17 minute read
JING-PIN YU & SABA MAZIOUM•BETTER DAYS
THE BRIGHT SIDE
Gaffer: Barry Conroy by David Wood
How did you get started?
My dad, Louis Conroy, is a gaffer and he got me an apprenticeship in 1999 with Paddy O’Toole in Cine Electric Lighting Company in Ireland. When I finished there I started working as a daily on various productions and then James McGuire started crewing me on jobs. I went on to best boy for James and thank him to this day for all the advice and guidance he gave.
Another big break was while working the floor with gaffer Terry Mulligan. He offered me the second unit gaffer position on a TV show called Camelot. It was an amazing experience and it gave me the confidence to start chasing jobs as a gaffer.
Did you always want to be a gaffer?
I don’t think so, but I always worked hard and wanted to do the best I could, whatever the job. Once I was offered a gaffer job I grabbed it with both hands and gave it everything. I think being a gaffer finds you, rather than you going looking for it.
How did you learn the trade?
The best learning I got was from working with and watching others – my dad firstly (he still teaches me to this day), but also Terry Mulligan, James McGuire and Noel Cullen. They all taught me so much simply by watching them. Through my years as a best boy I learnt all about the organisation of equipment and labour and how important it is to simply write stuff down. When I started gaffering, DPs like Martin Führer BSC, John Conroy ISC, Owen McPolin ISC and Laurie Rose BSC all had different ways of achieving things so I’ve learnt to be very adaptable. I’m still learning everyday on-set and I suspect I always will.
When is the gaffer/DP relationship at its best?
I really enjoy working alongside DPs and gaining their trust. It is a great thing when you get on and build almost a second sense of what they want. The camera test and pre-light days are always key for both parties to figure each other out and get a feeling of how we like to work.
On The Green Knight with DP Andrew Droz Palermo and director David Lowery, all three of us would talk through a scene on scouting trips and then when it came to our tech-talk, Andrew and I would both have similar ideas for lighting. All this prep work meant that the shoot went smoothly.
Tell us about your crew
My best boys Paul McNulty and Tommy Keyes, as well as Graeme Haughton who is my rigging gaffer, have all been by my side for years. My floor crew changes as people go off to become best boys and gaffers themselves, which is brilliant. Now we have Marc Cole on the genny and Mark McGowan taking care of the floor. I would also be lost without Terry Mulcahy who takes care of all things dimming and DMX. This is an integral part of film lighting now.
Your biggest challenge?
It would be the project I’ve just finished; a tenepisode TV series called Foundation for Apple TV+ which was huge. Multiple DPs, massive sets with a lot of LED practicals and big lighting set-ups. It was also shot across various countries, which added to the logistical challenges. We would be shooting in one country while setting-up in a second with another crew and planning for a third. This is where the behind-the-scenes work of a brilliant best boy and a rigging gaffer really show their worth. The crossover units and ever-changing schedules added to the workload.
Main: Barry Conroy, on Free Fire with DP Laurie Rose BSC Opposite lower: With father, gaffer Louis Conroy Below: Barry, spot check
Most difficult location?
On a show a couple of years ago, a location was found which had very limited access in a tightlypacked pine forest. We had a lot of night scenes and needed a hard backlight, soft fill and overhead soft light. We managed to get a machine on a firebreak road, but couldn’t get any balloons or other machines in to do the fill or overhead. We ended-up rigging 2K Jem Ball lamps high-up in the trees with bi-colour LED fittings in them which we had 3D printed and wrapped in LED strip. We then used LV4 Pro controllers from EMP designs and Tracer batteries to power them. We ended up making 20 of them and it worked out great in the end. It was a bit of a rig though!
Favourite movie?
My favourite to work on was Free Fire (2016) with Laurie Rose BSC and director Ben Wheatley. We had a warehouse in Brighton fully-rigged with in-built lighting and hidden fixtures so we could almost shoot anywhere in the building. The cast and the crew had so much fun on the shoot together. It was filled with dust, bullet hits, fire and water, but also lots of laughs!
Latest kit
A really good piece of kit is a great wireless set-up. We recently got our hands on the Radical Wireless Blackbird and Sparrow DMX and were really impressed with the range and stability of connection. The Blackbird version is also weatherproof which is brilliant.
I try to follow as many companies, gaffers and sparks on social media to see what they are using and what’s new. It’s great seeing how people use new innovations. Social media is great for rigs and ideas.
I also enjoy testing new gear. What I love most are the accessories that are continually coming out - they change the way we can use certain lights. For example, how DoPChoice Snapbags and Octarig suspension systems allow us to soften LED sources.
Sometimes what’s great is being able to use new technology to recreate an old technique. Using LED fixtures as space lights is a perfect example. Also, having ‘rock ‘n’ roll’ people on the crew is great for their knowledge of other fixtures we wouldn’t normally think of.
Any advice for aspiring gaffers?
Put down your phone and watch what’s going on around you. Never be late. Oh, and smile and enjoy yourself. What we do for ‘work’ is great!
Cinematographer Laurie Rose BSC says:
The gaffer/DP relationship is a crucial one for me. They do rather have to be a conduit for my macroanxiety, to make sense of wild ideas, organise them and bring them to life, with a great team and still have a laugh. If they’re along for that ride with you then they’re very special and you want to hang on to them.
Barry and I are of a similar age and his calm, considered approach counters my haphazard methodology perfectly. He always has a brilliant alternative and has the courage and knowledge to offer ambitious, practical solutions when all about is mayhem - it’s literally in his DNA.
Cinematographer Owen McPolin ISC says:
Often DPs think they choose the gaffers they work with, but the opposite is really true. At the root of the relationship lies trust and without that, the process of lighting and prediction becomes laborious, inefficient and liable to disaster. It’s that critical really.
When you work with an accomplished gaffer, they can almost predict the requirements based upon the style they perceive in their DP. Although I try my damnedest to stump Barry, he manages to distil lighting to its simplest core and by doing so, solves the given conundrum without so much as involving me, freeing me to tell the story. I trust him implicitly and when we work together my only worry it will be the last time, as he is clearly destined for enormous things.
Cinematographer Tico Poulakakis CSC says:
Anyone can be clear in their vision, but completely unable to accomplish it on a larger scale without someone to help them execute it, imbue it with additional complexity and elevate it beyond what the original had to offer.
My most recent collaboration with Barry on Foundation is a shining example of that. He has the logistical prowess to run an army, but the ability to remain grounded in the intent of a scene and what it should look like, to stay calm during its execution and add to it. Barry thinks like a DP, which makes my job so much easier and more enjoyable.
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Cinematographer James Laxton ASC and director Barry Jenkins have been close friends and collaborators since they were roommates at college in Florida, some 20 years ago. After working on several shorts together, they first made a name for themselves with Jenkins’ assured 2008 lowbudget feature debut, the San Francisco-set romantic drama Medicine For Melancholy, which earned Laxton an Indie Spirit Award nomination.
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Their second film, 2016’s Moonlight, a challenging tale of identity, sexuality and love, won three Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay for Jenkins, and an Oscar nomination for Laxton and his luminous, saturated cinematography. And, if they handed out Oscars just for painterly compositions and ravishing shots of curling cigarette smoke, Laxton’s lyrical work on their third film, 2018’s If Beale Street Could Talk, would have won hands-down.
For their latest project, an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s 2017 Pulitzer Prize-winning slavery epic, The Underground Railroad, the pair branched out into high-end television. Jenkins, who served as showrunner, co-writer, and EP alongside Brad Pitt, directed - and Laxton shot - all ten episodes of the limited Amazon Prime Video series, which chronicles Cora Randall’s (newcomer Thuso Mbedu) desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum Deep South.
After escaping a Georgia plantation for the rumoured ‘Underground Railroad’, Cora discovers
no mere metaphor, but an actual railroad full of engineers and conductors, and a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil, in addition to a series of safe houses and secret routes, used by enslaved African-Americans to escape into free states and Canada.
Over the course of her journey, Cora is pursued by Ridgeway (Joel Edgerton), a bounty hunter who is fixated on bringing her back to the plantation she escaped from, especially since her mother Mabel is the only one he has never caught. As she travels from state-to-state, Cora contends with the legacy of the mother that left her behind and her own struggles to realise a life she never thought was possible.
Here, Laxton talks about his long and fruitful partnership with Jenkins, the challenges of making the ambitious series, and his approach to its cinematography and lighting.
You and Barry met way back in college. How do you think your collaboration has evolved over the years? I don’t think it’s evolved at all (he laughs). I’m happy to say that it’s exactly the same, and our approach is the same as when we started. The way we try to make our images evoke a particular perspective or mood, the way we move the camera, the big emphasis on colour - all that was present in our college films. So the important things have always been there. What’s changed on this project is the sheer scale and scope we’re dealing with, and after three very low-budget films, a healthier budget to work with too.
Main: Cora Randall (Thuso Mbedu). Below: Caesar (Aaron Pierre). Right: Out in the Fields - Director Barry Jenkins.
Photos: Atsushi Nishijima/Kyle Kaplan/Amazon
Each of your collaborations look very different visually from the others. How did you and Barry start finding the right looks for this epic period story? We first talked a lot about the novel, and what concepts we wanted to take to a visual place, and how to present a very dark, brutal history of slavery and then place it in this almost mythological context - and the steam train is symbolic of the whole truth of the underground railroad. So it was playing with these two elements - the truthful material, and then the symbolism of this mythological telling of this truth. As for references, they were vast, from a film like Barry Lyndon (1975, dir. Stanley Kubrick, DP John Alcott BSC), which was in our ‘common memory’ rather than being a specific influence, to the work of Bill Henson, the Australian contemporary art photographer. His dramatic use of chiaroscuro lighting and flash technique, which I love, became a motif for us in many ways, and was very influential.
How long did you spend scouting? A long time. We began back in 2018, and we scouted Upstate New York, Ohio and so on, as the idea was to tell this American journey. But we soon realised that physically moving a crew around from state-to-state was a bridge too far. So ultimately it made more sense logistically and budget-wise to shoot it all in one state, Georgia.
What was your choice of cameras and lenses for the project? We shot digitally again, this time using ARRIRAW on the Alexa LF and Alexa Mini LF. We felt it was just the right camera package for this show and we ran two Alexa LFs all the time, except for the slow motion falling sequences in episodes 1 and 9m when we used the high-speed Phantom.
For lens we used Panavision Primo 70s and T-Series Anamorphics, and choosing them was a whole journey, with a lot of testing. Panavision really helped, and created some unique lenses for this show. Dan Sasaki and his team worked closely with us in tweaking, changing and augmenting a particular set of Primo 70s that gave us some wonderful flares and contrast ratios.
In addition to that, we shot both spherically, aspect ratio 16x9, and Anamorphically. We decided to do the latter as some of the episodes provide context for the spherical, and we shot the Anamorphic episodes with the T-Series in 2:39 aspect ratio to provide a different visual language. I assume you started working on LUTs right away with your regular colourist Alex Bickel who also did Moonlight and Beale Street? Yes, we built custom LUTs at the start, in prep, for each episode, and most of them were made from scratch, with different colour palettes for each one, to aid in telling the story. Seven were very unique, and the other three were versions of another LUT, so it’s pretty significant. Alex is a great creative partner for us, and it’s great to go into the DI later on knowing where you’re starting from. We had to do the DI remotely because of Covid, as he was in New York and I was here in LA. That was another first for me, and I missed being in the same room with Alex, especially as we spent 12 weeks on the final colour.
Did you have a DIT on set? Yes, my regular guy, Ryland Jones, and he did a great job working with the LUTs and making adjustments to make things match, like going from harsh direct sun to overcast, filling those gaps and making all the imagery cut together for the offline edit. And the conditions were pretty bad for a DIT, and he’d be pushing his big cart through the swamps and mud.
You shot on location, and it’s a period piece. How hard was that? It was brutal with all the heat and humidity in summer, and then later the freezing cold in winter, and then very remote locations. And it was my first project that was set in pre-electricity times, so you rely on a lot of candlelight and augmenting that with LEDs. For exteriors, we had to use some big rigs. Most of the lighting was Astera tubes, Litegear LiteMats, and ARRI Sky Panels.
Lighting was a big challenge, especially when shooting big fields at night. For example, in the first episode there’s a scene where the camera moves 360-degrees in one shot, and you need to see everyone’s face, as it’s not just an impressionisticallylit scene. It’s a performance scene with multiple characters and a lot of dialogue. And beyond that, you have to provide an ambient level so you can see distant trees and large crops that are backlit 100-yards away.
That wasn’t easy, and the shoot was full of extremes. We’d be in tiny spaces trying to light them with candlelight, such as an attic, or having to create a rig that would mimic a train arriving at a station, or light 800-yards of a swamp at night. No day was easy for the lighting team.
There are many intense scenes, but the lynching of Big Anthony must have been quite traumatic to shoot? It was the hardest of many hard scenes we had to shoot, and it really took a toll emotionally on many of us, including myself. But it was really important to not shy away from the moment. For me it was about making creative decisions that had everything to do with our characters, and to stay really present and to make sure we made the right choices in how we shot it. We didn’t want it to seem gratuitous in any way. Amazon actually provided a therapist to help people deal with it - that’s how hard it was.
DIRECTOR BARRY JENKINS ON THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD
This is obviously the most ambitious of the four projects you and James have done together. Absolutely! It was a huge undertaking in every way - all the casting and prep, the scouting, the locations, the sheer length of the shoot and then a long post.
The Covid crisis didn’t affect us much as we got through 112 days of the 116-day shoot before we shut down, and then we came back six months later to film those last four days - and those days were spread out over three different episodes, so we couldn’t even finish the show without them.
But during that shutdown when we were editing remotely there was so much civil unrest that I wished I could have rewritten a lot to make it even more timely in addressing all the current issues. But as the edit progressed, it became clear that the material already implicitly dealt with all the issues anyway.
Please tell us about the different looks and how you and James achieved them. That was a big challenge as the story moves across five states, but we couldn’t afford to move each time and film in different places. So we shot it all in Georgia, which had to stand in for places as different as Tennessee and Indiana.
This meant there was a lot of scouting, and a lot of trying to figure out, tonally and emotionally, how the main characters were feeling and changing with the different environments and landscapes.
James and I spent a lot of time talking about how to shoot it, what cameras to use. Among the more subtle ways we handled all the looks were the lens choices, the camera positions and movement, along with the custom LUTs James used, as well as working hard on all the colour correction in post, to really communicate how the story was evolving.
The shoot was very demanding as we had so many pages we’d have to shoot to capture an entire scene in one day - and the light was constantly changing. So even keeping the coverage consistent was a huge challenge.
And, we had a lot of sets. Production designer Mark Friedberg built the slave quarters from the ground-up, and then he also built the ‘underground’ train tunnel on tracks we found in a Savannah museum, as I didn’t want to bluescreen the train or tunnels.
