By Douglas Bankston, January 16, 2008
The things people do when they think no one is watching makes for good entertainment. With the proliferation of surveillance cameras, that "entertainment" can bring out the inner voyeur in all of us, and Look, written and directed by Adam Rifkin, does just that. The independent feature unveils secrets of a variety of characters through a series of interweaving stories that range from comedic to disturbingly dark.
For Rifkin, inspiration for the movie came in the mail--in the form of a costly traffic-light violation accompanied by a picture of himself behind the wheel. ("I say it was yellow," he maintains.) The fact that the authorities sent him his picture got the mental gears turning, and after in-depth research on the art of surveillance, Rifkin wrote the script for Look. The film was shot in its entirety over just three weeks, and the result is a compelling exposé of secrets and surveillance that was the jury prize winner at the 2007 CineVegas Film Festival. (It opened theatrically in December with a slow roll-out release.)
"Everybody is a bit of a voyeur," Rifkin notes, "and I wanted to make the audience an accomplice to what was going on. I wanted to force them to look in on something that they knew they shouldn't be watching. I hope that people are titillated by the voyeurism but also a little ashamed as they look at something that is none of their business."
Chicago-based cinematographer Ron Forsythe handled director of photography duties. Forsythe became involved in the project because of his previous work with Producer Brad Wyman. Wyman was responsible for getting Look in front of Executive Producer Barry Schuler (formerly of AOL fame). Digital guru Scott Billups worked his magic as the visual effects supervisor and as an additional photographer when needed.
The small team of cast and crew traveled around Los Angeles in vans, employing stealth tactics rivaling those used by some government agencies. "The whole project was liberating," Rifkin says. "This was very guerrilla-style moviemaking. The crew was so small and the amount of equipment so small--we didn't light any location. All we did was put our cameras in the places where actual surveillance cameras already were. A lot of times I wouldn't even tell the actors where the cameras were--in most locations, they were hidden."
The cameras of choice were Sony HDW-F900s and HDC-F950s (of which the head and recording deck can be separated) with Fujinon HD zooms.
"I knew what the capabilities of the cameras were," Forsythe adds, "and I'm a menu junkie, so I was inside the cameras tweaking them all the time. I was my own digital imaging technician. We were smart in picking locations that were lit in a certain way. Also, we knew what our capabilities were in post.
"I had an extensive sit-down with Scott [Billups] and learned what he knew about Magic Bullet," Forsythe continues. "I had never really sat down like that because I don't have the patience to be a post guy. I learned enough to know what we would do in certain situations. We didn't do a lot of setups. We would run a scene with just two cameras 10 or 15 times, but that was all they had to cut to. There was no cutting to a close-up. It was a whole different approach than normal moviemaking."
The idea of using actual surveillance cameras did come up, but the idea of being locked to a particular degraded look didn't sit well. "The better the image, the more choice you have for degrading it," Billups says. "If it's already degraded, you've painted yourself into a corner."
So Forsythe captured pristine high-def imagery with a two-camera setup as much as possible. "I rented an old motion-control head and mounted that on top of a junior stand," says the DP. "We used it to put the camera way up in the air, and we made critical adjustments using the mo-co head. A lot of times my cameras were on lighting stands to get that high angle. People in general don't pay attention, so when you hoist a camera in the air and put some crap around it that makes it look like a construction site, nobody notices."
This surreptitious filmmaking style actually freed the production from having to control the location backgrounds or shoot extensive coverage of scenes. Rifkin explains, "We didn't rehearse at all, which was intentional. When these actors were in the middle of a mall or department store, they had radio mics on, and all the extras were real people who didn't even know a movie was being made. In no time, the actors weren't acting; they were just having a conversation. They were having a scripted conversation, but nobody around them knew that. When you are shooting where you have to use only one take all the way through, it doesn't matter what the background is doing."
For legal reasons, signs were posted warning citizens that they were about to enter a filming area, but, again, who pays attention to those? If the actors interacted with anyone during a shot, that person naturally had to sign a release after the fact. Those that didn't had their faces blurred in post.
The production was permitted to shoot--for the most part--though the filmmakers used creative misdirection, sometimes explaining that they were shooting a "documentary" on surveillance. Or, as Forsythe puts it: "Permits? We don't need no stinking permits! Posted above the monitor in my office is my ticket I got in Beverly Hills for filming on the street without a permit. We pointed a camera out a window and another one in the back of a lift-gate truck with the lift gate all the way up but the door open so you could point the camera just over the top. Unless you were looking for it, you couldn't see it." But one eagle-eyed Beverly Hills officer sure did.
The cinematographer pointed out a few exceptions to the Look filmmaking credo. A scene at an ATM was lit with a Kino Flo, and the convenience store interior scene was shot with four Panasonic HVX200s to emulate a multi-security-camera setup. (Using four HDCAMs was cost-prohibitive.)
Though Look was shot in three weeks, posting the film took a year and a half, a schedule Billups describes as "heinous," but with good reason. "Every frame you look at is an effect," he says.
However, Billups' effects had an arc to them. "That was the thing--to not go so far that it becomes painful to watch, because who likes to watch a bad image?" he asks. "There was artistic license involved with it. You'll notice that we establish the degraded look and then back off a bit as the scene continues because we've already established the metaphor for that visual thread."
Billups also had high praise for the assist that Look composer BT lent with his stirring symphony of random electronic noise. "A lot of those effects sell because of BT's brilliance. He really came up with the audio equivalent of our visual degradation."
Working in his home studio, Billups applied the effects and edited the scenes with lengthy handles, then turned the material over to Editor Martin Apelbaum, who likewise worked at his own home.
Apelbaum cut on a Mac G4 with Apple Final Cut Pro 5.5. Nearly 78 hours of Mini DV footage, downconverted for the offline from the HDCAM source material, filled his internal drives and external FireWire drives. Look presented the editor with the opportunity to design camera moves for otherwise static footage using FCP. "I got to pretend I was a director," he says. "I could put a camera move here. It's the equivalent of pausing for effect--I could push in for effect. Not only was I deciding when and where a camera move would happen and how long it would take, but I could do it as much as I wanted without worrying about image degradation because that was the point."
Because the majority of footage was static, Apelbaum could also combine different takes. "I did it most for the convenience store sequence because it had the most counter shots," he explains. "It was really easy to do technically with a split-screen in Final Cut, just another layer of video, crop it and feather the side and you're done."
In the convenience store scene, a bird flies into the store while one of the main characters is dancing. "That bird was stolen from another take," Apelbaum points out. "When the image is degraded, you can't tell cheats like that."
.
|