short takes - a reluctant rock star
by stephanie argy

01.01

according to cinematographer jeff cronenweth, the basic idea behind the wallflowers' "sleepwalker" video was to make fun of being a rock star. the band's lead singer, jakob dylan, is known for being reclusive, and the video plays off the irony of a rock star who recoils from fame.

"sleepwalker" consists of a series of vignettes comprising key moments from a rock star's life. in each vignette, the camera pulls back or zooms out, turning the scene into a spoof of itself. in many cases, the entire scene turns out to have been some sort of fake; in one scene, for example, dylan stands in front of a beautiful sunset that turns out to be nothing more than a translite.

the director of the video was mark romanek, who has frequently teamed with cronenweth. the two are now shooting the feature one hour photo starring robin williams, and in the past they've created videos for such artists as the eels, weezer and nine inch nails. this year cronenweth won mtv's best cinematography award for macy gray's "do something" video, another project on which he and romanek collaborated.

cronenweth says romanek often brings in reference images to convey the style and look he wants for a particular project. "he's very good about doing his homework," the cinematographer says. in the case of "sleepwalker," the images romanek showed cronenweth were mainly photographs of rock musicians from the 1960s, including one of jakob dylan's father, bob dylan, surrounded by paparazzi.

for the video's paparazzi vignette, cronenweth used anamorphic lenses on a 35mm panavision panastar camera. "we wanted a little less of the coating and we wanted the horizontal flares that you won't get with a spherical lens," he explains. the anamorphic image was later unsqueezed in telecine, stretching the flares into long horizontal streaks.

in all the other sequences, cronenweth used spherical lenses -- mostly zooms, to facilitate pulling out of a the various scenes and revealing the wider settings. "we used a shorter zoom -- a 17.5-75mm 4:1 primo -- for some dolly-zoom compound shots," he says. "to do some snap-zooms, we used an 11:1[24-275] primo zoom as well."

cronenweth's film stock on the video was kodak vision 500t 5279, which he describes as "a fast, contrasty stock that allows a lot of latitude." in addition to helping compensate for the slower anamorphic lenses, the stock's extra speed was especially useful for the paparazzi sequence: "i tried to play out the scene entirely with strobe lighting and shot at 60 frames per second."

according to cronenweth, romanek is an innovator who likes to be to be [sic] among the the first to try out new equipment. because the "sleepwalker" video was shot shortly after showbiz expo, where many companies introduce new gear, cronenweth and romanek used the job to try out some lights they'd seen at the trade show. one was an umbrella light called the briese light, which is made by a french company. according to cronenweth, briese lights are focusable soft lights used primarily for still photography. the largest available unit measure 11' across, though the biggest in the united states at the time of the wallflowers shoot was only 7' across. we thought [it would be great] to photograph that," cronenweth says. in fact, the light actually appears onscreen in one of the vignettes.

another piece of equipment cronenweth and romanek tried after its appearance at showbiz expo was the bag-o-lite, a german light that the production rented through kino flo. "it's a 43k hmi light thats has an inflatable sock protruding from it," cronenweth details. a tank of compressed air blows into the sock so that it fills up and stiffens into a giant illuminated cylinder, and it becomes "like an 18-foot kino flo!" the cinematographer enthuses.

according to ed maloney, cronenweth's gaffer, the bag-o-lites were positioned end to end. for a scene in which the light from the tube needed to be warmed up, the entire tube had to be gelled. "you can't gel between the light and the unit," maloney says, "it's too hot."

cronenweth also combined the bag-o-lite with 50k soft sun lights from lightning strikes for performance footage in the video. "mark had remembered seeing some early beatles photo where the light was hitting them, but the photographer had underexposed them," says cronenweth. the result was a line of light that ran along the side of the musicians' faces. to re-create that look, cronenweth and maloney used the 50ks as a hard key light on one side of the musicans, then filled the other side with light from the bag-o-lite. according to maloney, the ratio between the two sides was about 3:1.

the paparazzi vignette was lit primarily with norman 400b strobe lights to stimulate flashes from the photographers' cameras. maloney reveals that the lights were placed to the left and right of the scene, above and below camera.

cronenweth used no filtration on the camera because he knows that romanek likes to manipulate imagery in post. "he comes from the school of really clean images," says cronenweth. "he doesn't want to get handcuffed in." in this case, romanek did indeed want to make some changes after the shoot, and he turned to the visual-effects company a52 to do work that is mostly invisible in the finished product. dan sumpter, a visual-effects supervisor at a52, recalls that romanek "brought us a whole group of things that he wanted us to polish. there are often quite a few things that he likes to do after the fact to perfect the promo."

much of the work invloved cosmetic touches that raised the look of the video to romanek's standards. "we went through and did quite a lot of massaging and combining of images," says sumpter. "mark tends to go with very clean imagery." shots of young women behind a shop window, for example, were retouched to hide seams and handprints.

one sequence in the video shows dylan in a room decorated in a baroque style, surrounded by several live animals. although the animals were filmed onstage during the shoot, their performances were not quite what romanek had in mind. "animals being animals, they dont always act the way you want them to," says sumpter. "[in] the shots where you see [dylan] on the couch, we were adding separate shots of animals so that the animals 'behaved' and were placed where [romanek] wanted them." although a horse is onscreen throughout this sequence, the animal actually wasn't filmed in the first shot of the series -- a camera pullback -- and romanek asked a52 to insert it. "that was probably one of the trickier shots," says sumpter, who had to track the camera move and apply that information to the image of the horse.

sumpter used a quantel infinity to complete the work. "in terms of postproduction tools, it's quite old," he says. "its very simplicity is one of its strengths, though. it's still a very easy intuitive box to use."

though cronenweth now enjoys a burgeoning career in feature-film cinematography, he says he's grateful for the work he's been able to on music videos -- and for the opportunity to see that part of the industry evolve and become more respected. "it was fun to watch [the realm of music videos] mature and grow," he says. "my jobs continually got better. the ideas became less about watching someone sing, and more conceptual in style." even now, he adds, he still finds videos exciting to film. "you get the opportunity to use toys, be extremely bold and discover how far you can actually push the limit. you're always out there trying something that hasn't been done."

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