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LOPENINGJANUARY2010
Photo main: Recreating Kilburn and The High Roads, precursor to Ian Dury and The Blockheads
inset left: Andy Serkis as Dury and left: Dury (Serkis) on stage belting it out with the Blockheads
THE DP VIEW
CHRISTOPHER ROSS
I didn’t have a great deal of prep on the film but Mat and I spent a fair amount of time
“talking about the private Ian Dury: his life, family and work. It was clear to me that Mat wanted the film to mirror Ian’s state of mind at each stage of his life and that this should lead our visual approach.
He also wanted to allow the actors as much freedom as possible, and with that in mind we adopted a quasi-documentary approach: broad light sources and zoom lenses. I felt that these were essential tools for Mat’s aesthetic of discovering and responding to performances during a take.
From Mat’s perspective we needed a capture format that would be small and discreet, allow us to react quickly to performance, deal with varied lighting conditions and help to create a sense of period and place.
Super 16mm was the perfect choice when faced with these dilemmas. I used Fujifilm ETERNA 500T for almost everything, including the live performances and only switched to ETERNA 250D for day exteriors.
I felt the subject matter would benefit from the more organic feel of the higher speed film stock and hope to push this further in the DI.
We used a Arri 416 and zoom lenses predominantly, with a set of Zeiss Ultra 16 lenses for low light, close focus or deep 2-shots, anything that would show up
the faults of a zoom lens really.
FUJIFILM MOTION PICTURE • THE MAGAZINE • EXPOSURE • 7 ”