While the F65 was announced some time ago, JVC’s first releases of information regarding a 4K camera probably predate the Sony offering. JVC’s GY-HMQ10, is of course a much smaller, lower-end and cheaper device, even given the competitive pricing Sony have mooted for F65. Much as it’s very likely to be the cheapest 4K camera in the world on release, though, this does create some challenges for JVC. Lens quality is a concern given that mere HD cameras, at a quarter of the output pixel count, often struggle to land enough resolution on their sensors with consumer-priced glass. There are issues of storage, and of processing power given that JVC’s camera is a single-chip Bayer device like more or less all of the other 2K-plus cameras that exist.

None of this is really news, though, so let’s think for a moment about what 4K is actually for. It’s a number cited a lot by people interested in matching or exceeding 35mm film, but it’s a sad fact that neither the photochemical nor digital-intermediate processes were ever capable of putting more than about 2K on screen, after all the duplication. The very best, slowest, 35mm negative has been measured at around 6K in laboratory conditions, but whatever you think of digital cinematography, it is unavoidable that D-cinema systems lose far less in the journey from the camera to the screen. As such, digital cinema probably only strictly needs 2K acquisition to equal what film has ever done.

With regard to glass, a lot of people are shooting on the relatively low-cost 4K cameras that are now available, but using lenses decades old. Much of this glass isn’t as sharp as the sensors with which it is paired, and while in some cases that is something that’s desired and looked for, it does question the idea that ever more pixel count is always useful. There’s also the argument as to whether a single Bayer sensor that’s 4000 pixels wide is really a 4K imager at all. It certainly doesn’t have the resolution of a device that would have been called a 4K film scanner or a 2K high-definition video camera with three image sensors and a color splitter block. Any single-chip camera has an RGB output that’s 67% interpolated guesswork, unless, like the F65 or Canon’s C300, the sensor oversamples the image by something like twice.

Even if you work around all this, though – if you shoot F65 with the best lenses, project it with Sony’s SXRD projector, and view it from one screen height away – how short-sighted do you have to be before it all becomes pointless? Not very. The average small-town projectionist has historically struggled to get the most out of a 35mm print, and I also fear the viewing public, who often can’t tell the difference between the ads and trailers that are in 3D and those that aren’t, will not be willing to pay more for 4K. Certainly not on the basis that it’s visibly any better than the 2K DCPs they’re watching at the moment, although I think that the situation with 3D proves that a proportion of people can be programmed to want something regardless of its actual merit. 4K as an origination format may make more sense, inasmuch as there should no longer be a concern about acquired resolution and the flexibility in post is a plus. Anyway, in the long term, until F65 there wasn’t really a 4K camera out there that you couldn’t argue about on some level, and nobody outside a dailies screening room, on a feature shooting very slow 35mm stock on excellent lenses, had ever actually seen a 4K image.

JVC’s GY-HMQ10 is another “4K” device that has a single 4K image sensor, and it is a consumer-targeted camera with a fixed lens that produces visible chromatic aberration that’s many pixels wide at the corners of the 4K output. It’s also a ½ inch sensor, tiny for one that has so many photosites on it, so other characteristics of the image are compromised – dynamic range is far from outstanding. All of this was made extremely obvious at the demo simply because the output of this poor little camera was being blown up by an excellent projector to an image twelve feet wide which I could stand a foot from.

All of this has been true of small prosumer cameras for ages, though. None of it stopped them from being used for higher-end work than perhaps would have been expected. Whether that really applies to the new JVC camera, where the resolution that makes it special is compromised by lens problems, remains to be seen.

There are interesting things being done, though. JVC’s camera deals with 4K as quad-HD, 3840 by 2160, for the very simple reason that the camera records the image – or will when released – on four SD cards in parallel, each using the 35Mbps codec that’s an off-the-shelf component for JVC. They intend to ship software to stitch these four streams back together to produce a single file for postproduction. This slightly Rube-Goldberg approach is presumably a side-effect of the desire to get the thing shipping quickly, but it does have the interesting implication that the 4K output has an aggregate bitrate of 140Mbps. This is a lot for HD if not 4K, and scaling the result to HD should make for a pleasantly  artifact-free image. It might even mitigate noise sufficiently to allow more cautious exposure, making that tiny, clippy sensor look much better. These measures might take the thing from being a fairly mediocre 4K camera to being a pretty reasonable HD one, for its size and cost.

In the prototype I saw, there were four HDMI outputs, each transporting one quarter of the image to the  DLA-RS4000U projector, continuing the quad-HD approach of the storage subsystem (although the projector offers a slightly more generous 4096×2400 resolution). Much as the camera is clearly targeted at the lower end of the market, the projector is a much higher-end piece of gear. Some 2K projectors use the fantastically named “wobulation” technique to achieve a slightly sharper image with better fill factor, but this thing is the real deal. There are three of JVC’s large 30mm D-ILA chips – the component which actually imposes the picture on the beam of light – and a proper 4K RGB output. The image is bright as a result of the Xenon lamp – wattage not given, although the entire device is rated at 825W – and the large effective F-number given by those big chips.

D-ILA, along with Sony’s SXRD and others, is a term for a liquid-crystal-on-silicon device, effectively a modulated mirror that places the LCD element on a polished metal surface as a reflective rather than transmissive controller of light. As such the liquid crystal device is bound directly to a comparatively large lump of metal that is easy to heatsink. LCoS can therefore tolerate an impingement of light that would cause a transmissive LCD to burst into flames, and can therefore use higher-density polarizing layers and produce higher-contrast images. The performance is not quite as good as DLP, but it is cheaper and can be easier to manufacture at high resolution. A few years ago JVC’s DLA-HD2K was the first consumer display that I saw successfully evaluated by Filmlight’s extremely fastidious Truelight calibration system, which would completely refuse to calibrate conventional TFT devices on the basis that the black level was too poor. It is not necessarily unreasonable for JVC to promote its D-ILA range as grading reference displays.

The demo I’ve seen of the LCoS projector and quad-HD camera combination are unscientific, and it is difficult to divorce my concerns about dynamic range from the knowledge that Japanese manufacturers actually seem to like their cameras like this. The Canon DSLRs, as both still and moving image devices, suffer a default colorimetry setup that tends to clip highlights harshly. The prototype camera that JVC is currently showing is far from complete, and I have no idea what, if any, control will be available over its contrast and brightness curves, or what may be intrinsic characteristics of the sensor. Other ambiguities are created by the combination of a low-end camera and a high-end projector, so it’s difficult to be unequivocal about the performance of either. What’s certainly true is that from F65 at the top end of the market to JVC at, well, not the top end, getting something that you can at least claim is a 4K camera is about to get a lot cheaper.

I’m just not sure whether that’s really necessary.

The article in its entirety can be see at www.btlnews.com

http://www.btlnews.com/crafts/camera/jvcs-take-on-4k/

David Jetre
Writer | Producer | Director | Designer
flickr | twitter | www.sandmerrick.com | www.jetrefilm.com

In its visual sweep and narrative scope, War Horse, directed by Steven Spielberg, harkens back to the kinds of movies Hollywood used to make. Much of the film’s impact derives from the eye-filling images created by director of photography Janusz Kaminski. And at a time when technology is remaking cinematography, the DP relied almost entirely on the cinematographer’s traditional toolbox – lighting, filters and framing.

“War Horse is a very old-fashioned way of moviemaking,” said Kaminski. “Everything is done in camera. All of the colorization of the images is done in camera; all of the compositions are in camera. That’s how I do it. And I don’t create the movie in the DI [digital intermediate]. I create the movie in the lab. I have photochemical dailies to go with digital dailies. The photochemical transfer was the guiding print for the DI.”

War Horse is based on a children’s book by Michael Morpurgo that was turned into a stage vehicle that won five Tony Awards including best play. It’s the story of a young boy, Albert, who raises and bonds with a horse, Joey. When World War I breaks out, Joey is commandeered along with other horses to do duty on the continent in the punishing conditions of the “Great War.”  In the end he returns and is reunited with Albert.

The film represents the 13^th collaboration between Kaminski and Spielberg, dating back two decades to the making of Schindler’s List, which garnered the DP his first Oscar for best cinematography in 1993. The second was for Saving Private Ryan in 1999. He was also nominated for Amistad, and French foreign film, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

Lighting the characters – and Joey – was an important consideration in filming the movie, especially in full daylight, which is usually not the case. “You want to have the characters illuminated with a sufficient exposure so you can at the same time get the richness of the landscape and the beauty of the sky and clouds behind them so that meant employing very strong lights,” he noted. “It’s about people shaping the land and their struggles to maintain their livelihood, so the land is a big part of the storytelling. You wanted the people to stand out from the landscape.”

The outdoor scenes in the film were shot in Devon, a picturesque area in the southeast of England and in the moorlands of adjacent Dartmoor National Park.  The English nature shots in Devon captured by Kaminski were some of the lushest since those captured by cinematographer Freddie Young in Ryan’s Daughter directed by David Lean.

Lighting Joey was even more of a challenge. (Actually five horses played Joey; each had a different skill, like the ability to lie down on command or turn his head toward the back).  “It’s much easier to light a person than a horse, which can get flustered by the bright set-up,” said the DP.  “We had to treat the horse like a movie star so we could light him properly.”  Because there was very little sheen on the horses, several lighting units were designed specifically for them. “At night or when you see the horse moving at a very fast speed through the landscape lighting was technically a big issue.”

One extended tracking shot in War Horse that moves through the infamous WWI trenches and captures soldier after soldier mired in the mud and vermin was shot by using a camera mounted on a technocrane that was itself placed on rails.   “That was very difficult to pull off and I’m very proud of that shot,” said the DP. For the scenes in the trenches, two films influenced Kaminski – A Very Long Engagement, photographed by Bruno Delbonnel for director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, lensed by Claudio Miranda for director David Fincher.

The films of John Ford, the iconic director of Westerns including Stage Coach and The Searchers, were also an impact on Kaminski and Spielberg, though no specific film was referenced.  “John Ford is ranked as one the best directors for exterior storytelling. He has become part of our tradition and the language of the cinema so naturally he had some influence.”

The film was shot  Arricams using two KodakVision 3 negative film stocks with Arri/Zeiss Master Prime lenses.  Multiple filters were often employed. The final shot of the silhouette of Albert on Joey against a brilliant red-orange sunset, was deliberately an homage to the well-known shot at the end of Gone With the Wind. “We shot at sunset, and there really was no color in the sky, but I used four filters and that created the red sky.”

Having worked together for so long, Spielberg and Kaminski have an unspoken language with each other. “We both have a similar take on how to tell stories,” the DP noted. “He works with the actors and the verbal language and I work with the shadows and the non-verbal and it’s a blast.”  Kaminski is currently lensing Spielberg’s next film, Lincoln.

The article in its entirety can be see at www.btlnews.com

http://www.btlnews.com/awards/contender-director-of-photography-janusz-kaminski-war-horse/

David Jetre
Writer | Producer | Director | Designer
flickr | twitter | www.sandmerrick.com | www.jetrefilm.com

Unlike other Academy Awards to be presented this year, achievements receiving Scientific and Technical Awards need not have been developed and introduced during 2011.  Rather, the achievements must demonstrate a proven record of contributing significant value to the process of making motion pictures.

The Academy Awards for scientific and technical achievements are:

Technical Achievement Award (Academy Certificate)

To Andrew Clinton and Mark Elendt for the invention and integration of micro-voxels in the Mantra software.

This work allowed, for the first time, unified and efficient rendering of volumetric effects such as smoke and clouds, together with other computer graphics objects, in a micro-polygon imaging pipeline.

Scientific and Engineering Award (Academy Plaque)

To Radu Corlan, Andy Jantzen, Petru Pop and Richard Toftness for the design and engineering of the Phantom family of high-speed cameras for motion picture production.

The Phantom family of high-speed digital cameras, including the Phantom Flex and HD Gold, provide imagery at speeds and efficacy surpassing photochemical technology, while seamlessly intercutting with conventional film production.

To Dr. Jürgen Noffke for the optical design and Uwe Weber for the mechanical design of the ARRI Zeiss Master Prime Lenses for motion picture photography.

The Master Primes have achieved a full stop advance in speed over existing lenses, while maintaining state-of-the-art optical quality.  This lens family was also the first to eliminate the magnification change that accompanied extreme focus shifts.

To Michael Lewis, Greg Marsden, Raigo Alas and Michael Vellekoop for the concept, design and implementation of the Pictorvision Eclipse, an electronically stabilized aerial camera platform.

The Pictorvision Eclipse system allows cinematographers to capture aerial footage at faster flying speeds with aggressive platform maneuvering.

To E.F. “Bob” Nettmann for the concept and system architecture, Michael Sayovitz for the electronic packaging and integration, Brad Fritzel for the electronic engineering, and Fred Miller for the mechanical engineering of the Stab-C Classic, Super-G and Stab-C Compact stabilizing heads.

This versatile family of 5-axis camera and lens stabilizers allows any standard motion picture camera to be fitted into the open architecture of the structure.  The system can be quickly balanced and made ready for shooting platforms such as helicopters, boats, camera cars or cranes.

To John D. Lowry, Ian Cavén, Ian Godin, Kimball Thurston and Tim Connolly for the development of a unique and efficient system for the reduction of noise and other artifacts, thereby providing high-quality images required by the filmmaking process.

The “Lowry Process” uses advanced GPU-accelerated, motion estimation-based image processing tools to enhance image quality.

To FUJIFILM Corporation, Hideyuki Shirai, Dr. Katsuhisa Oozeki and Hiroshi Hirano for the design and development of the FUJIFILM black and white recording film ETERNA-RDS 4791 for use in the archival preservation of film and digital images.

Specifically designed for laser film recording and widely used in the industry today, the high-resolution FUJIFILM ETERNA-RDS 4791 film stock is an important step in protecting the heritage of the motion picture industry.

Academy Award of Merit (Oscar Statuette)

To Franz Kraus, Johannes Steurer and Wolfgang Riedel for the design and development of the ARRILASER Film Recorder.

The ARRILASER film recorder demonstrates a high level of engineering resulting in a compact, user-friendly, low-maintenance device, while at the same time maintaining outstanding speed, exposure ratings and image quality.

Portions of the Scientific and Technical awards presentation will be included in the Oscar ceremony.

The article in its entirety can be see at www.btlnews.com

http://www.btlnews.com/awards/academy-announces-scientific-and-technical-awards/

David Jetre
Writer | Producer | Director | Designer
flickr | twitter | www.sandmerrick.com | www.jetrefilm.com

Among the many felicities of comedy-musical The Artist, French director Michel Hazanavicius’ captivating silent-film tribute to American filmmaking as the silent era transitioned to the talkies at the end of the 1920s and early 1930s, is the spot-on black-and-white cinematography of Guillaume Schiffman.  It’s therefore surprising to learn that the film was shot in color and later converted to the sensuous black and white that moviegoers see on the screen.

“We looked at available black-and-white film stock and it turned out to create images that were too sharp and not grainy enough,” says the director of photography. The solution decided upon with the director was to shoot the film in color, and then convert it to black and white. “We did a lot of advance tests and were lucky to have a long prep,” says the DP.

The Artist, a Weinstein Company release, is about a silent screen star George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) whose career is challenged by the advent of the talkies. He meets Peppy Miller (Berenice Bujo), whose fortunes are on the rise. The film taps themes from Hollywood classics such as Singing in the Rain and A Star is Born.

Hazanavicius storyboarded the entire screenplay and he and Schiffman spent a lot of time discussing their options during pre-production. Lighting and color scale became a key part of the story-telling. “Because there’s no dialogue, light has to tell you something, the shadows have to tell you something,” he says. “Michel told me how he envisaged the story, how he was going to play with the blacks and whites, shadow and light, and a lot of grays.”

Close coordination with production designer Laurence Bennett was also crucial. “If something on the set was blue, we had to determine how it would look against the background when it appeared in black and white,” he notes.

Schiffman used a Pan-Arri 435 ES camera and found some older lenses to soften the look. He also used special filters to diffuse the whites and mute the blacks a bit. The film was shot on Kodak 35mm VISION3 500T 5219 and converted to black and white at Laboratories LTC,Paris, France. A lot of fine-turning was done during the digital intermediate phase.

The Artist was shot entirely in Los Angeles over the span of only 25 days. Schiffman assembled his camera team locally, and has high praise for the professionalism of the Hollywood crew. “By American standards this was a very small film,” observes Schiffman. “But only once in a lifetime do you do a black-and-white silent movie that takes place in the 1920s, so everyone was very caught up in the special spirit of making the film.”  The camerawork was also shot in the traditional style, using dollies and tripods.

As part of the lead-up to starting the film, the director had the DP watch many movies from the 1920s and 1930s.  These included films by Franz Murnau, early King Vidor, Charlie Chaplin comedies and also some Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire movies. “I spent lots of time going to the Cinematheque [in Paris] when I was growing up so I was already familiar with some of these films,” says Schiffman. His father, an American, “liked  to take me to musicals, while my mother would take me to the latest cinema,” he recalls.   His mother, Suzanne Schiffman, worked on numerous films with French New Wave filmmakers including Jean-Luc Goddard and, in particular, Francois Truffaut. She was nominated for an Oscar for best original screenplay for Truffaut’s Day for Night.

Schiffman and Hazanavicius are close friends, and live near each other in Paris.  The Artist is their third collaboration. They previously worked together on two French James Bond spoofs, OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies and OSS 117: Lost in Rio.  Schiffman was also DP on a French film released in 2011, Gainsbourg: A Life, a biopic about the acclaimed singer.  The DP has received nominations for best cinematography from the Independent Spirit Awards, the European Film Awards and the Broadcast Film Critics Association.

The article in its entirety can be see at www.btlnews.com

http://www.btlnews.com/awards/contender-portfolios/contender-%e2%80%93-director-of-photography-guillaume-schiffman-the-artist/

David Jetre
Writer | Producer | Director | Designer
flickr | twitter | www.sandmerrick.com | www.jetrefilm.com

Melancholia is the visually stunning, apocalyptic new film from boundary-pushing Danish director Lars Von Trier.  The movie is a psychological disaster story about nothing less than the end of world. The title references the personal depression that starts unraveling a newly-wed bride, played to great acclaim by Kirsten Dunst.Melancholia is also the name of a giant planet that has appeared in the sky and is poised to crash into the earth.

The film boasts a sumptuous surface beauty, set against the existential unease and foreboding of the underlying plot. Both are expertly captured by director of photography Manuel Alberto Claro, who combines stately compositions with fluid, hand-held camerawork and sophisticated lighting.  Melancholia was the big winner at the recent European Film Awards, the continent’s version of the Oscars. Claro got the award for best cinematography and the film won for best picture and production design.

Melancholia begins with a hyper-romantic eight-minute prologue made up of a haunting series of painterly tableaux that surrealistically foreshadow the rest of the movie.  Following the static opening, Melancholia switches gears.  A high-spirited Justine (Dunst) and her new husband belatedly arrive in high spirits at the grand country house of her sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), where guests have gathered for a festive wedding reception. The atmosphere soon sours as family tensions flare and relationships fray. Justine can no longer hold it together and spirals into depression.

DP Claro photographed the brilliantly-lit, golden-hued scene (Von Trier wanted an over-the-top Danielle Steelfeel) with a panning and probing hand-held style. “The camera doesn’t know what’s going on, so it has to search and often arrives just a little bit late,” he says. “Lars wants the camera to react to what’s going on like in a documentary. He wants the camera to be spontaneous, just as he wants the actors to be spontaneous.”

The film’s budget was ample enough to give Claro the opportunity to utilize two state-of-the-art cameras. The film was one of the first to be captured with the new Arri Alexa digital camera, which became available just prior to the start of shooting. For the succession of super-slow-motion tableaux that open Melancholia, the DP employed the Vision Research Phantom HD Gold, which shoots at 1,000 frames per second.

The painterly images – Justine in her wedding dress floating Ophelia-like down a stream filmed with lily-pads; looking at flares of electricity leaping from her fingertips; standing amidst dead birds raining down on her – are careful composites of multiple captures by the Vision, sometimes at different times of the day, to produce dramatic lighting effects. To perfect the images, Claro also worked with visual effects supervisor Peter Hjorth whose main task was creating the approaching planet.

The film was shot in Cinemascope. “The wide-screen format helps make the film very cinematic,” observes Claro. “It’s easy to create very dynamic compositions, and it’s wonderful for scenes with a lot of actors and faces together because it diminishes the need for a lot of cross-cutting.”

For the first week of the Melancholia shoot, Von Trier was the camera operator, before passing the responsibility on to Claro. “Getting to work with Lars was like a dream come true,” says the DP, whose ambition to collaborate with Denmark’s best-known director stretches back 15 years to when he graduated from the Danish National Film School. (Born in Chile, hence the Latin name, Claro moved to Denmark at the age of four). DP Claro, 41, is set to repeat as a collaborator with Von Trier as DP on his next project, The Nymphomaniac.

The article in its entirety can be see at www.btlnews.com

http://www.btlnews.com/awards/contender-portfolios/contender-director-of-photography-manuel-alberto-claro-melancholia/

David Jetre
Writer | Producer | Director | Designer
flickr | twitter | www.sandmerrick.com | www.jetrefilm.com

Ever since I saw Blade Runner and Alien as a kid, I have always identified with Ridley Scott’s impeccable, lush and layered sense of Production Design.

Far and away his style is the most artistically balanced of any filmmaker. There are only a handful of other directors who have a well-trained eye to Production Design on par with Ridley Scott.

Naturally, I am very excited to see his Alien franchise prequel Prometheus this summer.

David Jetre
Writer | Producer | Director | Designer
flickr | twitter | www.sandmerrick.com | www.jetrefilm.com

Despite being of of the few genuinely entertaining movies this year, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows is not as tight a film as its predecessor.

After taking a while to get started, and once some rather awkward, underwhelming and underachieved scenes are endured, the movie picks up nicely for its second and third acts. The Production Design and Art Direction in this film are superior.

I’ll probably see it again, but there’s no rush.

David Jetre
Writer | Producer | Director | Designer
flickr | twitter | www.sandmerrick.com | www.jetrefilm.com

Hawaii serves as a pivotal character in The Descendants, director Alexander Payne‘s story of death and legacy. To fulfill such a role, establishing a strong sense of place became a primary objective for production designer, Jane Stewart, who spent approximately eight months in Hawaii with the production, including time in advance of the shoot location scouting and absorbing the unique culture and history of the islands.

Continuing her long-term collaboration with Payne, which began before his debut film, Citizen Ruth, and lasted through all of his features, Stewart reveals she had to take a different approach to stay true to this story because Payne prefers a plain realism in his settings, or as she says, “He is the king of banal, but the thing about Hawaii is that it’s really beautiful. I wanted to bring a lot of that in.” It’s not the kind of look that is found in the Midwest with its strip malls that were the setting of Payne’s films like Election and About Schmidt.

Stewart and Payne talked about how to open up the script and show the land, which is pivotal to the hero’s journey. “He is about saving the land,” shares Stewart. “The character reveals the history of the family. We are also seeing it visually. It’s very luxurious and has a kind of divine decadence to it. It’s very spiritual and you get the feeling there is a lot of history there.”

In The Descendants, Matt King (George Clooney) and his family are among the elite of the islands, descended from Hawaiian royalty and the early settlers that arrived with their bibles and missions. Stewart incorporated that history and class distinction into her design. “They live in these old plantation houses that used to be a half hour away from Honolulu by buggy,” explains Stewart.  “These places up on the hill were houses they would go to live in because of the breezes that came through. They were of a certain architectural time.”

The partially restored house used as the King residence in the film had belonged to the Robinson family, which were truly descendants of the type depicted in the movie. “It had an integrity to it that was real to me,” reveals Stewart. “That was part of what drew me to it.” However, the home had been striped of the original wood and painted shiny semi-gloss white. Because the film was the closest she had ever gotten to a period piece, Stewart pushed the envelope to give the home an old plantation style, having the art department completely restore the old woodwork. Following the trend of the late 16th century and early 17th century of using wallpaper depicting explorer Captain Cooke’s early experience with the Hawaiian Islands, the team also painted an illustration in the dining room, which, when combined with family paraphernalia, added to the historic authenticity needed for the story. “I wanted it to feel like it had been there since the ships arrived,” says Stewart. “I want people to want to go back to that house over and over again.”

Stewart credits her “other-half,” long-time set decorator Matt Calahan, as “a master at soaking up the different stores and shops and finding ways to do things with the amount of money they have.” During her research of Hawaiian lifestyles, Stewart took note of interesting details important to creating the story world. “Every house I went into was loaded with stuff. Everyone is a hoarder. I say this with love. I don’t know if people think that they’re on an island so they need to keep all these things,” comments Stewart. “When you’re dressing a set, you just layer it with lots of history, a little bit of the orient, some Americana – especially from the ’50s and ’60s – and that’s how it is.”

The article in its entirety can be see at www.btlnews.com

http://www.btlnews.com/awards/contender-portfolios/contender-production-designer-jane-stewart-the-descendants/

David Jetre
Writer | Producer | Director | Designer
flickr | twitter | www.sandmerrick.com | www.jetrefilm.com

“I have never designed a film with one set before,” said production designer Dean Tavoularis, who is best known for his work on epic movies like Bonnie and Clyde, Little Big Man, Apocalypse Now and The Godfather trilogy, (he won an Oscar for Godfather, Part II). He’s referring to Carnage, the latest film from director Roman Polanski. The comedy-drama takes place almost entirely in the living room of a Brooklyn apartment where two couples confront each other, first politely and then savagely, over a bullying incident involving their two sons.

“I like to look for contrasts in a film I’m working on, going from one atmosphere to another, an exterior to an interior – you can play off of these,” he said. “What struck me right away in reading the script was that there would never be a contrasting situation in Carnage. I also thought of the audience looking at one room for an hour and half.”

Polanski assured him that he wasn’t the only one working on the film and that “there were four very competent actors that could take care of the attention of the audience.” Jodi Foster, John C. Reilly, Kate Winslet and Christopher Waltz are the stars of the movie, which is based on a Tony-award winning play by Yasmina Reza, The God of Carnage.  When Reza visited the shoot on the sound stages of Bry-sur-Marne on the outskirts of Paris, she said that “the most moving moment was when I got a complete tour of Dean Tavoularis’ magnificent set.”

The realistic setting of a stylish, but not precious, contemporary apartment filled with books, primitive art and other objects is as important to the film as any of the characters, revealing the values of the residents while providing an environment that grows more claustrophobic as the tensions rise and twilight arrives.  There are other changes as the story unfolds, noted the production designer. “The camera becomes more mobile, the cuts quicker, the lighting darker, the window backings move into dusk.” The set’s floor plan also includes a bathroom, where a key scene gets played out, and a corridor outside the door to the apartment which leads to the building’s elevator.

Tavoularis is known for meticulous attention to detail and the 360-degree set even had objects placed inside of drawers of cabinets, in case Polanski asked one of the actors to pull something out in the course of filming.  He praises his set decorator, Franckie Diago, who had worked with him previously and is now a production designer in her own right. ““She was very gracious to accept working with me and I was so lucky that she was available,” he said.

In addition to his Oscar for Godfather Part II, Tavoularis was nominated four other times for an Academy Award for best art direction – Tucker: The Man and his Dreams, The Brinks Job, Apocalypse Now and Godfather Part III. In 2007 he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Art Directors Guild. His most frequent collaborator has been director Francis Ford Coppola, with whom he has done 10 films. He also has been production designer for directors Arthur Penn, Michelangelo  Antonioni, Wim Wenders and William Friedken.

After a 50-year career, Tavoularis, 79, came out of  a decade of semi-retirement to do Carnage. “I couldn’t turn down the chance to do another film with Roman,” said the production designer, who also worked with the director on The Ninth Gate.  He now spends most of his time painting. Earlier in 2011, his work was exhibited at the Grand Palais in Paris, in a one-man show titled “Dean Tavoularis: The Magician of Hollywood – Cinema in Painting and Painting in Cinema.”

The article in its entirety can be see at www.btlnews.com

http://www.btlnews.com/awards/contender-%e2%80%93-production-designer-dean-tavoularis-carnage/

David Jetre
Writer | Producer | Director | Designer
flickr | twitter | www.sandmerrick.com | www.jetrefilm.com

When I ask production designer, Patrizia Von Brandensteinwhat her mindset is when she begins a period project she immediately answers, “Terror.”

It needn’t be. Patrizia (she’s earned first-name treatment) is a legendary production designer who has demonstrated extreme comfort and dexterity working in any decade in any century in just about any place on Earth.

In Albert Nobbs, she’s designed a closely constricted world in poverty-stricken Dublin, circa 1894, for a hotel headwaiter who is a woman masquerading as a man. The role is a tour de force and a longtime passion for Glenn Close who first played Albert off-Broadway some 20 years ago, and persuaded Patrizia to join her quest to make the film when they were together in Australia in 2000 filming South Pacific for ABC. “Her storytelling was so compelling, and I got intrigued,” Patrizia says.

The two stumped across Europe (Budapest, Berlin) the next summer seeking a locale and talking to financiers about the story of a woman so afraid of falling into poverty and so traumatized by early life events, that she takes on the identity of a man. “It’s an Irish story and once we reached Dublin we knew it couldn’t be done anyplace else,” Patrizia says.

She demurs when asked if Close sought her participation as an inducement to producers, but her filmography was surely an attraction: three movies with director Mike Nichols, including two starring Meryl Streep (Postcards From the Edge, Silkwood); and four films with Milos Foreman, including Goya’s Ghosts, in which Patrizia offered her take on 18^th century Spain.

She’s covered New York at the turn of the 20^th century (Ragtime) and Chicago in the 1920s (The Untouchables), receiving Oscar nominations for both films.

She’s done 1930’s New York City (Billy Bathgate); 1950’s Louisiana (All the King’s Men); 1970’s Cleveland (Kill the Irishman); and New York again in what was then present-day 1987 (Working Girl).

Recently, in three years (2008-11) she designed 20^th century Russia (The Last Station), the present-day Outer Banks of North Carolina, and created a jet-setting take on the present day for Bradley Cooper (Limitless).

Of course she’s best known for her lush depiction of Mozart’s 18^th century Vienna in Amadeus, which won her the Oscar for best art direction.

“I guess I’ve been around,” Patrizia admits. “My husband says I can order dinner in 12 languages.”

Producers and directors came and went from Albert Nobbs, but the project didn’t come together until last year when director Rodgrigo Garcia (Passengers, Things You Can Tell by Looking at Her) and his production team came on board.

Approaching the 19^th century, Patrizia says, “I didn’t know the specifics of Dublin, but if you have a curiosity about a place and time, and a grounding in history and social culture, you can discover what you need to know.” She researched newspapers, diaries and old flyers as she recreated Albert’s Dublin.

But the key was finding Cabinteely House, a three-story stone house built in 1769 with “wide hallways and multiple runs of bedrooms along those halls, a big, square kitchen and a big back yard surrounded by a stone fence.” The building has been owned and preserved by the Irish government for nearly 100 years.

Asked if it was difficult to work in a 240 year-old building, she says, “It is absolutely more difficult working in a building like that than on a stage,” but with a budget of 6-million euros (well under $10 million at the time) building stage sets was not an option, she says.

The building was used for multiple sets, most of them interiors within the hotel where Albert lives and works, including the set that most defines him, his bedroom. Patrizia created it from a 3^rdfloor attic, partitioning it in half, limiting it to one small window and a little fireplace. “Because Albert has no life, it was important that we make his room as plain as possible, keep it stripped down and bare. We eliminated everything that could have been a distraction, leaving just a bed and the candle and the money (hidden) in the floor.”

That said, the textures alone of the coarsely woven fabrics on the thin bed linens, especially the pillow case which stands out in one particular scene, hold the eye longer than one would have imagined through Close’s restrained performance.

“That’s all in contrast to the relatively densely decorated interiors throughout the Victorian hotel,” she says. “The hotel has seen better days,” but the look nevertheless derives from a time when everything from carpets to woodwork to furnishings, was far more detailed and ornate.

When she first landed in Ireland, she “was overwhelmed with how many myriad colors of green could possibly exist,” she says. It stayed with me and I wanted at least a little green in every set, with some of them being very green indeed. It makes for lots of very cool backgrounds,” which is appropriate for Albert’s world, “and then when you do include a brilliant spot of color, there is a warmth to it, and it means something,” she says.

The only set that allowed Patrizia to throw open some space, as well as her purse strings, was a tea shop specializing in chocolates where Albert goes on an extraordinarily stiff date. The opulence of the setting, the brightness of the tablecloths and place settings, the height of the ceiling, the commotion of the patrons and the staff, all provide a devastating contrast to Albert’s smallness and containment; it’s a great example of filmmakers at the top of their game working brilliantly in concert with an actor giving a magical performance, to create a stunning movie moment.

It’s been more than 20 years since Patrizia’s last Academy Award nomination. It may be an uphill climb for her here because even though Albert Nobbs takes place in a period whose visuals often scream for attention, the film’s look is by necessity tremendously restrained. The degree to which Patrizia is recognized this season will be in proportion to her peers’ willingness to recognize excellence not in the one more thing added, rather, in the last thing taken away.

The article in its entirety can be see at www.btlnews.com

http://www.btlnews.com/awards/contender-production-designer-patrizia-von-brandenstein-albert-nobbs/

David Jetre
Writer | Producer | Director | Designer
flickr | twitter | www.sandmerrick.com | www.jetrefilm.com