American Cinematographer - June 1996 - 44

IN A SMALL,
PROJECTION
two DARKENEDand
watch
room,

men

sit

fragments of an action movie with
no soundtrack.
Beaming forth from
the wide-format
screen

beam

are

anamorphic
powerful images

of Tom Cruise, Emmanuelle
Beart,
Jon Voight, Kristen Scott Thomas,
Emilio Esteves, Vanessa
Redgrave
and Jean Reno. As the actors con¬
verse, struggle, or embrace in si¬
lence, their exclusive audience ex¬

changes

a few sparse comments:
"Tom's face is a little red."
"Emmanuelle needs more blue."
The setting for this scene
is Deluxe Laboratories in Los An¬

geles, where Stephen Burum, ASC
finalizing of the answer print
for Mission:
Impossible with timer
Denny McNeill.
is

After months of
prepara¬
tion and the frenetic
production it¬

self, the answer-print stage is

a

time of closure for
many directors
of
photography, a period when
they can sit back and appreciate
their work. Burum likens the cin¬

ematographic

| ing
|
|
|

|
'S

|T

process to "conduct-

symphony orchestra: you're
so busy bringing in the violins,
doing this and doing that, that you
don't have the real joy of listening
to the music, of really feeling the
music. And when you're
timing
and you get down to the third ana

I swer print,

£ you

it hits you all of a sudden:

have the time to enjoy what you

0

did. Until then,

«

When

you

| cinematographer
£
2

just don't."
a film, the

timing

scrutinizes the
color, brightness and quality of
each individual shot,
gauging its

£ coherence

against the surrounding

shots in the sequence. The answer

Imaging the Impossible
Cinematographer Stephen Burum, ASC

his longtime collaboration
with director Brian DePalma to
resumes

bring the seminal

spy premise of
Mission: Impossible to the
big screen.
by Benjamin Bergery

42

American

Cinematographer

June 1996

print is stricken directly from the
negative; its set of yellow, cyan and
magenta corrections are the foun¬
dation of an
interpositive from
which release prints will be
pro¬
duced, via the internegative. By the
second or third release
print, the

major timing adjustments have
merely a

been made, so the rest is
matter of
fine-tuning.

Burum, skin color

According to

is the clearest

indicator for refining
image quality
and tone at that final
stage.
"When
want to

you're timing, you

get a reference that will
serve as a standard, so that the lab
can
clip it out and put it next to
their timing machines," he ex¬
plains. "When there are major ad-



American Cinematographer - June 1996

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - June 1996

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