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FEATURE ANNE WITH AN E
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH
ANNE WITH AN E
DOP Bobby Shore chose the Panasonic Varicam and the worst lenses he could find for Netflix’s Anne with an E WORDS JULIAN MITCHELL PICTURES NETFLIX
on-set and try and shoot it like a documentary and not to be too precious about each shot. We wanted to dirty it up a little bit. “We didn’t have a lot of prep time, only about three or four weeks. So I didn’t really have time to test a lot of the cameras; but a friend of mine who was also shooting a period piece in Canada at the same time had tested the Sony F65, Sony F55, ARRI ALEXA, RED and the Panasonic Varicam. He very graciously gave me all of his tests which was all the same kind of stuff we would have tested anyway, like candlelight, figures in front of a window, that kind of thing. The Varicam stood out for me almost immediately – especially compared to the RED and the F55 – as having a really nice quality. I generally go with the ALEXA as it’s the camera I know best but the Varicam was almost identical in the images we got from it. “When we started testing we wanted to use the oldest, crappiest lenses we could find. We tested more than 80 standard speed and super speed lenses from Panavision and hand-picked the worst of the worst. The ones that had the least resolving power but flared really interestingly and weirdly, and if you shot with
he producers of the Netflix series Anne with an E wanted to adopt a reality-style aesthetic to the show but to keep the feeling of harmony in the beautiful countryside of where Anne was from. “It was described to me as a kids’ show but with a Merchant Ivory feel to it,” says DOP Bobby Shore. He, the show runner and the Director agreed on look references. “The references that we talked about included Jane Campion’s The Piano and Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights . The idea was to create an environment
ABOVE Amybeth McNulty as Anne and R H Thompson as Matthew. RIGHT R H Thompson with Geraldine James as Marilla.
them wide open they would fall apart a little bit. If you put them against a Primo or a Master Prime you’re going to notice all these characteristics; but if you look at it on its own there’s no point of reference so you get to respond to the feeling of the lens as opposed to the technical aspect of it. “We shot everything at 800 ASA. There was one shot that we shot at 5000 which was out of necessity. There was a lot of candlelight but I like the Varicam at 800 in the candlelight as it gives the look some more texture. We shot on sound stages most of the time with single sourced soft lighting coming in from the windows so there was nothing on the floor.”
IT WAS DESCRIBED TO ME AS A KIDS’ SHOW BUT WITH A MERCHANT IVORY FEEL TO IT
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