Page 26 - Fujifilm Exposure_35 Miss Potter_ok

GARRY TURNBULL
“I needed one film stock that would allow me to shoot from candlelight all the way through to bright sunshine - and also be suitable for digital manipulation in post-production.”
continued from page 22
excited about Japón, a 2002 Mexican fea-
ture directed by Carlos Reygadas that was shot on 16mm but also anamor- phic. To do a short that way would be quite an unusual combination.
“Now, it also happens that my favourite film ‘look’ of all time is a combination of anamorphic and black- and-white which, to me, is the most intensely aesthetic thing you can put on the cinema screen. Fellini’s La Dolce Vita was all that. I think I might have persuaded Matt to add the b/w element to anamorphic and 16mm.
“On Japón, which had been shot on standard 16mm, one of the camera- men, Thierry Tronchet, had devel- oped an anamorphic adaptor for the lenses. It was quite a fiddly thing, stuck on the front, a bit like the mes- meriser we used to use a lot in com- mercials, a thing you could twirl around at the front to make the pic- ture go slightly hallucinogenic.
“Anyway, the adaptor could give you a straight squeeze on to the nega- tive which, in the digital intermediate post-production, you could desqueeze and so create any format you wanted.”
Turnbull then sorted his camera with Joe Dunton for what was planned to be a three-day shoot but rather than use an anamorphic adaptor, “I was much keener to use actual anamorphic lenses which would also give us the look. They certainly did. The thing about anamorphic lenses is they’re not like modern lenses; they’re quite old-fashioned, don’t have mod- ern coatings, are softer and also flare a lot which we particularly liked. There were strong aberrations especially at
the corners that exaggerated when used wide open which I prefer. We wanted something as far away from a digital look you could get.”
“Which,” Turnbull adds, “brings us to Fujifilm. What Matt had out- lined to me involved everything from candlelit interiors to bright, sunlit beach exteriors as well as exteriors of a London housing estate. Being low budget, we didn’t have the luxu- ry of multiple film stocks. It’s always more efficient, especially on 16mm, where each magazine is 10 minutes long, to try and choose just one film stock. Also, there was going to be animation in post-production.
“So, basically, I needed one film stock that would allow me to shoot from candlelight all the way through to bright sunshine and also be suit- able for digital manipulation in post.
“I’d heard good things about, but hadn’t yet used, the 16mm version on the new Eterna 500T 8673 and although I’d previously only shot it as 35mm, decided that was the stock I should use. There were no correction factors at all and then we manipulated it into black-and-white as we telecine- ed. It was gorgeous.
“On set, we drained all the colour out of the monitor, masked it off with gaffer tape for an anamorphic look and just went for it. At telecine, it was amazing; Super 16mm with a 2 to 1 squeeze is much wider than even nor- mal anamorphic 2.35:1 so we actually cropped it back to standard 2.35 widescreen. Matt’s very happy with it.
The Boy Bitten, the title derives from the title of a Caravaggio painting
and is, effectively, a dream sequence about a boy who’s abducted by some “dubious characters and a pretty girl of course, first to the countryside and then to a beach before he finally wakes up. In reality, he’s wakes up in a council flat in East London and his mum’s looking rather oddly at him.
“It was going to be a three day shoot but for reasons of economy, it was decided to shoot a section on tape on one day and then the other material on film over two days. We must have gone through 55-60 set-ups in those two days, which also coincid- ed with some hottest days since records began. With the 500 stock, I was able to ND right down in the sun- shine and then later, still have enough exposure to shoot in some very low- light interior situations with the anamorphics, effectively getting the stop back that I’d lost to the lenses.”
This exotic promo, fitted in between his usual diet of commercials - many of them shot in Turkey which has almost become a second home over the past 10 years - offered Turnbull, as he describes it, “a won- derful sense of freedom.”
For someone who initially gradu- ated to camera more by good luck than judgement, Turnbull has pro- gressed far and geographically wide. He originally got his industry ticket working in a London lab before mov- ing to the cutting rooms of a success- ful Soho commercials company where he learned the ropes from “a lovely editor, Geoffrey Muller.”
But it was an old friend who’d become a camera assistant that
Photo main: Tricky shooting with a flycam; top right and above centre: DP Garry Turnbull; above left and right: scenes from The Boy Bitten
24 • Exposure • The Magazine • Fujifilm Motion Picture