This project resulted in Soos’ experimentation with Clairmont Camera’s SwingShift lenses (built by Century Precision Optics), which have bellows-like extensions which allow for greater flexibility in controlling focus and depth of field. He credits director/cameraman Samuel Bayer for bringing the equipment into the music video milieu, recalling, "I first saw a SwingShift [lens] used in the video for the Blind Melon song ’No Rain,’ in which Bayer did these beautiful shots of the band in a field of flowers. I picked up on it a year or two later. It was already an established look, but I really wanted to energize the technique, and I needed a song to motivate this dynamic approach."
In "The Beautiful People," Soos created an effect with the SwingShift lenses which he describes as "in-camera vignettes and vertical shifting of the image, as if a projector had lost its loop." While shooting, he and his crew deployed follow-focus gear to remotely manipulate the lens, lending the imagery its jumpy, blurry quality. Soos’ intention was to make artful use of "mistakes that most cinematographers try to avoid."
The Manson video was also the cameraman’s first application of mixed color temperatures. In blending a tungsten key source with ambient daylight-balanced bounce from an HMI fixture, Soos was thinking ahead to the postproduction process. "We lot of room to play within the telecine," he explains. "The daylight/ tungsten mix on the negative is usually enough to give the telecine artist enough chromatic separation within the scene to push and pull the contrast, colors, mids, blacks, and highlights in almost any direction. Lighting with color temperature in mind ultimately provides the most latitude for photographic printing."
The powerful subject matter of the "Beautiful People" piece contributed to an outcry against Marilyn Manson by conservative groups, and while Sigismondi accepts her role in the controversy, she remains somewhat uncertain as to what all the fuss is about. "It’s far beyond my comprehension," she says with a sigh. "When I hear things or read articles about people going crazy [over Manson], I wonder how they can be so blind to the irony it sounds as if they’re fanatics." She does concede, however, that she may have disrupted the slumber of some viewers "who have said that the tall figures in ’The Beautiful People’ are like characters from their nightmares." With a smile, Sigismondi adds, "But I think they’re the most beautiful creatures."
If the director’s imaginings are grist for the nightmare mill, it’s because these bizarre icons literally spring forth from her dreams. "It comes from the creative anxiety of having to come up with something in three or four days I’m constantly thinking about it. I fall asleep at three or four a.m., sometimes five, and I like to lie in bed when it’s dark and really quiet sometimes I have music on. I choose the early morning because, for me, the rest of the world has to be asleep. When waking or sleeping, you’re closest to the dream state, and that’s the state in which I get images that are completely finished. I keep a notebook next to my bed, and a lot of times I write in the dark, because if I turn the lights on everything disappears. I do little sketches [next to my writing] because I don’t know if I’ll be able to read my writing when I wake up. A lot of the Manson images came from that process."
After the success of "The Beautiful People," Sigismondi was courted by clients from all over the world. (She now divides her time between Toronto, New York, and London.) Her experiences amid the energy of her new, often overwhelming environment lent even more fuel to her fiery talent. "I was just walking around [Manhattan], getting bombarded with all of these images," she recalls. "I would do dangerously stupid things, like walk around at three a.m. with headphones on you should not do that! But those are the kind of things that put me on the edge and make me feel I’m alive. I would see something, say, in a store window, that would look like nothing during the day with people around. But seeing it at night, there was something about it." These nocturnal excursions directly inspired her next Manson video, "Tourniquet," in which a blue-skinned mannequin attempts to escape its confining environment; the singer himself is metamorphosed into an insect larva pinned to a wall.

http://www.theasc.com/protect/aug98/gothic/pg3.htm