American Cinematographer - April 2009 - 22

In Crank High Voltage, hard-tokill Chev Chelios (Jason Statham) requires constant jolts of electricity after his heart is stolen by a Chinese mobster and replaced with a batterypowered ticker. An HDV Action Spectacular by Iain Stasukevich In the final moments of the 2006 action film Crank, hitman-turned-hero Chev Chelios (Jason Statham) takes a mile-high swan dive from a helicopter. The sequel, Crank High Voltage, picks up right where that film left off, with Chelios splayed out on the asphalt, miraculously intact. Some Asian hood- lums roll up, scrape him off the ground, and take him away. When he comes to, Chelios learns his organs are being harvested for the benefit of a Triad mob boss. He plots his escape, but the hitch is that he has been fitted with an artificial heart that needs a steady supply of electricity. For the next 90 minutes, he finds increasingly weird ways to juice himself while hunting down his real heart, dispatching anyone who stands in his way. In planning CHV, co-directors Brian Taylor and Mark Neveldine decided the only way to top its high-voltage predecessor, which was shot on high-definition video by Adam Biddle, would be to use small prosumer and consumer HDV cameras, mainly the Canon XH-A1 and HF10. (A Sony PMWEX1 was used for high-speed work.) “There’s no way we could have shot this movie the way we wanted to with traditional HD or film cameras,” says Taylor. Cinematographer Brandon Trost was tasked with creating highly compressed 1440x1080 images that would be suitable for a final transfer to 35mm. A friend of Taylor’s since their student days at the Los Angeles Film School, Trost cut his teeth on digital video; the first camera he picked up was a Canon XL-1. “My experience comes from learning to make little cameras look like big cameras,” says Trost. “I’ve learned how to use their strengths to make them feel cinematic. It’s more of a feeling than something technical.” CHV was shot much in the manner of a skateboarding video — it was the only way to keep pace with the action. The camerawork was fast, loose and handheld, and shots were made mostly with available light. There was one HD monitor on set that was used primarily for playback. There were no waveform monitors and no video village. Interior locations and complicated lighting setups were kept to a minimum. Some days involved as many as 100 setups, according to Trost. “We would do reverses without cutting — we just jumped to the other side of the action,” he says. “We didn’t want to have everything planned; we wanted to stay in the moment so you could feel that intensity.” There were at least three cameras running at all times, and the main three were operated by Trost, Neveldine and Taylor, who were responsible for composing their own shots. Trost explains, “Our main concern was getting enough coverage that we wouldn’t be stuck. After the camera cut, we’d check with each other, and if someone had a two-shot and someone else had a single, we knew we could move on.” The filmmakers created some basic settings for the cameras, shooting at -3dB, dialing up the detail, and pulling the shutter down to 1⁄2000 of a second, which helped to increase the image’s apparent resolution and eliminate motion blur. They didn’t use cinema-lens adapters in front of the XH-A1, opting instead for the wide-angle and telephoto adapters that can be screwed to the front of the cameras’ fixed lenses. “In terms of depth of field, we went to extremes — either super-shallow or infinite,” says Taylor. “Jumping back and forth between ultra-wide and ultra-telephoto makes video more exciting.” The operators had to do their own focusing, and on wider shots, they could set the focus to about 31⁄2' and not have to worry because of the deep stop, recalls Trost. Exposure was measured using 22 April 2009 Crank High Voltage photos by Justin Lubin, courtesy of Lionsgate.

American Cinematographer - April 2009

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