Cinematographer Mike Sweeney, who worked for the CBC and other organizations.Andrew Gregg
Michael Sweeney, who died in Barrie, Ont., on Aug. 24, was one of Canada’s top news and documentary cameramen. Among his many accomplishments, he won a Gemini for Children of Darkness, a film on the famine and child slavery in Sudan; was director of photography and principal cameraman on the CBC series Canada: A People’s History; and worked on Nuclear Jihad, a documentary done in conjunction with the CBC and the New York Times that won a coveted international award.
He started at the bottom.
After high school, Mr. Sweeney apprenticed to a still photographer, learning how to frame shots and the intricacies of how much light you need to take a proper image. By 1970 he was a junior cameraman at CFCF, a Montreal television station. He would shoot silent film of fires and crime scenes on a Bell and Howell camera that held just 30.5 metres (100 feet) of 16-millimetre film, enough for about three minutes of pictures. Later he graduated to using a heavy Auricon camera that shot sound.
This was before the invention of the portable video camera. The film would have to be developed in a chemical soup, then run through a contraption called a telecine which converted the film into images that could be seen on television.
In 1974 he moved to Toronto to be on staff of the startup Global Television Network. He worked with Ann Macmillan at Global; Mr. Sweeney moved back to Montreal to work with Ms. Macmillan, by then the national reporter for CTV News. When she was transferred to London, he followed. From London, the two travelled into the Mideast often. On one trip from Israel into Syria and Lebanon, they were stopped by border guards.
Mr. Sweeney in Uganda.John Scully
“Mike charmed them. He started showing them how his camera worked. His wonderful lopsided smile won them over,” Ms. Macmillan recalled. “He was always so positive and polite. And he was a brilliant cameraman. He had a fantastic eye.”
Mr. Sweeney returned to Toronto in 1979, where he worked for CBC News and shot mainly for Newsmagazine, the half-hour weekly documentary program. It was replaced by The Journal in 1982.
“Mike and I were the first crew hired to work at the Journal,” said Alister Bell, a soundman who worked with Mr. Sweeney for 10 years, first at Newsmagazine, then at The Journal. “Our first major assignment was in Cambodia and Vietnam with Peter Kent.”
Mr. Bell remembers some harrowing incidents, including shooting footage in a moving vehicle on the runway at the Beirut airport when they could hear bullets that were all of a sudden aimed at them. The two men covered wars and disasters, but nothing prepared them for one of their assignments at The Journal, the 1984 chemical disaster at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, when a leak killed more than 3,000 people and injured more than 50,000.
“We were the first camera crew there. There were bodies in the streets. It was like Dante’s Inferno,” Mr. Bell said.
Mark Starowicz and his team started The Journal, most of whom came from CBC Radio, where they had worked on As It Happens and Sunday Morning. “We were print and radio people. Mike Sweeney taught us all how to see through his lens,” Mr. Starowicz said. “Mike said: I think of what I do as writing in light.”
Brian Stewart was an experienced television reporter when he started working with Mr. Sweeney in Ethiopia, Sudan and the first Gulf War.
“Mike Sweeney shot remarkable photography of National Geographic calibre,” Mr. Stewart said. “He gave much more than pictures. His brain was always working on many levels. And he was a solid rock in many tense situations.”
Michael Dennis Sweeney was born on Dec. 3, 1947, in the working-class district of Park Extension in Montreal. His father, Edward Sweeney, worked in a hospital; his mother, Rita (née Matthews), stayed home with her children. His mother died when he was 18, and his father when Mr. Sweeney was in his early 20s.
In 1980 Mr. Sweeney met Gail Fumerton. “He took me skiing three weeks after we met, and we would drive to Mont Tremblant from Toronto every Friday and come back late Sunday,” she said.
They married in 1981 and had three daughters. Ms. Sweeney says it wasn’t easy being married to someone who was on the road for long periods.
“He was gone for about two months after Madeleine [their first daughter] was born. He was in war zones, and he did Beirut, Cambodia and Ireland a lot. I kept the kids in the loop. I had maps of where he was in the house, and every time he moved, even in a war zone, I would put a pin and say, that’s where your dad is now. I made it adventurous for them,” Ms. Sweeney said. “I can’t lie, it was difficult. You had to make your own life, and I did. He once said to me that the only way he could do his job was if he had a secure place to come home to, a place that he loved. It let him go forth and actually film the outside world with confidence. He needed us to do what he did.”
When he returned from his foreign trips, he would bring his daughters something related to where he had been, often a book such as African Tales of the Hare, to try to share the culture he had just experienced.
Ms. Sweeney said the project he was most proud of was Canada: A People’s History. “He felt that it brought Canada together. Whole families would watch it.”
Mr. Sweeney learned to scuba dive to shoot certain scenes. Perhaps the most dangerous incident occurred in a boat off Newfoundland where he was shooting an opening scene involving a replica of the Matthew, a ship that belonged to explorer John Cabot.
“We almost died when the ship started to sink,” recalled Mr. Starowicz, the executive producer of the program, who was on board. He said Mr. Sweeney rescued the tapes and the camera. An SOS signal was sent out, and a trawler rescued them.
Mr. Sweeney was part of the team that won a Gemini award for Sudan: Children of Darkness, a 1989 CBC documentary on children fleeing slavery in Sudan. The producer was Tony Burman, the reporter, Mr. Stewart. Mr. Sweeney was nominated for four other Gemini awards.
He and his colleagues won an international award for Nuclear Jihad, made for the CBC Documentary Unit in association with the New York Times.
“Mike knew that television was a visual medium, and we would get up at four every morning and go into the mountains to get the red sun over Islamabad and its minarets,” said Julian Sher, the director, producer and writer of the program.
“Mike would take our journalism and turn it into a painting.”
The program won the Alfred I. duPont–Columbia University Award, which Mr. Sher described as the Pulitzer Prize of the documentary world. The other principal cameramen on the shoot were Brian Kelly and Louis DeGuise, whom he had worked with at the start of his career at CFCF in Montreal.
Mr. Sweeney was also proud that he could add CSC to his credits, the designation for the Canadian Society of Cinematographers.
He loved the water and one of his hobbies was fly fishing. Mr. Sweeney was always a fairly formal dresser. His wife said he didn’t own any sweatpants or a pair of sandals.
“He went to emergency a week before he died in a navy blue, linen sports jacket, a pastel striped button-down dress shirt and a pair of khaki pants, a pair of brogues and a Panama hat,” Ms. Sweeney said of her husband, who was suffering from cancer and died at age 74.
Mr. Sweeney leaves his wife, Gail and his daughters, Madeleine, Carlin and Margot.