There’s no resource like a little ingenuity. Just ask Patrick McLaughlin, director of photography on waydowntown, the third feature by Alberta auteur Gary Burns. Despite its modest production values, the film, which recently secured u.s. distribution through New York-based Lot 47 Films, captured the $25,000 Toronto-City Award for best Canadian feature at the 2000 Toronto International Film Festival.

The filmmakers opted to shoot waydowntown on a Sony DVW-700WSP digital Betacam (16:9 format) and then transfer their video images to 35mm film for theatrical projection. Dispensing with film processing reduced costs, but they also believed the resultant look, which casts somewhat of an unhealthy pall on the actors, was appropriate in telling the story of jaded young office workers (played by Fabrizio Filippo, Marya Delver and Gordon Currie). Bored with the daily grind, the group wagers to see which of them can last the longest without going outside, remaining within the core of Calgary’s interconnected downtown buildings.

McLaughlin’s partnership with Burns dates back to when the two attended film school at Montreal’s Concordia University. They collaborated on various school projects as well as several short films after graduating. McLaughlin went on to lens Burns’ debut feature, The Suburbanators, and served as second unit dop and camera operator on Kitchen Party, the writer/director’s follow-up. The cinematographer says their friendship helps their creative partnership.

‘We’ll hang out together and talk about films,’ McLaughlin says. ‘I was involved on waydowntown really early, so that gave us a lot of time to talk about what we wanted to do, rather than just coming in a month in advance to do some prep. I was even there for the scriptwriting part of it, and having worked on projects in the past gives us a similar sensibility and vocabulary, which allows us to do things quicker.’

Burns was originally shopping a bigger-budget project around, but it didn’t materialize and he turned his attention to waydowntown, still in treatment stage. At first he believed he would have to do the film on a smaller budget than he ended up getting, so he planned to satisfy both production and artistic concerns with an experimental conceit – shoot the entire film in one long take on a Steadicam. The 35mm format was discounted because of the weight of the cameras and the necessity of changing film rolls every 10 minutes. Video seemed the answer.

But as Burns wrote the script, interest in the project grew and more money came on board. (The film’s financiers include Telefilm Canada, CFCN Production Fund, Harold Greenberg Fund, Alberta Film Development Program and Canadian Film or Video Production Tax Credit.) Burns then felt he needed to expand the scope of the film, and so cutting became essential. But the idea of shooting digital Betacam remained.

Director and dop believed the video format would be particularly effective in contrast to several 35mm shots (originated on Kodak 5248 EXR 100T stock) in which the characters finally get outside their steel and glass prism. Viewers might not be aware of the film’s shift of formats, but it is apparent that warmer hues come with the characters’ burst of fresh air.

‘Even the moment when [Delver] decides to leave the building, even though the shot is inside, we go to film,’ McLaughlin elaborates. ‘I was just playing with that idea of wanting two really distinct-looking textures to work with, so the audience really feels the difference.’

McLaughlin initially considered shooting in the high-definition video format, a hot concept among filmmakers. The dop, in Montreal at the time, viewed some hd tests commissioned by the National Film Board, including a projected print of an hd-to-35mm film transfer, followed by the same test originated and projected on 35mm. Aside from the cost concerns of hd, the format didn’t look particularly different.

‘Before we even had the opportunity to price it out, we realized that hd transferred to film was too close to 35mm to really work with this project,’ McLaughlin explains. ‘When we’re working with that idea of cutting from the inside to the exterior, if the formats would have been too similar-looking, it wouldn’t have worked.’

Frenetic camerawork

The production’s initial concept of shooting the film hand-held was maintained in most sequences, lending waydowntown a sense of the characters’ perspective as they scurry about the confined office/shopping mall/parking lot complex like hamsters in a plastic habitat. To prime himself on this style, McLaughlin studied Donald McAlpine’s work on the 1996 production of Romeo + Juliet, an influential example of frenetic camerawork.

Audiences may not be accustomed to features shot on video, but when the filmmakers saw their images projected on 35mm stock, the look dispelled any fears they may have had.

‘Once you blow digital Betacam up to film, it doesn’t really look like the video we know from tv,’ McLaughlin notes. ‘It’s something distinct which few people have played with. It had a quality that worked for this project in enhancing the subjective viewpoint of the characters. After tests we knew we were on the right track.’

The video-to-film transfer was done at Calgary-based Acmeworks Digital Film, a company which up until that point had not tested its equipment to perform such an operation. Although the producers were aware of facilities in Toronto and Vancouver that could have done the job, they preferred to go with Acmeworks and keep it local.

‘What was nice about working with them was the opportunity to sit down face-to-face and smooth out problems that way, rather than sending off our stuff, getting something back and it’s all very anonymous,’ McLaughlin says. ‘They really did a lot of research and tests to get up to speed with it. Their work ethic and attitude was really great and it really paid off in the end.’

McLaughlin admits to not having shot much video prior to waydowntown, and he approached the shoot very much as though he was using a motion picture camera. This meant that instead of relying on the digital Betacam’s internal filters and white balancing to manipulate a shot’s look, he would have the crew alter the lighting, which consisted of a few Kino Flo fluorescents augmenting the available light in the shopping malls and business towers.

The cinematographer was somewhat frustrated in his efforts to get all the accessories he’s accustomed to, including proper matte boxes. Lens focus marks presented a further problem.

‘Because video cameras and lenses are made for a one-person operator, you have a lens that focuses within a 90-degree range, rather than 360 degrees and beyond, so the witness marks on the lenses are really close, which doesn’t help the focus puller in the film world,’ he explains. ‘And we weren’t able to get a follow-focus either, but Brian Shier, our focus puller and the only camera assistant on the film, pulled focus right off the lens and did a really good job.’

McLaughlin cites the fact that the image in the eye-piece is black-and-white as another shortcoming of the Betacam, but points to several advantages as well.

‘It’s so much more ergonomically designed for hand-held work than the film cameras I’ve encountered,’ he says. ‘It’s really light and easy to handle, and it’s super that you don’t always have to have your eye to the eye-piece, as you do with a film camera to prevent light from spilling back through the system and fogging the film.’

Despite the success McLaughlin is enjoying with this feature shot in his home province, he has returned to his university town of Montreal to pursue documentary filmmaking.

‘I studied documentary in school, and have always wanted to do that, but have never found much of it in Alberta,’ he explains. ‘It seemed like Montreal was a good place to try to get involved in more of that.’

He acknowledges that his career path might seem somewhat unorthodox.

‘I’ve been meeting a lot of people shooting documentaries who want to go the other route,’ he says. ‘I would never want to give up shooting fictional, narrative stuff, but it’s nice to have a mixture, and it’s fun working with ‘real’ people and seeing real stories.’ *

-www.waydowntown.com