ADVERTI SEMENT FEATURE | CVP
LOW LIGHTS WILL GUIDE YOU HOME
The tricky task of lighting by moonlight gave DOP Mark Payne-Gill the know-how to bring something truly groundbreaking to UK television
park that the roos inhabited, so we had the luxury of being able to take a time out if the clouds suddenly came in. But we’d always have to stay alert and be ready to mobilise for when they came past, which they often did quite speedily. It was really hard work and very ambitious, but we pulled it off and created a beautiful series that went against convention.” TESTING AND INVESTING Payne-Gill actually tested seven cameras before finding one up to the job, with the Sony AS7 II and Canon ME20F-SH competing against each other in the final round of testing, where he filmed a bird in flight inside a darkened studio. “The most important thing for me was that I found a camera able to deliver the best results in low light,” he explains. “And even though the AS7 II performed remarkably well, there were too many artefacts that rendered it unusable for our needs. We were pushing exposures to absolute limits and we needed to be able to go as hard as we could to extract the image without compromise. Even though the AS7 II is a considered 4K camera, it had an electronic pixelated look when cropped into the final image. The ME20 is only HD, but still managed to deliver detail in the bird’s feathers.”
LAST YEAR, ASTRONOMY aficionado and DOP, Mark Payne-Gill, was approached by Apple TV to lead the visuals on its new blue-chip natural history series, Earth at Night in Color . What the series is about and how it looks can easily be deduced from the title. However, how it was achieved is much less apparent, with all conventional methods of shooting at night completely thrown out of the window. “Offspring Films, the producers, didn’t want to use infrared, thermal imaging technology or any other tech that would help the image become clearer in the dark,” explains Payne-Gill. “They said the only source of light, unless otherwise impossible, could be from the moon.” Even before testing which camera sensors could perform well in low-light conditions, there were immediate creative concerns. Too much exposure could render the images as looking like day, and there was also the question of how to grade it.
“We were very blatant about how we framed the shots,” says Payne-Gill. “We needed to keep referencing the stars with wide shots so the audience was consistently reminded about the fact it was filmed at night. It’s a difficult thing to do, because it’s never been done before – or at least, it’s never been applied in this way.” Other constraints came from frequent inclement weather conditions; with snowstorms and cloudy skies, the light from the moon was limited. Nonetheless, this gigantic reflector in space was largely on their side. He explains: “The moon gave us a two-week window – when it was past the first quarter, through to the full moon and up until the last quarter – and we found that, with the right camera and lens, we could work well within this time frame.” While musing about the harsh working conditions, Payne-Gill recalls the exhaustion felt while filming kangaroos in Australia. “We were staying at a lodge in a
28 DEF I N I T ION | MARCH 202 1
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