3Crosses is a low-budget independent feature nearing the end of a two-year journey to completion. Jamie Hannigan talks to brothers Jason (writer/director) and Jonathan (producer) Figgis.

Two years in the making and counting, 3Crosses is the brainchild of writer/director Jason Figgis and producer Jonathan Figgis. The brothers started out with the IFTA-nominated documentary The Twilight Hour, and have been working on 3Crosses in between documentary day jobs (including the Sky Television production Uri's Haunted Cities with Uri Geller). A bloody thriller set in an alternate Dublin underworld, 3Crosses concerns the fortunes of two brothers and how they react to the murder of their youngest sibling. The main cast includes Emmet Scanlan, Maria Manton, Karl Hayden and Brian Fortune, with eclectic support from Bill Fellows, Samantha Mumba, Mylene Klass and Caprice Bourret, to name but a few...

Jamie: What equipment did you start out making films with?

Jason: We had an analogue camera which was a Hi-8. So we just thought: wouldn't it be great if we actually shot something on Hi-8 and actually tried to make it look good? So we ended up doing that, and then we approached a post-production facility and asked very basic questions about, y'know, how you could make stuff look better. And we ended up getting a grade on it, turning it into black and white, put a grain and a field-merge on it and – even though it was Hi-8 – it actually started to look like really old film, maybe 8mm or something like that. And we started thinking, wow, if you can make Hi-8 – which is one of the worst formats there is – actually look really presentable, so that when you transfer it to Digi-Beta and blow it up on screen one at the IFI, it looks amazing... We thought, shit, we're going to really start getting into digital technology and discovering all the possibilities with that. But before we decided to film anything we looked at all the best cameras; we'd try to shoot stuff that was very atmospheric using, y'know, fluorescent light... For doing a lot of low-light stuff the camera that we found best was the Sony PD150 – excellent for low-light capabilities. But before we started shooting anything at all, we did all that research and decided this is the camera that we want. We got a lot of feedback from a lot of other filmmakers and they all agreed - especially if you're looking to transfer to 35mm – that using that on particular settings with the best lighting would probably be the best option.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 109.