DEFINITION October 2019

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PEAK DRAMA DOP Si Bell joins the Shelby family and their empire of crime for Series 5 of Peaky Blinders

WORDS PH I L RHODES / PICTURES BBC PICTURES

S eries 5 of Peaky Blinders opens with a man on horseback riding across open country under a sky of roiling cloud, a backdrop so striking that it’s easy to believe the shot is a composite. In fact, it’s the work of DOP Si Bell and his crew as they leveraged some of the miserable weather that occurred in September last year, right at the beginning of a six-episode production marathon that would take in all of northern England. It’s a familiar part of the world for Bell, whose career began at Northumbria University with an interest in directing, though he quickly refocused to camera. “We got to shoot on film,” he recalls. “They had 16mm cameras. I wanted to learn more

Electricity that was at the BFI, which was well-received. That helped me get into the TV side of things.” Bell first encountered Peaky Blinders director, Anthony Byrne, on Ripper Street , which was “one of my first TV dramas”. Bell adds: “That was a big break. It was a big budget compared to what I was doing then.” For Bell, Peaky Blinders was a long- held ambition: “I was a big fan of the show, so I’d always wanted to do it. From a cinematography point of view, it’s very highly regarded.” Byrne, Bell says, had “always spoken” about wanting to do Peaky Blinders . “I’d always had chats that he was chasing it and he wanted to do it… When he was going

about the camera side, and worked as a clapper loader on film shoots with some pretty good cinematographers.” After graduating in 2007, Bell entered the industry as a camera trainee, working under SamMcCurdy, BSC, Lol Crawley, BSC, and Philippe Rousselot, AFC, ASC. All the time, though, Bell was shooting his own material. “I was a loader and assistant for three years, but I was shooting on the side. I tried to shoot as much as I could in the early days. When I was on bigger dramas, I was trying to do short films on the weekend with kit loaned from Jamie at Picture Canning.” Bell moved on to shoot “a lot of short films, low-budget features and a couple of commercials”. He recalls: “I did a film called

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