Page 25 - Fujifilm Exposure_23 Wildlife_ok

AMID THE
DREAMING SPIRES An interview with Paul Otter
Paul Otter still vividly recalls the day he started working on The House, the BBC’s award-winning - and head- line-grabbing -backstage documentary series about the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.
“Michael [Waldman, the director] took me into our office and there was this huge filing cabinet... you know, the type with doors. He opened it and it was full of Fuji stock. My first thought was, ‘Bloody hell, I’ve got to shoot all of this!’”
On the six one-hour series, which later won BAFTA’s Best Factual Series in 1996, and for which Otter personal- ly earned a nomination for his cine- matography, they went though a thou- sand rolls of film in the course of its year-long shooting.
For his most recent assignment, College Girls, which decorated Channel 4’s schedules this past summer and early autumn, Otter only used “some- thing like 600 to 700 rolls” despite the fact that the six-part series had a whop- ping three-year production schedule. A budgetary sign of the times?
Set in and around St Hilda’s, Oxford’s last single sex enclave, College Girls followed the university fortunes of, principally, Laura, Afshan, Lucy and ‘Tash’ from their first day ‘up’ in October 1998 through to their finals in 2001. As the C4 blurb out it, we watched as “faced with some of the toughest educational courses in the western world, the
girls also learn valuable lessons in love, life and independence.”
Working again with director Kevin Sim, with whom he had previously made some five films, Otter explains that “the remit was to get the intimacy with the girls but also an epic sense of Oxford – which I think we managed to do.
“Oxford’s a fantastic place to film, visually very seductive. It also appears to have a different kind of light from the rest of the country. I don’t think it actually has, but per- haps it’s something to do with the colour of the stone. There’s that feel- ing you’re not in this country but in some great European capital like, say, St Petersburg: solid, unrockable. So the idea was to get a sense of all that but also a feeling for the modern within that context.”
They filmed for about a week a month across three years. “Yes,” Otter admits, “it was an enormous undertak- ing but happily I was still able to get other assignments to fit round it.
“On the programme, we had a researcher, Sarah, who was in Oxford basically full-time and the director lives there too. Whenever we turned up it was as if we’d never been away because Sarah and Kevin had done their job so well. It proved easy just to pick up the camera and start shooting again without the usual formalities which can happen on these long proj- ects when you don’t see the people for a month. Most importantly, we man- aged to build up a very good rapport with the girls.
“It was not a strongly scripted project, as such. Generally, what we
tried to look for were themes and then apply the images to that. That’s the way Kevin quite likes to work. One of the great advantages we had which came with having three years to film was being able to go back and shoot the same things – certain ceremonies, for example – again.
“I’d have seen the rushes each time and so instead of having to scramble through something with two or three cameras we knew we always had another crack. That sort of oppor- tunity is unusual in documentary – to be able to go and film the same thing again just to shoot cutaways.
‘We were,” says Otter, “pretty damn economical with the film, especially in these days of video- tape, Personally, I’ve always found the discipline of shooting film absolutely sharpens the way your mind works. For me, there’s a kind of precious nature about film. It somehow focuses your responsibili- ty having this sort of organic thing running through your camera.”
That feeling originates from the first day Otter enrolled at film school years earlier at the old Sheffield Poly: “I remember feeling a great sense of responsibility as I put a roll of film through the camera – and have never lost that.”
Otter shot College Girls on Super16 using a mixture of Fuji’s 125 Daylight and 500T stocks: “Say you were going into a bar with some of the girls, it was always fast enough to shoot wide open with a prime lens.”
continued over
Photos main: Paul Otter; above: Bill Clinton with one of the performers during the shooting of The House (© BBC/Double Exposure)