THE TUESDAY DROP: 2600+ New Shots

09.27.22   Get your Decks ready ShotDeck Team! We’re adding the complete third season of Atlanta, as well as Guava Island, Boyhood, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, and more. Check them out below, and remember you can always request films for future drops by clicking here!

ATLANTA is an American comedy-drama television series created by and starring Donald Glover, and directed by Hiro Murai. Glover plays music manager Earnest “Earn” Marks, and the show follows the lives of him and his client, rapper Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry), alongside their friend Darius (Lakeith Stanfield) and Earn’s on-again, off-again girlfriend Vanessa (Zazie Beetz). The group navigates a seemingly otherworldly version of the Atlanta rap scene. Season 3 of Atlanta premiered in March 2022, and was nominated for Primetime Emmy Awards in the Outstanding Lead Actor (Glover) in a Comedy Series and Outstanding Directing for a Comedy Series (Murai) categories. Six of the ten episodes of the season were shot by Irish cinematographer Stephen Murphy, who was best known at the time for his work on Hanna, No One Gets Out Alive and Death and the Nightingales. 

Murai and Murphy began their collaboration speaking just as much about processes in cinematography as they did about specific references, particularly referencing Harris Savides’s tendency to light spaces rather than faces, and Gordon Willis’s simple approach to framing. Murphy shot the series with a preference for wider frames, believing that the environment around the characters was a crucial element in revealing who they were. One of Murphy’s biggest challenges came in the episode “New Jazz”, where Paper Boi is in a black box room and sees a white woman in white clothes bathed in a pool of light, approaching until it is revealed that there is an audience watching. While the lighting setup was relatively simple, Murphy and his team had to be technically diligent to ensure that both actors were lit so that you could see both of their features without creating too much contrast, given the disparity in their skin tones. 

GUAVA ISLAND (2019)

GUAVA ISLAND is an American musical film directed by Hiro Murai and written by Stephen Glover. The film stars Donald Glover and Rihanna as Deni and Kofi, two people who meet as Deni, a local musician, sets out to throw a music festival for the people of Guava Island to enjoy. Nonso Anozie and Letitia Wright also star. Guava Island premiered at the 2019 Coachella Festival, where Glover was co-headlining as Childish Gambino. Murai worked on the film with American cinematographer Christian Sprenger, who had previously collaborated with Murai and Glover on their television series Atlanta. 

Guava Island shot for 12 days in Cuba, and Sprenger worked there for seven weeks with Murai and Glover setting up the shoot. Sprenger found a relatively robust filmmaking community in Cuba, as a result of G&E houses set up for European commercial shoots, and experiences that members of his own crew had working on projects such as Fast and the Furious and Ray Donovan, which had filmed in Cuba before. Sprenger, Murai and Glover initially planned on shooting in 16mm film, but found the import / export laws of Cuba from America too burdensome to be able to pull it off. An episode of Atlanta had been shot on the Alexa Amira with Super 16 lenses, before being printed on film and scanned back in for the DI, and Sprenger had also taken this approach for a commercial shoot in Paris, working with colorist Ricky Gausis at MPC LA to accomplish the look. This gave the team the confidence that they could achieve a similar result by using the Alexa LF camera, using Kodak Vision3 500T 5219 35mm stock to print out the digital footage. The process of printing digital footage out onto film and then scanning it back added both contrast and grain to the image, and Sprenger and his team were cautious to ensure that he didn’t underexpose images too far (particularly for night scenes) and thereby end up with shots that were too noisy. Sprenger and Gausis built a hero LUT for set that gave everyone an accurate representation of the final look they were aiming for, and a version that would be hyper-protective of their night photography, pushing them to overexpose slightly so that they retained enough detail to not damage the image with grain by the time it got out of the printing process. 

BOYHOOD (2014)

Richard Linklater’s 2014 epic coming-of-age drama BOYHOOD follows Mason Evans Jr. (Ellar Coltrane) from the ages of six to eighteen as he grows up in Texas, along with his divorced parents (Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette) and his sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater). Boyhood was shot with the same actors over the same 12 year period over which the story takes place, with production beginning in 2002 and concluding in 2013. Boyhood premiered at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival and won the Silver Bear for Best Director at the Berlin International Film Festival. It was later nominated for six Academy Awards including Best Picture, winning in the Best Supporting Actress category (Arquette). Linklater worked on the film with American cinematographers Lee Daniel and Shane Kelly. Daniel had previously worked with Linklater on Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise, SubUrbia, Before Sunset and Fast Food Nation.

Linklater, Daniels and Kelly faced an obvious challenge making Boyhood to create a visual language for the film that could remain consistent across the 12 years of filming. Unsatisfied with the quality of digital cameras at the time that production commenced, Linklater and the DPs decided to shoot the entire movie on 35mm film, trusting that it would give the movie a consistent look and feel. The team would shoot for three or four days per year, and Linklater and editor Sandra Adair would then edit the footage, using that time to plan and write the next year’s scenes. Given that Daniel and Kelly took over for each other over the course of filming, they took the approach of allowing the moment to happen, rather than trying to have the actors serve their lighting schemes. Linklater had a process that involved a lot of rehearsal and a lot of shooting, and by the end of the 12 years, Daniel and Kelly had shot over 100 hours of footage that was progressively edited down into the final film.

ONE SINGS, THE OTHER DOESN’T (1977)

Agnés Varda’s 1977 film ONE SINGS, THE OTHER DOESN’T is a French drama focusing on the lives of Pomme (Valérie Mairesse), an aspiring singer, and Suzanne (Thérèse Liotard), a struggling mother, as they search for their own identity against the backdrop of the Women’s Movement in 1970s France. The film also stars Ali Rafie and Robert Dadiès. Like many of Varda’s films, One Sings, The Other Doesn’t has become synonymous with Varda’s bold, collage-like style of mixing filmmaking styles and approaches, and is a landmark of 70s feminist cinema. 

Production for One Sings, the Other Doesn’t took place in 1976. An initial version had been written to take place in 1972, but Varda abandoned it, wanting to focus on how women she knew in the feminist movement were moving towards living well, rather than making a film that only highlighted the bad things happening to women in society. Like her previous film Daguerreotypes, Varda did the voiceover for this film, and for One Sings, the Other Doesn’t, Varda also aimed to create a pastiche of filmmaking styles by combining dream and documentary into the narrative of the movie. One of the ways she achieved this effect was by mixing “songs that dreamily articulate feminist thoughts” with images of real women at a shelter.

THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS (2018)

Joel and Ethan Coen’s 2018 Western anthology film, THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS, tells six tales of life and violence in the Old West, following a singing gunslinger, a bank robber, a traveling impresario, an elderly prospector, a wagon train, and a perverse pair of bounty hunters. The film features an ensemble cast including Tyne Daly, James Franco, Brendan Gleeson, Grainger Hines, Zoe Kazan, Liam Neeson, Tim Blake Nelson, Chelcie Ross, Saul Rubinek and Tom Waits. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs premiered at the Venice International Film Festival, where it won the Golden Osella Award for Best Screenplay, and was later nominated for Academy Awards in the Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Costume Design and Best Original Song categories. The Coen brothers worked on the film with French cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, who they had previously worked with on their segment of Paris, je t’aime and on Inside Llewyn Davis. Delbonnel was also known for his work on films such as Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Big Eyes and Darkest Hour. 

Given the film’s over 800 visual effects shots and late magic hour shoots, combined with the physical and practical challenges the crew would face filming in isolated, unsheltered vistas, the Coen brothers and Delbonnel agreed to shoot The Ballad of Buster Scruggs digitally, making this the first film of the Coens’ career to be filmed this way. Delbonnel shot over 70% of the film using a 27mm lens, using this as the primary unifying technique for the visual language of the film across its six anthological short films. This use of wider lenses created a close collaboration between Delbonnel and production designer Jess Gonchor, where they would often have discussions about making rooms smaller than originally planned given the way they would be seen on a 27mm lens.

THE YOUNG GIRLS OF ROCHEFORT (1967)

THE YOUNG GIRLS OF ROCHEFORT is a 1967 French musical comedy written and directed by Jacques Demy. The film follows two sisters, Delphine and Solange (played by real-life sisters Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac), as they leave their small seaside town of Rochefort in search of romance. Hired as carnival singers, one falls for an American musician, while the other searches for her ideal partner. The Young Girls of Rochefort also stars George Chakiris, Jacques Perrin, Gene Kelly and Danielle Darrieux. The Young Girls of Rochefort grossed over $8 million and was nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Scoring of a Musical Picture – Original or Adaptation category. Demy worked on the film with French production designer Bernard Evein, who was also known for his work on films such as Cleo from 5 to 7, Woman Times Seven and The Young Girls Turn 25. 

Demy and Evein wanted to pay homage to Hollywood’s Golden Age of musicals with The Young Girls of Rochefort. They wanted a candy-colored palette with bright colors that created vibrant frames to capture the journey of the two young women at the heart of the story with spots of color. Evein repainted over 1,000 window shutters in the provincial town where the film took place to enliven its colors. The Young Girls of Rochefort was restored in 2014, with color grading overseen by Demy’s widow, Agnés Varda. The film has become one of the most influential musicals of all time, with its opening scene depicting a traveling carnival loading onto a suspended transport bridge becoming a touchstone reference point for the highway opening musical number of films such as Damien Chazelle’s 2016 film La La Land.

CAPTAIN MARVEL (2019)

CAPTAIN MARVEL is a 2019 American superhero film based on the Marvel Comics character Carol Danvers / Captain Marvel. The film was co-written and directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, and stars Brie Larson as the titular character, alongside Samuel L. Jackson, Ben Mendelsohn, Djimon Hounsou, Lee Pace, Lashana Lynch, Gemma Chan, Annette Bening, Clark Gregg and Jude Law. The film is set in 1995 and follows Danvers as she becomes Captain Marvel after Earth is caught in the center of a galactic conflict between two alien civilizations. Captain Marvel premiered in London in February of 2019 and grossed over $1.1 billion from its $150-75 million budget, making it the first female-led superhero film to gross over $1 billion. Boden and Fleck worked with British cinematographer Ben Davis on the film. Davis was best known at the time for his work on films such as Seven Psychopaths, Guardians of the Galaxy, Avengers: Age of Ultron and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. 

Davis opted to shoot the film primarily on the Alexa 65 camera, largely because of the way that it captured the intricacy of the period elements of the production design and costume design in the film. Having previously shot the Marvel films Guardians of the Galaxy and Avengers: Age of Ultron, Davis knew there was a point of departure with the 90s setting of Captain Marvel, and after experimenting with post-production techniques, decided to try to create a period look and feel in-camera as much as possible. Davis initially tried using vintage Cooke Panchro and Canon K-35 lenses on the Alexa 65 body, but they weren’t compatible with the large format Arri system, and Davis eventually enlisted Dan Sasaki of Panavision to design new lenses for the period scenes that would work with the camera.