“Depicting American Cityscapes as Hero”: DP Derek Howard on PLAN C

When a significant increase in abortion restrictions and bans began to unfold across the country, Francine Coeito knew she had to step up and do something. As a result, she formed the grassroots organization Plan C, which lends its name to Tracy Droz Tragos’ documentary about Coeytaux’s fight for everyone’s right to abortion drugs and broader reproductive health services.

Cameraman Derek Howard narrates Film director all about his shooting experience PLAN C.

See all the answers to our annual Sundance Filmmaker Interviews here.

director: How and why did you end up cinematographer on your film? What were the factors and qualities that led to your being hired for this job?

Howard: I had been working with one of Tracy’s producers, Soo Kim, on a number of other projects, so she also connected me to Tracy in the first place. We started working on tracing Tracy Rich Hill, and we found that we worked very well together and it made sense to continue collaborating on her next project which was in development at the time. Both Tracey and I have great respect and trust in Su as a producer and team builder, so it was a very comfortable and easy match from the start. They both knew that I had a lot of verité experience and a history of working on visually driven creative documents, so my previous work experience was a good fit for this particular project.

director: What were your artistic goals for this film and how did you realize them? How did you want your cinematography to enhance the film’s storytelling and treatment of its characters?

Howard: My goal is always to match the director’s vision as closely as possible and then try to improve it with my own personal style and input. I knew this film was going to deal with some very intense topics and extremely personal, vulnerable stories, so keeping the camera setup and crew as minimal as possible was going to be a big advantage. I used a manual approach to be able to track fast and dynamically developing moments that are often unpredictable. A mix of wide shots that show characters in context, cut with extreme close-ups that are often slightly abstract became the dominant mode in which we covered the scenes. We knew we wanted a more cinematic aesthetic to set it apart from many other more journalistic approaches to this subject, so we used Cooke Pancho/iClassic prime lenses to give it a more filmic quality. These older compact primes have a nice translation that reduces sharpness, introduces a lot of nice flare, and is good for working in low light situations, offering a lot of flexibility. With this tight setup, I was able to immerse myself in our subject as much as possible and achieve that “on the wall” closeness we needed to tell these intimate stories.

director: Were there any specific influences on your cinematography, whether it was other films, visual art, photography or anything else?

Howard: Tracy has built a body of work that revolves around reproductive rights, so her previous films were a very useful reference. A doctor I had recently shot called The hottest August was another source of inspiration in terms of the verité approach, the sense of space and time, and the desire to break away from talking heads and film interviews in a more creative way (often starting wider than what is convention and ending up much more tight and abstract). From Plan C was shot across the country, I watched photographers like Robert Franks and Walker Evans take the nation by storm and capture everyday scenes in vivid and beautiful compositions. The textures of small-town America became part of the film’s interstitial glue. I remember channeling movies like ignoble and The Florida Project when shooting colorful but banal suburban scenes around the country. David Hockney and Edward Hopper’s painting also offered useful references to the depiction of American cityscapes as the character himself.

director: What were the biggest challenges posed by the production for these purposes?

Howard: The biggest challenge while shooting Plan C was to find creative solutions for filming subjects who must remain anonymous for security reasons. Certain items [that] we would go back several times during the film to protect their identities, so I had to research how to film an interview with them and capture their presence and atmosphere without showing their entire faces. Long lenses such as 75 or 100mm are used to capture abstract details such as hands, feet, the edge of a face or a silhouette by a window. In the course of a long interview it becomes difficult to find new angles and compositions, so looking for fresh ways to convey the subject’s presence without actually being clearly visible was a major obstacle that was overcome mostly through experimentation and abstraction. made possible in large part by the first-class selection we were fortunate enough to have available.

director: What camera did you shoot with? Why did you choose the camera you did? What lenses did you use?

Howard: I used a Canon c500mkII with a Cooke Panchro/iClassic prime. I put the camera in Super35mm ​​crop sensor mode to avoid vignetting on those vintage primes that are optimized for 35mm. The director had purchased this camera and lens setup, so it was the natural choice to move forward. It was great for long rolls and long hours of hand holding due to its compact size and weight.

director: Describe your approach to lighting:

Howard: In most scenes in Plan C, available lighting is used. Since this was mostly a verité shoot, I didn’t have the luxury of pre-lighting and often arrived on location with minimal setup time. I would position the subjects near natural light sources, lamps and windows, or sometimes remove overhead lighting sources and let the natural ambient daylight play a key role in the scene. For a few specific interviews, I would simply use 750W tungsten lamps shot through diffusion to raise the main light a bit and pump up the light thrown by artificial sources. Sometimes I would use a reflective bounce or white cloth to pick up faces.

director: What was the hardest scene to pull off and why? And how did you do it?

Howard: One of the most challenging scenes to film was this large group gathering of the major players in the fight for access to the abortion pill. They rented a large house in a suburban setting that was relatively uncinematic, dark and visually dreary. The lighting in the house was quite unpleasant and a big mix of different color temperatures. I dealt with this by turning off as many lights as possible, opening (and sometimes closing) blinds to control the daylight spill, and trying to create some facial proportions and natural contrast to escape the flatness. The sheer number of essentials I had to cover in a cramped space presented a definite challenge. The saving grace was that we had enough time and flexibility from the subjects when and where we could set scenes, so it worked out in the end.

director: Finally, describe the ending of the film. How much of your look was “baked in” versus realized in DI?

Howard: We shot in Canon’s C-log raw, capturing the widest possible width of “negative” to maximize our options in post-production. The Panchro glass certainly fits a certain vintage aesthetic with overall desharpening, slight vignetting, and beautifully shallow depth of field and bokeh. Color balance and contrast levels were chosen precisely during DI. I was able to consult remotely using frame io to work with the colorist in real time on his initial passes of the film to adjust the look and monitor progress.

TECHNICAL BOX

Movie Title: Plan C

Camera: Canon C500mkII

lenses: PCooke Panchro/classic

Lighting: lowel 750W tungsten lamps, diffusion umbrella, reflector, practical lamps

Color Gradation: Different in design / davinci resolve.