Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Production Background 4: Cinematography Approaches

Cinematography has always been my favorite part of the film making process. And I’ve always loved documentaries that make a bold stylistic choices in their cinematography: films like The War Photographer, To Be and To Have, Fast Cheap and Out of Control…. These documentaries somehow are able to distill their essence, their ‘way of seeing,’ into concrete and unconventional cinemagraphic choices. Even with the sound turned off, a viewer of these films can be transported into a very specific and powerful mind-frame.

It’s also a very fine line. I've seen overly-bold choices that don’t quite work, and end up looking gimmicky and distracting. And when I think of my other favorite documentaries – Paris is Burning, Sound and Fury, Our Brand is Crisis – these don’t do anything bold or unconventional. They simply make the right choices from the conventional ‘bag of tricks,’ and execute them very well.

For this doc, the approach was to simply follow our instincts, try out a ton of things, and watch carefully for what felt right. I hoped for a really bold breakthrough, but didn't want to end up in gimmick-land.

APPROACHES THAT FAILED:
One initial "bold" idea was to commit to the idea of the “procession” – to try to capture the flowing vitality of the moving rara in as much of the footage as possible. This would mean: all of the interviews would use a pulled-zoom (so the picture is always zooming in or out super-slowly); all of the b-roll and city-scapes would be shot in a dolly or glide-cam.

In the end, not such a great idea. We still hadn’t quite found our story, and knew it would take a ton of interviewing to discover the right material. So the idea of one of us committing to doign nothing but pulling zoom through 150 hours of interviews didn’t sound too productive. Also, the glide-cam b-roll (especially using a wide-angle adapter) just ended up looking like a low-budget rap-video.

Scrap that.

Another idea was time-lapse. This is far from revolutionary, but I wanted to see how time-lapses could be used not just as “the city as a machine” or “watch the patterns as a process unfolds.” Rather, I wanted to explore time-lapse for mood. A lot of the documentary is about an invisible side of the city, just below the surface. I hoped that I could find a lot of time-lapses that could take a viewer “below the surface” or take them from the familiar city to the unfamiliar.

In the end, these image sequences were hard to find and harder to capture. Here’s a few of the ones I liked best: showing the transformation of Prospect Park after dark, the changing of “cultural ownership” of a public environment, the creation of a ritual space….

Most of these ended up on the cutting-room floor (or the banished regions of my hard drive). But that’s what blogs are for…
[The second time lapse is shot from the top of the
Arc De Triomphe. Thanks Parks Department!]

SUBTLE THINGS THAT STAYED IN THE FILM:
For whatever reason, two things I started seeing in the footage and liking were foreground silhouettes, and shots of characters descending into basements. The silhouettes just “felt right,” and for whatever reason felt in-line with the mood I wanted to create. And the basement shots came the closest to conveying the “hidden world” theme. Much of the Brooklyn Haitian roots community exists literally and figuratively “underground.” So I started watching for and capturing all of the moments of characters walking down stairs to hidden vodou temples, to illegal basement apartments, to under-ground rehearsal spaces… Here's a few examples of each:

Foreground silhouettes

[B-roll of train and Statue of Liberty; Kone rehearsal; street scene in garage]

Descending into basements:

[Drummers entering a basement vodou ceremony; Dadou's construction job in the bowels of a Manhattan skyscraper; and Joujou's basement apartment]


These are very subtle, and most likely an audience member wouldn’t notice them as visual themes at all. But in the end that’s what the film seemed to need.


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