Director’s Vision
The film
- Performer
- Natalia Melnyk
- Concept
- A life, birth to death
- Role
- Director & DOP
- Camera
- Ursa Mini 4.6K G2
- Lens
- Laowa Proteus anamorphic
- Location
- Dubai desert
For this project, I set out to film a life as a landscape. Natalia is a personal, experimental art film shot in the Dubai desert, built as an allegory that moves from birth through to death. The desert has no props and nowhere to hide, so it forces everything onto the figure and the light, and I wanted each stage of the life to carry its own visual weather, its own colour and quality of sun. I shot it anamorphic on the Laowa Proteus set for a wide, painterly frame, worked on false colour to hold exposure under a hard sun, and carried the emotional temperature into the grade. Without a story to lean on, the image does the work dialogue usually does: the film is made to be read, not followed.
A Life As A Landscape
I storyboarded the film as a life cycle, mapping the visual flow across the stages before the shoot so the light and the framing shifted in step with the arc rather than by accident. I shot it anamorphic, on the Laowa Proteus set, for the wide, painterly frame that treats a single figure in the desert as a composition.
Anamorphic gives the image its horizontal flares, its oval fall-off, and a shallow field that isolates the figure against all that space. Under a hard desert sun exposure is unforgiving, so I worked on false colour throughout and carried the emotional temperature into the grade in DaVinci Resolve.
Set design, lighting and rehearsal were planned in detail so an experimental film still had structure under it, and the emotion stayed balanced across the arc rather than peaking too early.
Director’s note
Every choice, the hour of the day, the direction of the light, was a line of the poem.
The Craft
Craft spec
- Role
- Director & DOP
- Camera
- Blackmagic Ursa Mini 4.6K G2
- Lens
- Laowa Proteus anamorphic
- Format
- Anamorphic widescreen
- Grade
- DaVinci Resolve, false colour
The large-format-friendly sensor and the anamorphic glass give the film its widescreen scale and its organic character, the flares and the fall-off that make a lone figure in a landscape feel cinematic rather than documentary.
The grade was built in DaVinci Resolve, tuned stage by stage so colour did as much of the storytelling as the blocking.
Inspirations
Natalia is a piece of personal, image-led filmmaking: a life told in a landscape, in one continuous visual language, with the anamorphic frame and the desert doing the work a script usually does.
It is the clearest statement in the reel of the eye behind the commercial work, a film made to be read rather than followed.
References
- Register
- Experimental, image-led allegory
- Frame
- Anamorphic, painterly, wide
- Stage
- The Dubai desert
- Read
- Poem, not plot