On Saturday I'm giving a talk-with-clips about my TV career at the Lass O'Gowrie on Charles Street in Manchester, and as the day gets closer I'm growing convinced that no one is going to turn up. If you've an events diary or similar feature and might be interested in giving it a mention, feel free to pass the information on.
I was born in Salford so this is a homecoming for me. I'll be covering ground from my start with Doctor Who through working with Brian Clemens on BUGS in the 90s with side-trips into TV horror and Rosemary & Thyme, right up to the experience of remaking Eleventh Hour in Hollywood for Jerry Bruckheimer (the first version, with Patrick Stewart, was shot in Manchester).
The talk's in an upstairs room of the Lass at 6.30, right after my old friend Bryan Talbot speaking about his Grandville graphic novels. It follows a day of events with Johnny Vegas, who I suspect will have no trouble pulling an audience.
Showing posts with label Carnival. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Carnival. Show all posts
Friday, 22 July 2011
Monday, 19 July 2010
Panning and Scanning
I was channel-hopping last night and came upon a comparative rarity; one of the digital channels, could have been ITV2, was showing a modern movie in 4X3 format, the almost-square 'Academy' ratio that was phased out in the cinema about 40 years ago and in TV at the beginning of this century.
Like a Chav faced with subtitles, I skipped right on by.
I've no problem with the Academy ratio, which was good enough for some of the greatest cinema ever made, but this wasn't that. This was a widescreen film in a cropped 'TV version' at least a decade old. Rather than source an up-to-date transfer, I'm guessing that the broadcaster had used the version supplied to them on tape when they made a deal for the rights. I mean, come on, guys. Cheat if you have to. Run out and buy a DVD.
Format can be problematical. The widescreen of your widescreen TV is not the widescreen of Ben Hur. Like most things in life, it's a compromise. The viewfinder on a modern film camera includes an element with the 'safety zones' of the different viewing formats etched into the glass, so the operator can ensure that whatever the composition, the essential information will fall within the frame and the shot will always make some kind of sense. Hi-Def video assist systems offer the same facility in the monitor display.
In the early days of widescreen cinema, feature film makers saw TV as the enemy and went out of their way to ensure that their images would exceed the capabilities of the smaller screen. Panning and scanning was TV's response to that. It was an alternative to 'letterboxing' the image, which preserved the composition but invariably triggered a stream of phoned complaints to the TV station's duty officer.
Panning and scanning involved continually reframing the film in telecine. This could go way beyond the cranking of a frame to the left or right to squeeze the action in - a small section of a shot could be selected and enlarged to fabricate a closeup from a medium shot, for example.
The end result would, in essence, undo the work of cameraman and director and sometimes the editor as well. Grain, contrast, focus, and framing would be all over the place. I recall a scene which, in the original, was a single long take of two people talking. The telecine operator had reframed each person in a separate, enlarged closeup and then cut back and forth between them as they spoke. Didn't match, didn't work, looked appalling. Used to be quite common.
'97 was the awkward pre-pubescent time for widescreen TV. The first sets were around, but almost nobody (apart from my dad) had one. Broadcasters hedged their bets, shooting new material in 16X9 widescreen but putting it out in a bastardised 14X9 shape that looked bad on both kinds of display.
I can place it so precisely because '97 is the year I made Oktober for ITV. The three-hour miniseries was shot on Super 16, a format that originated (if I recall my American Cinematographer correctly) with the Aaton camera company in Sweden. It used a customised camera gate to utilise more of the 16mm negative area. In the case of Oktober, the broadcast master was scanned directly from the camera negative and electronically converted to a positive image, eliminating the loss of quality you get when making a print.
ITV were hovering over when to 'go wide' so after the grading we made two complete transfers, one in full widescreen and the other in the half-cropped, half-letterboxed 14X9 ratio. I watched the widescreen version going through. Bruce McGowan's photography looked rich and wonderful, the high Alpine locations spectacular.
Guess which version went out.
The Betacam master of the widescreen transfer went into storage at NBC-owned Carnival Films, where I cross my fingers that it's survived their office moves of recent years. I last checked on it when Revelation produced their full-series DVD (for the UK only; the US release is a 96 minute 'feature cut'). I tracked it down, hooked everybody up, but there was some glitch with distributor approval and it was the 14X9 master that went onto the disc.
And so I remain the only person on the planet who's seen the three-hour show in its full 16X9 ratio, on a big plasma screen in a windowless editing suite that misty afternoon in Soho.
But someday... maybe someday.
Though probably not, I'm guessing, anytime soon on ITV2.
Like a Chav faced with subtitles, I skipped right on by.
I've no problem with the Academy ratio, which was good enough for some of the greatest cinema ever made, but this wasn't that. This was a widescreen film in a cropped 'TV version' at least a decade old. Rather than source an up-to-date transfer, I'm guessing that the broadcaster had used the version supplied to them on tape when they made a deal for the rights. I mean, come on, guys. Cheat if you have to. Run out and buy a DVD.
Format can be problematical. The widescreen of your widescreen TV is not the widescreen of Ben Hur. Like most things in life, it's a compromise. The viewfinder on a modern film camera includes an element with the 'safety zones' of the different viewing formats etched into the glass, so the operator can ensure that whatever the composition, the essential information will fall within the frame and the shot will always make some kind of sense. Hi-Def video assist systems offer the same facility in the monitor display.
In the early days of widescreen cinema, feature film makers saw TV as the enemy and went out of their way to ensure that their images would exceed the capabilities of the smaller screen. Panning and scanning was TV's response to that. It was an alternative to 'letterboxing' the image, which preserved the composition but invariably triggered a stream of phoned complaints to the TV station's duty officer.
Panning and scanning involved continually reframing the film in telecine. This could go way beyond the cranking of a frame to the left or right to squeeze the action in - a small section of a shot could be selected and enlarged to fabricate a closeup from a medium shot, for example.
The end result would, in essence, undo the work of cameraman and director and sometimes the editor as well. Grain, contrast, focus, and framing would be all over the place. I recall a scene which, in the original, was a single long take of two people talking. The telecine operator had reframed each person in a separate, enlarged closeup and then cut back and forth between them as they spoke. Didn't match, didn't work, looked appalling. Used to be quite common.
'97 was the awkward pre-pubescent time for widescreen TV. The first sets were around, but almost nobody (apart from my dad) had one. Broadcasters hedged their bets, shooting new material in 16X9 widescreen but putting it out in a bastardised 14X9 shape that looked bad on both kinds of display.
I can place it so precisely because '97 is the year I made Oktober for ITV. The three-hour miniseries was shot on Super 16, a format that originated (if I recall my American Cinematographer correctly) with the Aaton camera company in Sweden. It used a customised camera gate to utilise more of the 16mm negative area. In the case of Oktober, the broadcast master was scanned directly from the camera negative and electronically converted to a positive image, eliminating the loss of quality you get when making a print.
ITV were hovering over when to 'go wide' so after the grading we made two complete transfers, one in full widescreen and the other in the half-cropped, half-letterboxed 14X9 ratio. I watched the widescreen version going through. Bruce McGowan's photography looked rich and wonderful, the high Alpine locations spectacular.
Guess which version went out.
The Betacam master of the widescreen transfer went into storage at NBC-owned Carnival Films, where I cross my fingers that it's survived their office moves of recent years. I last checked on it when Revelation produced their full-series DVD (for the UK only; the US release is a 96 minute 'feature cut'). I tracked it down, hooked everybody up, but there was some glitch with distributor approval and it was the 14X9 master that went onto the disc.
And so I remain the only person on the planet who's seen the three-hour show in its full 16X9 ratio, on a big plasma screen in a windowless editing suite that misty afternoon in Soho.
But someday... maybe someday.
Though probably not, I'm guessing, anytime soon on ITV2.
Wednesday, 17 June 2009
Let's All Recycle
My first toe-in-the-blogosphere was this guest post for Danny Stack's Scriptwriting in the UK. Here it is again: I am nothing if not frugal.
Danny has kindly invited me to contribute a guest post, but has concluded his invitation with that most generous of terms, “anything on any subject that you care to discuss”.
If there was ever a provision more guaranteed to clear a chap’s mind and leave him incapable of choosing a direction, it’s the thought of such a menu of infinite possibilities. Choice isn’t always such a great thing. Sometimes it can just paralyse the will.
There’s a restaurant on Marylebone Lane in London that offers no bill of fare whatsoever; the waitresses merely ask you how you’d like your steak done, and then disappear, later to return with salad, bowls of ribbon fries, and perfectly-sliced chateaubriand. No choice at all, and the place is always crowded out. Which is fine if you’re okay with steak. If you’re a vegetarian, then I suppose at least you get to do most of the talking.
It’s good for meetings because there’s never any of that ordering-related stress you have when you’re trying to make an impression (don’t want to look greedy/naïve/picky/sit here with my chin dripping spaghetti). Towards the end of my work on a long-running show in the ‘90s (BUGS, if coyness irritates you) I was taken to somewhere very like it by the show’s producer.
He had a proposal for me. It was, I have to say, the kind of thing that every writer dreams of hearing. He wanted me to write him a thriller, a feature film. Nothing specified, no restrictions, just the invitation to come up with a subject and a story of my choice. He’d commission it, and we’d take it from there.
Well, I have my small portfolio of ideas and proposals, the kind of thing I’ve always got cooking and am looking for any opportunity to advance. But he didn’t want one of those. He was looking for something that had no form, no previous development... maybe it would make a franchise, maybe it would be a one-off. But once again, it could be anything, anything at all.
You’d think I’d leap on such an opportunity like a Lord Mayor at a finger buffet. I’d have thought so, too.
But it would be another four years before I could go to him and say, “Brian, I think I’ve got something.” Four years! To capitalise on a dream invitation!
It was a nice idea when it finally came, a little three-hander of a thriller – man, woman and child. A massive injustice to drive the plot, and oodles of psychological damage to be overcome. A hint of contemporary issues, just enough to crank up the excitement and not enough to make everything worthy. Romance, intrigue, mystery and scenes of physical peril.
And it came, not from any struggle to respond to the opportunity, but from a five-line story in a newspaper.
He liked it, and we were rolling. Next up – where to set it? Brian’s initial exploration had revealed the usual temerity one gets from UK investors, especially when the project in question is ambitious, expensive UK product. Everybody was interested in a small piece of something that already had enough investment attracted to be viable, but nobody was prepared to go to the casino and bet their house.
This time I wasn’t going to take four years to come up with an answer, because now I had place to start.
I’ve heard writers trying to emphasise the universality of their story by saying “This could be taking place anywhere at any time and happening to anyone”. What this ought to mean is, “its values are timeless, its conflicts familiar to all.” But it usually translates as “Everything’s negotiable if you’ll only give me the money to make something”.
I’d kind of been thinking Sunderland. But I was going to have to research this.
So I said San Francisco.
I wrote a rough first draft, and the next thing I knew, I was on a Virgin Atlantic plane with an appointment at the San Francisco film commission and a list of research issues that I needed to explore. Once there I hooked up with Eric Neldner, fresh from a stint as location manager on Nash Bridges and with a detailed knowledge of the city from every angle. We drove all over, hit some nice restaurants, and blagged our way through the high perimeter security of the government facility on Coastguard Island, just off Almeda.
(Not as impressive as it sounds. They were having an Open Day).
To date the film remains unmade. It’s a neat tale, but it never quite benefited from that combination of chance, preparation and the right combination of the right people’s whims that are needed to make any project take off. Or maybe it just wasn’t as great as we thought it was. But I got paid for the script, and I got a trip to California, and I’m still friends with everyone involved, so I count this as one of my happy stories. Would that all my failures went so well.
But I digress. The reason I launched off into that story was to demonstrate that total freedom’s all very well, but to get creativity started you need to throw some grit into the oyster, give your ideas something to fasten onto and grow around, give yourself something to react to instead of just sitting there wondering what kind of action to take.
I often find myself thinking of a story told about the choreographer George Balanchine. He saw one of his assistants sitting in the auditorium stuck for ideas while the dancers waited around onstage for instructions.
“At least do something,” Balanchine said to him. “Then we’ll have something we can change”.
In my case, the grit in the oyster was the newspaper cutting that sparked my imagination. Four years of nothing and then suddenly I had something that I could start to change. I’ve heard it suggested that the best way to do something original is to steal an idea, develop it, and then throw out the part you stole. That may not be great for your ego, but if you do a decent job of it and end up with something good, who’s going to care how you got there?
We none of us create from nothing. We all take what has affected us and reassemble it into new forms that we hope will affect others in a similar way. Bad artists simply reassemble the art they’ve seen. Reach that little further into your own life and perceptions, and what you add will give the ring of truth that makes work startling and memorable.
So to throw some grit into this particular oyster, to act as the dead donkey around which this particular sand dune might start to form, I suggested to Danny that he could maybe ask me three questions to get me going. Which he kindly did.
Unfortunately, I don’t seem to have left any room to answer them now. Maybe next time, Danny?
Danny has kindly invited me to contribute a guest post, but has concluded his invitation with that most generous of terms, “anything on any subject that you care to discuss”.
If there was ever a provision more guaranteed to clear a chap’s mind and leave him incapable of choosing a direction, it’s the thought of such a menu of infinite possibilities. Choice isn’t always such a great thing. Sometimes it can just paralyse the will.
There’s a restaurant on Marylebone Lane in London that offers no bill of fare whatsoever; the waitresses merely ask you how you’d like your steak done, and then disappear, later to return with salad, bowls of ribbon fries, and perfectly-sliced chateaubriand. No choice at all, and the place is always crowded out. Which is fine if you’re okay with steak. If you’re a vegetarian, then I suppose at least you get to do most of the talking.
It’s good for meetings because there’s never any of that ordering-related stress you have when you’re trying to make an impression (don’t want to look greedy/naïve/picky/sit here with my chin dripping spaghetti). Towards the end of my work on a long-running show in the ‘90s (BUGS, if coyness irritates you) I was taken to somewhere very like it by the show’s producer.
He had a proposal for me. It was, I have to say, the kind of thing that every writer dreams of hearing. He wanted me to write him a thriller, a feature film. Nothing specified, no restrictions, just the invitation to come up with a subject and a story of my choice. He’d commission it, and we’d take it from there.
Well, I have my small portfolio of ideas and proposals, the kind of thing I’ve always got cooking and am looking for any opportunity to advance. But he didn’t want one of those. He was looking for something that had no form, no previous development... maybe it would make a franchise, maybe it would be a one-off. But once again, it could be anything, anything at all.
You’d think I’d leap on such an opportunity like a Lord Mayor at a finger buffet. I’d have thought so, too.
But it would be another four years before I could go to him and say, “Brian, I think I’ve got something.” Four years! To capitalise on a dream invitation!
It was a nice idea when it finally came, a little three-hander of a thriller – man, woman and child. A massive injustice to drive the plot, and oodles of psychological damage to be overcome. A hint of contemporary issues, just enough to crank up the excitement and not enough to make everything worthy. Romance, intrigue, mystery and scenes of physical peril.
And it came, not from any struggle to respond to the opportunity, but from a five-line story in a newspaper.
He liked it, and we were rolling. Next up – where to set it? Brian’s initial exploration had revealed the usual temerity one gets from UK investors, especially when the project in question is ambitious, expensive UK product. Everybody was interested in a small piece of something that already had enough investment attracted to be viable, but nobody was prepared to go to the casino and bet their house.
This time I wasn’t going to take four years to come up with an answer, because now I had place to start.
I’ve heard writers trying to emphasise the universality of their story by saying “This could be taking place anywhere at any time and happening to anyone”. What this ought to mean is, “its values are timeless, its conflicts familiar to all.” But it usually translates as “Everything’s negotiable if you’ll only give me the money to make something”.
I’d kind of been thinking Sunderland. But I was going to have to research this.
So I said San Francisco.
I wrote a rough first draft, and the next thing I knew, I was on a Virgin Atlantic plane with an appointment at the San Francisco film commission and a list of research issues that I needed to explore. Once there I hooked up with Eric Neldner, fresh from a stint as location manager on Nash Bridges and with a detailed knowledge of the city from every angle. We drove all over, hit some nice restaurants, and blagged our way through the high perimeter security of the government facility on Coastguard Island, just off Almeda.
(Not as impressive as it sounds. They were having an Open Day).
To date the film remains unmade. It’s a neat tale, but it never quite benefited from that combination of chance, preparation and the right combination of the right people’s whims that are needed to make any project take off. Or maybe it just wasn’t as great as we thought it was. But I got paid for the script, and I got a trip to California, and I’m still friends with everyone involved, so I count this as one of my happy stories. Would that all my failures went so well.
But I digress. The reason I launched off into that story was to demonstrate that total freedom’s all very well, but to get creativity started you need to throw some grit into the oyster, give your ideas something to fasten onto and grow around, give yourself something to react to instead of just sitting there wondering what kind of action to take.
I often find myself thinking of a story told about the choreographer George Balanchine. He saw one of his assistants sitting in the auditorium stuck for ideas while the dancers waited around onstage for instructions.
“At least do something,” Balanchine said to him. “Then we’ll have something we can change”.
In my case, the grit in the oyster was the newspaper cutting that sparked my imagination. Four years of nothing and then suddenly I had something that I could start to change. I’ve heard it suggested that the best way to do something original is to steal an idea, develop it, and then throw out the part you stole. That may not be great for your ego, but if you do a decent job of it and end up with something good, who’s going to care how you got there?
We none of us create from nothing. We all take what has affected us and reassemble it into new forms that we hope will affect others in a similar way. Bad artists simply reassemble the art they’ve seen. Reach that little further into your own life and perceptions, and what you add will give the ring of truth that makes work startling and memorable.
So to throw some grit into this particular oyster, to act as the dead donkey around which this particular sand dune might start to form, I suggested to Danny that he could maybe ask me three questions to get me going. Which he kindly did.
Unfortunately, I don’t seem to have left any room to answer them now. Maybe next time, Danny?
Tuesday, 1 January 2008
BUGS
I had a note this morning from Dave Young, architect of my website, to let me know that Play.com are offering all four seasons of the mid-90s action thriller series BUGS at £7.99 a pop in their New Year Sale.(I mention the website business not because it's relevant, but because it's cheaper to hand out credit than payment.)
Bugs feels almost like a forgotten series now but for a while, back there, we owned Saturday nights. I can remember reading newspaper coverage of how ITV had been caught off-guard and were scrambling to find something remotely like it.
Which is kind of ironic, given that it was an ITV memo that started the whole thing. And that the entire tone and texture of the show were based directly on the kind of popular drama that had helped to define Independent Television through the 60s and into the 70s.
For me it began with a call from Stuart Doughty. Stuart had been the Presentation Department's Promotions Script Editor at Granada's Manchester studios when I'd worked there in the late '70s, and he was now a producer with Brian Eastman's Carnival Films. Carnival were/are one of the most successful of UK television's indie houses, with a back catalogue that includes Poirot, Jeeves & Wooster, and the original Traffik.
Stuart was aware of my genetics-on-the-rampage miniseries Chimera, and believed I could probably write technobollocks with the best of them. I remember that first meeting at the Carnival offices near the top of Ladbroke Grove; it was high summer and I turned up in shirt, shorts and basketball boots and must have seemed intent on talking myself out of the gig as I told them everything that I thought was wrong with the show concept. Their response was to commission a script, which rather took me unawares.
I didn't create Bugs. Brian and Stuart did, with a significant amount of development input and influence from Brian Clemens. Nor did I write the pilot; that was by Duncan Gould, so the show was pretty much fully-formed when I came to it. The format had been put together in response to a memo sent out by ITV drama to all the indies, calling for submissions to fill a slot it had designated for an action series. (That's the arse-up way we've done TV since 1990, when the Broadcasting Bill ended the Darwinian system of competing regional companies and replaced it with a non-creative commissioning and scheduling body.)
Every indie in town prepared a pitch, and somehow the BBC got sight of Carnival's. They commissioned it on the spot, while ITV were still opening envelopes. A two-series commitment, no messing. It's rare.
It also caught everyone off-guard. I came along at the point where they were having problems extending the format into a multiple-story franchise, something they hadn't expected to be facing for a while. I fear that I was probably a bit precious about it at that stage; I wrote novels and created my own stuff for TV, after all, and probably felt that episode writing on someone else's show was a retrograde step.
But when I started thinking of it as a chance to shed the extra burden of authorship and get involved in making something like the old Republic serials, just pure, kinetic, forward-moving fun, that made a difference. Believing that my Bugs script would be a one-off with no follow-up, I chucked everything into the story that I could think of. I called the result Assassins, Inc and was turning around to clamber back onto my lofty pedestal when the phone rang again.
It was Stuart. I remember his words exactly: "Brian says that we'll take as many of these as you can possibly do."
And my reply: "Well, Stuart, I do have an idea that might make another story. But it would all depend on whether you could get me a submarine."
There was a pause. Then, in words chosen with great care:
"All I can say at this stage is that I can't see any reason why not."
Which led to the Season One story titled Down Among the Dead Men.
That was how it went with me. I tackled every story thinking it would be my last. I didn't warm to every aspect of the format - I suppose my natural urge was to Goth it up a bit to contrast/juxtapose with all the shiny docklands architecture - but I worked within the style and had more fun than any series writer can decently hope for. In our season one closer, Pulse, I introduced Jean Daniel, a smooth French-born villain who'd quit the Foreign Legion because he thought it was full of sissies. Gareth Marks played him with such evil joy that we brought him back in season two and had him underpin our series arc, in which Jean Daniel manipulates the stock market from his cell and buys the prison he's being held in.
My main contribution to season two was the Cyberax thread, a sequence of stories involving an online distributed intelligence and the first computer virus to cross the species barrier.
The BBC were unhappy with the increasingly science fictional direction the show was taking, and said so. Season three was commissioned with a directive for less sf, more relationships. I was given the job of setting that up. Craig McLachlan ('Ed') had been planning to leave the show and I gave him a spectacular demise at the end of the first season three episode, Blaze of Glory. But as season three went into production he agreed to stay, so Ed lived; and the character intended to replace him in the lineup, a young woman named Alex, was reworked to play a supporting role. I always liked Alex, and wished I could have done more with the character; but Craig brought so much bounce and energy to the show that I was glad to see him stay. Some of my best lines were actually his ad libs.
For my last story in season three, Renegades, I asked to be allowed to go back to the Cyberax story and give it closure. BBC or no BBC, Brian backed me on it and the result was one of my favourite episodes.
I wasn't involved in season four. I was off making Oktober by then. In the context of my career, I tend to think of Bugs as a massive sidebar. I didn't invent it, I don't own it, I can hardly hog the credit for it.
But for a while, it Entertained Our Nation.
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