Exquisite Corpse
Exquisite Corpse
Exquisite Corpse
Interview with Fabian Gamper
January 2026
We’re back with more interviews! We had the chance to speak with Fabian Gamper, the cinematographer of Sound of Falling (2025), a beautifully sinister film directed by Mascha Schilinski.
Awarded the Jury Prize at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, Sound of Falling stitches together the stories of four girls who, across different time periods, resided in the same remote German farmhouse. Their lives eerily mirror one another despite being separated by time, tracing how generational trauma lingers as the same space evolves over a century.
Fabian was recently awarded the Silver Frog at EnergaCAMERIMAGE 2025 (International Film Festival of the Art of Cinematography) for his work on the film.
He spoke with our editor Yi An about the creative process behind the film’s look, how specific scenes were shot, and the immersive effects he wanted to achieve.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Yi An Chen (YA):
There’s a distinctively textural, grainy, and desaturated look to the film. How did you achieve that type of look? And what was the creative decision behind that?
Fabian Gamper (FG):
So the nice thing was that I could start very early in the process, when Mascha was writing the screenplay with Louise Peter. We started to talk about the film’s visuality and how it should look. The dramaturgy and architecture of the film are not linear or conventional. It doesn’t have a clear plot or even a main character. It’s constructed in the way that memory works.
Early on, we were talking about this idea and we felt that, to make the narrative work, the images really had to match that. We thought this wouldn’t work if you had wide shots in very clear, expansive images where you see everything and recognise every detail. So the goal was really to find images that look more like how our memories are — images similar to how you would have them in your head. The process for me was really to close my eyes and look at how my memory of something is looking and how to translate this kind of abstraction in a film, where you don't remember all the details and some things are blurred and out of focus.
So the first thing we thought we wanted was to shoot the film on 16mm — to have images that are not that clear, not that sharp and have this grainy structure. But we had a really small budget, and we couldn't afford to shoot this thing on film. We knew we had to shoot it digitally. Nowadays, you can add the grain and halation and all those effects in post-production, which we did, but it was not enough for us. So we started this process of testing and playing around with lenses. The first inspiration we had was Francesca Woodman’s photography, which has a very ghosty feel to it. She worked a lot with motion blur. But I did some tests and it didn't lead to the effect we wanted. It didn't work properly for our film. So I started exploring many other things.
The first thing I tried was a pinhole, which is not really a lens, it's just a tiny hole which you put in front of the sensor. It creates an image that is very soft and it doesn't have a focus plane because there is no lens, and it reacts to the sunlight that comes in. To us it felt like an image that is mysterious and comes from very far away. So then for a moment we thought, “Okay, let's shoot this film like that, that kind of matches the imagination.” But we realised it was way too blurry, you can't do a whole film like that; or you could, but the audience might be bored by the blurriness.
So then we decided to use this effect just for specific moments, and we also felt that we could explore the ways that you remember images. I created more effects, one of them being that I reversed the front element of a lens which also gave us a very special way of blurring the edges of the frame. We created a whole visual palette of these abstraction levels based on which we then shot the film.
YA:
I wanted to ask about those specific shots you mentioned as well, because I saw that some of them are blurrier, which looks like they were filmed on a camcorder — so I'm guessing those are the ones that were shot on the pinhole camera. And then there are those where the edges are really blurred.
FG:
Yeah, maybe it's them. When you have those images, there's always somewhere that is the focus, but other things are blurred in a very swirly way. This is when I reversed the front element. And the pinhole looks a bit like Super8.
YA:
Yeah, yeah! That’s what I was thinking. I felt that those shots were almost done handheld, and were more POV-like, as if someone else was filming in an intimate setting. Why were those kinds of shots chosen for particular scenes?
FG:
We felt that it was interesting to dive into the perspective of those characters. When you're experiencing the world right now, you're obviously locked into your head, and you see the world only through your eyes. But we felt that when you remember something, imagination mixes with what you remember from reality. So you have other images that interfere with these memories. But then, to bring in camera movement — there were plenty of ideas coming into that. When planning the film, we were very inspired by this farmhouse because it was really abandoned and had been empty for several decades. Walking around the place, we found furniture and photographs from other times. And it was really about this idea of feeling a connection to people who had lived there. We found this farmhouse to be a nice vessel for those kinds of connections between generations.
We also felt that it would be great if the camera was like a ghost who was able to walk around the farmhouse and was curious about what had happened there. Not only could it move through the spaces but it could also move through time, as if time didn't exist anymore. The camera was able to look around the corner and discover something that happened in another time period. So this idea of ghostliness gave us the motivation to move the camera around because usually, when you move the camera, you often try to hide your motion — you pan with an actor, or you follow an actor, or you do an emotionally motivated push-in, where you're not supposed to be aware that there's a camera. But for us, this concept of the camera being some ghost that was actually there worked nicely for the film. And we even included the actors in this idea. So we sometimes would have this breaking of the fourth wall where an actor was looking directly at the camera.
YA:
Yeah, I felt the sense of a ghostly presence a lot in the film — especially in how some scenes were framed, where it feels like you’re peeking through doorways, curtains, and keyholes, and only given a small amount of information.
FG:
Yeah, yeah, it helps to reduce the amount of information you have in one picture. To me it really added to the idea of perceiving the film as parts of a memory and there’s this mystery to it. When I have this framing, I have people looking through door locks and you only get this small thing that they’re looking at, which is also maybe what they would remember later on.
YA:
There are also quite a lot of dark scenes in the film, with the candles and kerosene lamps. Given that it’s four time periods in the film, I'm guessing the choice of lighting also had to reflect the different periods. How did that affect your cinematography while you were shooting?
FG:
Quite often when you have different time periods in a film, there would be one period that is the present, which has a certain look, and then you have other time periods as a flashback or a memory. That would give them a distinctive look or colour palette so you know this is now a memory for somebody. But for Sound of Falling it was really not like that. Every time period is equal and everything is a memory, so it was not about separating them. It was more about bringing those times together and making those connections between them.
We knew early on that each scene should have the same look and stylistic approach. But obviously, we wanted the viewer to be aware of the time period, so we realised that just by the set design, costumes and the amount of people being there and what they were doing, it became pretty obvious that you were in separate time periods. But what certainly helped was the use of practical lights because we wanted to have a very naturalistic approach.
For the night scenes, we realised that just by using the practical lights that are period-correct, you get a very different feel to each period. The candlelight and oil lamps in the earliest time period, neon lights in the 80s, and nowadays we use flashlights — those modern flashlights that are very bluish and strong. This gave us a lot of inspiration and a lot to work with for the lighting.
YA:
There’s one scene with the candlelight that’s a dinner or a party, which is a one-shot. How was it shooting that?
FG:
Yeah, that was a challenging one, because we were shooting in this original location — the space was quite tiny and we had all these people in there. We started designing the shot with the idea of the camera being a ghost. I tried to get away from my usual habits as an operator and just became somebody moving through the rooms and being curious. And the great thing with the candles was that it enabled us to really do the shot because you see almost every angle of the room. And since we had all these candles and oil lights, we could avoid having light stands being in the way.
YA:
Oh, I didn't think about the fact that if you're using candlelight then you probably won't have as much of the usual lighting equipment, because the lights on set are always huge, so I'm guessing they weren't in the way while you were shooting the scene.
FG:
The good thing nowadays is that you have cameras that are so light-sensitive. While testing, we decided to use a different camera for most of the nights instead of what we had in the day, because we would work with light levels where you just had candles. And the camera’s great because when you’re on set in person, it's really dark and you really can't see a lot. I think it helps a lot with creating the atmosphere in the film. For me it was very interesting to dive into those low-light level, practically driven scenes.
YA:
I was always curious because I work on sets as well and people take very long to set up lights, and sometimes I do wonder, “What if we just had candles?”
FG:
Yeah, but it's a challenging approach and it doesn't always work. Obviously to create the image you want, you still want to make sure you have the brightness and darkness where you want it. And so it really became a collaboration between the set designer, the light department, me, Mascha and also the actors because the lights needed to be in very specific spots to make it work. It's also not just about getting exposure, you want to have the tonality and the look you're going for. We felt that having the oil lamps hanging above the tables gives you a light direction that works as a key light or is in a good position to light the actors from slightly above. But of course you can always hide some lights in the ceiling; you can rig something.
YA:
There are also some scenes underwater that I found very beautiful. How was it to shoot those and how did you get it to look like that?
FG:
Thank you. It was a process that actually started by being limited by the budget. When scouting the location, we were at this river, and the river was really green. So the first thing I thought when looking at it was, “Okay, we shoot underwater — what do we do? Do we go to a pool or a studio, because you don’t see anything in this water?”
And then it was, “Okay, where does it fit in the schedule, and where do we have the money for that?” So I decided to just test it. I put a small DSLR camera in a very simple plastic bag and did some tests right in the river. I held my hand in front of it, just to see how close my hand would have to be to see it. We rewatched this test and felt that this particular effect we created with my hand was very interesting, and very much in sync with the atmosphere we were going for — because it’s hidden, and again, this memory thing goes hand in hand with the blurriness.
So what we ended up doing was getting a water housing for our main camera and a wider-angle lens, so we could have the actors quite close in front of the lens and still see them. We were lucky enough to get some sunlight — it would have worked without it, but it was of course very nice with the sunlight.
YA:
I think those are some of my favourite scenes. Also the flies! Were they real flies or special effects?
FG:
Some of them — the one in the beginning that crawls into the mouth of the dead child was CGI. It would not have been possible to shoot that. But some of them were real, some of them were actually... sometimes just a fly there.
YA:
The sounds in the film are also all very intimate, like breathing and creaks in the floor, so I assume they all had to be planned beforehand. You likely had to think of the visuals and how it would fit with the sound. How was it to work with sound in mind?
FG:
Yeah, yeah, totally. The sound really went hand in hand with the visuals and the planning. Usually, when you read a screenplay, you just have a description of where it takes place, and then comes the dialogue, and maybe some director’s advice. But for this one, since there is so little dialogue, it was written in a very literary way and was very much about how it looks and sounds. Mascha always had the sound in mind when writing the screenplay, and there were very specific remarks in it about what the sound would be like.
It also has a narrative function. Since the film is about trauma, it’s kind of the way trauma works — it splits up a traumatising event between images and sounds. The sounds sometimes reveal a little bit more than what the characters know. So this whole concept of how to approach the sound was already in the screenplay, and then the sound designers came onboard — Billie Mind, and also other artists. They really looked for a particular sound and then architected it into what it is now.
YA:
Was anything decided on set while shooting or was it all planned out? Because I'm guessing if the sound was written in the script, everything must have already been really organised in terms of what to shoot.
FG:
There are still a lot of things that could be changed on set. The way the actors do the scene and how it unfolds could be different from the screenplay. When I think of the screenplay now, it's very much about this feeling that you get from the film when you watch it and the effect it has. To me, the film is really close to the screenplay but not every scene is exactly there. Once we had the footage we still had to puzzle it out together and figure out how it worked now that we had moving images. There was a lot of puzzling over the footage in the editing process. It's not one for one.
Though it did take Mascha and Louise a long time to write the screenplay. It was a three-year process of developing their ideas and making them work on paper.
YA:
There are some parts of the film, especially the ones that are the blurrier scenes, where it felt very in-the-moment. So I was wondering if that was also planned out, for example when you zoom into a certain part of the frame or when you move to focus on something else — those felt more like a spontaneous decision.
FG:
Yeah, somewhere in between. I think it was the emotion that was planned out, but sometimes how you reach it was found later. For example, I don't know if this is the exact moment you thought of, but there is this moment when little Alma, the little girl is sitting on the sofa and is kind of interpreting this image she saw, right?
YA:
Yeah, that's the one.
FG:
And she's sitting there, imitating the other girl who died and we had to zoom in. We didn’t shoot that zoom. I mean, we did a lot of zooms in the film and it was also part of the concept, but we didn't use the zoom for that moment. We just had a little push in and it stopped at a certain point. I think at the beginning, they just wanted a little bit of the movement. And the editor zoomed in so much that you really, in this moment, see the digital pixels until the image kind of breaks apart. And I feel that this works in a way, again, as memory, as you know, you try to remember, but there is no more resolution. You see the texture of it, but you can't go any closer. And I think for this particular shot, the idea behind it was there and we were trying to define it, but the way it actually worked out was in the development of the screenplay, how we shot it and then the little adjustments made in the edit.
YA:
Any upcoming projects for you that you want to share?
FG:
Well, I'm now very happy to have the chance to travel with the film, which is really great. I unfortunately decided to say no to some films I would have loved to shoot, but for me it's a really nice opportunity to travel and meet people and have conversations about this film. I'm really happy about doing that right now.
YA:
It is a very beautiful film. I had to go back and watch a couple of scenes because I thought it was shot so well. It's also a very unique perspective. I wouldn't think that a film of four different time periods would be shot like this. It was so nice to hear your process.
FG:
Thank you! Thanks for the conversation.