Drive and
Bellflower are both movies with fast cars and distinctive looks but
one had a budget 765x the
other. Drive was captured to
Betamax's grandchild, Bellflower to a
Mac Book Pro."Refn and Sigel were inspired by the look of location-scout photos Sigel snapped using the Hipstamatic app on his iPhone. 'There are some color palettes in that program that reference retro photographic looks, like Kodachrome or Ektrachrome,'" They used
production design and
lighting for their look and shot with a camera that's new and digital, but
comes from a traditional cinema photography
house.
"'As part of my test, I took Ryan out in a car, and Tony and I rigged the car with a rack overhead with all different kinds of tiny lights, such as LEDs and 150-watt [Arri Fresnels],' says Sigel. 'We wired them all into dimmers in the trunk that could be wirelessly controlled, so we could turn lights off and on or dim them up and down. The lights were all so small and unobtrusive that they were never in shot, so Ryan could just drive around while Tony played the roof rack like a musical instrument. There were also times when we'd kill all of our lights -- we'd pull up to a stoplight, and you could see the light on Ryan's face go from red to green.'"
Bellflower
has a "distinctive look, credit given to cinematographer Joel Hodge's shooting style and the one-of-a-kind camera designed and built by Evan Glodell, who combined vintage camera parts, bellows and Russian lenses, around a Silicon Imaging SI-2K Mini."
"This camera does things that no other camera on the planet can do," Glodell says. "It can do tilt-shift effects with any lens. It can make a Steadicam shot from five feet away look like a telephoto shot from 100 feet away. It's like looking out of a whale's eye."
The
Coatwolf Model II digital cinema camera in
action.
Drive
had a
drivable trailer for holding a non-functional car and an SUV-mounted
crane while Bellflower's cameraman
hung out the window.
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 10:23 AM on December 7, 2011