Interviews - 01 - The Old Library
Christ Church Upper Library, Oxford, UK
Sony FX6 - Thypoch Simera-C 24mm
From the moment I learned that Oxford University was involved in the project, I had a frame like this in mind.
Sophisticated, elegant, and authoritative. We wanted a space that encapsulated the feel of what it meant to be a Professor at Oxford, and the academic authority that lands with that. The question was where could we find this frame?
Style
The first step was settling on a visual style for our interviews with the client. I wanted these interview shots to be visual anchor points for a film that was going to have a lot of information presented very quickly. I explained to them that I was really looking for a space that let people really feel the seriousness with which we were approaching this project, while keeping the subjects close enough to the camera to feel approachable and not like they were lecturing.
Going into this shoot I had center-framing in mind for our interview A angles. Besides being a sucker for symmetry, center-framing interviews is more visually impactful: it makes a viewer pause and remember the shot, and more importantly, the person in it. While center-framing like this is best avoided when going for a not as over-stated style, it served us well by creating uniting people across nations and disciplines with similar framing.
The client loved this idea, and was more than happy to try and pull it off. We settled on trying to find spaces that fit the location we were at while also communicating a sense of academia without being stuffy. Helpful for this was a reference frame from the documentary 13th that visually captured the feel of what we were trying to achieve. While we wanted to be a little closer to our subject, the reference got at the feel we were looking for.
13th, Dir. Ava Duvernay, DP. Hans Charles
Location
With Oxford being the home-town for the research program we were filming for, we had a leg up on finding a good location. As soon as I sent them the reference frame, one of the project staffers immediately recommended the upper room at Christ Church Library. We booked it an were set!
The Shot
Once we got into the space, it became obvious that it’d be best to shoot lengthwise. The depth of the room was fantastic, and we wanted to showcase some of the beautiful ceiling. I thought the large windows at either end would pose a much bigger problem than they did, but the reality was that our subject covered up so much of them that they were really not tough to deal with.
We keyed from the left to work with the windows that were already present. For our key light, we used an Aputure 600X with a Light Dome 150 and Magic Cloth pushing through an 8×8 quarter-grid. Effectively, we were mimicking the window light that was already coming into the space. We left just a hint of window in the shot to motivate this.
After establishing the key, we salt and peppered with another 600X as a hairlight (Overkill, but we had it built), and an Amaran F22C to push a little bit of fill back in. The neg underneath the setup ensured we didn’t have any crazy warm return on our subject.
We lucked out with the ambient lighting in the space: the uplights from the ceiling and downlights on the bookshelf add another dimension to the shot that we wouldn’t have been able to get with the limited time we had.
Final Thoughts
This is one of my favorite spaces that I’ve ever been able to shoot it, by far. I’m grateful to an awesome crew and client for making it happen! While I was initially a bit intimidated by the space, it actually coming together incredibly well, and led to this awesome shot.
Director/DP: Rylan McCoy
1st AD: Olive Johnson
B-Cam/Audio: Jonathan Blair
Gaffer: Danny MacGregor
