American Cinematographer - April 2007 - 135

duce

color to

really pull the
of the night exteri¬
ors, you'll see an accent of a sodiumvapor look, a yellow lamp or something
a warmer

cools out. On many

that slashes

across

the frame."

Because Perfect

Stranger was a
last-minute addition to the New York
production slate,

none

of the city's major

stages were available, so the ad agency
set was created 23 stories up

in the

rebuilt 7 World Trade Center. "It

was a

270-degree, south-facing view," Michos
says, "so we were dealing with the
changing quality and intensity of the
light, and the fact that night came early.
Certainly I relied on the fact that I was
going to go into a digital intermediate
[Dl] at Technicolor to help balance that
stuff out, but the Dl is not a panacea for
all things. You have to make very real
physical choices on set. I asked Tommy
Prate, our key grip, to gel all 60 windows

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"Because the

light plummets so
early in New York in
winter, and because it's usually cloudy to
begin with, we didn't get a chance to do
much magic-hour stuff," he continues.
quickly and

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"One of our difficulties while we

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in

the

practical locations was determining
when to call it quits on our day scenes.
Even though the script might say 'day
interior,' if a

scene

fell toward the end of

the

workday we'd turn it into a 'night
interior.' Between the windows of our

being 2 stops dark and losing the
light at about 4 p.m., we did a fair
amount of night lighting."
Another major set, Ro's apart¬
set

ment, was built in a warehouse. "As

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New Yorkers, we're very

adept at build¬
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warehouses and depots and things of
that nature," says Michos. "But they do
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sightlines, fire safety, cleanliness and
sound." A Brooklyn warehouse had the
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American Cinematographer - April 2007

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - April 2007
