June 23, 2004
For "Dogtown and Z-Boys," the acclaimed documentary about the rise of skateboarding culture in Venice, California, in the 1970s, Cinematographer Peter Pilafian worked closely with Director Stacy Peralta to develop a shooting style that would mirror the graceful, swooping movements of the sport. Just as the skaters in the film pioneered a skateboarding style, Pilafian and Peralta developed a uniquely kinetic visual approach to documenting it.
Since the release of 'Dogtown,' Peralta and Pilafian have collaborated on another documentary, this time about big wave surfing. "Riding Giants" is a logical outgrowth of 'Dogtown'; skateboarding and surfing are siblings, especially in Southern California, a mecca for both sports.
Peralta and Pilafian started kicking around the idea for "Riding Giants" while filming a Kmart commercial in Detroit. Peralta worked with Producer Agi Orsi, who had also helped produce 'Dogtown', to develop the project. When production rolled around, Pilafian was brought in to shoot the interview footage.
The film is a mix of new and archival material. The footage of legendary surfers riding the waves comes from various archives. The interviews, however, were shot expressly for Riding Giants, and it is in the interview segments that the footage, which Pilafian describes as "an extension of the 'Dogtown' style," really shines.
"The camera should feel like it's closely tied to the character. I like to think of it as jazz improvisation," he says. "The camera and the person being interviewed are two instruments in a jazz combo; they play together with the same rhythm and the same feeling. For viewers, that style heightens the interest and involvement with the person who's talking."
The shooting and editing are quick and flashy, a style well suited to the diminished attention spans of the MTV generation. "The way Stacy directs and Paul Crowder edits, they use only the very intense meat of the story in the final film. Knowing that, I was able to constantly move the camera," says Pilafian.
For example, if he thought a subject was about to say something that would likely end up in the final cut, Pilafian would work the camera in a specific way: zooming in, or panning or perhaps stopping the camera's movement entirely for that beat.
"I would do that kind of work knowing that I would immediately reposition the camera and do it again a couple of seconds later because we would never play through long pieces of the interview."
This is why the camera was always handheld for the interviews. Says Pilafian, "Handheld shooting allows for minor intuitive variations of angle, frame size and composition, which were driven as much as possible by the emotional content of the stories."
Peralta and Pilafian had originally intended to shoot "Riding Giants" on 35mm, but after calculating the costs they decided to shoot on Super 16-a handful of shots of sleds going into the water were filmed on 35mm, however. The team divided the interview subjects into four categories and treated each one with a different look in terms of film stock and lighting.
The first category was all about the contemporary giants of modern-day surfing such as Laird Hamilton and Dave Kalama, who were photographed with daylight-balanced 16mm 7245 (ASA 50), which Pilafian describes as "a very tight-grained, rich looking stock" that gives "a really lush look to the material, especially exteriors."
The second category focused on the story of big wave surfers at Maverick's, an infamous break in Northern California. "Because surfing Maverick's is a very harsh, intense, almost frightening experience, we decided to shoot all that material in black and white," says Pilafian. He also shot this segment with a much higher contrast ratio, using a very strong key light placed on the side and allowing quite a bit of drop-off on the fill side, even using negative fill where necessary.
The third category was composed of journalists and writers who covered the surfing scene. Pilafian shot this group with the fastest, grainiest color negative that Kodak makes, 7289 (ASA 800), in an attempt to give the footage a grainy, documentary look. Because the stock was so fast, Pilafian put plenty of ND in front of the lens and always tried to work at a T4.5 or lower.
The fourth and final category was, for Pilafian, the most fun. It followed surfers from the 1950s and '60s, the pioneers who dared to ride the outer breaks that no one else would touch. "From shore, it looked like a suicide mission, and we wanted to imitate that look." Pilafian was flipping through old Life magazines on the set of a period movie he was shooting when it hit him. He honed in on ads from the '60s, when color printing techniques were just emerging.
"Early color printing has a very specific feel. It is high contrast and kind of saturated, but in a peculiar way that looks almost hand-tinted. I wanted to imitate that somehow," he says. Pilafian considered cross-processing the film but eventually decided against it, partially because the process can be finicky and partially because it has a short archival life and he knew he would be shooting historically important interviews. He tested Kodak ECO, an early, extremely high contrast negative stock that's rated at 250 ASA, and both he and Peralta fell in love with the look. There was one problem: supplies of ECO are extremely limited.
"We had to look far and wide to find that stock. We got a few rolls from a warehouse in Colorado. I believe it's still manufactured and Kodak spins off a batch when they get low."
About the stock itself, Pilafian says, "We discovered that because it has such high contrast, even a lighting ratio of 1 to 1.5 was too extreme. And anything in the background that fell off too far would have no info whatsoever. You couldn't even pull it up in the telecine."
The shooting was spread out over a number of months through the spring and fall of 2003. The production also involved a significant amount of copystand work, shooting stills and prints.
Even in copystand shooting they made sure to stick with the kinetic 'Dogtown' style. The team shot still photos of the archival stills with a Super 16 camera, then tacked a dozen or more photos to a wall and shot them with a 35mm movie camera by panning up and down and all over the stills. This was all done handheld with the camera on a loose tripod, giving it a "more human feeling, as opposed to the perfectly smooth, mechanized feeling that you get from normal copystand work."
For post-production, Pilafian coordinated closely with Editor Paul Crowder and Colorist Andy Lichstein at Complete Post in Hollywood. Since Pilafian knew that they would be dealing with archival material in any number of formats-including 16mm, Super 8, still photos and Betacam-he convinced the crew to transfer all the original material with a 1.85 hard matte.
"We had always planned to release the film theatrically and I did not want to get trapped into having different aspect ratios, so I put a hard matte at 1.85," says Pilafian. "The exception was some of the early stuff that had been shot in 4:3. It had big waves on it and there was a question as to where to pan and tilt the 1.85; in some cases it was left to Paul [Crowder] and Stacy [Peralta] to decide."
The footage was transferred to 1080i and edited during the fall and winter of 2003. In fact, postproduction continued right up to the film's premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January. The film will be released this month.
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