March / 2002

The Stringerscope: A new spin on the phrase “talking head”
Eye-to-eye contact becomes an eye-line right into the camera

by Richard A. Stringer csc

MIRROR TRICKS: Look right into the camera, invites the reflected image of DOP Richard Stringer csc as he demonstrates the Stringerscope for eye-to-eye interviews. Photo: Richard Stringer

When Gail Singer asked me to shoot her CTV special Going to the Movies, she said there would be lots of interviews. She had lined up sociologists, psychoanalysts, dietitians, opticians, sexologists, historians, film critics, and just plain “folks who love the movies.” She wanted an in-depth look at moviegoing from every angle.

Gail even asked CSC News readers (October/2001) for personal stories about memories of and experiences at the movie theatre that could help her explore “one of the most moving, and sometimes comical, rituals of our times.”

There were a few technical challenges for me as DOP. Gail liked the idea that all the interview subjects should look right into the camera, rather than off to one side. Since people were revealing their innermost secrets and experiences at the movies it seemed much more personal and intimate when they looked directly at the audience.

I had been thinking about this eye-to-camera idea for some time. I knew documentary filmmaker Errol Morris uses this style in his films. He has an elaborate system in which the interviewee looks into a teleprompter screen, but instead of text they see Morris, who is looking at another teleprompter with the interviewee on his screen. He calls his system his “Interratron.”

I wanted to achieve the same idea, but we didn’t have much of a budget to work with. I would need a teleprompter rig of some sort, but the glass sheet for teleprompters, half mirrored to avoid double imaging, is expensive and only made in a few places in North America. While I was looking around, Terry Crack at Cinequip offered a prompter that had been broken in shipping and was just sitting in storage. The TV monitor was broken and the glass sheet was chipped, but only on the edge. So for an affordable price, I took ownership and started to work on it.

I put the rig on its side, created a support that works with my Arri sliding base plate, cut off some surplus metal, and attached a photoflood light to the top. The result is the “Stringerscope,” although for Gail’s show it became the “Zingerscope,” after her company, Zinger Films. No extra equipment or cameras are required — Gail sits right beside the camera (in a focus puller position) looking at the lens. The light helps illuminate her face and a bounce board prevents the subject from seeing her actual profile. She sees the subject’s reflection and her eye-to-eye contact becomes an eye-line right into the camera.

This gadget is great for shooting kids and pets because when they are looking at their parents or owners, they are also looking right into the camera. It can also be a low-cost teleprompter, with a printed script manually pulled up through the frame. If you rent it, I’ll even name it after you (at least till the end of the shoot)! I’m also working on getting a computer screen to work and turn the device back into a real teleprompter. Prompter type software is much more available on regular programs now.

Chroma Key on a Budget

Another concept for Going to the Movies was that all of the interviews were to be shot with a chroma key background. For you outsiders, this is like the weather map on the news — the forecaster is in front of a blue or green screen and the map is put in electronically so it appears that it is really behind him/her. We went about the chroma key issue carefully as Gail had to make it work on a tight budget. If you shoot incorrect or badly-lit chroma key it can result in a lot of expensive time in post to fix it.

We tried many materials and tested our results at several post facilities in Toronto. In the end, we found that a blue cloth Gail had on hand worked just as well as the fancy, pricey materials we tested. We had used it on You Can’t Beat a Woman, an NFB theatrical documentary on domestic violence which Gail shot on six continents. It was her experimentation with blue screen on that project that got her interested in using it as a “key” element in Going to the Movies. She wanted the background for the interviews to be animation or images of movie audiences and the like.

The big challenge for me was to shoot in a 16x20 foot garage space with one wall filled with our blue screen. There was no room on the side for lights, but I found that bouncing light off the white walls worked quite well and lit the blue quite evenly. However, keeping that light off the interviewees was difficult in that small space.

I had ideal portraiture lighting in mind — a nice 3/4 lighting with a defined shadow and a touch of backlight. But in our tests, we realized specific lighting, especially with backlight, separated our subject from the chroma key backgrounds. So we went for very soft lighting and no backlight. That way the people became more at one with the scene behind them. Normally, you might use a colour gel (opposite to the BG) on a backlight so you can offset any background colour spill on the subject which can make your keying difficult. To avoid this, I made sure the subjects were far enough away from the blue screen, and our test results have been very good.

Green is the preferred colour now as it has a more specific chroma value for keying and does not appear as much in subjects (blue eyes!).

We selected Beta SP as the format that best suited our budget. Gail’s previous theatrical docs were Super 16mm blowups. We are hoping that the festival market will now accept video screenings to eliminate the need for transfer to film. We started with the idea of shooting letter-boxed widescreen to match “the movie look,” but then realized that mixing widescreen chroma key images with 4:3 stock shot backgrounds would cost more in post (you have to adjust and move the images).

We shot about 40 interviews in our garage set and got some great stories and insight into the subject. We have since shot a special night at the Fox Theatre in Toronto’s Beaches area with some 200 interviewees, friends, and interested guests coming to a screening of Gail’s hit documentary about women comics, Wisecracks. The premise was the film’s 10th anniversary, but Gail really wanted to film a theatre full of moviegoers with our three cameras, and capture every nuance of Going to the Movies.

(Award-winning DOP Richard A. Stringer csc is based in Toronto, but has shot all over Canada and the globe.)

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