The role of a dedicated cinematographer on set is standard partly due to the fact
that producing strong images for a film usually requires an
experienced hand with extreme focus on technical and emotional details.
Directors who can DP at the same time are therefore a rarity. Reed Morano is
one of those rare people that is able to do both simultaneously.
Her work is often dark, widescreen, intensely personal and takes place in a limited colour
spectrum with a reactive, verite operated camera, informed by her early documentary experience.
In this episode I will examine the cinematography style of Morano
by going over her philosophy on creating images as well as the gear which she uses to do so.
Morano grew up in the US and developed an early interest in theatre and drama.
After initially applying to study journalism, her father persuaded
her to attend film school due to her love of telling stories and taking photographs.
She worked as a DP shooting documentaries until she was offered to photograph her first feature,
which made its premiere at Sundance in 2008.
She’s worked with directors such as Courtney Hunt,
Elgin James and John Krokidas as well as being a director in her own right.
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Monrano’s cinematography has a common thread across her projects
of framing characters in an intimate and personal way.
To create an emotional connection between the characters
and the audience she often gets physically close to the actors with the camera. Being
nearer requires using lenses which are wider such as in the 28mm to 35mm range.
Morano notes that there’s a fine line with framing like this
before the camera becomes too close and the images start to feel claustrophobic.
She likes operating the camera herself, especially when handheld,
as it allows her to be reactive to what the actors bring to the performance.
Even when directing a movie she sometimes still prefers to operate the camera herself.
“There was that unknown of can I split my brain and operate the camera and think
about the story and the emotions and find the emotion in the shot.
But so much of that is what an operator does already.”
“A lot of people told me not to do it. But I just had this weird feeling,
like I’m a mom with two kids and I work full time. I can probably do both jobs.”
“I took a chance and did it. I was DPing with my eyes closed and just concentrating on directing
and had the camera on my shoulder...It’s about being in the moment, that’s what
actors have to do, and it's kind of nice if the director is forced to be in the moment too.”
Importantly, she does concede that she is only able to ‘DP with her eyes closed’ due
to the 15 to 20 years of experience she had as a cinematographer prior to getting into directing.
Part of this handheld, personal operating style along with using soft naturalistic light
may have been influenced by her documentary background.
For a documentary shoot with LCD Soundsystem for example,
she was forced to make the natural light in the locations work,
where her only tools were closing a curtain or putting up duvetyne on a wall.
She’s a fan of the new school of area lighting where an entire space or set is lit,
as opposed to the old school style where actors were placed on very specific marks,
lit in that space only and forced to act within contained parameters of space.
She employed this area lighting technique on Little Birds to save on setup time
and give the actors more freedom to work.
“I always tried to design the lighting so it was 360 degrees,
so the camera could shoot anywhere. We had so little time to tweak the lighting in-between
shots. It had to work from almost every angle, yet still have depth and contrast.”
“For example, in our motel location, we even used the building itself
to help us push light deep into the room. We bounced our HMIs off the lip of the roof
and that enabled me to shoot 360 degrees without ever seeing a light.”
Using a limited colour spectrum in her images is another consistent feature of her work.
Morano briefs the production design team ahead of shooting
and gives them a palette of colours which they can work within.
Usually these colours are fairly muted, such as earthy browns, whites, soft yellows and greys.
Working within a limited spectrum of colour allows her to better control the image,
as colour blasted randomly and haphazardly throughout a frame
can start to feel careless, less deliberately constructed and less coherently graphic.
Morano’s career has taken place over the transition period from film to digital.
Her earliest 2008 low budget feature film, Frozen River, was recorded on an early digital
cinema camera. Panasonic’s second generation HD Varicam (which has a mouthful of a name).
While other features which she shot around the same time were
mainly captured on 35mm film cameras such as the Panaflex Platinum or Moviecam Compact.
She has a preference for electing 35mm film over digital whenever possible,
although as digital cinema cameras have improved over the years,
especially since the release of the Alexa, she has become less reluctant to shoot digitally.
“I had a learning curb with digital and it took me up to Meadowland to be happy with how it looked.”
“Digital may have refined my lighting overall because
I had to be better at it to make it look good.”
Being able to work with an immediate preview of what the image will look like
on a monitor from a digital camera made her more aware of how far she could push her lighting.
After gaining confidence from shooting darker and with more contrast when using a digital camera,
she could take those lessons and apply them when shooting on film,
where there isn’t always a clear preview image.
She always chooses an Alexa when shooting in digital due to its look.
Another way she compensates for shooting in the digital format
is usually choosing older lenses with strong, expressive bokeh and shooting them wide open.
This isolates the characters from their background
and adds to the personal, intimate feeling of her images.
To further rough up or soften the clean image of the Alexa
she likes using diffusion filters in front of the lenses.
For a scene in Meadowland, she captured tight details with an extremely shallow depth of field
and a dreamy, drifting focus with a Zeiss Proxar
close up filter to evoke an emotional, ethereal feeling from the image.
She selects different lenses for different projects, such as: Lomo anamorphics, Cooke S4s,
Panavision Primos and Zeiss Master Anamorphics.
Even when not shooting with anamorphic glass she likes to frame for the 2.35:1 aspect ratio,
which the majority of her feature projects are shot in.
When shooting on film she usually elects for 35mm Kodak tungsten stocks, such as their 200T or 500T.
Although in the past she did occasionally use Fuji Eterna stocks before they were discontinued.
Creating a specific feeling from an image is a difficult task,
but it’s a skill that Morano that crafted over her career.
She creates a personal connection to the characters on the screen through her combined
use of an intimate and reactively operated camera, with a carefully controlled colour palette, soft
yet dark lighting and choosing gear which produces textural images with a shallow depth of field.
Although she has a deep technical knowledge, it’s her added emotional sensibility and understanding
of the stories which she photographs that makes the images she produces all the more powerful.
I hope you enjoyed this episode of Cinematography Style. If you did please give the video a like and
subscribe for more of this content. Also let me know in the comments if you have any suggestions
for future DPs you’d like to see featured. Until next time, thanks for watching and goodbye.