Shooting World of Colours in HD

The World of Colours is a three-part HD documentary series from Gedeon Programmes (France) and Electric Pictures (Australia) that has been shot by French DOP Vincent Fooy using the Sony HDW-750P.

The directors — Olivier Lassu and Hugh Piper — wanted to explore how we experience and use colour and with the crew, they travelled worldwide visiting many countries including France, Australia, England, Canada, Italy, Switzerland, India, Tanzania, Japan, Guatemala, Peru and Lebanon. The series has been made with a budget of two and a half million US dollars and is to be broadcast by ARTE, SBS Australia, S4C, RTBF, TFO, and Tele Quebec.

It took Fabrice Esteve, formerly head of International Co-productions at Gedeon (who now works at Dogfight Productions) four years to gather together the co-finance for World of Colours, from 12 public broadcasters in addition to Electric Pictures. “Colours is the type of big budget worldwide documentary film that is very hard to put together nowadays, as only public broadcasters are really interested,” he says. “But one of the joys of this work is to be confronted with a subject that you previously have no idea about and then have to discover – it is like putting the pieces of a puzzle together.”

Gedeon is a large, French independent film and television company known for making factual programming including documentaries about science, archaeology and travel.

Most of its programmes are shot in HD and it was one of the first to use HD in France, using everything from HVR-Z1E camcorders upwards.

Seeing colour close-up

“In Colours we wanted HD to achieve a cinematographic look,” says Esteve. “We knew we would be working on the colours in post production and that HD would be an advantage for that. Our idea was to see detail: so we filmed colours very closely, using a macro to see pigments. For instance we filmed the threads in fabric used in Christian Lacroix’s fashion. We also filmed flowers, the colour of skin and Egyptian blue, one of the first man-made colours. The DOP Vincent Fooy used many travelling shots where the camera caresses the colours and objects.” The first episode of the series looks at how humans see colour, the second at how we make colour and the third on the meaning of colours.

As the series is aimed mainly at television, it was filmed in the 25p progressive mode. “We were looking for a cinematographic aspect with the images filling every frame,” he adds. The natural environment — the sea, sky and land — featured, as well as less attractive man-made interiors. ”We filmed some shots about the making of colours in science labs where we wanted to create a striking atmosphere; so we pushed the lights and colours to be very bright, leaving one colour highlighted,” explains Esteve.

As there were two DOPs on the series, one advantage of using the HDW-750P camcorder was that, as both needed to use the same settings for consistency, the settings could be saved on a memory card and passed from one DOP to another.

Widespread HD production

“The market for HD programmes has clearly grown,” says Esteve. “Documentary programming was the first genre in France to switch to HD. Those who produce documentaries tend to be independents that need their programmes to have a long shelf life, which HD provides. Drama took longer to move from 35mm but it is on its way. Several French broadcasters are now broadcasting in HD, or are about to, such as Canal Plus and ARTE. One problem that independents have is that although broadcasters now specify high technical requirements for HD, they don’t always pay extra for it and CGI and colour grading costs money. But we all know the future is HD and that we need to be using it”

Other Gedeon programmes shot in HD include the Travel Notebook series. For Esteve this is a perfect example of how HDTV can be used for series that do not require the full HD treatment. The idea of the show is that a crew follows a painter on his travels: he sets up his easel and paints a scene and people gather round him to see it progress. “The HDTV results are great on this show. It sets up a dynamic exchange and the viewer gets to see the creation of the picture,” explains Esteve. At the end of the programme, post production effects allow the scene to move from the painting in its various stages to the real scene and back again.

Now at Dogfight, Esteve is working on another big international HD co-production about nanotechnology, with support from ARTE, CBC Canada and NHK. “It is still exciting to make films,” he says. “I remember what Wim Wenders said when he collected his Palme D’Or — ‘Perhaps if we make better films we can make a better world’. Very ambitious perhaps and a bit of an illusion, but you need illusions. One thing I love is that I can make programmes that I want to see and my children want to see.”