This year’s Genie nominees for achievement in cinematography include a flick about a chick who turns into a werewolf, another about two girls discovering themselves (in the biblical sense) at boarding school, an East Coast yarn about the mythical sea, another that takes us to the depths of the Indian Ocean, and a period piece encompassing seven periods.

The horror genre has traditionally given directors of photography juicy material they can sink their teeth into, and, in the case of Ginger Snaps, Thom Best takes full advantage. Best, who previously collaborated with Ginger Snaps director John Fawcett on The Boys Club and who also has the North American Queer as Folk series to his credit, imbued the low-budget film (production budget $3.5 million) with all the slickness one would expect in the Hollywood-dominated genre.

Moody, sensual and bloody, but also with healthy doses of comedy, Ginger Snaps tells the story of a teen girl who must deal simultaneously with the arrival of puberty and her slow metamorphosis into a sort of werewolf.

To convincingly put across the gradual creature transformation, Best worked with Paul Jones, who was in charge of makeup effects. Jones handled all of the film’s subtle prosthetics and provided an animatronic that replaces lead actress Katherine Isabelle when she turns into a full-fledged creature by film’s end.

Best began his career lensing music videos, spots and shorts. He has also worked on MOWs, including the WWII-era U.S. production Run the Wild Fields. He jumped into the director’s chair for last year’s feature Ice Men, and more recently shot Men with Brooms, the curling comedy directed by Paul Gross. This is his first Genie nomination.

Mythical fish story

German DOP Sebastian Edschmid is nominated for Deeply, the feature debut of Toronto writer/director Sheri Elwood. The German/Canadian copro recounts the story of Clare (Julia Brendler), a teenage violinist traumatized by her boyfriend’s accidental death. To put it behind her, she and her mother (Alberta Watson) relocate to the secluded Ironbound Island in Nova Scotia. There, Clare befriends eccentric writer Celia (Lynn Redgrave). Believing it therapeutic, Celia reads the teenager her latest work, an old tale about a curse that depletes the island of its fish until an innocent is sacrificed to the sea. With the visualization of the fish story featuring Kirsten Dunst, the film cuts back and forth between past and present.

Deeply was shot on location on Ironbound, and Edschmid worked with production designers Bill Fleming (Rude, Margaret’s Museum) and Shelly Nieder, also nominated, to emphasize the isolation of the island and the power of nature on the characters’ emotions. Edschmid gets across the wilderness of the surroundings while lending the scenery a mythical glow, especially in the flashback scenes. He had to similarly create two disparate looks within one film in the 1999 German feature Unknown Friend, which also cut between timelines. His other lensing credits include the German shorts Lurch (2001) and Villeneuve (1998).

Gill’s third nom

Nominated for the third consecutive year is Montreal-based Pierre Gill, for Lost and Delirious, the first English-language feature by Quebec director Lea Pool (Emporte-moi). Gill has yet to claim a Genie, but he was a finalist for the Wesley Snipes actioner The Art of War (2000) as well as for the French-language Souvenirs intimes (1999) and Liste noire (1996).

Lost and Delirious, an adaptation of Susan Swan’s novel The Wives of Bath, follows the eye-opening experiences of Mary (Mischa Barton), the new student at an all-girls private school. She soon realizes her two older roomies, Paulie (Piper Perabo) and Tory (Jessica Pare), are engaged in a secret sexual relationship. Tory, after nearly being caught in flagrante delicto by her sister, decides to end the affair, but the obsessed Paulie refuses to be cast aside.

Private schools provide fertile ground for the theme of social conformity, and at times Pool and Gill seem to be visually referencing notable cinematic examples, particularly Lindsay Anderson’s if… (1968), with its convocation gatherings and rooftop violence. In contrast to the film’s bleak denouement, love scenes are shot in a soft light, soft-core porn kind of style. The film sometimes adopts an MTV aesthetic, with heartsick girls staring forlornly at the moon, accompanied by a Lillith Fair soundtrack. A scene in which Tory has a tryst with a boy in a forest is shot with the midnight magic of an R-rated Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Greene avoids cliches

Toronto-based David Greene must have been licking his chops at the chance to shoot Century Hotel with director David Weaver. Working on a budget of $750,000, Greene had the challenge of shooting a single hotel room in various ways to bring to life different generations of people who have passed through it. The risk, of course, was to not slip into period cliche. Greene and Weaver had to devise seven distinct looks and yet maintain some degree of continuity throughout the piece.

Working with production designer Julie Eknes and art director Michael Blecher, Greene shot the 1920s sequence in red and gold, whereas the ’30s has cooler green tones; the ’40s references Edward Hopper paintings with earth tones; the ’50s has a de-saturated, post-film noir look; the ’60s contrasts darkness with colorful psychedelic lamps; and the blue of the ’80s contrasts with a candlelight glow for the late ’90s. Greene’s camera mostly rested on a dolly, allowing the filmmakers to add fluid movement to potentially static material.

Greene’s career soared shortly after his graduation from York University’s film and video department in 1993. He began lensing music videos and commercials while taking on whatever dramatic work he could. Although this is his first Genie nomination, he has been nominated for a Gemini for best photography in a comedy, variety, performing arts program or series five times, winning for Water, Earth, Air, Fire in 1999.

Defending champ Turpin

If anyone is surprised by the nomination of Andre Turpin, it is Turpin himself. Not that the Montreal-based DOP need doubt his abilities – he is, after all, the reigning Genie champion for Denis Villeneuve’s Maelstrom – but in his perfectionist’s outlook, the camerawork on Un Crabe dans la tete was a secondary concern. Turpin wrote and directed the film, and, in his estimation, a director’s attention on the set should be on the actors, not the labor-intensive lighting. Turpin’s decision to be his own cinematographer was largely a cost-saving measure on the $1.7-million film.

The shooting consisted primarily of Turpin’s handheld camerawork and natural lighting in telling the story of Alex, an underwater photographer who is also a compulsive pleaser. The visual high point of the film is the underwater footage set in the Indian Ocean, which the crew actually filmed in Cozumel, Mexico over the course of seven days in the fall of 2000. The smooth, otherworldly shots give the film a look belying its small budget.

Turpin was also nominated in 1997 for his camerawork on Cosmos, an episode of which he also directed. He acknowledges the influence of Villeneuve on his own films, which is apparent in Crabe. Although Crabe’s naturalism has none of the cold grey look prevalent in the opening 30 minutes of Maelstrom, the two filmmakers seem to share a fondness for seafood as a storytelling device. While Maelstrom was narrated by fish on a butcher’s block, Turpin cuts to an image of a crab eating away at a brain every time Alex can’t cope with his emotional situation. Turpin seems to favor a swing-and-tilt lens and camera jitter on these vignettes, as though to inform the viewer that it is a figurative, not literal moment in the film.

The winner will be announced at the Genie Awards Gala Feb. 7 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. The program will be broadcast on CBC.

-www.academy.ca