The backgrounds that are seen through the windows of the car were shot with the Panasonic HD Varicam out the back of a moving car. We did a couple of passes in telecine to get as much as possible from the footage and found that pulling the keys was a fairly painless process,” explains Hunt. I wasn’t sure that HD would give us the detail at low light that we needed for pulling keys, especially with the motion blur of the live action. “There have been reports that HD doesn’t cope well with low light so the blue screen car interiors for the crash sequence were a bit of a concern. Much of the movie is set at night or in dimly lit interiors-including the car-crash finale, which was shot as a blue-screen composite.

The idea is one of the characters, while drugged up, hallucinates that the vibrator is speaking to her.” CG elements such as the vibrator were used during the shoot, displayed on monitors or projected on to walls. “When Production Designer Nick Tuft showed me his designs for a CG talking vibrator there were a few smiles around the table,” recalls Angela Hunt, VFX supervisor, “I’ve been asked for some strange CG objects in my time but this was the most bizarre yet. There were also some distinctly odd effects shots for Mill TV to work on. Luminal was just the type of project we wanted to get involved with, requiring CG work and live action composites,” says Dave Throssell, head of Mill TV.ĭirected by Andrea Vecchiato and produced by Alex Tate, Luminal is based on Isabella Santacroce’s cult Italian novel: the usual story of teenagers caught up in the excesses of chemical culture, but spiced up with a dash of sex-slavery, schizophrenia and sadism. Feature films on HD are an area that we wanted to explore. “HD is a format that we had worked with before for broadcast programs and been impressed with the flexibility and quality of the images. Luminal was graded and cut in London at The Farm’s HD facility Home, with VFX handled at Mill TV.

It’s not just a format that excites production companies-facilities more used to television post are finding a new market in HD features. peers that the savings on stock are very real. And while camera hire comes in somewhere between 35mm and 16mm, some U.K.-based filmmakers agree with their U.S. HD is a growing format for productions keen to keep the budget as low as possible. With a tri-lingual script (English/Italian/Japanese), an A-list French star in Denis Lavant (les Amants du Pont Neuf, Beau Travail), a fashion photographer for a cinematographer (Mark Lebon), and no distribution deal in sight, the fact that it was shot on HD is, perhaps, the least remarkable thing about it. LONDON – If nothing else, Luminal is an odd film.

Luminal by Isabella Santacroce