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SEE DICK DIE - Feature Film (1999)FORMAT: Digital (DV) Location: Los Angeles A psychological thriller with a rich tapestry of images and sounds. The story has many twists and turns between its four main characters. Karen wants to leave her husband for "another woman". The other woman, Monica, is a former drug addict rescued from an almost certain death on the streets of Los Angeles. However their plan to be together becomes complicated when Karen learns that her husband is terminally ill with cancer. She now feels obliged to stay with him until the bitter end. Meanwhile her husband, Ricky, asks a Dr. Schreck for an assisted suicide (euthanasia) scheduled to occur on his birthday. After the husband's passing, life becomes idyllic for the two woman. Moreover, there is the promise of the imminent arrival of a large inheritance of 3 million dollars left by her husband. But the creepy Dr Schreck wont go away, and keeps appearing in the two women's lives. Schreck secretly drugs Monica in order to discredit her in Karen's eyes, which leads to a catastrophic ending of their relationship. Then on the day the inheritance money arrives, the characters converge one last time. Only one of them walks away ..... with the money. NEW UMBRELLAComments by the Director of Photography, Peter Gray Shooting in DV (or "mini-DV" as it is often nicknamed) is becoming all the rage these days. The phenomenon is exploding at a truly amazing rate. There are now many hundreds of low-budget projects mushrooming under this new umbrella. DV will give you the same sort of image quality as traditional Betacam SP, but with all the advantages of shooting digital. You can buy DV gear for a tiny fraction of the price compared to the equivalent type of Betacam SP equipment. So that is the basis for all the excitement about this new format. The feature "film" thriller, SEE DICK DIE, was one of the first. I shot with the Canon XL-1 camcorder, that was creating a flurry of interest at the time. I shot with Canon's standard 16 times zoom lens, 5.5mm to 88mm (f/1.6 - 2.6). I found this lens difficult to keep in focus in manual mode, but I don't think this was a fault with the lens itself, but rather the whole servo-based system in the camcorder. The director liked my black & white, film noir, lighting style from movies I had been shooting in Europe. He wanted to try and achieve this sort of style on digital video. Video and black & white are quite similar in terms of their exposure latitude (i.e. they are both about 5 stops), so I was confident that this approach could work. The camera had no black & white function as such, so we'd be shooting in colour and switching to black & white in the post production. This is simple enough with video. But I couldn't sure they would not change their mind later, seeing the original was recorded in colour anyway. So while I optimized each shot for black & white, I also made sure the images worked in colour as well. A good move, as half way through the shooting the director decided it was going to be a colour movie after all. But the point is, you can do this easily in the video medium (unlike film). You can even release two versions of your movie, one in colour and one in black & white. But it is a compromise to some extent. The scenes I lit for black & white still look better in black & white compared to seeing them in colour. But at the same time, they do work quite well in colour if needed. Production details, including cast and crew list, can be seen on the Internet Movie Data Base via this direct link: And here is a link to the (very cool) See Dick Die web site: http://www.seedickdie.tv
Peter Gray
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