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Reader SurveyLow-budget widescreen
Jun 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
A Little Athens scene before (left) and after final color correction at Level 3 Post.
When director Tom Zuber approached DP Lisa Wiegand to shoot a low-budget (less than $1 million) feature called Little Athens, they first discussed shooting 16mm. But, according to Wiegand, Zuber opted for a widescreen (1:2.40 aspect ratio) look to play against the intimate character study. Wiegand convinced the director to shoot Super 35mm (Kodak Vision 5246 for daytime scenes and 7218 for night sequences) and then perform a digital intermediate to circumvent an optical blow-up. To make this approach affordable, filmmakers slightly delayed the start of production until Panavision had a 35mm package available as part of an independent film grant, and then they performed the DI at HD resolution at Level 3 Post in Burbank, Calif.
Wiegand relied heavily on a combination of warm, decamired filters to reduce the impact of cloudy skies for sunny-day scenes and Tiffen's new Glimmerglass filter to help make highlights “bloom.” Later, filmmakers briefly switched to 16mm for the climactic nighttime party scene, in order to create a different feel from the rest of the movie.
Wiegand says the DI (performed on a Da Vinci 2K Plus system by colorist Ron Nichols) proved to be affordable and crucial to overcoming the shoot's limitations.
“We were so low-budget, we had lots of uncontrolled exteriors,” she says. “If a car was the wrong color on the street, we [were able to] change, mute, or tone those colors down so they were not as noticeable in the frame. Our production designer [Abbe Thorner] had a specific color scheme for each character, and the imagery around that character had to maintain that scheme. The DI was priceless for that purpose — it let us desaturate other colors in those scenes.”
