The Chrysalis (2010), directed by Jeremy Ian Thomas, United States, 6:54 min.

Jeremy Ian Thomas, a professional colorist at Hdi RAWworks, sits in a cramped space around the corner from the Douglas Fairbanks building in The Lot in Hollywood, a site that resonates with film history—Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, among other names—a site where black-and-white silent films expressed the cutting-edge 90 years ago. Thomas sits on a swivel chair in front of an L-shaped desk in the middle of the room as he conceives the cutting edge with DSLRs in 2010. Behind him are two couches.

FIGURE 11.1 The color palette of The Chrysalis was browns, blues, and whites. Actor Mike Wade walks across salt flats in the midground of California’s Death Valley.

(©2010 Hdi RAWworks. Used with permission.)

Shelves are full of production knick-knacks. There’s barely room to pull up a chair because one has to walk over gear bags and LitePanels in order to chill. On the wall hangs a 10-bit plasma screen, the output to a fully decked-out Mac Pro containing more filmic energy than Charlie Chaplin. Here, Thomas makes HDSLRs and other digital films look really good.

Philip Bloom calls Thomas a wizard at color grading—but he doesn’t look like Gandalf. A tall, large man with boyish looks, Thomas expresses an infectious passion for filmmaking at all levels—from sound design, color grading, producing, and directing. Thomas attended the LA Film School and fell into color grading as a way to earn a living. But he loves getting a talented team together and putting projects together; he faces a team of people for a short he outlined with Robert Lehman, The Chrysalis, to be shot over the weekend in California’s Death Valley.

The Chrysalis was conceived as a short fiction project to prove the cinematic capabilities of the Canon 7D. Neil Smith, the owner of Hdi RAWworks and the producer of this film (as well as producer on A Day at the Races profiled in ), says that both projects “demonstrated that HDSLRs when combined with professional grade cinema lenses—from the high-end Cookes to the less-expensive Zeiss ZE primes—are capable of a wide range of visual storytelling.” Smith calls the project a shooting exercise, to push the capabilities of the Canon 7D. “We sent the film-crew out into Death Valley with a single African American actor and a standard 7D fitted with Zeiss ZE primes,” Smith says. “The crew filmed in the glaring sun of the desert for three days and then combined the footage with a very clever visual effect shot of a large spinning glass orb to produce an illusion of some magical transformation taking place out in the wilderness.”

The project essentially would answer these two questions: Could the Canon 7D hold up to the contrast of desert daylight and can it deliver a scene with CGI art?

With the producer’s go-ahead, they had to find a DP to shoot the project. Jeremy Ian Thomas met Dave Christenson when he came to Hdi RAWworks to talk to Neil Smith and Thomas about using the Canon 7D for a documentary he was shooting in Nepal. After Thomas saw Christenson’s footage, he asked him to DP this super-low-budget weekend project. It would include special effects CGI created by Kris Cabrera. But the microbudget of $1,000 meant nobody got paid, so the love for cinema and the love for shooting with DSLRs drove the crew to jump on board the project. Thomas explains that “they are all getting paid in hugs and some fruit snacks and we’ve got fruit snacks,” the crew around him laughs. I observe the preproduction meeting for the film.

Sponsors donated equipment, such as a Red Rock Micro shoulder mount, Lite Panels for lights (which they did not end up using), and Zeiss lenses (see Figure 11.2). Despite the sponsors, Thomas emphasizes that “it’s more important for us to come back with a really great little short than for us to utilize all the gear that was given to us and come back with a [weak] short. Let’s try to use everything we possibly can, but never ever let it hinder what we’re doing.”

FIGURE 11.2 DP Dave Christenson looks through a Zakuto viewfinder with a kitted-out Canon 7D. Director Jeremy Ian Thomas looks on (screen right).

(Photo by Hunter Kerhart. ©2010 Hdi RAWworks. Used with permission.)

THE PREPRODUCTION VISION OF JEREMY IAN THOMAS

The Chrysalis tells the story of a man going through a “spiritual experience,” Thomas explains to the actor and his crew. It’s “going to feel like a survival flick for the first three minutes” or so. We’ll see a “guy wearing Army” fatigues with a “backpack on and little camping stuff hanging off” (see Figure 11.3). He’s “going to be eating out of a can of beans, very kind of Mad Maxist, wide desert survival feel.”

FIGURE 11.3 Equipment hangs off actor Mike Wade as he pauses on the salt flats in The Chrysalis. We’ll see a “guy wearing Army” fatigues with a “backpack on and little camping stuff hanging off,” director Jeremy Ian Thomas says in a preproduction meeting.

(©2010 Hdi RAWworks. Used with permission.)

Thomas turns in his swivel chair, his Mac behind him, and spreads his arms out as he shares his vision of the opening scene. “He’s going to be sweating, he’s going to be tired; he’s in the desert and he’s going to see this piggy bank sitting in the middle of the desert salt flats. He knows that’s what he’s been looking for, but he doesn’t know why. So he runs up on the piggy bank and he looks at it and he obviously has an emotional connection to this specific piggy bank” (see Figure 11.4).

FIGURE 11.4 Actor Mike Wade reaches out to a piggy bank in The Chrysalis. “He knows that’s what he’s been looking for, but he doesn’t know why,” director Thomas discusses to his crew and actor in a preproduction meeting. “So he runs up to the piggy bank and he looks at it and he obviously has an emotional connection to this specific piggy bank.”

(©2010 Hdi RAWworks. Used with permission.)

“He sits down Indian style and he empties his backpack and then there’s a time piece, a camera, a stuffed animal (see Figure 11.5),” Thomas turns to the actor, Mike Wade, “and if you bring in any knick-knacks, it’s going to be a bag of certain things, and he’s going to set them up in a half circle.” He has “an epiphany of what his life has been about. And then he realizes, there’s something about the piggy bank that’s not right, so he crashes the piggy bank on the salt flats and shatters it and inside is a note [see Figure 11.6]. He opens the note and it’s a hand drawing, and it says ‘Me and Daddy’ and so it’s from his son, and you’ll hear some audio stuff that goes with that, maybe his son calling his name.”

FIGURE 11.5 Actor Mike Wade empties out his backpack and holds an old timepiece in The Chrysalis. “So he sits down Indian style and he empties his backpack and then there’s a time piece, a camera, a stuffed animal,” Thomas explains in the preproduction meeting.

(©2010 Hdi RAWworks. Used with permission.)

FIGURE 11.6 Actor Mike Wade smashes the piggy bank and pulls out a glowing necklace. Originally, as discussed in the preproduction meeting, Wade was going to pull out a note, “a hand drawing, and it says ‘Me and Daddy’ and so it’s from his son, and you’ll hear some audio stuff that goes with that, maybe his son calling his name,” Thomas says. But the change to the glowing butterfly necklace worked because it “represents the rebirth of this man growing from a moth to a butterfly,” Thomas explains to me later. The glow was created using After Effects.

(©2010 Hdi RAWworks. Used with permission.)

At this moment, Thomas continues, “off in the distance, you’ll hear a bit of a pulse, a pulsing noise low end that catches his attention and he packs everything up and it’s a crescendo. He’s pushed and motivated to do these things, but doesn’t know why. So he runs up on this sound, and that’s where 3D guy comes in,” he smiles at his CGI artist, Kris Cabrera. “There’s going to be a reflective sphere that’s floating above the salt flats that’s spinning, and you’ll be able to see a reflection of the desert and everything on it, and he’s obviously going to have this moment with this sphere; he’s going to walk up on it.”

Thomas pauses. “We haven’t quite decided what we’re doing with the sphere, but he’s going to touch it (see Figures 11.7 and 11.8), and it’s either going to expand into smaller balls and fall to the ground or turn into sand and go up his arm. But then we’re going to cut out of that immediately and—the ending is a bit up in the air—but he’s either going to be on a street corner with blood coming out of his nose taking his last breath as the camera pulls up and his wife is going to be over him trying to revive him, or he’s going to wake [up out of] a coma in a hospital bed and see his wife and child and realize that the greatest things in life aren’t things at all.”

FIGURE 11.7 Actor Mike Wade runs up to a spinning reflective sphere in The Chrysalis. The sphere was created using 3D Studio Max by Kris Cabrera.

(©2010 Hdi RAWworks. Used with permission.)

FIGURE 11.8 The raw footage of the scene, before color grading and CGI art. See Figure 11.7 to see the shot with the crystal and the blue added using Apple’s Color. Thomas worked with Kris Cabrera, who crafted the reflective sphere. Normally, they would use a C-stand and stick a green tennis ball on it, but they didn’t have a large enough crew to carry it, so they ended up using a tripod. “Because it was all white and it was so contrasty, we were able to just use the tripod out there. It was contrasty enough so that [Kris] was able to track off of that” in 3D Studio Max, Thomas explains.

(©2010 Hdi RAWworks. Used with permission.)

The story takes place in “the space between life and death. And he’s learning in this place … so the time piece represents time; the piggy bank represents money or belongings; the camera, memories; they all represent something,” Thomas explains. The camera was dropped; instead, a stuffed animal provided by Wade was prominent in the scene.

Ultimately, Thomas and his crew “wanted to see what we could do in a big white space,” he explains. “It is about the story, but it is more about the techniques to tell that story” that they’re testing out in the hopes that they can do future projects together and get paid for it.

They continue to talk and ask questions in the preproduction meeting. Thomas listens and is open to ideas from his crew, but he’s adamant about holding to an opening shot he wants: “All I absolutely have to happen for me—and I’m wide open to trying a whole bunch of other stuff—is that I want to be there an hour before the sun comes up. And I’m a little crazy, but I’ve started to sound design the opening shot without any pictures. I put some music and some wind chimes” together, he tells his crew.

In this moment, “I see him, a tight shot of him against that blue light that starts to happen before the sun comes up with that big open desert sky,” Thomas continues. “I see him cracking a can of beans and start eating the beans with the sound behind it. We go wide, and I want it to be very abstract where you can’t fully make it out who he is, where he is until the light starts to show itself. That I absolutely want.” However, despite the fact that they did shoot the scene, they did not end up using it in the final cut. “We actually shot Mike eating the beans. It was an amazing shot and really worked, but within the context of the whole movie, we felt it wasn’t needed. The movie is very ethereal and contemplative and the pace is very deliberate, so upon watching it again and again, [we decided] the beans scene was the only one we felt we could take out, and once we did, it just pushed the action along much quicker.”

I met up with Thomas after the shoot. They got out in the desert at 4 a.m., and walked several miles to their location. It was freezing at 30° Fahrenheit, and when the sun came up, it reached 80°. Thomas says he “actually started to feel pretty dehydrated. I had to start really drinking water, and I couldn’t keep the water down. I was throwing up the water, and I got really worried. It’s four miles back to the car, and there is not even any solace from the weather back at the car. That’s why on big shoots there are tents so people can cool off. We were eating crackers and drinking water; it reminded me of when I was in the military. I had to push through that emotionally.”

In the end, Thomas felt it was a good experience for the story, and for the actor. “It was good for the actor because being out there, you start to think, ‘Dude, what if I was actually lost out here and that was what the story was about.’ It was an amazing experience. It was an eye opener in a lot of ways.”

Working with the Actor

The realism helped because Thomas said they did not work off a script. He talked to the actor, Mike Wade, “about what needed to happen to move the story forward.” About the facial expressions, that “was all him,” Thomas explains. “I gave him the parameters and said, ‘Action.’ He’s a really, really good actor.” When Wade was walking through the salt flats, Thomas gave him this parameter: “Imagine just being stuck here, and that’s all the water you have in the canteen. That was enough. That got him to the place that this is life or death, because that’s what it is about.” Thomas would talk to Wade if there was a beat in the performance that didn’t feel right. “For the most part I let him interpret what we had talked about,” Thomas says.

Most of the scenes they did in two takes. The last scene with the sphere took about 10 takes, Thomas explains. “It was hard, because it wasn’t fear, so much,” so he had to get Wade in the right frame of mind. Thomas pulled out C.S. Lewis from memory. “There’s a book by C.S. Lewis called The Problem of Pain, and he talks about the idea of “fearing God.” Thomas adds: “The word, fear, in the Hebrew is more like reverence, awe. And it’s hard to explain something like that [to the actor]. So that took a little while to say, you’re not afraid, you’re in awe. So it was difficult to get to that emotion. But we eventually got there.”

One of Thomas’s favorite shots was the sunrise (see Figure 11.10). “Right as the sun started to come up across the mountains, it was this nice bluish-pink light and the actor had a garb on all the time, a head wrap, and he had it over his head like this, and he’s standing waiting for direction because we are getting our next camera set up. So he’s just standing there and the garb is flowing forward in the wind. He’s just standing, pointing the way the wind is going and I’m like ‘roll on that.’”

FIGURE 11.10 One of Jeremy Ian Thomas’s favorite shots in The Chrysalis reveals actor Mike Wade standing silhouetted in front of a mountain sunrise. “Look at that,” Thomas exclaims as he puts the image up on the 10-bit plasma screen. “Isn’t that gorgeous? How do you see everything, that’s not blown [out], there’s detail there. Isn’t that amazing? It is almost like he’s contemplating whether he is going to traverse or not. That is one of those happy accidents as a filmmaker. I’m like, ‘Wow’ I wouldn’t have set that shot up like that and it just happened,” Thomas explains. The details are in the craggy ground and the folds of the head garb.

(©2010 Hdi RAWworks. Used with permission.)

Postproduction on a 10-bit Plasma Screen

Thomas was pleased with the performance of the Canon 7D. “We couldn’t have pushed it any more than we did—all white with a black actor. Between the sky and the ice, it was probably a nine stop difference. So the fact that Dave got it all exposed is amazing. The stuff that we are going to end up using, barely anything is blown out,” he says during the early phase of postproduction. “There is only one shot where the sky is blown out. We shot it in a neutral way so it is all milky, which I think works. I’m going to do some grading, and I’m going to play around with it, but there is not a ton of latitude” in that shot. The color palette was limited, Thomas explains. He points at the 10-bit plasma screen in his office as he punches buttons on his Mac. We see a shot of the desert. “This is literally white, blue, and brown, so you can’t really push it real, real far, so I’m going to go drastic with the look and make it all blue,” he explains.

Thomas is a wizard on the computer. He pulls up a daily, shot with a 100 mm Zeiss. “That’s him walking towards the flats. The movie’s going to open with the wind and music and stuff playing here. See how bad the wind was on the edges of the frame? So bad, you’ll see it moving. For the first 20 seconds, it is just going to be this and you’ll think, ‘What is going on?’ And then here he comes. It is pretty cool stuff.”

The salt flats look like snow and ice. It “was almost like shooting a movie on a mirror,” Thomas muses. “A lot of people will think that is ice, which is fine. See how the water was reflecting; we’ve got some of that.” But no matter what people think it is, the scene, Thomas smiles, is “otherworldly, dude.”

But as he gets into color grading, Thomas reveals that Marvels Film Production’s cine-gamma curve picture style they used hindered his vision.¹ “Both my DP, Dave [Christenson], and I agree that we should have shot more neutral. We shot MarvelCine, which at the time seemed like it would be fine. But that’s where some of that magenta’s coming from, too.” They didn’t use SuperFlat—which Thomas typically favors with the Canon DSLRs—because “we were fighting off so much light [from the salt flats] that trying to add more light via the SuperFlat (which means we want to see further into the shadows) would have screwed up our gamma [curve]—which is our midtones. We would have had way too much milk in the midtones—too much dynamic range.” He would have liked to have shot it straight neutral. “The MarvelCine adds a little bit of color, and now in retrospect it dictated where we went with the color. If it was [shot in] neutral, I could have gone further in a different direction, because it already had a red tone to it and trying to fight off red with blue [in color grading] always gives you magenta, so that’s why it looks a little magenta,” Thomas explains. For the sake of the story, he adds, there’s really nothing wrong with that, but from the purity of the image, it doesn’t work for him.

In addition, Thomas admits that they ran into some aliasing issues because of a lot of square-type images they were shooting, “but it wasn’t enough that we couldn’t tell our story,” he says to an audience at a Hdi RAWworks screening on May 1, 2010.

“The first time we showed it, I don’t think people knew how to respond to it. It was just dead quiet. One person clapped, and I was like, ‘uh-oh.’ In my mind, it was like, ‘We’re in trouble.’ But by the third time we showed it, to the third set of people, it went really well. People come here [at Hdi RAWworks], because they want to see pristine imagery. What we made isn’t—it’s beautiful, but it’s not The Last 3 Minutes. It’s not supposed to be like that. It’s supposed to be otherworldly and gritty in ways, which is our style. Overall, I’m happy. This is the first time when I made something that I’m okay if people don’t like it, because [the project’s] coming from an honest place. I know what the parameters are. I know what our limitations were. That’s enough for me.”

The reaction may be tied not to its gritty look, but to the fact that the film lacks a decisive ending—which was due to a budget shortfall. As is often the case in filmmaking, limited budgets can compromise artistic vision and hinder storytelling. The film, as originally conceived, was supposed to end with the character waking up on a street corner and dying with his wife over him as Thomas noted earlier during the preproduction meeting. “What we wanted to do was just unattainable,” Thomas explains. “I would have liked to have ended it a [multitude] of ways,” he says.

In the meantime, Thomas will tinker with the film to perfect the story he’s trying to convey. “We’re going to add some matte paintings. So a lot of those wides where he’s walking and the sky’s open—as if civilization’s been depleted, there will be an old wind turbine back there,” he gestures with his hands as if he sees the image already fixed on-screen. “Or there may be an old Ferris wheel with moss on it, like the end of the world already has happened. This will help people cue into the sci-fi feel of it early on, because I’m not sure—.” Thomas collects his thoughts, thinking about his audience. “After seeing it today, we led [the audience] to believe that it’s a survival movie at first. Once he crushes the piggy bank, it’s a little bit too much for people, too quick. I think we have to cue them earlier that other things are going on.” The matte painting will help foreshadow the surreal shift in the film.

In addition, Thomas would like to add an ending where the character “dies on a street corner after being shot, taking his last breath.” At the time, the producer, Neil Smith, “felt it was too dark and suggested we shoot something sweeter and more of a Hollywood ending,” Thomas admits. That’s when they conceived “the idea [of] him being brought back to life in a hospital” with his wife leaning over him with the butterfly necklace we saw him find earlier in the broken piggy bank—but it ended up being too expensive to shoot.

Thomas would still like to go back and shoot his original ending. “I would like to do a jib shot from his eye up to reveal that there’s this whole scene unfolding in an urban environment. So it starkly contrasts from this surreal otherworld we lived in for most of the movie, and he’s coming to, taking in his last breath with his wife over him, and other people scurrying around.”

Whether this ending gets made or not, what can’t be denied is how the Canon 7D was able to cinematically deliver the evocation of an expansive emptiness with high contrast (an African American actor against white salt flats) and how it holds up with the insertion of high-quality CGI effects.

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