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Chris Doyle


David Mullen ASC

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That looks like one of those triangular thai pillows. I've seen him do it with a rolled up furni - pad, he called it "Chan Cam" had the grips tape it to his body. He's very quick and agile with the camera in that configuration.

 

Chris is an incredible guy... We worked together in NY 2005 on a music video for "The Strokes" The director ( Mike Palmieri ) and I met him at the hotel bar and talked him into coming to "PLAY" with us for our day 1 of 2. He had been working on "Lady in the Water" and needed to blow off some steam, so he went for it.

 

uhryanddoyle.jpg

 

 

Matt Uhry

www.mattuhry.com

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That looks like one of those triangular thai pillows. I've seen him do it with a rolled up furni - pad, he called it "Chan Cam" had the grips tape it to his body. He's very quick and agile with the camera in that configuration.

 

Chris is an incredible guy... We worked together in NY 2005 on a music video for "The Strokes" The director ( Mike Palmieri ) and I met him at the hotel bar and talked him into coming to "PLAY" with us for our day 1 of 2. He had been working on "Lady in the Water" and needed to blow off some steam, so he went for it.

 

uhryanddoyle.jpg

Matt Uhry

www.mattuhry.com

 

Lucky you.

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Does anyone know which lenses Mr. Doyle favors?

On 'Lady in the Water' where he had the choice he picked Cooke S4s. His HK work was mostly shot on Superspeeds I guess, but then again they probably were the only alternative available to him. '2046' was shot on Panavision anamorphics (C-Series I think) and he did not like the experience. But he probably did not have the best set of lenses on that film.

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What does that mean exactly?

 

I mean that he tends to do a lot of different things and I wouldn't be surprised if he chose different lenses for each film.

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I tried to talk tech with him but he was not into it at all... With me he acted like he knows nothing about any kid of equipment at all, which is obviously not the entire truth. I think he feels that too much obsessing about equipment gets in the way of creativity.

 

Matt Uhry

www.mattuhry.com

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To a certain extent I agree with him. In todays consumer oriented, gadget crazy world, too many people are too gear obsessed. While "how" is important, IMHO, "why" is far more important in the creative process. You could have all the over-exposed Fuji film stock and all the Cookes, Master Primes and beanbag pillows in the world and you still would not have a Chris Doyle look because you are not him and the actress you found is nothing like Maggie Cheung and you don't live in Hong Kong and you didn't eat a cha chaan teng breakfast and your mindset on the day of the shoot is not influenced by the fact that you had to listen to the neighbors play the same whiny, insipid pop song 37 times in a row.

He does not want to tell you that for X scene there were four blondes shot through 216 on a frame bounced off the ceiling because film making is so much more than that.

He would probably rather talk about other things.

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I saw today "2046".

 

Some interesting framing that i saw.

Placing the character(s) extremly

far to the side of the frame:

 

bscap002sq6.jpg

 

bscap006sq2.jpg

 

bscap019lr8.jpg

 

 

Some weird over the shoulder:

 

bscap024hr7.jpg

 

bscap009wn6.jpg

 

 

And...

 

The same extreme placement of

the characters to the side of the frame,

but facing the nearer edge...:

 

bscap001vs9.jpg

 

bscap026zq1.jpg

 

bscap007fv9.jpg

 

bscap004kl1.jpg

 

 

Interesting....

 

Regards

 

 

Igor

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See the frame grabs you just showed us, are a mere fact that , there are no rules in filming . Maybe those shots are not so comfortable to some audience , but to him at that moment it was his creativeness that called in and did the shots.. If we are bound by gear and rules, we will never improve our art.. But then again, you cant just take the camera and do some obscene framing, because whatever art your trying to do it has to be pleasing to a cretin audience, like the shots of Chirs Doyle are quite out there and daring but its nice, it suites the story, i would say it even made the story better.

We should strive to break the bounders of old mind frame, my humble and maybe truly wrong opinion.. :rolleyes:

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  • 3 months later...
I tried to talk tech with him but he was not into it at all... With me he acted like he knows nothing about any kid of equipment at all

 

"Brought up in suburban Sydney, he left Australia at 18 to join the merchant navy. After three years travelling the world on a Norwegian ship, he came ashore again, and lived in India, Israel and Thailand. He then decided to learn Mandarin, and gravitated to Taiwan, where the courses were cheaper than in Hong Kong. (He's now so fluent, he has to say his phone number out loud in Mandarin before he can work out what it is in English.)

 

In Taiwan, he fell in with a group of creatively minded people, one of whom asked him to film an ethnomusicological documentary he was making. He won a prize for his first 35mm film, Edward Yang's That Day on the Beach, at which point he realised he was a professional cinematographer. "That scared the poop out of me. We were just playing around before. So I ran away to France to try and learn competence, and I realised it was all bullshit. You only need a little bit of technical knowledge. Most people can get it in a couple of months. The training of the eye is the real job, and that takes forever."

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"Brought up in suburban Sydney, he left Australia at 18 to join the merchant navy. After three years travelling the world on a Norwegian ship, he came ashore again, and lived in India, Israel and Thailand. He then decided to learn Mandarin, and gravitated to Taiwan, where the courses were cheaper than in Hong Kong. (He's now so fluent, he has to say his phone number out loud in Mandarin before he can work out what it is in English.)

 

In Taiwan, he fell in with a group of creatively minded people, one of whom asked him to film an ethnomusicological documentary he was making. He won a prize for his first 35mm film, Edward Yang's That Day on the Beach, at which point he realised he was a professional cinematographer. "That scared the poop out of me. We were just playing around before. So I ran away to France to try and learn competence, and I realised it was all bullshit. You only need a little bit of technical knowledge. Most people can get it in a couple of months. The training of the eye is the real job, and that takes forever."

 

Doyle was a photographer before. He certainly knew all the issues like aperture, focal length, color temperature, composition, film stocks, etc. I think he's a cinematographer who cares more about intuition than techniques. If people talk to him like filmmaking is all about techniques and gears, I guess he'll fall asleep :lol:

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bscap002sq6.jpg

 

Framing is what I loved best about WKW and Doyle's collaborations. 2046 showcases the most beautiful and artistic framing in any movie I can recall seeing. It's amazing how a frame like this draws your eyes to the subject.

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  • 4 weeks later...
bscap002sq6.jpg

 

2046 showcases the most beautiful and artistic framing in any movie I can recall seeing.

 

Frankly,

I think you need to see more movies, lots and lots of movies before to make such a statement? ^_^

BTW, I didn't like Doyle?s work on Lady in the Water. What happened to him? It seems he didn't fit at all into the studios environment. Also, I was told he hated the all-planned in advance/storyboard approach of Shyamalan...

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Frankly,

I think you need to see more movies, lots and lots of movies before to make such a statement?

 

How patronising! Why can't Tom say what he feels?

 

His statement was '2046 showcases the most beautiful and artistic framing in any movie I can recall seeing'.

 

It's a personal opinion.

 

Who gives you the right to make a judgement and then be so patronising?...

 

Isn't that point about being 'artistic'; you allow yourself to express your own opinions and feelings?

 

Especially in a 'forum' which the dictionary defines as: 'a place, meeting, or medium where ideas and views on a particular issue can be exchanged'...

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For me, one interesting aspect of the framing choices in In the Mood for Love and 2046 is watching the evolution of WKW and Doyle's ideas about framing and composition move and evolve from one picture to the next. What begins in In the Mood (my #3 picture this decade, and #2 for cinematography) is taken to the next level in 2046, and it's a marvel to witness.

 

These films literally astonished me.

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