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MillimeterWinging It
Aug 10, 2009 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
Davis Guggenheim and team on the improvisational style for It Might Get Loud.
It Might Get Loud Director Davis Guggenheim brought his subjects—guitarists Jimmy Page, The Edge, and Jack White—together for the first time at a summit meeting on the gigantic Warner Bros. soundstage 16 in Burbank, Calif. That summit served as the binding element for his documentary, which pays homage to the electric guitar.
Stories and summit
As personal stories for each man emerged, Guggenheim arranged for crews to film them in their own environments—their homes, recording studios, and old haunts. White’s story was filmed at his home in Tennessee by cinematographer Erich Roland, while The Edge and Page were filmed by various cinematographers in the United Kingdom. Along the way, a technical methodology emerged that Guggenheim says helped him main¬tain his theme of contrast. He filmed most material from the personal stories on Super 16 film stock, but he used five Sony F23 HD cameras to capture the summit footage and recorded all audio to a mobile production truck.
“My sense was that the movie would be more powerful if you create a visual contrast between things,” Guggenheim says. “It’s like with cooking—you want something sweet and you want something sour. So the Super 16 felt richer to me, more personal, which was good for their stories. It evokes more feelings—it can be moody, deeper, darker, richer, with shadows and things. Whereas, at the summit, the HD stuff makes you feel like you are right there with them. It’s crisp and clean. By contrasting them, you get this great effect of the two senses of time—that they are coming together at the summit in realtime, now, while they are reflecting back on their personal stories, which is evoked on Super 16 from their personal narratives.”
Roland also filmed the three men in quiet, candid situations as they prepared for the summit. For all those segments, he chose Canon HD lenses (11x4.7 for wide angles and 22.85 for long shots), attached to his film camera using an Abakus adapter.
It Might Get Loud sound and music was edited at the Warner Bros. dub 12 mixing stage in Digidesign Pro Tools (v. 7.4) and mixed through a Digidesign Icon control surface.
Photo: Bob Beresh
“I use the Canon HD lenses for just about everything I do, whether I’m shooting HD or film,” Roland says. “What that does for me is allow me to get very used to two lenses, unless I need something very long, very wide, or very fast, which are unusual circumstances. In documentary situations, you have no focus puller anyway, so these lenses make it easy for me to do it myself simply, and that gives me a better chance of keeping these guys in focus with a lens I’m very familiar with.
“Working on a documentary, and working with Davis, you have to be prepared to get up and go at any time. There really was no master photography plan, so these lenses make it easier for me to [be flexible]. Since these are three very different men, you want to film them each differently. Jack White is very theatrical and has a certain style, so you want to shoot him theatrically. The Edge is completely the opposite—he’ll sit quietly for hours and work with sophisticated electronic equipment, so the lens wants to get closer to him, and you don’t want to shoot him from the same angles as you would Jack White. And then Jimmy Page is older, but he’s elegant and stately and dependable. He won’t launch himself out of the frame like Jack White would. So we gave him a more formal frame—he’s earned that kind of respect, to be honest.”
DP Guillermo Navarro supervised the summit shoot using the F23s outfitted with Fujinon 2/3in. HD Cine lenses. The plan for the summit, compared to the personal stories, was relatively high-tech. At the suggestion of supervising sound editor and rerecording mixer Skip Lievsay, the production chose the largest sound stage on the Warner Bros. lot (soundstage 16) for its superior acoustics, set up a central living-room style area for the three guitarists to interact and a lounge to the side, and then proceeded to mic almost every square inch of the stage.
They then shot the meeting with five F23s, but they did not switch cameras live, broadcast style. Instead, they recorded picture at 1080/60p (1920x1080) over dual-link HD-SDI fiber to Sony SRW-1 HDCAM recording decks. Under supervision from the shoot’s technical manager, Pete Rizzo, the production built a complete control room and video village on the stage, along with a tape room.
Meanwhile, interview audio was captured to tape through lavalier mics on each guitarist. Performance audio (all music) was recorded to a Le Mobile production truck. Recording engineer Guy Charbonet and his team recorded all music through an AMS Neve 8058 mixer into Apogee Electronics converters, where it was then isolated to hard disk using a Digidesign Pro Tools|HD3 system to organize the material for the looming remix.
“It was both a film-type shoot and a record-recording session,” says Lievsay, a frequent Coen brothers collaborator who also served as a consultant throughout the production process, in addition to his postproduction duties. “They had coverage of instruments and amplifiers to record directly into Pro Tools, but also radio mics and boom mics to get quality voice recordings as they chatted. That let the three guys walk around and chat, and a lot of candid stuff came out of it, with Edge and Jack White just asking Jimmy Page questions when they happened to be taking a break. They could hang around, sit on couches, and chat, and we could capture all that, and then we recorded their music as though we were making a record.”
Continue the discussion on Crosstalk the Millimeter Forum.