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“I started in dance, and later studied color theory and art history. Movement and visual expression now combine in my work. I work 50 percent instinctively and the other half scientifically. You have to blend those things together. I try to be intuitive with lighting and really see things for the first time, and that’s the fun, painterly part. Then there is knowing that the images have to be of a certain quality and how to achieve that. The film stocks are so good now, and if you take them to a digital intermediate, you have a whole world of creativity that we never had before. It’s an exciting time. The movies that I really love make me feel like I’m in another world. I think you can achieve that in many different ways, and it doesn’t necessarily mean realistic. It’s more evocative. As long as the impression that people receive from it feels real, then you have succeeded.”
Kim Derko csc studied art at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver, and apprenticed at the National Film Board in Montreal. She has photographed art projects that were displayed at the Guggenheim Museum and the Venice Biennale, and has more than 20 narrative credits as a director of photography, including the television productions Show Me Yours and Dark Oracle, and the independent features Kardia, Interviews With My Next Girlfriend, The Law of Enclosures, A Winter Tale and I, Claudia. Her work on the performance film Youkali Hotel won a 2004 Gemini Award. Derko has also directed three feature films and several music videos.
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Where are you from and how did you become interested in cinematography?
I was born in Edmonton and I grew up in Vancouver. My dad is a barber. I got into cinematography completely by accident. I studied dance very seriously from a very young age. I thought I was going to be a dancer. Then I went to art school at a place called Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, which is quite a fine school. I was studying art history and color theory and set the dance aside. I took a photography class and I took home some old equipment they were throwing out. I decided I wanted to do something, so I shot some Super 8 film of Eadweard Muybridge’s horses, the famous early photographic motion capture experiments. I went to Alpha Cine in Vancouver and they gave me what I needed to do the processing. I figured it out in a mad scientist kind of way. I took each frame and animated it and it turned out really great. I took a film class, and I started getting the bug for it.
When did it occur to you that this might be a career?
In my final year I entered an apprenticeship program in Montreal that was set up to train women in unusual fields related to the film industry. I applied with my little films, and to my surprise I was accepted. It was fantastic. I worked as an apprentice camerawoman for a whole year. I was able to follow these old-school documentary filmmakers around. They were very knowledgeable. I learned a lot by working at the National Film Board. In documentary filmmaking, you learn how to edit in your head while you’re doing it. I think that is a really valuable tool for a cinematographer for storytelling.
Did you work your way up through the crew system?
Later, I came to Toronto and started working in the industry on features and music videos. I was a camera assistant on a few shows. I had friends from art school who were making films, so I just started shooting. I had, and I still have, a lot of artist friends I work with who do time-based visual art that’s put in art galleries rather than cinemas. I worked for a few famous artists, and I shot projects for artists that were shown at the Guggenheim and at the Biennale in Venice. That was great because I was able to work with people who were very adventurous.
Does your background in dance affect your work as a cinematographer?
I love to operate, and I think that my background in dance has influenced how I do that. It’s hard to put it succinctly, but I started in dance, and then I went to art school and studied color theory and art history. All those things – movement and the visual expression – combine in my work. Film is a time-based medium, and the reason that it’s in time is there is light that is changing. The thing that separates motion pictures from still images is the fact that they are caught in time. Film is a really temporal medium that can fix a set of times. Light moving as the sun moves around the planet every day is a really big part of that movement. You can add the fact that the camera is moving in that time. That’s unlike a still image, which is just a moment or a series of moments. That temporal nature is part of dance as well. Not only is the camera moving, but light is also moving, even if it’s just the sun moving around the earth. It can be barely moving, but you can also use effects to show time passing more dramatically.
How does your experience in the art world inform your cinematography?
With anything – art, feature films, TV series – you walk in as a cinematographer listening to the director, trying to pull out of them how they want to do this. Rather than having a style that you use all the time, you have to really talk with that person and try to discover how they want to do it. Some artists I’ve worked with haven’t been filmmakers, and they have unusual ways of expressing how they might want to approach the shoot. That’s been an amazing training ground for dealing with regular film directors. Often, visual artists who make films don’t have school training, and they don’t have the language. They know what they want, but they articulate it in sometimes fabulous ways, and sometimes in ways that require really good listening. I think I gleaned that from working with artists. I enjoy that immensely because it’s different every time.
It’s sometimes said that cinematographers are half artist, half engineer. Do you agree?
You have to blend those things together. When you’re rehearsing or lighting a scene, it’s the former. All this new technology comes into the pre-visualization you didn’t have before. You don’t want to lock yourself into not catching something that you see that’s better than your idea. I try to be intuitive on the set with lighting and really see things for the first time, and that’s the fun, painterly part. Then there’s knowing that the images have to be of a certain quality, up to a certain standard, and knowing how to achieve that.
What’s your take on recent developments in filmmaking technology?
The CSC did a symposium last week on Super 16. We’ve all been talking about HD, various versions of 3-perf 35 mm, regular 35 mm, whatever, and how they get dumped into DIs. There are so many formats right now, and so much hybrid work. Often a director will want Super 8, video and 35 mm all in the same project. I shot a TV series in HD last year, and I enjoyed it, but I have to say as a visual person, right now the best thing that’s happening is that Super 16 and 3-perf 35 are excellent originating formats, especially when combined with the digital intermediate process. The technology is so good. It’s worlds of creativity that you don’t have in an optical, or the old telecine transfers for TV programs. I think right now the optimum path is to shoot on film, transfer it to HD, and project or broadcast digitally. The results on projects I’ve done that way in the last year are really amazing. I think that HD will continue to evolve, but right now originating in film looks so much better. It’s dealing with what I call an optical form versus an electronic form. Each can work with a certain subject and type of shooting. But speaking of pure visual quality, I’m very happy working on film. The film stocks are so good now. If you pair them with other new technologies like the Cooke S4 lenses, you end up with such great resolution, even with a Super 16 image. If you take that to a good 2K or 3K DI, you have got a whole world of creativity there that we never had before. It’s an exciting time.
You’ve done several Super 16, DI projects. What have you learned about the process over the course of them?
I’ve shot three independent features on Super 16 in the last few years. One of the problems with that is when you go into the DI, it’s like a candy shop. You could spend months painting forever with this new technology, because there are so many possibilities. But you can’t. The producer sets the timeline in the budget. In my first DI, I wanted to do all this stuff that I knew I could do, but there were 500 cuts in the first reel. I can’t spend the full two weeks on the first reel, and then rush through the other reels in five minutes. Part of it is learning how to use the tools. I do try to make a timeline now. But now that I’ve tiptoed through it, I know I’m always going to bring an image that’s pretty close to the creative direction anyway. We’re not just shooting films blank, plain and clean, and then doing all this stuff in post to give them a style. I’ve learned that you’ve got to bring a good original in there. Shoot as much of the style as you can, and while the DI can help you adjust things if you get in trouble, don’t rely on it for that.
Can you tell us about a recent project?
I recently shot a feature called Kardia. It’s a beautiful film. The main character goes through a series of memories that are all in very different times. The director and I decided to do extreme visual differences, to depict these timelines with extreme use of color. We really went crazy. I had so much fun.
We did one memory scene, a beautiful scene, where a man finds a baby in a snow bank. The period is sort of late 1950s. We tinted those scenes with a very heavy cyan tone. We shot this whole film with a lot of swing shift lenses that we used very subtly to make, for example, someone standing up appear a little crooked—very small details. Then we used color as a big wide paintbrush. We used an older, discontinued film stock to increase the grain on that, which is a bit of a bizarre thing to do in Super 16. It worked beautifully. We were able to exaggerate the idea that this was a historical memory from the past. It communicated that idea without using sepia tone or something more conventional, like calendar pages flying by.
Then we did something really radical on the 1950s interior of this man’s house. I did a ton of tests before we began shooting, and just on a whim I shot some of the daylight-balanced 7205 stock with tungsten light. My gaffer was worried that we wouldn’t have enough stop but I said, ‘What the heck?’ We started talking about it and did a series of tests where we just tinted our tungsten lights slightly blue to see what that looked like. The scenes came out a beautiful suede chocolate color. We ended up getting bigger lights and putting blue on them, and shooting daylight stock in those interiors. It was crazy, but the look is sumptuous and very distinct. We didn’t have to do very much DI on it at all. We basically just left it. It was a great experiment. It looks very period without a lot of the conventions.
How does your work mesh with that of your collaborators?
A director can pre-visualize and tell you how they envision the color and even the contrast or the feeling of something. But when you’re actually there shooting, if you can be awake or there to see it all, and the performance and the sets and whatever it is that you’re filming is happening in a good way, then you end up being more inspired to do something even better than what you visualized. It’s the whole team experiencing the make-believe in time together, instead of one writer on paper, the director on computer, the meeting between the DP and the director. Everybody is all together and it’s real now. The movies that I really love, make me feel like I’m in another world—that movie’s own world. I think you can achieve that in many different ways, and it doesn’t necessarily mean realistic. It’s more evocative. As long as the impression that people receive from it feels real, then you’ve succeeded. |
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