After cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC and director Frederic Goodich, ASC got together to push the new Sony F65 to its limits, the result was Kickstart Theft, a short film based on De Sica’s classic The Bicycle Thieves, which was shot in downtown Los Angeles in a range of challenging lighting and shooting conditions reports creativecow.net.
Director Goodich has helmed more than 1 000 commercials among many projects. DP Zsigmond has lensed such classics as Close Encounters of the Third Kind (for which he won an Oscar), The Deer Hunter, Heaven’s Gate and Deliverance. “After I did the DI on Black Dahlia, I fell in love with digital in post-production,” says Zsigmond. “I had wanted originally to stick with a chemical finish for the release, but it didn’t work out that way. Since then I’ve been doing more digital and wanted to try the Sony F65.”
Goodich says he was interested in doing something with social relevance, and eventually thought of The Bicycle Thieves, which he adapted for an urban Los Angeles setting about a homeless family dependent on a motorcycle to eke out a living. “I purposely picked a familiar story so that the viewer can focus on the images and the light,” he explains. “The notion was to shoot available light, with little or no little supplementary lighting, and scenes of high dynamic range wherever we could,” says Goodich. “We were supposed to ‘break the back’ of the camera – to demonstrate how it performed under daylight, tungsten, neon, fluorescent and mixed light conditions.”
Kickstart Theft also became a study in how an Oscar-winning cinematographer adapted to guerrilla shooting conditions, how the production adapted to tight turnaround with a small crew – and the Sony F65’s ease of use with a variety of lenses, and taking advantage of advanced ACES workflows.
All in all, Goodich and Zsigmond found the Sony F65 “simple to use’.
“We had a very small crew: a DIT, who also served as data wrangler, a first assistant and sometimes a second assistant, and three electric/grips,” they say. “We were able to do so much partly because we planned well, but also because the camera didn’t require a learning curve.”
