Cinematography Style: Polly Morgan

INTRODUCTION

“Stories that really excite me are the stories that are really representative of the human experience. The pain and the suffering or the joy and the love and all of these things that we all go through as people.”

Polly Morgan’s work as a cinematographer lies at the intersection between naturalism and traditionalism. Her work is fueled by capturing an expression of human experiences while at the same time often embracing a more traditionally cinematic style of working. 

This video will unpack this further by going over how she got her start in the industry, looking at her philosophy on capturing images and breaking down some of the gear which she has used to do so.  

BACKGROUND

“As a young girl I was always just a massive fan of movies. When I was 13 I was lucky enough to experience a film crew come onto our farm house and using it as base camp. You know, they let me look through the camera and it was really then that my love of cinematography was born.”

To turn this early dream into a reality took some time and a lot of work. After getting a Bachelor of Arts in broadcasting where she got hands-on experience with operating cameras, she spent about 10 years working in film as a crew member.

One of her early jobs in the industry was working as a production assistant for RSA, Ridley Scott’s commercial production company. After putting in time as a PA she worked as a camera trainee and then moved up to working as a loader. As an assistant she worked on some big studio films, such as Inception, and worked for many well known DPs such as Haris Zambarloukos, Wally Pfister and Dan Mindel.

This experience allowed her to study at the AFI Conservatory, after which she was able to launch into a career as a cinematographer - first shooting independent movies, before progressively shooting larger studio films.

PHILOSOPHY

When she starts a new project she’ll work closely with the director in pre-production to determine the emotional arc of the story, and then find a visual camera language that is representative of that story and the characters in it.

Her goal, along with the director she is collaborating with, is to craft a look that embodies a feeling. A look that supports the story so well that it becomes invisible to the audience, to the point that they are unaware that their emotions and impressions of the story are being manipulated by the camerawork.

“The one thing about cinematography is you don’t want the viewer to be aware of it. You don’t want someone to watch a film and say, ‘uh, the film was terrible but wow that cinematography.’ Because my job is to serve the story. My job is not to make beautiful imagery. If you’re telling a story how do you want the viewer to feel?” 

This look and feeling that she creates may be different depending on what the subject matter and genre she is working on is. Suspenseful horror may involve a more creeping movement and a darkly exposed image, whereas a lighthearted comedy will have a brighter colour palette, lighter exposure and a more stable camera. 

Perhaps her ability to alternate between different techniques and working styles comes from her diverse filmography. 

“I think I’ve been incredibly fortunate in that I managed to shoot commercials, TV, feature films and documentaries. It means that you’re working with a variety of budgets and you’re working with a variety of crew size and a variety of time.”

Although she is capable of changing the look of the cinematography to suit the story, I feel like at the core of her look she balances naturalistic feeling techniques - such as using natural, soft light and handheld movement - with more traditional, conventional, classical techniques - like using longer focal lengths for close ups, smooth cinematic movement or using a blue-ish moonlight and haze look for night exteriors. 

In this way she goes between using newer school techniques and more traditional techniques to tell stories.

So much of the role of the DP involves focusing on the technical side of creating images, but an equally important part which she focuses on is how she manages people to get the most from her crew and create the right on set environment.

“It takes a crew of people to make a film. It’s not just being an artist. You also have to be a manager and you have to be a leader. It’s just a juggle of, like, how to get the best out of people. How to be, sort of like, a collaborator and how to be a mediator. If people see the people that they are working for get stressed out or lose their cool, I think then it really creates an atmosphere which is not a conducive one to do good work.” 

GEAR

Since I keep mentioning how she contrasts naturalistic techniques with more traditional ones - let me break this down a bit by defining some examples of how, and with what gear, she does this. 

Let’s look at her lighting, starting with the naturalistic side. Ambient light which is not from artificially created human fixtures, tends to be quite a soft source of illumination. Natural sunlight often bounces off various objects, like walls, grass, or even the moon. Because bounced light is less direct, it is softer. Therefore she often uses softer, diffused or bounced sources of light to create a naturalistic feel.

“A more modern approach to lighting has been softer light. Now that we have more sensitive cameras and we don’t have to worry like they did 100 years ago on very slow film stocks, we don’t have to light with very strong, hard light.”

An example of her using a more sensitive camera can be found in 6 Balloons, which she shot on the Panasonic Varicam 35 - one of the earliest high end cinema cameras to feature a dual base ISO that went up to 5,000.

Having such a sensitive camera meant that she could use minimal lighting for night scenes on the street to achieve a more realistic look - which felt the real world light sources as they passed. For car driving scenes, which were shot on a process trailer, she accentuated the natural light by rigging RGB Arri Skypanels on the trailer outside the car to create the look of stop lights.

For other films she’s also leaned heavily into a soft, diffused, more neutral, natural, pretty ambient light look - especially for day exteriors.  She’s flipped this convention in other stories, by lighting scenes using a more traditional, old school convention - blue backlit moonlight with haze.

On A Quiet Place II, she shot on a far less sensitive Kodak 500T film stock, which she rated at 400 ISO. Shooting at 400 ISO, compared to 5,000 meant that she needed much more light to expose the image properly.  She used a combination of large HMI units and the high output LED Skypanel 360 - which she brought to a colour temperature of 4,400K. When shot with the 3,200K film stock it produced a cool, blue look. 

In a traditional, old Hollywood style, she backlit the actors with these hard sources, so that the lights were facing towards the camera. This subtly lifts the background and leaves characters in silhouette, illuminated by an edgy highlight. She then added haze, which accentuates the light source and raises the exposure of the midtones in the background - when the smoke is hit by light. 

This technique of creating a cool moonlight is quite a conventional way of lighting night exteriors. Even on other movies which she’s shot digitally, such as The Woman King, she’s repeated this technique. 

So her lighting of night scenes is one way that she has contrasted more naturalistic photography with a more conventional approach. Another technique is how she uses camera movement. The films that she shoots often have a rougher, on the shoulder, handheld movement which track the character with a more documentary-esque feeling of naturalism. 

She contrasts this with smooth, fluid, camera moves done on dollies, Steadicam or a Technocrane which are more conventionally cinematic. 

When it comes to choosing a camera, she’s opted for both film and digital acquisition before. She’s used film cameras, such Panavision’s Millennium XL2, with Kodak 250D and 500T stocks. However, she mainly uses digital cameras. Some examples include Panavision’s DXL2, the Alexa 65, Mini and Mini LF and Panasonic’s Varicam 35.

Likewise she’s used both anamorphic lenses, like the T-Series and Cooke Xtal Express, and spherical lenses, like the Panavision Primo 70s and the Zeiss Super Speeds.

She’s often drawn to Panavision glass and even shot Where The Crawdads Sing on unreleased prototype large format spherical lenses made by Panavision which had imperfections, focus falloff and a softness to them which are reminiscent of anamorphic glass - again, evoking a more textured, organic, naturalistic feeling.    

While, at the same time, she often uses longer focal length lenses for close ups, another more traditional technique.