美国摄影师杂志 2011.2月刊

God of Love Aims for Amour I By Iain Stasukevich

“You can’t control who you love. You can’t control who loves you. You can’t control how it happens or when it happens or why it happens. You can’t control any of that stuff,” muses Ray (Luke Math- eny),theprotagonistoftheshortfilm GodofLove. Rayisalounge singer, and he’s desperately in love with Kelly (Marian Brock), the drummer in the lounge band, but Kelly only has eyes for the guitarist, Fozzie (Christopher Hirsh). The plot thickens when Ray’s fervent wish for Kelly’s affections are answered with a box of magical darts that have aphrodisiacal powers.
Matheny also directed God of Love; it was his thesis project for N ew York University’s graduate film program. When he began discussing the movie with classmate and cinematographer Bobby Webster, the two quickly realized they shared many ideas about how it should be photographed. “Almost every modern independent film has exactly the same kind of look: handheld with a shallow depth-of- field,” says Webster. “The look we wanted forGod of Love was more about composition and framing and depth.I was excited about doing thoughtful dolly shots and using the camera as part of the blocking. That’s something I don’t see very often in low-budget films.” Math- eny adds, “There are some jokes and punch lines that work better when you can see everything that’s happening in the frame. The audience feels like they’ve discovered something in the scene.”

Webster and Matheny share a fondness for French New Wave films, and they cite Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt and A Woman is a Woman (both photographed by Raoul Coutard) as strong influences on God of Love. Additionally, they looked at Beat-era jazz photogra- phy, especially the work of William Claxton. “I’m really inspired by his great, iconic images, those crisp black-and-white photographs of the famous jazz musicians of the day,” says Webster.
During prep, Webster assigned Matheny an exercise from their early semesters at NYU. Matheny recalls, “Our aesthetics profes- sor, Gail Segal, would make us write papers to describe our approach to our film. Bobby practically forced me to write a paper [for    God of Love], which he then critiqued heavily. I don’t remember what it was like in its original form, but I remember what we concluded: There would be a certain number of close-ups, and we would never get any tighter than that, and whenever Ray prayed, there would be some kind of vertical line in the frame.”
“You get a lot of great ideas when you’re preparing a film, and I wanted to capture them,” the cinematographer says of the writing exercise. “When you’re on set trying to work out the fram- ing, it helps to have something to remind you of those ideas. Our decisions still felt organic, but we knew what we were doing going in, and we could add to it when we found something new.”

Webster shot God of Love in 16x9 with a Red One (Build 17), which enabled him to do the color timing on his own computer with Adobe After Effects. “.r3D files have more information than you need for the final image,” he notes. “As with 35mm film, there’s all this information you can pull back. For the exterior scenes, I didn’t worry too much about the sky blowing out; if you see detail in the RAW image, you can use a luma key to pull the sky back in.”
Nevertheless, some day exteriors did challenge the Red’s dynamic range. In partic- ular, Webster found he was getting too much unwanted bounce off of Manhattan’s sidewalks. To combat that, he positioned upside-down ND.6 and ND.9 grad filters in front of the lens. Throughout the shoot, he rated the camera at ISO 320 and judged his lighting with a histogram and a calibrated high-definition monitor, which allowed him to switch back and forth between Redspace and RAW. (They knew their final image would be black-and-white, so they could cast color-temperature cares to the wind.)
A number of scenes take place in the smoky jazz club where Ray and his band perform. Webster and gaffer Lydia Sudall took advantage of the overhead lighting grid and other practical fixtures at the loca- tion, Hello Brooklyn in Red Hook, and set an ambient level with two 1.2K HMIs through a 12\'x12\' silk. Dimmable 1K and 650-watt tungsten sources were used for key lights,
and Kino Flo Diva-Lites were used for fill. “Our key lights all had diffusion on them, and the smoke helped to give a broad, soft light,” says Sudall. “Then we used hard over- head sources as kickers, which the smoke picked up to create shafts of light. The idea came from the 1950s photography, but it also came from Bobby. I’ve come to learn he really likes backlighting.” Webster adds, “One of the nice things about a heightened look is that it’s easier to get away with unmo- tivated light. In the jazz-club scenes, we had the freedom to light for dramatic effect rather than motivation. We didn’t do much overall lighting [of the location] because we knew exactly what shots we wanted.”

God of Love also includes a few night-exterior walk-and-talks with Ray, Fozzie and Kelly, following their performances at the club. For these scenes, Webster and Matheny scouted a long, wide stretch of sidewalk at West 4th Street and 6th Avenue, one of the few places in Manhattan where the light from the windows is bright enough to expose a 60\' dolly shot. Webster used a dolly-mounted Diva-Lite for fill. When the actors stopped at the corner, they were lit with a 1.2K HMI through an 8\'x8\' silk frame.

Webster shot with a set of Zeiss Super Speed primes in order to make the most of his small lighting package. “We knew we’d have scenes that didn’t have a huge amount of light,” he says. “They may not be the sharpest lenses in the world, but for the 1960s-ish look we were going for, I was happy to have a bit less clarity. We mostly shot wide open, but we wanted to be able to see the backgrounds clearly whenever possible. We lit the jazz club so we could shoot at T4.”
No film prints of God of Love were made. “All of our exhibition has been on HDCam struck from a 1080p lossless Anima- tion-codec master file output directly from the original .r3D footage from After Effects,” says Webster. “Using the Animation codec gives you a very big file, but it’s definitely my preferred master format.
“I think that the Red’s .r3D files are transformative for low-budget filmmaking,” adds the cinematographer. “It’s the first and, at this point, the most affordable digital camera that records substantially more infor- mation than your release format, like film, and the availability of tools that allow you to access that information opens up a lot of possibilities. Low-budget filmmakers are typically cash-poor but time-rich, and with the Red, you can make up for lack of money for extensive post work by spending your own time to do it. It took me two weeks to do the work on God of Love that a skilled colorist probably could have done in a few days, but at least that was an option.”

In addition to marking the successful conclusion of Matheny’s studies, God of Love won a 2010 Student Academy Award. “Everything on the screen is exactly how we wanted it to be,” says Webster. “It’s the only film I’ve made where I can say that’s the case.”