American Cinematographer - July 2007 - 22

Along with Fido and Timmy, Mrs. Robinson watches as the shed she set on fire, with ne’erdo-wells inside, burns to the ground. ate (DI) with the final Technicolor palette in mind. However, he also wanted to incorporate certain retro techniques during the filming, such as rear-screen projection and a handpainted moon on composite plates. The production’s modest budget determined other choices, such as shooting spherical widescreen instead of anamorphic, and shooting 3-perf. For his camera package, Kiesser felt strongly about using Cooke S4s. “I knew they would enable me to shoot unfiltered and still get that Technicolor feel,” he says. “Quite often I’m torn between Primos and Cooke S4s, but I felt the quality the Cooke lenses have, especially in portraiture, was perfect for this show. But because we chose S4s, we were unable to afford the Arricam system, so we used an Arri 535B instead.” (Clairmont Camera provided the package.) During preproduction, Kiesser and the other department heads plotted out how they would achieve a highly saturated Technicolor look. “We had a lot of conversations about colors, their intensities, and the number of principal colors we wanted in each scene,” he recalls. The team decided to limit each scene to two main colors. The Robinson’s kitchen, for instance, is turquoise and bright red. “We tried to avoid colors that were close to flesh tones, so that in the DI we would be able to simply push the saturation on those primaries a little 22 July 2007 bit, or lean one way or the other to heighten the look, without affecting skin tones.” After extensive testing, Kiesser determined that the best film-stock choice was “Kodak Vision2, hands down. We were able to get that really pushed, three-strip Technicolor look we wanted.” He used 250D 5205 for day exteriors, and 500T 5218 for nights and interiors. Fido also contains a black-andwhite film within a film, a faux 1940s educational film explaining why zombies roam the earth. After obtaining stock footage of B-17s and marching armies on BetaSP and DigiBeta, as well as a VHS clip of rampaging zombies from Currie’s short film The Night of the Living, Kiesser tested various options for matching this pre-existing material. “We ended up shooting Super 16mm, using Kodak Double-X 7222 and forcing it 2 stops to increase the grain,” he says. This material was filmed with an Arri 16SR-3, 16mm Zeiss prime lenses and a Canon 8-64mm zoom. Per Kiesser’s instruction, 2nd-unit director of photography Randal Platt lit these scenes in a flat style; Kiesser later used tools in the DI suite to boost contrast. Fido was shot mostly on location in Kelowna, British Columbia, a small town whose tree-lined streets and 1940s-era houses resembled the world of the film. All that was needed was fresh paint on several houses, and the transformation of patchy green-andbrown lawns into emerald carpets during the DI. (At Warner Bros. Motion Picture Imaging, colorist Raymond Grabowski and supervising colorist Jan Yarbrough devised a look-up table that mimicked the Technicolor look, and small adjustments were then made on individual shots.) Near Kelowna was an abandoned distillery that served as ZomCon headquarters. Conveniently, a forest fire had ravaged the hillside behind the factory the year before, and its charred landscape made a perfect setting for the “Wild Zone,” an area beyond the community gates where flesh-eating zombies roam free. “We couldn’t have accomplished that digitally on our budget,” Kiesser says of the burnt landscape. Camera movement in Fido includes a judicious use of cranes. “The crane shot is a touchstone of the Fifties style, so it was really critical for Fido,” says Currie. Eagle Camera Support Systems supplied the production with four cranes: two Movietechs, a Felix and a Phoenix. Kiesser used these with a Hot Gears remote-head system. In one crane shot, Timmy leaves school and the camera pulls back to reveal two zombies holding the doors open for the kids, then goes higher to reveal the whole schoolyard and Fifties-era setting. A crane shot also introduces the Robinsons’ neighborhood, moving from the lush maple trees down to the quiet suburban street just as Bill Robinson pulls up in his immaculate Chrysler sedan. For Kiesser, those trees were a little too lush. “Between preproduction and the shoot, the leaves had filled in so much [the street] was like a dark tunnel, and there was a huge contrast range with the houses, which were often frontlit. I was wondering what the heck to do.” A local crew member, greensman Paul Bingham, contacted the city’s arborist and persuaded him to prune the trees — at no cost to the production. “They spent an entire day thinning the trees,” says Kiesser. “And I asked them to come back two more times! I’m

American Cinematographer - July 2007

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