INTERVIEW BEN SAFFER
Ben Saffer captures an intimate drama with the URSA Cine 12K LF and Cooke S8s W hen shooting indie short Dog , DOP Ben Saffer wanted to give the drama a rich emotional landscape to parallel the
feature A Kind of Kidnapping and was DIT for Linus Sandgren ASC, FSF on No Time to Die , has photographed work for several theatre directors, and finds that his technical background complements their approach to filmmaking. “There’s a synchronicity with theatre directors, who intuitively know what performance they want but might not necessarily know where they want to put the camera,” he says. “The challenge with Dog was giving the story more scope so we feel the landscape of the Dales.” MADE IN YORKSHIRE “Caitlin and Jessica were searching for somebody with local knowledge of Yorkshire, and, although I now live near London, I learnt about filmmaking and photography through wandering around the Dales while at university in Leeds,” says Saffer. The main location for the three-day shoot was a farmhouse deep in the Yorkshire Dales, which the producer and director found via an extensive scout of Airbnb. It had the requisite quirkiness and isolation, doubling as accommodation for the cast and crew during production.
“The logistical task was to do everything in a way that would make our cast of children feel less like they were on a film set and more like they were just playing,” Saffer explains. “We tried to keep the set minimal and work quickly to maximise the time we had with them on camera, potentially doing some fairly long takes.” Reading the script, Saffer’s instinct chimed with McLeod’s, which was to shoot in 16mm. “It’s set in the nineties and so needed a slightly nostalgic aesthetic, but given the amount of time we had, we wanted to be running camera and not miss any moments with our child actors that led us down a digital path,” he says. Saffer likens his approach to cinematography to evoking memories. “How I see things when I’m remembering is how I tend to filter my cinematography. Given Dog is set in the nineties, a period I remember well, my aesthetic approach was filtered through nostalgia for that.” To help establish the idea of memory, McLeod suggested creating pools of light. “She wanted the characters to walk through shadow, be silhouetted and then come into the light. The idea was to make the environment feel functional rather than too friendly.”
natural landscapes of its Yorkshire locale. The story follows the relationship between three siblings aged eight, ten and 12 who live on a farm with their parents. “Their parents aren’t absent; they’re just busy and tend to leave the kids to themselves,” Saffer explains. “We’re aware of the parents in the background, but our focus is on the kids and their attempts to connect with each other that don’t quite work out. It’s a lovely script. I’ve shot more than 50 short films and I’m always looking for different approaches to developing storytelling and characters.” Caitlin McLeod is a multi-award- winning theatre director for the Globe, the RSC and the National Theatre, who previously directed the dramatic short One Like Him , which was produced by Jessica Palmarozza of Flumeri Films, like Dog . Saffer, who lensed the indie
CENTRE STAGE Saffer (below) focused the filming on scenes of the children playing and highlighting the vast landscape
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