AmericanCinematographer201201

by the way.”
In one of the film’s most stylized
sequences, Mambetova stands in a Plexiglas
tank that covers her torso, and it’s full of
butterflies. Shooting against a white background,
Romano toplit the actress with a
heavily diffused 10K Fresnel and aimed two
Nine-light Maxi-Brutes at the background.
Once the butterflies were in the tank, the
filmmakers sat back and waited for something
to happen.
“Bugs, puppies and little kids are
arduous to photograph because there’s no
way you can corral them,” says the cinematographer.
“The beauty of the Phantom
is its circular buffer. When you shoot
anything above 450 fps at 1920x1080 on
the Phantom HD Gold, as long as the
camera is on, you’re always recording into
its internal circular memory buffer. If you use
what’s called a ‘post-trigger,’ you can hit the
record button after the action is done, and
you’ve got the shot. At 1,000 fps, you get
4.4 seconds of data [in the internal
memory], approximately 2.7 minutes of
footage.”
The girl’s reality is literally shattered
— at 1,000 fps — when shock troopers in
riot gear crash through her reflection in a
mirror. To give the shot a harsh look,
Romano used thinner diffusion on the 10K
and 5K.
“We were fighting the light in that
scene,” he recalls. “It wasn’t a front-surface
mirror, so I was getting two reflections from
my light sources: one from the glass and
one from the mirrored surface behind the
glass. It took a bit of finesse to get it right —
a combination of the mirror angle, diffusion
and precise cutting of the light.”
String Theory’s trippy images
presented Romano with some creative
opportunities he hadn’t encountered
before. “When David Dumas first described
this film to me, I have to admit I really didn’t
understand it,” he says. “While we were
shooting, I started to see what he and Zach
were going for, and now I’m really
impressed with every part of it.” ●
Top and middle: Romano depended on the Phantom HD Gold camera’s internal memory buffer to
capture stylized sequences with live butterflies. Bottom: The cinematographer finds his light.
18 January 2012 American Cinematographer