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“THE SKIN TONES ARE SORT OF RICHER AND BROWNER AND THAT BRINGS OUT THE WOOD AS WELL, BUT WE WERE ABLE TO KEEP THE WHITES A BIT CLEANER WHICH WAS REALLY WHAT WE WANTED.”
THEBOATTHATR
ever forget, someone once Nsang, where you’ve come
here from. This turned out to be sound advice for cinematographer Ed Wild
who found himself back on the water for a high profile music promo years after being a competitive rower in his youth.
Wild shot Take That’s The Flood, directed by Mat Whitecross, which was notable in the band’s canon for marking the return of Robbie Williams, making the film accompanying the single release
of particular significance to fans of the group.
But behind the camera it was Wild’s rowing experience that helped secure him the job.
“Mat called me,” he explains, “and said he had this Take That video and asked if he could have a chat with me about it because he knew that I’d rowed before, and I’d also worked with Take That before.”
The first issue that arose from the preliminary discussions Wild realised, was the presence of five, not four rowers, in the boat.
“It’s a five man scull,” Wild notes, “and there are normally only four man sculls. So they had to take a boat which would normally have a
cox sitting in the bow and a boat builder took the cox’s seat out and put another seat in the boat.”
Shooting over three days, primarily using 35mm Fujicolor ETERNA 250T, Wild and his crew followed the narrative of a song that’s almost five minutes in length, telling a ‘story’ which Whitecross (Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll) playfully describes as “Chariots Of Fire meets Forrest Gump”. This provokes a laugh from his cinematographer.
“I think Chariots Of Fire was a big pitch in terms of how we wanted it to look and that’s where they went with the styling and where we went
18 • EXPOSURE • THE MAGAZINE • FUJIFILM MOTION PICTURE
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