DEFINITION October 2019

picture canning

DRAMA | PEAKY BL I NDERS

I N ASSOC I AT I ON WI TH

The Picture Canning Company started out in the last century. This was a few years before high definition and its main business was renting out mostly ENG camera kits. Current managing director, Jamie Hutchinson, joined in 1998, spending his time in tape duplication suites until he worked his way in to the kit room. It’s this kit room background that has provided Hutchinson with such a thorough knowledge of what crews require. “I accelerated quickly from camera kit technician through the kit room,” he says. “Then the DV market came in and I headed up the digital side of things.” He progressed to running the drama department and, in 2004, Hutchinson moved to Picture Canning North, providing much- needed facilities in the north-east. “I was given a VW Transporter van, a digibeta camera and DVcam with support kit and went off to work in the area,” says Hutchinson. Hutchinson’s determination has helped keep the industry going in the north-east, supporting crew by providing work experience, training and kit support. In the past 15 years, he’s expanded from his parents house to a warehouse in Newcastle, while a move to supplying to high-end drama productions facilitated an expansion to London and Manchester. Yet Hutchinson’s ethos of providing round-the-clock support for clients, big or small, remains a key driver. The next chapter is an exciting one with a new venture on the horizon and some big changes that mean Picture Canning will be able to offer even more top quality service and support. JAMIE HUTCHINSON AND PICTURE CANNING’S NEXT CHAPTER

LEFT Si Bell and team on very wet location duties

Instead of using big lights for night stuff, which was the standard, we started using the Litegear Lite Tiles

imaging technician, James Shovlar, who applied a close approximation of Bell’s intended grade on a scene-by-scene basis and made the resulting LUTs available for use through post. The final colour pass took place at Encore Post Production under the supervision of senior colourist Paul Staples, with whom both Byrne and Bell had worked on Ripper Street . Bell supervised the first three episodes in full. “We had quite a strong idea of where it was going to go,” he says. “We used the offline as a guide. Paul didn’t just match it, but used it as a reference. Once we’d set up the first couple of episodes, I was quite confident. Anthony was there and he supervised the last three episodes.” Series 5 of Peaky Blinders is, in some ways, a family affair. “I brought all of my crew onto this series,” Bell says. “No one had done Peaky before. I’ve worked with the grip, Paul Kemp, since I started doing short films and we’ve done almost every job since. He’s a master on the crane and camera movement – he’s not one of these guys who needs instruction for everything. Andrew Fletcher operated the Trinity and Steadicam and most of the A camera. He did a brilliant shot in one of the later episodes where we played this one five-page scene in one shot; it was outstanding. Ollie Whickman is a great collaborator – Peaky was his first gaffer job on this kind of scale and he did a great job.” Finally, Bell is keen to credit focus puller Tom Finch for his skill at keeping the difficult lenses in check. Bell has since worked on Britannia and a production he describes as “a dark take on A Christmas Carol with Guy Pearce”. Dickens and Pearce? What more could you want for Christmas?

Shelby headquarters. Everything else we had to build again. The Garrison hadn’t been in the series for a couple of years, and that was a whole new build. We had the Houses of Parliament, a small set we used for the betting shop, the Shelby HQ and another set we flipped for different purposes – we used it for the Friends’ Meeting House set and another set that I can’t talk about.” Interior lighting set-ups were driven by the reality that period interior light is motivated by the exterior. “It was a lot of big lights outside windows, 18Ks and 20Ks. Everything was beams – Molebeams, whatever it was depending on the location.” Outside, similarly upscale arrangements were normal: “Nearly every day we’d have Manitous with 20-by-20-feet blacks on to flag the sun. It was all about controlling the light and making sure it would be ready to go when we turned up. Shoot quickly and get the look we wanted.” For night exteriors, Bell used a technique he and gaffer Ollie Whickman had developed on the Roman historical epic, Britannia . “Instead of using big lights for night stuff, which was the standard, we started using the Litegear LiteTiles and building them into big 16-by-8-foot rectangles. We put them on the machine and used them like the moonlight, a softer controllable source. We never had them at 5600K, we put a bit of the tungsten into it, so it was normally about 4800K. Depending which practicals we used, we might adjust that depending on how much orange light we had.” This sort of control was common to almost everything Bell used: “We’d have everything on the iPads. In the sets, the practicals would be dimmable, too.” EDIT AND BEYOND The edit used offline files created by digital

PEAKY BLINDERS IS AVAILABLE TO STREAM NOW ON BBC IPLAYER

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

Powered by