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SHOOT STORY PEAKY BLINDERS
it, a golden opulent sort of hue – the gold is reflected in the tables – and then I had blues, I had different things.” Here, Watters mentions the involvement of production designer Stephen Daly. “We asked for the stippled glass because it would catch the light.” In this scene, what appears to be an exterior window actually opens on to an interior atrium in the location. Watters had the atrium blacked out then relit it with SkyPanels to create a dependable daylight, and used a 9kW HMI to project hard shadows through the window blinds. He admits happily that, “I went over the top on that. You know, you’d have thought a 4K would be ample, but I went over the top so you could get those harsh shadows. I put shadow on Cillian’s face. I was trying to bring out film noir aspects but put that colour in behind him.” Watters’ approach to choosing those colours was a two-step process. “I had a small book of filters and I’d dial through them and say, let’s try this colour, that colour. I went through filters and I chose 20 or 30 filters beforehand, then Phil Brookes put them on a page. We had three pages of filters that we could hold
adventurous, Watters was, “treating it like a complete western. I was doing these tight shots of eyes looking up, fingers on triggers, and it was all used in the edit. It’s an insane amount of gunfire. I think the guys handling the guns, the armourers, were there 14 days the previous season and 47 days this season. Ear defenders all the time!” Even two-character dialogue scenes, a staple of television drama, were an opportunity to push the envelope. “Because it is Peaky , to light that you can really create something. It’s not just two people in a room – you can really go to town on it, up the stakes, up the drama by lighting it. It’s great, you can let the creativity flow. Every shot is considered, every shot is lit; nothing is haphazard.” Murphy’s character, Thomas Shelby, first meets Jessie Eden, played by Charlie Murphy, Watters dives keenly into the details of the shot design. “I used a lot of colour in this. I’m using colour a lot now in much of what I do, I used a lot of blue. In Tommy’s office, behind his window, I put a wash over THOMAS AND CHARLIE Describing a scene where Cillian
up and figure out – this is what we’ll do for this scene.” Having specified ARRI SkyPanels for what he calls “techy reasons,” Watters was then able to simply, “dial in a colour. On this film I’m just off doing, we use SkyPanels for colour all the time. I would show the gaffer that we’re looking for a particular filter colour, he’d stick it in, he’d get near and we’d do a bit of figuring out to find the hue we wanted.” ALEXA MINI Season four of Peaky Blinders was shot on the ALEXA Mini, making life easier for both handheld and
ABOVE Paul Anderson plays Arthur Shelby, Tommy's unstable older brother.
BELOW Opulent colours with a noir look characterised Watters' visual approach.
DEFINITION MARCH 2018
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