Page 16 - Fujifilm Exposure_30 Archangel_ok

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THE DP VIEW
CHRIS SEAGER BSC
Photo top: Daniel Craig on location (photo Michael Pickwoad); Above l-r: Producer Chris Hall, Michael Pickwoad, a man from Snow Business and Chris Seager BSC
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service, along with shooting in and around other parts of the city, came news that another big UK TV project was on its way east – Wallis And Edward, about you-know-who – which will recreate Thirties’ England.
Working with his regular operator, Jeremy Hiles, and grip, Steve Ellingworth, Chris Seager was – like Michael Pickwoad - also patiently util- ising a number of local crew.
quite like mixing stocks. In sim- plistic terms, what I particularly like about Fuji is it’s slightly more old-fashioned in terms of its structure, slightly rounder and,
in a sense, more three-dimensional. There’s real warmth to it, and the
colours are slightly more vibrant. I tend to use it in all flashback scenes as it gives a completely different ‘look’ to other product.
For Archangel, I wanted the flash- back scenes – which begin with the film’s huge opening shot of an enor- mous, official black car crossing Red Square at dawn – to have a genuine kind of opulence to them in terms of colour and vibrancy.
There had to be a sense of con- trast between Moscow, which is sunny and bright, and Archangel, which is deliberately darker and more de-satu- rated. The flashbacks were inter- spersed throughout the whole shoot, as they are in the actual story. Fuji was ideal for that, and for day and night I used the F-500 8672 stock.
What was my main lighting chal- lenge? Various ones, and difficult to define in some cases.
With Sex Traffic, I had tried to make the lighting ‘dirty’ – in effect, light ‘badly’. That meant using a lot of mixed light, to give it that Eastern feel. There were fluorescent lights in offices – some are green, some tungsten – and daylight, too. We had a similar thing with Archangel – often that sense of being awkwardly-lit.
There’d be times when actors might not be in a lit area on purpose. Like the occasion when the main female character, Zinaida, is in a cell. There’s just a top light and you don’t see the features on her face at all. Her body language says it all.
When we first talked about the film, we mentioned Fargo for reference purposes, especially as we were shoot- ing in snow. There’s a slight mono- chromatic look to it, but there was also an edge to it. It’s meant to scare the audience. As we get more and more towards the end of the story, the camera work becomes more frantic and handheld, a bit like in the film Narc.
There were not too many long lenses as that’s a bit of cliché. The two lenses we used most were the 18mm and the 25mm – they were definitely our workhorses. ■
ICE COLD IN ARCHANGEL
“...IN MOSCOW, IT WAS GUERRILLA FILM-MAKING. BUT IT REALLY WORKED AND HELPED GIVE US ENORMOUS PRODUCTION VALUE”
Yes, there were some frustrations about language, skill levels and even the occasional mind-set. But both experienced heads-of-department seemed convinced that the future’s bright for film in this beautiful corner of the Baltic. ■ QUENTIN FALK
Archangel was partially originated on 16mm Fujicolor F-500 8672 Motion Picture Negative
14 • Exposure • Fuji Motion Picture And Professional Video