American Cinematographer - April 2013 - 32

Cinematographer Alex Metcalfe lines up a
high-angle shot in the trees.

have done with a bigger camera. I pulled my
own focus for the fight scenes, and Andy
acted as B-camera operator with a Canon
[EOS] 7D, looking for details on a longer

lens. Going handheld and doing unusual
things with the focus and composition
made sense for the fights because it created
moments of confusion, which is what it
would be like in a dirty fight.
You said you had no movie
lights at all. How did you make that
work?
Metcalfe: This was a fairly tribal and
lawless period in British history, and presenting that world with lots of saturated colors
just didn’t make sense. So, Chris and I
decided to banish direct sunlight from the
film. Then, of course, we had to shoot
through three weeks of what was possibly
the sunniest winter in the history of Wales!
I had no sparks [electricians] at all, so I
bought a load of off-white canvas sheets,
and we put eyelets in them. Our production
designer knew a group of professional
climbers, and they would come in and go
up trees to rig these canvases. We were in
forests a lot of the time, so there was almost
always something to rig them to. The sheets
allowed us to take the light off the actors,
but, of course, the background then

became overexposed, so we had to be very
careful about where we set scenes.
So it became an exercise in
controlling the ambient light?
Metcalfe: ‘Negative fill’ was a
watchword, which I think is becoming more
common with the sensitivity of today’s
digital cameras. I had to be careful even
with that, though, because we didn’t have
an enormous post budget, and I knew I
wouldn’t be able to sit in a grading suite
removing reflections of blacks and flags
from the actors’ eyes. I had to be conscious
all the time of what was reflected in their
eyes, and if I could see something, I had to
decide if that was more off-putting than
having a flatter image. It was a continual
balance.
Tell us about the image workflow.
Metcalfe: The data file itself is in
the MXF format, which goes straight into
Final Cut Pro or Avid. Our day’s rushes
would be synced overnight and then given
to us on DVDs to view the next day. For editing, the rushes were converted to ProRes

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American Cinematographer - April 2013

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