Richard Kendrick is a cinematographer with more than twenty years experience in film and television.
Most of his work has been documentary but in recent years he have worked as DOP on commercials and feature films.
He has photographed 15 IFTA nominated documentaries, 8 of which won.
He has been nominated twice in the Cinematography category at the IFTAs for Two for the road and In Good Hands, and has won Celtic Film festival awards for Best Documentary with Get Collins, The Ghost of Rodger Casement, and Liam O Flaithearta, as well as a Riarch award with The Lost Generation - AIDS in Africa.
He most recently picked up the Best Cinematography in an Irish Feature award at the Galway Film Fleadh in 2017 for his work on Song of Granite.
they are on the one team. And I'm realistic about it too, there's plenty of times that doesn't work, but I think if there's a genuinely good vibes then that really helps.
For Song of Granite you shot on location in Connemara. What was that like?
Especially on a period film, but on any film location, the production design for me as a cameraman is so crucial . If it is not in front of you to shoot then you can't make it look good. Choosing the locations was critical. And for ages they were trying to find a village that felt like it was in 1930's. That's not an easy thing to do because we didn't have the money to build something. Eventually Kieran Hennessy, the location manager, says" I have this one thing. I don't really want to show you, but here it is". He had pretty much exhausted all of the other options and this was the island where we ended up shooting. The one that becomes the village that you see in his childhood. For myself and Pat, the positives outweighed the problems of getting on to it. From a production point of view, it was a hard thing because there wasn't even a pier on it. It was an abandoned island that had been abandoned sometimes in the 70's. Even to the extent that there was no power on it. We had to float out of generator to it. My gaffer, Tim Fletcher, had to go at high tide and float a generator across the island. It is probably only a couple of hundred yards from the mainland...it's not like going out to Tory or anything...but you still had to cross water. It just meant for getting across with the crew and equipment that you had to go at high tide. For Padraig O'Neill, the production designer, he had the crux of a 1930's village, he just had to add to it to bring it back to life. Which was considerably easier than trying to build it from scratch. And it helped with the whole authenticity of it. The big thing for me when I saw it first was that it was literally built on slabs of granite. In that scene where he's dancing in the foreground, that's all just big slabs of granite washed by the sea. It was too good to turn down. We had our work cut out for us getting everything out there, but it worked out for us. It meant that we could look in all 360 degrees really. That we had a full set.
And you get that iconic shot in the front door and out the back door of the house.
And that was an element of luck. That was a real house. That was one of the few houses on the island. And the shot was just there. That was not something that you could ever storyboard and Pat doesn't work like that anyway. Going back to when we first talked about it, Pat and Sharon gave me a book...same as they had on Silence, and is a treasured possession...a mood book of various pictures and poems and songs that they gave to me probably a year or two before the film started. Pat is not like a commercial director who would have everything storyboarded or shot-listed. It's a different way of
CinÉireann / December 2017 43