American Cinematographer - January 2021 - 68

AMERICAN
TIPPING
POINT
CINEMATOGRAPHER WWW.ASCMAG.COM

Above: Four icons
gather at a turbulent
time. Right: Tami
Reiker, ASC with
director Regina King
and crew. Opposite
page: King and
A-camera operator
Chad Chamberlain
(bottom) prep to shoot
a hotel interior.

68 / JANUARY 2021

schedule, however, time was not on their side.
Their solution tied into another of the director's priorities - a constantly moving frame - and Reiker's way of
achieving that. " Because the majority of the film takes place
in the hotel room, I felt it was visually important to not feel
static, " King says. " I wanted to keep the energy going because these men have so much life. I wanted to always feel
like there was movement, but I didn't want the camera to be
a distraction. "
Reiker adds, " We had these 10- and 12-page scenes, many
of them just wall-to-wall dialogue. That was very daunting. "
Two such scenes were set inside the Hampton House
Motel, and one unfolds on the roof. For the interior Hampton House sets - constructed in a rec-center-turned-stage
in LaPlace, La., outside New Orleans - Reiker notes, " We
wanted to keep the camera floating and drifting so we'd
be constantly shifting perspectives. I presented this idea of
keeping the camera on a jib arm but manually operated, not
on a hothead. We had each 65 on a [J.L.] Fisher 10 dolly with
a 12-foot jib arm and an underslung Cartoni Lambda head.
[A-camera operator] Chad Chamberlain and [B-camera operator] Austin Alward could swing and drift and get to every
corner of that hotel room. We could go from 2 feet to 10 feet
in one move, and it was the operators making that decision,
so it could be very organic. "
Every painting and mirror in these interiors had what
Reiker calls a " hidey hole " behind it so a jib arm could poke
through. " Everything except the back of the hotel could pop
in and out, " she notes. " So if A camera was in the room, B
camera could still be getting the full movement of the jib
arm through the holes that were cut out without having to
pull the wall " - a big timesaver.
On these long, dialogue-heavy scenes, the strategy was to
shoot takes of 10 to 15 minutes. The actors loved it because

it allowed them time to fully ramp up. It also helped with the
edit. " We didn't want to have the film all cut up, " says Reiker.
And although it was challenging for her crew, " the material
was intense, so shooting it this way was as immersive an
experience for us as we wanted it to be for the audience! "
By its very nature, the camera strategy made lighting
tricky, especially because the hotel room had a low ceiling.
" We had to use very low-profile lights, mainly on the ceiling, " Reiker says. " We used Astera Titan and Helios [LED]
tubes with Honeycrates and fabric grids. They were rigged
in all four corners of the room, and after we watched rehearsal, we'd decide which ones we'd use. For fill, we used
a baby scoop light made by [gaffer] Allen Parks; it was a 10inch metal disc with LiteGear bi-color LED cards and Magic
Cloth diffusion over the top, and we added snoots and honeycomb grids. That allowed us to have a tight fill light on
our actors without overpowering the set walls. " She gelled
the Astera tubes with 1⁄4 CTO and dimmed the practicals,
lamped with 40-watt tungsten bulbs, " to a nice warm hue. "
Reiker adds appreciatively, " The latitude with a 6K

American Cinematographer - January 2021

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - January 2021