For those of you who haven’t seen Andrew Wonder’s “Undercity,” yet, check it out:

Andrew Wonder (andrewwonder.com) is focused. Seriously. When he descended into the depths of New York City’s forbidden zone of subway spelunking, Andrew stuck his foot in the track and lost his shoe. He retrieved it, but didn’t notice the blood until some time later.

“After climbing for a few more hours I looked down to discover my pant leg soaked with blood and my ankle completely black and blue. I had done some real damage but didn’t want to stop shooting and even with an ace bandage around my ankle and a cut that took weeks to scab we kept shooting.”

Photo courtesy of Andrew Wonder.

This would impact his weight distribution, the handheld camera work in “Undercity” wasn’t “quite as smooth as usual (especially when climbing).” But that didn’t slow him down. Indeed, he trained his body to readjust — a tip for beginning shooters wanting to shoot steady handheld shots:

“For just over a week I would walk around my apartment with a mug filled to the brim with boiling water. Soon I was able to walk around on my bad ankle without burning my hand which gave me the control I needed to run and climb while still keeping the camera steady.”

Steve is an adventurer and “Undercity” did not slow him down. He’d been interested in shooting in the tunnels for several years, but couldn’t find much through online research.

One day I stumbled upon Steve’s site. I got very lucky with my timing, Steve was having a welcome home party from a trip to Russia and after reading my e-mail he invited me to join. I told him I’d love to shoot and check things out, told him I had experience with extreme conditions (thanks to parkour shooting) and he agreed to take me down if I would capture footage to make a short reel for him since he was about to move out of town to attend grad school. After the first night of filming where I injured my shin and ankle we became close friends and realized we loved going into the tunnels for the same reasons. We kept filming almost every night for a month.

 

After a week of filming I realized we had something that was more than just a montage and thought we could develop it as a TV show. I put a teaser online to gauge interest (it was huge) then developed a structure/format for a show. I then took my favorite adventures from the filming to create a short doc to showcase them along with Steve.

 

Some people criticize the piece for not showing enough of the environments. I have all that footage but this was a choice because I wanted the film to be an intense character piece on Steve and his passion for what he does. After a few cuts I realized the film felt even more intense when we took out establishing shots and always stayed within a few feet of him.

Background
Andrew is a filmmaker at heart. By the time he was 20 — and while still a student at NYU film school — he was accepted into the International Cinematographer’s guild, working as an AC, but “after a few real sets I fell very out of love with ‘traditional’ shooting.” He wanted intimacy with his subject — an intimacy found when shooting stills with “my Nikon F and Rangefinders. Those small cameras always allowed me to connect with my subject better than any traditional video camera and I always dreamed of them capturing motion.”

So with the release of the Canon 5D Mark II, Andrew said, “I had finally found my paintbrush.” And “using the 5D with canon lenses is the perfect mix of Panavision and Fujinon.”

Black magic in the 5D
Indeed, Andrew loved to use other cameras, such as the Sony EX1 and F900, as well as “ENG cameras because of the way they shot quick and handled, but with my Canon lenses I can shoot quicker and more efficiently than any other camera out there. The other thing about the 5D is that it’s the first video camera I used that everyone who sees the footage has a emotional response to. Even the F3 still feels like a video camera (raw, lifeless, etc) as do most current film stocks (vision 3 is flat/lifeless). There is some black magic in the 5D (especially in the dark or mixed lighting situations) that makes it a clear choice for me at this point.

Although he hates “how people compare [Canon 5D Mark II] and use it like a true cinema camera. I was a union AC and used every film camera out there. The 5D is no cinema camera.” Rather, he feels it’s “something completely different and when you treat it as such you can get amazing results.”

The strengths of the camera lies in the fact that it is a part of the evolution of cinema history, Wonder says. “We are at a place in cinema where for the first time in 100 years we have tools to make films NOTHING like what we’ve seen before. The 5D can go places and capture emotion in ways no camera has been able to do. I really feel like when people let go of the notions of ‘legitimate’ cinema and stop trying to make everything look cinematic and embrace these new tools everyone can make films audiences have never seen before.”

Testing out the 5D with parkour videos
Before shooting “Undercity,” Wonder tested the camera’s ability to “see if the 5D could handle action and extreme environments (like my Rangefinders),” Wonder explains. “We actually shot one with Steve who took the athletes to some real funky abandoned places upstate New York (http://vimeo.com/18064000) and a cool one with EX1s (this was before clients believed the 5D could do anything) where we shut down a state fair and I would climb rollecoasters with them as they jumped (http://vimeo.com/17746153).

Broadcast work using the 5D
Wonder has not only used Canon’s 5D for personal work, but he has also shot two reality shows for MTV with it. One, The Real Show Choir, “was shot almost completely wide open on a 50mm 1.4 and was aired pre-House,” Wonder says. “The second aired this fall and was the 200th episode of MTV’s MADE. I shot it with a Sigma 24-70 and a beta copy of the Beachtek DXA-SLR (which I burned through 5 of before figure out how to make it production ready). I still prefer the zoom H4N to the Beachtek but when you are giving a network 12-16 hours of footage a day not having to sync is a lifesaver.”

TIPS and TRICKS — THE TECHNIQUES OF ANDREW WONDER

Andrew Wonder’s approaches to shooting includes evolving from a Zoom H4n to the smaller Zoom H1 and manually focusing by muscle memory rather than using the LCD screen. The following are the techniques he used while filming “Undercity” in his own words.

Creating intimacy in “Undercity”
I had seen a lot of videos of TV programs that had dealt with this subject matter and they always felt bland and emotionless. People seem to have so many preconceptions of the mythical world of the underground that I wanted to play with those fears and tensions while still teaching a bit of history.

Emotionally I hoped that if I was always within five feet of Steve and if he was always speaking to me, the way he would take a girl on a date, you would have a true visceral experience when watching. What also makes this shooting style effective is that since you never see my reaction to the situations then audience members are forced to project their preconceived notions about the dangers of the underground onto the film creating even more tension. We took this idea even further in the edit using a mix of quicker jump cuts with drawn out long takes to keep an continual sense of uneasiness.

Creating the look in-camera using Portrait picture style at 2800K
I used a custom profile based on the portrait setting in the PP menu. I wanted everything to pop and I didn’t want to do it in post. We were almost always shooting at 2500 ISO or above so I knew that any grading (no matter how minor) would make the footage even noisier. I also think the skin tones are nicer in the portrait settings (with the right white balance and color tone) than the neutral.

For white balance I always use 2800K for tungsten lighting. I felt like it was handling mixed lighting better than 3200K.

Getting clean audio and saving a Zoom with rice
We were always using the Zoom H4N but originally we were putting it on a hot shoe on top of the camera with the lav receiver velcroed to the back of it. That worked for a while until I was climbing out of a sewer and the zoom hit the manhole and fell into the sewer. Somehow by immediately putting it in a bag of rice when I got home both were saved and still work to this day.

Andrew Wonder’s audio set-up. Courtesy of Andrew Wonder.

After this failure I started wearing a AC pouch with the Zoom H4n and receiver on my belt which gave me more flexibility. Recently I’ve switched over to using the zoom H1 because it’s so small and sounds great. The 1/8″ in works great with my lavs. I also now put another H1 on top of my camera with a hot shoe adaptor to get me nice stereo recording of the ambiance in the tunnels. I learned that using a traditional shot gun (like the rode mono video mic) is not good in the tunnels because you’re mostly looking at someone’s back and all the creepy noises really mess with the audio gain and don’t record well. The stereo recording (even the in-camera audio) mixed with the lav on the zoom created a really nice mood where you got to hear my actions and Steve’s. I would record the entire shoot without stopping and then used PluralEyes to sync up in Final Cut Pro.

Shoulder brace
The biggest invention that saved my life was the Zacuto Rapid fire (now Striker). At first when trying to put it in my arm pit I hated it, but I quickly discovered that I could hold it in a bayonet position which would allow me to run backwards and forwards while keeping the camera steady (as opposed to the arm pit method which only worked when I stood still). What I loved about the rapid fire is that when you need it, it’s there but when the camera is on a strap over my shoulder it’s like nothing is attached to the camera. For camera straps I prefer my old Sony DV strap because I can draw/drop it much quicker than the canon. It’s also more inconspicuous when trying to get the camera to a hidden location.

Zacuto’s Rapid Fire (now Striker) at work in the hands of Andrew Wonder. Photo courtesy Andrew Wonder.

Lens
I used the Canon 24mm f/1.4L Mark I. I tested both versions and felt like the version 1 was a little softer in a good way (I swore the moire problems were less pronounced) and the flares looked more cinematic. I fe:lt like the Mark II tried to hide the flares with its fancy modern coating but the times they did show up it was much uglier and since I wasn’t shooting stills I couldn’t Photoshop them out. Sadly I had to use the UV filter (creating more flares) because of all the muck down. Originally I wasn’t using the lens shade but when we were climbing out of a station I smashed the front of my lens pretty hard and realized it was very helpful for protection.

Zone focusing with muscle memory
I am a huge Zacuto Z-Finder fan but it would have been way too dangerous to shoot in the tunnels with it. 90% of the time I was either running, climbing or watching out for obstacles (3rd rail, etc) and had to shoot/focus without looking at the LCD screen. To focus it I had to go back to my rangefinder training and try to use zone focusing. I spent a few days with the lens and trained my hand to know the distance for a close up, medium shot, wide shot, and infinity on the lens. When we were running through the tunnels I used muscle memory to keep Steve in focus and rack to the background when necessary. I bought the camera right before shooting this piece and got used to pulling Canon lenses with my hand that now I can’t focus anywhere near as accurately with a follow focus or longer rotation focus barrel.

Lighting
We used all natural light. In situations where it was too dark I would give Steve a Litepanel miniplus to use as a flashlight

Editing and sound design: Put little music the mix (use nat sound)
My editor, Matt Kliegman (steamclam.com) and I spent a lot of time figuring out the right feel for the piece. From the start I wanted to keep things authentic and honest. I didn’t want to use inserts, cutaways, or any other editing tricks that I feel “lie” to your audience. We chose jump cuts to preserve the feel of the real adventure.

There are several moments where we use the transition from quick cuts to long shots to help build tension. We purposely put enough jump cuts at the beginning so that when you hit the first true long shots (especially Steve leaving City Hall) you instinctively know something is going to happen if we’re not cutting away. I think this technique was very effective throughout the whole film.

Another HUGE asset to the rhythm of the piece was the work of my golden eared sound mixer Robin Shore from Silver Sound (silversound.us). We worked really hard to make the trains the loudest sounds in the whole piece so when they do show up it’s a big shock. I am not a big fan of music in films because I feel like it always takes you out of the moment (even if it helps add more emotion). I have worked with Silver Sound the past few years to create a system where I use a combinations of lav and stereo ambience to help build soundscapes in post. This was an excellent example of how the technique can be effective to build more authentic emotion than a music track.

Final words of advice
Fortune favors the bold. Stop reading the internet and worrying about messing up. Make your HDSLR a part of you and march bravely towards cinema. Don’t worry about the problems (artifacting, moire patterns, rolling shutter) and push yourself to get places no camera has ever gone before.

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Kurt Lancaster, PhD, is the author of “DSLR Cinema: Crafting the Film Look with Video, Focal Press, 2011.” He teaches digital filmmaking and multimedia journalism at Northern Arizona University’s School of Communication.

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