DRAMA | L I NE OF DUTY
SHOUT OUT
but the thing that really saved me was the Quasar Science LED tubes – another great recommendation from Carlo. I’d use those as a soft top-light source on night exteriors, usually rigged to a Z40 genie boom which I could arm out over the action as a soft top-light. I was very impressed with their colour, quality and flexibility as well as their fantastic output. For our larger night scenes our usual approach would be to use a large array of tungsten ParCans rigged in either 24, 36 or 48 lamp combinations, mounted on large cranes, as our backlights. Depending on the size of the location we could have anything up to three or four of those on a given night. We’d then have our best boy Martin Cattigan lead a pre-rig crew to dress the locations with a combination of metal halide and sodium vapour practicals, LED tubes, fluorescent tubes, 1x1 panels and tungsten fresnels, all gelled with one of our many industrial colours. I got in the habit of dressing some of those 1x1 panels into shot in the deep background just to give some colour contrast and depth to some of our scenes. Then wherever the action was
BELOW RIGHT Stephen Murphy sets up episode one of Season 5
Special mention to my fantastic crew for keeping it all running so smoothly and doing stellar work: camera operator Jon Howard; focus pullers Noah Davis, Jason Cuddy, Sam Bell; clapper loaders Anthony Breen and Jenny Atcheson; camera trainees Gerard Donnelly, Jack Gourley, Pete Brown; key grip Nick Chester; dolly grip Donovan Gallagher; grip trainee Jacob Prescott; gaffer Carlo McDonnell; best boy Martin Cattigan; electricians Gaston Currie, Lee McFadden and Aileen Doyle; and a small army of day players including steadicam operators Danny Bishop and Dion Casey; camera operators John Beachum, Angus Mitchell and Ray Carlin; focus puller Chris Samworth and cinematographer Ruairi O’Brien ISC who shot our double banking unit.
I joined Season 4 (episodes 4-6) I top-lit almost everything and I’ve continued to use that style for Season 5; it works incredibly well. By keeping most of the lighting apparatus off the floor and in the ceiling it helps give me (operating the A camera) and Jon Howard (operating the B camera) more freedom to design shots that will develop from one character to the next without fear of seeing the lights. It also helps me give the actors more freedom in where they want to play a scene, and I think helps them feel a little less distracted by the extra equipment on the floor. It helps us cross-shoot, which is something we also find ourselves doing from time to time, and it really helps when it comes time to shoot our infamous interview scenes, which are usually staged as one continuous performance for each and every take. I tend to adopt a ‘light the space, not the shot’ approach which becomes particularly helpful on this show. It gives the director and cast more freedom with their blocking and it lends a reality to the lighting. People walk in and out of pools of light. Sometimes they’re in the shadows, sometimes they walk through a pool of light and are a little overexposed. It adds to the mood tremendously as well as facilitating the tight schedule. NIGHT WORK This year we had a lot of night work, both interior and exterior, with two very big night exterior set pieces, staged over some very large areas. Myself and my brilliant gaffer, Carlo McDonnell, wholeheartedly embraced grungy industrial sources as our key night exterior light source. We had several huge areas to light and I wanted a mixed colour palette of industrial colours – rusty- coloured sodium vapour and cyan-coloured metal halide. We tested several gel packs on different sources to come up with a colour palette we could replicate and control at any location, and mixed those with a large collection of practicals. I usually prefer to stick to more traditional lamps, preferring an HMI/ Tungsten/Kino lighting package, but on this job I knew I’d need to embrace LEDs both for their flexibility in colour temperature and their small size and weight. We made extensive use of several types of LED panel throughout the shoot
By keeping the lighting apparatus off the floor it give us more freedom to design more shots without seeing the lights
38 DEF I N I T ION | MAY 20 1 9
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