Well everyone in the film & TV industry suddenly has more time on their hands.
I’m currently locked in London at my shared house in Whitechapel. I was due to start prep on new series ‘Grace‘ for ITV but the week before that we got the instruction to self isolate and frankly I’d seen it coming having traveled through Hong Kong in January and watching the exponential growth of the cases reported in China. These days we all move around so much and the full spread was sadly inevitable with the current leadership of the US and UK. The response in places like my home of New Zealand is a testament to informed, empathetic and communicative leadership these major countries would be smart to follow.
So what does it mean to be a DOP right now? The world is consuming our content like never before but it’s so clear that in this situation my career and job is inessential, despite that demand.
So I’m tooling around my house, fixing things, adjusting computer files, cleaning. Just basically living as well and safely as possible until such time as we get to go back out on set.
I can’t see this happening in any sort of hurry as a film crew is an ideal incubator for a virus. I tend to catch everything going around on set as I work long hours, without breaks, get very tired and we’re all in each other’s space constantly. I dare say the ”honey wagons “ (lavatories/restrooms) will be far cleaner once we go back to work as people in general have had to learn how to wash their damn hands. It’s about time.
My latest project to keep myself busy other than gardening has been to go back through all the drives I can find and add images into a grand archive from the show Merlin that I filmed between 2008-2012 in Wales and France.
you can find these pages here at The Merlin Archive
One thing that has been great in doing this project has been to look back at 5 years of my progression as a DOP, and how actually using a DSLR as a tool on set was so brilliant to help my lighting, but also created this amazing vast record of the production with some seriously good promo shots in there once I got better at grabbing these frames.
It definitely makes me think it would be worth having a raw DSLR again to do this on set. I’m always there, whereas the on set photographer isn’t always paid for. I also have full access to the images which is great for me to create more promotional images of my own.
