Another new film exploring the topic of AI is Robert Rippberger’s Renner starring Frankie Muniz and Marcia Gay Harden. The official synopsis for the film reads: “Renner, a reclusive computer genius driven by a need for control, designs an A.I. named Salenus to help him overcome his crippling social anxieties and find love. Encouraged by Salenus, Renner forms a connection with his alluring neighbor Jamie, but their relationship starts to unravel when she begins to interact with the AI As dark secrets and betrayals begin to surface, Salenus’s influence on Renner takes a malicious turn, leaving him entangled in the devastating consequences of his invention”.
While Renner shares the same high-concept look as other AI-centered films, it was made on an indie film budget and shot entirely in a car warehouse.
So, how did the filmmakers pull this off? It started with the film’s cinematographer, Sean Emer, who found ways to get creative with lighting, camera angles, and shots. When discussing this topic Sean says, “What shooting in a warehouse did for us was allow us to actually light the movie. This warehouse had tons of space, and cost our production a tiny fraction of what a “true” film stage would have charged. Every dollar saved there went directly into essential elements for the film, whether it be crew or equipment. If we were tossing over thousands of dollars a day for a well-gridded and amply camlok’d studio, we would have very comfortably gotten a couple of days’ worth of footage and then run out of money. In a lot of ways, that warehouse - which was generously donated to us through producer Devin Keaton—saved the film. More than that, it made it possible to begin with”.
Sean goes into more detail on this topic in the interview below.
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No Film School: I’d love to know how you got into cinematography.
Sean Emer: Cameras, lights, and stories have been a major part of my life since I was born, actually. My dad was a cinematographer - though his work never extended much beyond corporate and event work. He didn’t call himself a cinematographer, or a DP. He liked the term “lighting cameraman”. That modesty didn’t stop him from passing on his excitement! When I was a kid he’d bring me along on his shoots sometimes, and teach me about basic things (This is called an Inky! And this one’s a Tweenie! I honestly thought he was messing with me, but really we just had better names for our lights back then!).
I think what really did it for me, in terms of cinematography—and filmmaking in general - was the absurd beauty of it. A film set is sort of the strangest place a person can be. It bears little similarity to any other environment we would find ourselves in normally. Big metal stands, ropes, wires, cables, shining lights, drapes, and big sails of black cloth, all the buzzing equipment and carts and boxes and troughs - it’s a place of madness. But, if you put your eye in this one particular spot, boom! It looks more real than reality. You never forget that feeling, walking through the forest of stands and reflectors and monitors to arrive at a single place, the camera’s place, where all that aberration forms a reality of your own design. It’s intoxicating.
NFS: Can you tell us how you got involved with Renner and what attracted you to the script?
SE: I had worked with Robert, the director, on a few of his previous films, the most recent being Those Who Walk Away. I was the gaffer on that one (and boy is that another can of worms! The movie was a ‘one shot’ film done at an indie budget, it was a very fun project to light), and my technical and creative contributions on the lighting design there recommended me to him when he began work on Renner, which was going to be a far more technically demanding project for lighting.
As for my own interest, I have to say first that Renner is releasing now into a sort of cultural monsoon in terms of AI and its impact on society. But when I first read this script, it would’ve been mid-2021 that I got the first copy, AI occupied a very different proportion of our collective minds. ChatGPT hadn’t been released yet, and generative AI for images was only just moving out of the ‘gimmick’ stage. AI was completely different and was thought of differently. When we entered production in 2023, the state of AI technology was transforming almost in real-time. It was intriguing to see how our story, which was written in a time before the beginning of this AI revolution, changed in tone simply through our own understanding and opinions on the technology. As a nerd and self-acclaimed tech geek, I couldn’t have asked for a better project!
'Renner' behind the scenes CREDIT: SIE Films
NFS: What did pre-production look like for you on Renner?
SE: The early conversations I had with Robert centered around getting on the same page visually. Before we talked about shots or lights or lenses I wanted to make sure that the movie I was watching in my head as I read the script was close to the same one that was in his head. My favorite way of doing this is to have the director give me films to watch. The first two I got from Robert were a classic 1960 black and white studio film, The Apartment, and the 2022 AI horror M3GAN. To say that the juxtaposition of these two films, separated by 60+ years of style and craft, was an intriguing notion is putting it too lightly! But it did a great job of setting the mental expectations for how we were going to approach the film.
The style and the language of the movie - that is to say the shot design, momentum, color, all of that - would live very much in the modern zeitgeist of filmmaking. But the flourishes on that work should always fall back onto dashes of classic studio style - entering to and landing on marks, slashes on walls, hard unmotivated edge lights, that sort of thing. In the end, I think our style gravitated more into the modern soft light look than we had originally planned on, but I don’t regret it - it’s important to stay fluid and open to change on set once you see the story coming together.
That doesn’t mean we didn’t plan exhaustively for the shoot though. We had some tight constraints to work within: limited budget, 4-person G&E team, and only 15 days to shoot. In terms of manpower and schedule, that’s a Lifetime movie. We did not want to make a Lifetime movie, we wanted to punch above our weight class, and that meant preparation. Every scene in the movie was shot listed across a few marathon Zoom sessions between Rob and me - I think he was in Europe finishing another film at the time. We’d spend 3-4 hours straight pitching shots and blocking using Production Designer Sonia Foltarz’s floorplans and Photoshop, always with Shotdeck up on a shared screen to grab inspiration. After we finished that list, we took a breather and then ran through it again.
Once we were on location, and the sets were built and somewhat dressed, we blocked out each shot with a director’s finder app on my phone - I used Cadrage, but Artemis or any others all work great. That was our last pass on the shot list, and the last thing Rob and I agreed on before spinning up the actual shoot was that we’d both be fine with throwing the whole thing out the window if we saw a better opportunity on set. We wanted to make sure the actors and everyone else involved in the story had the ability to influence it—and in several scenes, we re-blocked and redesigned the coverage on the fly simply because Frankie, Violet, or Taylor had a great idea that we ran with.
I’d also like to note that while the creative element of my prep was very tightly boxed in these jam sessions with the director, the overall process was actually far more supported by the producers. I know that there is a sort of jaded mindset among many filmmakers in which it is supposed that the Producer is an obstacle to their art, but I really think this is backward. The producers of this project were its greatest champions, and they moved heaven and earth to carve out a little space for us to create our art. Producer KT Kent was an absolute wizard (level 20, at least), and shielded us from so many problems that it is mind-boggling to think of in retrospect. While Robert and I bounced through the sets talking about shots and scene bumpers, KT was literally befriending an entire town and making our shooting environment supportive, comfortable, and reliable. She didn’t allow our meals and days to become bottom budget cost-saving Styrofoam disasters. She spent hours working with local businesses to make sure the crew was well fed, had a place to go unwind between shooting weeks, and so much more that can’t be properly appreciated. She took us from work colleagues to a family, and did it like it was nothing. Devin Keaton secured our shooting location for us, without which Renner would’ve never made it out of the email chains! Martin Medina is maybe the most impressive - and I say that even though I’m married to KT! The man almost single-handedly willed this film into existence, and he carried that weight without ever making even a PA feel like they were beneath his gaze. The sense of artistic camaraderie and safety that the producers created as the atmosphere for our film was essential and infectious.
NFS: You shot Renner completely in a car warehouse. Can you talk about this decision and how it was beneficial from a DP perspective?
SE: From the perspective of a DP, it wasn’t beneficial at all! At least, not in a direct way. The challenges of shooting a film on sets using studio methods but without studio infrastructure, all on an indie budget, are myriad. There was no grid to hang lights from. There was no professional power solution we could tap into - and only enough budget for a small supplemental generator that was available and fixed against a very thin (and not at all sound-proof) wall adjacent to one of our main sets. Most of our lighting was powered by big long chains of extension cords dribbling off to whatever wall outlets we could find near us. My gaffer, Cory Green, did a fantastic job in managing the power conundrum, and he prevented it from being an impediment to our image. We knew going in that this would be a big limiting factor - there was no budget, time, or infrastructure for powerful studio lights. Everything was LED, for both low power draw and flexibility.
What shooting in this warehouse did for us though was to allow us to actually light the movie. I know that sounds counterintuitive after I’ve just moaned about the lack of power and grids and whatnot, but I’m serious. This warehouse had tons of space, and cost our production a tiny fraction of what a “true” film stage would have charged. Every dollar saved there went directly into essential elements for the film, whether it be crew or equipment. If we were tossing over thousands of dollars a day for a well-gridded and amply camlok’d studio, we would have very comfortably gotten a couple day’s worth of footage and then run out of money. In a lot of ways, that warehouse - which was generously donated to us through producer Devin Keaton - saved the film. More than that, it made it possible to begin with.
I’ll complain to my dying day that we had to run 100’ of extension cords and top-stick half of our combos just to get some pepper lights over a wall, but making films sure as hell beats not making them.
NFS: What cameras and equipment did you use for the shoot?
SE: Ah, the classic conundrum! The gear question! I am self admittedly an absolute gear nerd and will peep pixels all night long if given the chance. So I’m happy to talk about the brushes we used on this painting, but I feel a need to say something before that. If you have to ask me what gear I used to make the film, the real thing to learn is that my answer isn’t as important as you think. I see a lot of bright-eyed and talented people starting their careers and creating their style in this industry, both in real life and in forums online, and for every “how can I use composition to make this character feel more confident” or “What kind of lighting techniques can I use to make these two scenes feel like a journey from safety to anxiety” question, there’s a million more that ask, “What camera/lens/light/tripod/meter/hat/socks do I need to be a real filmmaker”. So let me just yell into the storm a little here and say this: The right camera is the one you can get! The right lens is the one you’ve got! Cinematography is 99% where you put the gear, and 1% what gear you put there.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. To answer the question though, we used an Arri Alexa Mini paired with Angenieux Optimo zooms (15-40 and 28-76) as our primary camera kit. We had one specialty lens for the door peephole scenes - I believe that was the Nikkor 8mm Fisheye. For angles where we wanted to look aggressively straight up or track the lens very close to the ground, I used a Century Optics Low Angle Prism - maybe one of my favorite tools to have in the back pocket! The reason we picked the Optimos over a prime kit was purely utilitarian. I knew that Robert liked using slow zooms for impactful scenes, so I was going to have a zoom kit anyway. Combine that with the speed and efficiency I gained by only swapping lenses when going between ‘wide-ish’ and ‘tight-ish’, and we saved a lot of time on set. With only 15 days to shoot, that was essential. The last thing I wanted was to have all the sharp clarity and beauty of the ideal prime lens, but not the extra takes needed to nail the performance or the complex camera move. Story, story, story!
For lighting, we used a family of Litegear Litemat 4s as our main soft sources, and then peppered in edges, shapes, and splashes with a small army of LED Dedo lights. The translight outside Renner’s apartment was custom-made, and we used a series of Skypanel S60s in combination with a few Source 4 Lustrs to light it up. The main sunlight unit used for daytime scenes was a Nanlux Dyno 1200 if I remember right.
'Renner' BTS CREDIT: SIE Films
NFS: Renner has a very futuristic look. Can you talk about some of the tips or tricks you used to execute this vibe?
SE: I think that most of the futuristic look hinged upon the set design and the inset practical LED lighting. This was the trickiest part of pre-production. We luckily had Brent Wilson, who is definitely the best fixtures foreman I’ve ever worked with. Sonia designed the sets, I asked for tweaks based on shot designs with Robert, and once that was settled Brent came in and installed all of those LEDs in the walls before production started. We had him drop the leads off into DMX controllers for Corey, our gaffer to connect, and we were off to the races!
Like a good lighting nerd, I started there talking about the sets and ended up focusing on LEDs and DMX controls, so let me take a step back and reiterate just how good a job was done by the art crew. Sonia’s design was excellent and gave us a space that we could make feel large or small as was needed, and which could be filmed from any angle without fear of losing the futuristic polish Robert was after. It did more than simply avoid locking us out of shots, it helped enhance them in every way. It wouldn’t have been possible normally to build sets of this quality on a budget like this, but again our producers found the perfect partnership! A local construction company, Edwards Inc, came in and donated a ton of time, expertise, and material to build these sets to Sonia’s exact design. We even had flyaway walls, ceilings, a motorized platform for Salenus’s safe, a rain bar, and a manually operated telescoping elevator door. These are construction guys who as far as I know were working on a film set for the first time ever, and they really did a wonderful job.
With the production design dialed in so well, we used lighting - mainly color - to get a sort of spotless futurism where the whole world is measured, clean, and polished, but somehow still a little bit messy. We had some colors that we tried to make key, namely the cyan of Renner’s hallway and the city beyond, and the magenta of Jamie’s apartment. Both colors feel very neon and futuristic, especially in combination, and Robert was clear from the beginning that he wanted big splashes and stripes of saturated color as a theme in the film, so it was an easy solution!
NFS: Were there certain camera angles or techniques you used that created a higher-concept look?
SE: The camera movement in the film is very muted compared to most modern films where steadicams, dollies, and jibs can be found on just about every set. This is in part a bit of a nod to the more classic studio vibes of precise composition, and the evolution of a scene through blocking, pans, and tilts. But part of it was also directly influenced by the story. We wanted Renner to feel static because that’s what he is at the beginning of the film. He’s stuck, sterile, and starving. While we didn’t want to go full Ozu, we thought a more muted approach to movement would give the moments where we did move all that much more power. So we picked our battles, so to speak, and pushed, zoomed, and used handheld very sparingly. What saves the film from suffering from this is the same thing that I think also pumped up the futuristic vibes - our set design. The beautiful A-Frame hallway, big windows, and tight perspective lines afforded by the LED practicals made it somewhat difficult to find a shot on set that didn’t have something going for it, so we didn’t feel pressured to make up for anything by adding unmotivated camera movements or angles.
'Renner' BTS with Frankie Muniz and Sean Emer CREDIT: SIE Films
NFS: What was the most difficult shot in the film? Why?
SE: For me, it was the scene in the hallway where Jamie is attempting to leave, and Renner is trying to tell her how much he wants her to stay. The blocking of the scene pushes them ever closer to the door, Robert wanted it shot in a single take. We flew away the wall of the hallway so we could shoot through the A-frame LEDs, and I was set up on a dana dolly to make framing easier. However there wasn’t a particular plan here for this frame, we wanted to let the actors find what worked for them and then design around it. As they walked through it, I was playing around and caught the idea of this measured counter move, where the camera would play in opposition to the movement of the characters, catching them in a 50/50 profile moment with an A-Frame splitting the shot down the middle right at the pivotal moment in the scene. It would be an easy shot to accomplish with a large budget, with robot arms and programmable dollies and the like, but all I had was a dana dolly! Robert liked the idea though, so we went for it. It took something like 20 takes to get it, far beyond the shooting ratio of the rest of the film ( we rarely needed more than 5 takes), but it was worth it! Hands down one of my favorite shots, and its difficulty makes it feel even more rewarding to see.
And by the way, I have to say I found myself surprised with what a narrow range of choices I had pop in my head when I was thinking about difficult shots from this project. I think I owe that to how excellent my crew was, and a great example was my Key Grip, Mike Kyriakides, and his fleet of mirrors! We had a shot that should have been pretty difficult - a close profile of Frankie at the door looking through the peephole. We had no flyaway wall there, and the Alexa with the Optimo was a pretty beefy package, about half as long as the hallway was wide to begin with! So this shot should have qualified as a difficult one, right? But Mike was ready for it. He had these really nice, optically pure mirrors in his kit. No coating or anything, just single-pane clean mirrors. He rigged it in the corner of the hallway, and I shot into it with my camera. So that angle of Frankie in profile is actually shot from behind him and over his shoulder. We used that trick a few times to get angles in tight corners and tough spots, and there were a million other little things that should’ve made our work difficult to achieve, but the crew was experienced, skilled, and most importantly they were creatively invested. They weren’t there to fill time cards, you know? They were filmmakers as truely as I was, as Robert was, etc. It was an honor to work with them.
'Renner' behind the scenes CREDIT: SIE Films
NFS: Is there something about your work on Renner that audiences might not know?
SE: I suppose the thing I hope audiences don’t know after watching it is that we made this movie for so little money, under such tight time limits. It was an act of pure love of storytelling on the part of all of us - cast and crew - that allowed us to make this, and the goal we all had going into it was to make it feel like we had 2 months of shooting and a few million dollars to do it! It’s hard for me to tell if we succeeded because when I watch this movie, or for that matter any film I’ve shot, my experience is clouded with memories of the million different versions I have had in my head from the first read through the color grade. So I guess I hope that the audience feels how I felt when the story was new to me. I’m going to be a pretentious film school grad here for a moment (if that’s allowed on NoFilmSchool!) because there’s a quote from a book I read in college that has stuck with me through the years, and I think about it every time I start work on a new project. It’s from Sergei Eisenstein’s The Film Sense, where he talks about what ultimately is the goal of a filmmaker. It goes like this:
“Before the inner vision, before the perception of the creator, hovers a given image, emotionally embodying his theme. The task that confronts him is to transform this image into a few basic partial representations which, in their combination and juxtaposition, shall evoke in the consciousness and feelings of the spectator, reader, or auditor, that same initial general image which originally hovered before the creative artist.”
'Renner' behind the scenes CREDIT: SIE Films 
'Renner' BTS CREDIT: SIE Films 
'Renner' BTS with Frankie Muniz and Sean Emer CREDIT: SIE Films 
'Renner' behind the scenes CREDIT: SIE Films 
