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The Digital Cinematographer Ellen Kuras, ASC, discusses Bamboozled and the travails of digital filmmaking By Kevin H. Martin A television personality exhorts his TV viewers and live-audience members with heated declamations, then collapses backwards to the stage floor while the camera moves in for a close view of his supine form. While this action accurately describes an event in the 1976 film Network, a quite similar scene plays out in Bamboozled, director Spike Lee’s riff on TV, ratings and racism. Desperate for an out to his contract, TV executive Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayans) responds to urgings from network honcho Dunwitty (Michael Rapaport) to develop a show that will appeal to Black audiences. Delacroix deliberately authors a program that he believes will be completely offensive and totally unsuccessful, thus insuring his dismissal and freeing him from his servitude. Recruiting destitute black street performers Manray (Savion Glover) and Womack (Tommy Davidson), then renaming the pair Mantan and Sleep ‘N’ Eat, he puts them into black-face make-up and headlines them in a minstrel show for the new millennium. What Delacroix fails to anticipate is the show’s roaring success with viewers who, seemingly unaware of the negative stereotypes being represented by the performers, respond to the Step-n-Fetchit-like vaudeville routines with a fervor that puts Trekkies to shame. But while much of the country—Whites, Blacks and people most colors in between—begins donning black-face masks, some, including militant rap group the Mau-Maus, see this entertainment as the affront to Black history that it is, and plan to strike back against the system. By this time, the program’s demeaning nature has started to take a toll on its principal players. Sleep ‘N’ Eat refuses to continue on in black-face and quits the show, while Delacroix—initially horrified by the program’s success—becomes increasingly enamored of his exalted position. Ultimately, Mantan also rebels against the show, but even after making a passionate statement against the system that made him a star, he suffers the same fate as Network protagonist Howard Beale—getting executed on live TV by radicals. However, instead of being instigated by a desperate network, the assassination is an act of political expression, with the terrorist rappers destroying a man who symbolizes a return to the mindless, unthinking racism that passes itself off as entertainment.
Her initial surprise at Lee’s choice is understandable, given the director’s dedication to the medium of film. “He is one of the only directors who absolutely insists on looking at projected film dailies, and I have to say that I was much more inclined to shoot on film. At first, I was very resistant to trying this new approach with mini-DV or any form of digital video at all. But once I accepted that Spike wanted to make the film using the mini-DV format [the ‘mini’ in digital video is a huge distinction in comparing consumer, prosumer and professional level cameras], I had to begin the process of informing myself about this medium and how it functioned.” Toward that end, Kuras queried some colleagues on their experiences with the lower-end format. “As a cinematographer, I needed to learn just how much control I’d be able to have over the visual image— during shooting and then in post—where an awful lot would depend on the methodology selected, and which wound up being a lot more complicated than most people imagine. Everyone, I mean everyone, had a separate opinion about which road to follow. I have to thank an assistant—Kerwin DeVonish, a DV/mini-DV cameraman who was an invaluable technical resource to me. In addition, I had a little time to investigate the few houses that offered tape-to-film services at the time and run comparison blow-up tests. Since last year, many more labs and specialty houses have jumped into the DV flood to offer their own version of the DV-to-film blow-up.” Of equal or greater importance was Kuras’ desire to create a unique look for Bamboozled within the boundaries of video imaging. “I had never really liked the so-called video look,” she admits, “so I was interested in trying to explore ways to create a new visual language. Although generated on video, the final color-corrected visuals wouldn’t really be considered ‘video,’ nor would they try exclusively to emulate film.” In developing a point-of-view from which to approach this new project, Kuras looked back on her experience shooting the fashion documentary Unzipped for director Douglas Keeve, which mixed several different mediums. “Though none of the formats were video, we found that combining Super 8, Super 16, and regular 16 millimeter, plus mixing color with black-and-white imagery, contributed to the funkiness of the film.” The Revolution Will Not Be Digitized While most of Bamboozled was captured through digital video, select scenes—the minstrel show performances, for instance—were shot on Super 16. Choosing this format continued the mixed-media notion while also up-ending the traditional approach to capturing TV-related imagery. “Conventionally, the documenting or capturing of life—fictitious or real—is often expected to be rendered on film, while TV is often represented by video,” acknowledges Kuras. “We recognize when images come from TV because they are codified—by their grainy, pixelated, contrasty, harsh look. Spike and I decided to flip the conventional expectation—using Super 16 film images for the broadcast segments—so that anything that would theoretically have been shown on a television screen would be originated on Super 16 film, then blown up to 35 millimeter. This introduced a different sense of reality into the idea of this television show and brought it into a much more visceral sensibility.”
With the remainder of this satire to be shot on digital video, Kuras tested a variety of consumer cameras. “Spike was interested in using the smaller cameras, which meant mini-DV, and that translated to selecting between three-chip consumer cameras and single-chip consumer cameras which had a kind of look unto themselves. I presented Spike with the gamut of different looks possible, and we decided the feel of the Sony VX-1000 in PAL was best. It was a small camera, which enabled great mobility—a plus since Spike was interested in placing the cameras on tables just outside of shot. For me, I found the camera had a rounder look, for lack of a better term, more of a filmic look, more like Super 8 and the PAL standard gave use more resolution.” The depth of field, however, was harder to control with video than with film cameras—video generates images that are rich in depth of field—often too rich. “Even when you’re nearly wide open, the background tends to remain in focus unless you go on the longer part of the lens.” The mini-DV cameras’ focus was another important issue to contend with, particularly the discrepancies between what’s seen in the scope and what shows up on a monitor.“When you look through the viewfinder of the camera, the image does not match what you get on the tape, as the finder shows a much smaller area—and you just can’t see the focus,” states Kuras. “When tracking an actor, it got really tough, especially when they were moving in space either toward or away from the camera. There are no markings on the lens, so a first assistant can’t pull focus. The focus has to be done by the operator, so it took a week to two weeks for them to get the knack of it. Because of the electronic focus, we ended up using small monitors to see the actual framing and get an idea of the focus.” Zooming was also a tricky proposition with respect to image resolution and, as a result, had to be avoided whenever possible. “We also found that the image tended to fall apart when going wide on the image,” notes Kuras. “That was very noticeable to me when we blew up the film, and it was evident when we looked at our video dailies as well. The lenses and the three-chip cameras don’t have the resolving power for wide-angle images, though the longer lens shots—the close-ups—feel more filmicthan the wider views. That low resolution is something that is very hard to rectify in tape-to-tape, where we could exert limited sharpening of the image. But when the lens does not resolve well, or when the camera cannot handle the amount of information, it is very difficult to correct later on.” One final complication relating to use of the VX-1000 concerned the units running Sony code instead of a SMPTE timecode. To circumvent this, the sound department ran a DAT machine to create a master timecode, while production employed smart slates throughout shooting; none of the film’s sound wound up being taken from the cameras themselves. Dancing in the Dark
Though trying to maintain “cinematic” imagery, Kuras still found lighting video to be an entirely different process from that of film. When illuminating a background area, for instance, she had to switch off lamps that would have been left on if lighting the same space for celluloid. “The video was more sensitive to picking up the light in the background, bringing that part of the image forward. In an effort to influence the appearance of little depth-of-field, I tried to separate the background from the foreground by not using light. I stayed away from backlight except in some of the performance pieces, because I found that backlights tend to heighten that telltale white outline occurring in video, which I tried to avoid.” So while background lighting was not always essential, Kuras does challenge the unfounded claim that video requires no supplemental lighting whatsoever. “In the shadow detail, I found that the video could ‘dig in’ a little bit more than one might expect from video, but not more so than film, especially given the depth and speed of today’s higher speed filmstocks.” declares Kuras. “In certain dark scenes, the ‘rebel’ in me let the scene play ‘darkish’ to test video’s ability to see into darkness without pushing the gain function. You definitely still need to put light in these areas, because otherwise the video just won’t be able to read the information, rendering a very noisy and muddy image. “This is particularly evident in the scene with Jada Pinkett-Smith [as Delacroix’s assistant Sloan] and Damon in his apartment at night. They both emerge from the elevator and walk across the room. Although the process of tape-to-film exacerbated the darkness/video noise problem, I obviously shot myself in the foot in trying to prove a point. The scene is noticeably too dark.What I learned from shooting those darker scenes was that I probably would have gained a lot from opening up somewhere between a half to a full stop. Another rather dark sequencein Bamboozled’s shoot was a night exterior set outside a warehouse as the NYPD raid the Mau-Maus’ covert hideout after Mantan’s televised, gangland-style execution. Kuras lit the assaultfilm-style, with a few large sources such as bounced MaxiBrutes into 12-by12s and two 4K Xenon lights on full spot setting. “As I indicated earlier, we couldn’t shoot available light. Contrary to popular belief, we need to light where there is no light to make video work.I wasn’t willing to push the gain—we’d have had to go to six, 12 or maybe 18 dbs, which would have been way too much noise for the blow-up.” Kuras opened up exposure-wise on the nocturnal attack, following one of several recommendations from Swiss Effects, which did the video-to-film blow-up. Swiss utilizes a proprietary printing system that allows PAL video to be transferred at 2K resolution. “One tip I had received from Patrick [Lindenmeyer] was that if you can see what the detail is in the black area on the monitors, then you should be able to see the same amount of detail when doing the blow-up. You can deepen the blacks during the color-correction [through manipulation of the gamma only] and through printing down during the print’s timing, which is what we did for the raid. “[Swiss Effects] are very knowledgeable about how to maximize the image shot with a small consumer cameras. We didn’t have any controls other than setting them at minus three decibels in order to shift the scale down so the image was cleaner. I knew that most contrast and color controls were going to be handled in either the lighting or manipulated in the tape-to-tape color-correction. “Other scenes in which the contrast was difficult to handle occurred frequently throughout our shooting schedule. We shot one scene with Jada and Mos Def [as her brother, the militant rapper Big Black Africa] meeting outside her apartment with three cameras during a single long take. Unfortunately, we moved from bright sun into shadow but couldn’t rectify the stop—the mini-DV VX1000s reveal the ‘clicks’ between stops. Riding the aperture is much more difficult in these cameras—we weren’t able to change the stop because you would see it. Even with the tools that colorist Tim Masick and I had on hand, some of the detail in the underexposed areas wasn’t there, resulting in excessive video noise, which I was not happy about. As a result, Tim and I ended up trying to manipulate the look of the image to accommodate technical difficulties. Tim, a greater collaborator and visionary eye, is based at Moving Images PostProduction in New York.” Overall, she found video imagery’s dynamic range to be much less than that of even reversal filmstock, which she had exploited on Four Little Girls and Summer of Sam. “The white walls in office scenes were a real problem,” she notes, “because the white does not render very well on video. I was constantly trying to keep light off the back walls, but we were using small real locations. Dunwitty’s office was actually the CEO’s office at the corporation we shot at, so we couldn’t rig much in the way of lighting from the ceiling at all.” Adding to her woes, Kuras had to deal with floor-to-ceiling windows looking down and out on midtown Manhattan. “We wound up putting hard gels [ND .12 and 85 N3] on the windows, but even that was a real challenge, because when the Sun struck the outside buildings, the highlights went over 100 percent; hence it was very very difficult to maintain any kind of detail. “When I see the film now, I remember which scenes were shot first because I had unknowingly overexposed those images on mini-DV video.” Kuras observes. “When shooting professional video during my documentary days, I always used the zebra stripes to indicate clipping of the whites and to guide me as to the appropriate exposure. With mini-DV video, I allowed the zebras to play slightly as usual, but I soon discovered—thanks to Patrick Lindenmeyer of Swiss Effects who did the tape-to-film —that overexposure was detrimental to a good blow-up. The overexposure caused the color to become desaturated, the contrast to become muddy and its apparent resolution to become even mushier, as I learned from the conference room scenes. This, of course, was difficult to tell from a monitor—Patrick knew from the experience of tape-to-film. Again, in the color-correct, Tim and I tried to compensate for these earlier scenes as best we could.” Points of View Throughout production, operators wielded two principal cameras, with a number of locked-off cameras also being set up for many scenes. Director Lee employed the most elaborate array of cameras during the simultaneous shooting of the Mantan program and the live audience response. “In that instance, we had three film cameras [Arri SR3s with 10-100mm Zeiss zooms] shooting Super 16 [on Kodak’s 7274], on Savion and Tommy. Five VX1000 mini-DV, three-chip cameras were operated on both performance and audience, four TRV 900 3-chip cameras were locked-off on the stage and the audience, and three PC1 single-chip cameras were locked-off on details. We had 15 cameras running at the same time for some of the performance scenes. The camera crew outnumbered both the grip and electric crews combined!” Though this arrangementoffered many options in editing and allowed the shooting schedule (from September 27 to November 12, 1999) to proceed apace, Kuras found concealingcameras and arranging lighting (sometimes balloons set aloft) for multiple setups to be quite an effort. “When you’ve got cameras looking through nearly 360-degrees in all directions, it is really tough to hide lights while still managing to light people in a flattering way, and maintain any kind of stylized look. The further the movie progresses into the performance pieces, more noticeable the difference between the two mediums becomes, because the editors are cutting back and forth between the filmed shots and video shots of the audience. The editors also used some video footage of the performance itself, which wasn’t part of the original concept, but rather a stylistic editorial decision made during the cut. Bamboozledopens with Pierre Delacroix giving the audience a sense of his skewed world with what Kuras describes as “a classic Spike shot.” The director applied a similar effect to his protagonist’s movements in Do the Right Thing, Jungle Fever, Malcolm X and Clockers. As he introduces himself, Delacroix (and the room behind him) does a 360-degree pan with him and the space behind him spinning simultaneously. “Spike had the character—in this case, Damon Wayans, sitting on the dolly with the camera so that both move at the same time as we dollied backwards on the dance floor. Wedollied as a unit in a series of circles, spinning round to show the room moving in the background.” The cinematographer hung 6K HMI Pars and Par Cans with 1/2 CTB gel on the pillars and iron grids around the room, which included a huge punch of real sunlight pouring through one window at sunset. To get the flare which backlit the actor at one point during the room’s revolution, Kuras had to schedule its shoot at the end of the day. “That flared light really helped integrate Delacroix into the scene. Otherwise, the shot being so bizarre in the way that video creates the appearance of dimension, it could have been interpreted as our having keyed Damon into the scene.” For the Delacroix intro, a piece of dance floor had to be substituted in place of track beneath the dolly. But Kuras did utilize track throughout the seven-week production. “We mounted the little DV cameras on Sachtler Video 20 and 30 heads on two dollies,” says Kuras. “We also tried to use a mini-Steadicam rig for some walk-and-talk shots. The rig itself—a plastic mount with a handheld gimbal and built-in 411 plastic monitor—was very rudimentary, but Spike wanted to keep things simple. Again, it took some time and practice for the operators to handle these rigs, because the weight of the camera, and the monitor rig was balanced on an outstretched arm. The focus was extremely difficult to see on the monitor without upsetting the balance of the rig. The focus was a recurring theme that just kept coming up again and again.” Communication between departments proved essential for other aspects of the production as well. Kuras met regularly with the art department about the type of monitors being featured on set as actual televisions. “Because we were shooting mini-DV on PAL standard, the monitors actually operational on set had to be PAL in order to avoid the standard flicker,” recalls Kuras. “That required some effort on their part, since the U.S. standard is NTSC.” In some instances, the monitors were shot as greenscreens, which afforded the director options with respect to their ultimate content. “We pre-color-corrected the TV elements for the greenscreen shots, then provided these elements to an effects house [Mechanism] so they could be integrated to the final conformed image.” A vista of New York City with Mantan and Sleep ‘N’ Eat staring up at images of themselves broadcast on Times Square’s famous AstroVision ended up being a lock-off shot matted out in post by Mechanism. “If we had provided the feed for the AstroVision and shot it live—like we did for Summer of Sam—it would have been prohibitively expensive. Bamboozled was an extremely low-budget film. That’s one of the reasons why we also shot on mini-digital tape.” Greenscreen was also manipulated during the climactic moment when Delacroix’s disgusted assistant Sloan shoots the TV writer to death inside his high-rise apartment. “Not only was her reflection seen in the door, but there was also a reflection coming off of the green-screened monitor seen in the door,” recalls Kuras. “That double reflection wound up meriting a bit of discussion [in terms of] how much the keyed-in monitor material would play next to the actual reflection of Jada in the door. Sometimes, the keyed-in material had to be degraded because it looked inappropriately too real for the resolution of the mini-DV medium.” Color Adjustment All sequencesinvolving the militant Mau-Mau rap troop, whether lounging in a pool hall or cutting tracks in a record studio, are designed deliberately to contrast with the network boardrooms’ cooler look. During correction, they decided to drain the color somewhat, bringing out a latent black-and-white feel whenever the rappers appeared. “We did keep some warm light in those scenes, and while faces going toward yellow on video is sometimes a problem, the Mau-Maus were so stylized that I wasn’t afraid of giving them this yellow-brown, yet black-and-white feel.” After Mantan’s on-air murder by the Mau-Mau troop, reaction shots of Dunwitty, Womack and Sloan also play up a leached-out color effect to challenge the reality of the TV screen versus that of the character. Earlier on, a now-successful Delacroix decides to look up his parents and flaunt his newfound fame.Hepays a visit to his father (Paul Mooney), a stand-up comic performing at the Sugar Shack. “The backstage room where father and son talk was another real location that Victor brilliantly set up, with a number of mirrors helping the scene along. In the color correct, we allowed much more green to play in the room, because it seemed appropriate and reinforced both the art direction and the content of the scene. During the color correction process, both Tim and I always tried to ‘time’ the film in terms of the content of the scene. For us, content definitely influenced the look and vice-versa.” As Sloan and Delacroix make references to historical events and personages in several scenes, flash cuts are used to illustrate the verbal asides. (The movie’s coda features a damning litany of blackfaced images that span the very history of American filmmaking.) Archival material included both feature film and television images, ranging from The Jazz Singer, Amos & Andy, The Little Rascals and D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation among numerous other culprits. Kuras’ earlier work on Lee’s documentary Four Little Girls provided her with an opportunity to toy with black-and-white visuals, introducing blue hues to the blacks and blowing out the whites. But for Bamboozled, Kuras made a conscious decision to include the archival material as-is, without any attempt to affect the imagery or blend it with her own. “I thought that these clips should remain as people remember seeing them on TV. So I tried not to change color or density at all in order to allow the images to retain their integrity. Even so, given that we were printing on color film stock, some small bit of color does unavoidably get introduced.” In post, all of the PAL mini-DV tapes were digitally transferred to PAL Digi-Beta, which created clone copies without incurring generational loss. “We made Digi-Beta masters for two primary reasons. First, we needed a format that could support SMPTE time code, address track and sound tracks and second, a format that could be frame-accurately edited. We never went back to the original mini-DV tapes. In effect, they became our back-up master tapes. After these Digi-Beta tapes were conformed according to the edited Beta SP [PAL] Avid output onto another PAL Digi-Beta, I took this tape—a conformed PAL edit—color-corrected tape-to-tape onto yet another Digi-Beta. All of these steps stayed in PAL standard,” Kuras remarks. “During the first few days of dailies, which were on Beta SP tapes—made for the editor from the Digi-Betas—I found that I couldn’t check the focus. So we ended up viewing all the dailies from our master Digi-Beta tapes transferred at Magno’s facility in New York. “These Digi-Beta’s revealed the lighting quirks, camera problems and focus problems much more then the Beta SP dubs. And we did catch one bad camera after a day of shooting in the conference room when Savion Glover dances on the table. Shots from that camera are noticeable in the blow-up. But the problem would have gone undetected on the Beta SPs. That’s why I strongly recommended to the editing department that they check the shots before doing the final conform from the Avid edit list. Controls over the film to retain a desired look had to be maintained all the way down the line. “Through all the various stages—the shoot, edit conform, color correct, blow-up, negative cut, answer print timing to release timing—I felt like I was going from one dark room to another, spending time and energy in consultation with the technicians presiding over each of those rooms: Kerwin DeVonish, Joey Vito and Tim Mascik at Moving Images; Patrick Lindenmeyer at Swiss Effects; and Noëlle Penraat and Mato at FotoKem. “Swiss Effects did a great job with their attention to detail and getting the best blow-up possible. I also spent a lot of time at FotoKem with Mato, the timer, who’s a film veteran. He spent an enormous amount of extra attention to understand how the video reacted in order to make the best printing lights. I preferred to go for a softer look overall on Bamboozled to soften the video look. Given the nature of print stocks and what can be done with them, that was something of a challenge. In looking at the difference from the check prints from Switzerland and the prints from the States, Mato and I realized that the developing baths in the States tend to be warmer, hence creating more contrast. “We then tried to counter the contrast inherent in the filmstock by flashing. After seeing the first answer print done on Fuji’s release stock, Mato suggested that I look at the Fuji hi-con stock, printing the picture up instead of taking the usual route of printing down. At first, I was skeptical about the high-contrast because the hi-con seemed to be opposed to the softer, rounder look I desired. After comparing all the test prints and realizing that I would not be able to match the original check prints from Switzerland, I decide to print on the hi-con. Overall, the hi-con lent a much snappier feel to the film and really helped in terms of both clarity and color saturation.” With the experiment of her first digital video feature now a lingering memory, cinematographer Ellen Kuras, ASC finds herself being queried about the process, much the same as she sounded out others before embarking on Bamboozled. When people ask me about mini-digital, I have to ask them ‘Are you interested in the digital video medium or are you interested in budget?’ Shooting video is not necessarily cheaper than shooting Super 16. A lot of producers and directors have jumped onto the digital bandwagon because they’ve heard that it’s cheaper. That is still a big question, at this point. In addition, DPs should be prepared to spend considerably more time in postproduction for digital films. Whereas DPs are not usually paid for post, the additionally time spent in the color correction, the supervision of the blow-up and the answer print timing as well as the release timing necessitate a change in the terms of a contract. “Digital definitely does have its advantages and is appropriate in certain applications. With my strong desire to give the film a look and the need for a full color correction, we ended up spending quite a bit on the back end in post. Unless aesthetics or theory dictate choosing video—whether Hi-def or mini-DV—I caution everyone to consider all costs involved, not just the dollars you’d save during a production shoot. Remember, Bamboozled was shot on consumer cameras not on Digi-Beta or HD, and the on-screen images are a function of that specific camera system. I’ll be interested to see just how many people, when viewing this film, remain aware throughout that we shot in mini-DV.”•
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Shooting
on the familiar turf of New York City, director Spike Lee opted
to film most of 
Commercials
seen in 
As
part of her effort to develop a distinct visual style, Kuras employed
film-style lighting. Out of interest in testing video’s leeway,
she and gaffer John Velez (a VX-1000 owner himself) melded color
temperatures at every available opportunity. “We ended up mixing
HMIs and tungsten, then mixing warm white fluorescents and cool-white
fluorescents, and adding color to the fluorescents as well. I
used overhead lighting—such as a 4K HMI Par on stage, batten strips
[with mixed tungsten and daylight bulbs] in the offices and conference
rooms. I let the light go as much as four stops overexposed on
the highlights just to see how the overexposure would register
on mini-DV, which has incredibly limited latitude.”