PICTURE CAPTIONS 1) Above: In this frame from the film, Will (Treat Williams) discovers the disturbed scribblings of his son, Seth. This scene originally occurred in the daytime but was edited together with Will's search through the room to form one continuous scene over the course of a night. "In post, we gave it an amber look and crunched it," says Barrett. "Will is still silhouetted, and it sold effectively as a night scene." 2) Right: In another frame grab, Will and Tina (Linda Hamilton) share a kiss during dinner while bathed in soft, diffuse illumination provided by a booklight. 3) About: In this frame from the film, Will takes a closer look at a penny-token machine, another clue that leads Will to believe his son is guilty of murder. 1.2K Pars were aimed into the yellowish awning over the pation to provide background ambiance. A 750-watt Zip was placed low to the ground and aimed through diffusion at Tina. A small Kino Flo on Will boosted the light emanating from the machine. 4) Right: In another frame grab, an overly stressed and paranoid Will nearly whacks his boss. A film-look softward process was applied by The Post Group, whose staffers added motion blur and a film grain structure that resembles Kodak EXR 50D 5245 stock. 5) Top: Seth (Jonathan Jackson) has an apprehensive heart-to-heart chat with Tina about his paranoid father. 6) Bottom: Wayne Powers (far right) and cinematographer Michael Barrett try to keep pace with A-camera/Steadicam operator Jeffrey Hunt, SOC. The Steadicam was used frequently to "play on that audience question of 'Do we trust Will's point of view or should we look at it from the pont of view that WIll is not exactly a sane person?' - which is the second possibility in the film," nodes Powers. "With the Steadicam, we were able to use much less equipment than we would have needed with dollies and tracks." American Cinematographer December 2000 "Bare Bones" by Douglas Bankston Although its makers received support and financing from Artisan Entertainment and Nu Image, Skeletons in the Closet remains an independent film in the truest sense of the term. Written and produces by husband-and-wife screenwriters Wayne and Donna Powers (Deep Blue Sea), Skeletons in the Closet was directed by Wayne and shot in his hometown of Jackson, New Hampshirt, over 19 days. During production, Wayne took full advantage of free locations and help from friends and family - in fact, his elementary-school principle served as his location manager. Despite a tight budget of just $1.5 million, Powers managed to nab a high-profile cast. Treat Williams and Jonathan Jackson portray Will and Seth, a father and teenage son struggling to maintain a relationship many years after a tragic fire claimed both their home and the life of the boy's mentally unstable mother. Seth blames his father for her death, but over time, he has repressed the truth: that his mother physically and emotionally abused him and deliberately set the fire outside his room. Although he survived the blaze unscathed, Seth suffered deep emotional scars that result in cryptic behavior. When three people go missing, all of the circumstantial evidence points to Seth, and Will's paranoia makes it increasingly difficult for him to belive that his son is innocent. Meanwhile, Tina (Linda Hamilton), a woman with her sights set on Will, gets caught in the middle. Because of money and time constraints, the choice to shoot the film on high-definition (HD) video was made early on, although the filmmakers briefly flirted with the idea of shooting in Dogma-style. Shooting in HD would allow Skeleton's bare-bones crew to set up quickly and use a smaller lighting package. After viewing numerous demo reels, Powers found the right cinematographer for the job in Michael Barrett (Safe Men, The Suburbans, 75 Degrees in July. "As far as the choice to shoot in high definition, everyone seemed to know about it except me," Barrett admits with a chuckly. "Wayne sprung it on me in the middle of my interview. It made sense because of the schedule's limitations, and I was definitely interested in trying it - it seemed like a great opportunity. Of course, there is the whole stigma of shooting on video, and everyone was afraid to be seen in any photos with the cameras!" The visual style of Michael Mann's films, particularly The Insider, influenced Powers and Barrett, who opted to shoot coverage with two camera whenever possible. Most often, the cameras would shoot the action from roughly the same angle using lenses with different focal lengths; occasionally, the cameras would be used to capture opposing coverage. One technique used in several scenes consisted of locking off one camera with a wider lens, while using the secone camera to shoot a handheld, long-lens close-up of the same action. This helped to create a sense of uneasiness in the viewer's attitude towards Will by presenting a still shot of him followed by a cut to the handheld close-up. The small production's camera package, obtained from Rule Broadcasting Systems in Boston, comprised three Song HD-700 camera equipped with Canon and Fujinon zoom lenses. Jeffrey Hunt, SOC served as the show's A-camera/Steadicam operator, while Barrett operated the B-cmera. "I don't know if we could have done as much shooting in 19 days without that other camera," Barrett says by telephone from New Yrok, where he is currently shooted The Perfect You. "Jeff found a way to set up that second camera for almost every other shot. Usually by the end of the day, our setups numbered more than 30." The third Sony camera was rigged for Steadicam use at all times, and Powers notes that the liberal use of the gyrostablized rig was inspired by the POV camera style of Roman Polanski's films. "The Steadicam worked best for us in following Treat Williams' character into a room," he says. "We, as viewers, are seeing things and discovering them at the same time he is." "There was no HD output for the Steadicam monitor," Barrett points out. "Zbigniew Twarog at Rule worked on it night and day to attache a YEM downconverter to the side of the camera. When we showed up, he said, 'I've got good news and bad news. The good news is that I was able to convert it; the bad news is that it's the size of a Volkswagon!' When the whole thing was flying, it was bigger than a Panavision camera with Primo lenses. That's not saying it weighed more - it was bulky but rather light, and Jeff quickly got used to it. The camera was moving in every scene, and we didn't even have a dolly." In addition to frequenly manning the second camera, Barrett also ahd to help his skeletal lighting crew move and set up equipment. "I had a crew of two guys, one electrician and one grip," he says. "We also had a couple of high-school students who occasionally swung with us. Vincent Wren was my gaffer; he had worked as a best boy for me on a feature I'd done the previous summer, but Skeletons was the first project he'd ever gaffed on. Bill Brady Majors was my grip. They both worked incredibly hard, and we had a really good time. I look forward to working with them again." Like the crew, the lighting package was also small-scale, consisting of three 1.2K Pars, two pocket Pars, a couple of small Kino Flos and a small number of tungsten units - "basically, everything that can plug into a wall," says Barrett with a laugh. "It worked out well, because we found that in HD, you can have too much light. You want to open up the lens as much as possible to limit the format's seemingly infinite depth of field, which screams 'video.' It was something we were very ocnscious of. We tried to stay on as long a lens as possible. Unfortunately, the lenses we were using seemed to be designed more for the automatic focus of the camera, and the lens markings weren't great. My two assistants became a bit frustrated at times. Although I had been warned against lens diffusion when shotting HD for film transfer, there were a few times when I couldn't help myself, and we would use the lightest grades of Classic Soft filters. "Anticipating five days of color-correcction gave me more freedom with the lighting and saved us a lot of time - specifically in locations with fluorescents," he continues. "Usually I might change out the fixtures with color-corrected tubes, but with tape-to-tape, I knew I could bring the actors' skin tones back to normal while leaving the fluorescents as they were. All we had to do was match our sources to the existing lighting." The type of lighting units that were available did have an impact on Barrett's approach. "The prospect of balancing the windows for day interior illumination was daunting," he explains. "I couldn't light to a stop where I could see everything outside, and we didn't have time to gel the windows. Wayne liked the look of papered windows, so we ended up covering most of the windows with sheer lace curtains that we'd blow out." "Still, there were some pretty extensive Steadicam moves were we would go from outside on a bright sunny day to inside, and I only had 1.2K Pars to light with," the cinematographer says. "We did a lot of iris pulls - something that usually makes me a bit nervous. One night thing about working in HD was that we could play back our footage and see how we'd done; the monitor was incredibly important, since that was my lighting reference. One of the most difficult things was to break my habit of lighting through the camera, because the HD camera has a black-and-white, fairly contrasty viewing system." Whenever possible, the shooting day was scheduled to take place when the exteriors would be in shadow, in order to help balance interiors and exteriors. Something the production was blessed with overcast skies. In those situations, the interior lighting was built up enough so that anything outside the windows would read. "I tried to keep everything really soft," Barrett recalls. "A lot of lighting was done through 4-by-4 frames, with maybe a harder back edge forthat little specular reflection off the underside of a cheek." One day, while the filmmakers were shooting a scene in which Seth comes home from a very short military stint, a storm rolled in and darkened the skies much earlier than expected. "One Steadicam shot ran the length of the house," Barrett says. "Every single light was burning. I looked at the monitor, and it still looked like daytime! Once that night happened, I think it gave everyone a false sense of security in terms of turning night into day - which, luckily, we didn't have to do again. The main thing that helped us that night was that we had accepted the look of blown-out windows. I had been cautioned early on that once you blow something out on HD, it's almost impossible to bring it back, so I genreally shot the movie to be a bit less contrasty that I might normally have done." One interior dinner scene featured Will and Tina staged at sunset to achieve a stylied, pictureque look. The sequence was lit with multiple sources that were similar in color temperature. "Wayne wanted that scene to look very pretty," Barrett recalls. "I matched the sunset warmth [to an extent] with a tungsten lamp in the foreground, because I knew that when we cut in I'd want some warm light on the inside. I then gelled up one of the 1.2K Pars to produce a really hard backlight. Once I had the hardlight, I use a booklight for fill - most often, a 1,200-watt Par or a pocket Par bounced into a 4-by-4 piece of beadboard and broken by a 4-by-4 light grid frame in front of the board. That approach created a very diffuse, soft and even light." One of the film's most disquieting scenes occurs when Will ventures into Seth's attic room and notices that one section is freshly painted. By scraping away all night, Will discovers that the paint was hiding the cumulative effect of Seth's abuse, summed up in the words "Mama loves her baby," which are scrawled thousands of times on the walls. Will's deliberate trek up the stars and into the room involved a complicated Steadicam move in which the camera leads him up the stairs, becomse his POV in a 360-degree sweep of the room, and the focuses on Will again in a doorway by the fresh paint. "I felt that I needed something to light the scene that would give us a point of interest," Barrett details. "There was one lamp in the celing, which gives WIll a bit of illumination when he reaches the top of the stairs. I didn't like the idea of having a practical in each area of the room - after all, why would Seth leave all of his lights on? Owing to his tormet, I figured I could lay one practical lamp down on its side [and] have it in frame; the light coming out of the top of the shade would light up the desk area, and the light coming out of the bottom would light up the other wall and the mattress on the floor. When Will reaches that doorway, I have him backlit, and at that point you can believe that he's tutned on the other source." Unlike many indie productions, Skeletons in the Closet enjoyed a cushy postproduction schedule, including five days of tape-to-tape color timing on a daVinci 2K color corrector at The Post Group in Los Angeles. "Our colorist, Paul Westerbeck, was a terrific guy," Barrett beams. "We had good time putting all of the contrast back into the movie." Adds Powers, "Michael and I were able to try something, see it immediately and then adjust it immediately in tape-to-tape." The Post Groups suggested using a new film-look process called Film Style that they had acquired from the software company Monsters 50. The process, which runs on the facility's Inferno, combines the video fields and creates a motion blur that's added to the frames. Film Style also adds a "film grain" of choice, based on all of Eastman Kodak's current stocks. "The one that felt like the least like nose and the most like an approximation of grain was the 5245 grain look," Barrett reveals. "Combined with the motion blur, we felt that it was a significant improvement over straight HD. When you look at video, you're very aware that it is not a chemical medium, you're missing the motion of grain, which feels more alive and organic. I think [the process] took away the electronic texture and replaced it with the type of film texture that [viewers] are most used to seeing."