American Cinematographer - September 2010 - 71

board and diffused them to create one big circle of soft light,” explains Walters. “To keep light off the walls, we skirted it like a space light, but only to a depth of about 10 inches, so it was less than a foot from the ceiling. The dimmers were on separate feeds, so you could have a middle circle on, or an outer circle, and adjust the levels without any color-temperature shift in the greens and magentas. It was tungsten, so it just warmed up.” Another light that suited the cramped conditions onstage was a Photoflex OctoDome from Walters’ own kit. “It’s like an umbrella light for stills photography, but it has a constant light source,” he says. “You can use either an 800-watt tungsten or a 400watt MSR bulb, so it’s good for both daylight and tungsten work. It was a real space-saver in the studio, and it’s great for close-ups because it’s octagonal and looks round in the actor’s eyes. We also used it outside. There’s a shot of John standing on the bank of the River Mersey in Liverpool, looking out, and we put the OctoDome on a Manfrotto Mega Boom so we could swing it out in front of him; it was great for picking up the emotion in his eyes. It’s so light and easy, and you can pretty much put it anywhere. We used it handheld all the time for exteriors.” Most of Nowhere Boy was shot in single-camera setups, with McGarvey operating a Panaflex Platinum. “Usually I have an operator, but on lower-budget films, it’s sometimes nice to get back in the saddle again,” he says. “There are a lot of static shots in the film, partly because there wasn’t much space to move or track in Mimi’s house, but I tend to work off a dolly anyway, for ease of selecting camera height and because it’s a nice platform from which to work. We did have a few second-camera days where Pete Robertson came in to help out on B-camera [a Millennium XL], and he did some extraordinary work. But generally speaking, Sam, as a photographer, thinks with the Cyclops vision of a single lens, so when we did have two-camera setups, I tried not to

make them too disparate and certainly didn’t ever do any cross-shooting. Her focus was on the actors, and I had to keep her attention on one at a time.” As John rekindles his relationship with his mother, flashbacks to his early childhood hint at disjointed, traumatic memories of a time when Julia and his father were fighting for custody of the boy. This presented an opportunity to be more expressive with the visuals, and

for these scenes, McGarvey “wanted a much more saturated look, with more contrast,” he says. “I did lots of tests with cross-processing and shooting on reversal, but we decided that was too extreme. Instead I used Fuji [Eterna] Vivid 160, a beautiful stock that gave me the saturation I needed. [The rest of the picture was shot on Kodak stocks.] We pushed the Fuji quite a bit further, and Fuji might not be pleased, but it

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American Cinematographer - September 2010

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