American Cinematographer - August 2009 - 32

Innovations Spice Up Julie & Julia’s DI Fellow Foodies from a slightly lower angle than might have been entirely flattering, but she encouraged it,” says Goldblatt. “Julia Child was not a small woman, and Meryl wanted to be true to that. When we wanted her to look her best, we raised the camera.” Whereas Child’s apartment is roomy, the studio apartment where Powell lives is a modest 43'x19'. The kitchen is 6'8"x6'3" — tight quarters in which to cook, much less to shoot. “It was like a closet!” recalls Goldblatt. “We tore every single wall out again and again just to get our coverage. On a 27mm lens, with one wall taken out and [the camera] back a couple of feet, we could just get everything into frame.” After a pause, he laughs, “Actually, at times it was rather a challenge to keep the small space from looking bigger than it was.” Outside the kitchen’s sole window were three 5Ks shooting up at beadboards or rippled muslin. For the rest of the apartment, 5Ks and 10Ks were aimed through windows, replicating harsh sunlight. Ceilings of the Queens set comprised bleached muslin, with lights positioned above them. Two small skylights, never seen on camera, serve as additional light sources. Smaller and darker than the Childs’ apartment, the Powells’ home relied more heavily on practicals. A 50' Technocrane with a Scorpio Head was used for perhaps the most ambitious setup: a nightexterior shot in Queens that starts extremely wide on Powell’s building and ends with a close-up of her at her computer, seen through a second-floor window. This is the only shot of Powell’s apartment that was filmed on location. To help define the Con-Edison power station visible in the distance in the wide view, eight 12K Pars were grouped together on the ground about ¾ of a mile away. To light the K odak’s high-contrast Vision Premier print stock would seem to be an unlikely choice for a film such as Julie & Julia. As Steven J. Scott, EFilm’s supervising digital colorist, notes, “When you’re trying to make the leading ladies look as soft and beautiful as possible, Premier isn’t the first stock that comes to mind, as its stronger blacks and saturated colors can result in a harsher, less flattering look.” So why Premier? Because the filmmakers believed everything around the actors — including colorful Paris bistros, stylish period dress and décor, and, perhaps most importantly, the food — was best served by Premier’s vibrant color and strong blacks. However, Kodak’s standard Vision promised a gentler look and smoother skin tones. Director of photography Stephen Goldblatt, ASC, BSC wanted the best of both worlds, and in the end, he got it, thanks to a digital filter developed by Scott, his longtime collaborator in the digital-intermediate suite. “With our software and proprietary filter, we could tap the advantages of each stock wherever we wanted,” says Scott. Scott had been tinkering with the idea for some time, and Julie & Julia seemed the perfect film on which to try out the new tool. After testing both print stocks, the filmmakers decided to print on Premier using the new DI filter. During the digital grade, Scott and Goldblatt used EFilm’s proprietary Premier Deluxe look-up table and added Scott’s new filter, which allowed them to selectively emulate some of Vision’s characteristics, even though they were printing on Premier. As an example, Scott points to a scene in which Julia Child (Meryl Streep) and her husband (Stanley Tucci) sit in a corner booth in a French bistro. “Stephen wanted the rich, saturated colors of the décor and the deep color of Meryl’s dress to come through, but he also wanted Meryl and Stanley’s skin tones to be soft and luminous. With this filter, we were able to get both. The scene has an almost threestrip Technicolor look.” (The results were so impressive that Scott used the filter again on the next picture he graded, Night at the Museum 2, whose entire Imax run was printed on Premier.) Goldblatt was also pleased with something else Scott worked out for Julie & Julia’s DI, a “sunshine effect.” The production spent its last two weeks in Paris, shooting exteriors, and “I prayed to the gods of weather that we would have the dull, overcast skies that are so wonderful for actors’ close-ups,” recalls Goldblatt. “The gods listened to me, but I found that the wide shots, the architectural shots, needed some bite, and dull light didn’t give it to them.” The first use of the digital sunshine effect can be seen right after the opening credits. The Childs arrive at their new Paris residence in a powder-blue American sedan that rounds a corner and pulls up to the front gate; the camera starts low and wide on a crane at street level and tracks out as the arm booms up. Goldblatt wanted subtle streaks of sunlight to grace the buildings in the wide shot, and he wanted shafts of light hitting the walls of the house as Julia enters the courtyard. But on the day of filming, there was no hard sunlight. Scott solved the problem by creating a series of articulated mattes that moved through the scene. “You’d think it was real sunlight,” says Goldblatt, “but it was a matte done on the fly during the DI.” — Jean Oppenheimer 32 August 2009

American Cinematographer - August 2009

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - August 2009