Pick-ups for “Rory’s Way”

In August 2016 I was recommended to a production manager who was crewing up a small pick-ups shoot in London. The pick-ups were for Rory’s Way, or The Etruscan Smile as it was then known, a $12 million feature based on the best-selling novel of the latter name, starring Brian Cox and Thora Birch. Apparently test screenings had shown that the film’s ending wasn’t quite satisfying enough, and parts of it were to be remounted.

I was given a storyboard consisting of actual frame-grabs from the original version of the scene, alongside notes explaining how the action would be different. Not to give too much away, but the scene involves Brian’s character in bed, and a baby in a cot next to him. The changes simply involved Brian giving a different reaction to what the baby is doing. The bed was to be set up on stage against a blue screen, and composited into backgrounds extracted from the principal photography footage. The baby’s performance was not to be changed, so he was to be rotoscoped out of the original footage too.

I was sent the camera report, 2nd AC’s notebook and script notes from principal photography. The crew had known that the view out of the bedroom window would be added in post, and that separate takes of the baby and Brian would be digitally combined, so they recorded plenty of information for the VFX team. Between the three documents, I had the focal length, focal distance, aperture, white balance, shutter angle, filters, lens height and tilt of every set-up in the scene.

My next step was to email  the main unit DP, who was none other than Javier Aguirresarobe, ASC, AE – the man behind the lens on Thor: Ragnarok, Nicole Kidman vehicle The Others, two of the Twilight films, and Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Needless to say, I was honoured to be recreating the work of such an experienced cinematographer.

Unit still of Javier Aguirresarobe, ASC, AE on location in Scotland for “Rory’s Way”/”The Etruscan Smile”

Javier told me that he had shot with Arri/Zeiss Master Primes, and explained the feel and colour of lighting he had been going for. He had used an 81C (coral) filter to warm up the image a little, and a 1/8th Black Promist for diffusion.

After that, I sat down over coffee with Ben Millar, my gaffer. We analysed the footage from principal photography and reverse-engineered the lighting. I say “we”; it was mostly Ben. This is why a DP hires a good gaffer!

The pick-ups shoot was a single day. The afternoon before, the director and the camera department convened at the studio. The plan was to go through each of the set-ups using a stand-in in the bed. For each set-up, we first used the camera logs and script notes to put on the correct lens and filters, and set the sticks to the right height and tilt. Then, with a print-out of the original shot taped underneath the monitor, we nudged the camera around until we had the closest possible match in framing. This done, ACs Max Quinton and Bex Clives marked the tripod position on the floor with tape, writing the lens length, height, filters etc. on the tape itself to make things super-efficient the next day.

The pick-ups set was nothing more than a bed surrounded by blue screens. The bright gap between the screens represents the window from the original location.

On the morning of the shoot, the lighting department had two or three hours to set up before Brian was called. We used mostly Kinoflos, with a lot of flags to represent window frames through which light sources had been shining on the original set. The VFX supervisor Stephen Coren and I checked the histograms on the monitor to ensure the blue screen was lit evenly and to the level he required.

We were ready to roll in plenty of time, and things went more or less to plan, with the addition of an extra shot or two. The editorial team were in the next room, checking our shots against the original material, and they reported that all was well.

We finished up with a single wide night interior shot for an earlier scene in the movie. This was an interesting one, because we had to extrapolate the lighting for the whole room from a single close-up that had been shot in principal photography. Our wide shot, recorded entirely against blue, would be dropped into a wide shot from principal – a daylight wide shot, that would be digitally painted and retimed for night.

At the time of writing, Rory’s Way has just hit UK cinemas, but I have yet to see it. For all I know it might have been re-edited again, but hopefully my shots are still in there! Either way, it was a fascinating exercise to analyse and reproduce the work of a top cinematographer.

Pick-ups for “Rory’s Way”

5 Things I Learnt from Editing

I used to do a lot of editing work alongside DPing, and although those days are now behind me, their influence lives on. Every day that I work as a cinematographer, I use some of the knowledge I gained while slaving over a multi-coloured keyboard. Here are some of the most important things I learnt from editing.

 

1. Performance always wins.

The editor will always use the take with the best performance. What this means for the DP is that there is really no point requesting another take because of a missed focus pull, bumpy dolly move or dodgy pan, because inevitably the performance will not be as spontaneous and engaging as it was when you cocked up the camerawork, so the editor will use the first take.

Of course you need to make the director aware of any significant technical issues, and if they want to do another take, that’s absolutely their prerogative. But the editor will still use the first take. So get it right on the first take, even if that means pushing for another rehearsal.

 

2. Your darlings will die.

You know all your favourite shots? All the ones you’ve been mentally ear-marking for your showreel? The beautifully-lit wides, the fancy camera moves, that cool scene with the really interesting set? Yeah, half of those won’t make the final cut.

That wide shot is used for a single second before they cut into the meaty mid-shots. The camera move slowed the scene down too much so they chopped it up. That scene with the cool set looked great but didn’t advance the plot.

Two things to learn from this: 1. Do a great job, but don’t be a perfectionist, because you might be wasting everyone’s time on something that is destined for the cutting room floor. 2. If you want that shot for your showreel, grab it from the DIT, otherwise you might never see it again.

 

3. Bring ’em in, let ’em leave.

I can’t count the number of times, when shooting a close-up, I’ve advised the director to run the whole scene. They just wanted to pick up a few lines, but I convince them to let the talent walk in at the start and walk out at the end. That way the editor has much more flexibility on when to cut, a flexibility which I know that I appreciated when I was the one wrangling the timeline.

Any angle you shoot, push to cover the entire scene from it. In most cases it takes only slightly more time, and it’s easier for the actors because they get to do the whole emotional arc. And the editor will have many more options.

 

4. Spot the Missing Shot.

The ability to edit in your head is incredibly useful on set. If you can mentally assemble the coverage you’ve just shot, you can quickly identify anything that’s missing. Years of editing trained me to do this, and it’s saved annoying pick-ups several times. Officially this is the script supervisor’s job, but smaller productions may not always have someone in this capacity, and even when they do, another person keeping track can’t hurt.

 

5. Respect the slate.

On smaller productions, the clapperboard is often treated as an inconvenience. People sometimes chat over it, directors giving last-minute instructions, or actors finishing their showbiz anecdotes before getting into character, rendering the audio announcement unintelligible. On no- or micro-budget productions there might not be a 2nd AC, so the board gets passed to whoever’s handy at the time, who has no idea what the current slate or take number are, and the whole thing becomes a meaningless farce.

Which is fine for everyone except the poor bastard in the edit suite who’s got to figure out which audio clip goes with which video clip. It can add hours of extra work for them. I’ve been there, and it ain’t pretty. So, for the sanity of the (assistant) editor, please respect the slate.

5 Things I Learnt from Editing

Why Are There So Few Women in Camera Departments?

In an eye-opening 2014 investigation of gender within the UK film industry, Stephen Follows showed that just 92% of DPs are men. Why is this?

“Women just aren’t interested in that techie stuff,” is a common refrain, but then how do you explain the much greater percentage of women working in stills photography (anywhere from 17% in the UK to 51% according to a US report)? I believe the difference is that, unlike photographers, cinematographers are surrounded by large crews – and the attitudes and prejudices of those crews can hugely impact how comfortable and welcoming a career it feels.

Leslie Hill, one of Hollywood's first female camera assistants
Leslie Hill, one of Hollywood’s first female camera assistants (1976)

An excellent female camera assistant I once worked with mentioned, towards the end of the shoot, that she almost turned down the job. It was because of something a male member of the production department said to her during preproduction: “Can you even carry heavy camera kit?”

I had actually had a conversation with this man earlier in prep concerning the way he spoke about women, and his defence was that he was joking, he didn’t mean it. But even if this was true, the fact remains that the project nearly lost a very competent and experienced member of the camera team (who, for the record, had absolutely no problem lifting a heavy camera package onto my shoulder day in, day out for weeks).

How many  productions, I wonder, have lost talented female crew members because of similar misogynous remarks or assumptions? And how many such remarks does it take before some women might say, “Well, I’m a great camera assistant and I’d love to be a DP some day, but I’m giving up and switching careers because I just can’t take all this sexist bullshit any more”? How many such remarks until some women might even start to believe that they really can’t do the job as well as men?

Ellen Kuras, ASC, cinematographer of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind amongst others
Ellen Kuras, ASC, cinematographer of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind amongst others

This is surely part of the reason for the huge gender disparity amongst cinematographers – because some women have been teased, doubted, persuaded and bullied out of the department, maybe not openly, maybe not directly, but gradually and insidiously with a bigoted remark here, a misogynous joke there, and so on. And whether it’s intentional or not, it has an effect. Even calling lamps “redheads” and “blondes” is another grain of sand on the ten mile beach of misogyny. (Instead call them 800s and 2Ks – little things like this do add up.)

The responsibility is on all of us, men especially, to make sure we are not contributing to this culture, that we are calling out this behaviour when we see it, and that our departments are comfortable places to work for both genders. Some producers and directors complain that there simply aren’t enough women applying for positions in the camera dept, but if together we can create an environment that values them, I believe we will eventually find just as many women applying as men.

I’ll leave you with a couple of articles that highlight some of the excellent female cinematographers working today:

IndieWire: Top Women Cinematographers Reveal 7 Best Tips for Career Success

And So It Begins: Why are there no Female Cinematographers?

Why Are There So Few Women in Camera Departments?

9 Tips for Easier Sound Syncing

Colin Smith slates a shot on Stop/Eject
Colin Smith slates a shot on Stop/Eject. Photo: Paul Bednall

While syncing sound in an edit recently I came across a number of little mistakes that cost me time, so I decided to put together some on-set and off-set tips for smooth sound syncing.

On set: tips for the 2nd AC

  1. Get the slate and take number on the slate right. This means a dedicated 2nd AC (this American term seems to have supplanted the more traditional British clapper-loader), not just any old crew member grabbing the slate at the last minute.
  2. Get the date on the slate right. This can be very helpful for starting to match up sound and picture in a large project if other methods fail.
  3. Hold the slate so that your fingers are not covering any of the info on it.
  4. Make MOS (mute) shots very clear by holding the sticks with your fingers through them.
  5. Make sure the rest of the cast and crew appreciate the importance of being quiet while the slate and take number are read out. It’s a real pain for the editing department if the numbers can’t be heard over chit-chat and last-minute notes from the director.
  6. Speak clearly and differentiate any numbers that could be misheard, e.g. “slate one three” and “slate three zero” instead of the similar-sounding “slate thirteen” and “slate thirty”.
Rick Goldsmith slates a steadicam shot on Stop/Eject. Photo: Paul Bednall
Rick Goldsmith slates a steadicam shot on Stop/Eject. Photo: Paul Bednall

For more on best slating practice, see my Slating 101 blog post.

Off set: tips for the DIT and assistant editor

  1. I recommend renaming both sound and video files to contain the slate and take number, but be sure to do this immediately after ingesting the material and on all copies of it. There is nothing worse than having copies of the same file with different names floating around.
  2. This should be obvious, but please, please, please sync your sound BEFORE starting to edit or I will hunt you down and kill you. No excuses.
  3. An esoteric one for any dinosaurs like me still using Final Cut 7: make sure you’ve set your project’s frame rate correctly (in Easy Setup) before importing your audio rushes. Otherwise FCP will assign them timecodes based on the wrong rate, leading to errors and sound falling out of sync if you ever need to relink your project’s media.

Follow these guidelines and dual system sound will be painless – well, as painless as it can ever be!

9 Tips for Easier Sound Syncing

5 Tips for Successful Pick-ups

Discussing the next set-up on the Ren pick-ups shoot with director Kate Madison. Photo: Michael Hudson
Discussing the next set-up on the Ren pick-ups shoot with director Kate Madison. Photo: Michael Hudson

Recently I’ve been involved in pick-ups shoots for a couple of projects I lensed last year: action-comedy feature The Gong Fu Connection and fantasy series Ren. Both pick-up shoots were strange experiences, featuring some very familiar aspects of the original shoot – locations, sets, costumes – but noticeably lacking others – certain actors, crew members and so on. The Ren pick-ups in particular were like re-living principal photography in microcosm, with stressful crowd shoots followed by more relaxed, smaller scenes and finally night shots with flaming arrows again!

A CTB-gelled Arrilite 1000 stands in for the 2.5K we used for backlight during principal photography on Ren! Photo: Michael Hudson
A CTB-gelled Arrilite 1000 stands in for the 2.5K HMI used for backlight during principal photography on Ren! Photo: Michael Hudson

I’ve blogged previously about how a director/producer can prepare for pick-ups – by keeping certain key props and costumes, for example – but today I have a few thoughts from a DP’s perspective.

1. Keep a record of lighting plans. I have a pretty good memory for my lighting set-ups, but not everyone does, so keeping notes is a good idea. Your gaffer may even do this for you. I frequently use this blog as a means of recording lighting set-ups, and indeed tried to access it during the Ren pick-ups shoot but was foiled by dodgy wifi.

2. Keep camera logs. On a properly crewed shoot this will be the 2nd AC’s job. The logs should include at least the following info for each slate: lens, aperture, ASA, white balance and shutter angle. This can be useful in principal photography too, for example if you shoot the two parts of a shot-reverse at different ends of the day or different days all together, and need to make sure you use the same lens.

Production assistant Claire Finn tends the brazier which provides smoke in the absence of the Artem smoke gun we used during principal photography. Photo: Michael Hudson
Production assistant Claire Finn tends the brazier which provides smoke in the absence of the Artem smoke gun used during principal photography. Photo: Michael Hudson

3. Have the original scene handy when you shoot the pick-ups. Load the edit onto a laptop or tablet so that you can compare it on set to the new material you’re framing up.

4. Own a bit of lighting kit if you can. In the shed I have some battered old Arrilites and a few other bits and pieces of gear that has seen better days. On a proper shoot I would leave this at home and have the production hire much better kit. But for pick-ups, when there’s often no money left, this stuff can come in handy.

5. Keep gels. If you employ an unusual colour of gel during principal photography, try to keep a piece of it in case you need to revisit that lighting set-up in pick-ups. Production will have to pay for the gel once it’s been used anyway. On the Ren pick-ups shoot, after pulling all of my gels out of the plastic kitchen bin I keep them in, I was relieved to find that I still had two pieces of the Urban Sodium gel I used in the flaming arrows scene the first time around.

Urban Sodium gel provides the grungy orange light for the flaming arrows scene, just as it did last November. Photo: Hermes Contreras
Urban Sodium gel provides the grungy orange light for the flaming arrows scene, just as it did last November. Photo: Hermes Contreras
5 Tips for Successful Pick-ups