Lately, cinematographer Dion Beebe—who works in both the commercial and feature film arenas and is represented by International Creative Management (ICM), Beverly Hills, Calif.—has felt like the go-to guy when it comes to DPing musical numbers. Although he says he isn’t sure why, it could have something to do with the fact that he shot Chicago, directed by Rob Marshall, which won the Academy Award for best picture last year. (Marshall is represented by bicoastal Moxie Pictures for spots.)
Beebe most recently worked on a choreographed piece that’s smaller in scale—literally. "Puppets," for the Public Broadcasting System (PBS), out of Fallon, Minneapolis, and directed by feature filmmaker Scott Hicks (Shine, Hearts in Atlantis) through Independent Media, Santa Monica, is an ad featuring two dueling marionettes in a puppet show.
The puppeteers’ able hands work double time to portray a dramatic fighting scene, while an audience of wide-eyed children sits transfixed. The lighting is dark and moody, and the music has an action adventure-like quality, which adds to the drama. At the play’s climax, one puppet, who sits atop a horse, backs his opponent up against a staircase. A close-up on the dominant puppet’s face gives the viewer an eerie sense that he is weighing a decision. Suddenly, he looks up at the puppeteers and the strings that bind him. Making a quick decision, the marionette cuts himself free from his wires and gallops off the stage, pausing to rear his horse up on its hind legs in triumph before riding away. The tag: "Be More Independent."
According to Beebe, the biggest challenge from a DP’s perspective was shooting in a miniature world. "The puppets were real, so we set up a stage and built a marquee," he recalls. "Then we used shift and tilt lenses to control the plane of focus on the lens because the close-ups on [the puppets’] faces were quite key." Beebe, who also served as DP on another Hicks-directed spot for PBS called "Skunk," notes that there wasn’t any time to run tests with the lenses. For him, it’s just a matter of knowing in advance what’s required.
"That’s the difference between commercials and features—there’s not a lot of prep time," states Beebe. "As a commercial DP, you’re faced with such a range of challenges that the more you do it, the better you become, and it trains you to deal with different technologies. There’s a whole other mental approach when I take on a film. With commercials, there’s a different rhythm of working. It’s a lot more intense, and you have to build relationships a lot faster."
Crossover
Beebe—who received an Oscar nomination for Chicago, and recently worked on the just-released In the Cut, directed by Jane Campion—has averaged shooting two feature films a year since the early ’90s. He fits commercial work in between, and says that he tends to get most of his spot jobs through feature directors.
He recently shot a three-spot eBay package out of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco, with director Sam Mendes (Road to Perdition, American Beauty), who is represented for commercials by Moxie Pictures. Beebe’s also shot ads with the likes of Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity, Swingers), who directs commercials via Independent Media, and Lisa Cholodenko (Laurel Canyon, High Art), who helms ads via Form, Los Angeles. Yet Beebe has been operating in the spot world long enough to get awarded jobs outside the feature film circuit. Most recently, Beebe collaborated with director Frank Todaro of bicoastal/international @radical. media on a Time Warner Road Runner spot out of Shepardson Stern + Kaminsky (SS+K), New York.
The Australian-born DP started his career after attending film school at the Australian Film Television and Radio School, Sydney. Upon graduating, he directed and DPed music videos and commercials through a Sydney-based company called Worlds End Productions for one year, from ’91 to ’92. In ’92, he got his first feature job, a film shot in New Zealand called Crush, directed by Alison Maclean. Around the same time, he opened a company in Sydney with his wife, director Unjoo Moon (Sorrow’s Child), called Deep Blue Productions, and started a commercial production arm known as In Deep Productions. In ’96, Beebe and Moon shuttered In Deep Productions and moved Deep Blue Films to Los Angeles so Moon could get her master’s at the American Film Institute, Los Angeles. Beebe subsequently signed with ICM in ’97.
While Beebe has briefly toyed with the idea of directing, he seems quite content to DP. "At the moment, I’m enjoying working with directors, plus I have a lot of other stuff going on," he says. "We’re planning a feature, a children’s ghost story that my wife is directing. She’s going to be ordering me around a lot."
