Hobbs shot in Super 35mm (framing
for 2.40:1) with an Arricam Lite and Zeiss
Super Speeds.
“Visually it’s a dark film, but at the
same time, light plays an important role,”
says the cinematographer. “We wanted
muted green colors that would fade into
warmer yellows, and we wanted [the look]
to go back-and-forth between something
that’s really dark and something kind of
happy. Most of the action takes place in the
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 Cinematographer
Boyd Hobbs (far
right) won the
undergraduate
Heritage Award
for Loves Me Not,
which examines
the effects of
Stockholm
Syndrome. “We
wanted muted
green colors that
would fade into
warmer yellows,
and we wanted
[the look] to go
back-and-forth the same space with a moodier window
between crossed with narrow slats.”
something that’s
really dark and Though he was tempted by the
something kind of school’s array of grip and electric assets,
happy,” says Hobbs made an effort to keep things
Hobbs. Since
graduating from simple, using a 5K tungsten lamp for each
Full Sail window, a 2K open-face lamp in the hall-
University, Hobbs way and three practicals in the kitchen,
has been
accepted as a along with a pair of 650-watt Tweenies on
cinematography stands that were positioned as needed. “On
fellow at AFI. my previous film, I used twice as many lights
on a stage half the size,” he says.
Full Sail uses Continental Film Lab in
Miami for students’ final transfers. Hobbs
notes, “They typically set you up with an
online-supervised transfer, but I opted
instead to drive down to supervise it on site.
I wanted to get it perfect before it went into
editing, because every student who worked

apartment kitchen, and we worked with
[production designer] Alex Thomson and
[art director] Aaron Marinel to create a
single space that we could play a number of
different ways.”
The kitchen set was built on the Full
Sail stages and designed to facilitate the
creation of distinct zones of light; the film-
makers planned to use these to suggest the
characters’ wildly varying feelings. “There’s a
certain kind of light on the actor when he’s
in one space, and then a different kind of
light when he steps into another space,”
says Hobbs, who shot the kitchen scenes on
Kodak Vision3 500T 5219. “Sometimes
those spaces are two feet apart or visible
from a different camera angle. For example,
an open window offering bright light shares
Loves Me Not photos by Nuh Omar. Photos and frame grabs courtesy of the filmmakers.
on it would also edit it. I made sure everyone
in my class knew it had already been color
corrected.
“I’m still trying to figure out how to
light with film, because I haven’t done it very
much,” he continues, noting that instruc-
tors Rob Tuscani and James Neihouse have
been particularly helpful in this regard. “Rob
and James really pushed me to get things
the way I envisioned it in my head, and take
the time I needed to do it.
“Loves Me N ot was a success
because of the people who mentored and
worked with me. I can take on any project
knowing that as long as I don’t overthink or
underthink it, I can pull it off with the
support of my collaborators.” ●

16 May 2011 American Cinematographer

 CONGRATULATIONS
Wally Pfister, ASC

Winner of the Academy ® Award for

Cinematography and ASC Award
for Outstanding Achievement
in Cinematography for
Theatrical Release.

“Inception,” directed by
Christopher Nolan.

We salute your passion for

pristine filmed images.

Strap on the Gibson SG and jam.

Photo by Owen Roizman, ASC panavision.com

 Production Slate
The late, great
Jack Cardiff,
BSC makes a
point in a
scene from
Cameraman:
The Life &
Work of Jack
Cardiff, a
documentary
directed by
Craig McCall
that was shot
over many
years and in
several
countries.

I Spotlighting a Legendary Cinematographer

By Mark Hope-Jones
It all started in the early 1990s, with a Bolex. Director Craig
McCall was making music videos at EMI in London, and an elderly
gentleman noticed the 16mm Bolex camera on his desk and
wandered over to take a look. “I didn’t know who he was,” recalls
McCall. “He came over, and we got to chatting.”
The man was Jack Cardiff, BSC, who shot many of the most
visually accomplished three-strip Technicolor films ever made,
including A Matter of Life and Death /Stairway to Heaven (1946),
The Red Shoes (1948), The African Queen (1951) and Black Narcis-
sus (1947). He won an Academy Award for the latter film, and 53
years later, he became the first cinematographer to be presented
with an honorary Oscar.
Cardiff was at EMI because he had been invited to shoot a
version of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, and he returned to the office
several times during his prep. McCall, now aware of his extraordi-
nary background, spoke with Cardiff again as soon as the oppor-
tunity arose. “One day Jack opened a newspaper and saw that it
had just snowed in Venice, Italy, which it hadn’t done for
decades,” recalls McCall. “He loved that image, and he wanted it
for The Four Seasons, but he didn’t have his budget yet, so he just
borrowed the Bolex, drove to Venice and got it in the can. I
thought that was fantastically inspiring. He had the enthusiasm of
a film student doing his first production, yet he was in his 80s and
had made so many amazing films.”
As their acquaintance developed, McCall had the idea of
making a film about Cardiff’s illustrious career. He put the idea to
the back of his mind for a few years, but in 1997, he was on the
lookout for a new project and decided to shoot a pilot with Cardiff
in the hopes of rustling up a television commission. When he
accepted Cardiff’s invitation to visit the cinematographer’s home
and discovered a treasure trove of production photos, behind-the-
scenes footage and other memorabilia that Cardiff had accumu-
lated over nine decades in the film business, he realized how much
potential the project really had.
Born to two Vaudeville performers, Cardiff grew up around
entertainers, and he started working as a child actor, first appear-
ing in My Son, My Son (1918) at the age of 4. After acting in
several more films as a youth, he worked as a runner on the silent
film The Informer (1929), then moved on to clapper loader (when
sound came in), then camera assistant, and eventually camera
operator.
A turning point came when Cardiff was selected by Techni-
color, which was looking to expand into London, to be trained as
the company’s first British camera operator. In the interview for the
position, he admitted that he knew nothing of the process’
complex technicalities, but said that what interested him about
color was the opportunity to tap his knowledge of how the Old
Masters had used it as an emotive tool in their paintings. He got
the job.

18 May 2011 American Cinematographer

 Analogies between painting and
cinematography are common, but in
Cardiff’s case they are resoundingly rele-
vant. Applying the principles of painters he
had meticulously studied and copied to
Technicolor cinematography, Cardiff
quickly became a deft and delicate master
of color. From Van Gogh he learned how
to use red and green; from Vermeer he
learned how to light interiors. In McCall’s
film, he speculates that J.M.W. Turner
would have been “the perfect camera-
man.”
Operating jobs with Technicolor
gave rise to work as a second-unit cine-
matographer, and it was while shooting an
insert montage sequence for The Life and
Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) that Cardiff
got his big break. Passing through the set,
director Michael Powell noticed the meth-
ods Cardiff was employing to suppress
multiple shadows, and stopped to watch
him work. The result was an offer to shoot
Powell’s next picture, A Matter of Life and
Death/Stairway to Heaven. It was Cardiff’s
first feature as director of photography
and the start of a remarkable collaboration
with The Archers, the filmmaking partner-
ship of Powell and Emeric Pressburger.
As accolades for Cardiff’s work
multiplied, he collaborated with many
other great directors, including Alfred
Hitchcock, Richard Fleischer, Henry Hath-
away, Joseph Mankiewicz and John
Huston. He became known for his ability
to light actresses, and was specifically
requested by Marilyn Monroe for The
Prince and the Showgirl (1957). Female
stars admired him so much that they
agreed to sit for photographic portraits
taken by Cardiff during lulls in filming.
Cameraman photos courtesy of Modus Operandi Films.

Among these women were Monroe,

Audrey Hepburn, Sophia Loren and Anita
Ekberg.
As he sifted through prints of these
portraits at Cardiff’s home, McCall became
hooked. After completing the pilot for
Cameraman: The Life & Work of Jack
Cardiff, he made the rounds at the TV
companies but could find no takers. “The
timing wasn’t great because it had just
been the centenary of cinema, and every- Top: Cinematographer Ricardo Coll checks the light on his subject while filming at Pinewood
one had recently done special programs Studios. Middle: McCall (left) works with interviewee Lauren Bacall and cinematographer
on cinema history,” recalls the director. Jonathan Rho in Los Angeles. Bottom: McCall uses a 16mm Bolex to capture interviewee Martin
Scorsese, who is keyed by a light in his lap.
“So although people praised the pilot,

www.theasc.com May 2011 19

 Left: At the peak of their careers, Cardiff (left) and fellow cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth, BSC pose with a Technicolor ca mera.
Right: McCall and Cardiff discuss a shot at Pinewood Studios.
nobody bit, and I therefore had to go
down an independent path. I raised some
money and set about getting interviews in
the can, because many of the people I
wanted to film were getting older.”
Cardiff’s name opened a lot of
doors, and the interviewees McCall assem-
bled include Martin Scorsese, Kirk
Douglas, John Mills, Lauren Bacall and
Charlton Heston. As well as recognizable
names, McCall was keen to interview a
broad range of people who knew Cardiff
or could comment on his work. “The mix
of people pretty much reflects a film crew,
with actors, directors, editors, cameramen
and a sound recordist,” he says. “It also
reflects the transatlantic aspect of Jack’s
career.” (Historical context in the docu-
mentary is provided by film historian Ian
Christie and the late American Cinematog-
rapher editor George E. Turner.)
Interviews were conducted over a
period of years and in several countries.
Arri and Kodak provided ongoing support
for the project, but McCall had to source
equipment and crew for each period of
filming, which meant he wound up work-
ing with nine different cinematographers:
Steven Chivers, Ricardo Coll, Simon
Fanthorpe, N icholas Hoffman, Jonathan
Rho, Ian Salvage, John Walker, James
Welland and Bob Williams. It was the
director, therefore, who had to conceive,
maintain and sometimes defend an overall
20 May 2011
visual approach.
“For one particular interview, we
were putting a red light on Jack’s face,”
says McCall. “Ian Salvage was the cine-
matographer that day, and Jack said,
‘What are you doing with that red light?’
Ian explained that I’d asked him to do it so
the interview would intercut with clips
from A Matter of Life and Death, and Jack
replied that it didn’t look right to him. Ian
went to switch it off, but I told him not to
— if I learned anything from Jack, it was to
stand your ground! When Jack came to
look at the first cut, he said, ‘I really like
that with the red light on my face!’ So he
taught me a lesson. I had to stand up to
him that day, just as he probably had to
stand up to Michael Powell on certain
days.”
McCall shot the majority of the
documentary on Super 16mm, believing
the ubiquity of the format would suit such
a fragmented shoot, and he initially shot
the rostrum work on 35mm “to capture as
much texture and definition in the actress
portraits and photographs as possible,” he
says. On some occasions, Betacam SP was
also used, and a limited amount of rostrum
work was shot on high-definition video.
Shooting mostly on film permitted
McCall to re-telecine and grade all his film
rushes to create HDCam-SR masters when,
much later, completion funding came
through. He notes that if he’d shot on
American Cinematographer
DigiBeta, the best video format available at
the time, he would have been trapped by
the resolution. “I’m a great believer in
Super 16,” he says. “I would still shoot
with it today if I were doing anything that
involved documenting witnesses to
history.”
Shooting on film allowed McCall to
pursue a distinctive aesthetic, though it
also gave him a few nerve-wracking
moments. He recalls, “When we were at
Kirk Douglas’ house, he had all these beau-
tiful paintings by artists like Cézanne. He
left the room at one point, and I needed to
get the camera farther back, so I moved a
little Picasso sculpture that was in the way.
When Kirk came back, he asked, ‘Who
moved that?’ So I said, ‘Sorry, Mr. Douglas,
I moved it because we’re shooting on film
and we need the depth,’ and he replied,
‘Oh, okay.’ It was a bit terrifying, but he
went with it.
“For the Scorsese interview, I actu-
ally put a light on his lap because I wanted
it to look a bit different,” he continues.
“He was in a very good mood, so he said,
‘If you want to do it, I’ll do it.’
“I’d learned my lesson doing a lot of
bread-and-butter work interviewing heads
of corporations — my approach is to get in
early and have two lighting setups. If the
person comes in and is in a bad mood,
then I put in a soft light and quickly knock
it off. The second setup is a more compli-
 Thank You!
I am extremely honored to have received the 2010
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences John A.
Bonner Award. This would not have been possible without
all of you. I’d like to express my sincere gratitude to my
very gifted and loyal staff, my colleagues, my peers, my
family, but most importantly to all of you cinematographers
who inspire me. Thank you so very much!
Denny Clairmont

www.clairmont.com
 cated one that I’d worked out with the
cinematographer and usually involved
putting the camera farther back. I was able
to do that with Scorsese and many of the
others I spoke to for this film.”
The most visually creative elements
of the project were shot at Pinewood
Studios, where McCall worked with art
director Miles Glyn and cinematographer
Ricardo Coll to re-create some of the light-
ing and matte effects from Black Narcissus
as a backdrop to several interviews. At
Pinewood, they also shot footage of
Cardiff’s amazing memorabilia collection
and of the great cinematographer demon-
strating a Technicolor camera, his fingers
still nimble at the controls and a sparkle in
his eyes as he describes the beam-splitting
Front row, left to right: Academy President Tom Sherak, actress Marisa Tomei and Sci-Tech
prism that is the camera’s soul.

Between the completion of filming
and the documentary’s celebrated bow at
the 2010 Cannes Film Festival came a final
chapter both long and fraught with fund-
Academy Sci-Tech Awards photos by Richard Harbaugh and Todd Wawrychuk, courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences.
Committee chair Richard Edlund, ASC. 2nd row: David M. Laur, Arnauld Lamorlette, James
Rodnunsky, Denny Clairmont, Neil Wilson and Dr. Mark Sagar. 3rd row: Mark Noel, Eric Tabellion,
Florian Kainz, Alex MacDonald, Chris Allen, Mark Chapman and Rory McGregor. Last row: John
Frazier, Greg Ercolano, Mark A. Brown, Gautham Krishnamurti, Lance Kimes and Alan Rogers.

ing uncertainty. Ultimately, it was Cardiff’s
death, in 2009, that prompted renewed
interest in Cameraman and the last bit of
funding from the U.K. Film Council.
“Even at the first screening, at the
National Film Theatre, I was fretful that the
DCP projection wouldn’t work,” says
McCall. “It was only when I heard the
audience clap at the final credits that I real-
ized nothing else could go wrong. A few
days later, the movie was shown in
Cannes, and that opened it up to the
whole world.”
Cameraman has been screened at a
dozen U.S. film festivals to date and will be
theatrically released in N ew York City on
May 13, with additional cities to follow.
TECHNICAL SPECS
1.78:1
Super 16mm, 35mm, Digital Capture
Arri 16SR-2, Aaton LTR, N eilson-Hordell,
Sony HDW-750
Canon, Arri, Angenieux, Zeiss, Olympus
Kodak Double-X 7222, Plus-X 7231;
EXR 50D 7245, 200T 7274;
Vision 250D 7246, 320T 7277, 500T 7279
Digital Intermediate
I
Academy Lauds Sci-Tech
Luminaries
By Jay Holben
At this year’s Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences Scientific and
Technical Awards, held on Feb. 12 at the
Beverly Wilshire Hotel, actress Marissa
Tomei played hostess, handling the
evening’s esoteric jargon with ease and
humor. Award recipient Alex MacDonald of
Cablecam told her, “What you have to say
here is harder than what we do!”
Thirteen Technical Achievement
certificates and nine Scientific and Engineer-
ing plaques were awarded, and ASC associ-
ate member Denny Clairmont was honored
with the John A. Bonner Medal of
Commendation.
Technical Achievement Awards
are presented for accomplishments that
contribute to the progress of the industry.
This year individuals from four companies
were honored for their contributions to the
evolution of computer-render queue-
management systems:
Greg Ercolano,for the design and
engineering of a series of software systems
culminating in the Rush render-queue
management system. The Rush system has
hadan influential effect throughout the
industry, enabling scalable render farms at
numerous studios.
David M. Laur,for the development
of the Alfred render-queue management
system. Alfred was the first robust, scalable,
widely adopted commercial solution for
queue management in the industry. Its user
interface and support for multi-machine
assignment influenced the design of
modern-day queue-management tools.
Chris Allen, Gautham Krishna-
murti, Mark A. Brown and Lance Kimes,
for the development of Queue, a robust,
scalable approach to render-queue
management. Queue was one of the first
systems that allowed for statistical analysis
and process introspection, providing a
framework for the efficient use of render
farms.
Florian Kainz ,for the design and
development of the robust, highly scalable
distributed architecture of the ObaQ render-
queue management system. ObaQ has
scaled from managing a few hundred
processors in 1997 to many thousands
today, with minimal changes to the original
design.
Individuals from two companies were
honored for their contributions to the world
of computer-generated effects:
Eric Tabellionand Arnauld Lamor-
lette, for the creation of a computer-graph-
ics bounce-lighting methodology that is

22 May 2011 American Cinematographer

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B e c a u s e i t m a t t e r s .

practical at feature-film scale. This impor-
tant step in the evolution of global illumina-
tion techniques, first used on Shrek 2, was
shared with the industry in the duo’s techni-
cal paper, “An Approximate Global Illumi-
nation System for Computer Generated
Films.”
Tony Clark, Alan Rogers, N eil
Wilson and Rory McGregor,for the soft-
ware design and continued development of
CineSync, a tool for remote collaboration
and review of visual effects. Easy to use,
CineSync has become a widely accepted
solution for remote-production collabora-
tion.
Scientific and Engineering
Awards were presented for achievements
that exhibit a high level of engineering and
are important to the progress of the indus-
try. This year they were awarded to:
Mark Sagar,for his early and contin-
uing development of influential facial-
motion retargeting solutions. His work led
to a method for transforming facial-motion
capture data into an expression-based,
editable character-animated system that has
been used in motion pictures with a high
volume of digital characters.
Mark N oel ,for the design, engi-
neering and development of the NAC Servo
24 May 2011
Left: Sherak (top) and Edlund (bottom) greet the audience at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.
Above: ASC associate Clairmont accepts the John A. Bonner Medal of Commendation.
Winch System, and John Frazier ,for his
contributions to the system’s design and
safety features. The NAC System allows full-
sized cars, aircraft and other heavy props to
be flown on wires with unprecedented free-
dom of motion and a high degree of safety
onset and in real time. The system responds
to the motion of the operator’s hand,
permitting the recording and playback of all
axes of motion simultaneously, which may
be edited and refined for playback in subse-
quent takes.
In addition, two Scientific and Engi-
neering “upgrade” plaques were awarded
to the following individuals, who previously
earned Academy certificates for their work
on cable-driven camera systems that have
made it possible to move a camera safely
and accurately anywhere through a three-
dimensional space:
James Rodnunsky, Alex MacDon-
ald and Mark Chapman,for the develop-
ment of the Cablecam 3-D volumetric
suspended cable-camera technologies.
Tim Drnec, Ben Britten Smith and
Matt Davis ,for the development of the
Spydercam 3-D volumetric suspended
cable-camera technologies.
Finally, the John A. Bonner Medal
of Commendation , given for “outstand-
American Cinematographer
ing service and dedication in upholding the
high standards of the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences,” was presented
to ASC associate member Denny Clair-
mont.
In a later interview with AC, Clair-
mont noted that he grew up doing every-
thing he could to avoid working in the
motion-picture business. His father was a
commercial cinematographer, and Clair-
mont strove to stay as far away from “Dad’s
work” as possible. However, he and his
younger brother,Terry, took an early interest
in cars. “I loved anything with a motor in
it,” recalls Clairmont. “I started making my
own scooters when I was around 12 years
old. In high school,I took auto shop and
built my own hot-rod cars.”
After high school, the Clairmont
brothers started a shop and fixed up cars for
fellow racers. It became the go-to place for
local San Fernando drag racers. “We did
pretty well, but we weren’t really rolling in
cash,” he recalls. “Our customers were,
though. They all worked for the movie
studios in various positions, so Terry and I
went to our father and asked him how we
could get into the business. He taught us
photography and the tools of the trade, and
he said the best way to learn was to get a
Clairmont
The very mention of the name brings to mind integrity, perfection, fairness,
frankness, resourcefulness and can-do without compromise. Denny, we will
be forever grateful to you and your brother Terry for pushing the limits and
driving the bar of technology ever higher in the name of art.
You truly deserve the 2010 Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Sciences, John A. Bonner Award.

Congratulations
& Thank you!

It Starts with the Glass tm

www.schneideroptics.com

Tomei served as the evening’s hostess.
position in a camera-rental shop.”
Denny found himself a position as a
driver at Birns &Sawyer in Hollywood, while
Terry kept the shop running. Birns &
Sawyer’s lead repair technician, John
Russell, took an immediate liking to Clair-
mont and promoted him to a position as his
assistant. In 1969,when Russell left Birns to
take another job, Clairmont was promoted
to lead repair technician, a position he held
until 1976. He quickly became known as a
guy who could create specialty gear for
cinematographers or camera assistants.
With the support of a strong machine shop
at Birns & Sawyer, Clairmont began crafting
specialty equipment on a regular basis.
When Birns goteven busier, Denny helped
Terry, who had found work as a camera
assistant, land a job at the facility as well.
In 1971, Terry was working with
future ASC member Michael Watkins,and
the two joined forces to purchase a Cinema
Products XR35 camera. They entered a
contract with Birns & Sawyer to stock and
maintain the camera in return for a share of
the rental proceeds. The camera worked
consistently,and in 1973,Terry and Denny
decided to purchase a new Arri 35BL and
enter into the same contract with Birns. “At
that time, you could buy a 35BL with five
lenses and two 400-foot magazines for
$19,000,” Clairmont recalls. “I managed to
scrounge up $10,000 on my own and got
a bank to loan me the other $9,000. About
90 days later, when that camera was
constantly working, I went to the bank to
get a loan for a second camera.”
In 1976, Birns & Sawyer came under
new management, and a dispute with that
party cost Denny his job. He went home
and told his brother that he was out of
work,and asked if he could get a job on
Terry’s crew. “Terry said no,” he recalls with
a laugh. “He said,‘You’re the guy we go to
when we want good camera equipment.
Everyone knows you and trusts you, so we
should open up our own rental house.’”
Unfortunately, the three cameras the
brothers owned were under firm contract
with Birns &Sawyer. Because the Clair-
monts had a proven track record, though,
the bank agreed to loan them money to

26
purchase additional cameras, and Ed
DiGiulio of Cinema Products helped them
start their new company with a separate
loan of camera equipment worth more
than $300,000. Taking note of DiGiulio’s
move, several other companies followed
suit with loans of their own, including Arri,
Harrison & Harrison and OConnor. Clair- Sherak
mont Camera was born. commends this
year’s award
Today, Clairmont Camera occupies a recipients.
33,000-square-foot facility in Hollywood,
with satellite offices in Albuquerque,
Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. Denny
maintains his status as the go-to man for
custom equipment and was intrinsically
involved in the design of the Angenieux
Optimo zoom lenses.
He has been a member of the Acad-
emy Sci-Tech Committee since 1993 and “When I got the letter informing me design things and come up with new tools.
has served on the Steering Committee since that I would be presented with the Bonner I certainly wasn’t alone in earning this
2000. He has been honored with two Award, I was incredibly proud, but I was a honor.” ●
Emmy Awards, as well as a 1991 Scientific little worried, too,” he recalls. “So many
and Technical Academy Award for the people deserve the credit I’m getting, and
opto-mechanical design and development one of them is my late brother, Terry. Over
of the Canon/Clairmont Camera Zoom the years, many cinematographers and
Lens. camera assistants have pushed me to

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27
 Living
Out Loud
T
Cinema Verite, shot by Affonso Beato, hey were supposed to be the perfect American family.
They turned out to be anything but, and as their lives
ASC, ABC, revisits the first reality-TV unraveled on national television, they incurred the wrath
of millions of viewers who were scandalized by what they
series. witnessed week after week. As a character in HBO’s Cinema
Verite notes early in the film, “One must never let the public
behind the scenes, for it is the illusion they love.”
By Jean Oppenheimer In an age when reality TV blankets the airwaves, it
might be difficult to appreciate what it was like in 1973, when
the first reality series, An American Family, aired on PBS. The
•|• 12-part series, produced by WNET in New York, chronicled
the lives of Patricia and Bill Loud (portrayed by Diane Lane
and Tim Robbins in the new film) and their children, an

28 May 2011 American Cinematographer

 Opposite: Bill Loud
(Tim Robbins) and his
wife, Pat (Diane Lane),
see their marriage and
family disintegrate on
national television
after they agree to let
a television producer
film their lives. This
page, top: The Louds
meet with the
producer, Craig Gilbert
(James Gandolfini), on
the outdoor patio of a
Mexican restaurant.
Middle: A cameraman
captures footage of
the Louds in their
Santa Barbara home.
Bottom:
Cinematographer
Affonso Beato, ASC,
ABC (right) works
through a scene with
Lane and Cinema
Verite co-directors
Robert Pulcini and
Shari Springer Berman.

upper-middle-class family living in

Santa Barbara, Calif.
Cinema Verite, which premiered
April 23 and will play throughout May
and June, tells the behind-the-scenes
story of how the groundbreaking series
was made. When producer Craig
Gilbert (James Gandolfini) chose the
Louds, he didn’t know — but quickly
ascertained — that the seemingly model
marriage was coming apart at the
seams, and that the couple’s eldest son
was grappling with questions of sexual
Unit photography by Doug Hyun, Peter Iovino and Sam Urdank, courtesy of HBO.

orientation.
Director of photography Affonso
Beato, ASC, ABC was intrigued by the
movie-within-a-movie concept and the
visual possibilities it offered. “We used
Super 35mm, high-definition video
that was digitally manipulated to look
like 16mm, Super 8mm, and clips from
the original PBS series, which was shot
on 16mm, and the optical universes are
very different,” he says. “We differenti-
ated the formats by aligning them with
certain points of view.”
An Arricam Studio and Lite
captured “the movie POV” in 3-perf
Super 35mm (1.78:1), he continues. In
a sense, this was the big picture. Next
was the movie-within-the-movie, or the
documentary. Believing that “modern
Super 16 stock is so good and so grain-
less that it looks like 35mm,” Beato

ww.theasc.com
w May 2011 29
◗ Living Out Loud

Top: Gilbert
ingratiates
himself with Pat
at a California
resort hotel.
Bottom left: The
Louds and their
friends attempt
to stay “natural”
on camera.
Bottom right:
Beato finds his
angle. “Affonso
has a real gift for
seeing shots on
the spot and
executing them
quickly,” says
Pulcini.

decided to shoot this material with a
Panasonic AJ-HPX3700 VariCam and
use the digital grade to give it the look
of 16mm stock from that era. The
Panasonic was referred to variously as
“the documentary camera,” “the crew
POV” and sometimes “the 16mm
POV,” he says.
CinemaVerite jumps back and
forth between what the movie camera
sees and what the documentary camera
sees. It was essential that the footage
look substantially different so that view-
ers would immediately know which one
they were watching. “The movie POV is
composed, well-behaved, and we always
used a dolly, or occasionally a crane, for
that material,” says Beato. “The crew
POV, on the other hand, is kind of a
character in itself. We went handheld
and did a lot of panning and zooming, in
keeping with the style of the PBS series.”
The onscreen documentary crew
carries an old Éclair, but the footage
incorporated into the film was shot by
documentary cinematographer Sandra
Chandler, who walked onto the set after
the main camera operators, Anthony
Arendt and Joseph Arena, were
finished; she used the same lighting
setup. “Given that I would be shooting
handheld, I needed a shoulder-mount
camera, and the VariCam is set up

30 May 2011 American Cinematographer

 Top: The stress of
living on camera
causes tension to
creep into the
Louds’
relationship, but
Bill’s off-camera
philandering
pushes Pat to the
point of no
return. Bottom:
Both Bill and Pat
confide in Gilbert
when the
cameras aren’t
rolling.

ergonomically for that,” says Chandler,
who had worked previously with
Cinema Verite directors Robert Pulcini
and Shari Springer Berman. “The 3700
records to P2 cards and has the F-Rec
gamma mode, which gave Affonso
great latitude in post to create the
16mm look.” She kept a standard
Fujinon HD ENG zoom lens on the
camera.
Chandler also shot Super 8
“home movies” of the Loud family at
earlier, happier stages of their lives,
using a Beaulieu 4008 ZM4 borrowed
from loader Christian Kessler.
(Pro8mm in Burbank processed and
transferred the negative.)
Finally, clips from the 1973 PBS
documentary were added to the mix.
Often, two different formats appear
side-by-side on screen. Archival footage
of the real Louds plays on one side
while the actors portraying them appear
on the other. At times, the actors repli-
cate the exact movements of their real-
life counterparts.
Keeping track of which format
was to be used when, and what each
camera would need for a given shot,
could have been a nightmare. It turned
out not to be, however, thanks to the
meticulously organized workflow charts
Beato creates on every project. “Affonso
breaks down the entire [schedule]
during prep and sends the charts to his
crew,” says 1st AC Carlos Doerr. “He
lists cameras and lenses, any special
equipment, the stock we’ll need and
exactly how much to order, whether any

ww.theasc.com
w May 2011 31
◗ Living Out Loud

The documentary
show’s camera
team (top) tracks
the family’s
movements with a
vintage Éclair
camera, while
HBO’s crew
(bottom) captures
the scene with
modern
technology.

of the film, while Shari concentrates on

effects work is involved, and so on.
Those charts always keep us one step
ahead.”
Beato notes that planning ahead
is a necessity these days. Tight shooting
schedules mean “there’s no time to
inspire yourself or change your mind on
the set anymore. It used to be that the
director would come to the set, plan
with the cinematographer, and then the
electricians would appear with their
cables, all while 50 or 100 people
waited. That doesn’t happen anymore.”
But when things do change on
set, Beato can quickly alter his course.
“Affonso has a real gift for seeing shots
on the spot and executing them
quickly,” says Pulcini. Though he and
co-director Berman both interacted
with Beato on the set, Pulcini recalls, “I
spent more time with him because I
deal more with the camera and the look
the actors.”
AC visited the Cinema Verite set
on a cloudless, blistering-hot California
morning. In the scene at hand, Pat
arrives at a resort hotel to meet Gilbert
for the first time. Pat, a friend and
Gilbert sit down at a patio table under
an umbrella. Tennis courts and a swim-
ming pool are clearly visible in the back-
ground. The scene comprised five pages
of dialogue and had to be completed
before the sun crept behind the building
and threw the action into shadow.
Furthermore, Beato wanted the tennis
courts to retain strong definition; he
couldn’t just expose for the foreground
and let the background go bright.
Beato had his crew put a 20'x40'
softener over the table, and both
Arricams were backed up as far as they
could go, right against the sliding glass
doors of the clubhouse. The actors were
only 8'-10'away. “We had to light the
actors 3 stops over what we’d normally
do,” says gaffer Justin Holdsworth. “To
raise the light level, we used gold and
silver lamé bounces. Then, to give some
shape to the faces, we brought in a 6K
Par with a Chimera, moving it closer

32 May 2011 American Cinematographer

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◗ Living Out Loud
Scenes set inside
the Louds’ home
were shot at a
house in
Sherman Oaks
that provided a
nearly perfect
match for the
real residence.
The living room
offered a deep
background
thanks to the
pool area beyond
the sliding-glass
doors, but the
setting required
Beato to carefully
balance his
interior and
exterior
exposures.

than I normally would.”

Beato kept an eye on the sun. “I
was getting nervous,” he admits. “We
had one shot left when the directors
decided that another problem took
precedence. By the time we went back
to the patio to get the final shot, there
was no way to match the light levels.
The last shot we got wasn’t used.”
The blue skies and hard light of
California serve as Cinema Verite ’s
predominant look. Beato describes it as
“a Kodachrome dream: colorful, bright
and sunny.” This typically translated
into tungsten lamps gelled with ¼
Straw or CTO. There was also a much
cooler “New York look” (HMIs with a
bit of CTB) that was used for scenes
showing Pat visiting her eldest son,
Lance (Thomas Dekker), at the famed
Chelsea Hotel. (The interior of the
hotel was created onstage.) At the end
of the movie, after An American Family
has aired and the Louds find themselves
the target of intense ridicule and scorn,
the California look takes on a severe
tone, a heavier, bluish-green hue;
instead of using lens filtration to achieve
this, Beato planned to create the look in
the DI.
The Louds’ home figured promi-
nently in the series, and the Cinema
Verite team managed to find a house in

34 May 2011 American Cinematographer

◗ Living Out Loud
Sherman Oaks, Calif., whose interior
was almost a mirror image of the real
residence. (Another location provided
the front exterior.) The family tended to
hang out in the living room, which
looks out onto a patio, a swimming pool
and the back yard, all of which are visi-
ble through a wall of sliding glass doors.
“Affonso didn’t want to lose the depth of
having the pool in the background
while looking out from [the living
room],” notes Holdsworth. “That
meant balancing exposure inside for the
exterior.”
One such scene, early in the film,
shows Gilbert and all seven members of
the Loud family sitting around the
living room, discussing what the docu-
mentary crew will be doing. Gilbert is
sitting in a chair, his back to the sliding
doors. To create soft ambient light,
Beato bounced sunlight (and occasion-
ally an 18K) into the room off 8'x8'
frames of unbleached muslin.
Additionally, sheets of muslin were
spread across the patio outside and on
the living-room floor.
Arri T12s and 5Ks with
Chimeras, all bouncing off muslin, were
used inside. Because the ceilings were
low, it wasn’t always possible to hang
lights. “When we couldn’t hang lights, I
had a huge tripod with a menace arm to
position a Chinese lantern above the
actor,” recalls Beato. “If it was a moving
shot, we might hang the menace arm
from the dolly. All of the lights were on
dimmers.” A few Lowel Rifa 44 lights
Top: A truck-
mounted platform were also used for the actors’ faces.
facilitates a view Unbleached muslin was the
from the road. diffusion of choice. To light a scene in
Middle: The crew
captures a New which Pat and Bill talk, 30"“Mus Balls”
York street scene containing 1,000-watt bulbs were
outside the Chelsea strewn across the bedroom floor. Pat
Hotel. Bottom: AC
visited the stands at the bathroom sink, looking
production while into the mirror, and Bill is a few feet
scenes were being away in the bedroom, standing at a full-
shot at the Altadena
Town & Country length mirror. “This was a very tricky
Club (doubling as scene to shoot,” notes Beato. “The scene
the Santa Barbara opens on Bill’s reflection in the stand-
Biltmore), where
Beato strove to alone mirror. He steps into frame,
capture the more admires himself in the mirror and starts
idyllic aspects of talking to Pat. The camera is stationary
California living.
behind him, so we see both his back and

36 May 2011 American Cinematographer

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 ◗ Living Out Loud
Bill tends to
business as his
home life begins
to spiral
downward.
his reflection in the mirror.”
The scene cuts to the bathroom.
The camera is to the left and slightly
behind Pat as she stands in front of the
mirror, so we see her reflection. Another
mirror hangs on a closet door behind
Pat, catching a different reflection.
Doerr picks up the story: “Affonso, the
operator and I were snuggled into a
38
narrow hallway. The matte box was just
barely off-camera. The most difficult
part of this was when Pat reached down
to grab Bill’s hairbrush. I think we did a
135mm shot on that, really tight,
following her hand and going up to her
face and racking to the mirror.”
Beato used several pieces of
equipment on Cinema Verite that he’d
never tried before.He had heard good
things about a new HD video-tap
system, HD IVS, that attaches to the
Arricam cameras. It comes with a 6"
trans-video cine monitor. Beato notes
that it’s an expensive item to rent, and
he was grateful to Sean Jenkins at
Clairmont Camera in Hollywood for
fitting it into the production’s budget.
“Up until now, video taps have been
standard definition, which just isn’t
good enough,” asserts the cinematogra-
pher.
Another item Beato had never
used before was the Airstar Cloud, a
thin, flat balloon that is used as diffu-
sion. Made of Lunix fabric, it acts like a
huge silk. The scene was the outdoor
patio of a Mexican restaurant, and the
place was packed with people. Bill is
sitting at a table, drinking with friends,
when Pat and Gilbert arrive. “We spent
two days at that location, and the sun
going around would have totally
destroyed the light continuity,” says
Beato. “It turned out to be less expen-
sive to rent the Cloud than to pump [up
the] light to balance the restaurant’s
interior and exterior. It was absolutely
fantastic.”
The Cloud is 20'x20'but can be
expanded by zipping two or more
together. Beato’s team created one that
was 40'x40'. (It was provided by Airstar
Space Lighting USA.) When darkness
started to fall, the crew set up three
18Ks to replicate sunlight.
Beato used three Kodak stocks
for most of the project — Vision3 500T
5219 and Vision2 250D 5207 and 50D
5201 — and he also mixed in two Fuji
Eterna Vivid stocks, 160 8543 and 500
8547, for the Super 8 material to help
differentiate its look.
All of the 35mm material was
processed at Technicolor Hollywood,
where AC caught upwith Beato again
as he started the digital grade with
colorist Jill Bogdanowicz. “We’ve got
some intricate keys going through the
movie to give it a 1970s look,” says
Bogdanowicz. “For example, I have
[primary color] chroma keys working
on the California look, and I’m popping
these colors separately, which makes it
really saturated, like the look of early
’70s film stocks. That’s the vibe we’re
going for.”
Even with four formats to
contend with, Beato maintains that the
shoot was never confusing, though he
readily admits “it was very complex.” It
also brought back some unique memo-
ries. “I was the first person in Brazil to
use the Éclair, the camera used by Alan
Raymond and Joan Churchill [ASC] to
shoot An American Family,” he observes.
“It was the first portable camera that
really gave you the opportunity to be
mobile and shoot sound at the same
time with a Nagra.”
With a laugh, he adds, “I was the
only person on the [ Cinema Verite] set
who knew how to hold the Nagra. I had
lived it.”
TECHNICAL SPECS
1.78:1
3-perf Super 35mm,
Digital Capture, Super 8mm
Arricam Studio, Lite;
Panasonic AJ-HPX3700;
Beaulieu 4008 ZM4
Cooke S4,Angenieux Optimo,
Nikkor and Arri Macro
Kodak Vision3 500T 5219;
Vision2 250D 5207, 50D 5201;
Fuji Eterna Vivid 160 8543,
500 8547
Digital Intermediate
●
 Gabriel Beristain,
ASC, BSC goes on
location in Spain and
Argentina for the
atmospheric religious
drama There Be
Dragons.
By David Heuring

•|•

A R
oland Joffé’s There Be Dragons tells the story of a Spanish
journalist who, in the course of reconciling with his
elderly father, discovers that the older man was a close

Saint
childhood friend of Josemaría Escrivá (played by Charlie
Cox), a real historical figure who was named a saint in 2002,
nearly 75 years after founding the devout Catholic organiza-
tion Opus Dei. Joffé has said that the movie, which was
partially funded by Opus Dei, is “about love, human love,

and a
divine love, hate, betrayal, war, mistakes — everything it is to
be a human being.”
The movie’s cast includes Dougray Scott as the journal-

Sinner
ist and Wes Bentley as his father, Manolo. Their story unfolds
in four segments: the boyhood years of Manolo and Josemaría
in Spain during the early 20th century; the duo’s early
manhood in the 1920s; the Spanish Civil War era, which tore
the country apart in the late 1930s; and the 1980s, which serve
as the story’s present day.
Joffé chose Gabriel Beristain, ASC, BSC to photo-
graph There Be Dragons. Beristain was born in Mexico, where

40 May 2011 American Cinematographer

 Opposite:
Childhood
friends Manolo
Torres (Wes
Bentley, seated)
and Josemaría
Escrivá (Charlie
Cox) find
themselves on
conflicting
spiritual paths
as adults. This
page: Manolo
takes up arms
(top) while
future saint
Josemaría
chooses the
priesthood.

his parents were successful actors. He

shot documentaries and commercials
before moving to Europe, and eventu-
ally studied at the National Film and
Television School in England. After
spending 15 years working in the
British film and television industries,
Beristain took the advice of Allen
Daviau, ASC and moved to the
United States. “I was also aided by
Sandra Marsh, my agent at that time,
who persuaded Taylor Hackford to
consider me for Blood In, Blood Out,” he
notes. His résumé has since grown to
include 40 films, among them
Caravaggio, K2, Dolores Claiborne and
The Spanish Prisoner. He recently
wrapped the pilot for Exit Strategy.
When Beristain first read the
script for There Be Dragons, he saw two fascinating to me,” says Beristain. could make a great film from these
Photos courtesy of Mount Santa Fe.

ways to think about the visuals:
through the four main time periods,
and by tracing the distinct emotional
paths followed by Manolo and
Josemaría. “The war period, with all
the famous visual references, took
place around the time that color
photography was becoming more
common, and that was, of course,
“Also, our production design, by
Eugenio Zanetti, was a visual feast
because of all the period details and
textures. Added to that is the rich
iconography and symbolism of the
Catholic Church. The story concerns
one person who found a religious
mission in life and another who devel-
oped a hatred of religion. I knew we
elements.”
Early conversations between
Beristain and Joffé focused on texture,
atmosphere and décor, and how to
create chiaroscuro without losing sight
of delicate details, like the lace of a
dress. All this would need to be done
on a modest budget at locations in
Spain and Argentina. Two fundamen-

ww.theasc.com
w May 2011 41
◗ A Saint and a Sinner

Top and bottom

left: As children,
Manolo and
Josemaría make
frequent visits
to a chocolate
factory where
they receive
tasty treats —
and bits of
wisdom — from
Honorio (Derek
Jacobi). Bottom
right: The boys
enjoy the
comforts of an
opulent
upbringing.

tal technical choices that grew out of
their conversations were the decision to
light primarily with direct, undiffused
light (except for the 1980s scenes), and
the decision to keep the A camera
almost always mounted on a three-axis
Scorpio head operated by Beristain. The
Scorpio head was often used in conjunc-
tion with a Technocrane to facilitate
dramatic, sweeping movement.
Beristain describes his approach
to light as “emotional lighting” —
letting the emotional content of indi-
vidual scenes dictate his approach, as
opposed to applying an overall style to
the entire film. “Direct light is old-
fashioned, in a way, but it gives me very
precise control over what part of the
scene to emphasize or intensify,” he
says. “Considerable engineering and
ingenuity went into creating the lyrical
camera moves Roland sought for this
film. In exterior situations, we usually
used the Technocrane; for interiors, the
camera was usually on a jib arm, some-
times attached to the Scorpio, which
became my dependable steed. I was
almost always operating, which is
something I trained extensively for
during my years in Europe.”
The producers raised the possi-
bility of shooting digitally, but Beristain
says Joffé left the decision to him.
“After we considered all the options
and weighed all the practical and artis-
tic factors, we decided to shoot on
film,” says the cinematographer. “We
were going to have many different
cameras, and there were unknowns
about the dependability of postproduc-
tion in Argentina, which made using a
digital format less attractive. We
planned to film our exterior battle
scenes with half a dozen cameras and
two Technocranes, which would limit

42 May 2011 American Cinematographer

our lighting options. Film would give
us the maximum latitude and dynamic
range, as well as the flexibility to make
everything match in post. We also
knew we would be shooting during the
summer in Argentina, sometimes in
the mountains, where the skies are very
powerful and very clean. With film,
there’s no problem with strong high-
lights.” Beristain ultimately decided to
use four Kodak stocks: Vision2 100T
5212, 200T 5217 and 250D 5205, and
Vision3 500T 5219.
Joffé was keen to spread the
right mood throughout the set. “I
could see from the beginning that I was
working with a method director,” says
Beristain. “The mood of the scene was
something Roland wanted to bring to
everyone on the set, thereby leading
each department to the right contribu-
tion. Cinematographers have to recog-
nize how a director works and then
adapt to that method. Ours wasn’t a
‘heavy’ set, but we were invited to
recognize the dramatic value of the
scene and the need to execute the shots
in a way that was harmonious with that
mood. Roland got excellent perfor-
mances that way.”
The boyhood scenes were filmed
in a tiny, picturesque village in Castile
called Sepulveda. “That’s as Spanish as
it gets,” Beristain attests. “It’s a
medieval stone town, a harsh place, and
we mostly filmed exteriors there for
about three weeks.” Beristain mainly
used available light, although he was
occasionally able to augment the loca-
tion’s existing ambience with HMIs.
Once the company moved to
Argentina, production became more
complicated. Wide shots sometimes
required extensive bluescreen and
greenscreen construction to cover
period-inaccurate elements. “In a place
like Argentina, these challenges are
solved in an artisanal way,” says
Beristain. “The crews may not have all
the resources and be as well prepared
for these situations as they are in
Hollywood, but today, these kinds of In the film’s present day, Manolo’s journalist son, Robert (Dougray Scott, top), has trouble
techniques can be accomplished connecting with his emotionally distant father (Bentley, middle, in old-age makeup), but his
quest for understanding leads him to do some research at the Vatican (bottom).
anywhere. Buenos Aires has many

ww.theasc.com
w May 2011 43
◗ A Saint and a Sinner
beautiful, turn-of-the-century colonial
buildings, but some of them are right
smack in the middle of ghastly modern
architecture, so we needed to isolate
those locations by using large green-
screens. The scale was nowhere near
what I experienced when I was shoot-
ing additional photography on Iron
Man, but the Argentinian crew built
the greenscreens using whatever was at
hand, and those shots made a signifi-
During the cant contribution to the look of the
Spanish Civil film.
War, Manolo
aligns himself “By way of example, I’ll note that
with the rebels any screen larger than 20-by-20 feet
but turns on has to be put together skillfully in order
them and
serves as a to avoid seams and folds, and our crew
Fascist spy. put together an 80-by-80-foot screen
using several 20-bys carefully
suspended from a giant construction
crane,” he continues. “Just before the
shot, we discovered we needed an extra
20-by to cover a last-minute change of
composition. My point is, if you are
working with film crews far from
Hollywood, don’t assume something is
impossible. If you have the will, it’s
neither expensive nor difficult.”
Another visually arresting scene

44 May 2011 American Cinematographer

shows Manolo, now a soldier, making tungsten Fresnel lamps ranging from church sequence, Gabriel asked me for
his first attempt to kill a rebellious 650-watt units to 20Ks. We used HMI Musco or Bebee [Night] lights, but
worker. “I found a factory warehouse mixtures in daylight situations. Most of they are not available in Argentina,”
with a glass roof, and we shot it day-for- the sets were so large and complex that Hermo continues. “We couldn’t access
night,” says Beristain. “I shot it during we had two teams working simultane- the roofs, and we needed an 82-foot
the daytime but underexposed by 6 or 7 ously, with one crew pre-lighting the boom, so we rented a 131-foot tele-
stops. I knew that once we got to the subsequent scene. Close collaboration scopic mobile crane that is normally
digital intermediate, I could pick out with key grip Anibal Cattaneo was used on construction sites. We assem-
the windows and bring them down crucial. bled a truss structure that would absorb
further. I put three 10Ks inside the “For several scenes, including a vibrations and wind, and mounted
office, and everything else was available
light. It lends the scene an ominous
quality. That shot was all in knowing
how to manipulate the exposure and
knowing what can be achieved in the
DI.”
Like the majority of Beristain’s
crew on the film, gaffer Daniel Hermo
is Argentinean. Hermo studied
photography at National School
of Cinematographic Production and
Experimentation, and has served as
gaffer on many commercials and about
30 features, including the Oscar-
winning The Secret in Their Eyes.
Beristain’s direct-light approach
meant larger sources and more rigging.
Hermo explains, “To achieve the
aesthetic Gabriel described, we used

After joining the

rebels, Manolo
becomes a
jealous rival of
the faction’s
charismatic
leader, Oriol
(Rodrigo
Santoro, top).

ww.theasc.com
w May 2011 45
◗ A Saint and a Sinner
three Arri 18K HMIs on the truss. We
used this rig to bring light into high
windows, casting beams through the
smoke we had laid in the church inte-
Cinematographer rior.”In some situations, the crane rig
Gabriel Beristain, was augmented with an Arri
ASC, BSC says he
tailored his MaxMover to facilitate remote aiming
lighting to the and focus of the lights.
emotional The project’s “pièce de résis-
content of
individual scenes tance,” according to Beristain, was a
rather than vast battle scene in which the square
fashioning an and cathedral in Luján, Argentina,
overall style.
stand in for Madrid. In addition to the
numerous greenscreens, the scene
required extensive special effects, large
numbers of actors and extras, and care-
ful choreography. The size of the square
meant Beristain had to work with

“Our primary
concern was the
dramatic mood of
the scene.”

available light, and because the cathe-

dral was oriented east-west, it was
backlit in the morning and front-lit in
the afternoon. “Luckily, I had the
element of smoke to work with,” says
Beristain. “Whenever I had shadow
areas, I justified it as though smoke
were covering that area. The opening
shot was done in overcast conditions,
but once the sun came out, the smoke
saved my life. There are many actors
running through the scene, squibs
everywhere, explosions, shots being
fired — it’s chaotic, and the adrenaline
was pumping. You can’t stop everyone
and say, ‘Sorry, the light isn’t right.’
That’s a reality for most cinematogra-
phers. We need to sharpen our wits and
find a way. When it was sunny, some-
times the sun would break through the
smoke and create fantastic shots.” ➣

46 May 2011 American Cinematographer

◗ A Saint and a Sinner
Filming battle sequences with
kinetic intensity also required ingenious
solutions. To render a documentary feel
for certain scenes, the production
combined a Steadicam rig with a
Segway two-wheeled vehicle, which
camera operator Matías Mesa used to
cover rough terrain at high speeds.
“Roland is not generally very keen on
the Steadicam,” Beristain says, “but we
used it with the Segway in the battle
situations, and it added very much to
the sense of advancement we needed to
create. It’s more than just following the
characters.
“One of our most dramatic loca-
tions was the town of Epecuen, where

The movie’s main

battle sequence
was shot on a
square in Luján,
Argentina, which
stood in for
Madrid. A
Steadicam rig
combined with a
Segway two-
wheeled vehicle
(middle right)
allowed the
filmmakers to
traverse rough
terrain at high
speeds.

48 May 2011 American Cinematographer

 ◗ A Saint and a Sinner
An ailing
Manolo
experiences a
vision from his
youth while
lying on his
hospital
deathbed.
we shot a big battle scene,” he
continues. “It became a ghost town two
decades ago, when the nearby lake
flooded half the villa. Half the town
comprises water avenues and sub-
merged rooftops, and the other half is
dead trees, barren soil and abandoned
ruins. The soggy soil made it impossible
for us to bring in any heavy equipment, have that [fully integrated] quality,” he
so cranes and dollies were out of the
question. The Segway would just glide
over anything, and Matty achieved
phenomenal shots, like moving forward stands this, so I trusted him. In that
with enemy infantry as they charged
our heroes.”
Beristain knew that many long,
moving shots might not make the final
cut intact, and “Roland and I felt we
should not be saddened or discouraged
by this fact,” he says. “We believed that
by creating these dynamic, choreo-
graphed moves with the Scorpio head,
Technocrane, jib arm and Steadicam,
we were giving the film a different look,
and that even the cuts would be made
special by that movement. The cuts are
not simple, narrative-based cuts, but
rather based on the whole poetry.
Ideally the cuts and the movement
work in harmony to become something
very special, an integral part of the
mise-en-scène.
“I think it’s important for films to
says. “People don’t talk about that any
longer, and I think it’s a vital part of the
cinematic language. Roland under-
respect, There Be Dragons was a fasci-

50
nating experiment.”
The production’s front-end lab
work was done at Cinecolor Argentina
in Buenos Aires. That lab also handled
the majority of the 2K scanning; some
other scanning work was done at
Technicolor in Madrid, where
Beristain worked on the digital grade
with colorist Noémie Dulau.
“Nowadays I’m involved in many
conversations, panels and interviews
regarding how new technologies can
optimize the way a cinematographer
communicates with the dailies and final
colorists,” he notes. “Of course, the
integrity and artistic value of the
images cinematographers produce
depends very much on this communi-
cation, but I think equally important is
our close contact with the person who
will sit behind the machine, and our
capacity to involve him or her in the
project.
“When I met Noémie and told
her about my ‘emotional lighting’
concept, she looked at me with an TECHNICAL SPECS
expression that said, ‘Oh, no, this is
going to be painful,’ but after she read 2.40:1
the script and we had a few conversa-
tions, she understood that our primary 3-perf Super 35mm
concern was going to be the dramatic
mood of the scene. We didn’t care Arricam Studio, Lite
about the period or have any precon-
ceived notions about certain colors for Arri Master Prime,
certain characters. If the mood called Angenieux Optimo
for cool light, we made it cool; if it
called for strong contrast, we’d crank Kodak Vision2 100T 5212,
those blacks. The [Autodesk] Lustre 200T 5217, 250D 5205;
helped us make the lighting a great Vision3 500T 5219
character, like a storyteller within the
film.” ● Digital Intermediate
51
 First
Dance Arri’s Alexa makes its U.S. feature
debut on Prom, shot by Byron Shah.
By Noah Kadner
•|•
T
he new Disney movie Prom,a coming-of-age story about
an ensemble of teens getting ready for the biggest night
of their young lives, marks the U.S.-featuredebut of
Arri’s Alexadigital motion-picture camera. (The
European film Anonymous, shot by Anna Foerster, was the
camera’s first feature outing, according to Arri.)
For director Joe Nussbaum and cinematographer Byron
52 May 2011 American Cinematographer
Shah, the goal was a look “that felt real, raw and a little out of
control,” says Shah. “The movie weaves together multiple
love stories, and the look had to match the whirlwind inten-
sity of teen love.”
“We created a digital look-book made up of stills from
other movies, all of which had been shot on film; there were
no references for a digitally shot movie that had the look we
wanted,”notes Nussbaum.
Before production commenced, the filmmakers tested
the Alexa side-by-side with a Red One MX and a Sony F35.
“There was no studio mandate to shoot digitally, but Joe and
I both were open to the idea provided we could find a format
that worked for the project,” says Shah. “We didn’t test film
because we knew what film looks like, and we wanted to
judge the digital formats on their own terms. We set up an
apples-to-apples test: same lens, same stop, same filters, same
setup, same lighting, same settings and so on. We just
switched out the camera bodies.”
 Footage from representative
scenes was taken through to a 35mm Opposite: Despite an
early antagonism, Nova
print and screened blind at FotoKem. (Aimee Teegarden) and
Everyone agreed that the Alexa most Jesse (Thomas
closely represented the look they McDonell) grow close in
Prom. This page, top:
wanted. “It was really unanimous, from Justin (Jared Kusnitz)
Disney’s head of production, Sean asks Mei (Yin Chang) to
Bailey, on down,” says Shah. “The the big dance in creative
fashion.Middle:
dynamic range was what sold us on the Cinematographer Byron
Alexa. We lit a scene at the main loca- Shah (far right) and
tion, a school, that featured an actress company prepare a
close-up of Chang.
walking through a hot splash of Bottom: Shah confers
sunlight. It was 8 stops over key, but with director Joe
instead of clipping, the Alexa rolled off Nussbaum as camera
operator Paul Sanchez
more naturally, as your eye would (far right) frames a shot.
perceive the scene.
“Blown highlights are one of the
real tells of a digital format, and you
could never get away with such
extremes of contrast on any other digi-
tal camera without it looking elec-
tronic,” he continues. “When I’ve shot
with other digital cameras — Red, the
F35, a [Panavision] Genesis or
[Thomson] Viper — I’ve always had to
protect those highlights like a fanatic.
With the Alexa, we found a format that
could capture the extremes of bright-
ness and darkness necessary for a story
about the extremes of the teen heart.”
Introduced in April 2010, the
Alexa features a 3.5K CMOS sensor
and a PL mount, and records up to 60
fps at 1920x1080 high-definition inter-
Photos by Richard Foreman Jr., SMPSP, courtesy of Disney Enterprises, Inc.

nally to ProRes 422 or externally to

Arri’s proprietary ArriRaw format. The
camera also outputs an uncompressed
1080PsF 4:4:4 RGB stream, suitable
for uncompressed capture using exter-
nal recorders.
“We found the camera to be very
user-friendly,” says Shah. “It has great
ergonomics and very clear onboard
menus. Its viewfinder is the nicest elec-
tronic one I’ve seen yet. Of course, it’s
not the same as an optical viewfinder. It
wasn’t quite sharp enough to judge crit-
ical focus; that still has to be evaluated
on a big reference monitor.”
Eager to see its new camera put
through its paces in a feature-film
workflow, Arri offered the production
support that included access to Stephan
Ukas-Bradley, the company’s U.S.

ww.theasc.com
w May 2011 53
◗ First Dance
manager of technical services. Otto
Nemenz supplied the filmmakers with
two Alexas, a set of Cooke S4 prime
lenses and an Angenieux Optimo24-
290mmzoom lens; grip and lighting
gear was provided by Paskal Lighting.
Of the S4 primes, Shah notes,
“I’d tested Cooke Speed Panchros,
thinking they’d give us their lovely low-
con look, but on the Alexa they looked
muddy, not at all the way they look on
film. But the S4s looked fantastic on the
Alexa, delivering open blacks with a lot
of detail, and smooth skin texture. We
shot most of the movie between T2 and
T2.8, lending the characters a subtle
separation from their backgrounds to
heighten the intense emotions of the
moment.”
Prom is set in Michigan, but the
production shot the movie exclusively
in Los Angeles. Shah’s key crew
included 1st AC Ethan McDonald,
gaffer Jack English, camera operator
Paul Sanchez and key grip Patrick
Heffernan.
Footage was fed at 1920x1080
24p from the Alexa’s HD-SDI port to
an outboard Codex Digital recorder
capturing to the Codex’s native RAW
format. “The Codex files were
transcoded by FotoKem to DPX and
laid off to LTO tape,” explains Shah. “It
was a bit of a challenge because I cali-
brated my monitor to the Alexa’s Rec
709 color space LUT, so I was seeing a
lot less latitude than what the Codex
was actually picking up. But I knew
what we were truly getting, and I could
also monitor raw to confirm if needed.”
“With a lens on, the Alexa is a
little front-heavy, and the Codex
recorder helped to act as a physical
counterbalance, adding weight to the
back of the rig,” notes McDonald. “We
used an EasyRig backpack harness to
make things easier. The complete pack-
age — camera, recorder and lens — was
small enough and light enough to
handhold comfortably.”
Top: Nova leads a meeting outside the shed that houses the school’s prom decorations. Shah used varying degrees of lens
Middle: After the shed burns down, Principal Dunnan (Jere Burns, center) tasks Jesse with filtration, often a mix of Tiffen Low
helping to remake the decorations. Bottom: Jesse and Nova restore a water fountain in Con and Smoque filters. “Sometimes
the school’s art room.
we combined them with ND/IR

54 May 2011 American Cinematographer

filters,” says McDonald. “In testing, we
found that the Alexa has some built-in
IR protection, whereas most digital
cameras don’t have as much. We found
that NDs alone weren’t keeping skin
tones neutral, so we moved up to IR
filters.”
One of Prom’s big sequences is a
quintessential rite of passage, an elabo-
rate “ask” to the prom. In this case, it’s a
theatrical moment set, appropriately, on
the school’s auditorium stage. “We shot
that scene, between Justin [Jared
Kusnitz] and Mei [Yin Chang], on our
first day of principal photography,” says
Shah. “With a Steadicam, we follow
Mei running up to the stage, where
Justin has lit up the word ‘Prom?’ in
giant letters. We lit the letters with
Source Four [Lekos] on irises that we
hung amongst the theatrical lights
already at the location.
“The theatrical lights had beauti-
ful, vintage, amber glass stipple filters
that we augmented with 250 diffusion,”
continues the cinematographer. “Jack
[English] followed alongside the
Steadicam rig with a 500-watt ECT
globe in a Chinese lantern on a boom
pole. We backlit the auditorium chairs
using two Blondes with doubles on
them. We also used a Smoque filter,
which can give you some crazy, intense
flares.
“To create those flares, we used a
2K Xenon Super Trooper theatrical
follow spot on the balcony and shined it
just into the matte box, and a 27mm
Cooke S4 and a Tiffen Smoque 1,”
adds Shah. “It gave us some
marvelously out-of-control but very
spontaneous-looking flares. I was a little
nervous about giving the studio dailies
like that on day one because we’d
pushed the look so far, but they were
totally stoked, and we were off.”
Befitting a story about high-
school students, many scenes in Prom
take place in hallways and classrooms.
“In those spaces, we swapped out the
overhead fluorescents for daylight-
balanced Kino tubes,” says Shah.
“When there weren’t sufficient ceiling
fixtures, we’d augment with Joker
Nova’s father, Frank (Dean Norris, right), confronts Jesse at a grocery-store loading dock. To boost the
practicals on location, Shah reports that gaffer Jack English “created a special ‘pumpkin light,’ which was
basically a bare 400-watt industrial sodium-vapor lamp.”
Source Fours for ceiling bounce and
Kino Flo Vista Beams. As our key, we
put a 400-watt Joker light with a Jem
Ball on a boom pole that we’d dance
around with.
“Since this was a digital show, we
initially did a fair amount of ND’ing on
windows, and it turned out we were a
little overzealous,” he continues.
“When we started seeing how those
shots looked on the Alexa, we decided
to not waste the gel. The Alexa holds
hot windows really well, and we ended
up using less and less ND gel in general
as the shoot continued.”
A confrontational scene between
bad boy Jesse (Thomas McDonell) and
the father of his would-be date takes
place on a grocery-store loading dock
at night. “Jack created a special ‘pump-
kin light,’ which was basically a bare
400-watt industrial sodium-vapor
lamp that matched the practical on the
wall of that location,” says Shah. “We
rated the Alexa at 640 ISO and shot
handheld. The slightly desaturated
lamp gave a rough look, which was
perfect for the hard emotions of the
scene.”
Another night scene that tested
the Alexa shows the shed holding the
prom’s decorations catching fire and
burning to the ground. “We built the
shed on a football field at a middle
school in Northridge,” says Shah.
“We had one 18K HMI gelled with
Lee Steel Blue on a Condor hitting
the grass in front of the shed, and that
was about it in terms of lighting. The
special-effects team estimated that
the flames would only go up about 4
feet off the roof, so I had to guess the
exposure.
“We set the camera ISO to 200
and exposed at a T8, hoping that
everything else would be balanced
with the fire. We set up two Alexas;
one was a wide shot that dollied in,
and the other was on the 12:1 Optimo
to grab pieces. Once the burn started,
the flames leapt as high as 25 feet off
the roof, but the Alexa held the expo-
sure, and we got it all in one take.”
In the aftermath of the fire, Jesse
and Nova (Aimee Teegarden) find
themselves relegated to the school’s art
room to design new decorations. “It
was a ground-floor location that was
meant to play as a basement,” says
Shah. “So we started with four 4K
Xenons bounced off mirrors, projected
through clerestory windows playing as

ww.theasc.com
w May 2011 55
◗ First Dance
Top: Nussbaum directs Cameron Monaghan (left) and Nolan Sotillo (center). For scenes set in
hallways and classrooms, Shah says, “we swapped out the overhead fluorescents for daylight-balanced
Kino tubes.” Bottom: Lloyd (Nicholas Braun) talks with Besty (Allie Trimm) in the library. Shooting
with Arri’s Alexa digital camera, Shah never shied away from extreme highlights. “The Alexa holds
hot windows really well,” he says.
hard sun, and used a few Jokers with
Source Four attachments for extra
splashes of sunlight.
“Scenes progress in this room
from a bright day to a bluish twilight,”
continues the cinematographer. “We
bounced four HMIs [two 18Ks and
two 12Ks] into a row of 12-by-12
Ultrabounce frames for skylight
through the high windows, and then
used a tungsten key light inside with
56 May 2011
our ubiquitous Chinese lantern fitted
with a 500-watt ECT. We also dressed he says. “Like a lot of digital cameras,
the art room with lots of practical lamps the Alexa still needs that extra snap that
on hand-squeeze dimmers to play as
warm and inviting as antagonism
between the two characters gives way to used primes for almost the whole show,
romance. We did a lot of long, hand-
held takes to emphasize their changing
emotions.”
Nova and Jesse create a giant,
functional fountain for the prom’s
American Cinematographer
centerpiece. “We bounced Dedolights
into the fountain,” says English, “and
we also brought in a bunch of 150-watt
waterproof garden lights that we gelled
with Full Straw and ND. The fountain
had a copper-tile surface, and we
bounced two 300-watt Arri Fresnels
and two Peppers with 200-watt FEV
bulbs off it to produce shimmering
light on the kids’ faces.”
“For a lot of the night scenes, we
rated the Alexa at 500 ISO for more
shadow detail,” says McDonald. “In a
couple of instances, we went to 800 to
make a shot; that added some image
noise, but it was a pleasing, film-grain
sort of noise. For day scenes, we kept
the camera at 320 ISO, which seemed
to give us the best-looking skin tones.”
As Jesse and Nova complete their
work, the film transitions to the night
of the prom. “We lit the prom scene
with 56 Pars and 19-degree Source
Fours rigged over the tables,” says
English. “We dressed practical table
lamps with 216 diffusion gel in glass
cylinders and put two Jokers and
Source Fours gelled with 1⁄4 CTB on a
mirror ball over the dance floor.”
During the dance, the filmmakers also
made judicious use of a 25'
Technocrane and a Steadicam.
At the beginning of the shoot,
Shah and Nussbaum screened a selec-
tion of dailies at 2K resolution on a big
screen in a Pablo suite at FotoKem,
using a custom-designed film-emula-
tion LUT. “We didn’t film out any
dailies,” notes Shah. “Once we got
going, we had Internet dailies via the
Pix network.”
“In the dailies, I was surprised to
see a big difference in resolution
between our prime and zoom lenses,”
primes give on the big screen. That was
fine with me, because we would have
anyway.”
FotoKem’s involvement in Prom
began early in prep, with the help of
Tom Vice, manager and vice president
of FotoKem’s NextLab. “We’ve had a
◗ First Dance
Jesse and Nova
survey their
handiwork.
Looking back
over his first
dance with the
Alexa, Shah
notes, “we found
a format that
could capture the
extremes of
brightness and
darkness
necessary for a
story about the
extremes of the
teen heart.”
long relationship with Arri, and this
was an important project for them and
for Disney,” notes Vice. “Arri was heav-
ily involved and helped us in the early
stages, confirming workflows and
frame-rate combinations.
“We set Byron up with enough
Codex magazines to shoot for two full
days, which gave us enough time for
our dailies turnaround,” continues Vice.
“As each drive arrived, we’d load the
Codex RAW files onto the network
from our in-house transfer station. The
digital-imaging technician on set had
already input some scene slates and
metadata, which helped a lot.
“The Codex RAW format uses a
proprietary 3:1 wavelet compression,
which we’d immediately decode for
PIX and compress for Avid with
Byron’s desired LUT already applied,”
he continues. “Then we’d run off DPX
frames onto LTO tape for safekeeping.
The beauty of our system is that those
Codex files stay on our network and
can be called up directly in the Pablo
DI suite for the conform stage. We can
take the editor’s pull list, load it into the
Pablo, conform from Codex to DPX,
58 May 2011
and then go right out to film.” post. We had all the range we needed in
Shah worked with colorist John the DI, and Byron just nailed the look.”
Daro to create the film’s final output. “I “Everyone was making the same
knew the Alexa’s latitude was profound, movie,” notes Shah. “The studio gave
but it was a little crazy how much room us the support we needed, and the
we had to play with and how easily we results are a tribute to Joe and our
could adjust files,” says Shah. “We shot producer, Justin Spring. They encour-
into hot windows whenever we could, aged me to take some chances on my
but the only blown highlights were in first studio movie, and all those chances
the flames of the burning shed! paid off.” ●
“Going in, my chief concern was
that the texture of close-ups on the big
screen would feel electronic and unap-
pealing,” he continues. “Diffusion
wasn’t an option, because I didn’t like
how even light amounts of [Schneider]
Classic Soft look on this format —
totally phony. So I was delighted to see
that for the first time in my experience TECHNICAL SPECS
with a digital format, the close-ups look
gorgeous, supple and natural.” 1.85:1
Looking back on the experience,
both Shah and Nussbaum are pleased Digital Capture
with the Alexa’s performance. “It was
initially a race against time just to get Arri Alexa
our camera bodies right off the assem-
bly line,” recalls Nussbaum. “But after Cooke S4, Angenieux Optimo
that, it was unbelievable how few prob-
lems we had during production and Digital Intermediate
American Cinematographer
 2011
LOS ANGELES
FILM FESTIVAL
L.A. LIVE Downtown LA
June 16-26

Learn more at LAFilmFest.com

HOST VENUE PRESENTING PARTNER


Decoding
Digital
Imagers: Part 1
G
iven the proliferation of digital motion-picture camera
systems available to cinematographers today, a primer
on how these various digital imagers function is perhaps
overdue. If you are a cinematographer, a clear under-
standing of the factors that influence a sensor’s function and
integration into a camera’s design can help you make better
decisions about which system best suits your needs.
The first installment of this two-part series will discuss
how digital imagers developed and evolved, differentiate
between CCD and CMOS imagers, and touch upon the
concepts of resolution, Modulation Transfer Function,
perceived picture sharpness and Nyquist Sampling Theorem.
Next month, Part 2 will delve further into the function of
CCD and CMOS imagers and their application in various
camera systems, color-filter arrays, image processing, digital
output specs and recording mechanisms.
To begin our dissection of this topic, let’s look at how
digital imagers developed.
60 May 2011 American Cinematographer
The first of a two-part
look at the origins,
design characteristics
and functions of
today’s digital-imaging
sensors.
By Christopher Probst
•|•
A History of Digital Imagers
The invention of the first passive Metal-Oxide
Semiconductor imager is credited to Gene P. Weckler of
Fairchild Semiconductor, who authored the article
“Operation of p-n Junction Photodetectors in a Photon Flux
Integrating Mode” in the Sept. 1967 issue of the IEEE
Journal of Solid-State Circuits . Weckler’s early work in MOS
imagers was also detailed in his influential follow-up paper,
“Integrated Arrays of Silicon Photodetectors for Image
Sensing,” co-written with Rudolph H. Dyck for the April
1968 edition of the IEEE Journal of Transactions on Electron
Devices.
Simultaneously, in the United Kingdom, Peter J.W.
Noble documented his active pixel concepts in the article
“Self-Scanned Silicon Image Detector Arrays,” which was
also printed in the April 1968 edition of IEEE Transactions
on Electron Devices.
An invention that is more directly related to today’s
digital-imager environment, however,
occurred in 1969 at Bell Labs, with
George E. Smith and Willard S. Boyle’s
creation of the Charge-Coupled
Device, or CCD. The CCD imager
quickly established itself as a more easily
produced technology for the state of
semiconductor fabrication capabilities
in the 1970s and on through the 1980s.
Smith and Boyle were presented with a
2009 Nobel Prize in Physics for their
contribution to the birth of digital
imaging.
CCDs dominated early on partly
because of strong R&D by corporations
such as Sony, RCA and Bell Labs. In
fact, the Sony Corp. Research Center
actively developed CCD technology in
the early 1970s, and by 1972 displayed a
96-pixel linear CCD sensor at its
annual exhibition. By July 1976, Sony
had created its first single-chip color Opposite page: Arri's ALEV-III Super 35mm CMOS sensor used in the Alexa camera. This page,
camera prototype, and in March 1978, top: At Bell Labs in 1974, Willard Boyle (left) and George Smith demonstrate an experimental
camera featuring an early CCD imager. (Reprinted with permission of Alcatel-Lucent USA Inc.)
it unveiled its first three-chip CCD Below: The principle behind the charge-transfer and readout of a CCD chip. One row at a time is
camera design that utilized three then shifted through an A/D Converter, which makes the output signal digital.
110,000-pixel Interline Transfer CCD
sensors.

Defining the Pixel

In order to better understand how
digital imagers such as CCDs work, we
should first define an oft-misunder-
stood term: the pixel. The first known
use of the word was in a 1965 paper by
Fred C. Billingsley and George
Peterson, who collaborated at the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory.
“The term ‘pixel’ comes from two
words: Picture and Element,” says Larry
Thorpe, national marketing executive of
Canon’s Broadcast and Communication
Division and formerly a veteran of more
than 20 years in Sony’s HD division.
“However, there are several different
types of pixels, denoting several different
types of things. There are imaging pixels
in the sensor of a camera. There are
digital pixels associated with the camera
digitization processing and interfacing.
And today, with fixed-pixel displays,
there are also display pixels.”
For this discussion, we will focus
primarily on imaging pixels and their
derived digital pixels used in the

ww.theasc.com
w May 2011 61
◗ Decoding Digital Imagers: Part 1
Typical CMOS Photosite Structure
Microlens
Amplifier
Transistor
Column
Bus
Transistor
Silicon
Substrate
construction of a SMPTE-prescribed
delivery format. To help avoid confu-
sion, we will use the term “photosite” to
refer to imaging pixels and “pixel” when
referring to digital pixels. By definition,
imager photosites are the tiny receptors
in a CCD or CMOS sensor that trans-
form the two-dimensional optical
image projected by the lens onto the
sensor into an analog electronic signal.
CCD Imagers
The CCD, at its most basic, is
designed to store and transfer informa-
tion in the form of an electrical charge.
In cross-section, it consists of a substrate
of semiconductor material covered with
an insulator.
A pattern of metal electrodes is
positioned on the insulator, and every
third electrode is connected to a
common conductor. When voltage is
applied to an electrode, a potential
“well” forms in the semiconductor
beneath it. In the case of an imaging
sensor, the amount of charge that fills a
well depends on the amount of light
striking that area of the CCD. By
applying voltage to the next electrodes,
potential wells form under them, and
62 May 2011
Red
Color
Filter
Reset
Transistor
Row
Select
Bus
Photodiode
Potential
Well
part of the stored charge shifts over to
the new well areas. When voltage is
removed from the original energized
electrodes, the charge in their wells like-
wise spills over into the new wells. This
process continues down the line of elec-
trodes to a detector in a sort of “bucket-
brigade” fashion.
“Functionally, CCDs are the
simplest of imagers,” states John Galt,
senior vice president of Panavision’s
Advanced Digital Imaging Group, “but
to manufacture them with today’s specs
requires an amazingly complex process.
In fact, there are only a few manufactur-
ers of CCDs in the world.”
Jeffrey Zarnowski, sensor-design
engineer and chief technology officerof
Panavision Imaging, adds, “CCDs have
dominated the solid-state-imager
market over MOS or CMOS photodi-
odes for the past 30-plus years because
CCDs have the lowest noise and high-
est sensitivity. Sony had the lion’s share
of the CCD market thanks to its Hole
Accumulation Diode pixel technology,
which allowed for improved blue
response over standard photogate pixels.
Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, CCDs
continued to evolve in resolution and
American Cinematographer
Left: The structure of a typical CMOS photosite
with a microlens and a single color of a color-filter
array. A certain percentage of the “real estate” is
occupied by processing circuitry, leaving only a
fraction of the area for actual photo-electric
sensing. Right: One of the first CCD sensors
produced. (Reprinted with permission of
Alcatel-Lucent USA Inc.)
quality, and in the year 2000, Panavision
and Sony introduced the F900 as the
first 3-CCD 24-fps progressive HD
video camera.”
CMOS Imagers
Many of today’s digital-stills
cameras and digital-cinema camera
systems use a different type of digital-
imaging architecture: Complimen-
tary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor, or
CMOS, sensors. These are fabricated
with many of the same processes as
today’s highly complex integrated
circuits for microprocessors and
memory.
CMOS sensors differ from
CCDs in that they incorporate on-chip
much of the amplification and digitiza-
tion circuitry necessary to capture a
photosite’s analog electronic signal.
This circuitry allows CMOS photosites
to perform their own charge-to-voltage
conversion, instead of requiring the
charge to be transferred to an output
node for subsequent conversion into an
electronic signal. It does this by arrang-
ing the photosites in a checkerboard of
readout busses that contain not only the
photosite, but also as many as eight
transistors that convert the accumulated
electron charge into a measurable volt-
age. These additional electronic compo-
nents reside alongside the light-sensitive
photodiode and occupy a certain
percentage of the area of the photosite.
This remaining percentageis the actual
photosensitive area and mostly deter-
mines the actual sensitivity and dynamic
range of the sensor.
After converting the photosite’s
stored charge into an electrical voltage,
and before transferring the photosite’s
analog electrical signal to a vertical
column bus, this digital circuitry must
reset the photodiode to begin the next
integration cycle. The bus’s function is
to also supply necessary timing signals
to the photodiodes and send their read-
out information to the analog decoding
and processing circuitry. A benefit of
this grid structure of buses is that it
allows each of the photosites in the array
to be read as simple x and y coordinates.
“With a CMOS imaging device,
each photosite has an amplifier with a
number of transistors, diodes and capac-
itors — a miniature circuit — that occu-
pies the same [substrate],” explains Galt.
“With CMOS manufacturing, it has
been proven that the size of the features
on any semiconductor have been follow-
ing Moore’s Law, getting smaller and
smaller.”
Moore’s Law refers to Gordon
Moore, the co-founder of Intel Corp.,
who stated, “Every 18 months, the
density doubles, or the feature-sizes
half.” This rapid pace of increasing
technological complexity has allowed
CMOS imagers to make significant
qualitative steps. As Galt notes, “They
have gone from having circuit features
that you could see with the human eye
to having features that you can only see
with an electron microscope!
“To grasp the manufacturing
challenges this presents,” he continues,
“I use an analogy to help people get a
sense of how small the elements of these
devices can get. On edge, a dollar bill is
pretty consistently 100 microns thick.
On the sensor we use for the
[Panavision] Genesis, a photosite is only
A photomicrograph image of a cross-section of a pixel. Visible are the
microlens above each photosite “well,” as well as the color filter
photo-lithographically printed beneath the lens. (Image courtesy of Panavision.)
4.1 microns wide.”
Zarnowski expands, “The initial
promise of CMOS imagers was
hindered by the fact that they were
noisy [compared] to CCDs. This was
due to both Fixed Pattern Noise and
Temporal Noise, and as a result CMOS
imagers had objectionable patterns
that could be seen by the viewer and
didn’t quite have the same sensitivity
as CCDs. With the recent archi-
tecture changes made to eliminate
FPN and the creation of overall lower-
noise pixels — through the addition of
pinned photodiodes — CMOS imagers
are now living up to their potential.”
“CCD technology was the supe-
rior technology in the ’80s and probably
through the ’90s, but CMOS was on a
real growth curve because it’s a technol-
ogy that is used in all of the other semi-
conductor manufacturing operations,”
agrees Glenn Kennel, president and
CEO of Arri, Inc. “Unfortunately, all of
the Moore’s Law’s improvements no
longer apply to CCD because there just
aren’t enough products being developed
for them. CCD is still a viable technol-
ogy, but it’s more expensive to make,
and it isn’t improving at the same rate.
In fact, it has reached a kind of plateau.
CMOS imagers continue to improve
and have now passed CCDs in sensitiv-
ity, dynamic range and frame-rate capa-
bilities.”
General Components of a
Digital Camera
For simplicity’s sake, we can say
the digital camera has two discrete
sections: the front-end imaging section
and the back end for digital processing
and output digital interfaces.
In the imaging section, an image
enters a lens and is projected onto a
sensor. The sensor then samples this
image opto-electrically with its photo-
sites and generates an analog electrical
signal. It is at this step when the resolu-
tion for the entire system is greatly
determined and/or influenced by the
number of samples on the sensor — in
this case, the number of photosites.
This analog sampling of the image is
then “handed” to the digital section and
subsequently subjected to separate digi-
tal sampling.
“In the digital section, we have to
grab that analog information and digi-
tize it — it’s a second sampling step,”

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◗ Decoding Digital Imagers: Part 1
says Thorpe. “The resolution, the
dynamic range and the tonal reproduc-
tion, all of the really important imaging
attributes, have to faithfully be repre-
sented digitally. With some sensors,
such as CMOS imagers, that analog-
to-digital conversion is done inside the
sensor, but it’s still a two-step process:
analog transformation followed by digi-
tization. From that digital sampling
structure, you then do a lot of processing
and formulate interface signals that can
go to the outside world in the form of a
video-output signal to be viewed, or to
be sent to a recorder or other various
systems.
“Now,” he notes, “is there a link
64 May 2011
between the total number of imaging
photosites and their resultant digital
pixels? There can be, but there might
not be!”
In fact, it is not mandatory to
have a direct 1:1 relationship between
the number of photosites on a sensor
and the digital-pixel dimensions derived
from that photosite array. Indeed, the
concept of an imager’s photosites
directly corresponding to its digital-
pixel output specs is fraught with confu-
sion.
Thorpe recalls, “In 1981, when
the world created the first digital stan-
dards for standard-definition video,
SMPTE defined the North American
American Cinematographer
standard as: 720 (H) x 480 (V). The
CCD cameras invented at that time
were all horizontally sub-sampled [with
imager photosites numbering less than
the horizontal output standard]. That
was all they could build! But as the ’80s
progressed, manufacturers learned how
to build more sophisticated CCDs, and
by the late ’80s, they started to over-
sample, or super-sample, in the hori-
zontal direction. To my knowledge,
however, even today there is no profes-
sional standard-def camera that has [a
1:1 ratio of] optical photosites and
[output] digital pixels.
“Super-sampling facilitates sub-
sequent digital filtering and helps
produce a very nice ‘aperture,’ as we call
it,” Thorpe continues. “In HD,
however, in both the single-chip and
tri-imager systems, you will find a lot of
linkage between the photosites and the
digital pixels. One reason for that is that
when the first 3-chip CCD HD
cameras came out, in the early ’90s, the
creators decided to go as high as they
possibly could [in terms of definition].
Even today we still see lots of HD
cameras whose optical sites match their
digital pixels, but, surprisingly, we also
see lots of sub-sampling in HD camera
systems. Additionally, there are several
Ultra High Definition camera systems
emerging on the market that are now
super-sampling.”
Resolution
Clearly, there is some room for
interpretation in talking about photo-
sites, pixels and resolution. “The resolu-
tion of a digital camera is often defined
as the number of pixels in the signal
that’s being delivered, but that is inaccu-
rate,” states Thorpe. “However, it is true
that the topic of resolution and the
specifications for it are bound up in
discussions of pixels.”
Looking at the specs of various
camera systems on the market today,
you see a range of different photosite
dimensions utilized in various HD, 2K
and even 4K camera systems.
“There are a lot of differences to
be seen in each of these specs,” notes
Thorpe. “Why? Because every manufac-
turer wants lots of photosites on the
sensor to get more resolution, but that
creates a problem: As the number of
photosites goes up on a sensor, the
photosites get smaller, and when the
photosites get smaller, you see increased
noise and reduced dynamic range. So
there’s a tradeoff between resolution and
management of dynamic range and
noise; each manufacturer decides on a
certain number of photosites and then
does some clever processing — especially
if they sub-sample — to try to recover
some of the resolution.”
Sampling Theory and MTF
To describe the performance of an
imager, it is also necessary to define the
concept of sampling. “Let’s say I have a
CCD that’s looking at an image
projected onto it by a lens,” says Thorpe.
“That sensor is photosampling that
image with its photosites. With that
information, you will then have to recon-
struct all of those samples in order to get
something useful, like a video signal.
However, in 1928, Harry Nyquist wrote
a famous mathematical paper that
haunts us to this day. He concluded that
if you sample — optically, electrically or
digitally — you are stuck with a funda-
mental rule: If you have N samples
[across a line] or N-samples vertically,
you can only resolve N/2without experi-
encing an interference.
“In other words,” he continues, “in
the reconstruction of an image, your
sampling of those photosites must be at
least twice the highest detail that is of
interest to you. Otherwise, you’re going
to get interference, which we call aliasing
or moiré. This applies to the sensor that’s
doing optical sampling, and it also applies
to the digitization process that’s doing
digital sampling. Harry hits you twice in
any digital camera!”
To break it down mathematically,
if you have an HD imager with 1,920
horizontal samples, you can unambigu-
ously resolve only 960 line-pairs per
picture width. And if some information
coming in from the lens has a frequency
that is higher than 960, it is going to
generate a problem. In fact, if that infor-
mation is of very high frequency detail,
it will generate spurious signal interfer-
ence at a correspondingly low spatial
frequency intermixed into the signal:
aliasing.
The sampling capabilities of a
digital sensor are more commonly
denoted as line-pairs per picture height,
or lp/ph. To derive this number, you
need to transform the line-pairs-per-
picture-width value by the inverse of the
aspect ratio (16:9 in most digital
imagers), or by 9/16. So with our exam-
ple of 960 lp/pw, we transform that by
the inverse of the aspect ratio, resulting
in a calculation for the 1,920 samples in
the sensor example being able to accu-
rately resolve 540 line-pairs per picture
height across the picture.
But what exactly are the parame-
ters of resolving line-pairs? Here is
where Modulation Transfer Function,
or MTF, rears its confounding head.
“MTF begs the questions, ‘What
are we modulating, and what are we
transferring?’” says Thorpe. “Let’s
postulate a lens looking at a scene,
which in our test case is low-frequency
black-and-white bars that have a nice,
high contrast of 600:1. The lens’s job is
to transfer that scene from the real
world into an object-image. We hope
that object-image will be exactly the
ww.theasc.com
w May 2011
same as the scene in front of the lens, but
there is no such thing as a perfect lens, so
we cannot get the same 600:1 contrast
ratio through the lens. But let’s suppose
that we have a very good lens that deliv-
ers a contrast ratio of 595:1. We’ll lose a
little contrast, even at the lowest
frequencies of a black-and-white high-
contrast input.
“But here’s the bad part: If we
increase the frequency of that scene,
which means increasing the fineness of
the detail in the black-and-white bars
[like a test chart], the delivered image
will come through at an even lower
contrast than the lower-frequency scene.
That is true of every lens on the planet.
[An image projected through a lens] will
lose contrast increasingly as you raise the
detail fineness. Plainly stated, the trans-
ferred contrast is being altered as we
move up in higher and higher frequen-
cies. And it’s the variations in trans-
ferred-detail contrast that constitute this
transfer function; the transfer function is
how your contrast behaves as you raise
the fineness of the detail. If you put
enough of these frequencies in, measure
their output and plot them on a graph,
you get a profile, or modulation, of the
transfer of contrast. Hence, MTF.”
MTF occurs at multiple steps in
the image-capture, digitization and
output chain, and has a cumulative effect
65
◗ Decoding Digital Imagers: Part 1
actually lifts,” notes Thorpe. “That’s great
because it gives us a potential for more
resolution, but it’s also bad because
[increased resolution] gives us more
energy to generate aliasing.”
“Typically, photosites using
microlenses will have a fill factor of
approximately 70 percent,” says
Zarnowski, “and most photosites that are
6 microns or smaller will have a
microlens. On larger photosites that don’t
use a microlens, the MTF is directly
related to the percentage of the pixel that
the photodiode occupies. The smaller the
percentage, the lower the fill factor and
the higher the MTF; as the photodiodes
are effectively isolated from one another,
less cross-talk between them can occur.”

Perceived Picture Sharpness

on the “total system” resolution possible pixels are usually a different color, and and Optical Low-Pass Filtering
in a digital camera. The lens fitted to it’s why a microlens over each pixel is Resolution is often thought of as
the front of the camera has its own formed to focus the light directly onto synonymous with “sharp” and “in focus.”
MTF characteristics, as do the sensor the photodiode.” However, the concept is also entangled
sampling the image, the lens of a projec- A microlens is essentially a with our own human perceptionof
tor showing the image, and your very single-element lens formed on the sharpness. During the 1950s, RCA engi-
own eyes. sensor above each individual photosite. neer Otto Schade did extensive testing of
The microlens is typically circular in the subjective human response to resolu-
Fill Factor shape but covers a square photosite. tion and perceived picture sharpness.
An additional consideration with How well a microlens is positioned and From this research, he determined that
both CCD and CMOS imagers is that shaped has great affect on MTF and the human-perceived impression of
because part of the sensor’s surface area the fill factor of a photosite. sharpness was proportional to the square
features additional circuitry components “MTF is only one aspect of of the area under the MTF curve.
necessary to capture and digitize each image quality that goes into the numer- Thorpe explains, “Schade found
photosite’s charge, the photosensitive ous tradeoffs that have to be made in that when you look at a screen some
areas of the pixel do not abut one the design of the pixel,” expands distance away, the perceived sharpness
another. This “gap” between the Zarnowski. “Different pixel designs can that you see with your eyes and your brain
photosensitive portions of the photo- have as few as 1.33 transistors per pixel is weighted much more toward the
sites — the fill factor — is often or as many as 5 transistors per pixel. lower-band and mid-band spatial
discussed as a percentage of the area. For The fewer transistors per pixel, the frequencies. Higher frequencies do
example, a sensor with a 60-percent fill higher the fill factor; usually there’s a almost nothing to your perception of
factor would have 60 percent of a direct increase of the photosite’s full sharpness. When you square an MTF
photosite’s area devoted to capturing the well capacity. Additionally, a larger curve, that new curve, and specifically the
incident light. The remaining 40 photodiode and full well [capacity] can shape and area underneath it, is what
percent would denote the area occupied have a direct impact on the sensitivity your eyes and brain see as perceived sharp-
by the additional digital components on and dynamic range of the pixel — two ness. It’s not about having 1,000 or 2,000
the chip. other very important factors of imager lines of resolution; that range is almost
“In designing CMOS-sensor quality.” meaningless to us because we can’t see
photosites, there are metal wires that An ironic aspect of fill factor is frequencies that high from a normal
run vertically and horizontally in a grid that as the space between the photosites viewing distance.”
pattern,” says Zarnowski. “These metal increases due to these additional elec- In other words, good contrast
wires both block and reflect light to tronic components, so does the sensor’s reproduction in the overalllow-band and
neighboring ‘pixels.’ It is this scattered MTF response. “If you have a large gap mid-band frequencies in an image is what
light that can distort color, as adjacent between photosites, the MTF curve stimulates us to perceive an image as

66 May 2011 American Cinematographer

sharp. However, as most concepts in the
science of cinematography go, these
parameters of sharpness, contrast and
resolution are inextricably intertwined. In
fact, a sensor’s high-resolution capability
does impact its reproduction of the low-
band and mid-band frequencies.
“Contrast and sharpness areinex-
tricably linked,” confirms Thorpe. “We
can measure the MTF of a lens/camera
in line-pairs or with burst charts [a chart
that has some contrast in it], but the
bottom line is that you want the lens and
camera to deliver a curve with as high of
a ‘belly’ as possible at the lower-band and
mid-band spatial frequencies. A lens and
camera with the highest curve, the fattest
belly in terms of shape, will be perceived
as the sharpest. You don’t want to go into
the camera and turn up the digital edge-
enhancement to get edges reproduced
with clarity and no softness. You want
inherent sharpness coming from a good
MTF.”
Just how you get “a good MTF” is
determined from the start by the number
of photosites sampling the image at the
sensor and the quality of the lens. Every
step thereafter serves only to reduce the
image’s resolution, as Nyquist explained.
Put more directly, in order to get good
MTF performance at low-band and
mid-band frequencies, we need as much
high-frequency performance as possible,
even though we won’t ultimately see that
fine detail with our eyes.
However, in order to produce the
high-resolution performance necessary
to produce a “big belly” MTF response
curve in the low-band and mid-band
frequency ranges, we must deal first with
Nyquist’s sampling theorem to avoid
interference. This means pre-filteringout
any higher frequencies that might gener-
ate aliasing.
Thorpe describes this filtering
solution: “If we have a 1,920 (H) imager
that can unambiguously resolve 540 line-
pairs per picture height horizontally, and
if these photosites are large and abut one
another, then you get a curve like the one
[on page 66].
“Now, let’s say the lens projects
onto this sensor a very high-detail scene.
The top graph shows the sensor's MTF response to an incoming image in blue and the subsequent
Optical Low Pass Filtering at the Nyquist limit, resulting in the green curve below it. The bottom graph
shows all of the necessary digital filtering for Nyquist and SMPTE output requirements.
If its very-high-frequency detail is
higher than the carrier [or maximum
resolution capability of the sensor], it
will then generate a spurious interfer-
ence at a very low frequency in the
signal. That’s aliasing. And once created,
aliasing cannot be removed — it’s
indelible.
“How do you avoid that? You use
an Optical Low-Pass Filterin front of
the sensor, and shape that filter to try to
keep the in-band resolution up and the
aliasing down as far as possible. There is
no perfect way of doing that, so you end
up with a tradeoff. All camera manufac-
turers have their own criteria for their
Optical Low-Pass Filters, but they
rarely publish what those criteria are.”
As its name suggests, an Optical
Low-Pass Filter optically passes only the
lower frequencies at a manufacturer-
specified range. Frequencies above the
cutoff are effectively blocked by a
process that blurs the high-frequency
details, thereby preventing them from
generating interference. As Nyquist’s
theory suggests, the filtering must be
done at any and all sampling steps — in
the camera’s imaging section (in front of
the sensor for the photosite’s sampling
of the image) and then again in the digi-
tal section (for the digital sampling that
occurs electronically).
“The sensor is looking at the
image from the lens and is therefore
sampling it,” says Thorpe. “So it has a
sampling frequency and a corresponding
optical Nyquist value. The camera
manufacturer has to then put in an
Optical Low-Pass Filter, which allows
you to keep most of the [low-band and
mid-band] resolution, but there is still a
tradeoff in order to keep the aliasing
way down.
“Then that analog signal must be
digitized, and the digital section has a
digital sampling frequency that also has
a digital Nyquist value, which may or
may not be the same frequency,” contin-
ues Thorpe. “So, as you did with the
imaging section, you must filter the
digital section.
“Finally, all camera manufacturers
will put a third filter near the output of
the camera that’s intended to apply a
finite limit that protects against down-
stream digital processing [in the record-
ing system, in post and in subsequent
digital distribution]. With HD cameras,
the shape of that final filter is prescribed
by the SMPTE to be 30 Mhz. That is
built into the production standard and is
deliberately below the camera Nyquist
limit for HD.”
Ed. Note: See next month’s issue for
Part 2. ●

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w May 2011 67
 Roger Deakins, ASC, BSC
graciously accepts his
Lifetime Achievement
Award, “even if it is a bit
premature,“ he quips.

A Hollywood Affair Photography by

Alex Lopez; Chris Mankofsky; Isidore Mankofsky, ASC; Georgia Packard, SOC;
Jason Redman; Logan Schneider; Dan Steinberg; and Matt Turve.

C
elebrating cinematographers’ 2010 accomplishments for screens both big and small, the
Society presented the 25th annual ASC Awards for Outstanding Achievement in
Cinematography on Feb. 13. The gala awards banquet was held at the Hollywood & Highland
Grand Ballroom, just around the corner from the ASC Clubhouse, where the Society hosted
a lively afterparty. In the days leading up to the Awards, the Clubhouse also provided the setting for
the ASC's annual Open House, the Nominees Dinner and the inaugural Friends of the ASC event.
These were the nominees for ASC Awards in competitive categories. They are presented in
alphabetical order, with the winners highlighted in boldface type:
Regular Series/Pilot: Eagle Egilsson, ASC, Dark Blue, “Shell Game”; Jonathan Freeman,
ASC, Boardwalk Empire , “Home” ; Christopher Manley, ASC, Mad Men , “Blowing Smoke”;
Kramer Morgenthau, ASC, Boardwalk Empire, “Family Limitation”; David Stockton, ASC,Nikita,
“Pilot”; Michael Wale, CSC, Smallville, “Shield”; Glen Winter, CSC, Smallville, “Abandoned.”
Motion Picture/Miniseries Television: David Gribble, ACS, Jesse Stone: No Remorse ;
Jon Joffin, Alice, “Episode 2”; Stephen F. Windon, ACS,The Pacific, “Okinawa.”
Theatrical Release: Danny Cohen, BSC, The King’s Speech ; Jeff Cronenweth, ASC, The
Social Network ; Roger Deakins, ASC, BSC, True Grit ; Matthew Libatique, ASC, Black Swan ;
Wally Pfister, ASC,Inception.

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 4
3
1 2

5 6

10

Enjoying a moment in the spotlight at the ASC

Awards ceremony are: 1. Victor J. Kemper, ASC;
2. Awards Chairman Richard Crudo, ASC; 3. actress
Allison Janney, who presented the Regular Series
category, and Richard Kline, ASC;
4. Michael Watkins, ASC and Janney; 12
5. Owen Roizman, ASC; 6. Ellen Kuras, ASC, who
introduced the Presidents Award; 7. an exuberant
Douglas Kirkland, who received the Presidents
Award in recognition of his remarkable career as a
stills photographer; 8. student filmmakers Dagmar 11
Weaver-Madsen of UCLA and Boyd Hobbs of Full
Sail University, who earned ASC William A. Fraker
Heritage Awards; 9. Stephen H. Burum, ASC;
10. Kirkland and Kuras; 11. Woody Omens, ASC;
12. Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC.

70 May 2011 American Cinematographer

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2

5 6

7
4

8
10

Others who stepped to the podium: 1. director Michael Apted, who introduced the
International Award; 2. International Award recipient John Seale, ASC, ACS;
3. Bill Butler, ASC; 4. Seale and Apted; 5. ASC President Michael Goi; 6. actress
Gillian Jacobs, who presented the Motion Picture/Miniseries category;
7. cinematographer Marc Windon, who accepted the award on behalf of his
brother, Stephen Windon, ACS (The Pacific, “Okinawa”); 8. ASC members Robert
Liu, George Spiro Dibie and Donald M. Morgan; 9. John C. Flinn III, ASC, who
introduced the Career Achievement in Television Award;
10. Michael D. O’Shea, ASC, who received the award;
11. longtime friends O’Shea and Flinn.

11

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w May 2011 71
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5 4

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The cavalcade continues with: 1. Haskell Wexler, ASC; 2. Tom Hanks

introducing his friend Julia Roberts, who received the Board of
Governors Award; 3. Roberts hefting her trophy; 4. Hanks and Roberts
doubling their star wattage as they stroll offstage; 5. Jack Green, ASC;
6. Joel Coen introducing Lifetime Achievement Award honoree Roger
Deakins, ASC, BSC; 7. Deakins applauding his peers; 8. Michael
Chapman, ASC; 9. actress Diane Lane introducing the Theatrical
Release category; 10. Roizman reading a note from winner Wally
Pfister, ASC (Inception); Goi and Crudo closing the show.

11

72 May 2011 American Cinematographer

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Guests and honorees making the rounds at the pre-Awards cocktail hour
included: 1. nominee Kramer Morgenthau, ASC ( Boardwalk Empire, “Family
Limitation”) and Tracy Fleischman; 2. Kodak execs Kim Snyder and Bruce
Berke with Snyder’s husband, Jim; 3. Isidore Mankofsky, ASC;
4. ASC members Stephen H. Burum and Robert Primes; 5. John Seale, ASC,
ACS with Owen and Mona Roizman (Seale's wife, Louise, chats in
foreground); 6. Veronica Lighthill and her husband, Stephen Lighthill, ASC,
with Dan Kaslow and Nancy Schreiber, ASC; 7. Carmen Cabana and her
11 beau, American Cinematographer circulation director Saul Molina;
8. nominee Michael Wale, CSC (Smallville, “Shield”) and his wife, Janice;
9. Technicolor’s Bob Hoffman and his wife, Claire; 10. ASC events
coordinator Patty Armacost, Gina and Michael Goi, and ASC president’s
assistant Delphine Figueras; 11. the schmoozing throng.

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1. Françoise and Douglas Kirkland; 2. American Cinematographer

circulation manager Alex Lopez and his wife, Noemi;
3. Julio Macat, ASC and “Miss ASC,” Elizabeth Barndt, with Richard
Crudo, ASC and Joe Dunton, BSC; 4. Kay Baker and Shari Belafonte;
5: honorary ASC members Bob Fisher and Larry Mole Parker with
Victor J. Kemper, ASC and his wife, Claire; 6. ASC general manager
Brett Grauman and his wife, Benita; 7. Gordon Lonsdale, ASC and
his wife, Lynn; 8: Richard Kline, ASC and his daughter, Rija;
9. Macat with his agent, Frank Balkin, and Crescenzo Notarile, ASC; 12
10. Frank Kay, Jim Fisher, Barbara Bass and Alan Gitlin;
11. Kees Van Oostrum, ASC and his daughter, Sara;
12. Denis Lenoir, ASC, AFC and his wife, Joy.

74 May 2011 American Cinematographer

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12 13 14
Circulating at the Awards afterparty held at the newly renovated ASC Clubhouse: 1. Dion Beebe, ASC, ACS;
2. AFI students Mihal Dabal and Wesley Cardino (who earned honorable mentions in the student category) flank
cinematographer Polly Morgan; 3. Walt Lloyd, ASC, with friends; 4. Fujifilm’s Curtis Jones; 5. Daniel Pearl, ASC;
6. Chris Manley, ASC; 7. Dean Cundey, ASC and his wife, Tisha; 8. John C. Flinn III, ASC and his fiancée, Julie Phillips;
9. Logan Schneider, a dedicated Friend of the ASC; 10. Canon’s Tim Smith with Rodney Charters, ASC, CSC and
Kish Sadhvani of Kish Optics; 11. associate member Denny Clairmont; 12. Joel Coen;
13. honorary ASC member Brian Spruill; 14. Fujifilm’s Sandy Kurotobi.

ww.theasc.com
w May 2011 75
 1 2

4 5

6 7 8

9 10 11

12 13
14

Snaps from the Nominees Dinner: 1. ASC President Michael Goi; 2. Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC and his wife, Susan, flank
American Cinematographer executive editor Stephen Pizzello; 3. Glen Winter, CSC; 4. Eagle Egilsson, ASC;
5. Carol Peterson and Florence Omens; 6. the more spacious Great Room; 7. Ralph Woolsey, ASC and Justina Mintz;
8. Owen and Mona Roizman with Kodak’s Michael Zakula; 9. Kramer Morgenthau, ASC; 10. Douglas Kirkland with
Milt and Joy Shefter; 11. Don McCuaig, ASC and Richard Crudo, ASC; 12. nominee Michael Wale, CSC;
13. Roger Deakins, ASC, BSC; 14. Matt Leonetti, ASC and his wife, Mary Jane.

76 May 2011 American Cinematographer

1 2

4 5

8
7

11
10
1. Roger and James Deakins with John and Louise Seale; 2. John Bailey, ASC with
Kodak’s Judy Doherty; 3. Kodak president and general manager Kim Snyder;
4. Sharon and Michael O’Shea with Betty Negrin; 5. Janice Simpson and associate
member Grover Crisp; 6. Boston Red Sox fan Stephen Pizzello plays hardball with
New York Yankees apologist Owen Roizman, ASC as nominee David Gribble, ACS
(Jesse Stone: No Remorse) mediates; 7. Frank Kay and his wife, Sharlene;
8. Janet Parks and Michael Margulies, ASC with Victor J. Kemper, ASC and his
wife, Claire; 9. Roizman poses proudly with his own Reserved Parking sign,
which will mark his space on the ASC lot to salute his years of hard work as
chairman of the Building Committee; 10. Glen Winter, CSC and Julie Marr;
11. Michael Goi, ASC and nominee David Stockton, ASC ( Nikita pilot);
12. Robert Liu, ASC and his wife, Ivy.
12

ww.theasc.com
w May 2011 77
 1 2 3

6
4 5

7 9
8
Enjoying the first Friends
of the ASC event are:
1. ASC pals Michael Goi and
George Spiro Dibie; 2. nominee
Michael Wale, CSC; 3. John Seale,
ASC, ACS (middle); 4. nominee
David Gribble, ACS and Goi;
5. a Friend of the ASC with Roger
and James Deakins; 6. nominee
Jon Joffin (Alice, “Episode 2”);
7. Stephen H. Burum, ASC and 11
Polly Morgan; 8. a roomful
of cinematography fans;
10
9. Nancy Schreiber, ASC and some
Friends of the ASC;
10. ASC compatriots Dibie and
Victor J. Kemper, ASC (at right)
flank Fujifilm’s Curtis Jones as
Kees Van Oostrum, ASC
chats in backgound;
11. Burum, John Simmons, ASC
and Mark Bender; 12. a Friend of
the ASC poses for a photo with
Haskell Wexler, ASC;
13. Frank Kay and Larry Mole Parker 12 13
welcome a guest.

78 May 2011 American Cinematographer

 2
1

4 5

9
1. George Spiro Dibie, ASC takes to the microphone like a duck to water; 2. an Open House
attendee chats with Michael Negrin, ASC; 3. Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC and nominee Kramer
Morgenthau, ASC; 4. nominee David Stockton, ASC with fellow members Ellen Kuras and
Eagle Egilsson; 5. a Friend of the ASC with David Darby, ASC; 6. two Friends flank Steven
Fierberg, ASC; 7. Dibie anoints someone as “sexy”; 8. Bob Yeoman, ASC and two guests;
9. Haskell Wexler, ASC and Douglas Kirkland with attendees.

ww.theasc.com
w May 2011 79
 2
1

3
4

5 6

7 8

Soaking up both the sun and interior ambience at the ASC

Open House are: 1. nominees Glen Winter, CSC (left),
Jon Joffin (hydrating in the hot sun) and David Gribble, ACS
(brown leather jacket); 2. a throng of visitors; 3. Michael
Negrin, ASC (second from left) and his father, Sol Negrin, ASC
(far right) mingle with guests; 4. John Seale, ASC, ACS and a
circle of admirers; 5. Gil Hubbs, ASC (right); 6. Logan Hall and
Conrad Hall, Jr.; 7. Ellen Kuras, ASC and a group of
cinematography buffs; 8. the first Friend of the ASC, Christian
La Fountaine, with his father, George La Fountaine, ASC;
9. Haskell Wexler, ASC (third from left) and students.
9

80 May 2011 American Cinematographer

 1 2

3 4 5

Back in the open air: 1. associate member Andy Romanoff; 2. Nancy Schreiber, ASC and
Beverly Wood of Deluxe; 3. Haskell Wexler, ASC signs an autograph; 4. Larry Mole Parker and
Amy Vincent, ASC; 5. Tom Houghton, ASC holds court; 6. an Izzy’s-eye view captured from the
Clubhouse roof by Isidore Mankofsky, ASC.

ww.theasc.com
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 Post Focus
Special Agent
Sam Cooper
(Forest
Whitaker, at
head of table)
works with his
colleagues in a
scene from
Criminal
Minds: Suspect
Behavior.
I Sokolsky, Stanley Detail “KB Workflow”
By Michael Goldman
In digital television production, there is no such thing as a
standard workflow. As digital acquisition proliferates, a wide range
of innovative solutions are popping up to meet network and
producer demands, budget parameters, creative requirements, and
logistical limitations. Some shows have abandoned tape altogether.
Others remain in an in-between place, using cameras capable of all-
data acquisition but continuing to record to HDCam-SR tape.
But the reverse is also true, at least for Bing Sokolsky, ASC.
Last year, he shot the first 13 episodes of the CBS series Criminal
Minds: Suspect Behavior with a tape-based camera, Sony’s F35,
while simultaneously recording and using data on set and beyond.
Sokolsky had just finished shooting a pilot, Nomads, in Thailand,
using an all-data pipeline with the Red One in collaboration with
digital-imaging technician Kevin Stanley, and he’d enjoyed the bene-
fits of that workflow.
FotoKem’s N extLab mobile data system was a key part of
Sokolsky and Stanley’s process on Nomads; it enabled them to sync,
encode and color-correct data at the production’s headquarters, and
transmit that data to editorial back in the United States via the Inter-
net. When they began prepping Criminal Minds , for which the
studio mandated a tape-based camera, Sokolsky and Stanley
decided to use NextLab again.
“We had good success using Reds and a file-based workflow
82 May 2011 American Cinematographer
on Nomads, but for Criminal Minds we were using the F35, which
typically records to HDCam-SR tape,” says Sokolsky. “There are
ways, of course, to record files with those cameras using hard drives
and other systems, but those record a large digital file, one that
would be too large for us to move data and color-correct dailies on
set. Using NextLab gave me more control over the look of dailies,
and gave dailies to post about a day ahead of a normal workflow,
but it didn’t support large files from Codex or Panavision DSSR [Solid
State] mags. So Kevin and I explored how we could record data with
the F35 that could be ingested by NextLab.”
They decided to use Convergent Design NanoFlash HD-SD
data recorders to capture proxy 8-bit images (as 4:2:2 Long GOP
100Mbps QuickTime files in S-Log color space) of everything Sokol- Photo by Eric McCandless, courtesy of ABC Studios.
sky shot, while simultaneously recording 10-bit raw images to Sony
SRW-1 decks (as 4:2:2 PSF Sony S-Log files). The team was able to
shoot with both of those recorders onboard their F35s. This allowed
Stanley to manage and color correct NanoFlash media on his own
system near the set.
After being recorded, all files were sent via shuttle drive to
post facility Keep Me Posted, which used its own NextLab system to
render out data, apply color metadata and sound, and synchronize
all 8-bit image data quickly. Simultaneously, the production could
provide Keep Me Posted colorist Tom Overton with synchronized,
raw, 10-bit 4:2:2 HD images from the tapes.
“Both versions have embedded time code, so they’re dupli-
cates, making it fairly straightforward to conform the show after
 Cast and crew work in one of the show’s main sets. For the first 13 episodes of the series, Sokolsky (visible at far right in r ight-hand photo) and
digital-imaging technician Kevin Stanley integrated the tape-based Sony F35 with FotoKem’s NextLab mobile data system.
we’ve provided proxies for dailies and edito-
rial,” says Stanley. “It didn’t change my job
much in the sense that I still checked for
signal/file corruption, managed media,
applied looks to the log files and discussed
exposure and camera-related issues with
Bing, only I did it in a truck on location,
without that central hub of cables and
monitors running through the DIT system
on set. That freed Bing to work faster and
light by eye, the way he’s always done with
film.
“And we’re not burning in any look
we can’t change later,” he adds. “With
N anoFlash, we’re using a proxy editing or
dailies format. That makes time code essen-
tial on both. The big ticket is to save money
on files up front, to media manage and
color on location, and then to let NextLab
sync and render everything on the back
end.”
Sokolsky and Stanley have dubbed
this the “KB Workflow,” after the initials in
Photos by Matt Kennedy, courtesy of ABC Studios.
their first names. Their method of syncing
the two recordings relies on Ambient
Recording Clockit time-code sync boxes to
feed master time code from the sound
department, with that time code then
looped from the SRW-1 recorder to the
N anoFlash recorder via a 10-bit HD-SDI
stream with embedded time code. This
ensures that the conform process can be
straightforward.
Both recorders are powered by a
common power supply, but the biggest
engineering hurdle involved the creation of
a custom toggle switch to use as a trigger
to start and stop both the SRW-1 and
N anoFlash recorders at exactly the same
time. Steve Lucas designed the switch to
the filmmakers’ specs.
Sokolsky and Stanley chose a tape
stock and Compact Flash card size for the
two recorders that allowed both to record
for approximately 30 minutes at a time,
with file names designed to match the
corresponding recorder. After reloads, tapes
and cards were labeled and brought back
to Stanley’s DIT station, and he copied and
downloaded them to a protected RAID
storage array and verified everything with
his NextLab software. He also performed a
best-light color grade using Sokolsky’s
guidelines on the N anoFlash QuickTime
clips, creating corrected dailies with synced
audio that could rapidly move by physical
media or the Internet to various parties.
Then, he sent master tapes to Keep Me
Posted for the eventual conform.
Before any of this could be imple-
mented on Criminal Minds, however,
Sokolsky had to sell producers on the
concept, which he did with a series of tests.
Eventually, all 13 initial episodes of the
show were made this way.
The producers’ wariness illustrates
the state of the industry right now, says
Sokolsky. “I had to prove to the studio and
the network that this would work,” he
says. “We shot screen tests onstage with
actors, and while executives were watch-
ing, we took the NanoFlash CF cards to the
ww.theasc.com
w May 2011
DIT cart, had Kevin color the images and
hand them off to Keep Me Posted, and they
then used NextLab to sync up sound files in
just a matter of minutes. They transcoded
them and backed them up to LTO4 [tape],
loaded a hard drive with transcoded files in
the DN X36 [Avid] format and carried that
over to editorial, where they were loaded
into the Avid. Executives saw us shoot, color
correct, sync and edit, all within an hour.
“When we started the show, the
studio was not ready to accept a file-based
camera only, and I just didn’t want to push
them too fast,” continues the cinematogra-
pher. “My next project, a pilot called Part-
ners, will be shot on the [Arri] Alexa, so we
won’t need N anoFlash drives or tape.
Instead, we’ll use SxS [Solid State] cards in
the ProRes 4:4:4:4 format, and we’ll still use
NextLab.
“Many other TV shows will continue
to want tape involved, and this workflow is
perfect for them,” he notes. “I can work
untethered with any digital system and light
by eye, learning the new camera sensors
just like I would learn any new film emul-
sion.”
The cinematographer estimates that
the KB Workflow “put post a day ahead of
schedule and saved $15,000 an episode in
dailies. Plus, working untethered let us do
about 50-plus setups a day most of the
time, which was really nice.” ●
83
New Products & Services
Canon Introduces Ultra-Compact XA10
Canon U.S.A., Inc, has introduced the ultra-compact XA10
Professional Camcorder, ideal for situations that demand mobility.
The XA10 records Full HD 1080p video using an AVCHD codec.
The compact XA10 includes a detachable handle for low-
angle shooting and portabil-
ity; with the handle attached,
the XA10’s functionality is
further enhanced with the
addition of XLR inputs and an
external microphone holder.
The camcorder also boasts
infrared video capture, as
well as the option of record-
ing to a 64GB internal flash
drive or two SDXC-compati-
ble card slots, as well as Relay
Recording and the ability to
record simultaneously to two cards for instant backup.
The XA10 features a Genuine Canon 10x HD Zoom lens,
Canon DIGIC DV III Image Processor and a Canon 1⁄ 3" native
1920x1080 CMOS image sensor,which delivers outstanding resolu-
tion and quality. The zoom boasts a 35mm equivalent range of
30.4mm–304mm withan eight-blade iris capable of rendering
natural, smooth background blur with reduced lens diffraction. The
lens also features Canon’s SuperRange Optical Image Stabilizer (OIS)
system with standard, Dynamic and Powered IS modes for steady
video in almost any shooting situation. Autofocus speeds can be
selected from Instant, Medium and Normal to match the shooter’s
preference, and a focus ring on the lens allows for manual focus as
well.
For extreme low-light shooting the XA10 includes an infrared
feature. The camcorder also includes an infrared emitter with a
diffuser as well as a Green or White color option to shoot pleasing
high-definition infrared imagery even in complete darkness.
The XA10 provides users with complete manual control of
various functions including frame rates, zooming speed, focus, shut-
ter speed, white balance and gain control. Various frame rates can
be selected to match the user’s preference — 60i, PF30, PF24 and
native 24p. Through internal menus, users can adjust zoom-speed
settingsfor High, Middle and Low in 16 one-step increments for
both the body lever as well as the handle control. The focus ring on
the lens can be customized for manual focus control and users can
set the direction of rotation, as well as three levels of response
control. Auto-focus speed can be adjusted for smooth auto-focus
transitions, and a Face-Only AF mode allows for a blurred image as
a person walks offscreen. The camcorder’s white balance is
84 May 2011 American Cinematographer
• SUBMISSION INFORMATION •
Please e-mail New Products/Services releases to:
newproducts@ascmag.com and include full contact
information and product images. Photos must be
TIFF or JPEG files of at least 300dpi.
adjustable from 2,000°K to 15,000°K in 100°K increments.
The XA10 camcorder also incorporates a waveform monitor
into the camera body for accurate exposure and detailed analysis of
image brightness. Checking critical focus is also extremely easy with
the high-resolution LCD screen and peaking,magnify and Canon’s
Edge Monitor Focus Assist system.
For in-camera cinematic effects, the XA10 provides nine
customizable cinema filters, which can be adjusted in three levels —
Low, Medium and High. Additionally,the Standard Cinema Filter
function is further customizable through Color Depth, Contrast, Soft
Filter and Key adjustments.
The camcorder’s overall design is intended for comfortable
operation whether gripped in the operator’s palm or by the handle
for low-angle shooting. Compact and lightweight,the entire
camcorder weighs only 1.7 lbs. and measures only 3.7"x8.1"x7.0",
including the lens hood and handle. The 3.5" high-resolution
(922,000 dot) touch-panel LCD screen provides a large, vibrant
display and can be flipped for solo shooting with the LCD screen
facing the subject. The camcorder also includes an electronic
viewfinder for use in bright conditions where it would be difficult to
use the LCD panel.
The XA10 features dual XLR inputs for external audio sources
as well as a built-in stereo microphone. The camcorder supports
Dolby Digital 2ch (AC-3 2ch) with automatic and manual audio-level
adjustment.
Embedded in the detachable handle are the camcorder’s XLR
terminal inputs, audio switches, infrared light, tally lamp, removable
microphone holder, zoom and record switches,and a “cold” shoe.
For easy connection to both Canon and third-party wired remote
controllers, the XA10 has a built-in remote-control terminal (compat-
ible with LAN C protocol). A custom key and dial allow for more
convenient, one-touch access to various functions such as focus or
exposure.
The Canon XA10 Professional camcorder is available for a
suggested price of$1,999.99. For more information, visit
www.usa.canon.com.
Sony’s PMW-F3 Takes Pro Line Handheld
Sony has unveiled the PMW-F3, its first professional handheld
digital-production camera with a Super 35mm imager.
The F3 camcorder is based on Sony’s XDCam EX workflow
and uses Sony’s SxS ExpressCard-based recording media format. Its
Super 35mm CMOS imager delivers shallow depth of field with high
sensitivity, low noise levels and wide dynamic range. Through the
use of an HD-SDI dual-link output for external recording (4:2:2 1080
50/59.94P as standard and RGB 1080 23.98/25/29.97PsF as an
option), footage shot with the F3 can be seamlessly intercut with
content shot on Sony’s F35 or SRW-9000PL
cameras. The F3’s PL-mount adapter can
accommodate both PL and upcoming Sony
zoom lenses, and offers compatibility with a
variety of cine lenses such as Cooke, Fujinon
and Zeiss.
Users can select S-Log and Hyper
Gamma to increase the F3’s dynamic-range
performance. S-Log represents Sony’s
approach to the raw “digital negative,”
allowing access to the full dynamic range of
the Super 35mm imager for maximum flex-
ibility in image manipulation during post-
production. This capability, combined with
the widely used SxS format, lets user take
advantage of already well-established
XDCam EX and HDCam SR workflows.
Recording formats include
1920x1080, 1440x1080 and 1280x720 at
23.98/25/29.97p, 50/59.94i and, in DVCam
mode, 25/29.97PsF and 50/59.94i. Users
can also take advantage of “slow” and
“quick” recording, from 1 to 30 fps at
1920x1080 (17 to 30 fps in dual-link mode)
and 1 to 60 fps at 1280x720 (17 to 60 fps
in dual-link mode).
The F3 supports look-up tables for
dailies and on-set color management. Up to
four LUTs can be stored in the camera and
stamped onto the footage on the SxS card,
simultaneously using the camera’s dual-link
output with S-Log for the unprocessed
image.
Sony is also planning to introduce a
compatible SR Memory Portable Recorder
for the F3 camcorder. SR Memory, Sony’s
high-speed, high-capacity card format, will
give users the ability to record directly to the
industry-standard HDCam SR codec using
the SR Memory Portable Recorder
connected to the F3’s single-link and dual-
link output.
The PMW-F3 has a basic list price of
$16,000 without lenses. The camera is also
 available with a lens kit (comprising 35mm,
50mm and 85mm T2.0 prime lenses) for a
suggested price of $23,000.
For additional information, visit
www.sony.com/cinealta.
P+S Technik Develops Weisscam
Upgrade Modules
P+S Technik has developed three
software-based Application Upgrade
Modules for the multi-purpose Weisscam
HS-2 MKII high-speed camera system,
which can capture from 1 to 70,000 fps.
The Film Mode Module provides
enhanced image quality for recording at any
frame rate. This mode optimizes the camera
settings, significantly enhancing and stabi-
lizing blacks and low-light areas. The result
is 30-percent better performance on the
signal, especially at lower frame rates;
reduced readout noise; and increased
dynamic range.
The Studio Mode Module allows for
the integration of the Weisscam HS-2 MKII
directly into studio environments. It provides
RAW support for external IT recording
devices via GigE, and RAM HD-SDI preview
is available from the camera during record-
ing and playback. The Studio Mode also
enables easy setup and control of the
camera via a Hand Unit.
The Rental Mode Module offers the
possibility to modify the Weisscam HS-2
MKII to the needs of rental customers.
Customers can choose from three different
presets tailored for different applications,
and all feature sets can be changed and
unlocked on set by entering a PIN code. The
three presets currently available are
Commercial, Fiction and TV Drama.
For additional information, visit
www.pstechnik.de.
86 May 2011
Panasonic Expands P2
Camcorder Line
Panasonic Solutions Company has
introduced the AJ-HPX3100 master-quality
1080p P2 HD camcorder, its most compact
and lowest-price 2⁄ 3" 1080p 3-CCD
camcorder.
Featuring three 2⁄3" high-density 2.2-
million-pixel CCDs, the HPX3100 captures
full-raster 1920x1080-resolution imaging
with 4:2:2 10-bit sampling using the
advanced AVC-Intra codec. The camcorder
records in multiple worldwide formats, in
HD in AVC-Intra and in DVCPro HD at 1080
in 24p, 25p, 30p, 50i and 60i, and in SD
(480i/586i) in DVCPro50, DVCPro and DV.
N ew features in the HPX3100
include 24-bit audio in AVC-Intra 100/50,
wireless metadata input capability via wire-
less LAN and high-quality proxy recording.
The proxy board also provides uncom-
pressed audio, which can enhance editing,
especially for projects with a large amount
of content, like reality TV and long-form
projects.
The camcorder is equipped with
seven advanced gamma settings, including
Film-Rec 600-percent mode (made popular
by the VariCam) for capturing increased
dynamic range. It also features a built-in
reverse scan that allows unique setups such
as mounting the camera upside down or
the use of a prime lens or an anamorphic
lens adapter to create a 2.35:1 image.
Offering a new slim-line size for
added mobility, the HPX3100 sports a low
center of gravity and weighs only 8.6
pounds. The P2 HD camcorder’s superb
performance is enhanced with advanced
14-bit A/D conversion and a 12-pole matrix
color-correction function. Additional high-
end features include a Chromatic Aberra-
tion Compensation (CAC) function that
corrects for lateral chromatic aberration in
lenses, and a three-level Dynamic Range
Stretch (DRS) function that reduces blocked
shadows and blown highlights in scenes
where bright and dark objects coexist. The
HPX3100 has a high sensitivity of F11 at
2,000 lux in 1080i, and an S/N ratio of 59
dB (with Digital Noise Reduction turned on).
Power consumption is about 34 watts.
The camcorder records on high data
transfer speed E-Series P2 cards (capacity up
to 64GB).The HPX3100 has dual optical
American Cinematographer
filter wheels for separate control of ND and
CC,and a flip-out, 3.5" color LCD monitor
for easy viewing. There is an option for a
color or black-and-white type viewfinder.
Standard interfaces include an HD-SDI input
for external line recording, IEEE 1394A
in/out, USB 2.0 in/out, genlock in with HD
Tri-Level Sync or VBS in, and SMPTE time
code in/out.
The HPX3100 supports full 48-
kHz/24-bit audio recording on all four chan-
nels (in AVC-Intra 100/50), and supports the
optional AJ-RC10G and AJ-EC4 remote
control units for image and control adjust-
ment. Other features include Digital Zoom
and Digital Super Gain, and a One-clip REC
function that records up to 99 consecutive
cuts as a single clip, greatly facilitating editing.
The AJ-HPX3100 is available at a
suggested price of $19,950. To lower total
ownership costs, Panasonic offers a five-year
limited warranty (the company’s normal 1-
year basic warranty plus an extended
warranty for years two through five upon
registration).
For additional information, visit
www.panasonic.com/broadcast.
Arri Updates Alexa Software
Arri has released Software Update
Packet 3.0 for its Alexa digital camera
system. SUP 3.0 enables a host of new and
updated features.
For low-light situations, SUP 3.0
extends Alexa’s sensitivity to EI 3,200; the
new lineup of exposure indices is EI 160, EI
200, EI 400, EI 800, EI 1,600 and EI 3,200.
Alexa’s color-processing engine has also
been significantly enhanced, providing
higher color saturation in highlights as well
as improved skin tones under tungsten light.
Two new gamma options have also been
added: Log C delivers a signal similar to
negative film scanned on an Arriscan, and
DCI P3 is the color space used for digital
cinema projectors.
 The false color exposure check
changes the image to black-and-white, and
uses color to indicate specific signal levels
such as clipping, skin tones and 18-percent
medium grey. SUP 3.0 also introduces the
ability to superimpose two frame lines, two
user rectangles, a center mark and a
surround view mask over the viewfinder and
output images, all at the same time, which
is especially useful for productions with
deliverables of different aspect ratios.
SUP 3.0 enables in-camera playback
of QuickTime clips from on-board SxS Pro
cards, so takes can be played back on the
camera viewfinder or via different camera
outputs, allowing for an instant image
check; frame lines as well as information
about each clip can optionally be seen in the
viewfinder or superimposed on the image
output.
The optional smooth mode, for any
frame rate up to 30 fps and any shutter
angle up to 180 degrees, eliminates shutter-
ing in the viewfinder image, making camera
operating easier for shots involving fast pans
or fast action within the frame.
SUP 3.0 allows still images for conti-
nuity, lighting or grading references to be
grabbed and stored on the camera’s SD card
at any time during standby, recording or
playback; images can be stored as JPEG, TIFF
or DPX files.Audio can now be recorded at
various frame rates and embedded into the
image output, providing a useful guide track
that significantly streamlines the audio
workflow. Additionally, an HD-SDI 3G Single
Link allows a 4:2:2 signal at 48, 50, 59.94 or
60 fps to be sent over just one BNC cable.
SUP 3.0 also introduces the ability to include
a Variflag signal
All new ALEXAs will have SUP 3.0
installed, and all existing cameras can be
upgraded to SUP 3.0. For more information
or to download Software Update Packet
3.0, visitwww.arri.com. ●
International Marketplace

Monitor Yoke Mounts

TM

88 May 2011 American Cinematographer


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ing and vid eo pro duc tion. Words used are sub ject to
Min i mum amount per
mag a zine style ab bre vi a tion.
ad: $45
CLASSIFIEDS ON-LINE
Ads may now also be placed in the on-line Classi-
fieds at the ASC web site.
Internet ads are seen around the world at the
same great rate as in print, or for slightly more you
can appear both online and in print.
For more information please visit
www.theasc.com/advertiser, or e-mail: classi-
fieds@theasc.com.
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w May 2011 89
 Advertiser’s Index
16x9, Inc. 88
AC 1, 89, 92
Aja Video Systems, Inc. 23
Alan Gordon Enterprises 88
Arri 33
ASC 68
AZGrip 88
Backstage Equipment, Inc.
6
Bardwell & McAlister, Inc. 7
Barger-Lite 88
Bron Imaging Group - US 39
Burrell Enterprises 88
Camera Essentials 89
Cavision Enterprises 35
Chapman/Leonard Studio
Equipment Inc. 9
Chemical Wedding 93
Cine Gear Expo 91
Cinema India 95
Cinematography
Electronics 6
Cinekinetic 88
Clairmont Film & Digital 21
Codex Digital Ltd., 49
Convergent Design 37
Cooke Optics 27
90
Deluxe C2 Tessive LLC 57
Eastman Kodak C4 Thales Angenieux 15
EFD USA, Inc 13 VF Gadgets, Inc. 88
Film Gear 85 Willy’s Widgets 88
Filmtools 87 www.theasc.com 4, 50,
Five Towns College 85 88, 90
Fujifilm 47 Zacuto Films 89
Glidecam Industries C3
Innovision 88
Kino Flo 51
Kobold 39
Lite Panels 2
Los Angeles Film Festival 59
Maine Media Workshops 6
M. M. Mukhi and Sons 99
New York Film Academy 38
Oppenheimer Camera Prod.
88
Panasonic Broadcast
TV Division 5
Panavision, Inc. 17
Pille Film Gmbh 89
Power Gems Limited 26
Pro8mm 88
Schneider Optics 25
Shelton Communications
88
Sony Electronics 11
Stanton Video Services 87
Super16 Inc. 89
 JOIN YWOOD’S
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PROF 11
IN 20
Cine Gear Expo
June 2-5, 2011
Expo & Conference
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The Studios at Paramount, Hollywood, CA, USA

September 24-25, 2011

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phone: 310.472.0809 fax: 310.471.8973 email: info@cinegearexpo.com

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 In Memoriam
Don Peterman, ASC, 1932-2011
Oscar-nominated cinematographer
Donald William Peterman, ASC died on
Feb. 5 at the age of 79.
Peterman was born on Jan. 3, 1932,
in Los Angeles, Calif. After graduating from
Redondo Beach Union High School, he
served in the U.S.
Army, where he
was assigned to
travel the country
filming adocu-
mentary.
He began
his civilian career
as a film loader at
Hal Roach Studios,
and then spent
five years as an optical-lineup man and opti-
cal-printer operator at effects company
Cascade Studios.“All of that [optical-
effects] experience is out the window
because of computers, but I understand the
concept of compositing layers of images,”
he told AC while discussing his work on
Men in Black (June ’97). “There’s a certain
mindset you have to have on an effects film
… in order to piece everything together
and have a complete image of the film in
your head while you’re shooting.”
Peterman eventually began finding
work as a camera assistant and, before
long, as an operator. His operating credits
include the feature The Bubble (for Charles
F. Wheeler, ASC)and two seasons of Lassie
(for Robert Sparks).
In the 1970s, Peterman began find-
ing steady work shooting commercials, and
he eventually photographed more than
200 national-television spots. In 1979, he
notched his first featurecredit as a director
of photography on When a Stranger Calls .
He later told AC, “I shot that one with
nothing — strictly Sun Guns and bounce
cards at T1.4.” The scale of his projects
quickly grew, though, and in 1984 he
earned his first Oscar nomination, for
Adrian Lyne’s Flashdance (AC May ’83).
“Don is a guy who won’t accept second
best,” Lyne told AC.“I pushed him to the
92
limit,and he pushed me to the limit.”
In 1987, Peterman garnered a
second Oscar nomination and an ASC
nomination for Star Trek IV: The Voyage
Home (AC Dec. ’86). Directed by Leonard
N imoy, the film found the intrepid crew
of the starship
Enterprise trans-
ported back to
mid-1980s San
Francisco, a story
that allowed
Peterman to take
advantage of
location filming
to expand the
franchise’s visual
palette. “Star Trek was filmed mostly on a
stage before, and they could never use long
lenses because it’s impossible to get back
far enough,” he told AC. “We tried to
make it a little different by using really long
lenses as much as we could.”
“Don Peterman shoots from an
idea,” said Nimoy. “I saw stuff that he did
that tells me somebody has been paying
attention. There is tone; it’s not just,‘Light it
and get an image.’”
In 1984, Peterman was recom-
mended for ASC membership by Society
fellows Wheeler, Jack Cooperman, Gene
Polito and Howard Schwartz.
His credits also include Splash;
Cocoon; Planes, Trains & Automobiles ;
Point Break ; Addams Family Values ; Get
Shorty; Mighty Joe Young (1998); and How
the Grinch Stole Christmas.
“I don’t think you have to have a
style,” he told AC in 1983. “I think it’s good
if you do a different style in every picture.”
Peterman is survived by his wife of
54 years, Sally; a daughter, Diane; sons
Keith, Jay and Brad, and 10 grandchildren.
— Jon D. Witmer
●
 Clubhouse News
Deakins, ASC Associates
Visit Createasphere
Createasphere recently hosted Roger
Deakins, ASC, BSC in conversation with AC
associate editor Jon D. Witmer at the Enter-
tainment Technology Exposition in Burbank.
Marking the latest in the joint Createas-
phere-AC series of “Legendary Conversa-
tions,” the discussion offered a survey of
Deakins’ storied career, touching on his early
work shooting documentaries, his pioneer-
ing work with digital intermediates, his
recent forays into consulting on animated
features,and his use of Arri’s Alexa digital
camera on the upcoming feature Now.
Top: AC associate editor Jon D. Witmer (left) and
Roger Deakins, ASC, BSC. Middle (left to right): ASC
associate member Rob Hummel with Andrea Kalas,
Michael Friend and Steve Kochak. Bottom: During a
recent event at the Clubhouse, Bill Bennett, ASC
snapped this 360-degree panorama using his iPhone;
the exposure took 42.3 seconds.
94 May 2011
ASC associate member Michael
Bravin also participated in the Expo,
presenting the seminar “About Digital
Cinema: Our Past, Present and Future.”
Meanwhile, Createasphere’s Digital
Asset Management Conference opened
with a panel moderated by ASC associate
member Rob Hummel that focused on
how to best manage digital assets as legacy
systems become obsolete. The other
panelists were Andrea Kalas of Paramount
Pictures, Steve Kochak of Deluxe Media
Services and Michael Friend of Sony Pictures
Entertainment.
Stein Teaches for
StudentFilmmakers.com
Peter Stein, ASC recently led the
workshop “Lighting to Create a Mood” for
StudentFilmmakers.com. The lesson began
with a discussion of three-point lighting and
then moved into an exploration of hard and
soft light. Stein demonstrated uses for Fres-
nel fixtures as well as open-face units, and
he showed the attendees how to shape
light with barn doors, flags and nets. Other
points of discussion included key-to-fill
ratios and background lighting techniques.
“With the new technologies at
hand, current film students have the chance
to be the innovators creating the newest
and most daring styles in future filmmak-
ing,” said Stein.
Stein is scheduled to lead a series
of workshops with StudentFilmmakers
throughout this year. For more information,
visit www.studentfilmmakers.com.
American Cinematographer
Morgenthau, Baffa Discuss
“Best of TV”
Createasphere recently launched the
“Best of TV” webcast series, offering a
behind-the-scenes look at a number of tele-
vision shows. The webinars have so far
examined Boardwalk Empire (featuring
Kramer Morgenthau, ASC and editors
Tim Streeto and Kate Sanford, moderated by
AC associate editor Jon D. Witmer); Dexter
(featuring director/cinematographer Romeo
Tirone and editor Louis Cioffi, ACE, moder-
ated by AC contributor Iain Stasukevich);
Glee (featuring cinematographer Christo-
pher Baffa, ASC and producer/editor
Bradley Buecker, moderated by AC contribu-
tor Jim Hemphill); and Sons of Anarchy
(featuring cinematographer Paul Maibaum
and camera operators/SOC members Steve
Fracol and David Frederick, moderated by
Stasukevich).
Members at the Movies
Haskell Wexler, ASCrecently visited
the American Cinematheque’s Aero Theatre
in Santa Monica for a screening of Medium
Cool (1969), which Wexler shot and
directed. Following the screening, Wexler
joined the film’s star, Robert Forster, for a
Photo of Clubhouse by Isidore Mankofsky, ASC; lighting by Donald M. Morgan, ASC.
Q&A.
Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC recently
attended a screening of Scarecrow at the Los
Angeles County Museum of Art. The film,
which Zsigmond photographed in 1973 for
Createasphere photos by Ryan Miller, courtesy of Capture Imaging.
director Jerry Schatzberg, was screened as
part of the series “True Grit: The Golden Age
of Road Movies.” ●
 Close-up Tobias Schliessler, ASC

When you were a child, what film made the strongest impres- How did you get your first break in the business?
sion on you? I find it almost impossible to pinpoint my first break. All I know is that
Growing up in Baden-Baden, Germany, I was always fascinated by every director and producer who has ever hired me has given me a
American film culture. It represented another world. I loved Steve break.
McQueen and Paul N ewman. Le Mans (1971), Bullitt (1968), Cool
Hand Luke (1967) and The Sting (1973) all made a huge impression. What has been your most satisfying moment on a project?
At the same time, the German TV miniseriesEight Hours Are Not a Day I remember standing on the set of Dreamgirls, a foot away from
(1972), directed by Fassbinder, had all of Germany glued to the televi- Beyoncé during one of her incredible musical performances. I was
sion and got me hooked on German filmmaking. giving her an eyelight with a Kino Flo in my hand while the theatri-
cal lighting designed by Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer
Which cinematographers, past surrounded her. I felt like I was at
or present, do you most admire? the center of the moviemaking
[ASC members] Vittorio Storaro, world I had always dreamed of.
Gordon Willis, Conrad Hall, Owen
Roizman, Roger Deakins, Have you made any memo-
Emmanuel Lubezki and Harris rable blunders?
Savides, and the list goes on. Each At the age of 13, I flashed an
of them is an incredible visual artist. exposed roll of film while working
They push the boundaries without for my father — a classic mistake
ever sacrificing technical perfection, that you only make once.
and their cinematography always
serves the story. What is the best professional
advice you’ve ever received?
What sparked your interest in ‘Don’t shoot your demo reel. Be
photography? true to the story.’
I grew up in a filmmaking family. My father, Martin, made adventure
documentaries, and my mother, Anemone, was his editor. I was load- What recent books, films or artworks have inspired you?
ing magazines and rewinding film on a Steenbeck from an early age. I The Secret in Their Eyes was one my favorite films of last year. It was
used to read my father’s Kameraman magazines, which were basically such a powerful story, so well told.
the equivalent of American Cinematographer in Germany. I loved the
spreads showing the huge movie sets with all the lights and cameras, Do you have any favorite genres, or genres you would like
and I wanted to be part of that world. to try?
I’d love to shoot a dark social/family drama like The Ice Storm or
Where did you train and/or study? American Beauty.
In my twenties, I moved to Vancouver, Canada, and studied film at
Simon Fraser University. Early on, I figured out that cinematography If you weren’t a cinematographer, what might you be doing
was my passion, and I shot as many student films as I could. instead?
I can’t think of a better job, except maybe a Formula One driver.
Who were your early teachers or mentors?
In terms of life, my grandmother, mother, brother, sisters and daughter Which ASC cinematographers recommended you for
have taught me all the important things. As for work, I’ve always membership?
learned the most from my gaffers and key grips. Daryn Okada, Karl Walter Lindenlaub and Peter Collister.
Photo by Thomas Scott Stanton.

What are some of your key artistic influences?
I love to collect and surround myself with paintings and sculpture, but
I’m most influenced by the work of my peers and by contemporary
photography. For instance, I referenced a lot of William Eggleston’s
work for the movie Friday Night Lights. Right now I’m inspired by the
lighting in the work of Australian photographer Bill Henson.
How has ASC membership impacted your life and career?
I think of being invited into the ASC by my peers as the ultimate
professional honor. I’m grateful for the support and camaraderie of
other ASC members. ●

96 May 2011 American Cinematographer

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