Page 13 - Fujifilm Exposure_16 Bob The Builder_ok

THE DP VIEW
ROBIN VIDGEON BSC
Apart from two beautiful days on the beach at Bexhill-on-Sea right at the start, we had such terrible weather for our first few weeks shooting out- side at Chobham in Surrey that it posed a real problem when we came to filming interiors later at Twickenham Studios.
Although it was technically still summer then, a lot of the stuff was done in appalling light. We never had sun streaming in through a window because it seemed to be constant rain and dark cloud.
Clearly, you couldn’t repeat that on the sets. If I had lit it to match what we’d actually shot on exteriors, you wouldn’t have seen a set. So I had to cheat a little bit and make it a bit brighter on the inside than they were when we were on location.
Some of the sets are quite austere with a lot of dark panelling and dark colours and you couldn’t expect to flat light those. Therefore I used quite a heavy soft light coming in to pick up all the colours of, say, the leathers and the dark materials on the seating.
I used the new Fuji 400 for everything. Sometimes I rated it at 400, sometimes 600 and occasional- ly, on night exteriors, at 800. Even with its rating doubled, it still held. There were times when we had to do four seasons in a day, morning, noon and night in the same room. The stock worked incredibly well in all those situations. ■
WAR
tv production
WAR
She said she wasn’t interested in them as an actress but wanted to learn all about producing. How about doing it together, I asked?”
“Joanna has helped enormously, especially with the scripts and the casting. Although they are very real and written with enormous wit, the books don’t have a linear narrative. Douglas has done a great job adapting them, keeping their essence and find- ing a through line.”
Joining them on location in places like Chobham and Luton Hoo as well as Twickenham Studios was another Class Act collaborator – in every sense of the expression – veteran cinematog- rapher Robin Vidgeon BSC.
“ I think this may be the biggest thing the BBC has done on 16mm out- side digital stuff like Walking With Dinosaurs,” he purred, with the infec- tious air of a enthusiast who claims that even after 40-odd years in the business he’s still ‘learning something new every single day.
“For example, I’ve always thought that when you come into a studio, the minute you take out a wall it takes away from an actor the sense he’s in a real room. I don’t think we’ve once taken a wall out, and that’s been a real test for me. I’ve had to light as if we were on location in a real building.
“Mind you, it’s been a joy to work on designer John Ashby’s sets. Although I’ve seen all the plans, I’ve purposely not ever gone on them
before they were dressed. Then I’ve just said, ‘Wow!’”.
Suggest to director Krishnamma that perhaps he somehow lends an ‘outsider’s’ view of this quintessential- ly English source material rightly brings a good-natured rebuke.
The son of an Indian father and English mother, he was actually brought up in an “extremely middle class environment” on the Isle Of Wight: “In fact, I was probably about the only dark-skinned person outside the family I saw while growing up.
“In many ways, we were very much like the Cazalet family. I can recognise my own brothers and sisters in the story’s characters, my mother very much so, and also what goes on beneath the surface of an apparently idyllic world. There are a lot of dark tensions. I also especially identify with living in the same house for a long period of time.”
Don’t expect any major recreated wartime set pieces. Like Lambert, Krishnamma was keen to emphasise how the main focus of the drama is on the family “with the war merely as background.
“It’s very much about a collective rite of passage and I argued that it was far more important to imagine any horrors of the war rather than actually show them. It was crucial to try and keep it intimate because this is a very character-driven story,” he stressed. ■ QUENTIN FALK
The Cazalet Chronicle, to be aired later this year on BBC1, was originated on Fujicolor Motion Picture Negative