By Jon Silberg, August 17, 2009
South African director Neil Blomkamp received a lot of attention for his six-minute short "Alive in Jo'burg," which concerns a group of extraterrestrial aliens who land on Earth and end up living essentially in a refugee camp outside of Johannesburg, South Africa. Among those who took notice of Blomkamp's clever use of desktop visual effects and storytelling prowess was the director of the Lord of the Rings series, Peter Jackson. For the new feature, District 9, Blomkamp had access to RED ONE and Sony PMW-EX1 cameras and a lot more time and resources to tell a more involved story based on the notions in his short.
The short film "Alive in Jo'burg"
Cinematographer Trent Opaloch put the cameras—particularly the REDs—through their paces for the eight-week shoot, subjecting them to the extremes of a South African winter. They shot in an extremely poor area within Soweto. "It was really like people living in a garbage dump," the cinematographer recalls. "There are all sorts of animals running around there. It's really kind of shocking.
"It was a hard, hostile environment," Opaloch continues. "It was extremely dry, so there was airborne dust everywhere, almost like talcum powder, and it was very windy. After less than a week of shooting, my 1st AC called me over and said he needed to show me something. When I went to where he had the RED camera, he blew out about half a cup of dust from inside. He turned it over and more dust came out. It was like an ashtray. And I thought, 'My God! We've got seven more weeks of this!'"
He reports that the RED bodies held up quite well under the circumstances. "The only issue that we had with the camera the entire time was heat—we were inside a tin shack with the camera up on sticks about two inches from the ceiling and it got extremely hot," he says. "It had to come down every few minutes to cool off, but I think that would be true with any HD camera you put into that kind of situation."
Digital Imaging Technician Jonathan Smiles was positioned near the shoot in a large trailer with HD monitors and workstations to ingest the .r3d files as the 8GB memory cards came in. "He was a final set of eyes before editorial got the material for ingest," the cinematographer explains, noting that he preferred shooting on cards to using the onboard hard drive but adding that he has since worked handheld with the drive and would more likely shoot that way in the future.
He and Smiles would apply something of a look to the images by building curves within REDCINE to be used as reference files for the editorial department at Peter Jackson's Park Road Post in Wellington, New Zealand. "Nothing was baked in," the cinematographer explains. "At first there were some issues with the pipeline in the editorial department and the ability to read our reference files, and the footage was all looking three and four stops underexposed! That was frightening. Here Peter was doing this fantastic job of letting us go off and create this world without looking over our shoulders and he gets this material that looks terrible. Fortunately, we got it fixed soon afterward."
The structure of District 9 is a mix of an artificial film-within-a-film and the "real" story. The former is a kind of industrial film being made for the nefarious MNU Corp., an organization that positions itself as a public service entity but is really up to no good. The intersection of MNU and the aliens of District 9 provides the momentum of the film's story.
The style of this section is designed to look freeform—more like a documentary—and Opaloch went with the Sony EX1 for these scenes. "We wanted these sections to be handheld and look like a journalistic camera being operated by a semiprofessional videographer trying to capture everything that's going on," the cinematographer explains. "We wanted it to feel journalistic and somewhat like surveillance footage at times. A different mix of footage you might see if you watched a news story on CNN.
"But I was really conscious of the Cloverfield thing, the look that was deliberately made to look shaky and unprofessional. When that movie came out, they had motion sickness warning signs posted at the theater, and that freaked me out! I didn't want to go that far with it."
The two styles evolved during production. "At first," he notes, "the idea was to have a lot of contrast between the two types of footage. Pete had said, 'Go bonkers with the journalistic footage. Let the highlights blow out, let the camera find focus and have the iris adjust.' But then an interesting thing happened as we'd run a scene with the RED on a dolly and it felt like a completely different film. How would you ever piece these things together? And so we met in the middle. We went a little less extreme with the EX1 shots and a little less [clean] with the RED portions. I've seen the completed film twice now and I think that was definitely the right choice. The editors did a bang-up job cutting it together, and so now I think some of those transitions from one style to the other make some of the coolest-looking parts of the movie."
Given the conditions the RED ONE had to work under, Opaloch has nothing but good things to say about the camera's robustness and reliability in the field. And much of what Opaloch feels is successful about the look of District 9 comes from the fact that it was shot in the environment represented. "The place gave us an amazing look," he says. "You just show up and there's a donkey and a family of pigs right there. You have the African sun and this incredible landscape to photograph. You could never get that on a soundstage."
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| COMMENTS (6) | | 08/25/2009 | | I loved District 9..I'm very glad Niell did not shoot it in the style of "Cloverfield".
Shooting in a narrative fashion with minor hand held shakes here and there is an excellent reciepe fantastic. Cloverfield left me unable to focus on key points in the story, because that damn camera shaking all over the place..believe it or not I had to watch 3 times. |
| | 08/23/2009 | | Loved the film, and I thought the difference in the two looks was very significant. There was no mistaking the doc footage from the different camera. My only quarrel is that instead of making that part look documentary, they made it look more home movie. Anybody shooting a documentary like that might do lots of handheld, which is fine to differentiate it from the "real" film, but they wouldn't zoom in and out and wander all over the place with the camera like amateurs do when shooting home movies. Just a normal doc look would have been better. But that's a minor quarrel over a really nice film. |
| | 08/23/2009 | | District 9 was an outstanding film, but I agree that the "Doc" footage looked too similar to the Red footage. It might have been better had they resisted the temptation to make the two styles cut together smoothly. The aesthetic shift would have enhanced the feeling of reality within the CGI heavy production.
But that's nit picking on what is a terrific little fim. |
| | 08/19/2009 | | Either that haze in the backround was pollution or it was very hot out. I could definitely tell the difference with the cameras. I like Red cameras but don't think they're quite up to par for a film print. Of course in this case it's deliberate. |
| | 08/19/2009 | | I saw District 9, loved the film but the only problem I had was that doc footage looked the same as the narative. I didn't even know they used two different cameras. I think they went two far at trying to make the fotage look similar. They could have used the Sony for the whole production if they were going to to dumb down the Red. Still a great bit of film making. |
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