Digital Cinematography Arrives

The two movies widely considered the frontrunners for this year’s Academy Award for Best Picture – Slumdog Millionaire shot by Anthony Dod Mantle and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button shot by Claudio Miranda – have several other things in common. Both could loosely be described as urban fairy tales, in which the hero ultimately wins the lifelong girl of his dreams. Both are also in contention for the Oscar for Best Cinematography. And both were shot, at least in part with digital cameras, which the filmmakers of both movies say were the right creative tool to use each time they did. Clearly, digital cinematography has arrived.

For the record the two films together are nominated for a rather incredible 23 Oscars: 10 for Slumdog and 13 for Benjamin Button. In terms of percentage of screen time the digital cinematography played a smaller role in Slumdog than it did in Benjamin Button but even so it was a vital creative tool.

Slumdog was shot with a range of Arriflex film cameras, a prototype Silicon Imaging SI-2K digital camera and a Canon EOS-ID Mark III, which is essentially a digital still camera. The scenes in the narrow crowded streets of the slums of Mumbai were shot with the two digital cameras.

Mantle and director Danny Boyle say they chose those particular digital cameras for the street scenes because they were able to shoot without attracting attention. “People tend to ignore digital still cameras these days,” Boyle told one interviewer. And, as one blogger reported, Mantle used the SI-2K, because it’s a tiny digital camera that allowed him to hold the lens of in the palm of one hand and a minuscule monitor in the other; wires went up his sleeve and into a backpack carrying a hard drive.

Once director David Fincher selected him to shoot The Curious Case of Benjamin Button cinematographer Claudio Miranda says the decision to use the Thomson Grass Valley Viper FilmStream digital camera for the bulk of the production was an easy one. “We were testing other cameras but it came down to the fact that I knew [the Viper] very well,” he says. “I shot some of David’s first commercials with a Viper.” The World War II battles scenes and the idyllic Caribbean interlude were shot with an Arriflex 435 film camera and a few additional shots used Sony’s CineAlta F23 digital cinema camera. But, says Miranda, “95 percent of the movie was shot digitally with Viper.”

In additional to the commercials he shot with Viper for Fincher Miranda the two men have had a long history of working together that dates back to the 1980s. Miranda worked as an electrician on many of Fincher’s previous feature films and he was gaffer on The Fight Club and shot for two weeks on Zodiac, also using the Viper.

Miranda says he and Fincher love the workflow of the Viper. They like seeing what they get and the fact that when they shoot digitally they know immediately if they got the shots they wanted the way they wanted them. For Miranda it is not a case of trying to achieve a film look digitally but is something completely different. In his mind the Viper has its own look.

The fact that Miranda was familiar with the technology did not change the amount of preparation he did before shooting began. He reviewed many visual references to create the palette of the movie, among them the paintings of Andrew Wyeth. “I had a lot of prep,” he says. “It does take a lot of homework.”

Once production began, he says, the challenge is to understand how to light while shooting digitally. “I tried to [use practical lights] a lot,” Miranda says despite the fact that, in his words, “practical lights are a no no in HD.”

There were some tips he has learned along the way. Even people who have not seen Benjamin Button are doubtless aware that during much of the movie Brad Pitt’s head is digitally placed on the bodies of younger actors. In those shots, Miranda says, “Even though I was shooting the face I lit it as if I was shooting the whole character.”

He laughs when asked about the shots of the old man’s memories of being struck by lightning seven times. “I overexposed them dramatically just to blast them out of oblivion,” he says.

The boat scenes presented some of the biggest challenges on the shoot, whether shooting film or digitally. “The boat scenes were all shot using blue screen in a studio,” Miranda says. “The boat just lived in that space.” That required him to create the illusion that the boat was in the middle of the ocean, that it was noon and the sun was directly overhead or that it was moving through dense fog, or anchored beneath a moonlit sky.

The movie, which filmed in New Orleans, Los Angeles, Montreal and the Caribbean, had a 150-day shooting schedule. Dealing with an enormous amount of footage was also made simpler thanks to shooting digitally. “At the end of the day I went home with digital stills,” says Miranda

He used those images to create a website for himself and Fincher so that they could both track the progress they were making and make quick adjustments the next day. That contributed greatly to the eventual success of the movie. “You can see it so vividly in HD,” Miranda says.