Cinematography in Canada Since 1957

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That’s it for me! Thanks to the CSC for giving its members this space to share our work.

Doing good work in film takes just the right set of circumstances and people coming together, and film sets are full of crew and cast who have dedicated their lives to chasing that. Here are some photos of just a few of those people I’ve been lucky enough to learn from and work alongside. Grateful to be a part of this community of artists. Thanks for reading ✌️

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You Ask Too Much is a short film by Ajay Rakhraj about the months leading up to his grandmother’s passing, shown from her point of view. Ajay had seen my other first person short Terminally in Love and liked that I had thought deeply about POV, but wanted a very different visual language to represent an experience of increasing isolation. She has limited mobility and is near-deaf, relying on a text to speech app on a tablet to understand her family, who are moving her to a new residence against her will. So the film was to be built from static compositions, referencing films by Edward Yang and Andrei Tarkovsky. We shot in his family’s apartment, with the family members that experienced it playing themselves.

In the final act she falls and is concussed, which we represented with a modified Helios lens with a dual slit aperture, creating the appearance of double vision. She is then treated with hydromorphone which gives brief clarity, followed by steady decline as she floats in and out of consciousness. To depict this we used a Noctilux T0.95 lens with the Cinefade system, which links an iris motor to a variable ND filter to adjust depth of field without affecting exposure. The injection increases her visual depth of field, bringing more of her world into focus (slide 6). At its widest aperture the Noctilux has a soft, vignetted image, and slowly ramping the Cinefade brought the image gently from soft tunnel vision into brief clarity and back again (7).

Ajay had taken iphone photos of his family in the time leading to her passing, which had automatically generated short video clips from the live photo feature. When played consecutively these created a documentary of what his family had experienced. Its fragmented simplicity had a striking beauty that informed our approach to the film - brief moments in unadorned sequence that represent life. It’s a real privilege to be able to shape a film’s form directly from lived experience, and for its creation to be an act of healing.

The film is viewable at ajayrakhraj.com

Colour by Wade Odlum. Alexa Mini LF w/ Richard Gale Dog Schidt Optiks, Masterbuilt Classic/Portrait, Nikkor Noctilux

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Circuit Breakers is a kids’ sci fi anthology for AppleTV. Each episode has different leads navigating some cool sci-fi mishap - boy becomes infested with nano-bots, girl deletes her parent’s memories, mad scientist teacher freezes time, that kind of thing.

The show takes place in the “near future,” with hovering cars, holograms and lots of LED edge lighting. I wanted to lean into low, wide moving shots to feel the big world around our young characters, so the design of our ceilings was a big part of the frame, and the spaces needed to light themselves as much as possible.

Production designer John Dondertman has a great lighting sensibility, and nearly every room and hallway in our school and many of our other sets had RGBWW Moss LED built into valances and fixtures. We DMX mapped the strip to be controllable in 4’ increments so I could shape the ratios within environments.

We complimented the built in lighting with warm skip bounces and haze, with 10K tungsten fresnels rigged outside each of the windows. John designed a beautiful skylight in the school Atrium and I worked with him on the layout of the baffling and diffusion density so we could shoot it without seeing too much white. We filled it with bicolour Space Force Octos, which we also used above windows for 6500K ambience complimenting the tungsten sun.

Our last episode takes place on a martian space station, which was built in record time towards the end of the show. The work they did with CNC cut wood was pretty amazing. Once again almost all lighting was built in, with looks preprogrammed for different times of day and emergency lighting.

Shot on Mini LF with Supreme Primes and Black Pearlescent diffusion.

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pinhole journal was a film made during covid lockdown, like many others made by isolated filmmakers expressing what we were all feeling. Sharing here because the techniques developed were useful to me in my later work, and it feels like a true expression of a period in my life.

I had just bought an Alexa Mini LF, and the week after it arrived lockdown began. This was financially concerning, but gave me something to do. I borrowed some experimental lenses from friends and started filming life with my partner and I in the 16th floor apartment we lived in at the time.

I became interested in allowing light in behind the lens and shaping it. So I found ways to rig lenses in the right position with the PL mount removed, and stuck glass objects around the air gap behind the lens to texturize the light. I often think of how we can bring cinematography closer to painting - there’s so much expression in textures that we can only gesture towards with conventional lighting and lensing. Shaping the light leaks as an integral part of the image felt aligned with that idea.

The pinhole lenses became their own format - they needed 3200EI in daylight, and inside I’d lower the framerate as needed and step print to expose. It naturally looks like digital 8mm - grainy, everything in focus but nothing sharp. One of the “lenses” had a built in turret with different pinhole sizes, and rotating it combined with the low framerate felt like the way our lives were flickering by suspended in time. I also learned that with pinhole lenses, extension tubes behave like focal length extenders, so I made some extra long ones out of tin cans to shoot telephoto from my balcony.

Music by h hunt, colour by Clinton Homuth

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Wilfred Buck is a feature documentary that follows the extraordinary life of Wilfred Buck, a charismatic and irreverent Cree Elder who overcame a harrowing history of displacement, racism and addiction by reclaiming ancestral star knowledge and ceremony.

Directed by Lisa Jackson and based on Wilfred’s autobiography “I Have Lived Four Lives,” the film interweaves verite, archival and re-enactments. In 2022 I was lucky to play a small part in its creation, shooting dramatized scenes from his upbringing in The Pas, Manitoba and young adult life in Winnipeg.

Lisa decided early on that we should shoot on 16mm. There was an incredible depth of archival footage from the NFB, and we wanted to make the scenes we were shooting feel like they came from the era so she could flow between them as real parts of history.

Our shooting style was informed by the 60s/70s era film and photography. We were always reaching for images that felt loose and natural, juxtaposed with graphic compositions with a pictorial, storybook quality. Though the story of his young life is one of struggle, Lisa wanted to avoid bleakness in the imagery, instead imbuing them with the vividness of memory, and we embraced the rich, saturated palette of the archival footage.

We worked with a micro crew and minimal lighting on location in The Pas, a 6hr drive from Winnipeg. Keslow provided an ARRI 416, 16mm Ultra Primes and Canon 10.6-180mm zoom. Colorlab in Maryland was our lab with a surprisingly quick turnaround time for dailies given our location, with final colour by Jim Fleming working from Urban Post.

BTS Photos by Tom Wood

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Lots of fun & unusual BTS in this one ! 🔊

TERMINALLY IN LOVE is a short film I shot and co-directed with Emily Jenkins, about a neurotic stoner reeling from her recent breakup. I created the concept and Emily wrote the script and played the lead. The film released in 2019, but we had been testing since 2017.

The film’s goal was to depict the character’s consciousness in first person, with an interest in nuances like how eyelashes refract light and the textures of closed eyes. But the character isn’t really paying attention to the world around her, she’s stuck in her own fantasies and dreams, which needed less literal, more emotionally driven visual choices.

This film was one of my first experiments with lensless image creation. Abstract colour sequences representing hypnagogic dreams were made with light refracting through multiple layers of moving glass on servos and sliders, captured direct to sensor.

We shot the first person segments with an Alexa Mini, 14mm Master Prime, and a Movi M15 mounted on a modified Easyrig to our body actor Maccie Paquette, the only friend we knew strong enough to carry it. Today lighter weight tools are available, but in 2018 we decided the dynamic range and wide FOV/shallow DOF of that system was necessary for the image to feel human. I operated remotely with a mimic unit mounted to a helmet for organic head motion. Syncing the head motion, body acting, focus and actor blocking meant that the first person scenes needed to be tightly choreographed. We also learned that a head height 14mm lens looks pretty awful in a lot of circumstances, so vantage points with depth drove our blocking and locations. For static shots where the Movi didn’t fit (like a shower or hammock) we hung the camera from a bungie cord.

Memory scenes were shot improvised in third person, searching for moments that felt real, with heavily fragmented editing. Dreams were theatrical expressions of the character’s ego and desires, with shifting environments and plot lines that felt true to dream logic we observed ourselves.

Full film and BTS featurette at terminallyinlove.com

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I shot The Hardy Boys S3 in 2022. I had done a couple youth series prior, and while looking for references for those shows I was impressed by Fraser Brown’s work on Season 1 - precise anamorphic photography and beautiful sculpted darkness. So getting the job was a big deal for me. On past shows I had intentionally evolved the look or designed it from scratch, but this time I made my goal to honour the style and keep it going (perhaps informed by a call where Fraser talked about the value of staying true to what’s established, which I think was his subtle way of saying “don’t fuck it up!”)

It was a process of finding my own balance of preserving what’s important while allowing myself to work intuitively. I started prep by thoroughly breaking down the established set lighting, and found that while I resonated with the quality of light, ratios and palette, there were some places my instincts deferred, mostly on what colours should come from where, and eventually concluded that I needed to follow that. 2nd unit or inserts can be more strict, but as a single DP on a show working instinctively is necessary - it’s the difference between intuitively knowing what to do and needing to check your notes. I think the result is a show that feels continuous but has some of me in it.

Had a great time collaborating with our directors Jason Stone, Felipe Rodriguez and Melanie Orr, all of whom brought their own distinctive voice to their episodes, & was an honour receiving a CSC award for Dramatic Series Cinematography for the show.