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Holiday Inns in it but back then there was nothing there.
“We lived in a compound that had been built by Taylor Woodrow, and next to that there was a three studio television studio that had been set up with an OB vehicle. And there were only 600 receivers in the whole area.
“And because I was so bored I worked extra shifts, and learned what other people did. I learned to operate a studio sound mixer, a telecine and a Steenbeck. I used to sit at that cutting my own stuff, asking ‘which idiot shot this?’. Great stuff.”
From Oman to Israel, Boyle found himself doing freelance news work there for a year before returning to the UK. But the domestic industry had lit- tle to match his ambition, even after he took up the offer of working as an operator at the Rank studios. There he found himself behind one of the ros- trum cameras on the studio floor, before segueing into freelance televi- sion work, shooting programmes such as Mr & Mrs, The Max Bygraves Show and Magpie amongst others.
“It’s a totally different type of work” says Boyle. “But I was lucky, I was freelancing for everyone at the time. There was this whole developing area of single camera video. This was back in the days when one inch porta- bles were just starting to appear. The Moving Picture Company had their own cameras but they would shoot in film style, so I started working there as an operator.”
By the early 80s Boyle was finding work in plentiful supply, for the ABC TV series 20/20, as well as freelance assignments under the aegis of his own company OB Video. The rise in prominence of video was something that excited him greatly at the time.
“When I was a stills photographer I loved Polaroids because you got the picture straight away. The idea of video really appealed to me. The fact that I couldn’t get the picture I wanted was another matter.”
It was a meeting with Terence Donovan in 1985, when Boyle was com- missioned to film the documentary of a Pirelli calendar shoot, that changed the course of his career forever.
“I had a huge hotel room so I pushed the bed up against the wall and nicked one of the backgrounds that Terence had finished with. I posi- tioned it so that the soft light coming in through the window worked well, because I had almost no lights, and then started to steal the models when he’d finished with them.
After quizzing Boyle’s extensive, some might say encyclopaedic, photo- graphic knowledge, Donovan then hired him to shoot a Meatloaf pop promo.
The collaboration with Donovan put Boyle in some strange situations not least the shooting of a Conservative Party election broadcast that featured the daunting figure of then PM Margaret Thatcher.
“Terence was watching her on video outside, I was in the room with her and after about take 13 or 14, he walked in. She turned to him and said ‘I think we got it that time, Terence,’. He said ‘nah, you f***ed it up, love’, and she just said ‘oh well, we’d better do it again then.’ I must say she was a joy to work with.”
Such a breadth of experience would seem ideal for the challenges of working in features, but apart from some additional photography he did on Enemy At The Gates – which ran to more than nearly half an hour of footage included in the finished film, to Boyle’s surprise – the timing has
not been right. The success of About A Girl could change all of this.
“I’d worked on commercials that Brian Percival had directed for many years, and he came to me and said he had this short film that his lady had written. He said, ‘you won’t be inter- ested, it’s hand held, set down a canal and it has to look quite grotty’. I read the script, loved it and said, ‘yes please!’. And I shot it for him on the F-400 stock.
“I worked a lot with Brian on try- ing to set different looks or, at least, a different look that gradually slides the whole way through the film from a warm tone to something that’s very cold-toned with very low saturation. We did it using a digital intermediate approach but quite subtly so as not to prepare the audience for what eventually happens.
“It seems to have been quite effec- tive,” he adds, with some understatement.
“I think most people are in far too much of a hurry. I’m quite happy to learn to do the job properly. I learn something new every job I do. I learnt an awful lot about HD cams when I did a high definition shoot recently.
“I feel that I can shoot any size of feature now. One of my heroes is Freddie Young. He won his first Oscar for Lawrence of Arabia at the age of 60, so I’ve got a few years yet.” ■ ANWAR BRETT
About A Girl was originated on Fujicolor Motion Picture Negative
GEOFF BOYLE
“I think most people are in far too much of a hurry, but in truth I’m quite happy to learn to do the job properly.”
Photos top: Ashley Thewlis in the BAFTA Award winning short, About A Girl; above: Geoff Boyle at Mount Rushmore; in the Arctic circle for a Colgate ad; and at the Pyramids for National Geographic
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