Cinematographer Oren Soffer discussed bringing guerilla-style filmmaking to sci-fi blockbuster The Creator with Adrian Pennington.
A little ingenuity and can-do goes a long way. By some accounts British writer-director Gareth Edwards has stunned Hollywood in making The Creator for $80m while putting on screen the production value of a VFX spectacular four times that budget.
The world building of the sci-fi, set in 2065, may be derivative of films like Blade Runner, Star Wars or District 9 but it’s on a scale fit for IMAX and rendered with a brutal realism and cunning efficiency that puts mega-budget blockbusters like Avatar or Marvel movies to shame.
They did so by shooting guerilla-style with a relatively small crew in multiple locations, a prosumer camera costing £3,000, limited lighting gear and an unorthodox attitude to VFX grounded in the decade Edwards spent as a DIY filmmaker doing everything from VFX to editing in his front room.
“Our approach was less about saving money, although it was partly about keeping a small footprint, but an aesthetic choice to give Gareth the spontaneity he needed to tell this story,” said Oren Soffer, the film’s Israeli-American cinematographer in remarkably his first major feature as DP.
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