The Canon XL1 mini DV camera might be best known for wedding videography, but director of photography Jesse Rosensweet brought it into the digital realm on the feature It All Happens Incredibly Fast…

Producer Paul Campbell of Incredibly Fast Films was faced with the classic dilemma of finding cost-cutting ways to get the movie made. A great deal of saving was achieved through the participation of ACTRA’s CLIPP (Canadian Low-budget Incentive for Performers and Producers) program, through which certain eligible projects can engage ACTRA performers at rates below the Independent Production Agreement scale. This gave the production access to quality actors, including such recognizable Canadian faces as Maurice Dean Wint (Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Cube) and Tamara Hickey (The Associates).

Rosensweet hooked up with IAHIF’s first-time feature writer/director Jay Dixit through the latter’s sister Tara, who had served as the cinematographer’s camera assistant and would do so again on IAHIF. (Dixit is a York University film grad whose short film The Puzzle of Easy Enlightenment was a best foreign film nominee at the Student Film Awards in Los Angeles.) IAHIF also marked Rosensweet’s first feature as DOP. He began as a camera assistant and operator on both dramas and commercials, and in the last three years made the jump to DOP, lensing such short films as The Showdown and god.

The production opted to shoot in the DV format to minimize technical costs. Coincidentally, Rosensweet had lensed a short film that was not only in DV, but that was also shot in Toronto’s Duke of Gloucester pub, the location where IAHIF was slated to shoot. The cameraman’s work on the short impressed Dixit, who then had a fair idea of how his own movie would look.

Nearly all of IAHIF is set in the pub. It is book-ended by barflies recalling an incident that occurred in the pub years earlier – an urban myth of sorts. The majority of the film is a flashback to that notorious evening. IAHIF initially lulls the viewer into thinking it is going to be a different kind of film than what it turns out to be, with its opening scenes consisting of a group of regulars at a local watering hole sharing their observations on life.

Just when the viewer thinks it will be the kind of philosophical slacker flick Richard Linklater might do, things take an unexpected turn. A drunken lout initiates a brawl, and the bar managers throw him out. That would seem to be that – but wait. The brawler returns with some muscle-bound buddies, and events escalate to unexpected levels. After a bloody altercation settles, bartender Mean Tommy (Trent McMullen) locks the pub’s doors and Brett (Susanne Sutchy) calls the authorities. They then notice an uninvited guest, known only as The Stranger (Wint). He claims to have gotten inadvertently caught up in the melee, grabbing a gun from one of the attackers. Or, is he really in cahoots with the thugs? Nobody in the bar can figure him out, but The Stranger certainly tells some tall tales.

Rosensweet, who had shot shorts in 16mm, says that although he approached Dixit and Campbell with the idea of shooting in Super 16, a popular format with low-budget productions looking to blow up to 35mm, he believes IAHIF was an ideal project for DV.

‘The rule of thumb at this point is that you don’t want to shoot a movie that takes place primarily in exteriors on DV [where highlights often burn out], but with interiors it does hold up,’ he says.

Regardless of the caliber of Rosensweet’s results on IAHIF, DV is still not a widely accepted dramatic format, which perhaps accounts in part for the movie’s non-acceptance by the 2001 Toronto International Film Festival.

‘My feeling when we wrapped was that if it had been a 35mm production, it would have been instantly salable,’ he says. ‘I knew [the production] was going to face a bit of a [challenge]. But I know there’s been an explosion of films shot in digital in the last year-and-a-half, not just in DV, but in high-definition as well, and I think they pull it off.’

Getting coverage

Aside from the savings in terms of stock, processing and printing fees, shooting on tape allowed the crew greater time to get the coverage they needed. Where possible, they ran a second camera to maximize their limited time. The film was shot over the course of 17 days in January and February on location at the Gloucester, with Rosensweet operating the ‘A’ camera and frequent collaborator Dan Paquette, the movie’s gaffer, handling the ‘B.’

‘The nice thing about shooting on DV is the freedom to let the cameras roll,’ says Rosensweet. ‘That sort of freedom, [where multiple takes or set-ups are required in] a difficult scene or a scene in which the actors are improvising, is hard to get on a film set. This is especially true of a low-budget set where there’s a huge consciousness of every second of the camera rolling costing money.’

Rosensweet notes that preproduction with Dixit was intensive, and it had to be, because while most sets have 12-hour shooting days, the production was allowed access to the pub for only eight to 11 hours at a stretch. The cinematographer explains that the moody lighting design was to be ‘a modern interpretation of film noir,’ with more darkness and shadows in the frame than light spots. Black-and-white was never seriously considered, however, because they wanted to take advantage of the pub’s rich color palette. A good part of the movie was shot hand-held, with Dixit giving Rosensweet the reference of the groundbreaking TV cop series Homicide: Life on the Street.

‘In our film, especially when the energy level in the scene is high, the camera will use characters looking away to initiate pans,’ he says. ‘It’s like a ‘living camera’ in that it has an active [relationship] with the characters.’

Just as Dixit had a very dramatic arc to his plotline, he and Rosensweet devised a similar progression to the movie’s visuals. For example, it opens with a long, sweeping Steadicam shot, executed by Jeremy Benning, that brings the viewer into the pub scenario. But the style soon shifts.

‘There are distinct mood changes in which both the lighting and camera movement respond to what’s happening with the characters,’ Rosensweet says. ‘The beginning is very flowing, and then it slows down. By the end of the first act, there’s this feeling of having spent a little too much time in the bar, of having had just one too many. When the surprise comes, it’s quite a surprise, and the energy of the camera picks up.’

Rosensweet was trying to mimic a film look as much as possible. To that end, the Canon XL1 was souped up with a Fuji manual zoom lens, supplied by Kingsway Motion Picture. Technicians at equipment house William F. White modified an Arri base plate to adapt a 16mm follow-focus and matte box onto the XL1.

‘The one real weakness of the XL1 is that it comes with a motorized lens,’ Rosensweet explains. ‘Everything is driven by its servo motors – focus, zoom and iris – which is not appropriate for shooting drama, because it makes it impossible to accurately do manual focus pulls or zooms. With the Fuji lenses we were able to simulate a little bit more the look of a lens that’s used in the film world.’

Overall, the DOP likes what he got out of the DV format.

‘DV is actually able to record a lot of information – not as much as 16mm, but a lot of information nonetheless,’ he says.

Producer Campbell is actively submitting the movie to festivals including Sundance, Slamdance, Cinequest and the Rotterdam International Film Festival.

-www.incrediblyfastfilms.com