Page 23 - Fujifilm Exposure_18 Shackleton_ok

barquentine Kasklot (predictably nick- named Costalot) which had last seen service on Longitude in an entirely dif- ference guise. Its sinking was later recreated back at Shepperton.
To achieve a suitably epic TV ‘look’, Sturridge and his DP, Henry Braham (Roseanna’s Grave, Waking Ned, The Invisible Circus), made the arguably unprecedented decision to shoot on Super 35mm.
Said Braham: “There were two issues, in particular. I needed the abili- ty to manipulate the focus and be able to depth the field a lot especially
being so exposed out in that sort of environment. That’s why we wanted to use the widest possible format avail- able for a project of this size.
“Also there’s a new standard with TV; everyone’s got brilliant sets, DVD, the whole thing. They are virtu- al cinemas these days. So in a sense you’re competing with things like The Matrix. To the small screen audi- ence you’re being seen on exactly the same terms.”
To help achieve further the neces- sary sense of scale, from sea and air, Braham had the use of a helicopter and Wescam for the duration of the Greenland filming.
In order to maximise their crucial stay, cast and a 94-strong crew, includ- ing nine full time safety people, had to break, or drastically amend, almost all the traditional rules about filming in those extreme conditions.
“Ice is a very difficult thing to talk about,” said Sturridge. “It’s rather like a Japanese film director asking when is it sunny in Cornwall. We were not unprepared as such, but we had to completely relearn everything we’d expected and do almost exactly the opposite of what we planned to do on the ice.”
Nothing, though, would have quite prepared them for the traumatic day when the two mile long ice floe on which they were shooting started to break up into four bits.
Recalled Sturridge: “Intellectually, you knew it was going to happen, but when the ground under your feet begins to fall apart and you’ve got two miles of ocean beneath you and land is 20 miles away, your view of the uni- verse gets a bit of a rude shock to put it mildly.”
After the seagoing stresses of Gulliver’s Travels then Longitude and now Shackleton, what next? “The next one will be dry, with a lot of girls,” laughed Sturridge. ■
Shackleton was originated on Fujicolor Motion Picture Negative. It will be aired over two nights on C4 early in the New Year.
THE DP VIEW
HENRY BRAHAM BSC
T his was effectively two films for television, which was a new
experience for me. On the big screen your eye does the edit- ing about what you want to
look at. The thing about the smaller screen is that you’ve got to be much clearer about the way you compose shots and also the way you light them.
To make the medium work, you have to grab people’s attention more than you do once you’ve got them in the cinema. I tried to be very clear with composition and with light, not using a lot of it, really. Simplifying, sim- plifying, simplifying.
Visually, the story starts with a rich, opulent Edwardian feel to it. From then we move on to a romantic vision of the Antarctic. When things start to go wrong, and it becomes more of an action film, you start to take the colour away and get into a much harder look – grittier, more monochrome. There’s a real visual pro- gression throughout the story.
When I first arrived on the ice I was quite surprised. The colour is quite extraordinary, marine blues and pinks, colour you just don’t expect. My vision of it was almost black-and- white, like the reference pictures you usually see, almost a colourless land- scape. It wasn’t like that at all. ■