A scene from the movie.
“Cinematography essentially is all about working with light and colours. It must be every cinematographer’s dream therefore to have a project on which their colour range isn’t just limited to shades of the widely-used ‘warm’ and ‘cold’ but extended to embrace the entire spectrum of pinks, purples, greens, oranges, reds and yellows; all the colours of the rainbow in effect. That’s exactly the dream― but also the challenge― that was presented to Danish DP Sebastian Winterø.
Sebastian has just wrapped on a feature film called Love Is In The Air which went on general release in summer. Love Is In The Air is a tour de force of song and dance and drama and colours. It examines the twists and turns of relationships between four main characters at a teenage party.
For the director, Simon Staho, it was essential that light and especially coloured light represented the energy of life itself in this film. Simon wanted to create a unique and extreme look in terms of richness and saturation and wanted colours to reflect and comment on the emotions of the actors in a very direct way. The colours would evolve and shift during individual scenes as the story turned. He also wished to achieve everything in camera in order to see and sense the colours and animated effects and also to inspire the actors and crew.
A scene from the movie.
DP Sebastian Winterø admits that this was a challenge that stretched his usual cinematic approach and one which forced him to rethink his methods. Together with his trusted gaffer, Martin Riello, the pair set out to investigate and test equipment, gels and techniques for, as Sebastian says, “we needed to come up with a plan that would allow us to wash everything in the frame with richly coloured light as well as accommodate individual effects such as colour changes, moving flares, animated light effects and projections.”
“Most of the shoot was nights and interiors,” he continued, “which at first hand made our job easier as we had total control, a new black canvas to paint everyday, but with all the saturation we needed, all the gels in our package would reduce the output from a unit to a fraction which ultimately made the rigging job very extensive and demanding. 10Ks and Dinos suddenly acted as 2Ks and 5Ks and I had to embrace white walls and shiny surfaces, something you usually try and avoid. We ended up getting most of the equipment from theatre and stage rentals, working with moving heads, lasers and color-changing LEDs. The job was challenging from me because there were so many elements to consider. Everything reacts to coloured light; red makeup would turn black in green light, skin and other surfaces worked and reflected in unexpected ways, so too did flares because of all the colour bouncing around in the lens.”
A scene from the movie.
“After extensive testing, we decided on film as an originating medium,” explains Winterø. “We had to be able to render all colours all the way through the full spectrum and every format but film produced too much noise in some part of the colour range. Digital formats couldn’t handle the deep saturation at all. I used KODAK VISION3 500T Color Negative Film 5219 and with the extended latitude of a camera negative, I knew I was able to get everything, every detail to the grading suite as opposed to the poorer colour depth of shooting digital. Accurate exposure is critical with colours that are saturated this heavily and because of film I felt comfortable that we could bring out the full potential of every colour. Film also allowed me to work faster as it was able to tolerate any rigging flaws without me having to adjust gels and lights.”
“Looking back on this now,” concluded Winterø “Love Is In The Air was an amazing journey and I have never learned so much from a single project. I had to dismiss all the usual and comfortable tools that I would usually rely on because none of them would help me here.”
