CRAFT HIGH-END TELEVISION
PRODUCTION
MARTIN CHILDS
To give context to the new technology, let me start by saying I began working in TV in the 1970s. Back then it was permissible to mix footage shot on video at BBC TV Centre with footage shot on film on location. If you want a brief example of how this works or, to modern eyes, doesn’t, take a look at Fawlty Towers and Basil beating up his car with a tree branch. You will see its deserved reputation as an enduring masterpiece of comedy isn’t down to its seamless transition from exterior to interior. That mix (you might say clash) of media had become part of accepted TV grammar. Even well into the eighties, it’s what was taken for granted. You might use the reverse side of a tea-tray, for example, hand- lettered, as a hotel sign, a paper plate as a ceiling rose. An army blanket’s neutral colour and varied texture would become a chameleon-like cover-up for any anachronism and would be instantly invisible. I’ve used short lengths of 2 x 1 in a cake shop window as baclava – sprinkled with sawdust, with glue for honey so that the naked eye would believe it (even though the camera would be unlikely
to pick it up.) I wasn’t “getting away with it” – it was in excess of what was needed. When a sparkling ruby fell out from an actor’s walking stick and down a Highland hillside, replacing it with a half- chewed Rowntrees fruit gum was done for the actor’s benefit rather than the camera’s. If the leading actor’s fountain pen was lost, the art director’s biro would do and only the actor would notice.
Four decades later you can read the maker’s mark etched on a fountain pen nib and judge the quality of the ink it’s been dipped in. Further advances in technology can only make this more emphatic. Forty years ago I’d take my glasses off to determine whether a BBC camera or 16mm film would read a detail. On The Crown I magnify and we test. My aim isn’t hyper-reality but a kind of filmic reality that a period movie would have aspired to had the tools been available.
What has this done to my own creative decision-making? I judge by the naked eye and get ever closer to what the camera will
Production designer CREDITS The Crown seasons 1-4, The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Mr Holmes, Parade’s End, The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas, Calendar Girls, Shakespeare in Love
see. The Crown’s premieres have in the past taken place at the Odeon, Leicester Square, where that fountain pen can be forty feet long, the ink reflect an actor’s face. Yet part of the audience might watch on a phone, so my work must still be graphic. Collaboration with the director and the DP has always been key, but never more than now and in the future.
The benefits? In The Crown there are around four hundred sets per season. That’s forty an episode, a new set every minute or so, each different from the next and the one before. Advances in technology have given me licence
to use more subtly nuanced colours and textures to express character and mood. As well as to simply show the audience they’re somewhere else. Background detail can either gain more clarity or, by thrown focus, become abstract blocks of light and dark: my work has to be ready for both. Windows and the way they are dressed have never been more important, nor what’s seen beyond them. Who knew there are so many shades of white? Details you were never before able to see have become an ever more significant part of the telling of a story. Put simply, the art department must give the camera, and so the audience, more to see.
Winter 2020
televisual.com 67
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