We chose the Panasonic Varicam for Where Have You Gone, Juan Jose a true story of two brothers who leave their poverty stricken family in Mexico to seek a better life in the United States. Juan Jose was perfect for the Varicam because the story called for ramping and off-speed work. The "Cine Gamma" enhancement, a circuit board that adds two stops of latitude, was also enticing attribute.

From a cinematographer's stand-point, the usual rules of HD applied: shoot "wide open" by utilizing neutral density filters and move the camera away from the subjects as much as possible to lose the depth-of-field inherent to HD and 16mm film. After discussion with the director, I locked in four different "looks" for the film during camera prep. One of the great time and money saving features of HD is being able to preprogram looks via internal camera menu manipulation, white balance, internal Kelvin filters and a variety of filters in front of the glass. Color saturation was enhanced by about ten percent through in-camera "matrix manipulation." Once that was established, looks were derived from filtration in front of the lens and white balance. For Juan Jose, we chose the following looks: Exterior Texas - 4300K filter, a 5.6K white balance and a Schneider ½ Black Frost: Interior Texas - 3200K filter, a 4K white balance and a Schneider ½ Black Frost; Exterior Mexico - 6300K filter, a 7.4K White Balance and a Tiffen Tobacco Filter. To really warm things up, we used for Interior Mexico -6.3K filter, 6.3 White Balance and a Schneider ½ Black Frost. With so much filtration and white balance manipulation, I tweaked the 9" HD monitor on a daily and sometimes hourly basis. The monitor precautions I took in the filed really paid off in post-production as the looks came out just as we anticipated. Mark estimated that the production saves almost $15,000 by avoiding colorization in Post.

The movie premiered at the Denver International Film Festival and the look so closely resembled film that viewers assumed that it was! For a High Definition DP, that is quite a compliment.