By Jon Silberg, January 4, 2008
The makers of Cloverfield used some very high-tech gear, including the Thomson Grass Valley Viper and the Sony F23, to achieve a low-tech look. This horror film about a monster attacking New York unfolds as though we are watching a tape made by one of the characters who had his camcorder set to capture a party with friends and instead ends up taping a enormous siege of the city by a monstrous enemy (whose attributes Paramount did not care to share at press time). The look that director Matt Reeves was going for was something very raw and much of the film was shot on the prosumer Panasonic AG-HVX200, but for the significant chunk of Cloverfield that involves CGI and compositing, the signal from the HVX simply wasn’t up to the task and for these scenes cinematographer Michael Bonvillain resorted to the Viper in its highest bit rate, pseudo-log FilmStream mode and the Sony F23 in its equivalent Sony-branded S-Log format.
This mixture of cameras was the result of a compromise, Bonvillain explains. “Matt Reeves really wanted to try to do as much as possible with the smaller, lighter camera. The Panasonic was already a bit bigger and heavier than he would have liked. His concern was that there is a feel about images from a tiny camcorder that is different from the look you get with heavier, more solid equipment. A consumer camcorder is so light and when you pan it, there’s a different feel than if you pan these bigger cameras.”
Initially, he recalls, some producers were worried about relying even on the HVX’s image quality for a major feature. “Some people talked about shooting the whole thing with one of the high-end cameras and then ‘degrading’ it in post. There was talk of shooting with Steadicam rather than handheld and adding ‘shake’ afterwards. We listened to their concerns and did do some tests and eventually it became clear to everybody that it just wouldn’t be believable. Everyone’s got a video camera; everyone watches YouTube and home videos. We all know what Steadicam looks like. Take a Steadicam shot out of any movie and shake it up [in post] however you like and tell me if it looks like it was really shot on a camcorder. By using the HVX, [actor] PJ Miller could hold it himself a lot of the time so the eye line was always correct and we didn’t have to have a camera operator crouching between actors to make it look like he was holding it. If he moves it, you get this quick, sort of jittery, feeling instead of this heavy massive sense of, ‘Now the camera’s tilting.’”
But, he adds, the visual effects supervisor, Kevin Banks, had another very important concern. The camerawork could look as genuine as everybody hoped, but if the images weren’t robust enough to hold up to the heavy digital effects work in post, all the realism gained would be lost. Phil Tippett’s company [Tippett Studios] would be creating the CGI monster and Double Negative would create significant set extensions and backgrounds. Banks wanted to give them the purest, cleanest images possible to start and let them match the look of the lower-end footage after completing the composites. An image like the Viper or F23 could deliver laid down to HDCAM SR tape would ensure the most flexibility on the post side and therefore yield the most believable composites. On this point Reeves and Bonvillian agreed.
The cinematographer and Digital Imaging Supervisor Nick Theodorakis were very curious about the F23 but none were available as production commenced. Theodorakis had worked with the Viper previously. “It can give you beautiful pictures,” he says. “In FilmStream it can be a little green and it’s not always easy to get that out of the blacks, but we could work with that. But I was curious to see the F23. It’s been three years since the Viper came out and that’s a long time. I wanted to see where the technology had come. It would be interesting to see how the F23’s 14-bit A-to-D converter would affect the images.”
The Viper came from Panavision’s Plus 8 Digital, as did the Zeiss DigiPrimes and Canon zooms--the optics that would be subsequently used on the F23 as well. The shooting method for the high-end cameras made use of experienced camera operators, including Bonvillian himself, Bobby Altman, Chris Hanes and Wally Sweeter. “They spent a lot of time running through crowds,” says Bonvillian, explaining that they were generally cabled to another person with the SR deck, who was in turn cabled to someone with an HD monitor and batteries. “We had about 12 feet of cable between each. If it was too much it could be a problem for actors and extras, too little and if someone has to stop short it could end up damaging the equipment. We could run and turn 360 degrees if we had to. There was no video village or anything.”
“You can technically have a mile of [fiber optic] cable,” says Theodorakis, who alternated between fibre and BNC systems depending on the length of the run. “but we couldn’t really have a mile of cable. After about a block, everyone would be stepping on it.” Theodorakis credits Digital Imaging Utility Oliver Mancebo along with the operators for helping to deal with the daunting logistics of these long, handheld takes and tethered camera. We called him Miracle Mancebo. We’d have these elaborate 360-degree degree shots and such an immense amount of cable wrangling to do. It was like having another DIT on set. It seemed like he was always running!”
Theodorakis wanted to ensure that the director did not have to look at the green cast the Viper images have, especially right out of the camera, so he employed what is essentially a LUT system that could deliver a color corrected image to the on-set monitors and encode some rough color correction information in the form of DPX files that would accompany the tapes when they went to Colorist Stefan Sonnenfeld at Santa Monica-based Company 3. “I was able to get Iridas SpeedGrade OnSet in a beta version,” he explains. “I ran that off my MacBook Pro and hooked that into a Cine-tal monitor. I used the system like a LUTher box and it allowed me to steal real-time images from video, ‘color time’ them on my MacBook and then export the DPX files with 3D LUT tables to accompany the tapes.”
Bonvillian notes that he did resort to some tricks to bring an amateur feel to these high-grade images, within limits. For example, he would keep in mind the telltale auto-iris and auto-gain that kicks in on so many home videos as the scene goes from a light to a darker area. “We did some exposure changes on set,” he says, “but not many. If we go in a shot from cool white fluorescent lighting inside to sodium vapor outside, you would probably see the auto white balance working. We added some effects like that in the DI but we didn’t want to overdo it. The film works right out of the box and we didn’t want to get too artsy-fartsy about things like that.”
During production, the new F23s (sold through reseller Band Pro) became available at Pace Technologies, which had created a rig for handholding and accommodating a handheld battery. When Bonvillian tested that camera, he decided he wanted it, especially for shooting night exteriors.
“We were really amazed by the F23,” the cinematographer recalls. “We went to a dark corner on a street in New York with no permit and we’d just take putput generator and no lights and shot tests under sodium vapor light. I felt the Viper was equivalent to a 320 ASA and the F23 more like 500. And the sharpness was amazing. We used a tiny amount of sharpness on the camera and it was too sharp. We knew that this was the camera for all the shots we would do outside at night with primarily just sodium vapor lighting.”
Cloverfield shot in New York for 12 days. Theodorakis, who had worked as a cinematographer prior to moving into his current, more technical position, got to use the F23 to shoot a lot of New York plates for compositing with foreground work to be done at a shopping mall in Arcadia, at the Downey stages and in other areas of Southern California. Bonvillian and Gaffer Rick West set up a block in downtown L.A. to come close enough to a New York street so that Double Negative could create CGI set extensions to really sell it as New York.
To capture the look of shots captured under sodium vapor streetlights in New York, Bonvillian used real sodium vapor lights, not movie lights with gel packs, for the exteriors shot in the more controlled environments. Bonvillian explains that real sodium vapor light has a distinct look that is difficult or even impossible to duplicate, but it also causes a technical issue that was an issue particularly for Banks’ visual effects department.
“With any of those cameras--the Viper or the F23--when you do a fast pan in sodium vapor lighting, you get a triple image,” the cinematographer notes. “You get the image itself and then two trails. Kevin Banks was freaking out. ‘How do we cut people out of stuff when we’ve got three of them?’ ‘If we animate something to composite into the shot, we’ve got to duplicate the two trails!’ Matt and I said, ‘You gotta do it, man.’ We’re shooting on the streets and we can’t turn off the streetlights.’ They did manage to do it, though, and they did a great job.”
Bonvillian is very pleased with the way the different techniques come together in the film to sell the concept that we are seeing the horror as captured on an amateur Handycam and he found the challenges involved in making that work refreshing from the more traditional methods used on some of the series TV work he does. “TV work can be crushing sometimes,” he observes. “There’s no coverage in Cloverfield. We would sometimes not start rolling until two hours after lunch and then we’d shoot for three or four hours straight. There are so many effects shots and so many emotional scenes and the whole thing rejuvenated me.”
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