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THE LAKE (1994)FORMAT: 35mm Anamorphic Location: Former East Germany A young German tires to kill a Jewish woman as his initiation into a neo-nazi gang ...... but the tables are dramatically turned when the woman must decide whether to try and save her attacker's life. THE OLD WITH THE NEWComments by the Director of Photography, Peter Gray THE LAKE is the second part of a trilogy of short films by director, Garry Lane, where the story is told visually without dialogue. They are not silent films however, as music and other general sounds help to underline and expand the story. Part one of the trilogy, THE STREAM, and part three, THE BRIDGE, can be found in the photo gallery via these direct links. On this project, I was able to exploit a wonderful old technique once used extensively by black and white cinematographers. You can control the overall contrast of the images by varying the development time of the film negative. The main location was a wooden jetty jutting into a beautiful lake from a thickly forested shoreline. The jetty was bathed in bright summer sunshine for half the shooting day, then plunged into shadow cast by the trees for the remaining part of the day. So matching all the shots in terms of lighting contrast throughout the day was a very difficult task indeed. However, by increasing the image contrast for the shots in shadow, and reducing the image contrast for the shots in bright sunlight, we were able to get a remarkably close match. Close enough that the audience is not aware the scenes were shot over a period of several days with widely varying natural lighting conditions. I shot with the East German black and white film stock, Orwo NP77. Of all the black and white film stocks I've shot over the years, I have to admit this is the one I like the least. I was particularly unhappy with the rendition of the "blacks" in the image, and the stock is very much on the grainy side. Funnily enough, I found the video prints looking better than the film prints of the movie ..... the opposite of what you would expect. When re-timed to video, the images had better looking contrast compared to the original film contrast. Perhaps it is a blessing that Orwo stocks are no longer manufactured, although the company has a very interesting history. It was the old Agfa factory, then ended up on the other side of the iron curtain with the division of Germany after the second world war. Award: ACS SILVER AWARD for Cinematography, 1995 Invited to Official Competition Program:
Peter Gray
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