Page 30 - Fujifilm Exposure_35 Miss Potter_ok

Little Devil
“These are medium speed fine grain stocks offering great flexibility of exposure and excellent picture quality.”
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The Hairdresser’s Husband as an influ- ence. Shot over six weeks this summer the upbeat tone of a potentially down- beat story is intended to shift audi- ences out of any complacent feelings of disconnection with these characters.
“We decided that we wanted to give it a very fresh, bright, summery look,” Richards observes. “The story is about families who live in the suburbs and have fairly comfortable lives, and we wanted to represent that in the look.”
Speller was keen that Little Devil would not simply feature a reprise of the work he did on that previous pro- duction [Perfect Day] and to that end made some stylistic changes.
“I used much larger sources on thisone,”herecalls, “softsources which were then mixed up with harder light. Quite often if I had a trace frame with a large source through it I’d cut a hole in the frame or I’d have the light edging over the top or underneath or down the side so that we were getting some diffusion. The lighting style was strongly naturalistic, and we decided quite consciously that we wanted to light the ‘context’ and have the actor lit by spill, bounce or reflected light.”
Selecting stocks from the Eterna range, the 16mm Eterna 250D and Eterna 250 tungsten with Eterna 500 tungsten for night shooting, Speller found these delivered the latitudes he required in a wide variety of locations.
“This meant that I didn’t have to change stocks over a range of scenes,” he adds, “and it was close to working with one stock. For all day interiors, I shot with the daylight stock and for night or tungsten-lit scenes I went with the tungsten, so it
was like-for-like. I wanted as much uniformity of look and characteristics so that when I introduced something different, it really stood out.
“Typically, I was under-exposing by about half a stop as I wanted to work at quite generous apertures of T2.8 – T4.0. On very bright day exte- riors, I corrected the tungsten to reduce speed and lessen the need to use heavy NDs.
“These are medium speed fine grain stocks offering great flexibility of exposure and excellent picture quali- ty. They have a very fine grain struc- ture, wide tonal latitude and subtle colour rendition which can be exposed in a variety of ways to give really saturated tones.”
Now that they’ve covered getting the joy of getting hitched and the night- mare of divorce who knows what the
future holds for Johnson and Speller. The chances are though that they will reunite at some point in the future.
“We tend to like very similar things,” Richards enthuses. “Andrew has one of the best eyes in the busi- ness for creating images, but it has to be at the service of the drama. There’s no point in having a great shot if it doesn’t represent the drama properly. Sometimes your plainer shot does the job better.”
For now at least, this happy couple remain on very good terms indeed. ■ Anwar Brett
Little Devil, which will air later in the year on ITV, was originated on 16mm Eterna 250D 8663, Eterna 250T 8653 and Eterna 500T 8673
lthough it was a six-week shoot, and there was plenty of running prep time to work on the script, we did have 20 loca- tions to shoot on. One of the
biggest was the school where Robson was supposed to be the head teacher. We had a long tracking shot there. We shot in a real school and lit it from out- side on half a dozen 20 foot towers, with 6k HMIs on them coming through.
Another challenge was in the night scenes. I don’t particularly like the clichéd convention of blue moon- light so I was using a fluorescent green gel on the tungsten lamps, so I had a 20k with a fluorescent green gel and maybe a quarter blue, so the overall effect was like a silvery grey rather than blue. ■
THE DP VIEW
ANDREW SPELLER
A
Photo main and above left: Joseph Friend with DP Andrew Speller; centre: with Director David Richards; right: Maggie O’Neill on the set of Little Devil
28 • Exposure • The Magazine • Fujifilm Motion Picture