Cinematography in Canada Since 1957

#MattIrwinCSC @irwincine

Turning on the way-back machine here, along with the not-too-long-ago machine, to revisit some favourite music videos and shorts. I love short form for how easy it is to throw caution to the wind and try something weird with a far lower chance of making a CLM (Career Limiting Mistake ™️). For the longest time I would force myself to use a new major piece of equipment- like a camera, lens, lighting tool, or movement tool- on every shoot to gain some new experience. The habit started in film school, and though I now have favourites it honestly still continues.

1-5 - Julian Casablancas + The Voidz “Human Sadness” - Dir @nicholausgoossen . I had a long run with Nick shooting music videos and Comedy Central series. This one was one of my favourites, and one of the most experimental. The song is a 13 min epic shot on several formats with a kaleidoscope of imagery. The band’s aesthetic at the time involved all analogue acquisition, so for the performance section (which was recorded live as we shot it!) we ended up on- if you can believe it- standard def BetaSP. VER had to source 3 old Sony bodies from across the country and bring an old video engineer out of retirement to prep and match them. It softens a lot with the upres but I gotta say, the analog output viewed on an SD analogue reference monitor looked beautiful, like dated 16mm. It was roughly ASA250 and we used a lot of med/large tungsten on that set. Other segments used Alexa, 5D, C300, and a whole pile of of lenses.
6 - ‘Trevor Moore: The Story of Our Times’- Dir Nick Goossen again. RIP Trevor, you unfiltered genius. This was a comedy special, but his style is all music videos and skits. Early days of Panavision’s DXL and Primo 70 lenses, detuned to reference speed panchros.
7 - ‘Fresh Meat Mom’ - Dir @emilyoqcode - An unhinged and witty commentary on the early years of mothering
8 - ‘Happy Hour’ - Dir @andrearamolo - I have fog juice for you @cinepapa_ !!
9 - ‘Crazy Like Me’ - Dir @leahmckissock

Continued in comments …

#MattIrwinCSC @irwincine

Shooting 2nd unit and additional photography are subjects that DP’s seem to rarely talk about but most of us have experienced at some point. I have theories as to why, but it does kind of feel like the First Rule of Fight Club. Regardless, it can be a real test- and a chance to get inside another DP’s mind during a show and learn something new. I’ve by no means made a career of this, and I’ve also never once regretted taking 2nd unit work. Sometimes it’s cleaning up a feature’s worth of inserts (aka forensic cinematography), other times it’s whole scenes with the cast or added coverage, or a whole car chase with explosions. It all teaches you something.

Nobody ever taught me “how to 2nd unit” so I just figured it out on my own. It requires you to keep your instincts and bury your ego, can be very technical, political, and full of dualities— equally low and high stress, requires quiet observation and absolute decisiveness.
My own rule is that it has to be indistinguishable from main unit or I’ve failed. Anyone know that story about Haskell Wexler shooting pickups for Nestor Almendros on ‘Days of Heaven’, and the guilt he felt for using lens diffusion?

I admittedly have a technical head and I want ALL the information— scripts, dailies, rough cuts, DIT stills, lighting plots, what lenses when, what fixtures and fabrics when and why. It’s like a psych profile. The more you know not just tech specs but the thinking behind choices made, the easier it is to be autonomous, confident, and faithful to the show’s look. Best scenario is to spend time in main unit prep or on the set and make detailed notes, pictures, ask questions. Sometimes you can’t and have to scrounge it all together on your own. Make friends with the Gaffer and ACLT, Key and Best Grip, SFX key. And it can be really fun- and never short on weird rigs, jugaad, fireballs, and technology low and high.

Anyways, here’s some recent favourites from fight club.

(Descriptions in the comments)

#MattIrwinCSC @irwincine

Jugaad. The South Asians in the room will know this word (and please correct my use!), but I think all filmworkers understand its meaning. One of my favourite things about what we do is the exchange of knowledge, experience, and techniques that happens when we leave our locale to make a film somewhere else. Sometimes you get to bring someone, usually you’re working with all local crew. Jugaad, as I learned in Pakistan while shooting ‘The Queen of My Dreams’, encompasses the idea of creating something from what you have on hand, out of box thinking, or repurposing something to do what it was never intended for. Does this sound familiar? Grips are jugaad specialists, as are gaffers, SFX, makeup fx, puppeteers, as are all of us in our own ways. The more I work away from home, the more it’s proven to me that film workers worldwide are cut from the same cloth. So, starting with ‘Queen of My Dreams’ along with a few other films, here are some rigs from the road. If you find yourself shooting something in a foreign place, collaborate with your locals… I guarantee they will surprise you.

1-2: An outrigged Ronin on a rickshaw. @iam_islam_ud_din was our incredible vehicle rigger and remote tech… now based in Toronto!
3: Parallel worlds with @nickytheglasses on Motorheads 2nd unit!
4-5: Condors and scissor lifts are very hard to come by for film in Karachi, so an old riding crane does it proudly.
6: Louisiana, a favourite scalable nite ext rig that can be done nearly anywhere.
7: No process trailer, no problem. A police “scoop truck” loads quickly and can keeps the tires nearly on the ground. Air them down a bit and it’s level.
8: Handmade soft boxes @studio146rentals x2 1k broad bulbs in a stippled box with a yoke. Gorgeous light and great CU starter, and we used them en masse.
9: Key Grip Mark Bourgeois turned me on to landscape fabric for ceiling negative. Weighs nothing, and easy to peel back small sections if you go low.
10: Airborne fabrics in Karachi & Toronto

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#MattIrwinCSC @irwincine

‘Raoul’s: A New York Story’ is a documentary releasing in September, co-directed by Karim Raoul and Greg Olliver of ‘Chasing Whiskey.’ The film tells the story of a family of filmmakers turned accidental restauranteurs, their timeless French bistro in Soho New York that launched careers of famous chefs, and of gentrification and fate. It also just won a James Beard media award, which is pretty cool and I guess fitting for a story like this!

A true labour of love, we were chipping away at this film over many years and I now know Raoul’s like the back of my hand. Many days spent shouldered up in a tight busy kitchen, behind the bar, and all over the floor jamming up everyone’s flow. Chef David, Eddie, Franco, and the floor staff were very gracious with their space! A motif was established early on which came from working in all these cramped quarters— most of the interviews are shot with very wide focal lengths, 18-20mm, as if we’re always at a small 2-top leaning in to have a conversation. It also let us really feel the space behind and in some cases adds to the character of the person on camera.

We came up with a pretty unorthodox shot that’s repeated and bookends the film, inspired by the fact that Karim wanted to be a documentary filmmaker before fate intervened and pulled him back into the restaurant. (Spoiler alert, he’s still a filmmaker!) The camera starts nose mounted to a moving car, as it pulls up the restaurant it pans 180 to reveal Karim as the driver, and then disconnects and transitions into rough-ish *shoulder-mounted handheld* and follows him into the restaurant. The rigged pan and true handheld transition was the head scratcher, which led me to @mehran_hotgears. Hot Gears converts a standard geared head into a remote head, and is to my knowledge the only remote head system that is totally under the camera and will keep its balance when the camera is taken off. He made us a flush mounted magnetic release which allowed me to slide the camera straight back onto my shoulder. @rodvln hid in the back seat on the wheels and @ko_won_gyu pulled focus. (Last few slides + clip)

#MattIrwinCSC @irwincine

The 2nd season of CBC’s ‘Sort Of’ was a lot of fun to work on— fantastic crew and leadership, a very strong cast and story, and a seemingly rare chance to shoot Toronto for Toronto.
If I had to pick a one-word theme for the season- and probably the show as a whole- it would be transformation. Nearly every character has a notable arc both across and within seasons, and there is a physical and visual arc built into this season.

Though there are several story threads, this season is anchored around a tension between main character Sabi and their conservative father who is wrestling with his own feelings as he tries to understand Sabi’s transition. We view the “worlds” in the show through Sabi’s experience.

The family home has a dark cloud over it that swings lighter and darker as the season moves forward. As a baseline, we wanted it to feel gloomy, drab, and a bit devoid of colour and life— though not straying too far from naturalistic. My approach here was to light through or motivate from windows, around corners, and built in practicals. The exterior brighter than the interior, sunbeams always missing people, and the interior contrast relatively low. The house interiors were shot on stage, but we tried to treat the interiors as any other location and the ceilings rarely opened up. For scenes with Sabi and their dad, we picked frames that emphasized distance or isolation in the early episodes, and then walked that back as they grow closer.

By contrast, Sabi’s personal life away from their family is vibrant, energetic, and a bit glamourous. There is more coloured light, deliberate camera movement, and colour separation in the image- and focal lengths are generally wider. The club scenes were meant to feel cramped and chaotic. With the red/pink/amber colour mix, I tried to work in a hit of white or complimentary light into the shots which I think adds some dimension and helps the eye relax.

Much of this show is handheld and operators Mitch Mommaerts and Ashley Iris Gill often used Neuman air heads on dollies so we could maintain controlled camera movement.

#MattIrwinCSC @irwincine

‘TWO’ was a trilogy of short films I shot for director Jon Huertas and producers Andy and David Sacks. Three dark, quirky, and interconnected stories that take place around a desert crossroads motel. If you’ve done any indie time in Los Angeles you’ll know this infamous location… the 4 Aces is a purpose-built, partially dressed motel/gas station set which has been host to many commercials, blood baths, student films, and camera/lens demos. Some say it’s a graveyard of dreams and dignity— but that might depend on whether or not you were hired over Craigslist. In our case, we escaped with dreams and dignity intact.

For “Two Shallow” in slides 6-8 and bottom 10, we wanted the canyon to feel dry, hot, and dead. Winter in the high desert is actually quite lush with a lot of green foliage all over. So after a little testing I ended up using a Tobacco filter on the lens and then neutralizing the warmth with the camera’s white balance. This old filter series is very high red-orange, and it killed all the greens in-camera. @garethcook_ and I were able to take this further in grading, fighting the filter in the shadows and letting it go more in the middle of the curve.

I was reintroduced to using colour filtration at a CSC demo that @jeremy_benning and Evans Brown gave about their work on ‘The Boys’, and it inspired a lot of thinking on this. I could have reached this look entirely in grading, however doing it in camera I’d argue is a cleaner result and it locks the choice in. This could be taken further in creating a bespoke look... by colouring the sensor- even if you completely counteract it with the LUT/grade- you’re changing how the sensor is seeing light, and that changes the colour response completely. It’s not for everything, but it’s an interesting tool to have and something I want to further experiment with. Now that a number of lens series support rear element filtration, it wouldn’t be terribly impractical.

Another example of this would be Roger Deakins’ take on the Las Vegas scenes in ’Blade Runner 2049’— a custom colour filter designed to work with specific gels on tungsten lamps.

Anyone else try something like this?

#MattIrwinCSC @irwincine

Another all-time favourite show, 𝘊𝘩𝘢𝘴𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘞𝘩𝘪𝘴𝘬𝘦𝘺 is a documentary about Jack Daniel’s and its cultural significance across the world. I met my good friend and director Greg Olliver on this film— Greg comes from rock and music documentaries and has an engaging, rowdy, and heartfelt style to his filmmaking. I came to documentaries from narrative cinematography, though our storytelling instincts matched and this was the result. We shot over 2 years in 6 or 7 countries, mostly single camera, in a mixture of verite and planned, intentional sequences.

The most planned, intentional, and difficult of those sequences was an editorial “backbone”where we tell the story of 2 marked cases of whiskey travelling from the distillery, through the transport / supply chain, across the world to Tilpa NSW, a small station at the foot of the Australian outback. The point was to do this honestly and in real time as grand way of proving to all that the world’s most consumed whiskey is all made in one small town.

Pulling this off took an enormous amount of coordination and permission between shipping companies, gov’t agencies, commercial ports, and people— and our producers worked most of our 2 years to set it up. Our biggest question was how to shoot the 35 day voyage on a container ship across the ocean from Charleston to Sydney… at one point I was going to take the trip in full or in part, but cooler heads prevailed and we settled on a timelapse camera rigged to the bridge window of the ship. We were allowed to plug into ships power and leave backup parts taped to the window next to the rig. 1 frame per 30min of raws for 35 days. Turns out if you give a ship captain a few cases of whiskey, he’ll send you daily “the camera’s fine” updates! To my honest surprise, the rig held solid and was still clicking away when we collected it.

Unhinged tip… if you ever need to use an electronic lens for a walk-away timelapse like this, set your lens then disconnect itjust enough so the contacts break, then tape the hell out of it. This will prevent iris flutter from the body’s metering system.

Clip at the end, and aerials by @peteralton !

#MattIrwinCSC @irwincine

Starting this off with one of my favourite filmmaking experiences ever. I think there will be another post on this one later…

𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘘𝘶𝘦𝘦𝘯 𝘰𝘧 𝘔𝘺 𝘋𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘮𝘴 is an independent feature and a deeply personal story written and directed by @thefawz, and features a very strong cast led by @amritkaur @hmzhlq @nimrabucha . A young woman from Cape Breton returns to her family home in Pakistan after a tragedy and reconciles a strained relationship with her mother. Despite this, the tone is light hearted, witty, and moves with an Edgar Wright-esqe tempo.

The story takes place across 3 time periods: Cape Breton and Karachi 1999 (present day), Cape Breton 1989, and Karachi 1969. There are also several “Bollywood fantasy” sequences where characters enter the world of 𝘈𝘳𝘢𝘥𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘢, a 1969 romance starring Sharmila Tagore. The story jumps time constantly, and we use the Bollywood convention of “doubling” — Amrit Kaur plays both the lead character Azra as well as her mother as a young woman when we flash back. So that said, it was critical for each time period to be instantly recognizable. This consistency had to be maintained from Canada to Pakistan with two different crews and toolsets.

For a variety of reasons I was working with one set of lenses- Cooke S4’s along with a Canon 17-120 zoom we brought to Karachi. So, differentiating looks happened mainly in front of the camera, both with lighting and a deep collaboration with Production Designer @mgpierson - the best partner and a total genius- he even taught me how to love beige!

Karachi 1969 dictated the look of the other time periods. It hints at magical realism, at times gets a bit theatrical, and is extremely vibrant. Most of the colour comes from the sets and costumes, and I kept the light clean and neutral. We used deliberate backlight, atmosphere wherever possible, and wetdowns for night exteriors to give the city some shine and romance. Character lighting involved large wrapping sources. Camera movement was smooth and precise, and we usually favoured close ups on looser lenses.

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