CREATION STORIES•ROBERTO SCHAEFER AIC ASC
ROBERTO SCHAEFER AIC ASC•CREATION STORIES The dawn of Creation Opposite: lower Ewen Bremner as Alan McGee This page, from top: Leo Flanagan (r) as young Alan with Jack Paterson (L) With co-star Suki Waterhouse McGee in reflective mood
SCREAMADELICA
.Photos courtesy of SKY
By Michael Burns
“I had two camera bodies, but only had one set of Canon K35 spherical prime lenses.” Schaefer adds. “I had to do cross coverage at times, which I don’t usually like to do. You want close matching lenses for cross coverage, but I only had one of each set. I worked out that the 32mm on 4K is a 24mm on 6K. I set one camera to be 6K, one to be 4K and so I had double lenses for everything. When you then do your final work back down to 4K, you don’t see the difference between them. My DIT, Nick Everett, built 6K and 4K framelines that would come on whenever we might swap, and we knew effectively what we were shooting to match to the 4K master.” There was a lot of Steadicam during the shoot, operated by Sebastian Barraclough who took on the A-camera role, and a large amount of dolly work. “For the therapy session at the rehab clinic, we had a dolly on circular tracks – two heads on one Dolly with short zooms. Seb and I could adjust our lens sizes and shoot across each other in parallel,” says Schaefer. “We also used the same set-up at the scene in California where Suki is interviewing Ewen. We had the dolly track circling their table at the swimming pool.”
Creation Stories, directed by Nick Moran, tells the story of iconic record-label boss Alan McGee and the influential label he founded. Creation Records ran between 1983 and 1999, releasing music from seminal British bands including The Jesus And Mary Chain, Primal Scream, Teenage Fanclub, Ride and Oasis.
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love that period, I love the music,” says Roberto Schaefer AIC ASC, cinematographer on the film. “I used to do a lot of music videos in the ‘80s in London. Nick and I had a Skype chat and hit it off, we just we clicked.” Moran, well-known for his acting performance in Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels (1998, DP Tim Maurice-Jones), directed Creation Stories from a script written by Irvine Welsh and Dean Cavanagh, with Ewen Bremner cast as the Glaswegian McGee. Produced by Burning Wheel Productions, the film co-stars include Suki Waterhouse and Jason Flemyng, with Leo Flanagan as the teenage McGee, and Moran himself as provocative impresario Malcolm McLaren. Schaefer, of course, is known for working with director Marc Forster on Monster’s Ball (2001), Finding Neverland (2004), The Kite Runner (2007), the James Bond 007 feature Quantum Of Solace (2008), and Machine Gun Preacher (2011) “I liked the music, I liked the story. I liked Nick and I liked the idea of shooting in London again. I hadn’t been there since Quantum Of Solace, so it was a good opportunity,” says Schaefer. “From the beginning Nick had a pretty strong idea on how he wanted it to look and feel. He sent me a ‘bible’, with every page of the entire movie mapped out.”
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Keen to lean on Schaefer’s expertise, Moran proved open to using this tome as a starting point. “We just talked about different concepts,” Schaefer recalls. “We got together and did a lot of location scouting, talking through possibilities of how to shoot it.”
Roll With It Creation Stories started shooting in London in 2019, after several weeks of prep. Originally Schaefer proposed celluloid film, but digital’s capacity for experimenting with multiple takes swayed Moran. “This was his third movie as a director, and I think he felt comfortable with having a little more leeway, being able to shoot more if he needed to,” says Schaefer who had no objection to digital capture, and who recommended using Sony Venice. “The colour science in the Sony Venice camera is gorgeous,” he says. “It allowed us to shoot pretty much as much as Nick wanted to. The Sony codec is not massive like a full RAW, so didn’t become a big hassle with either transcoding times on-set or storage, so economically it made sense.” Sony Venice and its flexible Rialto image sensor extension system came in handy shooting in very small spaces. “In the back of the Rolls Royce, we put a lens on the Rialto and put the camera on the floor right against the front seat. It facilitated a lot of camera angles that you couldn’t otherwise get,” says Schaefer. “The built-in ND wheel saved me half an hour a day: when I wanted to get less depth-offield it gave me the ability to quickly just change to a heavier ND and open up the lens. The 2500ISO base, which is beautiful, also allowed me better low-light shooting.
House Of Love Locations were all practical, and mostly very small. A house that was used for McGee’s family living room and a kitchen scene posed problems. “It didn’t have the right layout for Nick, nor for the scene, so the production designer, Matthew Button, really worked hard. Using one of their practical walls, he built three new walls around with a window,” says Schaefer. “We had to completely redo the kitchen and put a fake wall in there too. So it made everything even tighter.” Then there was the house used for both a party scene and where the young McGee encounters some drug-users. “That had a very narrow creaky staircase that barely held two people at once. We needed a dolly up there,” says Schaefer. “I got the Cobra Dolly from Chapman Leonard. You can’t sit on it,
The colour science in the Sony Venice camera is gorgeous but it’s got a column that goes up and down and you can push it. The stair wouldn’t hold the weight of anything else. Getting lighting up there was a problem too.” As this was a period piece, there were also considerations about costume and replacing vehicles. “Fortunately one of the producers has a cinema vehicle company, and he was able to bring in enough vehicles for each period,” says Schaefer. “However, in the bar that they go to in Soho for the Oasis celebration party, we couldn’t use much of the window because it was all modern cars going past, so we had to choose our framing very carefully.”
Shine On Shooting took place in June of 2019. “We had a beautiful summer, which helped us with the ‘modern day’ California scenes, all shot outside in Hertfordshire. We were trying to give those scenes a sort of overall warm golden feeling,” recalls Schaefer Conversely a cooler feeling was applied to British scenes. “Except for when McGee is high and going around Soho; that was all trippy colours,” he says. “Of course, when we shot the Glasgow scenes, and wanted grim overcast days, it was actually sunny. For the scenes when McGee was a kid, we added a little desaturation, brought it more towards brown. The scenes with him and his family were toned down, with a little bit more contrast.” Use of lighting and exposures helped achieve this on-set, as well as two prepared LUTs that Schaefer and Moran used when monitoring. “We had the ‘Polaroid LUT’ that was really like ‘60s Polaroid colour film,” Schaefer says. “We applied that for all of the scenes when McGee was a kid. And then we had the ‘Modern LUT’, for when we were in the present. We also tweaked that a bit during final colour in the DI. “I didn’t use anything bigger than ARRI 12K Fresnels on this,” he adds. “I also had some 6Ks and 4Ks. I had a bunch of LiteMats from LiteGear, because you can get them into some locations where it’s too small to put anything else, as well as Kino Flo and some Kino LED fixtures. We used lots of practicals, and when we shot in the nightclub we used some club lighting.” Rock ‘n’ Roll Stars “Nick really had his head wrapped around everything, and the producers were all on our side,” Schaefer recalls. “They’re all good and they helped a lot.” Also of note are the contributions of Barraclough and Tom Taylor, who was first AC. “I honestly could not have done that movie without those two, they just made it so seamless for me,” Schaefer says. “They knew how to move forward. Seb is a great Steadicam operator and is great with coming up with ideas for shots, ways to deal with things. “For the scenes shot in Glasgow, I was booked on to something else and so Seb shot those pieces. Originally they were supposed to be a couple of inserts of buildings, and then they built that into some scenes. “Nick Everett the DIT was a brilliant help,” continues Schaefer. “He was like my right hand. With his eye on the monitor, he kept me right in my ear.” He also salutes costume designer Nat Turner and production designer Button, and their teams. “They were great,” he says. “The whole supporting crew, whatever level they were at, were all gung-ho. It was a very collaborative effort between all the departments. “And it was a lot of fun,” he adds. “Although I never got to shoot music videos of any of the bands that are in Creation Stories, I did shoot U2 and many other bands that were important at the time and part of that scene, and this brought me back to all that.” CINEMATOGRAPHY WORLD MAY 2021 55
