How DP Victor Inglés Approached Shooting Microbudget Comedy 'Free Time'
The 'Free Time' cinematographer chats with 'We Strangers’ DP Charlotte Hornsby about generous locations, small budgets, and coastal cultural differences.
Hello! Welcome to Nothing Bogus, an Indie Film Listings+ newsletter. The + is commentary, interviews, dispatches, tutorials, and other groovy stuff. This week, a meeting of two cinematographers! Charlotte Hornsby interviewed Victor Ingles about shooting Ryan Martin Brown’s debut feature, Free Time. You’ll find the listings at the bottom of this email.
by Ryan Brown
I first met the extraordinary cinematographer Charlotte Hornsby working on Jo Firestone’s amazing senior-starring film The Singles Retreat — though I was familiar with her work long before, as anyone who has kept an eye on the films moving through the festival circuit in the last five to ten years would have to be. Charlotte's body of work is incredibly versatile but always distinct — an essential ingredient in why the films she's worked on have become so lauded.
We had the good fortune of running into each other again at the New Hampshire Film Festival this past fall. She was there sharing Junk, a short film co-directed with Jesse Ruuttila, and I was there with a small feature comedy, my first, called Free Time.
Free Time just so happens to be shot by my long-time friend and incredible talent Victor Inglés, who flew over from Los Angeles on short notice to rush through a ten-day shoot back in the fall of 2021. I’ve known Victor for many years but we had not worked together in nearly a decade. What he was able to do with few resources (and with the assistance of our amazing crew) was staggering, and if the movie has any air of legitimacy it’s in great part due to his incredible work.
I was thrilled to introduce these two talents and suggest they have a chat about what it means to shoot a movie when there is not oh-so much time, money, or manpower to go around.
Charlotte: As the DP on an indie, your answer to budget constraints determines so much of the film's look. Your choice to shoot entirely in studio mode on a vintage zoom — which I think was the Canon 11-to-165 — feels very self-assured, and I think it does a lot to establish the tone and texture of the movie. Could you talk about those decisions?
Victor: Well, thank you. Going into this project, you know, Ryan and I, because of the budget and the time, we were trying to keep the ‘indie’ nature of this piece very present. I love the characteristics of Super 16, I love the small format. I love the kind of… I hate to say low-fi, but for lack of a better word…. the low-fi look.
The toughest part was convincing Ryan — I think he’d gotten used to shooting 4K and having that control in post, being able to do digital zooms, and such. But our references weren’t doing digital zooms, and I wanted us to be able to do it as much in-camera as possible. When you zoom on an actual lens, it compresses things, so it’s much different than if you were to do it digitally, as you know. And being able to actually react to what’s happening on set, if it made sense for the scene, to play off the actors — that was great.
Charlotte: And, Ryan has told me you have this insane, amazing ability to pull your own focus while you’re zooming?
Victor: That… I don’t know what to say. I’ve just operated and done that for so many years. I’ve done so many small projects and I’ve rarely had the luxury of having someone else pulling focus, so I think it’s just become quite natural to me when I’m shooting a scene. The smaller format, the larger depth of field helped. I don’t know if I would’ve been able to do it on a 35mm lens. And I didn’t want to bring someone in and put pressure on them every take to get it right. It was easier just to have it be on me if we needed to go again for camera.
Charlotte: Do you have a doc background?
Victor: No, not really. I grew up during the DSLR craze, so I was always pulling focus on a full frame, always run-and-gun, it’s just kind of the mentality I came up in.
Charlotte: Can you talk about your lighting strategy? Especially in locations where you can’t push in daylight from outside. There’s an amazing moment in the band practice space where there’s a combo that has a little clamp light on it, and it’s doing double duty to serve as a top overhead light.
Victor: The name of the game was seeing what each location did naturally, and then kind of supplementing that or motivating from that. So for example, the scene where the band is playing, I think that location already had some clamp lights all around the spot — so we felt like that was a great way to motivate the scene.
We had just an SUV-worth of lights. So essentially, I can bring something in for the close-up if we need it but that’s it. And then there were instances where Alexandra [Añez, our production designer], would bring in some nice practicals to some spaces and we could motivate from those, which was extremely helpful.
She had some fantastic desk lamps and other little props that would help motivate some other kinds of light around. Like, for that band practice scene, just because there's five or six people, you'd want to be as efficient as possible lighting them all. I think we just did one overhead skirted and then a backlight for our hero, kind of pushing a side light also being motivated from Alexandra’s lamps. So really just units outside the frame. And then when we get to close-ups, we just push-in with bounce essentially. On top of that, maybe some splashes of light on the back wall.
So really, I approached everything as: What's the key of the scene and what's motivated? And then if we have extra time, I'll fill in some extra accents in the background or a little something. Really, at the root, it was just seeing what the location had.
Charlotte: Were you guys shooting like nine pages a day?
Victor: Yeah, more sometimes. I mean, there are so many scenes with so many different actors. I think the heaviest day was the band because we did all of that in one day, including that stuff with Michael outside. Everything in the park near the end of the film was all in one day.
Charlotte: In working with the Alexandra, can you talk about putting together the park scene? In particular, all the pops of color, like the red velvet curtains in the rehearsal space or the amazing blue accent wall for Drew's apartment?
Victor: The locations gave us those things naturally, actually, which is kind of cool. Alexandra was a killer. She had so many small pieces, touches, little objects and posters, that would bring so much life to everything. It was crazy what her team did with the camp scene, with the tents, the laundry, and the coffee cup rack. I remember walking out onto set and just being like, Wow, I can't believe they built this whole world from nothing.
Charlotte: You live in LA. What was it like to do some much remote scouting?
Victor: It was interesting. Definitely not as fun as going around with the director and producers. But it was what it was. I mean, essentially they would just send me a lot of photos. I just asked, “Can you take a lot of photos and do a suntrack via an app, and send me what the movement of the sun is in that space?” And then I'd try to see what the advantages or challenges might be, and we'd narrow down some location options that way. I think by the time I arrived we had locked pretty much everything.
It was also my first time in New York. It was kind of refreshing to show up and just react to everything naturally. The whole environment, the culture, and the hustle and bustle. I was just trying to react to things and capture it in real-time. The producers did a great job, given our limited budget, of finding places that worked well for us, so it was fun just to show up.
Charlotte: Yeah, I feel like you always have to try to find those ways to get production value and cinematic imagery out of what your friends have and what you have access to.
Victor: I'll never forget that apartment [we shot in] because that was Justin [Zuckerman]'s apartment, our producer. It was like the biggest space we had available to us that we could utilize. So that was also where we were storing all the lighting and camera gear and everything. I remember every day before call, and then after wrap, me and the production team fire-loading the gear up three flights of stairs into this apartment, since there was no place to safely park the SUV. It was a very funny thing to me. Like, I guess this is what people in New York do.
Charlotte: Yeah, that's got to be one of the biggest changes from in L.A., where the space is cheaper and everything's, like, on the first floor. Were there any other shocking elements to you about New York production life?
Victor: I mean, that was definitely the biggest one. Going in and out of the subway was fun. I guess I was the most surprised at us having the camera out in the street and how little anybody would care. It's pretty amazing how much you can get away with.
Charlotte: Yeah, it's so funny. In L.A., because everyone is a filmmaker, the park rangers understand and will talk to you about call times and they'll know what your gear is. Did you have any favorite happy accidents? I'm thinking, specifically, of when Drew is on his Edible Night and you have firefighters pass him and he salutes them. That just felt like an amazing, unscripted thing that just happened.
Victor: Yes! Totally, that's in my top three, for sure. There was no plan for that. I think in the movie you could see me actually bump the camera a little because I'm laughing. Rajat and Colin's chemistry was so funny too. I think every one of their scenes together I was trying really hard not to mess up the shot because I was holding in laughter.
I also really loved the opening subway station scene. It was a fun camera move to pull off, starting in a close-up, and moving out to a wide, and kind of just doing this dance with Colin as he moved back and forth in the space. It was a lot of fun to shoot as a oner, even though that's not how it is in the film.
Charlotte: Was there anything on the film you got to try that you hadn't before, or anything you were really excited about being able to pull off?
Victor: Yeah, Ryan and I talked about Robert Altman, and I remember taking Altman to heart. So it was interesting and something I hadn't done before, the idea of staging with the zooms, and using that movement to motivate some of the emotion of a scene. Thinking about blocking differently, using the zoom to kind of move between set-ups instead of cutting — the idea of everything being in camera. After the first day or two I felt like I got the hang of it, and we could kind of throw the shot list away a little more.
Charlotte: Did you guys shot-list it all in advance? Or were you often just having an intuitive response to the performances?
Victor: We definitely had a baseline of what we needed for each scene. When we would go into a space, we'd say ”Okay, this is how we think the scene should play out.” And maybe I'd have a take where I could just do whatever I wanted, and ask Ryan what he thought about it, and maybe we'd realize we didn't even need to do something we had planned. It was cool to have him be open to me doing weird and crazy stuff like that. But it took a little to figure out when and how the zooms should be deployed. But I think we ended up figuring out something that felt right pretty quickly. It was fun. I loved shooting it that way. I'd do it again.
Free Time opens at The Quad Cinema on March 22nd and in Los Angeles at the Landmark Westwood on March 29th. Tickets for select screenings now on sale. Charlotte’s latest film, Anu Valia’s We Strangers, premiered last week at SXSW.
Listings
CASTING DOUBLE is casting multiple roles in a new short film from BAFTA-winning director Savanah Leaf. Shoot date: April 11, 12 or 13 TBD (1 day). Apply and learn more here.
Juan Pablo Rivera Garza’s new short film, The Daughter, is in search of an 18-22 year old woman for an undisclosed role. The film will be shot in Vermont and New York City in late July and early August. Apply here.
PBS is hiring for a Digital Studios Internship. Apply here.
Max Cea is in search of a couple cast members for an upcoming Stephen Musumeci-directed feature film shooting in Florida. Do you know anyone near Tampa who is either a middle aged man (40 - 60) with wildcard energy, or an elderly man (80s - 90s) with compelling screen presence? Email maxcea92@gmail.com. All roles are paid.
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