DRAMA | L I NE OF DUTY
IMAGES Behind the scenes on Line of Duty Season 5 and (right) DOP Stephen Murphy
being staged we’d drive in a Z40 with either some china balls or some Quasar tubes rigged to them as a soft top-light, usually gelled to match the industrial colours. The benefit to using Carlo’s array of Parcan backlights was I could vary the spread of the bulbs in each row, so that the lower rows would have wider bulbs, which helped with the drop-off directly under the machine. And because we were shooting in winter in Northern Ireland, where it gets windy, the wind would just pass through the rig. It also meant I could gel the lamps individually avoiding the large piece of gel that always becomes a wind sail on Wendy lights. NIGHT FOR DAY For AC-12, which is a large dressed location approximately 12 floors up, Carlo and I used some consumer LED tek-tiles in the ceiling and supplemented those with a combination of Quasar tubes and Kino Flos as our soft top key-light. At a certain point in the schedule we were faced with shooting large chunks of the script ‘night for day’ which when 12 floors up is quite a challenge. We couldn’t get any machines outside the building to light from outside, and even if we could, the size of the building would have meant the number of machines required would have been too expensive. Added to which our AC-12 set is filled with large panels and walls of glass which reflect any lights on the floor. So we had the art department build dozens of fake window frames for us, into which we placed four LED tek-tiles. All the power cables were hidden into a pre-built dressing that each window frame had so it was a self- contained clean rig. Each of these window frames would then ‘plug’ into the actual window and become a self-illuminated light source. When the camera panned across the windows it just looked like overexposed sky and the illusion meant we could extend our daylight shooting hours though the night. CAMERA PACKAGE We shot this season on Alexa Minis. It’s a very flexible camera that gives great pictures in a very rugged body. We used a full set
For AC-12 we used some consumer LED tek- tiles in the ceiling and supplemented those with a combination of Quasar tubes and Kino Flos
LINE OF DUTY SEASON 5 IS CURRENTLY ON BBC1 AND BBC IPLAYER. facilitate camera positions and because a lot of my brilliant camera and electrical crew were returning crew from last year we had our system down cold and could get set up very quickly. It’s a thrill watching the scenes unfold in real time in front of you and this year’s interview scenes were no different. we shot the brilliant Thandie Newton interview sequence we shot almost a 40-minute take, on almost every take. That requires an extra level of planning on our part, and we shoot with three cameras, which means hiding reflections within the glass box from each camera. Our glass interview room has some floating walls to help
of ultra primes and made regular use of a Hawk 150-450mm zoom (used as a variable prime) with occasional use of an Angenieux Optimo 24-275 zoom as well. We always shot with two cameras and regularly shot three cameras. This year I designed two show LUTs at Yellowmoon in Belfast with colourist Scott Ferguson, one LUT for day, one for night. I kept the camera rated at 800ASA for day scenes but for the night scenes I wanted a bit more texture so I pushed it to 1600ASA. I also used a combination of low-con, ultra-con and Smoque filters to alter the contrast curve of the sensor. Most of the time I was at a stop of between T2.8 and T4 for the night exteriors as I knew I’d needed to light for the bigger zooms and to help give the focus pullers a chance on the longer lenses. We’d usually start with the 24mm on A camera for our wide master and very quickly find ourselves swinging to much longer lenses so the deeper stop helped that considerably and gave the lenses a chance to perform at their best. The famous interview scenes are their own special challenge. Staged in the interview room in the middle of AC-12 – the interview room being a glass walled box designed specifically to be as exposed as possible – each interview scene is shot sequentially with every take covering the entire length of the scene. Last year when
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