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MillimeterColor Correktion
Sep 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Darroch Greer
If you like a little politics in your art, The Edukators serves up a real treat. Two idealistic friends, bent on political rebellion, break into wealthy homes and rearrange the furniture. They don't steal anything, but leave signs such as, “You have too much money,” and “Your days of plenty are numbered.” When they both fall in love with the same woman, and must return to one of the homes to retrieve a lost cell phone, their idealism is tested to the breaking point.
To capture a documentary-style feel, The Edukators, directed by Hans Weingartner (inset left), was shot in DV with a handheld Panasonic AJ-SDX900, almost exclusively under available light.
The incendiary parable is from a young, talented German director, Hans Weingartner, whose first film, The White Sound, was successful enough he could have chosen to shoot with a big budget. He chose to shoot his second feature on digital tape.
“I wanted a here-and-now look, so it should have a documentary style,” Weingartner says. “Everything is focused on the actors. I needed a way of shooting that allows me to concentrate on that, which means it had to be done easy, quickly, and cheap. That's why I chose to shoot on digital video. Digital video has a certain look, and I knew I had to incorporate that into the story. …And for this kind of radical film with a very critical message, it's hard to put up millions of dollars. It was clear I had to shoot it on a low budget, and I wanted to shoot it on a low budget. I didn't want more money because if you have more money, you lose your freedom.”
As befitting the radical story, the camera was handheld Panasonic AJ-SDX900 and shot almost solely in available light. A Chinese lantern was fitted with a 12W halogen bulb and a boom for a tricky night sequence outside the villa, but when the guard lights catch the intruders, the camera is briefly blinded, just as your eyes would be. “Sometimes, we adjusted the iris on the fly. For example, when the actress steps out of the mountain cabin into the very bright light, the camera takes a second until it has adjusted the iris. That's something that they never do in Hollywood films, but I like it because it gives a documentary feel to it.” They shot on DVCPRO 50 tape, which handled the lighting changes well — even when only flashlights lighted the screen.
DP Matthias Schellenberg and Weingartner did lots of tests with cameras, tape stock, and transfer processes, as Schellenberg's brother is head of the transfer lab Fein Werk. “For example,” Weingartner says, “we didn't do a laser transfer because we don't like the look of the combination of video and laser transfer — too sharp. [We did a] tube scan with a cathode ray tube. It's more analog than digital, so it helps with the digital look of video, which is a pixel look, and makes it look more organic.”
Color correction was still a chore, but Weingartner says he got what he wanted. “Video has a completely different way of recording colors than film. Especially it's very difficult to have green, and there's always a battle between red and blue on one side and green on the other side. What you do is you record with a very low contrast, with very flat gamma levels. It means that you catch every pixel you can catch. You have a broader relationship of lower and high contrast. Then, in the color correction process, you choose the look you want to have.”
