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Tuesday, September 20, 2011

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Cinematographer Nancy Schreiber, ASC, has always moved seamlessly through independent and mainstream features, music videos, documentaries and television. Perhaps it was due to the fact that she came up through the ranks in New York City, where she claims there was less stress on classification and moving between genres wasn’t such a big deal. Or perhaps that’s just her style.

Schreiber grew up in Detroit during the thriving years when musicians and art were in abundance. She attended the University of Michigan and graduated with degrees in psychology and art history. She started shooting stills at the end of high school and continued into her college years, when she also entered the independent film world at the very underground level in Ann Arbor.

“When I moved to New York City after graduation, I knew I didn’t want to be a psychologist,” recalls Schreiber. “So I answered an ad in the Village Voice and got on a movie as a production assistant.”

A pioneer in her own right, Schreiber worked her way up through the electrical department. “I guess people thought that was pretty wild back then,” she says. “There was only one other woman that I knew of in electric.”

Schreiber worked as a gaffer and earned while she learned. She realized early on that she had an aptitude for lighting and visuals, most likely from her experience shooting stills.
"Lighting seemed to be one of the most important areas to be proficient in if you were going to be a cinematographer," says Schreiber, who works in both Los Angeles and New York City, although she hardly spends more than a few months in any one city, going from documentary to feature to independent—seamlessly.  

HDVideoPro: You’ve had many chances to work with the RED since its birth. Talk about your experiences.

Nancy Schreiber: In fall 2008, I filmed Every Day with director Richard Levine, starring Liev Schreiber, Helen Hunt, Brian Dennehy and Eddie Izzard. It was the early days of the RED ONE, so I needed to compensate for its relatively slow ISO, using more light than is needed with the MX sensor. Fortunately, we were working in New York City with Offhollywood, one of the first companies to adopt and excel in RED technology.

There was no RED Rocket in those days either. We shot so much that downloading and backups were extremely time consuming without it. I often shoot two cameras on independent movies just to get through the high number of pages in the short number of days we’re given.

Thankfully, I had the use of RED Rocket on my last movie, Between Us. We shot the film on two RED MXs, which is the same configuration I had on the project prior to that, Fugly!, directed by Alfredo De Villa, with John Leguizamo and Rosie Perez. We were able to get our huge amount of data transcoded and backed up quickly with the RED Rocket. Also, since the MX is a higher-speed sensor, I needed less light. Two years later, RED production and post is rather commonplace, so it’s interesting to think that it wasn’t that long ago that people had such issues

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