"THE KILLERS" 35mm Film Noir

“THE KILLERS”

Making of….

 https://vimeo.com/115938375

This was a DREAM project for me! When director Alex Chikov contacted me to shoot this project, I instantly jumped at it! He wanted a pure non-digital film noir piece shot on celluloid with vintage gear…and I just happened to own these pieces of machinery.

I started as a film shooter and had migrated to digital...but I still owned several film cameras. I had recently acquired a beautiful Mitchell BNCR camera package with a full set of vintage Super Baltar primes from Martin Hill...in trade for an Arri 2C camera package I was not using….pound for pound, I got the better part of the deal.

After shooting both lens & camera tests on this 65+ year old camera, I felt confident with its performance.

Meanwhile, Alex had assembled a group of incredible actors who studied the 1940’s dialogue delivery and performance of the classic noir pictures. His wardrobe department complimented the actors with fantastic period costumes. The location was an actual abandoned diner and the incredible art department headed by Sarah Young peeled back the decades and recreated a beautiful post WW-2 interior, complimented with period props.

I had a meeting with Alex and we viewed many samples of the noir films that he wished to emulate. I studied those films and the incredible black and white hard light and exposures that those cinematographers created. MILDRED PIERCE, shot by the incredible Ernest Haller, ASC was a particular inspiring motion picture.

Director Alex Chikov rehearses the cast, who have removed their heavy overcoats & hats due to the location’s heat. Gaffer Russ Faust, in background, lights the set.

As things came together, the camera department met up and we had a quick “Mitchell ‘boot-camp’ school” and went through the process of building, loading and threading the big BNCR camera…checking lubrication and all the blimp housings, etc…needless to say, they LOVED playing with this classic camera!

Michael Wooten preps the slate as 1st AC Amy Faust and camera operator Alex Esber wait, note the array of lights in the ceiling and upper shelf of the location.

Amy Faust checks the gate, Alex Esber spins the shutter to the open position

Russ Faust gaffed this project and we spoke at length about trying to use ONLY period lights, no modern Kino or LED fixtures, ALL tungsten Fresnel units. The big fly in the ointment was that this was shot mid-summer during a bit of a humid heatwave, the location was non-air conditioned [since it was abandoned to begin with, the only power was the electricity we provided by our genny]..and the poor actors were complete troopers by doing their work while wearing fedoras, wool long coats with shirts and ties, etc… praise the makeup department for keeping everyone looking great under those hot lights and the very stuffy environment.

Shooting in Black & White means thinking in terms of gray scales…..gray tones are what colors render in B&W so you must think in terms of BOTH exposure AND Gray values. Colors of on-screen items such as wardrobe, props and set walls become gray tones, and you must understand and work with those values to separate the subjects from the environment background. Having a means to check these gray values is important…I used to use Polaroid stock to check exposures and gray values when shooting film [Polaroid 667 & 669 stock on a Mamiya 660SE camera [my AC called it “the Goose” based on the way 600SE looked in the label on the camera case]…with the advent of digital still cameras, shooting exposure tests has become so much easier and cheaper than the Polaroid days]…also the Film Noir lighting style used these gray values in a very artistic manner…the shadows and tones helped visually tell the story. Fedora hats, worn by the actors, added an extra challenge to lighting as we needed to adjust the height of our key lights to allow the illumination of the actors eyes as the hat’s brim would flag light off their face…this can be worked into the scene to either illuminate or block the light on the actor’s face, depending upon the needed emotional feel we wish to express.  

The ONLY modern gear we used was my Moviecam Compact that was used for a shot inside the backseat of the 1940 Buick for the initial shot as the BNCR would never fit inside that car! We also used the Moviecam on the Lenny Arm for the high-angle establishment shot.

Gaffer Russ Faust watches the Moviecam Compact on the Lenny Arm

Director Alex Chikov created a very loyal recreation of the classic film noir pictures of that era in this proof of concept short film. He established the period pacing of that era with the longer duration shots, had the actors play inside the frame and really emulated the look and feel in every detail.

Needless to say, we had a BLAST shooting it 

Dolly Grip Kevin “K-Mart” Martt discusses today’s special with the Mobsters.

Mandatory wrap photo

Some BTS photos….

CREW:

Alex Esber….Camera Operator

Amy Faust…1st Assistant

Michael…..2nd Assistant

Russ Faust…Gaffer

Scott Lipez…Best Boy

Kevin Martt…Dolly Grip

Mike Dittiacur….Key Grip

Jale Hosfeld….Best Boy

Dave Jarred…Grip

Production Design…Sarah Young

Prop Master…Ben Miller

Set Dec…Randy Miller Vanessa O'Kelley Andrew Southworth

Audio….Zach Mueller Nigel Maxwell

Director….Alex Chikov

DP…Jeff Barklage

AAA Holiday Stop-Motion TV spot

https://vimeo.com/478322623

“Hey Jeff….I’ve got a project right up your alley!!”

That was the initial start, when Don Lee from the Horizon Companies called to inquire if I would be interested in shooting and animating a stop-motion animation Holiday spot for the AAA company.

What else was I gonna say? J

Chris Weber conceived this charming Holiday spot and illustrator Bart Browne visualized the story into a set of really beautiful storyboards.

Bart’s storyboards

with my scribbled notes…

Much of the set were standard store-purchased Christmas trees, lights, decorations, but the crucial ingredients were the figures of the family and the AAA Guy…the AAA truck also became somewhat of a challenge to locate.

Our basic setup with the house lights on…

Note the elevated set,,,

We searched for generic designed toy human figures, of a workable size of over 5” high, with some limited articulation. I could have custom sculpted and cast foam latex figures with a machined ball & socket armature [like we have done in the past], but the style and look of this animation was to be more rudimentary “LEGO” style with obvious plastic figures and I chose to shoot the animation on “two’s” instead of more smooth “one’s” [film runs at 24 frames per second, so you would normally shoot 24 separate motions in animation per 1 second of screen time, that is called “one’s”; we choose to shoot 12 movements per second instead to not only save time, but to make it look a bit more “rough” and slightly amateurish, so for each movement of the animation, we shot 2 frames. The Christmas classics RUDOLPH THE REDNOSED REINDEER was shot on “two’s” & “Four’s”].

These figures had limited articulating joints, such as their shoulders could move but not their elbows, their neck/heads could only rotate about 10 degrees per direction...but this actually added to the charm of the animation [in my opinion]. We ended up purchasing a “nuclear” family with a mom, dad, son, daughter, grandmother & grandfather….we used the family [minus the daughter] and we turned the grandfather into a much younger AAA Guy buy repainting his gray hair black and adding a painted AAA vest and logo...grandmother joined the ranks of “non-essential personnel” and stayed out of this production along with the daughter. We hear they are currently vacationing in Barbados.

The AAA truck was a standard radio-controlled toy truck that had the motorized transmission removed and received a new red paint job and AAA graphics.

The set was an elevated set, based atop of 3 large folding heavy-duty tables, with 2 layers of foamcore taped to the tabletops, the carpet was taped atop of the foamcore. The reason for the foamcore was to give us a method to physically “pin” the stop-motion figure’s feet to the floor surface for stability…I drilled tiny holes in each figure’s feet and utilizing T-pins, we were able to stabilize each figure to the floor surface.

As you can see, the set dressing was standard Christmas stuff and we tried to work out ways to stabilize the wrapping paper, giftboxs and other toys in the immediate area of the animation as the repetitive hands-on animation might lead us to bump into and move some of these items.

Bart Browne did an incredible job art directing the set and asked if he could help animate some of our scenes….to be honest, I was skeptical as I had no experience working with him in this capacity, but since we had several characters together in several scenes, it seemed like a good idea to try him out on one of the characters….and since we could instantly play back the take, we could see how his animation looked. Well, I was VERY happy to see that he knew what he was doing and injected a bit more personality into a plastic and extremely stiff dolls! So we went ahead and shared the animation chores. It turns out that Bart is not only a very gifted artist [check out his storyboards] but has a lot of experience with CG character animation! Check out his website:   www.bartbrowne.com

Usually when you approach any animation shoot, you make up animation “dope” sheets out ahead of time...well, this time we simply winged it!

We did some in-camera effects during the animation such as focus racks and camera pans… simple really, I marked off 1mm dashes on a piece of tape and using a pointer made from a scrap of plastic, articulated the tripod head or the focus wheel.

Editor Steve Bruns assembled the footage, slid the VO track and music to fit, occasionally ramped the animation speeds to help everything fit.

SFX editor Bill Scholik added some very nice embellishments to the piece: headlights and flashers to the truck & car, smiles on the toy robot & stuffed bear, steam on the hot coco in the tag, etc…

Steve also had to deal with the opening atmospheric montage sequence of the various pans/tilts/diagonal shots I shot [in real time] of the Holiday icons: Nutcrackers, toys, ornaments, colored lights, etc…. we were not sure how much we needed of this stuff so I just hosed down the entire set for about 10 minutes J

Director Don Lee supervised everything and made suggestions when we would talk through the animation before each shot. We would act out the figure’s movement and time those motions with our iPhone stopwatches. If I remember correct, the only shot that we did 2 takes was the ending shot where the yellow car filled with the family speeds away as we rack-focus the lens from the family to a waving AAA Guy! We initially setup the shot to reflect Bart’s storyboards with the kid sitting up on the convertible section of the car [between a seated mom & dad] and waving to the AAA Guy…but once Don saw that footage, he advised us that the child’s placement on the car might not fly with the client as it is a bit too risky...so in order to make the boy “fit” in between mom & dad we had to take a saw and dismember our young lad at the waist! With a bit of poster putty to hold him in place, he waved away to the AAA Guy...but we had finished shooting his other scenes anyway, so a little bi-section was Okay!

I am very thankful that Don Lee called me to shoot this charming Holiday spot for him! He has an incredible facility and sound stages and we really had a blast playing with toys [and getting paid to do so!!]

Shot with classic Cooke Speed Panchro primes [and a little bit of SupraFrost filters] on my Red Scarlet.

CREW:

Director/EP: Don Lee  The Horizon Companies

Writer: Chris Weber

DP/Head Animator: Jeff Barklage

Production Designer/Co-Animator: Bart Browne

Gaffer: Dave Lee

Editor: Steve Bruns

CG/FX: Bill Scholik

wrap shot!

Bart Browne, Don Lee and me!

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