We have finally reached a significant milestone in the activities of Chiaroscuro Collective: our website is live, and on June 29, 2024, we will celebrate our launch event, marking our first public moment of meeting and exchange.
We have structured our celebration into three phases:
- A meeting with all Collective members: after so many virtual meetings, we needed to look each other in the eyes, embrace, and exchange our opinions in person.
- A meeting with students from film schools: from the very first step of our newly formed association, we want it to be clear that our focus is on the young and the future by sharing our experiences to stimulate the creativity of our cinema continually.
- A meeting with cinematographers who are not members of our Collective, as well as with colleagues from other categories, our suppliers, and collaborators. Since cinema is an art that arises from the collaboration of everyone on set, we hope that this dialogue continues off the set as well, to improve our preproduction work in films and series and to achieve our future projects in deep harmony.
Thanks to the impressive efforts of an extraordinary group of members and external collaborators, we have initiated some of the numerous activities of our Collective:
– The website serves as the repository for all our content production and as the main source of information about who we are and what we do within ChiaroscuroCollective.
– The social media platforms promptly communicate the release of our films and series or our participation in festivals.
– The podcasts, which, along with textual or video interviews, are conversations with cinematographers and colleagues from other departments, available in a dedicated section of the website and on major audio platforms.
Chiaroscuro Collective’s project was born from the desire to know each other better as Italian cinematographers and finds in the new website an open space to tell all interested parties how we made our films and series, what the creative project was, how we realized it, the challenges we faced, the bets we won and how we won them, and the ones we lost and why.
The driving force behind the formation of the Association began in 2022. The years 2022 and 2023 were very intense for cinema, rich in terms of the quantity and quality of Italian productions and crowded with international productions attracted by the quality of our craftsmen and the beauty of our locations, but also by the generous tax credit activated by the Government after the pandemic to allow a quick recovery of film production.
This richness of Italian and international production on Italian soil facilitated an intense exchange of experiences between Italian and foreign professionals and allowed many of our colleagues to collaborate with international productions, directors, set designers, and costume designers.
Simultaneously, due to the tumultuous development of platforms, we suddenly found ourselves facing the concrete possibility of accessing easy international distribution for our films and series, competing on the same playing field with much richer productions. And so the competition has become wonderfully complex and exciting. Can we and will we be able to make films and series just as beautiful, exciting, and surprising, even though our budgets are 3, 4, 6, or 10 times smaller than those of our foreign colleagues? This crazy challenge, seemingly impossible, is actually possible thanks to the innate creativity and deep visual culture that distinguishes us, our ability to blend craftsmanship with new technologies, and our attentive, never superficial look at human affairs that has always characterized the strength of our best cinema.
The current, sudden, and violent slowdown in production, caused simultaneously by the Italian legislative vacuum and the contraction of platform investments, only confirms our conviction that the only way out of this crisis, and any crisis, despite the reduction in our production budgets and the difficulty many films face in starting shooting, is to raise the quality of our work.
Chiaroscuro Collective was born following the tradition of Italian cinematography, which has helped make our cinema a pillar of world cinematography. This tradition was that of the workshop of Masters, where the knowledge and art of exposing the negative, lighting the set, moving the camera, and composition were learned.
In a process of transformation of roles and professions, where the ascent to the role of cinematographer no longer necessarily passes through all the rungs of the department’s hierarchical ladder, there is an urgent need for other tools that allow the transmission of knowledge and practical experience.
For this reason, we have chosen to have no secrets, to tell everything, and to answer curiosity without fear, because we know that the exchange of information between generations occurs in both directions: not only from more experienced to less experienced, from older to younger, but also in the opposite direction. And so from the young, and their continuous thirst for research, the more seasoned learn a lot, and the most daring among them immediately experiment with new forms of expression.
In these long months, we have worked intensely to lay the foundations of the Collective. Now that we have the tools, we must commit to spending the coming months talking about our work, facing the next challenges without fear, always raising the bar of the quality of our images, and giving new strength to our stories through our images.
P. C.
