SeeingEyeBlog

Yesterday Was a Lie is featured on Apple’s trailer site! That means it has potentially had more views today than all the views it has had since it was released.

I’m glad black & white cinematography is becoming more and more accepted. It should be available to filmmakers at every budget level as a creative choice, just as it has been in the past. In fact, the only other piece I’ve had featured on Apple was also B&W. I could go my whole career shooting black and white exclusively. Directors/producers, contact me if you have an upcoming black & white project!

I just recently watched a movie called Mademoiselle, a French-language film from 1966, about a schoolteacher in a bucolic French village, who fancies a man who doesn’t feel the same. So she starts doing things….bad, bad things.

The film was shot in 35mm anamorphic, and was black & white. There is something about the anamorphic format that, when rendered monochrome, creates a better representation of reality than reality itself. I say this about a film which has zero camera moves. No pans, no tilts, no dolly moves, no cranes, no zooms. Yet the photography is stunning.

I’m not sure I would say the same thing if the widescreen 2.35:1 aspect ratio were achieved with a spherical lens format. There is something richer and more textured about the anamorphic squeeze. An anamorphic lens has the field of view characteristics and depth of field characteristics of two different lenses in one. Vertically, it has the characteristics of itself (50mm for example). But horizontally, after the 2x squeeze, it has the characteristics of a lens half its length. This is a departure from reality, and an anamorphic image is a unique way of viewing the world that only really has a place in cinematography. On top of that, black and white is already a big departure from reality. This gives black and white anamorphic cinematography a truly unique vision in the world. A vision I think we should see much more often in films today.

Last year I shot a black and white noir film called Yesterday Was a Lie. It is in post, and I feel honored to have been given the chance to shoot a feature project in black and white. For a cinematographer, that is a rite of passage. Here’s a link to the treatrical trailer. I highly recommend viewing it natively in HD if you have the horsepower.

More stills from Yesterday Was a Lie. These are Chase Masterson and Peter Mayhew.

Yesterday Was a Lie has wrapped its Los Angeles unit, which means we have one final day of principal photography in San Diego. Over the four weeks we’ve gotten some great footage, an I lost at least one belt size. I hope the film does well. Here are some photos from the set: