Until going fully CG is as cheap as shooting live action, we need to remember that the most important relationship on the film set will continue to be the one between the director and the cinematographer.

One hundred years ago, director D.W. Griffith and his trusted cameraman Billy Bitzer pioneered such avant-garde techniques as the close-up, backlighting and location shooting in the dead of winter in New Jersey. In fact, Bitzer was the first to shoot an entire film using artificial light. Together they changed the art and craft of movies.

Flash forward to 2007, and pre-vizzing and the digital intermediate (DI) have replaced the need to risk body and soul for a shot, or wait for the perfect light to gracefully appear during the misnamed magic hour (which lasts about 30 minutes).

A few years from now, light may be something we manufacture exclusively in post along with downtown New York and the ageless, archived version of Brad Pitt. It’s worth noting, then, that the masters of the light and camera angles are not the guys sitting in front of their keyboards and monitors, but the ones who can interpret light and shadow and explain to a producer why an LRX rig with 6 12K lights and a 100-foot ladder is a better option than doubling the crew for one month of night shoots in the mud.

But we’re on the slippery part of a steep technology curve. As vaunted a publication as American Cinematographer devoted an entire supplement in May to the strain put on the director/DOP/production designer relationship as the production process goes digital.

‘There’s been a seismic shift in the preproduction process of recent films that has disrupted this core relationship,’ wrote the co-chairs of the American Society of Cinematographers technology committee. ‘Digital technology with its exponential pace has us all scrambling to keep up, and has created a new insular approach to the knowledge base within each craft.’

But which is more important in telling a movie story: the camera or the computer? The answer is already a little blurry.

‘When I was a student I used to do photography – I was doing my pictures in my darkroom,’ says one of Canada’s foremost masters of light, Pierre Gill (The Rocket), currently shooting the $6.5-million period thriller Rivard with longtime collaborator, director Charles Binamé (see story, p.16). ‘You could dodge the sky, make it darker, or even make the foreground brighter. Now the DI is exactly the same – with 200,000 more tools.’

Gill loves the DI, having used it in post for the past five years. Don Carmody, a producer with around 100 film credits who recently worked with Gill on big Hollywood FX film Outlander, is more pragmatic.

‘It’s a great process, but it’s time consuming and expensive,’ says Carmody. ‘We’re talking about a quarter-of-a-million-dollar line item. And then if you have to throw in another 10 grand for the DP [during that process], it hurts.’

Carmody points out that not so long ago, the cinematographer would meet with the color timer to do the color correction on the final answer print – which meant watching the movie twice. With the DI, it can take a week or two. ‘If the DPs are complaining that we’re not willing to pay for that – well, we aren’t,’ he says. ‘No one needs you sitting there. Just tell the guy what to do, the way we used to do it.’

Gill was instrumental in ensuring that an ambitious shooting schedule on Outlander came in on time, but does Carmody see the role of the cinematographer changing for the worse, given the advance of the digital production pipeline?

‘It’s still very collaborative with the director,’ he maintains. ‘Some directors are smart enough to take advantage of a good DP, and some aren’t.’

Gill isn’t so sure that’s the only issue.

‘It’s like working with commercials, where you sometimes use animatics – little drawings. When they start shooting, they say, ‘In the animatic, the shot was higher.’ You’re like ‘It’s a fucking drawing. Can’t we shoot something and create it?’ If you do too much [planning of] stuff, you cut the creative energy of the production. That’s one of the downsides of [digital technology].’

Gill adds that if the director isn’t visual, then he’s going to ask the FX supervisor to come up with a lot of things, which leads to the feature film version of the animatic – the pre-viz. This ‘virtual’ construct of scenes with CG is sometimes created months before the DOP even arrives on the production, and can be expensive and labor-intensive.

The FX guys might be showing up in preproduction earlier and earlier, but the way movies were made back in the day when Griffith and Bitzer went to war together remains the same. You write it. You shoot it. And you edit it. Gill calls it the three acts of creation, where the DOP and director are joined at the hip for most of the process. But there’s a digital challenge to that relationship that needs to be monitored.

‘It’s frustrating, because as a cinematographer my job and my skill is to find the nice angle and the nice camera movement,’ says Gill. ‘A guy that’s working on the computer is really skilled at doing amazing stuff with 3D, but it doesn’t mean that he’s going to know exactly how to create a shot.’

Producers must ensure they don’t cut the DOP out of the picture. They’re the only ones who know how to turn on the lights when the theater goes dark.