American Cinematographer - April 2010 - 78

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Sundance 2010: Expanded Palettes

His & Hers tells a unified narrative of love made up of interviews with 70 females, ranging in age from young to old. Top right: Cocinematographers Michael Lavelle and Kate McCullough flank director Ken Wardrop.

literally move through their world.” Thematically, His & Hers feels like a continuation of Wardrop’s short film Undressing My Mother (2004), on which Lavelle served as director of photography and McCullough operated the camera. Both films were shot with a four-person crew rounded out by producer Andrew Freedman, who pulled double duty as the sound recordist. Lavelle also shot the shorts Scoring and Farewell Packets of Ten for Wardrop, and in 2008, he wrote and directed the short film Out of the Blue, for which McCullough won a Best Cinematography award from the Rhode Island International Film Festival. One of the first decisions the filmmakers made was to shoot His & Hers on Super 16mm. “To shoot a
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documentary on film was an incredible privilege,” says Lavelle. “It was very tricky for Ken, because we usually had only about a can of film for each interview and its cutaways. It was really tight.” His & Hers was shot over three months, during which the four crewmembers stayed in a house in the Irish Midlands, central to the interviewees, whom Wardrop found with the assistance of researchers Hannah Smolenska and Sheena O’Byrne. The average shooting day began at 7 a.m., with one of the filmmakers preparing breakfast while another made the day’s lunch and the other two packed the gear into the van. By 8 a.m., the crew was on the road to the first of the day’s two interviews; each interview, plus its corresponding cutaway shots, had to be
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completed within four hours. Although Wardrop met with all of the interviewees in advance, the cinematographers didn’t meet them until the day of shooting. McCullough recalls, “We sometimes had photos of the person’s house, so we could get ideas about which spots might be good for shooting. The main concern was where we placed the person; that dictated everything else.” “We wanted the light to have a natural feel,” adds Lavelle. “Anything that looked lit was something we just had to rethink.” To take advantage of natural light, the cinematographers shot on Kodak Vision3 500T 7219 with a set of Zeiss Super Speed lenses, favoring the 12mm, 16mm and 25mm focal lengths and frequently maintaining a Tstop of 1.4. (They framed for 1.85:1.) Filtration was kept to a minimum, with only an occasional ND or polarizer placed in front of the lens. When conditions required additional lighting, they turned to a 1.2K HMI or a 4' four-bank Kino Flo; they also frequently bounced light into a silver cake tray. “The company had a very small van, and that was our physical limitation: What lights could we put in there that our budget could afford?” says Lavelle. The key to the interviews, Lavelle stresses, was “to be as low-key and friendly as possible so we wouldn’t disturb whatever was naturally going on in the house. It was really important to

His & Hers images courtesy of Venom Film and the filmmakers.

American Cinematographer - April 2010

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