American Cinematographer - July 2008 - 16

Right: The extrawide frame encouraged Cvetko (below left) to experiment with her compositions while emphasizing the characters’ surroundings. Bottom: The woman’s eyes follow her new husband as he runs back to work. The film, Smith says, is “about a beautiful moment hidden within a busy life.” another layer of beauty to help capture the essence of the film,” he says. Smith and Cvetko decided to shoot On a Tuesday in Super 35mm (using Kodak Vision2 5205 250D) with the intention of finishing on film. Smith scanned one of the panoramic APS photos they’d taken while scouting and used Adobe Photoshop to measure the image size, which was 3.18:1. Lee Utterbach in San Francisco provided the production with an Arri 535B and Cooke S4 prime lenses. The team couldn’t afford a custom 3.18 ground glass, so during prep, Cvetko shot a framing chart and matted off the picture area on all the video-assist monitors. Initially, the filmmakers were concerned the effect might not work in post, so Smith asked Cvetko to use 3.18 framing but shoot for 2.35 safe. 1st AC Tom Spingola mounted a masked 8" LCD monitor above the camera’s eyepiece so Cvetko could check the frame without straying from the camera, but even so, shooting for two different aspect ratios quickly became a troublesome experience. “It was really stressful on the first day,” says Cvetko. “I’m very obsessive about my composition, and switching between the eyepiece and the monitor wasn’t working for me. Shooting digitally definitely lends itself better to operating by a monitor, but with film, I really love that final check of looking through the eyepiece.” This is one instance where the trust Cvetko and Smith had built paid off on set. “At the end of the first day, David saw my frustration and said, ‘Just go for it and we’ll make it work,’” she recalls. “He didn’t want me to have to constantly worry about whether it was better for 2.35 or 3.18.” Once she was free to experiment more confidently with the panoramic frame, Cvetko discovered it offered as many challenges as it did opportunities. While the ultra-widescreen format proved ideal for isolating and accentuating the finer details of City Hall’s sweeping Beaux Arts design, it was less so for shooting singles of the two actors sitting shoulder-to-shoulder in conversation, as they do in one scene in the building’s rotunda. This scene, which takes place just minutes prior to the civil ceremony, is an important one for the couple and a defining moment for the style of the film. “We couldn’t get singles,” says Smith. “It wasn’t until Svetlana started exploring that she came up with this anti-framing, putting the groom far on the right in one shot, whereas traditionally he would be framed to the left. The same goes for the bride, who is framed to the left.” When the two shots are juxtaposed, they seem to bring the couple closer together. Getting permission to shoot in and around San Francisco City Hall was a coup; the building had been off-limits to short-form productions for almost a decade in the wake of a feature-production accident that caused a devastating flood in the building’s rotunda. On a 16 July 2008

American Cinematographer - July 2008

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