The Creator is a beautiful, wholly realized vision. Directed by Gareth Edwards, the science-fiction film uses familiar genre tropes to paint a new picture in which artificial intelligence is abused by mankind instead of the other way around. The world is not only vast but packed to the brim with vibrant, warm life, especially when the artificial intelligence graces the screen.
Edwards and his team, including the brainiacs at ILM, created a vision that surpasses movies with two, three, and sometimes even four times the budget. Here’s a part of the film’s secret sauce: the crew did it all on consumer cameras. Edwards and his pair of cinematographers, Greig Fraser and Oren Soffer, shot The Creator on the Sony FX3 (available here).
Recently, HeyUGuys asked Edwards about his decision to shoot on the consumer camera. Here’s what he had to say about his fondness for the camera:
The camera’s lightness not only adds to the film’s atmosphere but also its pacing. Edwards transports the audience from the theater to the world of The Creator partly because of the sense of freedom – and as a result, urgency – the Sony FX3 afforded the crew.
Initially, Soffer wasn’t sold on shooting the Thailand-set sequences with the consumer camera. “But that was just because I knew nothing about that camera yet,” he told Filmmaker Magazine. “So, I went to FotoKem with Greig and our colorist, Dave Cole, and looked at their test footage, and I looked at those commercials, and it was instantaneous: ‘The camera can do that! I get it now. Once you open that lid and realize that this camera can actually shoot 4K RAW with 15 stops of dynamic range, you understand how capable it is of handling a shoot like ours.”
The camera operators move through the environments with as much purpose and wonder as the film’s protagonists (played by John David Washington and Madeleine Yuna Voyles). The emotion and camera motion are in lockstep. Thanks to a camera readily available to all aspiring directors and cinematographers, Edwards and his crew delivered one of the most impressive visions of 2023.
The Creator is now playing in theaters.
