Singing Beauty (Artist Film)

  Singing Beauty is a short experimental artist film which I helped out on. It was directed by MA student Liam Healy, and shot by past student Paddy McGowan. I was Paddy's AC (Assistant Cinematographer) for this project, and was in charge of lighting, pulling focus, and various other duties. The Film consisted of a middle-aged man, in old fashioned 'peasant-like' clothing, in a darkened warehouse singing a feminine song, Mama Cass - Dream a little dream, and then this was intercut with beautiful, smooth shots of the seaside, sand dunes and sea.

  The way paddy wanted to shoot was pretty specific. He wanted minimum shots to be taken, but every shot to be perfect, so therefore we spent lots of time preparing each shot. The location we used was a stunning warehouse/mill in Ancoats. The location was perfect for this project as there were no windows so that we could manipulate the light however we wanted it, and plenty of beams to attach lights to etc. We top lit the subject using a pro-daylight HMI, and spot lit it so that the light was a narrow beam, only hitting the subject instead of spreading over the rest of the room. This looked really nice as his face was coming in and out of the light as he moved, and the light was quite low key. We also used a soft Bowen daylight in front of the character to give a little more light to his face, and also to find a little bit of detail in the back wall of the warehouse instead of the background being completely blacked out, but only very subtly. There were also some large pillar/doorway type things that led to another room. We blasted 3 redheads through these gaps to generate sharp shards of light and shadows on the floor of the warehouse, flooding into the main room, this effect looked very nice.

  The film was shot on the Canon C300, which is the camera I will be shooting one of my grad films on, so it was good to use the camera again and get to grips with it a little more.