In the News

The Jason Priestly comedy Cas & Dylan, shot by Gerald Packer csc, was recently selected as the Film Circuit People’s Choice Award winner for 2013. Now in their 10th year, the annual Film Circuit People’s Choice Awards are decided by audiences across the country who vote for their favourite films screening through Film Circuit.

Meanwhile, Atom Egoyan’s feature film The Captive, shot by Paul Sarossy csc, asc, bsc was one of three Canadian films in competition at the 67 th Festival de Cannes, held from May 14 to 25. The other two Canadian films in competition are Xavier Dolan’s Mommy and David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars.

Equipment Rental House Opens in East End Toronto

The Canuck Camera Corporation (CCC Rental House) is the newest equipment supply company to hang out its shingle in the GTA. Located in the Scarborough area of Toronto, CCC offers an array of cameras from Canon to RED for rentWe also have a duty to forge ahead and embrace the new talent and the younger generation as they emerge in the film and television industry. This and more will be driven by our mandate “to foster and promote the art of cinematography.” The membership of the CSC is what makes up the society. We rely on you and ask for your continued support and assistance in helping us to achieve all that we have planned for the future. This is a very exciting time for the CSC, and over the next while we will be announcing plans that we know will take us to greater heights. It is our intention to elevate the status of the Canadian Society of Cinematographers and to create an awareness never seen before. At this time, I would like to acknowledge the confidence and trust that you, the membership, have placed in me. I am extremely honoured, and together with the Executive, I will do everything possible to continue in the same spirit and with the same energy, commitment and passion as my predecessors. I look forward to this new challenge. Thank you. George Willis csc, sasc al, plus lenses, image stabilization systems, the newly developed Air Xposure drone and a large green screen studio space.

Postproduction House 902 Post Opens New Digital Facility in Atlantic Canada

Halifax-based postproduction boutique 902 Post Inc. earlier this year announced it was bringing its film picture finishing technology to Atlantic Canada with 902 Post Digital Theatre One, a new custom-designed digital screening theatre equipped with a Christie Digital DCI compliant digital projector. The facility is the first of its kind in the region, enabling producers to colour correct and screen their work in an industry-standard environment rather than travelling elsewhere to do so, Playback reports. The facility also boasts a Dolby Digital Cinema Sound Processor and a high-tech colour management system.

Industrial Light and Magic Opens Permanent Studio in Vancouver

Lucasfilm’s Industrial Light and Magic in March officially opened its 30,000-square-foot studio in Vancouver. Some

From The PRE

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Inside Deluxe’s new facility in West Toronto.

200 employees are expected to be working there by this summer, an expansion on the 100-plus employees already working at a temporary satellite office, according to media reports. The Vancouver studio is expected to take on features such as the Star Wars trilogy, Warcraft, Jurassic World, and Tomorrowland, and has already worked on projects like The Lone Ranger and Pacific Rim.

Deluxe Toronto Relocates to City’s West End

After 25 years, Deluxe Toronto has relocated its postproduction, media services and content protection operations to a 62,000-square-foot facility at 901 King Street West, occupying the top three floors of an eight-storey building. All services will be fully data based, from processing to delivery and storage, and engineers have constructed a 10 GB fully networked facility, offering improved connectivity to the outside world via Deluxe’s Express Network to Los Angeles, New York, Vancouver, Atlanta, London, Sydney and most points in between.

MA 135/T1.9 Completes Master Anamorphic Family from ZEISS and ARR I

ARRI and ZEISS presented the ARRI/ZEISS Master Anamorphic MA135/T1.9 at this year’s NAB Show in Las Vegas. This lens completes the Master Anamorphic family, bringing

it to a total of seven focal lengths. The MA135/T1.9 rounds off this portfolio of anamorphic cine lenses jointly developed by ARRI and ZEISS. The three-lens sets (35, 50 and 75 mm) available since September 2013 are already in use on a wide range of projects. Delivery of the MA 135/T1.9 begins in July 2014. The lenses show hardly any image breathing and low distortion. The issue of anamorphic mumps – when

faces shot at close range appear wider – is balanced out automatically. This is achieved by positioning the cylindrical lens elements at strategically important points in the lens. The almost telecentric optical design reduces colour errors (chromatic aberrations) and shading in the corners of the image. The lenses also produce an anamorphic bokeh that is free from artifacts. A newly developed iris diaphragm with 15 aperture blades has been integrated into the ARRI/ZEISS Master Anamorphic lenses to create a bokeh that is oval and evenly illuminated.

Enemy

Aesthetics of Darkness

By Nicolas Bolduc csc

Denis Villeneuve and I shot a short film together in 2008 called Next Floor [Editor’s note: 2010 Winner of the CSC Award for Dramatic Short Cinematography.] It is a weird and wonderful allegory, a sort of dark ode to excessive human consumption, of our increasing love of immoderation. There was a linear story, as abstract as it was, but the interpretation was open. Denis had this kind of feeling in mind for Enemy, zooms and weirdness included.

Enemy is basically the story of man seeing his doppelganger in a film and becoming obsessed with meeting him. The story originally came from a dark place in author José Saramago’s mind, and Javier Gullon’s script felt like Lynch had bitten Cronenberg and then punched Grandrieux in the face. My first reaction was, “I really don’t understand it all. But I really, really want to see this movie!” Denis reassured me, “I don’t understand it all either, but isn’t that fantastic? Let’s explore.” I had never seen a film like the one we were going to do, so I absolutely wanted to shoot it.

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Actor Jake Gyllenhaal playing against a tennis ball as a stand-in for his character’s doppelganger.

POINT OF VIEW

The first thing for me was to try and grasp something visual out of the script that I could make my own and use it as a sort of point of view to tell the story. Point of view discussions actually became quite frequent between Denis, Matt

Hannam (the editor) and me, mainly because of the nature of the story and its various levels of reading. But also because we all had our own interpretations of what the story was really about. How to approach it as a cinematic piece was pretty much all we talked about during prep. What Denis was interested in as a director was telling the story of a man who was trying to leave his mistress to return to his wife. The story about identity, about self-annihilation, is one level of reading it. For me, to create an approach that could be grounded visually, I felt I had to film the story in a way that told the story of two completely independent characters with two clear linear narratives. My obsession was making these two men as real as I could, and I thought that if we believed in the camera that this story was about two separate individuals, it would make the unsettling sensation even stronger. To achieve this, the main character and his doppelganger, Adam and Anthony (both played by Jake Gyllenhaal), had to intervene in one another’s lives physically, or else, in my mind, we would never believe that they were both real, and it would feel like some sort of sleight of hand from the filmmakers.

VISUAL PARANOIA

Denis was thrilled to tell me that we had a whole new playground to shoot in: Toronto. Neither of us had shot there previously, and the challenge was nothing unnerving because the city is incredibly photogenic. But the idea was to make something different out of it, something that was more inspired by an interpretation of the book from José Saramago than anything we would have seen previously of Toronto. Denis wanted to create a São Paulo-meets-Toronto city, hot and polluted, a vast metropolis so big that anyone living in it would feel claustrophobic.

We watched a couple of films in prep: Vertigo, for the obvious duplicity theme; Polanski’s The Tenant; Antonioni’s Red Desert; Kubrick’s 2001. I also showed Denis some ‘70s paranoia films that I found fitting like Pakula’s Klute and The Parallax View. I really felt inspired by their strange suspense and Gordon Willis’ bold and dark photography that just doesn’t get old.

From a photographic standpoint, Denis showed me two stills that became the actual inspiration of the film. They were strange photographs that he had taken at completely different moments, and they weren’t good photographs, but they had strange moods, and I understood at once what to do with them because I was engrossed by their strangeness. One was a picture of a yellowish smoky sand storm in Jordan taken through a hotel window, and the other was an underexposed reddish face of one of his kids in darkness at home. I loved the pollution of one and the muddy darkness of the other. The idea to start my conception of the film with something so abstract and completely untied to the script was an interesting challenge. I thought these images were more

about a state of mind, a feeling, than an actual reference, but it made sense for the film we were doing.

The toxic yellowish dust storm became the proposal to create an overcast polluted Toronto that felt like São Paulo, and the reddish face was the underexposed and intimate dark space for the sex scenes and pretty much all of Adam’s apartment where all the eerie stuff happens.

Since I wanted everything in the film to feel muddy – and I wanted it all to be done in-camera – I tested on the ALEXA my favorite filter-sandwich, the Straw and Chocolate, to create a yellow cigarette-stain feeling for the day scenes. They turned out great with the skin tones of all three actors, as well as the sets and the muted costumes. I’m allergic to those blue nights for city scenes, so gaffer Terry Banting doubled MT2 orange gels on tungsten lights for the night scenes. It was over-the-top perfectly yellow. Trying to give a yellowish tone just in post is close to suicide, and you just end up dialling in a ridiculous amount of green and magenta in the skin tones.

I normally like to go really dark on films, but Denis was actually pushing me to go even darker than I was used to. We knew there was no way of making the shots brighter in post and we took that chance: it was total commitment. Sometimes people would arrive on set and trip on cables and equipment because it was so dark on the stage. Of course Charlotte Mazzinghi the colour timer – who was appropriately named the Mud Djinni – kept it elegantly dark and murky all along the Enemy path.

ZOOMS

Denis and I had used zooms extensively on Next Floor and we wanted to use them again, but differently. On this feature I didn’t want the lenses to overpower the image and make it feel like a huge aesthetic statement from the ‘70s. So I proposed 1.3 Hawk anamorphics from Vantage, and we used an Optimo adapted with an anamorphic back. I used the zooms mostly “invisibly,” or sometimes to slowly enhance a dramatic moment. Also, it’s quite exciting as an operator to use zooms when everyone thinks there are none. One example: there’s a moment when Jake runs back to his car after going to Anthony’s agency. I’m around 90 mm on him and I just zoom out as he’s running towards me and finish in a 30 mm. He enters the car and then I zoom back on his face. Nobody knows there’s a zoom because it’s hidden in Jake’s movement.

CREEPY HOVERING

Enemy is quite a claustrophobic film so it needed to breathe. Wide aerial shots were the best way to give some form of release to the viewer. Denis really wanted to make the city look almost like a never-ending metropolis but where a giant spider could be even taller than the buildings. Toronto is expanding at a crazy rate and the view from a helicopter is quite vast, so no CGI was needed. We looked for the uneven, un-glossy Toronto that is never really shown: unfinished buildings, cranes, construction, traffic, etc. We flew for several hours on the last day of shooting with the small Optimo zoom on the Stab-C head, and I was able to improvise some creepy travelling-in/zoom-outs with the chopper over the buildings in the St. James area. The buildings looked as though they were breathing.

THE AMERICAN SPECIAL FX

Denis called Jake his American Special FX because this film is more about mood and acting than it is a technical showdown. To feel the madness of the story, of its environment, it had to be felt mainly through the actors. Not getting entangled in any of the technical issues was our main concern, but the script created challenges: the duplicity of Jake, the spider, a car accident and all the apartment scenes that were to be shot on stage for different reasons. Since our references were films from the paranoia period in Hollywood and the ‘60s, we wanted to make everything feel “in-camera.”

Patrice Vermette, the set designer, wanted to build sets that could be shot like real locations, so we agreed to bolt in the ceilings and floors, and I would use most of the actual practical lighting as main night lighting on set. I wanted to avoid the green screen also, which is hell to use with the window reflections and the green spill it creates in very low light. Pat had the brilliant idea to make 15 meter Translights for the exterior. They were very well done, and we even used the Translights for exterior shots on a balcony as actual reflections in the windows! All this “realism” made everything feel so much less like a constructed film set and more like a real location.

We knew early on that the violence of the car accident had to be done as a surprise and with such force that it would be impossible to imagine any of the passengers surviving. Also, making it in one single shot was so much more in the style of the film. We shot the car swerving live at the top of the shot on a camera car with a crane and a zoom, and there was a flipped car at the end of the shot. Rodeo FX made the amazing tumbling in-between. I kept it really dark, but I wanted the ending with the real vehicle to be in all these construction lights to make it feel still organic.

THE TWO JAKES

We approached the shooting of the visual effects for the duplicity scenes in the same fashion. We didn’t want to use the Milo because it’s a bulky and noisy machine and it was giving

us possibilities that we didn’t want. The best small device was the Moses, from Whites, that was operated with remote wheels and that has a light gripoperated dolly-track system. So the first recorded pass of one Jake – where two characters would be integrated in later-on – felt like a real simple cinema shot, nothing fancy and no intended technical showing off. The Moses would just repeat the moves over and over for the other character Jake had to play against himself. Jake was playing against a tennis ball for the sake of the eye lines that were moving. In both scenes where he meets his double, I had poked a tennis ball at the end of a C-Stand, and with the help of a small hand-held monitor that showed me the first pass cross-faded with the one we were doing I would give Jake his eye line, floating the tennis ball around like a puppeteer.

HOVERING

We didn’t have a storyboard or even a shot list while shooting, except for the duplicity scenes. Never having any storyboards made us quite keen on listening to each other, to propose things that rang true to the tone of the film and that were also economical for the time we had and the tight budget. We wanted to give a feeling of tension through the frame by letting the actors live through it, so in the schedule there was a lot of time dedicated to the blockings, to the construction of the tone of the scenes, trying to avoid the obvious traps the script laid out for us. Then when we were all on the same page as to where we were going in the scene, we would shoot very little shots, but sometimes up to 30 takes to make it just right. Denis would give Jake and his fellow actors Mélanie Laurent and Sarah Gadon the freedom to try things, to improvise, and I would capture them quite simply, often with as minimal lighting as possible.

There was no reason to make things look glossy or impressive, and in the end the longer the shots were, the better. I would often put the camera on an Aerocrane and just float and zoom slowly to get to wherever the scene was going. Eric Bensoussan, the focus puller, admitted that it was the hardest film he has ever done because everything was unstable, floating and improvised. I admit that I thought that running after kids, handheld in a jungle on Rebelle [Editor’s note: see “Rebelle: A Congolese Tale in Incredible Colour,” Canadian Cinematographer, March 2012] was worse, but apparently not!

Caitlin Cronenberg

Director Denis Villeneuve consults with actor Jake Gyllenhaal on the set of Enemy.

Caitlin Cronenberg

Norm Li csc

The independent feature Afflicted follows two friends – Derek and Clif – embarking on a year-long backpacking trip around

Finds Footage for Afflicted

By Fanen Chiahemen Photos by Trevor Addie

the world after Derek is diagnosed with a life-threatening condition. Clif, being an aspiring filmmaker, brings along a camera to document the entire journey and keeps it rolling when Derek starts to develop some bizarre symptoms following an encounter with a mysterious woman in Paris. As Derek manifests a violent sun and food allergy, superhuman strength and speed, and a thirst for blood, he unleashes mayhem that culminates in some budget-defying action-packed sequences, some involving French SWAT teams, leaps between buildings and a fight scene with a vampire. Spanning a range of genres – including horror, found footage, super hero, and vampire – Afflicted was shot in France, Italy, and Spain over a two-year period on Canon 5D MK2s and a GoPro camera, with co-directors Derek Lee and Clif Prowse in the lead roles as fictionalized versions of themselves. For cinematographer Norm Li csc, shooting in the found-footage subgenre was a new experience, often calling on him to assume the role of the protagonists, who purportedly are capturing the events. Li tells Canadian Cinematographer about shooting the film, which premiered at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival and opened nationwide this spring.

Actor-director Derek Lee wears the strap-on camera rig devised by Sean Arden.

Canadian Cinematographer: How did you and the directors approach the visual language for a film of this genre?

Norm Li csc: The only film we looked at really was REC, a Spanish found footage film. But we didn’t go into too much detail because we didn’t want to get any pre-conceived ideas of how to shoot it. We wanted to come up with our own visual language. In terms of the language, we knew we couldn’t incorporate any traditional cinema tools such as dollies, Steadicam, or cranes. It had to be static, handheld, or body mounted. It was critical that it felt realistic. For many scenes, we didn’t want it to look like there were many cuts. Long continuous takes were very important to this film. We actually had to make a lot of scenes look like they’re one long take when they are not.

CC: How did you stitch together shots to look like one continuous take?

Li: I believe there are over 150 of these stitched-together shots in this film. Sometimes we even stitched scenes we filmed in different countries! Basically we did that through moving matte lines and whip pans. This was achieved by using any kind of vertical line, where for example there is a wall that the editor can match and move to the next location by matching the same vertical line, going from left to right or right to left. Another method was using the whip pan where you whip from left to right or right to left, whatever direction we need, and then continue the same motion in another scene or shot. Within the whip we could transition or do a slight dissolve to help us get to the next shot pretty much seamlessly. Another method was flaring the camera or dropping the camera, where the impact of the camera would allow us to transition from one shot to another.

CC: How did you work out the camera operation with the two actor-directors?

Li: I operated the camera for a lot of the film, but a large portion of the film was also shot by the co-directors themselves in certain circumstances if we felt that having them shoot it would add something unique. There were times when we needed to see, for example, Derek or Clif ’s feet or arms in the shot, where they would reach for something. I would hold the camera and they would be to my right or left sticking in their arms or feet. But sometimes we were in awkward positions where we couldn’t do that, and I found that it was better to just have them do it. Sometimes it was also just better for the performance if they held the camera. Say one character’s having an argument with the character who is shooting, he can’t be arguing with me; it wouldn’t help the performance. The other camera operator was one of our main stunt performers for most of the wire work, Brian Ho. He wore the camera for all the scenes where Derek’s character was suspended on wires, jumping between buildings, or any dangerous stunt work.

CC: Clif and Derek sometimes wore a “strap-on” camera rig to shoot some scenes, mounted on their torsos like a vest, with the camera attached to it. Can you talk about devising the rig?

Li: The strap-on camera rig was designed to be a part of the film since both characters wore it to document segments of their trip. It was fabricated by a very talented guy by the name of Sean Arden. It was a close collaboration as Sean executed the ideas, while we made suggestions on its design and functionality. It was important that it could endure the extreme situations such as skydiving, jumping between buildings, wire rigs and fight scenes. We had to make sure we could adjust the angle and height of the camera for different scenarios, as well as design special pockets to hide remote focuses, transmitters, batteries and cables.

CC: How did you simulate shooting as the characters in the film?

Li: I had to put myself in the mindset of Clif or Derek when operating the camera – would they turn it off in certain situations? Would they drop it? In the film, Clif is an amateur filmmaker and Derek has no idea about cameras, so for Derek’s character I would hold the camera as if I was not even framing. I would almost try to disregard what I was looking at, but also try to frame it at the same time This is the first found footage film I’ve done. It was difficult because you can’t be too perfect, you can’t frame or light traditionally either. You have to do things like be off skew, cut off one side of the frame, and over or underexpose. That was the difficult thing – to not make it seem contrived, but make it really feel authentic. I also had to adapt to each character’s situation and emotional mindset and translate that into the camera operation as much as possible. I would have to really think about what these characters were going through. For example, if they were scared of what’s around the corner or excited to be on a road trip, how would they hold the camera and how would I feel in that given situation?

practical lighting – did you ever enhance the lighting or did you just rely on the cameras?

Li: One of the other main challenges of the film was to light it to make it look as realistic as possible, as if it was not lit at all artificially. If we were filming night exteriors, I would follow the same or similar colour temperatures of any given city we were filming in. Italy had a lot of orange sodium vapour street lighting, and Paris had a lot of cyan mercury vapour street lighting. So in Paris I would mainly use the Rosco LitePanels to match; they have a sickly feel to them. And then in Italy, which has a lot more sodium vapour-style orangey lights, I would gel my lights with either half or full CTO to just kind of match that, and place it somewhere to make it look like there was only a back light or side light or fill light or no light. We just needed to make it look as real as possible without looking lit so we could still see them. Luckily with the Canon 5Ds we can get away with increasing the ISO a lot higher than we normally do. The cameras allowed us to shoot at 1000-1600 ISO safely. Fortunately, additional video noise while using higher ISOs was acceptable since it was the found footage genre.

Some night scenes were lit only by a high-powered military Eagletac LED flashlight, other scenes we augmented using a series of Rosco LitePads and LitePanels, some were lit with work lights and fluorescents, while others were lit by everything from 150W to 1K Fresnels. I even lit some shots with my iPhone! For the fight scene at the end between Derek and Audrey, the vampire, the location we acquired was fantastic, but we had to black out all the windows and light the scene accordingly to make it look dark, gritty, and realistic. I lit the

DP Norm Li csc (right) with co-director and actor Clif Prowse.

CC: The film offers lots of opportunities for

whole scene using several fluorescents and LEDs.

CC: What was the most challenging shot to capture?

Li: There were so many challenging shots! However, one of most challenging series of shots to capture was from the police chase scene where we had Brian rigged and ratcheted off of two 150’ cranes, allowing him to be catapulted from one rooftop to another at high speed, and which also allowed him to jump from ground level to the top level of a six-storey building. One of the shots required me to literally hang horizontally off the edge of the building from my knees to get a shot of a French policeman dropping to his death as Derek loses his grip. The stunt coordinator Lauro Chartrand did an amazing job for this film and we were very fortunate to have him on board.

Afflicted includes some budget-defying action sequences shot by the crew on location in France, Italy and Spain.

Gabriel Medina

Shoots Indie Horror Film Bind

By Katja De Bock Special to Canadian Cinematographer

Standing in a location the size of a closet, trying to capture a scary night scene with a child actor and only one oil lamp as a light source, director of photography and CSC associate member Gabriel Medina feels on top of the world. Fully in sync with his director’s creative vision, and in control of his own camera gear, he enjoys the concentration of getting yet another challenging scene in the can, as he did on the set of Bind, shot in Langley, B.C.

Bind, directed by Dan Walton and Dan Zachary, tells the story of a family moving into an abandoned orphanage, only to find that their charming home has a disturbing history that will come back to haunt them. The family’s young daughter, Sarah – played by Sierra Pitkin (Juno) – sets the mystery in motion when she discovers the ghost of a woman who used to live in the house.

For the low-budget indie production (under $1million) the directors-producers needed a DP who would bring his own gear and be willing to operate the camera. Growing up in Mexico as the son of well-known actor Alejandro Vega, Medina had the opportunity to learn all about the local film industry from scratch. As early as age eight, Medina performed in numerous commercials, films and television series and went on to focus on the technical side of film production.

“I worked with him [Medina] previously on a short film called Prophet. He knows what I like, and he is the only one that I can see eye to eye with,” Walton says. “He has lots of film gear at his disposal. He can get a lot accomplished with a modest budget.”

For Bind, Walton wanted an old-school vibe, a dark and gritty ‘70s, ‘80s look, blended with a modern flair. To achieve that look, Medina used a combination of both long and wide lenses, including 9.8 mm Kinoptiks for the establishing shot, 14 mm Century Optics, and 18 mm lenses, to give the main location – an abandoned Hydro building – a large, foreboding look. Sometimes, to add tension in a scene, he would use longer lenses, 85 mm, 100 mm or 400 mm Canon Century Optics, to compress the action on screen.

“I believe we were successful on all fronts,” Walton says. “I think there is a nice balance. You get breathing room when you need it and when the suspense comes the look is tighter, compressed.”

“I like to paint with light,” says Medina, who used principally HMI lights that are daylight colour temperature (5600K) in combination with tungsten lights (3200K). “I love to do day for night for this kind of horror film. If I would be shooting a romantic comedy, my lighting would be mainly tungsten and definitely not day for night. I really love the tone that is created by using day for night in this horror movie.”

Medina also says he lovesworking with1.2 HMIs. “They are exactly what I need for small locations through windows or French doors. The look that is created is almost identical to

DP and CSC associate member Gabriel Medina.

that of moonlight. I also really enjoy creating my looks with ARRI tungsten lights, but when locations are small, I use LED panel lights,” he says.

Walton is specifically pleased with a scene in the film where Ben, played by Darren Matheson, gets drunk and finds a horrific surprise in the shower. “We are most proud of that scene because it is very cinematic. Lots of slow dolly moves and wide lenses. The scene has great tension and suspense,” Walton says.

Medina says the scene was challenging, primarily since the location was just a small bathroom, which had to include two actors, the camera operator, the sound person and a 1st AC, as well as an over keeper (a slider). “However, I had so much fun creating this scene, using also a haze machine,” says Medina, who made use of two LED flat panels inside and an ARRI M18 outside of the window for moon light. “Mostly 14 mm, 50 mm and 85 mm lenses play in this scene, as well as a one-tube Kino Flo light.”

With the exception of an establishing shot, Medina shot Bind on his ownRED ONE MYSTERIUM-X camera. “The RED MX has some kind of magic that I like,” Medina says, with a spark in his eye. “The RED MX was the first camera in the market for 4K. So many movies have been made with that camera. It’s the camera that put all the film cameras out of business.

“A lot of people say it has a different texture, even though it is the same sensor; it’s something that looks more like film than the EPIC,” he continues. “It shouldn’t, because it’s the same sensor, but still a lot of people like the RED ONE better than

Jorge Posada

the EPIC if they want to create a film look. That’s why I call it magic. Don’t get me wrong, I love my EPIC X and obviously it is a superior camera, but RED ONE was what I would consider the beginning of a new era of cinematography.”

A few second unit shots were achieved with a BLACKMAGIC camera. “Those shots are really quick, so in the final project they will be hard to see beside those of the RED,” Medina says. “BLACKMAGIC is another camera that shoots 2.7 K. It is not quite 4K, but still you can use clips from it. It was mainly used for inserts and one scene that takes place in a forest where a girl is running.”

He also used a set of RED Pro Primes, a 1.8, a Canon PL Mount 2.8 telephoto and a 9.8 Kinoptic. “This last one just for one establishing shot,” he says. “I needed the aperture of 1.8 and also the sharpness that is already known in this set.”

In some scenes, Medina used practical lights that already existed in the location. “I did not use the practical to light the character, but showed the practical in the frame to have a motivation where the light was supposed to come from,” he says. “For example, we have a scene in a barn and you can see a bulb light hanging off the celling behind the actor sitting in a chair. I used this bulb for two purposes: first, to create a depth from the actor to the background, and second, as the motivation for my backlight, an off-camera ARRI 350w with a dimmer,” he explains.

In some scenes Medina occasionally used LED panels, which meant a new learning experience. “Every project is different, and every situation comes with a new learning experience, like in this case, working in small places with LED

Jorge Posada

lights. This is not an easy task, as the LEDs don’t have the colour temperature right, so you have to play a lot,” he says. “They don’t have the punch that I like, but in tiny locations they are useful. They don’t evoke heat, so with so many people in a tiny space I don’t really want to have a tungsten light, it would be a really hot place after some time.” He adds that some LED panels are not exactly colour balanced, so they have some green resembling fluorescent lights, so he used gels to minimize the green.

In Bind, Medina used a few handheld shots, as well as a few sliding shots. “Every moment in the movie is used to tell a story with different emotions,” he says. “The vision of Dan Walton was to create a feeling with every shot. Sometimes we had a shot that needed to terrify the audience. For example, when the ghost Hester is outside of the door, we used a slider and made a nice slow sliding movement towards her and back again. That would totally make me turn on the light in my house if I were watching this movie by myself!”

As usual, Medina operated the camera himself. “Ninetynine per cent of my shows I like to operate my own camera. I feel that I have more control of how I want to tell the story. In this show I operated 100 per cent on main unit, and Dan Zachary was the operator and DP on second unit,” he says.

Stills from Bind.

“Sometimes, with 35mm, I want to concentrate on the lighting, because with film, it’s a bit more tricky.”

Medina greatly appreciated his gaffer, Clyde Harrelson, who is originally from Montana. “This is the second project that we worked together on, and I really think that we understand each other well. And that is really important for me.”

Bind is scheduled to premiere this summer and is produced by GroundDead Productions.