Cooke Anamorphic lenses help cinematographer Nathalie Pitters capture her and director Caleb Femi’s passion project Giraffe.

 

Caleb Femi, the director, and I, have worked together on quite a few things.. I can’t remember where we got the funding for “Giraffe” or how it happened, but we met I think in 2017. He’s a poet and he had shot a dance film that I really loved. So, I messaged him and said I’d love to connect. When we met he told me he had an idea for a little short film called “Giraffe”. It mutated & evolved over the years, but that was how the idea started.

The original concept was that someone buries a time capsule, and then years later its dug up and we see the story of this discovery unravel in three different time spaces. I asked Caleb, “why did you choose the name giraffe?” And he said, “because it’s such a hard thing to describe, how do you describe a giraffe? You can’t.”. He wanted to go for something that was an intangible concept. It was the very first project we discussed, but back then there wasn’t any funding. Then over the years we made a couple of other short films, passion projects, art films, things like that, based off his poems and we would always discuss ideas on a bunch of other things. Sometimes I would see a photo, drawing or video installation and I would just send it to him and say, “we need to do something based on this”. We would then brainstorm some ideas, and he would do the same with me.  He’s my soul director, you know, we’re very connected. I can’t remember how and when the funding came about but one day he called me and let me know that “Giraffe” was a go, and sent over the script. It was set in the near future and the premise is that government surveillance is rife, especially for young underprivileged black teens. At a certain age they are forced to have an operation that removes a part of their brain, turning them into subservient, compliant, lobotomised zombie-like shells of people.

 

Read the full interview with Nathalie here.