When Clint Eastwood and Cinematographer Tom Stern, ASC, set out on the massive two-film treatment of the Battle of Iwo Jima—Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima—the director expressed interest in shooting the second, smaller-budgeted, Japanese-language film digitally. While Letters from Iwo Jima was not shot digitally, the process of experimenting with the Sony HVR-Z1U HDV camcorder suggested to the filmmakers a use for the compact cameras. They handed them out to extras, who ran through scenes with concealed Z1Us that would pick up unexpected, unplanned shots that could be cut into the final film and treated during the DI so as not to be jarring when combined with the 35mm film material.

"We primarily used the cameras for combat scenes," says Stern. "We'd hide them inside these 6x14-inch ammunition cases. We'd cut out one end of the case and build a port out of Lexan [durable plastic] and then caulk the whole thing up." Because they were camouflaged in ammunition cases, the cameras didn't stand out if the extra was captured by one of the 35mm cameras covering the primary action.

The footage recorded by the Z1Us possessed a unique kind of immediacy. "There's an intensely subjective feel to some of the shots we used," Stern notes. "We had feet landing in water and the kinds of shots you see in combat photography where the cameraman is being shot at. I think it helped with Clint Eastwood's anti-iconic approach to war in these films. In some war movies, it's like a ballet of perfected death—like the people in the middle of it all know exactly what they're doing. We were looking to get a sense of luck and happenstance—the fog of war."

Naturally, much of what these cameras recorded was unusable. "It's not like we had a camera and somebody was operating it," says Stern. "We just had it set on automatic, and the zoom lens was just at a fixed focal length—which was usually pretty wide because it would be moving around too much to be zoomed in very much—and nobody was monitoring what they were seeing. In eight hours of material, we'd get maybe four great shots, but those shots were like found objects—they had just the right feel to them."

Stern says the Z1U was chosen primarily for its ruggedness. "Like the old Timex commercial, they took a licking and kept on ticking. There was dirt and sand kicking up all around them, but we had a guy who cleaned them out every night and they all worked fine the next day. One did go up in a direct pyro hit—the whole thing was just all fused together—but the rest worked fine the whole time."

Stern says he would never have attempted this mix of video and film if the postproduction work was going to be done photochemically, with the Z1U images being filmed out and cut into a negative for traditional printing. Cutting from the 35mm to the Z1U images would have created too much of a break in the film's overall look. But in Colorist Jill Bogdanowicz's DI suite at Technicolor Creative Services, it was possible to ease into and out of these shots subtly and gracefully.

In the first place, there was a certain amount of desaturation applied to all the battle material, so matching color information was less of an issue than it would have been otherwise. "That didn't hurt," says Stern. "It helped with the melding of the different shots. But really, when you have both formats in the DI space and you mix them up, you really only need to blend with the shot before and the shot after. So if the grain doesn't match or you have a more compressed gamma in the video shots, we can ease in and out of the look dynamically."

While Stern felt that this prosumer level of camera would not be the right tool to shoot Letters in its entirety, he says that he and Eastwood continue to keep a close eye on the technology at the prosumer end of the spectrum. The cinematographer recalls that when Eastwood first brought up the subject of shooting digitally, he began to respond by discussing the pros and cons of the high-end digital cameras such as the Thomson Grass Valley Viper, ARRI D-20 and Sony HDW-F900 and HDC-F950. But that wasn't what Eastwood had in mind at all. "He said, 'No, no, no. You're not understanding what I'm saying,'" Stern recalls. "He said, '"What I'm talking about is the little ones. If we have to use one of the big digital cameras, I'd rather use film.'

"There are things he sees as big advantages, like the ability to run and run without stopping," Stern continues. "That was something he thought of as a director that hadn't really seemed like that big an advantage to me. And he likes the depth of field you get from the smaller lenses you use [on 1/3-inch chip cameras] that can really put you more in the moment. When we had tested the camera and taken the footage through a DI and out to film, the thing that bothered him was the blacks. He loves deep blacks and we just couldn't get that even with all the resources in the DI suite. But there is certainly a lot to be said for these cameras, and I think the technology is getting to the point where Clint wouldn't have the same objections to shooting a whole feature with one of these small prosumer-level cameras. It might be only a few more product cycles away."