In the News

Member News

The feature film Inch’Allah, shot by Philippe Lavalette csc, in February received an international premiere at the Berlin Film Festival as part of its Panorama sidebar.

Meanwhile, Jeremy Benning csc teamed up with Scott Free Productions and director Adrian Moat to shoot the new television drama Killing Lincoln, based on the controversial best-seller written by Bill O’Reilly. The film, produced by Ridley and Tony Scott and featuring Oscar winner Tom Hanks, was scheduled to premiere in February on National Geographic.

In other news, Paul Sarossy csc, bsc in February began oshooting in Sudbury, Ont., on Atom Egoyan’s upcoming feature Queen of the Night, while Nicolas Bolduc csc this month begins a two-month shoot in Winnipeg of the movie Cry/Fly. The director is Peruvian Claudia Llosa, who directed The Milk of Sorrow.

Also, Resident Evil: Retribution, shot by Glen MacPherson csc, asc, in January won the 2012 Cineplex Golden Reel Award, presented to the Canadian film that earns the highest domestic box office in that year. Resident Evil grossed more than $5.4 million in Canada in 2012.

Letters to the Editor

Hi all at the CSC, As always we enjoy your magazine. Nice article on Roy Tash (On the Road with Roy, January 2013). We are going through our photos, etc. – history since 1954. Thought you’d like to see the first Roy Tash Award given out by PM Trudeau. Bob flew Roy and Alphee to Ottawa for the presentation. I’ll keep you in mind for more. Love to everyone. Bob Crone csc and Vi Crone The films Laurence Anyways (DOP Yves Bélanger csc) and Rebelle (DOP Nicolas Bolduc csc) led the Jutra Award nominations with 10 and nine nominations respectively, including nominations in the cinematography category for both DOPs. Both features were also nominated for best film, as was Inch’Allah, shot by Philippe Lavalette csc. The winners will be announced March 17.

Cooke Optics Receives Academy Award

Cooke Optics this year received an Academy Award of Merit for innovation in the design, development and manufacture of motion picture camera lenses. The Academy commented that Cooke received an Award of Merit because it “helped define the look of motion pictures over the last century.”

HD Source Acquires Assets and Personnel of Sharp’s Broadcast

HD Source (a division of ZTV Broadcast Services) has acquired the assets of Sharp’s Broadcast (formerly Videoscope), a division of Sharp’s Audio Visual. As a result, HD Source is expanding its sales and service offerings to include the High Definition broadcast products from The Professional Solutions Group, a division of Sony Canada. In addition, former sales and service staff members of Sharp’s Broadcast have joined HD Source. The company will provide sales and service support to the broadcast and production industries, as well continuing to care for the corporate communication, educational and medical imaging markets in and around the Greater Toronto Area. The repair and diagnostic department of HD Source now features Alnoor Remtulla and Nazrool Khan to service HD equipment.

WFW Halifax Moves

William F. White announced in January that its Halifax location has moved to Tour Tech East, 180 Thornhill Drive, Unit #2,

Dartmouth, NS, B3B 1V3.

with Brendan Steacy csc

By Fanen Chiahemen Photos by Ken Woroner

When Maritimer Craig Morrison was 88 years old, he decided to build a new house for him and his wife to grow old in. Being a self-sufficient man who had raised his family in St. Martins, New Brunswick, by farming and lumbering, he planned to build it with his own hands, just as he had four other houses in the province.

But local inspectors soon stopped the construction, saying Morrison was contravening national building codes. He became embroiled in a legal battle with the courts that was well-documented in local and national media. His battle came to an end in 2010 – three years after he began building – when a judge ordered the planning commission to come to an agreement with Morrison that would allow him to build his house and live there in peace.

His story has now been brought to the big screen in Michael McGowan’s latest feature Still Mine, starring James Cromwell as Morrison and Geneviève Bujold as his ailing wife. It was a special presentation at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival and was favoured among critics.

“The film is an exquisitely mounted and deeply affecting love story about a couple in their twilight years,” TIFF programmer Steve Gravestock wrote of Still Mine, which opens next month.

Its success is no doubt in part due to Brendan Steacy csc’s cinematography, which is strongly rooted in the stunning landscapes of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Northern Ontario where the film was shot.

“The visual language was very naturalistic,” says Steacy. “We just let the Bay of Fundy be what it was. Shooting something that spectacular is really just about representing it honestly.”

With very little action, the richness of Still Mine is in its subtext, and McGowan specifically wanted a formal look that would underscore the acting. “It’s a film that’s in the performances, and the camera work didn’t need or demand to be frenetic. We wanted really to set the frame in a very classic style,” he says.

Working with McGowan and production designer Tamara Deverell to develop a unified look for Still Mine, Steacy’s primary task was to make the natural light work for the film. “As our working relationship progressed it became apparent that Brendan almost processes the world through light,” McGowan says. “He’s always looking and playing with light, whether it’s putting his hand in front of a shadow or taking an iPhone shot of a sunset. He really – unlike probably any other DOP I’ve worked with – does paint with light and filters the world through his interaction with light.” Steacy still had the challenge of fighting the contrast as the weather changed. “We could start a scene in full sun and be in full cloud by the time the actors finished their dialogue,” he recalls. “The weather would move really quickly. That was difficult. You’d get a master in one weather, and then you’d do close-ups and it’d be completely different. You’d shoot one side, then the other side, then have to go reshoot the master because the entire scene was in full cloud. We would try as much as we could to shoot wide and get it while the light was nice and then match in the close-ups.” The weather also affected the way the interiors were lit, Steacy says. “If we were coming in from outside and it was bright sun as someone entered the house, we had to keep the feeling of sun inside.” With virtually no streetlights around, in rural New Brunswick nothing can be seen with the naked eye after dark, so Steacy sometimes had to find a way to make sure the characters were visible in night scenes. “There’s literally nothing there, and I didn’t want to put moonlight because it doesn’t really make sense to me, so we wanted some sort of logical source,” he says. “We found this 30 foot long wooden post at one of the neighbours’ farms and put it in the ground as if it was a farm post light, and we put this light fixture on top of it. It was all based on what we saw in New Brunswick and at the neighbouring farms where people have these great big metal farm lights, and so we added those when we needed them.”

When shooting inside the couple’s house, a farmhouse the

Left: A couple in their twilight years. Right: James Cromwell and Geneviève Bujold in Still Mine.

production found in Golden Valley, Steacy lit scenes through windows, softening 18Ks and 6Ks with heavy diffusion. “Again trying to make everything feel naturalistic,” he says. “We also wanted to give the actors the space to move on the floor and not encumber them too much, so we tried to keep the floor clear of film lights.”

Meanwhile, practical lights inside the house were mostly tungsten, true to the way homes are lit in the area, Steacy says. “People haven’t really switched sources so much there,” he says. “There’s a scene where Craig is going over his accounting at his desk, and we lit that with a 60-watt light bulb, a practical light bulb bouncing off the desk, a little clamp light. We had maybe a single Kino from another room coming in that gave it a really subtle edge, but mostly it was just lit with this one 60-watt bulb.”

Steacy also used the lighting to subtly offset the two distinct worlds represented in the film. Morrison’s world, a natural, organic, wholesome environment, was lit with a warm light. But when the dispute arises, the elderly man is forced into a corporate world of building permit offices, lawyers’ offices and courtrooms – a milieu that is alien to him – and the light takes on a cold and unnatural character.

For those scenes, Steacy altered the colour bounce and the shape of the light to make it “flat and toppy. It’s a lot of fluorescents. There’s no warmth or contrast. It’s more sterile. It’s just a stark contrast to the world he lives in where everything is made of wood and is from the earth,” he says.

Left: Director Michael McGowan. Right: Geneviève Bujold as Morrison’s ailing wife.

Deverell recalls how the colour palette for Morison’s world was born out of a scouting trip to the Bay of Fundy. “Early on Brendan, Michael and I went to New Brunswick and were walking along a beach, and there were all these beautiful round stones, and I picked up a bag full, which I brought all the way back to Ontario,” the production designer recalls.

Steacy adds, “When we got to Northern Ontario and sat down in the kitchen and started talking about the palette of the film, she pulled these rocks out of her pockets and lacquered them so they looked wet and had the same colour they had by the ocean. And she said, ‘Okay, this is the colour of Craig’s living room, and this is the colour of his dining room.’ And we all adopted that colour palette as the palette of the film. They were all greens and reds, some blue and some grey, all deep natural colours.”

Shooting with the ALEXA, Steacy was able to dial colour into the camera and did very little filtration in the camera. “Colour filtration doesn’t make sense anymore because you’re not restricted to tungsten or daylight,” he explains. “You can have any colour stock you want now. So if I wanted to put in a thousand degrees of warmth, instead of doing it in the lens, we do it in the camera.” For lenses, he opted for ARRI Master Primes. “I like those lenses a lot, they’re very sharp and they’re well colour matched. They have very limited ghosting, they’re very contrast-y, so when you’re shooting into skies or bright situations they don’t give you a ton of veiling glare. They’re sharp wide open – which is a 1.3 – which is great for night time stuff, when you want to actually use the world around you. And they’re fast.”

Shooting far from post facilities, a DI truck was a necessity and streamlined the process of watching dailies. “We had someone on a truck on set doing colour correction, so we were watching stuff as we went. I had a Resolve on set that I would do primary grading on, and then stuff was going back to a post house while someone else stayed up there with us and did transcoding overnight and burned them to iPads for us to watch,” Steacy says.

As he has been doing since he became a DOP, Steacy operated the camera during the shoot of Still Mine – (“I continue to find it not only keeps me more connected to the film, but it’s also the best vantage point from which to light,” he says) – which McGowan sees as a demonstration of the DOP’s dedication.

“He was willing to do anything for the production,” the director says. “I mean, we didn’t have trailers for the stars, and he and I found ourselves, three days before the start of principal photography, up near North Bay in some pickup truck looking at Winnebagos. I don’t know if too many DOPs would happily go along on a fishing trip for Winnebagos.”