Sundance Film Festival

Bobby Bukowski couldn’t say no to Prague and the chance to shoot the Bavarian forest (for The Crown of Vysehrad). But the opportunity came at a price. The DP wouldn’t be able to join his first-time director Dainel Barnz and colorist Doug Delaney in the color suite for Phoebe in Wonderland. This was a harrowing compromise for a DP; Bukowski had planned to be there and the film counts on color as a narrative point: it’s a story about a young girl living in two worlds—one real, one imagined. And that’s not all: Barnz had his heart set on autumn and the film was shot (with a lot of exteriors) in the full force of Queens summer. Autumn would come in the DI suite. And there had been no film dailies.

Bukowski tested and settled on Super 35mm Fuji Reala 500 (Cooke S4s); for “reality” he would overexpose two stops, then pull back one stop in processing (“it lowered the contrast and made the grain finer”). He went for a slower Fuji 64 stock for Pheobe’s fantasy exteriors, which are very warm and hyper-real with super saturated vivid colors.

That’s not all Bukowski tested. Even before he knew about his scheduling conflict, Bukowski wanted to establish a shared reality with his director and other collaborators. He wanted everyone to have a mental picture of what would happen to the imagery as it moved through production design, principal photography and DI. He wanted to show them where the color would go; how it would look on the stock, how it would change in the DI, so each could design with that in mind. They shot hair, makeup, wardrobe, location situations. Bukowski showed Barnz what exposures did, what he meant by “dark.” “For me, to form that language with the director, costume designer, the production designer, to show how the stock related to contrast, how it rendered color, I wanted to invite the entire crew into that process. If it’s not a collaboration, it’s not going to work.”

Then, before he left for Prague Bukowski and Delaney put their heads together at Post Logic, looked at the film, set key looks, contrast, and determined the color for the three princial environments (reality, fantasy, school). “Each had distinct color nuances so we set those looks, then I went away to Prague and he sent me jpegs of what he had done and calibration settings for my monitor.” It was pretty successful. Barnz sat in on the sessions and with Delaney upheld the vision.

For his part, Delaney felt sure he could get the autumn right, referencing his own life in the Midwest. Bukowski had shot cautiously, especially on the wide shots so there would be minimal panning and therefore minimal tracking, minimal expense. Was it worth it to give up camera movement to get autumn? “It’s like everything when you’re making a film,” Bukowski says. “You ask, ‘what is going to be the virtue of doing it this way?’ It would be really naïve to think in a low budget film that you wouldn’t have to pay attention to the budget in regards to how you design the film. You always say ‘this is the limit of the resources. Now in that box, what can I create, what can I walk away with, what can I be proud of?’”

The testing paid off. “It’s very smart in a DI to know where you’re going before you hit that room,” Bukowski says, referring to the temptation to be dazzled by the dials. “But it is very important to design your movie and stick to the design. For me, part of how I uphold the narrative is through lighting and composition, based on what we talked about, how we designed the movie.

“I feel like everyone was really encouraged by the tests—we knew we could take the design a certain distance, but then the DI could take it the rest of the way. People we reassured that however they were conceptualizing the movie in terms of theirpart of the design, it visually would be upheld.”

“It was great to have that level of communication before we even entered the color suite,” Delaney recalls. “Bobby and Danny let me know really early on what their intention for the film was, what they were looking for. When we finally filmed out at Deluxe we were happy about how things turned out, but there had been a lot of anxiety about it. I feel like I did reduce that anxiety and helped them use color in the narrative in a way that makes sense to the people who are watching it—that it serves the narrative without getting in the way of it.”

One last thing about choosing Super 35. The film has a lot of shots on the school stage, which benefited and at the family dinner table. Watch for the way Bukowski used essentially a four-shot closeup to give each of the family members equal weight. “Compositionally the story is so much about the density of a family life, it’s all these people occupying the same space simultaneously, emotionally.”

Phoebe in Wonderland is in Dramatic Competition and premieres tomorrow (2:30) at the Racquet Club. Also Monday (1130p) at the Library, Tuesday (6:30p) in SLC at the Rose Wagner Center, Thursday (9:15a) at the Eccles, and Friday (8:30p) back at the Racquet Club. Click here for theater info