The Spectrum section, at the Sundance Film Festival, has always been a forum for edgy and uncompromising work. Unfettered by juried panels or hit-hungry distributors looking for the next Little Miss Sunshine, it’s a place where audiences come to be surprised and challenged by stories told from the margins of American society, and sometimes our most far-flung physical boundaries. Such is the case with Chronic Town, a rough-and-tumble drama, set in the deep freeze of Fairbanks, Alaska. JR Bourne plays a down-and-out cabbie on a drug bender after his girlfriend dumps him. The good-natured loser blames his LSD trip for the suicide attempt that follows, but either way, he ends up in a mental health center, and state-mandated group therapy. He has to prove he’s ready to venture back out into the -25 temps of Fairbanks, a city that appears mostly populated by alcohol and drug-addled dead-enders, all scraped raw by the effects of past abuse, in one form or another. And just when Bourne’s character finds some inner peace, via a platonic friendship with a stripper he meets in his therapy group, life’s badass ways come crashing in again, robbing Chronic Town’s anti-hero of even a glimpse at redemption.

Cinematographer Yiannis (pronounced yah-knee) Samaras hails from Greece but worked for eight years as a lighting designer in New York City nightclubs and theaters. He moved to Los Angeles and, at the urging of cinematographer Tom Richmond, enrolled at the American Film Institute. After graduating in 1998, Samaras worked as a camera assistant, operator and 2nd unit DP before making the full-time jump as DP for commercials, documentaries and short films. Chronic Town marks his feature debut and Samaras could not have set the bar higher: on location in Alaska with a micro-budget that precluded grip or lighting equipment, or even a Super 16mm camera. “One of our producers had a contact with VER in Glendale,” Samaras recounts from his L.A. base, “and we got a great deal on a Sony CineAlta PDW-F350. I loved that the camera could record straight onto an optical disk and we wouldn’t have to worry about cabling, given the cold weather. I also liked the variable frame rate and true slow motion. The CineAlta isn’t as small as shooting in mini-HD, and we felt that was a type of psychological reassurance to our cast and crew, working in locations that had never even seen a film crew.”

That may be an understatement. Two of Chronic Town’s pivotal moments occur in a log cabin deep in the woods and on a frigid and snowy mountaintop known as Murphy’s Dome. Samaras describes the scene where Bourne and his gal pal, Emily, find out her father was killed by a patient in their therapy group, as a “happy accident” that visionaries like Conrad Hall, ASC would have championed. “We needed a master shot,” he recalls, “but all I had was the camera’s on-board monitor to gauge exposure. The sky was so blue and bright, and there was so much light reflecting off the snow, that I dialed in the ND filters and made an educated guess. When we got back to the car, I saw this wide master shot was a bit underexposed. I also realized that the de-saturation and grain build-up matched the characters’ moods. The director went back to the location another day to re-shoot for performance and this time around I intentionally underexposed to reproduce that look for the entire scene.”

In fact, Alaska’s weather was a factor throughout the lean seventeen-day schedule, but not in the way the DP had expected. Samaras, and his first-time director, Tom Hines, had designed the color palette around February conditions—overcast skies and snow showers—that would emphasize the cold blue light. But on the second day of production, the sun came out in full force and never let up. “It was difficult to control contrast, and we didn’t have time to wait for the sun to change,” notes Samaras. “I basically had to figure out ways to take light away.” Given the lack of access to film lighting units, Chronic Town’s interiors, including the bar where Bourne

spends most of his time, were lit with practicals of varying color temperatures. “The bar’s porch,” Samaras remembers, “had a halogen that gave off a lot of green. I used that as a key and put the one 575W HMI I had behind them to highlight the smoke from the joint they passed around, and then some bounce light to pick up the snow. For the pot dealer’s cabin, I had no space [for units] at all. We put ND on the windows, and added a China Ball light wrapped in Duvatyn in the center of the room. I think modern audiences are very comfortable with all the blended color temperatures: that’s what reality looks like these days.”

Using a documentary style by necessity, Samaras was careful to cover his bases: before he left L.A., he made sure his presence at the digital color correct was in his contract. And despite the CineAlta’s wide array of bells and whistles, Samaras opted for the minimal amount of camera settings. “I used the soft gamma curve (#4) for lowered contrast, and manipulated the knee for the highlights,” he notes. “In the color correct, I needed to bring the film back to life by crushing the blacks, and adding tonality to the skies. Mostly that meant using [Power Windows] to grade the blue, but sometimes it meant warming the skies up in relation to the snow’s blue tint on the ground below.” With little time or money for crane or dolly shots, the Chronic Town camera team worked mostly handheld. “We took our cues from the actors,” the DP recalls. “We’d always do a master shot [Samaras alternated between two Canon HD-Cine 7.5 zoom lenses] to see how the actors moved through the space. And then we moved in for coverage, if it was needed. I’d grab the long lens in-between takes and steal little moments from each location—people, scenery, clouds, whatever. Most of that footage made it onto the screen!” Samaras says the same obstacles that made shooting in Alaska such a challenge, were also its biggest rewards. “They don’t have the infrastructure for making movies and rarely see film crews,” he concludes. “That means your technical resources are very limited, but the community itself is quite open and friendly. One guy gave us the keys to his cabin in the morning and we didn’t see him until we wrapped that night.”

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