Tania Lambert’s work on SBS anthology Erotic Stories was recently recognised with an AACTA nomination for best cinematography in television. But it’s been a long journey as one of the few women working in a male-dominated industry.
“I kind of got to a sticking point and found it quite hard to keep going,” she said, referring to the challenges she encountered a decade ago after shooting the successful TV series The Moodys.
“But I’ve really noticed a huge shift over the last four years and who knows, it might be streamers coming in, it might be just a general shift, but I do think that there’s really an opening up to DOPs that don’t have as much TV experience.”
Lambert is now entrenched in the industry as a top cinematographer and is using her experience to help change some of those structural inequities. She recently mentored cinematographer Kate Cornish on the eight-part Erotic Stories series through Screen Australia’s Credit Maker scheme, which allowed Cornish to gain her first long-form broadcast drama credit.
“For three of the weeks, I was on set with Tania observing how she worked,” Cornish said at a recent Australian Cinematographers Society (ACS) event with Lambert. “And also prior to that I was with Tania during the last couple of weeks of pre-production so I could observe how she did her shotlisting and breakdowns which again was incredibly useful and obviously informed how I then went and did my pre-production. I was shadowing Tania and she was graciously answering all the questions that I had even though she already had her own job to do.”
Cornish said her episode had the most graphic scenes, which made having an intimacy co-ordinator incredibly helpful. “I was present for all of that blocking, so I could see exactly the positions that they would be in and also show the actors how close I would physically be to them with the camera to make sure that they were comfortable,” she said.
Each episode was written by a different writer and had its own unique visual style, including different aspect ratios, according to Lambert. “The one thing that we really wanted to approach in a very cohesive way and then we brought through the whole series of how to approach intimacy… we wanted it to have that honesty and authenticity,” she said.
Cinematographer Bonnie Elliott ACS, who helped drive the involvement of DOPs in Credit Maker, said the program’s four funded positions were now likely filled. The scheme is not only giving new cinematographers an entry point into the industry, it is providing producers with confidence to employ new talent given the time pressures to shoot around eight minutes of footage a day.
“I think that it’s been really successful,” Elliott said.
The eight-part anthology series, Erotic Stories, can be viewed at SBS. Lambert’s AACTA nomination was for episode two (The Deluge) and Cornish shot episode eight (Masc Up).