DEFINITION March 2020

THE PERSONAL H I STORY OF DAV I D COPPERF I ELD | COMEDY

IMAGES DOP Zac Nicholson with crew members including camera operator Iain Mackay and grip Jody Knight

clear the floor for the inevitable ensemble scene, no C-stands allowed. To this end Nicholson and his gaffer Harry Wiggins decided to use window light with minimal light inside the rooms. “Sometime we use a big ten-foot soft box with a light in it that could also flag the sun and diffuse the light. Other situations, like the bottling factory, we had three fairly hard LRX lights which are remote controlled and waterproof HMIs – you can focus them, spot them and flood them remotely. It was augmented in the room a little bit. We would do as much as we could through the window.” Harry Wiggins, the show’s gaffer, further describes the lighting design. “The bottling factory was all LRX lights coming in the windows on the south side; this is an 18K parabolic light on a robotic stirrup. You use a little handheld joystick to control them. We also had some practicals inside

have Dolly and track and did some things that were a little bit more controlled with their tracking and camera moves. But his favourite way to shoot is to be in the thick of it with the camera on the shoulder or with the Steadicam. We expanded it a bit by using the drone, not to some fancy flying shots but to be able to look down on the scene a bit like an author, or as a godlike vision.” CLASSIC CAMERA You’d think that with all this desire for handheld and Steadicam movement, Nicholson might pick an Alexa Mini or smaller form factor camera; but you’d be wrong. In fact, he picked a classic, the Arri Alexa Classic which is basically the original, over ten-year-old model. But why the Classic? “If I’m lighting and operating I need as good an eyepiece as I can get. For me the digital

camera with the best looking eyepiece is the Classic. It has a great image in terms of colour and contrast. It feels like the closest thing to the monitor that I’ve seen. “If you’re shooting with Armando and you’re shooting all the time, you ’ re catching things all the time and a lot of those things can’t be repeated. So if you’re operating and lighting you need good idea that you’re happy with it in the moment.” PERIOD LIGHTING Period comedy movies are a little bit thin on the ground and especially Armando Iannucci comedies that steal your attention with their machine gun one-liners. That’s not to say that Copperfield wasn’t taking its 19th century pre-electricity status seriously. Interiors still had to evoke the semi-dark candlelit rooms as in any other period drama. The only difference would be to

MARCH 2020 | DEF I N I T ION 23

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