When he took on the job of lensing Apple iTunes’ "Concert," DP Barry Peterson faced a rather unusual challenge: satisfying the creative team from TBWA/Chiat/Day, Los Angeles; director Kinka Usher of House of Usher Films, Santa Monica—and 40 busy rock stars.
In the spot, which debuted earlier this spring, a young man fantasizes about entering a large concert hall and encountering all of his favorite recording artists—from Liz Phair to Iggy Pop to George Clinton to Lil’ Kim. He then proceeds to direct and organize the stars in order to create his own CD with the iTunes software. ("We’ll start with Liz—’Polyester Bride.’ ")
"The big thing with that shoot was everybody’s schedules," recalls Peterson, who is represented by United Talent Agency (UTA), Beverly Hills, Calif. "We had to make forty people happy without having them sit around and wait, so we needed to come up with a lighting scheme that would accommodate all of that."
While the boards initially called for two locations, the final ad "ended up being just the boy walking through the doors of the concert hall," Peterson explains. "With Kinka, I came up with a bottom-lit footlight. It was pretty traditional lighting for the stage, which meant I could move relatively quickly with everybody."
Happily—and somewhat surprisingly—there wasn’t a diva in the whole bunch of rock superstars. "The shoot went really smoothly," reports Peterson. "The people wound up being great, which was a relief. And Kinka is an incredibly decisive director, so you don’t waste any time doing things you don’t need to be doing."
Usher also welcomes input from the DP. "Since his background was originally in the camera department, he’s got a very good sense photographically," explains Peterson, who has previously shot three other spots for the director. "He’s very accommodating to DPs. When you say, ‘Kinka, it would look a lot better if we’d look left,’ he’ll go, ‘Oh, you’re right. Let’s look left.’ Whereas some directors would say, ‘No, he needs to come in from the right,’ just because that’s what they had on their minds, Kinka’s very much interested in making a good-looking picture."
Peterson appreciates that collaborative approach. "I think the longer I shoot, the more interested I am in the storytelling of whatever it is we’re doing," he says. "I enjoy collaborating with the director. It does us all good when [the film] looks better, and [the spot] works more cohesively. So I do whatever I can to get involved."
Early films
A self-described "Super 8 kid," Canadian-born Peterson says his interest in camerawork dates back to childhood. "Since I was twelve years old, I’d spend all my summers making my own short-subjects," he remembers. "I started out on Super 8, and then I bought a Bolex. During the Star Wars craze, I tried to introduce special effects into my little films."
Despite his childhood helming career, Peterson never considered becoming a director: "I wasn’t interested in that," he explains. "I just fell in love with shooting."
After high school, Peterson briefly relocated to Los Angeles, where he pursued his interest in special effects as an effects animation cameraman for the company Ultra Image.
Peterson later returned to Canada and worked as a commercial and music video DP in Toronto for several years before moving back to Los Angeles. While he was in Toronto, he met director Steve Chase, then of now defunct Fahrenheit—Chase is now a part of bicoastal Reactor Films. "Steve was doing a big Carlsberg Beer commercial," Peterson recalls. "He did half of it in America and half in Toronto. I shot the second half of it and from then on, we pretty much connected."
That connection has lasted. "We’ve probably done seventy-five big spots together," says Peterson, who DP’d Doritos’ "Laundromat" for Chase. That ad earned a silver Clio in 1999 in the direction/visual style category, and was one of several Doritos commercials featuring former Miss USA Ali Landry that the DP shot for Chase via BBDO New York.
Over the past 10 years, Peterson has worked with such top directors as Baker Smith of Harvest, Santa Monica; Ray Dillman of bicoastal Gartner; and McG, who directs spots out of A Band Apart Commercials, Los Angeles. Most recently, Peterson shot several Coors Light ads for McG out of FCB Chicago. One of the Coors Light spots debuted during the season finale of Friends.
But Peterson’s professional relationship with Chase remains particularly close. Besides sharing an affinity for action-oriented spotwork, the two have developed a form of shorthand: "He and I have done so much work together that I know his aesthetic. I know the type of shots that he’s interested in and the things that he likes."
Peterson doesn’t go back as far with Tim Burton, but he does have the distinction of being the only DP who has shot spots for the director: "He’s only done two [sets of] commercials, and I’ve done them both with him," Peterson relates. Last spring he traveled to Prague to lens Timex’s "Mannequin" and "Kung Fu" for Burton, who is represented for commercial work by A Band Apart 35mm, Los Angeles. The ads were done via Fallon, New York. "We’d shot together the year before on a French commercial [‘Gnome’ for Hollywood Gum, out of Euro RSCG, Paris]," remembers Peterson. "He’s a really collaborative guy. But I also think, when you work with someone like Tim, you have a preconceived notion as to what he would want in a specific shot. You say, ‘Well, it’s Tim Burton. He’s going to want it dark, and he’s going to want wild characters with big shadows on the walls because that’s what Tim Burton does.’ "
That is, in fact, what Burton and Peterson did with the Timex spots. Both of the imaginative ads—which depict futuristic action heroes battling otherworldly villains with the help of Timex watches—are so strikingly dark and shadowy that they’re practically black-and-white. "Mannequin" stars a female spy who impersonates a dummy to outwit her huge, bald-headed foe, while the Matrix-like "Kung Fu" features a black-clad, watch-wearing hero engaging in hand-to-hand combat with a series of bad guys.
Though the fighters in "Kung Fu" often appear to be moving in slow motion and floating through the air, Peterson points out, "there was not one special effect in that commercial, other than wire removal." Since the actors flipped and flew with the help of harnesses and wires, Peterson needed to devise a lighting scheme that wouldn’t interfere with the equipment. "We ended up coming up with an overhead, soft-box lighting technique that allowed cables to be run off on either side and in either direction," he says. "We were able to fly that around wherever the people were in the scene, and it still created a nice somber, overhead feel. The background was then lighted as a palette."
Feature Duties
These days, Peterson has been immersing himself in longer-form action sequences as DP of the MGM film Plague Season, directed by Ron Shelton. The movie—which stars Kurt Russell and takes place during the 1992 Los Angeles riots—is the second feature for the cinematographer, whose first was the Ben Stiller-directed Zoolander. "Since it’s a gritty story that concludes at the riots, we’ve been doing a lot of interesting camera movement," Peterson says of Plague Season. "There’s lots of Steadicam stuff, and we’ve been using some skinny shutter stuff in the action sequences to make them feel a bit more kinetic and edgy."
With both films, notes Peterson, his extensive advertising experience has served him well. "Commercially, you learn to do interesting images relatively quickly, quite often with very little money," he explains. "I think that’s why there’s a trend right now in movies to hire commercial cameramen."
For his part, Peterson still has no desire to direct. "Right now, I’m unbelievably happy," he states. "To be able to bounce between commercials and all the visual cues and tricks we learn there, and playing with the storytelling in movies—it’s really the best of both worlds."ƒ
