Cinematographer Gregory Middleton received a Genie Award nomination in 1997 for his first feature. That film was Lynne Stopkewich’s Kissed. He followed that up the next year with another nomination for lensing Raul Sanchez Inglis’ The Falling. This year, the Montreal-born cameraman just may find himself on the Genie short list yet again, this time for his work on Jeremy Podeswa’s The Five Senses.

Middleton, a graduate from film school at the University of British Columbia, spent five years shooting corporate and music videos, as well as serving as camera operator on John Pozer’s The Grocer’s Wife and Mina Shum’s Double Happiness, before finally getting the opportunity to shoot Kissed.

Speaking from his hometown of Vancouver, where he is currently scouting locations for Suspicious River, Stopkewich’s new film, Middleton recounts meeting Podeswa in Merritt, b.c., on the set of Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter: ‘I was doing the helicopter work on that film, and Jeremy was doing publicity work, which he’d been doing for a couple of years after he made his first film [Eclipse]. We met briefly and chatted, but not about The Five Senses, because that was still quite a ways off.’

When it did come time to find a cinematographer for the project, Podeswa remembered the encounter, and impressed with Middleton’s work on Kissed, phoned him from Toronto and sent him the script, which the dop found ‘amazing…Jeremy is a very intelligent, interesting director, so it was the perfect scenario.’

Despite Podeswa’s one feature and some television credits, Middleton would not qualify him as the sort of director who would tell his crew what he wanted in exact technical terms.

‘He would leave it to me to get a lens out on the viewfinder and walk around and say ‘What do you think of this?’ ‘ Middleton recalls. ‘Then he would look through the viewfinder and [tell me what he liked] and why, which is the best part, because that would lead me to understand for future scenes what he is trying to express and what his taste is.’

Maintaining consistency

The Five Senses follows five characters who live or work in the same apartment building, each of whom connects to the world chiefly through one of the senses, and all of whose lives are affected by the disappearance of a little girl in a nearby park.

Since the film shifts among multiple story lines, Podeswa and Middleton were faced with the challenge of finding a distinct visual quality to match each character while maintaining a somewhat consistent look throughout the entire film.

They first settled on an overall color scheme that abounds with cool blue, green and grey tones, achieved through the careful control of what appeared in front of the camera. Production Designer Taavo Soodor’s location decor did not stray from these colors, which meant painting over red signs and fire hydrants, while costume designer Gersha Phillipps dressed the characters up in earth tones.

It is the architecture of the characters’ respective environments that lends each his or her own visual signature. Middleton illustrates: ‘The housekeeper, Robert [Daniel MacIvor], lives in a high-end condo – small, but fancy, neat, and empty, which is the same with the clients for whom he cleans. Their houses are pristine and completely new, with a lot of blank walls, and that style makes a definite statement about them. If you compare that to the eye-doctor who is going deaf, Richard [Philippe Volter], he’s from Europe and often surrounded by a lot of wood paneling – in his office, examining room, and apartment. There’s much more grounding to older European things there. And the cake-designer, Rona [Mary-Louise Parker], lives in a more loft-like place with open shelves, and it’s a bit more eclectic. What’s around her is neat but also a little bit busy, because she’s a busy kind of person.’

Camera, stock selection

Middleton hoped to shoot with an Arriflex BL4s for that camera’s adjustable pitch feature, which can help compensate for the sound of the film passing through the camera, a particular problem in the small, echo-filled locations the production would be using. Because cast members were based all over the world, the expense of bringing them in later for adr would be immense, so the crew had to get usable sound while filming. Unfortunately, with so many concurrent productions in Toronto last November, no BL4s’s were available, and Middleton had to go with a regular Arri BL4.

He believed Kodak stock would remain quiet enough during shooting and so chose its Vision 500T 5279 for interiors, and EXR 5293 for exteriors. The faster film was needed since it would not be very bright at that time of year, and with the film’s tight schedule (25 days), many shooting days would stretch beyond sunset.

Lighting solutions

Many of the film’s interior scenes which transpire in the daytime were actually shot at night, so Middleton would set up light fixtures outside the windows of locations, as with the house where Rona visits her ill mother.

His lighting package included one 18K HMI Fresnel as well as a 6K and two 4K HMI Pars, and the cameraman explains this type of setup as, ‘you use something for sun, and then you do the rest with soft fill, either through the light grid or you bounce.’

A fair bit of light was required for the sequence, yet Middleton had to be cautious about continuity – the scene occurs in the afternoon, and the surrounding exterior scenes were going to be cloudy, so bounce light and not direct light provided the appropriate look.

One of the crew’s trickiest locations was the interior of a church, where call girl Gail (Pascale Bussieres) brings Richard to enjoy the sounds of a choir while he still can. ‘Churches are notoriously difficult,’ according to Middleton, ‘because those pretty stained glass windows are really thick, and require an enormous amount of light to actually shine anything through them or even just to illuminate them so that they look bright, as if it was day outside. The church was not enormous, but we saw a lot of windows, and it was a lot of work.’

He credits gaffer Terry Banting, key grip Dave Erlichman and focus puller Monica Guddat for rising to the occasion on the sequence.

The apartment interior for massage therapist Ruth (Gabrielle Rose) was actually a fifth floor office at the Ontario Heritage Centre on Adelaide St. E. The crew had to strip out a lot of glass inside the space, and its six windows had to be sheared, because in the script the apartment faces the park where the child disappears, but what is actually across the street on Adelaide is a big glass tower.

To provide the necessary daylight, Middleton employed the LRX Dwight Crane, which consists of a five-ton double-axle truck with a built-in crane arm that can ascend 110 feet. Six custom-built 6K Pars are at the top of the unit, each on individual motors that pan and tilt 360 degrees, and the entire assembly pans and tilts as well.

‘We had it parked on the opposite side of the street going straight up in the air,’ Middleton recollects, ‘so that we could get 20 feet to 30 feet above our window height, and get a good angle from the ‘sun’.

‘You can bring a remote control on the set and control it all from inside, which makes it enormously fast. I could focus each light individually on each window, and also vary the look – I could flood them, spot them for early morning, and I could also gel them and warm them up. You can drive the truck up, park it and get the [arm] up and the lights burning in about 20 minutes. It was a very efficient tool.’

These anxious concerns for time and money characterize independent productions, but Middleton wouldn’t have it any other way. ‘I want to work on interesting films,’ he professes. ‘I don’t want to work on a feature just because it’s a feature. I’d much rather pick things by the material and the people I work with. If I wouldn’t pay $10 to see it, I’d rather not work on it.’