DEFINITION October 2019

PEAKY BL I NDERS | DRAMA

ABOVE Series DOP Si Bell kicks back on-set

We had 91 lighting plans and 91 different lighting set-ups. We did them on Shot Designer so everything was organised into it, I knew I was quite likely to get it.” Those initial conversations happened in the middle of 2018 and, when pre-production began, Bell took full advantage of a generous ten-week prep period. “It’s such a big thing to plan,” he says, mentioning particularly the delay between the recce and shoot. “There were so many locations that we recce’d in September and shot in January where we needed multiple machines, rigging and scaffolding to achieve what we wanted.” Getting all this right was a matter of meticulous planning. Bell reports: “We had 91 lighting plans and 91 different lighting set-ups. We did them on Shot Designer, so everything was organised: which machines, what lighting we had rigged. We used the art department plans, put our information into them and printed out a 91- page document with every single plan for the rigging crew so everything was completely clear – what needed to be done, which blackout tents, what rigging was needed. “It was a pretty detailed schedule in that sense; definitely the biggest lighting job I’d ever done.” NETFLIX INVOLVEMENT Bell was under no pressure to use the same equipment as previous seasons – quite the opposite, in fact. “Netflix was more involved in this season. It wanted to shoot 4K and it didn’t want the Alexa, so we picked a new camera. We ended up on the Red Monstro, because we needed a 4K camera.” Creatively, too, Bell was given free reign. “It wasn’t like doing a normal ongoing series, the execs were very much ‘we want you to take control of it’. We wanted it to look like Peaky , but it was very much ‘bring your sort of take’ to it.”

OCTOBER 20 1 9 | DEF I N I T ION 23

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