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THE DP VIEW
BARRY ACKROYD BSC
MOTION PICTURE & PRO-VIDEO tv production
all over the world and shot in all sorts of places so he has an extraordinary fund of knowledge. But as much as I admire the work he has done on Ken Loach’s films, my style couldn’t be more different. It’s very visceral and highly coloured, and is more to do with entering the minds of the charac- ters rather than observing them.
“It’s very emotional, without the detachment that Ken has. It’s highly scripted and quite structured. So it’s fascinating that Barry gets on with it, he doesn’t spend hours and hours lighting the set, making a big song and dance about the mystique of being a
DP. He’s an enthusiastic and a terribly positive character, but also he’s very interested in the image.
“The Lost Prince was so different to anything he’d shot, it was a period piece and very grand, so it was a fascinating collision between him and me. I like things to be quite rich look- ing and he likes to use a lot of natural light, yet he showed me these two things can be compatible.
“And I encouraged him to create this world, so that everything seen through the child’s eye had to be heightened. All my work is slightly heightened. It’s interesting that he
brought his experience and this style of minimal light to my world, which tends to be highly coloured and impressionistic. That, I think, is a very interesting mix.” ■ ANWAR BRETT
Friends And Crocodiles and Gideon’s Daughter, to be seen on television later this year, were originated on 16mm Super F-250D 8662 and Super F-500 8672
n the first of these films there’s a huge party scene at night, in the grounds of a stately home. There’s a lake, boats made to look like swans, which are lit,
and musicians on a pontoon. The sto- ryline takes you right around that lake. That took almost a whole week to film, shooting at night.
We had theatrical lighting set ups for some of the exteriors and the stages, and what we did mostly was dress the scene with appropriate peri- od fittings and period lights so we would keep that feel. So what we went for what was very real in that sense.
Otherwise I lit it in a very similar way to how I did The Lost Prince, try- ing to keep it very believable and real and accentuating the surreal elements of it with the lighting.
We had to do so much from two scripts, very detailed and complex. We often shot with two cameras, Stephen wanted that a lot of the time, and every DP knows that you’re mak- ing some kind of compromise with your lighting to do that because you have to then make it work from two angles.
But one of the reasons I get on well with Stephen is that I’ve always had that thing of lighting ‘in the round’, so that if you want to change angles you can. ■
Fuji Motion Picture And Professional Video • Exposure • 9