DEFINITION February 2019.pdf

SHOOT STORY | BANCROFT

feet – in 16mm and 35mm – and that gave me a deep love and appreciation for the look of film negative, which I still carry with me. The Venice is the closest I’ve seen to film negative out of the digital formats. By far.” Lighting the series’ extensive night exteriors was complicated by the desire to work without restricting blocking or camera placement. One approach was quickly rejected: “the traditional 18k HMIs on various cranes and arms and stuff”. Nyberg explains: “I knew full well that we wanted to look everywhere all the time, so I quite quickly dismissed that idea. I knew we wouldn’t have the money to do it properly, with really big lights far away.” Here, Nyberg mentions one principal location, a large house, which would set the tone for night exterior lighting. “I made the house a light source – because it’s such a big house I reasoned they’d have ground and security lights at night. With my gaffer, Jon Best, we let the house light up the environment. The way the action is staged is that they’re either backlit or side-lit by the house. My approach has been devised through knowing what’s in the script,” Nyberg says. “It may not work for the next thing I’m doing.” The Venice offers a base ISO of either 500 or 2500, maintaining 15 stops of dynamic range in both. “For night, I go to the 2500 ISO base and then rate the camera There’s so much to do, so many characters and so many eyelines. The scripts are full of stage directions

at 1600. That gains me an extra latitude stop in the blacks and makes the night stuff really rich. This is compared to pushing an Alexa, which is a native 800 ISO, up to 1600 ISO, where it gets very grainy but you’re also losing a lot of latitude in the blacks.” B CAMERA COMPROMISE Nyberg monitored the production on his own TVLogic VFM-055A, also referring to stills prepared by Dinnigan on an iPad. “We took a version of one of the Rec. 709 LUTs and made it a little cooler in the blacks and added some skin tone changes. Nothing drastic. It’s working really well. We’re also shooting with filtration – I’m using a 1/8 Black Pro-Mist together with a 4mm Schneider True-Streak. It works particularly well when you’ve got soft light sources around for day exteriors and you get

THE SECOND SERIES OF BANCROFT IS EXPECTED TO AIR TOWARDS THE END OF 2019 was four weeks into a five-week shoot. The production will grade over nine days at Encore in London, where Nyberg hopes to work with The League of Gentlemen alumnus, Chris Rodgers. Beyond that, Nyberg says: “Scripts are coming in. TV drama is very busy at the moment.” that classic torch thing in police shows. You do have to watch it though or it can become way too much. You have to either pull the filter or alter the action.” Grip choices included drones and Steadicam, operated by Henry Landgrebe. Nyberg avoided bringing in a crane for occasional days, fearing it would seem out of place in a production that did not routinely use one. “For the opening scene of episode one, where Bancroft is arriving at the town hall when she’s been promoted, we open with quite a similar shot to the bird’s-eye view in Zodiac that follows the taxi.” With a B camera always available, Nyberg says: “We’ve shot quite a lot of two camera stuff for some locations. There’s so much to do, so many characters and so many eyelines. The scripts are full of details about stage directions and they all need to be covered.” Reaching for the B camera is, Nyberg says, a great way to remain on schedule. “It’s all to do with the pressure to complete days, which is pretty constant. I don’t really like cross-shooting, because you end up compromising both frames, but sometimes it’s the only way to get through a day. We did figure out a way of using two cameras – we have two frames going the same way and the lighting works for that. You can frame it in a way that doesn’t feel too vanilla.” At the time of writing, the production

ABOVE The Venice offers a base ISO of 500 and 2500, with 15 stops of dynamic range in both.

36 DEF I N I T ION | FEBRUARY 20 1 9

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