Quantum of Solace

2008

This moto, or moving-photograph, was produced as an ad for Quantum of Solace. I believe it was the first use of this idea in advertising. It appeared at all the screen sites on the London Underground and on big screens in Times Sq. and on Hollywood Blvd.

It’s a really simple concept. We use a high resolution video camera and shoot a short clip which has still frames that look like photos. You then lay it out like a poster and insert the animation.

Rather than looking like what it is, a short video clip on loop, people tend to equate the presentation and layout with still images and think “That poster is moving”. It’s a cool effect which gets a lot of attention.

On set we discovered that the original Red One (camera) over heated and shut down when left on its side for extended periods of time (something they since fixed) so ended up surrounding it with ice-packs and fans to stop it from powering down.

You can shoot a moto with any camera, you don’t need a Red. The stills off a Red look great and I don’t know what a still taken from a Canon 5D MkII looks like after processing and it needs to look photographic to work. Resolution isn’t the problem. Motos are displayed on HD monitors so you don’t need a 4K file to start with.

The reaction to this was really good. It was the beginning of a trend and that’s really satisfying.

—Greg Williams (with Samuel Agboola)

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Garrett Hedlund

June 12th, 2010

This was shot at night on the top of a skyscraper in downtown LA. There’s no depth of field because I’m almost wide open. If I’d been at f1.2 the lovely baubles of light would be perfectly round, but as I’m at f1.8 they’re a little hexagonal because this lens doesn’t have the nine curved blades you need for truly circular wide apertures.

I’m always confused when people ask questions like “Did you use flash here?” You could light this with strobes but why? I don’t use strobes at all as a rule anymore but I used to, and I prided myself on how natural I could make them look. People have forgotten why we used flash to begin with.

In the old days they used to open the shutter, fire the flash and close the shutter to take the shot. Sync-flash allows you to use very small, very bright, “explosive” light sources. For a millisecond they give you light output like an 18,000 watt HMI. The point of speedlights was not to replicate natural lighting. It was to compensate for equipment and film-stock that couldn’t get images in any other way. It used to be a technical requirement. Now it’s more an artistic choice. Using strobes to replicate the kind of darkness in this shot when digital cameras can give you clean high-ISO’s is pointless to me. 

Learning to look at a photo, and break down in your mind how it was lit, is a skill which will speed up your learning process massively. Once you can read light you can replicate it. 

The smaller the light-source, the harder the shadows; the larger the light source the softer the shadows. When I say large i don’t mean power. I mean the physical size of the light. Put a diffuser 3ft square in front of a torch and it becomes a 9 sq. ft light source. In this case, there were some security lights on the roof so we stuck one up in front of him, one further back behind him and glazed them with a bit of frost. Simple. In other images I used my iPad as a light source.
You can tell from the shadow coming off Garrett’s nose that, if he’s looking at twelve o’clock, the key-light is at ten forty five. If you look at the edges of the shadows you can see the light on his neck is soft and the light on his nose is hard.

You can also see how dark it is; the burning cigarette is bright enough to illuminate his nose and mouth. It was a pretty dangerous shutter speed. I was firing bursts of threes shots for stability and this was a middle frame.

The blur in this shot makes it feel more real. The perfect definition that’s possible with good cameras and tripods isn’t how we see. Especially at night when we don’t see much color. I want my photos to make you feel as if you’re there. That’s one reason why sometimes you have to work to make images as imperfect as our memories are. People are used to photography now and are less easily fooled by what they see. There’s a reason that movies degrade images if they want you to feel you’re “in the action”. 
My shots are simple. There is an idea that you need a specific camera, or bit of technology, to take a great picture. You don’t. You don’t even need much knowledge, just the confidence to keep it simple and trust your instincts.

When I was a kid, one of the reasons I got into photography was that I was a kit monster. The cameras, lenses, bayonet mounts and film fascinated me. Thinking about how I was going to carry the film, how to keep it dry and from getting too hot was fun. Camera’s can be boys toys, they’re like guns in that regard, and it’s what drives the camera market. People always want the latest technology. I do too, I’m a sucker for it.

For years I craved cameras that could do what they promised and allow me to shoot in any lighting and record an honest impression of what I saw. What’s odd is that now I’ve got cameras which actually do what it says on the tin, the gear doesn’t interest me nearly as much as it did. 

—Greg Williams (with Samuel Agboola)

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Jacqueline Fernandez

2011

I shot this for Vogue India with a RED Epic digital cinema camera at The Glass House in Highgate Cemetery, London. The green light is coming through the glass floor above. We just shone a light at it and just went with the green hue it gave us.

This composition relied on keeping that light off the male model and in shadow. We had a reflector giving some light and shape to the post he’s leaning against but deliberately kept him in silhouette.

We shot a sequence on the Red and pulled stills from it to use as the spread in the magazine. I was shooting through a 24mm Canon lens and there’s a little perspective distortion you can see if you look closely. I also shot some stills on a Canon 1Ds Mk III and the magazine ended up using a mixture of both in the layout.

I used two systems because they give different feels. This shot doesn’t feel like a still, because of the chip size and the way the camera processes the image, it feels like a still from a movie and a lot less like a fashion shot which is what I wanted.

I shoot most things wide open, below f2, and I light for what I see in camera, as opposed to planning for a extra layer of post production grading.

I don’t light differently for different skin tones. Skin’s just a texture you throw light against. When I’m shooting two systems simultaneously, as in this case, I generally use the same continuous lighting for everything.

I don’t worry about the technical stuff too much, I just worry about the content. So many people put their effort into trying to create technical perfection and I don’t think that’s aesthetically interesting. It’s not real. Nothing’s perfect.

—Greg Williams (with Samuel Agboola)

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Tell Tale

2010

In January of 2010 I made two short films with with my commercials regular producer Bob Ford. Sgt. Slaughter, My Big Brother, starring Tom Hardy, called which is currently on the festival circuit (Another post, another time – Sam), and Tell Tale starring Carla Gugino.

Tell Tale is an erotic film noir loosely based on Edgar Allen Poe’s Tell-Tale Heart. It was written by Sebastian Gutierrez using ideas he, Carla and I came up with together. I’d shot Sgt. Slaughter three weeks before and I financed both films myself, pulling in a lot of favors in the process.

Making films is a team effort and I lit it alongside a guy who’s assisted me for years called Steve Nelson, who I met when he was on the camera team for Quantum of Solace. My lighting technician Steve Jackson, who I have also worked closely with for years, was the gaffer.

I was set to shoot a portrait session with Carla and discussed using use the Red (Epic video) camera to capture some motos. We thought “Why not give it a bit of a narrative?” and it grew from there. Originally it was going to be a minute long but we ended up with a short film.

We shot Tell Tale in Los Angeles and Red kindly let us use their studios and cameras, one reason this is the first film ever shot using the Red Epic. We had a very early prototype strapped to a trolley with several computers and 12 technicians attached to it checking it was all working. Several shots we took with it made it into the film.

It took three frantic days to finish and our last one ran 21 hours which is completely unsustainable. A great crew can carry a first time director when they stumble. You realise that though you can’t know everything, between them, the crew do. With the right people you get dragged along the most extraordinary accelerated learning curve. I am very proud of the job I did and I cannot thank the crew enough. You make short films to learn lessons and I learned a lot.

When I look at the finished film there’s not a lot I’d change. I know I shot too much coverage, because I wasn’t confident enough about what not to include, and as a photographer I’m always thinking “This is a great angle and that’s a great angle”, so naturally I shot them all. It was a mistake.

We setup ten different angles on the interview scene and only used four or five. On a short film, which you’re paying for yourself, the last thing you want to do is not use half the shots you’ve taken. It means I spent three or more hours of my life, and everyone else’s – because I’m only paying costs so no one’s making money – on images that didn’t don’t make it into the film. That was the big lesson.

Carla’s very giving and she was really supportive and brought a lot of experience to the set. She was a real producer as well as actress and very involved in getting the film made. I think she’s amazing. People talk a lot about how sexy she is. She’s also a really great actress. Very good at her job.

People like Tell-Tale. It’s won a couple of awards. Best Cinematography at The New York Short Film Festival, Best Screenplay and Best Cinematography at The Burbank International Film Festival, and Carla was nominated for Best Actress at The Burbank International Film Festival as well.

I invested a significant amount of my own money, effort, and reputation to get the film made. It’s had about 200,000 views on Vimeo. My Daisy Lowe video, which I didn’t even think about until I was actually shooting stills with her and cost next-to-nothing, has had over four million. That’s a big difference. It says a lot about people’s desire to concentrate for more than a couple of minutes when watching video online. It also proves that however cliched it sounds, “sex sells”.

Ultimately you don’t make short films to count their views on the web. You make them to prove you can handle narrative. I am hoping to shoot my first feature film later this year and my short films have helped enormously with that process. They’re an education.

—Greg Williams (with Samuel Agboola)

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Tahar Rahim

7th September, 2011

Tahar is the star of ‘A Prophet’, a French movie made in 2009. If you haven’t already, then you should see it. It is a masterclass in understated direction and acting. In my job I’m lucky that I occasionally get to work with very talented people. Normally though, they have discovered how great they are years before and that has effected their characters and a natural wall has built up to defend themselves. It is almost as if this guy doesn’t know how good he is yet and I always find that very exciting. I can count on one hand how many times I have met someone who’s at that cusp. He’s very alive, very in the moment, very present, very collaborative.

It was shot at a college in Paris for a  profile in L’Optimum. It’s daylight lit. I was thinking about Robert De Niro in Mean Streets. A dodgy, but lovable, character, staking somewhere out. Looking at girls. Looking for trouble. He looks as if he’s out for himself. There is also a strong sense of comedy. Throughout the day Tahar was up for anything. He loved taking direction and, as I shouted out different emotions for him to portray, he turned from one character into another at the flick of a switch.

I’m at f6.3 because of the amount of light. In several of my other posts I say that I try and shoot under f2. I think that when you’re in broad daylight at f1.2 it looks a little odd, like an effect. When you’re at f1.2 in candlelight your subconscious, which has learnt over time what reportage photos look like, understands why – so you believe it.

—Greg Williams (with Samuel Agboola)

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Eva Green

January 6th, 2006

This was taken at the end of a day during the filming of Casino Royale. We were on Lake Como in a Riva (speedboat). The boat didn’t feature much in the film as I recall but it was around so we used it. Eva’s wearing her costume and it was starting to get dark.

I had a hair and makeup crew on-board and took pictures of her in the boat’s cabin as well as on deck. It’s all natural light and I didn’t give much direction. It’s what I’d call a reportage portrait.

I love this shot because it’s both sexy and natural. You feel there’s a real smile on her face and of course there’s the slit in her skirt. You see far less than you would were she wearing a bikini or a miniskirt, but it feels as if you’re seeing something you shouldn’t be.

Often the first image you take when you walk into a scenario is the best one. When you compose completely by heart it just works. When your head kicks in you start making corrections and, though the image may be technically better, it lacks the thing that made you take the shot to start with.

I could have kept her shoe in frame and cropped her elbow. Funnily enough I did that later on the contact sheet.

Years ago a photographer friend taught me a good trick; When you flip a picture around and view it upside down, or on its side, it loses some of its tangible meaning and you can view it more abstractly. Normally if the shape is pleasing to the eye then the picture works. In this case, when you crop it near her elbows it doesn’t work as a shape as well as it does here.

—Greg Williams (with Samuel Agboola)

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Rosie Huntington-Whiteley & Ryan Reynolds

2011

This was part of a campaign I did for Marks & Spencer’s Autograph range using Ryan Reynolds and Rosie Huntington-Whiteley. It was cut to be cinema length but (at the time of posting) has only run online. We shot this in London at St. Pancras Station and the Royal Institute of British Architects and its environs.

It was shot concurrently with the stills on a Red Epic camera. Obviously, the client knew I was shooting video but I know they were blown away by the footage. We produced a film that would normally require double the stills budget and man hours for a fraction more money and with no extra time. I won’t pretend it was cheap but a couple of years ago this level of production would have required 35mm film, a large extra crew and a couple of days. That’s expensive. I shoot using film lighting, as opposed to strobe, so there is no need to relight for video.

This is, I am sure, how things are going to evolve for photographers. You’ll need to be comfortable and equipped for motion and stills work. I’m very aware I’m not alone. Every photographer I know is up to it in one way or another. You can’t buy a pro stills camera anymore that doesn’t shoot video.

It will be interesting to see how the advertising agencies change. Today most still have a TV department and a print department. They’re converging as you read this because as everything goes digital the idea of TV and print look increasingly out of date.

We shot the stills and would then spend an extra five or ten minutes at the end doing a moving version of the same pictures. As a result we haven’t created a commercial with any proper narrative. You get the sense of a new relationship between the two but that’s it.

We put in a little romance at the end as Ryan goes in for a kiss. It works nicely and gives us the beating heart of the piece.

Almost every shot is dirty, meaning it’s shot through something. The pictures on the cobbles have a fleshy hue because I shot through my fingers. I found that close to the lens my fingers created a dark wash and holding them open in front of the lens in daylight produced a pink haze.

We also shot through leaves, trees, shelves, lamps, glass, and flowers. Anything we could find to dirty up the foreground and give a bit more atmosphere. It helps to make the footage feel more voyeuristic, as if we’re watching these people go about their everyday, as opposed to them showing it to us.

There wasn’t much direction to give them except “You’re just meeting up and are excited to see each other”. It’s all pretty simple. “Walk from here to there and look as if you’ve noticed someone across the road and they’re an old friend”. I talked to Rosie about having protective feelings for Ryan and you’ll see she puts his hand on his chest, it’s a nice touch.

—Greg Williams (with Samuel Agboola)

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Halle Berry

2002

This is the moment Halle found out she’d been nominated for an Oscar. A TV crew came in to tell her and she did this little jump for joy straight after the interview wrapped. It was kind of spontaneous and kind of for their cameras but I wasn’t aware it was going to happen. They said something to her like “How does this make you feel?” and she jumped.

There’s so much wrong with this picture. It’s a good example of why people say technically perfect photographs aren’t necessarily the best photographs.

The angle is ‘Dutch’, as they say in movies, with the verticals tilted to one side. There’s blur because the camera was around my neck, hanging at my side, when she started to move. I just grabbed the lens, pushed my finger into the position where approximate focus was based on instinct, and shot from my waist before she started coming down.

I was using a Leica M6. Some Leica lenses have a handle on the focus ring. You learn that when you’re pushed all the way over to the right you’re at infinity, when you’re all the way over to the left you’re at 0.7 metres, and when the handle’s pointing straight down you’re at 1 metre. When you get used to them, and I shot nothing but Leicas for six years, carrying four at a time, each with a different lens, you always know where to push your finger when something happens. You can get the lens pretty close to in focus fast.

You can see the whole story in the shot. The mic is being held by the guy in the camera crew doing the interview. On the right you see a backdrop, which was supposed to be the ocean Halle comes out of in her iconic orange bikini. The tubular object behind her is the set of the tunnel in the London Underground where Bond gets his invisible car.

Technically it’s massively flawed but despite that it’s a very real, human, photo of an important moment in someone’s life. It was just a lucky shot.

—Greg Williams (with Samuel Agboola)

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Vogue Italia

May, 2007

The story was about a girl from the future who was terrorizing a human girl. It’s not my favorite, but I like this picture because it’s contains a few special effects.

I have an inherent dislike of too much retouching. I retouch people normally only if they’ve got a spot, or a particularly ugly wrinkle. Something unsightly. I feel that the more retouching you do to a persons face the more character you lose. It’s our imperfections which make us human. I try to do as little polishing as possible.

In this instance we were trying to give the impression there was an orb flying overhead which had some sort of hold over these girls. Rather than go the way that a lot of people would, and using Photoshop to comp in a model built in 3D, we shot the whole thing in camera.

I built the orb myself. I was living in New York at the time and I went to a plastic shop on Canal St., bought the plastic and made it in my basement in Brooklyn where I was living at the time. We stuck the orb on a stand and put a powerful, little, HMI light called a Joker-bug 800 on another stand behind it. The Joker-bug puts out 800 watts and we fired it through a spotlight lens which produces a very strong directional beam. All we did in post-production is paint the stands holding everything up out. The little red lights you see are the spots from laser pointers we fired at it. There was no power to the orb at all.

It seems obvious but it’s not the way a lot of retouching is done today. It meant the orb was really there so the reflections you see on it are real. It helps make the whole image ring true.

We used a lot of smoke and a lot of wind. I think in this case it was a leaf-blower. It was editorial and we didn’t have the budget for a massive fan. I love the redheaded model’s expression. It’s fabulous. She’s so emotive face. She’s a model but she could be an actress.

I shot this in a house in upstate New York near Vermont at magic-light. People have different ideas of when magic-light is. In theory it’s just before the sun sets. I, and many others, think it starts after the sun sets. That’s when we see the most beautiful light of day. I love it when house lights and street lights come on but there’s still some light in the sky. I call the other time, that hour before the sun goes down, sunset, not magic light.

—Greg Williams (with Samuel Agboola)

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Jude Law

2009

This was taken for Figaro magazine and it’s a still from a Red camera. What’s interesting to me about it is the moment it captures, and what I went through to get it.

We did this shoot with Jude where we effectively got him to run through little scenes. The whole thing took place in an underground car park in London. I told Jude to imagine someone dangerous had just walked into the car-park and his life was at risk.

I could have taken this picture on a stills camera. I do feel that I’ve done enough good reportage in my life to say I do know about capturing a moment.

I would also say that moments happen so fast that I could probably put a fair few of the great moments I’ve caught in my life down to chance. In the time from when your brain says go, until you push the shutter, until the camera actually records the image, things change. Everything involves a bit of luck and just because you take a photo with a stills camera doesn’t make you some sort of genius.This is even more relevant when you start using motor drives. There is a huge amount of chance at play.

I can’t claim the decisive moment in this shot, as I can in my old reportage stills, but I can say that when I shot it I knew I had got something. I watched it happen.

There’s a debate about this approach being the death of photography but it’s interesting to see what you get when you can go back and forth between frames and pull out a moment. With my Red Epic camera I can pull 5K frames 96 times a second if I need to. I can’t imagine getting the same performance out of an actor while running the noisy motor-drive of a DSLR as easily as I did for with the near-silent Red One.

It’s a strange and controversial argument from someone who loves still photography as passionately as me, but I sincerely believe this is the future.

We captured a real moment. We created the scene, decided the angle, and I asked for the performance, but the moment wasn’t decided when I clicked the shutter.

To be continued I guess…

—Greg Williams (with Samuel Agboola)

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