By Jon Silberg, March 14, 2007
In Fay Grim, Director Hal Hartley revisits some of the characters from his 1997 film, Henry Fool, particularly Fay (Parker Posey), who finds herself caught up in international intrigue involving a series of mysterious journals and a dogged CIA agent (Jeff Goldblum) that takes her from her Queens home to Paris and Istanbul. The earlier film was shot on 35mm film, as were all of Hartley's early films, but because HDNet was heavily involved in Fay Grim's production, the format came with the deal.
In addition to working in 35mm, Hartley has directed features shot on Mini DV: The Girl from Monday and Book of Life. In fact, he's quite impressed with some of the features of his Sony DCR-VX2000 Mini DV camcorder (PAL version). His film features have generally been characterized by long takes occurring within fairly wide frames, some subtle camera movement and a lot of movement by actors going in and out of shots. When working in the prosumer or consumer formats, he's gone for a more experimental look with the image, such as streaky, steppy lighting effects.
For Fay Grim, he returned to the approach he used when working in 35, save for a single adjustment that doesn't have to do with the format: just about every shot is composed at a tilted (Dutch) angle. "My imagery has evolved since Henry Fool," Hartley explains. "And I think the angles sort of tell you right away that this is going to be fun. We also have some scenes that are made up solely of still photographs that Richard Sylvarnes, my designer and set photographer, shot and downloaded into his iPod so we could select which ones we'd use right there on the set. Then I cut these stills together and made a scene out of them. I like to break the habitual way people tell stories in films."
Cinematographer Cawley had shot several films for Hartley previously, including The Girl from Monday, and while she enjoyed some of the experimental ways the Mini DV cameras were used and the fact that she could get away with very few lights, she was glad to be shooting Fay Grim in HDCAM with the Sony HDW-F900 CineAlta. "On The Girl from Monday," she recalls, "I was operating and I had to pull focus by eye. Those lenses don't have any markings. I like the bigger lenses with markings that we have in HD, and it helps that the AC can take care of more things like pulling focus."
Cawley made use of Zeiss DigiPrimes, primarily the 20mm and 10mm, because of their equivalent field of view to Hartley's favorite 50mm and 35mm optics when shooting 35mm film. She brought on a digital imaging technician for a day to create a few preset looks that she would use throughout the shoot. "It was all pretty straightforward," she says. "Just to take the edge off the sharpness and make a slight change to the color. Nothing else
. Except for the Dutch angles, it looks like Hal's 35mm movies."
She carried a combination waveform/vectorscope to the locations but rarely used it, preferring instead to light by meter (she rated the camera at EI 250) and then fine-tune to the monitor. She'd intended to bring a big CRT HD monitor to all the locations-the film was shot in Berlin, Paris and Istanbul-but quickly abandoned it for a flat panel more conducive to shooting in small houses and hotel rooms. "It was just so big," she says of the HD monitor. "Wherever we were, it was in the way."
The lighting package was essentially the same as she'd use if she were shooting on film. "For day, we used big HMIs. 12K, some 6Ks and 4Ks. Then for night scenes, I used smaller tungsten units and these Linestra architectural lighting fixtures Hal and I have gotten into. It's a 30-inch tungsten tube that's used a lot in hotels on bathroom mirrors and things like that. The gaffer, Bjorn Sussen, would mount them on C-stands. They give a nicer, warmer feel than Kino Flos. And then, for a little extra light on a face or an eye light, I love the little 2x10-inch dimmable Mini LitePanel lights."
Hartley edited Fay Grim himself in Final Cut Pro HD, though not in an HD format. The original tapes were downconverted to Mini DV. The EDL that he and Assistant Editor Kyle Gilman created later was sent with the original tapes to Swiss Effects in Zurich to be onlined. Swiss Effects also performed the tape-to-tape color grading and the final film-out using ARRILASER recorders. "Swiss Effects did such a wonderful job on The Girl from Monday, they were really the only people we wanted for this one, too," says Cawley.
Hartley says he enjoyed working in HD and would certainly use the format again, though he thought of the process on Fay Grim as essentially the same as shooting film, not so much the experimental playground DV filmmaking can be. "The resolution in film and HD is fantastic," he says. "I'm not looking to play with the image the same way. I think differently about working in film and HD than I do about Mini DV. This shoot was like a film shoot in that I've got a camera on a dolly and people are riding on the dolly and the whole thing weighs 1,500 pounds. There's a weight to it that makes me think differently about how the actors and the camera move together."
But Hartley also intends to keep doing work with cameras like his VX2000. "I shoot smaller projects with it all the time," he says, adding that he's not excited about some of the attributes of Mini DV that some other filmmakers embrace.
"I like that the smaller cameras make you want to get close to people and things," he allows. "The fact that you can move along a street with the camera handheld and with a very small crew seems like the most obvious benefit to some people, but that doesn't interest me at all. That style of filmmaking has created some of the most boring films I've ever seen!"
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