INTERVIEW BEN SAFFER
INTIMATE GENTLENESS For Dog , Saffer paired the camera with a set of Cooke S8/i primes, lenses he had shot with before, but had been itching to use on a narrative project. “If I’d shot on 16mm with very sharp lenses I would have got a similar result to shooting on 12K, large format digital with forgiving lenses,” he says of the S8s. “These lenses are very forgiving. However, you still get that centre sharpness, which is something you often get with S16s. We spent a lot of time with the 40mm and 65mm focal lengths. The 65mm gave us a bit of distance and we used the 40mm when we wanted to be right up in the space with the three kids. We also shot close to wide open, which I don’t always do, but it gave us an intimate gentleness to counteract the high resolution.” He shot in 8K using the full sensor readout at Q1 (quantisation) variable bit rate to reduce storage and prolong recording time. “Blackmagic Raw (BRAW) is one of the best codecs available. I know that we are going to be able to do everything we want to in the grade. Using this version of BRAW enabled the file sizes to be manageable on a short film budget while retaining everything we wanted visually. The data rate impacts the amount of money you need to spend on hard drives, so this route kept everything in check, with high-quality images.” Saffer put a subtle LUT on the camera but didn’t tweak much beyond that. “The dailies looked great. The look I want to achieve is between a Kodak Vision2 and Vision3 because, for me, the nineties feels like the Vision2. It has brown hues and delivers rich skin tones, but with a little too much magenta, which the Vision3 offsets with its lovely teal tones in the blues.” Saffer has used broadly the same LUT on his previous four narrative films because he prefers the simplicity of a film workflow. “I think it’s better to have a film stock that you’re shooting on, and
be stepping away to go look at a 17in screen. I needed to stay there with the camera pretty much framed up all the time, so having an EVF I could trust was a big deal. I always want a solid way of monitoring the picture that I can light from, which generally means having a good viewfinder. “Honestly, these are pretty hard to come by. It mystifies me that camera manufacturers find it so hard to make them good enough, but the Blackmagic EVF is fantastic. It comes out of the box pretty much dead-on calibrated. I have also got my 17in Sony OLED, which has been my trusted calibrated monitor for a long time, and the EVF was pretty much bang on to that. “I also want to make sure my focus puller, Andrew Nowley, is happy in terms of having all the connectivity and power options we need. He did a great job of coming up with a rig for the camera that worked for Dog ,” Saffer continues. “Sometimes I would be operating right up against a wall and had to be on the right-hand side of the camera. Usually, I’d just flip an external on-board monitor across, but here we could use the AC’s monitor on the side of the URSA Cine 12K. It was very useful but meant we had no room for accessories on that side, so we ended up building onto the back of the camera instead. “Handheld, the URSA had good balance but was quite weighty, which is what you want. I want the camera to feel grounded and present, not lightweight and jittery – it was a good experience.” Dog is currently in post-production and is targeted for being shown at festival screenings in 2025
BEHIND THE CURTAIN To achieve the nineties look McLeod wanted for Dog, Saffer studied the Kodak Vision series for inspiration
then to create the look with the lighting, lenses and filtration rather than having to do heavy grading. If you’re changing the LUT all the time, it starts to feel like an Instagram filter – like it’s being imposed on the image rather than its foundation.” HANDHELD WITH EVF Since Dog was almost all handheld, the camera’s usability was important. “When you’ve got kids on-set, you can’t
IT’S SET in the nineties, SO NEEDED A SLIGHTLY nostalgic aesthetic ”
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