Page 10 - Fujifilm Exposure_30 Archangel_ok

MOTION PICTURE & PRO-VIDEO feature in focus
“I thought Reala 500D was the perfect choice for the sections that I wanted to give a warmer feel to, as the character starts to settle in and find love”
C
inematographer Lawrence Sher responded immediately to the quirky screenplay for Garden State in part because it was set just miles from where he grew up. But it was the story itself that drew him
into the project.
“It was one of the most imaginative
and emotionally true stories I’d read,” he says. Written by actor Zach Braff,
helps him see his life in a new light. The visuals, says Sher, were par-
tially delineated by colourcast; some portions were made to look cool while others were bathed in warmth.
“You want to establish a tone in the first couple of images,” he elabo- rates, referring to one of the first images in the film - a stark, graphic dream sequence in which Braff’s char- acter sits on an airplane, oblivious to
best known as Dr. Dorain on the hit TV series Scrubs, Garden State tells the story of a young actor returning to his New Jersey home after a decade away.
Sher (Kissing Jessica Stein, Club Dread) particularly liked the fact that the script takes bizarre turns while striving to maintain an emotional truth at its core. The film, which Braff also directs and stars in, follows a struggling young actor as he leaves his frustrating Hollywood existence and returns to New Jersey to attend his mother’s funeral.
There he encounters his estranged father (Ian Holm), some old friends, his damaged brother and the lovely young lady, Samantha (Natalie Portman), who
the fact that it’s going down in flames. “He reaches up and calmly opens an air vent. He’s totally disconnected from his environment, which is a sea
of chaos. So we have this warm light motivated from the plane’s wing that seems to be on fire and cool lighting strikes working together. Those two colour elements recur throughout. He starts out in this cold world and gets to a warm place when he falls in love.”
The film shot for a total of 25 days - mostly in the Garden State [New Jersey], with a few additional scenes picked up in New York and LA. Sher felt the Super 35 format would help provide a hint of stylisation to even the most straightforward scenes.
He went with Panavision cameras and Primo primes, and composed for a 2.35:1 aspect ratio. Deluxe, Hollywood subse- quently did the blow-up to 35mm anamorphic format using traditional optical printing methods. “I think any DP would prefer to do that digitally,” Sher laments, “but we just didn’t have the budget for that. I still think it worked out better than if we’d shot it [1.85].”
The cinematographer utilised a mix of film stocks for Garden State, but he relied heavily on Fujifilm’s 35mm Reala 500D 8592 for both aesthetic and practi-
cal reasons. In his search for the perfect stocks, he spoke with DP Ellen Kuras, ASC, who was finishing up work on Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind.
“She was one of the first DPs to use the film,” says Sher, “and she real- ly liked it. So I tested it and just fell in love with the colour. It produces amaz- ing skin tones. I thought it was the perfect choice for the sections that
I wanted to give a warmer feel to, as the character starts to settle in and find love. The Reala gave me the warmth I needed to offset the cold,
8 • Exposure • Fuji Motion Picture And Professional Video