Adam Laity

Adam Laity is an award-winning cinematographer and filmmaker working in documentary, fiction and experimental shorts and feature films. His work has been screened at international festivals and galleries round the world and in 2014 he won the Royal Photographic Society’s DepicT! Cinematography Award for his short film, The Peace of Wild Things. His work often focusses on the relationship between human figures within a landscape, and explores how ‘we, the human’ interact with and see ourselves within an environment. This passion for landscape is reflected in his practice-led research PhD- working within the Digital Cultures Research Centre at the University of the West of England- looking at the relationship between the cinematographer and the emergence of a contemporary eco-sublime landscape, and how this functions as a way for humans to visually understand or re-frame ourselves within the landscape of the Anthropocene.

He worked with Lisa May Thomas on her last film project The Touch Diaries, where they developed techniques and methodologies for exploring and documenting movement on video in affecting, expressive and intimate ways. Building on this work Adam will be working closely with Lisa, the Figuring dancers and the designers of both the physical and virtual spaces to tell the story of this research in an authentic and engaging way that enables the work for both a public and an academic audience.

His project outputs will include the production of creative video documentation as an invaluable tool in practice-led research; production of high quality video as promotional material that can be used online to generate interest in the project, increase public awareness of the research and can function as an important method to access future funds for the research project; and he will also be serving as cinematographic advisor on the project as a whole, specifically with a mind to developing the relationship between VR and cinematography by investigating what both mediums share, as well as what each can learn from the other. In particular, he is interested in the use of lighting, lens function, the place of the horizon as a way of grounding oneself in VR and the role of ‘camera perspective’ within VR.