SHOOT STORY | DARK HEART
Unfortunately, the last series of Vera and Shetland that DOP Ed Moore shot attracted some internet trolling, especially from a group of retired BBC camera people. They actually wrote a letter to Ed Moore’s agent, saying that he didn’t know how to frame anything and should go back to film school. However, we think that they should applaud this superb example of new style visual storytelling. “It’s good to try something new and we were often told to calm down by the producer,” says Ed. “You can take it too far but it’s better to be overshooting the mark and coming back onto it rather than always doing the safest thing possible. We just pushed against the norm in a friendly way.” BBC OLD GITS
That nine-week schedule had a lot of split days to get a lot of night into the show
which have been heavily used by various productions since becoming vacant. “It’s funny,” Ed remembers, “because there’s so many production office signs. You want to wander around – anyone want a DOP? That was the closest we had to a standing set.” Ed describes an unusual, though well-planned schedule. “That nine-week schedule had a lot of split days to get a lot of night into the show. We would do an 11am call time, shooting through to 10pm. That was great for the director and me – we could get a lot of variety into the show.” department. “We had some fantastic locations... we had a lot of stuff in a beautiful church, St. Augustine’s in Kilburn. We ended up lighting that with a 100kW SoftSun, probably our biggest lighting set-up. We had 18ks and 20ks around the church... the 100kW SoftSun sounds like a lot of power, but you put it through stained-glass windows that are a hundred years old – there’s not enough left. I think I ended up at ISO 2560. Is the SoftSun dimmed at all? No, guv, it’s at 100.” The production’s gritty look occasionally encouraged the filmmakers to overlook things that might normally have seemed like a bit of luck. “We did a whole sequence on the same platforms at HERE COMES THE SUN Ed is especially keen to credit the work of the locations
up wanting to have a technician. Which is not to say I didn’t rely on Jason, particularly balancing on lens changes; it’d take an additional 20 seconds.” The flexibility of the gimbal meant that the camera could be positioned without any need to find space for the crew: “I could be with the director. I could be looking at a bigger monitor than if I were on the camera. If the director suddenly decided we wanted to do the next shot as a walk-and-talk it took two minutes for me to put the rig on to support the gimbal. In terms of getting the most out of the day it was superb.” This approach relied
DID YOU KNOW? In 2013 Ed was the last DOP to ever shoot Judi Dench as M in a glossy promotion for Philomena
heavily on the skills of grip Ben Moseley. As Ed puts it, “Sometimes I’d have the gimbal on a slider, and he’d be doing stuff the operator would be doing – holding an over-the-shoulder, for instance. We had the option of wireless
Charing Cross that Skyfall used. It was a very expensive location because we had our own tube train for a couple of hours. The lighting was helped by the fact that when Roger Deakins was in there they’d rigged hundreds of fluorescent tubes down one of the platforms that you can use for filming. The other side is really dingy because half the bulbs have gone. We thought – that’s our location... because they were broken it looked fantastic.” Other locations included Guy’s Hospital, with views of the Shard, the Windmill theatre in Soho, and a single day outside London on the Isle of Sheppey, which Ed describes as having “its own bizarre stark beauty”. In one memorable scene, Ed relied heavily on the light of traffic signals, backed up with ARRI Skypanels set to mimic their colour. “We had to have a reason for a character to get stuck behind some roadworks, and the art department
communication but Ben is so in tune with where the camera should be, [it was] a beautiful dance, really.” Second- unit DOP and operator Andrew Rodger worked more conventionally on the B-camera, sharing the set of uncoated Super Speeds, with an additional set of conventional, coated lenses available for circumstances where the uncoated look became too noticeable. The only sets were constructed in the buildings formerly occupied by the Central Saint Martin’s art school in Holborn,
TOP LEFT Ed Moore. TOP RIGHT The shoot involved one day outside of London, on the Isle of Sheppey.
58 DEF I N I T ION | SEPTEMBER 20 1 8
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