PRODUCTION. THE LETTER
SHOT IN THE DARK DOPs Cristian Dimitrius and Cosmo Roncon Junior favoured the Red Gemini for filming in the Amazon rainforest thanks to its performance in low-light conditions
documentary My Octopus Teacher – met producer Martín Nova and executive director of the Laudato Si’ Movement Tomás Insua at a Vatican conference. Discussing the encyclical, they agreed they wanted to bring the message of the pope’s letter into a live-action film. The premise was to allow the voice of the unheard to speak. The result, The Letter: A Message for Our Earth , is a YouTube Originals film made by OTF. Director Nicolas Brown was tasked with visualising a storyline for four voices that have gone unheard in global conversations about the climate disasters facing humanity. The film chronicles the journeys of leaders hailing from Senegal, the Amazon, India and Hawaii in their bids to bring perspectives on climate injustice for wildlife, the poor, the indigenous and the young into dialogue with Pope Francis himself. It’s an invitation to people of all walks of life to take on a spiritual and ecological journey.
“This film was conceived in the pre-Covid period, gestated during the pandemic and birthed post-pandemic,” explains Carla Rebai, story producer at Off the Fence. “The nature of the project itself meant filming in all corners of the world, bringing various logistical and technical challenges.” FINDING SOLUTIONS Rebai adds that filming with someone extremely busy like Pope Francis brought another set of challenges: “From securing a private audience with him to adjusting to unfortunate technical glitches when he arrived 20 minutes before the scheduled time,” she says. “We had full access to the Vatican footage and stills archives. The Dicastery for Communication collaborated with us for filming the meeting between Pope Francis and our contributors.” For the Senegal and Italy sequences, the film was shot on Canon EOS C500 Mark II cameras with Sigma Cine
“I chose the Canons because they are such efficient documentary cameras, combining great dynamic range with ease of use when handheld”
ON THE ROAD The Senegal unit made use of a Sony Alpha 7S III on a DJI RS 2 as a B camera (top)
40. DEFINITIONMAGAZINE.COM
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