HD Cinematography of "Electronica"
by Jon Bickford, April 2007

Shooting "Electronica" was a great experience for me as well as a great test of the Canon XL-H1's capabilities in adverse circumstances.

All of the exteriors were done in a pure guerrilla style which is to say no lighting or even bounce boards whatsoever, just pure, un-controlled, brutal August sunshine.

I did what I could to take the extreme contrast out, stretching the blacks and crushing the highlights as much as possible in camera. Shooting into the sun for a beautiful back light, overexposed highlights - were just going to be a fact of life.

Since blown highlights are a problem with nearly all digital cinema cameras today it is important to work the harsh ugliness out of your highlights, to do that on this project I used 1/8-1/2 Black Promists from Tiffen. This gave the overexposed areas of the
frame a soft, glowing feeling and helped to give the images a "film-like" quality.

Our Director Antonio Rivero wanted to use long lenses and hand-held camera work to give the film a gritty and voyeuristic feeling. The stock 20X Canon lens was great for this work.

Every scene in the film is shot handheld with the exception of the time Emily Dunn (Amy Rose Drucker) spends at home in her apartment. That scene needed a sense of stability and solitude so it's very stoically photographed with solid tripods and slow fluid camera movement.

Antonio and his team (Art Director Rebecca Totman) did a fantastic job with the visual design of this show, the vibrantly painted interiors, the gritty exteriors and spot-on wardrobe (Costume Designer Sven Christensen) were cued by a distinct, yet rich color palette. To augment this even more we increased the color saturation in camera and editing. In certain interior scenes, I was able to tweak the color by adjusting the Kelvin selection in camera.

The Canon XL-H1 did a great job working under some very difficult lighting conditions and the entire cast and crew worked miracles to pull off the entire shoot in only two days. Overall I consider the photography of "Electronica" to have been a great experience and
I am very excited that it has commanded the attention it is receiving.