American Cinematographer - September 2004 - 53

Vicious Circles
For

a

daytime

interior set

f *1

inside the

Crawley family

■-

residence,

.

cinematographer

s

«

d

i

Declan Quinn

exploited the
location's 20'-tall

bay window,
which boasted

500-year-old
glass.

amber

"We wanted to

keep that color,
so I lit through
the glass and let
the color play,"
he says. To
control the
exposure,

Quinn

placed .3ND or
.6ND gels over
the windows that
were

visible in

the frame.

practical locations in southern
England, often at historic homes that
had just the right mix of elegance
and aristocratic decay. " [The Stanway
House] is not all refurbished and

Nair. "Its mustardcracking. You really
generations have lived

juiced up,"

says
colored stone is

feel that the

there, that it's not
When
inside

to

museum."

shooting night

these

needed

a

mansions,

scenes

Quinn

match the effect of candle¬

light. "For key light, we'd typically set
a
big softbox back at a distance and
put three, four or five lights in there,
[gelled] with a couple of different
colors
one slightly red, another
more clean," he
says. "Some were on
-

flickerboxes,

so

there's

a

bit of color

change in the light as it flickers,
which feels natural. For fill, we'd use
a

Rifa 88 just under the lens or along¬

side the mattebox." Made
the Rifa

light has

Chimera-like

a

by Fowel,
IK lamp inside a

casement

and

can

easily be handheld. Quinn warmed
fixtures by either dimming them
down to 40-70 percent or gelling
them with Fight Amber.
40

September 2004

Working with Kodak Vision2
500T 5218,

which he used for the

entire

picture, Quinn pushed the
stock to ISO 800 on night interiors,
"ft held up very well when pushed,"
he notes. "And it's very fine-grained,
I wasn't afraid to

it outside in

of the ways I've found to erase the
camera shadow is to mount a very
soft

light around the mattebox to
bigger source behind
camera." Battery operated and

blend with the
the

corrected

5500°K, these small

daytime." All in all, he gives the 5218
high marks. "I had a problem with
the first Vision 500T stock [5279]

them

because the flesh

had

up

use

tones

always

came

ruddy and it was too contrasty for

some scenes.

The

new

stock is

a

little

in the shadows and much
truer to flesh tones. That was really
helpful with Reese's pale skin; we
could get great detail in her face and
more

open

also have detail in the darker guys

alongside her."
For close-ups, Quinn had a
trick up his sleeve: thin light boxes
made for slide viewing. "One of the
biggest problems I have in lighting
and it's there every day - is that
there's a camera in the way," he says
with a laugh. "When you're lighting
women and trying to get a beauty
light, the camera is always right
where you want the light to be. One
-

panels

to

be attached to the matte¬
box with Velcro, creating an eye light
or gentle fill. Quinn started using

so

can

on

to

Cold Creek Manor, when he

shoot Sharon Stone with

10mm lens

on a

Steadicam. "It

a

was

the

only way to stop the camera from
shadowing," he says. "Now I do it all
the time. I always have a box of those
light panels with me."
Because of the production's
modest budget, the team was only
able

to

view film dailies of

a

few

select shots

during the first week on
location. "Film dailies in the first
week

or two are very important to
establishing the look of a film," notes
Quinn. "We projected them MOS
using an Arri FocPro."
When filming big exteriors,
the production took full advantage
of England's period architecture. All

exteriors set in Fondon

were

filmed
American Cinematographer - September 2004

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