DR MARTENS FW19 - GLOBAL CAMPAIGN, DIR. ALEX DE MORA, PROD. WAS STUDIOS - NAKHANE & SISTREN, 35mm & 16mm
Director/Photographer Alex de Mora had been experimenting with redscale 35mm photography and asked if I’d be up for trying the same on 35mm motion picture film. Agency We Are Social were very supportive of us and allowed a lot of testing in the run up to the shoot. 1t AC Thomas Nicholson was super knowledgable and enthusiastic with this project and together we tested loads of different film stocks and 35mm cameras at Panavision London.
Conceptually, we wanted to visually demonstrate breaking through barriers, creative, psychological, societal or otherwise - and the liberation that evokes. This required a strong establishing world, (16mm Black and White) and then a powerful and disruptive look for transition (35mm reversed/redscale). Cinelab London supplied the 35mm stock then rewound and reversed it for us in Lab conditions, so that we could load it into the camera mags normally but would be shooting through the film protective backing and expositing the red layer of film first. Chemically the red layer, the most sensitive, is layered first on the stock, with Green and Blue on top, hence the massive Red bias.
So that the medium truly fit the message, we had to take some risks ourselves in this film, and since none of the cameras were designed to take film incorrectly loaded, and the protective backing took out a massive 5 stops of sensitivity from the stock, there was a large degree of experimentation involved. However from our tests we decided that Tungsten balanced film (500T) gave us the nicest tones of red and yellow at the point of exposure, the more you exposed the negative (sometimes 7 stops over-exposed) the more you eat into the other layers. We also played with shutter phasing, de-synching the shutter to create that surreal smudge/teleportation effect, to add more chaos. Finally colourist Tim Smith at Cheat then finished the film for us, bringing everything into a harmonious place and emphasising beautifully the move from the two worlds.
