American Cinematographer
December 2003


Director of photography Steve Gainer steps into the ring for Black Cloud, a boxing tale of mythic proportions.

by John Pavlus

Unit photography by Kyle Kendrew
Additional photography by Joe Pacella

The titular character of Black Cloud is a young Navajo man (Eddie Spears) whose disaffected worldview is holding back from achieving his dream of becoming a professional boxer. The film's cinematographer, Stew Gainer, can relate to this theme. After all, he only discovered his love of filmmaking after failing to become a rock star. "I got close a few times," Gainer says. "I played in a lot of bands, I hung out with lots of famous musicians, but I never made it - and I'm so happy I didn't. The career that I moved into is so much artistically fulfilling than drinking beer and slamming power chords."

After ditching his rock 'n' roll lifestyle (he recalls waking up one morning on a friend's sofa with his clothes in a Hefty bag, seeing "the age of 30 rushing at me like an asteroid"), Gainer soon realized he wanted to be a cinematographer. "From working as a PA and editing infomercials, I started getting an awareness of the functions of most positions on a motion-picture set," he says. "I noticed that the person who had the greatest creative control but didn't have his neck on the chopping block was the director of photography. What's more captivating and enlightening than watching a story unfold through the magic of a great cinematographer? Those images can alter your mood; you can go into the theater cranky, watch a film shot by Roger Deakins [ASC, BSC], and walk out floating."

Gainer began working toward his goal by sweeping the floors in the camera department at Paramount. Within six months, he became head of its film lab. I spent time with many great cinematographers and watched them work. It was a great film school for me, because I was in the big leagues as an observer."

Several years later, Gainer began shooting features for Roger Corman. He then met director Dave Meyers, for whom he began a lengthy stint shooting music videos. "I've shot about 300 now, and its been a sensational opportunity for me to experiment visually," he says. "It also helped get me out of Roger Corman-style poverty! Corman traditionally pays his cinematographers $60 a day."

Gainer's big break came in 2001 from director Larry Clark, whom the cinematographer met through a mutual music video connection. Clark hired Gainer to shoot the feature Bully, and offers from other independent filmmakers, including Greg Araki, John Waters and ex-NYPD Blue star Rick Schroder, who wrote and directed Black Cloud, soon followed. "I'm just happy as hell to be shooting motion pictures, man" says Gainer, whose speech still bears traces of its old hair-band cadence. "While music videos are educational and quite profitable, the life [of a video] is only as long as the song its based on, whereas a feature film just seems to stay around forever." He adds with a laugh, "Much to my chagrin, many of the Roger Corman films I've shot have stayed around forever!"

The filming of Black Cloud began on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona, and then moved to Las Vegas during the real 2002 Golden Gloves tournament, a competition that Black Cloud eventually enters. Gainer says he was excited by the visual possibilities of combining a "modern-day Rocky story" with the environmental majesty of a Western. Because many of the day exteriors would be shot in Monument Valley, Gainer referenced what he calls "the Western canon" during his three week prep. "I'm so in love with the beauty of those early Westerns," he says. "When I was a little kid, one of the films that really kicked my ass was True Grit. Rick and I also looked at some films shot by William Clothier [ASC] in Monument Valley. Sprawling plains, blue skies with big, puffy clouds - I couldn't imagine changing that." He shot exteriors on Kodak EXR 50D 5245, rating it at 25 ASA.

While scouting locations, Gainer realized that some, such as Canyon de Chelley, were too beautiful for Black Cloud. "I had to make the [characters] stand out and look important in front of all this majesty; otherwise, it would have been easy for them to disappear in all those incredible canyons," he explains. To help solve the problem, he borrowed a technique used by Vittorio Storaro ASC, AIC on The Last Emperor. instead of using HMIs, he lit exteriors with half-corrected 24K tungsten Dinos, which accentuated the actors' warm skin tones against the imposing background. "That tool is dramatic, and now I'm addicted," he says. "The people literally look like they're greenscreened into those backgrounds. They're radiant."

When matched with a bit of diffusion, this technique allowed Gainer to complement the sun's backlight "perfectly." And because the Dinos (rectangular units composed of 24 1K lamps) cast less obvious hot spots than HMIs, Gainer could more easily diffuse their light to key against the sun. However, he notes that his anti-HMI stance was also motivated by more quotidian concerns, such as their inability to be "hot-struck" and their tendency, to generate unsightly flicker it not constantly monitored. "When you have a really small crew, and your best boy is off running for a stand, he can't be held responsible if the generator isn't running precisely at 60Hz," he says.

"[The flicker] is pretty unfixable once you're in post. We were not getting dailies, so by the time we knew we had a problem, we would have been too far down the road to fix it. So I decided not to use any HMIs."

Gainer also had the luxury of scheduling much of his exterior work according to the data gleaned from his sunPATH indicator on scouts. This, along with his tungsten lighting technique, helped him circumvent the brutally hard shadows cast by the midday desert sun. "Rick had decided where he wanted to stage the action, but I had a lot of input as to what time of day we'd do it," the cinematographer says. "I was able to shoot most of my exteriors, early in the morning and later in the evening, and at midday we did interior work.

Once the sun has dropped 30 or 45 degrees down off its peak, you get a beautiful edgelight," he continues. "So if you can plan your shots around that, you really don't have to top anything. The amount of light that comes from the sky can be overpowered with whatever your key is, or you can turn [the actors] around and use the ebbing sunlight as your key, which is very beautiful. Then, when you go into close-up, you can put an Opal up to soften [the light] just a bit and keep the actors from squinting."

Of course, circumstance occasionally put exterior shadows beyond Gainer's control. "You tend to let it go when you're in a big wide shot and refine it when you move in for close-ups," he says. "The only scene of that sort that I'm unhappy with is between Tim McGraw and Eddie Spears. We shot Tim all morning, and when it came time to turn around on Eddie, there was hard light pounding him and the wind was blowing so hard that I couldn't put any silks over him. Not only would it have been dangerous - a small crew can't really hold down 12-bys - but it also would have been too noisy for sound. But the scene is dramatically intense, so I don't think [the shadows] will be that noticeable to the audience."

Gainer, who has worked with many first-time directors on music videos, says Schroder was "the most confident I've ever worked with. He knew enough to let me do my job; he told me what he wanted and allowed me the freedom to create it, which was exhilarating." Because Gainer had just three weeks of prep for a 24-day shoot comprised of "painful" six-day weeks, such smooth collaboration was vital to maintaining a fast pace. "We averaged about seven pages a day," he recalls. "Music videos definitely make you fast, but this shoot was crazy fast."

Gainer adds that something else he learned while watching great cinematographers at Paramount also helped him contend with the demanding schedule: "It would be a great luxury to be able to take my time and light everything perfectly but the more I learn, the more I notice the difference between things that must be lit and things that are inessential. The average viewer isn't going to be paying attention to so much detailing in the background; he or she will be looking for the actor's eyes."

Although Gainer and Schroder didn't have the time to gather Gainer's preferred "tearsheet" examples of still photography during prep, they did use another effective previsualization method: blocking out scenes with a MiniDV camera in the cinematographer's backyard. "Numerous scenes were video-storyboarded, and because I also operated on Black Cloud, we just walked through the shots," he says. "I actually cut them together on my home editing system to see how they worked. Rick then pointed out what he liked, and I took all those notes and went out to the desert."

Some cinematographers relish the opportunity to operate the camera themselves, but Gainer says he'd rather not do so. "Operating is probably the most fun job on the set - if it's your only job," he remarks. "But it's an advantage to be able to stand back and watch the actors as they're walking through the light. When you're operating, you're paying so much attention to composition and headroom and framing that you might be slower to notice a boom shadow."

Gainer generally dislikes being "tethered to the camera," so he operated via video goggles, an unusual piece of equipment that, much like a virtual-reality headset, places an independent video monitor in front of each eye and creates "what looks like a 50-inch screen in front of your head." Gainer says the goggles can't accurately judge focus for lenses longer than 25mm, but "for anything wider than that, it's a dream." Black Cloud was filmed in the standard 1.85:1 aspect ratio, and Gainer shot most of the action with wide-angle Panavision Ultra Speed lenses. "Because the story is about big spaces and big people, I kept the 10mm on the camera as much as possible," he notes.

To free himself up even further, Gainer kept the show's camera, a Panaflex Platinum mounted on a 6' jib arm whenever he could. This gave him the flexibility to keep the actors, many of whom were nonprofessional, in frame if they didn't precisely hit their marks; he could also change camera position very quickly, a big advantage on a short schedule. "The jib arm is a very fast tool, and I've used it on every film since Bully," he says. "If you put the camera on the tripod and the director says, 'Let's go a little lower,' then two or three people have to lower the tripod and bubble it up. The jib arm lets me go from ground level to way overhead instantly so I can offer the director different shots. Plus, the jib arm doesn't get tired!"

For several key scenes, Schroder wanted tracking shots of the actors riding wild horses through the desert canyons. A daunting prospect even on paved roads, these difficult shots had to be created on Monument Valley's uneven terrain. "Just look at the tracking shots in Stagecoach - it's like you're sitting on the hood of a truck," says Gainer. But what John Ford and Bert Glennon, ASC couldn't manage, Gainer could create with ease using Wescam's gyroscopic XR head. "Even in the most extreme conditions, the XR smoothed out the frame so much that it looked like a helicopter shot - just stunning," he marvels.

Gainer, who says he has enjoyed Michael Chapman, ASC's work on Raging Bull "about a thousand times." also drew inspiration for Black Cloud'ss fisticuffs from a less obvious source. "The movie I drew the most from was probably Gladiator [see AC May'00 ]," he says. "Whether [John Mathieson, BSC] was using a 45-degree shutter or ramping the [shutter] speed, Gladiator's fight sequences are visually stunning, so energetic and fun to watch." Gainer filmed "99 per cent" of the boxing footage - which ended up totaling about nine hours - handheld, and built up progressively more stylized in-camera effects for each round. "We start out with a 180-degree shutter at 24 fps," he elaborates. "Then the second round might move to a 90 degree shutter angle and a little bit of 12 fps. The third round might have 45-degree shutter angles with ramping from 6 to 24 fps, with some 120 fps mixed in. The editor sort of mixed some of those parts up, but it works well."

In Las Vegas, the filmmakers were granted permission to shoot on the Golden Gloves main stage in the mornings and afternoons. At 5 p.m., they were bumped onto one of the secondary "qualifying round" rings, where they could continue to shoot while the real tournament continued into the evening. Gainer had his cameras "steal some shots" of the real boxers, which were later intercut with footage of Black Cloud's fictional bouts.

On the tournament's main stage, Gainer had hoped to hang a series of Coop lights to create a large soft source overhead, but the film's budget didn't allow it. Instead, he erected a 40'x40' truss above the stage and ringed it with Par cans to supplement the practicals already in place. Gainer then patched all the lamps into dimmers "to cut one side or the other, depending on which side I wanted more backlight on." At first, he worried about multiple shadows from the hard point sources, but he discovered that "because of the distance and the proximity of the cans, there were practically no shadows - they were all filling each other in."

Gainer filmed the tournament bouts on Kodak Vision2 500T 5218 stock, which he overexposed by one stop, resulting in a comfortable exposure of T5.6-T8. "That enormous depth of field certainly aided [first assistant] Shereen [Saleh]," he recalls. "When you're handholding a 75mm [lens] and the boxers are moving unpredictably, trying to keep the shots in focus is a miracle. [We] rehearsed the moves, but when they're walking in there and swinging at each other, they don't always move the same way for each take."

In the final round, Black Cloud catches a wicked uppercut that sends him to the floor. He then enters a spiritual reverie from which he summons the strength to rise and knock out his opponent. The camera introduces the sequence by booming straight down directly over Black Cloud's upturned face as he lies prone in the ring. Gainer created the move with a Super Technocrane mounted on parallel scaffolding above the action. "If we'd used a normal jib arm or crane, it would've been very difficult to move the camera straight down because the arm would've had an arc," he says. "The Technocrane allowed us to expand or contract the arm as we went down, so we could do a true straight down motion."

One boxing scene set earlier in the film relied upon less technical derring-do for dramatic visual effect. At one of Black Cloud's lowest moments, he is taunted by his trainer, Bud (Russell Means), in the practice ring on the reservation. The young boxer releases a cathartic torrent of punches on his mentor, finally extinguishing the poisonous anger that was holding his talent back.

Gainer originally planned to light the action with fluorescent practicals, but he eventually decided that the pivotal interior scene called for "something a little more gutsy" than usual. He shot the scene on 5245 and lit it with a 24K Dino backlight bursting through the gym window. "Anytime you can use slow stocks for interiors, the shadowy areas go really black," he explains. "Once you go into close-up, you have to use a bit of fill because you're Using that contrasty stock. But in the wide shots, there was no other light in there; it's just the Dino coming in and bouncing off the floor. I had them tent the outside so that no sunlight would come through, and then I blasted the Dino through."

Though his feature career is accelerating (he's currently shooting a picture on the East Coast for indie icon John Waters), Gainer is quick to note that he has plenty of room to rise before he approaches the level of his idols, with whom he regularly rubs shoulders in his capacity as curator of the ASC Museum. "Maybe someday I'll get a chance to light something for more than one hour," he jokes. "My dream is to say [affecting a refined European accent], "Today we light, tomorrow we shoot."


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