Photoshoot BTS- Un-Graded, Un-CC’ed.
Kodak is near its death and someone needs to blame someone. The main culprit: digital imaging. Even more so, digital cinema of today. This being images taken from the Alexa, Red, Sony cameras, DSLRs, the list goes on. The further the advancement of these cameras that push to exceed film, the worse off it gets for film stock lovers.
Flash forwarding to my point: there was a debate on Facebook recently about how cinematography is going the way of the Dodo thanks to a common “do it in post” attitude. You can see it here:
http://www.facebook.com/kahleem.poole/posts/2827763966979
Now granted, I probably didn’t do myself any favors with the “move on” bit, but I was somewhat emotional with the situation. Even though Kodak’s death affects me as well.
My point being, cinematography and photography doesn’t have everything to do with whether film is alive or dead as a medium. It can be achieved just as skillfully, artistically and thoughtfully through a digital sensor as it can through 500T stock. The idea of “…do it in post…” is an ideal from today’s quick fix type of thinking I would have to guess. Not necessarily the result of film going bye-bye. It’s the same with music, movies, games, everything today. But, that’s for another story.
Visually, my main influences for this docu film were from David Fincher and Jeff Cronenweth ASC’s “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo”. Apparently I’ve been attracted to Fincher’s films for quite awhile now and didn’t even realize it was greatly due to the image work.
Long story short, TGWDT was shot on the Red’s own high dynamic range MX sensor, which has a very log-like profile to it. And similarly, I always tend to shoot on the Cinestyle’s Log-C profile as well. So I wanted to try to use Cronenweth’s workflow from this film (and similarly from The Social Network as well).
Yami Mufdi, a great person we’ve worked with several times before, came in to model for this project. The shoot’s theme coincided with my current view at the same time: the Makeup Forever HD Un-Retouched Contest. The idea was that every contestant had to submit photos that were unedited, as in zero color correction, zero color grading and zero modifications of any kind.
I rated the camera at 640 ISO regardless of the changing light conditions and adjusted the f-stop and lighting accordingly. For this I used my own package of Nikkor AI-S, a Canon 24-105mm L and Zeiss Planar lenses. Additionally there were lighting setups already on set for the photo shoot, but in instances of preparation, interviews and other comfortable moments, I would use the daylight as a key, adjusted practicals from the room, or on occasion, use an Amaran LED light. Everything beyond that was about framing, framing, framing.
And for the channels described at the head of the film:
Pieces of Risa: http://www.youtube.com/piecesofrisa
Capture Lab: http://www.youtube.com/capturelab
