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“Shooting Vérité Means Embracing the Coincidences”: DP Lars Erlend Tubaas Øymo on Folktales
Still from Folktales. Courtesy of Sundance Institute. In the northern extremes of Norway, along the Russian border, is a folk high school that teaches teenagers self-reliance and survival. That school is the subject of Folktales, directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, who also co-directed Jesus Camp and Endangered, among others, together.
Most remarkable about Folktales is its remote location. Below, cinematographer Lars Erlend Tubaas Øymo (Songs of Earth) discusses the challenges of working in the Arctic and walks us through the equipment that made shooting a film at temperatures significantly below freezing possible.
See all responses to our annual Sundance cinematographer interviews here.
Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job?
Øymo: My most recent work as a DP was the documentary Songs of Earth by Norwegian director Margreth Olin. The film received recognition for its cinematography and was nominated for several international awards. I was lucky to work with an amazing team of specialized cinematographers and gain a lot of valuable experience as a DP. Directors Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing were looking for someone Norwegian with experience shooting in arctic climate, someone comfortable with nature, with a sensitivity towards shooting cinema vérité. When they started asking around for a DP in Norway, my name quickly came up. During our first meeting, we hit it off immediately. They had an infectious energy that I was drawn to, and we really matched in curiousness and playfulness towards the filmmaking process.
Filmmaker: What were your artistic goals on this film, and how did you realize them? How did you want your cinematography to enhance the film’s storytelling and treatment of its characters?
Øymo: For me, with my previous documentary being heavily focused on nature, I was drawn towards the character driven, cinema vérité style that Folktales offered. It was important for me as a cinematographer to create a visual language that reflected our characters’ personal and intimate meeting with the wild and untamed nature of Finnmark, northern Norway, while at the same time allowing them to breath and be fully present in their experience of this formative year. The folk high school is an inner journey for each of the students. With the use of long lenses, we found the right amount of intimacy and distance needed. It allowed us to give our characters their needed space while still being able to isolate and enable us to reflect upon our characters’ subjective experience of this little arctic bubble on the border of Russia.
The film is set in Pasvik, Finnmark, a tiny village surrounded by ancient forest and howling dogs on the border with Russia. This is no ordinary place. It was important for the directors to explore the often unexplainable and mysterious forces of nature and how it impacts our imagination and shapes us as human beings. I personally love magical realism and the mystery of the subconsciousness. My work is mainly focused on nonfictional films, and I love documentaries that utilize another layer to add depth and poetry to real life. Being surrounded by amazing nature, darkness, the light from campfires and majestic northern lights, we were always looking for visuals that allowed us to home in and create a magical layer for the film.
Filmmaker: What camera did you shoot on? Why did you choose the camera that you did? What lenses did you use?
Øymo: Shooting vérité means embracing the coincidences and the opportunities that appear in front of your lens, to listen and to react to your surroundings. Ideas and situations rarely turn out how you imagine, so you need to be able to adapt quickly and have equipment that allow for sudden turnarounds. We also needed tools that were easy to transport by a small crew, allowing us to work in an arctic climate with temperatures dropping below -25 degrees Celsius, as well as providing us with enough low light sensitivity, especially during polar nights.
I chose the Sony FX6 as our main camera because of its size, weight and light sensitivity. The camera is easily adaptable for various shooting conditions, and the Sony lenses have a lot of focal range while being lightweight and compact. The Cinema Line series also provide a lot of options for lightweight, gimbal setups, which we needed for the dog mushing sequences. Being a small crew with lightweight technical options allowed us to react quickly and embrace the unpredictable nature of the school and the students. Both the directors and our technical choices created a playful and spontaneous environment for us to work in, which I think is reflected in the interplay between both the film’s nonfictional and magical layer.
Filmmaker: Describe your approach to lighting.
Øymo: We used natural light for the most part, looking for reflected light and adding negative fill if needed. Fluorescent tubes were diffused and color corrected with filters in the classroom where they gathered in the mornings. Interview settings were lit with soft light from an Astera Helios tube, Aputure Accent B7c bulbs in china balls or a Aputure LS 60x if we needed a little extra. We also used colored LED strips and Aputure bulbs to add ambient light in rooms if needed.
Filmmaker: What was the most difficult scene to realize and why? And how did you do it?
Øymo: I think the most difficult scene to shoot was the students’ solo night experience. The students are left to tend to themselves and set up camp in the wilderness in -20 degrees Celsius. We wanted to respect and emphasize our characters experience of being alone and left to themselves, so we decided to shoot everything with a 200-600mm lens on a tripod. This meant carrying and setting up camera, in the dark, in powdered snow. Even though exhausting, it turned out to be a really good choice, allowing us to be up close without being in the way, and thereby be closer to our characters subjective experience. I shot the scene with the help of my fellow cinematographer Tor Edvin Eliassen, who I really feel contributed to, and complimented, the visual style of the film.
Dog mushing sequences were shot as a result of experimentation. Our main challenge was temperature and wind making the batteries drain really fast, memory cards freeze up, and gimbal equipment struggle. Also, finding the right grips and mounts for GoPros posed a challenge. But trial and error also allowed for finding setups and solutions that worked, ending up in really beautiful shots of the dogs and situations with the students that wouldn’t have existed on tape without all that preparation and experimentation we put into it.
TECH BOX
Film: Folktales
Camera: Sony FX6, Sony FX3, Sony FX30, DJI Mavic 3 Pro, GoPro 12
Lenses: Sony FE 70-200 f/2,8 GM OSS ii, Sony FE 200-600mm f/5.6-6.3 G OSS, Angenieux EZ-1 FF 45-135mm f/3
Lighting: Helios tube (Astera), Aputure Accent B7c, Aputure LS 60x
