American Cinematographer - August 2009 - 26

McAbee, who directed Stingray Sam’s six 10minute vignettes, stands at the ready for a camera test while Miller checks the frame. percent IRE range, the picture seemed to hold together 5 or 6 stops of latitude below that. Another thing that seemed to work was shooting with a soft, directional contrast, knowing that more contrast would be added later in post; I tried to keep the shadows about 3½ stops under key, knowing we could take that to black later.” Fredward’s secret lair is the visual opposite of the fertility clinic. Working in the wood-paneled conference room at Manhattan’s Gershwin Hotel, Miller had to light a dark location against bright costumes and light skin tones — the pasty-faced Fredward and his tuxedoed cronies are clad in white, while The Quasar Kid wears a skintight, sequined jumpsuit. Gaffer Cait Davis and key grip August Popkin rigged eight 36" China balls with 500-watt tungsten bulbs, creating an even toplight that would allow the actors to move around freely. The dark walls acted as negative fill, while the action was separated from the background using daylight-balanced Kino Flos and Source Four Pars bounced off soft silver reflectors. Our heroes part company after they rescue the girl, and Stingray decides to return her to her father. After crash-landing in the middle of a desert, Stingray and the girl find themselves on the wrong end of Fredward’s anti-matter pistol. The production found a stretch of beach on Long Island with enough open space to stage the standoff, and Miller set all of his shots above the actors’ eyelines to mask incongruous terrain. “It solved the problem of seeing anything 26 August 2009 we weren’t supposed to see, and it also reduced the background to the texture of the sand,” he recalls. The low winter sun was used to frontlight the actors, and tungsten Pars were used to fill in the shadows when necessary. The scene gave Miller one of the most striking compositions in the series: a long, wide shot of the beach set against a dark sky, with a line of sand at the bottom of the frame to hide the ocean. Fredward and the girl are on one side of the frame, and Stingray is on the other. At first glance, the background seems otherworldly enough to be a painted backing, “but it was a real sky!” says Miller. “I used an old 85mm Zeiss lens for that shot,” he continues. “When you’re recording to video with a long lens on a small chip, and there are only two planes of focus to a shot — the actors and the sky — the P+S Technik adapter gives you a greater sense of compression. If there had been a third element between the two of them, it wouldn’t have looked as good.” The combination of gentler lenses and the adapter created a thick bokeh around the edge of the glass and added halation to the hot spots, enhancing the “older film look” Miller and McAbee sought. Miller also used Schneider Double Fog filters (1⁄8 for close-ups and 1⁄4 for wider shots) to accentuate the ethereal quality. He took a similar approach to photographing the rest of that world — Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood — using 85mm and 135mm lenses to compress locations into paintings and backdrops. The filmmakers did manage to work in some practical 2-D elements. The film is bookended by Terry Gilliamstyle collages that were designed by West Coast artist John Borruso. Though McAbee originally intended to integrate them into the movie, he eventually decided they didn’t fit the design of the rest of the picture. Glupczynski had another idea. Miller explains: “The P+S Technik adapter’s oscillating ground glass adds an organic texture to the video image, and we decided to use the HPX3000 with a zoom controller and a dolly to photograph each collage. The human control seemed to bridge the gap and create a cohesion between the two worlds.” Stingray Sam was onlined at Final Frame in New York, with colorist Will Cox at the Nucoda Film Master. Because the final image would be blackand-white, Miller used mixed color temperatures for his separators and fill lights throughout production. By putting them on a different color channel in post, he was able to better isolate and adjust them. Stingray Sam was completed in time for Sundance, where it was projected digitally. McAbee would like to see the film get a multi-platform release, but for now, he is hand-delivering the HD master to every festival screening. “I just hope people have a chance to see this movie,” says Miller. “Whether they see 61 minutes or 10 minutes, they’ll feel it’s a complete, fully realized world. All of our decisions were geared toward keeping the audience within the small universe Cory created.” TECHNICAL SPECS 1.33:1 (16x9 original) High-Definition Video and Super 8mm Panasonic AJ-HPX3000, Pro8mm Max8 Classic Kodak Tri-X Reversal 7266 Zeiss Standard Speed lenses I

American Cinematographer - August 2009

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