American Cinematographer - July 2006 - 51

their space.

Furthermore, the camera's resolu¬

as

tion

If you're lighting a room
opposed to finessing everything
for the actors, and then shooting
long continuous takes on DV, you
can

do it fast. But I still had

camera

crew,

tric. You

a

full

with full grip and elec¬

definitely won't

save

time

diminished by masking

the
image with the camera's "letterbox"
setting. "At that time, it didn't have a
squeeze mode, so we weren't shoot¬
ing true 16-by-9," explains Kelly.
was

"Then

we

lost

some

more

in the

and money by cutting that."
In addition to facilitating long

conversion to 1.85:1. We

takes, the digital format had to sup¬
port the animators' needs, which

end."

sophisticated than they
Waking Life. "Waking
Life was shot with 60 interlaced
frames per second, and there were
major issues transferring to 24 fps
for the film-out," says Kelly. "Also,

sional difficulties for the animators,
who had to blow each frame up to

the animators needed

Gordoa. "If there isn't

were more

had been

on

to

have

a

good, solid frame to animate off of."
The filmmakers decided shooting in
24p would kill two birds with one
stone, but they wanted a small cam¬
era to allow for quick shooting in
practical locations. They chose
Panasonic's AG-DVX100, which

Kelly describes

"the best pro¬
sumer 24p camera on the market at
as

that time."

Kelly had plenty of experi¬
ence

with the

camera.

After shoot¬

ing a short film with one a year ear¬
lier, he had been impressed enough
by its capabilities to purchase one of
his

own.

"By the time Scanner came
was very familiar with

around, I

what the Panasonic could

and

couldn't do. I find DV is very much
like shooting reversal film - you
worry about your latitude
and where your highlights are
instead of worrying about the shad¬

basically

a

very

using
small part of that chip in the
were

That translated into

occa¬

1280x720 for reference before ani¬

mating. "What's going to be illus¬
trated is pretty much determined
when the footage is first shot," says
mation there for

a

a

face

lot of infor¬

or an area

of

the frame, the animators

might be
translating what you
they might run into prob¬

successful in
want, or

lems." He adds that the best capture
medium for the interpolated-roto-

scoping technique would be 24p
high-definition video.
Kelly did his best to satisfy the
animators' needs by shooting with¬
out filtration and tweaking some of
his lighting setups to preserve detail.
"I tended to light a bit flatter, defi¬
nitely not as contrasty as I normally
would," he says. "What I shot for was
a range of textures; I was squeezing
as

much information

as

I could out

of that Winch
He says

chip in the camera."
he "pretty much got free

rein" from Linklater

on

except when certain

lighting setups

that looked fine

on

that count,

the monitors

threatened to tax the animators'

video, when the highlights
there's nothing left."
Although the DVX100 con¬
ferred some advantages during pro¬
duction, it had handicaps as well.
For one, says Kelly, the Leica

interpretive skills. "The only time
Rick said something was when I
went too dark in the night scenes,

Dicomar

tle difficult, because

ows.

In

go,

to

a

zoom

lens, which equates

32.5-325mm

35mm, "was

zoom

good, but

lens in

you

take it off." For another, he

can't

was not

impressed by the wide-angle
adapters from Century Optics, the
only ones available at the time.

too

because he

was

worried about get¬

ting enough information in the
frame," recalls Kelly. "That was a lit¬
on

the set it

looked like

daytime. We just had to
make sure to darken it in post."
Given the heavy role of post
on the
project, there were occasion¬
al temptations to cut corners on the
set. "The nice thing was that we

These frames show how the animators' work

progressed on a
Top to bottom: video original, lines
only, in progress, finished character and finished scene.

shot of Freck in the diner.

American

Cinematographer 47
American Cinematographer - July 2006

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