TECHNIQUE DOCUMENTARIES
she laughs, “but there’s something fun about saying yes to a collaboration not because it’s a job or because you think it’s going to have a big festival run, but because you’re curious.” Originally trained as an actress and dancer, Henry fell into cinematography through ‘thinking about the world beyond the words’. This came into play on Cover- Up ; “it’s important to get to the intention and build the visuals on top of that,” she explains. “We talked about how important the story is to now, how it needed to feel modern even while we were looking back on 60-plus years of a career.” During interviews, Henry established distinct daytime and nighttime looks ‘to create a bit of diversity of image’, while the rest of the film drew inspiration from narrative features like The Conversation and All the President’s Men . “We knew we were going to shoot on long lenses and zoom lenses, and we wanted to put a lot of voyeuristic movement into them, so we ended up with four cameras,” Henry details. “We had two frontal cameras, a medium wide and a medium close.”
Hersh’s collection of documents – decades’ worth of anonymous tips and interview transcripts – also received their fair share of screen time. “We created a set-up where we could film the documents, so it wasn’t just scans,” says Henry. “There was life behind them. We photographed the documents on a black background, so they’d have a three-dimensional quality.” Like Piscopo, Henry worked largely within the Canon ecosystem, choosing the C500 Mark II as her main camera and a selection of zoom lenses with Tiffen Pro-Mist filters. “One of my chief concerns was being able to match across multiple cameras and with our archival footage,” she adds. “Right as we were prepping, Canon released a new Raw codec, so it worked really well.” Henry believes in the influence of cinematography, arguing each visual choice holds power. “Where and how you choose to film somebody tells the audience a lot. There’s control in that. I’m not a journalist and I’m not here to just capture; I’m here to tell a story.”
those lenses provide allowed me to render skin tones and shadows as well as translate the women’s emotions. That equipment alone helped me shape the aesthetic more than any pre-planned design.” When a scene called for more spontaneity, he traded the primes for zooms, letting him “adjust the focal length in an instant. There are situations where you have to be ready,” he adds, and the C500 Mark II didn’t disappoint. “I’m continuously asking whether each creative decision serves our subjects’ voices,” Piscopo continues. “A documentary is not simply a work of art. It is also a tool for change.” THE WORLD BEYOND THE WORDS Filmmakers like Laura Poitras embody Piscopo’s sentiment. Her doc, Cover-Up, co-directed by Mark Obenhaus, lets viewers sit down with Seymour Hersh, an investigative journalist who uncovered multiple war crimes committed by the US military. Obenhaus’ stepdaughter, Mia Cioffi Henry ( Sorry, Baby ), was behind the camera. “It was a bit of a nepotism story,”
UP CLOSE Henry used four cameras for her work on Cover-Up (pictured) in order to create a sense of voyeuristic movement
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