‘If it’s not in the catalogue, make it,’ says Mark Irwin csc/asc, the Canadian cinematographer whose credits include The Fly, Scream and Vampire in Brooklyn (Paramount) and who now calls Hollywood home.

Currently in Toronto to lens the Dufferin Gate cable feature Torre for Showtime, Irwin feels that Canada is more likely to use and create the latest camera/ lighting equipment and accessories than the big players in Hollywood. ‘There are very few things that come out of Hollywood that could be called innovations,’ he says.

‘The hmi and zoom lens are a French design, flatbed editing is German, the flying spot scanner is English,’ says Irwin. ‘The Panaflex is a miniaturized Mitchell from the ’20s ­ that’s as innovative as they get.’

Selling toys to Tinseltown

Irwin says he and his crew of assistants, grips and gaffers have been responsible for some of the new gear that American suppliers like Chapman and Clairmont now carry.

But getting Hollywood to accept his ideas wasn’t easy. When he brought down a set of pneumatic dolly tires that he had designed during The Fly with PS Production Services in Toronto, the folks at Chapman weren’t immediately impressed. ‘They looked at my dolly grip and said, ‘Look, you just push the dolly okay?’ recalls Irwin.

Eventually the tires caught on as did other Irwin and company designs, like his mi light, which he has used on every film he has worked on. The mi’s soft hang mount and 4000 watts of double diffused soft light make it one of the workhorses in his lighting arsenal.

Another one of Irwin’s favorite lights is the bfl (Big Fluorescent Light ­ ‘What the heck did you think it stood for?’), designed by his gaffer Jay Yowler and produced by ps in Toronto. The three-inch-deep light holds 27 fluorescent tubes and maintains perfect Kelvin throughout the dimming range. It gives off little or no heat while producing as much light as a diffused 6 k.

‘The bfl is extremely cool. I find working in California that things can get a little volcanic,’ says Irwin. ‘I’m not fond of melting actors and I’m certainly not fond of doing 15 takes of a performance that melted away after the second take.’

‘Upside-down’ bracket gives worm’s-eye POV

Irwin has also lent his name to a bracket which allows the dop to mount the camera from the top, on a fluid head, offset from the dolly.

‘Clairmont manufactured it andŠyou know you’ve got it made when you make it inside the catalogue. They called it the Irwin upside-down bracket,’ says Irwin, who likes the bracket’s ability to give a ‘worm’s-eye pov.’

The veteran dop says he still uses the Austrian designed Moviecam camera whenever possible, partly due to its wide range of mounting points. Irwin calls Moviecam’s new sl carbon fiber camera ‘the world’s lightest, quietest camera.’

When Agfa stopped manufacturing his favorite film stock, XT320, Irwin was relieved to find that Kodak had created the suspiciously named 320T as part of its Vision series. The stock perfectly matched the softer pastel look of the Agfa that Irwin finds more realistic. ‘It had a beautiful contrast curve and low color saturation, which is what I never liked about Kodak because it was too vibrant, especially in the red.’

Irwin has latched on to some digital innovations, including taking a digital still of every setup he d’es when working on film-to-tape productions.

‘The Achilles’ heel of all film-to-tape productions is once you create an image it’s turned into a signal and from then on who knows what it will look like,’ says Irwin. ‘We take a still of every setup, doctor it in Adobe Photoshop to the way we want it to look, and then when we send it to the color timer they know exactly what you want. A bad monitor can’t create a problem.’

Arriflex 435 gets 3 thumbs-up

While Irwin tends to work on features and mows with his tried-and-true standard equipment, it is the commercial and music video dops who seem to be more aware of and willing to try out all the latest gear.

Revolver Films’ Ray Dumas (who is also a director and Steadicam operator), Douglas Koch and The Partners’ Film Company’s Chris Soos have all had the chance to preview some of what’s hot in cinematography.

In terms of cameras, everyone’s talking Arriflex 435, with its digital design and incredible speed ramping abilities. But Soos, Dumas and Koch all agree that the 435 still has some kinks. ‘It has bugs,’ says Dumas. ‘I would suggest anyone using it have a backup on the set, but it d’es amazing things. The speed ramping is something you’re gonna see a lot more of, though I think people will probably get tired of it eventually.’

Soos, who recently won the Canadian Society of Cinematographers award for best music video (Marilyn Manson’s Beautiful People), says the 435 ‘is more like a laptop than a sewing machine like the old cameras. Computer cameras are susceptible to crashing, but the payoff is the effects on the camera. It’s the best camera [for use on music videos] on the market hands down. You can go from one to 150 frames per second. At 150 fps that takes over some of the photosonics cameras.’

Koch agrees that the 435 can be a ‘little finicky,’ and finds that the assistants don’t know it well yet. He says if he has a problem with the new Arri, he just turns it off and ‘reboots’ it like a computer. ‘God only knows what kind of microprocessors are inside this thing,’ says Koch.

Flexible Frasier lens

When it comes to lenses, Koch is excited about the new Frasier lens system that is available from Panavision Canada. Named after an Australian wildlife cinematographer, the system allows for unusual camera angles and offers a very large depth of field.

‘It’s a relay lens with a whole bunch of lenses that come with it to change focal lengths,’ says Koch. ‘You can literally poke the thing behind the steering wheel of a car without having to saw the front end of the car off.

‘Another one of its features is the ability to dutch tilt it optically in the tube. You have to be able to do this because as you reorient this funny pitching mount at the front, the image and lens twists and turns with it, so you have to relevel the image.’

Dumas recently tried out the new Arri variable prime lenses when he was in Texas as the Steadicam operator on a Metallica video from Revolver. ‘I didn’t like them because they were too big,’ says Dumas. ‘They shouldn’t call them primes because they weigh a ton. They’re fast lenses but I don’t see much use for them.’

Kinoflos, Lunix balloons shine bright

The word on lights for commercial and music videos is Kinoflos, Kinoflos, Kinoflos. The flicker-free tungsten or daylight-balanced fluorescent lights appeal to Dumas because of their speed of setup, practicality and lack of heat.

‘You just plug them into a household outlet,’ says Dumas. ‘I was shooting in a Dairy Queen with ice cream cones and just thanking god I had Kinoflos. They’re quick and dirty.’

Koch likes the new dimming feature on the Kinos. ‘I was bummed out that you had trouble dimming them in the past. They were too bright so I was always putting neutral density gels on them,’ says Koch, who recently shot the spots for Prime Minister Jean Chretien’s re-election campaign and a Budweiser commercial with director Marco Brambilla.

Koch cites the French-designed Lunix balloon lighting system as the latest innovation he saw at the recent Lighting Dimensions Trade show in Orlando. The lights float inside a helium filled balloon and come in a variety of sizes. They can be used to create artificial moonlight or an artificial moon outside and are recommended for lighting delicate interior locations that prohibit a lot of rigging.

The balloon lights are available at Toronto’s Christie Lites and have been used recently on Goosebumps, Nikita and Eaters Of The Dead in Vancouver and Blues Brothers 2000 in Toronto.

Like Irwin, Soos is a big fan of Kodak’s Vision Series, specifically 5279 and 5274. ‘It will take anything,’ says Soos. ‘You can save any shot within two or three stops under. It has amazing color saturation, very rich blacks, and what you gain in speed is far more than what you lose in grain detail.’

Koch likes Kodak, too, but wishes the film supplier would produce more radical stocks. ‘Kodak seems to be continuously but rather conservatively improving their product as opposed to putting something out that would really set itself aside. They always worry about compatibility. If they gave us a film with 1000 asa, even if it had a bit more grain, those of us working in commercials going film to tape would find the grain a lot less noticeable.’

Steadicam operator Dumas says he is always trying to find things to attach to his Steadicam rig to create new effects. A jerry-rigged ringlight was one such attachment that he recently designed and uses to key light subjects and add supplemental light.

By rigging his Steadicam horizontally and using a periscope lens, Dumas says he can get the ‘ultimate low angle’ as the lens sits just above the floor.

Dumas, who confesses to hanging around Active Surplus looking for wwii-era Kenyan gyroscopes to attach to his rig, is currently testing the Cinema Products LC3 digital follow focus system. ‘I think I’m the only person in North America who has this. It’s a wireless system that operates the zoom, focus and iris on the Steadicam so you don’t have to trail cable.’

Robert Lynn and his Megamount repeatable remote head system are the latest thing at William F. White in Toronto. The shop now has a remote head department offering rentals and service which Lynn is managing. Lynn offers the three-axis Megamount system along with an operator. The Megamount can also accommodate video, 16mm and 35mm.

‘It’s a big time and money saver,’ says Lynn, who used the Megamount to film plates on Panavision 65 for the feature film Contact. ‘If you’re at the top of a 120-foot crane and you want to change the look of a shot, we can do it with the third axis in five minutes instead of changing the base of the crane which can take half the day.’

Hoping to give a bit of competition to the Megamount is Paul J. Kneller and his company Fly ‘n Gate. Kneller has just come out of r&d on their repeat motion multi-axis aerial camera system and has acquired the u.s. patent for a six-axis complete system, which he is hoping to get on the market soon.

Speaking of flying, Dave Tommasini and Lee Cole of 4 Seasons Aviation have just acquired a new twin-engine Eurocopter Twinstar helicopter that can accommodate the Megamount as well as Wescam and Tyler mounts. Recent credits include The Big Hit, The Wall and all the aerial photography on the best cinematography Oscar-nominated I’ll Fly Away Home.

Great cinematography can also happen underwater, and that’s where Jim and Lorna Kozmik of Aqua Image in Ajax come in. They have just finished building an aluminum amphibious housing that will accommodate seven of the latest Sony Digital and Digital Betacam cameras. Currently working on their new 26-episode documentary series Undersea Explorers, produced by Dan Mauro, Aqua Images has 1200 to 2000 watt hmi lights that operate underwater.

Jim Kozmik says that over the winter they hope to develop a crane system capable of operating in the wet or dry.