Lighting The Mighty Boosh – a positively surreal experience for ELP
As those involved with lighting Film and TV drama productions will tell you, there is a new player on the scene providing studio and location lighting services.
ELP, best known for their pioneering work in broadcast and live events now have a base at Pinewood Studios from where they service Film and TV dramas.
ELP have a reputation for innovation, creativity and providing ‘unconventional’ production solutions. Therefore, they felt very much at home this summer providing lighting for the second series of surreal cult comedy show The Mighty Boosh.
Due to air 26th July on BBC Three, this off the wall show is the brain child of Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt. Together they write and star in a collection of magical adventures based on their Perrier Award winning comedy act.
Series one graduated from BBC Three to BBC2 and it’s hoped that this second series, produced by Baby Cow Productions will do the same.
Shot at Three Mills Studios in East London over a hectic seven week production period, this series saw a different studio set each week as intrepid heroes Vince Noir (Noel Fielding) and Howard Moon (Julian Barratt) embarked on a string of adventures. Traveling to far flung places such as The Desert of Nightmares, Black Lake and The Planet Xooberon…..
As Director of Photography John Sorapure explains, all this weirdness brought certain production challenges.
“The adventures and fantasy sequences were so diverse that each show required a very different look and feel. One week we could be shooting a desert scene and then an underwater scene…. we could be shopping in a supermarket set within a forest or parading around a Mexican village. Because these rapid set changes were carried out while we were filming on another stage, I had to make sure that the lighting rig we installed had maximum flexibility. We didn’t really have the luxury of pre-lighting and once the sets were in, access to the lighting grid was fairly limited.”
The main rig comprised an assortment of 10K and 5K Fresnel and soft lights with Iris 4’s to light the 120’ painted backing. They also used ground row to light this from the floor. The floor kit comprised of a selection of 5Ks, 2Ks,1Ks, 650s, Kino Flo, Zap Lights, Arri 5K soft lights and Dedos. Mac 2000 moving lights were bought in to provide special effects such as projecting foliage patterns through gobos.
A large 20X20 light box with 9 x 5k soft lights was built to help illuminate both day and night scenes. This provided greater flexibility and more control than just using Space Lights.
“I was impressed that ELP were able to source equipment for us at short notice. One day we broke our Chimera Pancake light and within two hours we had a new one delivered. Nothing was too much trouble,” comments the DOP.
A 20 x 16 ft back projection screen was used to project computer generated images for travel sequences, of which there were many. The story line is a set of adventures after all. But as you might expect by now, this was ‘travelling’ with a twist. Everything from a camper van to a magic carpet was used as a mode of transport.
The crew, headed up by Gaffer Brandon Evans were resourceful in their endeavours to create desired visual effects for the DOP. Flags and other objects were waved in front of key lights for movement and motion effects, water trays with broken mirrors were used to create ripple effects and the lighting desk was able to sync with the back projection to emulate lighting changes on foreground action.
John Sorapure deliberately tried to bring more mood and lighting contrast to this new series. The surreal storylines often lent themselves to shooting in a tongue in cheek horror or film noir style. In fact over 70% of the scenes were set at night.
“This was as far away from your regular sit com as you could possibly imagine. My brief from Director Paul King was to create areas of light and shade and not be afraid of high contrast. He has a great grasp of movies and often encouraged me to push scenes to look more cinematic, which I enjoyed doing immensely!” comments the DOP. “To make things more complicated, everything we shot against the back projection screen had to be very low level lighting so that it did not diffuse the image on the screen. My choice of lighting equipment and how I deployed it was largely dictated by this requirement to create areas of light and shade as quickly and economically as possible”
He concludes…“ELP furnished us with everything we needed and helped us keep to a tight budget. Andy Mountain my desk operator did a great job in providing many different looks from a single lighting rig. Because of the flexible way we set things up and the variety of kit from ELP, we were able to accommodate the many various set changes without major re rigging and then quickly switch from day to night scenes by using the desk when needed. In the end I think I used every single lamp. Nothing that we ordered went to waste.”