Page 32 - Fujifilm Exposure_48 Tamara Drewe_ok

TONY SLATER-LING
“WE PREFERRED TO USE 35MM FILM FOR THE SAME HD QUALITY BUT WITH MORE MOBILITY AND LATITUDE.”
➤ “Iwantedsomethingabitsofter, lower contrast because we were shooting a lot of the time in that strong midday sunshine. I wanted the actors to look like they were baking, as it were, but wanted the latitude to hold details in the shadows. At night time, the 500T had an amazing latitude and worked extremely well with the mixed lighting sources”.
Mention of actors brings one neatly to Slater-Ling’s beginnings. After enjoying drama at school and youth theatre in his native Manchester, he took a degree in theatre studies at university
in Liverpool.
“After my first year, I very quickly realised I didn’t really want to be an actor and started teaching myself photography. From that I got into making short films with friends at uni. I carried on, though, with the degree but did photography and filmmaking as a kind of aside.”
Clearly he’d acquired the bug and after university applied for and got a traineeship with Channel Four. “The idea is that you’re meant to do a bit of everything but I kind of did camera for about 90% of that two years.
“My last job there was as a trainee on Mike Leigh’s Naked. They then stopped filming for a while and when they went back to finish the end, the loader had to leave because he’d booked a holiday so I did that last week on the film as a loader.”
With his ticket secured, Slater-Ling began his career in earnest, quickly ‘lucking’ into what would eventually become his very fruitful association with fellow Mancunian, David Odd.
Among the many productions on which they worked together, with Slater-Ling in a variety of roles, from operator to 2nd unit cameraman, were All The King’s Men, Some Voices, Messiah, Flesh & Blood, The Lost World, White Teeth, The Second Coming and 40. “He taught me so much,” Slater-Ling recalls, “giving me a lot of breaks. Yes, he was fantastically generous.”
The last of those credits, 40, a C4 drama in 2003 co-starring Eddie Izzard, Kerry Fox and Hugo Speer, would also then lead on to his next big break. “Emma Burge, the producer on it, then also became a
producer on the first series of Shameless and asked if I’d like to DP.”
So began a long involvement with what has become one of C4’s most successful ever series originally created by Paul Abbott and still going strong after seven years. Slater-Ling would shoot the first three series, 26 episodes in all, of the Manchester-based comedy drama, before returning after a break to do other things to direct two episodes in Series 6.
“There had been talk of doing it on film when we started but it was never really going to happen. It was a new commission, quite a high page count and not a huge hourly budget. I wanted something relatively mobile so I could run around with it. I certainly didn’t want to shoot on digibeta. That first series was pretty much six months of hand-held stuff and we shot on Canon XL1s. This was pre 16 x 9 chips with quite low resolution and little latitude but I liked the raw quality of the image. I’d love to have shot on Super 8 but financially and technically it wasn’t a viable thing to do.”
When he returned to direct Shameless three years later, it was, he admits, quite a challenge. “Nerve-wracking? Not really, rather a different kind of challenge. There were perhaps different priorities for me to think about and perhaps you could say it was a slightly more lonely place to be. I picked my own DP, an Irish lad Donal Gilligan; I’m sure I drove him nuts occasionally. I found it interesting, but I’m much happier being a DP.”
Another crucial and rewarding longtime collaboration for
Slater-Ling has been with the director Kenny Glenaan, which began on C4’s multi award-winning 2004 drama Yasmin and has continued through Spooks, The Good Samaritan and Wired.
Then there was their 35mm feature Summer, a powerful, provocative flashback tale of friendship starring Robert Carlyle and Steve Evets, as, respectively, a haunted bachelor and his paraplegic pal set in town and countryside Derbyshire.
“It was obviously low budget and I wanted to shoot it all on just one stock therefore I chose the Reala 500D so it’d have a soft, low contrast
look to it. Also, at night-time, I liked the idea of shooting on a daylight stock because I wanted all the practicals to go warm and the HMIs to stay white.
“If you count the cuts in the film there are probably 420 and all the transitions are done in camera; there are no visual effects. Practically, we couldn’t afford them anyway, and we also thought it’d be far more interesting to do as much in camera as possible.”
He and Glenaan are currently preparing a new feature, Dirt Road To Lafayatte, a music-based, coming-of-age story set in America’s Deep South. “I’ve done some stills out there, also some provisional recce-ing and was going to shoot
footage at an annual festival before I started Mad Dogs – but the ash cloud intervened,” growls Slater-Ling of past memories.
With a CV also boasting recent 2nd Units for Susanna White on both Generation Kill and Nanny McPhee And The Big Bang as well as main unit cinematography on two new episodes of Doctor Who, directed by Jonny Campbell – for whom Slater-Ling has also shot Sainsbury’s food commercials in the past – it’s a career which goes way beyond just the domestic.
“If you’re a good DP,” says Slater-Ling, “you should be able to turn your hand to anything. If you have any nous or talent and interest in what you’re doing, it’s purely down to storytelling – be it a humvee in the Iraq desert or a tomato in East Cheam!” QUENTIN FALK
Mad Dogs, to be transmitted on Sky1 HD next Spring, is originated on 35mm Fujicolor ETERNA 250T 8553 and ETERNA 500T 8573
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