American Cinematographer - December 2005 - 28

right:
snuggles

Near
Kitten

with childhood

friend Charlie

(Ruth Negga).
Far right:
Director of

photography
Declan Quinn,
ASC. Below:
After a rough
night in London,
Kitten
encounters

a

kind stranger,
Bertie (Stephen

Rea), who takes
an

immediate

caters to British soldiers. "I wanted the

liking to him.

room to have a womblike warmth," says
Quinn, "so I used Primary Red for the

in the U.K.

helped keep the camera
agile," he adds. "We tried to keep the
camera moving with kind of circular
motions. For example, we'd start on a TV
set, then move around the room and
come back to the TV set. There's always
energy to the camerawork that
keeps the story moving."
He shot most of the picture's night

some

material and all interiors

on

Kodak

Vision2 500T 5218, which he "fell in love

with

Vanity Fair. [See AC Sept. '04.]
fine-grained and a little more
open in the shadows than its precursor,
[Vision 500T] 5279." Still, he finds 5218 a
on

It's very

daylight film because I knew the flames
lighting source,
though I did supplement them a bit," he
explains. "5218 would have made the
flames look very white, almost blownwould be the main

out

white, and I didn't think that

was

right for the film. I wanted the flames to
have a lot of red, and by using HMIs to
light the background and shooting on
daylight film, we achieved that." To
supplement the flames, he used two
small Lowel Rifa lights gelled with 14
Straw and dimmed to match the color of
the fire. "Rifa

by using an LLD (UVreducing Low-Light Daylight) filter during
daylight interiors and correcting for the
extra blue during color timing. His other

lights are very useful
they're an enclosed soft light
that you can lift in your hand," he points
out. "They're lightweight and easy to
move around during a shot; if the camera
is moving in close on somebody and the
camera shadow is becoming a problem,

main stock

I

bit

warmer

some

than he likes, so he reduced

of the redness

was

Kodak Vision2 250D

5205, which he used for day exteriors.
Quinn

employed a third stock, Fuji

Reala 500D 8592, for two firelit scenes.
In one, Kitten and his friends enjoy a

campfire with

a group

of bikers. "I chose

because

can

sneak the Rifa in

over

the lens to

compensate."
The film opens

with

unusual
of Kitten's
village that suggests the perspectives of
two talking birds that have set up the
story. The sequence comprises a series
of dissolves, and Quinn used the FlyingCam remote-controlled helicopter rig to
capture some of the shots. "At the end of
the scene, the Flying-Cam goes over a
sequence, an

aerial

an

survey

roof and heads down toward the church

backyard,"

says

crane arm

shot]

the camera

on

as

the

was

comes

down to land

priest's doorstep."
In a noteworthy sequence that

shot on

a

set built in

is detonated in
24 December 2005

Quinn. "A Hot Head and
then take over [the

14-foot

a

Belfast,

London

a

bomb

nightclub that

ambient

light and offset it by keying
people with a chocolate gel that gave
skin tones a nice sepia color. We set up
a wall of mirrors in the background to
create a sense of more space and more
people, and we found a wonderful
period disco light, a spherical, spinning
source.

We also added smoke."
In the scene, Kitten and her

dance partner walk onto the dance floor
in a Steadicam shot that then continues,

following them as they glide across the
dance floor through some hot spots of
light. As they draw closer to the mirror,
Kitten looks at his reflection, and then

the mirror

explodes into shards of glass.
glass breaking at high speed
and background plates of the interior of
the club that could be put into the reflec¬
tions of the exploding mirror," says
Quinn. "Effects artists put images of the
background plate into the individual
pieces of glass that were spinning
"We shot

toward the

camera

and animated them

frame

by frame. We put smoke and fire
[effects] behind the mirror to give the
explosion some depth."
For the first two weeks of the

shoot, Quinn and other key crew viewed
select 35mm dailies on an Arri LocPro35,
but

during the subsequent six weeks,
only DVD dailies were made available. "I
don't like to make judgments by DVD or
any kind of telecine transfer, because
those images really don't represent what
the film stock will do," says Quinn. "If it
comes

to

that, I'd rather not watch

anything and just trust my eye."
5^
American Cinematographer - December 2005

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