Catch-22: How it was shot

IBC

Joseph Heller’s 1961 novel Catch-22 is set in World War Two, but it’s clear that the makers of the first television adaptation - including series executive producer, director and star George Clooney - believe its satirical take on the insanity of war is just as relevant today.

https://www.ibc.org/production/catch-22-how-it-was-shot/3935.article

It follows a US bombing squadron whose leaders continually raise the number of missions their men are required to fly before being sent home, resulting in no one being sent home.

The only way out is to claim insanity, but a request to be removed from duty is proof of sanity, hence the bureaucratic rule Catch-22.

“The very idea of war is absurd,” says cinematographer Martin Ruhe, ASC. “For anti-hero Yossarian this is simply about life and death. The stakes could not be higher. But for characters like Milo, war is a huge business opportunity. This is not just absurd; this is how war is.

While Yossarian (Christopher Abbott) rages at the sheer insanity of it all, his problems are compounded by characters in his own army including the profiteering Milo Minderbender (Daniel Stewart), mediocre commander Major de Coverly (Hugh Laurie) and parade loving Lieutenant Scheisskopf (Clooney).

Ruhe had previously lensed The American, a taut thriller set in Italy starring Clooney and produced by Grant Heslov. It was Heslov and Clooney who approached Ruhe to photograph Catch 22.

“They wanted it to look like something shot in World War Two, so I did some research mainly into period colour newsreel and high contrast footage,” Ruhe explains. “I shot some stills and played around with the look in Photoshop. The obvious decision would have been to shoot 16mm, but film cameras are not too practical, particularly for manoeuvring inside planes, so we had to find a look in digital that wasn’t too clean.”

The story is set on tiny Italian island Pianosa and shot on location in Sardinia and areas around Rome where the Mediterranean light helped Ruhe to find a look that exuded baking heat.

“We wanted this yellowish feel – to really feel the heat,” Ruhe explains. “It’s permanently hot, people are always sweating, it’s not a pleasant place. We added film grain for a richer texture that conveys the feeling of heat.”

The show’s producer, Hulu, also required a 4K finish which led to Ruhe’s choice of ARRI Alexa Minis. “I wanted a small compact camera so we could shoot as much as possible in the planes. We had the fuselage of a real WW2 bomber (in a studio in Rome) to do all the flying shots with actors.”

Ruhe shot using Cooke S4 Prime lenses which yielded aesthetic aberrations and flare as well as using zooms in reference to the films of the 1970s such as Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H.Even more compact 4K Flare camera heads (designed by IO Industries) were mounted to the planes used for aerial work.

“We’re using the zoom to draw attention to something, for example to pick someone out in a crowd and to follow them for a time. It’s not very subtle and I don’t usually do it, but it worked here.”

A major scene in the fifth episode involves an attack by German planes on the army base (arranged by Milo to boost the value of the planes remaining after the attack). Shot at night, Ruhe used HMI lights and gels to give a bluish-green hue for moonlight and then worked with illuminations from the explosions as planes are destroyed across the airfield.

“The shoot felt as big as a major feature and the way the story was treated felt like doing a film, but we were cross shooting several episodes at a time. On one day we’d be setting up multiple scenes in one location for different episodes with different directors, which is a big difference from a feature.”

Unlike the novel, the series unfolds chronologically from 1942 to roughly 1944, but the series retains the chaotic energy and sense of madness.

It’s rare that a national newspaper praises the cinematography but UK’s The Guardian did in its review: calling the adaptation “immediately impressive – visually deserving of a bigger than a laptop screen – with a cohesive, arid palette and shots ranging wildly in scope from resonant closeup to sweeping landscape.”

“George and Grant were effectively working as showrunners plus directors. You must move fast with George. He is quick at making decisions and he’s also very visual which surprised me. He knows how the camera moves and how to direct actors and he’s very experienced all of which makes him very easy to work with.”Clooney directs two episodes with Ellen Kuras (perhaps more familiar as a cinematographer on features like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) and Heslov (who produced Argo and Good Night, and Good Luck directed by Clooney) also directing two each.

Bird’s eye viewRuhe was also reunited with the mainly Italian crew with whom he had shot The American.

“There’s something nice about going to places and working with the local crew – and these guys are fantastic,” Ruhe says. “You learn more because there are always so many ways to do things. You pick up things you didn’t think of.”

“There are only so many Mitchell B-25 bombers left in the world, but we had one and a Douglas DC-3 for a few days. We tried to get as much mileage out them as we could, with camera mounts on the body and interior for aerial sequences. We also shot from a helicopter, but we had to turn over a lot of plates to VFX to enhance these scenes.” Also tricky was managing the considerable amount of airborne action. Ruhe tried to do as much in camera and in the air as possible.

DNEG was the sole VFX vendor delivering 717 shots across 105 sequences under supervision of Brian Connor out of Vancouver and Dan Charbit supporting Connor from DNEG’s Montreal office. Matt Kasmir was the on-set VFX supervisor for Hulu. Work included CG planes and military vehicles, water/ocean and beach extensions, sky replacements, CG flak, ground smoke, fire FX, CG clouds and destruction matt paintings taken from aerial photography.

Ruhe shot to prominence photographing Control, Anton Corbijn’s 2007 biopic of tragic Joy Division singer Ian Curtis. He also shot Michael Caine thriller Harry Brown (2009) and American Pastoral, the directorial debut of Ewan McGregor. Before Control he was a renowned pop promo director working with the likes of Depeche Mode, U2 and Coldplay and today juggles feature and TV work with commercials.

“For me, shooting commercials is useful because there are technical things you can learn and new gear to get to know, plus you meet new people,” he concludes. “But I love doing that with actors, which you can’t do in music videos. For me, the highest discipline and the best thing you can do is to tell a story.”

Planet-scale AR in Harry Potter: Wizards Unite

IBC

Niantic  says Harry Potter: Wizards Unite will bring unprecedented scale to AR gaming. It could also provide a glimpse into the future of entertainment. 

https://www.ibc.org/tech-advances/planet-scale-ar-in-harry-potter-wizards-unite/3937.article

The company which jump-started consumer AR with the phenomenal hit Pokémon Go is back with a Harry Potter-themed game which promises to be the first real-time synchronised multi-player augmented reality experience.

It is primed for the introduction of 5G and could be the killer app which operators and handset makers need to get consumers to buy 5G smartphones and network subscriptions.

But the ambitions of its developer go far beyond simple gameplay.

The “planet-scale augmented reality platform” which underpins it is intended to function like a global operating system forapplications that unite the digital world with the physical world – or as Niantic’s John Hanke puts it – uniting holograms with atoms.

“We stand at the beginning of a whole new era of augmented reality experiences and a new digital interaction for information and entertainment,” the company’s founder and CEO said at Mobile World Congress in February.

“Yes, it is being hyped, but a paradigm change like this happens maybe once every couple decades.”

Pokémon Go has achieved over 2 billion downloads. The company’s vision and track record have valued Niantic at almost $4 billion, propelled by investors including Samsung Ventures and esports group aXiomatic Gaming.

It will be hoping for more of the same mass participation when it launches Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, made with the blessing of Warner Bros. and JK Rowling, later this year.

The title is built using an inhouse gaming engine “that allows hundreds of millions of players to play in a single global instance,” Hanke says.

Pokémon Go, which is built on this platform, has already demonstrated concurrent real-time usage of several million players in a single, consistent game environment, Niantic says, with demonstrated monthly usage in the hundreds of millions.

But the AR Platform, for which Harry Potter: Wizards Unite is the first application, is of another order entirely. With it, the San Francisco-based outfit aims to solve a number of the key limitations of current AR. Ideally, AR objects should be able to blend into our reality, seamlessly moving behind and around real-world objects in real time.

To tackle this, Niantic is using machine learning to determine the depth of every pixel in a video frame and then applies that to make virtual objects obey real world physics.

What’s more it is using the same pixel depth data to map every physical location of every user on earth for AR experiences potentially involving billions of people.

If successful it will challenge both Apple and Google’s efforts to establish a monopoly in the emerging AR field.

How? To begin with it’s worth knowing that Niantic was a start-up within Google that helped build apps that became Google Maps and Google Earth before being spun-off in 2005 with Hanke at the helm.

He is taking a similar contextual mapping approach so that animated objects and characters (a Quidditch ball, a wand or a fantastic beast, say) are visible at the same time, in the same place and continuously in time to anyone with the app on their phone or with AR glasses.

 “That means we have to photograph and analyse a user’s immediate environment and their positional data to create an AR map in the cloud and serve it back to share with other users.”

Understanding the AR world
Niantic’s AR is an attempt to move from computer models of the world centred around roads and cars – like Google Maps - to one centred around people.

To help with that it is using a dataset submitted, curated and updated over the past six years by players of Pokemon Go which it is combining with other datasets to build contextual computer vision.

According to Niantic, such advanced AR requires an understanding of not just how the world looks, but also what it means: what objects are present in a given space, what those objects are doing, and how they are related to each other, if at all.

“Once we understand the ‘meaning’ of the world around us, the possibilities of what we can layer on is limitless,” it explained in a blogpost. “We are in the very early days of exploring ideas, testing and creating demos. Imagine, for example, that if our platform can identify and contextualize the presence of flowers, then it will know to make a bumblebee appear. Or, if the AR can see and contextualize a lake, it will know to make a duck appear.”

Niantic has the financial resource to code and acquire the tech to do this. In November 2017, it bought Evertoon, a start-up exploring digital social mechanics. In February 2018, it acquired mapping and computer vision specialist Escher Reality and followed that last June by adding London-based start-up Matrix Mill.

This is now Niantic’s London office where Matrix Mill’s trio of neural scientists – all with a shared University College London background - are using computer vision and deep learning to develop techniques to understand and contextualise the 3D space from information culled from the smartphone cameras of game players.

As Hanke puts it, “the larger the vocabulary, the more understanding we have, and the richer the AR on our platform can be.”

A prototype virtual dodgeball game Codename: Neon was developed last year to test the company’s contextual computer vision where AR objects understand and interact with real world objects or people. For example, players in the game can harvest energy from white pellets on the ground, and those are a shared resource–so if one player gets them, the other players can’t.

“All the action, firing, dodging and absorbing of energy is shared with all other players at a very low level of latency,” says Hanke.

Lagging behind
Another internal experiment, Tonehenge, encourages people to work together to solve intricate Myst-like environment puzzles.

Some of the features of these games will reappear in Harry Potter: Wizards Unite.

The other Achilles heel of AR is the latency of data being sent over the network in response to user actions. It’s nearly impossible to create a shared reality experience if the timing isn’t perfect – but 5G solves this.

 “Even good latency times today are 100 milliseconds. With 5G we can get that to a near instantaneous tens of milliseconds,” Hanke said.

To put this in perspective, with rendering at 60fps, each new image is displayed at less than 16ms. According to the company, this means that in a peer-to-peer multiplayer AR game you can see where your friends actually are rather than where your friends were.

The company’s cloud-based platform is designed to make it easier for other developers to create AR apps which can run on any device, unlike Apple’s ARKit and Google’s ARCore, which are both focused on their own iPhones and Android smartphones.

Modelling a ‘people-focused’ world of parks, trails, sidewalks, and other publicly accessible spaces still requires significant computation. The technology must be able to resolve minute details, to specifically digitise these places, and to model them in an interactive 3D space that a computer can quickly and easily read.

This is enabled by mobile edge computing in which the processing power is moved closer to the user – at one of the millions of new 5G cell sites being installed - and allows Niantic to perform compute intensive work such as arbitrating the real-time interactions of a thousand individuals playing in a small geographic area.

It has partnerships with Deutsche Telekom, Korea’s SK Telecom and Samsung.

 “If you want to build compute intensive shared AR experiences, we need the next level of network,” Hanke says.

All of this presupposes a future of ubiquitous wearable computing, one in which the augmented reality experience is inherently shared and social.

If that’s to work, Niantic believes the AR interaction must feel natural to our senses. “The digital would obey similar rules to the physical in order to create the suspense of disbelief in our brains,” explains Diana Hu, formerly of Escher Reality now Niantic’s head of AR Platform.

For example, in Pokémon Go when it rains in a player’s location in the real world, that is reflected in the game.

Last year Niantic launched a contest for developers to share ideas and build new experiences on Niantic’s platform. The winner stands to receive one million dollars and will be announced later this year.

“It’s all about unleashing the power of indie developers,” Hanke says.

In Niantic’s world, our everyday experiences are enhanced by hardware that is unobtrusive, can go anywhere, and is connected in real-time with low latency 5G connections.

A similar - even rival - concept for mixed reality spatial computing at scale is being imagined by Magic Leap.

It will be interesting to see if and when those worlds collide.

T-commerce gets AI push

DTVE

Imagine if you could make your screen interactive – how would that change your business? That’s the proposition from Spott.ai, the Belgium-based outfit which has a SaaS cloud solution allowing clients to upload any content including video and make it interactive – and shoppable.

https://www.digitaltveurope.com/longread/zappware-strategy-summit-t-commerce-gets-ai-push/

Speaking at the recent Zappware Strategy Summit in Ghent, company co-founder and co-CEO Michel de Wachter urged content owners, brands and broadcasters to look at the disruption in the media market as an opportunity rather than a danger.

“The next generation of broadcasting and Smart TVs has the intent of going far beyond just applications,” he argued. “Television-based commerce, also known as T-commerce, is on the verge of transitioning our perception of a viewer’s experience by integrating the option to buy products simultaneously. The idea is that one can act on the urge of buying the product seen in a show immediately rather than forgetting about it shortly after. T-commerce is a budding solution for marketers and retailers, as the power of consumerism has shifted to the buyers themselves.”

By providing contextually relevant information, Spott.ai’s software – which runs on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform and leverages Microsoft’s facial recognition and language detection software – transforms the audience’s experience of watching a live or on-demand show from a passive into an interactive one.

De Wachter claimed that more than 40% of the TV audience skips ads in a nonlinear environment and that more than half of viewers watch a second screen while watching TV.

“We have to create income and value in a different way,” he said. “You have to rethink the user interaction.”

It all comes down to making the user experience interactive, he said.

“Studies show that people still watch 2.5 hours of TV per day. Service providers invest a lot of money in content. But what you don’t allow viewers to do is what they can do on every other screen which is to tap or push, to interact. What happens if you give them a better experience?

“You have to increase reach by transforming TV into an interactive marketplace. Our technology can turn every platform into a purchase platform, no longer directing viewers to the brand’s website, but having viewers complete a transaction on your platform.”

Launched in 2016, Spott.ai clients include Lidl, H&M, Publicis Groupe, Decathlon, Unilever and the Eurovision Song Contest. It claims more than 60% interaction rates and greater than 3% click throughs boosting conversion to purchase.

“By processing content once [using Spott.ai technology] it becomes interactive across all platforms: your websites, social media channels, third party websites, interactive video player platforms and even physical assets, such as paper magazines and boarding,” de Wachter said.

The Spott.ai dashboard benchmarks performance of every unit of content on all platforms based on views, clicks and baskets.

He admitted that getting Hollywood studios to part with the data about their content (movies, drama) was an uphill task and that the concept would prove itself first on genre such as reality cooking shows or music shows which have an obvious second screen interaction potential (e.g download recipe and buy ingredients or utensils/ viewer singer and buy track).

“You can transform the UX directly into real dollars,” he insisted.

George Richmond BSC on Rocketman

Panavision

Elton John’s larger-than-life, rags-to-riches story is given the musical treatment in the new movie Rocketman from Paramount Pictures. The film is depicted as “a true fantasy” even though the script doesn’t shy from some of the more rock ‘n’ roll aspects of the British superstar’s lifestyle.

https://www.panavision.com/george-richmond-bsc-imbues-period-looks-and-fantastical-scenes-anamorphics-rocketman

“The stress on fantasy really allows you to go into the musical side of things and to push the use of fantastical images to tell the story,” says George Richmond, BSC, who reteams with director Dexter Fletcher from Sunshine on Leith (2013), a musical set to tracks from Scottish band The Proclaimers.

This is Richmond’s third musical counting his experience as a camera operator for Dion Beebe, ASC on Rob Marshall’s Nine in 2009. While Nine was shot on film using spherical lenses from Panavision, Rocketman, was shot with a Panavised ARRI Alexa and G Series anamorphic lenses arranged at Panavision London.

“Now that I’ve shot three, I find musicals one of the most fun forms of filmmaking,” says Richmond whose cinematography credits also include Eddie the Eagle and Tomb Raider (2018). “Everyone seems to enjoy their craft, and it’s most enjoyable for me to be able to listen to the music and try to move the camera to the rhythm.”

He adds, “There were some terrific ideas in this script too including a great character arc for Elton as a 6-year-old, through his struggle with addiction and fame, to coming out of rehab. The way the script is structured with scenes of rehab at the beginning and end, and at various points in between, allows you to jump into whatever time period you want to tell the story.”

The screenplay by Lee Hall (Billy Elliot) charts the pop icon’s early years as a working-class north London lad, then as a prodigy at the Royal Academy of Music. The story follows his eventual musical partnership with songwriter Bernie Taupin, and his preparations to release Honky Château, his 1972 breakthrough album.

Taron Egerton (who appeared with Elton John in Kingsman: The Golden Circle which was lensed by Richmond) stars as John. Jamie Bell plays Taupin, Bryce Dallas Howard is Elton’s mother Sheila, and Richard Madden is Elton’s manager John Reid.

While needing a lightweight camera to assist in the fluid camera moves he was plotting, Richmond’s principal criteria in acquisition was to “buck the trend” of filming with large-format cameras.

“I wanted to try to create an image more in keeping with how we remember the 1950s to 1970s period, by not putting too much information (resolution) into it.”

He selected to work with the Super 35 chip of the Alexa Mini shooting ARRIRAW 2.8K for the anamorphic and open gate 3.4K for the VFX spherical footage.

“The other key decision was to shoot anamorphic,” he says. “I’m a great fan of anamorphic. You can infuse a sense of period into the project just by the lens choice but when we combine Panavision G Series lenses with the amazing set design, lighting design and costume design of Rocketman then it makes my job a lot easier.”

Rather than song and dance numbers, Rocketman features a number of narrative-led fantastical set pieces for which Richmond devised complex, fluent camera moves.

The sequence choregraphed for the song “Rocket Man” is the film’s center piece. “It begins with Elton at his party popping pills and drinking booze, then he throws himself into a swimming pool, sinks to the bottom of a now impossible large underwater space and sees a younger version of himself singing back at him. He’s pulled out of the pool, and we see him in an ambulance singing snatches of the song as medics try to put an oxygen mask on him. In a space that resembles the loading area of a hospital, his stomach is pumped of pills. We transition into some fantastic industrial space where he gets undressed and changed in a graphic silhouette with the LA skyline in background. Then, suddenly, we’re out into the Los Angeles Dodgers stadium where Elton begins to sing and then goes up like a firework and explodes. You can imagine how much fun it was to create those images, which looked terrific with the anamorphics,” he says.

Richmond’s focus puller, Dave Cozens, worked with Panavision London to have correctors/shims added to the wide G Series to reduce the falloff on the top and bottom portions of the frame.

“Generally, when shooting wide open on the wide anamorphics you get focus aberrations on the outside of the frame but with careful calibration you can tune those aberrations out of the top and bottom but leave them on the side. That allows you to increase the amount of useable focus when shooting wide or close to actors – so the top of their heads, for example, are not out of focus – while retaining faster fall off at the sides for a vintage anamorphic look.”

Another sequence set to “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting” was conceived as a single long-shot and required considerable preparation. It starts out with Elton in a pub, moves with him outside into an alley, through a fence then into and around a funfair populated by crowds of (1960s gangs) Mods and Rockers where a fight breaks out. It then tracks back the same way to settle Elton once more in the pub. The sequence is used to transition Kit Connor, who played 12-year-old Elton to Egerton playing Elton as a young man.

Richmond explains that the camera was mounted on a Stabileye head attached to a straight 4-foot-long metal bar and carried through the sequence by key grip David Appleby and camera B grip Craig Sheils.

“This allowed us to move the camera from ground level to full reach during the shot and it is small enough so as to be discreet, very mobile and not in the way of the lighting,” he says. “It’s stabilized but gives a slight handheld life to the shot.”

For the finale to the defiant song “I’m Still Standing,” Egerton was shot digitally to blend in with 16mm footage of the original 1983 promo which was shot in Cannes and directed by Russell Mulcahy.

“The original intent was to shoot our own version of the promo, but in what was a really clever idea from Dexter and Matthew (producer Matthew Vaughn), it was felt to be more playful to use the original negative of the video and use the selected shots required. The 16mm rushes were de-noised to remove all grain.

“We shot Taron against bluescreen with matched lighting and superimposed him on top of Elton and painted out the elements that didn’t work. A small amount of grain was then added at the end to help it all sit in.

“It’s a fitting end to Elton’s journey whom we have seen rise to fame, his deterioration into addiction and then coming out the other end triumphant.”

Craft Leaders: Polly Morgan, ASC BSC

For some cinematographers, it is the technical aspects that make them fall in love with the role. But for Polly Morgan, who’s credits include Legion, Inception and 6 Balloons, it was her love of colour.

Every successful cinematographer seems to possess the superhuman ability to tune into the world with a heightened visual sensibility. Which makes Polly Morgan, ASC BSC, a superhero.

“As a cinematographer, and perhaps it’s true of any artist, I feel like I belong to a secret club where we get to look at the world in a unique way,” the British born DP tells IBC365. “I see little pieces of magic every day. It could be light coming through trees or a patch of sun on a wall or reflections bouncing on someone’s face. When you’re used to looking at the way light interacts with people and movement and colour it really opens your eyes to a whole new world. It’s a very sensual and evocative experience. I can get lost even sitting on train looking at the raindrops on the window.”

It turns out that Morgan was exploring her superpower at a very early age, even if family and school were a little bemused by her behaviour.

“I remember being told at school, repeatedly, that I should focus on the academic side,” she explains. “Doing art wasn’t necessarily thought of as a good thing but that’s where my passion always was.”

Her infant dyslexia goes some way to explaining why film and art spoke to her more than the written word.

“Writing and dictation were always harder for me to grasp whereas I could always remember images. Shapes and colour were ingrained in my mind. I was always able to be more descriptive in pictures.”

Growing up in rural Sussex she spent a lot of time playing outside. “My imagination ran wild. When I was read to as child, I would imagine scenes in my mind’s eye. Sometimes my dad would come downstairs at 5 AM and I’d be there in front of the TV with the sound off, just sitting trying to make a story with images.

“Even today, when I ready a script, it is images that comes to me first.”

When a Channel 4 crew used the family farm as a base to shoot a documentary about composer Edward Elgar, the thirteen-year-old got her first taste of filmmaking.

“They let me look through the eyepiece and ride in the crane. I fell in love straight away.

 “I kind of knew I’d be involved in TV production of some sort. My grandfather was an artist, my mother is a painter and sculptor and although I’m the only one of my four sisters who works in the arts, perhaps because I’m youngest I was given freer rein to do what I wanted growing up.”

She took a broadcasting studies degree at Leeds University and then a year out in Toronto as PA for a commercials producer before returning to graduate. Then she began working as a runner at Ridley Scott’s RSA.

“When I was a PA someone said it would take 10 years to realise my dream of becoming a cinematographer. I was horrified as I was so hungry to shoot, and I promised myself I’d do it quicker. That was when I was twenty-one and I shot my first feature at thirty-one. Looking back, I wouldn’t change a thing.”

America-bound
America was calling. “Having grown up watching all these stories made in America I always wanted to move to the States. I considered it aged 19 but Canada was less intimidating. It was a stepping stone.”

While working as camera assistant to Haris Zambarloukos, BSC (Murder on the Orient Express), she was encouraged to apply to the American Film Institute in LA.

“I was paying to make short films in my spare time, and I guess he saw that passion in me. He had graduated from the school and had had a wonderful experience,” she says.

“It took me a few years to get there as I still had to pay for it, which isn’t cheap, but I was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship which helped a lot.”

Morgan gained more experience with cinematographers including Wally Pfister, AFC on the set of Christopher Nolan’s Inception (which won the Oscar for cinematography).

“I’m fortunate to have met some really generous and supportive cinematographers and Wally was one of them,” Morgan explains. “Watching him light for 90-odd days on that movie helped give me confidence in lighting. I learned how to work quickly and how to create a mood and feeling without being afraid of the dark. I do like to play with shadows and light and create atmospheric images.

“I also learned how camera and light interact with each other. Rather than concentrate on achieving the perfect light, you light the space and give the actors freedom to move within it.”

Art and science
Cinematography is both art and science and if Morgan seems such a tactile filmmaker you wonder if the technical mechanics leave her a little cold.

“I was very fortunate when I was camera assistant to work on big-budget studio movies. They were shot on 35mm, and everything was done in the old-school way and a lot more complicated than digital. It took me a while, but I studied the books and learned from some of the best DPs in the business and as I shot more and more the technical side became second nature. I learnt to expose correctly, how to light and select film stock and filters.

“But no, I’m not as technical as some. I joke with some friends of mine who are DPs that they should go and work for NASA. They are very intellectual in the way they use technical terms to describe what they want. The way I think, and talk is more emotional and comes from a sense of feeling and colour. It’s a more visual approach, full of colour, texture and contrast. I still love to get involved with testing lenses and sensors or film stock, but it still comes down to how an image makes make me feel.”

She adds: “You can fixate on the latest technology, such as capturing the most resolute image possible, but perhaps the better choice for the story, might be a lower resolution and a softer more evocative accent.”

Morgan shot her first feature in January 2011: Junkie, directed by Adam Mason, followed by the indie The Truth About Emanueland has since shot 6 Balloons, episodes of BBC psychological drama From Darkness and CBS historical drama Strange Angel as well as filming additional photography on FX’s anthology series American Horror Story.

Now based in LA, she recently finished lensing Lucy in the Sky, the first feature from Fargo creator Noah Hawley with whom Morgan had worked on Marvel Comics’ serial adaptation Legion. The film also reconnects Morgan with actor Natalie Portman from Morgan’s time as assistant camera on V for Vendetta in 2005.

IBC

Inspired by the real life of NASA Captain Lisa Nowak, Lucy in the Sky is about an astronaut who returns home from a long mission and finds herself losing her connection to her family.

https://www.ibc.org/production/craft-leaders-polly-morgan-asc-bsc/3927.article

Morgan says: “The story of a woman’s journey of self-discovery resonated with me. When I spoke to Noah, he wanted to be authentic in his storytelling and approach the material in a very visual way. We connected on the idea of emotion and texture.”

Morgan selected the Panavision DXL camera using the RED 8K sensor paired with anamorphic lenses. The high resolution was essential in order to capture various aspect ratios used in the storytelling.

“We used frame size as a tool so that when a character feels free, we open up the aspect ratio and in other scenes we close it down to express their claustrophobia,” Morgan explains.

“The process of filmmaking is always an evolution. When I read a script all the images flood to mind, but these are isolated until you begin to work with others. You work with the director to ensure that their vision and feeling for the film are aligned and then there’s a lot of teamwork over many months to bring this to screen. But the part that still gives me goose bumps is seeing images that I only imagined come to life. That is the most incredible feeling.”

Striving for gender parity

Broadcast

Technicolor is on a mission to increase diversity and tackle the VFX industry’s talent shortage.

https://edition.pagesuite-professional.co.uk/html5/reader/production/default.aspx?pubname=&edid=9af7f2e7-fd0c-45ee-ace4-e318ac365a87&pnum=20

https://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/digital-editions/broadcast-tech-june-2019/5140069.article

The dial is ever so slowly nudging to parity in the entertainment industry. This year more women than ever before were nominated for Academy Awards in non-gender specific (non-acting) categories – and the Oscar ceremony saw more women take the stage winning or co-winning in categories including Best Documentary Feature, Best Live Action Short, Best Animated Short, and Achievements in Sound Editing, Production Design and Costume Design (though none were nominated for directing).

It’s also the year in which Technicolor’s Maxine Gervais (Black Panther) became the first woman to win a Hollywood Professional Association award for Outstanding Color Grading.

Among the many male dominated industry crafts, though, VFX stands out. The global pipeline of potential VFX talent graduating from university averages just 21 percent female. Milk co-founder Sara Bennett remains the only woman VFX supervisor to win an Oscar (for 2016’s Ex Machina); Suzanne Benson the sole female VFX artist won for Aliens back in 1986.

At the same time, the exploding demand for content is straining the limited pool of talented VFX artists and technologists in the industry.

Rachel Matchett, worldwide head of Technicolor VFX, believes that creative diversity is a solution to the talent shortage.

She says, “No one came to my college when I was growing up and talked about VFX but we are actively doing that now and the more we can expose the opportunities to colleges and to parents, then the better chance of finding even more talent regardless of gender and particularly to grow the female workforce.”

Matchett has spent two decades in the industry moving through the ranks to achieve a leadership position where she hopes to affect change. After a decade at sister facility MPC she now heads up Technicolor VFX, a ‘boutique’ division within the wider group spanning sites in LA, Toronto and London focussed on episodic TV drama

“My first step is to make sure I am promoting and pushing female leadership to have the respect of the creative team around them,” she says.

To that end, she promoted Kate Warburton, Tricia Pifer and Robin Nozetz to executive produce the division in London, LA and Toronto respectively.

“Everybody knows it’s a male dominated industry,” she says. “A lot of women feel the need to have a voice but are not sure how to articulate it and be listened to. The more you get women into senior leadership the more they will have the ability to nurture future female talent.”

Her goal echoes that of her boss, Technicolor’s global president of post, Sherri Potter. Her policies aim to double the industry average across the organisation to 40 percent female and to raise that to 50 percent in 2020. For Matchett, that means recruiting or promoting at least 75 female staff.

Matchett, who cites producer Claire Simpson (Coraline, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit) as an influence and inspiration on her career, is a Women in Film and TV mentor and takes an active role in Access VFX, a cross-industry initiative to promote diversity and inclusion in the VFX industry.

One challenge is to overcome the perception of VFX as a traditional computer graphics-based job, and to see it as a career that offers unlimited opportunities to be highly creative and to do ground breaking work.

“I really feel there is so much talent that doesn’t get tapped into and is not given a crack of the whip. It’s about helping women into the workplace and giving them the confidence to make mistakes because that’s the only way you can grow.”

She says she hasn’t “outwardly witnessed” sexism at first hand but suggests that a lack of diversity is often down to barriers in building relationships with male hierarchy.

“A lot of VFX is about relationship building with clients but in the creative world your work should speak for itself. You could have a hundred different showreels and not put any artist names to it and simply pick out the work you like. That would be true meritocracy.”

Indeed, Lauren McCallum, Global MD of Technicolor’s Mill Film, contends that diversity and inclusiveness can enhance the VFX creative process by delivering more engaging content.

“The reality is that many of us go to the cinema because we want to experience something new and different,” she says. “If you don't change the range of perspectives contributing to the creative process, the likelihood of really reaching that full artistic potential is limited.”

Mill Film adheres to the same aggressive targets to reach gender balance in its creative workforce and by the end of 2018 had a female artist community representing 41% of its total.

A frequent assertion heard in VFX is that women don’t pursue their careers because it’s too difficult to endure the punishing lifestyle that can demand 16-hour days for weeks on end and still have a family. Yet the idea that many are not self-selecting out of the industry needs serious consideration.

“It is a deadline intensive environment and one push we are making at Technicolor is to develop software tools such as [in house pipeline] Pulse to benefit a quick turnaround and to keep the guesswork out of what clients need to do,” Matchett says. “The level of experience of a director needs to be honed as well. Many are not used to dealing with all aspect of VFX so part of the job is helping them understand what CG can do for them while managing our teams so that they don’t burn out.”

Recent work at Technicolor VFX includes over 600 2D and CG shots as sole vendor on BBC and HBO period drama Gentleman Jack for writer director Sally Wainwright. Other projects include 150 shots on The Spanish Princess for Starz and 350 shots on Channel 4 mini-series Chimerica including recreations of Tiananmen Square in 1989.

That’s just out of London. Matchett also has overall responsibility for shows including True Detective, The Loudest Voice and Big Little Lies out of LA andFrontier out of Toronto.

“With a two and half hour feature you have a good idea of the shot count and work involved but episodic is more of a moveable feast,” she says. “What was budgeted for in episode 8 may have changed by the time they get around to shooting it. So, until they shoot each episode you’re never quite sure what are going to be hit with. Schedules are challenging and expectations are an all time high but the diversity of work makes it creatively exciting.”

Matchett admits it will take another few years before industry initiatives like outreach to higher education begin to generate a significantly wider pool of female talent.

“The ability to target a certain percentage is a strong statement but it can’t simply be words and no action. It’s something that you need to believe in and push for.”

Rogan's pursuit of purpose and integrity

Broadcast

The husband and wife team behind Rogan Productions why they aim for productions of purpose, perspective and craft.

https://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/futureoftv/rogans-pursuit-of-purpose-and-integrity/5140127.article

“It may be trite to say that we want to make the world a better place, but we genuinely believe we have the ability to shift the way people see things,” says James Rogan, co-founder of Rogan Productions.

There can be few more powerful testaments to this than the recent series about one of the highest profile murders in Britain. Stephen: The Murder That Changed a Nation was an indictment of the police inaction to the racist murder 25 years ago and picked up two Grierson awards for Best Historical Documentary and Best Documentary Series.

Rogan points to O.J.: Made in America, an ESPN Films documentary mini-series from 2016. “That was a massive creative turning point and Stephen was a kind of response to that,” he says.

“The response to Stephen when it was aired across three nights on BBC1 was overwhelming. These ambitious pieces can become events that people talk about.”

Rogan Productions is led by husband and wife team, creative director James and managing director Soleta Rogan. Their ground rules are that every project must have a strong sense of purpose, perspective and craft.

“With every project, we have a very strong sense of what we want to say and the impact we want it to make,” says Soleta Rogan.

“You want to make sure people can share directly in the experience of those who have been at the forefront of major events. That means finding the right perspective for such a purpose.”

Before setting up independently in 2013, James Rogan’s directorial work included BBC2’s Life in the Freezer Cabinet, about the budget supermarket chain Iceland Foods; and BBC Storyville’s Trouble with Pirates. Along with Roger Graef, he also co-directed feature doc Monty Python: The Meaning of Live, which was about the legendary comedy group’s last performance.

It’s a style dubbed ‘true fiction’ by director and producer Asif Kapadia, who broke the mould in 2010 with his archive-driven portrait of racing driver Ayrton Senna and for whose company, On The Corner Films, Rogan directed Stephen.He says he launched the indie to develop “passion projects” inspired by narrative storytelling: “I come from a fiction background and believe that all the creative values of fiction should be present in documentaries in order to make them both truthful and accessible.”

“Our films are very driven by character in a way which comes from fiction,” says James Rogan. “We use commentary or voiceover infrequently because it can feel lazy and not the best way of delivering the story, and we use experts sparingly and only when they add value.”

An example of this is One Night in 2012, a feature-length Imagine special for BBC1 about Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony for the London Olympics, which was assembled with user-generated content from the body cams of volunteers.

Other characteristics of James Rogan’s documentary treatment include a close working relationship with the editor. “That collaboration is very important,” he says. “I don’t script films in advance.”

While ideas are often ripped from newspaper headlines, Soleta Rogan says the key is also about “asking what’s going to be big in two years’ time”.

“Sometimes that can count against you when you sit down with a commissioner and you’re basically asking them to take a punt on your hunch that your idea is going to hit the right note with an audience way down the line,” she adds. “But we’ve won quite a few of those arguments now.”

“As a director-led company we strive to work with both new and experienced filmmakers because their voices bring about a greater range of perspectives.”

The company has also worked with several established directors on other major projects. Recent examples include Stabbed: Britain’s Knife Crime Crisis (Toby Trackman for BBC1), Border Country(Guy King for BBC4 and BBC Northern Ireland; co-produced with Erica Starling Productions) and two-part BBC Panorama special Crisis in Care (Angie Mason), which airs tonight (5 June).

Looking to newer directing talent, Neringa Medutyte, made her directing debut for the Rogan-produced Waiting for Invasion, which about conscription in Lithuania, for Al Jazeera’s Witness strand. Panorama’s Can Violent Men Change? landed experienced producer-turned-first-time director Katie Hindley an RTS nomination for independent journalism.

Rogan also has an established branch for branded production with Rogan Digital, a commercially focused division behind online content for the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust and The Craftsmen’s Dinner, a YouTube series commissioned by whisky brand Balvenie featuring chef Michel Roux Jr.

“One key advantage of a stream of digital work means we can remain wholly independent and that gives us full autonomy over how and when we make films that ultimately meet our own creative objectives,” says Soleta Rogan.

With at least another four projects due to deliver before the end of the year, the company is focused on growing the Rogan brand and the ambition of its output, while maintaining commitment to its core values.

“We know a lot of our currency is in the quality of our delivery so we’re very careful not to compromise on that,” says Soleta Rogan. “We want to be discerning enough to support projects of integrity and the highest level of craft because that’s the way to achieve maximum impact.”