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MillimeterLong Shot
Apr 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Darroch Greer
Certainly the biggest success story of the Oscar-nominated Best Pictures this year was Capote, an exceptional film made by a writer and director with little experience. The achievement of Capote is inspiring, and credit is due — besides the star/director/writer triangle of old friends — to DP Adam Kimmel.
Kimmel is responsible for making the harsh winter plains of Manitoba double for Kansas in its blue and silver tones, and he did almost all of it in-camera. The new Vision2 stock from Kodak Expression 500T 5229/7229 came out just as Capote was rolling into production. “There are some reps at Kodak that know that I've been sort of complaining about too much color or too much contrast,” Kimmel says. “Their development has all gone in that direction, and when I talked to them about this film they said, ‘Twenty-nine, you test it. It's lower color, lower contrast.’” Kimmel had one day to test the new stock, as well as test the match potential with the three Vision stocks he was using — Vision2 100T 5212/7212, Vision2 200T 5217/7217, and Vision2 500T 5218/7218. “I found that by pull-developing and over-exposing and under-developing, I could keep the colors in the same family of saturation.”
Particularly, Kimmel needed a slower film for the exteriors, so he tested pulling the slower stocks. “It worked perfectly. Side by side, on split screens, they looked like they were two versions of the exact same film. I'm really happy with that part of it.” Kimmel used the four different stocks in Capote. Except for the killing flashback, everything is either pull-developed or the Vision2 5229 stock.
The cost of a DI was out of the question. For his color palette, Kimmel was happy doing things the old-fashioned way. “A lot of it's in-camera. I own a lot of filters. A lot of those landscapes are gentle colorations and grads. Schneider filters would be the answer to that.”
