‘It was one of my best experiences in filmmaking,’ says veteran British director of photography Chris Seager of his gig lensing the Canada/U.K. supernatural thriller White Noise.

Coproduced by Vancouver’s Brightlight Pictures (60%) and the U.K. branch of Gold Circle Films (40%) in association with Universal Pictures, White Noise had, at press time, taken in US$44 million at the North American box office. TVA Films is the Canadian distributor, recording nearly $3.3 million at the till so far.

Seager is pleasantly surprised by the film’s success, acknowledging that White Noise didn’t resonate well with many critics.

‘It certainly is a very scary film, and has a good look and feel about it, even though at times I felt the story could have been developed more,’ he says on the phone from his home in London.

White Noise stars Michael Keaton as Jonathan Rivers, a man devastated by the death of his wife Anna (played by Canadian Chandra West), who is murdered after a kidnapping. Rivers opens a passage to the supernatural, attempting to contact his dead wife through ‘electronic voice phenomena,’ whereby the dead communicate with the living via household recording devices.

Seager has been in the film and TV biz for more than 30 years, beginning his career at the Guildford School of Art in England before joining BBC Television as a trainee studio camera operator. Over the past 17 years, his credits have included many British TV series, minis and MOWs, including last year’s U.K./Canada copro Sex Traffic.

Seager’s work on White Noise marked many firsts for the cameraman, as he had never worked in Canada before, nor collaborated with director Geoffrey Sax, a fellow Brit.

‘Geoff and I were going to work together on a BBC drama, and had actually started prepping it when the show got pulled,’ he recalls. ‘We just clicked. Geoff is a very visual person, with a warmth about him, and we share a similar sense of humor.’

Seager and Sax began preproduction in London, where most of the scripting, planning and storyboards were completed, before flying to Vancouver to scout locations.

‘I like to have a lot of input in locations, because it’s important that they have the right feel,’ says the DOP. ‘I especially look at the position of windows and the angle of the venue.’

White Noise was filmed entirely in Vancouver in September and October 2003 over a period of 33 days. Exteriors were filmed around the city’s downtown core, while Vancouver Film Studios and Woodwards, a former department-store-turned-warehouse, were used for interiors.

As far as the film’s look goes, Seager’s goal was to make the production appear more expensive than it is.

‘It’s a relatively low-budget film in terms of American big-budget movies – between $10 million and $12 million,’ he notes. ‘But we wanted to give it a Hollywood look, make it more glossy and more mainstream than an independent film.’

Seager says that’s the reason the production shot in the 2.35:1 widescreen anamorphic format. ‘We wanted to use the frame as much as we could and give it some space, width and size through spectacular wide shots,’ he explains.

Two lighting styles

Seager adopted two lighting styles for White Noise, since the opening scenes of the film depict a very happy life for the couple.

‘I used soft lighting at the onset to give it a friendly, glossy and warm feel,’ he says. ‘But after his wife is kidnapped and Jonathan moves to a new apartment, we start chilling things down by making it colder, analytical and more contrasty, as the blacks become blacker and whites whiter.’

The lighting kit at the DOP’s disposal included 18K HMIs, 7K Xenons and various tungsten fixtures.

A big fan of the works of painters Rembrandt and Caravaggio, Seager believes a cinematographer’s job is to ‘paint’ with light. ‘I tend to like sharp lighting coming from three-quarters back across the set, and I use light sources primarily from windows and doorways,’ he explains. ‘Inside, I don’t do too much – mainly soft lighting from Kino Flos or a bit of bounce lighting.’

Seager, Sax and film editor Nick Arthurs were the production’s only non-Canadian crew members. The DOP is full of praise for his Canadian team, adding that he couldn’t have done the film without gaffer John Dekker and key grip Michael Taschereau.

‘I prefer the Canadian crew system, because in Britain we don’t have both a key grip and gaffer,’ says Seager. ‘It gives me added freedom to do more.’

The production had two Panavision cameras fitted with Primo lenses operating at all times, and Seager says both were utilized as much as possible. ‘The second unit filmed insert close-ups or picked up shots we couldn’t pick up because of time constraints,’ he recalls.

Having what Seager calls a ‘proactive camera’ became imperative to avoid static, boring shots, especially in the ‘EVP’ room, where Rivers tries to contact his wife through a TV monitor, and where 30% of the film takes place. ‘We had quite a mixture of crane, Steadicam and dolly shots to float around the EVP room, which was built on a stage where we took the walls out,’ he explains. ‘We moved the camera around to avoid it becoming TV screen after TV screen.’

With Seager’s hands full with the lighting, Marty McInally operated both camera and Steadicam.

Film stocks included Kodak Vision2 5218 500T, a particular favorite of Seager’s, and Vision 5246 250D.

‘I knew my lighting would be quite contrasty, so I wanted a stock to help me in that sense,’ he says. ‘Vision 5218 possesses more latitude and is more forgiving, while making it quite difficult to really overexpose an area, and I really wanted to get detail in overexposed areas.’

The DOP spent more than two weeks color-timing White Noise at London’s Pepper post facility. Stargate Digital in Los Angeles handled CGI and VFX, while Technicolor Vancouver produced the release print negative.

Seager is currently working on the BBC MOW Girl in the Café, written by Richard Curtis (Bridget Jones’s Diary, Love Actually).

-www.whitenoisemovie.com