March, 2012

Copyright Adam Forslund

As a cinematographer it can be difficult to get ready for a shoot. I read the script then re-read it. Make notes and go over those with the director. Everything has to go from a grey fog to a very solid vision in a matter of days, weeks and months. The metamorphosis of words to pictures can be difficult. What appears in my head may not ever exist in the real world or may be beyond the reach and means of the budget.

Which brings forth this analogy.

Making a film is not unlike building a house.

You can think of the Writer/Director as the architect. The Director of Photography as the general contractor. The Director will sit with the client to determine their desires. Is the house red? Should the living room face south? Bedrooms north? Once all those elements are worked out the DP comes in and start to work.

As a DP it is my job to get the crew to take those ideas and put foot to ground and make it happen. Do we need a 10k to make that scene? Should some light spill across that bed? What will happen if that medium shot falls flat?

The Director and Director of Photography working together making compromises where needed and not sacrificing others to build the best film possible.

As in building a house the difficult part is breaking ground. Once that has happened things just kind of happen and everyone moves to complete it. When you wrap a film and see the end credits for the first time it is like handing over the keys. And, when you think back about it you know all the little secrets that are behind that front door.

Despite the fact that I think of my self as a young guy I can remember “Mikey” tv ads, VHS rental when the store also rented players, Laserdisc, DVD and Divx wars, the wide acceptance of HD TV. More over the migration from film toward digital imaging.

By no means does this mean that I am a Luddite and want to keep my head deep in the sand as the world passes me by. It’s more that the progression of the world doesn’t seem so progressive. You go from grabbing a roll of film and knowing its look and feel, making a choice in seconds–Now, a picture is made but it’s not ready for until someone spends hours in front of a screen just to get it look like right. Then more time to get it to look good on paper.

There was darkroom time in the bygone days but it seems that to take a photo from light to paper takes longer in the era of 1’s and 0’s.

Many will say that the darkroom has simply been replaced by the screen. But, I don’t see it that way. The darkroom was an effiencent place where you would print a test strip and go. Or, at least for me. But, I would also try to work with the same film and paper and developed an understanding of what results I would get in all matter of conditions.

Retouching seems to take hours to do something as simple as building the overall look and feel of the image. What could be made in the time it takes to load a camera to get the contrast, grain, hue, saturation, vibrance now is done in hours in a chair. What was built in by Fuji, Ilford, Kodak is now in the eyes of the viewer at the desk or coffee shop.

But, as Pathé said “The March of Time!”