这是发表在AC 2010十月號上的社交网络摄影笔记，可惜英文太差再加上这种技术文的专业词汇又太多，就只能这么与大家分享了。大家硬着头皮看吧，同时也坐等超级牛人的全文翻译……

With Friends Like These... 

David Fincher and Jeff Cronenweth, ASC help beta-test Red's Mysterium-X chip on The Social Network, which chronicles the founding of Facebook. 
Director David Fincher declares that his team employed "a righteous workflow" for The Social Net-work, a digitally captured feature that details the development of the Facebook website by Harvard University students in 2003. According to Fincher, his team, which included cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth, ASC, managed to simplify' while significantly advancing the data-based workflow methods employed on Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (shot on high-definition video and 35mm; AC Jan. ?9) and Zodiac (shot on HD video; AC April '07). 
Fincher had used Thomson's Viper on Zodiac, and the Viper and Sony's F23 on Benjamin Button, but when he started prepping The Social Network, he made an early decision to adopt Red One cameras and data- management techniques for the project. Friend and fellow filmmaker Steven Soderbergh offered Fincher the use of Soderbergh's own Red cameras, and around that time, Red was preparing to introduce its new Mysterium -X 4K sensor. Fincher persuaded Red to upgrade Soderbergh's cameras with betaversion MX sensors, and he and Cronenweth shot The Social Network with them, recording mainly to 16gigabyte CF cards. 
"Viper technology was a few years old by the time we started this project," explains Fincher. "I was comfortable with it and liked the bandwidth and the pictures I got, but ... Steven [Soderbergh] let me use his Red Ones on some Nike commercials, and I just felt the Red was fiimrecompatible. It's light and small, and I could walk away from the set at the end of the day with a wallet full of CF cards, take them to the editorial department, download them, and go back and use them again. I call it a righteous workflow. 
"Red's new chip was in the beta stage when I started prepping Social Network, and I felt that if the company could guarantee the chip's stability throughout our shoot, it was a risk worth talcing," continues the director. "[Red CEO] Jim Jannard did that, so the decision was easy. When 1 brought Jeff Cronenweth in, I said, If you don't like the tests, we can discuss making a change, but otherwise, this is how I want to go.' We went into a digitalintermediate suite, and the 4K images we saw made Jeff happy." 
Cronenweth had previously shot music videos and the feature Fight Club AC Nov. '99) for Fincher, and had also shot second unit for the director's films Seven AC Oct. '95) and The Game AC Sept. '97). When Fincher offered to bring him aboard Social Network, Cronenweth had not used the Red One with the new chip, though he had digitally captured commercials with the Red, Thomson's Viper and Sony's F35. Cronenweth says he quickly became comfortable with the MX chip after testing, and he believes the Red suited the "reality-based" aesthetic of the project at hand. He also felt the Red would help the production work around the fact that it had no access to the Harvard campus, where much of the story takes place. "We had to tread lightly when shooting near Harvard, while at the same time maintain high standards," says Cronenweth. "I was confident that the Red would allow us to work light, move fast, handle low light and still get rich visuals. We could still monitor and regulate exposures, if you will, but our footprint was very small - we didn't even have a DIT [digital-imaging technician]. We had a video-playback tech to record data, and one camera assistant managing data and sending everything to editorial. The video-playback tech received the normal 720 out signal for video assist via normal cabling." 
The production carried two of Sodcrbcrgh's Red Ones (Build 21) upgraded with JVlX chips and outfitted with Arri Master Prime lenses. Keslow Camera supplied the team with the Master Primes and a third Red One. (A second unit, which focused on crew- race footage, was outfitted with two lightweight Kevlar Red bodies that Red made specifically for the filmmakers.) Soderhergh's cameras were run most of the time, with Peter Roscnfcld operating the A camera and Cronenweth on the B. The production utilized the Redcode 42 compression scheme, but Red also upgraded software so the production could go as high as 36 fps and still stay within Redcode 42. The movie was shot 2:1 (4096 ? 2048) for a final aspect ratio of 2.40:1. 
Most of the time, the 4K images were recorded directly to CF cards. For long dialogue scenes or data-eating speed-change sequences, however, the team also used Red-Ram and RedRaid drives. The filmmakers visualized what they shot "rather simply," according to Fincher, on a pair ot Panasonic BT-LH 1760 HD focus monitors. Rather than calibrating the monitors with a variety of look-up tables, they relied on the basic Redcolor default LUT, saving their fine-tuning for the digital grade. Cards were sent to editorial each day and offloaded, with an editorial assistant backing up each card to two separate hard drives and LPO tape before returning the cards to set. No physical media were used for dailies; instead, the production relied on the Pix System online media platform, staying in the data realm throughout. 
Cronenweth says there were several advantages to having MXconfigurcd cameras at his disposal. "Dynamic color range, improvement in latitude, highlights not vanishing as quickly into clipping areas, and actually extending the toe area - those things were beautifi.il," he enumerates. "Most of this picture, like many of David's movies, takes place in low-light situations, so those things were helpful to us." 
Rosenfeld also enjoyed his first encounter with the Red. "We pretty' much used it as if it were a film camera," says the operator. "It's a digital movie, but there were no laptops in the camera department, no DIT, and we were never burdened with having to dub or copy cards on set. We rarely viewed playback through the camera, as the video-assist operator handled shot evaluation in a traditional fashion. The only cables were the traditional ones used on any video-assist tap; they ran to David's HD monitor. 
"Also, T liked the eyepiece, because with the bigger chip, I could really sign oft on focus, which is hard to do with digital cameras," continues Rosenfeld. "There's an area operators call the 'lookaround,' an area that isn't recorded in the aspect ratio. It's useful for spotting intrusions or violations, like tracks or booms or stands. With most other camera systems, if you see it in the eyepiece, it's too late, but with the MX chip, there is a little lookaround built into the format. This was the first digital-cinema system Pve used where the eyepiece monitor was sharp enough for me to actually see focus." 
Cronenweth notes, however, that manipulating depth-of-field remains a challenge. "It filmmakers shooting digitally choose to use depthof-field as a storytelling tool, then it's imperative to control the exposure to control focus," he explains. "We shot with the [Tl. 3] Master Primes wide open most of the time. When we went outside, which was rare, we had to really stack ND filters to get the exposure down and achieve a comfortable amount of depth-of-ticld. When shooting digitally and stacking filters, one must ahvays remember the sensitivities of the chip or sensor and what the effect of those filters might be. We used IR neutral-density filters to control the warm effects that the NDs inherently bring, and to give our bluelight-sensitive chip a better chance at capturing the images the way we wanted them." 
Fincher's goal was straightforward photography in real-world light. "What David wanted was evident right away," recalls Rosenteld. "He likes symmetry - balanced compositions, strong lines, level frames, zero keystone effects. He favors [dolly] track and avoids cranes as much as possible. I believe there is only one handheld shot in the entire movie. David was so clear on what he wanted visually that camera placements and focal-length choices were easy to make." 
Because the production couldn't shoot on I larvarci property, the university facilities were re-created onstage in Los Angeles. Great care was taken to ensure that all of the set lighting was motivated practically, according to Cronenweth. There was a heavy reliance on fluorescents and small ningsten lights hidden in ceilings, a general favoring of small units to create little pockets of fight and shadow throughout the old buildings depicted in the movie. "Much of it was practicáis and simple lights, basic Fresnel and Kino Flo fixtures," says gaffer Harold Skinner. "We also used Lightcraft 4-foot 2Ks and soft-light rigs I call 'covered wagons,' which are basically lamps in a 4-foot cylinder with protective grids approximately 12 inches in diameter. Inside each are common globes, 75-watt PH211s, 250-watt ECAs, 500-watt ECTs, and so on. We also used little clip-on lights thiat we called 'budget busters.'" 
The inclination to keep things simple pervaded the shoot. As an example, Skinner points to a scene that takes place in a Bay Area club in low light. In the scene, Napster co-founder Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) tries to educate Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eiscnberg) about business strategies in the online world. Cronenweth says he started with a complex Technocrane shot that looked 180 degrees from the bottom floor of the club to a secondfloor VIP area. Fincher wanted to enhance the chaos of the club around the two men while making Parker's lecture sound sinister. 
The notion of lighting the two actors from their tabletop was proposed, and it was expanded to cue light and color changes to the beat of the ambient music. Skinners team devised a solution by using LED media panels to splash colorful QuickTime movies onto the actors' faces. "A dance-floor lighting rig and a few other moving lights were interacting in tlie background, but the table was the only keylight in the scene," says Skinner. "We had LED media panels built into the tables, and the light emanating from them was a series of QuickTime movies as fractals animated on the LED screen, coming through the screen below a diffused surface. We used 11mm LED tiles from PRG and controlled everything from a Virtuoso DX2 console and an Mbox Extreme Media Server." 
The Social Network's first shot, a night exterior that plays during the opening titles, was perhaps the most complicated piece of the movie to capture. The sequence depicts Zuckerberg racing through Harvard Square and the university gates. Capturing the sweeping panoramic night exterior required all three Red Ones; images from the cameras were later tiled together into a single image to create an establishing view of Harvard Square, with the university in the background. The obstacle was the fact that most of the property pictured in the sequence was owned by Harvard, and therefore off-limits. "Fortunately, we had the support of the city of Cambridge, and their workers replaced all streetlight globes that wouldn't give us our desired mercury-vapor feel for the entire two-block area," says Cronenweth. "Then, we hid our own globes [on dimmers] on the back side of the same streetlights to create bigger pools of light under them. We also used various parking spots to create as many edges as possible with tungsten 10Ks and 5Ks to separate Jesse out from the dark bricks of the campus." 
Cronenweth's crew also set up some moving lights to play as Eisenberg passed certain locations on the street. But the team still faced the problem of how to properly backlight edges of the iconic brick arches at Harvard Square that serve as a campus entrance. The shot, as designed, needed the backlight, but the filmmakers weren't allowed on campus. Fincher's solution was to hire a street performer to set up his performance cart inside the gate, and to have Cronenweth's crew place in that cart a portable, battery-powered light source - two 500-watt ECT Photo Floods hooked up to an 1,800-watt inverter/battery pack - designed to fire up only when the filmmakers were shooting. 
The most specialized lighting, however, was required for the movie's most complicated visual effect: about 15 face replacement-shots used to make two different actors appear as identical twins, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss. The brothers were champion rowers who crewed at Harvard and later sued Zuckerberg over Facebook's creation. Fincher couldn't find a set of identical twins who satisfied his requirements, so instead, he hired one actor, Armie Hammer, to play Cameron, and another, Josh Pence, to supply the body and body movements for Tyler. The filmmakers used a combination of split-screen shots and digital face replacements whenever the brothers interacted, especially during rowing sequences. For those shots, the production turned to Lola Digital. "Armie looked the most like the real brothers, so I wanted to use his face," says Fincher. "I realized we could use a lot of split screen, even moving split screens. As long as we had a plate I liked and enough data around the second take, we could just rack the background of the second take. As long as the actor didn't go out of frame, we could split-screen it back in. We did that a lot; the actor would go out tite A side and back in the B side, and then we would track the plate on the B side to an A plate, and rotoscopc it all back in and track it to the plate. But when they were rowing, we had to do facial replacement." 
Lola's visual-effects supervisor, Edson Williams, says the idea was not to build an all- CG head of the actor, as in Benjamin Button, but to shoot multiple cameras on Hammer and project that imagery onto Pence's face. "We put tracking dots on Josh's face, and then he and Annie would interact as if they were two different people in the scene," says Williams. "After principal photography was done, we'd capture that photography and analyze it to find the body double's lighting patterns. We would then re-create that lighting on a stage and project it onto Armie as he sat stationary in a chair." 
The approach is based on science pioneered by Paul Debevic, but instead of using Debevic s movable light stage, Lola simplified things. "Paul has a clever technique to mimic real-world lighting on a stage, but we had two problems: the immense amount of data processing required, and the Red One's rolling shutter," Williams explains. "We used Reds, but Debevic's system works with pulsewidth modulation, which is an energy-efficient way to control LED brightness using a fixed frequency [up to 3,000 hertz], with only the duration of each pulse changing. But with the Red's rolling shutter, pulse-width modulation can cause flickers because the scanlines don't sync with the pulses. So instead we went with 12 [Litepanels] Bi-Color LED panels, which don't use pulse-width modulation, and change brightness without flicker. We controlled the panels with programmable DMX lighting controls, and we'd visually match our set lighting to the lighting on Armies face that was recorded on location." 
As Hammer delivered his fines in the DMX-controlled environment, Lola would capture his facial movements with four Reds, and then the team would project that footage to a CG model of his face, tracked to Pence's movements with Boujou and PF Track software. CG tweaks to the face were done in Maya, and everything was composited using Autodesk's Flame, which was important, according to Williams. "What we learned on Benjamin Button was that projecting faces is really about shadows and light," he says. "This way, we had a lot of control over shadows and light before the projection, and could adjust lighting on the footage we shot of Armie before we projected it to the geometry tracked onto Josh. It's sort of a 2-D process with 3-D assistance. You're not creating a CG face, you're projecting real skin onto geometry." 
The crewing sequences, shot by the second unit aboard two-man racing sculls, posed another problem: the cameras were too heavy for the boats. Fincher asked Red if there was a way to somehow lighten the load. "The Empacher boats are fragile and flex a lot, so we needed lightweight camera mounts and bodies," explains Cronenweth. "Red stripped the Ones down and gave them carbon-fiber bodies; they weighed less than 6 pounds each. That freed us to place them wherever we needed without interfering with the integrity of the boats or compromising die athletes' performances." 
Red's close partnership with Fincher continued through post: Red invited the filmmakers to do the entire Dl process on Red Studios' Stage 4 in Hollywood. There, a 20'x40' theatrical screen and a Sony SRX T420 4K projector were available for colorisi Ian Vcrtovec of Lightlron Digital, who graded the picture on Quantel's Pablo Neo. (The movie's assembly work was handled by Fincher's editorial team, which sent media to Vertovec as DPXsequence equivalents of reels on hard drives.) After the color timing was complete, the picture underwent a noise-and-grain-reduction sweep at Reliance MediaWorks' Lowry Digital. The finalized files were filmed out at 2 K at Technicolor, where David Orr timed the answer print. (Technicolor and Deluxe Laboratories did the release printing. Lightlron Digital created die DCDM master.) 
"I think the MX chip made a huge difference in the DI," says Vertovec. "With digital cameras, you often fight the signal-to-noise ratio in shadows. You often get a lot of contamination in colors down there, because you try to boost the signal, but you also push it down to avoid a lot of dancing in shadows. With the MX sensor, when stuff goes dark, it just goes dark. When you look at your waveform monitor, blacks are almost a solid line because there is almost no noise. David wanted the picture to be dark and moody, and they didn't overlight it on set and then ask me to push it down. We could move things around, certainly, but still stay at the low light level they wanted." 
Opposite (from left): Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), Dustin Moskowitz (Joseph Mazzello), Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) and Chris Hughes (Patrick Mapel) experiment with computerized social networking at Harvard University. This page, from top: Zuckerberg and Saverin works out a crucial equation that speeds up the Facebook program; Cronenweth, ASC (foreground) and key grip Jerry Deats line up a shot with the Red camera. 
Right: Sa part of an initiation ritual in the freezing cold, a "grand inquisitor" throws some tough questions at Harvard students, who must remove a piece of clothing after each wrong answer. Below: Director David Fincher (right) works out a scene with Eisenberg on location. 
Left: Harvard's crew team rows down the Charles River in Boston. Below: The crew films a scene in which two of the team's members work out at the university's practice facility. 
Clockwise from top: Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), thé flashy co-founder of the Napster filesharing service, offers to join forces with the Facebook team; Saverin and Zuckerberg find themselves at odds; Zuckerberg ponders a problem. 
Clockwise from top: Hijinks ensue at the house that serves as Facebook headquarters; coeds take a big hit; Parker and his cohorts celebrate their success. 
Right: Eisenberg exchanges dialogue with actress Brenda Song in a car scene photographed on stage. Below: Zuckerberg finds his idol, Parker, devilishly seductive when the two meet for drinks in a nightclub. 
Right: Saverin's mercurial girlfriend, Christy (Brenda Song), burns one of his gifts as her jealousy grows. Below: Erica (Rooney Mara) breaks up with Zuckerberg, an emotional blow that sets him on the path toward social networking. 
Left: Zuckerberg testifies at a deposition during the legal battle for Facebook. Below: Priming himself for a meeting with a group of "money men" who burned Parker, Zuckerberg dons defiantly insouciant attire. 
Diagrams provided by gaffer Harold Skinner, on this page and the next, detail the crew's lighting strategies for a two sequences. The path shown above was laid out to follow Zuckerberg as he races through Harvard Square and onto the university's campus (visible at upper right). 
This diagram shows the crew's approach to the streets just south of Harvard Square, where they shot sequence that leads to a club. 
Tracking dots were applied to the face of actor Josh Pence to help facilitate visual-effects techniques that would replace his features with those of co-star Armie Hammer (left), allowing the two actors to play identical-twin athletes Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss. 
TECHNICAL SPECS 
2.40:1 
Digital Capture 
Red One 
Arri Master Primes 
Digital Intermediate 
Printed on 
Fuji Eterna-CP 35 13D1 
Michael Goldman is a freelance writer ("With Friends Like These..." p. 28). 
Copyright American Society of Cinematographers Oct 2010