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Why did you decide to use dance for telling this story? How is the way to create with Drosia Triantaki?
We decided to use dance in this manner before the story even existed.
For both films, we had specific imagery that we wanted to realise, and then the story got built around it. That is maybe oversimplifying a bit, though, as there was a lot of back and forth. I think the answer to the question is that we weren’t happy with some works of screendance that we were seeing at the time; we felt we required, as an audience, some context: be it narrative, abstract, philosophical, anything. This requirement led to the development of our approach.
Drosia is an extremely capable, disciplined, cerebral dancer. We spent a lot of time discussing the screenplay, and she did a great deal of research on actually applying our thematic material to her movement. Many scenes were inspired by her work.
One thing I specially liked was the cinematography or photography of your films, they have a special color and light. Tell me about the work of Vaggelis Koumouris and the camera you use.
We use the Blackmagic Cinema Camera, which we (proudly) own. The look of the films is a product of a good combination of lighting and post-production: we tried to analyse films we like, try and figure out how they were shot, and then apply our conclusions, even if that meant taking some risks.
For Symmetry, we were able to rent some high end lighting equipment, which was very helpful. Also, in my opinion, a lot depends on set design, which in our case was a product of finding the right locations and some good art direction by Aliki Iosafat. A big part of the look was achieved by our decision to shoot Raw in log colour space for maximum flexibility, then in post achieving the desired result through colour grading, relighting, and VFX techniques.
Vaggelis is a student in the local film school. Along with Eleni Chrysomalli, a graduate of the same school and director in her own right, they helped not just with photography and camera work, but also with the production as a whole. We were very lucky to have them during shooting, as they had more filmmaking experience than we. Each brought about a different style of work and their influence can be felt throughout Ep.II.
This is of course true for every single one of the contributors, from our brilliant sound designer Alfonso De Grandis to the special FX makeup artist Anta Nalbanti, the performers Nana Kouli and Constantinos Katsamakis, and everyone else in a long list that can be found in the official website: die-wolke.org/imago2