American Cinematographer - May 2014 - 45

Unit photography by Niall O'Brien. Additional photos by Daniel Landin. All images courtesy of A24.

Opposite page:
An emotionless
extraterrestrial
(Scarlett
Johansson) takes
the form of a
human female in
Under the Skin.
This page, top:
While cruising the
Scottish
countryside
seeking men to
seduce and
"process," the
alien meets a
disfigured recluse
starved for
physical contact.
Bottom:
Cinematographer
Daniel Landin, BSC
surveys a seaside
setup.

Glasgow is an energetic city and has its
own intense pride. Although there has
been prolonged industrial decline and
hard times, there is still vitality and a
direct engagement [that is] less
common in London. People are less
guarded, and we were able to work with
a lot of non-actors who weren't aware of
the film industry and had little desire to
engage with it. We wanted to be very
discreet about getting in, shooting and
leaving without affecting that too much.
Would you say the story is told
from the alien's perspective, or is it
more of an objective experience?
Landin: One of the challenges
was to capture her gaze, which is devoid
of subjectivity because she has none. At
the beginning of the film, she doesn't
have any emotional connection to the
landscape or her human body, and she
doesn't react to beauty or violence, and
we wanted our cameras to convey that
objectivity. Then, as the film progresses,
human emotion starts to corrupt her
vision, and also ours. She starts to learn
how to see more like a human, a condition which can only lead to her demise.
We understand you used a new
camera, the One-Cam, along with an
Arri Alexa. Tell us more about those
choices.
Landin: We shot about 60
percent of the movie with an Alexa Plus
[capturing in ArriRaw to a Codex

recorder], but the decision to go digital
was really driven by the development of
the One-Cam, a small digital camera
specifically invented for our film by Tom
Debenham, Louis Mustill and Arron
Smith [at One of Us in London] after
we had tested all the other compact
cameras. The One-Cam has a Super
16-sized [1" diagonal] 2.7K CCD
sensor, which we cropped at 1.85:1,
though its native ratio is more like
1.66:1. Once we had a prototype, we
shot extensive tests for resolution and
lens options. Our first AC, Nathan
Mann, then worked with Movietech,
our camera-rental house, to take the
basic unit and make it more roadworthy.
Tom also designed a custom look-up
table for us in the interest of being truer
to the way the One-Cam saw things
and replicating monitoring/rushes/edit.
Preserving saturated reds was an important part of this decision. We used OneCams to shoot the driving scenes with
Scarlett in such a way that we could hide
the cameras whilst shooting simultaneous reverses. Whilst testing, we were so
pleased with the One-Cam image that
we considered shooting the entire film
on it, but there wasn't enough time to
make it rugged enough for general
shooting in our more hostile environments.
Tell us more about your hiddencamera setups in the van.
www.theasc.com

Landin: Jonathan didn't want to
stage and restage action for the camera,
so it was crucial to put the cameras in
the right places so that things would
unfold naturally. Production designer
Chris Oddy redesigned the van's dashboard so we could conceal eight OneCams in it. The cameras were small
enough to be in each other's shots, so we
had a front-3⁄4 camera both for driver
and passenger, two cameras concealed
behind the headrests, one wide twoshot mounted in the center of the dashboard, one camera shooting from
behind the steering wheel on a medium
May 2014

http://www.theasc.com

American Cinematographer - May 2014

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - May 2014