Tag: RED Cameras

Frame & Reference Podcast: Michael Cioni, CEO & Founder of Strada

Kenny McMillan (Instagram)
April 18, 2024
Frame & Reference (Twitter, Instagram)

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.

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Silent Killer

A Conversation with Brian Osmond, SOC

David Daut
March 2024 (Winter 2024)
Camera Operator (Society of Camera Operators)

Having been in development since 2007, David Fincher’s adaptation of the French comic series The Killer arrives as a slick, stylish, and darkly funny film about a professional assassin desperately trying to project an image of cold, exacting competence, all the while struggling to keep his head above water in the aftermath of a job gone wrong.

With its solo protagonist who goes for long stretches of the film without saying aloud a single word, The Killer often resembles a silent film as much as anything else. Camera Operator had the opportunity to talk with A camera operator Brian Osmond, SOC, about working with Michael Fassbender in this unique role, the camera as “straight man” for the film’s sly comedy, and the professional relationship he’s developed with director David Fincher over the past seven years.

With no name and no background to go on, we meet “The Killer” in Paris, France, in the midst of his preparations to assassinate a similarly unnamed target. After days of meticulous planning, the moment finally comes with the target in sight, ready to take the shot, and he misses! Our mysterious assassin is left trying to pick up the pieces of this botched assassination all the while the situation continues to spiral out of control. The Killer is directed by David Fincher from a screenplay by Andrew Kevin Walker and stars Michael Fassbender, Arliss Howard, Charles Parnell, Kerry O’Malley, Sala Baker, Sophie Charlotte, and Tilda Swinton.

Camera Operator: Let’s talk about the first 20 minutes of the movie. That’s the part that really stuck in my head after the movie. That long, slow burn setup to what’s kind of the movie’s main punch line: him missing the shot after all that meticulous buildup and preparation. Can you talk a little bit about what went into shooting that sequence?

Brian Osmond: Yeah, it is a slow burn, isn’t it? It’s a bit painstaking, but ultimately I really like the sequence. His meticulous nature is obviously on display, and when it finally comes to the moment to pay it all off, he misses! And that sets up the rest of the movie. Shooting it was a lot of work, as you can imagine. The entire sequence, structurally, was made from three pieces: there was the Paris work, there was the stage work with Michael, and there was the stage work for everything across the street, and those are seamlessly combined with compositing and editing.

Read the full interview

“David Initially Said, ‘What if We Do the Whole Movie Handheld?’”: DP Erik Messerschmidt on The Killer

Matt Mulcahey
January 11, 2024
Filmmaker

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, Mank and 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.

Read the full interview

The Professionals: “The Killer” and “Ferrari”

Erik Messerschmidt, ASC shoots two stories about men whose business and private lives spin out of control.

Patricia Thomson
January 2024
American Cinematographer

A pair of films shot by Erik Messerschmidt, ASC premiered at the Venice International Film Festival last August, and both were collaborations with leading directors: David Fincher’s The Killer and Michael Mann’s Ferrari. Messerschmidt recently spoke with AC from Spain about his work on each production.

The Killer | A Devil of a Job

Fincher and Messerschmidt didn’t discuss the look of The Killer as much as its tempo and structure.

Adapted from a graphic-novel series, the film follows a methodical, nameless assassin (played by Michael Fassbender) whose life spirals out of control after a job goes horribly wrong in Paris. He tries to restore a sense of order by punishing those responsible.

Messerschmidt won an Academy Award for Fincher’s Mank (AC Feb.’21), and his collaborations with the director span the Netflix series Mindhunter and the feature Gone Girl — with Messerschmidt serving as gaffer for Jeff Cronenweth, ASC (AC Nov. ’14) on the latter.

“David is fastidious,” he says. “He is very prepared, but very collaborative and considerate of what it is everyone’s bringing to the project. He shares his goals for the film with you, and he shares the techniques that he wants to use in a really elegant way. So, you begin to understand quite quickly what he’s looking to achieve on a given shot, a given scene or even on a given film.

“On this film, David was particularly interested in exploring The Killer’s state of mind through the camera’s perspective,” recalls Messerschmidt. “The Killer in his natural state is very much in control of his environment — nothing surprises him, and we wanted the audience to immediately connect to his confidence.”

Read the full double feature in the January Issue of American Cinematographer

David Fincher’s Killer Combination

Jake Ratcliffe, Joe Cannon
December 8, 2023
CVP

Leitz SUMMILUX-C lenses and RED V-RAPTOR and RED Komodo cameras.

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“The Killer” Camera Department: Dominican Republic

Notice the VFX foliage in the out-of-focus foreground.

The Killer: Michael Fassbender

DOMINICAN REPUBLIC UNIT
Director of Photography: Erik Messerschmidt, ACE
A Camera Operator: Brian S. Osmond
A Camera First Assistant: Alex Scott
B Camera First Assistant: Brian Wells
A Camera Second Assistant: Jonathan Clark
B Camera Second Assistant: Matt Gaumer
A Dolly Grip: Dwayne Barr
B Dolly Grip: Mike Mull

Idea and BTS Video: Cate Adams, Costume Designer
Location: Dominican Republic
Editor: Leonard Zelig (The Fincher Analyst)

‘The Killer’ Cinematographer Breaks Down the Methodical Opening Scene of Fincher’s Netflix Thriller

Jazz Tangcay
November 17, 2023
Variety

‘The Killer’ Cinematographer on the Opening Scene of David Fincher’s Thriller and Making Michael Fassbender’s ‘Nest’

Valerie Wu
November 18, 2023
Variety

How do you get into a killer’s head?

It starts with situating yourself within their perspective, as “The Killer” cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt says.

That perspective was firmly established in the film’s opening sequence where subjectivity was key. The Parisian opening scene features the titular character — the assassin known only as “The Killer” played by Michael Fassbender who readies himself to kill a target in the building across from him.

Messerschmidt who sat down with Variety expressed that his familiarity and previous work with “The Killer” director David Fincher shortened the process of bringing the script to life. For Messerschmidt and Fincher, the goal was to hone in on the core themes of the story, and then start delving into the details from here.

Read the full profile

Clubhouse Conversations: “The Killer” Cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt, ASC

Wally Pfister, ASC
November 16, 2023
American Cinematographer

In this episode, cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt, ASC is joined by interviewer Wally Pfister, ASC to discuss his work on The Killer — the neo-noir thriller from director David Fincher that follows an assassin on the run after a botched hit job.

In The Killer, the titular antihero misses one of his intended targets for the first time in his career, and is forced to flee and survive the inevitable consequences. The film marks the second Fincher-directed feature shot by Messerschmidt, following the 2020 film Mank, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Cinematography.

In this interview, Messerschmidt discusses the film’s Paris-inspired color palette; how he shot scenes “loosely” or “rigidly,” based on the main character’s degrees of control over varying situations; how he approached the lighting for a complex fight scene; how he incorporated planned postproduction decisions for lighting, flares and camera destabilization into his workflow; and what he learned about what an audience sees versus what it hears.

Erik Messerschmidt, ASC first emerged as a filmmaker when he was hired by Society member and mentor Mark Doering-Powell on several features as a grip and later gaffer. After Messerschmidt served as Society member Jeff Cronenweth‘s gaffer on the David Fincher-directed Gone Girl (2014), Cronenweth encouraged Fincher to hire Messerschmidt to photograph the Netflix series Mindhunter. Messerschmidt would reunite with Fincher for their 2020 feature Mank, which earned him an Academy Award for Best Cinematography.

Wally Pfister, ASC is a filmmaker whose cinematography credits include the Christopher Nolan features Batman Begins (2005), The Prestige (2006), The Dark Knight (2008) and Inception (2010). He was nominated for an Oscar for Best Cinematography for all of these works, winning one for Inception in 2011.

Watch the full conversation

Find all episodes in our ASC Clubhouse Conversations series

“The Killer” Cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt on Re-Teaming with David Fincher

Jack Giroux
November 14, 2023
The Credits (MPA)

David Fincher’s lean, mean The Killer is a film stripped down to its bare essentials, much like the work of its titular assassin. Based on a French graphic novel and adapted by Andrew Kevin Walker (Se7en), Fincher’s adaptation tells the story of an unnamed killer (Michael Fassbender) and the strict, self-imposed protocols of his trade. It’s the rules of the process that concern the titular character, not moral dilemmas, yet they become unbearably intertwined after he botches an assignment, and the fallout affects someone he loves.

On the surface, The Killer is a revenge story. Once the job goes terribly wrong and his partner, Magdala (Sophie Charlotte), suffers violent consequences, Fassbender’s nameless assassin breaks his own rules to track down those responsible. The Killer is a world of shadows, sociopaths, and the people they prey on. For Fassbender’s antihero, feeling like the prey is a novel concept, and he’s determined to do anything to realign the world so he fits back in as a proper predator.

Once again, the director collaborates with cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt, who has been Fincher’s DP on Mindhunter and Mank. With The Killer, Messerschmidt helps Fincher place the viewer into the cramped, icy perspective of the titular character with a grace that belies the chaos he creates. We spoke to Messerschmidt about his working relationship with Fincher and what it was like to bring The Killer to life.

Read the full interview

Execution Is Everything

The film reflects the muted yellow and green colour palette of its graphic novel inspiration.

Oscar-winning DP Erik Messerschmidt ASC reteams with David Fincher for a live-action comic book adaptation that required a meticulous approach to its cinematography.

James Mottram
November 2023
British Cinematographer

When Erik Messerschmidt ASC got the call from David Fincher to work on his new film The Killer, it was an offer that arrived almost as stealthily as its lethal protagonist. “He only ever [asks] once he knows he’s going to make the film,” says the American-born cinematographer, who previously collaborated with Fincher across two seasons of the Netflix series Mindhunter (2017-2019) and the acclaimed Hollywood-set period tale Mank (2020), which won Messerschmidt an Academy Award for Best Cinematography. The Killer, an adaptation of the French graphic novel, written by Alexis “Matz” Nolent, offered a whole different set of challenges, however.

This tense, taut thriller follows a nameless assassin, played by Michael Fassbender, who is fighting for his life after a job he undertakes in Paris goes disastrously wrong. “When I first read it, I was so excited about how little dialogue is in the film. It’s all voiceover,” explains Messerschmidt. “Normally, when you shoot a scene in a narrative film, you’re shooting actors predominantly talking to each other. And this film… on the set it was quite a quiet place. Which is really, really interesting. And it changes the dynamic enormously.”

To borrow the film’s cunning tagline, “Execution is everything”, and making The Killer became a meticulous experience for Messerschmidt and his team. Choreographing the camera to reflect the perspective of Fassbender’s killer, as he watches from the shadows, required absolute perfection. “It became very much about precision,” he says. “It’s an enormous amount of pressure on the camera operator [Brian S. Osmond] on this film.” Every step of the background artists was accounted for, like an elaborate dance. “So, it’s all sort of in concert…[that] is the intention most of the time.”

If you are a subscriber, read the full profile in issue 120 of British Cinematographer

Or you can read it on the website