Canadian Society of Cinematographers Magazine September 2015

CANADIAN SOCIETY OF CINEMATOGRAPHERS

$4 September 2015 www.csc.ca

Guy Godfree csc

Wet Bum

Boris Mojsovski csc Kidnap Capital Filming with Firearms

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A publication of the Canadian Society of Cinematographers

The purpose of the CSC is to promote the art and craft of cinematography in Canada and to provide tangible recognition of the common bonds that link film and digital professionals, from the aspiring student and camera assistant to the news veteran and senior director of photography.

FEATURES – VOLUME 7, NO. 4 SEPTEMBER 2015

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Credit: Kelly Krushel

The Canadian Society of Cinematographers (CSC) was founded in 1957 by a group of Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa cameramen.

Since then over 800 cinematographers and persons in associated occupations have joined the organization.

Wet Bum: Guy Godfree csc Dives into Teen Angst By Fanen Chiahemen

We facilitate the dissemination and exchange of technical information and endeavor to advance the knowledge and status of our members within the industry. As an organization dedicated to furthering technical assistance, we maintain contact with non-partisan groups in our industry but have no political or union affiliation.

CORPORATE SPONSORS

Kidnap Capital: Boris Mojsovski csc Pushes Boundaries in Fact-Based Thriller By Fanen Chiahemen

10 Credit: Maliseet Fury Pictures Inc

AC Lighting Inc. All Axis Remote Camera Systems Arri Canada Ltd. Canon Canada Inc. Clairmont Camera Codes Pro Media Dazmo Camera Deluxe Toronto FUJIFILM North America Corporation FUJIFILM, Optical Devices Division Fusion Cine HangLoose Media HD Source Inspired Image Picture Company Kino Flo Kodak Canada Inc. Lee Filters Miller Camera Support Equipment Mole-Richardson Nikon Canada Inc. PS Production Services Panasonic Canada Panavision Canada REDLABdigital Rosco Canada S1 Studios Toronto SIM Digital Sony of Canada Ltd. Technicolor The Source Shop Vistek Camera Ltd. Whites Digital Sales & Service William F. White International Inc. ZGC Inc. ZTV

Filming with Firearms By Dave Brown, Special to Canadian Cinematographer

COLUMNS & DEPARTMENTS 2 4 5 22 24 26 27 28

From the President In the News CSC at TIFF Steve “Z” Makes a Big Move Tech Column CSC Member Spotlight - Dylan Macleod csc Classifieds Productions Notes / Calendar

Cover: Still from Wet Bum

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Canadian Cinematographer September 2015 Vol. 7, No. 4 CSC BOARD MEMBERS PRESIDENT George Willis csc, sasc, gawillis@sympatico.ca PAST PRESIDENT, ADVISOR Joan Hutton csc, joanhuttondesign@gmail.com VICE PRESIDENTS Ron Stannett csc, ronstannett@sympatico.ca Carlos Esteves csc, carlos@imagesound.ca TREASURER Joseph Sunday phd JSunday1@CreativeAffinities.com SECRETARY Antonin Lhotsky csc, alhotsky@gmail.com MEMBERSHIP CHAIR Phil Earnshaw csc, philyn@sympatico.ca EDUCATION CO-CHAIRS D. Gregor Hagey csc, gregor@dghagey.com Dylan Macleod csc, dmacleod@sympatico.ca PUBLIC RELATIONS CHAIR Bruce Marshall, brucemarshall@sympatico.ca DIRECTORS EX-OFFICIO Jeremy Benning csc, jbenning@me.com Bruno Philip csc, bphilipcsc@gmail.com Brendan Steacy csc, brendansteacy@gmail.com Carolyn Wong, CarolynWong50@gmail.com EDITOR-IN-CHIEF George Willis csc, sasc EDITOR EMERITUS Donald Angus EXECUTIVE OFFICER Susan Saranchuk, admin@csc.ca EDITOR Fanen Chiahemen, editor@csc.ca COPY EDITOR Karen Longland ART DIRECTION Berkeley Stat House WEBSITE www.csc.ca ADVERTISING SALES Guido Kondruss, gkondruss@rogers.com

OFFICE / MEMBERSHIP / SUBSCRIPTIONS 131–3007 Kingston Road Toronto, Canada M1M 1P1 Tel: 416-266-0591; Fax: 416-266-3996 Email: admin@csc.ca, subscription@csc.ca Canadian Cinematographer makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of the information it publishes; however, it cannot be held responsible for any consequences arising from errors or omissions. The contents of this publication may not be reproduced in whole or in part without the express written consent of the publisher. The opinions expressed within the magazine are those of the authors and not necessarily of the publisher. Upon publication, Canadian Cinematographer acquires Canadian Serial Rights; copyright reverts to the writer after publication.

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FROM THE PRESIDENT George A. Willis csc, sasc

T

hese two words, called out for all to hear and on every film set, “We’re baaaaack!” are known to elicit different responses and emotions. For some it is an indication that they are one hour closer to hearing the equally familiar and sometimes welcome words, “It’s a wrap!” For others it’s simply a part of the everyday process on set and means nothing more than to acknowledge that the break is over; in other words, back to work.

However, there are those who value every moment of the lunch or dinner break, whether 30 minutes or an hour, and who are prepared to forego the opportunity of adding to their caloric intake. It would seem that not even the most mouth-watering supply of victuals can come between them and their favourite replacement for food – sleep. And that in itself is a kind of sustenance.

I believe that there are a growing number of industry crew members who are opting for the chance to grab a sound blanket and then curl up in whatever space is available to have a catnap. Well, truth be told, the time allotted to the meal break can be more than enough to allow some to not only drift off but collapse into a deep sleep. On many occasions, I have personally witnessed this procedure and can attest to instances when the snoring emanating from beneath a blanket rivals the sound of a Harley motorcycle.

A natural extension of this statement would be a question: why is this of any importance at all, and where is the relevancy? I believe that the answer lies in the importance (or sometimes the lack thereof) that is given to getting adequate rest.

While not wishing to single out the film industry – for there are many job categories that demand great energy and physical commitment – there is definitely an intensity to be found while working in, on and around the environs of a film set. And this expending of so much energy in such a short space of time may well be responsible for the need to relax when a sudden break is called.

Or maybe it has something to do with overdoing things. Whatever the case, there is enormous value which we should be placing on our health, whether at work or at play. Those 40 winks, as they used to be called, have a lot to do with the manner in which our system behaves, or misbehaves.

Taking the opportunity (on formal breaks) to have a power nap, or in some cases just calmly rest the body, I do believe has many benefits. Just relaxing the whole system, even for 30 minutes, is almost therapeutic in itself as it gives the body time to play catch-up before the next physical demands are made.

However, this brief respite from the daily grind may be seen only as a panacea, and there is no way to replace the much-needed time that the body see President page 28

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IN THE NEWS

(Vic Sarin csc) in the Allan King Award for Excellence in Documentary category. The Awards will be presented at the annual gala on October 24 in Toronto.

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wo CSC members have been nominated for this year’s Emmy Awards in the Outstanding Cinematography for a Single-Camera Series category – Rob McLachlan csc, ASC for Game of Thrones “The Dance of the Dragons,” and Greg Middleton csc for Game of Thrones “Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken.” Winners will be announced at the Creative Arts Emmys show on September 19 in Los Angeles.

Projects shot by CSC members were also among the nominees for this year’s Directors Guild of Canada Awards, including Corner Gas: The Movie (Ken Krawczyk csc) and Elephant Song (Pierre Gill csc) in the Best Feature Film category; Bomb Girls: Facing The Enemy (Eric Cayla csc), Kept Woman and Trigger Point (Daniel Villeneuve csc) in the Best Television Movie/ Mini-Series category; and Monsoon (Van Royko) and The Boy from Geita

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There were also winners and nominees among the membership at this year’s Leo Awards in June. Winners

The Dead: The Story Of The Chinese Labour Corps In WWI). Among the nominees were Norm Li csc in the Best Cinematography Motion Picture category (Grace: The Possession); C. Kim Miles csc (Arrow - Blind Spot) and The Flash - The Man In The Yellow Suit) in the Best Cinematography Dramatic Series category; and Allan Leader csc (The Liquidator - Redneck Round Up) in the Best Cinematography Information, Lifestyle or Reality Series.

Also in June, Women in Film and Television Vancouver named Pauline Heaton csc winner of this year’s Artistic Innovation Spotlight Award. The Spotlight Awards Gala celebrates the outstanding achievements of British Columbia women in screen-based media.

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included Bruce Worrall csc for Best Cinematography Dramatic Series (Strange Empire – Confession); Norm Li csc for Best Cinematography Documentary Program or Series (Tricks On

4 1. Rob McLachlan csc, asc Game of Thrones 2. Pierre Gill csc Elephant Song. 3. Van Royko Monsoon. 4. Vic Sarin csc The Boy from Geita

SIM Group Now Offers Playback Services in Toronto

TIFF Celebrates 100 Years of Technicolor

SIM Digital announced in July that it has brought its playback service to Toronto. The service provides customized 24and 30-frame video and computer playback systems and related services to film and television productions. SIM Digital can provide productions with a variety of playback monitors from classic CRT-type television sets and computer monitors to state-of-the-art video wall systems. Playback is available for most devices at either 24fps or 30fps to conform to production requirements. SIM’s range of services also includes technical support and graphics production. Meanwhile, the SIM Group company’s Pixel Underground announced that it had completed a facility expansion that includes the addition of a cinema-style 4K grading theatre. The new construction also includes a 4K online finishing suite. The new 4K theatre features a DaVinci Resolve colour grading system; a Sony 4K, DCI-compliant digital projector; a 14-foot projection screen and a Flanders 55-inch evaluation-grade monitor in a cinema environment that can accommodate groups as large as 15.

This summer, Toronto’s TIFF Cinematheque programmed a centenary salute to Technicolor, showcasing some of the most dazzling uses of colour-film technology in the history of cinema. Running from June 19 to August 13, “Dreaming in Technicolor” showcased 27 Technicolor epics, with highlights including: 4K Digital restorations of Jack Cardiff ’s The African Queen (1951), and the Powell and Pressburger masterpieces The Tales of Hoffman (1951) and The Red Shoes (1948) Restored 35 mm prints of The River (1951), and the first feature shot entirely in the newly developed three-strip Technicolor system, Becky Sharp (1935) Archival 35 mm prints of Rear Window (1954) and The Wizard of Oz (1939) – both struck during the last revival of the Technicolor dye-transfer process in the 1990s.

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Open House Announcement: ZTV/HD Source

When: October 15, 14:00 to 19:00 Where: 1670 Enterprise Road, Mississauga, Ontario.

NEW CSC MEMBERS

Credit: Neil Mota

Credit: Joseph Finkleman

The CSC congratulates the following members on receiving csc accreditation:

Guy Godfree csc Christophe Collette csc

Write to Us

www.csc.ca Connect online with the CSC

CSC at

Canadian Cinematographer welcomes feedback, comments and questions about the magazine and its contents. Please send your letters to editor@csc.ca.

Letters may be edited for clarity and space.

@csc_CDN

2015

CSC congratulates the following members whose films were selected for the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival GALA PRESENTATIONS Yves Bélanger csc, Demolition (dir. Jean-Marc Vallée) Karim Hussain csc, Beeba Boys (dir. Deepa Mehta) Karim Hussain csc, Hyena Road (dir. Paul Gross) Rene Ohashi csc, asc, Forsaken (dir. Jon Cassar) SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS Yves Bélanger csc, Brooklyn (dir. John Crowley) Steve Cosens csc, Born to Be Blue (dir. Robert Budreau)

Serge Desrosiers csc, Ville-Marie (Guy Édoin) Daniel Grant csc, Into the Forest (dir. Patricia Rozema)

André Pienaar csc, Len and Company (dir. Tim Godsall)

A complete list will be published in the October issue of Canadian Cinematographer after all the films have been announced.

Canadian Cinematographer - September 2015 •

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WET BUM

Guy Godfree csc By FANEN CHIAHEMEN

F

or 14-year-old Sam – the protagonist of writer-director Lindsay MacKay’s debut feature, Wet Bum – the pain of adolescence is leaving its mark in the most awkward of places. While her peers are developing curves, she is all skin and bone, knobby knees and elbows, something the mean girls never let her forget during swim class. So rather than getting undressed after swimming like the other girls, Sam simply throws her clothes on over her bathing suit, the telltale wet patch trailing her everywhere she goes, even to her after-school job at a nursing home where her mother makes her clean rooms. It’s a world she finds no less baffling than school, and she struggles to make sense of the residents’ mysterious idiosyncrasies. Only in the pool does she find temporary respite from the often cruel and confusing world around her.

MacKay says when writing Wet Bum, she always envisioned the institutional settings of the school and nursing home as feeling “clinical and isolating in some way because Sam’s finding her way in both those places, whereas underwater is a place of calm.”

As is often the case with small films like Wet Bum, realizing a director’s vision can hang on a cinematographer’s clever use of camera, and Guy Godfree csc says he and the rest of the crew adopted a philosophy of simplicity, from the composition to the photography, relying on the “robust and fast”

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ARRI ALEXA rated at 800 ASA and making the performances a priority. “We chose a simple way to do things because it’s a very quiet, lovely story about a teenage girl dealing with some very real things, so we never really wanted to get in the way with the photography,” Godfree says.

Throughout the shoot, Godfree used 35 mm, 50 mm and 75 mm Cooke S4 Prime Lenses almost exclusively because MacKay wanted to use medium or tight shots as a way to ground the film in the teenage girl’s story. “We never really liked the idea of cutting to the wide. We only cut to wide shots occasionally as a relief point or as a contrast to what we would do normally,” Godfree says. “We had this idea that you don’t need a wide lens to show a wide scene, you can use longer lenses, and by the time you’re done the scene you will have painted the scene in pieces.”

The lighting style Godfree employed for Wet Bum was also naturalistic, by aesthetic as well as necessity, with the cinematographer focusing on simple augmentations and what he calls “consistency control.” The production did not have a generator, so none of the lights he used were larger than what could be run on house power. “A lot of it was trying to find a good solid single source and going with it. So that’s where you rely heavily on the robust quality of the picture that comes out of the ALEXA and its latitudes,” Godfree says. “And you rely heavily on postproduction and colour

correction. Because you just don’t have time to constantly monitor colour temperature shifts, so a lot of it is just creating a consistency.”

With Wet Bum also being MacKay’s first feature, creating a space for the director and actors to work and to spend time on the script was paramount for Godfree. “I didn’t ever want to be in the way of that, so I didn’t want to fill the set with light stands and spend two hours lighting and only have 20 minutes to shoot. I’d rather it be reversed – that I’d be ready in 20 minutes and have two hours to play it rather than light it,” he says.

“I consider my job to protect the director as much as possible.

The success of a movie is not based on what I do as much as it’s based on being able to tell a story. So that’s the balance you’re always running on a movie, especially one this small.”

Godfree’s lighting package consisted of the Arriflex M18, which was his largest lamp, a small tungsten package and a collection of Kino Flos, plus gripping gear.

“I usually have an augmentation of natural light, and then my lighting next to the actors is whatever I can do passively, bounce cards or negatives. If I can help it, I rarely do hair light. I back light mostly, but just not kickers, hair lights or the like. It’s very much a way of creating a soft sense of separation and a sense of natural light through windows and lamps, and then working with the passive cards to fill or shape it,” Godfree explains.

He notes that one of the biggest challenges for him on Wet Bum was having to shoot in a working retirement home, where the crew only had a limited amount of time to get their shots. He often had to rely on existing light fixtures, “which was cold white fluorescents, so it was tough,” he recalls. “I had to always try to find a way to augment that, and the hardest part about mixing light sources is that when you correct out your fluorescents your daylight goes purple, and that looks terrible so how do you balance that? These are the struggles you have when you don’t have complete control.”

Wet Bum is a film with very considered camera movement.

Rather than employing Steadicam or cranes, the camera simply pans and tilts accordingly, seeing Sam’s world through Sam’s eyes, and often moving in a way that reflects her feelings and predicaments.

In a pivotal moment, Sam stands before a mirror at home, uncharacteristically experimenting with make-up ahead of a dance. Instead of observing her directly, the camera is positioned off to the side in such a way that only half the

Canadian Cinematographer - September 2015 •

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mirror is visible and neither Sam nor her reflection can be seen, essentially assuming the role of a tentative observer not unlike a shy teenager. Then the girl’s mother walks into the room, much to the chagrin of Sam, who in an awkward reflex leans into the frame, her made-up face finally coming into view at the end of the scene.

“Lindsay and I have this thing where if we’re going to get what’s going on in the scene, we don’t need to have close-ups and inserts, we can let it play out in sound and in dialogue, and those are the important things that will come through,” Godfree says.

“I love films that don’t provide you with everything straight away or that challenge the viewer in some way,” MacKay offers.

“And I love composition; I think it’s one of most powerful things in filmmaking.

In that scene, it was the first time you really see her wearing make-up and trying to fit in and look pretty, so for me it was an exciting reveal, holding it and building anticipation; it brings you in more.”

As Samantha becomes bolder, her essence is again captured through deliberate use of camera and framing. At the retirement home, one particularly cantankerous resident orders her not to look around his room while she cleans, but when the man leaves, she does just that, slowly taking in his belongings. However, rather than pan around the room to reveal what

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Top photo: Julia Sarah Stone as Sam in Wet Bum. Credit: Jeremy Chan

2nd photo: Actor Kenneth Welsh as a retirement home resident in a scene from Wet Bum. Credit: Erin Simkin

3rd photo: A scene from Sam’s swim class.

Credit: Jeremy Chan

4th photo: Sam learns to be more comfortable in her skin.

Credit: Kelly Krushel

the girl is seeing, the camera stays on the actress, while the contents of the room remain mostly defocused.

“We were very conscious to stay with her because it was the act of exploring the room that was the point of the scene, rather than the room itself,” Godfree explains. “The fact that she’s acting out a bit is more interesting than the things she sees. So there’s a lot of depth there but we didn’t really go for all the inserts,” he adds, noting that editor Jorge Weisz deserves equal credit for his choices.

While shooting swimming pool scenes was daunting, it was important to still match the visual language of the film even when underwater. “When you get into the pool, you get into Sam’s head space. She can shut herself off from the world above, and everything above water fades away, so I wanted it to be almost magical,” MacKay says.

To convey the contrast between the way Sam feels underwater versus on land, MacKay and Godfree decided to employ slow motion, shooting at 36 to 40 frames when in the pool, a decision that also had a technical application. “If you shoot a little bit slower you get a bit more time, and obviously you can’t hold your breath for that long, so it was good for us getting a little bit more time underwater, but it also adds to that ethereal sensation and the feeling of floating and the otherworldliness,” MacKay says.

Although it was difficult to find a good underwater housing for the ALEXA, the production was able to secure the new Hydroflex camera housing, which had been released just months prior to filming, with the help of Panavision (SIM Digital was the film’s main supplier). Most of the underwater footage near the surface was operated by Godfree, but he also relied on underwater camera operator Brent Robinson for deeper material, as well as a scuba team from Torontoarea Oakville Divers Scuba Centre for technical support – required both by law and to offset the logistics of underwater filming.

“It’s very time consuming, it can be dangerous, and it’s hard to be in the water for eight hours a day because everybody gets cold and that starts to come across on screen. Communication is difficult; we had a couple of camera issues to solve, water clarity can be an issue, and there is all this stuff you have to control,” Godfree says.

But for MacKay it was less about the spectacle of being in the water than about using the medium to tell the story. “I feel so often when people shoot underwater, they get wide and flashy in terms of showing space and the tricks of the camera, but I wanted it to be very much about Sam’s perspective,” she notes. “I find it to be a meditative space for her, and I want to feel the way she’s feeling.”

Godfree, she says, was a cinematographer she could rely on for his opinions and his visual design. “He was amazing,” she says. “Those close shots of Sam swimming towards the camera are very difficult to do and he really pulled it off.”

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Canadian Cinematographer - June 2015 •

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BORIS MOJSOVSKI csc Pushes Boundaries in Fact-Based Thriller

Kidnap Capital By FANEN CHIAHEMEN

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S

ome 10 years ago, Montreal-based filmmaker Felipe Rodriguez was part of a documentary crew that followed a group of Central American migrants on a dangerous journey to the United States. Rodriguez spent months with the migrants, who were fleeing impoverished countries like El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua, encountering gangs, vigilantes and border guards along the way. “We were with them all the way through the process,” the then-DP recalls. The film, Wetback: The Undocumented Documentary, was a festival success, but it also resonated with Rodriguez. “It kind of really sticks with you, a story like that,” he says. “Everybody’s been talking to me about it. And then one day a director friend said, ‘The real problem is what happens when [the migrants] get here.’ So I started doing some research and we ran into all these stories.”

It was those stories that led Rodriguez to write his first feature film, Kidnap Capital.

In Kidnap Capital, opening in festivals this year, a Mexican migrant and his pregnant wife harbour the familiar dream of heading north to the United States where they see a more promising future. With few resources at their disposal, the couple risks an illegal border crossing, investing their faith – as well as their life savings – into a human smuggler, otherwise known as a coyote, hired to ensure their safe passage to their new home. Instead, shortly after setting foot on U.S. soil, the couple are violently taken hostage and transported to a house in suburban Phoenix, Arizona, where they are confined in a room with almost two dozen other unfortunate migrants. They have been lured into a kidnapping ring orchestrated by gangsters who, exploiting the migrants’ illegal status, demand ransoms from their families back home.

Kidnap Capital may be a work of fiction, but it sheds light on the fate of so many would-be migrants, and it became of the utmost importance to Rodriguez, and DP/co-producer Boris Mojsovski csc to be uncompromising in their storytelling and deliver a visceral experience. “I didn’t want people to watch the movie and say, ‘Oh, some Canadians made a movie about what happens here,’” Rodriguez says. “It was very important to have it feel as real as possible.”

But so little is known about the world of kidnapping rings and so few images of that world are recorded, that, with no real visual references, Mojsovski and Rodriguez were initially at a loss as to how to devise a visual roadmap for Kidnap Capital. “There are not a lot of pictures or material about these people who are captured and live in these conditions, for obvious reasons,” Mojsovski points out. “These criminals don’t take pictures of them, so we did a lot of reading of police reports that would illustrate what that world is like. Usually in kidnap movies you kidnap one or two people or you have

hostages in a bank, but it’s kind of rare to have 20, 30 people in a room.”

The only images Mojsovski was able to pin down were about half a dozen photos taken at a Phoenix drop house. “At first when you look at these photos they’re very bright, and everybody’s reaction is that it’s interesting to have this bright look, which is the opposite of my inclination to make it very dark and moody,” the DP says. “But [the photos] were taken with a flash on a crappy camera. That’s why they’re bright. There was something interesting to Felipe about the bright light that would further torture the migrants. And we talked about it to death. And then we screened the test and we tried light and dark and everything in between, and everybody who saw the tests right away liked the dark, moody environment.”

As part of their commitment to keep the story true to life, Mojsovski and Rodriguez wanted to shoot the action in real locations rather than build sets. After a lengthy search, they managed to secure a house just west of Toronto that could stand in for a house in Phoenix and accommodate the crew, as well as the more than two dozen extras playing the kidnapped migrants.

Once they established a room as the “chicken room,” where the migrants (who the kidnappers call pollos, or “chickens”) are kept, Mojsovski determined that the main source of light would have to come from the bathroom just off of the chicken room. The main lighting source was therefore four bare bulbs housed in a primitive metal cage, “so these migrants wouldn’t break the bulbs or use the wires as weapons,” Mojsovski reasons. “Everything we did in this movie was really logical. We had to think the way the migrants think and think the way the criminals think because we couldn’t really find enough material about what is really going on in these drop houses.”

While thinking about staging and blocking during preproduction, the filmmakers reasoned that the migrants would gravitate towards the bathroom for water. The bathroom would therefore be the brightest spot in the room, with its light falling off into the corners. “I immediately knew that was the way to go – super moody, one source, and as the light drops, people go into the shadows,” Mojsovski says.

“The only thing we didn’t account for was how 20 almost completely naked men would look in that room. The first day when they all showed up, we couldn’t all fit with the cameras.

We had a huge problem; we just couldn’t move anywhere.

But then we used it to our advantage by making the camera a character in the room and shooting handheld,” an idea that Rodriguez came up with and that Mojsovski initially fought.

“I truly believe handheld can work in films, and when it works perfectly, it’s magical, and I cannot always put my finger on why it works,” the DP explains. “But I think most of the time handheld takes me away from watching the film because I become aware of the camera. I don’t like following somebody with a handheld camera, and we didn’t do any of that; it was Canadian Cinematographer - September 2015 •

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mostly just for the feel of the camera breathing with the characters. That I buy, that’s fine. It gives a certain feel.”

As camera operator Joe Turner notes, the handheld was not employed in the typical “reactionary” style. “Usually the reason you go handheld is because it feels like a documentary and reactionary – something happens in the background out of focus or off camera, and you swing the camera, and the camera reacts as if shooting something live. It feels very real,” Turner says. “We weren’t doing that. We were very specific in terms of what we wanted as far as focus rack. Suppose we had someone in the foreground and we knew what they were talking about was someone in background, or that someone in the background would be very interested in what they’re saying, we’d rack to the background right at that moment.

Now, that’s a very manipulated move. And most of the things we did in the film were more like that.”

Turner also devised ways to hide the camera movement to avoid the documentary aesthetic. “The problem with handheld is when nobody’s moving you don’t want to move the camera, so if I need to get from point A to point B, and not take the viewer out of the moment, we have to do it without feeling the footsteps, so we would use a linear bed to make it smooth,” he says. “Or in one case we wanted to get through a very tight space that I couldn’t walk through, so we used a jib arm.”

He would also sometimes place the camera on a spongy

Boris Mojsovski csc (left) and Director Felipe Rodriguez

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ball. He explains, “Sometimes I would want to be so low on the ground but still want to have a handheld feel so if I found the point on the camera where it rests on this spongy ball, I can put my hand underneath it and give it a little bit of movement.” The crew were also equipped with the Newman Airhead, which Mojsovski says allows for “handheld-like” dolly moves.

Nevertheless, Mojsovski says Turner, as well as focus puller Dave Sheridan, went “through hell,” on the shoot, being squeezed into the tiny room with the extras. “They were bumped and bruised and kicked and everything else you can imagine,” the DP recalls.

To capture the action, Mojsovski opted to shoot 4K RAW with the Canon EOS C500 rated at 850 ISO and equipped with the Odyssey 7Q recorder, supplied by SIM Digital. “I’d used the camera before and really liked it,” he says. “I especially liked it inside because I could control the highlights. I think it’s a camera that has a really nice latitude – it’s amazingly stretched on the bottom end. The bottom end is probably the best there is in the business.” The RAW files, he says, were “gigantic. During the shoot, I would often stop lighting, get on the phone and order more hard drives. We went through at least a bedroom-sized pile of hard drives on this production. But it paid off because our images are beautiful.”

Because the crew were shooting in such close quarters, Mojsovski shot most of Kidnap Capital on the Canon 24 mm Cine Prime lens, something he said “opens up a lot of interesting possibilities and complicates things a lot in a small room.”

The DP had initially wanted to use a 32 mm lens, which he felt “looks pleasing and yet is still immediate.” But Rodriguez wanted the camera to be close to the actors’ faces to enhance the feeling of being among the migrants. “I thought it would be tough for a Canadian or American audience to put themselves in that situation. So I was trying to look for a way to really get with the actors. We always filmed from the perspective of the kidnapped people, and the camera is always with them to give the feel of how you would feel in a room with 15 guys in your underwear,” Rodriguez says.

The trouble was that lighting for 24 mm close to the actors presented quite a challenge for Mojsovski and crew because there was so little space to light foreground or background, and the 24 mm sees a lot on the sides. “That was very challenging in a small room where you already cannot put light because you see everything. And light can only come from one direction, the bathroom, so in order to keep the dark side of the face to the camera, which is my mantra, we went through hell and back in that small room. On top of that, I wanted the light to be super soft yet very side-y. It was the toughest thing I’ve ever shot,” Mojsovski recalls.

“You have a room with no practicals, no furniture and no pictures, just bare walls, and on top of that everybody leans on the wall, a green disgusting old dilapidated wall that thou-

Stills from Kidnap Capital.

14 • Canadian Cinematographer - September 2015

sands of people have leaned against. We are always trying to push people away from walls in movies in order to have depth, but here we were completely stuck. We had people leaning on the wall with a wide-angle lens seeing most of the room so there’s no room for the lights,” the DP explains. “If we wanted to see foreground and background in that room, that usually means we saw mostly two-thirds of that room, and in order to hide a light, we would either have to avoid an area where the light comes from, which would mean we would have to avoid the source of the light, the actual practical light that comes from the bathroom, and if we did that, we would never have a white reference within the frame – meaning some kind of source or practical light, which is very important in my work. So all possible elements were stacked against the cinematography in this movie.”

Furthermore, one of Mojsovski’s lighting philosophies is to always shoot on the dark side of light rather than the key side. Meaning, Turner says, “If we’re in an over-over situation – over one person’s shoulder looking at another person talking to them – the light always has to be on the side of the person you’re shooting is looking towards. That means there is a dark side to the face and they’re always looking towards the light.

“And the way he likes to light is big soft sources. Usually on any frame that you’ll see on any movie or series that Boris has shot, if you were to be a little bit wider, you’d see what we call ‘the monsters,’ basically big huge sheets of diffusion that hang off of pipe. And then he puts lights bouncing behind it,” Turner continues. “So it can be very difficult as an operator.

He boxes me in quite often. So he finds out what my frame is and then he puts lights right along the edge of it.”

With all the difficulties they faced, the production’s saving grace, Mojsovski says, was the support they received from the industry, especially from friends in the rental business like William F. White, SIM Digital or Canon who supplied new lenses, zooms and primes. Also, Mojsovski, who likes to colour on set, says he was lucky to have Joshua Jinchereau as an on-set DIT colourist, along with a fully-equipped DaVinci Resolve trailer courtesy of Toronto-based post house The Rolling Picture Company.

“For a little movie, I didn’t expect such a luxury as a full trailer for colour,” Mojsovski says. “Every day during lunch and after wrap, I would spend time with Josh, and we would colour the dailies, and that’s very important to me. I always develop numerous LUTs beforehand that everyone can view on various devices on set, so the look of the film is on everybody’s monitors already, or 90 per cent of the look is there.

So Felipe and I came up with that look, Josh and I refined it, and our look for the movie was there from day one. And that’s how I like to do it because everyone sees what the movie’s going to look like for real, and it gets people excited and motivated.”

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Tips on getting the shot you want and keeping your crew safe

Filming

with

Still from the series The Pinkertons, shot by Thom Best csc, who worked with firearms training specialist Dave Brown.

16 • Canadian Cinematographer - September 2015

S Firearms

By DAVE BROWN, SPECIAL TO

CANADIAN CINEMATOGRAPHER

omeone once said that if you find a job you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.

In more than 20 years of handling firearms on film sets, working with actors on how to make it look real, and keeping both cast and crew safe when firearms are being used, I haven’t worked a single day in my career. And I loved every minute of it. I even managed to learn a thing or two about the use of firearms in filmmaking.

Canadian Cinematographer - September 2015 •

17

Credit: Maliseet Fury Pictures Inc

FIREARMS AND CINEMATOGRAPHY Coordinating the safety of firearms on film sets may be one of the most unique occupations in the industry. I learned as early as my first day on set that filmmaking is a very collaborative process.

Every job is important. But there are good reasons for the often close relationship between directors, cinematographers and experts such as myself who are there to get the shots they want, quickly, safely and within budget. For as long as there are still actors to act, cinematographers to shoot them and directors to direct them, actors will be using firearms. And we all want those shots to look real.

We use actual firearms, loaded and fired with blanks. It’s what we do. With all the advances in computer-generated imagery, we will still be using blanks for years to come. We want the scene to look good and we want the story and the characters to be believable. Cinematographers paint a story with light and movement. Firearms experts paint a story with realism and gunshots.

Blanks are not cheap. Plus, there are safety hazards. It will be more expensive to tell the story in the camera, using real firearms and blank cartridges, than it would be to just give everyone fake guns and CGI in the muzzle flashes later. But there is a hidden cost to doing everything in post. Actors are going to hate it. Performances are going to suffer. (Pity the unfortunate person on a big-budget production who has to hand a plastic toy gun to a name actor, and say, “Here. Act.”) So what are blanks and how do they work? A blank is a cartridge loaded with enough gunpowder to create a bright flash at the end of the barrel in order to convince an audience that a firearm has been fired. We work in a visual medium. Without that muzzle flash, the audience would have a hard time believing there was a gunshot. Ironically, the muzzle flash at the end of the barrel

18 • Canadian Cinematographer - September 2015

Dave Brown oversaw the use of firearms on the set of the feature film Road of Iniquity. Credit: Maliseet Fury Pictures Inc.

is pure Hollywood. Real firearms rarely have any flash, as all of the gunpowder is designed to burn within the length of the barrel. This is why blanks often have far more gunpowder in the case than the actual cartridges they are designed to simulate.

Blanks contain no bullet (projectile) but they can still be dangerous. That explosion of flame, hot gas and debris from burned and unburned gunpowder is what creates the hazard at short range.

So why not just generate a muzzle flash in the computer? Personally, I hate CGI muzzle flashes. When just done for budget and not safety reasons, I think they look fake and are sometimes seen by the audience as a sign of lazy filmmaking. Plus, actors hate CGI muzzle flashes even more than I do. They want to look good and they want to appear as though they know what they are doing with a gun in their hand. This is difficult if you are holding a plastic gun with no heft to it and trying to sell a gunshot that has no noise or flash.

Actors want the weight. They want the action. They want the noise. They want the story to look good and their characters to look believable. If the guns and

gunshots aren’t real, they know they might be left standing there looking like idiots, trying to toss a plastic gun in the air in some kind of fake recoil. They also know if a production cheapens out on real guns, they are probably also going to cheapen out on bringing in competent experts to prove them safe, show them the proper way to hold them or even help them with something as simple as having their belts, holsters and equipment on in the right spot.

When handled by experts who know what they are doing, real firearms are no more dangerous than any other prop on set. They need to be treated with respect and they need to be consistently safety-checked, but the presence of those firearms should not make it more complicated or have people worried about their safety. They are there to make scenes look better.

CAPTURING GUNSHOTS We might spend weeks planning gunshot sequences, days building sets and hours setting cameras and lights, but if we forget one simple little detail, all that work has gone to waste.

The goal is to capture a muzzle flash.

But experienced cinematographers know that the flash from a blank is very brief. With handguns and rifles, it can be as short as a few hundredths of a second. This means that the odds of capturing a clean muzzle flash from every gunshot are not on our side. Totally random, it can be as few as about one good flash in four or five tries. There are ways to optimize the capture with shutter angles and frame rates but when we need a nice clean muzzle flash so that all our hard work doesn’t go to waste, the solution is often as simple as just shooting another take. It always astonishes me when we have assembled a talented team in a wonderful location with all the props we need and the performances they are aiming for … and they want to walk away after just one take.

This is where knowledgeable cinema-

tographers and camera operators are key. They know when they have captured a good flash. When shooting on film, it is simple — if the camera operator sees a good flash in the eyepiece or the cinematographer sees a flash in the monitor, it is not on the film frame.

Shoot another take. With digital, it is the opposite — what we see is what we get. We not only have the advantage of seeing what light actually strikes the sensor, we can also do a quick playback.

If it’s not there or only partially there, shoot another take.

When digital cameras were first used on big-budget productions, it was always amusing for veteran cinematographers to hear a producer or director announce something like, “Digital captures all gunshots.” It wasn’t true on film; it’s not true on digital. There are lots of things we can do to optimize our chances of a nice gunshot, but with modern rifles and handguns, the odds are still against us. (Shotguns and period firearms on the other hand, are nearly always captured on multiple frames.)

Every time I hear someone yell, “We’ll fix it in post!” I die a little bit inside. I want to fix it now. Sometimes it really is as simple as shooting another take and reviewing what you have.

BROWN’S LAW Years ago, I was searching for an easy explanation of the relationship between distance from a firearm and the potential hazard of a blank. Going back

WHERE

to my high school physics, I began to realize that a blank behaves much like light waves. There is an exponential relationship between the amount of light and distance away from its source, and because a blank expels gunpowder and hot gases out the front of the barrel in a bit of a cone shape, one could say there was a similar relationship with the discharge of a blank. Brown’s Law was born.

Harmless at long range but exponentially dangerous at closer distances, it is that explosion of hot gas, plus flakes of burned and unburned gunpowder that can seriously injure someone with a blank if too close. Brown’s Law simply states that the hazard of a scene involving a blank is directly proportional to the power of the blank, and inversely proportional to the square of the distance away from the blank. (H = P over D squared.)

One can’t just plug in numbers on a calculator, but it gives a rough estimate of why some scenes are a breeze and others cause us nightmares.

We can often load or purchase blanks in different power levels. For example, if we were to substitute a half-power blank for a full-power blank, we would basically cut the hazard to anyone standing in front of that gunshot by half. But what if the director changes their mind, and suddenly shortens the original distance between the gun and the other actor (or camera crew) in half? You have now multiplied the hazard by a factor of four times.

H = Hazard of the scene P = Power of the blank D = Distance from the blank

P H= 2 D

The hazard of a scene involving blanks is directly proportional to the POWER of the blank and inversely proportional to the square of the distance away from the blank Double the power and you double the hazard. Cut the distance in half and it is now FOUR TIMES more dangerous. Cut the distance in half again, and it becomes SIXTEEN TIMES more dangerous.

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Credit: Maliseet Fury Pictures Inc

In even simpler terms, distance is your friend. It is always better to create a greater distance away from the blank than it is to try to lower the power of the blank. (That is not always possible with semi-automatic or automatic firearms that use a certain power of blank for the action to cycle properly.) Of course, in the vast majority of our gunshots on a film set, we deal with this by not having the actor who gets “shot” in the same frame as the gunshot itself. But let’s not forget that the other actor can be relaxing in their trailer when the gunshot is fired but the camera crew is still directly in front of every shot. Safety protection is mandatory, especially when working with very close distances.

Actual safe distances vary widely with every load and for every type of firearm, which is why we test everything in advance. But I will also share one secret — we don’t always tell the director the real hazardous range of a blank. Normally, I take the dangerous range that people need to be away from a gunshot, and then triple it. This way we avoid situations where our safe distance is inched closer and closer, or when we need to quickly switch from a lower power to a higher power blank to achieve a better look. With proper eye protection — which is always our biggest worry — a good firearms safety coordinator can work quite close, but you absolutely need a person you can trust.

No one likes to stare down the barrel of a gun, even an unloaded one. When there are firearms on set, one should be able to glance around and see an experienced firearms safety expert standing right beside that camera to give guidance (and often right in the line of fire to provide an eye line.) There is a saying that amateurs practice until they get it right; professionals practice until they can’t get it wrong. To me, handling firearms on a film set is much like packing parachutes for skydivers. Do you want your parachute packed by the amateur who finally gets it right after 100 tries, or the professional who gets it right 100

20 • Canadian Cinematographer - September 2015

Scene from Road of Iniquity.

Credit: Maliseet Fury Pictures Inc.

times in a row? Productions not willing to pay the cost of a professional just cannot imagine the cost of employing an amateur.

GENIUSES AT WORK Working with cinematographer James Glennon asc and actor Robin Williams on the 2005 film The Big White, shot in the Yukon and Alaska, was one of the highlights of my career. I became friends with both. I found out very quickly that beneath the quirky humour, Robin never missed a single detail. We were shooting scenes involving a revolver, and every day I showed him the empty firearm, loaded six dummy cartridges into the chambers for a proper “loaded” look, and demonstrated it was completely safe by a final check of pointing it in a safe direction and pulling the trigger. On our last day of working together, Robin asked me why I always clicked the trigger exactly eight times.

Throughout the course of the filming, he had very quietly noted that I always

pulled the trigger the same number of clicks. There were only six chambers, but I always pulled it two more than was necessary. Being a lifelong observer of human behaviour, Robin wanted to know if there was a story behind that.

There was. Standing on a Yukon ice field with Glennon and Williams, surrounded by a scenery of beautiful mountains and wilderness, I felt honoured to be able to share a very personal story. I told him, “Robin, the first six clicks are for you; the seventh one is for me, and the eighth is for Brandon Lee.” I have learned many lessons in my 20 years in the film business, and none more important than the one I learned on day one — we don’t just work with guns, props, cameras or lights; we work with people. We collaborate with talented people to do great work and we work every day with human beings we need to keep safe. No one should ever have to risk life or health for the sake of making a movie.

This is why firearms experts and cinematographers form unique relationships that go far beyond mutual respect.

We both want it safe, on time and within budget, and as good as it can possibly be. We speak the same language, we passionately love what we do, and we make no excuses for sometimes being perfectionists.

After all, if an actor makes a mistake, they get another take. If we make a mistake with firearms, you will read about it in a thousand newspapers in the morning.

Based in Winnipeg, Dave Brown is a wellknown firearms training specialist. One of few civilians in Canada considered an expert in police weapons training, he has trained military, government and police officers on safety and advanced firearms handling skills. Noted for a calm approach and a relaxed teaching style, Dave has worked with hundreds of actors on film and theatre sets and now travels across the country to teach workshops on firearms safety in film and television production.

Canadian Cinematographer - September 2015 •

21

Steve “Z” Makes a

Steve Zajaczkiwsky: Owner ZTV/HD Source

By GUIDO KONDRUSS

A

s I walked through the plate glass doors of a large red brick building, I was immediately greeted by the cacophony from a busy renovation symphony. A circular saw ripped through a 2x4 in one room, a drill screeched in another, while a large man in a blue construction helmet shouted for workers to move some dry walling. This is the new headquarters for ZTV/HD Source, and in the middle of it all is Steve Zajaczkiwsky, or Steve “Z” (pronounced Zee) to many who know him.

“I’m never, ever, ever, ever moving again,” said a laughing Zajaczkiwsky. “When you have to conduct your business in the heart of the renovation it gets cuckoo. I was walking around dropping the F-bomb every 30 seconds for months.”

You might say that Zajaczkiwsky is a delighted victim of his own success. He’s the founder and owner of ZTV Broadcast Services, a top-notch Toronto-area rental house that he built from scratch 23 years go. In recent years, Zajaczkiwsky has acquired DV Source, Sharp’s Broadcast, Precision Camera; added Sony and Canon dealerships, mixing it all

22 • Canadian Cinematographer - September 2015

together under the HD Source banner for high-end sales and service. It was all good but for one problem: Zajaczkiwsky’s holdings had doubled in size and his shop was now bursting at the seams.

“We were stacking things higher and higher, running out of roof space,” Zajaczkiwsky chuckled. “We simply needed more room.”

The solution was a large corner building with three elevated loading bays, located just northwest of Toronto off Highway 401, near the little-known back entrance to Pearson International Airport. While the size worked, the inside needed drastic altering to fit Zajaczkiwsky’s unique concept for his new digs.

“I envision this place almost like a drop-in centre. There’ll be no retail counters here,” Zajaczkiwsky said. “It will be friendly, inviting and all about the customer.”

As makeover plans expanded with Zajaczkiwsky’s ever growing vision, so did the need for building code permits, which took longer to process than anticipated. The two-month

Big Move

Ken Thasan: Sales Rep/HD Source

renovation lead-in time quickly evaporated to zero. The permits finally arrived the same day as ZTV/HD Source began their big move to their new home. Despite the intricate logistics of transporting several mountains worth of gear over a month’s time into a new building that was in renovation chaos, the team at ZTV/HD Source never skipped a beat, keeping the doors wide open for business each and every day.

“It took lots of planning,” Grace Reeves, Marketing Co-ordinator for ZTV/HD Source, said. “We were doing things such as renting gear at our old location and having clients return it at our new facility. There were so many potential blips that could have occurred but didn’t.”

Working out of a new building in the midst of jack hammers, hard hats and power tools required its own bit of fancy footwork. “We had to know where things were, where the equipment was, how to get to it and move it easily around the renovations,” Zajaczkiwsky said. “What we did was put everything on skids. The work cabinets with product inside went on a skid back to back, and a pump truck moved them around. It actually worked out very well.”

The west side of the new building houses ZTV. It’s a long high space, bounded on one side by steel warehouse shelving, loaded with cases of equipment. Wooden skids are still very evident, some of them with the work cabinets still sitting on top. There are a couple of tables, but definitely no service or retail counters. It’s a bit crowded at ZTV at this writing because office staff and HD Source specialists are also sharing the space, while the renovation work continues on their parts of the building.

HD Source will be setting up on the east side of the building. While the rough work has been done, the detailing has yet to be started. Ken Thasan, HD Source sales rep, says he’s very excited about the new HD Source home and its possibilities to be distinctive.

“It’ll be an open concept, with a couple of out-of-the-way desks for us, but essentially the entire room will be a presentation space for our premium gear,” Thasan said. “Anyone can come in and browse or they can let us know that they want to see a particular piece of equipment, say an F55, and we’ll set it up in the camera bay. You can talk to us, ask us questions or not say a word, and we’ll leave you to your own devices to play around with the equipment. But we’ll never be far away.

“Look,” Thasan continued. “Everybody these days works long hours on set under tons of pressure. We want no one to feel any pressure here at HD Source at all. We want people to be comfortable with us, comfortable with our environment and comfortable with the gear. That’s what we’re going for.”

To see how it all turned out, don’t miss the ZTV/HD Source Open House.

When: October 15, 14:00 to 19:00, Where: 1670 Enterprise Road, Mississauga, Ontario.

Canadian Cinematographer - September 2015 •

23

TECH COLUMN

Thanks for the

MEMORIES

Courtesy of Digistor

I

n all the discussions around how digital technology has impacted lenses, lighting, camera bodies and how sensors have displaced film, lost in the conversation is the humble memory medium. Sure, memory has become a commodity. Film, on the other hand, had and has an impact on the final product; the subtones and nature of the medium are as much an artistic choice as framing, focus and lighting.

Kodak or Fuji? Well, it was until Fuji wrapped and left the set.

Digital memory doesn’t contribute anything in that regard. It sits there quietly and does what’s asked within a specified set of parameters such as capacity and transfer speed. A true professional.

Consider for a moment, however, where the industry would be without all the work done in developing digital memory. And where is it going? Pretty easy really: smaller, faster, larger. Take a look around your desk drawers. If they’re like mine there’s probably a few ancient 32 Mb or 256 Mb CF cards rattling around. Ancient, aren’t they? This is the way of technology. A decade ago a 200GB SanDisk Ultra microSDXC UHS-I card – the size of my little fingernail – would have been science fiction.

Today it’s real, and those CF cards seem almost obsolete.

Cinematography requires ever more capacity and faster read-write speeds.

As Murray Ellis II, of Digistor, which makes professional level SSD drives for 4K capture on Blackmagic Cinema cameras, notes, the demand is for more, more, more. “We found, at least with our drives for video capture, that cinematographers want capacity,” he said, noting the issue of drive failure – a throwback from the days of spinning platters aren’t an issue anymore. “They trust the drive, they don’t assume swap-

24 • Canadian Cinematographer - September 2015

ping out with many smaller capacity drives is more safe, and they are correct in their thinking. A damaged drive due to power surge, static shock, or lightning strike is extremely rare, as rare as getting hit by lighting I guess.”

The price and portability of SSDs – a 1TB SSD lists at US$520 – makes it fairly easy to keep swapping out the drive and having an onset digital imaging technician process and dupe the contents. Drives these days rarely fill up and camera firmware usually leaves some onboard space for headroom.

Still, not all drives are universally plug and play, unlike film, which long ago was formatted into industry-wide standards for 8, 16, 35 and 70 mm. Part of that is because each device has different demands and space requirements. “I don’t know this for sure, but I assume Sony forces their own standards on the memory industry to keep quality high, and you’ll find far fewer low-quality memory knockoffs for a Sony memory stick than for a standard SD card,” Ellis said. “We try to message that our SSDs are of the highest quality and get that message above the fog. There are so many SSD manufacturers and there are some products of questionable quality.”

So, where’s the “sound barrier” these days, so to speak. Is it size or speed?

What research is pushing the envelope? “Much of the barrier is customer adoption,” according to Ellis. “Chipset manufacturers control NAND flash drives and RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) are able to produce higher capacity compatibility, or even support for faster speeds writing to NAND across multiple chips at once.

Buy they often wait until customers are shouting for it (before initiating design and production).”

He added that in the future, anything

higher than 1TB will have to make sense for the chipset manufacturer to support, for the NAND flash manufacturers to create memory for, and whether the market is ready to buy. Still, with 4K common and 6K and more on the near horizon, the demand for memory is going up and at the same time the form factor is also morphing. “We see SSDs in the industry getting thinner, as they should because inside an SSD is a logic board, which is pretty thin to begin with,” he said. “However, we build our SSDs for the cinematographer market, and they use cameras and recorders that expect a certain drive specification. We build to 9.5 mm thick, the standard for these applications. However, you may find most other SSDs in the market have dropped their size to 7 mm, which is a new standard for every other application. Those drives rattle and have undue force exerted on their connectors in filming applications. We don’t want our customers to have that experience.”

The future, however, is just around the corner. “Of course we have a 1TB drive now and we have a lot of things up our sleeve, working with Panasonic as a main technology partner,” Ellis said.

“We are working on high-end microSD, SD storage, as well as WiGig, a line-of-sight high-speed data transfer technology.”

Ian Harvey is a Toronto-based journalist who writes for a variety of publications and covers the technology sector. He welcomes feedback and eagerly solicits ideas at ian@pitbullmedia.ca

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CSC MEMBER SPOTLIGHT

Who have been your mentors or teachers?

John V Lindsay was an incredibly supportive and guiding influence on me. While I was still in school, I had the opportunity to work on a short film. It was my first time on a set so I was incredibly intimidated. John made me feel at home while making me work my ass off!

What cinematographers inspire you?

All of the usual suspects – Roger Deakins, Vittorio Storaro, Christopher Doyle. But more recently, Erik Wilson, Benoît Debie and Canada’s own Nicolas Bolduc csc.

Name some of your professional highlights.

Signing with my agent of 15 years – Sesler – was a huge leap for me professionally. Serving on the CSC executive has helped me fulfill the need to give back to other cinematographers and help future generations.

What is one of your most memorable moments on set?

I was working as third grip on the second unit of a really bad TV series. I was itching to get shooting full time and was feeling uninspired. We were working in a shoddy old warehouse.

I was sitting on an apple box staring at the floor (as grips are wont to do). I saw a little image on the concrete floor. It was a sky. With clouds and the sun shining. I looked up and noticed a small hole in the roof of the warehouse. It was creating a “camera obscura” effect and projecting an image of the outside sky at my feet. It was a great moment and reminded me that what we do is magic.

Dylan Macleod csc What films or other works of art have made the biggest impression on you?

When I was at film school in the early ‘90s, I was really enamoured with the films of the ‘70s. Coppola, Scorsese, Malick.

But Stanley Kubrick has probably had the longest-lasting impression and continues to inspire. Since then David Lynch, Gaspar Noé and Xavier Dolan have provided fresh and different ways to approach the art of filmmaking.

How did you get started in the business?

After a circuitous route getting into film school and thinking I wanted to be a director, I came to my senses in third year and realized it is cinematography that I was actually interested in. I had always assumed that the director did what a cinematographer does. I was interested in visual storytelling and lighting. After graduating, it took many years working as a grip and shooting when I could to build my reel and relationships before I was able to call myself a DP and start shooting full time.

26 • Canadian Cinematographer - September 2015

What do you like best about what you do?

I like the variety and challenges that we are constantly presented with. We are so lucky to be able to work with so many talented people over the course of our careers.

What do you like least about what you do?

The unpredictable schedule and long hours tend to make personal relationships challenging. Thankfully my girlfriend gets it!

What do you think has been the greatest invention (related to your craft)?

That is a tough question. Fundamentally the concept of the camera obscura and focusing an image onto a surface is probably the most fundamental. I think modern digital sensors are pretty stupendous. The fact that as of the last year, we can photograph moving pictures under the light of the moon is liberating.

How can others follow your work? www.dylanmacleod.com vimeo.com/dylanmacleod

Edmonton Film Cooperative wants your unused Arri 35 mm camera. Do you have film cameras languishing on a shelf? Give it a new life, give it to a film coop and we will give you a healthy tax credit. Have a 35BL, a 235, a 435 gathering dust because everyone is Red cam nuts? Have other great camera accessories? Let us know, let’s make a deal. Contact Andy @rentals@fava.ca and work a great deal.

SHORT-TERM ACCOMMODATION FOR RENT Visiting Vancouver for a shoot? One-bedroom condo in Kitsilano on English Bay with secure underground parking, $350 per week. Contact: Peter Benison at 604-229-0861, 604-229-0861 or peter@peterbenison.com.

EQUIPMENT FOR SALE FOR SALE: Canon 7D body, Canon 60D body, Canon 14mm f/2.8L, Canon 70-200mm f/2.8L, Canon 17-55mm f/2.8, Canon 100mm Macro f/2.8L, 16GB CF card, 32GB CF card, Zacuto Z Finder Pro, iKan V8000 Monitor kit, Nikkor 20mm f/2.8 AI-S, Nikkor 28mm f/2 AI-S, Nikkor 35mm f/1.4 AI-S, Nikkor 50mm f/1.2 AI-S, Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 AI-S, Nikkor 105mm f/1.8 AI-S, Nikkor 200mm f/4 AI-S, Leica R 135mm f/2.8, (all Nikkor’s come with 77mm step-up rings, zip gear and Redrock Canon EF adapters - excellent quality). Please email gregor@dghagey.com for pictures and prices.

FOR SALE : Preston FI+Z (RF) remote follow focus package.

Includes: MDR1, 2X DM1 motors(Jerry Hill style), Microforce zoom control, Iris controller, hand unit, speed booster (12v-24v)+ fast charger.

Panavison, RED, Arri power cables/run cables. + brackets/ various lens gears/marking discs.

ASKING $9,000 for more info and a detailed spec list please contact: Greg Biskup (647) 405-8644, greg@ biskupcine.com Cooke Speed Panchro 18mm 1.7/T2. “C” Mount, Nice condition. From United Kingdom #572079, asking $1,800.00 Barry Casson csc Office: 250-721-2113 bcasson@speakfilm.com Canon Wide angle Lens J11A X 4.5 B4 IRSD and Canon Servo Zoom Control ZSD-300 Value 27 000$ Asking only 3 000$ Elmo Suv-Cam SD ELSC5C and accessories New Value 1 200$ Asking only 100$, Anton Bauer UltraLight & Ul Soft Box Asking only 150$, Frezzi HMI Sun Gun & Frezzi Soft Box Value 1 700$ Asking only 400$, Porta Brace Rain Slicker for Pro Camcorder RS-55 like New Asking only 150$, Script Boy Wireless T.C. System needs minor repair Asking only 100$, Shure Mixer FP33 & Porta Brace audio mixer case Asking only 450$, Sony Monitor SD PVM-14N1U new Asking only 50$, 2 Camera Canon Dig Rebel 10Mp XTi, Sigma 70-300 F4-5.6 Super C-AF, 4 Canon Batteries and accessories Asking only 550$, Porta Brace monitor Case for Panasonic BT-LH910 like new Asking only 100$ andrepaul@me.com or call 514 831-8347 Panasonic AJ-HDX900P 290 drum hours, $7500.00 Canon KJ16ex7.7B IRSE lens, $5000.00 CanonJ11ex4.5B4 WRSD lens, $4500.00 Call Ian 416-725-5349 or idscott@rogers.com Asahi Pentax spotmeter(just serviced) 425.00 Minolta Colormeter III F 750.00 Spectra Professional IV 250.00 Spectra Professional IV A 300.00 Minolta SpotmeterF(need repair) 100.00 Bernard Couture: p.bc@sympatico.ca; 514-486-2749

Professional U/W housing from renowned world leader Amphibico.

2006 Sony HVR-A1U camera with 0.7x wide adapter and all accesories.

2006 AmphibicoEVO-Pro housing with .55x wide conversion and flat port. Rare model built in small quantity.

Most camera functions accessible.About 60-70 dives.

Complete overhaul and pressure tested by factory in 2010.

3.5’’ LCD Monitor, rebuilt in 2010. 2 compact Discovery 10W HID lamps by Amphibico with batteries and chargers.

Spare o-ring for all. Soft and hard carry cases. All in good condition.

E-mail or call for photos and more information.

514-941-2555, daniel@dvdp.ca Transvideo Titan HD Transmitter and Re¬ceiver kits. $3000ea. 2 for $5500. Similar in style and operation to the Boxx Meridian. 1- Angenieux 25-250 T3.9 Arri PL mount, std film gears on focus, zoom, and iris (32 pitch-mod 0.8), lens support and collar, shipping case included $2900 1Tamron 300mm F2.8 Arri bayonet mount with PL adapter, std film gear on focus (32 pitch-mod 0.8), 42mm filters: clear, 2 x 85, shipping case included $900 Contact: stephen.reizes@gmail.com Panasonic 3D Professional Full HD Video Camera (AG-3DA1) The AG-3DA1 is the world’s first professional, fullyintegrated Full HD 3D camcorder that records to SD card media. The AG-3DA1 will democratize 3D production by giving professional videographers a more affordable, flexible, reliable and easier-to-use tool for capturing immersive content as well as providing a training tool for educators.

At less than 6.6 pounds, the AG-3DA1 is equipped with dual lenses and two full 1920 x 1080 2.07 megapixel 3-MOS imagers to record 1080/60i, 50i, 30p, 25p and 24p (native) and 720/60p and 50p in AVCHD. Camera is very new. Includes Kata Carrying case, 4 batteries.

Asking price: $17,500 (includes tax).

Will ship out of province.

To view photos/questions email frank@tgtvinc.com or call 416-916-9010.

Proline 17 inch Teleprompter Included is both PC AND Mac versions for our industry leading Flip-Q teleprompter software. Flip-Q automatically “Flips” the secondary output on your laptop so both the operator and talent will see perfect reading left-right text. The ProLine 17 standard LCD panels are the lightest weight, lowest profile designs in their class. In addition, they offer both VGA and composite video inputs adaptable with any computer output or application. They also offer flexible power options including 100-240V AC or external 12v DC input.

Price includes Tripod attachments and Pelican carrying case.

Complete tool-less set-up.

Asking Price: $2,000 (includes tax) To view photos/questions email frank@tgtvinc.com or call 416-916-9010.

Sony PMW-F3 with S-log firmware. Low hours, Excellent condition. Kaiser top handle, 32GB high rate card. $3500.00. Gemini 4:4:4 Solid State recorder now PRORes capable, with eSata and Thunderbolt readers, lots of accessories, case, 512GB and 3x 256GB solid state drives/ cards. Excellent condition. $3000.00 IBE-Optics HDx35 PL to B4 adapter comes with power cable and soft case. Used on F3 and Alexa for superb results. $3000.00. Willing to sell everything as a complete package for $8500.00 Available for everything. Contact John Banovich 604-726-5646 or JohnBanovich@gmail.com

Nikkor AF-S VR 500mm F 4 IS ED Lens. Super rare and very hard to find!!! Serial # 204153 Perfect condition.

Not a scratch on it!!! Only one year old. Included Hard Shell Case, Lens Hood, Lens Strap, Case strap. Come with Manfrotto Carbon Fiber tripod, Jobu head and Jobu Mounting Bracket. Asking price $9000.00 gandalf-merlyn@shaw.ca, 604.566.2235 (Residence), 604.889.9515 (Mobile) Panasonic BT-S950P 16:9 / 4:3 SD Field Monitor for Sale (Excellent Condition) - $100.Portabrace included Please contact Christian at (416) 459-4895 or email cbielz@gmail.com SERVICES 20% Off to all CSC members! Looking for a Green Screen Studio? Greensuite209 is owned and operated by a CSC member, and is now offering 20% off our regular studio and equipment rental rates for all CSC members! We are a 1750 sq. ft. green screen studio in South Etobicoke just south of William F Whites. We have a 11’ X 29’ X 14’ Digicomp sloping green screen.

Check us out online at www.gs209.com and contact us for any further information! email: Booking@ GS209.com.

HD Source is well-known and respected for their excellent SERVICE department and truly skilled technicians. As an Authorized Sony Service Depot, HD Source professionally maintains, repairs, and performs crucial upgrades to a wide range of equipment, including HD and 4K. HD Source also proudly services Canon Cinema EOS products and Canon Broadcast lenses, and boasts an on-staff Canon-trained and experienced Lens Technician. HD Source understands how important each piece of equipment is, and will get it operating and back to you as quickly and as cost-effectively as possible.

Call Alnoor at 905-890-6905, email him at alnoor. remtulla@hdsource.ca, or drop by HD Source anytime at 1670 Enterprise Rd. (Dixie & 401).

HILL’S VIDEO PRODUCTIONS – BURLINGTON Looking for a unique shooting control room? Rent our 32 ft.

1981 Bus complete with control room and audio.

HDSDI fiber boxes for long runs. Great for keeping warm on those multi camera shoots. www.hillsvideo.com Rob Hill – 905.335.1146 Do you travel between Toronto and Hamilton for production every day? Need a place to: screen dailies, host your production office that’s close to both? Hill’s Production Services www.hillsvideo.com. We are a full Service Production Company with cameras and edit bays for making EPKs. Some grip gear, if you find yourself in the field, short of one or two items. Hill’s also has office space and a mobile screening room. Located just off the QEW in Burlington.Check us out 905-335-1146 Ask for Rob Hill.

CAMERA CLASSIFIED IS A FREE SERVICE PROVIDED FOR CSC MEMBERS. For all others, there is a one-time $25 (plus GST) insertion fee. Your ad will appear here and on the CSC’s website, www.csc.ca. If you have items you would like to buy, sell or rent, please email your information to editor@csc.ca.

Canadian Cinematographer - September 2015 •

27

CLASSIFIEDS

EQUIPMENT WANTED

PRODUCTION NOTES

12 MONKEYS II (series); DP David Greene csc; Boris Mojsovski csc; to December 20, Toronto ARROW IV (series); DP Gordon Verheul csc; to April 26, 2016 Vancouver BEAUTY AND THE BEAST IV (series); DP Bruce Chun csc; DP David Makin csc; B Camera Operator Peter Battistone; to November 17, Toronto DEGRASSI: NEXT CLASS 15 (series); DP Mitchell Ness csc; to September 10, Toronto THE GOOD WITCH II (series); DP John Berrie csc; B Camera Operator Paula Tymchuk; to Jan 28,2016, Toronto HEARTLAND IX (series); csc DP Craig Wrobleski csc; B Camera Operator Jarrett Craig; to December 14, Calgary HEROES REBORN (series); DP Glen Keenan csc(alternating episodes); to September 18, Toronto IZOMBIE II (series); DP Michael Wale csc; Operator/Steadicam Greg Fox; to December 18, North Vancouver LEGENDS OF TOMORROW (series); DP David Geddes csc, asc; to April 6, 2016, Burnaby LUCIFER (series); DP Ryan McMaster csc; to November 27, Burnaby MINORITY REPORT (series); DP David Moxness csc; to December 18, North Vancouver MR. D V (series); Camera Operator Christopher Ball csc; to September 4, Halifax MURDOCH MYSTERIES IX (series); DP James E. Jeffrey csc; DP Yuri Yakubiw csc; Camera Operator Brian Gedge; 1st Assistant Kevin Michael Leblanc; to December 8, Toronto QUANTICO (series); 2nd Unit DP Robert Mattigetz csc; to December 15, Montreal REIGN III (series); DP Michael Storey csc; B Camera/Steadicam Andris Mattis; to December 2, Toronto ROGUE III (series); DP Steve Cosens csc; to September 11, Toronto THE ROMEO SECTION (series); DP Brendan Uegama csc; to October 14, Vancouver SAVING HOPE IV (series); DP David Perrault csc; to December 9, Mississauga SHADOWHUNTERS (series); Eric Cayla csc; to October 9, Mississauga SHOOT THE MESSENGER (series); DP Arthur Cooper csc; Camera Operator Keith Murphy; B Camera 1st Asstistant Marcel Janisse; to November 25, Toronto SLASHER (series); B Camera 1st Assistant Tony Lippa; to October15, Sudbury SUITS V (series); DP Alwyn Kumst csc; Camera Operator/Steadicam Michael Soos; B Camera Operator Peter Sweeney; Trainee Alan Ruth; to November 6, Toronto SUPERNATURAL XI (series); DP Serge Ladouceur csc; Camera Operator Brad Creasser; to April 20, 2016, Burnaby TERRIFIC TRUCKS (series); DP Ben Lichty; to October 1, Toronto THIS LIFE (series); DP François Dagenais csc; to October 10, Montreal WONDERFUL WAYNEYS (series); DP Russ Goozee csc; Cam Operator J.P. Locherer csc; to November 15, Toronto YAMASAKA VII (series); DP Daniel Vincelette csc; to December 11, Montreal

CALENDAR OF EVENTS SEPTEMBER 10-20, Toronto International Film Festival, tiff.net 18-27, Cinéfest Sudbury International Film Festival, cinefest.com 19, CSC Camera Module – High Speed for ACs, Toronto, csc.ca 20, CSC Camera Module – High Speed for DPs, Toronto, csc.ca 23-Oct. 3, Calgary International Film Festival, calgaryfilm.com 24-Oct. 9, Vancouver International Film Festival, viff.org

OCTOBER 1-10, Edmonton International Film Festival, edmontonfilmfest.com 15, CSC Lens Testing Module, Toronto, csc.ca 17-18, CSC Camera Assistant Workshop, Toronto, csc.ca NOVEMBER 7, CSC Advanced Post Workflow Workshop, Toronto, csc.ca 28, Camera Module (Sony F55 & 5) for ACs, Toronto, csc.ca 29, Camera Module (Sony F55 & 5) for DPs, Toronto, csc.ca

President from page 2 needs to rest. On an on-going basis, such as on a series where little time is available for rest, one must be cognizant of the strain that is placed upon the system, but more importantly, know when to pay attention to the many warning signs that might be a harbinger of unwanted consequences.

There could well be some value attached in exploring this topic further in a lengthier article, but for now I would suggest that you look up the call for a 12-hour workday in the 2006 documentary by Haskell Wexler asc called Who Needs

Sleep? This is food for thought, and I would welcome any feedback.

One of my elected subjects to study in school was Latin, and years later I was never able to actually rationalize why I had decided to study this language. However, I do recall that the teacher was adamant that we remember many of the classic Latin imperatives, and one in particular comes to mind that might be pertinent in this instance : Mens sana in corpere sana, which translates to, “A healthy mind in a healthy body.”

28 • Canadian Cinematographer - September 2015

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