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The Power Of Imagination
T hings are rarely as they seem in life. In film the fiction is a contract willingly entered into between the
creative talents who make it and the audiences who lap it up. But still the challenges, and the aplomb with which they are met,
can be unforgettable.
For Amnesia, a two-part psychological
thriller written by Chris Lang and made by Ecosse Films for ITV, these challenges were many and varied.
Director of Photography Dominic Clemence was charged with the task of bring- ing this tale to life, putting his experience and imagination to work to sustain the mystery around a traumatised detective whose wife is missing, and may have been murdered. This fact could even now be affecting his judge- ment in the pursuit of one particular suspect.
An impassioned DP, and sometime direc- tor himself, Clemence was reunited with director Nick Laughland, after the pair had worked together with much success on Sirens and Wire In The Blood. Producer Jeremy Gwilt was acutely aware of the impor- tance of cinematography on a psychological thriller like Amnesia.
“Cinematography can define the right mood and feeling in the characters, as well as evoking the right response from the audi- ence. In addition, here we have nightmare sequences where we’ve gone for highly stylised effects and I think that some of those have been a voyage of discovery, to try and work out how far we can push it.”
When troubled Detective Mackenzie Stone (John Hannah) relives his last moments with his wife the audience cannot always be sure if this is memory, fantasy or invention.
“They are slightly uncertain in terms of what’s real and what’s not,” Clemence adds, “and we retain that ambiguity. We ran a series of tests to create a particular look for these, overlaying a series of images, similar shots, so the action is principally the same but obviously never totally in sync.
“And then we mixed those together but only for a few frames, so you’ve got this effect that looks like momentary ghosting that gave the image a kind of ‘otherness’.
“At other times we would be shooting at eight frames a second, so what eventually hap- pens when you look at the image, you’re not totally sure of what you’ve seen. We also shot some of it day for night, other bits at night, the idea being that dreams and thoughts are never constant, they are always changing.”
“I think Dominic’s a very cinematic Director of Photography,” says Gwilt. “There are some DPs who are brilliant and light beau- tifully, and Dominic does that but he also cre- ates a very concentrated, filmic appearance.
“It’s hard to describe but he has a natural inclination to lead the viewer’s eye to a point of key significance, and lights in a way that is highly dramatic. And that suits this particu- lar thriller brilliantly. It is expressive lighting, but it’s also made for television, and televi- sion is the medium of the close up.
“It’s certainly true that as a psychological thriller the visual grammar of the piece is very much the developing close up because there are internal processes and tensions between our two main characters.”
A graduate of the Royal College of Art, Clemence holds a BA (Hons) in Film, Photography and Television, and an MA (with distinction) in Film Direction and Cinematography. He is also a past winner at the once annual Fujifilm Scholarship Awards. His screen credits include the feature, Respect, directed by Oz Hutchins, and TV dramas including The Dark Room, Taggart, Bomber, Murphy’s Law and Family.
For Amnesia he selected the Fujicolor 125 F- 125T 8532, F-250D 8562 and F-500T 8572 stocks, putting them through their paces in a range of locations from inside the M25 to the south coast on England during a blissful summer.
“We shot one sequence on the Isle of Wight,” explains Jeremy Gwilt, “at an exist- ing boat storage building. We converted it into a three storey property with a spiral
staircase, we created a kitchen, bedroom, sitting room and office.
“When we go to that location of course it’s like you get these great lungs full of fresh air, both metaphorically and visually. And we were blessed with the most incredible fort- night of sunny weather when we were there. So it offered a great contrast to the leaden skies of the London locations, and those claustrophobic, fluorescent tube lit interiors.”
These scenes were, however, tricky to get right. “We had these problems of huge con- trast ratios,” adds Clemence. “We wanted to get exposures inside and outside, looking through to where the action might be hap- pening in the foreground inside the building. But there was also action going on outside that we needed to be exposed for.
“Outside I was typically getting readings of 22 plus a half, and the inside would be dif- ferent by eight and a half stops. This is where knowledge of film is vitally important, unless you know your stocks really well you don’t know what you’re going to get.
“You might know that your film theoreti- cally has a latitude of seven stops, so the exterior is going to appear bright and the interior is going to seem dark but overall it will read within the correct parameters.
“What we found it that it stood up really well in terms of latitude and grain structure, we’ve given it some punishing treatment but it’s stood up really well. On this film the colour saturation in the skin tones was important, because it was very much about the people.
“In low lights the colour remained true when you were really pushing the exposure, the skin tones didn’t become red they remained natural. And the highlight detail also held way beyond the seven and a half stops that I would have expected. I was still able to define stuff that I wouldn’t have expected it to.” ■ ANWAR BRETT
Amnesia was originated on 35mm Fujicolor F-125T 8532, F-250D 8562 and F-500T 8572
Shooting Amnesia, a new two-part psychological thriller for ITV
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