A Career In Momentum | A Poster Grrl's Story (Keenan Parry Edition)

Well, by now you've hopefully read the posts by @illpoetic and @asonintrigue. If you haven't I suggest you do so, as they're fascinating and go into aspects of the film I wasn't even around for.
Ason
Illpoetic

This is long. There are a lot of pictures. You have been warned.

My main roles were cinematographer, VFX/color treatment, and co-editing it with Ason. If you've read Ason's account of this film, you will have gathered by now that this was a purely passion project that pulled off a hell of a lot. While post-production was a huge hurdle to overcome, I was spared the struggle of dealing with a majority of the sound and score. Again, read the posts by Ason and Illpoetic.

While some of the Visual Effects in the film were tedious (more on some of the vfx below) they were nothing compared to four days of production. Up until Poster Grrl, I hadn't stepped into the sole cinematographer role with @fringelifesquad in a film. I had shot music videos as a freelancer, a few shorts and was even cinematographer along with Ason for I Am The Decimal. (Speaking of which, I'll make a post about I Am The Decimal soon...) But this would by my first Director of Photography role with Fringe Life. Considering Poster Grrl was a film Ason and Chelsea had talked about for a while, even before we ever met- this was a huge honor. On top of that, the content of this film and the story behind it is extremely personal. To be the person that focuses on the visual storytelling is not something I took lightly.

Cinematographers, or director of photography, (who cares) will often talk about the meaning/symbolism in the way they tell a story with composition, light, ect. at this point. I myself enjoy dissecting and utilizing this in my animation and art- even tending to be a bit of a perfectionist with it. I knew I had to let a lot of that go with how I approached this film as a whole. This is a film that was shot in a controlled but chaotic, improvisational manner. There were very specific choices made prior to shooting that would help the aesthetic thrive in that atmosphere. How does one get what they want out of a film approached in this way? How is the feeling conveyed?

First thing. It really helps knowing you'll be editing the film later, so you can make specific choices and know what to expect in post-production. Apart from that, you carefully choose your tools, know limitations, and always think pragmatically. So: it's a low budget film, we have limited time, locations being picked at random, and a specific grungy rock aesthetic to set a 90's tone and immerse ourselves in Chelsea' history.

The Camera (Big Bertha):
We wanted to shoot the camera with a shoulder rig (more on that medieval torture device later) - so we had a technical limitation to consider. DSLR's like the GH5 and Canon's can produce amazing images, don't get me wrong. But the rolling shutter effect looks awful when shooting on a shoulder rig. Back then, it was almost impossible to find an affordable camera with a global shutter. The Black Magic URSA had just come out, it was more affordable than anything else and we needed global shutter.

Lenses:
Rokinon: Well built, affordable, wanted a little aberration.
35mm
50mm
80mm

With a full frame camera, I thought going wider than 35mm wouldn't work with the immersion we were aiming for. Going too wide can be too surreal at times.

Style:
A typical use of framing and composition in film is to show power dynamics or the characters state of mind. That is something I did not want at all in Poster Grrl. There are no power dynamics as nobody is in control. The story does not permit anybody to judge who has power over the other. This story is about Renee and what her world is like. I tried to make it clear that the angles of the camera are not piecing together some grand meaning that can only be understood by being film literate.

A trope that you often see in the movie is the camera whipping around to catch up to Renee. I would ask to do a new take if I noticed myself being predictive with movement. The camera is not in control of the story. Sometimes shots were very well rehearsed with this mantra, others came on the fly due to the improvisational matter in many of the walking scenes. The only breakaway from this is one moment that implies the abuse Renee experienced as a child. I approached this scene carefully but I did not want to shy away from anything. We're on this journey with Renee and we owe her this moment. I made the choice to follow from behind the shoulder of the perpetrator:

And force the audience into his perspective, breaking the fourth wall - Renee looking directly at us for the first time:

To this day I have trouble watching this scene as I've dissociated myself from being the person holding the camera in that scene. This was also shot near the end of "The 20 Hour Day."

The only tripod shots are in the rehab facility/therapy scenes. The camera again takes on the atmosphere and stubbornly locks itself down. The uneasy, sterile feelings of therapy centers and rehab facilities is made much clearer when you can't be distracted by anything else, if you ask me. Having the camera moving around gives the scene unwarranted kinetic energy.

The 20 Hour Day:
So, while much of the filming went pretty smooth, considering the challenges with the microphone (you read Ason's post right?) there was a day that pretty much took me to a new level of drained. Big Bertha is 20 pounds of metal and the shoulder rig was two rods and a handle. So, not a shoulder rig. Not sure why but there was no padding of any kind and we didn't have time to get a new rig. I attempted towels and bean bags but nothing really stopped that thing from cutting into my shoulder after shooting up to 10 plus hours straight a day, with only a few tripod scenes. What really got me is when a location fell through and the only way to get a scene we needed was to pull a 20+ hour day of shooting. Now, I was actually running and training actively for 50k races. I was running 50+ miles a week, going for 30 mile runs on some weekends- so I wasn't exactly out of shape. After days of hard shooting, lugging Big Bertha around, not getting much sleep, we finally got to the end of this 20 hour day. We were doing the scene where I run up the stairs with the camera, following the actor all the way from the front door. It's probably 1am in the morning and we were setting up the next shot, where we have a few from the top of the stairs. Ason was behind me telling me to get ready, pointed at where I need to shoot. I have no idea how long he was talking, or how long the actor was staring at me confused, as I was pointing the camera at a blank wall in a daze. I handed the camera to Ason, don't remember if I said anything, walked down the stairs, and collapsed in the grass outside the house. One of the dogs that lived in the house came to see if I was okay and we sat in the grass for a few minutes. I then went back inside and shot until past 4am. I couldn't speak in complete sentences, people would ask me questions and I wouldn't be able to answer them. Thanks to Ason's guidance, I was able to hit record and finish many of the therapy scenes that night.

Now that we're past production, I can talk a little post-production. First, I'd like to point out a few things I did to the film that should go completely unnoticed if I do my jog properly.

When Renee is smoking meth, we didn't have a safe way to do it practically, so I built a particle based smoke simulator to add the entire process in post. Exhale and all.


I had to track it all by hand because I shot it through the blinds- I knew I would regret that while I was doing it.

A small yet very important detail of a poster hanging on the wall. Chelsea was very specific about this picture she remembers and wanted to tie it into the following scene with Renee handing a bottle of liquor to a bum. Something that seems inconsequential to many, but we worked very hard for little details like this. So I tracked, rotoscoped, and replaced that damn picture in every shot.
Before:

After:

Building procedural and adaptable controls for the distorted visuals:

Little Things:
Little flashes and breaks as the story movies along. Filmed those by opening the camera lenses and shining a flashlight at the sensor over a year after shooting. I wanted to build transitions and ways to show breaks in her memories that were still organic. I film and layered hundreds of these throughout the film. I then mixed those with old stock footage elements of film being ripped out of film projectors and looped them through the same system I built for the distorted effects.

Almost every shot has visual effect attached to it, fading in and out as the emotional content dictates. I decided to embrace the grungy noisey, low light footage rather than fight it. I didn't try to make it look better, I actively tried to make it look worse.

The color correction is the final stage and again I didn't attempt to fight the footage. We use color heavily and you will see that particularly in the colors red and blue. The entire color correction is based on an analogous color theme. This being dictated by the colors typically seen in Columbus Ohio.

I could go on and on about this film. I am unbelievably proud of the passion and work everyone put into this film. The story of this is equally as important as the story behind it. We would not have driven ourselves mad like this if we didn't care. While some have called the film depressing and wanted closure at the ending; I say that if you care enough to look into the history of this film- the closure you seek is the fact that this amazing women named Chelsea overcame many odds to assemble a group of complete maniacs to tell her story.

With that, I will include a few more of my favorite shots in the film, in no particular order.

Thanks to all that made it all the way through. I can't express my gratitude to all the amazing feedback and people in this community.