Sundance Film Festival

Two very different projects for DP Tim Orr at this year’s Sundance. See previous posting for his account of shooting still, composed frames for Mike White, using older Fuji stocks that provided the retro grain structure and contrast that the director was looking for in his gentle comedy.

Snow Angels was a very different story. Orr frequently collaborates with director David Green (Snow Angels is their best work he thinks). In that project–shot in a dark and frigid Nova Scotia February–Orr executed what he described as a kind of dance with the actors, trusted by his director to essentially edit with his camera.

Shooting Super 35 3 perf Kodak on the Panavision Millennium and Millennium SL with Primo lenses, Orr says the film–based on a novel–was “interior storytelling, both in location and in the story. It‘s very plot and character driven, it was about creating everyday environments that still had a certain amount of poetry to them.

The plan was for a lot of single takes, so Orr laid down track and rode the dolly slow. “I‘d be on the zoom, constructing the scene. Instead of just covering the scene we were able to get a lot of different angles that cut together very well, different focal lengths, and it gave the actors tremendous freedom and brought a sense of realism.”

The show had a DI at Postworks for film out to Fuji stock–a process Orr says really worked. “The LUTs have come a long way,” her says, “what we saw in the suite was exactly what we saw on the print–which is an enormous relief.”