HD shines a light on Edward Lear

A new three-part series follows Edward Lear’s life and travels across the Balkans in the mid 19th century. Lear is best known for his nonsense verses and the children’s poem, The Owl and the Pussycat but he was also an accomplished artist.

Producer Mark Lavender says the series was shot in HDCAM with an HDW-750P camcorder hired from VMI in the UK.

“Basically, within this three-part series we’re tracing a journey that Edward Lear made in 1848,” Lavender says. “It’s fair to say that Lear is best known for his limericks and poems, which will be introduced but these aren’t our main focus.

“In fact, Edward Lear spent most of his life painting and drawing – though he didn’t settle anywhere for very long. We do know, though, that he stayed Corfu for some time, and so we have been tracking his journey across the Balkans; from Greece, all the way into Albania. The journey itself was not easy, and at the time in which Lear lived life would also have been made more difficult for him because it was commonly thought that the making of images – and so, his painting – was a demonic act.

“The diaries that Lear kept were published in the 1850s, and we’ve got copies of these, and a number of his paintings which we have used to locate exactly where he went.

“We begin our journey in Northern Greece and Macedonia. Part two sees us travel through Albania and then all the way back into Greece. I think we have managed to convey the ways in which certain things have changed in these places over time. Often we found that we would arrive in a country with a lot of preconceptions that we didn’t always realise that we had, and in actual fact the places that we went were something of a sleeping beauty – a lot of places that have never been filmed before.

Taking the plunge

“The filming itself relied heavily on the HDW-750P HDCAM camcorder – I was a bit apprehensive about shooting on HD, and our budget wasn’t really set up for it, but in the end we decided to take the plunge with the idea that doing so would give the series more of a shelf life. The HDW-750P was so robust, and the results were just spectacular. I’m used to using a J22 Canon lens, but this camera was great – it coped particularly well in areas with a lot of contrast range. The light in these places is generally really bright during the day, so we would sometimes wait until 7 or 8pm to start filming – usually from a high vantage point as the sun was just going down.

“The chip was very sensitive, and we really were very impressed with that. Also when it came to filming in some of the low-lighted Byzantine churches we were able to just take the shutter out of the camera, rather than having to hire lighting, and it seemed to cope really well with that too.

“To be honest when we started filming I was fairly negative about the whole thing, but doing this production on this camera really has converted me; it’s so much like using film, and the range is all there – it was just right.

“Obviously the quality of the image was very important for us, and the results have far exceeded our expectations – it’s been a great adventure.

“Regarding the conditions in which we were filming, it was very hot, but we wouldn’t usually go out in the middle of the day. Rain wasn’t a problem either – the camera was never really exposed to wet conditions, but even when it was pouring down the image still managed to look rich. I’m not a cameraman myself, but I did have a go at shooting for a couple of days and I have to admit, I expected it to be a lot more complicated than it was.”

19 December 2007