Paper Heart, a playfully imagined journey of one young woman’s quest for love, was shot with Panasonic AJ-HDC27H VariCam HD Cinema cameras by Director of Photography Jay Hunter. The film, which debuted at Sundance in January 2009, stars Michael Cera (Juno, Superbad), Charlyne Li (Semi-Pro, Knocked Up) and Jake Johnson (Curb Your Enthusiasm). It was directed by Nicholas Jasenovec, who shares the screenwriting credit with Yi.

Even though she doesn't believe in love, Charlene Yi bravely embarks on a quest to discover its true nature—a journey that takes on surprising urgency when she meets unlikely fellow traveler, actor Michael Cera. Yi, a Los Angeles artist and comedian, has an interesting array of friends and acquaintances who, in hybrid documentary-feature style, offer diverse views on modern romance, as well as various answers to the age-old question: does love really exist?

Paper Heart was shot with two VariCams on a 10-week shoot in January through May 2008. The shoot encompassed international locations (Toronto and Paris), as well as a month-long road trip across the United States from Los Angeles to New York City. DP Hunter said he chose VariCam because the director felt off-speed acquisition would be integral to the production. Another consideration in VariCam's favor was Hunter’s own familiarity with the camera; he had used it on more than 20 projects already, including one of the earliest VariCam-shot features, Frankie and Johnny Are Married.

“VariCam is my preferred 2/3-inch HD acquisition system,” Hunter said. “It’s true 720p, with a softer edge and colors that are not overly saturated. There’s no problem eliminating the funky, video-edge sharpness that I find inherent with most video formats, and if I dial in the right menu settings, I feel confident I can eliminate any telltale signs that we captured on video as opposed to film.” (That confidence was borne out by the fact that several Sundance programmers assumed that Paper Heart had been shot on 35mm film.)

The production rented the two cameras from Video Equipment Rentals' Los Angeles office (in conjunction with Los Angeles camera rental facility R Gear). “I worked with VER’s go-to video specialist, Steve Lucas, to establish a look for the production,” Hunter recounted. “We adjusted the gamma curve for Paper Heart to a level that maximized the latitude, while lifting the blacks and midtones and holding the highlights.

”Essentially, what we did was reduce the knee point and knee slope in order to capture maximum detail in the highlights. The result was a milky, low-contrast, ‘blah’ look, but that was deliberate as I wanted to mimic a RAW setting that one finds in still cameras.”

“Not only did we optimize for color correction, but this extended latitude also allowed us to go into any environment, even those with minimal lighting capabilities, and still produce high-quality imagery,” he continued. “Several of our locations, especially on the road trip, were found spontaneously without any scouting, and ranged anywhere from a pitch-black bar to a Texas field in the noonday sun.”

“In a sense, we had to relearn how to expose the image, since even a slight amount of overexposure would cause the highlights to clip at an accelerated rate,” Hunter said. “Where I’d normally set the zebra bars at 64, here my setting was 46. I was radically underexposing, but the result was the richest detail and most extensive latitude I’ve ever seen on a 2/3-inch camera. It was intimidating at times because I was afraid that such underexposure would leave us with a very thin ‘negative,’ but (due to our custom gamma curve) underexposing by up to two stops would instead give us an incredibly dense ‘negative’ or image base.”

Hunter operated the A camera, with longtime collaborator Ben Gamble on the B camera. The production had two successive assistant camera operators, Clint Kasparian and John Orphan. Orphan also served as DP on some second unit photography.

“There was very, very little real lighting, but our minimal approach allowed us adapt well to unfriendly lighting situations as well as to minimize our physical presence in a location,” Hunter said. “The overall production style was freewheeling, to say the least, with lots of improvisation on the actors’ part. Some of the best scenes were totally unplanned. Ben and I worked mostly handheld, with a camera sliders, sticks and CamTramSystem dollies used here and there.”

The VariCams were equipped with Zeiss DigiPrime lenses. “I try to avoid constant zooming in a documentary-style shoot, and we used no zooms whatsoever, with no ability to change focal length,” Hunter said. “The Zeiss primes gave us a wonderful depth of field, with pleasingly soft backgrounds, and no lens breathing when we were rack focusing. Our choice of lenses enhanced the cinematic approach we were taking with the VariCams. It was a bit frightening to approach documentary situations with fixed focal lengths (leading to many sleepless nights), but the risk ended up paying off ten-fold.”

Editor Ryan Brown worked with more than 300 hours of footage to do the initial cut on an Avid Media Composer. Post finishing was done at LaserPacific, where colorist Rose Calabrese supervised the final color correct. Paper Heart will be digitally projected at Sundance.

“Paper Heart wouldn’t exist without a camera like VariCam,” Hunter said. “Film would have required a larger crew, we would have only been able to afford a four-week vs. ten-week shoot, and we’d never have walked away with hundreds of hours of footage. VariCam technology was intrinsic to liberating the movie’s form and achieving a new, intimate type of storytelling.”