Meet Beverly Wood, an innovator in color technologies for major motion pictures. She began working as an analytical chemist in the early 1980s before moving from the east coast of the U.S. to the west coast—a move which greatly influenced the trajectory her work. Her specialized knowledge of chemistry, engineering, and filmmaking led to her award-winning contributions to the creation and development of Color Contrast Enhancement (CCE) and Adjustable Contrast Enhancement (ACE) motion picture processes.
During this live online interview, you will be inspired by the story of Wood’s career, helping cinematographers, like Darius Khondji and Roger Deakins, to achieve their visual goals, and guiding them through the transition from chemical to digital technology, which changed how we see films today.
Frame & Reference is a conversation between Cinematographers hosted by Kenny McMillan of OWL BOT. Each episode dives into the respective DP’s current and past work, as well as what influences and inspires them. These discussions are an entertaining and informative look into the world of making films through the lens of the people who shoot them.
In this episode, we’re joined by my friend Michael Cioni to talk about his new company Strada (YouTube).
Michael is a serial entrepreneur whose career includes numerous awards for his creative work and technical achievements. He is an accomplished director, cinematographer, musician, four-time Emmy winner, member of the Motion Picture Academy, and Associate Member of the American Society of Cinematographers.
A U.S. patent holder of digital cinema technology, Michael was the founder and CEO of the post house Light Iron where he pioneered tools and techniques that emerged as global workflow industry standards. After Light Iron was acquired by Panavision, Michael served as product director for Panavision’s Millennium DXL 8K camera ecosystem.
He then joined the cloud startup company Frame.io where he served as Senior Vice President of Global Innovation. After Frame.io was acquired by Adobe, Michael led numerous workflow innovations including the breakthrough Camera to Cloud technology program as Senior Director of Global Innovation.
He continues to be motivated by the desire to democratize professional workflows and focuses his efforts on inventing new ways for filmmakers to create through his technology. Michael is a well-known and gifted speaker, advocate for the community, and serves as a mentor and educator throughout the global media industry.
Filmtools, the West Coast’s leading supplier of film equipment. From cameras and lights to grip and expendables, Filmtools has you covered for all your film gear needs.
ProVideo Coalition, a top news and reviews site focusing on all things production and post coming out of the industry.
Producer and long-time David Fincher collaborator Peter Mavromates extend their partnership in The Killer where an assassin seeks revenge after a botched assignment. The Netflix feature consists of 900 digitally-augmented shots that range from shortening the tail of a dog to CG airplanes, tasked to a vendor list that includes Ollin VFX, Artemple-Hollywood, Savage VFX, and Wylie Co. as well as an in-house team. “Visual Effects Compositor Christopher Doulgeris and I will go into the color bay with [Colorist] Eric Weidt and talk about some issue that we had,” Mavromates explains. “Even sometimes if it’s an outside vendor, we’ll focus to help problem-solve. It’s this wonderful and fluid atmosphere, and it works for David Fincher because he’s always got ideas flowing. He doesn’t want to be on a clock at a facility where you’ve got from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. and then it’s overtime. There’s none of that. David will walk the halls and stop in on people to check on stuff.”
In chapter one of The Killer (2023), Michael Fassbender sits in a Paris WeWork office, rented as the base of operations for his nameless hitman’s latest job. While waiting for the target, pigeons fly past, their wings loudly breaking his forced concentration. The odds they entered the frame at a serendipitous moment are low, and there’s no reason to pay for a bird wrangler given the advanced state of CG. Once you see them, they’re impossible to unsee as they follow Fassbender’s character from city to city, segment to segment. It’s clear that they must be a digitally created motif, a fresh reminder of David Fincher’s unwillingness to let the real world preclude his very precise vision.
Initial responses to The Killer included many variants on “minor Fincher,” which raises an obvious question: what’s the perceptible gap between a major and minor David Fincher film? Surely it’s not a question of craft; second for second, Fincher’s films have to be in the top 0.5% of technically-worked-over products. Control, famously, is his thing, to the extent that even The Killer’s seemingly handheld shots were, in fact, static shots made shaky to a exact degree in post. “Minor,” then, refers to the ostensible worthiness of the material: why all this effort to so little end, i.e., the umpteenth variant on “hitman cleans up after a job gone wrong”? When you’ve begun your directing career coming up with compelling images for lower-tier Rick Springfieldsingles everything after is, presumably, a breeze to elevate. Still, that doesn’t answer the “why bother” question.
Bobby Miller January 11, 2024 Creative Industry Insight
In this episode, we welcome VFX Editor Casey Curtiss who joins us to talk about his work on The Killer. Casey walks us through what the role of a VFX editor entails and how those skills were used on The Killer.
The Killer begins with an assassin (Michael Fassbender) in a half-completed WeWork office awaiting the arrival of his latest target. As he waits, he details his vocational mantras for the audience in voiceover: stick to the plan. Don’t improvise. Never yield an advantage. Forbid empathy. Fassbender proceeds to miss his shot and spends the rest of the film breaking each and every one of those tenets in the chaotic aftermath.
Many of the pieces written about the film have pointed out perceived similarities between the film’s methodical, detail-oriented titular character and the perfectionist reputation of its director, David Fincher. However, what makes Fincher’s approach to filmmaking so fascinating is the way it combines the fluid with the obsessively regimented. For The Killer, the illusion of handheld camerawork, anamorphic lens characteristics and glass filters were all created in post, where they could be minutely modulated. Conversely, Fincher often prefers to design coverage on the day after blocking rehearsals and is open to the spontaneous comedic possibilities of the cheese grater.
On Fincher’s Mindhunter, Mankand now The Killer, cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt has been the director’s partner in that duality. The Oscar-winning DP graced this column for a fifth time to discuss his latest work.
The last few years have been a whirlwind for Erik Messerschmidt, ASC. He had been working his way through the camera department for nearly two decades, including as a gaffer on David Fincher’s Gone Girl, before he began acting as DoP on a number of high-profile shows, one of them being Fincher’s Mindhunter for Netflix.
When Fincher decided to make Mank, his biopic about Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, as played by Gary Oldman, he brought Messersschmidt along with him to shoot the film in black and white. The movie was slightly hobbled by the pandemic that kept it from playing theatrically, but Messerschmidt won the Oscar for Cinematography, as well as the feature film category for the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC).
Last year, Messerschmidt reunited with Fincher for his adaptation of the graphic novel, The Killer, starring Michael Fassbender as an assassin on a streak of vengeance after a job goes wrong. He also teamed up with the great Michael Mann to shoot his racing biopic, Ferrari, starring Adam Driver.
Below the Line spoke with the cinematographer a few months back when he was in Poland for EnergaCAMERIMAGE, although we got on Zoom with him from the States.
Julian Mitchell, editor, media maker publishing December 18, 2023 NAB Amplify
NAB Amplify caught up with cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt just as he was about to fly to the Camerimage film festival in Poland, where Ferrari, his first film with director Michael Mann, was in competition. “An extraordinary experience, once in a lifetime,” was his on-the-spot reaction to the question, “How was it?”
But we wanted to talk to him about The Killer, a Netflix movie with an appearance in selected theaters at very selective times. Most people would wait for the stream and live with the Internet compression artifacts for the treat of a Fincher film, this time about a man who kills for a living. Cue Michael Fassbender, with sociopathic personality traits and an attention to detail that leaves nothing to chance; some reviews suggested that this man was a depiction of Fincher himself.
If you have seen previous films or television shows from the Fincher/Messerschmidt duo, especially 2018’s Mindhunter, you would be in a comfortable place from the get-go of The Killer: An avocado-colored LUT, exquisite scene management, and meticulous coverage. “Is this all you?” the DP was asked.
“It’s a thing that David and I do together. I enjoy the process of camera direction; I view it as sort of my principal job, really. It’s thinking about the structure of the film and of each scene. Every director’s interaction in terms of coverage and camera direction is different. It’s the first thing David and I discuss: structure and pacing. It’s almost an editorial conversation in terms of what we’re going to provide Kirk [Baxter, the editor] and how each scene breaks down in terms of the pace,” he said.
With six unique locations, grading The Killer was never going to be simple. Colourist Eric Weidt shares how he captured David Fincher’s meticulous hitman.
The latest film from David Fincher, The Killer, sees Michael Fassbender play the titular assassin – a Smiths-loving cynic who embarks on an international chase after a high-profile job goes awry. The story takes our anti-hero from hazy Paris to humid Florida to wintry New York, with each location taking on its own challenge – both for the Killer and the film’s colourist Eric Weidt.
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Based on Alexis Matz Nolent’s graphic novel series and inspired by Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai, The Killer combines a fast-paced plot with moody yet bold colours. “I think Fincher is a big comic book fan,” begins Weidt, “especially in the art of framing to impart the beats of a story. Working in film, he brings that to movement as well – he’s seeking a visual rhythm that makes you forget it is highly constructed.
“David likes to push and pull colours, but always strikes an unconscious balance,” he continues. Weidt began working on The Killer while it was still at the pre-production stage, developing lookup tables alongside cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt ASC, who had previously worked with Fincher on Mank, for which he won an Academy Award.
The Fincher Analyst 