Copyright © 2008 Rebel Zone Productions. All rights reserved.
The Project: Arizona Seaside
Director: Pil Pilegaard
Synopsis: A young Kazakhstani girl with dreams of making it big as a country singer in Nashville ends up at The Seaside Motel in Arizona. Her short but eventful stay has some very unexpected consequences. Arizona Seaside is a comedy with sophisticated humor and colorful characters. Imagine Memento meets Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, then add a little Cockney rhyming slang and some Worcester sauce to spice it up.
Background Information: Arizona Seaside is the third collaboration between myself and Director Pil Pilegaard. Our honed shorthand allows Pil to maximize time with his actors, while I have the freedom to lens, set up dolly, and light in a way I know Pil would have envisioned, had he had the time to remain on set.
Cinematic Treatment: Most of our visual decisions about look and technique were discussed and planned in pre-production. However, I am always exploring more interesting ways to tell a story on set, as Pil's directing approach is very much about pushing the visual envelope.
Pil broke the movie up into two visual motifs-the city versus the desert locations. Pil wanted a calm, stylized look for the city scenes versus a crazy, warm, wild, free-flowing feel for the desert scenes. I underpinned the characteristics of these different looks primarily through movement. I utilized a traditional dolly for controlled and motivated movement for the city sequences, and a bungee rig for a more frenetic style in the desert locations. Pil referenced a couple of handheld movies as visual ideas for some of the key desert scenes. I am not a proponent of the counterintuitive approach to capturing handheld footage in a frenetic way. I feel that this throwing away of your instincts does not ensure organic naturalism, but rather a contrived look that has more chance of nauseating the audience out of the moment than engaging them as participants in the scene. My solution to engaging the audience with appropriate movement was through the use of a bungee rig. For interior shots the bungee rig was underslung and rigged to a truss with tracking guide rails, which freed me up to do lateral dolly movements, in addition to the vertical freedom the bungee cord allows. For exterior shots the bungee rig was rigged to the end of a crane, which the Dolly Grip could sweep around as I operated the camera. The bungee rig's unpredictable inertia as the crane is swept ensures that at times the camera is pulled off the correct composition, so instinctually I will be framing to the sweet spot, creating a dynamic ebb and flow of correctly versus incorrectly composed frantically captured action. Fifty percent of the movie was shot in Lancaster, California, where every evening there were spectacular sunsets. I credit Pil, who approved me shooting almost every exterior scene at magic light. This approach adds pressure in that time becomes such a premium, however with Pil having rehearsed his actors so well it was a worthwhile decision. As a result, many of the exterior scenes have the actors bathed in gorgeous light, which adds so much visually to the kind of warm, energetic imagery we were going for in the desert. I think of Arizona Seaside exteriors as my Days of Heaven moments, as the late, great cinematographer Nestor Almendros shot that entire feature in magic light. Because I created the look in-camera I didn't need to use the DI process to create a look; it was only used to keep scenes consistent.
To view the official site and catch up with festival screening times please visit www.arizonaseaside.com
Arizona Seaside won Best Cinematography at the FAIF International Film Festival in 2007.
