Laurie Anderson Uses Tiny Cameras To Get The Big Picture

Producer Cheryl Kaplan describes Hidden Inside Mountains, the HD project created by Laurie Anderson for the 2005 World EXPO, which starts later this month in Aichi, Japan, as "a nonlinear narrative constructed from a series of short vignettes based on nature and time." The VariCam shoot relied on a nontraditional acquisition method – the use of tiny (3.15-inch long) ELMO MN 400 lipstick cameras – to create 480-line images within images that would hold up when projected within the final picture. The tiny cameras, sporting 4mm lenses, could be placed precisely to offer unusual perspectives on their subjects, including projecting live footage over parts of a scene as it’s being shot. "It’s almost like viewing a live performance," says Kaplan. Hailing from the art world rather than the film industry, Kaplan says her main regret when working in HD is that it’s difficult to convince curators of the need to install projectors that can display HD images at full-resolution.

"Still images that Laurie had created were projected onto objects and people using an Apple G4 laptop computer and Barco projectors. That was filmed with the Panasonic VariCam, but the complex part is that on top of it, we were adding a film-within-a-film layer. Laurie and some of the people in the film were using the Elmo lipstick camera to generate further images, which were shot with the VariCam in HD. And the lipstick cameras were hooked into the Barco projectors, which is why the sharpness was even more incredible. Everything is accelerated all the way around because the quality of the lipstick camera is so high to begin with, the quality of the Barco projector is high in its own way, and then the VariCam is capturing all the detail and putting it together.

"This is going to be shown on the largest AstroVision screen in the world, which is being created specifically for the World Expo. In the end, the AstroVision is a gigantic screen, but it’s NTSC, so it’s this odd thing of creating all of this in HD and going back through NTSC. It’s the tragic flaw that exists – in order to maintain these high production values all the way through, you have to follow through in terms of the projection. People think of shooting in HD, but it’s hard to show HD in a museum installation. People think that if you can just shoot in HD you’re fine, but they don’t realize that it has to be seen in HD.

"I’ve seen the differences between the [Sony] CineAlta and the Panasonic camera, and it’s interesting. There are subtle differences. But the Panasonic VariCam was capable of slowing down and speeding up, which was important. And the integral part of all this was the lipstick camera, which offered a small size and high quality. We were definitely syncing up the technology in terms of production values between the Elmo camera, the Panasonic VariCam and the Barco projector." - Cheryl Kaplan, Producer