DARK HEART | SHOOT STORY
IMAGES Ed lit St. Augustine’s church in Kilburn, London, with a 100kW SoftSun, the shoot’s biggest lighting set-up.
We talked in prep about seeing the parts of London you wouldn’t necessarily see. The joins between old and new
D irector of Photography Ed Moore describes hearing the words “gothic noir” early in the prep process for Dark Heart . “Those are words which are exciting for a cinematographer to hear,” he begins, the glee already apparent. “It’s set in London, lots of night...” The production, currently known by a working title, was produced by Silverprint Pictures for ITV1 directed by Colin Teague and shot over nine weeks in spring 2018. “The idea,” begins Ed, “was to do a six-part series. The pilot would be recut into episodes one and two, and I was hired to shoot the rest.” The pilot episode had been produced some time before, with photography by Sam McCurdy BSC, although Ed mentions that “we did reshoot a little bit of episodes one and two – but not a lot. That nine weeks was new episodes.” Ed’s involvement came via series producer Letitia Knight and executive producer Kate Bartlett, with whom he’d worked on episodes of Vera and Shetland . “We talked in prep about seeing the parts of London you wouldn’t necessarily see,” Ed recalls. “The joins between old
and new... we wanted to keep it down and dirty.” With this in mind, Ed used the Alexa Mini, choosing Zeiss Super Speed lenses with the coatings removed to provoke flare and glow. These, he knew, would present a challenge to focus puller Jason Cuddy who commented, “The uncoated ones are so mushy; even when they’re technically in focus they don’t look in focus. Working off monitors, with peaking, it was more of an exercise in using the force.” “During our first meeting with Colin he was emphatic that we had to work very quickly,” Ed remembers. “We were on the same page as regards references, but we couldn’t be hanging around, we had to be able to put the camera anywhere quickly and it’s got to look great.” With this in mind, Ed left the A-camera almost permanently mounted in his own DJI Ronin 2 gimbal, used both in the conventional handheld mode and as a remote head using the then- experimental DJI wheels. TRAINING WHEELS This, Ed feels, was a huge timesaver. “It does everything. It does require a lot of technical support which I do myself because I’m a huge nerd. For most DOPs you would end
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