Creed
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How They Pulled Off Creed’s Two Biggest Shots: A-Camera Operator Ben Semanoff
There are few moments in cinema as iconic as Rocky Balboa bounding up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with Steadicam inventor Garrett Brown galloping alongside him off-screen. The technology for Brown’s camera stabilization system was new enough at the time that the seminal shot required a crew member to sprint behind Brown with two car batteries attached to the camera via jumper cables in order for the rig to function in the cold Philly winter. Creed, an expansion of the Rocky universe from Fruitvale Station director Ryan Coogler, offers a barometer for the Steadicam’s evolution with its […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Mar 14, 2016 -
“Front Street Gym is the Heartbeat of the Film”: Production Designer Hannah Beachler on Creed
When the original Rocky hit screens in December of 1976, the underdog tale’s titular pugilist was a slightly doughy, none-too-bright palooka who guzzled beer after fights and collected for a loan shark. Rocky even loses the climactic bout, but earns a personal victory by going the distance. In a decade cinematically defined by Travis Bickle, Deep Throat, and “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown,” that qualified as a rousing crowd pleaser. By the time Rocky IV arrived less than a decade later, Stallone’s southpaw was now a ripped, perfectly coiffed millionaire who practically ends the Cold War by breaking a hulking Soviet […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Dec 23, 2015 -
“Found Footage with Style”: Cinematographer Maryse Alberti on M. Night Shyamalan’s The Visit
As a teenager in the south of France, Maryse Alberti’s first two trips to the cinema led her impressionable eyes to Duel and Harold and Maude. If she’d instead began her cinematic journey with The Barefoot Executive and Escape From the Planet of the Apes, maybe she wouldn’t have become the cinematographer of The Wrestler, Happiness, When We Were Kings and Crumb. But the combined spell cast by Steven Spielberg and Hal Ashby – the great populist entertainer and the iconoclastic humanist – set Albert on a path that has led to a four-decade career pivoting between documentary and fiction. Alberti’s latest straddles […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Sep 21, 2015
