Think of it as kind of a trial by fire for Richard Crudo, ASC, who recently took his first turn at the helm on a narrative feature. Last Night is an independent feature produced in Bucharest, Romania, with a 22-day shooting schedule and a modest budget. A blizzard coated the ground with two and a half feet of snow on the night he arrived.

Crudo has earned 25 cinematography credits for a diverse array of narrative films since 1994, including American Buffalo, Music from Another Room, Outside Providence, American Pie, and Brooklyn Rules. With the main exceptions of cinematographer Bill Trautvetter from the United States and Bob Crippen, an AD from Canada, Crudo’s production team primarily consisted of natives of Romania.

“There is a vibrant film community in Romania that is producing four or five motion pictures a year,” he says. “Last year, one of them, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, won awards at festivals and in the Golden Globes Foreign Language Film category.”
Castel Film Studios, a Romanian company, provided a broad range of support services, including camera crewmembers, equipment rentals, assistance in location scouting, arrangements for stage rentals, set construction, and catering. Cinelabs Romania in Bucharest is certified by the KODAK IMAGECARE Program, which helps to train personnel and monitors quality control of negative processing.

Trautvetter had worked with Crudo as a camera operator and second unit cinematographer on five previous films. Their established relationship enabled them to hit the ground running. It was Crudo’s first collaboration with Crippen, who has compiled some 30 AD credits in 15 years. Crudo says they had an immediate rapport.

“Last Night is an action-adventure story set in Los Angeles with Steven Seagal cast in the leading role,” Crudo says. “A plague that turns people into vampires has wiped out much of the world’s population. A group of survivors is held up in a hospital that only has one way out. They have to make their way downstairs to an exit in a sub-basement while dodging vampires.”

Crudo and his team began three weeks of preproduction planning in Bucharest last January. Most of the film was shot on sets built in a former Russian watch factory. The building had a transparent ceiling, so people could work in daylight and eliminate the cost of using electricity around the clock. The ceiling was covered with a canvas material when the building was converted into a film studio.

“Serban Porupca (production designer) and his team did a terrific job of creating beautiful sets with limited means,” Crudo says. “The sets were designed to motivate light and darkness and to give us the freedom to place and move cameras. The gaffer also does the grip’s job in Romania, so Calin Catalin was a one-man electrical department.”

In addition to collaborating with his production team on set design and with Trautvetter, Catalin and Crippen on defining and planning execution of the visual grammar, Crudo structured the script and cast six actors in England for main roles via the Internet during preproduction. He explains that there was neither time nor budget for him to fly to London to interview actors.