Mike Gibisser and Mary Helena Clark wore many different hats on the Sundance film A Common Sequence, including those of director, director of photography and editor.

Screened at Sundance, A Common Sequence explores tradition, colonialism, property, faith and science, seen through labor practices that connect an endangered salamander, mass-produced apples, and the evolving fields of genomics and machine learning. Clark and Gibisser take viewers to the areas and people involved in these physical and political worlds with an intuitive visual style, letting the audience experience each location’s atmosphere as it really is.

Mike Gibisser

“This film was very DIY,” says Gibiss. “Mary Helena and I were a two-person crew throughout. We even did our own color grade.” The pair called on Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve for the post.

Let’s find our more from Gibisser…

Can you talk about your process for planning shots?
In the field, we would start with brief location scouts and then have a conversation about what we wanted to shoot in the scene and how it connected to the rest of the film. We’d then determine specific images and framing that were necessary to capture. The process had to be very open, intuitive and responsive to whatever was going on in front of the lens at any given moment. Those check-ins or brief strategy sessions allowed us to structure that necessary improvisation around a few necessary shots.

What did you end up shooting on and why?
We both have a history with film, so we considered shooting on Super 16. But we didn’t know what to expect in terms of shooting conditions, and the shooting itself was exploratory —we found the narrative arc as we were shooting. So we decided it was safer to shoot digitally.

Mary Helena Clark

In choosing gear, we knew we needed to be pretty nimble. We needed compact equipment that we could easily carry, and we were shooting in a huge range of conditions where we couldn’t control the light, so we needed a production camera with a lot of versatility and internal ND. I had access to a fleet of Blackmagic 4.6K Ursa and 6K Pro cameras through the university where I teach (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee), so we decided to use those — particularly the 4.6K, whose form factor allowed for a lot of spontaneous control.

Can you talk lighting?
The decision to shoot digitally was lucky because one of the first scenes we shot, which opens the film, was a night fishing expedition that was lit only with the headlamps used by the three fishermen. Everything in the film was shot under existing lighting conditions, so we weren’t lighting spaces, but we were often framing for light — streaming through a window as texture in the background or making sure to frame windows or fixtures to create hot spots in the frame while letting the foreground fall slightly into shadow. Mary Helena responds to flatter images, and my tendency is toward contrast, so we tried to create a dynamic interplay between the two throughout the film.

Are there some scenes that stick out as challenging? Can you talk about those?
Except for a couple of scenes, the film doesn’t overtly recall a verité aesthetic; we were shooting each location basically as we found it. And several scenes in the film revolve around the labor of science, which oftentimes occurs in spaces that are necessarily antiseptic. So one big challenge was to figure out how to shoot generally flat or plain spaces in a visually dynamic manner without over-aestheticizing them in a way that was unproductive for the film as a whole.

One strategy we used was to employ unconventional coverage of spaces and the actions within them. Both Mary Helena and I come from experimental backgrounds, so it wasn’t a predetermined or even conscious decision. But several spaces in the film reveal themselves slowly. We often start with close-ups or fragmented views, and only over time do you get a sense of the overall geography of the space and how people, or robots, move around and work.