American Cinematographer - September 1991 - 84

If you're

going
straight to video,
you'd be crazy to

money on video, where you have
to watch your red levels because if
the image is supersaturated ev¬

erything will just turn into this big
red blob. We solved that by using
a combination of red accent
lights
and a lot of neutral pink lights in the
foreground, which I thought was
appropriate since a girl was doing
a
striptease in it."

shoot 16mm when

basically
get the same look
with Super 8."

you can

But

achieve

-Tony Elwood
producer/director of
Super 8 feature "Killer".

mm*m

SUHCBSBBHB

SYSTEM

means

able to

that the look isn't too dis¬

tracting. Colorwise, the film was
extremely saturated and very un¬
settling, and I'd never lit anything
quite that extremely before."
Goi used Fuji stock to cre¬

35mm when transferred
to video.

*MTV, America's Most
Wanted, Flatliners, Black
Rain, Teenage Mutant Ninja
Turtles-tiave all used
8 in their productions.

ever

good," he responds. "The fact that
no one has said that
things look too
strange for them to follow the story

'Comparable to 16mm and
m

Goi

have not commented on the fact
that the sets are so bizarre, which is

Watch for "KILLER"
soon on Showtime!
i5S55

was

feeling of real-world
normalcy in such unusual settings?
"People who have seen the film
a

ate

Super

dark, color-saturated look for

Soul Stealer. "I shot most of the film
with a pretty high level of contrast

Super8 Sound:
Harvey St., Cambridge, MA 02140 (617) 876-5876
2805 W. Magnolia Blvd., Burbank, CA 91505 (818) 848-5522
95

because I

was
trying to get a really
deep saturation of colors and a very

rich black," Goi recalls. "I shot

mostly Fuji 320

or 250 ASA stock,
which I rated down to saturate the

N E W !

negative. The grain structure of Fuji
is very different from Eastman's,
and I think downrating the film
helped in that respect because we
managed to get very tight grain in

Clint 1Eastwood:
1M

the blacks and shadowed

S O

t>v Fuensanta Plaza

which worked for certain scenes
where the greenish-yellow color I
associated with Jones' deadly drug
was in evidence. For scenes with
other tones, I'd beef up the gels to
shift the balance back."
Goi adds that he rarely
used filters to enhance the color of
the film: "I'm not a big fan of using

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of filtration in

front of the camera unless I need it
for a specific effect. On Soul Stealer,
there was so much going on in
terms of lighting effects that I
worked very hard to keep my col¬
ored lights off the actors' faces."
This

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Fuji also has a slightly different
palette than Eastman: it registers
greens and yellows really well,

proved especially necessary
whenever he had to shoot the many

American Cinematographer - September 1991

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