‘I’d never shot on high-definition before,’ says Montreal cinematographer Eric Cayla of the Media Principia feature The Baroness and the Pig. ‘I would have been more than happy to shoot on 35mm, but when I was approached to shoot in HD, it added something new to the project and I liked the challenge.’

Cayla, a two-time Genie Award nominee, hooked up with Baroness writer and first-time feature director Michael Mackenzie to craft the HD feature, the budget of which he estimates at more than $5 million. Director Tim Southam, with whom Cayla has collaborated on films including the forthcoming The Bay of Love and Sorrows, had referred the cameraman to Mackenzie and producer Bob Krupinsky.

‘They [Mackenzie and executive producer Daniel Langlois] needed a DOP who was ready to leave film aside to pursue the digital format,’ Cayla explains.

The Baroness and the Pig is a drama set in Paris at the end of the 19th century. ‘It’s a love story, but it’s also a story about how we adapt to change and progress,’ Cayla says.

Hollywood actress Patricia Clarkson (a recent Emmy winner for Six Feet Under) plays a wealthy American baroness who tries to join – and reinvent – the Parisian salon set. She favors the technological advancements of the time – especially electricity and photography, as do the filmmakers – but her ideas are dismissed by French aristocrats.

The cast also includes Colm Feore (Trudeau) as the Baroness’ manipulative husband and Caroline Dhavernas (Lost and Delirious) as Emily, an enfant sauvage raised by farmyard animals (the pig of the title), whom the baroness tries to shape into a housemaid.

The film was shot over 35 days in 1999 in a Hungarian castle three hours out of Budapest. ‘The production was looking for a location that would have the architecture of Paris for the 1890 period. They also needed a location that wouldn’t cost an arm and a leg,’ Cayla says. Additional street scenes were shot in the old city of Quebec.

Cayla spent a week in Hungary for preproduction, capturing a great number of images. Upon his return, the DOP continued to prepare shots with production designer Ben van Os and costume designer Maryse Bienvenu. ‘The look of the film depended largely on Impressionist paintings and old photographs,’ the cinematographer says. The uppermost concern was how HD would respond to different textures and colors in the costumes, art design and wall paintings.

‘The HD look was cold in the beginning,’ Cayla recalls. ‘But we had to find a way to make it work. There are so many things you can do with those cameras – you can change the setup of the colors, the whites and blacks, and by doing all those changes within the camera you come up with something that works for you. It isn’t film but something different.’

The crew shot with the Sony HDW 700A 1080i camcorder. ‘It has a very ‘video,’ very crisp look,’ remarks Cayla. ‘With the 24p, on the other hand, you get more of a film look. The challenge was to make the movie work with a video look, without thinking ‘film look.”

Keen eye

Cayla’s keen eye for visuals developed at an early age. ‘I started taking photographs at 14, mostly of nature and abstract forms,’ he recalls. After studying communications at Montreal’s Concordia University for one year, he decided to go to the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, where he focused all his energy on the art of cinematography.

The DOP says he prefers shooting features to TV. ‘You can spend more time researching the look for the story. The director can create more complex mise-en-scene with the actors, which in turn challenges me more with the lighting and camera setups,’ he explains.

Cayla says his collaboration with Mackenzie was smooth, due largely to extensive preparation and Mackenzie’s strong background in theatre. ‘He knew what he wanted as a storyteller. He had an idea and vision he wanted to explore, but with the actual execution I had more input creatively than [I would have] with a director more experienced in film.’

The feature was shot with a single camera, manned by Cayla, resting on a conventional dolly. ‘Since the preparation with the director was so intense and because of the way we were shooting the scenes, there would have been disadvantages to having a camera operator,’ Cayla notes.

Mackenzie wanted to experiment with the visuals and have them treated digitally in post. Although when the film screened at the Toronto International Film Festival it was piped in via satellite and projected digitally, the producers also made a 35mm transfer. The DOP was excited to see how HD would respond to the process.

‘The transition was surprising,’ he says. ‘We discovered that the resolution wasn’t as pure once transferred to 35mm. But it was astonishingly superior to transferring Super 16 to 35mm.’

Cayla says that capturing on HD video allowed him to sleep better at night. ‘If you’re exploring and trying something new with film, it’s worrisome because you’re always wondering if you’ve pushed the camera too far, since you’re only going to see the results the next day. Whereas with HD [the image] is there, you don’t worry about it because you know what you have.’

The archival look employed in some scenes, incorporating black-and-white and sepia tones, was decided upon in post-production.

‘When we were shooting, the idea was to give it a de-saturated look through the colors or to accentuate certain colors, like warm ones in some situations. But in post it was adjusted to perfection. We treated the image in black and white and gave it certain grains,’ Cayla explains.

The production required 10 to 25 setups per day. ‘One of the disadvantages to shooting in HD is that the organization is greater and the process takes longer,’ the cinematographer says. ‘The other disadvantage is in the hardware, meaning the choice of lenses and cameras. In film you have so many different [kinds of] cameras, if you want to have a camera in a certain place, or if you want slow motion, you have all those tools, whereas with HD, for now, you’re limited.’

For a scene with Emily running through a forest, the crew wanted to slow down the image, but their technique resulted in a skipping effect. ‘Slow motion in HD doesn’t respond the same way as in film. In the end, we accentuated that skipping to create an effect. There are other skipping effects in the film that we didn’t really want, but it is part of the medium.’

The DOP employed a similar mindset with the film’s lighting. ‘You have to conceptualize the same way [with HD as with film]. But technically, to get the same result, there are differences in the way you diffuse the light. I found that I had to diffuse a little more,’ he explains.

According to Cayla, Langlois, the founder of Principia and Pixel Systems, which set up the satellite transmissions at TIFF, played a major role in creative decisions. ‘He wanted to explore new ventures with The Baroness and the Pig through its HD usage. In the daily process he wasn’t there, he let us do our thing. But he was very precise on the overall product and where he wanted it to go.’

Cayla’s most recent project is Silent Night, a Hallmark MOW produced by Muse Entertainment in Montreal.

The Baroness and the Pig will be the closing film of the Montreal International Festival of New Cinema and New Media on Oct. 20, and will be released Nov. 22 in Montreal and shortly thereafter in Toronto, Vancouver and Ottawa.

-www.baronessandthepig.com