Dan Goldfarb Interview, Sept. 23, 2006

Dan Goldfarb : I got a call from Steven Antselevich and he said he needed me to go ahead and shoot this film for him, or this video and it was "Game Shop". I had never ever met Yuri [Shapochka] before. He said 'I've got this writer that wants to go ahead and do this and we need a 'cinematographer' to go ahead and do this'. So I sat down and I met with Yuri and we went over the script, Isaw the script and I was asking him a lot of questions about what he wanted, what it meant, how he wanted it lit, what the motivation was. And you really have to sit down and figure out what's in his mind, how I can take what's in his mind and make it so it's going to look decent in terms of a motion picture or video presentation.

Reelscene : Did you take any individual elements and try to interpret them in a certain way or did Yuri more or less give you a basic set of how he wanted the lighting to go in the scene?

Dan Goldfarb : I just asked him what he was trying to say with each individual scene and each individual shot. By what he wanted and what was important I either setup the depth of field or set up the lighting or I set up the composition or I set up the millimeter on the lens to take that in. Depending on what he wanted to say with the individual shots.

Reelscene : The final release was in black and white or monochrome format. Did you make any adjustments in production for that or was it just strictly a color shot that was corrected in post production down to a grey scale?

Dan Goldfarb : Well now, what I did was I basically shot it as if I was going to do something with it in terms of black and white. For example, I used a green gel on a dimmer that was under the cash register and normally that would not work.

Reelscene : This would have been for the shot of the main character.

Dan Goldfarb : Of Alik [Antselevich].

Reelscene : Well the actor was Alik.

Dan Goldfarb : Alik. He was the guy in the Game Shop, he was the sales person behind the counter. Normally that amount of green would not work. It could possible work if someone had one of those old time green monitors that they used to use for computers...(beep- beep, beep-beep, beep-beep).. and there's my watch going off. Any how. What I did was because I knew it was going to be in black and white I went ahead and pumped in a little more green from the bottom of his throat up into his face to make him look really pale and change the contrast as if the Game Shop was making him look sick. And it translated into that in black and white even though they took out all the color, it worked beautifully.

Reelscene : Plus it brought out a little bit more texture...

Dan Goldfarb : It brought out texture on his face and also green will increase contrast, and make him look very pale in some ways and bring out contrast in others. When you light someone from the bottom they're not going to look that great anyhow. So, what I wanted to do is to change the contrast and make him look a little sick and the green happened even if it was black and white, it made it work.

Reelscene : So this was a contribution to the overall effect of the film.

Dan Goldfarb : Yeah. You've got to know filtration if you're going to work in video. There's a lot of people out there that have an idea [that] they can just take a camera and shoot it. But what it generally turns out to be a lot of the time is like saying something with an Instamatic camera. If you don't pay attention to your tools, you're not using them effectively. You have to pay attention to your tools, you have to know what to do with your tools in order to say something with it.

Reelscene : Well thank you very much.