Aaron Moorhead co-directed, co-edited, produced, and served as cinematographer on Spring (2014), his artistically beautiful horror/romance film that meditates on the scientific and magical powers of love and attraction between people. The film exhibits fantastic usage of lighting and effects against resplendent Italian settings to develop mystifying and enigmatic visuals for the film’s equally transcendent themes.

Screenwriter and co-director Justin Benson was inspired to create a film set in Italy after a wanderlust backpacking expedition. The script was written for the Amalfi Coast, but shooting was relocated to Apulia for technical and economic reasons; a change that didn’t impact the film negatively in any respect.

The film utilized drone-mounted GoPro cameras for many shots, capturing an overhead view that felt Godlike in nature. Will Sampson, the film’s steadicam and drone operator, said in a wonderful interview, “I feel like GoPro’s get a bad rap. I really like them and I used the footage from Spring as a calling card to show people how it can mix with Red (Epic) footage when you have a good colorist like we had and are using the correct settings on the GoPro.”

Moorhead and Benson shot-list each segment of the film, but never storyboard. They like to plan only as much as is necessary to craft the scene in a minimum number of shots, while attempting to utilize the offerings of the environment of the set space to jazz things up. Shots in Spring like the close-ups of bugs and scorpions were moments found and captured naturally while shooting, and incorporated in for effect.

In regards to the film’s prevalent use of in-camera zooms, Moorhead said (from the same interview as above), “It goes back in some ways to the naturalism. If you were to (push in or pull out) with a dolly, it feels too cinematic and not naturalistic like we wanted. And if we did those moves handheld and literally walked in, then we start breaking from our omniscience and start turning the camera into a person, a documentarian, and we didn’t want that either. So in order to kind of split the difference, to get that encroaching feeling of the walls closing in (when we pushed in) or the feeling of the walls opening up and realizing the characters are alone (when we pulled out), that perfect mix was an extremely creeping zoom.”

Mostly overhead lighting was used in the film, which maximizes utility in small shooting environments - a common situation in Spring. Other beautifully-lit segments, like Louise (Nadia Hilker) and Evan’s (Lou Taylor Pucci) romantic boat-in-the-cave scene, surrounded by an iridescent green-glow of lighting, was a post-production effect.

Lighting was designed for dramatic effect in other situations, like Louise’s sacrificial ritual in a different cave. She’s harshly and dramatically lit from above, coupled with quick cuts and odd music, to signal a feeling of desperation. “This woman is a scientist and she believes in hard science,” Moorhead says, “but here she is – when science seems to fail her – resorting to an arcane ritual.” The lighting speaks to that emotion.

Ultimately, Spring achieves a very unique and beautiful visual style that not only helps classify this genre-bending film as part romance, fantasy, and horror, but is thematically effective to the story’s examination of love.