I Shot a New Hit Movie on a 1969 Video Camera

I have shot movies for Andrew Bujalski in the boxy 1.33:1 aspect ratio (also known as 4:3, the industry standard), or on grainy 16mm black-and-white negative before. But Computer Chess is our most extreme technical experiment so far. While we were working on Mutual Appreciation in New York in 2003 I remember talking with Andrew about different film and video formats. I joked about using an old video camera and thought that recording on VHS tape in long play mode could be an interesting look for a movie. But before I had even finished the sentence I realized that I had nourished an idea already floating inside Andrew’s mind. Eight years later we shot our fourth movie together, Computer Chess, and we used a black and white tube camera, made in the early seventies. Andrew has told me about William Eggleston’s video project Stranded in Canton, which the photographer shot in the seventies with black and white and infrared-sensitive video cameras. Andrew was fascinated of the quality of that footage and wanted to achieve a similar look for Computer Chess, which is set at a computer chess competition around 1980. These cameras would probably have been used for documentary coverage of an event like this.

It was very difficult to find working black and white tube cameras in the year 2011, but we managed to acquire three Sony AVC 3260 cameras, which were the best option for giving us a more or less stable signal to record. The Sony AVC 3260 camera’s heart is a 2/3 inch black and white Vidicon video tube. Shortly after shooting tests with the Arri Alexa for another project, I got one of the tube cameras sent to Los Angeles a couple of months before the shoot for first tests. It came in its original case with all the original accessories; it was like traveling back in time. When I first turned the camera on, I was excited as an adventurer on a new quest, wielding this piece of machinery from another time, with all its technical limitations and artifacts, which felt exactly right for what we were trying to do.

And on the other hand I was worried. As a cinematographer, I would be responsible for the images produced on this unstable camera, which was not built for shooting features, and which seemed to have its own life, and on whose performance we would have to rely on twelve hours every day.

My father, who inspired me to become a cinematographer when I was a child, was one of the pioneers of Austrian television. He started as a cameraman on those huge TV cameras back in the fifties. It didn't escape me that these old cameras looked a lot like the ones we were going to use on Computer Chess.

The benefits of these old tube cameras are manifold and we embraced them all. Because of the tube’s nature, bright parts of the image, especially highlights, burn into the tube, meaning that when the framing changes, the shapes of these bright objects stay as shadows on the screen, sometimes making objects and people look transparent. Highlights leave a trail behind them when they move through the shot. The camera can’t handle much contrast and in extreme situations, like shooting against a light source, interesting electronic patterns like wandering black waves appear.

These tubes also have a very specific soft character, which would not be easy to recreate in post. The cameras had electronic issues and sometimes would generate electronic noise when touching the camera body or the lens. All these artifacts combined lent a transcendental character to the image and helped express the sometimes unexplainable things that happen between man and computer in our story.

Of course there was also a back side to all of this, risks that we had to keep minimal and technical problems we had to solve. There are not many spare parts for these cameras left, but we got some replacement tubes for emergencies and had an electric engineer on standby. He also modified our cameras. Fortunately repairs were not necessary during the shoot, but we had some scary moments.

Our tests showed that the camera’s signal would not run stably enough by itself, so we had to run it through a time base corrector before sending it to an analog-to-digital SDI converter, and finally to our AJA Ki Pro Mini, which recorded in the Apple ProRes format. In the end we had a whole cart full of noisy electronic gear, which E.J., my assistant, controlled. The camera was connected via a thick cord to this “EJtron”, as Andrew called it. It also functioned as Andrew’s private video village, which was a first for him since we never had a video assist on any of our other movies.

Each of the three cameras offered it’s own challenges and characterisitcs, and after a couple of days, I found the body that was most reliable. I removed the camera’s bulky original viewfinder and replaced it with an onboard LCD monitor with a built-in waveform monitor. (Before every take I had to adjust the video levels with a screwdriver into a healthy spot with the help of the waveform monitor.) I discovered the camera always needed some time to warm up before it ran, more or less stably. We also had to be really careful to avoid bright objects within the frame in between takes and during set-up, to avoid unwanted burn-ins on the tube, which could take a long time to fade away. Despite some glitches, luckily it didn't give up on us until the very last day of shooting.

Besides the original Sony zoom lens, I used Canon and Nikon lenses with adapters for the camera’s c-mount. I also bought a cheap surveillance camera type 6mm lens, which produced a big vignette on our 2/3 inch tube, which I used in this shot:

I am happy with the look of the film and am also glad that Andrew wanted to work this way because I like different and unconventional choices if they support the story and don’t just exist for the novelty of it. But I'm not sure if I would want to shoot another movie with this camera.

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_Matthias Grunsky is a cinematographer based in Los Angeles. This story was adapted with permission from his blog._