Behind the scenes
Posted: Tue Jan 24, 2012 4:13 pm
Walking home from town just now I stopped to watch the BBC doing some filming for the new series of Upstairs Downstairs, the Eaton Place exteriors for which are filmed in a street just around the corner from our house. In fact, there was no actual filming going on - just a lot of vans and equipment and people sitting around waiting for something to happen - but it was fascinating to have a look all the same. The modern road and pavement surfaces were disguised with gravel, and there were piles of sandbags in front of all the houses in the terrace (the new series is evidently set in wartime).
What's really interesting (to TV trickery geeks like me) is the way they make the street look as though there are houses on both sides, like the real Eaton Place in London. (The street where they film has houses on one side and a small park on the other.) There were quite a few shots in the last series where, for example, you'd see a couple of people walk out of the front door and across the street to a car in the foreground, before it then cut to a reverse angle of them getting into the car and driving off; in fact the camera was pointing in the same direction for both shots and the car was repositioned so that the "reverse shot" could show it parked at the pavement edge with houses behind. A couple of establishing shots appeared to show both sides of the street in frame at the same time, which was done by stitching two shots together with CGI.
I remember years ago as a kid going on holiday with my mum to Lyme Regis in Dorset and being puzzled by the fact that some of the shop fronts in the main street appeared to have fake peeling or weathering painted on the woodwork. We discovered from the owner of our hotel that location filming for The French Lieutenant's Woman had taken place there some weeks previously; it had taken four months to age and dress the street for about three days' filming (resulting in a few minutes' screen time) and they were now half way through another four months of restoring it all to the 20th century.
Anyone else interested in this kind of stuff and with stories to tell?
What's really interesting (to TV trickery geeks like me) is the way they make the street look as though there are houses on both sides, like the real Eaton Place in London. (The street where they film has houses on one side and a small park on the other.) There were quite a few shots in the last series where, for example, you'd see a couple of people walk out of the front door and across the street to a car in the foreground, before it then cut to a reverse angle of them getting into the car and driving off; in fact the camera was pointing in the same direction for both shots and the car was repositioned so that the "reverse shot" could show it parked at the pavement edge with houses behind. A couple of establishing shots appeared to show both sides of the street in frame at the same time, which was done by stitching two shots together with CGI.
I remember years ago as a kid going on holiday with my mum to Lyme Regis in Dorset and being puzzled by the fact that some of the shop fronts in the main street appeared to have fake peeling or weathering painted on the woodwork. We discovered from the owner of our hotel that location filming for The French Lieutenant's Woman had taken place there some weeks previously; it had taken four months to age and dress the street for about three days' filming (resulting in a few minutes' screen time) and they were now half way through another four months of restoring it all to the 20th century.
Anyone else interested in this kind of stuff and with stories to tell?