Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice, but it takes a Canuck flick such as The Divine Ryans to prophesy our annihilation in the form of countless hockey pucks falling from the sky. The sequence, a nightmare of nine-year-old Draper Doyle Ryan (Jordan Harvey), presented director of photography Alwyn Kumst with his biggest challenge on the imX communications feature shot in St. John’s, Nfld.

‘That was good fun,’ recalls Kumst, whose work on the film earned him a nomination for best cinematography at this month’s Genies. ‘Everybody in the crew – wardrobe, makeup, special effects, everybody who could pick up pucks – was standing behind the camera throwing them in the air.’

Additionally, a special effects team led by Karl Simmonds shook pucks out of two cylindrical drums with holes in the bottom, dispensing the black disks on Draper Doyle and his Uncle Reg (British actor Pete Postlethwaite).

In the scene, Draper Doyle dons his goalie equipment and the jersey of his beloved Montreal Canadiens in an effort to stop this so-called ‘Apuckalypse.’ Director Stephen Reynolds insisted on a pov angle from behind the cage of the boy’s helmet, pucks pelting him from above.

In the shot, Kumst, serving as his own camera operator, was actually the one on the receiving end of this rubber hailstorm. He counts this as one reason he was good to his crew, who, armed with pucks, were in a perfect position to vent any hard feelings. He assures us, however, that his colleagues ‘were mostly concerned about my protection.’

The Apuckalypse, which was further enhanced by computer-generated pucks, is one of the film’s few sequences that veers from naturalism in its story of Draper Doyle coping with the suicide of his father (Robert Joy) through the tutelage of Uncle Reg and his love for the Habs, at the peak of their rivalry with the dreaded Toronto Maple Leafs in 1966/67.

Kumst welcomed the realistic tone after two years of shooting the television series The Adventures of Sinbad back in his native South Africa. (He is currently preparing for a second season on the Alliance Atlantis series Peter Benchley’s Amazon.) ‘Sinbad was so effects-driven that when I got [The Divine Ryans] it was so nice – there were hardly any effects apart from the Apuckalypse,’ he explains. ‘It was a straightforward people story.’

Tight schedule

Being hired for this film and subsequently being nominated for a Genie continues six years of success Kumst has enjoyed since relocating to Toronto. He began as a stills photographer, noting, ‘in South Africa, all kids my age were conscripted for military service. Instead of being a trooper, I was running around with cameras.’

From there it was an easy transition to shooting war documentaries, which brought him to such volatile environments as Angola and Nicaragua. On these assignments he developed a skill for quick setups. ‘Working in war zones, you had to think on your feet,’ he comments.

Time was of the essence on The Divine Ryans as well, with a 29-day shooting schedule divided between location work in St. John’s and in the studio at Halifax’s Cinesite. Ten-year-old lead actor Harvey’s days could not extend beyond 10 hours, so if the crew did not finish a scene one day, the next day they would be on to a different location and the opportunity would be lost.

‘We had to really pre-rig the day before,’ Kumst recollects, ‘so that when we started our call time, we could go straight into shooting and go right up until wrap with minimum movement and changeover between sets.’

Kumst’s degree of preparedness was due in large part to nearly one month of preproduction, beginning with numerous conversations with Reynolds, with whom Kumst had previously worked when Reynolds was an assistant director on the series TekWar. ‘Part of my process is to just sit and listen to what the director is thinking, because you can only start making creative suggestions once you know where he’s going with the story,’ the cameraman insists.

‘Otherwise, you’re just making recommendations based on ‘Well, this technique’s previously worked for me’ or ‘That technique…’ ‘

Kumst joined Reynolds and locations manager Gary Swim to scout St. John’s on the $4-million picture. ‘Being there beforehand and having Gary bring us the option of three or four locations before we had to lock it down was great,’ says Kumst. ‘So often this sort of project doesn’t have the money to bring in the dop at that stage.’

B-plan bonus

Reynolds selected locations and had sets painted with a deliberate color scheme in mind. One notable example is the school which Draper Doyle attends for choir and boxing lessons, which boasts striking two-tone green and yellow walls, and which the crew shot as found. The building is actually a bingo hall, which meant they had to shoot around scheduled bingo games.

Kumst initially wanted to light the space by building scaffold towers for lamps he could shine through the windows, which were 45 feet off the ground. Yet time constraints dictated that he opt instead for interior tungsten lights, using 4 20K’s on the mezzanine at the back of the building as his source, with bounces at the opposite end of the hall.

‘With the warmth of the yellow-colored walls, I think the b plan worked out better in the end,’ he concludes.

Reynolds wanted a 360-degree dolly shot around the boxing ring, and with this lighting setup, that meant going from a back-light to a front-light situation and back again. Kumst credits his 500 asa Kodak 5298 film stock with maintaining consistency throughout the sequence.

Although budget considerations prevented him from using a silver retention process in the lab to achieve the deeper blacks he sought for the dark film, a similar effect was achieved by printing on the new Kodak 2393 stock.

The process did have a side effect, however – color oversaturation. The resultant rich hues nevertheless add an apt degree of nostalgia to the period film, suggesting the Technicolor process employed in movies of that era. ‘It was a bonus for us in the end,’ Kumst says. ‘It enhanced the picture.’

Overall, Kumst is pleased both with the look of The Divine Ryans and the collaborative experience shared by himself, Reynolds, producer Christopher Zimmer, and screenwriter Wayne Johnston. In fact, they will soon be sending him another screenplay. ‘Being asked back means you brought something to the table,’ the dop declares.