The Sundance documentary Plan C, directed by Tracy Droz Tragos, follows Francine Coeytaux and the team who established Plan C — a grassroots organization dedicated to expanding access to medication abortion.
DP Derek Howard
Droz Tragos follows the group as they look for ways to distribute abortion pills while following the letter of the law. Unmarked vans serving as mobile clinics distribute medication to those who cannot get help in their own states.
The doc was shot by DP Derek Howard and edited by Meredith Perry (who will be talking to us about her role in the film in the near future). We reached out to Howard, who got involved in Plan C near the start of production. “I believe there had been just a few research shoots completed before we really got the camera package organized and started getting out there filming,” he says.
Let’s find out more…
How did you work with the Tracy Droz Tragos? What direction were you given?
This was the second project I worked on with Tracy, so we had a little bit of experience working in the field together. Tracy owned the camera package we were using — Canon C500 Mark II with Cooke Panchro primes — so she has a good understanding of the technical side of things. We would agree on a few focal lengths we were going to favor and omit medium shots for the most part. I would have a lot of freedom in terms of composition and lighting, and we would often check in with each other about swapping primes at appropriate breaks. After a few shoots it became pretty intuitive as to when it would make sense to change lenses and go closer or widen out.
Once we got into a good groove, we didn’t have to communicate about these choices so much, and it just started to flow as the style was established. We were lucky to have an incredible editing team (Meredith Perry and Beth Kearsley, who cut on Adobe Premiere). They were putting together sequences throughout shooting so I could review what was making the cut and focus in on the style more precisely.
What about working with the colorist? What are some notes that you exchanged? Who was the colorist?
We graded Plan C using Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve with Brian Hutchings in several remote sessions over Zoom and using Frame io. We would do a quick pass of the entire film, establishing looks at the beginning of each scene, and then skip ahead to the next one so he could work independently once we’d set some parameters.
DP Derek Howard
Then after some days, we’d have another pass, make more detailed adjustments and just build things from there. A lot of the notes were to do with highlight control, color temperature shifts and depth enhancements. We wanted our heroes to have a warm and inviting aura and to lean in to certain seasonal shifts. Often, we’d want to create a feeling of more depth by darkening certain foreground or background areas and helping to direct the viewer’s eye. We would often key specific colors and have them pop in saturation to emphasize certain details, like someone’s nail art or the color of their eyes.
As you said before, you shot on the Canon camera?
Yes. We shot Plan C on the Canon C500 Mark II with Cooke Panchro/i Classic primes in Super 35mm crop sensor mode. This camera is an ideal choice because it is small and lightweight, can record continuously for long periods of time with minimal battery consumption, and has internal Rawlite. The Cooke Panchro primes are a fantastic pairing with this camera, as they are compact, fast and have a nice softening translation of the image that cuts the digital sharpness and has very pleasing flares and bokeh.
DP Derek Howard
Can you talk lighting?
I took advantage of available lighting as much as possible, positioning subjects close to windows or away from direct light sources. Overhead lighting fixtures would be turned off, and sometimes we would use practical lamps for a little lift in the ambient levels. On very few occasions, I would use some 750-watt tungsten lamps shot through diffusion to key an interview and sometimes some bounce or white cloth to lift faces.
Are there some scenes that stick out as challenging?
The biggest challenge while shooting Plan C was to find creative solutions for filming subjects who needed to remain anonymous. We would return to some of the subjects several times throughout the film, and they needed to have their identities protected, so I had to explore how to film an interview with them and capture their presence and vibe without showing any full faces.
We used long lenses, like a 75mm or 100mm, to film abstract details such as hands, feet, the edge of a face or a silhouette by a window. Over the course of a long interview, it gets difficult to find new angles and compositions, so searching for fresh ways to convey a subject’s presence without actually seeing them clearly was a big obstacle. We were able to overcome that mostly through experimentation and abstraction made possible in large part thanks to the prime lenses we were lucky to have available to us.
DP Derek Howard
Looking back on the film, would you have done anything different?
Of course. With every project, when you watch it, you can’t help but critique your own work and think about different things you would have done. So much time passes from production to premiere that by the time you are watching the final film, you always feel like you have evolved in your style or learned things that you would have applied to the shoot.
With Plan C, I would have liked to have a few portable, battery-powered fixtures, like an Astera tube or an MC Lite to quickly add little accents to a scene. Having compact, battery-powered lights than can produce any color you might need are super-handy and flexible if you need to adjust a scene super-quickly. Often in verité situations, there is no time for lighting, but having these types of fixtures allows for very fast enhancements that can help elevate a scene a lot.
Any tips for young cinematographers?
Pay attention to the content of a scene as closely as possible. Once you are feeling the moment and are as present as possible, you will intuitively operate the camera differently than if you are just focusing on all the technical factors. React to the emotions in each scene; allow your humanness to be a part of your handling.
Be as prepared and researched as possible before shooting, but during filming, turn that part of your brain off and work from the gut. All the prep is still inside you, but I find the best moments come when you put that in the background and let your intuition take the lead. Remember to look away from your monitor or eyepiece from time to time and look around the scene for other details or things that are happening out of frame that might be valuable to incorporate.
