An Online Magazine dedicated to production and promotion of independent films.

Kodak Focus at the 2007 Film Independent LA Film Festival

This years Kodak Focus (formerly the called the Kodak Three Reeler) was held in the beautiful Billy Wilder Theatre at the Hammer Museum in Westwood, CA. As she has done in the past, Lorette Bayle of Kodak acted as moderator.  The advertised cinematographer, Janusz Kaminski was unavailable because of a shooting commitment.  Instead Roberto Schaefer served as the cinematographer of the day.  Roberto’s impressive list of films from the last 10 years include: Waiting For Guffman, 1996, Everything Put Together, 2000, Best in Show, 2000, Monster’s Ball, 2001, Finding Neverland, 2004, Stay, 2005; For Your Consideration, 2006; Stranger Than Fiction, 2006, and the just completed The Kite Runner, 2007.

Roberto showed three reels, all of which he made while working with director Marc Forster. The first was reel six of Stay, a film which they spent $52 million making on a $40 million budget.  They were given the green light by the studio to go full out on making the picture, but the critics hated it and it grossed only about $6 million.

Next we watched reel one from Stranger Than Fiction.  It was great seeing this reel as I’d forgot how much I liked this film.  In this reel, there are a lot of digital effects related to Will Farrell being a slave to his watch.  Roberto talked about using various kinds and sizes of blue and green screens to do the special effects. 

There are several scenes in this reel of Emma Thompson in her office, a white room on the 10th floor of an apartment building.  These scenes were shot in an actual apartment rather then on a studio set.  The problem Roberto faced here was keeping the sunlight out so he could control the interior lighting.  He did this by having the crew build a very large sun shade which they hung in cantilevered fashion from the roof of the building.

The final reel we viewed was reel six of Finding Neverland.  Roberto discussed the camera techniques he used to create the magic of this film, especially, the scene where Johnny Depp and the young boy are sitting on the park bench after the mother’s funeral.  He used two cameras to shoot this scene.

My favorite part of the discussion concerned the difference Roberto experienced working with directors Mark Forster and Christopher Guest.  With Forster, every detail of every scene is planned.  While he doesn’t use story boards, Roberto does use a diagram of each set to prepare his lighting plan.  While preparing to shoot The Kite Runner in hot, steamy, western China, He and Marc spent 10 hours a day for several weeks, planning each scene before doing any shooting.  With Christopher Guest, there is very little planning and Roberto talked about how he has to work closely with the actors during the shoot to get what the director wants.