LASSE TOFT

From when I saw the first treatment for FIRST NOTE, I agreed with John that this needed to be a beautifully slow-paced film with solid images. The treatment and the script were both very cinematic. Everything is told in pictures and with sound.

Peter Tilten’s family is a solid Vermont family and we wanted to keep that feel in the way the movie was filmed. The images are solid partly because the camera stays solid. It barely moves – and moves slowly and steadily when it does. The camera almost always “looks” straight out, which I think adds to the solidity of the image. It is the way we see things when we are standing or sitting in perfect balance. There are a couple of exceptions to this rule when the characters are at different levels.

John and I chose to help convey the film’s sense of realism by shooting many of the scenes with available light. In some of the scenes this was a real challenge, but only a few were actually enhanced by stronger movie lights. The shot of Peter at the computer screen is filmed with the glow from the screen as the only light source. I filmed the scene at 15 fps and transferred the footage to video at 15 fps. That way the scene is still running real time on the screen, but I gained almost a stop in exposure because of the slower shutter speed.

The biggest light used in the filming of FIRST NOTE was a Red Head 1000watt open face light, which lights the bottom of the shot looking straight down on Peter from where the radio is in the barn. I often use Kino Flows as a nice big soft light source to wrap around and shape the faces. The breakfast scene was filmed exactly like that. Other than that, a couple of 650 watt tweenies and 300 watt inky dinkies were in use a few times. That was all. For the rest I mostly used practicals. All the light bulbs in the milking parlor were exchanged with 75watt photofloods, to have consistent light and color temperature in the entire room.

FIRST NOTE intentionally shows some film grain, as John and I discussed different looks and decided that we really liked the texture that film grain adds to the image and the story. The texture can soften the image in a very beautiful way. I knew that I’d be shooting on Fuji film, so I simply chose their fastest stock the F500. In the telecine process, when the images are transferred from film to video, there are some very sophisticated electronic grain reduction tools available to us that allow you to very accurately control the amount of grain that shows up in the final image. When looking at the footage for FIRST NOTE, we decided to leave them all off.