Broadcast TECH
old fart and say it’s better than HD’
Farrell’s experiments included
hacking at fi lm with a razorblade as it passed through the telecine’s gate, dousing fi lm with bleach and using a foil wrapper to shimmer light into the lens. “My room would be packed with people – artists, directors, DPs and hangers on – and full of curry, alcohol, cigarettes and god knows what. I’d be screaming, ‘I need more tinfoil,’ or, ‘give me more Vaseline’ – it was a great collaborative effort and it wasn’t how anyone else worked.” The days of working on music
promos are, by and large, gone. And with the shift from fi lm to digital, the Pandora Pogle grading system has been replaced by a Nucoda, tubs of Vaseline and salvaged pieces of glass have made way for Sap- phire and Tinder plug-ins, and the CRT has been dumped for an LCD display. Does Farrell miss working
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with fi lm? “I consider myself very pro-fi lm, 16mm and celluloid, but I won’t be an old fart and say that fi lm is better than HD – I have embraced both.” He enthuses about the image
quality of the Red and Alexa cam- eras, but says achieving depth with HD images is hard work. Farrell works in layers, using a lot of differ- ential focus and separation of the foreground and background. “Most TV drama originates on the Red and Alexa cameras. I’d say their one downfall is they can look a bit simi- lar, so my job now is to make these formats look different each time, which we managed with series like Downton Abbey and The Shadow Line – they looked very different. And if ever there was an argument for HD, programmes like The Devil’s Whore and Wallander are it.”
AIDAN FARRELL ON…
Winning a Bafta Special Award “Ridley Scott won one, but so did the Chuckle Brothers.”
Don Bluth “He gave me my dog-with-a-bone mentality.”
Nicky Sargent and Vikki Dunn, with whom he co-founded The Farm “They gave me the freedom to work across genres, and to experiment.”
Reference monitors “The Dolby PRM-4200 [right] is amazing. We have
May/June 2012 | Broadcast TECH | 23
Sony OLEDs too, but using them is like grading on a matchbox. Viewers have 50-inch TVs so it makes sense to grade on some- thing of a similar size.”
His grading “I strive to change my style but the biggest compliment is when someone says they saw two min- utes of a programme and knew I’d graded it.”
‘I’m very pro-fi lm but I won’t be an
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