PROFILE
THE COLOUR MASTER I
FACT FILE
Education Studied art and photography 1986 Assistant head of camera department, Sullivan Bluth Studios, Dublin 1989 Windmill Lane 1991 Molinare 1998 The Farm 2001 Emmy (The Human Body) 2001 RTS Television Award (Australia: Beyond The Fatal Shore) 2004 RTS Judge’s Award (Men Of Iron) 2009 RTS Craft and Design Award (Wallander) 2012 Bafta Special Award
CREDITS
The Vampire’s Life (1993, BBC2) Rumer Godden: An Indian Affair (1995, BBC2) The Planets (1999, BBC2) 100 Per Cent White (2000, Channel 4) Teachers (2001, C4) Blackpool (2004, BBC1) Primeval (2007, ITV1) The Devil’s Whore (2008, C4) This Is England ’86 (2010, C4) Downton Abbey (2010, ITV1) The Shadow Line (2011, BBC2)
t’s hard to keep up with Aidan Far- rell. The Farm’s star colourist talks quickly, leaping into a new sentence before he’s fi nished the last. At one point, he interrupts himself to say “this will make sense in a second”. And despite more digressions, he’s right. To be fair, plotting a course through a career that has spanned concerts, drama, documentaries, comedy, feature fi lms and more than 2,000 music videos and com- mercials is not an easy task. Farrell grew up in Dublin playing with a 16mm Bolex and an Éclair camera, shooting on scraps of stock acquired by his brother-in-law, an RTÉ cameraman. His interest in fi lm and photography – he lists Martin Parr, Bill Brandt, Mario Testino and David LaChapelle as heroes – led to him becoming “a DP’s man rather than a grader’s grader”. It also led to his fi rst job, in the camera department of Sullivan Bluth Studios in Dublin. Under Don Bluth, Farrell worked
on An American Tail, Rock-A-Doodle, The Land Before Time and All Dogs Go To Heaven. “Don taught me attention to detail and persistence of vision – you don’t move on unless it’s perfect,” says Farrell. His other passion was music and he describes growing up in Dublin as being “a bit like The Commitments”. “Everyone played in a band, so when I wasn’t drumming or playing guitar, I was mixing the sound for a band or taking photo- graphs of them.” Farrell went
on to join Dub- lin post-produc-
22 | Broadcast TECH | May/June 2012
Aidan Farrell brought a passion for photography into the technical world of grading. George Bevir fi nds out how his unconventional career – and experiments with Vaseline – have led to a Bafta Special Award
This Is England ’86 and (below) The Shadow Line: two dramas with very different looks
tion facility Windmill Lane as a col- ourist, despite knowing little about the job and what it would entail. “Maybe I should have been a light- ing director or DP. But it was at Windmill that I realised I could do all the things I wanted to do photo- graphically, but unlike those out on location, I could keep warm as well,” he jokes.
Making the grade At Windmill Lane – and then at Molinare in London – Farrell com- bined his passions for photography and music by grading music pro- mos. “Promo commissioning editors always wanted something fresh, so there was pressure to deliver a new look, and that meant I got to try out more and more outra- geous things.” Farrell manipu-
lated the Zeiss lens of the telecine with Tiffen Pro-Mist and Soft/FX fi l- ters. “Tradition- ally, graders were very good
technically and they knew the capa- bilities of the telecine, but it was a technical role; graders sat in a room and took instructions from the DP and the director,” says Farrell. Instead, he treated the telecine
as a camera and a second opportu- nity to manipulate the image. He started collecting different pieces of glass to put in front of the lens – a “purely organic” process, he says – which created effects that would not otherwise have been possible. And he didn’t stop at glass. “The things I’ve done with Vaseline I’d defi nitely get arrested for in Ireland,” he quips. Farrell joined Molinare in 1991 in time for the birth of Britpop. He points to Oasis’ Cigarettes And Alcohol, Blur’s Chemical World and Suede’s Trash as promos that helped him get recognition. “I worked on dramas during the day and promos at night, but it didn’t feel like work because I loved it so much. The people I met were right up my street and they really pushed me. If you came in [to my grading suite], you had to put your seat belt on.”
www.broadcastnow.co.uk/techfacils
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52