American Cinematographer - June 2016 - 20

Top: Bader shoots as Urie sits with a drink. Bottom: Soria (back to camera) observes as 1st AC
Matt Ryan (far left), Bader and Alderson (pushing dolly) get a shot of Urie performing on an
elevated platform.

In addition to the "faux jib," camera
moves were accomplished with a Dana Dolly
and a Matthews Doorway Dolly - either on
track with skateboard wheels or directly on
the venue's floor. "We had a few takes
where key grip Jeb Alderson pushed me just
freewheeling on the smooth floors," says
Bader. "He has some real finesse with that
thing, because we pulled off some great
precision moves, and a doorway dolly isn't
the easiest thing to control."
As an insert camera, Bader broke out
his Digital Harinezumi 3, a low-resolution,
bargain-priced Japanese camera he discovered while reading about Spring Breakers in
20

June 2016

American Cinematographer (June '13). "It
has a really strange look that is degraded,
grainy and blown out, and that would be
very hard to duplicate with a better
camera," says Bader, who used the
Harinezumi's "dirtiest" monochrome preset.
"Since we had such a limited amount of
time, I just taped it to the rails on the front
of the [Epic] and let it roll during all of the
takes."
One short clip from the Harinezumi
that made its way into the video actually
reveals another of Bader's lo-fi rigs - a
record turntable with shards of jagged Plexiglas that were taped to an LP of Carl
American Cinematographer

Douglas' "Kung Fu Fighting." The turntable
was placed in front of the camera for some
close-ups, with the Plexi refracting light as it
spun in front of the camera's lens. "You can
actually see the arm of the turntable in one of
those Harinezumi shots," Bader says with a
laugh. "It's a little peek behind the curtain."
Trying to squeeze the most out of their
six-hour window, Bader and his crew rolled
until the final seconds of their allotted time.
"Our location fee essentially tripled if we went
beyond six hours," Bader says. "We did one
rehearsal with Brendon Urie, and then we
never stopped shooting until our six hours
were up. We were still shooting the last closeup with one single light when we were
getting ushered out - just my gaffer Eric
Clark waving a Leko over Brendon's face."
The music video's digital grade was
performed on a similarly tight schedule. Working out of his home studio in Las Cruces, N.M.,
colorist Sherwin Lau received a hard drive of
footage on a Sunday and worked into the
small hours of Monday morning to finish his
grade. On the drive were the R3D camera
originals; using editor Pete Martich's locked
cut in the Adobe Premiere project file, Lau
exported an XML directly into Blackmagic
Design's DaVinci Resolve 12. His final deliverables were both a 1080p ProRes 4:2:2 HQ
QuickTime and a more compressed H.264 file,
per record-company request. Three days after
his completion, the video debuted on
YouTube.
"What they got on set and what you
see as the [end product] are pretty close," Lau
says. "I did increase the contrast and bring out
some of the [mid-tones], and then I had to
match the Epic and a7S, which had a little bit
of a green shift." Lau's final touch involved
adding a 35mm "Ultra Fine" grain plate from
Rgrain. "The overall look we were going for
was classic, elegant and jazzy, and once I saw
what that location looked like in black-andwhite, it gave me a good idea of what I
needed to do," he says.
Adds Bader, "I've always loved blackand-white. You get to play so much more with
contrast, and there's a lot of forgiveness in
hard lighting. It was actually so freeing on this
shoot to not have a scrap of diffusion on set."
To watch "Death of a Bachelor," visit
www.youtube.com/watch?v=R03cqGg40GU.
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American Cinematographer - June 2016

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - June 2016