L I NE OF DUTY | DRAMA
DUTY CALLS Line of Duty DOP Stephen Murphy breaks down his technique to capture Season 5 of this high-octane police drama
WORDS STEPHEN MURPHY / PICTURES BBC
T he photographic style of Line of Duty has evolved over the years. Season 1 and 2 were shot with a lot of snap zooms, in a slightly more frenetic style; Season 3 moved away from that style, and by the time I joined the team, halfway through Season 4, the visual style had evolved to where it is now. I’d describe our visual style as a long-lens show, shot in a grounded, realistic way. It’s almost documentary in its quest for realism but without the handheld, searching camera that some other police procedural shows embrace. We rarely use handheld cameras, but we do keep the camera moving almost constantly, using a combination of dollies, sliders, steadicam and car rigs. That style worked well for us on my episodes on Season 4 so everyone was keen for us to maintain that visual style for Season 5. GUEST WORLD Each season, the story is split between the world of AC-12 with our three principal cast members and what I guess you’d call our ‘guest world’, the world our principal cast is investigating. AC-12 has a functional reality to its visual style that is very important to maintain. It needs to feel real, and yet still have some visual interest to it. It’s a bright, fluorescent-lit office space, which is appropriate to the reality of how that would be in that world. Then, when we travel outside of that space and into the world of our antagonists, I have the creative freedom to use more shadow, more colour; because again that is closer to the reality of what that world would be. That grounded, functional aesthetic is the show’s style. Sometimes that means willingly embracing imperfect light, imperfect exposure, imperfect composition; but that’s all part of the beauty of the show’s visual style. It’s not supposed to be a glamorous style, it’s not glossy; it’s a beautifully imperfect semi- naturalistic style.
Part of the show’s visual style is the pace at which the show is edited... we work at a fast pace with multiple cameras
LOCATION HEAVY Line of Duty is a challenging show to shoot. It’s shot entirely on location, or occasionally on set-builds within a location, and some of those spaces are very small and or hard to access. That use of locations helps add to the authenticity of its visual style but it does present us with a few logistical problems. Added to that is the speed we have to work at and the amount of coverage we need to get. Part of the show’s visual style is the pace at which the show is edited. Even though we do stage long tracking masters the show is cut at a very fast pace, and part of the energy of the show comes from that editing pace. One of the things we try to do to help that is to provide a lot of coverage, and that means working at a very fast pace with multiple cameras. The key to facilitating that shooting speed is how I light the show. I love soft top-light; it’s beautifully dramatic and it makes working with multiple cameras a little easier. When
IMAGES Season 5 was shot on Arri Alexa Minis with Ultra Primes and Hawk zooms
MAY 20 1 9 | DEF I N I T ION 37
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