DEFINITION July 2018

SHOOT STORY THE WOMAN IN WHITE

for them technically was that our marks had to be so accurate. Some of the emotional stuff they have to do, and then land about a foot from the camera every time perfectly. All of them were great and got in to it and were excited by it. However, one of the older actors, Charles Dance, took about a day to understand what was going on with a camera so close to him. As he’s also a director he just wanted to understand what the effect was going to be.” Eben is currently shooting The Feed episodic for Amazon Video and he and director Carl Tibbets are using a similar shooting technique but pushing it even further by using a 21mm which sometimes will mean actor’s faces are inside the mattebox. This time they’re using the Leica Summiluxes at 1.4. How you light for that is another problem without getting shadow and how do you then get light in the eyes? Focus is obviously another challenge for such a close focus technique especially with wide-open lenses of that quality. “Because they’re wide angle lenses I do have them wide open,” explains Eben. “Even on interiors I usually have an ND6 or even higher sometimes so I can get to T2 and so there is shallow focus so

have Seamus Lynch, the gaffer from the film The Lost City of Z, with the DOP Darius Khondji. That was shot in some of the same locations with massive lights and shooting on film, old-fashioned type shooting. I wanted to do something different from that and use entirely small LED fixtures and have controlled soft light rather than hard light. So we used almost 100% ARRI Skypanels and we had them all wirelessly synched up so I could sit there with an iPad and just bring things up and down, dial a little bit of green in to that, a bit of orange in to that, match that candle... it was like on-set grading, it was brilliant. “Also a problem that I always have with period drama is that in daylight scenes where they have candles lit the candles look incredibly warm and the daylight looks incredibly blue and there’s hardly any strong contrasts between them. We decided that we were going to CTO every single window in the entire show. So in every location we had CTO gel on all the windows everywhere so that daylight coming in was warmed up and was closer to the colour of candlelight.

you get the psychological ‘look at this, look at this’ effect. “I’m just unbelievably lucky to have my focus puller, AJ Golesworthy, who has been one of my ACs for eight years now. He’s done everything I’ve done and was even the best man at my wedding. He never wanted to be a focus puller but he’s just unbelievably talented and he doesn’t actually really set marks. He’s just got this ability and great sympathy for the content.” LIGHTING APPROACH Eben was looking for a cinematic naturalism for the shoot and always to have contrast and cinematic images. “We didn’t want anything to feel lit in a studio lighting sort of way. There weren’t any builds and we shot in locations mostly. I was lucky to

IMAGES The cast had to adjust to having cameras so close to them.

IN EVERY LOCATION WE HAD CTO GEL ON ALL THE WINDOWS EVERYWHERE SO THAT DAYLIGHT COMING IN WAS WARMED UP

DEFINITION JULY 2018

DEFINITIONMAGAZINE.COM