American Cinematographer - January 1997 - 86

not want to let this old material out

of their

sight.
"Instead,

we put my Eclair
tripod, with a 9.5-57mm
Angenieux zoom, and placed these
frail, old drawings on the floor on
a tilted board, to try to keep the
material parallel to the film plane.

ACL

on a

But the results

terrible, and

were

could not keep it parallel. One
day, Amy Steckler [of Burns' com¬
pany, Florentine Films] came up

we

with

a

solution. She had been look¬

ing at her refrigerator, and she sug¬
gested that we get a piece of flat
ferrous metal and stick the material
to it with magnets. It worked won¬

derfully. We do it that way to this
day, shooting most of the flat art
standing vertically, camera on a tri¬
pod, moved by hand."
Burns' cinematographers

From the international suc¬
cess

of "Clerks" at Cannes,

through the dominating

presence at student film festi¬
vals throughout North America,

have found that not

an ani¬
aesthetic

through worldwide industry
acceptance of graduate stu¬

blessing. Says Moore, "The human

dents, Vancouver Film School

feel is much

more

positions students for success.

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-

evocative than

stand, and

more

camera

a

empathy
by

is moved

combining archival material

and present-day footage; his idea is
that the archival material should
become a live-action event, and
that the live landscape should be
like an archival image, a moment
frozen in time, with the timeless

quality of an old photograph."
The filmmakers do

use an

animation stand when

filming cer¬
tain material and pieces of artwork.

If the shot involves bound volumes
or

Acting for Film & Television
3D

an

hand. Ken likes to turn the tables

past decade and predictions for
even more growth to the end
of the century, shouldn't you do

items too frail to be

hung by

magnets to the metal easel, a still

photographer takes

an 8" x 10"
chrome with a view camera, which
is then shot on an animation stand.

Says Squires, "Anything

on which
need a zoom, or a move that
needs to be precisely timed, is done

we

on an

art

Oxberry."
Lighting for reflective flat

was

created with two Lowell

Tota-Lights bounced into umbrel¬
las at 45-degree angles to the easel.
Expounds Squires, "We shot all of
the flat art on 48, at T5.6. Of course,
most lenses are sharpest one or two

stops down from wide open, so
just standardized it at T5.6."
These images were captured solely
with prime lenses: a Cooke 75mm
we've

and

a

Nikkor 55mm

1168 Hamilton Street, Vancouver,
B.C. Canada V6B 2S2

84

using

January 1997

macro.

To gain some respite from
the requisite talking heads and ar¬
chival material, Burns regularly
recruits

experimental filmmaker
bring his "expres¬
sionists language" to the films.

Peter Hutton to

Hutton, the current Chairman of
Bard

College's film department,
taught Burns, Squires and other
documentarians at Hampshire Col¬
lege 18 years ago. Now, Burns so¬
licits Hutton to produce evocative
black-and-white time-lapse se¬
quences in historical locations.
Says Hutton, "These little seg¬
ments for Ken's

films are derived
from my own interest in getting
cinema down to the essential ingre¬
dients of

light and movement. In

my own personal work, I do por¬
traits of cities and landscapes, al¬

in black-and-white, always
looking to bring filmmaking down
ways

to those essential elements.

"In Thomas

Jefferson, I did
light studies at
Monticello, all time-lapse blackand-white, of light traveling
through the rooms. Jefferson was
interested in skylights, and there
are a lot of
fascinating opportuni¬
ties to play with light there. I prac¬
tice contemplative cinematogra¬
phy. I never use any lights, just
a

of

series

natural illumination. On this

project, it

and the
a couple
of high-quality prime lenses on
the turret, sitting in a room at
Monticello waiting for the light to
move
through it while clicking off
single frames."
After spending consider¬
able time canvassing Monticello,
both Moore and Squires maintain
camera, a

just

was

me

little Bolex with

that the national monument's in¬
herent splendor was ample com¬

pensation for all of the obstacles
that had to be

overcome.

Moore, "I've shot all
world and have

Notes

over

never seen

the

any¬

place more conducive to creating
striking images than Monticello.
Thomas

Jefferson chose

an

in¬

credibly spectacular location; the
gardens, the house, and the land¬
scape are so well thought-out and
planned, it is almost impossible
not to make beautiful pictures
there."

♦
American Cinematographer - January 1997

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