Continuing the ongoing series of interviews with creative artists working on various aspects of movie and TV productions, it is my pleasure to welcome Rasa Partin. In this interview, he talks about balancing the art and the craft of visual storytelling, experiencing stories on a variety of screens in our lives, how much planning and preparation goes into every shot, and the impact of Covid on the industry. Between all these and more, Rasa dives deep into his work on the recently released “The Immaculate Room”.

Kirill: Please tell us about yourself and the path that took you to where you are today.

Rasa: My journey is a winding one. I was raised by American parents who practiced Hinduism and yoga since the ’70s. We didn’t have TV at home, and we didn’t go to the movies. The first movie I remember seeing in a theater was “Jurassic Park” when I was thirteen.

When I was nine my parents decided to send me to a monastery boarding school in India. And my family moved there for the next seven years. Back then it would take a movie about six months for American films to get to Indian theaters. So for me seeing a movie was always a special, grand affair that was usually a memorial event. I especially remember that seeing “The Matrix” was life-changing for me. Around then I started secretly wanting to make movies when I grew up.

Returning to the US around 16 years old I started doing a computer programming degree in college. While there, I met a friend who turned me on to this car club and I met a bunch of friends there. Armed with a Hi8 video camera I went to the car club meetup, and later that night, found myself in the back of someone’s car doing donuts in the rain. I had enough computer skills to download the footage, get my hands on some editing software, put it to some music and made a 3 min YouTube video before YouTube was really a thing.

A group of us ended up working on a few feature-length car culture documentaries that we self-released and sold on DVD via a website. That opened up some international travel and adventure opportunities.

Yearning for a way to get closer to the real film industry, a friend helped me find an internship in Washington DC at a documentary production company that made History Channel shows. That lead to some documentary production jobs but eventually towards understanding that I wanted to pursue cinematography and that I should attend AFI, which I completed in 2016. It was about 14 years between that night in the rain shooting donuts and graduating AFI. Looking back, it’s been a very long journey and a ton of lucky breaks.

Kirill: Do you think there’s an artist in every one of us? Can anyone be an artist and should anyone be an artist? Is there such a thing as too many artists in the world?

Rasa: I think that everyone has something artistic in them in some way, even if some people don’t look for that art. If you’re a scientist, there’s art in how you’re approaching things or the way you’re thinking about things. You’re taking a problem, and you’re trying to creatively add a human interpretation of it, and maybe seek some other way to go about it.

But, it’s something that I grapple with. Is what we’re doing really necessary in the reality of the world? I do think that people do go crazy without stories. And stories are the only way we can make sense of a lot of the ironies and inconsistencies of the world. So in that sense, storytelling is definitely imperative, and it’s going to happen no matter what. In films, in games, in books, it’s not going away.

Kirill: Expanding on this, between the art and the technical craft of it, is one more important than the other?

Rasa: Going into AFI, I thought I would be learning a lot about the technical things, like lighting, lenses, camera systems, data systems, managing a crew and other topics. We did some, but the main study there was storytelling starting from reading a script.

The curriculum then was that 90 films were made by the first year students that are in all different disciplines. You hear about the scripts, you participate in the film shoot as a DP or as a crew member, you hear about the post, and then you watch it all as a group and criticize it – all as a group. Seeing 90 short films and discussing what worked and what didn’t work – that hones and drills in the need for story.

Kirill: If you are saying what works and what doesn’t work, how much objectivity is there in art in general? You might have 20 people in the room watching the same movie, and it works for 10 of them and it doesn’t work for the other 10. Is it the fault of the audience, or is it the fault of the storyteller when something doesn’t work? Is there even such a thing as somebody being at fault?

Rasa: Everyone is an individual with different taste. That said, you need to start your story with a good premise. It’s not just the art of the telling of the story. The premise of a story needs to have enough narrative friction, in whatever sense that is, to create a fire. And then that fire needs to be able to boil the water throughout the whole narrative. If you start with a weak premise, it’s going to be really heavy lifting to make it successful.

As a filmmaker, you step back and think on what the premise of this movie is. Is it a worthy story to tell, to take up someone’s two hours?

Continue reading »

Continuing the ongoing series of interviews with creative artists working on various aspects of movie and TV productions, it is my pleasure to welcome Anka Malatynska. In this interview, she talks about her passion for photography, the transition of the industry from film to digital, differences between feature films and episodic shows, and the impact of Covid on the industry. Between all these and more, Anka dives deep into her work on the recently released “Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin”, as well as a sneak preview into the upcoming “The Listener”.

Kirill: Please tell us about yourself and the path that took you to where you are today.

Anka: My name is Anna Malatynska, and I’m a Polish-born American-raised cinematographer. When we moved to US, Poland was still a communist country. I have these early memories of the National Geographic magazine with color pictures sent to us from relatives from the Western world, and those pictures opened up this world. My father was a Himalayan mountain climber who got to travel all over the world, even though we were locked in a communist country, and he brought a lot of ideas and pictures.

For me it was the pictures that resonated as a vehicle to be able to move beyond my immediate world. The first thing I remember was wanting to know as much about this planet, and the people, and the different ways that you can live, and photography looked like the avenue. I was involved in shooting and developing my own pictures by the time that I was thirteen. And by way of that I discovered acting. I did local theater productions that lead to a commercial agent. It was there I got a glimpse into the film industry and I thought that it was a horrible place. So I moved away from it, and got into math and science.

Somehow that journey of acting, storytelling, pictures, math and science deeply translates into the art and craft of cinematography. As a cinematographer, you are using all of those parts in your work every day. In college, again, I was enamored with storytelling and got back into photography, and all of that led me back to cinematography.

I’ve been doing it ever since. I started working in camera departments immediately after graduating from NYU. I knew that image making was where my soul was guiding me too. It’s been a lifelong task.

Cinematography of “Monsterland” by Anka Malatynska.

Kirill: Would you say that you straddled both sides of the film to digital transition? Do you feel that we have lost something with a gradual decline of film as the medium?

Anka: I was raised as a filmmaker right in the transition between film and digital. The year that I was doing my student films at NYU was the last year that they used an editing Steenbeck where we cut the negative. Those were some of the last years that we were using 16mm film.

I didn’t go from college to graduate school straight away. I worked for several years in the industry in between, and when I did go to the American Film Institute, most of our work there was already digital.

If you want to be a cinematographer or a photographer, it’s important to understand photography at its elemental level. Film is the really elemental level. There’s an element about film that’s tactile, and I’m a tactile visual learner. It’s easier to get concepts in my body that are rather abstract, be it the zone system or how to see light the way a camera sees the light. It’s helpful to go through the physical process of developing a negative and rendering a print that lands these concepts deep in the brain. Start with Black and White film photography, and once you know the basics and have that background, you can keep up with however the technology changes, because in the end, the basics are the same.

Now we can talk about what has been gained and what has been lost. What has been gained is that there are people who have access to cameras who in the past would not have been able to access storytelling. We gain a lot of the world from that. In the end, all of human culture at the baseline is about storytelling. The more varied the people that can tell and express their stories are, the more interesting of a society we have, and the more ideas we can have.

On the other hand, maybe not all of these stories are compelling. You might have a great actor in the film, but there’s an absence of a cinematographer, big gaps in the visual language of it. Sometimes you watch something, and it looks like a storyboard for a film, an outline or a concept for something that could be executed better. This is the other side of everybody being able to get a camera and calling themselves a cinematographer.

We lost some things, but we also gained important things through what has been more of a democratization. Filmmaking is now more accessible at a financial level.

Cinematography of “NCIS” by Anka Malatynska.

Kirill: Looking at the balance between the art and the technology of it, would you say that a great cinematographer needs to have both of these? Can you be just an artist, or just a technician? Do you have to be both?

Anka: One hundred percent you have to be both. One doesn’t really exist without the other. It is an art and it is a craft. And like any craft, you have to be physically grounded in that craft. That’s where the intuitive artistic decisions will come from later on down the line. You have to work without the stress of thinking about how to achieve a certain thing.

You have to have that bag of tricks. In filmmaking, no matter how prepared you are, you will get a lot of curveballs and a lot of things will not necessarily go as planned. You’ll have to adjust the plan that you planned for, and still tell the story, and still get the scene, and still make the day.

Kirill: Do you think that both art and craft can be taught, or is the artistic side something that one is born with?

Anka: I believe the human condition has a great propensity for art and imagination. We dream up the life that we live. We make up the societies that we then participate in, and that takes imagination and artistry.

When you watch little kids, you see how deep in their imaginations they are, and we continue that throughout our lives. As we grow, we gain the ability to truly express it and put it into the world at a physical level. I think we all begin as artists. Whether we learn to execute that art and whether we feel empowered enough to gain the skills to be able to execute the art – that’s more of the question. We all have the capacity, but can we get the training, the inspiration, the encouragement, and the idea to pursue such a thing?

Cinematography of “The Kindred” by Anka Malatynska.

Continue reading »

Continuing the ongoing series of interviews with creative artists working on various aspects of movie and TV productions, it is my pleasure to welcome Victoria Paul. In this interview, she talks about changes in the way stories are made in movies and television over the last few decades, the ever-raising quality and expectations bar from the viewers, the impact of Covid on the industry, and the advice she would give to people just starting out in it. In between all these and more, Victoria dives deep into her work on “A League of Their Own”.

Kirill: Please tell us about yourself and the path that took you to where you are today.

Victoria: I started designing for theater, working as an assistant for some terrific designers on Broadway and designing myself off Broadway. I lived in New York, and I thought that was my path. It’s a rich collaborative experience, and in a way it’s more temporal than working on a movie because it’s immediate, it happens every night. It’s a genuine family that gets formed there.

As an assistant designer, the equivalent to an art director in the film world, I was dealing with a lot of the technical and logistical parts, mounting the show and making that train run on time. At some point I was contacted by a friend who told me that a film was coming into New York which needed a draft person / assistant art director. That was “The World According to Garp”, and the production designer was Henry Bumstead, who’s a legend in American film design. Doing that film was a transfomative experience. It was a big learning curve, not technically because those skills translate, but about what the world of film was.

Kirill: How has that experience changed for you over time. If you go back to early ’80s and then jump straight into 2022, would it be a big shock, or is it based on the same building blocks and just the technology is different?

Victoria: The way we make movies and television has changed in a couple of fundamental ways. I don’t think you can say it’s just the technology that’s different, because the technology is fundamental to what we do. We’re artists, but we’re also craftsmen, so our toolkit is how we function.

The process now is much faster. We used to have many weeks of prep, and that’s all been shortened. And it’s been shortened because we can turn visuals out quicker, because of how we draw now, because of how we pre-vis. We can get decisions quicker because we can turn out pre-vis and 3D models, and show directors what they’re going to get sooner. The technology helped speed up the train, but what was lost is maybe some of the time we would spend ruminating and talking and thinking. Back then it was a harder to visualize as quickly. I think what the technology has done is let us communicate better.

I can take a ground plan or a 3D model of something and show it to a cinematographer, and we can have a chat about where windows are, or where doors are, or where lighting sources are, and get that sorted out quickly.

Concept art and set photo of Beyer Field outfield on “A League of Their Own”, courtesy of Victoria Paul.

Kirill: When I talk with cinematographers, there’s the big topic of the industry transitioning from film to digital, and a lot of people miss the physicality of film as medium. Is there such a big thing that in your part of this industry that would be perhaps equivalent of that?

Victoria: Maybe younger set designers and assistant art directors may not miss it, but when I started, all drawing was hand drawing – and it was beautiful. The drawings themselves were wonderful objects. And the great thing about the drawings was that you could always tell who did them. They had the mark of the maker.

Although the information is the same and the layout is the same, you could tell by the style of drawing, the style of lettering, the size of lettering, the kind of font they use. You could immediately tell who drew each piece.

And now we’re in a digital art department where one set designer can start on something, build a ground plan and some elevations for me, and then I can give it to someone else to do some modifications or a quick director’s plan, and they exchange it, and when we look at it, it’s not clear whose iteration was the last one. In some way, it has lost personality. But it’s a small quibble, and certainly not as quite as big a discussion as the look of film versus the look of digital.

Kirill: What used to be special effects is now done digitally with VFX, you have new technologies available in different departments, and the world of visual storytelling itself is shifting with the advent of streaming platforms. Do you find that the boundaries of what it is that you’re responsible for are shifting?

Victoria: I don’t see a lot of difference between film and episodic in terms of how we approach the work these days. The big difference is in how many weeks of prep you have, and how much money you have – which translates into what you can build, and also into how big your art department can be. It’s not so much about film and TV, but rather about where’s your overall budget.

In terms of what the art department and myself as a production designer are responsible for, I don’t think that has changed very much. What has happened is that we have more tools at our disposal. There has always been a big conversation with special effects. If something is getting blown up, or a vehicle is going to crash into my building, I have to know what special effects needs from us to make it work. We still need to design and build it. That has not changed. I just wrapped a show called “Twisted Metal” and it’s all about vehicular mayhem. We were in constant discussions with the effects people on how to achieve things. But no matter where the effects take over, we’re still designing it.

Concept art and set photo of the factory floor on “A League of Their Own”, courtesy of Victoria Paul.

Continue reading »

Continuing the ongoing series of interviews with creative artists working on various aspects of movie and TV productions, it is my pleasure to welcome Eve McCarney. In this interview, she talks about balancing the art and the craft in the field of visual storytelling, doing research, the ever-rising bar of expectations from episodic productions, and the impact the global pandemic has had on the industry. In between all these and more, Eve dives deep into her work on “American Horror Stories”.

Kirill: Please tell us about yourself and the path that took you to where you are today.

Eve: I’m a production designer for film and television. I was working at a boutique advertising agency in New York City in 2007 when I started looking for another career since I wasn’t inspired by my work anymore. I remember watching the Oscars that year, and there was an art direction category. I thought, I’m an art director what’s the difference?

I started doing research on what the job entailed, and the more I read, the more interested I became. I had also worked at a newspaper in New York, and with that professional experience together with my work at the advertising agency, it looked to have a lot of overlap with my skillset along with my studies of film and art history. My background as an artist and photographer didn’t hurt either.

I applied and was hired to art direct a short film called Officer Down shooting the very next weekend, and that’s how my journey in the world of art direction and production design began. When I walked into the prison on the first day of shooting, I just knew this it was it. It was exciting and social, creative, and challenging. I was 27 at the time, a bit older than others when they join the industry and already had two careers at that point. About six months later after designing various small jobs around NYC, I quit my job and moved to Los Angeles.

Kirill: Do you find that your background in other industries give you a bit of an edge who have started in this industry straight out of college?

Eve: I think so. I find that my previous experiences help me in ways I couldn’t have envisioned prior to being in this field. Dealing with clients has been quite helpful in dealing with producers. Dealing with ad campaign budgets has translated directly into managing budgetary complications for sets builds. My extensive background in graphic design translated directly into a skill set for creating presentations, concept art and environmental design pitches.

Most production designers come in after having learned architectural design in college. I love taking classes and expanding my knowledge and skill set and I made it a goal to learn the technical side of designing by taking courses to learn hand drafting, sketch up and photo render programs. As I started working on bigger shows around 2010, I gained practical experience with larger set construction and was able to apply the skills I gained into technical applications.

Dollhouse bedroom keyhole, production design of the “Dollhouse” episode of “American Horror Stories” by Eve McCarney.

Kirill: If your start was watching that Oscars ceremony, how much of your work life is glamor, and how much of it is grind and long hours on set?

Eve: Very little glamor [laughs]. It is a grind. It’s hard work, but I was an athlete my whole life, and I’m used to working hard. I used to wake up while it was still dark and practice in the pool in the winter in Pennsylvania, and I would train all summer too. I’m used to that dedication and hard work.

Quite honestly, I thrive off it. When I’m working and creating, I’m at my full potential. The hardest times for me are the breaks between the jobs. It’s definitely a grind, but I’m happy to do it. I find so much joy in designing.

Kirill: How many hats do you wear? You’re an artist, a craftsperson, an accountant, a timekeeper, a psychologist / psychiatrist, and maybe a babysitter for grown people in your department. Does it get overwhelming sometimes?

Eve: Sure, sometimes it can, especially on the smaller projects where you have less support. In that case you are wearing many hats and you’re doing things practically with all of those various hats. I’m designing the graphics, and creating / managing the budget, and helping to paint the set, whatever was necessary on those earlier shows. On the bigger shows, when you have a full team in place and a proper support structure, it makes a world of difference.

I was fortunate to have two amazing art directors on “American Horror Stories” as well as two fantastic set decorators. My construction coordinator is fantastic, along with his whole team. When you have that support in place, it takes a lot of pressure off. Regardless, it can be overwhelming at times. During those moments I’ll take a minute, breathe and try to get some perspective. In my experience, it’s always worked out. You need to stay positive.

Continue reading »