1 The Director of Photography – an overview

2
The DP’s preparation
Research
Many pictures require specific, detailed research, particularly if they
are period pieces, or if the director asks for a certain style or look.With
the run-up and preparation times currently being scheduled, however,
there is often too little time to research your subject properly. It is therefore
useful to accumulate a store of reference material or to have a
good idea where such material can be found. This can help not just
with preparing for a shoot, but also with an initial interview for a picture.
Discussing a script you only received 24 hours earlier with a
director who has been living with it for months can be a lot easier if
you have an understanding of the script’s context and can knowledgeably
refer to images that relate to that script.
Regular visits to second-hand bookstores can provide a useful
library of old picture books at very little cost. Several years before I
needed them, I acquired a marvellous set of books covering the years
of the Second World War almost entirely comprising of photographs
taken at the time with minimal captions; there is a book for each year.
Some five or so years later, I was asked to shoot a picture which
opened with men in a train returning from the Dieppe raid of 1942
with flashbacks of the men being rescued from the waters along the
French coast. My set of books provided pictures of men actually in oilcovered
water being picked out of a life raft after that raid, a picture of
a woman waiting for a train containing survivors of that raid and one
of people using an underground station as a bomb shelter. All these
scenes were scenes in the script I had been offered and I was able to
base my interpretation of the script on them.
While it is the DP’s job to interpret the script and the director’s
vision of that script, it is an immense help if you can base your imagined
pictures on reality – it brings a greater believability to the finished film.
Old photographic books are useful (as well as quite fun) to collect, as
are books of fashion photographs. With old photographs it is often as
useful to imagine why the picture is shot and styled in a certain way,
as this puts one’s thinking into the mind of the original photographer
and you can begin to feel more of the mood of the times.
7