October 10, 2012 · News

Unbearable

I’m on my way to shoot a nice little short film that tells a story of love and betrayal between two teddy bears! The mastermind behind all this is the writer/director Nick Luddington whose script about bear-love was shortlisted during the 50 Kisses Competition.

http://www.londonscreenwritersfestival.com/50-kisses/

I’m setting off to do this with a great team of collaborators ready to give up their weekend with the families to make history with this little furry piece. Funnily enough our lovely Production Designer Clare Porrit has found the perfect two bears, that for some weird coincidence are from the same brand (European ’nuff said) of my daughter’s favourite teddy (Tommy for her).

The hope is to make it to the final selection of films made from the shortlisted scripts and have a spot in the final feature that will then be released.

Once again this is all being made possible by our great producer Emma Sturgis.

 

September 27, 2012 · Video

Spot the war!

Ok, as first post on this new blog of mine I decided to show a very old video I shot while I was attending film school in Rome, it must’ve been 2002 (ten years already!). It was shot with a low end interlaced DV consumer camera, which was all we could get. At the time we were lucky enough to shoot 35mm film only at school, but the school itself was not going to pay for some student project, so all we could land was that cheap number. The video is very bare with no sound, but somehow I’m fond of it. It’s quite frightening that it still makes a lot of sense: in ten years not many things have changed (nor they had in many hundreds of years actually). It can be oil or something else but wars are usually fought for something that it’s sadly most often not freedom for the people involved. We still managed to shoot it within the school’s sound stage during a lunch break, stealing some white wall interior bits from a previous scene built there for the yearly year-end short films as well as scramble an oil barrel from the nearest petrol station where we would usually top up our cars’ tanks once a week, and finally fake blood of course. The light must’ve been some 2K tungsten fresnel from top back with the fill given by the bounce on the white linoleum base underneath the barrel.

September 25, 2012 · Uncategorized

Welcome to my new site!

It’s with great pleasure that I’m launching my new website, with a new design and lots of new content. On top of my work as a cinematographer, that can be seen in the page ‘Works’, I’ve added a ‘Stills’ section to showcase some of the pictures I’ve been taking in my (very limited) spare time. I’m by no means a pro stills photographer, as I do it for my own pleasure and not for a living, although lighting and composition are my bread and butter as you might have guessed. I only hope that you will enjoy them – they’re ment to amuse you and show a different side of me. I miss a lot my old darkroom, the smell of chemicals and the thrill of watching the image appearing right in front of my eyes, as well as all the fun dodging and burning and the rest of it. I now mostly shoot digital and post on Lightroom. As it happens nowadays most of the time I DoP, I do it using a digital movie camera, ending up the post on Baselight, DaVinci and the likes – depending on the post house. Honestly though, as much as I love film – every medium has its highs and lows and for a certain type of project digital capture has become invaluable. The good old 35mm though it’s still a top shooting format, especially for image capture, and should not be dismissed just yet. On this site you’ll also find an ‘Imagery’ section that is meant to be just a visual page for stills coupled with quotes or thoughts that have come to inspire me, I hope I’ll think/shoot/find/borrow many more of those to keep the page fresh. Last but not least I decided to include the ‘Blog’ section, which may sound silly but it could be an opportunity to share my thoughts with you as well as behind the scenes pictures, technical tips and news about what I’m working on as well as any other thing that comes to mind. Honestly it’s not the first time that I try blogging and it hasn’t gone well so far, as I’ve never found the time to keep it up. This time I’ll try harder. I hope you’ll enjoy my works. Best, L.

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