38
SHOOT STORY THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MISSOURI
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri needed a look that didn’t break the sense of drama
WORDS JULIAN MITCHEL L IMAGES FOX SEARCHLIGHT / DANE BREHM
that look. After three days without a DIT all the dailies had come back unsatisfactory. He therefore wanted someone who could come in and work as the on-set colourist as he wasn’t getting back what he was seeing on- set. That’s really my bread and butter role. Ben is an extremely competent cinematographer and knows so much more than I do about lighting and film processes and I could understand what he was going for. He needed someone to control the colour and manage the relationship with post as well as managing the data. “Ben had created an LUT, actually several, for a lot of the scenes while he knew he didn’t have a DIT. But then we’d get on-set and start lighting, also some stuff was ‘day for night’ and ‘early morning for dusk’. We started playing with colour temperature and the density of some of those LUTs. He
found in Sylva, Asheville and the surrounding area. There was talk of shooting the movie on film but a large amount of night work and fire shooting persuaded DOP Ben Davis to look more for a digital solution. Also the drama was going to be shot with many scenes in close-up with a look derived from the location. Ben planned that the look wouldn’t get in the way of the main three-header drama. BACK TO EBBING Dane was called back to help control the look for an ARRI ALEXA XT movie but with some Blackmagic Design camera use for the news footage. The ARRI cameras shot ARRIRAW to Codex drives. There was a problem with the look of the dailies as Dane explains, “It had to do with the colour of the dailies, Ben wanted a particular look and he wanted the ability to tweak
or DIT Dane Brehm, his time on- set for the movie Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri was initially very short. Dane had got the job through contacts already on-board for the movie but as soon as he arrived in Sylva, North Carolina, doubling as the fictional Ebbing, he heard that Fox wasn’t happy using a DIT and were looking more for a data manager. “Fox don’t like to use DITs because we’re ‘expensive’,” he says. “Anyway I got the message that I wasn’t on the movie and they all flew out to the set. Only a few days later I get a call: ‘Dane we were so wrong, Ben (Davis) must have a DIT, can you be here in two days.’ So I packed up my stuff and shipped out.” Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri was a location movie. Apart from the police station which was built, the production used what they
ABOVE Woody Harrelson and Frances McDormand on set.
BEN KNOWS SO MUCH MORE THAN I DO ABOUT LIGHTING AND FILM PROCESSES
DEFINITION MARCH 2018
DEFINITIONMAGAZINE.COM
Powered by FlippingBook