Sure Shots

In the early 1980s, three friends embarked on what would become a 30-year adventure. Collectively known as Beastie Boys, the trio comprised Adam Yauch, Michael Diamond and Adam Horovitz aka MCA, Mike D and Ad-Rock, respectively. Though they grew out of New York City's punk scene, they soon embraced hip-hop, and as the years progressed, their creative output charted their growth as artists and as people.

Their rhymes were by turns incisive, hilarious, skewering and uplifting and could cover the gamut all in one song while the band's music videos set the bar for raw creativity. A number of those videos were directed by Yauch often under the guise of his fictional uncle, Nathaniel H rnblow r but a well-known handful, including those for the Ill Communication tracks Sure Shot and Sabotage, were directed by Spike Jonze in the early days of his own career.

Beastie Boys stopped being a band in 2012, when Yauch died from cancer, but Diamond and Horovitz then set about telling the group's story with the comprehensive Beastie Boys Book, which in turn inspired the recently released feature Beastie Boys Story. Directed by their old friend Jonze, the movie is a mashup of documentary and live performance, narrated by Diamond and Horovitz, who presented the show onstage to four sold-out theater audiences as cameras rolled for the movie.

To shoot the live performances, Jonze turned to cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw. The two had previously planned to collaborate on a music video that ultimately never rolled camera. He kept me on his radar, the cinematographer says, and then we spoke about Beastie Boys Story and the Netflix comedy special Aziz Ansari: Right Now, which we shot the month after.

Durald Arkapaw is herself a veteran of music videos, but capturing Beastie Boys Story's live, scripted performances in a theater setting with multiple cameras was an altogether new experience. They're not performing music, so our references were geared more towards live stage shows, she says. Mike Tyson had done a one-man show that Spike Lee directed [Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth], and we looked at that and a few other live shows. There's a great sense of connection that you get from watching these people tell their own story.

For the cinematographer, Beastie Boys Story began with a lot of rehearsing at the Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles, she notes. Jonze, Horovitz and Diamond, she explains, were working through the script onstage, and we brought in a camera and worked on the lighting design to see what we could pull off when we went on the road. We first went to Philadelphia, where we shot one show at the Tower Theater, and then we took it to Brooklyn, where we shot three shows in three nights at the Kings Theatre.

Cast and crew took advantage of further tech rehearsals in each venue, and the Philadelphia performance was like a rehearsal in a sense, but with an audience, the cinematographer says, noting that the final edit almost exclusively comprises footage from the Brooklyn performances. The repetition was great because there were so many elements that had to be cued. It was scripted, so we had teleprompters, and there were breaks where props would come in. There were so many elements I hadn't seen before in doing these types of live shows.

As they prepped the show in Los Angeles, Durald Arkapaw found Jonze to be decisive as well as receptive to suggestions. He knows exactly what he wants, but he's also super-collaborative, which is amazing. He'd be very clear, then I would show him something on camera, and we'd tweak from there and come up with what was best.

Beyond ensuring that Diamond and Horovitz would be comfortable with the script and that both cast and crew would be ready for the show's myriad cues, the rehearsals were important for making sure Spike and everyone loved the camera positions, the cinematographer notes. If we put one in the wrong place, we'd have wasted the whole show for that camera.

Inspired by an angle in Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth, one of those positions was achieved with a rail cam fitted with an 8mm lens and placed in the pit at the front of the stage, where it could track back and forth. Spike loves the wide lenses, Durald Arkapaw says. I think those shots are so cool because they remind you of when Beastie Boys were performing live.

To shoot the live shows, which took place in April 2019, the production employed six Alexa Mini cameras in total. We had 22 camera people on our team, the cinematographer says, operators, 1sts, 2nds, Steadicam, the rail-cam guys and our two DITs.

The A camera, operated by Andrew Fletcher, was on a Steadicam and moved throughout the theater onstage and through the audience with K-35 primes. As the nights went on, he would roam for different audience reactions, getting different vibes, Durald Arkapaw explains. He'd go up to the second tier and get wide shots from that position, which was really beautiful.

The B camera was the rail cam, while the C and D cameras, both with Panavision 3:1 SLZ3 135-420mm (T2.8) Primo zooms, were operated on bazookas from the front of the theater, center stage, to capture close-ups of Diamond and Horovitz. The E camera was on dolly track and wore a Panavision PZW 15-40mm (T2.6) Primo zoom to capture wide shots from the back of the theater. Finally, the F camera was placed in the stage wings with a Panavision 11:1 SLZ11 24-275mm (T2.8) Primo zoom to grab profiles of the two performers; for the final performance, the E camera was moved from its usual vantage and joined the F camera in the wings.

Some of the zooms were modified to get a more vintage look and take the edge off, the cinematographer shares. I've been working with Panavision Hollywood for many years, and [technical marketing manager]

LINK:	https://www.panavision.com/highlights/highlights-detail/sure-shots...
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