SHOOT STORY | DEATH AND N IGHT I NGALES
No one was worried about the level of darkness I’d used and I wasn’t concerned
GRADE During prep, I worked with dailies colourist Scott Ferguson at Yellowmoon in Belfast to develop a single LUT that I could use for the shoot. I shot make-up and costume tests with actor Ann Skelly (heroine Beth Winters) and tested some of the practicals that we were building. It gave everyone a sense of the quality of the images and how dark we might go. No one was worried about the level of darkness I’d used and I wasn’t concerned about it for TV broadcast. We were committed to a cinematic image. I knew that meant some people would be watching what were supposed to be dark images on screens that weren’t optimised to display those images, but you can’t work towards the lowest denominator. You can’t shoot interesting images worrying about what they might look like on someone’s iPhone in a bright sunny office. You have to aim for a higher standard. We all loved the dailies and we all loved how the images looked in the DI and we were supported every step of the way by the production and the BBC execs, which was refreshing. I would like to think that in this day and age of HD TVs most of the audience will have their televisions calibrated to a reasonable degree and will have seen the images as they were intended to be seen. FLASHBACKS Within the narrative of the series, there are a series of flashbacks and a dream sequence. We decided that treating the flashbacks in a different visual style would
just work against the visual simplicity we were working towards with the rest of the film. There were enough other visual clues within the frame, change of costume, change of hair etc. to mark the different time periods, so we didn’t alter anything else photographically. For the dream sequence, though, we did do something slightly different. We shot close-ups with an eyeline directly down the lens, just to give a sense of unease or surreality to the sequence, and we worked with a more heightened, saturated colour palette. LOCATION The entire shoot was shot on location in Northern Ireland. We were based in Belfast, but shot in a variety of locations. One of my favourite sets was the kitchen, which was a partial set build within an existing location at Myra Castle. The location itself had an incredible variety of subtle colours, soft greens and beautiful ochre bricks. Gillian’s set extension and dressing was just fantastic and it gave us a fabulous canvas to work on. I couldn’t shoot a project of this quality without the support of a fantastic camera, grip and electric crew. I had a superb crew, led by focus puller, Andy Gardner, key grip, Ben Mosley, and gaffer, Kevin Hetherington. I also received tremendous support from the superb post team at Yellowmoon. DEATH AND NIGHTINGALES IS AVAILABLE ON BBC IPLAYER NOW
30 DEF I N I T ION | JANUARY 20 1 9
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