ABSTRACT

Birthdays, an early HD production, is an 8-minute short intended for the UK cinemas and to be shown at film festivals in order to progress the young team’s careers. There was simply not enough in the budget to shoot on 35 mm and as it was intended for cinema presentation it would not have been made if High Definition (HD) had not just arrived. On this occasion I agreed to be the Director of Photography (DP) as I liked the Director, Chris Atkins, and his company Stage 2 Screen. He had also written the script, and it gave me the opportunity to shoot without making any concessions to trying to make HD look like film. I would light the picture like film but would use no diffusion and would not vary the camera settings from the Panavision recommended settings for a write-out to film. This way I would discover what HD, when shown both as digital projection and as 35 mm film, would look like.