Congratulations to the winners of the 2012 Plus Camerimage awards!
ASC members were present in five of the juries. The dutiful jurors included Paul Cameron, Stuart Dryburgh, Stephen Goldblatt, Robbie Greenberg, Ed Lachman, Stephen Lighthill, Karl Walter Lindenlaub, Yuri Neyman, Daniel Pearl, Roberto Schaefer and Rodney Taylor.
Main Competition
The Main Competition Frogs for best feature film cinematography were given to a French-Canadian, a French woman and a Kurdish Irani.
Golden Frog
Nicolas Bolduc for his work on the African child soldier story War Witch by Kim Nguyen.
Silver Frog
Caroline Champetier, AFC, for her work on the highly original, surreal film Holy Motors by Leos Carax
Bronze Frog
Touraj Aslani for his work on a poetic story of love and exile: Rhino Season by Bahman Ghobadi.
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Golden Frog: Nicolas Bolduc – War Witch trailer – watch on YouTube
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Silver Frog: Caroline Champetier, AFC – Holy Motors trailer – watch on YouTube
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Bronze Frog: Touraj Aslani – Rhino Season trailer – watch on YouTube
This is my second post about my initiation in ultra high-speed shooting with French cinematographer Didier Daubeach. My first post introduced ultra high speed cinematography.
Here we look at examples from a recent promo he shot for Michelin tires.
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tire promo
The two-minute promo, entitled Michelin, the Eyes, was directed by Jean-Marc Gosse for the McCann G Agency in Paris. The promo was shot by two camera units.
Didier Daubeach was the cinematographer for all the ultra high-speed footage, and his colleague Eric Genillier shot the second unit scenes with actors in them. The crew included ACs Marc Stef & Thomas Collard, Gaffers Thierry Baucheron & Benjamin Prevost, and Key Grip Cyril Kunholtz. The video was edited by Christophe Bene. I recommend watching this in HD if your connection speed allows it:
Didier’s equipment included:
– 1 Photron camera used at 2000 fps
– 1 Red Epic shooting at 50 and 240 fps
– 1 Angénieux Optimo 24-290mm zoom
– 1 set of Zeiss T2.1 lenses
– 1 99K and 1 30K Longstrike light fixtures from Luminys
– 2 Joker 400s from K5600 Lighting
There were three cars, two of which were prepped for a low shot of the tire with the Epic. Didier also used a camera car with an Aerocrane outfitted with a Stab-C stabilizing head for shots of the car on the road.
One of the riggings positioned the Epic facing the tire
I recently had the opportunity to witness my first ultra high-speed shoot with French cinematographer Didier Daubeach.
I asked Didier about his approaches to very high speed shoots, and his recommendations for techniques. I share his insights here, illustrated by clips from the cinematographer’s work in the first of 2 posts.
Here is a second video of my interview with Vince Pace, newly ASC, and James Cameron.
I asked them about the cinematographer’s transition to 3D, and as you will see, Cameron is particularly vocal on the subject.
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Vince Pace and James Cameron have been pioneering digital 3D filmmaking for a dozen years, starting with a focus on underwater movies, and culminating in the landmark 3D feature, Avatar. Pace is a cinematographer, stereographer and 3D maven. Cameron’s other directing credits include Terminator, The Abyss, True Lies and Titanic. Cameron also recently set the world record for solo deep sea diving.
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Some notes on the interview:
lighting is lighting
The contemporary filmmaker’s landscape is evolving into a mélange of 2D, 3D and virtual. Indeed some projects are dominated by green screens, and a few films even involve no real world elements at all, just virtual camera moves following actors in motion capture suits, (a situation that is wonderfully ridiculed in Leos Carax’ Holy Motors).
Perhaps Cameron’s most memorable point is that, even in a virtual movie, the filmmaker still needs a cinematographer who will apply the very same lighting skills he does in the real world. “Lighting, says Cameron, is lighting”.
It is in this spirit that Roger Deakins, ASC, served as visual consultant on the animation features How to Train Your Dragon and Rango.
I shall return to the intriguing subject of virtual cinematography in more detail in a future post.
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double jump
Cameron reminds us that for a cinematographer to make the transition from 35mm to 3D stereography requires a double jump: first to digital, and then to 3D, and he points out that 2011 was the year for single or double jumps for some very talented cinematographers.
The ASC jumpers include Emmanuel Lubezki, whose first digital feature, Gravity will be converted to 3D in post, Roger Deakins, who did his first digital 2D shoot, In Time, and Robert Richardson, who double-jumped with Hugo, and won an Oscar for best cinematography. Vince Pace assisted the Hugo filmmakers in exploring 3D stereo.
It’s equally daunting for a director to venture into stereographic storytelling, and this past year’s 3D novices include some big names like Peter Jackson (The Hobbit), Ang Lee (Life of Pi), Martin Scorsese (Hugo), Ridley Scott (Prometheus) and Wim Wenders (Pina).
Cameron and Pace see this trend as part of an inexorable evolution to an all-3D future. I’m not so sure; it is natural for a filmmaker to explore 3D and try it on a project. The real question is how many of these filmmakers will shoot nothing but 3D, as opposed to jumping back and forth between 2D and 3D. My own intuition is that 3D stereo is destined to become a genre, one storytelling possibility among many, until we make real progress in holography.
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change it up
Cameron provocatively asserts that one can learn the essentials of 3D in a couple of days, and he brushes aside the different schools of 3D stereography, saying that he and Pace have used both convergent and parallel approaches, and that he disapproves of “3D cops”.
The director humorously evokes the council of Nicea, a 4th century gathering of christian bishops to define religious dogma, stating that the 3D world needs a similar meeting of minds.
I came away from our discussion with the impression of a very practical, hands-on approach to 3D stereo, with no taboos. As Pace concludes simply: “if you like it, do more; if you don’t, change it up”.
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links
Vince Pace discusses Hugo in a Hollywood Reporterarticle
The Guardianarticle about Cameron’s upcoming production of 3 Avatar sequels back to back.
I had the pleasure of interviewing James Cameron and Vince Pace at the IBC show in Amsterdam a few months ago. I will present and annotate the video interview in two parts, starting here with our discussion of 3D cameras and workflows. Part 2 will address the 3D transition for the cinematographer.
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Vince Pace and James Cameron have been pioneering digital 3D filmmaking for a dozen years, starting with a focus on underwater movies, and culminating in the landmark 3D feature, Avatar. Pace is a cinematographer, stereographer and 3D maven. Cameron’s other directing credits include Terminator, The Abyss, True Lies and Titanic.
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3D mission
It’s fair to say that Avatar, the biggest grossing film of all times, accelerated the worldwide change-over to digital projection, as theater owners scrambled to get the revenue increase from 3D features.
Cameron and Pace are now on a mission to accelerate what they see as an inevitable transition to all-3D broadcast and film production. Cameron has noted that it was the introduction of color television that marked the end of black and white films. Similarly, he reasons that when most home screens are 3D, movies will necessarily follow suit.
The pair of filmmakers founded the Cameron Pace Group, a company that offers 3D services to filmmakers and broadcasters, and sports and performance events like the Cirque du Soleil. Cameron was quoted in the Hollywood Reporter as saying “our strategic plan is to make 3D ubiquitous over the next five to 10 years on all platforms”.
True to its mission, the Cameron Pace Group has helped many prominent filmmakers make their first 3D film, and the company’s credits include an impressive number of big 3D features including Pirates of the Caribbean 4, Transformers 3, The Three Musketeers, Hugo and The Life of Pi.
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rigs and cameras too
For the movies cited above, the Cameron Pace Group provided their proprietary 3D Fusion Rigs, along with their workflow expertise, while the cameras came from rental houses.
Recently Cameron and Pace made headlines when they announced that they will be buying dozens of Epic and Alexa M cameras, in special deals with Red and Arri. Red head Jim Jannard stated that they were buying 50 Epics, while Arri confirmed that the Cameron Pace Group will be receiving the first batch of Alexa Ms ahead of everyone else.
I begin the video interview by asking the two about their choice of cameras.
In my first post about the Gokinema 3D Workshop I attended in Sweden, I noted a few basics concepts: edge violation, screen distance and IA (inter-axial), to complement my article in the November issue of American Cinematographer
I now share two of the simple tests we shot to evaluate the look of distant 3D backgrounds, which I call faraway for short. When watching 3D movies I have often been struck by how objects at distances of more than a hundred meters have a different quality, often lacking the depth we perceive with our eyes. Geoff Boyle‘s 3D workshop in Gothenburg was a great opportunity to begin exploring the faraway image.
Once again, if you don’t already own some, I heartily encourage you to obtain a pair of cyan red cardboard glasses. And once again, I must stress that I am just a student of 3D, not an expert.
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Thomas Harbers assisted Geoff Boyle with the course, providing post-production for the 3D footage we shot.
Thomas is a man of many talents: in addition to 3D production and post services, he also does CAD and invents gear; his latest offering is DasRekorder, a file-based recorder for 3D video streams. Thomas kindly prepared the anaglyph movies from the workshop for this post.
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faraway flatness
The YouTube icon below displays the separate left and right views, once you click the play arrow, the video will combine them in an anaglyph.
I recommend looking at this full screen.
We shot this scene converged with 2 small SI-2K cameras mounted on a Stereotek rig, using 16mm Zeiss Ultra Primes. The point of conversion was about 10 meters, the nearest distance to the incoming boat. There is a HIT of 0%, in other words Thomas left the images as is. (Note that the bottom-screen info is wrong).
This footage illustrates how faraway objects in stereo 3D often look flattened. The bridge in the distance almost looks like a painted backing, except for the moving cars.
(click for larger image in separate window)
The flattening effect is most noticeable to me when the incoming boat is seen in front of the bigger vessels behind it. The foreground ferry’s volume makes the background ships seem that much flatter.
(click for larger image in separate window)
Thomas comments that “this is an impossible shot, you can’t make both the distant objects and the close objects look good”. The lesson here is that it’s the combination of deep nearby and flat faraway objects that doesn’t work.
The November issue of American Cinematographer features an article I wrote about low-budget 3D, based on a workshop I attended in Gothenburg, Sweden which was led by cinematographer Geoff Boyle, also known as the father of CML, the Cinematography Mailing List. Geoff was assisted by post specialist Thomas Harbers.
I wanted to offer some 3D images and notes from the workshop to complement the article, and raise some 3D topics. I must emphasize that I am still a student of 3D. I do not pretend to be a 3D expert, rather I propose to share my notes and questions on the subject, as I “deepen” my knowledge. Please do not hesitate to give me your corrections and explanations.
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Geoff Boyle showing us 2 Alexas on a P+S Technik Freestyle Rig
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anaglyph glasses
I now believe that anyone interested in cinematography should own a pair of Red/Cyan anaglyph 3D glasses. I got mine for free at a trade show, but one can also order some on the internet (check the links below). The Greek etymology is ana + glyph, to carve upon. The word originally referred to low relief sculptures with a slight offset between background and foreground. Anaglyph 3D also has a slight offset, a horizontal shift between the red and the cyan images.
It is in this spirit that I will offer some anaglyph images from the workshop to complement my article.
If you don’t have glasses, I would like to convince you to get some soon, and in the meantime, you can analyze anaglyph images sans glasses, like many stereographers do on the set. They do so because viewing anaglyph with glasses quickly tires your eyes, however you can still get a quick visual indication without glasses of the amount of depth from the thickness of the red or cyan offset.
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colored edges
During the workshop, I shot the image below with a P+S Technik Freestyle rig on my shoulder — with two tiny SI-2K cameras. Let’s start looking at the anaglyph image without glasses. (You might want to click on the image to see a bigger size in a separate browser window). Look for the colored edges. If there are no colored edges, the image is the same for each eye and the object position is on the screen, just like all the objects in a 2D movie.
Objects with red and cyan edges are either behind or in front of the screen: the larger the colored edge, the greater the distance from the screen. This edge is sometimes measured as a percentage of the total screen. During the workshop, Geoff Boyle once positioned a 1 cm piece of tape on our 1 meter screen, saying “here is a 1% reference”. We also used the built-in grids of our Transvideo monitors to display percentage offsets.
click on any image for closer view
edge violation
Let’s put on the glasses. When I look at a 3D images with my glasses on, I sometimes get confused about where the screen plane is. One way is to hold your hand out and point your finger sideways at where you think the screen is. You can also move your mouse cursor around. In both cases you’ll probably end up finding the screen position halfway up the ramp. Continue reading ’3D Workshop: Edges, Screen, IA’
The September issue of American Cinematographer features an article I wrote about PINA, the beautiful 3D film directed by Wim Wenders, assisted by cinematographer Hélène Louvart, AFC, 3D supervisor François Garnier and director of stereography Alain Derobe.
Wenders was very busy on another project when I was writing the article, but kindly accepted to answer some written questions in time for publication. I thank him for the time he took to write this thoughtful, honest and passionate text!
I must add that PINA is a true 3D masterpiece that combines the cinematic and dance art forms in a powerful, poetic and moving film.
click on images for closer view
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emotion
Benjamin B: Can you talk about the emotional impact of Pina’s work on you?
Wim Wenders: I was totally overwhelmed when I saw a piece of Pina Bausch for the first time. Nothing had prepared me for it. I didn’t care much about dance, I must admit. I didn’t think that was for me, or concerned me in any way. My girl friend at the time had to drag me into the theatre to see CAFÉ MÜLLER. And then I found myself on the edge of my seat, after 10 minutes, crying, and finally weeping through the entire performance. What I saw on stage touched me more than anything I had ever seen. It went deep into my heart and really shook me to the bone. This (to me yet unknown) woman by the name of Pina Bausch was showing me more about men and women than the entire history of cinema had done, and all that without a WORD! I was eager to see more, and could not get enough of Pina’s work. (Luckily, there were already 20 pieces at the time!) She had created a new art form, indeed, that didn’t owe much to neither conventional dance nor theatre…
You see, as a film director I fancied I knew something about the language of our bodies. We deal with actors, sometimes famous ones, we often tell them what to do, we sometimes correct them. And after all, the actor’s “presence”, that magic thing some of them have to appeal to the camera, what else is it than their body language? So, in my profession, we think we are experts in that. And then you see the work of Pina Bausch, and you realize: we are all analphabets of that language, we know little or nothing in relation to Pina about how to decipher that most fundamental language on Earth.
I have known Pina (and her work) for over 20 years, and I cannot possibly grasp how much that encounter influenced me. A couple of years after I saw her work for the first time I made Wings of Desire. Which is probably the most “choreographed” film I ever made, and which certainly owes a lot to Pina. (More on subconscious levels, I guess, than on any obvious first-hand “inspiration”.)
BB: Is there a scene in PINA that you particularly liked directing and why?
WW: Yes, one little moment. It is a quote from the piece TEN CHI … An older man is carrying his daughter on his back. He walks leaned over, like carrying a big load, and she is cuddled on his back like a baby. And then he stops and she glides down from his back. And then the unimaginable happens: she bends down, and her father climbs onto her back and also turns into a baby, and she carries him for a stretch of the path. And then she stops and they change parts again. Father and daughter cross the entire stage like this…
We shot this outdoors, and I was looking for the longest time for the ideal place for this little scene, until I found a location, in an industrial area near Wuppertal, that looked like a moonscape. I have seen this father and daughter movement countless times, on stage, and then in the editing room of course, but even now, in the finished film, I get goose-pimples when I see it…
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presence
BB: How do you feel about placing people or objects in front of the screen? Can you give an example from the film?
WW: Hard to give ONE example. In 3D there is this whole new aspect to consider: where to you place your characters in space? Are they on the screen level, or behind, or before it? That question appears with every shot. You have to organize the entire depth of the space you have available. In a way that’s the basic work in 3D that you expect, also from watching other 3D films. What really hit me more during the shoot, a whole new experience, was that the actors’ bodies themselves appears so differently.
All of a sudden, these bodies have VOLUME. They are round, and voluptuous, no longer flat surfaces as they have always been on the screen. That presence of the body has surprised me most, more than depth and space as such. And in a way, I felt we were on new territory here with PINA, as the dancers and that incredibly physical work they are doing were the main subject of the film. There was a phenomenal affinity between 3D and our subject. They both brought out the best in each other. Not only was 3D perfect to represent dance, dance also really brought out the essence of 3D, it felt.
BB: Can you talk about how 3D conveys the presence of performers differently than 2D? Is there a shot that comes to mind?
WW: The most simple shot of the film was the most striking one in that regard. It was a recurring set-up, some sort of a “silent portrait” that we made with each of the dancers, over a longer shooting period. They each sat in front of the camera, as if it was a sitting for a painter, or photographer, eventually directing their look straight into the lens. I always sent the entire crew away, when the stereo cameras were running, so I was alone with each of the actors/dancers, and we would have a really intimate situation. I sat behind the rig with our TRANSVIDEO monitor on my lap, so I became invisible for the person in front of the cameras, while I could watch in 3D what we were shooting. So there was just a person sitting in front of a three-dimensional camera, and I was watching a live feed on a monitor.
I tell you: it blew my mind! This was the most exciting thing in my 3D experience, I felt, far more compelling than huge crane shots with hundreds of camera positions and a complex choreography. The presence of that person on my 3D monitor was breathtaking. It really felt, for the first time, as if I could actually touch the dancers. There was an aura around them I had never experienced in cinema before. They were THERE is an ever before unseen way! We could use the entire little space – the person on a chair with a wall a feet behind them – for our stereographic representation. There was nothing “spectacular” about the whole thing, only that the very presence of a human being was utterly spectacular in itself. The face was a real landscape, the body had volume and roundness, “weight”… I cant even put it in words why this was so thrilling and extraordinary. The “reality” of the body, the “existential truth” of this representation, the very miracle of a human being alive not only in front of the camera but also captured absolutely “live-like” by this new medium… it struck me each time we did this shot (and I went through the experience each time anew) that this was, indeed, the future of filmmaking, especially of documentary filmmaking.
You always say that great actors have that special “presence” in front of the camera, but here was an even more magnified presence. You can only guess how this would be filled by a great actor in a story that would actually USE this potential of 3D and not just treat the new language as a production value in itself. The real attraction of 3D is how people can appear in this new space! I have just not seen that yet in a movie. 3D movies are all about themselves, it seems to me, all self-fulfilling prophecies. There was only one masterpiece in the genre so far, and that was Avatar. Ever since I wait for a film that would incorporate 3D with all its new possibilities for storytelling.
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wide
BB: How does 3D change your mise en scène ?
WW: What changed most for my own approach to filmmaking and directing was the use of lenses. The use of a wide angle, let’s say a 24mm lens for a huge wide shot (if we are talking 35mm film lenses) or a 32 to 38 for a medium wide shot, or a 50-65 for a close-up, or an 135 for a tight close-up… As a film director (like most of my colleagues) I have that in my blood, I “think” in set-ups and focal lengths that go with it.
That just didn’t work for me in 3D. I soon realized that the ideal lens for a 3D shoot was the one that came as close as possible to our human eye and its angle of perception. For our SONY 1500 cameras that became a set of 10mm Zeiss prime lenses, and we shot the entire film with that focal length, with the exception of very few closer shots that we did on a 14mm. (Which is still relatively wide.) I just thought that changing lenses did some harm to the stereographic perception. If you changed focal length when going from a wider shot to a closer one the entire space would be compressed. I experienced that as unpleasant when I made the first cuts in 3D and started to refrain from changing lenses. We would just go closer or wider with the camera, this way respecting as much as possible a 3D approach that was as “physiologically correct” as possible.
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future
BB: What do you think is the future of 3D for features and documentaries?
WW: There is no future if the new medium isn’t done more justice soon! If the studios keep producing trash with it, strictly action-based roller-coaster rides, the medium will collapse. It can do so much more!!! I can’t wait to see filmmakers, independent directors and authors and documentary crews take up 3D, make the best out of it and use it finally to its full potential. Stories that are “space adventures”, not in outer space, but on our own planet. Intimate stories of real people, not just of fantasy characters! I can’t wait to see the first round of documentaries exploring the new three-dimensional language to its max, taking us into the lives and the work of people in ways that we have never seen before. THEN 3D has a brilliant future, then it is a change comparable to the step from silent movies to sound!
BB: How about you personally, which kind of projects would you like to shoot in 3D or 2D in the future?
WW: I have done a couple of short films since PINA, documentary-style, or as an installation for the Architecture Biennale in Venice. I am working with a writer on a feature film that could be shot in 3D, an intimate story that would have the “affinity” to 3D that I mentioned before. I am also very tempted to shoot another feature-length documentary in 3D, with a very small crew, travelling a lot and filming in remote places. I’m really addicted to 3D, I must say. Very hard to return to conventional flat screens once you have tasted the thrill of a three-dimensional shoot.
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Links
September 2011 Preview of American Cinematographer. You can read my PINA article on pages 44 to 55.
(If you are a subscriber you can download the entire issue).
Berlinale Podcast by my colleague Iain Stasukevich. Iain did thoughtful interviews of Wenders, Guy Maddin and Wojcieszek at the Berlin Film Festival.
This is the first installment in a series of occasional columns that will analyze film scenes in detail, using key frames as illustrations.
Scene in Stills is an extension of the work on scenes in my book Reflections, 21 Cinematographers at Work, published by the ASC Press.
I start with a scene from one of the most perfect films ever made, Rear Window (1962) by Alfred Hitchcock, starring James Stewart, Grace Kelly and Thelma Ritter, with cinematography by Robert Burks, ASC. Burks collaborated on 12 films with the legendary director, using his friend Leonard J. South, ASC, as camera operator.
Robert Burks was nominated for an Oscar for the wonderful Technicolor cinematography of Rear Window.
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How do you introduce an important character? Every story has to. In Rear Window, it goes like this, about 15 minutes into the movie:
The scene
The camera moves across the courtyard buildings at dusk, a singer is doing scales, windows light up, the camera moves into our hero’s darkened apartment, he is asleep, a shadow crosses his face…
Congratulations to the winners of the 2012 Plus Camerimage awards! 
Golden Frog
The pair of filmmakers founded the 
my knowledge. Please do not hesitate to give me your corrections and explanations.
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