American Cinematographer - May 2008 - 30

Above: The crew prepares to film a driving scene on location in Toronto. Below: Middleton (left) and director Jeremy Podeswa plan their next setup. “Jeremy and I partly designed the look and feel of the film based on where it ends, with Jakob [played as an adult by Stephen Dillane] finally willing and able to be in a loving relationship,” notes Middleton. “He goes to Greece, and it’s spectacular and beautiful, and we wanted a lot of saturation and what people might consider the old-fashioned Kodak look. “Backtracking from there, I decided to use different film stocks for Toronto because much of that part of the story takes place in the winter. Eterna is a really great film stock; it has a slightly softer look than Kodak in the flesh tones, and it’s very clean in the blacks. To help reduce the color a tiny bit, I pullprocessed some of the footage in the apartment by half a stop.” Middleton was permitted to take two crewmembers from Canada with him to Greece, and he chose 1st AC Dean Stinchcombe and key grip David Askey. (For the Toronto portion, Middleton worked with gaffer Terry Banting and key grip Mitch Holmes; he praises both “for their hard work, skill and positive attitudes.”) Middleton shot Fugitive Pieces in 3-perf 1.85:1 using a Panaflex Platinum and Primo primes and zooms (including a 24-275mm T2.8 and a 17.575mm T2.3) rented from Panavision Toronto. Despite the small grip, electric and camera packages, the production had its hands full getting the equipment to the hillside home Jakob keeps in Hydra, the port city on the island of the same name. Middleton reveals, “All of our gear was either hand-carried or traveled on a donkey. It was pretty amazing! “We had one 12K Par, one 6K Par and two 4K Fresnels, and at times, we used every light I had to accommodate the balance between the interior and the exteriors [visible] out the windows,” he continues. “We had one small scaffolding tower, but the Greek crew was used to working with a smaller amount of equipment, and they were all very adept at rigging in difficult spots — it was not unusual to see my gaffer climb up the actual Crank-O-Vator stand to get to the light.” (Unable to get their generator onto the island, the crew had to tie in to the city’s power.) While the filmmakers were in Greece, the Kodak lab in Athens processed their footage, but the crew rarely saw dailies while on location. In Toronto, where they used Deluxe Laboratories, they were allotted a few thousand feet to print and watched the rest as standard-definition video dailies. Deluxe Toronto also handled the film’s digital intermediate (DI), during which Middleton worked with colorist Chris Wallace to fine-tune the transition between time periods. “I was particularly conscious of Stephen Dillane, who is closer to Jakob’s age at the end of the film and has to look much younger earlier on,” he notes. “That was quite a challenge for hair, makeup and lighting. We occasionally used some light [Tiffen] White Pro-Mists, and we accentuated that in the DI. “We also experimented with the amount of saturation and contrast,” he continues. “The difficult thing was finding the right feeling for Greece in the 1940s. When we applied a slightly desaturated look, it started to look unreal. We had to strike a careful balance, preserving the tones of the dry grass, olive trees, plaster walls and tanned skin while reinforcing Jakob’s fear.” Middleton is appreciative of his longstanding collaboration with Podeswa, emphasizing the open dialogue he and the director share. “Early on, Jeremy and I discussed which format to use, and we toyed with shooting 2.40:1. We did some tests and decided it might not be such a good idea in light of the interior spaces we’d be shooting in. That [test] sparked a lot of discussion about what the movie is really about and how we could reflect that with the spatial relationships between people. In the end, I think we made the right choice.” I 30 May 2008

American Cinematographer - May 2008

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