American Cinematographer - December 2007 - (Page 35)

Cecelia welcomes a friend to her family’s home, which features a large, brightly lit sitting room. This section of the film, set in 1935, was filmed on location at Stokesay Court in Shropshire. back of the lens. The only time the filtration came off, he explains, was “when we were shooting against very bright windows. It would bloom out too much and the areas of overexposure would start to corrupt the shadow areas. For those odd shots, I used Schneider Classic Softs — 1⁄8, 1⁄4 or 1⁄2.” While praising the stockings’ effect, McGarvey’s 1st AC, Carlos De Carvalho, notes that the material “reacts very differently if you have a lot of stop on the lens, so [McGarvey] kept things pretty much wide open, which made it more challenging for me — more exciting, actually!” Easing the damage to De Carvalho’s nerves, Panavision supplied a complement of RF (rear filter) lenses, with the exception of the 40mm prime. De Carvalho explains, “The lenses have a little screw-on adapter on the back, which allowed me to pre-net all of the lenses and have a separate ring for each lens. The longer the lens, the more you have to stretch the stockings, so we had to be careful to mark them all. But it allowed us to take the stockings off or put them back on quickly.” Working with Hugh Whittaker and Charlie Todman at Panavision London, the production assembled a camera package comprising two Panaflex Millennium XLs and a PanArri 435, Primo prime lenses, three Primo zooms (a 4:1 17.5-75mm, an 11:1 24-275mm, and a 3:1 135-420mm), and a Lightweight Zoom (17.5-34mm). McGarvey often used two-camera setups, operating the B camera himself with 1st AC Rawdon Hayne. He tended to keep zoom lenses on both cameras: “They afforded us the ability to keep compositional integrity, to hold the frame when people didn’t quite hit their marks.” Likewise, he and key grip Gary Hutchings preferred using dance floor over laying track, which Hutchings says “restricts you and doesn’t let you adjust by a few inches. We’d only use rail if it wasn’t going to get in the actors’ way.” McGarvey often wielded a handheld light, as for a scene that shows Cecilia seated near a mirror, doing her makeup. As McGarvey moved with an HMI Pocket Par, he “was flaring the lens either in a bounce through the mirror or directly into the camera but just out of the shot. The editor was able to use these flashes as cutting devices.” The scene was captured by Robertson’s handheld camera. “It had to be quite a sensuous move,” recalls the operator. “The idea was to have a very loose camera, so I was always slightly behind Keira’s movements, finding what she was doing, which counterpointed a lot of the other camera movement in that part of the film. Briony’s world was much more metronomic and ordered, whereas Cecilia’s world was sensuous and languid.” De Carvalho adds, “I approached [the scene] with fear, really. Seamus lit that to T1.9 because he wanted a shallow depth of field, and we were using a 100mm with a 1⁄2 diopter so we could get really close focus.” To help link the various elements of this scene, Wright played music while rolling to give everyone a subtle rhythm to match. Having American Cinematographer 35

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American Cinematographer - December 2007

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