Looking at life through the lens generates insightful perspectives so we thought it a good idea to seek out cinematographers behind some of the most interesting fare in the ad discipline this season. Certainly qualifying among the high ranking entries would be the HBOvoyeur initiative directed by Jake Scott of RSA for BBDO New York, and Dove’s “Onslaught” directed by Tim Piper Ogilvy & Mather, Toronto. “Onslaught” is this week’s SHOOT “Top Spot.”
Besides talking to the DPs behind these two notable endeavors, we usher in the perspective of cinematographer Tami Reiker who’s no stranger to breaking new ground and continually seeking out creative challenges.
So here are POVs from notable DPs spanning their work, their relationships with directors, experiences with digital cameras and how they got into the business.
Philippe Le Sourd “It was an amazing experience–something completely different, not like a feature or a short movie or a commercial,” says cinematographer Philippe Le Sourd of his collaboration with director Jake Scott on HBO’s “Voyeur” campaign, which encompassed such elements as a building-sized “peep show” in Manhattan, two hours of content online at hbovoyeur.com and a film available via HBO On Demand.
The “peep show” projection (on a Lower East Side NYC building) is the image of an apartment building, in which we see residents moving about, allowing passersby, if they so choose, to be voyeurs into their private lives. Online you can peer further into these people’s living spaces and lives, with a video featuring 30 actors in a dozen apartments. Delving deeper, you see that some of these lives and happenings in the apartments are connected to one another.
The challenges for Le Sourd were varied, including determining the colors and contrast for each adjacent apartment on a single floor of the building as constructed on a set. There’s one continuous take for each floor, meaning he had to be in sync with the proper rhythm of the action unfolding in all the units, with lighting changing during the appropriate moments of scenes in the different dwellings.
At the same time, the intent was to make it so the viewer didn’t lose sight of the big picture–the different lives being depicted–even while opting to divert his or her attention for a moment into the goings on in a particular apartment.
Plus, the visuals took on an increased importance in that there was no dialogue. It was in effect a giant silent film with the cinematography being vital in conveying sharp contrasts in emotion and storyline from one apartment to the next, all playing simultaneously before our eyes.
“Jake and I talked in great detail about the acting and the emotion of each person in every apartment, for each scene, for each floor, trying to figure out the right color, the darkness and brightness needed to underscore the behavior on display,” relates Le Sourd. “The challenge was complex but it was a joy to work with Jake, dealing with multiple scenes at once in one continuous take for each floor. We spent a day shooting for each of the four floors in the apartment building.”
This was the second time Le Sourd, who’s represented by The Skouras Agency, has had the opportunity to team with Scott. They first worked together several years ago on a George Michael music video.
“Jake immerses himself in a project and that was again the case with this [“Voyeur”],” says Le Sourd. “He has great insights into what an actor goes through to convey emotion and that insight had to be even more heightened for this project in that the emotions were being conveyed without sound.”
Le Sourd is no stranger to the Scott family–or as of late to the new media world. On the former score, he served as cinematographer for two projects directed by Jake’s father, the acclaimed Ridley Scott, spanning short and long form; one being the feature film A Good Year; the other a four-minute piece for fashion client Prada that plays at retails stores and select venues.
As for the alluded to new media, Le Sourd recently also lensed the visually stunning Seduction by Light, a short film for Philips Electronics directed by Wong Kar Wai through Anonymous Content for DDB Amsterdam. The short is being distributed via the web, DVD and as a select promo piece. Starring up-and-coming French actress Amelie Daure, the film subtly promotes the innovative technology behind the Philips Aurea television set. The short is a sexy, futuristic spy thriller. The future world is created through a palette of colors that blend and pulsate, alternating between under and overexposure of light. Helping to realize Kar-Wai’s vision through color and light was Le Sourd.
While both these brave new media world projects were shot on film–as has been the lion’s share of Le Sourd’s work over the years–the cinematographer has gotten his feet wet in the digital realm. This past May he shot a Gucci commercial with Panavision’s Genesis HD camera. The spot was directed by David Lynch via Le Pac, Paris.
“The experience of working with David and the Genesis was wonderful,” relates Le Sourd. “The camera facilitated complete freedom of movement and lighting.”
Le Sourd started out as an avid still photographer, attended film school in France and made his initial foray into cinematography as a loader and assistant to noted DP Darius Khondji. Le Sourd then first established himself as a DP in the music video arena, shooting clips for such directors as Erick Ifergan and Stephane Sednaoui.
Then Le Sourd diversified into commercials and longer form fare. Among his other assorted notable spot credits is Johnnie Walker’s “Human” (from BBH, London), which was one of the entries that helped earn Dante Ariola of MJZ this year’s Directors Guild of America (DGA) Award as best commercial director of 2006.
Marc Lalibert– Else This week’s SHOOT “Top Spot of the Week” is Dove’s “Onslaught,” directed by Tim Piper of Ogilvy, Toronto. It’s a fitting, impactful folllow-up to Dove’s “Evolution,” which was co-directed by Piper and Yael Staav (who’s now with bicoastal Furlined and Toronto’s Soft Citizen), successfully raising questions about the standards of female beauty in our culture and what they do to the self-images of girls and young women.
When DP Marc Lalibert-Else, CSC, who’s repped by Sesler & Company, got a call expressing interest in him to shoot “Onslaught,” he was immediately interested. “I have an 11-year-old daughter and I know what girls go through in this regard. I felt there was no way I won’t do this,” recalls Lalibert-Else. “The concept is so powerful.”
“Onslaught” marked the first time Lalibert-Else worked with director/creative Piper. “Tim had such a firm vision in mind that we knew pretty much exactly what we wanted going into the project.”
The concept is that no matter where a young girl looks, media is attacking her with fashion model visions of what ideal beauty is and should be. This led Lalibert-Else to shoot with a variety of cameras–35mm film, Panasonic’s HD VariCam, and a prosumer version of HD. “No format was wrong–we even tried to get Super 8 going but the post schedule made that impossible,” relates Lalibert-Else. “The point is that we didn’t want the imagery to have one consistent feel. We wanted imagery that was coming from seemingly everywhere–different formats but all carrying and bombarding girls with the same unrealistic beauty message.”
The VariCam was used for the mock infomercials sequence in “Onslaught” where presenter after presenter is touting products that will make women sleeker, slimmer, prettier, more attractive to men, et cetera.
“Onslaught” was one of three projects on which Lalibert-Else worked in tandem with Piper, one being another Dove spot in which we see a teenage boy standing outside a young girl’s window. A voiceover relates that the girl can think of numerous things wrong with her appearance while the boy cannot think of one. And Lalibert-Else also shot for an ongoing film project interviews with girls ranging in age from eight to 12. A woman who’s off-camera conducted the interviews which give insights–some disturbing–about how these youngsters define beauty.
Lalibert-Else describes the experience of collaborating with Piper and the significance of the message as “most gratifying for me to be involved in.”
However, at one point it didn’t look like Lalibert-Else would be professionally involved in cinematography to begin with. He was studying economics, with photography as a side hobby, when a buddy of his landed a job as a production assistant on a TV show. “I was exposed to a whole world that makes a living doing what I loved to do as a hobby,” recollects Lalibert-Else. “So I dropped out of college and began my pursuit.”
That pursuit had him working his way up the ranks, moving from the U.K. to Canada and getting his initial big break lensing a pair of movies for MTV, including 2Gether directed by Nigel Dick.
But the feature length fare kept him away from his family months at a time so he personally needed to seek another alternative, asking his agent, Dora Sesler, if he could get into commercials. He did, first establishing himself in Canada and now doing an increasingly larger share of U.S. spot work, a prime example being a Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority spot, part of the “What happens here, stays here” campaign from agency R&R Partners, Las Vegas. Lalibert-Else lensed the Vegas spot–directed by Scott Vincent of Hungry Man–in which a guy spends an evening hitting on different ladies, telling each he has a different professional occupation. It’s almost like he’s making up careers as he goes along.
Lalibert-Else shot the Vegas ad with an HD camera, the Sony HDW F900, with a pro 35 adapter. He’s familiar with shooting HD, having shot a 15-minute short, Greetings From Earth, directed by Kim Jacobs of HKM, with Thomson’s Grass Valley Viper Filmstream digital cinematography camera. Greetings from Earth premiered at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.
“Any cinematographer in this day and age who says film is the only medium is eliminating tools that can be a valuable addition to his or her repertoire,” observes Lalibert-Else. “I think it’s still a mistake to say that high-end HD is going to mimic film perfectly. The fact is that HD cinematography has its own attributes and can work if matched with the right project. You just have to look at it as another tool in the context of what we have at our disposal.”
Tami Reiker Tami Reiker ASC broke new ground with her lensing of the HBO pilot Carnivale, directed by Rodrigo Garcia. She became the first woman to be nominated for an American Society of Cinematographers (ASC) Outstanding Achievement Award–and then added a precedent to that by becoming the first female to win the honor–on the strength of that pilot episode. The ASC win came in ’04.
But Reiker, who’s repped by Dattner Dispoto and Associates (DDA), has hardly rested on her laurels. This past summer she was in Westport, Conn., where she shot the telefilm For One More Day for Harpo Films based on the novel by Mitch Albom. Executive produced by Oprah Winfrey and directed by Lloyd Cramer, For One More Day stars Ellen Burstyn and Michael Imperioli, and is slated to make its network television premiere on Dec. 2.
The movie chronicles three eras, two from yesteryear. For those eras gone by, “We flashed the film–to add grain and soften the image–and underexposed two stops for most of the footage,” relates Reiker. “We also used old Cooke lenses….Today, so much of what is shot looks so sharp, even too sharp–you see film work on some of those flat screen TVs and it looks like video. But we were able to attain a look reminiscent of a European movie from the 1960s.”
For Reiker, her movie work informs her commercials and vice versa. From For One More Day, she says, “I can show the results of the film being flashed. It allows me to bring something tangible back to commercials if a storyline calls for something like that. In commercials there’s rarely time for extensive testing. No one is going to approve anything unless they can see it. Well, they can see it in this case. I have the dailies [from For One More Day].”
Since her summer of lensing in Westport, Reiker has hopped back into the spot fray, having shot Bud Light and Planter’s Peanuts for director Tom Routson from Tool of North America, Verizon and Quit Plan (both lensed in Toronto) for director Allen Coulter of Hungry Man and a fun PSA for AARP helmed by actor/director Tony Goldwyn via Image Media.
“I simply love crossing over, going back and forth between short and long form,” observes Reiker. And at times her collaborators are themselves the catalysts for crossover. Early on her career, for example, Reiker shot spec work in New York for an agency creative who had directorial aspirations: Craig Gillespie. She has since over the years shot numerous real-world commercials for leading director Gillespie (who’s now on the MJZ roster) as well as his recent feature filmmaking debut, New Line Cinema’s Mr. Woodcock, which stars Billy Bob Thornton and Susan Sarandon.
It was back in New York that Reiker first established herself in the industry. After shooting student films at NYU, she served as an apprentice and assistant to many notable cinematographers, including Harris Savides. But she knew she didn’t want to be an assistant for long so took out a loan and bought a 16mm camera.
“The timing was terrific in that back then every band had a music video,” she recalls. “I’d go once a month to Jamaica and through this Jamaican company I shot a bunch of videos. It was a great experience and gave me a foundation to build upon.”
Then came the dot-com rush and a huge wave of related commercials, which also spawned shooting opportunities in advertising for Reiker. One such opportunity was Sega’s “Obsidian Egg” commercial directed by MJZ’s Rocky Morton; that spot won Reiker a Belding Award for best cinematography and helped earn Morton a DGA Award nomination as best spot director of ’98.
Around this same time, in the late ’90s, Reiker collaborated with director Lisa Cholodenko, shooting the acclaimed feature High Art. Reiker garnered a best cinematography nomination at the ’99 Independent Spirit Awards for High Art. She then went on to shoot her first major studio feature, DreamWorks’ The Love Letter starring Kate Capshaw, Tom Selleck and Ellen DeGeneres.
The aforementioned director Garcia sought out Reiker for Carnivale based on her work in High Art.
“High Art was an example of my being fortunate in that projects I’ve done have helped to bring about other projects,” says Reiker, who additionally credits in that respect agent Bill Dispoto who has repped her since the very inception of her cinematography career.
“Bill has a real strategy whereby he helps me to take on the right work, which in turn leads to other creative opportunities. And those creative challenges and opportunities are what drive me as a cinematographer.”
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