Back from Sundance

So, I arrived back from Sundance early on the 31^st Jan. It really was the most amazing 10 days filled with a really strong selection of American and international films and documentaries from all over the world. One of the things that struck me was how young a lot of the film makers seemed this year, or maybe I’m just getting older. Both are probable and inevitable.

It was also a good festival in terms of film sales and there was quite a buzz developing for many of the films. Mike Cahill’s low budget existential Sci-Fi movie Another Earth was bought by Fox Searchlight and the films star, the multi-talented, actor, writer and producer Brit Marling seems set to become one of the new darlings of American independent cinema.

Paddy Considine’s feature debut Tyrranosaur starring Peter Mullan and Olivier Colman was another film which audiences were really talking about. It was a dark script which I had read early last year and ultimately passed on a meeting for because I could not see through the hopelessness of the subject matter which started with a dog being beaten to death and progressed through wife beating and domestic rape to manslaughter and another killing of an animal. I spent much of the movie close to tears due to the extraordinary performances by Mullan and Colman and Paddy displayed such an assured hand that he created an entirely engaging and heart breaking low budget British film that was not gratuitous in it’s depiction of violence and was an incredibly honest depiction of ordinary people in extraordinary situations.

The Q and A’s for my own films Here and On The Ice continued throughout the week to very receptive audiences throughout the Park City venues and also two screenings held out in Salt Lake which was mostly attended by local residents as opposed to the Sundance festival crowd. Both films also screened at the Eccles theatre which is the biggest of the Sundance screening venues and holds 1,600 people. Following the screening of Here I was asked a technical question about the cinematography in the film and I started to explain to the audience member how we shot with two 35mm camera, one 3-perf. and another 4-perf and how we shot additional ‘B-roll’ with Ben Foster as we made our unit moves between locations. I then found myself exploring the bigger questions regarding my approach to shooting this film. The day before I met someone at a party who jokingly suggested that due to the incredible landscapes we were presented with in Armenia my job was not that difficult. I pointed out to the audience that there was a degree of truth in this statement as the strong script, amazing actors and fantastic locations meant that outside of the obvious logistical and technical aspects of my role as DoP, the most important aspect of my job was too respond ‘correctly’ or ‘appropriately’ to the performances and environments within each seen and if I did this then the cinematography would naturally fall into place. I think the cinematography in Here was very much about ‘finding’ the film and letting the film present itself rather than imposition.

On Friday I eased myself back into work, aside from January’s colour correction, to shoot another 16mm promo for the British soul/hip-hop act Ben Drew aka Plan B. This involved a one day shoot in Enfield at an amazing house which had not been redecorated since the mid 60’s. It had the most amazing designer furniture and décor and we shot several scenes with Strickland Banks’ (Ben’s alter-ego) girlfriend played by Vickie McClure (Lol in This Is England ‘86).

Whilst in London I also visited the cutting room of the BBC2 drama ‘The Crimson Petal and the White’ which I shot last summer/autumn and is due to broadcast in April of this year. They have locked 3 of the 4 episodes and I am due to start colour correcting / grading on the 21^st through March. The cuts are looking really strong and I’m incredibly pleased with the look of the series. It was my first TV drama as a DoP and I feel really lucky to have been trusted with all four eps. of this prestigious period drama starring Romola Garai, Chris O’Dowd, Gillian Anderson and Richard E. Grant. We shot on the RED one combined with some nice old 70’s Canon K-35 35mm lenses and it was the first time I had used this camera for a long drama. I was really happy with the results and as shooting on film was not an option from the start I felt happy I could nudge the production away from using the Sony 900 cameras that I had used on Four Lions.  

I finished the week being interviewed by Sebastian Doggart for the Telegraph as he is writing an article concerned with the British presence behind the camera at Sundance this year and he is also a big fan of my work on Ballast. He assumed that I was based in London and it was nice to correct him and fly the flag for Newcastle and the film makers and industry members based here. This week sees me teaching a cinematography workshop on my old media production course at UNN before heading back down to London for an interview and work on a Henry Holland viral shot on the Canon 7D. I’ll be sure to post again soon.

Best,

Lol

February 07 2011

Back to Industry Blog