Born in Singapore, Rae Lyn Lee graduated from Temasek Design School and began her career as a fashion and lifestyle photographer for Singapore Press Holdings Magazines, shooting for titles such as Shape, Maxim and Icon. Eventually, she moved to Europe to study film-making at the London Film School. Specialising in Cinematography, Lee now lives and works in Luxembourg.
Lee is also the director of photography of Serena, the winner of the Best Picture Award at the Malta Short Film Festival 2014 and she was here to collect the prize.
Lee’s biography states that, despite a successful job as photographer, her growing love for the moving image led to a career change.
“When you work on a magazine, whether it’s fashion photography or lifestyle photography, you always capture things in a moment and then it stops there. I always want the image to move forward; I want to know what happens next.
“They say that a picture speaks a 1,000 words, but they do not affect me viscerally. That explains my shift to cinematography.”
Directed by Eric Lamhene, Serena is a harrowing tale of four teenage boys whose initially harmless, if annoying, teasing of an older woman ends in tragedy.
The story takes place over the course of one night in the street and a nightclub. The lighting is particularly striking and Lee acknowledges it was a very hard shoot.
“The street lights are never strong enough,” she sighs, “and you don’t want too much noise or grain in your picture. We also had budget constraints. It wasn’t like some Spielberg film where we can block the entire street and have the biggest lights everywhere and boom, you’re done.”
A picture speaks a 1,000 words, but they do not affect me viscerally
“So we had to work with what little we had. Obviously it’s all very technical – when you shoot scenes with that light, you can’t see any more detail because the colour just eats everything. So you have to compensate.”
The club scenes proved equally challenging. “Club lights are really not strong enough so I had to recreate this world from scratch.”
Serena touches on the topical issues of teen delinquency and bullying. It features a young cast. Lee talks about the difficulties the boys faced in dealing with the subject matter.
Lamhene explained the story to them and when he told them they eventually had to beat a woman up, they responded, wide-eyed with a “No way!”. It took a while before they actually understood what we were trying to do.
She describes how the entire set had to be cleared, and it was just the camera, the focus puller, director and actor.
“It is a different way of film-making; it is, if you will, manipulation of people. Which is kind of what Hitchcock would do,” Lee says. “But these kids had no life experience to draw on, so we needed to find ways to make them feel, even going so far as to pretend to punch them in the gut to explain where these feelings should come from.”
Turning to current projects, Lee replies with a laugh that she is constantly working for food. “Eric is writing a feature film and I’m going to shoot it because I am his default cinematographer and we work well together. Aside from that, I do shoot films for other directors and work as it comes.
“My goal is always to make something beautiful,” she says in conclusion. “Be it happy, be it tragic because even the saddest thing can be beautiful because beauty is not judged by topic. If you look at it a certain way, a dead dog lying on the ground can be beautiful. That’s the goal of my life: to make beautiful pictures.”