Cinematography Style: Ben Richardson

INTRODUCTION

Ben Richardson’s cinematography has subtly evolved from an organic, looser, handheld look, to a bit of a cleaner, smoother style. However, his photography has also maintained a naturalistic feel to it that makes it seem that what is happening on screen is true to life. 

Let’s explore how his career has evolved, all the way from his start in animation, to working on some of the most popular contemporary long form television series by breaking down his philosophy on cinematography and some of the gear he uses to achieve his look.  

BACKGROUND

Ben Richardson’s first adventure into cinema didn’t start with live action filmmaking, but rather with animation. He moved from England to Prague where he found a close knit creative community, as well as a low cost of living, that allowed him to work and survive outside of the industry system of filmmaking. There he directed and shot the animated short film Seed.

“For me animation was a way to have a kind of control without having to have a huge budget. You could accomplish things with animation kind of with just sheer will power. You know, you’re literally crafting every frame. You don’t need a lot of light. You don’t need a lot of equipment.”

In Prague he met his first major creative partner, director Benh Zeitlin, who was also there looking to make an animated short. They later worked together on the live action short film Glory At Sea - a stylistic precursor to their first feature Beasts Of The Southern Wild.

There are some notable similarities between the animated short Richardson shot and directed and the first feature that he photographed: both were shot on a textural 16mm film medium, both featured a handmade, cobbled together, art direction aesthetic and a neutral colour palette with greys, blues and browns.

PHILOSOPHY

Richardson’s work on the feature also incorporated another key thread in his work: the ability to visually translate the feeling of a character and their performance to the screen. 

“I just remember having this experience of how she felt on screen and how you could translate the presence of this amazing little performer in the room to the camera. And it was the very subtle sort of movements and the way you framed her and the way you sort of held her that just, sort of, really translated what we could all feel in her physical presence into the screen image.”

Creating images that truly capture the feeling of the actor’s performance is a big focus of his. 

Whether that was with the rough, loose handheld work on Beasts Of The Southern Wild that always chased around the character, keeping the camera low to the ground at her eye level to better empathise with her perspective of the world, or whether it was by using more smoothly operated camera work and long telephoto lenses to compress more hardened, calculated characters against the landscapes and make them looming and ever present in Yellowstone.

Whatever cinematic perspective he uses, his approach to photography is never heavy handed or reliant on stylised visual tricks.

A technique I noticed he often uses when framing is incorporating foreground elements into the shot. So, instead of shooting a ‘clean’ shot without any elements placed between the subject and the camera, he’ll often place something in the foreground of the shot while keeping the focus deep on the subject.

To me, this has two functions. For one it creates a bit more depth in the frame and makes images feel less flat and more dimensional. It can also create quite an objective feeling, like the camera and therefore the audience is a silent observer, crouching in the grass or sitting across the room watching a scene play out. 

Richardson almost always shoots and lights in a way that is very naturalistic and tries to suck the viewer into the story, so that the camera’s presence is unnoticeable and offers as little distraction as possible.

His films often rely on shooting in real locations, rather than studios, use natural palettes which aren’t overly vibrant, and, most importantly, lights spaces in a naturalistic way - which truly represents the way the locations feel in real life, in much the same way as he tries to capture the feeling of actor’s performances.     

“The references we were looking at in terms of colour palette and the lighting side of cinematography were very naturalistic and I definitely wanted to work with that and I wanted to work with as much natural light as possible. And what that really came down to was just a tremendous amount of tech scouting, making sure that I knew exactly where and when the sun was going to be doing the things we wanted it to be doing.”

This process of observing how the natural light interacts with each shooting location, and using that to schedule the perfect shooting time for each scene is a great way of controlling lighting conditions without having any lights. 

Because these shooting windows were quite narrow on Beasts Of The Southern Wild this did mean any time they ran over schedule they significantly cut into their available shooting time. Such as this complex fishing scene - which they shot in the final 17 minutes of light remaining in the day. Covering the action with a single, long take in the wide shot and scrambing together the rest of the coverage with the final 11 minutes of light to spare.

GEAR

When working with a small crew and limited gear, the best way to light is to manipulate the light already present in a space by making small tweaks to balance it. In other words controlling how bright or how dim the light is in certain parts of the frame.

“Even simple things like opening and closing doors, you know, switching out a 25 watt bulb for a 15 watt bulb in the corner and, you know, tiny little shifts to keep balancing this place but all driven by this attempt to be very naturalistic and give the environments room to breath in the same way that the performances were.”

To preserve continuity and enhance the naturalistic look on other long form projects like The Mare Of Easttown, he used larger tungsten light sources to recreate the feeling of sunshine - specifically 10Ks and 20Ks. 

Rather than shining these directly through windows he used CRLS aluminium bounce reflectors. These little panels act like mirrors that you can use to bounce hard light sources - but because they are made from polished aluminium rather than glass they reflect light with a slightly softer quality.

You can also use them to increase the distance between the source and the subject by placing the reflectors outside the window, and then the lamp away from the window pointed at the reflector. This creates less fall off and gives the light the quality of natural sunlight.

Because real ambient sunlight indoors comes from the sun bouncing off different objects in a room - it has quite a broad, soft, low intensity. Therefore most of his day-interior lighting tries to mimic this soft, spread out quality.

While his day-exteriors usually just use whatever the natural light is doing - whether that is hard, direct sunshine, or a dimmer, diffused cloud cover. Like most DPs when shooting with hard sunshine the characters are often blocked and positioned so that the sun either lights them from the side or from behind as a backlight.

When it comes to cameras, most of his feature films have been shot with a single camera. However, because television series, with their many episodes, usually need to be shot quite quickly with quite a lot of coverage, he’ll often have to bring in multiple cameras. 

Yellowstone used three cameras - Arri Alexa Minis - to cover scenes. Normally when using so many cameras it makes it a bit practically easier to use zoom lenses. This is because the position of one or two cameras may need to shift so that the other cameras won’t see them. Having a zoom lens, rather than a prime, lets the camera operators then adjust the frame by zooming in or out just a little bit to avoid getting the other cameras in shot.

However, Richardson liked to shoot with fixed prime lenses - the Zeiss Ultra Primes. Knowing what prime lens was on each camera helped him structure the scenes more easily and know what coverage he would be getting - even if he wasn’t looking at every shot on a monitor. 

For example, if he put A cam on a 24mm Ultra Prime and B cam on a 135mm lens, he knew he was getting one wide shot and one close up. However if he had both A and B cam on a 24-290mm Angenieux zoom lens, the operators would be able to zoom in and out and pick up different shots at different focal lengths in a way that may have been a little less focused and deliberate.

Richardson often likes to choose longer, telephoto focal length lenses. This is especially noticeable on shows like Yellowstone - where he would shoot close ups of characters on 135mm or even 180mm prime lenses. 

Even wide shots, which are more often shot with wider angle lenses, he likes to shoot on telephoto lenses. This compresses the image - making it feel like the background landscapes are closer to the characters than they actually are. Because using a longer focal length means placing the camera further away from the actors to get a wide shot, it also means that these shots will often incorporate some foreground elements between the camera and the actors - which we mentioned before.    

Unlike some DPs that only like using old vintage lenses with interesting swirling characteristics, anamorphic bokeh or heavy flares, Richardson often prefers spherical glass which is a bit more modern, consistent, sharp, and preserves some shape of the background in the bokeh. These lenses include the Zeiss Ultra Primes, Zeiss Master Primes, or Leica Summilux-Cs.

Again, this look pushes a naturalistic feel rather than an overly stylistic one.

Other than Beasts Of The Southern Wild, which was shot on 16mm film, he almost always uses a Super 35 digital Alexa: like the Mini or the XT.

He’s also used basically the same LUT file over his past 5 projects with the Alexa, to get a consistent, natural colour look that he’s happy with.