Waking The Dead

One of the BBC's most popular dramas, Waking The Dead regularly draws audiences of over eight million. It's twice been nominated for an International Emmy and in 2004 won the award for Best Drama Series.

Now in its 8th series due for release in Spring 2009 we caught up with DoP Mike Spragg, Gaffer Joe Burke and Best Boy Rob Osborne on set at the BBC Visual Effects building at Kendal Avenue.

“The storylines are darker in this new series” explains the DoP.
“And I wanted to reflect this in the way we approach the lighting on set. I’ve always been an admirer of the highly stylised look you get in 1940s and 50s Hollywood films. I wanted to bring that kind of ambience to this new series.”

The show has always had a distinct ‘sodium look’ to the lighting almost as if it were part of the Waking the Dead brand identity. Mike has deliberately cultivated this and on this visit we saw a perfect example of the ‘sodium look’ in a shady Ukrainian bar.

ELP supplied an assortment of Arri fresnels, Kinoflow kits, Chimeras, Dedo lighting kits and hand held lights as part of an extensive lighting package to service the series. They also provided a 60KW Generator, dimmers and power disto. As Best Boy Rob Osborne explains “the ability to control power and dimming using ELP’s gear was central to achieving the look we wanted”

He continues “In the storyline of the next series the investigation team move offices down into a basement. Naturally this lends itself to dimmer lighting so we fixed a load of practical lighting (desk lamps, side lamps etc) and connected them all to the ELP dimmers so that the intensity of every light source on set could be controlled by the crew. This extended to all other appliances like computer monitors and TVs. It was a massive task but gave us total light intensity control” .

Location power was also something which the crew remarked on as particularly impressive about ELP’s service. “ELP’s Land Rover generator is worth its weight in gold!” exclaimed Rob. “Not just for rural areas where you need power in hard to reach places. But also in urban environments where you need to fit into a normal car parking space and there is no room for a big truck.”