December / 2002

Bruce Worrall csc - Shooting Deathlands with a Reversal Strategy
‘It’s really sci-fi with a bit of a twist — surreal high contrast, very dense colours’

by Don Angus

Right from their first conversation about making the television movie Deathlands, Vancouver-based DOP Bruce Worrall csc and Los Angeles director Joshua Butler wanted “to find a look that was something out of the ordinary.”

Deathlands DOP Bruce Worrall csc: “My meter’s never been out of its case so much, checking and double-checking.” Photo: Don Angus

What they decided on was colour reversal film stock, Worrall told CSC News, and there the adventure began. Based on the science-fiction book by James Axler, Deathlands may be the first made-for-TV drama shot entirely in reversal, the DOP speculated, adding that the “positive” choice turned out to be as troublesome technically as it was satisfactory creatively.

He and Butler started talking about eight months before Deathlands went into production in October for USA Network’s Sci-Fi Channel, discussing whether it was going to be HD, regular 16mm or 35mm. “But we liked the idea of something a little on the rougher side, and we also believed that shooting reversal would provide a look that could not be achieved by ‘fixing it’ in post.”

Worrall, ultimately shooting Super 16mm, said he had worked with Butler twice before, on the MOW Beer Money in 2000 and the Christmas tale Prancer Returns for USA in 2001. Prancer Returns earned the 42-year-old cinematographer an ASC nomination last February in the category of “movie-of-the-week/miniseries or pilot for cable or pay TV.”

On Deathlands, shot largely in the dark and dingy innards of the old Gooderham and Worts distillery in downtown Toronto, “we wanted to exert a certain amount of shooting control,” and give the cable network a finished product out of the lab instead of negative to play with in post-production. “Quite often you shoot something and then later they’ll do something (in post) that you didn’t expect they would. We wanted to present a product that they would see right off the bat — this is what you are going to get.”

Some of the characters from Deathlands are shown with their armoured vehicle, called “the sec wag.” Pictured (from left) are cast members Vincent Spano, Nathan Carter, Cliff Saunders and Jenya Lano.

The reversal look, Worrall said, “is very punchy with primary colours; it’s a chance to take some colours and just make them very vibrant. The tonal range is so much more diminished and there isn’t the latitude of negative stocks. The blacks are crushed very quickly and the whites, or any highlights, will blow out even quicker. It has a little bit of a comic book look to it. It’s really sci-fi with a bit of a twist — surreal high contrast, very dense colours. Some of the premise is based on the actual jacket covers of the Axler books. They are all very surreal, punchy.”

Shooting Super 16mm, 1.77:1 (16:9) wide-screen format with a mask, the DOP used mainly Eastman Ektachrome 7240 and 7250 reversal stock, with tungsten ratings of 125 and 400 respectively.

The story takes place a hundred years in the future. “It’s set in the U.S. during a post-apocalyptic war. You’ve got this high radioactive haze which tends to get deeper when night falls. I decided to shoot day for night; that’s a little bit of an old school thing that’s not done very often anymore, but we were interested in just trying things. I hadn’t shot day for night before, other than having to out of necessity. This was a choice, and I think it worked very well.

“As I was doing a filter test, I saw something in a red filter that looked kind of interesting. Josh (Butler) agreed, so we shot day for night with a red filter, a Harrison Red No. 4. With the haze in the air, when the moon comes out it’s red.”

Worrall said he had shot reversal in his student days, but never professionally. “I had two weeks when I got to Toronto to test it, trying to get the at-night feeling and also in terms of makeup, wardrobe and prosthetics. I didn’t have time for testing the film as accurately as I would have liked, so I sort of pegged it at three stops. It’s a bit of a learning curve; my meter’s never been out of its case so much, checking and double-checking.”

“I quite like the stock, and Josh and I feel that we have come pretty close to what we were after. I like the look; it’s got enough going on that it’s interesting no matter what you do, provided that you get your exposure right. I like what it does to skin tones. It also makes you work a lot harder. If I’m shooting negative and I’m off by two stops, there’s a lot a latitude to bring it back. But if I make a two-stop mistake in this (reversal), then that’s a pretty serious issue. So that keeps me on my toes. I enjoy the challenge.”

Worrall said there was some discussion about going with HD on Deathlands, but “I like film and the magic involved in turning the celluloid into the image. Before I came to Toronto, I shot a movie-of-the-week for MTV in HD. I found it very clean and hard; it’s great video. With the resolving power of good HD lenses, a lot of people end up with a great deal of glass in front of the lens to take away what the system does so well; fortunately the project for MTV was well suited for that cleaner look and I shot it pretty much ‘out of the box,’ filter free. However, as things stand today, if someone gives me a choice and unless the script calls for an antiseptic look, then I tend to want to go to film.”

The problems with the reversal stock were in the processing, or at least that’s where they showed up. Eventually, in keeping with the sci-fi theme, “x-rays” got blamed.

A Toronto lab did the processing the first two days, but “you’d be at one stop and then it would get darker, like someone turned a switch, and then it would get lighter. After that we shipped the film to Yale Film and Video in North Hollywood. It came back and seemed OK, then we started getting pulsing in the shots. We shipped a bunch of short ends to Rochester for Kodak to look at, and some Kodak technical people went to Yale to watch the processing. We took our cameras — two SR3s, one of them high speed — back to PS to be serviced and checked three times.”

On the Toronto set of Deathlands, DOP Bruce Worrall csc (left) sets up a shot with director Joshua Butler. Photo: Don Angus

No problems were found with the L.A. processing, the film or the cameras, Worrall said. The final word was that airport x-rays were causing the fluctuations, and, in an attempt to minimize exposure, the production started driving the film across the border to Buffalo and putting it on a plane there for Los Angeles. “I guess after 9-11 they (Toronto airport authorities) need to x-ray everything. They don’t believe you when you say ‘film, please do not x-ray.’

In the end, “we had to reshoot two scenes, and Josh will be cutting around some of the little fluctuations.”

Worrall said his lighting style on Deathlands tended “to be somewhat simple. I didn’t have that many lights up, so no matter what ASA I was using the lens was usually wide open. The only variable was if I needed any high-speed coverage within a scene. The lenses were Zeiss high speed and we had three zooms — an 8-64 Cooke, an 11.5-138 and a 25-250, both Angenieux.”

He said he is still fascinated with the craft of cinematography, and he doesn’t want to take on a directing assignment just yet. “I’ve been asked to direct but I don’t really want to. If the right project came along, yes, but the bottom line is that I am a photographer, I see the world in terms of light and shadow and I find that to be a full-time job.”

He has been shooting for a dozen or so years, since the film program at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver and then London Film School in England. “I was supposed to be a director and editor there (London), but because of my photographic ability people kept asking me to shoot their films. While I didn’t really want to be a photographer, I enjoyed and respected the position. I liked what you could do and the responsibility involved in the short term. You don’t have to baby-sit it through the crap at the beginning and all the stuff at the end. It’s just for that specific length of time, and you still have a great amount of input, be it creative, dramatic or practical. I like that.”

* * *
Executive Producers of Deathlands are Chet Fenster and Joshua Butler of Kinetic Pictures, Los Angeles. Producer: Derek Rappaport; Director: Joshua Butler; Production Manager: Rita Picard

Camera department: DOP Bruce Worrall csc; operator Robert Stecko; 1st AC Scott Cowan; 2nd AC Simon Brown; B-Operator David Perkins; B-1st AC Steve Tsushima; B-2nd AC Adam Jefferies; trainee Andrew Ois. Worrall thanked his camera crew “for their extra attention to detail that I asked for and received on this show.”

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