American Cinematographer - April 2009 - 68

Sundance 2009: 5 That Thrived how far I can push it, and it has sensational latitude. Essentially, I was trying to soften the images and create the kinds of images you’d see in older photographs.” De Borman conspired with production designer Andrew McAlpine to give Jenny’s home a lived-in look. The set was built at Twickenham Studios, and McAlpine made the most of it. “I always like to move through corridors and go from one room to another, and Andrew very cleverly designed the set to look as real as possible,” says de Borman. “It had some depth to it, so you could see into the main corridor from any position, and we could play with that. He also mixed furniture and objects from different periods, not just the Sixties, to make everything look more authentic. In real life, people generally have a mixture of furniture from different eras. “In the house, I didn’t want to use overall lighting; I wanted to make the lighting very soft and very specific,” he continues. “I used soft lighting on faces throughout the film, but particularly in the house, I wanted to have areas that were dark, so I tried to create pools of light that would make things more moody. I used a lot of China balls and smaller units, and I had a lot of mixed lighting as well, especially for scenes set in the late afternoon, so that things went a bit dark in the corners.” De Borman adjusted his approach for a key sequence in which Jenny, David and his friends bask in the glamour of the posh nightclub Café de Paris, where they enjoy a performance by a sultry torch singer. “I tried to lend that sequence as much glamour as possible to create a contrast with Jenny’s home life,” he says. “I tried not to make everything too bright, but the lighting was still much brighter and more polished than the scenes in the family’s house. I also lit Jenny’s face much more to make her seem livelier. I bounced Par Fours off the white Jenny dances with her paramour’s best friend and business partner, Danny (Dominic Cooper), after a day at the races. De Borman lent club scenes added glamour to create contrast with Jenny’s cozy but predictable home life with her parents. they were so good at telling stories — plus, they did it simply. There was still an air of innocence in that era, too; the cynicism that’s crept into life these days wasn’t as prevalent back then. Lone and I were constantly saying, ‘We’ve got to try to capture that period’s simplicity and get that naiveté into the characters.’” De Borman shot An Education with Arri cameras, using 3-perf Super 35mm to save on stock and facilitate the fine-tuning of colors and contrast in a digital intermediate, which was carried out at London’s Midnight Transfer. He felt the widescreen format lent the character-based picture more cinematic sweep: “It’s an intimate story, so you want to fight against it feeling like television. In my opinion, 90 percent of good photography is composition and 10 percent is lighting. In general, I wanted the camera to be close to Jenny so viewers could feel her emotions. That doesn’t mean I was always using huge close-ups; I just gave a lot of thought to where I put the camera to reveal the characters — whether to push in during a sensitive moment, and so forth. I would look for those moments and discuss them with Lone. Everything I did with the camera was based on Jenny’s emotions.” The real key to the look de Borman fashioned was his decision to shoot with a set of vintage Cooke S2 prime lenses. “When you do a period film, there’s always that question: should you emulate films that were shot in that period, or do you do your own interpretation of the period? I sort of discovered how to do a period look by using secondgeneration Cooke S2 lenses that had a slight softness about them; they’re sharp, but they have a quick falloff. I’d used them on Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, a film set in the 1930s, because I was trying to emulate the work of a photographer from that era. I found that the lenses really helped to create a period look before I’d even done anything with lighting or contrast, and without it looking too filtered or obvious. On this film, I was trying to work a bit against what’s happening at the moment with digital capture, which yields high contrast and very sharp focus. I wanted a combination of softness and contrast, and I ultimately decided to shoot on Kodak [Vision2 500T] 5218 exclusively. I know that stock very well, so I know 68 April 2009

American Cinematographer - April 2009

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