Lighting Winter's End...

Roger Pearce checks the
light falling onto Amie Higgs
To help tell the story of Winter's End, the production turned to feature film camera operator Roger Pearce. Roger was kind enough to help the film lending his time, knowledge and expertise. The camera team consisted of Roger, his son Simon as Camera Operator and 1st assistant/focus puller Adele Lovett.

From early meetings and recces, Roger and Paul Dudbridge agreed on what the look of the film should be. With a mixture of a period 1940's setting, the festive season and the fantasy overtones, the makers had some play with what they could get away with. Reality wasn't something they were really going for. A warm tone was settled on with CTO in 1/4 or 1/2 strengths placed over the lamps.

After considering the notion of using a smoke machine for atmosphere, Roger in the end decided to use a FOG 1 filter in front of the camera, after the FOG 2 proved to be too much. Gaffer Colin Holloway explains, "With smoke you pump it into a room and fill it up, to the point where you think it's too much. You wait about 10 minutes for it to settle and you're left with a great haze to shoot through. The downside being matching the smoke shot to shot, and waiting the 10 minutes to achieve the effect." Using a fog filter produced the desired look and made it constant through out the film adding to the 1940's feel.

The camera of choice was the Digi-beta 970 shooting in 25P to further add to the 1940's film look. For the majority of the film Roger shot aiming for a stop of F2/2.8 for consistent exposure, opening up fully for the exteriors of the hall at F1.7. Roger always tried to work within a stop and a half which helps when you get to the grade. In addition, after trying various speeds the Digi was eventually rated at 500ASA. When it came to time to shoot the exteriors, Gaffer Colin Holloway rigged 4 2k blondes, one for each of the hall's windows to show the warmth coming from the inside of the Christmas party. With the special effect snow on the surrounding areas, a HMI 2.5kw lamp was used to light the hall and a smaller 1.2 HMI facing the opposite direction giving actor David Hopewell a rim light as he approaches. The trick was to not make it look lit, in reality it would be pitch black out there but you had to be able to see something. The crew shot at dusk too, to give the sky a little bit of colour to cut the hall roof out from the surroundings.

Inside, the hall and dancers were mainly lit with 3x 4,4 Kino flo soft lights. To give some backlight to characters, smaller 300w arri's or 150w dedo lights were placed in the ceiling and on the roof beams.
Steadicam in action
The opening steadicam shot took a bit of planning, co-ordinating the camera move and extras, some of which were young actors of 10 years of age. The shot begins on a bouble hanging on the Christmas tree, then following some young children as they run from the tree, in front of the band, to our main character Julia. We stay with her as she takes us through the crowd to the end of the hall. The idea was, instead of having a huge wide establishing shot of the interior, we would reveal the information gradually and as the dancers on the dance floor make Julia avoid hitting them, is in turn is able to show Julia uncomfortable in her surroundings from the get go as well as telling the audience where we are. Steadicam operator Marc Covington performed the move and was captured in 3 takes.

Roger works by a rough rule of thumb that it takes between 20 and 30 minutes to set up each shot. From this, and from working with the shot list, shots were able to be allocated at the start of the day as to what could be achieved in the 12 hours of shooting time. The production averaged about 23-25 shots per day. This way you are able to make your day without having to carry things over.

With thanks to Roger and Colin for their time and help with production.

BACK