The Cinematography behind BFI’s Premiere ‘Dawn Every Day’

Written by Evan Weidenkeller

Dawn Every Day is a true story about a boy who tries to conjure up ways to keep his best friend from moving out of the country and learning about the world outside of his home. A true story about the director, Amir Youssef’s Father in 1950s Cairo Egypt.

Our goal with the film was to try and capture a moment in time and tell this story through the eyes of Nabil (our protagonist) and seeing the world through his perspective. When Amir spoke with me about shooting this film, the one element he was sure about was shooting this film in black and white. And a single image from Cairo in the 50s that he wanted to use as a source of visual inspiration.

To me, this image felt very voyeuristic and objective. But at the same time, it felt intimate. And even though the girl at the window is out of focus, we are drawn to experience this moment wit her while the world around her moves on.

It was our goal to recreate this same feeling from the photograph and portray it in our film, Dawn Every Day. From here we began constructing our visual language of the movie.

‘Dawn Every Day’BFI

The Specs

Our last film together was shot on 16mm Kodak 200T, and it was our hope to shoot this film on 35mm Kodak 5222 Black and White Tri-x. It is the film stock that is around today that has the most similar look to what film stocks would have been around during that time. And it was our intention to try and get an audience to feel as though they were in Cairo in the 50s by any means necessary.

However, as we began looking deeper into how the process of shooting on film in Egypt, we began to realize that it might be logistically way more difficult than we would have imagined. Getting the film into Cairo would have been the easy part. The biggest hiccup for me was having to ship a 35mm Camera into Egypt from Germany. And even once we shot the film, we would then have to ship the negatives in bulk back into Germany so they could be scanned and developed at a post house there.

If anyone has ever shot on film, they know the hardest part about shooting on film, is the waiting period from when you shoot, to when you actually get to watch the dailies after the film has been developed and scanned. And having to ship our entire film out from Egypt to another country made us very nervous. And we couldn’t find a way to do this that guaranteed our film would make it into Germany Safely.

So instead we pivoted away from shooting on film and decided to go with the next best thing. A new camera that had just been released from Arri called the Alexa 35.

This was around the time when Arri had just released the camera and I had not done a lot of testing on this camera as of yet. It was my goal to see how I could use this camera to manipulate the sensor as much as possible so I could craft an image that looked exactly like Kodak 5222 without the need for post color. Trying to do as much in camera finals as possible in order to make post production easier and simpler

Arri Rental in Los Angeles was kind enough to let me into their studio to start running tests on this camera and see just how I could manipulate it to achieve the look I wanted.

Using a Custom LUT (Look Up Table) That I had built, I used this test to craft a LUT that mimicked the Kodak 5222 exposure bracket as much as possible. The great thing about Kodak 35mm 5222, is you need quite a lot of light to get a good exposure in it. And even then, the stock itself is very contrasty and the highlights will blow out very quickly. So you have to set your exposures really closely together to get an image out of it. My LUT was built in a way that mimicked this exactly.

However, this wasn’t enough to get the look I desired to match a 35mm Film Stock.

For those who don’t know, the beautiful thing about the new Alexa 35 cameras is their ability to burn in what’s called a “Texture” onto the digital image. Basically what a texture is is a form of software that manipulates the sensor to add grain and texture onto a digital image to help “dirty” it up in a way. Arri wanted to put the power of the image back into the hands of the director and cinematographer. So that is exactly how we used this camera.

With the help of Arri, we were able to create a custom “Texture” that allowed us to create a grain structure and hallation that replicated Kodak 5222 almost perfectly. To create our “look” I used a combination of my LUT and a custom Texture and shot the film at a 3200 ISO to further increase the digital grain while trying my best to lose detail in the shadows but save some more in the highlights.

You can see in the image above, that there is noise in the shadows and hallation in the highlights with a very steep contrast to match. And all done in camera.

Our next step in this process was to figure out our visual language for the film. We spent some time trying to reimagine our lives as we were kids and realized how big and grand everything felt when we were younger. The world felt so much larger but we felt so small and insignificant in comparison. We took this idea and rode with it. And from here we built ourselves some rules.

We shot 90% of our film on a lens called the Ultra Prime 8R. An 8mm lens that is rectilinear, meaning even though we are almost seeing 180 degree angle of view, the lines in the lens do not bend. They remain straight, creating a truly realistic image. Using this lens allowed us to remain as wide as possible and create images that made the children feel so much smaller in comparison. On top of this, we knew that we wanted most of our images to come from a child’s height and stray away from photographing scenes from a taller perspective.

Once Nabil started to learn about and understand why his best friend had to leave the country, we would start to move from 8mm and 12mm lenses to 18mm and 20mm lenses which gave us a new unique perspective and added some subtle intensity to the image.

Learning the Script

Now that we built our rules for the visual language of the movie, it was time to start planning and shot listing. At this time in pre-production, Amir was already in Cairo and I was still back in California. We relied heavily on weekly Zoom meetings to discuss our film and come up with ideas on how to approach shooting each and every scene. And with a 10-hour time difference, it often meant that either Amir or myself would be up in the middle of the night discussing these moves. And with a film that is entirely in a foreign language.

For a film that was entirely in Arabic, I was a little worried I didn’t speak the language. So I asked Amir to send me both an English translated script and a script in Arabic. The goal for myself was to be able to memorize the script in Arabic so that when we were there shooting, I would understand where in the scene we were when our actors were performing.

Arabic is a very beautiful and unique language that I was not able to master in the time allotted. So I ended up just writing the phonetics of Arabic words at the bottom of my script and memorizing how each word sounded with each piece of dialogue. It took some time, but in the end, this was a tremendous help with me being able to react and adjust accordingly depending on the emotional arc of the scene.

Staging the Film

Once our location was locked. I was able to get a LiDAR scan of the entire property which we used as a template to start storyboarding and building our lighting diagrams. This part is usually very key for me, so in pre-production, everyone on the team knows where we will be looking so everyone can plan accordingly. From here we were able to plan every move we would make and found out what would work in the edit and what we could easily cut if we ran out of time on the day.

Using either Unreal Engine or PreViz Pro, I’m able to quickly build our sets using real assets from the practical location. This gave Amir and me the freedom to move and explore our camera to find which angles and blocking worked best for each individual scene.

For this film, I ended up going with PreViz Pro because of its ease of use when we are on location or out at a bar working on our laptops. In the end, we were able to photograph around 95% of the shots we had planned out in pre-production.

All in all, this process from pre-production to post took about 6 months. In the end, the entire team and myself were deeply happy with the results. The film Dawn Every Day Premieres at BFI in London 2024. It will be making its showcases around the world in almost every major city.

For those who can catch our film, I’d hope you’d reach out to us and tell us what you think! It’s a story that means a lot to us and we are excited to share it.

For more updates on the film follow us on Instagram @Evan_Weid_DP @amirnyou @Cats__films