American Cinematographer - December 2003 - 34

the frame. He confronted the

"tearing"
problem by experimenting with various
combinations of heavy filtration all
through prep and even into principal
photography. "We used five or six differ¬
ent filter combinations throughout the
movie," he says. "We tried different
nets, colored nets, browns and blacks,
Tiffen Soft/FX and Tiffen Black ProMists. What seemed to work best was

a

heavy Schneider Black Frost
together with combinations of Tiffen
UltraCon. That mix really lent some life
to the highlights and flares."
The production's gaffer, Rick
Thomas, calls Dunn's approach "pretty
gutsy. He put ellipsoidals in the wings [of
the ballet stage] that were blaring right
down the lens. Every operator who saw
very

Less

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it

ran

back to the tent and said, 'I can't

anything! It's all flares!' Then we
played back the footage, and it was
incredible
it had all these little explo¬
sions of light that the dancers were
moving in and out of. They bloomed out,
but only for an instant, and then the
dancers emerged."
Dunn's extensive filtering also
see

-

worked to crush the shadow areas,

Equipment that works,
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"One of the great

things about the jour¬

ney on this project was discovering
we could get away with - how

malistic

could be and still read

we

contrast

what
mini-

ratios,

or

how deeply we could

dig into the shadows," says the cine¬
matographer. "We wanted to keep the
shadows rich, because otherwise the HD
becomes

a

fantastic

-

-

us

flat mush. A pure black is
dense and almost creamy

and the Schneider Black Frost gave
that

purity."
Dunn's

tation

propensity for experimen¬

put to the test immediately,
because his three-week prep period

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actually involved one of The Company's
biggest setpieces: an outdoor ballet
staged at night in Grant Park, along
Chicago's lakefront, in the middle of a
rainstorm. "That's something that actu¬
ally happened in the Joffrey's history,"
notes Dunn. "They started a perfor¬
mance and it began to rain, but the audi¬
ence stayed with it. We were still in prep
when

32

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was

we

had to shoot the sequence, so
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