American Cinematographer - November 1999 - 72

AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER

A Less-Than-Civil War

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grain because I think it looks

better on the screen, and I wanted the

image to be smoother for this film."
Lee's shot selection lent

a

third-party, almost observational feel
to

the camerawork. "That's the way

Ang saw the story," Elmes states. "He
likes to have a good sense of the
geography in a scene. Hand in hand

other necessities.

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with that, he likes the

sense

of the

sitting back and watching the
His feeling is that the camera

camera
scene.

shouldn't

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approach are the
noticeably smooth tracking shots
used during several horseback action
sequences. The film's opening finds
Jake Roedel racing on his steed across
a field in order to attend a
wedding.
In that instance, a nearby dirt road
offered Elmes the rare luxury of
using a camera car. To compensate
for the bumpy trail, a Steadicam was
employed to absorb most of the jolts.
"We found that we could easily use a

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Further enhancing the camera's

Panel Discussions-

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75mm, 100mm
shoot a close-up

or

150mm lens to

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off

of a rider with the
camera car
trucking alongside, as
long as the Steadicam was part of the
system," the cameraman recalls. "The
Steadicam proved to be a very good
rig, and Tom Lohmann is very good
at using it."
The tight confines of the
woods, however, required a different
technique. "We'd try to find locations
that had a pathway nearby, so we
could build a dolly track and just
push the camera along really fast for
a short run. If
you're clever, you can
one scene

side of the

one

dolly and then turn the camera
around and do the same dolly move
while shooting in the opposite direc¬
tion, because you have great woods
on

the other side
In

one

as

well."

hectic scene, Roedel,

Chiles, Clyde and Holt are trapped
inside a burning farmhouse by
Federal troops, and a violent firefight
ensues. Inside the house, "we had a

couple of handheld cameras running
simultaneously, and
70

we

lit the inte-
American Cinematographer - November 1999

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - November 1999
