Writer/director Richard Kelly and cinematographer Steven Poster ASC first came together in 2001 for the schizophrenic story of Donnie Darko, renewed their teaming for the post-apocalyptic style Southland Tales and recently finished Kelly’s big screen adaption of Richard Matheson’s six page 1970 Playboy-published short story Button, Button called The Box. The relationship the two have developed over the years has become extremely effective in creating their nothing-is-what-it-seems stories.

“It’s a kind of symbiosis,” Poster explains. “Our styles are so similar. What I like to do visually, to express, dovetails with what he likes. It’s not the same thing, but the same sensibility. When I see a tone, for instance, a tone of light, it’s what he was thinking. When he sees movement, it fits.

“We really have so much fun exploring,” Poster adds. “We have these little sessions where he wants camera two inches that way and I want it two inches that way. We’re not arguing about a hundred feet. We’re arguing about an inch or two.”

As with all of Richard Kelly’s projects, The Box is a little bit science fiction, and a lot of Kelly’s creative way of exploring a variety of themes that are important to him. He’ll tackle global politics, the energy crisis and explore suspense, love, drama and the American Family.

For The Box, Kelly’s testing the strength and commitment in an American family, there is another level of exploration. A different form of capture. Digital, using the Genesis camera. “Shooting digital is wonderful,” says Kelly enthusiastically. “I fell in love with it immediately.”

Although Poster is extremely adept at working with the Genesis system, so comfortable that it feels like he’s working in film, the team knew that they had a different kind of challenge with The Box – the time period. While HD has made amazing strides in capturing present-day stories and huge other-world sagas, it is only recently that cinematographers have begun to attempt to stretch the technology to capture different time periods.

With The Box, one of the key elements that needed to be addressed was presenting a story set in 1976 that had the look and feel of 30-some years ago. “To choose a digital medium as a mechanism to photograph the past could be a little dangerous proposition,” Kelly admits. “I’ve seen it backfire in period pieces, in daylight exteriors, with motion blur, wide shutter, and more.” Kelly is aware that modern technology can get in the middle of the capture often taking the viewer out of the moment and that can be the ruination of a project.

“We knew we had to be specific with our filtration and shutter speed, the photographic light conditions, and how we handled daylight exteriors, interiors, night, and kept a consistence to the look from day to night, interior to exterior, and without motion blur on the Steadicam sequences,” says Poster.

“There was a concern, before using the Genesis, that in digitally shooting a period piece you get that temporal feeling of live television,” Poster explains. “There is no way to explain it. It’s just a difference in quality and emotional response to the images. When we tested the Genesis, we found that, as long as we weren’t using a 360 degree shutter and moving the camera too fast, you didn’t get that. Once we were assured of that, we could easily move forward.”

The next step was to find the “look” to properly explore the suburban world of the Lewis family (Cameron Diaz and James Marsden) circa 1976, as they struggle to stay even and then struggle to survive, once they are given the simple wooden gift box that spirals their lives out of control. “Creating the feel of 1976 had more to do with testing the kind of look that might have existed during the time period,” explains Poster.

“My first instinct was to treat the Genesis like film and go back to the kind of filtration used during those years,” he explains. “I looked at what I thought might have been the diffusion; Mitchell A and B, for example. We tested low-cons, contemporary Pro Mists and Glimmer Glass (not available in that time period), to see what they would do.

“When we tested our combination of various filters and combinations we also tested to see how the Genesis handled mixed lighting sources,” he adds. “We spent a couple of hours in the Public Library in Boston, because there was every kind of florescent, incandescent, and daylight there all in one place. The combinations would have to handle it all.”

Poster and team also tested a location that was a sewage plant, where the only light they could use was sodium vapour. “We tried the old filtration and found it didn’t return the same look we would have expected. We found that a Tiffen Pro Mist in a lower number allowed us to capture the baseline look.”

To make sure Kelly and Poster could stay true to the look they created for 1976, Laser Pacific’s Colorist came to the set in Boston. “He could take a look at what we had in terms of contrast and saturation, where we placed the blacks and whites, and we could come up with a base LUT for the two locations, importing that into the GDP box from Panavision that was carried by D.I.T. Alan Gitlin,” Poster explains.

“This kind of team work was extremely successful and we found that it wasn’t a stretch for us to define a curve and quality of lighting to shape a consistent image.”

That said, Gitlin’s job as the Digital Imaging Technician was straight forward. The changes needed came when Poster dreamed up a new idea to enhance the image. However, most scenes were shot with 0db gain and a 180 degree shutter. For nights they would boost to 3db gain and 270 degree shutter. “There was almost no visible noise at any setting. What was there was a pleasing texture that looked more like film grain than noise” Poster said.

Poster uses a spot meter and 18 percent gray card to get his exposures. He expanded his method of reading the gray card in the scenes by placing the card in the light that he was reading and then adjusting the exposure with the waveform monitor. “We tried to keep mid-gray anywhere between 20%-50% on a 100% scale,” Gitlin explains. “I’ve begun to suggest this procedure with other productions and some cameramen like the consistent results.” Image was recorded to SRW-1where the signal and speed could sometimes be changed.

And then, of course, there were just a couple of horror stories – behind and not in front of the camera. “We had a Richard Kelly style car crash sequence,” Poster recalls. It was below zero out and snowing. At times the wind got up to 45 miles-per-hour. We lost a big chunk of our lighting because it was too windy to put up some of the condors. The big concern, however – the temperature of Panavision’s Cine Primo lenses. We had to keep them true while dealing with the cold.”

Panavision’s leading engineer quickly built a heated eyepiece for the camera to keep it from fogging. And, to keep the trueness of the lenses when we weren’t shooting the team wrapped heating pads around them. Low-tech often times really does come to the rescue!