SHOOT STORY | VAN I TY FA I R
if it was going to move it needed a reason to do so. But it was usually Becky that the camera followed, what she was thinking and what she was doing. The secret for Ed and James was to keep the rules consistent over the seven episodes and that meant for new locations you would immediately go to a 10mm wide to introduce the new setting. James was sure that this practice developed a style you could almost forget about. “You just do those things and then see what it looks like in the edit. But I was pleased that we were consistent with it and it was coherent. Sometimes on shows you mean to do that but by day five you’ve sort of forgotten what you’re doing. For this we looked to develop a style and stuck to it.” Ed is quick to applaud Mammoth the production company for encouraging different ways of shooting; of course they will rein you in if you go too far. “They don’t want something stuck in the mud, they want the expectation of emotional expression through the camera work. I think we’ve done some interesting things in-camera like the revolutions of the camera going in and out of new episodes. Trying to explain that to an executive sounds like you’re trying to shoot Scooby Doo or something, we did it in- camera by finding an old optic that allowed us to do that. James wanted to introduce the episodes with a statement if you like and that became the thing.” BECKY RULES In a story arc over 15 years Ed and James needed a set of rules to come back to when stories ranged from sleepy countryside folk to the Battle of Waterloo. As she is in most scenes Becky Sharp had her own set of rules
for shooting her. “We had a set of rules for her where she generally felt isolated from an environment, or she felt connected to it or would aspire to it. So wherever we went with her on her journey we would shoot close and wide with her and we also shot mid- length lenses and we always centre-framed her. So when she was generally really happy and connected to her environment we shot her in the most beautiful way we could which was generally with mid-length lenses centre framed. We always tried to tie her in to her environment so we weren’t using long lenses and a shallow depth-of-focus, there was always a level of clarity to the environment. We use a wide lens in the scene to have a ‘painterly’ approach within our TV hour. With her it wouldn’t be so ‘cutty’ and we’d let the cuts breathe, also
They want the expectation of emotional expression through the camera work
ABOVE Group shots were often shot as tableaus, ironically in a Vanity Fair Magazine Annie Leibowitz style.
30 DEF I N I T ION | SEPTEMBER 20 1 8
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