“My #cinematographer Boa Simon (@boasimon) and I wanted ‘Buscando Alma’ to feel like poetry,” says the heartwrenchingly beautiful short film’s director, Melissa Fisher (@melissathefisher). “While Cristina & Alma’s day-to-day lives are grounded in realism with natural lighting and clean optics, we wanted to elevate their emotional journey with dynamic camera work and expressionist in-camera effects. For flashback sequences, we shot through an assembly of beam splitting prisms with a low-power diopter. This effect helped evoke a feeling of precious, intimate memories. The arrangement also allowed two image pathways to converge on the sensor at different focus distances, creating a gorgeously ghosted second image. This established a visual symbol of duality indicating Cristina’s past and present lives, and her two gender expressions. We opted for spherical lenses in order to achieve a naturalistic and immersive clarity. We chose a set of #PrimoArtiste lenses because they’re clean but not overly sharp, and render more gently than other highly ‘accurate’ optics. They also gave us these splendid, colorful blooming flares without losing contrast to a heavy veil. We scouted each location with those rich, romantic flares in mind, chasing after that magic hour glow. In turn, these flares bloom at the most emotionally evocative moments in the film, punctuating our character’s internal state of mind. These qualities were then beautifully tuned by our colorist Tashi Trieu (@tashitrieu_color). In my research of the immigrant journey, I immersed myself in the powerful and haunting photography of Sebastião Salgado. The way in which he captured moments of displacement and migration in ‘Exodus’ is as beautiful as it is devastating, contrasting immense suffering with the hope for a better life. I also love the work of Terrence Malick; the way he captures the beauty of the natural world and contrasts it with the brokenness of humankind. His work is grounded and realistic, yet heightened towards something divine. Films such as ‘Tree of Life’ inspired the way we lit our scenes and moved our cameras, always from an emotional point of view and in search of the beauty of each moment.”