CRAFT HIGH-END TELEVISION


PRODUCTION


MARTIN HAWKINS


I enjoyed shooting After Life for HDR but, to me, it’s just another level of quality. I’m not a technical cinematographer. I love story. I love focusing on the comedy. My background is sitcoms and people don’t tend to look at style. First of all, comedy has to be funny. When directors start talking about the look of something over the comedy, they’ve got the structure wrong. It’s got to look good but that never overtakes the comedy.


Most directors who do comedy want it to look real. Ricky [Gervais] wants it to look real. He doesn’t like forced things. And once you’ve got away from realism, then the viewer starts getting distracted. And anything that distracts from the comedy is not a good thing.


At the grade for episode one, season one, Ricky was blown away by the HDR image, how real it is. And that was a good marker for him. But it can look too real. And it can look too sharp.


So, you know, as much as we’re progressing with all these nice crisp, sharp pictures, you still end up slightly diffusing it.


I stick with what I know. And I know how to light the scene. And I don’t think it matters whether it’s 4k HDR or HD SDR, I wouldn’t do anything differently. But then that’s why I worked with Vince Narduzzo on the grade.


With comedy, you don’t really get to test. Obviously you have test days in the camera hire room but I don’t think I’ve ever gone out and filmed a test shoot. Prior to the After Life shoot, we did a test grade of some material that I had, just playing with colours and the look and Ricky liked these kind of sepia blues but, in terms of the shoot, we went and shot it straight and did everything in post.


I like to get on with it. The difference been drama and comedy is that in drama it’s all about the shot, the lens, the track. When you’re doing comedy, it’s all about


Cinematographer CREDITS After Life, Derek, Life’s Too Short, Outnumbered Nighty Night, D’Mrs Brown’s Boys Movie


the comedy. And if you need to lay a track in order to make that shot funny, or to tell the story in some way, you just lay it, and it happens in 10 minutes. So you’re driven in a different way.


In terms of monitoring, my attitude is to keep it simple. When you start getting too carried away with the quality of the shot you start distracting from the performance so I tend to keep things very simple. We had a couple of 17 inch monitors that Ricky could go to for a playback. And then we had a couple of eight inch monitors around the set and I


also had little seven inch monitors at the top of my camera with an A and B input and we could talk over that. It was about as simple as you can get as he was performing and directing.


Performers and directors don’t like waiting around for things. So the faster things happen, the better. The more gear you’ve got to move, the longer it takes. The trick is to have a good DIT and they give you the feedback. Then it’s between me and them and if there’s a problem, I’ll deal with it. It gives you the confidence to carry on.


Winter 2020 televisual.com 77


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  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92  |  Page 93  |  Page 94  |  Page 95  |  Page 96  |  Page 97  |  Page 98  |  Page 99  |  Page 100  |  Page 101  |  Page 102  |  Page 103  |  Page 104  |  Page 105  |  Page 106  |  Page 107  |  Page 108  |  Page 109  |  Page 110  |  Page 111  |  Page 112  |  Page 113  |  Page 114  |  Page 115  |  Page 116  |  Page 117  |  Page 118  |  Page 119  |  Page 120  |  Page 121  |  Page 122  |  Page 123  |  Page 124  |  Page 125  |  Page 126  |  Page 127  |  Page 128  |  Page 129  |  Page 130  |  Page 131  |  Page 132  |  Page 133