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Cinematographer Dan Parsons recently shot five shorts for the Global Short Film Network (GSFN): If God Had Wanted Us to Fly He Would Have Given Us Wings, The Undeniable Untimely Death of Leland Sturgis, Shut Up and Die Like an Aviator, Not Evelyn Cho, and The Haircut at locations including Austin, Texas and Culver Studios in Culver City, Calif. Parsons discusses the challenges of the projects with Craig Erpelding. For more on Parsons visit his Reel-Exhange profile.

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CE: You just completed work on 5 different short films with 5 different directors, using two different camera systems in about 3 months time for GSFN—what were the biggest challenges in getting it all done?

DP: The shortage of time was really the biggest obstacle in prepping and shooting these films. While every film has a unique tone and approach to the telling of its story, what was different for these films was the amount of time I had to adapt to the different approaches of each director as well the limited time available to collaborate on the visual language for each story. The variety of directing styles combined with the uniqueness of every story is a large part of what attracts me to filmmaking and drives me to be a better cinematographer. However, adapting to these differences in such a short amount of time presented quite a challenge.

With the first two films, adapting to the directing approach was streamlined by the fact that I was working with the same director on both films, and [Director Pete Schwartz] and I could switch gears during preproduction and work between the two films. With the more recent films, quickly adapting to the styles and approaches of the various directors was superseded in difficulty by the sheer coordination of all of our schedules for preproduction meetings.

That preproduction coordination on the more recent films was compounded during production by the fact that we shot the films back to back on the smallest sound stage at Culver Studios. Credit certainly goes to Yoanna Wijaya, production designer, and Chris Mello, art director, for not only designing and building the sets but doing so in such a way as to accommodate the need to have at least two sets built at all times during production so that we could make our days. There was actually a moment during production when we ran out of room on the soundstage to stage the lighting and grip gear, and the grips had to convert an office into a staging area.

CE: Can you compare/contrast the two camera systems you used—the Panasonic HPX2000 and RED One?

DP: Going into these projects, I knew that the GSFN producers were committed to the idea of shooting digitally and were very interested in the Red One. All things considered (apart from film), I chose the Panasonic HPX2000 for the first film for two main reasons: first, it is more sensitive to light than the Red One, and second, the last half of the film was shot on a 33’ jib and the shots required control of the camera and lens during each setup. The accessories to do this with the Red One were simply not available on site at the time of production. A third benefit to shooting on the HPX2000 for the first film, in my opinion, was shooting to P2 cards. I have been using Panasonic’s P2 format since January 2006, and my experience has been nothing but satisfactory. I was a little worried that some of our jib movements on the first film might be risky shooting to hard drive on the Red One—especially with longer takes. So the HPX2000 with solid-state media proved to be a great way to go.

The Red One quickly showed one of its merits, however, on the second film—the day after we wrapped the first film. The 35mm equivalent depth of field on the Red One allows for the exquisite optical characteristics filmmakers have come to appreciate with 35mm film. While I normally approach DOF as one of the storytelling devices available to me as a cinematographer, on the second film the Red One’s narrow DOF became a practical solution for a particular shot. In short, there was an unsightly dumpster behind two characters that was calling attention to itself. My first approach in that type of situation is to move objects that offend the frame or to “cheat” the background in favor of a better composition. Those options weren’t possible in this case; however, the Red One’s narrow DOF easily rendered the dumpster indistinguishable in the background. This extreme level of optical control would simply not have been possible with the HPX2000.

The post workflow of the Red One also proved to be a great asset on set. Tim Sutherland, from Birns and Sawyer, was my Red Tech for the films shot in Culver City. As soon as the hard drive or CF card was full, Tim would offload the footage to two separate hard drives so that there was an immediate backup of all the footage. Next, he would bring the footage into Red’s software and output a still from each setup with a predetermined look applied so that the directors and I could see exactly what we were getting. At the end of the day, Tim would hand me a DVD of the footage so I could watch dailies immediately. For a DP who has an unashamed preference for film, this is a workflow to which I could easily grow accustomed.

Not everything about shooting on the Red One was flawless. The three major issues I would like to see addressed by the Red engineers are the fact that the camera features a daylight-balanced sensor, the fact that it is relatively “slow” with a normal ASA rating of 320, and finally, the image is quite noisy in the shadows. While diehard fans of the camera may argue that the first two issues are “adjustable,” I would agree that yes, while the metadata can be tweaked, doing so can often expose the third issue I have raised: the noise that is quite visible in lower light situations. Yes, this noise can be “squelched” by “crushing the blacks” in post, but that only works with films where the story calls for that style of color timing.

With lower budget production in mind, if only one of these three issues were addressed by the Red engineers, I would personally like to see a tungsten-balanced sensor employed on the camera. Tungsten lights tend to be more budget-friendly than daylight-balanced units such as HMIs, so this could help reduce the cost of production. While balancing tungsten lights for 5600K with CTB gels is possible, doing so can quickly reduce the output by nearly 50%. Losing light means potentially renting bigger lights and, in turn, a bigger generator. For budgetary reasons I used a tungsten lighting package for the productions in Culver City, and given our very short production schedule I opted to add a filter to the lens on two of the films rather than spending valuable setup time adding gels to the lights and controlling any 3200K spill.

After shooting some tests with a series of 80A, B, C, D, and E filters, director John Bucher and I both agreed that the extra warmth by shooting without corrective filtration was actually better for Shut Up and Die Like An Aviator. In general, I don’t personally gravitate towards extra warmth, but my approach as a cinematographer is to allow each story to serve as the framework for my creative choices. In this particular case, when John and I saw the filter tests we both exchanged a look and knew without saying a word that unfiltered was best for the story. For Not Evelyn Cho and The Haircut I shot with filtration to render white as neutral.

CE: Does, shooting for the GSFN—and their mission of top-notch story-telling and films that act as conversational springboards—provide any unique challenges to you as an artist?

DP: In general terms, narrative film audiences are accustomed to a three-act story structure. However, GSFN is producing films with stories written in a two-act structure, and depart from the traditional approach to narrative filmmaking. One might say that where three-act films end with a period, these films end with a question mark. Conceptually, this was easy for me to understand, but knowing how to creatively execute a two-act structure was a new challenge. For instance, in the three-act narrative structure I might choose to take one visual element such as lighting or color and modulate it over the course of the story to reflect or contrast the arc of a particular character. If one were then to take a still from each act of that story it might be possible to quantify the changes in visual design that are happening across the narrative. This modulation of visual design is still possible with the two-act structure, but the sense of resolution and completion to the character arc are just not the same.

Each of the films had their own creative opportunities, but Shut Up and Die Like an Aviator was the film that called for a radically different shooting approach than I had previously encountered on a film. As I alluded to before, I believe cinematography should be driven by the story. With that in mind, Aviator is the story of a self-described, unsuccessful rock musician as told through the lens of a friend who aspires to be a documentary filmmaker. From the beginning I knew that the camera work had to allow for an unrefined quality, and anomalies of framing and focus which occur from any unpredictable movement of the actors would be part of the visual design. Shooting handheld is not new to me, but the idea of using camera operation as a character was something that had not been called for by any previous story I have shot.

Shooting these short films for the GSFN has been a great experience for me as a cinematographer. The GSFN producers are committed to excellence in all aspects of storytelling from start to finish, and particularly, I have been impressed with their commitment to finishing the films with the best available resources. In August, four of the films were colored in a Lustre suite at Universal Studios by colorist Lenny Fohrer. I am a proponent of the D.I. process having finished several previous films in this environment, and I was pleased that the GSFN producers were committed to finishing the films using this process.