Fraser is the cinematographer on Project Hail Mary. His approach across genre cinema has been consistent: available light where possible, in camera effects rather than post production fixes, and a tolerance for darkness that lets an image be genuinely dim rather than artificially lifted.
He is Australian and worked in commercials and independent film before moving to large productions, arriving with habits formed on small crews. He has been closely involved in developing virtual production techniques, where actors perform inside a screen displaying the environment, an approach he helped establish on a science fiction television series and which has since spread across the industry.
Recurring subjects: scale established through negative space, faces lit by a single practical source, and landscapes shot to feel physically present rather than composited. He favours long lenses and haze, and he is unusually willing to let a subject fall into silhouette, trusting the audience to read the frame rather than lighting every face for safety.
He has won an Academy Award for cinematography on a desert science fiction epic, and his work on a superhero film and a space opera prequel is widely studied. His contribution to virtual production has changed how large scale genre television and film are physically made.
For viewers who watch for the image. Suited to anyone interested in how contemporary science fiction is lit and photographed, and to those curious about virtual production and where it came from.
Large-scale hard science fiction and first contact, with suspense built from deduction, isolation, and the idea that contact is translation, not conquest. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller direct Ryan Gosling in the adaptation of Andy Weir, where math, wit, and practical creature work keep the pace human.
A visual effects supervisor pitched this story in 2003, for a television series that was never made. Gareth Edwards eventually filmed it as a war picture, dropping the opening crawl, and it reached cinemas in December 2016 around a mission to steal the Death Star plans.