Interview By Roman Sokal for Canadian Cinematographer. May 2022. Click the image to view PDF.

CANADIAN SOCIETY OF CINEMATOGRAPHERS

MAY 2022 ISSUE

CANADIAN CINEMATOGRAPHER

VOL. 14 NO. 3

BY ROMAN SOKAL, SPECIAL TO CANADIAN CINEMATOGRAPHER

CHASING THE LIGHT

As a Grammy-winning, two-time Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, Neil Young may have toured all over the world, but when it's time for him to make a film, the cinematographer he turns to can be found in Queenston, Ontario, a rural community nestled against the Niagara River with a population of a few hundred people.

Associate member Adam CK Vollick's work was first noticed in 2004 by Daniel Lanois, producer for such music legends as Bob Dylan and U2. Vollick had photographed a family event that was published into a book, which caught Lanois' eye, and when the producer summoned Vollick to his studio to do some publicity stills, a new stage of the young cinematographer's career took flight.

"It was around the same time that his record Belladonna was coming out. He had some press photos done that he wasn't happy with. It was a right-place, right-time scenario for me," Vollick recalls. "Daniel said, 'Hey, Adam, I really loved those pictures you took of the family, and I wonder if you'd come down to my Toronto loft. I have some spotlights and a few things around, a 5,000-square-foot space with instruments and everything. So come on down and just have some fun tomorrow.' The rest is history."

BARN

In the years following, Vollick became Lanois' visual conduit, supplying psychedelic imagery for his live performances, record covers, and even co-directing and lensing Lanois' documentary Here Is What Is, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2007. "Shortly after doing a few shows together, I became his sort of resident visual artist," Vollick says. "After Here Is What Is was the Black Dub project. We stylistically chose to approach it like the track on Here Is What Is called 'Harry.' 'Harry' is the birth of my visual voice. It's a one-take pan around the room of the band performing a song all at once. It was a magic carpet ride we all went on. So we decided to treat the Black Dub films like that. I tapped this extra-sensory perception I have for 3D space; it probably came from all the visual exercises I did trying to see around corners and through time in my Spacetime painting works."

Here Is What Is and the Black Dub films were shot with a variety of cameras, including a PXL2000 Fisher-Price video camera. "We needed to get it into DV format," Vollick explains. "I sent it away to a guy on eBay I found who modified them to have a regular analogue out jack. Then I plugged that into the DVX100 that we shot everything else with and recorded everything to DV tape so that we could then transfer off of DV tape into the editing suite and avoid that whole cassette thing altogether. There's no look like it. We also used some pinhole cameras from my short stint installing security systems."

Not long after that, Vollick caught the interest of Young, as well as director Jonathan Demme. "At the time, Daniel's manager and Neil Young's manager were one in the same, the legendary Elliot Roberts," Vollick says. "Elliot showed those [Black Dub films to Neil, and Neil decided, 'I've always wanted to make a record with Daniel, and I want this kid from Canada to film it. That's where [Young's 2010 album] Le Noise came from. Then Jonathan Demme, who was in the midst of making a three-picture series of concert films with Neil, saw Le Noise, and I started getting invited to his projects too. With Demme I worked on Journeys at Massey Hall, and I was called in to shoot a concert with Kenny Chesney, which was one of the first livestreams that YouTube ever did, from the Jersey beach. Jonathan put me in a Tom Ford suit and made me the onstage and under stage operator for Justin Timberlake's Netflix concert film of his 20/20 tour."

Vollick's imagery was used on the album cover of Le Noise, captured and processed in a grainy, high-contrast, black-and-white still. He has since supplied images for various albums and DVD packaging. "I have contributed a lot of album artwork over the years. Up until then, I'd shot everything besides the weird art with a Panasonic DVX100, which was a standard definition little handheld video camera," he says. "It was a great thing to learn on, I have come to realize it was kind of like a digital 16 mm, similar in mobility to what the New Wave guys in France would have been using back in the day. It totally influenced the way I learned to see through a film camera. But when we got the call to do Le Noise, hi-def had become a standard. I thought, 'We can't continue to shoot with this. We've got to step up. But I wanted the same feel, a sharp and fast mechanical lens and an unencumbered camera body. So we moved up to the big brother of DVX 100, the hi-def version of it, the HPX170. I knew photographically we can't centre-cut a 1920×1080 frame and then blow it up to a 12-inch record cover. It's gonna look like garbage. So I started thinking, 'What footage do we have that I can stitch together as a panograph? There was this one take we did of this song 'Hitchhiker' where we shot during the day. It starts with a long pan up from the ground, snaking up a cable to Neil through the open doors. Very eerie backlighting, sage smoke in the air. I thought, 'This is perfect.'

"There's another process I created through the way I treated my Spacetime paintings, where I created the grain from scratch, layering a whole bunch of grain together to simulate the kind of organic grain structures, almost reticulation, that you would get when push processing real film too hard," Vollick says. "I laid that on top of it after I'd stitched it all together, and that became the look of the Le Noise film as well. Ever since then, Neil's called me for pretty much every musical project he's done."

Vollick employs a renegade type of approach to his work, shooting largely solo, although he says he is now interested in putting his wholehearted effort into shooting narrative features. Recalling some past shoots with Young- including the 2018 feature film Paradox, starring Young and directed by Young's life partner Daryl Hannah; Young and Hannah's 2019 documentary Mountaintop; and Barn, a stand-alone film to Young's 2021 album of the same name "I had no crew. Zero," Vollick states. "It was all about my operating, being there to get it. It was pure vérité. There was so much that came from the in-between moments and the talent around. In the recording studio, you learn that you've always got to be rolling. You never know when the muse is going to come and sprinkle the fairy dust. Whenever I have a camera in my hand, I have to be entirely present. Even when I put the camera down, I leave it rolling. That's my mode of operation, and I think it's what's led to my longevity with Neil. I don't miss anything. If I can help it, there's always something rolling somewhere.

"A secret to all of my studio practices is I have a Sound Devices 10-track field recorder that records high-res and a bunch of wireless mics that I hide around different parts of the studio, the control room and the performance room," Vollick says. "When I send it all to the postproduction house, I send it along with notes about key events that happen at times of day. Then that's a master timeline, a ruler, for them to sync the different cameras to and line them up. Then I monitor that recorder on a wireless listening device in headphones so that I could hide, out of sight, in the studio and know everything that was going on."

One of Vollick's trademark go-to lenses is a 5.8 mm circular fisheye. "I use it like a God's-eye perspective," he says. "It has a polished inner barrel. Most lenses have a matte finish inside the barrel so as to eliminate flare. This one is polished, so any flare is greatly accentuated. Because it sees around 205 degrees, every little light that hits the lens causes an explosion of colour. It's not practical most of the time, but it is a certain effect that can be great in close quarters and such when employed properly."

Vollick's approach to shooting images is also spiritual in a way, founded on an innate understanding of the connection between human beings and creative energies. "As an artist and a human being, I feel like we're all a part of one giant thing," he states. "Without getting too metaphysical about all of this, the idea that we're apart from one another is kind of a fallacy. Of course we are. You live in your house, I live in my house, but I think that our consciousness is something that is at play in everything. We are all a part of the same fabric of energy, and each of us is a pinhole aperture in that fabric to the light that exists on the other side. So whenever I can make people feel that connection to things, that awe, the realization that our thoughts and feelings transcend objects, media and all that superficiality, with everything that I do, I try to put that kind of fingerprint of life on it.

"With Mountaintop. Elliot Roberts had just passed away," Vollick reveals. "The nighttime time-lapses that I did, I would let burn at the same exposure into daytime so that we'd have these organic fades to white. I've always wished Mountaintop was more beautiful. However, the subject matter was pretty gritty. The songs were pretty gritty. Neil's mood was pretty gritty. And the story that he cut together about the making of it was pretty gritty."

Vollick acknowledges he has an affinity for natural light. In Barn, he allows strips of sunlight to highlight the faces of the musicians, while maintaining detail in the darkest of spots. "I feel like I've been a student of light my entire life. I've been observing it ever since I was a baby," he muses. "I remember riding in the backseat of my parents' car when my brother was really little. It'd be that ultramarine blue dawn and my mom was going to work. I remember squinting to change the shape of the oncoming headlights. My early memories are all remembrances of light encounters. I have a nostalgia about how every day of the year looks different than every other day of the year. Every day, every minute is different from the last. I'm hoping someday to shoot by moonlight."