ADOLESCENCE PRODUCTION
confident we’d be able to work through it all. We knew we were doing something ridiculously ambitious, so we expected problems. It sort of fortified us.” One thing that made the process exponentially smoother was the fact that Thorne, Barantini, Graham and Lewis had worked closely together on Boiling Point , a feature-length one-shot film, in 2021. Ever since they made that, Graham had his eye on doing another oner-based project, eventually reaching out to Thorne in autumn 2022 with an idea. Inspired by a series of real-life reports of young boys in the UK being involved in knife crime, Graham wanted to zone in on the topic – and he wanted to get the Boiling Point band back together. “I think I was always the person they wanted to do Adolescence , so I didn’t have to do much pitching myself,” recalls Lewis. “I’d done a few ‘normal’ jobs for TV since Boiling Point , but I was so happy to jump back into the one-shot format because it’s just really exciting – when He was brought on ‘exceptionally early’ for an intense prep phase, involving close collaboration with the director and art department from the get-go. “Normally, the location, director and art team are the first to start, but I started with them,” Lewis explains. Since the one-shot format made camera movements so integral, it had to be considered from the very beginning: “If we were looking at a location that wouldn’t work technically, we had to know about it,” he says. To plan out the complex camera paths, he created top-down drawings of each location on his iPad, using Shot Designer, animating the movement of both the camera and the actors. “It’s essentially a map,” he explains, “so you can see where everyone is and how they will interact – you can’t do a written shot list for this kind of thing.” This phase was both collaborative and iterative. Lewis and the team broke down each episode into sections – the raid, the convoy, the police station – and meticulously plotted them out. it’s not really stressful that is…” LAYING THE GROUNDWORK “We’d be there in the spaces, walking up and down, working out the beats,” he explains. The blocking constantly evolved, especially for delicate sequences
NAILING THE ONERS Episode 3 (above and right) proved not just technically, but also physically demanding for DOP Lewis, who used all manner of accessories and rigging (left) to make sure the camera caught the right angles
sticks out in particular: “In episode 3, I was the sole camera operator because there was no place to easily transfer the camera. I wanted it to be extremely steady. The only way to do that on our camera (the DJI Ronin 4D-6K) was with a steady arm, which is tricky to dismantle and transfer to somebody else. Shooting that for me was physically awful – it felt like my spinal column was collapsing in on itself. I thought I might faint at times.”
So many things could go wrong and kill a given take, meaning everyone would have to go back to square one. If the focus puller couldn’t pull focus it was game over, if the AD couldn’t perfectly cue the SAs or coordinate the cast around corners, the shot would fall apart. But through constant troubleshooting, ‘we made it work’, grins Lewis. “There was a bit of blind faith in thinking we’d find a way. We had such a good team that I was
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