In Memoriam

Photos courtesy of Cinéfilms & Vidéo Roger Racine csc on the set of the 1950 film Les Lumières de ma ville

Roger Racine csc 1924 to 2014

C’est avec des grands regrets que nous vous annonçons le décès de Roger Racine csc, le fondateur de Cinéfilms, a l’âge de 90 ans. Roger connu une carrière exceptionnelle et fut un des plus grands pionniers méconnus du cinéma canadien français. Directeur-photo de son métier, Roger commença sa carrière a l’ONF en temps de guerre et participa en tant qu’opérateur de caméra a des grandes manœuvres militaires au grand nord canadien comme Operation Muskox. Du public il passa au prive en devenant le premier directeurphoto professionnel canadien-français sur les longs-métrages comme Aurore, Enfant Martyre et Le Gros Bill. De retour au public en 1954, lors de la fondation de Radio-Canada, Roger devint réalisateur de télévision, un media qu’il adorait, et fut parmi les fondateurs de l’association des réalisateurs de Radio-Canada suite a la fameuse grève de la télévision de 1959. Roger quitta Radio-Canada en 1964 pour fonder Cinéfilms et se consacra a son métier de direction-photo et réalisateur/ producteur, mettant en images des grands ce monde dont Fidel Castro et René Lévesque et des réalisateurs tel que Oliver Stone. Il connut une fructueuse carrière au privé jusqu’à sa récente retraite, allant jusqu’à gagner un prix gémeau pour avoir produit le meilleur documentaire catégorie portrait avec sa télésérie sur René Levesque et aussi le Lifetime Achievement Award de la CSC. Republished with permission from Cinéfilms & Vidéo Productions Inc.

ENGLISH: It is with the deepest regret that we announce the death of Cinéfilms founder Roger Racine csc at the age of 90. Roger had an exceptional career and was one of the pioneers of French Canadian cinema, albeit an unrecognized one. A director of photography by trade, Roger began his career at the National Film Board during the war and worked as a camera operator, filming major military manoeuvres such as Operation Muskox. He left the public sector and became the first professional French Canadian DP on such feature films as Aurore, Enfant Martyre and Le Gros Bill. Returning to the public sector in 1954, when Radio-Canada was founded, Roger worked as a director in television, a medium that he loved, and he became one of the founders of l’Association des réalisateurs de Radio-Canada following the famous television strike of 1959. Roger left Radio-Canada in 1964 to found Cinéfilms and he devoted his career to cinematography, directing and producing, creating images of the likes of Fidel Castro and René Lévesque, and working with directors like Oliver Stone. He had a successful career until his retirement, managing to win a Gemini Award for the TV mini-series documentary René Lévesque, héros malgré lui, as well as a CSC Lifetime Achievement Award.

Roger Racine csc in His Own Words:

Over the years, the CSC got to know Racine through a number of interviews. Here are some revealing excerpts:

Roger Racine csc while shooting the military expedition Operation Muskox, circa 1948.

On how he got into the business:

My eldest sister used to take me to the Capitol Theatre [in Ottawa]. We would go and see films like Tarzan. I got the bug of the cinema from a very early age, so I went to the National Film Board with my projector and some 8 mm films and [there] was MacLean, and he was more or less the See Racine page 22

President from page 2 An analogy that I would make is that of someone who is inexperienced in the culinary arts and wishes to throw a dinner party. Where to begin? Does one just go out and purchase food items and attempt to concoct a meal and hope for a favourable outcome? Of course not! It takes planning, knowhow and experience to know what works to ensure success. Our industry is no different. For those who are anything less than prepared, there is an old adage in our business: “You are only as good as your last job.” For anyone entering the film and television industry, I would suggest attempting anything within reason, but understand what it is that you wish to accomplish. Take it one step at a time and don’t bite off more than you can chew on any occasion. Of course, try not to make mistakes, but if you do, make sure that you learn from the experience so as not to repeat them. Be alert, accommodating, and, above all, absorb everything, and you should do well. I wish all students good luck in finding that perfect career path.

CSC Annual General Meeting

Monday, February 2, 2015 at 6:30 p.m.

Technicolor Toronto Boardroom No. 1 49 Ontario Street

Following the meeting we will have a light dinner and refreshments, courtesy of the good folks at Technicolor. Great opportunity to meet and chat with your fellow cinematographers! Hope to see you there, CSC member!

It’s time to start thinking about entering that almost perfect film you shot!

THE

TH

CSC Awards is coming…

Entry forms are on the csc website: csc.ca Deadline is January 30, 2015

And don’t forget to nominate your 1st or 2nd AC for the Camera Assistant Award of Merit!

Here are the categories for Directors of Photography:

H Documentary H Docu-drama H Dramatic short H Music video H Performance H Commercials H Branded Content H TV Drama H TV Series H Features

Here are the categories for Cinematographers:

H Roy Tash (spot news) H Stan Clinton (news essay) H Webeo (web content) H Corporate/Educational H Lifestyle/Reality H News Magazine

H Student Film

Bobby Shore

cscGoes BANG BANG BANG BANG BABY BABY

By FANEN CHIAHEMEN B B ang Bang Baby could be what you get when you cross a classic Elvis movie with a nuclear disaster and some mutants. The film tells the story of a teenager named Stepphy Holiday, who dreams of escaping her sleepy town of Lonely Arms and becoming a famous singer. It’s the 1960s, and she knows little about the A-bomb or satellites. Her biggest problems are caring for her alcoholic father and dodging the unwanted advances of the town creep, while she fantasizes about her favourite matinee idol. That all changes when a local chemical plant springs a leak, spilling a mutation-causing mist, just before her famous crush rolls into town. If it sounds surreal, it’s because it is. Bang Bang Baby is an expressionistic period piece and daring fusion of styles. One newspaper called it a “mash-up of teen melodrama, drive-in romance and B-movie sci-fi of the 1950s.” At screenings it’s been called part parody, an environmental piece and a campy comedy. It’s a world of chalky pastel colours wrapped in a menacing purple mist, with visual effects that include rear projection and blue screen. “The whole thing feels like a John Waters, David Lynch kind of fever dream,” cinematographer Bobby Shore csc offers. “It’s really odd and strange.” In fact, writer-director Jeffrey St. Jules was inspired to write Bang Bang Baby – his first feature film – more than 10 years ago while watching Viva Las Vegas. He says he was initially captivated by the madness of Ann-Margret’s performance, but the darker elements developed in the writing process as he explored the underbelly of escapism. “I felt like it all came out of the story,” St. Jules says. “You’re already in a world where anything can happen; you don’t have to be beholden to reality. I wanted to make a movie about her fantasies and nightmares, and the genres were just ways to express those fantasies and nightmares. It seemed to fit into the world of it for me so I went with it.” St. Jules’ musings won over last year’s TIFF crowd – Bang Bang Baby won the City of Toronto Award for Best Canadian First Feature Film for its “ingenious mixing of genres, sophisticated blend of tones and ability to create its own strange, tragicomic and original world” – a dream outcome, perhaps, for a vision that was far from easy to realize. With no easy synopsis, St. Jules had to cultivate strong images for Bang Bang Baby from the very beginning, ultimately obviating the need for lengthy conversations about the narrative when assembling his crew and securing funding. Shore recalls getting the call from his agent about shooting Bang Bang Baby. “Jeff and I went to undergrad together 14 years ago in Montreal, and I hadn’t seen the guy since then,” Shore says. Rather than discuss the film with the cinematographer, St. Jules simply sent the script and a look book, which Shore says “was such a weird amalgamation of different types of imagery, but somehow there seemed to be a very cohesive nature behind it.” St. Jules is admittedly taciturn and seems to rely on a mental database of movie images to communicate. “Jeff is one of the smartest directors I’ve worked with, but it takes a while to understand where he’s coming from and his thought process,” Shore says. “He would say one thing and I would interpret it one way and a day later I would come back with ideas based on that previous discussion, and he’d say, ‘No, I don’t think I want it to be like that.’ Then he’d pull up some random clip from an Elvis Presley movie and say, ‘It should feel like this,’ and then I would get it. And that became a really fun process.”

Together Shore and St. Jules came up with a period backdrop for Bang Bang Baby that borrowed from the works of filmmakers like Douglas Sirk – an aesthetic of locked-off cameras, bold, saturated colours and lead actresses lit to look almost supernaturally beautiful. “I started to realize how much Jeff wanted to play with the idea of artifice and how much he wanted to take the tropes and techniques of 1950s filmmaking and apply that to this movie. It was fun to dive into this world where everything could be stylized, where you could really use the lighting to enhance the mood and tone of each scene,” Shore says, adding that they had a tungsten-only rule on set – no HMIs or fluorescents, which were not commonly used during that era of filmmaking. “We were using those previously accepted aesthetics as a way to foreground the artifice of this story in this weird, meta, self-referential way, kind of foregrounding the process and the technique of making the movie.” To get that period look, Shore fitted a RED EPIC with Panavision Standard Speeds from the 1960s, which he says “flare really badly and maintain a super low contrast, and if you shoot them wide open you get these really odd chromatic aberrations around the highlights. But it just looked really appropriate with shooting digital. Their resolving power is a lot lower than new lenses. A period piece like Bang Bang Baby should have a softer more classic look, and it would be better to achieve that with the lens you’re using as opposed to using filtration in front of a newer lens.” With the mood in Bang Bang Baby swinging from whimsical to nightmarish, the director and DP had to make sure they were always on the same page when approaching each scene, so they crafted a document that Shore calls the “fantasy-nightmare scale. We drew a giant graph that had a line in the middle. Plus 10 was fantasy, minus 10 was nightmare, and zero was our baseline, Douglas Sirk-era look. We graphed the entire script and we always had that as a reference on set to help us decide how nightmarish or fantastical each scene was.” During Stepphy’s fantasy sequences, Shore would add giant backlights to create a glow and halo around actress Jane Levy’s head, lighting her gauzy and soft. Because the girl’s fantasies are triggered by the appearance of the teen idol she obsesses over, Shore would light him the same way. “No matter where he was, we’d stick him in as much backlight as

Actor Justin Chatwin as a rock and roll star, the subject of a young woman’s fantasies in Bang Bang Baby.

Credit: Courtesy of Scythia Films

Bobby Shore csc on the set of Bang Bang Baby.

Credit: Kristof, foto-studio.com

possible. We used a lot of stage lights, like Leko lights and Source 4s, things you can control easily. So wherever he was we would take a Leko and point it right at him and then shutter it off so it didn’t really touch the rest of the set. It helped a lot that he wore a nice white suit. We would just backlight it to the point where the white suit would be overexposed and glowing.” For those scenes, Shore switched the lenses on the EPIC to a pre-C Series 45-90 mm Anamorphic zoom. “It’s super soft and low contrast, and you have to centre punch everything because it just is completely out of focus on the fringes,” Shore says. “It gives a different visual texture and has a shallower depth of field than the spherical Standard Speeds, which we wanted to use to really isolate Stepphy in her fantasy world by really making her the sole point of focus in these shots.” A few sequences in Bang Bang Baby are rendered in black

and white, including the teen idol’s films that Stepphy watches regularly on television, and for those scenes Shore used a Panavised Cooke 25-250 mm lens. “It’s an older, softer lens and it has a lower contrast to it. We also ended up putting a stocking behind the lens to give the highlights a glow and to really give everything a bit of a softer feel to it. It’s a trick DPs would use in the ‘50s for diffusion,” Shore explains. “They’d buy black Dior stockings, stretch it behind the element of the lens and glue it down and it would diffuse the image in a very obvious way and make it very soft. It also had this weird rainbow artefact, and anything that was overexposed would have a white orb around it. I just felt like that’s how they shot black and white in the ‘50s, so we’ll just approach it in the same way.” When Stepphy’s dreams mutate into nightmares, Shore switched up the lenses again to the modern Primo lenses, “which resolved a lot better, to give everything a more tactile, sharper, immediate feeling to it,” he says. The visual reference for the nightmare look actually came from production designer Aidan Leroux, who years ago introduced St. Jules to the photography of Gregory Crewdson. “Crewdson would take photographs in mundane places and through really stylistic lighting, costume and set design would flip it on its head and portray the seediness and disgusting nature of these scenes,” Shore says. To evoke that quality, Shore would employ a very theatrical and expressionistic look on Levy, often placing her in half light imbued with lavenders and deep blues. Sometimes he would put her in harder light to create a greater contrast and to enhance the dark, nightmarish quality of the scenes. “For the last act, when the fantasy and nightmare worlds collide, we changed our lighting style again to suit the tone. We used no model light on her, just soft top light without any kind of fill, and let bags form under her eyes,” Shore says. “It was far from flattering, yet all departments were on board with it, as was Jane. It was an interesting collaboration with wardrobe, which did a killer job of changing her from these really brightly-coloured frilly dresses to colourless frumpy dresses and pants. The makeup department also did a great job of making her look dull and pale. And then instead of using 50 mm or 75 mm lenses for close-ups, we would use our 27 mm Primo and shoot her close and wide without any filtration and with harsher lighting. “One scene that foregrounds this change well is the nightmarish birthing scene of Stepphy’s soon-to-be-mutant child,” Shore continues. “We walked onto set, turned off all the lights, stuck a 60-watt clear bulb in a lamp, which we placed next to Jane, and just started shooting, knocking the lamp shade around every once in a while to add some moving shadows to the shot.” Much of the drama in Bang Bang Baby plays out in the house where Stepphy lives with her alcoholic father, and that

Credit: Kristof, foto-studio.com

Cast and crew on the set of Bang Bang Baby.

location was a three-walled set with large windows that Shore could shine big gelled lights through. “Jeffrey wanted a lot of the movie to feel proscenium and almost theatrical so you could never actually do full reverses on people. So we were only ever looking in one direction on all sets,” Shore says. “We had a grid above with a bunch of 2K Softlights and Lekos that we would use for the more theatrical lighting, little pinpoint sources here and there. But for the more fantastical scenes it was just giant lights through windows and giant bounces over the set walls. It was a bit of a challenge to achieve the look with the EPIC because it doesn’t have the best dynamic range and the highlights tend to blow out quickly. So it took a lot of light just to achieve something naturalistic even though we would have three 20Ks and a bunch of half Dinos and so many lights burning at the same time to make it look like there wasn’t really that much lighting going on at all.” St. Jules wanted to carry the period drama aesthetic through to the set pieces outside the house so that when the leak at the chemical plant eventually sends a terrified Stepphy running into a forest, the crew approached the scene the way a Sirk-era film might do it. “We thought how would they build this in the ‘50s?” Shore says. “Well, they would build this

BANG BANG

BABY

Bright, bold colours highlight the dreams of a teenage girl in Bang Bang Baby.

forest on a sound stage, just fill it with smoke and backlight and just shoot it. “We couldn’t afford to build a forest bigger than 20 feet by 20 feet so we hid the sound stage by pumping everything with smoke,” he continues. “It’s supposed to be a mist leak, so we just backlit everything with lavender gels on all the lights to give everything a purple cast to it. So we used our limitations as a creative tool.” Shore notes that the crew might not have been able to pull off such set pieces had it not been for the support of the rental houses that supplied their equipment. “We got our camera and lens package from Panavision when Stewart Aziz was still working there. They donated the package for the equivalent of a case of beer. He was really supportive,” Shore says. “William F. White also stepped up and donated a massive lighting package,” the cinematographer adds. “I’ve done a lot of features with Dan St. Amour there. They were all super friendly and helpful. [Producer] Dan Beckerman also has a really good relationship with those guys. Basically everyone went to their respective vendors and people we used to work with and begged, borrowed and stole. The generosity people showed was pretty phenomenal.” Meanwhile, on set every department muscled through the gruelling two-month shoot, despite not having an adequate budget, on sheer belief in the project, Shore says. “It was definitely the hardest shoot I’ve been on,” the cinematographer reminisces with some measure of fondness. “Everyone stepped up to help everyone else. You were never waiting on the art department or the electrics or grips, especially key grip TJ Richardson. He and his guys really carried this movie on their backs. Whenever anything was vague in terms of what department should take care of a particular task, the grips ended up handling it and did a killer job. And that all came from the fact that there was such an originality to the tone and the approach to Jeff ’s script,” Shore says. Yet St. Jules was always open to input from Shore and other creative heads, which the director says enriched the final product. “The reason we have the DP and the production designer and all the creatives is so they can bring their own thing to it and make it better than what you would have imagined,” St. Jules posits. “In many respects, what Bobby and Aidan brought visually is better than what I would have imagined on my own. All in all, I’m really happy with the way it turned out.”

C ast N o S hadow

Credit: Jim Desautels

Scott McClellan Brings Light to Newfoundland Film

Filmmaker and St. John’s native Christian Sparkes says he has always felt that children are a great lens through which to see the world. “Because it’s an honest lens,” the CFC Director’s Lab alumnus says. Sparkes had worked with children on several films and television shows, but he found the ideal material for his first feature, Cast No Shadow, in screenwriter Joel Thomas Hynes’ treatment of a summer in the life of a troubled 13-year-old boy attempting to navigate his tumultuous world in a rugged seaside town. Raised by an abusive and criminal father and preoccupied with thoughts of his dead mother, Jude Traynor (played by the screenwriter’s son, Percy Hynes White) uses his imagination as a coping mechanism, but he also lashes out frequently and resorts to delinquency. The lonely and neglected boy dreams up the source of his troubles: an evil cave-dwelling troll, which the boy must appease with trinkets he keeps in a treasure chest in a crawlspace under his house. Although Cast No Shadow goes to some dark and unsettling places and features elements of fantasy and thriller, it was shot against the autumnal beauty of Newfoundland, and months before principal photography, Sparkes and cinematographer Scott McClellan – whom the director had met a decade ago in the film program at NSCAD University in Halifax – headed to Bell Island to scout locations. “It is really one of the definitive landscapes in the movie,” McClellan says. “It has a couple of little villages on it. Otherwise it’s very secluded and sparsely populated.” Indeed, the Atlantic backdrop was the perfect canvas to explore some of the themes in the film, McClellan says. “Jude is a small boy all alone in the world. So it was important to show the dichotomy between the character and his setting by shooting these big wide vistas and having him as this very small character in these settings, expressing his loneliness in that way,” he says. As the boy changes, though, the world around him starts to look different too, as do the overtones of the images that McClellan crafts. “There is something very romantic about childhood, and that’s something we tried to portray visually by having lush warm landscapes and warm colours and very comfortable inviting places,” the cinematographer says. “It’s not until later when he begins to lose hope, and that magic that has been his world dwindles and things desaturate a little bit and the palette becomes cooler.” McClellan opted to shoot on a RED ONE with Zeiss Super Speeds, a package obtained from SIM Atlantic

Credit: Jim Desautels

in Halifax at a reduced rate thanks to camera manager Jeff Wheaton. “The nice thing about using Super Speeds with the budget we had is that they are such fast lenses, they allowed us to shoot in lower level lighting scenarios,” McClellan says. With the RED, McClellan was also able to shoot virtually all the daylight exteriors in natural daylight, with only the aid of some negative fill and some bounce. But Sparkes called the film Cast No Shadow partly because the idea of shadows was “such a strong image in the film and was very prominent in the script,” the director says. “The idea of the shadow as an alter ego, a mirror image of yourself, but a darker image of yourself. The idea is that if you cast no shadow you can keep the evil at bay.” The title of the film seems to underline McClellan’s approach to the cinematography in keeping with that imagery. “We always wanted shadow to be a manifestation of Jude’s darker tendencies, his bad habits and his faults,” he says. The cave where Jude’s imaginary troll lives was actually a cluster of Second World War-era ammunitions storage bunkers, built into Newfoundland’s Southside Hills. With no power in the bunkers, McClellan relied heavily on batterypowered LEDs to simulate various lighting sources within the cave. The director of photography used daylight balanced 1x1 LED panels to simulate early morning ambient skylight in various backgrounds inside the cavern. The cinematographer also used battery-powered ARRI LoCasters on boom arms in close-ups to simulate light from the lantern the boy carried with him into the cave. The lantern was in fact fashioned by gaffer Ryan Hernandez who outfitted it with a 300-watt bulb from a Fresnel. The electrics then ran a cable hidden in the actor’s clothing as he carried the lantern in wide shots “so we could get the right exposure levels in these wide shots for the fall-offs that we needed. And we would ND the camera-facing side of the lantern so that the hotspot in the lantern wouldn’t blow out

Cinematographer Scott McClellan (with camera) shooting on Bell Island with director Christian Sparkes (right) and first AC Andrew Hills (left).

Previous page: Jude carries found treasures to a seaside cave to appease a troll he has dreamed up as the source of all his troubles.

quite as much but still have a greater fall-off behind the light,” McClellan says. The other important location in the film is the crawlspace where the boy keeps his treasure chest of trinkets. “It’s where he’s the safest; he goes there to be alone with his imagination,” McClellan says. “There had to be a certain magic to that place that didn’t exist anywhere else in the movie. When we shot in there I warmed it up more than I regularly would, softened it with filters more than I had the rest of the movie, and I gave it a more comfortable cocoon-like quality that had a hint of magic to it.” Jude also finds some relief through a friendship with a reclusive woman named Alfreda, and an abandoned house on Logy Bay was dressed with quirky lamps and candles to serve as Alfreda’s home.“It was a very old house, but Xavier Georges, the production designer, really did a fantastic job dressing the sets,” McClellan says, adding that he was able to go “with a more candlelit light quality in there, and it really made the home a very comfortable and inviting world for Jude.” Shooting day for night inside the house, key grip Miles Barnes and his crew would black out the windows and then McClellan would carry the candles with Kino Flos. “We used long two-bulb Kinos that we would diffuse and warm up a little bit with some light CTO. And then we would really black wrap a lot of what that Kino was doing to eliminate as much fill as we could and sculpt it into something that looked more like a warm candlelight,” he says. “In the wide shots we’d try and vignette the edges of the frame however we could to keep everything very confined and cozy between Alfreda and Jude.” By contrast, scenes with Jude’s father, being a negative force in his son’s life, were lit darker. “In a lot of scenes he is walking through shadow or standing in shadow,” McClellan says. “Not necessarily his whole body but his face at least.” In a scene that McClellan considers one of the best in the

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film, Jude’s father comes upon his son in the kitchen and begins to verbally abuse him. “You see Jude in a late day sunlit kitchen and Dad almost in complete shadow at one point when he’s bearing down on Jude at his worst. And that was something we really achieved through careful blocking,” McClellan explains. “It was a matter of putting Jude in a specific place so he was lit better, and putting Dad where he was kept shadowy. Sometimes Jude had return to help bring his level up a little bit, and sometimes Dad had a bit of negative to help bring his level down a bit. But there were no lights in the room for that scene. There were two 1200s outside the windows going through some light diffusion and we warmed a quarter CTO and also a 575 coming through window.” Tense scenes between father and son also played out during car rides at night, and McClellan was careful with the way he lit those. “One thing I don’t like about night driving scenes is when it feels like the dashboard is lighting the characters. For me it never really feels natural. It’s just too close to the actors,” the cinematographer says. “So for these car scenes we put the car on a low-rise flatbed so they didn’t have to drive; they could focus on performances, and that allowed me to light with lower levels. It was very simple; we ran everything off of batteries for that and we mounted a couple of small battery-powered brick lights to suction cup spigots on the front hood of the car and on the back. And then I covered the windshield with a silk and then some extra diffusion on top of that, and we softened it up as much as we could. “And then because we were driving in such rural areas where there wasn’t a lot of ambient light or streetlights or light from homes or anything, we put a 1x1 panel on a roof, shooting into the background dimmed with diffusion and then dimmed that down as well,” McClellan continues. “And it was just so you could pick up a little bit of what was happening in the background of the shot in terms of trees passing by, just to give it more of a sense of movement.” In the final act of the film, the boy is confronted with the consequences of his actions in a sequence that takes place in one night, beginning at a local dance. “That’s when we went from a warmer colour palette to a cooler palette,” McClellan says. “So he starts at this dance where he is lit by these sodium vapour-looking lights. Then he leaves the area, goes back to his house which is now dark. You then see that the warmth of crawlspace is now gone, and it feels like moonlight is lighting a lot of it. Even when he goes back to Alfreda’s for the penultimate scene, it’s all now feeling like moonlight is lighting the interior of the house instead of warm candlelight.” When Jude finally visits the cave at the end of movie, he is “left by himself with the cold realities of his circumstance,” McClellan says. “And you just see his shadow on the wall of the cave. For that we had an open-face 1K that we used to carry the lantern that the boy had, and we had it hidden behind these set pieces, which were basically these wooden cut-outs of stalactites and stalagmites made by Xavier and his team. And that helped us shape the wide shots into something that looked like a more natural cave. For the lantern we hid a 1K behind the wooden cut-outs and had the gaffer tilt the 1k to mimic the movement of Jude’s lantern swinging. And Jude is lit very harshly by this lantern, and it’s the only time in the movie you see any lighting like that. Everything that was once romantic and idealistic is now seen in a harsh broad spotlight. It’s an unforgiving light and shows everything for what it really is.” Despite the harsh realities that Cast No Shadow depicts, the film swept the 2014 Atlantic Film Festival, winning six awards, including Best Cinematography, Best Direction and Best Atlantic Feature, an undoubtedly sweet triumph for the cast and crew. “When you’re not paying people a whole lot, sometimes there is a bit of guilt about pushing people too hard,” the director says. “But everyone was passionate about the film and stayed really engaged and did their best work.”

Top: In Cast No Shadow a 13-year-old boy with a tough life uses his imagination as a coping mechanism. Bottom: Cinematographer Scott McClellan shoots the final scene in a cave in the Southside Hills. “I hate having bags on the camera while I’m working with it, so I would challenge first AC Andrew Hills to make me custom fitting bag covers that were easy to work around. He rose to the challenge and since then I’ve heard from other people that he’s still making these covers, and they’re amazing!”

A Building of Destiny

Crafting a Classic Look for Parks Canada

In August 2014, I had the pleasure of working with a phenomenal team on a video recreating the historic 1864 Charlottetown Conference that led to the Confederation of Canada. Parks Canada had commissioned the video for Province House National Historic Site in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, to replace one that had been made in 1999. The task of producing this ambitious video fell to Tim Joyce of Sound Venture Productions in Ottawa, who enlisted director Jocelyn Forgues with whom I had collaborated several times before. The new 15-minute video, called A Building of Destiny, will be available in both English and French for the next several years and tells the story of the Charlottetown Conference and the role of Province House. The utmost goal was, therefore, to produce a video that would stand the test of time, and that would continue to resonate with audiences long after the cinematic trends of today have been exhausted. With that in mind, I worked diligently with Tim and, especially, Jocelyn, to develop a visual grammar for the project that would inform our decisions on set. The video includes a host (Sonia Boileau) speaking directly to the audience; scenes re-enacting historic speeches, meetings, and other events related to the historic deliberations about the Confederation of Canada; and several graphic elements, including maps, archival photographs, and paint

Actors Josh Weale, Mathieu Arsenault, Dennis Trainor, Jamie Cordes, Tim Wartman and Matt Putnam in a still from the video. By MATTHEW A. MACDONALD ings, all seamlessly integrated with the live action material. We decided on a classic, deliberate look and feel for the project, intent on eschewing the more casual, handheld style of cinematography that is quite popular today and which I felt may date the picture. We did several things to achieve this, including remaining on a dolly for most of the shoot. This alone resulted in a very fine, deliberate style of composition and camera choreography, made possible in large measure by the incredible talent of key grip and dolly grip Peter Chartier. For my lighting design, the idea was to light primarily from outside the windows in our various interior locations. We had the privilege of shooting in some gorgeous locations, including Province House, but also the Lieutenant Governor’s residence. Lighting through the windows allowed us to maximize our use of these spaces, give the actors more flexibility of movement, and achieve a consistent, natural look while still being able to control the light. My main source for these day interiors was a 12K HMI Fresnel. For a major scene involving the Fathers of Confederation in Confederation Chamber at Province House, we mounted the 12K on a scissor lift outside a second-storey window and aimed it at an angle down the length of the long table in the centre of the room. This created a beautiful beam of simulated sunlight on all the actors seated around the table. To add texture to the background, we placed small mirrors on the floor behind the table to cast scattered reflections of the light on the wall; the effect was striking. The scene was further augmented by fill from a Kino Flo and an 800W HMI Joker through diffusion. In lighting a scene in an elegant room at the Lieutenant

Governor’s residence, which stood in for a restaurant where George-Étienne Cartier, John A. Macdonald and George Brown were meeting, we bounced the 12K into a 20’x20’ sheet of natural muslin positioned at an angle immediately outside the windows, and augmented this with an 800W Joker through the window from outside and another 800W Joker bounced into natural muslin on the inside. The directional 800W Joker through the window served as the key light for the host, who was seated in the foreground and who I wanted to set apart visually from the historical drama unfolding behind her. Helping me achieve all this was a superb team of local technicians, but especially gaffer Jon Olts, a consummate craftsman and artistic collaborator. Jon helped me immensely in refining my lighting designs and implementing my ideas. As for the camera, we chose the ARRI ALEXA because of its overall image quality, the elegant way it handles skin tones and colour in general, and its incredible ease of use. To further achieve a classic look, I used a set of Zeiss Super Speed Mark III lenses, which have a pleasing, slightly softer look than some more modern lenses and render colours and flesh tones beautifully. As for grading, I found that the built-in ARRI LCC look gave us almost exactly the colour rendering we wanted, which simplified our work on set and reduced the need for tweaking in post. All of our camera, lighting, and grip equipment was supplied by Affinity Production Group in Ottawa, and I am very thankful for the assistance of Ron Gallant and his team at Affinity. Finally, for scenes involving only the host, we remained relatively wide, shooting variously with an 18 mm or 25 mm lens and positioning the camera closer to her. The idea was to bring the host closer to the audience visually, lending immediacy to her presence. By contrast, for the re-enactment scenes, we favoured slightly longer lenses in the 35 mm to 85 mm range. To further distinguish the two looks, I used a 1/4 black frost filter for the historical re-enactment scenes. We had considered using haze, but that was not appropriate, given the historic locations we were shooting in and the desire not to shower the valuable artefacts they contain with mineral oil! Throughout the project, I exposed consistently for T4 to achieve a pleasant, manageable depth of field. This also gave our actors, and first camera assistant Brian Sharp, some much-needed breathing room. Two other considerations were important in this regard. First, the desire for some depth in the images to remain true to my idea of a classic look, and second, the fact that the Zeiss Super Speed lenses tend to wash out at wider apertures. This is an example of a commissioned video project where the conventions of traditional cinematography and filmmaking were not luxuries, but necessities to achieve a particular, classic look. It was an exciting project to work on and I hope you have enjoyed reading about it.

TECHNICAL SPECS: 16:9 H Digital Capture ARRI ALEXA 2K H Zeiss Super Speed Mark III

Matthew A. MacDonald is a cinematographer based in Ottawa, but originally from Halifax, Nova Scotia. He became an associate CSC member in 2014.

Top: Cinematographer Matthew MacDonald (with camera) rehearses a shot in Province House with first camera assistant Brian Sharp (left) and director Jocelyn Forgues (arm raised) looking on. Bottom: Preparing for a shot in Confederation Chamber in Province House.