DP Yannick Hausler on What We Wished We Could Be

Please share an outline of the production?

In the 1970s and 1980s, more than 30,000 people in the UK were infected with HIV and hepatitis C after being given contaminated blood products. It’s a scandal that should’ve caused shockwaves but has, for the most part, remained unrecognised.

Why was it so important to tell this story? How different was the production from previous projects?

It’s taken almost 40 years in the UK for the government to acknowledge and deal with the victims of the contaminated blood scandal from the 1970s and 1980s. We wanted to show the real-life repercussions of living with infected blood, centred around a love story. Jenna Louise-Hawkins, the writer of the short, has first-hand experience, as her husband was a victim, which meant we had an amazing guide in approaching the subject. It felt quite special as we were all on the same page. I personally wasn’t very aware of the scandal, so being part of this has really opened my eyes to how many people it affected and I hope the film gets the audience thinking.

How did the director articulate what they were looking for?

Luke made a detailed treatment that he sent to me along with the script. I gathered some reference images on ShotDeck as inspiration and talking points and we went to the pub the same week and discussed all of the ideas. Luke didn’t want to tell the story in a conventional way, so we have two timelines throughout the film. The real world can be beautiful, heartbreaking and horrifying which were the key building blocks to Luke’s vision of the film. The very heart of the film is a love story, and we wanted to explore the consequences of relationships without being too brash about the blood scandal.

How did you decide upon the visual language?

Since there are two timelines in the film, Luke originally wanted to set them apart by having before the argument ‘warm’ and after the argument ‘cold’. Closer to the shoot we decided to be more subtle about it. The lighting gets subtly colder throughout. There are also some production design changes that helped sell this too.

There were also conscious decisions to give certain scenes a much darker feeling, for example when Aidan opens up about his condition, on the floor by the sofa, we decided to use silhouette.

Our real friend was darkness. I wanted to emote that with lighting to enhance the world our character was feeling and living in. We also didn’t want to overshoot so we were quite specific on the shots and if/when they moved. The camera would only move when motivated by an important or emotional action from our characters, for example, Charlotte injecting Aidan with his treatment. The camera movement intensifies the emotion in the scene.

Some of the feedback we’ve had from the infected blood community was that they loved how dark the world felt, as while they were infected and going through horrific treatment, that is how they saw the world.

Why did you choose to shoot on 16mm and what stock were you working with? From the start, Luke and I felt like this needed to be shot on film. I wanted the rawness of 16mm, not just for the nostalgia of the early 2000s time period the film takes place in, but also to emote the feelings of our character being ‘infected’. So much comes from the performances, but I also feel like with film everyone from cast to crew needs to be laser focused when the camera is rolling. Everyone knows the pressure is on as you can’t infinitely roll like on digital. It created a really nice collaborative and well thought-out atmosphere and you’d think twice before pressing that red button. It was my first time shooting on film which added another layer of “wanting to get this right”, especially as we were intentionally underexposing some of the scenes.

We decided to shoot on 500T Kodak film stock as we wanted to really push the 16mm look, emphasise the grain and keep the grittiness around the border to show the imperfections, as we thought it helped with the story and what our characters are going through. I took the decision to use the tungsten stock to help us achieve the evening scenes and added an 85B filter for the daylight scenes. We also didn’t have the biggest lighting budget, so it helped us with general exposure over the 200T stock.

For the black and white sequence we used Kodak Double-X stoc,k which I pushed in processing by +1. This allowed us to get extra grain and contrast in the image to enhance the feelings of an isolated stage and darkness and hide the pillars and white walls of the location we were filming in. We used Cinelab in London to process all the rushes and used their Scanity 4K scanner.

The 1:66:1 aspect ratio also allowed us to fill the frame with singular faces in a really nice way, making them feel isolated at times.

How did you go about devising the shot list?

As Luke and I have worked together before, we already have a shorthand of how we work. We did do a shot list and had some discussions before the shoot, but we also didn’t let it box us in on the day. Once we had a shot list, Luke did go away with a storyboard artist and boarded the film, but it was more of a reference for everyone to have an idea how it was going to go. We definitely planned our bigger story moments and those stayed the same.

What cameras and lenses did you use and why? Who supplied them?

We shot on the Arri 416 with Zeiss Distagon lenses, provided by Sunbelt Rentals. There’s not a lot of choice with S16 cinema lenses, and we wanted to make sure we had wide enough lenses as the focal plane on S16mm is a lot smaller. We had an Optex

5.5mm and the Zeiss Distagon 9.5mm, 12mm, 16mm and 25mm. We opted for the native Super 16 look of 1:66:1 aspect ratio.

How did you go about devising the lighting schemes and what fixtures did you use and why?

Mark Lane was my gaffer on this project. It was the first time we had worked together but we clicked immediately. Funnily enough we actually met at Camerimage in Poland as Sophie, our producer, put us in touch. We had a recce together, we discussed what I was thinking and we went from there. The location was an old house with very few sockets around so we worked with a lot of LED such as Litemats and I love a tungsten practical bulb on a dimmer. There’s something about the warmth and feeling that LED can’t quite hit just yet. We also had an M40 unit but with a 2.5K HMI bulb which we used for sun through the windows with some straw gel. We used a Source 4 for the black and white sequence.

Did you have to create any custom camera and lighting rigs?

Seems a bit silly now but we didn’t have a grip apart from the car mount day. The scene with Charlotte reading out medical side affects which the camera arcs around to reveal Aidan in the mirror, was done on a simple wally dolly h-frame tracking sideways with a 3ft slider mounted on top tracking backwards. It very much felt like being back at film school, but hey it worked. Nothing fancy. That was a challenging shot as it would have been a thousand times easier on a proper peewee dolly.

What challenges did you encounter when shooting the project and how did you overcome those?

There’s always challenges or any production but I think the main one for us was keeping within an affordable shooting ratio, which ended up being around 6:1. We really had to hone in having 1-3 per takes per setup. If we got it after the first one, we would move on. We would rehearse and block a lot, so everyone knew what they were doing. What also really helped was Luke’s casting as we had two successful theatre actors who really just nailed it everytime. The shooting ratio was probably the biggest difference for us as we both learnt on digital. For instance, the kitchen argument scene, we only had enough film to shoot one take on each shot in that scene.

On the last day we had an accident where an unused film reel was accidentally opened which meant we only had half a roll left to shoot the final day. Without telling Luke, as I didn’t want to worry him, I had a scramble to find some 16mm film stock on a weekend that we could transport to set immediately. Luckily friends of friends managed to send us 2 rolls of 200T within an hour or 2 and we only ended up using the extra roll for the final shot.

How did you decide upon the colour palette and LUTs?

Colour palette wise, we really wanted to keep it natural and moody. We didn’t use a moonlight through the windows. We wanted to keep it all contained within the home with warm practicals. The bathroom allowed us to go a lot cooler later in the film as we wanted it to feel like a more sterile environment for his medication, sharps box and needles. From memory, we cooled that down ever so slightly with some litemats. It also helped that the tiles on the wall felt cool because of their green/blue hue. LUT wise when reviewing the dailies the next day, we just used the Kodak Print LUT in Resolve to emulate a print stock.

Was there much in the way of changes in the DI and which colorist were you working with?

Felipe Szulc was our colourist at Nomad. I’d worked with him on a couple of other short films before so I knew I could trust him on this one. We mainly focused on black levels, tweaking some yellowing of skin and eyes to keep the jaundice as realistic as possible. Our makeup artist did a lot of the work but there was some fine-tuning required. Jenna, our writer, was also involved in this process as our advisor on how far or little to push these medical symptoms on screen.

Is there a particular shot or sequence you are most proud of?

I’m proud of the silhouettes, even though I’ve done them before, it was special to do them on film, and because there was no monitor to use to check if the effect was working, I had to rely on my previous experience and Mark the gaffer.. I was always worried about whether I’d messed up, until the dailies came back and I could see the results. I’m also happy with the nighttime bathroom lighting with Aidan injecting himself. The clinical but sickly feeling of the top light and greens from the wall is really effective.

What lessons did this production teach you?

I’ve definitely learnt a lot about exposing without a monitor and trusting your gut. In the past I may have been a tad too reliant on a digital image but there’s no better tool than using your eyes in the space. I had no idea if we had it in the can or not until the dailies came back at the end of day two. I still have a lot to learn and want to shoot celluloid film again, and I hope to take my learnings and improve on the next one.

Do you have anything to add?

You can keep up-to-date with the latest What We Wished We Could Be news via our Instagram (@whatwewishedfilm). We have had an exciting 2024, including being BIFA longlisted, qualifying for BAFTA and receiving a nomination for Best British Short Film at the British Short Film Awards. We are looking forward to sharing the film with more audiences in 2025.