American Cinematographer - April 2008 - 72

Sundance 2008: Mining for Movies Right: Shouldering the camera, In Bruges cinematographer Eigil Bryld captures one of Ray’s encounters with Chloe (Clémence Poésy) and Jimmy (Jordan Prentice) in the town plaza. Below: Ray and Ken try to figure out their boss’s intentions. shows Ray being lifted onto a gurney and placed into an ambulance. He is barely conscious, and both his POV and the shots looking down at him feature skewed angles. To get the shots, key grip Nick Cupac built a body brace for Farrell to wear under his costume. An Arri 235 equipped with a 40mm lens was mounted on the brace, and it loomed 21⁄2' above Farrell. “It was a lot of weight for Colin,” notes Bryld. “Normally, you’d rig the camera to the gurney, but we wanted to lift Ray off the ground and put him on the gurney.” The production’s camera package also included two Arricam Lites and the new Angenieux Optimo 12:1 zoom. (All gear came from Arrimedia UK.) Bryld selected the Arricam system because he wanted to use the Master Primes, both for their speed and for “the way they drop off out of focus.” Some of the chase through the city was shot with a Libra head mounted on a mule. “Colin and Ralph were running at such a speed that nobody on a Steadicam could have kept up, and we didn’t want to tell them to slow down,” says Bryld. “Pete also had a little rickshaw to use on the bridges, some of which are 500 years old and not designed for big trucks.” Several key scenes take place in the town’s 250'-tall bell tower, and getting equipment up the narrow, winding stairs was impossible. For shots involving the tower interior, sets were built in a nearby factory space. “For views of the city out the tower windows, we shot plates from a construction crane placed in front of the tower and also used a variety of rigs from the real tower because the crane couldn’t see in all directions,” says Bryld. “About twothirds of the tower set was surrounded by greenscreen, and the other portion of the view was a TransLite — we couldn’t afford to do it all greenscreen.” Scenes set on the tower steps were filmed on a 10'-high set. “When we had to show characters going up or down the stairs, we could re-use the same little bit of stairs over and over again — we could make it look like a different part of the staircase by removing some panels,” says Bryld. “When we were working out what kind of lights to build into that set, we noticed the real tower had fluorescent fittings that seemed rather crude; I thought they would be good in the set as well because it’s all wood and brick and feels quite heavy otherwise. The fluorescent tubes keep it from seeming too old-fashioned.” Hotel-room sequences were also shot on a set with greenscreen at the windows because the real hotel rooms in town were too cramped to facilitate shooting. Because of all the greenscreen work, the filmmakers decided up front to finish with a DI. The footage (Kodak Vision2 250D 5205 and 500T 5218) was processed by Deluxe London, scanned at Midnight Transfer and graded at Framestore CFC, where Bryld and colorist Adam Glasman used Filmlight’s Baselight. “We just tweaked things on a general level,” says the cinematographer. “We didn’t want the film to feel electronic; we wanted it to have an organic feel, like a fairy tale.” — Jean Oppenheimer Nerakhoon (The Betrayal) Director/Cinematographer: Ellen Kuras, ASC Co-Director: Thavisouk Phrasavath The “labor of love” documentary may be a bit of a cliché, but how else could one describe Nerakhoon (The Betrayal), which took cinematographer/co-director Ellen Kuras, ASC more than 20 years to complete? “I never imagined it would take 23 years,” she admits, “but over the course of those years, I’ve been really busy, you know!” From the time she began the documentary as a graduate student with no filmmaking experience to her present status as an 72 April 2008

American Cinematographer - April 2008

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - April 2008