Forbidden Ground: WWI Cinematography

Feature Film — Forbidden Ground

Transforming the landscape

Transforming a landscape to reflect the scale of the Great War is an extraordinary hurdle for independent filmmakers, especially when you are geographically half a world away from the original European battlefields. To replicate the muddy, devastated landscape of the Western Front in 1916 France, we travelled to a farm just outside the rural township of Dubbo, New South Wales. This regional location, supplemented by select interior and pickup shots completed in Sydney, served as our primary canvas.

Managing the environmental transition from the sun-drenched, arid topography of regional New South Wales to the cold, waterlogged clay of the Somme demanded strict collaboration between the camera, art, and special effects departments.

Principal photography was a punishing 19-day and 19-night consecutive schedule completed over the Christmas period of 2011. Confronting the intense heat of an Australian December while attempting to evoke a bleak, freezing northern European winter forced us to exercise absolute control over our setups. The shoot was physically draining — days running up to twenty hours on the heaviest setups, thick mud underfoot for almost the entire production.

Working in long, committed blocks paid off creatively. It let our lighting and atmospheric design stay highly cohesive as we moved between the trenches, No Man's Land, and our command-post interiors.

To physically restructure the Dubbo farmland into a convincing war zone, the production deployed over 300kg of physical explosives through the pyrotechnic company Armzfx, run by co-director Johan Earl. By choosing in-camera physical explosions over digital effects, we established a highly tactile, immediate environment for the actors.

From my perspective behind the lens, I navigated the spatial limitations of our location by employing a highly deliberate framing strategy. The camera consistently isolates the characters in tight compositions and intense close-ups, focusing on the faces of young men straining to survive. This stylistic choice served a dual purpose: it heightened the psychological claustrophobia of the narrative while restricting the lens's field of view to exclude regional Australian flora and flat horizons that would have quickly broken the illusion of historical Europe.

Directorial Clarity in the Mud

Forbidden Ground was co-directed by Johan Earl and Adrian Powers. Because Johan was pulling double duty — starring on-screen as Sgt. Major Arthur Wilkins while also overseeing the pyrotechnic team — Adrian carried the lion's share of the in-the-moment directorial decisions on set. Johan would trudge through the mud between takes to review playback with him, ensuring safety and narrative beats were perfectly aligned.

On a tight, independent schedule, directorial clarity is one of the most underrated gifts a director can give a cinematographer. Because we spent very little time hunting for the frame, we could direct our focus into the nuances of lighting, lenses, and atmospherics.

The Digital Toolkit: Navigating Early Sensor Constraints

We shot the film during a fascinating transitional era for digital cinema acquisition. Our camera package comprised a mixture of early-generation digital sensors, with Edgar Deluen keeping everything pin-sharp as our "A" camera focus puller.

Operating the Sony F3 during this period introduced some distinct sensor-level hurdles. The camera had been released commercially only two weeks prior to the commencement of principal photography. Because of this tight timeline, neither the paid nor the free internal S-Log firmware upgrades were available to us. We were therefore forced to record utilising the camera's internal Cinegammas — limiting the sensor to a dynamic range of approximately 12 stops of light.

In high-contrast environments — night scenes illuminated by pyrotechnic flashes and harsh backlights — this 12-stop threshold required highly precise exposure control to prevent highlight clipping while preserving rich shadow detail.

Our acquisition workflow relied on capturing footage spherically using a high-quality Zeiss Master Prime lens set. The spherical footage was subsequently matted to an ultrawide 2.35:1 aspect ratio during post-production, later modified to 1.78:1 for home entertainment and DVD releases.

Painting with Backlight: Atmospheric Smoke and the Fog of War

A substantial portion of the film is set in the pitch-black expanse of No Man's Land at night. The core lighting strategy I developed relied on establishing strong directional motivation using powerful backlights — 4K HMI fixtures projected directly through thick, live atmospheric smoke, dust, and pyrotechnic debris.

• Graphic Silhouette Generation — The intense backlighting transformed falling dirt, rising smoke, muzzle flashes, and soldiers' profiles into stark graphic silhouettes, heightening dramatic tension.
• Physical Diffusion and Edge Softening — Physical smoke acted as a natural optical low-pass filter, beautifully softening the image and rolling off highlights in-camera without relying on heavy post filtration.
• Depth Construction in Void Spaces — By backlighting the smoke layers, we recorded distinct planes of atmospheric density, creating three-dimensional depth of field within a physically flat environment.

Global Perspectives: Deakins, Fraser and the Philosophy of Light

Roger Deakins CBE ASC BSC prioritises lighting the space rather than individual shots, ensuring actors have the freedom to move within a believable environment. His cove lighting technique — bouncing powerful fixtures off large muslin surfaces — creates a soft, wrapping quality that mimics natural ambient light.

In contrast, Greig Fraser ACS ASC has built a reputation for highly adaptive imagery that merges digital sensors with vintage optics. On Dune: Part Two, he captured Giedi Prime using a 3D rig containing one colour and one infrared sensor, frequently pairing modern digital sensors with 1970s Panavision C-series anamorphic lenses.

Our methodology on Forbidden Ground sat somewhere in the middle — a highly structured, stylised backlight design while remaining as run-and-gun and lightweight as possible on the ground.

A Different Approach: Shutter Angles and the Saving Private Ryan Question

Looking at the ultimate in war cinematography, Saving Private Ryan provided a reference point to consider — and ultimately pivot from. Janusz Kamiński's approach employed acute shutter angles and phase shifting — pulling the film down during the exposure window to create a distinctive streaking effect. In the digital world of 2011 I was unable to achieve this in-camera, though I'd experimented with the technique on my short film Bleeders, shot on the Arriflex 435 ES 'Extreme'.

After consideration I decided not to use this technique on the battle scenes but thought the soldiers would be more agitated and nervous prior to going over the trenches. My methodology: shallow shutter angles inside the trenches, and normal photography — albeit slow-motion — for when the battle ensued.

Post-Production: Harmonising CGI and Colour Grading

With principal photography completed in our 19-day window, we collaborated with visual effects artists to integrate digital matte paintings — extending background horizons with distant artillery flashes, ruined forests, and endless lines of trenches. The colourist applied a highly desaturated, washed-out palette chosen to reflect the psychological state of the soldiers and the bleak, cold climate of the historical setting.

As Roger Deakins has frequently remarked, the most successful cinematography should exist as a cohesive piece where no single element draws attention to itself over the story.

A Humbling Milestone

Our work on Forbidden Ground went on to win an ACS Bronze Award at the NSW & ACT chapter in the Feature Films — Cinema category. On the night of the awards, I found myself listed alongside Dion Beebe ACS ASC — the Academy Award-winning Australian cinematographer behind Memoirs of a Geisha. Standing in that company was a genuinely humbling moment.

Conclusions & Technical Takeaways

Ultimately, Forbidden Ground stands as an example of independent Australian filmmaking at its most resourceful — showcasing how a dedicated crew can transform a dry farm in New South Wales into the historic, mud-drenched trenches of the Somme through technical discipline and creative problem-solving.

Glenn Hanns ACS is a Sydney-based Director of Photography specialising in feature drama, television and documentary. His work on Forbidden Ground was distributed through Lionsgate and recognised with an ACS Bronze Award NSW 2013. For project enquiries visit the contact page.