Fasten Your Seat Belts, It's A Breathtaking Ride: Richard Crudo, ASC on Grind
By Bob Fisher

This article originally appeared in ICG Magazine in
August 2003.

Let's be honest. His initial instinct was to take a pass when we asked Richard Crudo, ASC to talk about Grind. He characterized the film as another comedy mainly targeting teenage audiences. There are no morality plays woven into the fabric of the story, no dark characters and no visual effects. Grind is a road show. School is out and four buddies from Chicago are following a famous skateboarder on a summer tour. They are pursuing a dream, hoping to get noticed and perhaps launch their own careers.

Their trek starts in Chicago, then takes them through Kansas, Colorado, Arizona and on to Los Angeles. Along the way, they skateboard their hearts out. For them, it's an act of pure joy. The comedy is physical and verbal, including pratfalls while they are skateboarding. Crudo explains that it's kind of a badge of honor for skateboarders to be reckless and crazy.

What experiences prepared him to shoot a film with a deeply etched skateboarding theme? The answer is nothing and everything. Crudo earned a graduate degree in filmmaking from Columbia University, in New York while working as a film loader on low budget films. After graduation, he crewed with Greg Andracke, Chuck Levey and others on documentaries and such magazine shows as 60 Minutes and 20/20. Crudo says that's when he learned to really see natural light and what it took to work under unrelenting pressure. Later, he was a camera assistant for Gordon Willis, ASC on Broadway Danny Rose, The Purple Rose of Cairo, The Money Pit and many commercials. Crudo doesn't have to explain how that experience influenced him.

He earned his first notice as a cinematographer in his own right in 1994 on a black and white feature called Federal Hill. Other notable dramatic credits include American Buffalo, Bongwater, Music From Another Room and Outside Providence, along with such lighter comedies as American Pie and Down to Earth.

Crudo volunteers, "I've never been near a skateboard in my life. I prepared by looking at as many videos and DVDs about skateboarding as I could find…and there were a lot. I had no idea about the impressive width and breadth of this subculture."

He explains that most of the videos were crude homemade movies shot by kids who were skateboarders. Crudo says he used them to glean ideas about how to shoot Grind differently. He wanted to do something on a much bigger scale designed to pull the audience deep into the skateboarding sub-culture on a visceral level.

As he read Ralph Sall's hilarious script, Crudo realized it wasn't going to be a walk in the park. He had 35 days to create the illusion of a cross-country trip with four main characters and an ensemble cast. 90 percent of the story takes place in daylight exterior conditions. 40 percent of that involves skateboarding scenes with dynamic action.

"Bill Gerber and the other producers were committed to shooting the entire film in Los Angeles, and my hat is off to them for that. I just can't say enough about those guys. They could've chosen to take this movie anywhere but they did the right thing – they chose to shoot it at home." he says. "They believe it's important to make stories that take place in the United States in the United States. A great part of the reason is they understood and appreciated the need for a talented American crew. That meant a lot to me, personally. There are no better crews than our own. Though we've literally taught the rest of the world how to do it over the years, as you can imagine, I was anxious to shoot here with my regular crew."

Crudo came onto the project five weeks before shooting began. He needed every moment of that time. Four weeks into prep, Casey La Scala, a former development executive who was involved with the project, replaced the original director. It was his first time at the helm. Crudo had already spent much of the preproduction schedule scouting Los Angeles County for locations that were appropriate for creating the illusion of a cross-country car trip with believable environments.

One of his first suggestions was to shoot Grind in 2.40 anamorphic apsect ratio, but he settled on 1.85:1 instead. Since the skateboarding sequences were to be shot with as many as five cameras, Crudo felt it would be easier to get the required number of matching lenses in spherical format.

"Bob Harvey, Lori Killam, Frank Kay and Andy Romanoff at Panavision were an enormous help in servicing this job. I've been with Panavision since the start of my feature career and there's never been an instance in which they've ever let me down. I owe them a tremendous debt of gratitude."

His basic camera package included two Panaflex Gold II'S, two ARRI 435s and a 50-year old Eyemo with a windup motor. Crudo chose a mix of Ultra-Speed and Super-Speed prime lenses and Cooke 5:1 and 10:1 zooms. He usually filmed the big exterior skateboarding scenes with the Cooke zooms, generally at a stop of T5.6, which helped carry focus on the fast-moving skaters.

"The zoom lenses gave us the freedom to make adjustments on the fly," he explains. "This was very much a documentary-type of deal. The Eyemo was mainly used as part of a special rig that was bolted to a skateboard. It allowed us to get into the middle of the action. The ARRI 435s were used for ramping shots when it was appropriate to speed-up or slow down the action for dramatic affect."

The actors did much of their own skateboarding except for the heavy stunt work. The latter was done by some of the world's top skateboarders, including Bucky Lasek, who is one of the greats.

"We want the audience to experience skateboarding through the eyes of the characters," Crudo says. "I had a second unit director-camera operator, Matt Goodman, a world ranked skateboarder who works with the legendary skateboarder Tony Hawk. He was actually able to skate and shoot street courses and vert ramps, following the characters, getting close to them with a handheld ARRI 435 camera. Right out of the box, he did an absolutely fantastic job.

"It's almost a ballet with a lot of shutter adjustments and speed ramping," Crudo continues. "We never lost a frame. Mostly we were on street courses. Sometimes there were competitions. Other times, our skateboarders just took over a parking lot and put up their own obstacles, often in confined areas. We also made effective use of the vert-ramp. Here, the skaters would work the half-pipe, so to speak, often flying up the sides of a 16 foot-high wall, doing flips and turns all the way."

Crudo experimented with frame rates in these sequences. Typically, he started a shot at A normal 24 frames per second speed, ramped it up to a higher speed for the most intricate part of the trick, then slowed it back down to normal for the rest.

”We almost never went above 72 frames per second because it just didn't feel right," he explains. "This is something we discovered through trial and error."

The story takes place in summer, but they started shooting in October and continued on into the Holiday season, during the shortest days of the year. Crudo estimates that they basically had eight hours of workable daylight and used every second of that time. He says it is unlikely that he could have done it without a skillful crew who collaborated as a team.

His gaffer was Steve Belsky, a frequent collaborator. Brian Osmond, his first assistant on A camera, has worked with Crudo for six years. Eric Roizman was his A camera operator, with Ralph Watson handling the Steadicam and B camera. His first assistant on B camera and the Steadicam was Jeff Hand, the second assistants were Steve Marshall and Adam Baral, and the film loader was Laura May Bobick. The still photographer was Dale Robinette. "I've shot movies all over the world," Crudo stated, "And hands-down they're the best crew I've ever worked with."

He also had kind words for his immediate collaborator. "Casey (La Scala) took to directing like a fish to water," Crudo says. "He was involved in developing the script, so he was familiar with the material. He knew the tone he wanted but didn't spend a lot of time telling me how to shoot it. Basically, we would watch the actors walk through a scene and decide where to place and how to move the cameras. We had a broad idea of where the actors were going but they also improvised. We were laying back and documenting what they were doing and they never complained if we asked them to repeat a complex skateboarding sequence more than once."

One of the technical nuances that flew under the radar was the way Crudo and his crew crafted a consistent look while shooting big day exteriors in unpredictable light. Some scenes were filmed on or near the beach. Some mornings they began shooting with an overcast sky. It would clear up a bit and then get cloudy again. Occasionally it rained, followed by a crystal clear sky with bright, unrelenting sunshine.

Crudo and his crew took a workman-like approach to enforcing a seamless continuity. They typically had three or four 18K HMIs, which were used to create sunlight and to fill the shadows created by floating clouds. Their toolkit also included big reflectors - 20 x 20 and 20 x 40 foot silks, bleached muslins and grid cloths.

"The 18K WAS the primary workhorse in these situations, either bounced or direct through some diffusion," Crudo says, "but we were making lighting decisions in the moment, and they would evolve five minutes or 10 minutes later when something changed, which was almost all the time on this shoot. That's why you need a crew that works as a team. They have to be in-synch with each other. Plus, you develop a shorthand as you go. A healthy routine sets in. For example, every morning when the lights came off the truck, the rags were automatically framed up and ready to go whenever we needed them. Everyone knew each other's moves and was able to anticipate without being told."

Crudo felt it was important to provide a foundation of reality for the actors to perform their antics. That included continuity in the texture and color of light.

"The audience is sitting in a dark room and you're trying to draw them into the story, so they temporarily forget they're watching a movie," he says. "If the quality of light keeps shifting, it subconsciously takes them out of the story."

Another advantage of shooting in Los Angeles was the depth of the infrastructure at his fingertips. Crudo observes that everything he needed was 20 minutes away, from Panavision and the other rental houses to Technicolor laboratory and the Telecine facilities. Crudo began every morning at the lab with his dailies timer, Ron Scott, who he characterizes as "a genius," and Art Tostado, whom he calls "brilliant."

"They were a critical part of the team," says Crudo. "I'd worked with them for years at CFI, before they became part of Technicolor. There was no problem convincing the producers or Casey that we needed to see dailies on film. They simply wanted to do things the right way. And not only was it cost-effective, it was smart for the entire production. Right down the line, everyone involved really cared about what they were doing and understood that nuances in images make a difference."

Crudo opted to record the entire picture on Kodak Vision 5279 film, which he over-exposed slightly by rating it as a 400 rather than a 500-speed emulsion. That gave a little extra richness to the details recorded on the negative without intrusive grain. Crudo explains that he decided to use the fast film on a mainly daylight-exterior picture because it allowed him to squeeze the most time out of the short days.

In addition, he shot all daylight exteriors without an 85 filter on the lens. That gave him an extra two thirds of a stop which also helped extend the shooting day. He compensated for the slight shift in color balance during timing at the lab.

In one sequence, a character is about to drop from the lip of a huge vert ramp. This "half-pipe" had a 16 foot height to its coping, was 40 feet wide and had a breathtaking 60-foot depth. La Scala wanted the audience to experience the emotions that the character was feeling on a raw, visceral level. No problem. Crudo designed a point-of-view shot coming off the top of the ramp that raced to the bottom at break-neck speed. To do it, he had the grips mount an ARRI 435 camera on a skateboard. They also built a little roll cage as part of the rig, so as not to damage the camera.

A 14 mm lens was used and the effects of under- and over cranking were tested with the goal of creating butterflies in the pit of the viewer's stomach. But this was no mere exercise in evoking thrills and chills. For that moment, he and La Scala wanted to go further and put the audience inside the mind of a character making the jump.

Crudo spent only one week of the precious five week prep period with La Scala scouting locations that provided settings for the stops the characters make on the way to Los Angeles. They also discussed La Scala's vision for the story and how it could be translated into moving images. They created a skateboard park at the beach in Santa Monica for Los Angeles scenes, used a parking lot at Malibu State Park for Kansas, shot on Pear Blossom Highway on the edge of the desert for Arizona scenarios, and in Tujunga, on the outskirts of the city, for Colorado.

There was virtually no time to shoot makeup, hair or wardrobe tests with the actors and no defining color palette in costume or production design. One of the actors, Vince Vieluf, was 32, but Crudo says, “He looks like a kid." The others were in their 20s. He shot some tests on the first day of principal photography, but that was the extent of his prep time with the actors. "Most of the women in the story are just passing through," Crudo observes, except for one, played by Jennifer Morrison, "a skateboard chick" who had a past relationship with one of the characters. "She was gorgeous and there was very little for me to do beside expose her properly," he said.

Grind was produced entirely at practical locations, including a house in Brentwood, which provided a setting for one of the main character's homes in Chicago, and a couple of skateboard shops around Los Angeles. He describes interiors shots as "pretty straight-forward" with reality-based lighting motivated by what appeared natural in the space.

"We wanted a feeling of tactile energy almost all the time, especially in the skateboarding scenes," he says. "The actors and stunt guys are almost always moving and we wanted the cameras moving, too. I put a camera on a Lenny arm pretty regularly which gave us some interesting angles and movement. Putting Matt Goodman on the skateboard with a camera under his arm also helped get a lot of dynamic angles and frenetic movement. If you want a moving camera while they're skating, you have to get in close and use a wide lens. That gives you the perspective of being closer to the character. Longer lenses make you feel further away and a little bit removed from the action."

”The 14 mm lens is about as wide as you can go without getting distortion on the edges of the frame," he says. "We got close to whatever we were shooting, finding odd angles which exaggerated some aspect of what we were photographing, just to give it a little goofier feeling. That was the language appropriate for this movie. We also used 17 and 20 mm lenses a lot, generally at very low, exaggerated angles, even for establishing shots."

Since all the cameras employed video taps, the director was almost always situated in video village, which Crudo says was close to the actors, depending on the space they had to work with. But La Scala was always within speaking distance.

Though there are a few dramatic moments underscored by lower key lighting, Crudo uses the words "goofy, funny, teenage movie" to describe Grind throughout our conversation. But, he still treated it with the same respect and attention to detail that he would give to a film dealing with more serious subject matter. The final touches were added when he timed Grind at FOTOKEM, fine tuning the scene to scene color structure for continuity as the story moves from the cooler environs of Chicago, to increasing warmer climates. Here, Crudo Credits chief timer Dan Muscarella for his invaluable contribution. "Dan is another CFI refugee - and I know this is starting to sound trite, but it's true - he's one of the best guys working. I was truly blessed on this job."

Grind was produced by Gaylord films and Asphalt Productions and distributed by Warner Bros. An unsigned internet review sums up what Crudo modestly omits: "I saw an early cut of this movie and I have to say it was absolutely hilarious. Tons of great cameos. Like a long, funny skateboard video with cute boys and a cute storyline. Not to mention a rad sound track. When they start advertising this movie, I would say yes it is as funny as it looks and worth your time."