Raphaël Vandenbussche, talks about his choices to film "Eat the Night", by Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel

Pablo and his sister Apolline escape their daily lives by playing Darknoon, the video game they grew up playing. One day, Pablo meets Night, whom he introduces to his little dealings, and distances himself from Apolline. As the end of the game approaches, the two boys provoke the wrath of a rival gang...

The choice of a restrain technical crew was first. To work as one. Camille and Arthur - the core - looked after the two REDs. Paul was bouncing the light. Laura supported me and framed the B camera. And Léna, a talented grip intern, was running around.

A compressed RED Gemini and a RED Komodo enabled us to shoot a cold, colorful city of le Havre in 2.39. With a Cooke S4 series and a low budget. The challenge was sometimes to use the two REDs shooting shot and reverse shot together, the 32 mm and the 40 mm. Shot - reverse shot is such a difficult mecanic to overcome ; there are very few films where I find that this "music" sounds good. But here, I’m very happy with the scenes, thanks to slight imbalances and stunning cut.

The actors - Lila, Erwan and Théo in particular - were heroic in the cold, windy English Channel. Clouds on their mouths and fresh tears on their cheeks. For my part, I’d like to thank the Décathlon next door to our Adagio apartment hotel.

You will see, the sets (design by Margaux Remaury) are beautiful. And the film’s great visual strength is embodied in Darknoon, the video game created by Lucien, Sarah, Caroline, Jonathan and their post-production teams. It’s sublime, because Darknoon becomes an unheard-of emotional medium, via a marvellous image that movie audience is not familiar with.

Of course, we had several key films in mind, as well as music and feelings to build the images. The reference image is a photograph by Tobias Zielony, it gave me the essence of the image and its color. The RED material was soft enough and ideal for the saturation I wanted, in keeping with the Darknoon universe. I used a single LUT, which was very accurate and immediate. Filming camera tests was too expensive, so Arthur and I made a LUT, using a random image and our color intentions. And it was great. I like the idea of a LUT built a bit mentally - the orientation table of a still imaginary landscape. The LUT is a multi-stringed instrument that is now at the heart of our DoP work.

The film’s lighting is very simple. Achieved with small LED projectors (Asteras mainly). I liked the idea of using the glow of heaters or power strip LED indicator to light a scene ! Thanks again to Paul who came back specially from Latin America for the film.
All in all, many happy memories. And above all, Caro and Jo sitting on the floor watching the monitors, focused, connected, bundled up smiling, always kind.

Note
I’d like to take this opportunity to appeal to the AFC website users for help. I’m shooting in Asia, where Aputure products are crushing the market. While I’m pleased to be able to use their range of low-cost, low-power projectors, I’m increasingly concerned about the future of these tools. The path taken by diodes doesn’t seem to be the most virtuous. Fragile and rapidly going out of fashion electronically, these products seem to me like disposable iPhones every three years. From technological brilliance to ecologic disaster. Could we exert pressure to impose powerful reuse and recycling standards ?

(Text by Raphaël Vandenbussche for the l’AFC, and translated from french with DeepL.com)