Page 27 - Fujifilm Exposure_13 Shiner_ok

TIME
tv production
TIME
feeling. But you can’t please everyone. Now it’s more ‘story-of-the-week’ driven, with guest stars coming in and out.”
With the central cast pared down, Berry’s character of harbourmaster and former Royal Navy man Mike Nicholls and Tina Hobley’s WPC Melanie Rush return. For Hobley as for Berry, Harbour Lights represents another opportunity to define a new screen persona after huge success in a popular soap - in her case playing Sam, the femme fatale bar- maid in Coronation Street.
“It’s wonderful to be back in Dorset,” she beams. “This
year it feels like coming home. I’ve brought the whole family down with me, including my baby daughter, so it’s like our little home away from home. The series we did in ‘98 was much longer, but now we’re only away for three months, which is just enough. And I’m especially pleased they’ve given the show another
chance. Now it’s more like a drama and less like a soap.”
Having that experience in
common with her leading man
may make for an instant bond
between them. It’s true that
the relentless grind of a con-
tinuing soap can weary even
the most enthusiastic actor, but Hobley admits that the pace is almost as hec- tic on her current project.
“It’s still only a ten day shoot for an hour of screen time, which is very fast. I would love to do something where you had loads of time, because you’re still fighting the clock. What’s lovely, though, is having a journey. Knowing that it’s going from A to B, because with a soap there’s no end. That’s very frustrating because you don’t have any say in the character, but on this we have read throughs and we can talk to the writer and offer some input.”
Shot, as Hobley suggests, on a tight schedule, shows like Harbour Lights rely on experienced hands like Ken Coles, lead DP and an unexpected con- vert to the Fuji stock he was asked to test by producer Steve Lanning before the series began.
“I had never used Fuji,” he explains, “but I was asked if I would be interested in doing some comparison tests. I sup-
pose it’s the old comfort thing - what you’ve always used is what you stick to. I did the tests and couldn’t find any par- ticular difference visually.
“I know there tends to be a slightly green bias from time to time in rushes, but it’s not anything that gives a particu- lar problem. And if you’re shooting out- side in an area that is particularly green it’s a bonus. It was actually quite exciting, particularly on the high speeds and the daylight film stocks. It was so nice to shoot just using daylight film stock, and not be fiddling around with filters.
most pressure is Nick Berry, but you would never guess it. Cheerful, charm- ing, mixing easily with cast, crew and the increasingly more familiar locals of the production’s base at West Bay, he is a picture of calm amidst the usual helter skelter of a film crew.
He knows his strengths and, in Harbour Lights, plays to them. But play- ing slightly flawed peak time heroes does not begin to define the limits of Berry’s ambitions. They lie elsewhere, a clue coming from his increasing interest in developing more projects through his
and Steve Lanning’s Valentine Productions company.
“Steve is a very experi- enced man,” nods Berry. “He produced Heartbeat which is where I first met him. I want- ed to get involved behind the scenes, and this seemed a good opportunity. Valentine is a way of creating stuff and maybe working on the kind of thing that I want to work on myself, trying to get jobs for the boys, and trying to create opportunities for people who should be doing it.
“At the moment they [the BBC] want me in it, but hope- fully we can get going on other things that we’re work-
ing on that don’t include yours truly. I’m more interested in that. I feel con- strained by the image I’m perceived to have – that’s half the reason for my wanting to move behind the camera. But the reason we got this deal with the BBC was because this was the kind of genre programme they wanted to make.
“People like to pigeonhole actors. It used to be that if you did television then you didn’t do film or at least you were not considered to be film types. But then,” he cautions, speaking as one who knows, “it also used to be the case that if you did along run in a popular soap opera you couldn’t do anything else afterwards. I’ve never really been that overly ambitious. I like being a part of this circus, but the longer I do it the more fun I find I have working on the technical side.” ■ ANWAR BRETT
Harbour Lights was originated on Fujicolor Motion Picture Negative
“The high speed material in particu- lar, the 500 ASA for night shooting, has been a revelation in terms of how far you can push it and not have it go grainy. It’s still got crisp, high quality blacks so I’m very pleased with it. But I’m not a technician’s technician, I’m a hands on person and if I get hold of something I run with it.”
A key member of personnel on such a tightly run ship, Coles is the head DP, lighting the majority of episodes and selecting the crew that the next DP assigned will inherit. Coles and his crew initially work together for ten days, creating one hour long episode, before he moves aside - along with the director and even the First Assistant - to research, recce and pre- pare a future episode. In this way the crew is kept busy, and painstaking cre- ative decisions can be made under marginally less pressure.
Of course the person on the Harbour Lights set who should be under