WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING•POLLY MORGAN BSC ASC APUTURE LIGHTSTORM
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“That said, I did bring a slightly different feel to the courtroom sequences, in that they have a richer contrast, and Phedon Papamichael ACS GSC’s work on The Trial Of Chicago 7, was a gorgeous inspiration in that respect.”
Shooting large format brought tangible depth to the image, especially as regards the portraiture Whilst Morgan loves to operate, the logistics were such that she preferred to delegate the camera elsewhere, and she called-on the talents of none other
than Mitch Dubin SOC, with whom she had previously worked on Legion and Lucy In The Sky, assisted by 1st AC Bryan DeLorenzo on focus. “Mitch is an absolute legend,” she remarks, “Thanks to him and Bryan, every frame is exquisite, and we owe so much of the film’s beauty to them.” Along with key grip ‘extraordinaire’ Nick Leon, and dolly grip Gerald “G” Autin, Morgan’s crew also included Grayson Austin on B-camera/Steadicam. After the production had wrapped, Jimi Whitaker ASC came in to shoot additional photography as Morgan was in South Africa working on The Woman King. Morgan started production with gaffer Paul Olinde, but when he was taken-ill during the first and last week, Dan Riffel, her gaffer on A Quiet Place II, proved a worthy substitute. The lighting package was supplied by MBS in New Orleans. “It’s so gorgeous to shoot in Louisiana and New Orleans, and it’s hard not to film something that looks
pretty,” says Morgan. “But we definitely had our work cut out with the weather. We scheduled production in order to miss the hurricane season, but it came early and we were constantly rained-out. On one occasion we had to shut down for three days because every single one of our sets was flooded, and all we could do was sit in our cars, watch the lightning and witness our locations become mud pits. “Despite the downpours, we worked hard on the lighting and stuck to our original plan to keep things looking sunny and develop veiling flares from the backlight, and I think that comes through in the final film.” As for the logistical challenges, Morgan says, “I’d never done anything like this film before, and what was exciting to me was how we were going pull off such things as the water work, amid the heat, all sort of bugs and lots of alligators. “On-screen you see a young woman alone in her tiny wooden boat, but what you don’t see is the armada we needed to make these shots – two camera barges with cranes, a DIT support boat, a hair and make-up boat, a video village boat, a craft services vessel that would come over to deliver food and drinks. There was even a Porta-Potty boat for people to relieve themselves. It was unbearably-hot and sweltering on the water, and Nick Leon proved adept in building solid overheads on the different vessels to provide us with shade.” The focus, during the final DI grade, was chiefly on making sure the original naturalistic visual intent was preserved through the multitude of HDR and SDR deliverables. “My highlights on the HDR pass only sat at 150nits, which was perfect for coherence between the HDR
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and SDR passes,” says Morgan, “and Natasha did a great job in seeing that the look we envisioned at the start was carried all the way through. “We would have loved to have filmed this movie on celluloid, but that wasn’t on the cards. During the DI, Olivia and
I fought tooth and nail with Sony, successfully so, to put a bit of film grain on the image in the DI, just to break up the clean-look of digital image and to make things more cinematic. “Throughout the whole production, we kept in our minds some words from the original book… ‘Marsh is not swamp. Marsh is a space of light where grass grows in water and water flows into the sky,’… and I am very happy with how things turned out.”
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