New York University (NYU) - location: New York, NY

Austin F. Schmidt's film Ezekiel's Revelation is now playing on the festival circuit

Ezekiel's Revelation is a short film photographed by Austin F. Schmidt and directed by Katherine Sharp that is now playing on the festival circuit. Ezekiel Lewis is a twelve-year-old boy growing up in Tennessee's Bible Belt region. When a car crashes through his family's living room, his extremely religious parents take it as a sign from God, and decide to give up everything they own and move to Florida to attend a Bible college. With the realization that his life is quickly and radically changing, Ezekiel is forced to come to terms with his own beliefs, his family, and more importantly, his place among them. The film followed a difficult path to completion. Following is the story of the film's production:

QUESTION: Tell us how the film was made, almost abandoned, and then successfully re-made.
AUSTIN F. SCHMIDT: We began shooting Ezekiel's Revelation in May 2005. It was director Katherine Sharp's NYU thesis production. We opted for Kodak 35 mm film. The entire New York crew traveled down to Tennessee to shoot for 10 days. It wasn't until after we had returned to New York and viewed the dailies that a camera malfunction (a mistimed shutter) was discovered, resulting in more than 75 percent of the footage being ruined. The film was abandoned without any hope of ever completing it, and then Katherine moved to Los Angeles.

A year later, she revived the film and decided to re-shoot and finish her film. It took enormous effort to organize the original cast, secure funding, and find locations in Los Angeles that looked like Tennessee-all in a month's time. We told our story to Kodak. With their help, we were able to shoot the rest of the scenes that had been destroyed the previous year. The shoot went off without a hitch, and the film has finally been completed. It is running on the festival circuit.

Ezekiel's Revelation is an interesting story about physical, emotional, and technical challenges as well as a testament to Kodak's commitment to support young filmmakers. We wouldn't have been able to complete it without Kodak's help.

Q: How did you first become connected with the project?
A: I had met Kate Sharp several years earlier while we both attended a summer film program at FAMU in Prague, Czech Republic. We found our tastes and opinions were very similar. I have since shot pretty much every production she has directed or produced. Besides my familiarity in working with her, I was very attracted to the script's plot and the young characters wrapped up in it. Many of the issues they face are things that I could relate to from my own childhood, and it was interesting for me to revisit those days and experience them all over again. Insecurities about love, religion, and parental expectations are some of the many issues that the children deal with in this film. I've also shot many films with kids and really enjoy it.

Q: How did you and the director work together to devise a visual approach?
A: When devising a visual approach for this film, we used different aspects of movies to help communicate what we were trying to achieve. For example, we referenced The Royal Tenenbaums for its camera movements and framing. We didn't want the camera to move much, but if the action demanded it, we tried to hide it as much as possible. We also wanted well-staged symmetrical wide shots to open many of the scenes, so there was a certain theatrical element to a majority of the film. However, we didn't want the audience to feel as though the story was not based on reality so we were careful to balance out the staged elements with naturalism as well.

We also looked at Silvia for our color palette. We wanted the light and the atmosphere to feel soft and natural. We tried to avoid any saturated colors in the frame. I added a little warmth in the highlights whenever I could.

Snow Falling on Cedars dealt with the framing of children and adults with a 1:2.35 aspect ratio, which was what we intended to use as well. Some people only like to use that aspect ratio when dealing with nature scenes and sweeping shots with a lot of horizontal lines in the frame. I love shooting 1:2.35 just as much when shooting intimate stories. Framing for the face is one of the most important considerations when shooting a movie and I feel the wider frame offers a more controlled composition with a lot of space and weight to work with on each side. The hard thing about this aspect ratio when shooting with children and adults in the same frame is their difference in body height. Because of this, Kate and I talked extensively about how we wanted to block scenes to avoid awkward framing with an adult's head way up top and a child's way down below. Overall, I feel we did quite well.

Q: How did you use color, contrast, lighting and lenses in support of that design?
A: The film is not supposed to have a moody, dramatic or overtly stylized look to it. We wanted the scenes to play out, and I didn't want the photography to necessarily stand out and take away from the issues with which the children are dealing. With that in mind, I wanted the image to have a desaturated look to it, just enough to where the skin still looks fresh and healthy. This also meant low contrast. Once I had set my general contrast level, I only played with it a little to help show what time of day/night it was. I always like to have a lower contrast negative with more dynamic range. It is always easier to add more contrast and snap to the picture in post, especially when digitally color correcting. This approach also meant little use in colored gels. The only time I gelled a light was to add a little warmth in the highlights.

The first time we shot Ezekiel's Revelation in Tennessee I used a bunch of HMIs for the day exterior scenes. When we re-shot in Los Angeles, I didn't touch the HMIs during exterior day scenes to keep them as natural looking as possible. I'm not sure anyone will be able to tell the difference between them. I guess it's just a mental thing for me.

Q: Which film stocks did you choose and why?
A: Technically, we couldn't shoot with anamorphic lenses because of the additional cost and technical burden on the camera assistants. So, we opted to shoot Super 35 mm which also gave us an added bonus of three-perf film, so we saved money on stock by shooting less.

The first time we shot Ezekiel's Revelation in 2005, I used KODAK VISION 320T 5277. It is one of my favorite stocks because of its grain structure and low contrast, low saturation. It was perfect for this film. I've actually used it on most of the films I've shot and would just alter the lighting and contrast ratios if I needed to make it look differently. When we re-shot the film a year later, I used KODAK VISION2 200T 5217. To help keep the low contrast and low saturation levels consistent between the two stocks, I softened my lighting with thicker diffusion in the frames. I also worked closely with the production and costume designers in regards to clothes and interior house colors. When shooting exteriors with 5217, I utilized an Ultra Contrast 1 filter to help pump some light into the shadows and lower the contrast. Any other visual discrepancies between the two stocks were easily smoothed out in post.

I was concerned how the grain would match up between the two stocks. I haven't seen a print of the film yet, as we have only gone through a 2K telecine to HD-5. At this point, the Spirits do tend to smooth out some grain in an image so they seemed to match fine.

Most everyone assumes shooting on 35 mm is too expensive these days. I actually happen to disagree and find the prices are only slightly higher to that of HD and sometimes Super 16 mm. The big differences are in the cost of negative. Fortunately, with Kodak's help, we shot 35 mm despite our low budget.

Q: Tell us about the postproduction process.
A: Postproduction was where we discovered the mistimed shutter. After shooting for ten days in Tennessee we returned to New York and developed the negative normally. A few days later we began a supervised HD-5 transfer at Rhino FX on the Sony Vialta. The first 3,000 feet of film looked fantastic and the director and I were very happy. Around the fourth flat, the footage had huge white vertical streaks stretching from every highlight in the frame. It looked almost as if someone had taken a water brush and painted up and down the negative. At that point, we figured it was a mag malfunction and that it would only be that camera roll. However, the next roll looked like that, and the next. At that point, the director couldn't watch anymore and walked out of the room to call the producer. I knew the rest of the negative would have the streaking but I continued to view the footage with the colorist in the hopes that there would be more salvageable footage. None of us, including the tech department at Rhino FX, could figure out what had happened to the negative because none of us had seen a mistimed shutter streak the negative to such an extreme level. Regardless, it was completely ruined, but they were so patient with us and continued to view the rest of the negative. It was finally determined that the shutter was mistimed at some point while shooting, which caused the film to advance while the shutter was moving, resulting in exposure streaks from the highlights. My crew and I remembered having a few camera jams from faulty mag loadings at the same moment the mistimed shutter occurred in the footage. None of us thought it would be such a big deal at the time, and after retesting the mags for a half hour on set, we thought nothing more of it. It was the hardest lesson learned in my career so far.

Postproduction the second time around was carried out in Los Angeles. We developed normally at Technicolor and then did an HD-5 transfer at The New Post Group. Everything turned out just fine. While doing the final supervised color correction session, the main manipulation we did was to smooth out any differences between Tennessee and Los Angeles. We also desaturated the footage just enough so that the skin color still looked natural. I also utilized one of the optional tools in the machine called a defocus board. I wanted the images to have a little halation around the highlights. Usually I do that in camera with nets or diffusion filters, but because we had no time to test I didn't want to risk it and felt that by using the defocus board in post, I would have more control. The defocus board does exactly what it sounds like. The colorist can isolate a color or area in the image and defocus it, causing the selected area to soften. In this case, I had him isolate the highlights and defocus those to create the slight halation similar to that of a net or diffusion filter.

Because this film was only made for festivals, we finished it in HD-5 format.

Q: What part does risk-taking play in your work, if any?
A: Unfortunately risk-taking does play a huge part in much of my work. I say unfortunately because it is usually not by choice and more of a result of the low-budget independent world of filmmaking. There are two ways to lower risk-taking. One is experience and maturity, which will happen naturally over time. The other is through shooting film tests to discover the exact film stocks, aesthetic approaches, color design, makeup and costuming that is desired.

While color correcting on this film, I ran into the problem with a secondary character's makeup. First, the red of her lipstick popped out a lot more on the negative than I seemed to remember on set. The colorist was able to fix that by isolating the red and desaturating it. Secondly, and more importantly, was that the base of her face makeup combined with the 1/4 of her key/rim light matched exactly with the color of the wallpaper she was sitting in front of. Her skin tone looked a little yellowish-brown and kind of got lost against the wall. Interesting enough, this was not a problem with any of the other actors. It was just the way her skin tone reacted to the base makeup and colored gel. That is impossible to see on set. In all honesty, no one really noticed, but I did. The result was not pleasing to me but those are the types of risks a production takes without testing.

Q: Was there a shot or scene that was particularly interesting or challenging to you?
A: Honestly, I had the privilege to shoot one of my favorite scenes of all time on this production. The scene takes place by a lake and is an emotional conversation resulting in an argument between the main character and his tomboy friend. The main technical difficulty was finding a huge exterior lake that looked like rural Tennessee rather than Los Angeles, where we were filming. While scouting out other sets on a ranch in Santa Clarita, we came upon a lake. It was more of a swamp, full of cattails and moss hanging from the trees. I was told the old Budweiser Frog commercials were shot at that exact spot. At any rate, it was perfect. While shooting, we kept the light as natural as possible only bouncing silver mirrors through thick frames of diffusion to key the children's faces under the dark shadows of the tree. We also bounced some hard mirrors off the lake surface and one of the grips splashed the water to create ripples on the branches and trunk around the children. It took so little effort to light because it was naturally beautiful and in circumstances like that, I try not to mess up or manipulate what Mother Nature was so good at creating in the first place. Although I loved lighting that location, what I enjoyed most about shooting the scene was working with the director and the two children. It was the first day of our re-shoots and I hadn't seen the two kids for over a year since Tennessee. Watching them perform the scene and seeing how much they had matured in their acting skills was very fun to watch. It was also wonderful to watch the director work with them. I could see she also recognized their maturity, and didn't really feel the need to rehearse much. After a quick conversation, the kids were off performing the most emotional dialogue scene of the whole film.