DEFINITION July 2018

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SHOOT STORY THE WOMAN IN WHITE

vignettes on everything and shaping things, bringing faces out. We wanted it to be what it is.” Eben in fact was having to grade the show from Hong Kong where he was shooting so it wasn’t ideal. CAMERA MOVEMENT The production was only offered five days of Steadicam for a 70-day shoot so not a camera movement they could really exercise in any consistent way. So for the first time Eben used a MoVI gimbal for some following shots. Again the whole idea for the camera movement was psychologically led. “There were certain scenes that were obviously handheld to build visceral tension in connection to the character and sometimes you just have two people walking in a road and you’ve just got to be in front of them and tracking. Sometimes laying track is impractical so the MoVI was our solution to that, it’s half way between handheld and track. Most of the show was shot on the PeeWee Dolly. “I operate myself and there were some whip pans and tilts; there’s one shot where somebody signs something and it whip pans to the ink and whip pans back. There are quite a few of those pans and tilts thrown in just to lift it again out of the traditional period drama paradigm. It gives you a little wake-up really, we used more and more of those and some Dutch angles to push the limits of ‘not’ period drama.” WE WEREN’T PUTTING VIGNETTES ON EVERYTHING AND SHAPING THINGS, BRINGING FACES OUT

We then didn’t have such a strong contrast between them – I don’t know how I would have done it without doing that. We just came to that conclusion from the aspect of ‘you can’t gel a candle’. “We wanted it to be dark when it was dark and light when it was light. I don’t use a light meter so much these days but just ‘feel it’. If it feels right, then that’s what I go with rather than setting to a certain exposure or having any strict rules. I tend not to touch ISO and treat it like stock, I’ll treat the ALEXA (the Mini in this case) like 800 ASA and don’t touch it throughout the shoot. I’ve actually started rating the ALEXA at 1000 ASA as a base as you get a little bit more almost grain which I think looks nicer than the 800 ALEXA. It gives you a tiny bit more highlight detail and a tiny bit less shadow detail. The shadows fall away quicker and it holds on to more detail in the highlights; I like that and that’s what I want. I was quite often using ND so I had more light than I needed if you see what I mean so I had to take that away in front of the lens. “We did use a tiny bit of diffusion with Glimmer Glass and I was only using an eighth most of the time. So just to take a little edge off but not to really diffuse like a silk stocking. We also used lots of haze throughout the show but some national properties wouldn’t allow us to use it. We felt that but there was nothing we could do about it. Limmeridge, the house where most of the first episode, takes place, is made up of about five

different locations and in two of them we weren’t allowed to use haze. As you walk through the main door for the first time there is no haze, then the character walks from that room into another room filled with it.” GRADING There wasn’t a lot of time for grading and so Eben spent some valuable time camera testing and setting LUTs with colourists, “We had a brilliant colourist in Gary Curran. We decided to set film stocks with our LUTs and pretty much not grade it. We thought, let’s have it in-camera all the way through and just leave it, and that’s sort of what we did. There’s the odd scene with the sun going in and out that needed help and things like haze we did try to give a little bit more airiness in post. There were a lot of screen grabs I took along the way and if I A/B them with the final grade then they are pretty identical which is pretty nice. We weren’t putting

ABOVE All the windows on set were gelled to warm up the daylight coming in.

DEFINITION JULY 2018

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