Reality television has infiltrated every nook and cranny of the entertainment industry, nowhere more so than the many shows tailored for teenagers: from becoming a contestant on American Idol to cruising Laguna Beach, there’s always a video camera trained on a pack of image-savvy kids somewhere, and they love it. Makes you wonder what filmmaker Nanette Burstein (On The Ropes) hoped to achieve when she and her two-person crew (sound and camera) took up residence in Warsaw, Indiana for ten months, documenting the lives of teenagers lurching through their all-important senior years. How (those present at the film’s Sundance premiere wondered aloud) would American Teen be any different than what MTV programming executives force-feed kids on a daily basis? The answer came soon enough: using spectacularly original interstitial animation, and an intimate narrative style, Burstein debuted a satisfying genre-busting hybrid that appealed to the YouTube and Boob Tube generations alike.
“Nanette was looking for a cinematographer who had done immersive vérité work, where you basically move in with a group of people and document many storylines at once,” observes cinematographer Laela Kilbourn. “I’d shot a film called Sync or Swim (Slamdance 2008), which was about the world of synchronized swimming, and Word Wars (Sundance 2004), about competitive Scrabble playing at the elite level, and they were in that same vein. However, for American Teen we shot more footage than any other documentary I’ve done. All told there was 1,000 hours [Wolfgang Held, Robert Hanna share secondary photography credits], and we followed up to eight different storylines. To get the level of trust Nanette wanted from her subjects, we basically had to become a part of that small Indiana town.”
Speed and flexibility were the main concerns when it came to choosing format and equipment, given that Burstein only wanted a single stealth-like camera. Kilbourn used a Panasonic SDX900 digital video camera, which offered a native 16:9 aspect ratio, three-2/3” CCD imagers and 24P capture for the bulk of the shoot; when the action moved into tighter spaces, like driving in the teenagers’ cars, Kilbourn shifted to the smaller format DVX-100A. The 1/3” chip mini-DV camcorder provided the maximum amount of access and intimacy to capture the story’s mercurial subjects. The DVX-100A is a fixed mount lens; the SDX900 allowed Kilbourn to swap out a high quality Canon 7.6 – 168mm zoom, outfitted with a built-in doubler. Kilbourn avoided bringing in lighting packages that would alter the kids’ reality, relying almost exclusively on practical lighting and natural environments. “I used one or two lights from a small kit [made up of a Diva Lite 200 fluorescent, and three Peppers] for the interviews,” she adds. “And, occasionally I would ask to turn on lights when a room was so dark we couldn’t get an image.” Overall, she tried to maintain a narrow depth of field, and was careful to white balance in each new environment, to best reflect maximum color accuracy. “We wanted the video to look beautiful and have our presence be so unobtrusive that the kids would forget we were even there.”
We see American Teen’s four main characters reveal emotional peaks and valleys on-camera that resonate with truth: they have no perspective on their lives and drama comes crashing in and out with each new day. Although they know they are archetypes (nerd, jock, cheerleader, rebel-artist), the subjects come alive as individuals with the all-access camerawork. Their innermost hopes and dreams are underscored by a series of animation sequences (produced by New York-based Blacklist) that Kilbourn helped to seamlessly blend with her live action work in the color correction. Observes Burstein about the arresting mixed-media inserts: “As a documentary filmmaker you’re normally limited in how to explore a subject’s fantasy life, but I thought animation would be a great device, since fantasies are always surreal and exaggerated. When I explained to the kids that the fantasies I had asked them to describe on-camera would be animated, they all thought the idea was ‘really cool.’”
Colin Clemens, star of the basketball team in a state where basketball is revered, is the essence of cool, at least when American Teen begins. Later on we learn Colin’s family can’t afford to pay for college, and the pressure to secure an athletic scholarship nearly upends him. “We shot a lot of Colin’s practices and games,” explains Kilbourn. “Basketball is fast and fluid, and, like any sport, has its own subculture. I didn’t limit myself to one type of coverage: for the practices and most of the games I used a combination of handheld and sticks, long lens or wide, depending on where the tensions in the story were: Colin’s friends, his parents, the coaches. The trick with documentaries is to pay such close attention to your subjects that you try to anticipate their actions. Listening to what’s going on around you is just as important as what you’re seeing through the viewfinder in that regard: the more you listen the better the chance the camera will be in the right place at the right time to capture that magic moment.”
Kilbourn likens the role of documentary cinematographer to low-impact camping, where “leave no trace” is the abiding aesthetic. And shooting American Teen with one video camera and a skeleton crew meant a “constant negotiation” with the film’s subjects to keep pace. Notes the director: “I kept in daily contact with [the kids] to know what was happening in their lives and who was important to film each day. I had to rely on their honesty to not miss any significant moment. But time was on my side. I had all year.” Burstein says she wanted to follow the “rules of fiction filmmaking,” despite the limitations of the documentary genre. “We always moved around the room, filming a wide shot and matching close-up angles,” she continues. “That way when it was time to edit down the scene to its essence, it would feel as though we had multiple cameras capturing it.” Kilbourn thinks her background prepared her well for the demanding hybrid that was American Teen, where reality television and narrative drama collided. “Victoria’s Secret was one of the first to start documenting their own commercial fashion shoots in the late ‘90s,” the DP concludes. “I was an AC for cinematographer Kevin Lombard, who was an early adopter of small format digital cameras, like the Canon XL-1, on those Victoria’s Secret shoots. We’d be juggling multiple camera packages and formats every day—film for the beauty work and film and video for the behind-the-scenes. It was a crash course on how to shoot documentary and narrative footage at the same time, often on the same day.”
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