Cinematography World November 2021 (CW006)

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THE ART AND CRAFT BEHIND THE CAMERA

INSIDE THIS ISSUE LINUS SANDGREN FSF ASC•ARI WEGNER ACS•ALICE BROOKS ASC•EDU GRAU AEC ASC•RACHEL CLARK•CLAIRE MATHON AFC•CHUNG-HOON CHUNG•GREIG FRASER ACS ASC ROBBIE RYAN ISC BSC•MATTHEW LEWIS•ROBERT YEOMAN ASC•DARIUSZ WOLSKI ASC•DARIA D’ANTONIO•ELI ARENSON•JOHN PARDUE BSC•HARIS ZAMBARLOUKOS BSC GSC

Celebrating Cinematography A Chiara Tim Curtin. American Latina Paolo Carnera AIC. As In Heaven Marcel Zyskind DFF. A Metamorfose dos Pássaros (The Metamorphosis of Birds) Paulo Menezes. A Quiet Place 2 Polly Morgan ASC, BSC. Artemis Fowl Haris Zambarloukos BSC, GSC. Asteroid City Robert D. Yeoman ASC. Babi Yar. Context Sergei Loznitsa. Babylon Linus Sandgren FSF, ASC. Bad Hair Topher Osborn. Beba Sophia Stieglitz. Beginning Arseni Khachaturan Bergman Island Denis Lenoir AFC, ASC, ASK. Blue Bayou Ante Cheng, Matthew Chuang ACS. Bones and All Arseni Khachaturan. Censor Annika Summerson. Chemical Hearts Albert Salas. Compartment No. 6 Jani-Petteri Passi. Crisis Nicolas Bolduc CSC. Da 5 Bloods Newton Thomas Sigel ASC. Death On The Nile Haris Zambarloukos BSC, GSC. Detours Alexey Kurbatov. Diários de Otsoga (The Tsugua Diaries) Mário Castanheira AIP. Doc Martin Simon Archer BSC. Eight For Silver Sean Ellis.

Earthearthearth Daïchi Saïto. Été 85 (Summer of 85) Hichame Alaouie. Euphoria Rina Yang | Marcell Rév HSC. Eyimofe (This Is My Desire) Arseni Khachaturan. Février (February) Ivan Chertov. Flag Day Daniel Moder. Futura Ilya Sapeha. God’s Creatures Chayse Irvin ASC, CSC. Holler Dustin Lane. I Know This Much Is True Jody Lee Lipes ASC. Inexorable Manuel Dacosse SBC. Inherent Sebastian Bjerregaard. Jurassic World: Dominion John Schwartzman, ASC. Killers of the Flower Moon Rodrigo Prieto ASC, AMC. Last And First Men Sturla Brandth Grøvlen DFF. Last Night In Soho Chung-Hoon Chung. Le Bal des Folles (The Mad Woman’s Ball) Nicolas Karakatsanis. Le Sel Des Larmes (The Salt Of Tears) Renato Berta. Liquorice Pizza Paul Thomas Anderson | Michael Bauman. Los Conductos (Encounters) Guillaume Mazloum. Malcolm and Marie Marcell Rév HSC. Mare Erol Zubcevic. Master of None Mark Schwartzbard, Thimios Bakatakis GSC. Memoria Sayombhu Mukdeeprom. Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always Hélène Louvart AFC. Nope Hoyte Van Hoytema ASC, NSC, FSF. Nordsjøen (North Sea) Pål Ulvik Rokseth FNF. Notes From The Underworld Rainer Frimmel. No Time To Die Linus Sandgren FSF, ASC. On The Rocks Philippe Le Sourd ASC, AFC. Otac (Father) Aleksandar Ilic. Passion Simple (Simple Passion) Pascale Granel. Paradise Drifters Jasper Wolf NSC. Play it Safe Jaime Ackroyd. Preparations To Be Together Róbert Maly. Red Rocket Drew Daniels. Safe Anna Franquesa Solano. She Rafael Leyva. Small Axe Shabier Kirchner. Sorry We Missed You Robbie Ryan BSC, ISC. Sound Of Metal Daniël Bouquet NSC. Sous le ciel d’Alice (Skies of Lebanon) Hélène Louvart AFC. Spencer Claire Mathon AFC. Ste. Anne Kristiane Church, Amanda Kindzierski, Lindsay McIntyre, Rhayne Vermette, Erin Weisgerber. Succession Patrick Capone, Christopher Norr. Tenet Hoyte Van Hoytema ASC, NSC, FSF. The 40 Year-Old Version Eric Branco. The Banker Charlotte Bruus Christensen ASC. The Devil All The Time Lol Crawley BSC. The Eddy Julien Poupard AFC, Eric Gautier AFC. The Eternal Daughter Ed Rutherford. The Fablemans Janusz Kaminski. The French Despatch Robert D. Yeoman ASC. The Inheritance Ryan Petey. The King Of Staten Island Robert Elswit ASC. The Nest Mátyás Erdély HSC. The Northman Jarin Blaschke. The Parents’ Room (La Chambre des parents) Pierluigi Laffi. The Phantom of the Open Kit Fraser.

The Souvenir: Part II David Raedeker. The Starling Lawrence Sher ASC. The Story Of My Wife Marcell Rév HSC. The Tango Of The Widower Diego Bonacina. The Two Sights Joshua Bonnetta. The World To Come André Chemeto. The Worst Person in the World Kasper Tuxen DFF. The United States vs Billie Holiday Andrew Dunn BSC. The Velvet Underground Edward Lachman ASC. Tonalli Colectivo Los Ingrávidos. Tove Linda Wassberg. Train Again Peter Tscherkassky. Two Against Nature Sean Price Williams. Un Beau Matin (One Fine Morning) Denis Lenoir ASC, AFC, ASK. Untitled Lakers Project Todd Banhazl. Val Keelan Carothers.

Vengence is Mine, All Others Pay Cash Akiko Ashizawa JSC. Wendy Sturla Brandth Grøvlen DFF. West Side Story Janusz Kaminski. Westworld John Conroy ISC, Peter Flinckenberg FSC. What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? Faraz Fesharaki. White Bird Matthias Koenigswieser. White Noise Michael Seresin BSC, NZSC. Wonder Woman 1984 Matthew Jensen ASC. Zanka Contact Benjamin Rufi. Zola Ari Wegner ACS.

Rascals Publishing & Media Ltd! Red Lion Yard, Odd Down, Bath United Kingdom BA2 2PP Tel: +44 (0) 1428 746 375 Editor-in-Chief RON PRINCE ronny@cinematography.world Special Consultant ALAN LOWNE alan@cinematography.world Editorial Assistant KIRSTY HAZLEWOOD kirsty@cinematography.world Advertising Manager CLAIRE SAUNDERS claire@cinematography.world Subscriptions & Social Media CHLOÉ O’BRIEN chloe@cinematography.world Web Manager IAIN HAZLEWOOD iain@cinematography.world Art Direction & Creative Kinda Stuff JAM CREATIVE STUDIOS adam@jamcreativestudios.com tim@jamcreativestudios.com

CONTACT US News hello@cinematography.world Ad sales & Subscriptions +44 (0) 1428 746 377 Artwork artwork@cinematography.world +44 (0) 1428 746 375 www.cinematography.world

EDITORIAL TEAM Ron Prince has over three decades of experience in the film, TV, CGI and VFX industries, and has written about cinematography for 20 years. In 2014, he won the ARRI John Alcott Award from the BSC. He also runs the international content marketing and PR communications company Prince PR.

*Productions released, shot or in production in 2020/2021.

© 2021 Kodak. Kodak and the Kodak logo are trademarks.

1ST

OUR ANNIVERSARY

DP Stephen Lighthill ASC, president of the ASC

Launched in lockdown and cradled through the Covid pandemic, Cinematography World has reached the grand old age of… one! To mark this momentous milestone, the extraordinary edition you are holding in your hands is crammed with more stories about more cinematographers than ever.

Cinematography World is created by people who care about the international community of cinematographers. Our first six editions have included the work of more than 70+ DPs around the globe, along with many associated features and articles – all researched and written by a team of outstanding correspondents.

This has fuelled the rapid and continual growth of our reach: to over 60 countries worldwide, via our print magazine; views from 120 countries on our website; and more than 31,000 receiving our regular newsletters; and, the figures keep on rising.

Whilst we are passionate about what we do, we extend a wholehearted and thunderous ‘thank you’ to all of our well-wishers, supporters, advertisers and readers, without whom this success would not have been possible.

Although we are celebrating our first year, we do so with torn emotions, as it comes at a time when DP Halyna Hutchins lost her life on a film set. The global village in which we work means that we are all connected and affected by this heart-breaking, appalling and avoidable tragedy. It is with these thoughts that we dedicate this edition to Halyna, and send our deepest condolences to her family, loved ones, friends and colleagues.

Thank you. Stay safe. Keep reading Cinematography World!

“Count” Iain Blair is a British writer/musician who lives in LA and writes extensively about film/entertainment for outlets including LA Times, Variety and Reuters. He interviews movie stars, as well as Hollywood’s top filmmakers.

Darek Kuźma is a film and TV journalist, translator/interpreter, and a regular collaborator/programmer of the EnergaCamerimage Film Festival.

He is an ardent cinephile who has a lifelong romance with the visual language of cinema.

David Wood is a freelance journalist covering film/TV technology and production. He was a former technology editor at Televisual, and is a regular contributor to Worldscreen, TVB Europe and Broadcast.

Kirsty Hazlewood has over two decades of editorial experience in print/ online publications, and is a regular contributor to folk/roots music website Spiral Earth.

Ron Prince Editor in Chief ronny@cinematography.world

Michael Burns has covered film, broadcast, VFX, animation and interactive design, in print and online, for 20 years, for publications including IBC Daily, Digital Arts, TVB Europe and Broadcast Tech.

Michael Goldman is an LA-based award-winning, journalist/author, specialising in the art, technology and people involved in filmmaking and cinematography. He is a long-time contributor to American Cinematographer and CineMontage.

Natasha Block Hicks is an artist/designer/maker, who spent a decade as a freelance film and TV camera assistant, and indulges her love for cinema and cinematography through research and writing.

Oliver Webb is a film graduate/freelance journalist based in Barcelona, and is the founder/editor of CloselyObservedFrames. His interests include screenwriting, British New Wave cinema and the works of Ingmar Bergman.

#SHOOTFILM Learn more at Kodak.com/go/motion

We must start a conversation about functional guns on sets. There is no place for weapons that can kill on a motion picture

Ron Prince photo by Joe Short www.joeshort.com

Thank you to the cinematographers who choose Film

ISSUE 006•CINEMATOGRAPHY WORLD

Cover Image: Daniel Craig as 007 James Bond in No Time To Die, an EON Productions & Metro Goldwyn Mayer Studios film. © 2020 DANJAQ LLC and MGM. All Rights Reserved.

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CINEMATOGRAPHY WORLD NOVEMBER 2021 3

Beautiful look.

Full control.

ISSUE 006•CINEMATOGRAPHY WORLD

INSIDE

ISSUE 006 NOVEMBER 2021

ZEISS Supreme Prime Radiance Lenses ZEISS Supreme Prime Radiance lenses enable cinematographers to create beautiful, consistent and controlled flares in the image while maintaining contrast and avoiding transmission loss. Yet, they offer all the attributes of a modern cinema lens: largeformat coverage, high speed of T1.5, robustness and smooth and reliable focus.

From the inventors of antireflective lens coatings. Made in Germany. zeiss.com/cine/radiance

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DARREN SMITH MD MBS •VIEW FROM THE TOP

22 SPENCER

PRODUCTION NEWS IMAGO NEWS WHO, WHAT, WHEN & WHERE CLAIRE MATHON AFC•SPENCER CHUNG HOON CHUNG•LAST NIGHT IN SOHO GREIG FRASER ACS ASC•DUNE ROBBIE RYAN ISC BSC•C’MON C’MON

26 DUNE

MATTHEW LEWIS•BOILING POINT LINUS SANDGREN FSFS ASC•007 NO TIME TO DIE STUDENT UNION•ŁÓDŹ FILM SCHOOL SMOOTH OPERATOR•RODRIGO GUTIERREZ ACO ARI WEGNER ACS•THE POWER OF THE DOG ALICE BROOKS ASC•TICK, TICK . . . BOOM EDU GRAU AEC ASC•PASSING

34 007 NO TIME TO DIE

RACHEL CLARK•PIRATES CAMERIMAGE 2021•PREVIEW ROBERT YEOMAN ASC•THE FRENCH DISPATCH DARIUSZ WOLSKI ASC•LAST DUEL & HOUSE OF GUCCI DARIA D’ANTONIO•THE HAND OF GOD ELI ARENSON•LAMB

52 PIRATES

JOHN PARDUE BSC•ANGELA BLACK HARIS ZAMBARLOUKOS BSC•BELFAST SPOTLIGHT•LITEGEAR GAFFER’S CAFÉ •MICHAEL AMBROSE SHOOTING GALLERY•CAMERIMAGES

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VIEW FROM THE TOP•DARREN SMITH, MD, MBS GROUP UK & EUROPE

ScreenSkills: supporting growth and recovery UK-wide

DON’T LOOK DOWN

Being asked to write a ‘view from the top’ might somehow suggest that we are already there. Whilst it is true that the MBS Group has come a long way since forming, I assure you that there remains plenty left to achieve.

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s a company, we are of course, totally committed to supporting the productions and crews with whom we work. However, as is widely documented, subjects including diversity, community outreach and sustainability, are now such important factors in everything we do. These topics are relevant to us all, not only in the field of production, but throughout all types of businesses, the world over.

Being asked to write a ‘view from the top’ might somehow suggest that we are already there. Whilst it is true that the MBS Group has come a long way since forming, I assure you that there remains plenty left to achieve.

As a company, we are of course, totally committed to supporting the productions and crews with whom we work. However, as is widely documented, subjects including diversity, community outreach and sustainability, are now such important factors in everything we do. These topics are relevant to us all, not only in the field of production, but throughout all types of businesses, the world over.

Globally, our industry is acutely aware of the need to deliver improvements in sustainable performance – and there is some phenomenal work being carried out to instigate and deliver change at the ‘front end’. We should, however, also reference the work being done in the wings; throughout the rental houses, services and facilities sectors. It’s here where these important issues are being addressed, on a daily basis.

At the MBS Group, it’s our people who are our greatest asset, the beating heart of our organisation.

The warehouses, offices and depots, where teams are busy prepping, testing and cleaning equipment, may seem a far cry from the glamour of Hollywood.

Maybe the names won’t feature in the end credits, but the parts being played here are no less important in keeping our business moving. I have the utmost respect for these ‘back-room stars’ and the invaluable contribution they make.

Many of these folk may have never stood on a movie set, but they are diligently working, quite literally behind-the-scenes, to support production at all levels – and it’s here, through our work both in the Europe and the US, that MBS is creating opportunities that are available to all areas of the community.

As companies grow, the emphasis has to be on the ‘extras’ we can supply, to help build a more sustainable future, within our industry and beyond.

Without a skilled, properly trained workforce, we would have no industry at all. We therefore need

MBS is creating opportunities that are available to all areas of the community to ensure we maintain the capacity to nurture new talent, to provide the training that will help safeguard our futures.

I am proud to be part of an organisation that is helping to make a difference.

As we further develop the MBS business, exploring new disciplines and expanding into new territories, we are building and infrastructure which transcends the ‘traditional’ boundaries of the movie industry. By working closely with community groups and local councils, we are able to deliver education and outreach programmes which, in turn, benefit the whole area.

When starting out, I never envisaged that we would one day be holding career days or

6 NOVEMBER 2021 CINEMATOGRAPHY WORLD

arranging educational visits designed to inspire the next generation of filmmakers. But, of no less equal importance is having the chance to inform and educate on the very real career opportunities being made available to the technicians, drivers and office personnel, who play such vital roles in our industry.

It is important to let the kids out there know that a ‘career in the movies’ doesn’t have to be reliant on securing a spot on reality TV. The gaffers, electricians and cinematographers of the future, need to be made aware that these vocations are achievable – as do those working at a grass roots level.

Factors such as localised recruiting, sourcing via local supply chains and re-thinking some of the ways in which we work, all contribute to improving performance and boosting economic growth.

Extending our workforce, to include training and sustainability personnel, tasked not only with setting internal targets, but with making sure we are held accountable for our actions. Operating responsibly, to our full potential, all helps us contribute to the regional well-being of the areas in which we operate Of course, we’ll never lose sight of our prime directive, to provide the finest service, equipment and production support available. This is what we do. Our investment in sustainable technology remains relentless. The innovation we are introducing is changing the way crews are lighting modern sets.

However, it is perhaps the less tangible results of our endeavours that stand to truly make a difference – our investment in the people who will help build a future for us all.

No doubt, there is still plenty to be done, however, as an industry we should perhaps allow ourselves a moment, just to recognise some of the steps that are already being taken to address the important issues we face.

Whilst ‘the top’ might appear to be in view, there is no space for complacency. By working together with local communities to create opportunities for all, we can help lay the foundations that will allow future generations to aim high. Just remember, whatever you do, don’t look down.

Darren Smith Managing Director MBS Group United Kingdom and Europe

You can’t make great film, TV and animation without investing in the people Read the stories of the people we support at screenskills.com

PRODUCTION & POST NEWS

PRODUCTION & POST NEWS

TRAGEDY AS DP HALYNA HUTCHINS IS KILLED ON-SET

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ews about the averted strike

by US film and TV workers was completely overshadowed when it was reported that cinematographer Halyna Hutchins had been killed on-set, with director Joel Souza seriously injured.

Hutchins, who was married with a young child, and was named as a “Rising Star” by American Cinematographer in 2019, was rushed to the University Of New Mexico Hospital by air ambulance, but was later pronounced dead. The incident occurred on the set of Rust, an independent feature that was filming at the Bonanza Creek Ranch, a popular production location south of Santa Fe. The Santa Fe County Sheriff’s office said in a statement that Hutchins and Souza were shot when a prop firearm was discharged by 68-year-old Alec Baldwin, who is the producer and actor for the new film, which is about an accidental killing.

Hutchins’s death is another devastating tragedy for workers in the film industry, echoing the accidental on-

set deaths of British camera operator Mark Milsome, who was fatally struck by a Land Rover whilst filming BBC drama Black Earth Rising in 2017, and Sarah Jones, the US camera assistant on Midnight Rider who was killed by a train during filming.

A public vigil for Hutchins in Los Angeles served both as an unofficial memorial event and an outlet for anger over working conditions in Hollywood

that many believe were linked to the 42-year old mother’s death.

IATSE’s international vice-president, Michael

Miller, said, “We’re here to mourn. But I’m afraid we are also gathered with some frustration and anger that, all too-often, the rush to complete productions and the cutting of corners, put safety on the backburner and crew members at risk.”

Stephen Lighthill ASC, president of the ASC, and Hutchin’s mentor from the American Film Institute (AFI), implored those gathered at the vigil, “to start a conversation about functional guns on sets. There is no place for weapons that can kill on a motion picture.”

A statement from The Mark Milsome Foundation, read “We are shocked and deeply saddened to hear of the killing of DP Halyna Hutchins and the injury of director Joel Souza.

This comes at a time when the foundation will be marking the fourth anniversary of cameraman Mark Milsome’s death on-set. All accidents are a result of unsafe acts and negligence.

More focus and clarity are needed to make those responsible pay for their actions. We should never see these circumstances repeated.”

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“Giving a living wage for the lowest-paid earners in the union; improved wages and working conditions for streaming; retroactive wage increases of 3% annually; increased meal breaks; daily rest periods of ten hours, weekend rest periods of 54 hours; and significant increases in compensation to be paid by newmedia companies.”

IATSE also reported that union workers will get Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday added as a

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RRI was honoured for the development of its SkyPanel family of LED soft lights, at the 2021 Engineering Emmy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles. John Gresch, senior vice president sales & marketing at ARRI Inc, accepted the award.

“This is truly a great honour,” he remarked in his speech. “On behalf of ARRI, especially our lighting engineers in Stephanskirchen in Germany, the management team in Munich, and all our worldwide locations, I thank the Television Academy.”

DEDOLIGHT LIGHTSTREAM PB70 VIRTUAL LIGHT SOURCE

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he concept of reflected light is as old as image creation itself. In the past, reflected light has been used to support other lighting situations, but now it can be harnessed as a versatile creative

holiday. The agreement, however, must still be ratified by members.

On IATSE’s website, president Matt Loeb said, “This is a Hollywood ending. IATSE members were prepared to withhold their labour and go on strike until issues related to the quality of their lives were addressed.

“We went toe-to-toe with some of the richest and most powerful entertainment and tech companies in the world, and we have now reached an agreement with the AMPTP that meets our members’ needs.”

The AMPTP represents major employers and producers of television and film including Walt Disney Studios, Warner Bros., Paramount Pictures, Apple, Netflix, and Amazon.

source, with some interesting advantages, via the Dedolight Lightstream system.

Creating the illusion of natural light, deriving from the far distance, even in the smallest most confined space, is achievable using the system. In practice, reflected light can be used to enhance the sensation of space and depth, creating a three-dimensional illusion.

It can offer a very different character compared to other kinds of lighting.

The largest parallel beam lighting instrument provided by Dedolight is the PB70 parabolic beam light. This provides a parallel light source that is clean and homogeneous, achieved by a parabolic

reflector that works best with a point light source, such as the metal halide HMI light source used in the PB70.

A noteworthy feature includes the virtual light source. With such a near parallel beam, the light does not derive from the light fixture, but from a virtual light source way behind the fixture. The outer rays of the beam are elongated backwards until they cross and that is where the virtual light source is active. With the Dedolight PB70 this is between 2 – 6 meters behind the instrument. This enhances the distance from the effective light source to the object and thus it diminishes all the ill-effects of the square law. For more information and explanatory videos, please visit the Cinematography World website,

TIFFEN INTRODUCES WARM DIFFUSION FILTERS

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HOLLYWOOD WALKOUT IS AVERTED n Saturday 16th October, 2021, the union representing Hollywood crew members agreed terms with major studios to avert a nationwide strike, which would have shut-down film and TV production across the US. According to IATSE, the International Alliance Of Theatrical Stage Employees, a new, tentative, three-year contract with the Alliance Of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) includes:

ARRI GETS ENGINEERING EMMY FOR SKYPANELS

ilter manufacturer, The Tiffen Company, has added a line of Warm Diffusion filters that give new cinematic looks to a diverse array of skin complexions, dark to light, in-camera.

The Antique Satin line-up smooths fine details, such skin pores, whilst maintaining overall sharpness, but without reducing contrast. They prevent highlights from blowing-out and shadows from losing detail. They are well-suited for dark complexions and adding life to pale skin.

Antique Pearlescent filters offer the same

skin-tone enhancements, whilst creating a soft atmospheric glow, along with a mild desaturation of colours and creamy halation. This makes them optimum for period pieces, taking the look from mild nostalgia to Monet-like Impressionism.

Along with warm skin-tone enhancement, Antique Black Pearlescents use a Black Pearlescent component to maintain deep blacks and rich light tones, whilst preserving shadow detail, especially in the face, for a romantic softness without excessive halation or loss of contrast.

LCA LIGHTS CAMERA ACTION OPENS IN GERMANY

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CA Lights, Camera, Action has opened new operations in Berlin, Germany, with a state-ofthe art studio, demo room and warehouse. The new hub will service European customers with a wide range of equipment, including lighting, grip, power, distribution, cables and consumables.

LCA Berlin will also be open for rental houses, TV and film studios, independent lighting directors, gaffers and DPs looking to purchase a wide range of products from manufacturers including LiteGear, Creamsource, DMG Lumière, Rosco, Chris James Filters and Chroma-Q.

“With the changes since Brexit, the time was right to open in Central Europe, and the Covid pandemic compounded this still further,” said Nick Shapley, managing director of LCA, Lights, Camera, Action. “More often than not, a quick turnaround of goods is required, and Berlin seemed a logical location as it hosts many companies within the film sector, and is also a central point for European freight.”

Heading-up LCA’s new European operation is Andy Sauer, who started his career as a lighting technician on-set before moving to Lightequip and more recently DoPchoice.

CINEMATOGRAPHY WORLD NOVEMBER 2021 9

PRODUCTION & POST NEWS

MACBETH AND BOND BOOKEND CAMERIMAGE

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DoPCHOICE INTRO’S LIGHT-DIRECTING TOOLS FOR APUTURE NOVA P600C

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NOW £4,469*

oPchoice now offers light-directing Snapbag soft boxes and Snapgrids to make the most of Aputure’s new P600c LED fixture. To complement this panel light, DoPchoice has designed a dedicated new Snapbag soft box and Rabbit Ears Mount Adapter, plus a host of other tools.

The Snapbag SBAPW6 has the same features as DoPchoice’s Snapbags, including a rectangular design that snaps-up instantly in a single piece and attaches directly to the Rabbit-Ears mounting system thanks to a new Adapter bracket.

Interior silver metallic sidewalls magnify output and create a smooth, even spread of light. A removable Magic Cloth diffusion panel is included for even more softening control.

To optimise control of the illumination direction, the patented 40° Snapgrid (SGAPW6W40) is available to snap out of its compact bag and quickly span the Snapbag face via hook & loop mount.

DoPchoice also offers additional softening choices. The octagonal 3, 5 and 7-foot Snapbag Octas provide wider solutions with tool-free, setup and teardown. Octas may be used open, exposing their silver lining or with the included front diffusion panel. If directional light is desired, customfitted 40° Snapgrids are available.

he 29th edition of the EnergaCAMERIMAGE Film Festival will open with a screening of The Tragedy Of Macbeth, whilst No Time To Die will close the festivities, which take place in Toruń, Poland, betweem 13-20 November 2021.

Both films will be inroduced by their respective director/DPs – Joel Coen and Bruno Delbonnel AFC ASC, and Cary Joji Fukunaga and Linus Sandgren FSF ASC. See our special preview for the line-up of Golden Frog contenders.

CVF PRESENTS A NEW APPROACH TO MEDIA FINANCING

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reative Vision Finance (CVF) has launched as an innovative media and entertainment asset-financing company, offering a fresh approach to lending for industry creatives, hire companies and broadcasters. Leveraging some of the key innovations from the rapidly developing field of ‘fintech’, its customer-focussed approach is driven by a team with over three decades of experience in TV and film production.

Offering a range of leasing deals, refinancing and commercial loans, as well as bespoke arrangements, CVF’s mission is to lower the barriers to specialist media finance in the UK and Europe. The introduction of a dedicated online portal which shows the latest updates on agreements and allows customers to digitally sign and manage their accounts is just one of the many tools the company is adopting to empower its customers.

By maintaining strong partnerships with resellers, the company offers entire shooting packages – including cameras, lenses, accessories, lighting and audio under its finance deals – ­­ with options for post production, as well as financing for software, vehicles, furniture and infrastructure. These same partnerships are also beneficial at the conclusion of deals, providing multiple options for customers to remarket assets.

“Unlike traditional banking routes for media financing, we understand how the industry works,” commented CVF director, Rebecca Price.

“We understand technology lifecycles, the way that projects are ‘greenlit’, the ‘just-in-time’ approach to delivering kit, and the impact that Covid has had on recent freelance incomes.

With links to the industry itself, we know exactly the challenges that companies and individuals face as they gear-up again following the pandemic.”

2021 BSC SUMMER LUNCHEON

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“ was delighted to attend the 2021 BSC Summer Lunch with my colleagues Alan Lowne and Claire Saunders,” writes Ron Prince, editor-inchief, Cinematography World. “It was wonderful to be with so many friends and familiar faces after what seems like a lifetime of lockdown.

Firstly, I would like to thank both RED and Movietech for hosting us on their respective tables, allowing us to enjoy their company and that of their other guests.

What started off as quite a dreary drive to the luncheon, turned into a sunny and uplifting occasion at the The Beaumont Estate, near Windsor.

The favourable weather allowed everyone to enjoy the outdoors, before we sat down for the president’s address and an excellent lunch.

New BSC members including Baz Irvine ISC BSC, Mattias Nyberg BSC, Dave Alex Riddett BSC and David Raedeker BSC were presented with their certificates. The date of the 2022 BSC Expo at Battersea Evolutions was announced as Thursday 10th to Saturday 12th February.

Those we have lost over the last 18 months were fondly remembered. Indeed, Harvey Harrison BSC gave a touching toast to our good friend, the late Tony Spratling BSC, and saluted his wife Diana Spratling, together with Diana Thomson and Anna Lee, who were also in attendance, as he remembered their husbands Alex Thomson BSC and John Lee. Photographs from the day were taken and graciously given by our dear friend Richard Blanshard.”

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IMAGO•NEWS

UNITED WE STAND I

MAGO,the International Federation Of Cinematographic Societies, elected cinematographers Elen Lotman ESC and Ron Johanson OAM ACS as co-presidents, after an Extraordinary Annual General Assembly on Saturday 4th September 2021.

The DP duo were quick to release a statement outlining the new aims for the organisation.

“Warmest greetings from two very proud individuals, who have been elected as copresidents of IMAGO – The International Federation of Cinematographers.

But it is so much more than just us, we now have two vice presidents – Bojana Andric SAS and Adriana Bernal Martinez ADFC; a general secretary – Aleksej Bercovitch RSG; treasurer – Roger Simonsz BSC; and a financial controller – Eric Guichard AFC. Put these individuals in tandem with a progressive, active and collaborative board, and you have the 2021 version of IMAGO. It is our cumulative plan to restore IMAGO to where it was, where it began with solidarity, transparency and above all universal friendship, which is what it stood for in the first place.

But let us not get too far ahead of ourselves: we need to bring all parties to the table via our IMAGO Future Conference, which we anticipate will take place before Christmas 2021, so that we can hear all the voices of IMAGO in order to put a comprehensive plan in place that takes in all opinions of our member countries.

We need to remember that IMAGO is about people, and it is those people from all IMAGO member nations that need to be heard and understood. Our IMAGO family includes our amazing committees, who work tirelessly across many platforms seeking out better ways to benefit our members relating to education, working conditions, authorship rights, diversity and inclusion.

The IMAGO Technical Committee has made enormous ground in the involvement directly with our sponsors to encourage them to seek out IMAGO as a form of guidance and participation with new and existing technologies.

IMAGO remains committed to growth and advancement, heralded last year with the ASC becoming full members and representation on the current IMAGO board by Steven Fierberg ASC and Roberto Schaefer ASC AIC. This year Azerbaijan (AUF) was admitted as an associate member and South Africa (SASC) and Argentina (ADF) became full members.

Also recognition must go to our IMAGO Election Committee of Kommer Kleijn SBC, Paola Rizzi ADF and Janez Stucin ZFS, who have guided us with great care over the last few months, along with Hannah Phillipson our dedicated and hardworking administrative coordinator.

There is much to do, however we would like to hear from you, our member countries, in order to enable us to put things in place that relate to all of our members. To that end we have an IMAGO Community Page that you should have received

It is our plan to restore IMAGO to where it began with solidarity, transparency and universal friendship log-in details for on our website or Elen and I are happy to respond to any emails.

IMAGO, which has been de jure international, will now, with the new leadership, become a de facto global organisation. The world has changed enormously during the last years and there are so many challenges that all cinematographers face everywhere, globally.

IMAGO has never been more relevant in its main aim to connect cinematographers from all over the world and now we have a dedicated team from all over the world to lead the way.

We are collectively ready to begin the next phase of IMAGO’s journey, of course with your collaboration.”

Elen Lotman ESC and Ron Johanson OAM ACS Co-presidents of IMAGO Statement on behalf of the IMAGO Board

In other news: as cinematographers worldwide united recently in support of action by the International Alliance Of Theatrical and Stage Employees (IATSE) for better working conditions – since resolved – IMAGO said it wholeheartedly supported the fight for a better industry.

In a statement in behalf of the IMAGO board, Lotman and Johanson said, “In the era when global culture is dominated by audiovisual

12 NOVEMBER 2021 CINEMATOGRAPHY WORLD

communication, the workers who are the basis of the whole industry should not be suffering from inhumane working conditions. We stand in solidarity with our fellow filmmakers in the fight for a better industry for as all.”

Several years ago, IMAGO published a model contract for cinematographers with comments and guidelines for working conditions.

IMAGO’s proposal admitted expressly that it was not a standard contract, which could function in all countries, but IMAGO proposed the document as a ‘checklist’ for member associations and offered it as an attempt to professionalise an international standard in the relationship of cinematographers with producer and financiers. The federation is urging its members to take another look at the Guide On Contractual Agreements For Authors Of Cinematography on its website.

And if you are working overseas, IMAGO has created a new list of national service suppliers for cinematographers – called World Services For Cinematographers. Now you can find out what equipment and services are available to you before you arrive in a location. Please visit www. imago.org for more information.

WHO, WHAT, WHEN & WHERE

OUTSTANDING OPTICAL PERFORMANCE

PAINTING WITH LIGHT Our regular round up of who is shooting what and where

This page: DP Luke Jacobs and crew shooting for Aston Martin

INDEPENDENT TALENT: John Mathieson BSC is lighting Warner Brothers’ series Batgirl. Caroline Bridges is shooting on a new series of Silent Witness. Maja Zamojda BSC is working a new series of The Wheel Of Time. Chas Bain is filming A Town Called Malice, directed by Jamie Donoghue. Ole Bratt Birkeland BSC is prepping Ol Parker’s Ticket To Paradise. Darran Bragg is shooting The Larkins Christmas Special with Robin Sheppard. Bjorn Bratberg is lighting The Devil’s Hour with director Isabelle Siebe. Caroline Bridges is lensing on Silent Witness. Oliver Curtis BSC is shooting Lockwood & Co. for Will McGregor.

Ben Davis BSC is filming Martin McDonagh’s Banshees Of Inisherin. Adam Etherington BSC is shooting Disney+ series The Wedding Season with director George Kane. Catherine Goldschmidt is shooting Red Gun for director Geeta Patel. Eric Kress is lighting Borgen S4. Seamus McGarvey BSC ASC has completed his turn on Wonka.

Andreas Neo is shooting 2nd unit on the ocean-liner horror The Queen Mary, directed by Gary Shore.

Aadel Nodeh Farahani has wrapped on Tell Me Everything, directed by Richard Senior. Mark Patten BSC recently shot Mechanical with Morten Tylden.

Stephan Pehrsson BSC is prepping for Wednesday Addams. James Rhodes is shooting block 4 of the eight-part supernatural drama The Rising, directed

by Carl Tibbetts. George Richmond BSC is lighting Matthew Vaughn’s feature Argyle. Christopher Ross BSC is on Shogun. Ashley Rowe BSC is lighting Sandra Goldbacher’s The Reckoning. Oliver Stapleton BSC is doing Claire Scanlon’s The People

We Hate At The Wedding. David Ungaro AFC is shooting La Gravité with Cédric Ido. Jordan Buck, Chris Clarke and Sam Goldie have been busy on commercials.

MCKINNEY MACARTNEY MANAGEMENT: Stuart Biddlecombe is filming The Devil’s Hour for Amazon. Sergio Delgado is shooting Fate: The Winx Saga S2 for Netflix. Mike Filocamo continues on Elite in India. Gavin Finney BSC is lighting Good Omens S2 for Amazon/BBC. Jean Philippe Gossart AFC is lensing The Witcher: Blood Origin for Netflix. David Luther recently started working on Wool for Apple TV. Dale Elena McCready NZCS recently shot on ITV’s No Return, and did a virtual production for Sky. Sam McCurdy BSC has started on Shogun in Vancouver for FX. Andy McDonnell is filming Token for ITV. Mike Spragg BSC is filming Pennyworth S2. Richard Stoddard is shooting Brassic S4. Robin Whenary has wrapped on Doctor Who in Cardiff. Ben Butler and Alessandra Scherillo have been lensing commercials.

UNITED AGENTS: Remi Adefarasin BSC is prepping Secret Invasion for Marvel Studios. Philippe Kress DFF has wrapped on Fate: The Winx Saga S2 with director Sallie Aprahamian for Archery Pictures/Netflix.

Alwin Kuchler BSC has wrapped on The Marsh King’s Daughter with director Neil Berger in Toronto.

John Lee BSC is grading His Dark Materials with director Harry Wootliff. Mark Nutkins has graded The Split S3 with director Dee Koppang O’Leary

for Sister Pictures. Gavin Struthers BSC ASC has wrapped on Your Christmas Or Mine with director Jim O’Hanlon. Haris Zambarloukos BSC GSC is prepping Meg 2: The Trench with director Ben Wheatley. Alan Almond BSC is available. Danny Cohen BSC is lighting Shane Meadow’s The Gallows Pole for Element Pictures/BBC. Damian Paul Daniel is filming Sarah Morris’ Sky Arts project, 21st Century Orchestra. Martin Fuhrer BSC is shooting Holding, an adaptation of the novel by Graham Norton, directed by Kathy Burke for ITV Studios. David Higgs BSC is lighting Half Blood for Imaginarium Productions/Netflix, directed by Rachna Suri. Matt Lewis’s film Boiling Point premiered at the London Film Festival. Kieran McGuigan BSC is shooting the first block of The Capture S2 for Heyday Television/BBC. Laurie Rose BSC is on Universal Pictures’ Rosaline.

Bet Rourich AEC was 2nd unit DP on The English for BBC One/Amazon. John Sorapure is working on Warner Bros’ Wonka as second unit director. Simon Tindall has graded the second block of Call My Agent and is prepping the comedy I Hate You for Big Talk Productions/C4, directed by Damon Beesley.

Ollie Downey BSC is shooting eps 3, 5 and 7 of Amazon/Sister Pictures The Power, directed by Ugla Hauksdóttir and Lisa Gunning. Laurens De Geyter BSC is house renovating and looking for the next project. Sam Heasman is working on series You, for Kudos/Sky. Si Bell is busy on Floodlights directed

by Nick Rowland for Expectation Entertainment/ BBC2. Charlotte Bruus Christensen DFF ASC is shooting the feature Sharper, directed by Benjamin Caron, in New York. James Friend BSC ASC shot

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WHO, WHAT, WHEN & WHERE

WHO, WHAT, WHEN & WHERE Opposite: (top) Jo Jo Lam on the set of Playland Café; (middle) Chris Dodds with actor/ director Cathy Tyson on Lilian; (below l-r) Edgar Dubroskiy in Geneva shooting European Superleague, and Jallo Faber and Nils Eilif Bremdal-Vinell shooting Troll for Neflix; This page: Tom Debenham on a Burberry shoot

block 3 of Trapper Keeper, directed by Philippa Lowthorpe, for LucasFilms and is prepping The 39 Steps, directed by Edward Berger. Anton Mertens SBC is lighting a feature in France. Milos Moore is lighting Pennyworth S3. Neus Ollé AEC BSC is lighting Spanish TV series La Edad De La Ira. David Raedeker BSC did with pick-ups for Estuary. Niels Reedtz Johansen is lighting a drama series in Copenhagen. Joshua James Richards is prepping his directorial debut. Anna Valdez Hanks is lighting the second block of Culprits for director Claire Oakley and Disney+. Ben Wheeler has finished on The Baby for director Faraz Shariat and Sister Pictures/Sky/HBO, and has started on block 3 of Lockwood & Co for director Catherine Morshead.

Barry Ackroyd BSC is lighting the Whitney Houston biopic I Wanna Dance With Somebody directed

by Kasi Lemmons, in Boston, USA. Laurent Bares is prepping the TV show Crossfire with Tessa Hoffe in Tenerife.

Philipp Blaubach is in Toronto shooting TV show Culprits for Jay Blakeson. Sara Deane has wrapped on the feature The Infernal Machine in Portugal. Brendan Galvin is shooting the feature The Plane in Puerto Rico. Nick

Gillespie has wrapped on TV series Trigger Point with directors Gilles Bannier and Jennie Darnell in London. Marcel Zyskind recently shot As In Heaven for director Tea Lindeburg, which premiered at the San Sebastian Festival 2021. Tim Maurice-Jones BSC is shooting Expendables 4. Diana Olifirova is shooting The Baby for Ella Jones in London through Sister Pictures.

Ed Rutherford, Alex Barber, Hatti Beanland, Daniel Bronks, Simon Chaudoir, Stephen Keith Roach, Alex Melman, Ben Moulden, Tristan Oliver BSC, Simon Richards, Miles Ridgway, Chris Sabogal, Glynn Speeckaert, Peter Suschitzky and Joost Van Gelder have all been shooting commercials.

ECHO ARTISTS: Nicolas Canniccioni is shooting feature film Frontières with director Guy Édoin. Nadim Carlsen DFF is now lensing Snabba Cash for Netflix. Carlos Catalan lensed episodes 4, 6 and 8 on Amazon’s The Power with director Shannon Murphy. Federico Cesca ASK is shooting Industry S2 for HBO with director Birgitte Staermose. David Chizallet AFC is shooting Dead Lions with director Jeremy Lovering for See-Saw/Apple TV. Rachel Clark has started shooting Al MacKay’s series Without Sin for ITV. Nick Cooke is grading eps 3 and 4 of This Is Going To Hurt for BBC2. Ruben Woodin Dechamps recently wrapped the BBC feature Silent Roar with director Johnny Barrington. Edgar Dubrovskiy has wrapped on the documentary The Devil’s Advocate with director Sam Hobkinson for Sky. Bonnie Elliott ACS has wrapped on The Shining Girls with director

Daina Reid for Apple TV. Jo Jo Lam has finished lensing the feature Playland Café with director Georden West. MacGregor has started the shoot on Ric Roman Waugh’s feature Kandahar. Lorena Pagès lit the short Ceres for director Amelia Kusini.

Korsshan Schlauer is shooting on the series Tell Me Everything with director Marley Morrison. Bartosz Swiniarski has wrapped on the series Black Widow with director Simão Cayatte. Niels Thastum DFF is prepping the feature Northern Comfort with director Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurosson. Stuart Bentley BSC, Andrew Commis ACS, David Gallego ADFC, Charlie Herranz, Anders Malmberg, Christopher Miles, Lachlan Milne ACS NZCS, Michael Paleodimos, Will Pugh, Noel Schoolderman, Chloe Thomson BSC, Maria von Hausswolff, Felix Wiedemann BSC and Sean Price Williams have all been busy in commercials.

MYMANAGEMENT: Max Witting has been shooting for City University for Pinzutu Films and directors Gabriele Lo Giudia and Nick Rowell. Carlos Veron filmed music videos for Mimi Webb directed by Samuel Douek, and Metronomy with Curate directors Dreamjob.

Tómas Tómasson is filming a TV series in Cairo with e-Productions/Mass Comm 98 called The Octet, directed by Ahmed Medhat. Todd Banhazl continues on HBO’s Showtime drama series. Chris Dodds shot the short Lillian with actor/director Cathy Tyson. Craig Dean Devine has started principle photography on BAFTA award winning TV series Derry Girls S3 with director Michael Lennox through Hat Trick in Belfast. Filip Marek is starting prep on his first feature with director Robert Hloz, shooting in Czech Rep, Poland and Slovakia.

Issac Bauman is in London shooting on The Queen Mary, directed by Gary Shore. Nicolaj Bruel DFF is lensing on the Sky film The Hanging Sun, a noir thriller shooting in Norway, based on Jo Nesbø’s bestselling novel Midnight Sun and adapted by writer Stefano Bises, directed by Emmy-nominated Francesco Carrozzini. Adric Watson has been

on another documentary feature adventure about coal miners with director Matthew Thorne shooting in Croatia, Bosnia and Turkey. Jallo Faber FSF is shooting in Norway on Netflix feature Troll, directed

by Roar Uthang, starring Ine Marie Wilmann and Mads Sjøgård Pettersen. Arnaud Carney shot the promo ‘Thank You All I’m Fine’ for Hollysiz with director Fabien Constant. Gaul Porat lensed on the Charlie XCX music video ‘Good Ones’ with London Alley director Hannah Lux Davis in Mexico City and a promo for Anita ft Saweetie for Pretty Bird directors Bradley & Pablo. Paul O’Callaghan has been in Cardiff on the VFX unit for His Dark Materials S3. Lee Thomas shot a short in Snowdonia with his brother and director Chris Thomas, filming on Sony Venice, plus also continuing his aerial filming.

Darran Tiernan is shooting HBO Emmy Awardwinning series Barry S3 with directors Alec Berg

and Bill Hader. David Lanzenberg is shooting with director Tim Burton on Wednesday, the liveaction spin-off series from The Addams Family for Netflix. Ian Forbes has wrapped on his first feature, the female revenge thriller set in Cornwall called Into The Deep, written and directed by Kate Cox through Signature Films and Tea Shop Films. Robbie Ryan ISC BSC is shooting Poor Things in Budapest with The Favourite director Yorgos Lanthimos, starring Emma Stone, William Dafoe and Mark Ruffalo. Allison Anderson teamed-up with BAFTA Newcomer Hazel McKibbin to shoot She Always Wins, a short which shot in Snowdonia. Dominic Bartels, Steve Chivers, Pete Konczal, Sam Meyer, SyTurnbull, Ahmet Husseyin, Ekkehart Pollack, Todd Martin and Daisy Zhou have all been lensing commercials and music videos around the world WIZZO & CO: Susanne Salavati has now Independence Day. Aaron Reid is shooting an embargoed ITV drama directed by Paul Andrew Williamson.

Molly Manning Walker has wrapped Charlotte Regan’s debut feature, Scrapper. Ben Magahy is shooting a documentary directed by Mary McCartney. Frankin Dow has graded the Olympic doco directed by Orlando von Einsiedel. Hamish Anderson has graded BBC’s Get Even S2. Luke Bryant is prepping Grace directed by Kate Saxon. Gary Shaw is shooting

His Dark Materials S3, and Tim Sidell has grades Peter Strickland’s feature Flux Gourmet. Nicola Daley ACS is shooting Netflix’s Half Bad with director Debs Patterson. Oli Russell is shooting Riches for ITV. Theo Garland is opening Bloods S2 alongside director Ben Gregor. Sverre Sørdal FNF shooting Malou Reymann’ feature Defekt.

Seppe Van Grieken SBC has graded The Midwich Cuckoos. Ryan Kernaghan is prepping Wrecked alongside director Chris Baugh. Karl Oskarsson IKS is shooting an embargoed drama and Chirstophe Nuyens SBC has graded his embargoed drama. Richard Mott has wrapped Our House, directed by Sheree Folkson. Steven Ferguson has done the DI on Chloe. Haavard Helle is grading The Loneliest Boy. Charlie Goodger has wrapped Big Boys alongside director Jim Archer. Matthias Pilz has graded Red Rose with director Henry Blake. Adam Gillham is shooting the final block of an embargoed US drama. Nick Dance BSC is shooting The Suspect.

Chas Appeti has graded the Amazon Original Jungle. Carmen Pellon Brussosa shot the short Annie Shared Her Location directed by Cyrus Mirzashafa and Natalie Ava Nasr. Arran Green has graded Missy Malek’s short, Friday Night.

Antonio Paladino, Fede Alfonzo, Will Bex, Joe Douglas, Arran Green, Patrick Meller, David Procter and Murren Tullett have all been lensing commercials and music videos.

SARAH PUTT ASSOCIATES: Emily Almond Barr continues on Sanditon S2 for Red Planet Pictures. Duncan Telford has graded

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WHO, WHAT, WHEN & WHERE

WHO, WHAT, WHEN & WHERE

Opposite: (top & below) DP Andrew Clark; (below) Rina Yang on the set of HBO’s Euphoria; This page: Manoel Ferreira SASC on Fate: Winx

The Cockfields S2. Yinka Edward lit a project called Daylight Rules for Sky/BFI. Sashi Kissoon shot Lapushka, the directorial debut of Kevin Proctor, starring Maxine Peake. David Mackie is lighting on Mammoth Screen’s Tom Jones in Belfast. Giulio Biccari is lighting a block of The Power in South Africa. George Amos is operating on Masters Of The Air. Andrei Austin ACO Associate BSC SOC operated on The Man Who Fell To Earth, followed by Anansi Boys with DP Neville Kidd. Andrew Bainbridge ACO operated on a block of Lockwood & Co for director Joe Cornish.

Jon Beacham ACO is operating on The Lark for Netflix. Danny Bishop ACO Associate BSC SOC- is in Berlin working alongside Florian Hoffmeister on Tar. Ed Clark ACO is working on Good Omens S2 with DP Gavin Finney BSC. James Frater ACO SOC is in Berlin working on John Wick 4. Ilana Garrard ACO has wrapped on The Swimmers. Zoe Goodwin- Stuart ACO is shooting on Wonka. James Leigh ACO is in Belfast on Tom Jones with DP David Mackie. Will Lyte ACO continues on The Lark with Jon Beacham.

Vince McGahon ACO Associate BSC continues on See Saw’s Embankment starring Gary Oldman.

Julian Morson ACO Associate BSC GBCT is on the much-anticipated fifth installment of Indiana Jones. Aga Szeliga ACO continues working on HBO’s Red Gun. Tom Walden Associate ACO has wrapped on Midwich Cuckoos. Tom Debenham and Rick Woollard have been shooting and operating on commercials.

LUX ARTISTS: The agency welcomes Jarin Blaschke to its roster. Autumn Durald Arkapaw is shooting Black Panther 2.

Maceo Bishop is shooting The Watcher, directed by Chloe Okuno.

Nicolas Bolduc CSC is lensing Martin Bourboulon’s

film Les Trois Mousquetaires. Justin Brown is shooting Apple TV series Hello Tomorrow!. Arnau Valls Colomer AEC is shooting En Los Márgenes with director Juan Diego Botto. Lol Crawley BSC is shooting Noah Baumbach’s film White Noise. Crystel Fournier AFC is lighting Italian feature Chiara. Guillermo Garza is shooting Rupert Wyatt’s feature, Desert Warrior. Jess Hall BSC ASC has finished on Chevalier, directed

by Stephen Williams. Danny Hiele is shooting Mexican TV series La Usurpadora with director Julian Torregrosa. Magnus Joenck is filming Nicolas Winding Refn’s series Copenhagen Cowboy. James Laxton ASC is lighting Lion King directed by Barry Jenkins. Ula Pontikos BSC is prepping the TV series Three Women. Adam Scarth has finished on Cold Harbour Lane with director Nathaniel Martello-White. Nanu Segal BSC is filming A Spy Among Friends with director Nick Murphy. Anna Franquesa Solano is filming Expatriates with director Lulu Wang. Ruben Impens SBC is shooting Felix van Groeningen’s feature 8 Montagne. Lukasz Zal PSC is filming Jonathan Glazer’s currently untitled feature.

Rasmus Videbaek has finished shooting the next instalment of The Crown for Netflix. Jakob Ihre FSF, Mauro Chiarello, Nicolai Niermann, Rina Yang, Sebastian Winterø, André Chemetoff, Giuseppe Favale, Monika Lenczewska PSC and Daniel Landin BSC have all been busy on commercials.

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INTRINSIC: In features, Dave Miller has finished the Michael Sheen feature Age Of Tony for Sigma Films. Nic Lawson continues on a forthcoming Marvel feature and Malcolm McLean is operating on Expendables 4. Ciaran Kavanagh is shooting on Charmed in Canada, David Liddell has graded Crime. Richard Donnelly continues The Nevers S2. Gabi Norland has been on Casualty, as has Tom Hines before grading The Chelsea Detective. Andrew Johnson has returned for more Holby City. Bebe Dierken is prepping for Bridgerton. Rasmus Arrildt DFF is on the second block of The Capture. James Mather ISC stepped in on The Dry in Dublin. Martin Roach, Gareth Munden and Lynda Hall have been lensing spots.

BERLIN ASSOCIATES: Will Baldy has completed Trapper Keeper (aka Willow) for Barking Lion Productions, with director Jamie Childs. Sarah Bartles Smith is shooting Slam Production/ITV2’s Deep Heat with director Sandy Johnson. Andy Clark recently shot eps 3 & 6 of Call The Midwife S11 with directors Thomas Hescott and James Larkin. Nick Coxis shooting Compulsion for LA Productions in Liverpool.

Harvey Glen shot some days on Hullraisers for Fable Pictures and has joined Two Four TV’s Project Toronto. Alvaro Gutierrez shot block 2 of Killing Eve S4, with Anu Menon directing.

Annemarie Lean-Vercoe has graded Britbox/ ITV’s Murder In Provence, directed by Chloe Thomas. Toby Moore shot on Vera S11, ep 5, and Silent Witness blocks 1 & 3. Trevelyan Oliver has wrapped on The Tuckers S2 for BBC Cymru.

Benjamin Pritchard recently shot McDonald & Dodds S3 for Mammoth Screen/ITV. Andrew Rodger is shooting the feature 3 Day Millionaire with director Jack Spring. Pete Rowe is shooting Charlie Brooker’s mockumentary series Cunk On Earth for BBC2. Simon Rowling is on Lord Of Misrule for Riverstone Pictures with director William

Brent Bell. James Swift lit a block of McDonald & Dodds S3. Simon Walton is on ITV’s Shetland S7, block 2, with director Louis Paxton. Matt Wicks is shooting Funny Girl for Potboiler with director Oliver Parker. Phil Wood is lensing Working Title TV/BBC’s Everything I Know About Love with director Julia Ford.

WORLDWIDE PRODUCTION AGENCY: Angus Hudson BSC is lighting Netflix’s I Used To Be Famous with director Eddie Sternberg.

Callan Green ACS NZCS has begun second unit photography on Apple TV’s Masters Of The Air with director Cary Joji Fukunaga. Baz Irvine ISC BSC shot second unit on Netflix’s Havoc,

directed by Gareth Evans. Tony Slater Ling BSC has wrapped on Stephen Moffat’s thriller Inside Man with director Paul McGuigan for BBC1, Netflix and Hartswood Films. Ed Moore BSC continues on ITV’s four-parter Nightingale with director Jim Field Smith. Mattias Nyberg BSC shot on the comedy series Mammals with director Stephanie Laing for Amazon/Vertigo Pictures. Simon Archer BSC is shooting BBC crime drama Sherwood with director Ben A. Williams. Ruairi O’Brien ISC is lighting the final block of Amazon’s The Power with director Neasa Hardiman. Katie Swain is shooting on ITV’s Sanditon with director Jennie Paddon.

August Jakobsson IKS is lensing the thriller Severance with director Andy Morahan. Robert Binnall continues main unit cover and second unit on espionage drama Liaison. PJ Dillon ISC ASC is shooting Moonhaven, produced by AMC Studios. Richard Donnelly continues on HBO’s The Nevers. Manoel Ferreira SASC has wrapped on Netflix’s Fate: The Winx Saga with director Ed Bazalgette. Anna Patarakina FSF is on the final block of Sky’s The Midwich Cuckoos with director Borkur Sigthorsson. Andy Hollis is shooting on McDonald & Dodds S3. Matthew Emvin Taylor, Stefan Yap, Callan Green ACS NZCS, Nathalie Pitters, Benjamin Todd, Marcus Domleo, Jake Gabbay and Matthew Fox have been variously shooting commercials and music videos.

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Images: Photo (middle) by Pablo Lorraín.

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HAUNTINGLY BEAUTIFUL

By Ron Prince

S

hot on Kodak, in Super 16mm and 35mm, and with an opening slate that reads “A fable from a true tragedy”, Spencer is an irreverent imagining of what might have happened during a ghastly Christmas weekend in 1991 at the Queen’s frost-bound Sandringham estate, when Diana, Princess of Wales (née Spencer) decides to end her marriage to Prince Charles.

The intoxicating, psychological drama, directed by Pablo Larraín from a script by Steven Knight, received a three-minute ovation after its world premiere at the 2021 Venice Film Festival. Kristen Stewart received acclaim for her compelling lead performance as Diana, and critics have lauded the exquisitely wistful cinematography of French DP Claire Mathon AFC. “I liked the mystery that emanated from the script, the fable side of this story about Diana. There was something both sensitive and visual in it that made me want to participate in Pablo’s universe,” says Mathon.

“During my first discussions with Pablo, we talked about the manner in which we were going to shoot and frame Kristen playing Diana – the distance, the focal lengths, the height and also how the camera would move. Pablo wanted to get very, very close to her, to create intimacy, and also to find a singular energy, with a certain nervousness, in the camerawork.”

As regards the origination format Mathon declares, “From our first discussions, filming Spencer on film was not just obvious, it was a necessity. The question was whether we would shoot 16mm or 35mm?”

Mathon says there were many contemporary photographic references and admits that some photographs showing Diana and her two young boys ­– Prince William and Prince Henry – ­ accompanied her throughout the shoot.

Mathon and Larraín also reviewed sequences Stanley Kubrick movies – such as Barry Lyndon (1975, DP John Alcott BSC) and A Clockwork Orange (1971, DP John Alcott BSC) – as much for the style of the camera movement, the rhythm of the shots and the use of short focal length lenses, as for the plasticity of the filmed image on faces and the volumes of the different spaces and sets.

“For aesthetic reasons, but also for its lightness and the ergonomics of the camera equipment, we chose to go with Super 16mm for most of the production,” Mathon reveals.

“The economic advantages of shooting Super 16mm were, of course, also part of the discussions.

“However, there were times when we didn’t want to show too much grain in the image, so we shot the more fragile, darker night scenes on 35mm film. Shooting on 35mm allowed us to retain softness and detail in dark areas, while keeping fairly fine granulation in the overall image.”

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I got immense pleasure out of framing, breathing and being at one with Kristen and her character Production on Spencer took place over 38 shooting days from January to March 2021 at locations in Germany, before production moved to the UK for the final stretch of filming in Norfolk and London.

Supported by ARRI Rental in Berlin, Mathon shot Spencer using ARRI 416 Super 16mm and ARRI LT 35mm cameras, fitted variously with Zeiss Ultra 16 and Leitz Summilux optics.

“Pablo and I liked the precision and minimal distortion of the Ultra 16s in short throw,” Mathon says. “The 8mm and 9.5mm were recurring short focal lengths as we were often very close to Kristen’s face. I chose the Leitz Summilux for their softness and depth.”

Mathon used a trio of Kodak Vision3 film stocks for the shoot – 7203 50D for brighter exterior day scenes, 7207 250D for overcast exterior and general interior day scenarios, using 7219 500T and 5219 500T for the night sequences. Film processing and 4K 16-bit scans were done at Hiventy in Paris.

“I have always favoured less sensitive filmstocks and, if the light had been sufficient, I would have shot every outdoor day scene using the 50D,” says Mathon.

“Crucially, the 50D became the benchmark for the final look of the film, partly due to the overall smoothness of the image, and partly the lovely soft rendition of the colours we wanted. For example, we really liked the rendering of greens, in the lawns and fields that were present in our English exteriors, and the lavish reds of some of the costumes in the movie.”

Critics have noted Mathon’s framing in Spencer, with the camera being constantly in motion, gliding behind and circling around Princess Dianna.

“We used Steadicam, the dolly and shot on the shoulder extensively, to create different rhythms, tension and a special intimacy with Diana. For me, the exciting and rewarding challenge – for which I thank Pablo – was using such short lenses. I got immense pleasure out of framing, breathing and being at one with Kristen and her character. I was impressed and carried by her immense talent and generosity.”

Filming Spencer on film was not just obvious . . . it was a necessity! www.RED.COM 22 NOVEMBER 2021 CINEMATOGRAPHY WORLD

LAST NIGHT IN SOHO•CHUNG-HOON CHUNG

CHUNG-HOON CHUNG•LAST NIGHT IN SOHO

The crew welcomed me with their arms wide open

WHAT DREAMS MAY COME

I don’t like to overcomplicate things…

I prefer simple plans

By Darek Kuźma

E

dgar Wright’s time-travelling retro horror, Last Night In Soho, benefits from South Korean DP Chung-hoon Chung’s sleek cinematographic style that is easy on the eye and playful on the senses.

Eloise, Last Night In Soho’s first protagonist, is an aspiring fashion designer with a fixation on anything linked to the 1960s. One day she finds a way to travel back to the swinging London of that era and is dazzled by its splendour. Yet what initially seems a dream come true turns into something downright wicked. Enter Sandie, the film’s second protagonist, a wannabe singer with a go-big-or-go-home attitude and somewhat disturbing affection for toxic men. In the real world the two could co-exist without ever knowing each other, but in this particular reality of mayhem, malevolence and murder they begin to merge into one character. But then again, what is real?

Going to watch an Edgar Wright film you half-expect a stylish pastiche loaded with popular culture references and shenanigans, and while Last Night In Soho is undeniably an Edgar Wright film, it feels slightly different from his previous efforts. The reason is Chung-hoon Chung, a cinematographer known for his work with ferociously visual directors such as Park Chan-Wook and Alfonso GomezRejon, and who replaced Wright’s go-to DP Bill Pope ASC during prep on the movie.

“I was wrapping up a project in Atlanta when I got the call that they wanted me on Edgar’s new movie. How could I refuse?”, laughs Chung. “For me it was back to LA for a day, to do the washing

and get packed, and then head straight off to London!”

Needless to say, Chung was a little anxious to enter a 70-something day shoot that aimed at recreating the visual richness of ‘60’s Soho without longer prep, but he was adamant about making it work.

“I was feeling insecure because the crew consisted of people with whom Edgar had worked before, and here I was, a stranger wanting to become a part of their family,” he reminisces.

“But they welcomed me with their arms wide open. And, after my first in-person meeting with Edgar, in a screening room where he showed me his mood reel, I knew we would make this work and have a blast. I mean, I almost cried when I realised that he and I saw the film exactly the same.”

Chung claims, largely contrary to his body of work, that he has never considered himself a visual stylist.

“I don’t have a style. My talent is, I understand drama,” he remarks. “My job is to transfer the directors’ visions into images. That’s plenty of work as it is. With Edgar each shot matters, everything’s part of a bigger story, and when I understood how his mind works, shooting was simple really.”

He also admits he has never been very big on the horror genre. “As a kid, I was part of the Spielberg generation, and after that horrors just didn’t stick with me. But when Edgar showed me Dario Argento and Sergio Martino films, I knew exactly what he needed me to do. It was all there, it just needed to be put into the realm of Edgar Wright.”

24 NOVEMBER 2021 CINEMATOGRAPHY WORLD

we had to work on real, night-time Soho streets, that were always busy with real people, we decided to mix film and digital. About 80% was shot on 35mm using the Panaflex Millennium XL2, the rest, especially those night scenes, on ARRI Alexa XT and Alexa Mini,” notes Chung.

More than half of the film was shot on stage, though to stay consistent with his lighting schemes, he worked with battletested gear and the help of gaffer Mark Clayton.

“Outside, I used a lot of Tungsten, 5K, 10K, 20K, but mostly it was LED light, such as Sky Panels and Helios Tubes. With all the changes in colour intensity and syncing images with music – we even used metronome on set! – it was easier to control all the set-ups.”

As you will see, there is a lot of camera movement in Last Night In Soho, especially when the two protagonists swap within some of the more hectic scenes.

“I treat the camera as another actor, I like to react with it and to catch beautiful moments. If actors change the way they act between takes, why should the camera stay the same?” says Chung. “This is why I

Images: Artist, Parisa Taghizadeh.

Copyright: © 2021 Focus Features LLC. All Rights Reserved.

hate Steadicam, it’s too mechanical. Even on Oldboy I had, like, two Steadicam days. But it was different on this production, because here I had a brilliant Steadicam operator, Chris Bain, who literally danced with the actors. So we shot more than 70% of the film with Steadicam and dollies. No motion control and no VFX, just a plain old camera dancing with people surrounding it.”

The result appears complicated on-screen but according to Chung was relatively straightforward on the set.

“I don’t like to overcomplicate things, I’m not smart enough. I prefer simple plans and change whatever needs to be changed during shooting. I always serve the story.

Last Night in Soho was shot over two years ago, between May and August 2019, but had to be shelved because of the obvious reason. While global audiences will finally admire this visuallyevocative film, Chung-hoon Chung has already since shot two of the most anticipated projects of 2022 – a cinematic prequel to the video game Uncharted, and Disney+ original series Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Indeed, in this neon-lit, Giallo-inspired, genreshifting realm of horrors and wonders, weird and sinister things happen, especially when the wideeyed Eloise becomes fixated with Sandie’s sex appeal and begins to imitate her physicality. Is this still Eloise, lost in her confused imagination, or is Sandie somehow seizing her body through some macabre time-travelling affair? Or maybe they are both puppets in some shadowy figure’s malevolent plan? Everything in Last Night In Soho – from camera movement to colour palette to lighting – screams ambivalence. Until the final act, when the most important plot points are resolved and viewers can wrap their head around the twisty climax.

Chung, however, cannot emphasise enough that the plan was simple.

“We had two different time periods that connect in various ways,” he explains. “The present is more cool, slick and desaturated. When Eloise travels back in time, the images get warmer with her delighted gaze. Back to the present: cool. Back again to the 60s: warm. Neon lights, shades of blue, white and red, with red serving as a thematic aid.”

The periods also differ in terms of equipment that was used.

“Initially, the present was shot with Panavision Primo Prime spherical lenses while the ‘60s were shot with Panavision C-series Anamorphic Primes,” says Chung. “But at one point, when Eloise and Sandie start to blend with one another, we mixed between the two.”

What about the cameras?

“Edgar wanted to shoot 100% film, but because CINEMATOGRAPHY WORLD NOVEMBER 2021 25

DUNE•GREIG FRASER ACS ASC

GREIG FRASER ACS ASC•DUNE

Australian cinematographer Greig Fraser ACS ASC has shot projects both small and large, including Bright Star (2009), Zero Dark Thirty (2012), Foxcatcher (2014), Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Lion (2016) (which earned him Oscar and BAFTA nominations, and the Camerimage Golden Frog), Mary Magdalene (2018) and Vice (2018).

Images: Photo credit: Chiabella James.

Copyright: © 2020 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved.

SANDS OF TIME

By Iain Blair

B

ut his latest film, Dune, is “probably the most challenging thing I’ve ever done, if just in terms of its sheer scope and scale. I don’t take on projects that I don’t get nervous about. Fear is always a part of it, but you don’t want to be the guy who screws it up,” he says regarding the movie that has already become part of the 2022 awards conversation for its fusion of sumptuous and intimate visuals, and what some have described as an overwhelming sensory experience.

He’s not kidding. Directed by Denis Villeneuve (Arrival and Blade Runner 2049), and based on Frank Herbert’s seminal bestseller of the same name, Dune features alien worlds, monsters and wars set thousands of years into the future, as it charts a mythic hero’s dangerous journey across enough sand to make a trip to the Sahara look like a day on the beach.

Whilst Dune was epic in scale, Denis also wanted it to feel extraordinarily intimate

With an all-star cast including Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Josh Brolin, Zendaya and Dave Bautista, it tells story of Paul Atreides (Chalamet), a gifted young man propelled by fate into an intergalactic power struggle on the remote planet of Arrakis, where he has to battle intense heat, hurricanestrength sandstorms and monstrous sandworms.

Production on the Legendary Pictures/Warner Bros. movie, using ARRI Alexa LF and prototype Alexa Mini LF cameras, took place between March and August 2019. Sets for the production were built at Origo Film Studios in Budapest. Locations encompassed Wadi Rum in Jordan, Stadlandet in Norway, as one of the settings for planet Caladan, plus the vast, rolling sand dunes of the Liwa Oasis in the United Arab Emirates, which formed a key backdrop of the planet Arrakis.

Here, Fraser talks about the challenges of making the ambitious epic, and his approach to the cinematography and lighting.

Please tell us about how you and Denis started finding the right looks for this epic story. What were your reference points?

Denis was incredibly passionate about this film, and had been wanting to make it since he was a kid. Whilst Dune was grand and epic in scale, he also wanted it to feel extraordinarily intimate to the characters. So we designed the film as a combination of wide shots, depicting the sweeping landscapes of the deserts on planet Arrakis where most of action takes place, together with extreme close-ups for the many intimate moments between

You don’t want to be the guy who screws it up

26 NOVEMBER 2021 CINEMATOGRAPHY WORLD

the characters. That meant keeping them in the centre frame, unless we were showing them in amongst the landscape. More often than not, the landscape was secondary to them, and their coverage, and we chose not to romanticise things.

We didn’t actually look at films per se. We looked at some photography, and I listened to Denis for many hours about what he wanted and the mood he was trying to evoke. There were some instances where we looked at a LUT and tested it, and there were a few times we went down the road of a skip bleach bypass, which gives you a very high contrast look, but that wasn’t quite the right look either.

So we pulled it back from there. Ultimately it was more a voyage of discovery, playing with lenses to feel out the look, and I often find that that process of feeling it out gives you the best results.

Every film is framed through a different prism. Denis had a vision for it, I had a vision for it too, and I

was able to make it all tangible through lens tests, camera tests, film tests and output tests.

How long was prep and what did it entail?

I was in the middle of shooting The Mandalorian (2019, 3 episodes) when Denis and I began talking. We did a couple of tech scouts while we were trying to figure out stuff like: how much can we shoot on a backlot? How much needs to be shot in a real desert? What kind of desert and where? They are aesthetic questions, but they’re also technical questions. We also had to consider how many days could we realistically be moving a crew to Jordan, and then back to Hungary, knowing there’s far more infrastructure in Budapest than in Jordan?

So we made several trips and I went back-andforth to Budapest. We scouted in Jordan and found the place where we were going to stage all the

sandworm scenes. Prep took place from October 2018 through to March 2019, and then we began shooting and wrapped in August 2019.

Did you and Denis decide to shoot digitally on ARRI Alexa LF cameras rather than on film right from the start?

No, and we were really unsure, so we went out to the sand dune desert, south of L.A. near the Salton Sea, where they shot some of the desert scenes in Star Wars: Episode VI – Return Of The Jedi (1983, dir. Richard Marquand, DP Alan Hume BSC) and shot a ton of tests – everything from 35mm film to the large format Alexa 65 and IMAX in Anamorphic and spherical. We basically ran the gamut of options to test of how the movie would feel.

We then we went to the IMAX theatre in Playa Vista and projected it all and compared all the looks, and it was funny to see Denis’ reaction. This why as a DP I always try to keep an ear close to the

ground and an eye on a director’s first instinctual reactions and then their intellectual reactions.

There are a lot of crucial choices made when you shoot a film, and it’s not just what looks best necessarily. There are knock-on effects. I thought we’d shoot film, and fully expected Denis to love IMAX film or even 35mm Anamorphic. But celluloid film did not overwhelm Denis as much as I thought it might have. He felt it had a nostalgic quality which, despite being beautiful, wasn’t what he envisioned Dune to be. On the other hand, although digital felt more contemporary, it didn’t feel organic enough.

Last time we talked you said you’d been developing a process and a ‘look’ that combines digital with the warmth of analogue?

Yes, it’s something I’ve been working on for a few years before Dune came along, and so I suggested we look at it and try this technique as the

CINEMATOGRAPHY WORLD NOVEMBER 2021 27

DUNE•GREIG FRASER ACS ASC partners in creating the look, partly because they have a lab at their disposal.

We shot all of the rock desert scenes in Jordan and then all the desert sand dune scenes in Abu Dhabi. And the way I saw it – probably simplistically – was that Arrakis was Earth, and the rocky parts are like countries, and all the sand is like our oceans, and to get from landmass to landmass you need to go over the ocean, and that’s where it’s most dangerous, with the sand worms and all the harsh elements. Then we shot all the other stuff in 2:35:1 format, as a contrast to the IMAX scenes.

next step. In theory and in simple testing it works like this: you basically shoot the movie digitally, give it a quick grade, output it to film, and then you grade the scan of that. So you get the best out of digital

and the best out of film, and we found it to be a really interesting process. Essentially, the final image you see on screen has been through an emulsion.

It’s a beautiful meld of digital and analogue.

You shot tests of this process, right?

We did. We shot a setting sun and projected it. On the left was pure digital, on the right was the digital/film process, and the sun, having been output on film, had this richness to it, this threedimensionality that the digital image did not have.

So that proved to me it worked. It looked like we’d acquired it on film and it had that look film gives you when you shoot highlights.

Look, I’m sure people will disagree and tell me we could have got that look in a computer, but for me the ‘analogue-ness’ of it gave it an amazing look, and I’ve pushed to use the same process on a few projects I’ve done since.

What cameras and lenses did you use?

Please also talk about the decision to shoot IMAX for all the desert sequences?

We used the ARRI Alexa LF 4K and Alexa Mini LF with Panavision H-series and Ultra Vista lenses. We decided to shoot IMAX for all the desert sequences as it shows this whole new world through Paul’s eyes, and we went for a much looser, handheld style with the big impact of IMAX. We’re encouraging everyone to see it in IMAX if possible, because it’s been envisioned in IMAX. We deliberately went for an unsaturated look. Our skies aren’t blue, our rocks aren’t red, our sand isn’t golden. We designed our LUT to take away the blues of the sky and so on. We actually used several different LUTs and our colourist Dave Cole, and lab, Fotokem, were able to combine the elements of highlights and shadows to create a LUT that worked for us. They were very much

Did you have a DIT on-set?

Yes, Dan Carling who’s done quite a few of my films including Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and Mary Magdalene. We worked very closely on Dune as it was so crucial that we got the right images and graded them right way.

The other thing that was a very big factor for us was dealing with all the lighting on the stages.

I’ve been quite passionate about trying to find LED lighting with the most amount of target. Effectively we had stone-coloured walls that very easily could have become monochromatic, or just really drablooking, if we hadn’t got it right. So it was very important to me that I was able to light them with the most amount of colour-depth possible. I really like using Digital Sputnik LEDs, because they’re a clean source and I feel they have the best colour rendition.

We used a lot of studio lights for all the interiors, but we shot with a lot of natural light for all the exteriors. I backlit the actors during the exterior moments, in an effort to avoid dark ‘panda’ eye sockets caused by the bright and contrasty sunlight in Jordan and Abu Dhabi. It’s not hard for the sun to look super harsh. Trying to find that balance and stay cinematic was still a challenge to ensure the shots weren’t badly lit.

We only had one exterior set-up at the studios, which we called The Nexus. That was a big attack scene and we just used natural sunlight for that sequence.

Did it turn out the way you envisaged it?

It did. I saw Dune in an IMAX cinema and I could hardly contain myself. With the soundtrack, the acting, the colour grade and the design, it was an incredible, epic experience, like being on a rollercoaster. Working on Dune was a great

I wanted to capture the violence of the sun

28 NOVEMBER 2021 CINEMATOGRAPHY WORLD

collaborative experience with a great team led by Denis, and I’d love to repeat it.

Q&A WITH DUNE DIRECTOR DENIS VILLENEUVE Why did you choose Greig and what did he bring to the project?

I chose Greig because I love his camerawork. He has such a great eye for where to place the camera, the composition and the framing. At the beginning we went for a more formal, classical look that emphasised very solid tableaus, but then the more the movie evolved, the more the camera left the tripod and it became like a documentary in style, with Greig doing much more handheld shooting in the desert. So the more Paul’s world gets stripped away, the freer the camera gets.

This was your first collaboration with Greig. Tell us how you worked together?

I wanted a DP who was very flexible and spontaneous, which Greig is. I also like how he embraces nature and natural light. He doesn’t try to control nature, but dances with it, and he can move very fast. That was very important as we were shooting with the main unit, and at the same time I was directing a splinter unit and we were supervising a second unit. I’ve never done that before. Greig is a master at juggling all this stuff. I’ve never seen anyone else do what he can – answering a call on his phone about another unit while he’s in the middle of shooting and watching another monitor.

Years ago I interviewed David Lean and he talked about making Lawrence Of Arabia (1962, DP Freddie Young OBE BSC ASC) and how Wadi Rum was the most magical location he’d ever shot in, partly because of the light.

But your scenes shot there look very different.

Talk about the colour palette you and Greig went for and why.

Of course, I was very aware of the look David Lean gave Lawrence Of Arabia. But for this, Greig and I wanted a far more desaturated look, to really emphasise the harshness of the sun and the desert.

Everything is faded and bleached, and I wanted to capture the violence of the sun. I wanted nature to be powerful and abrasive, not beautiful. It seemed like the best look was to capture the brutality of the planet and cut-out any sense of romanticism about the desert.

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Images: Photo credit: Chiabella James.

Copyright: © 2020 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved.

C’MON C’MON•ROBBIE RYAN ISC BSC

ON THE ROAD

By Darek Kuźma

ROBBIE RYAN ISC BSC•C’MON C’MON cinematographer who would render the urban micro-worlds inhabited by Jesse and Johnny as realistically and honestly as possible, but with a dash of a cinematic spectacle.

“I just loved Mike’s attitude towards filming, giving the actors freedom to interpret the feeling of words and scenes,” says Ryan. “The film was scripted, but he wanted us to be intuitive and react to whatever we would find along the way. This was and is far from documentary, but has a documentary aspect to it.”

The production shot entirely on-location in Los Angeles, New York, New Orleans and Detroit, but because of the very nature of making a road movie this way, it was quite a lengthy process.

“We travelled north, south, east, west with a really small crew – most of the time it was no more than 30 people,” Ryan recalls. “We would do the prep in a given city, film for two weeks, and then move to another city to spend three weeks prepping and two weeks shooting, more or less.

“We started midSeptember 2019 and finished mid-February 2020, even though it was, like, a sevenweek shoot.

But because we worked as a sort of unit the whole time, it didn’t feel long. And the people we met in each city were so nice to us, it was always sad to leave.”

Because Mills based the

C

inematographer Robbie Ryan ISC BSC found an elegant way to suffuse Mike Mills’ tender B&W drama C’mon C’mon with an elusive visual poetry of everydayness.

Jesse is an inquisitive, nine-year-old, LA kid, with a head full of eccentric ideas, whose crazy antics make adults groan with discomfort. Johnny, his estranged uncle, is a radio journalist who agrees to fill-in for his sister whilst she goes saving her troubled ex-husband from himself. Even though Johnny is initially overwhelmed by his nephew’s sturdy yet

30 NOVEMBER 2021 CINEMATOGRAPHY WORLD

fragile personality, the two of them learn to get along just fine.

But when Jesse’s mother’s moral obligation prolongs indefinitely, Johnny decides to take the boy on a crosscountry trip that will help him finish his radio project on what American kids would like their future to look like. And, oh boy, do they form a close bond!

C’mon C’mon is a moving and emotionally-sincere tale of adults and kids learning from one another, without any gratuitous self-importance or autocratic displays of power, told by means of a road movie of sorts. Thus it needed a

If there’s any rule I followed, it’s the old, tried and trusted ‘keep it simple’

character of Jesse on his own son, and Joaquin Phoenix was keen on lending Johnny at least a bit of Mills’ personality, the key to making C’mon C’mon was to combine intimacy with idiosyncrasy, and simplicity with sincerity. So it was a no-brainer for Ryan that the director insisted on shooting in B&W. “It’s the soul of the movie, in-sync with the performances and movies such as Wim Wenders’s Alice In The Cities that Mike really likes. The core of his approach was to get to the essence of the characters, to be nuanced and observant in a way you don’t feel you’re being led down a certain path.

Mike is talented in finding the moments that define such character-focussed storytelling, so B&W was always the way to go.”

Such a particular attitude to filming obviously

B&W was always the way to go required a very specific toolset to make the whole shoot go as smoothly as possible.

“We always knew we’re going to cover it like a normal film, but also give it a sort of free flow. We tested both film and digital and ended-up with ARRI Alexa Mini, not even the large format, just the little old Mini. Two of them, actually,” reveals Ryan.

“We nearly went down to shooting monochrome on the Alexa XT B+W, but they’re hard to find and expensive. So after extensive tests of how various digital cameras turn colour B&W, we put our trust in Alexa Mini. Coupled with Panavision PVintage Prime lenses, and a Panavision 19-90mm PCZ for some of the more documentary-like stuff, it did the job just right.”

“If there’s any rule I followed, it’s the old, tried and trusted ‘keep it simple’,” says Ryan who nevertheless tried to experiment a little with his tools to give Mills more options.

“There wasn’t any difference in how I approached shooting in a city or in a forest – the idea was to follow the characters in the same language,” Ryan explains. “In the beginning I thought I could shoot footage using a stabilised head on a rig, but that was a disaster and we hired a Steadicam guy. So C’mon C’mon was shot on dollies, Steadicam and sliders, depending on the feel we wanted to get from a scene. Oh, Mike

loved the slider and we ended-up doing tons of slider shots. So I became a grip as well as the camera operator. We shot the chapter openings for each city cleanly and simply with the amazing DJI Inspire drone.”

Simplicity was also the answer to the many questions concerning lighting in a large number of urban locations.

“I used a lot of LiteMats because they’re quick, handy and perfect for the film’s B&W visual identity. The digital sensor sees a lot of detail, so you don’t need huge amount of light,” explains the cinematographer. “It was more about blacking-out the windows and stuff like that, rather than dragging big lighting units around with us. The grips Jason Juhl Gray and Julien Janigo would quickly blackout a house for a night-time shoot, and changed it the other way for daytime. We still used some pronounced lights, though it wasn’t a big package.

Like we had a bit of HMI and obviously a number of strong LED sources, but these were basically additions.”

C’mon C’mon wrapped in February 2020 in the very cold Detroit, just as the world was starting to get worried about a certain vicious pathogen. The meant that Ryan was unable to participate in the DI process, done with colourist Mark Gethin at MPC’s US facility.

“I was definitely sorry I couldn’t accompany Mike and Mark, but the truth is most of the work had been done in-camera – including the LiveGrain, you know, the software to incorporate a grain structure into the digital video to give it a more filmic dimension while you’re filming,” recalls Ryan.

“Not being able to put the final touch, this would be my only regret. The rest – the prepping, the shooting, the travelling, the cities, the people, the sort of family that we became – was worth every second of it.”

Main picture photo by Tobin Yelland.

BTS photos by Julieta Cervantes.

CINEMATOGRAPHY WORLD NOVEMBER 2021 31

BOILING POINT•MATTHEW LEWIS

Images: Boiling Point stills by Christisn Black, BTS photos by Alex Fountain.

PRESSURE COOKER

By Ron Prince

A GLOBAL PARTNER IN PRODUCTION

A

ged just 23, British DP Matthew Lewis pulled-off a remarkable feat with the one-shot-wonder film that is Boiling Point, directed by director Philip Barantini.

Running at 90-minutes, and captured by Lewis in a single continuous take – with no cuts or invisible joins – the absorbing story follows Andy (Stephen Graham), the owner and head chef at a hip East London restaurant, during a frenetic pre-Christmas dinner sitting.

The film opens as Andy receives a call from his exwife about parenting problems. But that’s just the start of his troubles, as he soon discovers the local health inspector has docked points off the restaurant’s hygienerating, steaks are in short supply, key staff are late or out of their depth, and celebrity chef Alistair Skye (Jason Flemyng) will be dining this evening accompanied by an influential restaurant critic.

Boiling Point screened to packed cinemas during the 2021 London Film Festival, and earned acclaim for Graham’s gripping central performance, as well as Lewis’ formidable camerawork in around the tables, kitchens and backyard of the restaurant.

“It’s wicked to have been able to shoot something like this at such an early point in my career,” says Lewis, a film graduate from Portsmouth University, who had previously shot Barantini’s well-received crime thriller Villain (2020). “But, the prep, logistics and practical coordination were pretty mind-boggling, and following the action with the camera through multiple rehearsals and actual takes was physically-demanding.”

Lewis worked with London camera house Focus24 for several months in advance of the shoot to develop an Easirig camera system that would enable agile movement as well as seamless recording of the long take.

“I was super-certain that I would use the ARRI Alexa Mini, as it is small and compact,” Lewis says, “but I discovered the weight distribution caused me to have to compensate with my shoulders and back, and we could not readily find a solution to record 90-minutes continuously.

“The team at Focus24 team suggested working with Sony Venice in Rialto mode – with the sensor head on

the rig, plus a 2-axis Flowcine Serene to help iron out my footsteps, and an Sony AXS-R7 external recorder strapped to my back – and I was immediately won over by how much better that felt physically. Also, we could capture in Sony X-OCN 6K format and hot-swap the cards in the recorder to ensure a seamless take.”

The final camera and body rig combination also included a Zeiss Supreme 29mm lens plus remote focus mechanism, a Pancro Mitchell D-strength diffusion filter, two Transvideo Starlite HD monitors pitched at 45º, a Teradek Bolt 3000 XT transmitter and two 150W batteries – came it an 10kg all-told.

Lewis’ 1st AC, James Woodbridge, pulled focus remotely using a ARRI WCU-4 hand unit.

The prep, logistics and practical co-ordination were pretty mind-boggling “We ran through the camera moves and story beats with our cast for two weeks, and then did two full rehearsals before the actual shoot itself, by which time I knew the camera path off by heart,” says Lewis, who was supported by in his camera-moving endeavours by grip was Will Anderson.

“The shoot itself was scheduled for four consecutive nights, with two takes each night at 10pm and 2am – making eight in all. Even though I had an insane amount of shoulder padding, I had a professional back-andshoulder massage for 20 minutes after every take to make sure I didn’t seize-up, and remember smelling of Deep Heat throughout the shoot.”

Production took place at Jones & Sons restaurant in

32 NOVEMBER 2021 CINEMATOGRAPHY WORLD

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Wherever production takes you - we’re with you all the way. the-mbsgroup.com

Dalston East London, in March 2020. Jem Balls were used to illuminate the exterior sequences, whilst the interiors were illuminated using carefully-concealed RGB Quasar tubes, Tungsten Fresnels and existing practicals refitted with LED bulbs, under the auspices of gaffer Max Hodgkinson.

Several areas, including some of the dining tables, were lit from above with dimmable Tungsten softboxes.

The lighting on these could be heightened, whilst the surrounding ambient light was lowered, to deliver a subtle vignette to the image for key moments. The lighting and power package was provided by Pixipixel.

Although Lewis was prepared to shoot eight full takes, UK lockdown intervened, which meant the production could only shoot for two nights.

“As if things weren’t pressed enough, there was a general gasp amongst the cast and crew when we learned that we only had two nights and four takes to get the movie,” remarks Lewis.

“But it had a remarkable galvanising effect, and everyone focussed their energies towards getting the emotion on-screen. I have never before experienced such camaraderie or commitment amongst the cast and the crew on a project. We shot four takes, but it was the third that became the final film. I’m glad that we wrapped when we did, as I think I’d have been a wreck after a further four takes.”

Lewis completed the final DI remotely with colourist was Tom Alexander at Technicolor.

UK MBSE UK Colnbrook London I The Wharf Studios London I Cardington Studios I Symmetry Studios I UX1 Studios I Pinewood Studios I Shepperton Studios I United States Buckingham Studios CA Calvert Studios CA I East End Studios CA I LA Center Studios CA I LA Hangar Studios CA I LA North Studios CA I MBS Equipment Co. HQ CA I MBS Media Campus CA I Raleigh Studios Hollywood CA Saticoy Studios CA I Television City CA I The Culver Studios CA I Two Bridge Studios CA I MBSE Orlando FL I Areu Studios GA I Atlanta Metro Studios GA I Blackhall Studios GA I EUE/Screen Gems GA Mailing Avenue Stageworks GA I MBSE Forest Park GA I MBSE Savannah GA I OFS GA I Third Rail Studios GA I Trilith Studios GA I Tyler Perry Studios GA I Westside Stageworks GA I MBSE Oahu HI MBSE Chicago IL I Celtic Studios LA I MBSE Metairie LA I Second Line Stages LA I Starlight Studios LA I The Ranch LA I MBSE Boston MA I MBSE Insight NJ I Albuquerque Studios NM Garson Studios NM I Santa Fe Studios NM I Cine Magic East River Studios NY I Cine Magic Long Island City Studios NY I Cinema World NY I Gold Coast Studios NY I Grumman Studios NY MBSE Insight NY I Kaufman Astoria Studios NY I MBSE Maspeth NY I MicelsoniPark NY I Silvercup East NY I Silvercup Main NY I Silvercup North NY I Steiner Studios NY I Upriver Studios NY York Studios Maspeth Campus NY I York Studios Michelangelo Campus NY I MBSE Pittsburgh PA I MBSE Richmond VA I Canada MBSE Calgary AB I Rocky Mountain Film Studios AB I Byrne Studios BC Dewent Studios BC I Golden Ears BC I Jacobson Studios BC I Kent Studios BC I Kingsland Studios BC I Lake City Studios BC I Martini Studios BC I McConnell Studios I BC I McConnell Studios II BC MBSE Eastlake BC I MBS Media Campus Vancouver BC I MBSE Vancouver - Burnaby BC I MBSE Vancouver - Langley BC I Northbrook Studios BC I North Bend Studios BC I Riverbend Studios BC Surrey Studio City BC I Winston Studios BC I MBSE Toronto ON I Stanfield Studios ON I Dominican Republic MBSE Dominican Republic I Ireland Ardmore Studios Co Wicklow I Troy Studios Limerick

NO TIME TO DIE•LINUS SANDGREN FSF ASC

LINUS SANDGREN FSF ASC•NO TIME TO DIE Images: No Time To Die, an EON Productions & Metro Goldwyn Mayer Studios film.

Image credits: Nicola Dove and Jack Mealing. © 2020 DANJAQ, LLC and MGM. All Rights Reserved.

camera crew got better and better at handling and reloading them, and made it work.

“Also, because we wanted to mix aspect ratios at different points, I had to compose the IMAX sequences with the eventual 2:40:1 release format in mind, and had to always make sure than any camera, grip and lighting equipment was not seen in the rest of the image.”

Sandgren joined the production in November 2018 and, after four months of prep, began principal photography in March 2019.

Production concluded 122 shooting days later at the end of October 2019.

Filming locations, which frequently saw the first and second units dovetailing, included: the hilltop town of Matera in Southern Italy; Kingston Container Terminal in Jamaica; the snowy countryside and frozen lakes around Nittedal, plus the Atlantic Ocean Road, in Norway; the Faroe Islands; the Cairngorms National Park in Scotland; and landmark locations around central London.

Several massive sets were also built at Pinewood Studios, such as Safin’s concrete lair inside the cavernous 007 Stage, whilst the extensive Havana, Cuba, chase sequence sets were constructed on the backlot.

“I have never worked on a film that shot across so many different locations around the world, and had so many huge sets,” Sandgren admits. “ At one point we had ten sets in various stages of build, pre-lighting and production all

HEART & SOUL

By Ron Prince

O

07 fans might be split over the events in Daniel Craig’s final outing as James Bond, but there’s no doubt that his time as the iconic super-spy has ended with an almighty bang.

Released in October 2021, and hailed as and “epic barnstormer”, No Time To Die could very well pass the $700m mark at the global box office and make a challenge to become Hollywood’s biggest release of the year.

Shot on 35mm, 65mm and IMAX 65mm celluloid film formats, by Swedish DP Linus Sandgren FSF ASC, the 25th movie in the James Bond series sees Bond enjoying a tranquil, sun-soaked life in Jamaica after leaving active service. However, his peace is shortlived when his old CIA friend, Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright), shows-up asking for help. The mission to rescue a kidnapped scientist turns out to be far more treacherous than expected, and Bond soon finds himself on the trail of the menacing and mysterious super-villain, Lyutsifer Safin (Rami Malek), who is armed with a dangerous viral bioweapon.

Amongst the inevitable and impressive punch-ups, shoot-outs and explosive stunts, in glamorous and gaudy locations alike, Bond also faces complicated romantic entanglements with Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux) and a face-off with their mutual nemesis, Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Christoph Waltz), in story that embraces heartbreak, horror, humour and even a henchman with a high-tech glass eye.

Made for an estimated $250 million, and running at an epic 163-minutes, No Time to Die was directed

by Cary Joji Fukunaga from a screenplay written alongside Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Ben Whishaw, Naomie Harris and

Ralph Fiennes reprise their roles from previous 007 films respectively as Q, Moneypenny and M, with Lashana Lynch entering the fray as 007’s replacement, and Ana de Armas as CIA agent Paloma assisting Bond.

“I grew up in Sweden with 007 movies and have seen every Bond film over the course of time. They have inspired me since I was a teenager starting to make my own movies on Super 8mm film,” says Sandgren, whose impressive credits, all shot using celluloid film, include American Hustle (2013), Joy (2015), La La Land (2016), Battle Of The Sexes (2017), First Man (2018) and The Nutcracker And The Four Realms (2018).

Sandgren won an Oscar for Best Cinematography for his work on La La Land, and depicted the dynamism of different events and emotions across the story arc for First Man using Super 16mm, Super 35mm and IMAX 65mm (15-perf) film formats – his first experience shooting with that particular large format.

“It was an honour, and a little bit surreal – like being invited to Buckingham Palace to meet the Queen – when I was introduced to Cary, who is a great director, and the hugely-experienced producers, Barbara Broccoli, Michael G Wilson and Chris Brigham, with regards to shooting No Time To Die. “But we had a very pleasant chat about the film the very first moment. I expressed my feeling that there is something enchanting and romantic at the heart of a good Bond movie, and how you should be engulfed by the experience – the classic, colourful action, the strong highs and lows, the laughs and emotions.

Cary was of the same mind and was really into the idea of shooting large format – on film, in widescreen CinemaScope, 65mm and possibly IMAX 65mm.

34 NOVEMBER 2021 CINEMATOGRAPHY WORLD

“Even at that early stage, I could feel there was a special responsibility to take care of the beloved 007 franchise and this movie in particular. I have to say that, throughout the whole experience, the producers proved very caring, trusting and were completely supportive of our choices.”

In working out their visual formula for No Time To Die, Sandgren and Fukunaga watched different large format films at IMAX’s LA headquarters, undertook their own 35mm, 65mm and IMAX tests, and contemplated scenes from movies such as Dunkirk (2017, DP Hoyte Van Hoytema NSC FSF ASC), which had been filmed on IMAX 65mm (15-perf) and 65mm (5-perf) large format film.

“We concluded that No Time To Die was a 35mm celluloid, widecreen 2.40:1 Anamorphic movie - as that automatically gives epic scope and romantic soul from the start,” Sandgren explains. “However, we wanted to shoot certain sequences in IMAX, to really open-up the bottom and the top of the screen, so the audience would be completely immersed in the storytelling. IMAX does that – it really makes you feel that you are sitting inside the image.

“I had used IMAX before on First Man, when we wanted to change the storytelling from ultra-realism to surreality. But here we thought of harnessing IMAX for the experience of immersive action, such as the opening scenes in Norway, Italy and Jamaica, before the main titles appear. The final film has around 40 to 50 minutes of IMAX 65mm material in it.”

Sandgren adds, “Of course, it can be daunting to work with big IMAX 65mm cameras, that weigh 34kg with a magazine, driving through narrow alleys with them fitted to cars and motorbikes, or shooting Steadicam and even handheld. But our grips and

Tildesley, discussions with David Sinfield, and ideas from Daniel Craig himself, about suspenseful lighting and blocking in sequences such as Safin’s bunker. So there really were many beautiful ways that things came together.”

As for selecting the Anamorphic lenses for the production, Sandgren declares, “the easiest place to find that glass, with the greatest variety, was at Panavision, Woodland Hills, with the help of Dan

Sasaki.

“The movie had to look sharp. The C-series Anamorphics I used on La La Land, are beautiful, but I felt they were a little too expressive with their edge flaws and flaring characteristics. Although Dan did a lot of work recoating the more modern T-series Anamorphics for me, they were too clean for my taste.

“Then, my focus puller, Jorge Sánchez suggested the G-series Anamorphics, that I found to be clean-

at the same time, as well as two builds on the backlot. It was incredible.

“So I had plenty of conversations with Mark Tildesley, the production designer, Chris Corbould, our special effects supervisor, and my gaffer, David Sinfield, about the logistics and planning about how to build the sets so that the camera and lighting would work. For example, the Havana sets were as large as many of the backlots you can find in LA, and we had ten cranes just for the overhead night lighting.”

When it came to aesthetic look of the film, Sangren says, “We arrived at our colour palettes and lighting plans in many incremental and inspirational ways. Cary and I went through the script scene-by-scene, discussing how we wanted to take things, imagining how each sequence would look. I put together a mood book of images, stills and paintings from the large library I have at home, including atmospheric stills from photographers like Todd Hido and Gregory Crewdson.

“We also took our cues from the film’s settings. Cary really wanted to embrace and heighten the looks of the different locations, so that one scene did not look like the next – whether is was the peace and tranquillity of Bond’s Caribbean hideaway, the icy landscapes in Norway, the dark, exotic sultriness of Cuba, or the stone-cold interior of Belmarsh high-security prison.

“We also had concept art from Mark

looking, with good contrast, well-balanced aberrations and impressive flares, and a nice poetic expression to the image. They are also consistent at T2.6 across the range, and not quite so heavy as the alternatives. So we went with the G-series, and used the 40mm and 75mm lengths most of the time.”

“For the IMAX cameras, we used the IMAX Hasselblad optics, but Dan also made a special, additional set of Panavision IMAX lenses that enabled

CINEMATOGRAPHY WORLD NOVEMBER 2021 35

NO TIME TO DIE•LINUS SANDGREN FSF ASC closer focus. I have to say that Panavision, along with many other vendors on the film, were willing to spend time adjusting or making new things to help us. It’s a lovely thing that they were just as interested as we were in making a great movie and they were intrinsic to the process.”

Sandgren’s core arsenal of cameras included: Panavision Millenium XL2s 35mm; Panaflex System 65 SPFX and Panaflex 65mm HR Spinning Mirror Reflex 65mm; plus 15-perf IMAX MKIV and IMAX MSM 9802 high-speed cameras. However, production on No Time To Die coincided with production on both Tenet (DP Hoyte Van Hoyteme FSF NSC ASC) using IMAX cameras, and Death On The Nile (Haris Zambrloukos) using Panaflex 65m’s, some of which were pre-booked by those productions. This meant Sandgren variously having to share or relinquish a number of his large format cameras, and add ARRI 765 65mm cameras to his inventory, which were then used for the film’s intimate dialogue scenes.

Regarding the 35mm and large format 65mm filmstocks, Sandgren went with Kodak Vision3 50D 5203 and Kodak Vision3 250D 5207 for day exteriors, and Kodak Vision3 500T 5219 for the night scenes.

“The 50D is very clean and colourful. When were shooting sequences on 35mm, we used it for

our exteriors and open sky shots, such as the vistas above MI6 and the forest-scapes in Scotland that doubled for Norway,” Sandgren explains. “If we were struggling with the light, such as the scenes inside the forest, or some of the day interiors, we went with the 250D. “However, the 50D has fine grain and we knew the images would look too sharp when shooting the exteriors in IMAX 65mm, so we used the 250D 65mm in those situations.

“The 500T was a great filmstock for our darklylit and night-time scenes – in 35mm, 65mm and IMAX 65mm formats – and we had plenty of those in this production. I could generally expose at my target aperture of T2.8 without needing to alter the illumination levels on any of the neons, car headlights or practicals. It is incredible how the 500T can record details at both ends of the dynamic range, in extreme highlights and the dark black areas in the same image.

“All of these stocks played to the sense of colour we wanted to imbue at our different locations, and although I often like pull and push processing at the lab to adjust colour and contrast, the celluloid emulsions absorbed the richness of colour in our lighting, and I just did normal processing on this film.”

Film processing of the exposed 35mm, 65mm and IMAX 65mm footage was done at Cinelab. The

LINUS SANDGREN FSF ASC•NO TIME TO DIE 35mm material was scanned at Company3, with 65mm and IMAX footage scanned at Final Frame Post.

“As there was so much for me to oversee – the substantial main and second units, the stunt scenes with as many as eight cameras rolling, pre-lighting the sets, reviewing dailies, etc. – knew I had to be flexible and available, so I decided not to operate,” says Sandgren.

“But I did not have to worry. I have a lot of respect for the operators, Jason Ewart, Ossie McLean and Ollie Loncraine, and their camera assistants, who were always so positive, running around with really heavy cameras shooting Steadicam or handheld. They all put in an amazing effort on this film.

“Additionally, our second unit director Alexander Witt and his operators – Peter Field, Clive Jackson and Gary Spratling – plus Jo and Endre Eken Torp, the DP and 1st AC on our splinter unit in Norway, all demonstrated supreme skill and artistry in framing and lighting their work to match the main unit cinematography. David Appleby, our key grip, is a wonderful man with a large heart, and proved a real trooper.”

Of course, the gaffer is always amongst a DP’s best comrades on any shoot, and this was no different.

“Shooting in six countries around the world, with many

Images: No Time To Die, an EON Productions & Metro Goldwyn Mayer Studios film.

Image credits: Nicola Dove and Jack Mealing. © 2020 DANJAQ, LLC and MGM. All Rights Reserved.

cameras and multiple sets, I realised early-on that I needed a workflow where we could streamline the chain of information regarding the lighting. David Sinfield is an exceptional talent when it comes to the logistics on large films and delivering beautiful light sources on-set,” says Sandgren.

MBSE provided a complete and sizeable studio and location lighting package to the production.

“David and I did a lot of testing in preproduction to make sure we could apply different colour palettes at our various locations and sets.

We programmed the lighting desks with colour presets for the LED lights and made detailed notes about the locations and time-of-day. Because of the formula we created for the lighting, it meant the LEDs could be adjusted or changed at the very last minute.”

As an example, Sandgren points to the sequence set in the top-secret MI6 lab, that was originally lit with yellow and white Astera tubes.

On the day of shooting, Fukunaga enquired about other colour options for the scene. As every single fixture was connected to the lighting desk, it was quick to explore different options and settle on the laser-green hue that appears in the final movie.

However, on the film’s largest stage at Pinewood Studios, Fukunaga wanted to dramatically enhance the visual impact of Safin’s huge underground concrete bunker, which was filled with water in the middle, and had doors opening to the sky in the ceiling of the set build.

“The set was already around 250ft-long, but Cary wanted to make it even longer,” explains Sandgren. “So we hung a bluescreen at the end to 36 NOVEMBER 2021 CINEMATOGRAPHY WORLD

enable the VFX team to do a set extension. To give the set a moody and somewhat futuristic feeling, David and I worked with Mark Tildesley and we ended-up having around 30 custom-made light sticks standing vertically out of the water. They were the only light source in that entire environment, and gave a very simple but interesting graphical effect.

“To create the effect of dazzling sunlight coming through he doors above, we had four 100K SoftSuns, in addition to daylight, pouring-in light. At one point during our time at Pinewood had we had nine 100K plus one 200K SoftSun fixtures working on different stages.”

Sandgren completed the final DI grade on No Time To Die with his regular colourist Matt Wallach at EFilm in LA, who also graded the dailies.

“I wanted to go back to the traditional way of working with celluloid, in the way that it was one person, the colour timer at lab, who controlled and supervised the colour on the film,” says Sandgren.

“I was very happy with the precise dailies that Matt delivered – they were the look of our film – and I asked him to be our colourist throughout the process, from the dailies to the DI.” Sandgren concludes, “No Time To Die was a big ship to steer, but it had the feeling of being more like a small and intimate independent production.

This was really down to the incredible, guiding hands of the producers, and the momentum they inspired for getting things done. It was a wonderful experience. It is also a great testament to loving kindness of celluloid film and its ability to deliver soul and charm to a huge Hollywood blockbuster.”

CINEMATOGRAPHY WORLD NOVEMBER 2021 37

STUDENT UNION•ŁÓDŹ FILM SCHOOL

ŁÓDŹ FILM SCHOOL•STUDENT UNION This page: (top) DP Pawel Edelman PSC at Łodź Film School, photo by Marek Szyryk; (middle) DP and film school dean, Jolanta Dylewska PSC, photo by Robert Palka.

Students start shooting narrative projects right from the get-go

THE APPRENTICE SORCERERS

Let’s face it – being a cinematographer is a challenging job, physically and psychologically

By Darek Kuźma

T

he ambition of the Direction of Photography and Television Production Department of the Łódź Film School, Poland, is to mould future cinematographers into both artisans and artists.

Cinematography has been an integral part of Łódź Film School’s academic identity since its inception in March 1948, less than three years after the inferno of World War II that had sent Poland into total disarray. Led by eminent pre-war film industry veterans and intellectuals – people who had laid the foundations of Polish cinema and used their cameras to document the traumas of the war for posterity – the department dedicated to the art of cinematography quickly became something more than a training ground for skilled technicians. The necessary mastery of film techniques and technologies was supported by infusing the students – talented boys robbed of any formal education – with cultural and humanistic knowledge. And awareness. The underlying idea was to broaden their horizons so that they would become invaluable storytelling partners.

Nearly three quarters of a century later the cinematography department, with renowned DP Jolanta Dylewska PSC (Camerimage Golden Frog winner for Agnieszka Holland’s In Darkness) acting as its Dean since 2020, still holds to those values.

“I believe there are four areas in which cinematographers should excel: technique, technology, aesthetics and dramaturgy,” declares Dylewska. “The former relate to the what and how, the latter to the why. We want our students to be artisans, for this is what the job entails. But we also try to embolden them to think like artists and support directors in every way.”

A wide variety of acclaimed alumni proves the point: cinematographers such as Paweł Edelman (dir.

Roman Polański’s The Pianist), Ryszard Lenczewski (dir. Paweł Pawlikowski’s Ida), Zbigniew Rybczyński (Tango), Sławomir Idziak (dir. Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down), Dariusz Wolski (dir. Ridley Scott’s The Martian), and more recent ones like Łukasz Żal (dir. Paweł Pawlikowski’s Cold War). Together they represent a good many Academy, BAFTA, César and European Film award wins and nominations.

Edelman and Lenczewski are also professors at Łódź Film School and educate the new generation of cinematographers.

Because of this, the enrolment process is slightly different than in other film schools and consists of several stages. Apart from numerous formal requirements the school asks candidates to present

themselves through a one-minute video and a socalled artistic work portfolio.

“It’s quite a loose concept. Some send us photographs and films of their making, others use poems, short stories, paintings and music to show us who they are,” informs Dylewska. “We are all active cinematographers with a vast experience in the field, therefore we look for people with unique visual

sensitivity, an artistic potential, and this is how we meet them before we get to talk to them.”

The selected few are asked to do a few visual assignments and then meet with a board of school professionals (cinematographers, directors, art historians, film historians) in-person to discuss both their artistic portfolio and the way they envisage themselves in the future.

“We don’t test their general knowledge of film

38 NOVEMBER 2021 CINEMATOGRAPHY WORLD

and culture, after all, this is what they come here for, but rather examine their reactions and personality traits, the way they can communicate or express their ideas. Let’s face it – being a cinematographer is a challenging job, physically and psychologically. It demands numerous skills, team management and creativity in situations that can be overwhelming. It’s not for everyone.”

The cinematography department offers five-yearlong Master Of Arts programme, with a maximum of 12 students accepted each year: seven Polish and up to five non-Polish. Because the school is structured according to general Polish university and artistic education tradition, the majority lectures are held in Polish. Thus, foreign students have to spend one year learning the language at B2 level before they can proceed with their studies.

In 2021, eleven candidates – seven Polish, four non-Polish – were accepted. They now face five years of working on film sets, discussions and camaraderie, as well as sweat and tears and getting acquainted with various shades of the everlasting magic of moving images on the impressively laid-out school campus in Łódź.

“We do have a lot of theory and lectures but the students start shooting narrative projects right from the get-go,” notes Dylewska. “In the first three years they mostly work on their own screenplays and get a taste of both directing and team effort needed to get anything made. But they also collaborate with students-directors, from year one, to make the work even more fruitful.

“And, what’s essential to the idea of artisans/ artists, they’re required to shoot on film and digital, and get to know both technologies inside out. In the first year they learn lighting and composition in B&W, only then do we introduce colour, and then it’s up to them to decide what’s best for the projects they’re about to go forward with.”

Working with filmstock and shooting on 35mm and 16mm is definitely one of the many joys of studying in Łódź. “We’ve never resigned from film – it is too intricate and beautiful to devoid our students of the opportunity to try their hand at it. As in every other sense, the aim is to diversify their experience,” Dylewska remarks.

Needless to say, the school’s rental house is equipped with a variety of tools: digital cameras

(ARRI Alexa Mini, SXTW and XT, Sony FS5 and FS7, Blackmagic 6K, Z-cam E2), film cameras (Moviecam Compact and SL, ARRI 435, vintage ARRIFLEX III, BL II and IIC, 16mm Aaton XTR), and lenses (Zeiss Superspeed, Standard Speed and CP2, Angénieux Optimo, MK I and LA2, Cooke Speed Panchro 50mm and 100mm, Cooke Cine Varotal, Canon K-35, Xeen Cine, Astro Berlin 300mm, ARRIFLEX 14mm, and many others).

During their final years the aspiring

cinematographers use the experience to shoot bigger projects, including their graduation films, headed by the students of the Film & TV Direction department. However, even though the art of cinematography and getting the necessary on-set know-how is and always will be the most important

important to them personally.”

Obviously, pandemic-era lockdowns forced the cinematography department to modify its programme. “Students value the way we intertwine film and cultural lectures with the practical side of things, but we couldn’t make the latter work online.

Because we always had incredible foreign visiting tutors, we introduced virtual masterclasses with some of the greats working today,” asserts Dylewska.

“When talking about Joker Larry Sher ASC opened his laptop and shared a number of his tricks of the trade. Mikhail Krichman revealed his notes from the films of Andrey Zvyagintsev. Mátyás Erdély HSC went into details of making Son Of Saul. Hoyte van Hoytema FSF NSC ASC, our former student who left the school without a degree, discussed his work with Christopher Nolan. We hope to have the 2021/2022 year without major intrusions, but we’re ready for anything that comes our way.”

There is another lesson to be learned from the Covid challenge. “We’re fully aware that only a handful of our alumni may find a job at the movies, and they need to be aware that they’ll have to be flexible and carve their own path. This preparation is part of the programme and our attitude towards teaching. I’m happy to say that our students have become documentary auteurs, work in live theatres, use their skills in bold transmedia projects, a few have turned into magnificent directors of feature films,” adds Dylewska.

“It doesn’t matter if you shoot huge narrative films

or small music videos – what matters is that you’re aspect of studying in Łódź, the students are also equipped with knowledge and mentality to face obliged to hand over a written academic work. the obstacles that lie ahead, both in the technical/ “They can write about a number of things, technological and the aesthetical/dramaturgic sense. analyse films, discuss artistic sensibilities of eminent That you use cameras and lenses to tell great stories. cinematographers or directors, produce essays on how a specific film camera can become a wonderful And that you infuse these stories with bits of yourself.

That’s what our department and Łódź Film School tool when used appropriately. It’s not the subject that are all about.” matters but how they, the people we got to mould artistically for five years, write about it. Therefore, we encourage the students to write about what is CINEMATOGRAPHY WORLD NOVEMBER 2021 39

SMOOTH OPERATORS•RODRIGO GUTIERREZ ACO ASSOCIATE BSC

RODRIGO GUTIERREZ ACO ASSOCIATE BSC•SMOOTH OPERATORS To be catapulted to such a heady position was unnerving at first.

“Robert Redford, the director Sydney Pollack, David Watkin and the first assistant David Tomblin were debating how to approach a shot,” Rodrigo relates. “Sydney Pollack turned to me and asked, ‘What do you think?’. My life flashed before my eyes and I thought, ‘Here I go, this is where they discover that I’m useless’.”

With nothing to lose, Gutierrez told the waiting crew what he thought they should do.

“Pollack looked at me and said, ‘You’re right,’ and then my whole mindset just changed,” continues Gutierrez.

“I realised that actually I did have something. Experience is a valuable thing, but to have original ideas counts as well.”

Gutierrez’s path as an operator was by now firmly cemented, and he

NOBODY PUTS IN B-CAM THE CORNER

Stuart Dryburgh ASC) operating B-camera alongside Peter Cavaciuti ACO SOC Assoc BSC, and Marvel’s Doctor Strange In The Multiverse of Madness (2022, DP John Mathieson BSC) where he was obliged to operate A-camera remotely due to Covid restrictions.

Many of Gutierrez’s recent jobs have been as B-camera, which, to the uninitiated, caught-up in the perceived hierarchy implied by the alphabetical labelling of cameras (and this writer fully admits to being one), may seem odd for such an experienced operator.

“In the UK in the past, there was no ‘A’ and ‘B’, just camera operators, and we were all considered equally qualified to do the job,” explains Gutierrez. “Then

SOC Assoc. BSC, as well as operating on television series such as the aforementioned Silent Witness.

Gutierrez has long been a supporter of the craft of camera operating. He was one of the original founders of the Association Of Camera Operators (ACO),

By Natasha Block Hicks

I

t is only by the twists and turns of fate that the name Rodrigo Gutierrez ACO Associate BSC came to be associated most strongly with the British, rather than the Italian, or even American, film and television industry. How did the eloquent Colombian-born operator come to be behind the camera on such stalwart British home-productions as Silent Witness (1996-2007)? He joined us fresh from wrapping B-camera on Amazon Studio’s sci-fi series The Peripheral (2022) to fill in the gaps.

“It’s a long story,” Rodrigo begins intriguingly.

“My father was an American citizen and I lived in New York. In the early ‘70s I was thinking about university, but it was still the time of conscription and there was huge pressure on black and immigrant populations, especially South Americans, to join the army.

“I’m a pacifist,” he continues brightly, “I love life. I had to leave.”

Having a notion that he might like to work in the film and television industry, Gutierrez applied to the Centro Sperimentale Di Cinematografia, the Italian national film school, where he was given a place for the September intake. It was 1971.

“At the time it was the only film school that combined study with placements on industry productions,” he relates. Then the Italian industry slumped, and so the school contacted Gutierrez and

I love being the first person to witness a performance that will touch someone’s heart

gave him two alternatives: Łódź in Poland, or the London Film School in England.

“My English is better than my Polish,” he jokes, and so in the November he arrived in London.

Upon graduating from the LFS, Rodrigo had to make a case to UK immigration for a further year’s visa, to try and gain some experience in the industry, but like many other newcomers found the doors onto set barred by the Association Of Cinematograph, Television & Allied Technicians (ACTT). Time was ticking.

“You couldn’t get a job in the industry unless you were a member of the union, but you couldn’t get into the union unless you had a job,” Gutierrez reports with a snort. Fate saw fit, however, to bring him in front of Alan Sapper, the general secretary of the ACTT, who sent him in the direction of Allan King Associates (AKA), the cinéma vérité documentary makers. There he met meteoric cinematographer Chris Menges BSC ASC, and after gaining the all-important union ticket as a freelancer in the camera department, started assisting in documentaries.

“In the early ‘80s, this country produced the best documentaries in the world by far,” states Gutierrez reverentially. “For example, I spent six months travelling the length and breadth of China with Chris O’Dell BSC on The Heart Of The Dragon (1985).

We were the first Western camera crew that were allowed to travel freely in China. The things we saw would blow your mind. It changed me.”

Slowly but surely, the upcoming talent from AKA were starting to get their breaks in drama. Producer Rebecca O’Brien and DP Witold Stok BSC bought

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Gutierrez onto a low-budget feature, Friendship’s Death (1987), for his first operating job. In 2020 Friendship’s Death was re-released by the BFI and selected as a Cannes Classic.

“Suddenly everybody’s talking about it,” laughs Gutierrez, “which is funny, because it was my first little film as an operator.

“I mentioned that I was had started operating to a gaffer friend of mine, Larry Prinz, who was just

has not wavered from this calling in the interim three dozen years.

“I just realised that it was such a beautiful craft that I didn’t want to go anywhere else,” he extols.

“Looking through an eyepiece and being the very first person to witness an amazing performance, something that will touch someone’s heart. That excitement is what I love.”

Throughout the rest of the ‘80s and ‘90s, and firmly back down on terra firma, Gutierrez was a regular camera operator for Stok, on low-budget British features such as The Turn Of The Screw (1992) and The Match (1999). He operated for Oliver Stapleton BSC on Stephen Frears’ comedy The Van (1996), and then appeared beside DP John Mathieson BSC on Plunkett & Macleane (1999) for the first of several collaborations.

The millennium saw Gutierrez on higher-budget, multi-camera productions such as Wimbledon (2004, DP Darius Khondji AFC) where he joined Mike Proudfoot ACO Assoc. BSC and Sahara (2005, DP Seamus McGarvey ASC BSC), where he operated B-camera alongside Peter Robertson ACO

and its first president from 2010 to 2012, initiating the reinstatement of the Operators Award during his term. He teamed-up with Robertson to share their knowledge via a series of publicly available YouTube videos produced by Cooke Optics TV, exploring role of the camera operator and looking at key techniques.

Like many operators, Gutierrez keeps and maintains a few key items of kit, “the tools of my trade,” as he puts it, “and I keep them in absolutely top condition.” These tools will usually include one or more fluid heads, and for many a year Gutierrez has been loyal to British manufacturer Ronford-Baker.

“Ronford-Baker were always there for me from when I started as a young assistant,” says Rodrigo.

“They always received me and wanted to know how I was doing. Their expertise in answering questions, repairing equipment and, of course, manufacturing is second-to-none.”

To the present day, Gutierrez’s busy CV features plenty of transatlantic multi-camera productions, such as Disney’s Alice Through the Looking Glass (2016, DP

came Steadicam. These days a lot of productions prefer to have an A-camera/Steadicam operator, and then the B-camera operator, like myself, just as a normal operator. Which is fine. Until they start to misinterpret that the A-camera operator is somehow more knowledgeable than the B-camera operator.

“There are a few directors of photography that don’t follow that book,” Gutierrez continues. “John Mathieson, for example, will have three operators on his jobs and each operator is as experienced as the other. The fact that I’m A-camera is just a letter.

But unfortunately, it is happening more and more, that B-camera is perceived as lesser.”

Seeing as Gutierrez is so often sought-out by DPs and operators as a trusted collaborator this problem looks set to persist.

For now, Gutierrez unwinds by taking long walks with his stills camera in hand. “I like to capture the amazing tapestry that nature provides,” he remarks serenely.

Thursday 10th February 2022 – VIP Preview - By Invitation Friday 11th & Saturday 12th February 2022 Open Days Battersea Evolution, London

about to go on second unit for a picture called Out Of Africa (1985, DP David Watkin BSC),” continues Rodrigo. “A few weeks later I had a phone call from the production saying the second unit operator had been delayed and could I come over for about five to seven weeks? I said, ‘Come and film elephants?

I’m your man!’”

“So, I ended-up in Africa and then through other circumstances the main unit operator, the famous Freddie Cooper, was ill with an eye infection and they put me up front, this young kid who nobody knew, shooting Robert Redford and Meryl Streep.”

BSC expo

Europe’s Premier International Event for Film & TV Production Equipment & Technology CINEMATOGRAPHY WORLD NOVEMBER 2021 41

THE POWER OF THE DOG•ARI WEGNER ACS

ARI WEGNER ACS•THE POWER OF THE DOG says Wegner. “Essentially we distilled our palette down to a dusty rainbow of colours between sliver and brown, with some pastels and gold to highlight Rose. The only exception was to be the verdant green in the scenes where we filmed Phil’s private space in the willow glades. We wanted these to feel like an exhale, an oasis, full of life.”

Principal photography on The Power Of The Dog took place in New Zealand over a total of 50 shooting days, spread across two separate stints due to a nationwide Covid-19 shut-down.

Filming began on New Zealand’s south island in January 2020, in the Hills Creek area of Otago, where a remote, former sheep farm was transformed into the cattle ranch. Special attention was paid to the geographical layout of the main house and outbuildings, both in relation to the path of the sun and the eyelines from the property to the mountainscapes in the distance. The first two storeys

FAMILY MATTERS

By Ron Prince

I

f Benedict Cumberbatch’s performance in Jane Campion’s The Power Of The Dog is considered one of his best, and a worthy awards-season contender too, the same could equally apply to Australian DP Ari Wegner ACS and her cinematography work on the film, described as high art that shimmers with empathetic, emotional intelligence.

of the mansion’s façades were constructed – the third floor and roof were VFX-composited in post production. The shell of the house acted as a useful space for cast and crew dining, wardrobe and make-up, as well as the video village. Shooting also took place in the town of Oamaru on the coast of North Otago.

The production then moved to a sizeable warehouse in Auckland on New Zealand’s north island, where the interiors for the film had been constructed. Location photographs of the vistas from the ranch on the south island were printed on to scenic backdrops, which were hung and appropriately lit outside the interior set-builds.

Production in Auckland lasted for one week, before lockdown ensued. Filming resumed in June 2020 for the remaining four weeks.

Recalling the decision-making about aspect ratio, cameras and lenses, Wegner says, “We

explored lots of framing options – 4:3, 2:1 and 1.85:1 – but there were shapes that were calling out for 2.40:1 – the ensemble scenes around the long table, the cattle drives and long mountain ranges. We shot using Alexa Mini LF and Panavision Ultra Panatar lenses, from a package provided by Panavision in Auckland.

“I had never used the Ultra Panatars before, but I really loved them, they are beautiful without being attention-grabbing. The lenses have a 1.3 x Anamorphic squeeze, so the look is not entirely spherical but not obviously Anamorphic either. I used a Tiffen 812 warming filter for pretty much the entire shoot, as I wanted to mute and unify the colours a touch more, and the 812 did that in a surprising and subtle way.

“Jane generally enjoys longer lenses than I have typically used, and I really fell in love with using them on this film as a powerful tool for setting the

Images: The Power Of The Dog, image credit Kirsty Griffin/ Netflix/Cross City Films Limited © 2021

Based on Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel of the same name, the slow-burning psychodramatic Western is set on a remote range in the brutish badlands of Montana in 1925. Cumberbatch and Jesse Plemons lead as brothers Phil and George Burbank, who manage the ancestral cattle ranch, and have even shared the same bedroom for 20 years. Until, that is, George suddenly takes a wife – the widowed Rose Gordon (Kirsten Dunst), who runs a nearby restaurant and rooming-house. He moves Rose into the mahogany-panelled mansion with her sensitive son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), but the hard-bitten Phil treats these interlopers with mocking cruelty and derision, until the unexpected comes to pass.

The Netflix production had its world premiere to critical acclaim at the 2021 Venice Film Festival, where Campion won the Silver Lion for Best Direction, prior to a run on the worldwide festival circuit and limited release on the streaming platform. Wegner picked-up the Artisan Award at the Toronto Film Festival.

“I have been a great admirer of Jane’s work for as long as I can remember,” says Wegner, whose recent credits include Lady Macbeth (2016, dir. William Oldroyd), In Fabric (2018, dir. Peter Strickland), The True History Of The Kelly Gang (2019, dir. Justin Kurzel) and Zola (2020, dir.

Janicza Bravo).

“As a cinematographer you dream about the possibility of collaborating with an auteur director like Jane. She is one of the first filmmakers I ever discovered – back in high school actually – and is maybe my original inspiration, as her work got me excited about film as an art form as well as a career.”

“I shot a commercial with Jane about five years ago. It was a brief experience, but we really

clicked. Cut to the last few days of 2018, I’m in the supermarket, I look down at my phone and Jane Campion is calling. She tells me she’s read a book and she’s writing the script, and might I be interested in talking about it?”

“As soon as Jane started telling me about the setting, the time period and the characters, I knew The Power Of The Dog would be an incredible project for a cinematographer – and, of course, the chance to collaborate with her was completely irresistible,” recalls Wegner.

One of the prerequisites for the job was that Campion wanted someone who would be accessible throughout the 12 months before production actually started, and who would be especially willing to spend time early-on getting involved in planning.

“A full year before production started, we started scouting and talking,” Wegner recalls.

“Driving and talking, exploring on foot and talking.

Basically a lot of talking!

“One of the most important things for us was scouting the locations at the same time of year we would be shooting. Colour and light in that part of the world change drastically with the seasons. So it was important to us that we saw places as they would be a year later, when we would arrive with a crew. We did more trips over the rest of 2019, finally settling on a location for the ranch, discussing the big picture decisions as well as minute details.

“The great thing about having time is you can sleep on every idea. A few months before the shoot, we left the production office and settled down at Jane’s house, about three-hours drive from where we were going to shoot. We spent four weeks together storyboarding, going through the script one beat at a time to crystallise what each shot needed to convey or hint at. Both of us would draw

42 NOVEMBER 2021 CINEMATOGRAPHY WORLD

then compare, adjust and refine.”

Wegner adds, “I usually love creating quite specific visual rules for films, but for this project I’d say what we landed on would be better described as a set of values – unadorned, deliberate, non-judgmental photography, no emotionally-manipulative camera moves, no shots that were trying to convince an audience about anything. Shots that could show a character feeling something without telling a viewer what they should feel about it.

“The whole film would hopefully lead up to complex, multiple, emotional feelings for the audience at the end, and we knew that would be strongest if viewers could bring their own preconceptions to what they were seeing, rather than have the film dictate an opinion to them.”

Inspiration for the visuals started with B&W portrait and documentary photography of the time, including the work of Evelyn Cameron (1868 - 1928), a British woman who documented her pioneering life and times in Montana as a diarist and a photographer.

“Her work is beautiful and heartfelt and delicate, in a world that wasn’t easy for her, and I found that, and her images, endlessly fascinating.

There’s a very gentle eye and mind behind the camera, you can just sense it,” notes Wegner.

Painterly references encompassed Andrew Wyeth and Lucien Freud, for the restricted, muted colour palettes and minimalist compositions in their work. Amongst the filmic inspirations was A Man Escaped (1956, dir. Robert Bresson, DP LéonceHenri Burel) for its stripped-down, matter-of-fact and cinematographic style, full of tension.

“Jane and I discussed the colour palette of the film at length with Kirsty Cameron, the costume designer, and production designer Grant Major,” CINEMATOGRAPHY WORLD NOVEMBER 2021 43

THE POWER OF THE DOG•ARI WEGNER ACS geography of a scene, or embedding characters in landscapes in an authentic way. Plus, when you are working with locations so vast, there is almost no limit to how far you can take the camera back.

There are very few wide shots in this film using wide lenses.”

Wegner says that after production wrapped each day, she spent time with DIT/dailies colourist James Gardner applying a grade that would carry the film through the editorial process.

“At the end of a day, I enjoy watching what we’ve shot again – away from the time pressure of the set, on a nice monitor in a dark environment” she says. “On-set we monitored in Rec.709 which is a LUT I know very well. It’s not always the prettiest LUT, but when I monitor in Rec.709 it’s one less variable to take into account. Spending time with James at the end of the day meant we got the best of both worlds, monitoring in Rec.709 on-set and having graded images for the editorial team. When the time finally came for the DI, the colourist Trish Cahill at Sound Film, myself and Jane spent three weeks rediscovering the footage all over again.

That was a real joy.”

Although Wegner operated the handheld scenes, Grant Adams took on the lion’s share of A-camera duties, including Steadicam moves. 1st ACs Daniel Foeldes and Ben Rowsell supported them with Henry West joining after the Covid lockdown. Aerial drone photography was shot by Sam Peacocke. Sam Strain was the key grip, and Thad Lawrence the gaffer.

“In keeping with our philosophy of not being emotionally-manipulative, we aimed to only move the camera when prompted by an actor’s

movement, or to be in lockstep with a physical action, like Rose’s stopstart piano playing.” says Wegner. “When it came to the handheld sequences, we took a similar approach, but gave the camera more agency to be curious, to tilt or pan to discover something that was of interest.”

Recalling her lighting strategy for the film, Wegner remarks, “I generally don’t use lights on exterior scenes - but I love daylight control, what you can sculpt with bounce and neg. What you see of the amazing landscapes on-screen is for real. The natural light in New Zealand, during the first and last hours of the days, is magical. Having spent so much time there in prep, Jane and I knew the light in that valley particularly well. So we were able to strategise during the day if we knew something was going to happen with the light and get a break away camera ready to capture that.”

For the fearsomely-dark interior scenes shot in Auckland, which play such a strong role in the psychological storytelling, Wegner kept the lighting low-key.

“The house is an opulent mansion, but it’s not a welcoming place,” she explains. “It was important to us that Rose felt ill-at-ease from the moment she entered, and that this place could be intimidating day or night.

“I wanted it to feel anxiety-inducing and dark, but obviously without losing the glorious set that Grant had built for us. So I lit the dark timber panels a lot with sheen, worked with silhouettes of the architectural

First Things First shapes, like the banisters and animal heads, and made sure the angle of the keylight on an actor was just enough to see the emotion and light in the eyes, but not much more.

“For night interiors I really enjoy Jem Balls and bounced Dedolights - for our day interiors I would light the backdrops quite hot, allowing the inside to feel dark and oppressive. We would generally bounce-in HMIs to key, and light the backdrops with SkyPanels or ARRI X Lights, depending on the season or time of day we were trying to depict.”

Wegner concludes, “A quote from Andrew Lesnie ACS ASC which has always stayed with me is that ‘some directors want a facilitator, others want a collaborator’. One of the things I appreciate most about Jane is that she is a true collaborator. She creates a family environment which puts everyone at ease and, from there, ideas can flow in both directions, loop around, and go through various generations until the strongest ones stick.

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Images: The Power Of The Dog, image credit Kirsty Griffin/ Netflix/Cross City Films Limited © 2021

“At the beginning of official pre-production Jane requested a two-day read-through of the script with all the department heads. All together in one room she was able to share how she envisaged what was on the page, and we all shared our early vulnerable ideas and research. In prep, those big picture conversations, with everyone around a table is what I crave more than anything, but in my experience those moments actually turn out to be so hard to come by. So two whole days was a feast! We certainly didn’t have all the answers by the end of it, but we were adrenalised with ideas and the knowledge that we were all starting the conversation from the same place.”

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©2021 Universal City Studios, LLC. Illustration: Dyna Mendoza

44 NOVEMBER 2021 CINEMATOGRAPHY WORLD

TICK, TICK...BOOM!•ALICE BROOKS ASC

ALICE BROOKS ASC•TICK, TICK...BOOM!

This page: (top) (l-r) Andrew Garfield, director Lin-Manuel Miranda and DP Alice Brooks ASC on location in NYC. All images: Tick, Tick… Boom!

Photo Credit: Macall Polay/Netflix ©2021.

ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

Lin and I are the same age and share the same memories of what New York was like in 1990

By Iain Blair

I

t’s been a huge year for cinematographer Alice Brooks. Well-known for her rich, textured photography, powerful compositions and dramatic lighting, she received rave reviews for her inspired work on In The Heights (2021) the film adaptation of the Lin-Manuel Miranda musical, directed by Jon M. Chu. And now she’s followed that success with another high-profile project, tick, tick…

BOOM! for Netflix and Imagine Entertainment.

Another musical, it’s directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda, who makes his feature film directorial debut, and produced by Ron Howard. An adaptation of the semi-autobiographical musical by Jonathan Larson (Rent), the film stars Andrew Garfield as Jon, a young theatre composer trying to make it in New York City in the 1990s, alongside a stellar cast that includes Alexandra Shipp, Vanessa Hudgens, Judith Light and Bradley Whitford.

I taked to Brooks about the challenges of shooting tick, tick…BOOM!, the cinematography, lighting and working with a novice director.

You must really love musicals, as you’ve shot two in a row now.

I do. I grew up watching musicals. My mom was a singer and dancer and my dad was a playwright. I’d watch all the classic musicals on TV all the time, and I have a huge wealth of knowledge about them. Then later, Jon Chu and I met as film students at USC nearly

20 years ago, and I shot his musical short. That led me to In The Heights and now this.

Talk about how you and Lin-Manuel collaborated.

The first time we discussed tick, tick…BOOM! it was just four days after wrapping In The Heights. He sent me the script, and immediately I thought, ‘This could be a scene from my childhood.’ It starts on my birthday, January 26th, 1990, in New York where I spent my first decade, in the eighties. And just like Jonathan, we lived in a 300sq/ft tenement apartment with a bathtub in the kitchen, and the place was always full of my parents’ artist friends who became my surrogate family. And like Jonathan, we also lost a lot of them to AIDS. So I prepared a lookbook for my meeting with Lin, filled with photos of my childhood.

And when Lin saw them, he remarked, ‘These are your personal photos?

They could be something right out of the movie.’

Lin and I are the same age and we share the same memories of what New York was like in 1990. So right from the start it was an effortless collaboration.

Turning a stage musical into a film can be quite challenging. How did you approach the look of the movie, and were there any surprises working with him as a first-time film director?

Lin comes from a theatre background where

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you workshop a play, and we did the same thing. The core team, including me and Lin, the production designer, writer and storyboard artist would sit down for long, in-depth meetings and

I grew up watching musicals explore and play with ideas for the look and design.

It turned into the most drawing and re-drawing of storyboards ever, because that’s the way Lin works.

There was a lot of trying things and back-and-forth until we’d settle on something, so our prep was like workshopping.

How long was the prep and shoot?

We prepped twice, as Covid hit us in the middle.

We first prepped for three months starting at the end of 2019, and shot for just eight days before we got shut down for six months. Then we did another month of prep and shot for 42 more days. So it was very strange.

How did you make all your camera and lens choices?

As I do on every film, I tested a ton of different camera packages and lenses. As it was Lin's first movie I asked him how involved in all that he wanted to be. He said, 'I want to learn everything.' So I'd shoot the tests and we'd meet at the lab and project them, and then narrow down our choices.

Interestingly, we ended-up with the same package we used on In The Heights – the Panavision DXL2 with Panavision G-series Anamorphic lenses.

The difference is, we detuned the lenses in a totally different way, with the help of Dan Sasaki at Panavi-

diner and his apartment – that we could study. So we were able to recreate all the key locations very accurately.

sion once again.

Then after Covid had hit and we finally came back, Netflix and our producers were very worried about us using atmosphere. So I did new tests and Dan stripped more coating off the front of the lenses to age them more and make them more reactive with the light. And then I ended-up shooting with a filter on top of that, a 1/8 Black Promist. And we also used a Betacam for the ‘found footage.’

What about the lighting, as this film’s a lot moodier than In The Heights?

Yes, it’s much darker in tone and look, and very different. It’s far more intimate. My main lights were ARRI Sky Panel S30s, S60s and S360s, plus T12s, 18Ks, Hybrid LED space lights, Color Force and small Tungsten units. We lit our theatre with Lekos, Par cans, and HMI follow spots.

The stage portion was based on the real stage show Jonathan Larson did at the New York Theater Workshop, and we were originally going to build that set elsewhere. But after Covid hit and the theatre shut down, we were able to shoot in the actual theatre and use a lot of their lights and rigging, and we spent nine days there. That brought so much to the project.

But we had to recreate other locations, like the Moondance Diner where he worked right up until before Rent came out. The wonderful thing was we had so much research material available as a friend of Jonathan’s was constantly recording him and we had eight years’ worth of video – of locations like the

The film is darker, but the Sunday number in the diner is so joyous and bright. Tell us about that?

It’s the brightest scene in the whole movie, and I used 60 Hybrid LED space lights outside, along with a series of T12s and an 18K, to shoot it. It was inspired by the Stephen Sondheim musical Sunday In The Park With George and Georges Seurat’s pointillist painting, A Sunday Afternoon On The Island Of La Grande Jatte, which is so vibrant and where the colours are so saturated. We wanted that look

posed the image, and then in the CDL we brought down the exposure, which it gave the material a sort of heightened plastic quality with skin tones that were a little smoother and more vibrant.

You shot a bravura Busby Berkley-style opening sequence for In The Heights, and another, but very different, pool sequence for this. You must be becoming an expert at shooting in swimming pools!

(Laughs) I think I am! This scene was by far my favourite – the biggest challenge and the most rewarding. It's a wonderful demonstration of a single moment of genius for Jonathan. We found this amazing pool in the West Village which had tile lines on the bottom that looked just like music staff paper lines. I took all these underwater shots with my iPhone and we noticed that the No.30 tile was at the very centre. Lin had the idea of Jon touching the 30 tile marker, which was also the age he was so afraid of turning. And only later did we find out it was the same pool that Jonathan had swum in every day.

to contrast with the dark coldness of New York in January. And I love the shot of Jonathan right before this, where we did a hand held push-in on him doing his introduction to the song.

Did you work with a colourist in prep on any LUTs? Yes, I worked very closely on the LUT with a great dailies colourist, Dustin Wadsworth, in conjunction with colourist Stephen Nakamura who did the final DI at Company 3 in New York, where we also did all our dailies. And then we had a wonderful DIT, Abby Levine, who worked on the CDLs for each scene. So, for instance, on the Sunday sequence, we over-exCINEMATOGRAPHY WORLD NOVEMBER 2021 47

PASSING•EDU GRAU AEC ASC

EDU GRAU AEC ASC•PASSING Images: Passing BTS photos by Emily V. Aragones.

Images copyright © 2021 Netflix, Inc.

ASC), Shadow Of A Doubt (1943, DP Joseph A. Valentine), Strangers On A Train (1951, DP Robert Burks ASC), plus some scenes from Notorious (1946, DP Ted Tetzlaff ASC). We looked at David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945, DP Robert Krasker BSC ASC) as well, which is one of my own personal favourite movies. There is something to learn and to appreciate from those films that isn’t seen in modern filmmaking, although we also referenced newer B&W movies to get other ideas would help us to inhabit our worlds in our movie.

I’m proud of how we played with the dimension of depth Which camera did you use? Did you shoot in B&W? To me, the cameras that shoot just in B&W are not as visually interesting, or offer as many possibilities, as colour cameras. So we decided to shoot Passing in colour using the ARRI Alexa Mini, but used a LUT to convert the image to B&W on-set. We always thought in B&W during production and never saw an image in colour during the whole shoot.

We tested things like make-up, wardrobe and the set dressings to make sure they gave the right result in B&W. This meant, for example, that we painted the walls of Irene’s house a particular shade of red – which was so ugly that you could hardly bear to look at it. However, during the DI colour grade at Harbor Post with colourist Roman Hankewycz, we could pick that red hue and make the B&W result look slightly brighter or darker depending on the scene or the light within the shot.

SHADES OF GREY

By Oliver Webb

W

ritten and directed by actress Rebecca Hall in her feature directorial debut, Passing is an adaptation of the 1929 novel by Nella Larsen of the same name. The title refers to AfricanAmericans who racially passed for white during the segregation era.

Hall is the daughter of famed theatre director Sir Peter Hall and legendary opera singer Maria Ewing. Although the British actor presents as white, Hall in fact comes from a mixed-race background, with a generational history of passing on her maternal grandfather’s side.

Set in 1920s New York, Passing follows Irene (Tessa Thompson) who unexpectedly runs into her former high-school friend Clare (Ruth Negga), and finds that they each live different lives, in different worlds on opposite sides of “the colour line,” which will ultimately threaten both of their realities. Shot

by Spanish DP Eduard Grau AEC ASC, in exquisite B&W in 4:3 aspect ratio, Passing will be released on Netflix in November 2021.

How did you get your break in the industry?

I wanted to be a filmmaker from the age of 13. I was fortunate enough that they opened a film school in in Barcelona, the Escola Superior De Cinema I Audiovisuals De Catalunya. The ESCAC is a very good school – many good filmmakers were trained there and were actually my teachers. I was lucky to join when I was 18 and stayed for four years. I

graduated as a cinematographer and then I went to the National Film & Television School (NFTS) in London, where I studied for another two years.

Twenty years later I still keep learning!

After the NFTS, I started working in the British film industry and did a couple of small films there. I also did an art house film back in Barcelona, Honor De Cavalleria (2006, dir. Albert Serra), which was nominated for the Golden Camera at Cannes. I was blessed to get a call from Tom Ford to shoot A Single Man (2009) and that changed my life and my perspective completely. I was 27 at that point and moved to America.

How did you first get involved with Rebecca Hall?

I did a movie in 2010 called The Awakening (dir.

Nick Murphy), Rebecca was the lead actress and we got along super-well. It was my fourth film. We’re about the same age and have similar perspectives about filmmaking. We met again when she starred in The Gift (2015, dir. Joel Edgerton) and we felt very comfortable collaborating together on that movie.

After that, Rebecca called me about a short film she was going to direct, but I couldn’t do it in the end.

However, she called me again regarding Passing.

Although I came late on to the film, it turned our to be another great collaborative experience. We pushed each other to deliver the best from one another, but always in a fun and constructive way. It is always a healthy relationship when filmmakers support and

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Which lenses did you choose and why?

We shot with Lomo Anamorphics, Russian lenses from the ‘70s. Those lenses don’t have that much resolution, especially around the edges, but they do have a painterly quality that is very difficult to find in other glass. They are different, and shooting with Anamorphic lenses for a 4:3 movie, hasn’t been done many times before.

A producer said this movie should feel like the caress of a woman. I put a lot of care into the texture, feel and senses of the movie, and I liked the feeling that those Lomo lenses gave. Whilst they are special, they are also difficult to work with, and my camera team did an amazing job to make those lenses work.

One of the things that I’m particularly proud of is how we played with the third dimension in cinema – with depth. Rebecca wanted to shoot with a very flat frontal camera and to play with how a character appeared in the square frame. For example, sometimes when we wanted to investigate Irene’s character, to get into her real emotions and her thinking, we went with stranger angles, a few more profiles and intimate close-ups, to create a different perspective on her. That play between lenses, perspectives and angles is something I think is really special.

Sometimes in filmmaking you need to take risks, to use something unique that will enhance the qualities of the movie in a different way. Passing doesn’t feel like many other movies you might see nowadays, and that is something we’re really proud of.

We see a lot of close-ups and medium closeup shots of Irene, which evoke a feeling of confinement. Tell us about that?

Shooting 4:3 helps, and makes more obvious, that feeling of confinement, that feeling of a character being boxed-in to their world, like being in a beehive, where you don’t or can’t see much beyond. I think that feeling of the beehive – that really all of us live in – is one of the key feelings of the movie, especially Irene’s world, which is constrained and limited.

Where did you shoot?

We shot mainly on location in New York, in a real house in the real Harlem. The only thing we had to build was the hotel room, which we built on a stage.

What was your working schedule like?

It was a 23-day shoot, which meant that we had time constraints and had to be very economical in our choices. On such a short production, you need to be much more decisive than when have a lot more days, so we were ready to into battle every day and we came out successful.

Q&A WITH PASSING DIRECTOR REBECCA HALL What drew you to adapting Nella Larsen’s book, Passing? Why did you feel it was an important story to portray?

I first read Nella Larsen’s book about 15 years ago. It was at a time in my life when I was spending more time in America. It’s sort of difficult to spend any constructive amount of time in America without thinking about race and racism.

I was increasingly coming to terms with a legacy of passing in my own family. My mum is from Detroit originally. My grandfather was black and originally born in Richmond, Virginia, and his parents were also black. He made the decision to pass for white, and I was thinking about what that means for my mother, how it fits into the relationship of our own understanding of race and all these things.

A legacy of passing in the family means the obscuring of race. Everybody is white now and so we don’t talk about it, which in itself is kind of a racist thing. I wasn’t entirely comfortable with that, and started to talk more about it to people, as I hadn’t done that during my adolescence. I wanted to know more about it, but the available information was so vague.

encourage each other to do their best work.

What were your initial conversations with Rebecca about the look of Passing?

There aren’t many films shot in 4:3 and B&W these days, but Rebecca was adamant about this formula. She wanted to make a movie that had the look-and-feel of old-school movies, and shooting 4:3 in B&W gave her that. It all made perfect sense.

The 4:3 aspect ratio helped the feeling of things being restrained, about life taking place in different worlds. That was interesting. She always manifested her intentions to use black, white and the many shades of grey in between, to talk about race. That was interesting too, and beautiful, as it was saying something very important about the characters and the worlds they were living in. As a cinematographer, that is really what you want – when your visual work really talks about the characters and embraces the themes of the film.

What creative references did you look at?

We looked at a lot of old photos from photographers, such as Roy DeCarava, the black artist and photographer who lived in the same areas that we were shooting in Harlem. Those were a big inspiration for me.

We also considered old movies, classic Hollywood and British films, such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940, DP George Barnes CINEMATOGRAPHY WORLD NOVEMBER 2021 49

NEW SIZE. SAME FEATURES. AVAILABLE NOW.

PASSING•EDU GRAU AEC ASC Images: Passing BTS photos by Emily V. Aragones.

Images copyright © 2021 Netflix, Inc.

SOFT LIGHT. PRECISE WHITE.

When I went to America in my early 20s, someone said, ‘This thing, this struggle, you are going through, is encapsulated in Nella Larsen’s book that was written in 1929. You should read it.’

I did, and was really knocked sideways by it. Not only for the personal reasons that I just explained, but also because it felt to me to be incredibly temporal. It’s a strikingly complex yet simple book, and I felt that it would make a brilliant film for all of these reasons.

Did the subject matter present any obstacles in getting the film made?

Yes. It’s not popular to make films that don’t have clear resolution or clear dictums. There’s also not that much precedence for historical fiction about black people that doesn’t directly involve episodes about white violence on a black community. Passing is about how your psyche if affected by living in a racist society overall, not necessarily about single acts of white violence.

Also, I didn’t make it any easier for myself because,

even with the first draft, I wanted Passing to be made in B&W. It was very clear choice for me, both conceptually and stylistically.

What discussions did you have with Edu before shooting?

There were mentions of Hitchcock films, and I asked Edu to look at Joseph Losey’s film The Servant (1963, DP Douglas Slocombe BSC).

There were other films that were not anything to do visually with Passing, but had a feeling of something relevant, such as Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light

I put a lot of care into the texture, feel and senses of the movie

50 NOVEMBER 2021 CINEMATOGRAPHY WORLD

(2007, DP Alexis Zabe), which I also asked Edu to look at.

Edu came on to the production rather late in the day, as I originally had a different DP on the film. As I knew Edu from previous projects, I called him last minute and said, ‘Do you want to come and shoot a B&W film in 4:3? I need you tomorrow.’ Thankfully he was available and got on a plane immediately.

How has your work as an actor informed your work as a director?

I think it’s really on a basic educational level.

Working as an actor it’s lucky, and the best learning experience you can imagine, when you get to experience different directors at work, and witness how differently each one works. That gives you some of the most valuable lessons you can have when you come to directing yourself. But, there’s only really one way to do it, and that is your way, because it is ultimately about your relationship with what you see on-set and on the monitor.

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PIRATES•RACHEL CLARK

RACHEL CLARK•PIRATES

PARTY LIKE IT’S 1999

By Natasha Block Hicks

Images: Pirates BTS photos by Jack Smith.

A

s soon as Rachel Clark arrived for her interview as a candidate DP for Pirates (2021) – Reggie Yates’ feature directorial debut following three friends as they traverse London in search of the ultimate Millennium party – she knew that this would be no routine conversation.

“It’s quite terrifying being interviewed by someone who has interviewed people for a living,” Clark says of the British TV presenter, radio DJ and actor, during our late-night Zoom interview from the production offices of Without Sin, a four-part drama she is shooting for Left Bank Pictures. “Reggie is a pro. I felt like he eked a lot of personal information out of me in a very short space of time.”

Pirates is Clark’s first ‘official’ feature as a newly-fledged DP, and she has reached this level the traditional way over 15 busy working years, moving-up through the ranks. Highlights of her career to date include working as 1st AC on Andrea Arnold’s road movie American Honey (2016, DP Robbie Ryan BSC ISC), “an incredible experience,” she says, and her graduation to operator/DP was marked by Rocks (2019, DP Hélène Louvart AFC), where she acted as B-camera operator and 2nd unit DP. “Rocks was almost like a DP internship,” recalls Clark gratefully. “I was involved in a DP capacity, but there was also another DP there, Hélène, who was guiding me and including me in every part of the process. I never went back to assisting after that.”

From their first meeting onwards, Yates and Clark found common ground as two contemporaries passionate about independent films, and some of these informed the making of Pirates.

“Reggie talked a lot about the lighting, use of colour and skin tones in Belly (1998, DP Malik Hassan Sayeed),” divulges Clark. Sayeed, also known for lighting Spike Lee’s He Got Game (1998), was once referred to by DP Bradford Young ASC as the “gifted god of lighting black folk.”

“Our three actors had very different skin tones,” continues Clark, “Reggie was passionate about making sure we represented them truthfully. This was something we discussed extensively, looking not only at films that had done it well, but also those which had

We shot on ARRI Alexa Mini for the fact that it is small and flexible done it badly.”

More than just discussion points, Yates went on to pay homage in Pirates to those independent films that had particularly inspired him.

“There are a few shots in the film which are an ode to La Haine (1995, DP Pierre Aïm AFC),” says Clark, “composed conversations where the characters sit in a line and don’t necessarily look each other in the eye. There’s a shot in La Haine where they’re sitting in the playground by this big hippo slide. We had our characters sitting on bollards in front of a giant snail.

“There’s a scene outside a nightclub that Reggie always calls the ‘Belly scene’,” continues Clark.

“Shooting a nightclub set on the eve of the Millen-

52 NOVEMBER 2021 CINEMATOGRAPHY WORLD

nium afforded us an opportunity to introduce some strong colours. We were directly inspired by the garage music scene of the ‘90s – clothing and fashion at the time were very bold and striking. We looked at a lot of images and videos captured at garage nights. Purples and pinks were a direct reference to those real images, and they look amazing on black skin. Throughout the rest of the film you’ll find burnt oranges, blues and greens.”

Yates, however, was concerned that Pirates, though late-90s period and urban, shouldn’t be grimy and gritty. “We’ve seen it so many times before and we didn’t feel the need to repeat it,” stresses Clark. “Reggie wanted to celebrate London and black culture. We talked about the film being a bit of a love letter to London, garage music, the boys and friendship.

“We were lucky to be able to work with the incredible colourist Jateen Patel at Molinare,” Clark acknowledges. “Jat had graded all of Reggie’s previous shorts and I was very grateful to Reggie for introducing us, he did an amazing job on the film. I graded remotely for the most part while working nights on location shooting B-camera/splinter unit for Rob Hardy BSC ASC and Alex Garland on their new film Men (2022).”

The ubiquitous presence of a bright-yellow vintage Peugeot 205, known as the ‘Custard Cream’ and affectionately considered to be the fourth character in the film, helped inform the choice of camera.

“The car was tiny,” emphasises Clark, “and then you got these three boys in it, plus me. We shot on an ARRI Alexa Mini for the fact that it is small and flexible.”

For lenses, Clark chose the Primos from Panavision.

“I’ve always loved the Primos, and the fact that Panavision were able to supply me with a great selection of close-focus Primos for our car work was a no brainer. It helped so much having the flexibility to move around, to get close without the need to rely on diopters. The Primo lenses have a slightly nostalgic feel, but they’re still really sharp. We did loads of tests and they were the ones that felt right. We used the lightest of

pearlescent filters as well to add a softness around the highlights.”

A goodly proportion of the action of Pirates takes place in the streets of London after dark, which in 1999 were still dominated by colour-deadening sodium-vapour lamps, largely now updated to LED lighting.

“We didn’t have the kind of budget that allows you to shut down stretches of London streets for long periods of time, or relight those streets,” says Clark. “We had to be smart with our location choices and camera angles instead. We largely stuck to smaller streets that hadn’t been modernised.

“There’s a scene we shot in Vauxhall under an old brickwork railway bridge. It had these extremely bright modern LED lights all the away along. We

decided to gel them all to an amber yellow and added a blue backlight, which kicked beautifully off the wet-down. It was pretty simple but effective. I wouldn’t say it was totally ‘real’, but it looked great and felt like

We were inspired by the ‘90s garage scene – clothing and fashion were very bold and striking part of our show.”

A requirement of the lighting in general for Pirates was that it had to be quick and simple.

“We had a lot of night to shoot and a lot of location moves,” exclaims Clark, “so we needed to be fast and efficient. We used a lot of LED lighting, like the Astera Titan and Helios tubes. They are battery powered, light, waterproof and give you full colour control.”

Everywhere they went, the music of the late-‘90s garage scene followed.

“The characters in the movie are pirate radio DJs,” reveals Clark, “hence Pirates. The tracks were in the script. Reggie had a Spotify playlist which we listened to throughout prep and we always had music playing on-set while setting-up or in-between takes.”

This fixation was more than just a crew-motivating tactic.

“Reggie was obsessed with beats per minute and pace and timing,” details Clark, “he spent a lot of time in the edit constructing everything to have a certain rhythm. We discovered that shots which were cleaner and simpler allowed him to cut to the beat in a way that would help the timing of the jokes. It informed our

subsequent choice of shots.”

If the discerning reader has picked up on the above anomaly in the order of editing and shooting, it is because the Covid pandemic cut the production schedule in half. Although there were some low moments, where Clark wondered if her maiden project would survive to see completion, and social distancing measures made recreating heaving Millennium party club scenes seem like a Sisyphean task, Clark’s overall opinion is that the hiatus was a positive thing.

“It gave us a chance to take stock,” Clark remembers, “and really look at what was working, what wasn’t and where we could be a bit braver. We didn’t want to reinvent the movie, but the things that worked, we could then push them a bit more. In fact, everyone came back from lockdown with a real fire to improve and push ourselves as much as we could.”

Clark is philosophical on this point. “I feel like everyone should get that chance,” she says. “Imagine you were doing your first feature, and then someone says, “right, you can have a three-week break in the middle to edit some stuff, get some rest and recalibrate. What a gift. Pirates definitely benefitted from it.”

CINEMATOGRAPHY WORLD NOVEMBER 2021 53

2021 PREVIEW•ENERGA CAMERIMAGE

ENERGA CAMERIMAGE•2021 PREVIEW

Opposite: Jost Vacano BVK ASC, photo by Hermann J. Knippertz; This page: Denis Villeneuve, headshot by Ulysse Del Drago. Other photos: courtesy of Pawel Skraba,Pavlo Khabarov and Krzysztof Wesołowski

LEAPING BACK

Article by EnergaCAMERIMAGE team, with additional reporting by Ron Prince.

E

nergaCAMERIMAGE, The International Film Festival Of The Art Of Cinematography, is back and ready for yet another in-person edition in the charming city of Toruń, Poland – where it was founded in the early 1990s – from 13-20 November.

And what another stellar celebration is on the cards. This year’s guest list includes: Jost Vacano BVK ASC, Linus Sandgren FSF ASC, Robert Elswit ASC, Robert D. Yeoman ASC, Greig Fraser ACS ASC, Bruno Delbonnel AFC ASC, Ari Wegner ACS, Vittorio Storaro AIC ASC, Michał Englert, Haris Zambarloukos BSC GSC, Martin Ruhe ASC, Mikhail Krichman, Markus Foerderer, Elen Lotman ESC, Philippe Rousselot AFC ASC, Ed Lachman ASC, Piotr Sobociński Jr. PSC, Caroline Champetier AFC, Denis Lenoir AFC ASC ASK, Kramer Morgenthau ASC, Alice Brooks ASC, Witold Płóciennik PSC, Marcel Zyskind DFF, Anastas Michos, Ildikó Enyedi, Denis Villeneuve and many, many more.

Anyone who has been to EnergaCAMERIMAGE at least once will know the festival is far more than the sum of its parts. Yes, it has an incredible line-up of high-profile screenings and cinematic surprises, plus multi-layered cinematography workshops, dozens of Q&As and fascinating panels with the industry’s crème de la crème.

But EnergaCAMERIMAGE was, and always will be, about people and the inspiring company of thousands of industry professionals, students, cinephiles and film geeks from all over the world.

So, the main attraction this year will be the possibility to meet in-person and simply experience the whole thing together.

The 2021 festival will be organised along a hybrid formula. Which means that a number of film screenings, seminars and workshops, meetings with the creators of the showcased films, as well as other events, will take place in-person and in cinemas in Toruń, and on the festival’s dedicated online platform.

Concerned by the predictions about the arrival of the fourth wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in Poland, and paying close attention to security measures applied by other festivals around the world, the organisers would like to minimise the risk of transmission during the in-person part of

this year’s edition. The goal is to create a safe environment that will support unforgettable cinematic experiences whilst maintaining all available security measures.

The purchase of entry cards for the in-person part of the festival is possible only for holders of a valid certificate confirming that they have received a full dose of the Covid-19 vaccine. All in-person attendees will be required to comply with the sanitary regime imposed by guidelines for cultural events from the Ministry of Culture, National Heritage & Sport. Face masks, hand disinfection and a social distance of 1.5m will be required for all festival cinemas, where the number of seats available will depend on the requirements at the time.

Lifetime Achievement Award for Jost Vacano BVK ASC Jost Vacano BVK ASC, born in 1934 in Osnabrück, is one of Germany’s most successful cinematographers.

His interest in cinema developed relatively early in life. He learned filmmaking first by going to the cinema, then on the sets of short films by Peter Schamoni. The collaboration with the director resulted in a dynamic TV career in the 1960s. Vacano made his cinema debut with the feature Schonzeit Für Füchse (No Shooting Time For Foxes) (1966), which won the Silver Bear in Berlin.

Vacano’s career took off in the mid-1970s, when he shot The Lost Honour Of Katharina Blum (1975) for Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta, and later Lieb Vaterland Magst Ruhig Sein (Dear Fatherland Be At Peace) (1976) with director Roland Klick.

A breakthrough came with his collaboration with Wolfgang Petersen on the hugely popular Das Boot (1981), one of the most important titles in the history of German cinema. In order to film in extremely small, restricted spaces in a submarine, he developed a handheld, gyro-stabilised camera system, which allowed for high mobility of the camera operator. For his dynamic, disturbing cinematography in Das Boot he was nominated for

54 NOVEMBER 2021 CINEMATOGRAPHY WORLD

an Academy Award.

Vacano worked with Petersen again on The NeverEnding Story (1984). But the biggest confirmation of the DPs versatility was his 20-year collaboration with Paul Verhoeven, which resulted in seven completely different but visually sophisticated films – from Spetters (1980), a modest, social drama filmed in the Netherlands to the Hollywood blockbuster Hollow Man (2000). Together with Verhoeven, he created war cinema classics, such as Soldier Of Orange (1977) and Starship Troopers (1997). His work also created unforgettable worlds of dystopian Detroit in RoboCop (1987), a futuristic colony on Mars in Total Recall (1990) and neon Las Vegas in Showgirls (1995).

In the early 1980s, Vacano joined the struggle to legally recognise cinematographers as cocreators of cinematographic works. After achieving success in Germany, together with directors and film editors, in getting recognition from the VG Bild-Kunst collecting society, he started an unprecedented lawsuit that is helping to establish fair remuneration from the turnover made from film works under German law. This important case is still not resolved by final judgment – after almost 14 years of persistence – but it has massive significance for cinematographers worldwide.

Outstanding Director Award for Denis Villeneuve The festival always looks out for directors who perceive the visual language not just as a powerful tool, but also an opportunity to invite audiences on spellbinding journeys.

Those directors collaborate with cinematographers to infuse their cinematic worlds, ideas and the spaces between characters, with a visual poetry that constantly redefines what the art of filmmaking is all about.

Academy Award-nominated, French-Canadian filmmaker, Denis Villeneuve, is such a director, and will be in Toruń to receive his award and present his latest work – the grand cinematic spectacle Dune, shot by Greig Fraser ACS ASC, screening in the Main Competition.

Villeneuve is one of the most celebrated directors

in the industry, with previous work – such as Enemy (2013) shot by DP Nicolas Bolduc, Arrival (2016) lit by Bradford Young ASC, plus Prisoners (2013), Sicario (2015) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017) all filmed by Roger Deakins CBE BSC ASC – making waves, winning awards and respect worldwide.

Colin Tilley Wins Achievement in Music Videos Award Colin Tilley is a multiaward winning and Grammy-nominated American filmmaker, music video and TV commercials director, who has created a plethora of work with artists such as Kendrick Lamar, Cardi B, Justin Bieber, Nicki Minaj, Justin Timberlake, Zendaya, Enrique Iglesias, Mary J. Blige, Usher, Rita Ora and 50 Cent, among many others.

A maverick from day one, Tilley began his directorial career aged just 19, shooting and editing music videos for local Bay Area rappers.

He embraced a DIY approach to filmmaking, cutting his teeth as a one-man production machine, waltzing through concrete jungles and hanging out of cars with his eye in a camera.

Teaching himself to light, shoot and edit films through YouTube tutorials, Tilley eventually garnered industry attention, which took him to LA and introduced him to a new tier of talent. Tilley directed, produced and executive produced his first short, Mr. Happy (2015, DP Rob Witt) starring Chance The Rapper. He has since produced, written and directed commercials for leading brands such as YSL, Reebok, Rolls Royce, Beats by Dre, Diesel and Audi.

Bruno Nuytten Photography Exhibition Born in 1945, in the suburbs of Paris, Bruno Nuytten passionately pursued the profession of cinematography for over 20 years. As the DP on movies, he accompanied many acclaimed directors, including Jacques Doillon, Bob Raphelson and Andrzej Żuławski, and notably shot Stuart

Rosenberg’s Brubaker (1980), Alain Resnais’ Life Is A Bed Of Roses (1983), plus Claude Berri’s Jean De Florette (1986) and Manon Des Sources (1986).

Later, he focussed on directing and screenwriting.

Between 1986 and 2001, Nuytten directed the following films: Camille Claudel (1988, DP Pierre Lhomme AFC), which was awarded with five Césars; Albert Souffre (1992, DP Eric Gautier AFC); Passionnément (2000, DP Eric Gautier AFC) and Jim, La Nuit (2002). Despite his long-standing dedication to the world of film, he moved himself away from cinematography and directing into photography with the hope of discovering a reality perceived without fiction and myths.

He most frequently photographs objects, places and undefined beings, which at that specific moment of capture seem to be weirdly familiar. The peculiar photos he takes are somewhere on the edge between real and imaginary. The iPhone’s camera has become his pocket laboratory. Through image manipulations, Nuytten tries to obtain exactly the same feeling as the one that accompanied him during the process of capturing it, whilst hoping to make it shareable.

La Fémis Film School Shorts Review Every year the festival includes a review of shorts from a selected film school. This year’s choice is the prestigious Parisian institution La Fémis. Festival audiences will have the opportunity to watch early films by such artists as Emmanuel Mouret, François Ozon, Léa Mysius and Emmanuelle Bercot.

Founded in 1986 and headed by director Michel Hazanavicius, La Fémis trains more than 50 students each year in ten filmmaking skills: directing, writing, producing, editing, DP, sound engineering, production design, continuity supervision, distribution and exhibition.

The school has become a filmmaking benchmark in France and abroad. Since it was founded, its students have directed more than 2,800 short films, feature films and documentaries.

There will also be a seminar on the art of cinematography hosted by a special graduate from of the school.

CINEMATOGRAPHY WORLD NOVEMBER 2021 55

TICK, TICK...BOOM!•DP ALICE BROOKS

FilmLight Colourist Awards FilmLight, a leader in colour management technology, is running a programme of awards celebrating colourists and the art of colour worldwide. In its inaugural year, it will honour colourists in four categories: theatrical feature; nontheatrical or TV series production; commercials or music videos; and, the most innovative use of technology to achieve a creative result.

The winners – to be announced during the festival – will be decided by a jury of noted cinematographers, including Anthony Dod Mantle DFF BSC ASC, Bradford Young ASC and Danny Cohen BSC, and industry creatives such as senior colourist Peter Boyle and Simon Astbury.

Philippe Rousselot AFC ASC Night Shooting Masterclass “On a dark night a horseman gallops through a moonlit forest.” This is a phrase one might come across when reading a script and which needs to be translated into images.

From the earliest days of cinema, night exterior scenes have been the biggest and more interesting challenges facing DPs, especially when the scene descriptions do not match any real or imaginable situations.

Night means dark, when the human eye cannot see or can hardly see. But filming is essentially the opposite, it means visibility. From this contradiction, all kinds of strategies have been designed, aimed at specific problems on specific situations. Realism, naturalism, symbolism, fiction, shooting at night versus day-for-night; join Philippe Rousselot AFC ASC’s conversation where imagination can run free, as conversations sometimes do in the middle of the night.

El Zone system by Ed Lachman The illustrious Ed Lachman will discuss El Zone – the incredibly intuitive, innovative and essential exposure tool he invented. As a young DP, Lachman

tried ways to understand and control exposure in his negative to create different cinematic looks.

He managed to find his own method to create a unique system, which later, he translated into digital technology. Lachman devised a system based on 18% grey, a universal standard for photography.

The EL Zone system has 15 delineated colour zones in one-stop increments, plus half-stop increments above and below 18% grey, making light level adjustments more precise. It is also possible to use a screengrab of a scene to precisely match exposure and lighting at a later date. El Zone was first implemented by Panasonic in the VariCam 35 and VariCam LT cameras.

AFC’s “Blind” Full Frame & Medium Format Film Lens Test Every cinematographer who has had the opportunity to conduct blind tests knows how surprising the results can be: the filmstock your always thought would give milky blacks instead gives the most velvety results; the lens thought to be the most forgiving is, in fact, the harshest.

Following its successful Standard Format Lens Presentation in 2019, the AFC is back with a new round of “blind” tests, showing full frame and medium format lenses. Overseen by Caroline Champetier AFC, Martin Roux and Denis Lenoir AFC ASC ASK, the wide-ranging presentation involves 34 pairs of lenses (all full frame or medium format, spherical and Anamorphic). The group filmed two models with each lens in identical wide and tight shots.

Now the AFC is offering you the opportunity to view the results blind – without knowing the brand or type of lenses used for each shot. The screening will allow you to evaluate each lens without bias or prejudice, and decide which ones you like and those you don’t. At the end of the screening, the identity of the lenses will be revealed. This time, however, the surprise may not be so much the differences between these optics, but their similarities.

56 NOVEMBER 2021 CINEMATOGRAPHY WORLD

DP ALICE BROOKS•TICK, TICK...BOOM!

Exhibitors At the time of writing, confirmed exhibitors at this year’s festival included: Aputure, ARRI, Astera, Canon, Cooke Optics, Creamsource, Dedo Weigert Film, DoPchoice, Leitz, Moonlighting Industries, Panasonic, Sony, Sumolight, Vantage Film (Hawk) and Zeiss.

WHO WILL WIN THE GOLDEN FROG? Films in the Main Competition…

Animals – DP Frank Van Den Eeden NSC SBC, dir. Nabil Ben Yadir u

Belfast – DP Haris Zambarloukos BSC GSC, dir. Kenneth Branagh u

C’mon C’mon – DP Robbie Ryan ISC BSC, dir. Mike Mills u

Dune – DP Greig Fraser ACS ASC, dir. Denis Villeneuve u

u

Eight For Silver – DP & dir. Sean Ellis

The French Dispatch – DP Robert D. Yeoman, dir. Wes Anderson u

The Getaway King – DP Jacek Podgórski, dir. Mateusz Rakowicz

u

Hinterland – DP Benedict Neuenfels AAC BVK, dir. Stefan Ruzowitzky u

King Richard – DP Robert Elswit ASC, dir. Reinaldo Marcus Green u

The Last Duel – DP Dariusz Wolski ASC, dir. Ridley Scott u

The Last Execution – DP Nikolai von Graevenitz, dir.

Franziska Stünkel

u

Respect – DP Kramer Morgenthau ASC, dir. Liesl Tommy u

u The Tragedy Of Macbeth – DP Bruno Delbonnel AFC ASC, dir. Joel Coen

THE FRENCH DISPATCH•ROBERT YEOMAN ASC

ROBERT YEOMAN ASC•THE FRENCH DISPATCH

HOLD THE PRESS

By Ron Prince

This page: Actor Benicio Del Toro with crew members Bertrand Girard, Damien Luquet, Grégory Fromentin, Nicolas Saada, DP Robert Yeoman ASC and Valentine Payen, during production on The French Dispatch.

Photo by Roger Do Minh.

D

irector Wes Anderson is one of the most cherished of auteurs working in independent movie-making today.

His celluloid-originated features interweave intriguing narrative threads with star-studded casts and off-beat visual styling to relate quirky and highly-entertaining human stories. Shot on Kodak 35mm colour and B&W filmstocks, by regular cinematographer Robert D. Yeoman ASC, Anderson’s new and highly-anticipated comedy, The French Dispatch, promises more of the same.

Set in the grand but fictional French town of Ennui-sur-Blasé, the film has been described as, “A love letter to journalists… in a fictional 20th-century French city”. Set after World War II, it concerns an American newspaper editor who runs a magazine in France and who regularly sends stories about various aspects of French life back to the United States.

Typically, different personal stories in the form of a triptych are knitted into the fabric of the film.

The extensive ensemble cast brought together for The French Dispatch comprises some of Anderson’s regular favourites, such as Bill Murray, Frances McDormand and Tilda Swinton, plus supporting

Actors Timothée Chalamet, Benicio del Toro and Elisabeth Moss make their debuts for the director, and other performers set to appear include Christoph Waltz, Lois Smith, Henry Winkler, Rupert Friend, Griffin Dune, together with the French actors Denis Ménochet, Guillaume Gallienne, Félix Moati and Vincent Macaigne.

Out of Anderson’s many creative collaborators, DP Robert Yeoman ASC is perhaps the most pivotal of all in helping to put the director’s cinematic vision on to the big screen. Apart from Anderson’s stop-motion features Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) and Isle Of Dogs (2018) (both shot by DP Tristan Oliver BSC), Yeoman has served as the cinematographer on every one of Anderson’s other productions.

The French Dispatch represents Yeoman’s eighth movie collaboration with Anderson, starting with his

We both fell in love with the Kodak Double-X Negative look players from the director’s acclaimed The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), including Saoirse Ronan, Willem Dafoe, Mathieu Amalric and Adrien Brody.

debut Bottlerocket (1996), followed by Rushmore (1998), The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (2004), The Darjeeling

58 NOVEMBER 2021 CINEMATOGRAPHY WORLD

Limited (2007), Moonrise Kingdom (2012) and The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014). All were shot on 35mm film except Moonrise Kingdom, which harnessed 16mm.

Filming on The French Dispatch took place over the course of 50 days, around the picturesque city of Angoulême in the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region of south-western France, using practical locations that were carefully dressed to help depict the post-war time period. A variety of sets were constructed in a vacant factory, which was used for the production’s stage work.

“I first read the script of The French Dispatch in the summer of 2018,” recalls Yeoman, who earned a Best Cinematography Oscar nomination for his work on The Grand Budapest Hotel. “As usual I loved what Wes had written, although I knew that it would be a challenging shoot. But that is always the case with him. Many times Wes will describe the kind of shot he is looking for, and I’ll think to myself, ‘How am I going to do that?’ or ‘That impossible!”. It’s a big part of working with him, but we always find a way of pulling it off.”

Yeoman adds, “So much depends on our locations, so I try not to have too many preconceptions until I see them in person. When I arrived in Angoulême we spent a fair amount of time together looking around. We would sometimes take a film camera and shoot them in available light to get ideas. Often these tests were shot in extremely low light, and I was frequently surprised by how much detail the lab was able to bring out in the shadows. The latitude of film is extraordinary. From watching these tests, I was encouraged, when we came to shoot, to be more bold in the lighting and worry less about fill light than I have in the past.”

Recalling the visual references for the film, Yeoman remarks, “Wes always supplies a library of DVDs, photos and books that the actors and crew can

borrow to inspire them. He is a great fan and student of French filmmaking, especially the French New Wave and B&W photography.”

Amongst the many movies considered were: Le Feu Follet (1963, dir. Louis Malle, DP Ghislain Cloquet), Classe Tous Risques (1960, dir. Claude Sautet, DP Ghislain Cloquet), Pépé Le Moko (1937, dir. Julien Duvivier, DPs Marc Fossard/Jules Kruger), Quai Des Orfèvres (1947, dir. Henri-Georges Clouzot, DP Armand Thirard), Vivre Sa Vie (1962, dir.

Jean-Luc Godard, DP Raoul Coutard) and Touchez Pas Au Grisbi (1954, dir. Jacques Becker, DP Pierre

Montazel).

“I personally brought my copy of In Cold Blood (1967, dir. Richard Brooks, DP Conrad Hall ASC) to the reckoning,” Yeoman declares. “One of our stories had some scenes in a prison and I drew from Conrad Hall’s daring lighting and B&W photography as inspiration.”

Yeoman shot The French Dispatch with ARRICAM ST and LT cameras, fitted with Cooke S4 prime lenses, supplemented with an occasional zoom, framing most of the action in Academy 1.37:1 aspect ratio.

“We previously shot this way on The Grand

Budapest Hotel, as 1.37:1 helped to delineate the 1930’s period of that film. Both of us also loved the possibilities for compositions, and were very happy with the results,” Yeoman explains. “This aspect ratio was also used in many of the French films that inspired us and, similarly, it helped enhance the feeling of the time we wanted to evoke on The French Dispatch.

Occasionally, we shot a scene in Anamorphic, mainly to make a bold dramatic statement.” The camera and lens package was supplied by RVZ in Paris.

With the director and DP both being celluloid stalwarts, there was never any film vs. digital debate.

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THE FRENCH DISPATCH•ROBERT YEOMAN ASC

ROBERT YEOMAN ASC•THE FRENCH DISPATCH Images: all images from The French Dispatch courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2020 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.

All Rights Reserved.

Yeoman, who always operates the camera on Anderson’s movies, shot The French Dispatch on 35mm celluloid, utilising Kodak Vision3 200T 5213 for the movie’s colour sequences and Kodak Double-X Negative 5222 for the B&W sequences.

Both stocks were used for interior/exterior and day/ night scenes. Yeoman rated the 5213 at 200ASA and shot daylight without an 85 filter. The 35mm rushes were processed normally, without any push or pull processing, at film lab Hiventy in Paris, with Sixteen/19 delivering the dailies.

“I like the aesthetic feel of celluloid, and the texture of film grain was an important element in the look of this film, particularly from the B&W stock,” says Yeoman. “Originally we planned to shoot less of the movie in B&W, but Wes and I both fell in love with the Kodak Double-X Negative look and shot more scenes with it than were originally intended. In the end the movie is about one half in colour and one half in B&W. “Additionally, I think film not only gives Wes the quality of the image that he is looking for, but also that the process of shooting is much more his preference.

When a film camera is rolling, everyone in the cast

and crew is highly-focused on what is happening.

When you shoot digitally the on-set energy often feels more dispersed.

“We have a small crew on-set, and no video villages. The only screen is a small handheld monitor that Wes holds as he sits next to the camera.

Generally, he watches the actors and occasionally glances at the monitor to see how the shot is working. There is ordinarily no playback, unless there is some type of stunt or effect, and not a lot of discussion. The fewer people on-set, the happier he is.”

Speaking about his approach to motivating the camera for storytelling purposes, Yeoman observes, “As always, Wes pushed all departments to think outside the box and come up with more creative ways to achieve what he has imagined. He prefers using simple, imaginative rigs than modern equipment to achieve our shots. It is not always easy but the results are always rewarding.

“The French Dispatch was carefully planned out before we shot, and Wes was very specific about his camera moves. Our grip equipment was fairly standard except for some very intricate dolly moves

that Wes had designed, which meant we brought-in a lot of track. At times we had a track on top of a track so we could move both laterally and in-and-out within the same shot. We generally shot all of the moves on the dolly on tracks.

“There is one sequence that was filmed entirely handheld, and only one Steadicam shot, as Wes is generally not a Steadicam person. His shots are so exact that it is difficult to achieve them with a

Steadicam. For very high angles we were typically on a scaffold, as opposed to a Technocrane, as he prefers the older style of executing shots.”

Yeoman’s lighting package, provided by Transpalux in Paris, included a bevvy of HMIs, Tungsten lights, ARRI Sky Panels, plus other smaller LEDs, all depending on what the scene and location called for.

“Wes and I thoroughly discussed our lighting approach to each and every scene,” Yeoman explains. “I know his preferences and would try to give

him options wherever I could. I also design the lighting so we can move quickly while shooting and not take much time between set-ups.

“As always we used the French New Wave as our inspiration. We hoped for cloudy days and the sky was generally cooperative, which meant we rarely used lights on day exteriors. There were certain shots on the stage that required a stop of F11 to hold focus

for the actors in both the foreground and background.

So we bounced several 18Ks onto the ceiling (which was covered with white cloth), and hung some light grid underneath to further soften the lights. We used a lot of lights, but got our F11 on the Kodak 200T stock.

“We also used conventional Tungsten lights on night exteriors and during stage work. We particularly liked the Sky Panels for the amazing flexibility they give in terms of exposure and colour temperature and used them extensively. Generally the light panels and Tungsten lights were programmed into an iPad so we could make adjustments and lighting changes within a shot very quickly.”

Yeoman’s crew included gaffer Greg Fromentin, who brought his lighting crew from Paris for the production. “We had a wonderful collaboration, and it was a pleasure working with someone who always had some suggestions about how best to light a scene and we worked together beautifully.

Greg and his crew often anticipated our lighting needs and were one step ahead of me,” he says.

The 1st AC was Vincent Scotet, who Yeoman says was able to quickly adapt to his and Anderson’s unorthodox way of shooting. “He did an amazing job on focus. We often had to do splits to keep actors in different areas in focus and he was exceptional.”

Sanjay Sami, a regular with Anderson and Yeoman, performed duties as key grip. “Sanjay is from India and brings a wealth of experience from having worked all over the world. Wes would often describe a potential shot, and Sanjay always came up with the best solution to achieve it. At times his rigs were somewhat unusual but they always worked to perfection. His smile and sense of humour were

always appreciated on the set and he even converted me into a rugby fan!”

Yeoman concludes, “I just love the look of film, and we were all surprised by how much we liked the look of the B&W footage we had shot. This was something I don’t think could be achieved had we shot digitally.”

Wes will describe the kind of shot he is looking for, and I’ll think to myself, ‘How am I going to do that?

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HOUSE OF GUCCI & THE LAST DUEL•DP DARIUSZ WOLSKI ASC

At an age – he turns 84 this November – when most of his peers have long since slowed down, burned out or retired, Sir Ridley Scott seems to be speeding-up.

The prolific director already had one new release this year – The Last Duel, a 14th century epic starring Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Adam Driver and Jodie Comer.

And now he has a second high-profile film coming out – the very different House Of Gucci, a real-life murder-mystery about the eponymous fashion dynasty, starring Lady Gaga, Al Pacino, Jared Leto, Salma Hayek and Adam Driver (again).

DP DARIUSZ WOLSKI ASC•HOUSE OF GUCCI & THE LAST DUEL

Images: (top) House Of Gucci, photos by Fabio Lovino © 2021 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures Inc. All Rights Reserved; Images: (below) The Last Duel, photos by Jessica Forde, including cinematographer Dariusz Wolski ASC behind the scenes. © 2021 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.

IN FASHION

By Iain Blair

The cinematographer on both films was Scott’s frequent collaborator Dariusz Wolski ASC, whose projects for the director include: Prometheus (2012), Exodus: Gods And Kings (2014), The Martian (2015), All The Money In The World (2017), Alien: Covenant (2017) and Raised By Wolves (2020).

I talked to Wolski, whose other diverse credits include News Of The World (2020, dir. Paul Greengrass), for which he was Oscar-nominated, plus four films in the Pirates Of The Caribbean franchise, about working with Scott and the different challenges of shooting both films.

You must really love working with Ridley as you’ve shot two in a row now to add to many others. How do you and Ridley collaborate?

I love working with Ridley. There are so few directors of his calibre left now, so I feel very lucky to be shooting his films. I’ve been a huge admirer of his work since I first came to the States. Going back, Alien (1979, DP

Derek Vanlint CSC) and Blade Runner (1982, DP Jordan Cronenweth ASC) were big influences on me. They had such a big impact, with their aesthetic and visual approach, and strongly influenced my career.

I was fortunate to work with his brother, Tony, on two films – Crimson Tide (1995) and The Fan (1995) – and their production company, RSA, doing a lot of commercials. Then Ridley asked me to shoot Prometheus in 3D stereo as I’d shot some 3D projects before, and stereo was all the craze then. That led to all the other projects with him. So we know each other well and work together well.

He is extremely communicative and very collaborative, and he always has a very clear vision for each film. Even when it was 3D stereo he never compromised that vision. Shooting 3D is very cumbersome and restrictive, and I approached it the same way he did – just break all the rules. Ridley is a rebel and just does it his way.

When the 3D craze was over, we just carried on as usual. For The Last Duel we worked the same way we always do, with multiple cameras set-up to capture any given scene – usually four, but sometimes five or six depending on the coverage he wanted. We also used several cameras on House Of Gucci, but I didn’t have to deal with battles and the joust, so it was looser in style.

Did you shoot House Of Gucci & The Last Duel back-to-back?

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Pretty much. For me, all the prep was a little easier on House Of Gucci. We had the same production designer, Arthur Max, who was working in Italy with Ridley, who himself was busy casting, working on the script and all the storyboards. We finished shooting The Last Duel in October 2020, then I began prepping for House Of Gucci in January 2021, and we shot from early February to early May. Please talk about how you and Ridley approached the look and all the locations.

What were your points of reference visually?

The story for House Of Gucci really takes place in Milan and around Lake Como, Italy, with scenes in New York, and St. Moritz in Switzerland, and it’s another period piece, set in the ‘70s, ‘80s and early ‘90s. For me, it’s really hard to believe that the ‘90s is now a ‘period,’ but it is. That was a shock! It couldn’t be more different to The Last Duel in terms of its look and feel.

House Of Gucci is all about the world of high fashion and glamour and the lifestyles of the rich and famous – Studio 54, jet-setting, that kind of thing. You have all the fashion shows too. We recreated three of those, and two were exact copies of real shows, as they were all well-documented and we were able to do a lot of research on all the periods.

Ridley loved the work of this American-French fashion photographer, William Klein, who’d shot these amazing, grainy B&W photographs documenting all the behind-the-scenes stuff at fashion shows. You’d see all these girls, half-naked with cigarettes in their mouths

backstage, just before they go on the runway – the real underbelly of high fashion. So that was a big inspiration for us, along with the work of Helmut Newton.

I heard you shot in Rome quite a bit?

Yes, Rome doubled for Milan quite a lot as we could only shoot in Milan for a week. We also shot in Gressoney-Saint-Jean in Aosta in the Alps to cheat for St. Moritz, but we were able to shoot around Como and Florence.

Tell us about your camera and lens choices?

I shot with the same camera and lens package I used on The Last Duel – the ARRI Alexa Mini LF. It’s 4K, versatile and small, so you can shoot Steadicam or handheld. Mostly I used Angénieux Optimo short zooms – the 40-80mm and 60-120mm. They’re very flexible, you can use them handheld, and I love the quality. I also used Panavision PVintage 65mm Primes, which are very fast.

What about the lighting?

This was quite a different approach from The Last Duel, where I used a lot of LEDs. Obviously with high fashion there’s a lot of flash photography and strobe lights, all very fast. And you need that glamour look for the models and so on, which isn’t really my

style, but the story called for it. I’m also not actually a really technical person, but I have a great crew and DIT and gaffer, and together we came up with a look that really worked well I feel.

Is it true you don’t like to work with a colourist in prep on any LUTs? Yes. You have your palette in your mind, and I was working with my usual DIT, Ryan Nguyen, on the set.

It’s good to have a consistent crew in that way, as all the digital technology is evolving and changing all the time, so I rely a lot on Ryan.

As for the LUTs I used on House Of Gucci, they were very different from the ones we used on The Last Duel, and we also did some B&W stuff. We do on-set grading as we go and create the files which then go to my colourist Stephen Nakamura at Company 3 after the movie is cut.

What was the most difficult scene to shoot in House Of Gucci?

It was probably one of the simplest to watch – the one where they’re on a boat on a lake and it’s this very romantic moment. Often the simplest scenes are actually the hardest to shoot and light and control.

Shooting in Rome sounds like it could have been a nightmare, with all the people and traffic, but it was fantastic as it was on lockdown for Covid. So it was totally deserted – or at least pretty empty compared with what it would normally be like. And Gressoney was also pretty empty and quite beautiful. Even though

it was still winter up in the Alps we had to use some fake snow.

What about the DI and working with your longtime colourist Stephen Nakamura?

We go way back, to the Pirates Of The Caribbean films, and Ridley is a huge fan of Stephen’s work too.

So we have this shorthand and understanding. Stephen knows our work inside-out. We give him the files so he knows the look of the film in his mind, and he knows exactly what we like and don’t like. He does a lot of homework on his own too.

Then Ridley looks at it, I look at it, and it doesn’t take a lot of tweaking to get to where we want to get.

For House Of Gucci we began the DI in LA, and then moved to London and Stephen came over to do the final grade with us. Of course, it was very different from what we did for The Last Duel – way more contrasty, way more glossy, like fashion photography, but also with a bit of an edge. It’s not sweet glossy, and I’m very happy with the look we got.

What’s next for you?

I just began prepping another film with Ridley, called Kitbag, his Napoleon film, which we start shooting in January 2021 in Malta and England. We’re still scouting for all the battle locations, and I think it’s going to be amazing.

CINEMATOGRAPHY WORLD NOVEMBER 2021 63

THE HAND OF GOD•DARIA D’ANTONIO

DARIA D’ANTONIO•THE HAND OF GOD

RIGHT HAND WOMAN

Opposite: DP Daria D’Antonio, photo by Franco Origlia.

Both pages: The Hand Of God images, including director Paolo Sorrentino at the camera, by Gianni Fiorito.

By Natasha Block Hicks

T

he Hand Of God/È Stata La Mano Di Dio has been described as BAFTA Awardwinning director Paolo Sorrentino’s “most personal film yet.” Loosely set in the Naples of the ‘80s, weaving together autobiography and allegory, The Hand Of God follows 17-year-old Fabietto as two significant external forces – the arrival of soccer legend Diego Maradona to play for S.S.C. Napoli, and a cataclysmic family tragedy – propel him out of a Walkmanencompassed teenage inertia towards a painful but liberated young adulthood. We caught up with Italian DP Daria D’Antonio to discuss what The Hand Of God means to her.

“The story is set in a period of time which is also the time of my teenage years,” explains D’Antonio, who was Naples born-and-raised and a contemporary of Sorrentino. “There was a lot of emotional involvement for me, looking back on those years of being a teenager and young adult, when there was this selfdiscovery and falling in love with cinema.”

This was D’Antonio’s first time lighting a feature for Sorrentino as principal DP, but the pair had previously collaborated as director and DP on multiple short films, and on the La Fortuna segment of a collective feature entitled Rio, I Love You/Rio, Eu Te Amo (2014). Their relationship does, however,

There was a lot of emotional involvement for me, looking back on being a teenager and young adult

predate D’Antonio’s shift from operator to DP a decade ago. Indeed, D’Antonio and Sorrentino’s first encounter can be traced back to 1998, when Sorrentino was making one of his first films, the short Love Has No Bounds/L’Amore Non Ha Confine (1998, DP Pasquale Mari AIC), on which D’Antonio was a camera assistant at the start of her career.

Regular alliances ensued in the interim years, such as The Consequences Of Love/Le Conseguenze Dell’Amore (2004, DP Luca Bigazzi AIC), Sorrentino orchestrating as writer/director and D’Antonio by then operating, and Napoli 24 (2010), a segmented collaborative documentary on which both their names appear in the writer/director credits.

D’Antonio operated B-camera and was second unit DP on The Great Beauty/La Grande Bellezza (2013, DP Luca Bigazzi AIC), for which Sorrentino collected the 2014 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. D’Antonio’s subsequent projects with Sorrentino were to be as principal DP, but it was still six years before they were to collaborate on a full feature film together.

This working relationship, spanning both their

64 NOVEMBER 2021 CINEMATOGRAPHY WORLD

careers, has meant that Sorrentino and D’Antonio have developed their own shorthand way of communicating, “a kind of coded language,” as D’Antonio explains.

“In some ways it makes things simpler,” she elaborates, “but with The Hand Of God, sometimes it was more complicated exactly because of this emotional weight, because the movie is set in places which are familiar to me as well.”

The Hand Of God is the first time that Sorrentino had returned to film in Naples since his first feature One Man Up/L’Uomo In Più (2001, DP Pasquale Mari AIC), and it is tempting to imagine that this coming-ofage story might be some kind of filmic homage to the city that raised him, but D’Antonio is careful to point out that The Hand Of God was intended to be a strippedback film, where unadulterated storytelling was to take centre stage.

“The idea was to use the backdrop of Naples, but to tell a story which could have been set in any other moment in time or in any other place,” D’Antonio explains. “We didn’t want to give it the typical features of the Naples of the ‘80s. There were some specific elements such as the arrival of Maradona, but the city is intended to be described only from an emotional point-of-view, as a setting for the events.”

A book of B&W photographs of Naples, taken by Luciano De Crescenzo, a Naples-born actor, writer, director and engineer, provided a reference point for the depiction of the city.

“They were pictures that he’d taken in the streets of Naples between the ‘70s and ‘80s,” details D’Antonio, “but the look we wanted to give to the movie was not so much committed to the Naples of that period. The inspiration for me also came from listening to the stories that Paolo would tell me, of what he remembered and what I remembered of that time.”

Though promoted as a “film without style”, The Hand Of God nevertheless has an aesthetic of its own.

“The idea for us was to have a palette, which would be very colourful in the first part, when Fabietto

is with his family, happy and joyful, enjoying their Sundays in a very carefree manner,” D’Antonio explains. “In the second part, as the events progress, this colour would then slowly fade away.”

D’Antonio and Sorrentino turned to the Red Monstro 8K with a set of ARRI Signature primes, sourced from D-Vision srl, to capture The Hand Of God in full frame.

“I love the Red Monstro 8K camera very much,” enthuses D’Antonio. “We’ve used it many times before in Paolo’s projects and I feel very comfortable working with it. It was a pleasure for us to be able to work within our comfort zone in terms of the camera.”

In contrast to the sweeping opening sequence, where the camera is mounted on a helicopter, and a midway Russian Arm set-up following a car racing through the city, on the whole camera movement was utilised sparingly in The Hand Of God, with plenty of static shots

and just a few Steadicam and dolly sequences.

“We wanted to make this movie in a much simpler way because we wanted it to be distinct from Paolo’s other movies,” explains D’Antonio, “and to leave room for the emotional storytelling to take the foreground.”

The same was true for the lighting.

“I tended to use natural light or practical lamps,” says D’Antonio, “I rarely added specific lighting, except for instance for a night scene in the square. We changed all of the streetlamps over to sodium-vapour bulbs because now there are LEDs everywhere. And there was a scene in a grotto where I used a light from the bottom, but basically we didn’t change much else.”

Choosing natural light has its own set of challenges, and one of the trickiest scenes from D’Antonio’s perspective came early-on in the movie.

“We shot a large family scene outside over four days,” describes D’Antonio, “and since we shot it in sequence, with four cameras, we did not organise it on the basis of the light. It was quite complicated to keep continuity because we had some weather changes over the four days. But we had to go with what we had.”

Another key scene in the closing chapters of The Hand Of God proved equally challenging, but for reasons that were astronomical rather than meteorological.

“There is a very delicate scene which takes place at dawn,” explains D’Antonio. “But the period of dawn in the Mediterranean region is quite short. It was a difficult scene to get right from the emotional point-of-view, and for the light, but we had to find a way to film which would allow Paolo and the actors to take their time.”

These two most challenging of scenes ended-up being two of The Hand Of God’s most successful and profound moments.

“I’m very proud of these two scenes, and I’m also very proud of the initial sequence where you have the Little Monk,” hints D’Antonio. “As a matter

of fact, I’m proud of the whole movie,” she continues, “I’m very happy with the result because I’m happy that Paolo is happy. We achieved what we set out to do from the lighting and the filming standpoint.”

D’Antonio readily pays reverence to filmmakers like Paolo Sorrentino that she has worked with over the years.

“I started working very young and I’ve really paid my dues because I started from the basics,” she says.

“All of the filmmakers and directors I’ve worked with have fed and nourished my passion, have helped me grow, they have been my most important influences.

I also owe a lot to literature. I love to read and my passion for narrative storytelling has helped me very much in imagining and building and creating stories.

“Curiosity is behind it all,” she concludes, “always looking around and being curious and listening. It has helped me a lot to be a good listener.”

CINEMATOGRAPHY WORLD NOVEMBER 2021 65

LAMB•ELI ARENSON

ELI ARENSON•LAMB Images: Lamb stills by Valdimar Jóhannsson, BTS photos by Lilja Jons.

SHEPHERD’S WARNING

Valdimar wanted to have a very distinct colour palette

By Oliver Webb

A

childless couple living in rural Iceland discover a mysterious newborn creature in their sheep barn in Valdimar Jóhannssons‘s extraordinary debut feature. Deciding to nurture the creature, called Ada, and raise it as their own, their relationship and new family life begins to fall apart.

Beautifully-shot in naturalistic blue and green hues by Israel-born DP Eli Arenson, Lamb is a supernatural take on parenthood that is deeply rooted in Icelandic folklore and mystery. The film stars Noomi Rapace and Hilmir Snær Guðnason, and was co-written by Jóhannsson and Icelandic poet, novelist and lyricist Sjón.

How did you start out as a cinematographer?

I’m originally from Israel. I learnt how to use a camera in the Israeli military where I was stationed as a photojournalist. I studied at the American Film Institute which took me to LA. It’s a difficult city to acclimate to. I’ve always had a connection to Iceland and my partner and baby are Icelandic. I’ve been back-and-forth for about five years now, but I officially moved to Iceland a couple of years ago.

How did you get involved with Valdimar Jóhannsson?

I knew Valdimar was working on a very special film. He was talking to other high-profile DPs at the time. He had this idea of a special lens that he wanted to use. He wasn’t sure exactly what that would mean technically, but he wanted to have this really particular look for some of the scenes in the film. I helped him out with the resources in LA and went to Panavision and Radiant Images to do a bunch of unusual tests for him. I never thought I was going to shoot Lamb at that time. I was secretly hoping that I’d get to shoot it. It was a super-exciting opportunity for me.

translated. It’s sort of an Icelandic folklore word, meaning more like a gentle beast, or a creature that is elevated from the animal kingdom. In English, ‘beast’ sounds like a thing that comes and eats you, but the idea is something gentler in nature The elephant in the room was the character of Ada, the lamb-hybrid in the film. We were figuring out how to do that. I had previously done a short film a few years ago that had a character of a pig that had to sit upright in a chair, like a human. We endedup with this combination of filming a real pig and an animatronic body, where the head was composited over the body with very minimal CGI. It was a way to keep costs down and also a way to get a

What were your creative conversations about the look of Lamb?

The Icelandic title Dýrið… can’t be really 66 NOVEMBER 2021 CINEMATOGRAPHY WORLD

photorealistic result.

Lamb was a lot more complicated than that short, but it did utilise this technique of shooting real lambs and real human babies and making a composite together on screen, so it has this really uncanny feeling. When you look at the image it looks like a real lamb. There were also puppets and CGI, but the mix of techniques is what keeps you guessing.

Lamb has been described as a horror film, although Valdimar claims it was never intended to be horror. What did he want to achieve?

Valdimar is a super-visual director, but we never talked about Lamb being a horror film. It definitely has horror elements in it, but none of our references, or anything we aspired it to be, were in the horror genre, or any genre for that matter. It’s an arthouse film. You can describe it as magical realism, where there is a very real world with one odd element in it that everyone takes for granted. It just is and you deal with it. I think if there is a sense of dread it is more from the drama within the supernatural.

What creative references did you consider?

Valdimar loves arthouse cinema.

He had lots of filmmakers he would reference like Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Carlos Reygadas, Bela Tarr, Lars Von Trier, Amat Escalante and classics like Tarkovsky. It’s hard to think of one specific film. We had a lot paintings and old photographs from the north of Iceland and books as well.

Sjón’s novels were very important to us.

It’s kind of mix of all that put together.

How would you describe the look of the colour palette in the film?

It was very important for Valdimar to have a very distinct colour palette, and he wanted to follow it religiously. He had lots of different photos, which we narrowed down to maybe 30, and then made a collage of all those together. Then we digitised it and lowered the resolution to nearly nothing, to just blocks of coloured pixels. It was a way for me communicate with him, this shade of green, or this shade of blue, or whatever. That was shared with all the other departments very early-on. All the props, wardrobe and production design was based on this, and everything was super-unified in terms of the look.

What was your approach to lighting the film?

I think the biggest light we had was 12K HMI. Other than that, we relied on natural light as a base and augmented it. We used all the LEDs we could get which had CIE 1931 coordinates in the setting. I’m a huge fan of colour metering. When we were shooting over summer, the midnight sun had a particular shade of blue to it when the sun was below the horizon, even at 3am. It gets to really cool temperatures, beyond 20,000 Kelvin and it bounces off of all the green of the mountains surrounding the farm. It had this really weird but beautiful natural colour.

Give us some details about your selection of aspect ratio, cameras and lenses?

We used the ARRI Alexa Mini and shot on ARRI Master Anamorphic lenses. Those lenses were perfect because Valdimar isn’t a fan of the usual distortions and flairs which you usually get from other Anamorphic lenses. Shooting in tight spaces, it was really nice to frame Noomi with a 50mm Anamorphic instead of a 25mm spherical. The prologue was shot on Master Primes and we had one specialty 9.8mm lens.

Did you operate?

It was a single camera production and I operated. It was a very small and intimate shoot.

Noomi had just come off of a Hollywood feature

before she came to the island. I don’t think she’d done a shoot this small, ever.

Did you encounter any challenges with the locations?

We shot in this valley in the north of Iceland called Hörgárdalur, which is about an hour out of the closest city. It was important to find a location that felt really isolated. Valdimar had found an abandoned pig farm there, and we made a deal with the owner to fix it up. The weather was extremely challenging and there was no cell phone reception. We had one location, which was a lake up in the mountains for the boat scene. We had to hike up the mountain for about an hour-and-a-half with all our equipment on our backs. We shot the film over three seasons and we finished the winter scenes in February just before the pandemic. We were really lucky.

What was the most challenging sequence to shoot?

There’s a scene in which Noomi and Hilmir’s characters are walking down a field holding the baby lamb, and the mother sheep is following from behind. Valdimar had a very specific image in mind, where the characters are framing the composition on each side and the sheep approaches out of the mist between them.

In pre-production I had very high doubts we would be able to achieve this in camera, but Valdimar was determined we would succeed. We had planned all sorts of back-up options to shoot this

in layers and composite the elements together, but in the end we got it in the third or fourth take. If you look closely far in the background, you might notice the farmer who owns the Mother Sheep hiding in the grass in a camouflage net.

Obviously, figuring out how to make the lamb do this and a baby do that was super-challenging. But we were ready for that because we had planned out all of the scenarios, and also had the amazing Peter Hjorth as VFX supervisor. The creature grows from infant to around the age of three during the course of the film, and we had multiple child actors and several counterpart lambs to go with the children.

To fit all these pieces together perfectly was a huge undertaking.

What were your working hours like during production?

We kept to 12-hour days. We would shoot lots of times during the nights. One of the advantages of shooting in the spring and summer up in the north of Iceland is that the sun never sets. We were cheating, we would shoot night scenes during the day and day scenes during the night. The schedule was about 35 shooting days, but spread over three seasons.

What’s the best advice you’ve received?

One of my teachers at AFI, Bill Dill ASC, used to say “If everything’s a close-up, nothing is a close-up.”

And I can’t agree more. Pull that camera back! And this saying goes for everything. If the camera is always moving, it’s never moving. If you can keep effective tools of cinematography tucked away, you can then utilise them at an impactful moment in the story.

CINEMATOGRAPHY WORLD NOVEMBER 2021 67

ANGELA BLACK•JOHN PARDUE BSC

JOHN PARDUE BSC•ANGELA BLACK both up to the Technocrane section and before picking it again to travel from the bedroom across the road junction and up to the neighbour’s door, where we made another VFX stitch enabling us to come back and shoot this interior section of the neighbour’s cottage that was tented day-for-night – an idea suggested by 1st AD Simon Damast to give more time for our night-fornight sequences. In the end, there were four VFX stitches to the sequence allowing us to shoot the sequence over three nights. The final stitch was again at the door of the neighbour’s cottage as Angela exits returning to the family house with police cars in attendance.

Another area of discussion was the 60-metre dash as Angela crossed the traffic junction to the neighbour’s cottage, for which we decided to start behind Joanne and wrap around her. There was much talk of rickshaws or running with a Movi-Pro stabilised head for speed, as we surmised that Joanne would be running quickly having faked a break-in at the house.

Principal camera operator Tom Wilkinson opted for the Steadicam knowing that this was the only way to achieve a shot both following and then leading an actor. He switched the Steadicam halfway through to a ‘Don Juan’ configuration, pointing the camera backwards when he was walking forwards. Credit should also be given to focus puller Piotr Perlinski for nailing each take.

The shoot took place at night, which involved both exterior lighting with cranes and small interior lights where they could be hidden. We had to make sure the transitions from a warm domestic interior colour to a night-light or moonlight would be achievable in shot.

Angela switches off the lights one-by-one as she walks

LONG SHOT C

inematographer John Pardue BSC kindly wrote in with details about the collaborative efforts that went into making ITV’s six-part drama, Angela Black, starring Joanne Froggatt, Michiel Huisman and Samuel Adewunmi, and a single-shot sequence that is key to the storytelling.

Angela Black cleverly weaves a contemporary story of domestic abuse with the psychological suspense of an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Writers Jack and Harry Williams were initially inspired by the Hitchcock classic Strangers On A Train (1951, DP Robert Burks ASC), and also by Hitchcock’s singleshot thriller Rope (1948, DPs Joseph A. Valentine ASC & William V. Skall ASC). Angela Black contains a 13-minute shot with no edits, a sequence taking

viewers through every moment of the lead character’s disorientated behaviour, escalating to a point where the enormity of what she is doing starts to unravel in her mind.

“After reading Jack and Harry’s genre-fusing script it was clear to our director, Craig Viveiros, that we would need to have a cinematic style that developed throughout. We used very clear geometry in the framing at the top of the story, utilising hard lines and shapes, as well as muted tones to articulate Angela’s imprisonment within the horrific scenario of her life. As the show progresses and Angela begins to reclaim some of her identity, the shapes start to soften off and

the colours become more eclectic as her world opens up,” writes Pardue.

“Another of the key elements to consider was the house this family lived in. We wanted a fluid approach to the camera movement, being able to leave the actors and then return to them. Being able to look into the house from the outside enhanced the space and tension between the characters, creating a sense of dread and ominous presence. The house also had to deliver all the story elements for the lengthy single-shot sequence, which occurs in episode three – which meant we had to make its architectural peculiarities work both photographically and for the drama.

Craig choreographed a single-shot sequence that fulfilled the script exactly – and it was not without a few technical difficulties. We always imagined the main house would be a studio build, as so much of the story takes place within it. It often makes sense to build a key location in a studio for greater control, especially if there are some big sequences, However, the budget dictated that we would need to make this work in a location.

We soon put aside concerns of lighting difficulties or whether there was enough space for the camera. I like a challenge and I think I can say the same for the whole crew of Angela Black. Solving problems is what we enjoy doing.

The single-shot sequence went like this: Angela (Joanne Froggatt) drugs her husband Oliver (Michiel Huisman) and once he appears sleepy, she leads him from the living room and directs him upstairs.

We move with Angela to the back of the house as she continues to turn off the lights. The suspense of the shot continues to build as the camera exits the house and views events from outside before travelling up to a bedroom window joining Angela as she pulls back the duvet to help Oliver to bed.

We follow Angela back down the stairs in the darkness. There is a hint of moonlight when she meets her accomplice Ed (Samuel Adewunmi). He goes upstairs to the bedroom as we follow Angela through

68 NOVEMBER 2021 CINEMATOGRAPHY WORLD

the front door, frantically running across the road intersection to a neighbour’s house. She rings the police with a fabricated story of an intruder in the house. As the emotional rollercoaster of what she has just set in motion starts to take hold, the police lights rush by the window, and she knows that it is time to return to her house. With a very real fear of what she might find, Angela walks back to her house where the police are parked-up with “blues” flashing.

The collaboration of a good crew is essential to achieving a single-shot sequence like this. Tom Wilkinson’s excellent Steadicam work was central with the addition of a clever Technocrane shot taking in the perspective of looking into the house from outside as we rejoin Angela’s journey in the bedroom.

The outside shot provided a visual breather allowing Joanne to reach the bedroom without us having to awkwardly follow her up. Getting the Technocrane into the garden was a bit of a headache for key grip Rupert LloydParry and assistant Alex Kelleher but, taking it all apart and back together again was all in a morning’s work.

The Technocrane part of the sequence was at one point going to be made on a Ronin stabilised head with a ‘hand-off’ in the bedroom. However, the VFX team was confident that a stitch was achievable with an eye and distance match between the crane and the Steadicam. It meant we could use the Steadicam

around the house and this needed to be believable and seamless with our dimming. We ended up using some carefully hidden Astera tubes with additional ARRI Sky Panel 60s through the skylight on the roof, all dimmable together for the moonlight takeover.

When we moved to the street we discovered, luckily, that at some point between the tech recce and the shoot, the sodium street lamps had been replaced by new LED lights; a moment of movie serendipity perhaps. Gaffer Gary Hedges and best boy Steve Walsh switched to the Sky Panel 360s to go on the pickers for the exteriors, a dimmable LED with the ability to introduce some green to match the LED streetlights.

The fall-off of the 360s also helped blend back and front light for the different direction of camera travel.

I approached the photography in the show in much the same way as I had photographed the BBC mystery thriller And Then There Were None (2015), a previous mini-series collaboration with Craig. We both felt that a similar naturalistic approach would create a believable world rather than anything over-stylised. Composition and camera work were very much dictated by the emotional weight of the scenes. Tom and I enjoyed Craig’s sense of shot design so the shooting process was very fluid. We used the Sony Venice large format with K35 lenses. The camera is great for magentagreen swing in the skin tones, and the faster 2500ISO setting is really useful. Movietech gave us a great package with excellent back-up.

We followed a more filmic aesthetic rather than trying to make a statement with a heavy-handed grade.

Andrew Daniel graded the show at Goldcrest. He built on what we had achieved in-camera, creating a

We wanted a fluid approach to the camera movement

sense of darkness without crushing the whole image, using a delicate balance with the contrast levels. I really enjoyed the grade process and Andrew’s attention detail is excellent. He found a good place for our colour palette with some subtle hues adding to the contemporary feel of the cinematography.

It is far too easy to talk about the technical concerns of a complicated shot and forget to mention the patience of our cast. While we tried to sort out lots of lighting and camera conundrums (under some degree of pressure), our cast gave fantastic performances on every take, and sometimes there were quite a few takes. Joanne Froggatt never dropped her level of performance throughout the show and the single-shot sequence is a good example of the emotional intensity that she managed to maintain on a cold night wearing a nightdress, whilst we all ran around in thermals and heavy jackets.”

Opposite: Tom Wilkinson shooting Steadicam on Angela Black.

This page: DP John Pardue BSC and director Craig Viveiros on-set.

All images courtesy of ITV Studios/Two Brothers Pictures

The collaboration of a good crew is essential to achieving a single-shot sequence

CINEMATOGRAPHY WORLD NOVEMBER 2021 69

BELFAST•HARIS ZAMBARLOUKOS BSC GSC

HARIS ZAMBARLOUKOS BSC GSC•BELFAST Images: Belfast photos, including BTS shots of DP Haris Zambarloukos BSC GSC and writer/director Kenneth Branagh, by Rob Youngson. © 2021 Focus Features, LLC.

BELFAST WORKFLOW WITH DIT JO BARKER

BOY IN THE HOOD

By Ron Prince

C

ompared to some of the other films we have made together, Belfast was a modest, entirely personal, get-back-towork project, that we thought very few people would see. So the very positive reaction to it is a wonderful surprise,” remarks British DP Haris Zambarloukos BSC GSC regarding his latest collaboration with director Kenneth Branagh.

Written, financed, shot in lustrous B&W, posted and released under various states of lockdown, Belfast is Branagh’s semi-autobiographic, coming-of-age film about childhood and working class family life during The Troubles in Belfast, Northern Ireland in the late 1960s. It premiered at the 2021 Telluride Film Festival, won the People’s Choice Award at Toronto, and is now strongly-fancied as a contender in the 2022 awards season.

Belfast is told from the perspective of Buddy (Jude Hill), a nine-year-old boy who is based on Branagh himself. Buddy is part of a tight-knit family, which includes his dad (Jamie Dornan), his mum (Caitriona Balfe), and his grandparents (Judi Dench and Ciarán Hinds). Buddy has an idyllic childhood — enjoying trips to the movies, playing outside, and spending time with his family — but things begin to change when the Troubles between his Protestant and Catholic neighbours explode.

“When Ken first told me about the film, I suggested we shoot it in B&W. He laughed and said ‘I knew you would say that’,” says Zambaloukos about his seventh production with Branagh. Their collaborations started with Sleuth (2007), and have included Thor (2011), Cinderella (2015), Murder On The Orient Express (2017) and Death On The Nile (2022).

“Although the final film is chiefly in B&W, monochrome was not a new thing to us at all,” explains the DP. “We had done partial B&W elements before in Murder On The Orient Express and Death On The Nile, and we evolved and developed them for this story. So we planned some short colourful moments in Belfast that we felt would support the wonder and enchantment of life seen through a child’s gaze.”

These include the opening moments when the camera jibs up over a wall in present-day Belfast to magically reveal monochromatic terraced streets from the 1960s, as well as Raquel Welch in a furry bikini

“

in One Million Years BC, and the flying car in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, seen in colour when Buddy and his family are at the cinema in the B&W world.

Features such as The Bicycle Thief (1948, dir.

Vittorio De Sica, DP Carlo Monuori), Cinema Paradiso (1988, dir. Giuseppe Tornatore, DP Blasco Giurato), Respiro (2002, dir. Emanuele Crialese, DP Fabio Zamarion) and Tsotsi (2005, dir. Gavin Hood, DP Lance Gewer) were touchstones in the evocation of childhood memories. Zambarloukos says the Polish film Ida (2013, dir. Paweł Pawlikowski, DPs Ryszard Lenczewski PSC & Łukasz Żal PSC), plus stills work by Magnum photographer Philip Jones Griffiths – such as Boys Destroying A Grand Piano (1961) – helped set the naturalistic aesthetic look and the portraiture.

Production took place during an eight-week period between August and October 2020, at a disused school in Sunningdale, followed by terracestreet sets that were constructed and oriented to take maximum advantage of the natural daylight, at Farnborough Airport, Surrey, before the production visited the city of Belfast.

“We had a very simple approach to the lighting, which was to use natural, available light as much as possible, supplemented by practicals and bounced light,” explains Zambarloukos. “We sometimes had matchbox-sized LEDs, that our gaffer Dan Lowe has in his toolbox, to augment eye lights, but we tried too keep things minimal.”

The production was framed in 1.85:1, and captured using ARRI Alexa Mini LF fitted with System 65 and Sphero lenses, as part of a package provided

by Panavision in London.

“This was an intimate film, and the combination of aspect ratio, camera and shooting at T4 to T5.6, gave a medium format look that was somewhere between Leica street photography and Hasselblad portraiture,” he says.

Although he action was filmed in colour, the onset workflow was conducted in B&W, using a LUT developed by colourist Rob Pizzey at Goldcrest.

Digital Orchard’s DIT Jo Barker worked alongside Zambarloukos during production (see sidebar), performing primary and secondary grading on the rushes near-set, ready for Zambarloukos to review during lunch. “I adopted the same practice as I would

70 NOVEMBER 2021 CINEMATOGRAPHY WORLD

on a celluloid film shoot,” he remarks.

Written during lockdown, Belfast was one of the first to start filming when restrictions were eased in the summer of 2020, but the safety of the cast and crew was still a top priority.

“Belfast was shot with the foresight that production would have to take place under tight Covid measures,” says Zambarloukos. “Ken was adamant that no one became unwell and the whole shoot was planned with social distancing in mind. We all wore face-masks, and everyone was tested on a daily basis.

“Even though we shot in the relative safety of an empty school building, and later on the sets at Farnborough, we kept windows open to ensure good ventilation. We got through the entire shoot without any delays or cases. I think it was an amazing undertaking and really helped to show other productions that the industry could get safely back to work after months of lockdown.”

Keeping safety uppermost in mind, Zambarloukos operated on what was largely a single camera shoot.

Andrei Austin came in on Steadicam and B-camera for the film’s riot scenes, with DP Yinka Edward shooting insert work as part of the second unit.

Zambarloukos remarks that most of the film was quite deliberately “still and composed in terms of camera movement, but when it moved it really moved.

“For example, we wanted to frame the riot scene at the beginning of the film from Buddy’s point-of view, rather than it being a typical action sequence. So we planned a shot on 360º tracks – set-up by my regular key grip Malcolm Hughes – where the camera could pivot around Buddy. During the choreographed take, the camera circles through two full revolutions, starting with calm and empty streets but ending-up with an angry mob piling-in and a Molotov cocktail being thrown. I think this really helped to anchor the storytelling around Buddy, and to say something about the innocence of youth.”

Zambarloukos adds, “It was a terrific shoot, and it felt like we were doing something truthful and sincere.

There’s a certain courage in films that portray joyful participation in the sorrows of life, and that always makes for an emotional connection and cathartic experience in cinema.”

“For the first half of the shoot I was based nearset at the school, and for the second half I was based in a mobile unit at Farnborough Airport. Both spaces were shared with dailies operator Szymon Wyrzykowski from Digital Orchard, who was running the lab, so we could communicate the whole time.

We would receive cards from the camera team on a regular basis, and the data was then ingested

by Szymon into our QNAP system. I could then access the images and create a project which I graded roll-by-roll. Szymon would colour trace in Resolve from my project, meaning that we could both work at the same time and speed-up our process.

An iPad with stills from each set-up would be shown to Haris and Ken, and I’d then go back and make adjustments if needed. Haris would also come by during his lunch break to go over what we had done so far, at which point Szymon would create the deliverables.

There are influences of the Polish film Ida in this project, which happens to be one of my favourite films too. I gathered a range of stills from the film and frequently referenced them whilst grading.

Everything was processed with Haris’s LUT-ofchoice created by Rob at Goldcrest, and adjustments were made from there to fit this project. Haris was also very keen for the dailies to look as close to the finished product as possible. This meant rather than just the usual CDLs, I also did a lot of secondary grading.

As most of the images I have seen from 1960’s Northern Ireland are B&W news footage, seeing this film in B&W felt very familiar. We played with some parts being in colour, such as the modern-day and cinema-going elements, and created dailies in both B&W and colour for these sections to help experimentation in the edit.

Everything on-set was filmed and viewed in colour so it was only once it reached us that it became B&W. I remember taking an iPad over to set and showing Ken the transformation of a shot with Jude as Buddy, and how stunned he looked at the finished product.”

Jo Barker studied cinematography at the Czech film school FAMU, before moving into postproduction, scanning film for features and then creating dailies for major films and TV series. Here she learnt grading skills from top colourists and soon began grading herself. Missing working on-set she then found her place as a DIT combining her lab, colour and camera knowledge.

CINEMATOGRAPHY WORLD NOVEMBER 2021 71

LITEGEAR•SPOTLIGHT

SPOTLIGHT•LITEGEAR

Opposite: (below) Al DeMayo and a LiteGear LiteMat Spectrum4 This page: (below) Mike Wagner, plus stills from various sets lit using LiteGear fixtures.

FLEXIBLE BUILDING BLOCKS

LiteCard have transformed many other sets across the world by allowing production and lighting designers to integrate light into places not previously thought possible. The range is constantly evolving: the very popular LiteMat provides evenly-spaced, colourcorrect LEDs spread out over a large area to deliver high- powered soft light without requiring diffusion, whilst LiteTile is a foldable LED lighting fixture made completely with engineered textiles. ”To some level, we are competing with companies

By Michael Burns

“ M

aking movies is a very special thing – a mixture of art and science, of craft and skill,” says Mike Wagner, CEO of LiteGear. “I think that you have to understand how movies are made to create outstanding products for those craftspeople.”

“That is probably the biggest contributor to why LiteGear has been so successful from the very beginning,” he continues. “It was founded by people who made movies for a living, who have a passion for movies and stay very close to the community.”

Founded in 2006 by cinematic lighting veterans Al DeMayo, Mike Bauman and Jeff Soderberg, the roots of LiteGear lie in the Marvel movie Iron Man (2008, dir. Jon Favreau, DP Matthew Libatique ASC), where Bauman was gaffer and DeMayo the fixtures technician. DeMayo’s custom-built solution for Iron Man’s glowing chest-piece using high-powered LEDs sparked an interest in their potential for flexible lighting applications, which led to a venture initially providing base LED components and the dimmers that controlled them.

“We made products that people could create things out of,” says DeMayo. “We wanted people to integrate them into props and set pieces. We were sitting on the LED rocket when things took off. We didn’t make the rocket, we didn’t fuel it, but man, we went for it.”

“I was the head fixtures tech on JJ Abrams’ Star Trek (2009, DP Dan Mindel BSC ASC). We were trying to light the Starship Enterprise bridge, which is oval.

There’s not a straight line in that whole damn set and we were trying to light it with glass fluorescents.”

As a solution, early versions of LiteRibbon, a flexible strip of LED emitters on an adhesive-backed, lightweight material, were used to light the set, whilst LiteCard was developed for the non-linear applications. “Star Trek allowed us to create not just the linear light emitters but also LiteCard.” DeMayo says. “So I like to say the LiteGear product line evolved from the challenges of lighting the Starship Enterprise.”

LiteGear’s founders worked next on Iron Man 2 (2010, dir. Jon Favreau, DP Matthew Libatique ASC) with Tony Stark’s chest panel drawing 25W as opposed to the original’s consumption of 50W. Although the LiteGear team didn’t work on Iron Man 3 (2013, dir. Shane Black, DP John Toll ASC), LiteRibbon was used for that production and subsequent costumes in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

But the demands of the company were growing. ”Iron Man 2 was the last movie that I worked on from start-to-finish,” DeMayo recalls. “In 2009, I realised I couldn’t work full-time on-set and successfully run LiteGear as well.”

Boldly going “Back in 2006, we were all still working on-set and doing LiteGear on the side,” continues DeMayo.

Full spectrum For the next ten years, DeMayo served as CEO and head of product for LiteGear, building it up to a

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Back to the roots Two years ago, DeMayo brought in Mike Wagner as CEO and also returned to work on-set, whilst still playing a central role as executive chairman.

Formerly at ARRI, Wagner has meetings with Bauman and DeMayo at least once a week. “We discuss what’s happening in the field, we talk about strategy and future products,” Wagner says. “They work in the field because that’s what they love to do, but also because it gives them great insight into how we move and direct the company. They serve as a lightning rod, making sure that the company stays on the path it was founded upon, and which has made it so successful.”

According to Wagner, LiteGear has grown every year it has been in business. “The two founders have been able to keep such a close connection to the community that it’s allowed us to continue to release products that people want,” he says. “It started with LiteRibbon, plus the smaller form factor products which were very successful, and it has grown very organically since then.”

Second generation products such as LiteMat

45-strong workforce. Soderberg left the company (he is now EVP of product innovation at MBS), but DeMayo’s fellow co-owner Bauman still serves on the board of directors of LiteGear. Bauman, one of Hollywood’s top gaffers, continues to influence product direction through his experience on features such as Ford v. Ferrari (2019, dir. James Mangold, DP Phedon Papamichael ASC), Birds Of Prey (2020, dir. Cathy Yan, DP Matthew Libatique ASC) and The Tragedy Of Macbeth (2022, dir. Joel Coen, DP Bruno Delbonnel AFC ASC). He also served as cinematographer on Paul Thomas Andersons’ latest

You have to understand how movies are made to create outstanding products feature, Licorice Pizza (2022).

LiteGear products have also shown up on an array of current and up-and-coming productions including Free Guy (2021, Shawn Levy, DP George Richmond BSC), Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021, dir. Andy Serkis, DP Robert Richardson ASC) and No Time to Die (2021, dir. DP Linus Sandgren FSF ASC), plus forthcoming attractions including Top Gun: Maverick (2021, dir. Joseph Kosinski, DP Claudio Miranda ASC), Avatar 2 (2022, dir. James Cameron, DP Russell Carpenter ASC) and Mission: Impossible 7 (2022, dir. Christopher McQuarrie, DP Fraser Taggart).

Indeed, products such as LED LiteRibbon and

like ARRI. People are using SkyPanels and LiteMats as ‘yin and yang’ because they don’t do the same thing, they complement each other,” says DeMayo. “When you need something compact and that can fit in a corner the SkyPanel is great. But the LiteMat 4, for example, is more intimate.

You can bring it in just two feet away from an actor, and it doesn’t require a lot of accessories.”

and LiteTile have themselves evolved. “Starting with a single colour, then bi-colour and now full colour, there’s a continuous improvement concept,” Wagner says.

Supporting cast Like the rest of the media and film industry, the company has been tackling the pressures of the Covid pandemic and the realities of the climate emergency.

“We used the industry shutdown as an opportunity to look internally at improvements that we could make to our operation,” says Wagner. “Now there’s a real

hunger for shows with a cinematic quality to them, so we’re seeing a demand that’s higher than it’s ever been.

The biggest problem now, which is ubiquitous in the industry, is supply chain issues.”

One of the areas that LiteGear focussed on during Covid downtime was after-sales support. “We now have a formal service department,” says Wagner. “It will continue to be expanded, to provide a worldclass service, with very low turnaround times when it comes to product servicing, to have repair guides, a certified service programme and a robust supply of spare parts.”

Repair rather than replacing of course is also more sustainable, and in fact LiteGear has a goal of having almost zero waste from its production line. “We’re proud to say that all of our products are low energy, and are perfect for this shift that everyone is going through,” says Wagner.

“We don’t have a lot of emissions as a company, but we are looking into the supply chain, how we ship products around the country and internationally, how raw materials get to us. Our goal is to be a good corporate citizen; that means being good to our employees, but it also means being good to the environment. So every major decision is put through that lens as well.”

“We think there are some great opportunities out there,” says DeMayo.

“The hot thing right now is cinematic lighting for virtual production. We built a mode for LiteMat Spectrum that allows for the signal derived from the virtual production LED wall to go to our fixture.

That interprets it and provides cinematic white, which fits right in and allows the console programmers and the guys from the video server to get cinematic quality on the subject.”

“It’s a very exciting time to be in the lighting industry in general,” says Wagner. “The technology’s advancing quite rapidly, the adoption rate of LEDs is quite high. Hardware is important – you want a good quality of light and colour, of course, but the software is such an important component to our fixtures now. Software not only allows you to manipulate the LEDs to get the colours that you’re looking for, but also provides additional opportunities for features never thought of before.

“We recently released a software update with a gradient mode that automatically calculates the colours between two different pixels, so that you could transition from one colour to another colour and have the controller automatically interpolate the pixels between. It’s little features like this that allow us to stay ahead of the game, but also make the fixture more versatile and put more powerful controls into the hands of the user.”

“What people needed five years ago is not what they need today,” adds Wagner. “That’s exciting, but also daunting, from a manufacturing and engineering standpoint. That’s why we try to stay at the cutting-edge.”

CINEMATOGRAPHY WORLD NOVEMBER 2021 73

GAFFERS CAFÉ•MICHAEL AMBROSE

ACTION LIGHTING EVOLVES

By Michael Goldman

Few people have a better understanding of how rapidly and significantly the cinematic lighting universe has evolved in the last several years than veteran gaffer Michael Ambrose. Ambrose’s latest action-related lighting achievements can be seen in recent films and on various streaming platforms, including F9: The Fast Saga, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, and Space Jam: A New Legacy, among others. He also headed-up action unit lighting work on major features in recent years, such as Ford v. Ferrari (2019), Captain Marvel (2019), Black Panther (2018), and a host of others. F9 was his third Fast & Furious lighting job, and that work alone makes him an expert when it comes to crafting illumination for major studio action films.

Over the years, I have covered the cinematography work on the Fast & Furious franchise and was curious as to how lighting tools and methodologies had changed since Ambrose worked on his first film in the series, Furious 7, about six years ago. Ambrose recently took time out from working on an upcoming Netflix series called From Scratch to help me understand some of those changes, and the fundamental impact they have had on the production of tentpole feature films.

In particular, Ambrose emphasises that LED and wireless control technologies became “absolute game changers over the last several years. We even have new positions on our crews that didn’t exist five years ago, because lighting has become so much more technical than before,” he relates.

“Each light has so many capabilities and versatility. Each one requires firmware and software updates and menus to access various control options. That is why we had to create a position called ‘systems tech.’ Basically, the systems tech is the person on-set in charge of data and technology for all lights, keeping themselves up-to-date with every fixture and manufacturer so we can operate smoothly and efficiently on-set.

“They have to keep track of all the updates, because now, thanks to

firmware and software, lights can continually be improved, whether in the colour language or the control language. We can do cueing and integrate media content into the lights themselves so that they can do various effects we could not accomplish so easily five years ago.

“Also, we are almost exclusively using a console programmer/operator to control everything on these kinds of films. There are so many options in terms of what these lights can do regarding intensity, colour, and other parameters – you need an expert to control all that on-set.

These are very new technologies in our industry.”

Regarding the rapid adoption of LED technology, Ambrose says the first time he made significant use of LED wall methodologies to produce interactive light was on Furious 7 in 2015.

“Since then, that has always been how we show the actors driving in dangerous environments,” he says.

“We will put video content on long strips of LED video walls, down each side of the car, over the top of the car, and have rolling walls moving in front of and behind the car – essentially surrounding the car with LED

It is inevitable that we will use virtual stage environments more and more to do process work

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MICHAEL AMBROSE•GAFFERS CAFÉ Opposite: (top) shooting Ghostbusters on-location with ARRI fixtures; (middle) taking a light reading on F9; (below) deploying a Creamsource LED on Ghostbusters; This page: (top) lighting Space Jam with Creamsource Vortex 8s and Astera tubes; (middle) a Ford TVC with Creamsource Vortex 8s; (below) illuminating a Ghostbusters driving shot.

Selected filmography as gaffer (unless otherwise credited) Ambulance (2022) Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021) F9: The Fast Saga (2021) Space Jam: A New Legacy (gaffer: additional photography) (2021) Yes Day (2021) Captain Marvel (gaffer: action unit) (2019) Lucy In The Sky (2019) Ford v Ferrari (gaffer: action unit) (2019) Here And Now (TV series) (9 episodes) (2018) Black Panther (gaffer: action unit) (2018) The Fate Of The Furious (2017) Kong: Skull Island (gaffer: action unit) (2017) Furious 7 (2015) Mad Men (TV series) (75 episodes) (2007-2013) The Expendables (2010) Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (TV series) (10 episodes) (2008-2009) Transformers (gaffer: second unit) (2007)

walls to put the vehicles into certain environments. That was a gamechanger when we started doing it, and it looked great. We avoided needing to shoot Vin Diesel or any of the actors driving down the street in the Fast & Furious franchise because of that technology, and that is just the beginning with the arrival of virtual production methods. It is inevitable that we will be using virtual stage environments more and more to do our process work and further reduce

Thanks to firmware and software updates, lights are being continually improved in colour and control

heavy, hot lights; how we could keep it cooler on the stage, use less electricity, less air-conditioning, and generally make it more comfortable for actors; how we could move faster, change gels without burning through them so fast, and so on. But today, it’s standard operating procedure. We all expect it.

We rarely get that kind of pushback anymore.”

He adds that major lighting set-ups are now typically more efficient to create and execute than even a few years ago, thanks to the many options provided by LED and DMX technologies.

“I used to need a big generator and huge lights to light a few city blocks like we did in F7,” he says.

“I would have people manning each one, and that was the way it was done for years. But now, with LED and radio DMX network technology, I can have my console programmer in a van that looks like some sort of secret spy agency vehicle. They have all the equipment in there, with antennas sticking out. And at each aerial, we will have LED lights like ARRI S360 Skypanels, for example, with two of those in the air, or three or four rock-and-roll moving, intelligent lights underneath.

“I can put a small generator out there, rather than a big toe-plant – what we call a ‘putt-putt generator’ – and have a radio signal send a beam over to my console programmer in the van, allowing them to light-up a mile of city street and have everything they

need at their fingertips to change colour and focus remotely. We still need a person manning each lift, obviously, but they don’t need to be sitting in a bucket 125-feet up in the air in the freezing cold, because we can send the signal remotely.

“This also means less fuel and less diesel power, and generally, a smaller carbon footprint, because of the more efficient use of electricity. It’s pretty amazing how far it has all come.”

Ambrose also points out that certain types of LED tools are, at this point, basically essential to the kind of work he does on big action movies. In particular, he points to lighting tubes from German manufacturer Astera – battery-powered, remote-controlled, highly sophisticated LED lights that have become hugely popular in recent years.

“Astera tubes are an amazingly versatile piece of equipment that we now use every single day,”

he explains. “They came out of the theatrical and concert markets, and quickly became indispensable.

They have a four-foot tube and a two-foot tube, and the engineering on them is amazing. They each have 16 sections, you can control any colour you want, and they are completely wireless in terms of control.

The radio is built-in, it’s all battery-operated, so no cables are necessary. Plus, they have a long life, depending on what mode you set them to. That’s an example of a technology that has become a crucial part of my toolbox over the last five years.”

You can read more about Ambrose and his work with DP Stephen F. Windon ACS ASC on F9: The Fast Saga in the July edition of Cinematography World.

scene work down the road.”

Ambrose remembers, however, trying to get approval to use such tools and techniques back in 2016 and getting what he calls “pushback” from producers on why it was necessary and worth the expense. Today, by contrast, he says the major deployment of LED technology is not only expected on major productions, it’s commonplace.

“We used to have to come up with justifications for the additional expense,” Ambrose says. “LED was a little more expensive, so we had to demonstrate how the efficiencies would help us. Shooting in a place like Atlanta in the summertime, where you have to have air-conditioning and things, we showed them how it helped not to have to put up a whole line of CINEMATOGRAPHY WORLD NOVEMBER 2021 75

SHOOTING GALLERY•CAMERIMAGE MEMORIES We have many happy memories from our encounters at the annual EnergaCAMERIMAGE Festival Of Cinematography (we have attended 17 so far), and send our best wishes to the team for the 2021 edition.

Bronze version of the medieval wooden donkey to which criminals were strapped and then flogged, Toruń, 2019.

Legendary cinematographer Billy Williams BSC in the hall of fame, Łódź, 2008.

Cinematographer and CML hero Geoff Boyle NSC pictured outside The Opera Nova, Bydgoszcz, 2018.

The remarkable John Seale ACS ASC on the staircase inside The Opera Nova, Bydgoszcz, 2011.

The inimitable Julio Macat ASC in the lobby of the Copernicus Hotel, Toruń, 2019.

Camera operators extraordinaire Chris Plevin ACO (l) and Rodrigo Gutierrez ACO (r) in Bydgoszcz, 2011.

Oliver Stapleton BSC and Anthony Dod Mantle DFF BSC ASC at The Holiday Inn, Bydgoszcz, 2016.

A selfie with John Toll ASC (l) and Ron Prince (r) at the MCK, Bydgoszcz, 2017.

Has anyone seen Dan Sasaki on his way back from Bydgoszcz?

Stansted Airport, 2016.

The venerable Vittorio Storaro AIC ASC at the Słoneczny Młyn Hotel, Bydgoszcz, 2012.

All photos by Ron Prince.

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