"Църква за вълци“ – зад кадър
A Woolf‘s Church Behind the Screen

Summary/Abstract: A Woolf ’s Church is a TV series, produced by Bulgarian National Television (BNT) in 2004-2005. Since 1989 this was the largest feature film production - twelve 57 minute episodes. Managing spirituality with the instruments of capital led to another illness in world cin- ema. Should the producers get larger revenues or should the technical quality of the film be better - this became controversial problem. Chasing after fast revenues many producers discarded film and replaced it with video recording. As far back as 1997 of the past century with a report entitled Do Not Digitalize little Red Ridding Hood at a conference of the Institute of Art Studies - The Cinema of the 21st Century - Art and Technology, the author convincingly defended his thesis that the physical na- ture of the instruments with which a given work of art is created impose a specific aes- thetic imprint on it. Today, this discussion seems a bit amateur. The choice between film and video to a great extent depends on the characteristic light conditions of the places where the film is shot, on the pre- ferred visual stylistics of the screen image, on the volume and type of technology for possible visual effects and other considerations of similar character. It is logical for the director of photography to be the first to reach the most correct technological decision and to convince the director and producer. Regretfully, he is often invited after these decisions have been taken. That is what happened in the TV series A Woolf ’s Church. The lack of funding, the theatrical basis of the scripts, and the use of video laid their imprint on the aesthetics of the series, bringing it close to what is known as TV theater. The necessity to shoot with a digital equipment on one side, and the desire of the film crew for the series to have film aesthetic’ characteristics, challenged the director of photography to seek the necessary technical methods or appropriate artistic solutions for this. Examined are the visual characteristics of the technical parameters, such as lighting contrast, image resolution as a function of the size of the censor, the most up to date film formats – Penelope, the advantage of the great depth of field, the overcoming of the traditional notions about the scale of the important for the story details, the ban on the use of low key lighting, etc.

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