American Teen director Nanette Burstein and her crew set up a shot.

If you happened to spend much time in Warsaw, Indiana, during the 2005-06 school year, you were probably aware that documentarian Nanette Burstein and a small video crew were following several high school seniors around for a movie. Burstein, best known as co-director (with Brett Morgen) of The Kid Stays in the Picture—the feature-film companion to former Hollywood mogul Robert Evans—set about documenting the lives of a group of high school students for the feature American Teen, soon to be released by Paramount Vantage. She, Cinematographer Laela Kilbourn, Production Sound Mixer Anna Rieke, a field producer and a PA captured more than 1,000 hours in the lives of the students as they attended school and interacted with friends and family.

New York-based Kilbourn had devoted more than a year to several projects previously, including Word Wars about the world of competitive Scrabble, and the synchronized swimming documentary Sync or Swim, but her commitment for American Teen was a bit more immersive. “This was really the first time I just packed up and moved into a new community like this,” she says.

	American Teen director Nanette Burstein checks her coverage.

The filmmakers initially chose 16 kids to “star” in the film, though by the time the film had gone through the editing process, that number was whittled down to the five with the most interesting story arcs. With the exception of a few large events, everything was covered single-camera style to avoid making the roving crew even more prominent than it was.

Kilbourn (who was, at different points, spotted by videographers Wolfgang Hend and Bob Hanna) shot the majority of the piece on the Panasonic AJ-SDX900 in standard definition onto DVCPRO50 tapes. The 2/3-inch camera, she says, gave her a good tradeoff between image quality and simplicity; a bigger, higher-end HD camera could have distracted Kilbourn and her subjects, while something lower-end could have compromised the images she and the director intended to play well even in theaters. Kilbourn left a Canon 7-168mm zoom lens on the camera for the duration of the shoot.

The cinematographer also made use of the smaller, 1/3-inch AG-DVX100 in the rare instances when a second camera was used, such as the prom, and in tight spaces, such as car interiors, where the SDX900 would be challenged for space.

Kilbourn used color bars as a reference and then exposed and focused manually. Since lighting was minimal—“If there was a lamp in the room, we might turn it on, but that’s about it,” Kilbourn says—she was primarily concerned about the very low-light situations she would find her subjects in.

She reports that she was comfortable with the DVX100’s ability to hold detail in contrasty situations. “I was most comfortable with the day exterior material. The camera could handle that very well. But the low-light situations always made me worry about resolution and detail. There were scenes where I just crossed my fingers and hoped we got it, and I was generally very happy with how it all ended up looking.”

The camera recorded in Panasonic’s 24pA format (24p Advanced—Panasonic’s method of dealing with the 3:2 pull-down issue). Kilbourn set it up to keep the images as clean as possible so there would be room in post to work with them. “I set it up for a color palette I like and avoided going too far down into the blacks,” she explains. “On a digital show, I try to not go too far in any direction. You want to preserve highlight and shadow information and [process] the image in camera as little as possible.”

After Burstein, Tom Haneke and Mary Manhardt finalized their offline edit of the show, the EDL, original DVCPRO tapes, Mini DV tapes and a small number of computer animations were sent to Post Logic in Los Angeles for finishing.

Editor/visual effects artist Matthew Johnson used Autodesk Smoke 2007 (with Service Pack 4) on an HP workstation running Linux and input the portions of the tapes included in the EDL at their native resolutions. Digital animations, which were created to help illustrate abstract concepts the students discuss on camera—depression, the wonders of college life—came in from various sources as 1920x1080 DPX files.

Johnson then used Smoke’s proprietary systems to remove the 3:2 pull-down sequences created in the cameras for recording 24p to tape and upconverting all that material to a real 24p format at the same resolution for output to HD D5 tape. This was then graded in a da Vinci suite in a D5-to-D5 session. “I think that people who shoot in standard def and finish in HD always benefit by doing the upres first and then color-correcting in HD,” Johnson observes, “rather than color-correcting in SD and blowing that up to HD.”

After a digital cinema version of the D5 was projected at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, Paramount Vantage acquired the film's theatrical rights. At this point, Post Logic colorist Doug Delaney returned to the uncorrected D5 to do another pass in the FilmLight Baselight color corrector specifically to yield a D5 version that would look as good as possible when filmed out using the company’s ARRILASER. “It’s important to do additional color correction if you’re going to film out,” Delaney says. “Film projected on a screen has different sensitivity and contrast issues than a video image on a CRT. There are lookup tables that can help with some of the issues, but you really want to have a colorist making interactive decisions about specific scenes and shots.”

Delaney says of the original material, “I was impressed. The cinematographer did very nice work. The SDX900 really handled a lot of different situations very well. I had much less latitude to work with than I would if I was working from film negative, of course, but the quality of the images they got on location with available light was astounding.”

As a rule, Delaney notes, the quality of footage from such cameras will always benefit when a videographer doesn't process the image too much in camera. “Obviously, it’s important to try as much as possible to avoid clipping highlight or shadow detail,” he says. “You don’t want to do much to the chroma, and it’s usually best to stay away from ‘enhancement,’ ‘edge detail’ and any of the other ways different manufacturers call the sharpening tools. There are a lot of things that might make the picture look nicer on a monitor but will be problematic when you try to blow it up and color-correct it.”

For Kilbourn, the most important facet of the cameras she used was their simplicity. “This is the kind of job where the most important thing for me to do is be able to forget the gear and listen to the kids and be involved in with what they’re doing,” she says. “The camera has a lot of menus, and it can do a lot but you don’t have to do anything with menus while you’re shooting. You can use them in advance if you want and then just concentrate on what’s happening without ever having to think about the equipment. On documentaries, that’s really very important. It doesn’t matter what great things a camera can do if it’s going to distract you from what you’re there to shoot.”