interview and words written for RED
article here
On September 5, 1972, details began to emerge that 11
Israeli athletes had been taken hostage while participating at the Olympic
Games in Munich. Over the next 22 hours events unfolded that shocked the world,
all of it televised live by an ABC Sports team more familiar with calling the
play-by-play shots on sports.
A new film, September 5, dramatizes the crisis
from the point of view of the broadcast crew who covered the tragedy happening
just a few metres away from inside the cramped broadcast control room.
“Our first question was how can we make an audience in a
movie theater feel like they are glued to television as people were back in
then, watching live and not knowing what's going to happen?” posed Markus
Förderer, ASC, BVK. “How can we recreate that real-time journalistic immediacy
to keep people hooked.”
Förderer, whose credits include Constellation and Red
Notice, previously worked with director Tim Fehlbaum on The
Colony and Hell.
“We talked about how we would shoot the action if we were a
documentary crew in the control room at the time. In the same way that the ABC
crew suddenly get pulled out of the sports world to document world history, we
thought a documentary crew would go handheld, probably 16mm, and would just
follow the story wherever it took them.”
From this basic idea they tested 35mm and 16mm and compared
results to the RED V-RAPTOR, a camera Förderer had used to shoot the AppleTV+
sci-fi series Constellation.
“On Constellation we had some extreme dark scenes filmed in
northern Finland where the sun never comes over the horizon. I knew from that
experience how sensitive V-RAPTOR is in the blacks and also our set in September
5 would be dark and illuminated largely by television screens. The TV
monitors are the window to the outside world for our characters and our
audience even if the actual events are happening within yards of the ABC Media
Center.
Since the ABC News team mostly experienced events through TV
monitors in the control room the DP wanted to make the screens a key light
source. “We purposefully had all the characters wear glasses so we'd see the
monitors reflecting back from their eyes. If we’d shot film, we would have been
forced to add a lot more artificial movie lights to help expose the scene and
we didn't want that look.”
“The main reason we went digital was because RED’s V-RAPTOR
could shoot at this extreme high 3200 ISO and give us some grain that we wanted
for that filmic feel. We added additional grain on top in post but the original
image gave us a great start.”
Reviewers have compared the look to films from the seventies
which Förderer takes as a compliment but disagrees with the sentiment. “Films
in the ’70s, with obvious exception of The Godfather, tended to be
over lit with tungsten simply to achieve decent exposure. Here, I wanted to
create a hybrid approach of something that feels familiar to the period but is
also contemporary, fresh and modern. That's where digital came in.”
Förderer chose Zoomar zoom from the seventies and tuned Apollo anamorphic
lenses paired with the 8K VV sensor to create the desired look. Scenes
in the control room and in the ABC Media Center were shot at 6K because
Förderer felt the full VV sensor lent too shallow a depth of field. “For our
purposes that made the image too pretty,” he says. “I wanted a certain
harshness. We shot half of the time with spherical Super 35 lenses switching to
anamorphic whenever the story gets particularly tense. This felt closer to
16mm.”
“It's such a big story, that in reality was watched by 900
million people around the globe, so I didn't want it to feel like true 16mm.
However, whenever the story gets really tense we switched to anamorphic and
used the full height of the sensor in 8K anamorphic mode. When we recreated
some of the archival shots we switched to the true Super 16mm sensor format.”
While original footage was available to the production,
almost everything on the television screens in the movie, save for some shots
of ABC host Jim McKay, was recreated by the production.
“One reason was because we decided not to show any of the
real hostages out of respect for their families,” Förderer explains. “Even the
opening swimming race featuring Mark Spitz was recreated in the actual Olympic
pool in Munich. While preserved as a historic site it has also been modernized,
so we had to take particular care over camera placement.”
Some of the archival pieces were shot on RED HELIUM using
Super 35mm lenses in a Super 16 crop which the HELIUM’s smaller sensor helped
capture.
“We shot with the highest ISO and used the highest
compression ratio in order to soften the image in camera as much as possible.
RED has these amazing compression algorithms which are usually invisible when
you compress the image. Usually if you shoot the full 8K sensor with high
compression you get away with it because you down sample from 8K to 4K, but we
wanted a really small sensor crop on HELIUM so the resolution was around 2K and
then we pushed it with high ISO and used the highest compression to take a lot
of detail out. It looked quite analog in a way which is what we wanted.”
Applying a LUT in camera further distorted the colors to
appear like an authentic analog TV picture. Some of those archive shots were
fed live onto the monitor wall in the newsroom gallery so the actors could
better react to events.
“With our A camera V-RAPTOR and anamorphic lens we covered
the actors in the gallery and when we pan to the monitor in a close-up or a
zoom we see ‘live’ on screen the interviews and presentation in the TV studio.”
They discussed shooting the entire 90-minute feature as a
single uninterrupted take or as a series of long takes joined by seamless cuts
like Birdman.
“The film’s theme is also about media and therefore the
importance of editing so the approach we took was to shoot long takes always
knowing it would be tightened up in the edit,” he says. “I think that's what
makes September 5 unique. Hopefully, you feel an energy from
the camera.
“For example, when Peter Sarsgaard’s character (ABC Sports
President Roone Arledge) storms into the control room with a piece of
information, I whip pan to John Magaro's character (ABC Sports producer
Geoffrey Mason) then zoom in on the television screen to show what happens
there. We knew we wanted to hit certain moments like that as precisely as
possible but it was also important to Tim and I that it feels nonchalant. We
pan into it, tag it for a beat and then the next character wipes through the
frame that takes you to the next beat. We always knew shots were going to be
tightened up and fast paced in editing, but the longer takes in which we never
linger on one moment for too long, still impart an energy which you wouldn’t
get if we’d set up and composed each shot for coverage.”
At Bavaria Studios in Munich, they built sets that
faithfully recreated the claustrophobic space of the original ABC Newsroom
facility. “It was important to us not to cheat. We didn't want to have floating
studio walls where we could have had more space for the camera. It needed to be
confined and claustrophobic.”
In a further attempt to capture the freshness of a live
event, there were no rehearsals. Förderer and B-cam / Steadicam operator Stefan
Sosna positioned themselves in the room as if they had only one chance to
record.
“We did do several takes and sometimes we’d make a short
pickup of somebody pushing a button or grabbing a microphone but the scene was
always captured as a oner with two cameras.
”At the end of each scene, when we thought we had it, Tim would do what he
called ‘wild style’ in which the actors could move or perform any way they
wanted. The same goes for the cameras. We could go in for a close-up of an eye
in the middle of the scene, or just be really bold, because we knew we already
have the scene in the can. That created some interesting moments for editor
Hansjörg Weißbrich to fold in. It’s how we were able to create shots that you
couldn’t necessarily conceive with storyboarding.”
The lighting tone for each scene varies according to the
mood of the story and is driven by the content on the monitors. As the news
team count down the clock to go live on air Förderer timed certain lights in
the background to turn off then raised the tension further by increasing the
strobing frequencies of the television screens.
“On most Hollywood movies depicting TV screens you’d spend a
lot of time and effort to sync the TV image with the camera to reduce flicker.
Here, we embraced that.”
Forderer’s inspiration was the documentary film Apollo
11 which features rows of monitors in NASA’s command center
“flickering like crazy and creating this sensation of urgency and high
adrenaline which is exactly what we wanted.
“We synched the camera shutter with the screen to allow a
certain level of flicker and had an additional row of LED lights above the TV
wall to push more light into the actor's eyes. The color of these lights was
synched to match the content on the TV wall.”
From neuroscience studies he learned how different light
pulses can impact people in different ways causing a state of heightened
alertness. In pre-production, Förderer tested flicker frequencies with an
Astera tube.
“I didn’t want to make the audience feel sick but we did
pre-program different frequencies,” he explains. “Whenever the tension is low
in the control room we have a little bit of flicker to get the audience used to
the effect. When the tension is high, such as when a masked man is shown on
screen for the first time, we dynamically ramp up from 25 hertz to 50 hertz. If
you go too fast, it disappears and you don't see it. If it's too slow, it's
very obvious and annoying. Get it right and it’s almost like when you hear
drums, it affects your heartbeat, especially if you watch it on a big screen in
a dark room.
“That’s what I find so fascinating about my work as a
cinematographer. Working with light is so invisible and immaterial to the
audience because hopefully they’re immersed in the story and don’t pay
attention to the lighting. But subliminally it does have an emotional effect.
“On this set the strobing was so extreme I had producers
coming up to me and asking, ‘Markus, what's going on, are your lights broken?’
I said, ‘Trust me it's going to make sense. Just watch my monitor. Don’t use
your naked eyes.’”
For a scene showing how ABC’s secretly shot 16mm footage of
the terrorists was developed, Förderer visited FotoKem in Burbank who
generously permitted him to shoot the scene there.
“We wanted to create this sensation of a pitch-black
environment in the dark room. FotoKem were gracious enough to let me film there
but they said it had to be me alone, no crew, and no film lights. At the time
they were developing Oppenheimer IMAX prints and couldn’t let
anything risk that. So, I brought two little battery powered LED lights with
magnets that I could attach and dim down. We dialled in this special dark green
-yellow color that they use in labs sometimes when they change the film. And
then used the V-RAPTOR at the edge of exposure to create this sensation of no
light. You can just feel them handling the film. It intercut seamlessly with
inserts of our actor’s hands shot in Munich. It was great to have FotoKem
involved for this scene so it feels like the processing was done by
professionals.”
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