Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
zapruder film in ACE - 1998 - home movie technology
by Eric Rudolph
Poor-quality copies of the Zapruder film have been available through various sources since the late Sixties, but up until recently this astonishing document has never been commercially available to the general public. That situation changed this summer when Chicago-based MPI Home Video released Image of an Assassination: A New Look at the Zapruder Film on videocassette and DVD. This new digital version of the film was struck directly from Zapruder's camera original and contains the controversial visual information recorded between the film's sprocket holes. The lack of availability of this additional information in high-quality form has spawned a host of theories about the film's veracity.
In actuality, the Zapruder film has quite prosaic origins. In November of 1962, Abraham Zapruder purchased a Bell & Howell model 414 PD Zoomatic Director's Series 8mm movie camera, fitted with a Varimat 9-27mm f1.8 zoom lens, at Peacock Jewelry on Elm Street in Dallas. Zapruder's dress company — Jennifer Juniors — was also located on Elm Street, directly across the road from the Texas School Book Depository and Dealey Plaza.
On the fateful day of JFK's slaying, Zapruder did not bring his movie camera to the office. He went home and retrieved it only after an assistant convinced the amateur cameraman that he would want to show his grandchildren a film of the Presidential procession.
As Kennedy's motorcade approached Dealey Plaza, Zapruder found an elevated filming position atop a concrete abutment close to the famous grassy knoll (near the spot where most denouncers of the Warren Commission Report claim that several of the shots, including the fatal one, originated).
According to Martin Shackelford's paper A History of the Zapruder Film, Zapruder was standing 185' from the southwest corner of the Depository building (from where the Warren Commission said lone assassin Oswald fired upon the President) and 65' from the center of Elm Street, the spot where Kennedy was killed.
Marilyn Sitzman, the same assistant who urged her boss to go home for his camera, stood behind Zapruder on the concrete pedestal, and held onto him to allay his fears of losing balance if he happened to become dizzy. With the lens of his high-end home movie camera set at maximum telephoto range and loaded with a partially used roll of Kodachrome II film, Zapruder set about capturing one of the most wrenching incidents in American history.
The Image of an Assassination project began when Zapruder's heirs decided that an archival copy of the film should be made. (The family regained control of the film from Life magazine in April of 1975, one month after a poor-quality copy was first aired on national television.) A decision was made that the copy should take advantage of advances in digital imaging, which would include eliminating the need for the 35-year-old film to be subjected to potentially damaging runs through a mechanical film gate.
After it had been determined that the best approach would be to shoot large-format still transparencies of each frame to be scanned and re-animated digitally, the Zapruders' attorney contacted Joe Barabe of McKrone Associates, an Illinois firm wihich specializes in photo microscopy.
Barabe packed up his gear and shipped it to the National Archive II in College Park, Maryland, where the camera original of the Zapruder film is kept under temperature and humidity-controlled archival conditions as a courtesy to the Zapruders.
Barabe devised a simple polyester film-holding system that doubled as a frame-numbering mechanism, as well as an easel made of microscope slides which held the film as flat as possible under the camera. Barabe hastens to note that no glass existed between the 8mm original and the copying camera's lens; the special easel was designed with a half-inch hole in the center.
Using a 4 x 5 format copy camera fitted with a Zeiss Luminar 40mm f4.5 lens which magnified each frame 12 times, Barabe made six-second time exposures of each of the approximately 480 frames of the film itself, which was illuminated by a light box fitted with a transparency copying bulb.
The stills of each frame were made onto Kodak 6121 color transparency sheet film taken from the same emulsion batch. The 8mm film was photographed from edge to edge in order to include the area between the sprocket holes.
The five-day photographic process did present several problems. "Shooting stills at high magnification makes the choice of the f-stop important for matters of depth of field and resolution," says Barabe. "We wanted the greatest depth of field to compensate for the fact that film curls. However, to stop down too much at this high magnification would have lowered the resolution because of defraction effects. We had to find the ideal balance, which we determined was to stop down from f4.5 to f6.3. We tested the resolution and depth of field at this setting and found it to be quite good."
A .60 neutral-density filter was included in each of Barabe's stills. "The .60 ND, with the light from our source coming through, photographed as a middle gray. Since each transparency was later checked with a densitometer and by eye, this gave us a solid density reference point," he explains.
After the processed still film was reviewed and reshoots were done, the transparencies were sent to a company which scanned each 4 x 5 transparency at 1,500 DPI resolution. The frames were then sequenced and registered on a computer, using the images of the sprocket holes and frame edges as guides. Scratches and dirt were removed and dark areas opened up via Photoshop; some camera shake was also eliminated digitally.
The still frames were then animated back to the camera's running speed of 18 frames per second, creating a new digital motion picture version of the 480 still frames. (The home video also includes several slow-motion and tightly cropped versions of the Zapruder film, as well as versions showing the area between the sprocket holes.)
One of the Zapruder film's most important features 35 years later is the fact that it was shot on a standard home movie stock of the time — Kodachrome II. This emulsion has long been proven to possess excellent sharpness, color saturation and image stability. What is immediately striking about the revamped Zapruder film is the appearance of its sharp, bright, saturated colors.
The home video version of the film is reportedly the first copy fashioned from the camera original since Kodak struck three copies of it in Dallas on the day of the assassination. Now, the general public can view a pivotal moment in history with a clarity close to that seen by those handful of people present at the initial Kodak screening.
The video release of the Zapruder film facilitates close scrutiny of its images, allowing one to easily absorb the event's truly heartbreaking aspects.
As the Presidential limousine emerges from behind a street sign, Kennedy has both hands at his throat after being shot for the first time. Noticing that something is amiss, Jacqueline Kennedy turns toward her husband with concern. At the same time, Texas Governor John Connally turns in his seat and speaks to the President. An instant later, Connally himself is shot and slumps over.
The vehicle proceeds for a moment, then clearly slows and appears to nearly stop. At the exact instant that the car comes to a halt, the left side of Kennedy's head is blown open in an explosion of blood and gray matter. At the moment of the fatal shot, Mrs. Kennedy had been leaning her head quite close to that of her husband. At first, she gently places an elegantly white-gloved hand around the back of her husband's neck just below his obliterated head. Then, after absorbing what has happened, the First Lady responds in horror and climbs onto the back of the car.
Another astonishing aspect about the film is the fact that Zapruder (who nearly loses the President from the bottom of his frame just prior to the fatal shot) had positioned himself in what appears to be a direct line with the President at the moment of the deadly shot. This instant is also the point at which Kennedy and Zapruder are closest in terms of physical space.
The MPI video also clearly displays the visual information between the sprocket holes, where ghostlike images of the scene are occasionally present. Alterationist researchers state that these images are proof that the entire Zapruder film is a cleverly fabricated fraud. Supposedly, this discrepancy results from a hastily planned overnight alternation of the film by the government, which used ultra-sophisticated filmmaking techniques completely unknown to the motion picture business in late 1963 and for many years to follow. But according to MPI staff member and Image of an Assassination writer/producer H.D. Motyl, "There is nothing in the sprocket area that proves or disproves a [theory] that the film was altered."
Researcher Anthony Marsh maintains that the ghost images are the result of a design anomaly in the aperture plate of Zapruder's camera. A groove next to the actual aperture area permitted the pull-down claw to access the sprocket holes instead of the more conventional notch at the top of the aperture plate: this design, Marsh insists, is responsible for those sprocket area images.
Others theorize that crucial evidence in the scene's imagery was actually recorded between the sprocket holes. However, the video release seems to refute those arguments as well, since no nefarious activity is apparent in this area.
Anyone wishing to see the actual Bell & Howell movie camera with which Abraham Zapruder made his famous film need only visit the Sixth Floor Museum located in the former Texas School Book Depository building. The humble camera, on loan from the National Archive, sits under a museum case in subdued archival lighting, along with 12 other movie and still cameras also in use in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963.
eternal sunshine american cinematographer
http://www.theasc.com/magazine/april04/cover/index.html
Forget Me Not | |||||||||||
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, shot by Ellen Kuras, ASC, explores a man's fight to retain his romantic memories. by John Pavlus Unit photography by David Lee The plots of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman's bizarre movies (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation) have always defied easy description. Thus, it might be surprising to some that his latest tale, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, follows the universally familiar romantic pattern of "boy meets girl, boy loses girl" - that is, until the point in the story where "boy arranges to have all memory of girl erased." Eternal Sunshine tells the tragicomic story of Joel (Jim Carrey) and Clementine (Kate Winslet), a loving yet hopelessly mismatched couple who, after breaking up, decide to have their painful memories of each other permanently removed. Providing this dubious treatment is Lacuna Inc., whose funky young technicians identify and delete their clients' troublesome recollections. But when Joel accidentally becomes lucid during the procedure and begins to surreally re-experience all of his vivid moments with Clementine, he realizes he has made a grievous mistake, and struggles to mentally preserve the remaining details of his bittersweet love affair. The film's director of photography, Ellen Kuras, ASC, notes that director Michel Gondry, whose acclaimed music videos "often deal with the morphing of time and space," was ideally suited to visualize a story whose primary setting is the boundless realm of its protagonist's memory. However, Gondry was eager to depart from the hermetic, studio-bound experience he'd had on a previous Kaufman project, Human Nature. With its slippery shifts between reality and distorted memories, Eternal Sunshine required a look that could blend location-shoot authenticity with unpredictable flashes of whimsy. Kuras, whose own work often strikes a balance between raw and stylized imagery (notably on Summer of Sam; see AC June '99) proved a perfect match. The cinematographer soon discovered just how challenging it would be to marry the two halves of Gondry's vision. "Starting off, he wanted to shoot the entire movie in practical locations, and he would have preferred me to shoot everything in available light," says Kuras. "He felt that the more real the film looked, the more you would believe it when the memories melted into reality. It was important for him not to get overburdened by the lighting, which I agree with in theory. But in practice, you have to be able to light so the camera assistants have a stop to work with to get the movie in focus! I said, 'Michel, even on a documentary, I wouldn't shoot exclusively with available light.'" But running parallel to the director's desire for naturalism were his decidedly "unnatural" ideas for the film's transitions between reality and memory. "Much of the syntax of the dramatic action leads you to believe that you're in a memory, or a memory of a memory, but the reality of where you are in time and space is not exactly clear," Kuras explains. "One of the ways Michel wanted to suggest this visually was by calling back to early cinema, where magicians were using live-action practical effects in order to change time and space. He didn't want them to feel or look completely seamless. In one of the scenes, he wanted me to shake the camera so we could see it was a handheld effect in camera, as opposed to a locked-off superimposition effect or double exposure. That was the enigma of the film to me: we would have these unconventional, trompe l'oeil transitions that were not transparent film language, but the lighting sources had to be naturalistic at the same time." Kuras and Gondry used most of their six-week prep to determine the feasibility of these ideas, as well as scout locations in and aroundNew York City for the wintertime shoot - "one of the coldest winters on record," Kuras recalls. Although most of the picture was filmed in practical locations, the filmmakers knew that some studio work was unavoidable. "We always had two cameras running, so it was impossible to do some of these effects [in a practical location] because there wasn't enough room," says Kuras. Production designer Dan Leigh recreated key locations - including Joel's Yonkersapartment and an oversized, 1950s-style kitchen from Joel's childhood memories - at a former U.S. Navy base in New Jersey. Eternal Sunshine was Kuras and Gondry's first collaboration, and the cinematographer says that the first three weeks of production were devoted to developing a lighting strategy that would combine an extensive use of practicals with a handful of movie lights. "On the first day of shooting, I wasn't allowed to use any real movie lights because Michel wanted me to light to eye," she says. "For a night exterior, for example, I had to clip some sodium vapors onto telephone poles to augment the existing sodium vapors. On stage, Michel wanted to recreate the conditions we had encountered on location. After they'd built Joel's apartment set, Dan [Leigh] pulled me aside and said, 'All of the ceilings have been nailed down, so you won't be able to light from above.' That made me laugh - the last nail in my coffin!" Complicating matters further was the fact that two handheld cameras were filming near-360-degree coverage most of the time. "There were no marks and very few rehearsals, so we didn't have any kind of gauge for where the actors would be," recalls Kuras. "Ultimately, that meant we were lighting the room, not the actors. Sometimes they were in the key light, and sometimes not. If I knew where the actors were going to be, I'd try to put something in, but it wasn't as though we had electricians hanging around with Chimeras for beauty lights. Although I understood the kind of movie Michel wanted to make and tried to give him what he wanted, there were moments when the cinematographer in me just cringed, especially when the actors danced in each other's key light. In one scene, when Clementine brings Joel to her apartment for the first time, we had two cameras covering the scene from start to finish, and because we were seeing the entire room, I had to use the practical lamps as the only source of key light; I couldn't get any other kind of ancillary light low enough to look natural. We ended up cutting holes in the lampshades and hiding light bulbs around the set to illuminate the scene. Unfortunately, what happens in this situation - and what happened in this scene - is that one actor ends up shadowing the other." Throughout the shoot, Kuras and her longtime gaffer, John Nadeau, strove to jerry-rig units that would provide ample illumination but would also fly under Gondry's definition of a "film light." Kuras explains, "We had different assortments of lightbulbs - refrigerator bulbs, or small bulbs on hand dimmers - that we'd hide behind furniture or lampshades in order to give ourselves some stop. In Joel's apartment, we fabricated a light we jokingly called the 'Mini-Musco,' which was essentially a C-stand with four clip lights and blackwrap on it. We ended up lighting all the interiors with either available practicals or those clip lights, which had 150-, 250- or 500-watt bulbs. It was a game of hide-and-seek, determining how and where we could hide our little kit of light bulbs.
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