American Cinematographer - May 1998 - 87

shoot

at 6

"The

fps," Reshovsky relates.
around

movement

would have been

Bono

quadruple speed.
used for the

But the mix of the song

video

was a

version

we

little different from the

did

our

tests on,

hard for Bono

and it

his
vocals at quarter-speed: the playback
of the song became this bizarre noise.
Even at 12 fps, it was tricky for Bono
to lip-sync the song at half-speed.
Phil thought that the combination of
was

too

to

sync

all these elements would lend the

otherworldly feel. There is a
strange quality to Bono's movements
in the finished clip, his mouth is

piece

an

-

nine

tries) tested Reshovsky's
resourcefulness, since he was

required to simultaneously operate
Panaflex

two

cameras

-

each fitted

scale on my computer. On the set, we
ended up cutting two slabs of wood
into gears that the cameras actually
rested

on.

We then

with 35mm E-series

locked the gears

lenses

moved

-

anamorphic
placed in the middle of the

diner booth.

close

cameras

sand¬

together

on a single dolly, as
each other as we could phys¬

to

-

O'Connor fluid heads

"We had both

wiched

one camera

physically inter¬
so that when I

ically get them, facing opposite
angles," Reshovsky explains, "At two
different points in the video, the two
cameras had to pan
away from Bono
in opposite directions but completely
in sync," Reshovsky explains. "We

both
-

were on

the other

would

immediately move in the
other direction. Everybody was
making fun of the gears because they
looked just like wooden cheeseboards! It was a crude system, but it
worked well."
Since the two

lenses

anamorphic

displayed

a wide expanse of
the diner in both directions simulta¬

Stacked

anamorphic
frames depict
U2's members:

(clockwise from
top left) singer
Bono, guitarist
The

Edge,

drummer

Larry

Mullen Jr., and
bassist Adam

Clayton. Tandem
Panaflex

running
fps
simultaneously
captured the
images, which
cameras

at 12

then
combined in

were

post.

neously, Reshovsky and his assistant
were the
only crew members who
could fit

on

the set. "It was like shoot¬

360-degree shot without the
movement," he recalls. "The way the
cameras were
configured, there was
no
way I could look through them,
so I was sitting on a dolly looking at
the two images on a monitor. My
assistant, Greg Rhineer, was using
ing

a

remote

focus 10 feet behind

also had

I

me.

lyric sheet with me,
because we had to pan or dolly at
certain points in the song. With the
half-speed playback, though, the
song was really hard to understand.
Bono would get lost at times, and I
would use a stopwatch to tell him the
next line that was coming!"
Reshovsky then tailored his
lighting to heighten the strange sense
a

of dislocation between Bono and the
rest

Asociate.

D&Naaocyvuliorfdtresy
Image

singing the song in sync, but his body
movements are double-speed like
everybody else's. He's in a different
world than the people around him,
even
though he's right there with
them

[physically]."
Shooting at 12 fps also length¬
ened the filming duration of the onetake video, extending the song's
actual five-minute

running time to

10 minutes. A number of

non¬

professional extras
move

were drafted to
into the booth at strategic

conversations
around the singer. The single-take
concept (which was nailed down in
moments to carry on

had

both

cameras

sandwiched

together

on single dollies as close to
each other as we could physically get

have

them. The

the

most

efficient way to

would have been
on

remote

to

heads

do it

put the cameras

[using]

a

single

controller, with the polarity reversed
on one

been
so

of them. But that would have

too

much

was an

expensive, and we only had
room

in the

location, which

actual closed-down diner in

Detroit.

"The

night before the shoot, I

got a book on gear design from the
library, and I enlarged some
diagrams I found in it to the proper

of the diner. "I lit Bono with

Dedo

light mounted right

camera
a

over

a

the

because Phil wanted him

to

hot, glowing quality," relates

cinematographer. "The other
people in the booth are exposed rela¬
tively normally, but he's got this extra
hotness to him. I used white light on
him with no gels at all, 2 'A stops over¬
exposed. But at one point, there's a
slight tonal shift in the song and we
dolly off to the counter of the diner.
When we dolly back to the booth,
there's a different person sitting
from Bono, and I felt it was an
appropriate time in the song to turn
off Bono's hot light and give both of
across

American

Cinematographer 81
American Cinematographer - May 1998

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