There is a certain migration happening from the South East to the South West of England and it’s not just to do with social and economic reasons. For the TV business going West can be the difference between making something to budget and schedule and not. Skins, Channel 4’s infamous youth drama, shoot all around the city, taking advantage of the polar opposites of Clifton’s Georgian affluence and the housing estates of Easton. Unlike London shooting in the city of Bristol doesn’t garner the attention of the Police or even much attention from the public, (especially now as Skins is proudly a Bristolian production). Crews and gear are cheaper and of course there is no congestion charge.
Skins is a youth drama that to a degree is written by people of the same age as those who act in it. The decision to form the Skins Writers Workshop may have been the inspired move that set the series apart from the Hollyoaks type of angst ridden youth drama but it is also the in-built assembly line of young actors, many hugely inexperienced, that possibly gives the programme that edge. It is dealing with this combustible mix of raw writing and raw acting that demands a firm and experienced hand on the lens.
The programme is now shooting it’s third series and has been bolstered by a number of ringing endorsements from the industry, BAFTA and RTS nominations including ones for photography and lighting and further to the plaudits a possible US version. The third series is the first to start completely shooting in high definition but not for any particular ‘future proofing’ reason, the cameras are just better and reasonable to hire. Perhaps finally we have reached the point where the decision to shoot HD doesn’t mean poring over the business plan to find the budget or using a foreign sale to red light the HD equipment list.
The DoP for the third and second series and some of the first is Nick Dance, another migratory bird as he has set up house and home somewhere between London and Bristol. Nick’s huge experience in documentaries, film, TV drama and commercials suited Skins as they wanted a film look. Nick has shot Sorted which was his first go at an HD drama: “The producer had seen Bleak House and was impressed with the look and wanted to try HD for Sorted. I was approached and decided to take on the challenge as I felt HD was making fast inroads to film and TV production.” After considerable testing with the camera set-up, filtration and lighting they started the shoot. “For Skins I had enough experience shooting HD to know it’s limitation, but was able to combine my film knowledge in composition and lighting to give the producers what they wanted.”
Nick was originally approached to shoot the last two episodes of Skins Series One, one of which was the episode that attracted all the craft nominations. Nick has made his name with documentaries early in his career (see sidebar ‘Nick’s Shooting History’) and brings that experience to bear on Skins: “In all television drama certainly in the UK, as ever, the budgets are reduced and the producers are looking for people who are a bit more flexible with the way they approach it. The old school DoPs could have commanded as much time as they needed to light scenes but now everyone wants the same quality, there are no excuses. So there is the pressure of getting the quality on budget and on time. Chris Clough, Skins’ producer, does appreciate that I’m from a documentary background and suddenly having that experience is an important part of drama because as a ‘doco’ cameraman you’d turn up to somewhere in the middle of Africa maybe and make something of it. Today there is less time for recces and quite often we turn up at some locations without having seen it before. I like thinking on my feet, working on the day and get inspired from that.
“That way of working certainly works for something like Skins which is spontaneous, lively, light but it has it’s dark moments too. But we do try and keep an ‘up’ feel to it. But even on features you don’t get the time you used to get. But of course now cameras are much better, video cameras will handle the contrast. When I started you had 100 ASA film, you had an Ikegami which was probably less than that equivalent to 80. Now we have 500 ASA film stocks, we have video cameras with at least 5, 6, 700 ASA equivalent.
“Bad Girls was my first proper drama which was shot in the late Nineties. That was shot on DigiBeta and the crew was bigger with tighter time constraints than I was used to. The drama was shot on a big set based at Three Mills in London. I was seen as documentary film maker who possibly couldn’t handle the lighting and the pressure. But my philosophy has always been keep it simple, just because you’ve got a truck full of lights on a drama doesn’t mean you have to use them all. You really just don’t have time to use a lot of lights and actually I just think it becomes more complicated, you get more shadows. I used to do a lot of ‘available light’ stuff on documentaries, you appreciate window sources and where the light is coming from. From a lot of drama that still is a good starting point, let see how the scene is playing with natural light sources. If you’re doing something ‘fantasy’ you can do something else, do something high lit.“ Nick calls Skins ‘heightened naturalism’ which means using that documentary technique but maybe putting in some more warmth and some more light. That doesn’t have to mean hand held as there isn’t much of that in the series.
page 2
