16 minute read
STUDENT UNION•LONDON SCREEN ACADEMY
SCREAMADELICA
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.
Ilove 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.”
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.
“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.”
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,
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.”
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
TATTOO YOU
After shooting Nadine Labaki’s acclaimed, Oscarnominated and Cannes Film Festival-winning film Capernaum (2018), Lebanese cinematographer Christopher Aoun BVK has been in high demand and freely admits that choosing his next project can be a tricky task.
“I like films whose small stories tell bigger ones about the human condition, and it has not been easy for me to be satisfied with a lot of the scripts I have read since shooting Capernaum,” he says. “I am fascinated by the process of creating and deciding on how to translate a script into images which become alive. I like to work on projects that feel close to, or shed light on, people’s realities - to dive deep into those lives and to try to understand human beings using the amazing and perceptive storytelling tool that a camera can be. So I’m always asking myself which film to shoot next.”
One project that fitted the bill was Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Man Who Sold His Skin, Aoun’s third full-length feature. Inspired by Belgian contemporary artist Wim Delvoye’s living artwork ‘Tim’ (2006), the €2million internationally co-produced drama follows a Syrian man who, in order to get to Europe and be with the love his life, accepts having his back tattooed by an artist.
The stylish and vivid film premiered in the Horizons section at the 77th Venice International Film Festival, where its lead, Yahya Mahayni, won the Best Actor Award. It was also selected as Tunisia’s submission to the 93rd Academy Awards, where it was nominated for Best International Feature Film.
Aoun himself has been widely praised for bringing a blend of lustrous textures and compositions to the screen with a confident painterliness in support of a narrative that mixes art and human rights.
The story itself follows lovers Sam and Abeer who are separated as political tensions erupt in Syria in 2011. Whilst Sam seeks refuge in Lebanon, Abeer’s family forces her to marry a rich diplomat and move with him to Brussels. In desperate pursuit of the funds, and necessary paperwork, to travel to Europe to rescue her, Sam accepts having his back elaborately tattooed - in the form of a Schengen visa, which allows travel to and across EU countries -by controversial contemporary artist Jeffrey Godefroi (Koen De Bouw). Sam’s body is turned into a living work of art and he effectively becomes a human canvas, promptly exhibited in a museum. But he soon realises he has sold much more than just his skin.
Ben Hania, who is based in Paris, is a multi-award winner for her documentaries, including Le Challat De Tunis (2013, DP Sofian El Fani) and Zaineb Hates The Snow (2016, DP Kaouther Ben Hania), and the feature film Beauty And The Dogs (2017, DP Johan Holmquist). Aoun, who was born in Beirut and who now lives in Berlin, studied cinematography at the Université Saint Joseph De Beyrouth and the University Of Television & Film Munich.
“Kaouther and I have similar paths, both coming from the Arabic world and both now living in Europe,” Aoun recalls. “We had never met before, but I had watched Beauty And The Dogs and we connected very quickly on The Man Who Sold His Skin.
“What I liked about her script was the perspective of melodrama in the manipulative art world to tell a story about freedom. Kaouther had already storyboarded a lot of scenes in the film, and our initial conversations were about bringing these tableaux together to make them more homogenous, but keeping the essence of what she wanted through reflections, considered compositions and vibrant colours.”
Aoun also explains that, “Kaouther introduced me to the concept of ‘bi-colours’ - a term referring to a palette of pink, blue and lavender, inspired by the colours of bisexual pride symbolism. Bisexual pride means that no matter what the sex of your partner is, you prefer to be identified as bisexual rather than heterosexual or homosexual. We were inspired by this because in the film we want to question how human beings are always categorised - in our case by lines on a map or a simple piece of paper to put us in a limited box. We combined this idea with the colours in the Schengen visa itself in our consideration of the colour arc in the story.”
The vast majority of visual references for the film spanned the history of art, from Renaissance and Baroque to contemporary artists, together with stylish photographs of art galleries and installations that Ben Hania had shot herself. Movie touchstones included vividly-photographed features, such as Wong Kar-Wai’s In The Mood For Love (2000, DP Chris Doyle), Barry Jenkin’s Moonlight (2016, DP James Laxton) and David Leitch’s Atomic Blonde (2017, DP Jonathan Sela).
Production on The Man Who Sold His Skin took place between July and September 2019, over 35 shooting days, at locations in Marseilles, Brussels and Tunisia. After testing at Vantage in Weiden, Bavaria, Aoun elected to shoot using Hawk class-X Anamorphics combined with the Sony Venice camera. The camera was set to 4K resolution using an Anamorphic 4:3 image area on the sensor.
“I chose the Sony Venice, as it delivers a similarly pleasing image to the ARRI
Alexa in terms of colour and overall image expression, but it is more practical on-set,” he says. “I felt that features - such as the Venice’s large in-built ND range, its 500ISO base for typical cinematography applications with on-set lighting and high-base 2500ISO for dimly-lit environments, plus Rialto mode shooting - would help me to work faster, and be more flexible, especially in places like Tunisia, where conditions were not easy.
“Capernaum was a handheld, documentary, character-driven story, which I shot using Hawk C- Series Anamorphics and the ARRI Alexa. However, The Man Who Sold His Skin was not a realistic world. It needed a very different aesthetic quality to depict how our character’s mind might be his own, but his body belongs to someone else. I wanted to create visuals that put the audience in the position of a spectator, gazing at an artwork on display. With that in mind my thoughts, I tried to create a variety of different colours and textures using filtration throughout the movie, to put more layers between the spectator and the object in front of the camera.
“The Hawk class-X lenses are sharp and crisp, which I liked, but still have a human and emotional spirit to them, along with a nice bokeh. The image already had the Anamorphic effect of focussing the viewer’s eyes to the middle of the image, but I wanted to introduce extra layers of analogue texture on top of that from the moment when Sam does the deal with Jeffrey in the bar. So sometimes I had as many as seven or eight filters - such as gradients and diffusers - on top of each other to have warmer edges at the top and bottom of the frame, whilst keeping things cooler, brighter and crisp in the middle.”
Experimenting with colour in-camera still further, Aoun also reset the Venice’s white balance according to certain colours he had flooded into a particular scene through the lighting.
“For example, when Sam is at the doctor’s place I shifted the camera’s white over to the lavender pink of the lighting. This resulted in a normal look, but with interesting green shimmers,” he explains.
Lighting-wise, Aoun mainly deployed LED fixtures - such as ARRI SkyPanels, DMG Lumière SL1 Mix and Mini Mix’s, plus Astera Titan and Helios Tubes - to inject bright bold colours on-set. This particularly helped to bring vivid visual appeal to art gallery locations, which tended to be plain white. However, for bigger interiors spaces, already lit by existing lights such as chandeliers, he avoided mixed lighting, and opted to support the look using warm Tungsten illuminaires.
The final DI grade was conducted by colourist Dirk Meier at Post Republic in Berlin, where Meier and Aoun smoothed and blurred the edge contrast in certain scenes for what Aoun calls a ‘painterly effect.’
The DP’s crew comprised of a multi-national mix from France, Sweden, Belgium and Tunisia, including: Nestor Salazar as A-camera/Steadicam operator; Wafa Mimouni as focus puller; Mohamed Habib Ben Salem as gaffer; Gabrielle Delle as the DIT; and Patrick Llopis heading the grips.
“Unlike Capernaum, where I operated throughout, I did not shoot on this production. Although I wanted to grab the camera, I forced myself not to, controlled my emotions and trusted and encouraged the team to create the visual language Kaouther and I wanted, and we became a very good team.”
Aoun concludes, “This was a different type of artistic endeavour to Capernaum. I was very happy that I could switch between documentary and a more constructed form of cinematography. As much as I like telling stories from the Arab world, my goal is to keep moving and to explore other cultures and genres in the next stage of my career.”
Main: Skin trade - Yahya Mahayni stars in The Man WHo Sold His Skin Below: DP Christopher Aoun BVK
Photos: Christopher Aoun/ Samuel Goldwyn Films
