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T he role of a cinematographer, primarily with non-professional actors. Juliet setting seems, at first, to be “Although we were shooting in
quite close to Ackroyd’s last film with Loach, Ae Fond Kiss. Given the themat- ic similarities, a distinctly different look to the film was essential.
“Of course,” Ackroyd agrees, “but then that goes without saying on any job. I think you keep your own kind of signature, though every time you go on to a new film you adopt a different approach. Dominic wanted a different approach from Out Of Control, which was done in more of a documentary style.
“We kept a little bit of that feeling here but we didn’t make it quite as rugged as that. In fact we chose a super 2.35:1 format. We kept all the equipment very light, used fast expo- sures, and shot these wide-open vis- tas. The town we filmed in is set in a valley, so at times it was almost like shooting a western.”
Ackroyd and his team were faced in particular with the challenge of a lot of rain-swept night shoots during a busy five-week shoot.
casting light upon a dramatic situation, has been taken to the logical extreme by Barry Ackroyd BSC. Lauded for his long association with Ken Loach, Ackroyd has just finished
shooting Northern Souls, a gritty love story that marked the debut of a camera-mounted light that he himself has helped develop.
“We’re calling it the Eyelite,” he explains, “because the shape of it is an oval instead of a circle. It proved to be really useful. There was one scene with our main female character, shot at night. We stood her in a field on the edge of this housing estate.
“I put the Eyelite around the lens and we did a hand-held walk around her with the lights of the city going around in the background. The Eyelite gave it this beautiful soft, no- shadow kind of feel. And it was attached to the camera, so it goes where the camera goes.”
Efficiency of movement was cru- cial on Northern Souls, which was cast
A certain economy of crew, and a lack of the paraphernalia associated with a movie set helped make for a more nat- uralistic feel to it all. And, Ackroyd believes, it offers the actors the best opportunity to bring the scene to life.
“I’ve worked like this before with Ken,” Ackroyd continues, “and in a way there is a benefit of getting it done very quickly because you’ve got a lot of non-actors who put an enormous amount of energy into the scene. They don’t pace themselves so well, so it’s sometimes better to get it all finished before they burn themselves out.”
Written and directed by Dominic Savage, Northern Souls promises to be quite different from his last collabora- tion with Barry Ackroyd, the award- winning TV drama, Out Of Control.
Set in an unnamed city in the English north-west, it tells of the romance that unexpectedly blossoms between a young Pakistani girl and a white boy brought up in a racist household. This improbable Romeo &
wide-screen we made the decision to use spherical lenses not anamorphic,” Ackroyd adds, “so we had Ultra Primes at 1.8-1.9 exposure. My focus puller, Carl Hudson, is someone I work with a lot and I was confident he could cope with that.
“We would shoot wide open. We’d just light the foreground and the street lights were always at head height on the other side of the valley. When we pulled that out of focus on the long lens you could fill the frame. I wasn’t aware of that until we started shoot- ing; these are the things that you have to pick up on and run with.”
Having worked with Savage before, a degree of shorthand already existed between director and DP. That was useful when it came to establish- ing the look, leaving Savage free to guide his inexperienced cast through the intricacies of their roles.
“Interestingly the discussion in style tends to be a phrase, like ‘it should all be very fluid’, though
28 • Exposure • Fuji Motion Picture And Professional Video