Jenna Coleman (Doctor Who, The Cry, The Serpent) stars as rookie detective Ember Manning in this new thriller from writer Cat Jones and producers, Firebird Pictures.
A fire tears through a holiday home in a scenic Lancashire lake town. Detective Ember Manning must work out how it connects to a podcast journalist investigating a missing persons cold case and an illicit ‘love’ triangle between a man in his twenties and two underage girls. As Ember gets closer to the truth, it threatens to destroy her life, forcing her to re-evaluate everything she thought she knew about her past, present and the town she’s always called home.
This detective drama was graded by halo’s Senior Colourist, Duncan Russell. He explains “One of the main themes in the show is duality, both of people and the natural environment. People and places can be seductive but dangerous. So the brief was to invoke a creeping sense of menace in a familiar, almost bucolic location. We had to strike a balance between postcard beauty and an uncanny feeling of dread. This was wonderfully realised by the show’s DOP Ben Wheeler, who used a lot of mixed colour temperature and smoke to get us into this brooding world.
From a technical point of view, we didn’t use the full potential of HDR brightness unless it was a neon practical or fire. The natural highlights of clouds and domestic lighting was kept distinctly on the gloomy side of things, which maintained the oppressive, almost dank mood. We had some creative fun with a scene in the final episodes that features drug abuse at a party. As the characters begin to feel the effects, we decided to warp some parts of the image, stretching and twisting faces and hands like a hallucination. It’s subtle, but it was a lot of fun to do. We also provided beauty work with our new AI face tracking tools, which were a real timesaver, and augmented some natural flares with digital ones, just to make sure they landed. We have ended up with a show with glossy mainstream appeal, but very much on the cinematic side of that. The Showrunner, Cat Jones described the show as a twisted fairy tale and I think that’s exactly what she got.”
For the sound, halo’s Re-recording Mixer, Simon Hill gives us his insight. “I love working with writers who also serve as showrunners. Cat Jones has such a deep understanding of the story we’re telling and having seen this show develop over the years – from first draft to first mix review – the challenge is bringing that story from paper-script to our speakers. I could feel Cat hearing in paragraphs and suggesting tonal changes that you’d normally do with a line re-write – but now we’re working out ways to do that with sound. It’s not a method every show warrants, but it’s incredibly rewarding to change the tone of a scene just through what the sound is doing.”
Halo provided full UHD HDR post production for The Jetty, a 4 x 60’, produced by Firebird Pictures for BBC One.
Director: Marialy Rivas
Producer: Natasha Romaniuk
Exec Producers: Elizabeth Kilgarriff, Cat Jones, Sarah Wyatt, Marialy Rivas, Jenna Coleman and Jo McClellan Colourist: Duncan Russell
Dubbing Mixer: Simon Hill
Online Editor: Tom Young
Post Producer: Stephen Morrison
Sales Exec: Will Garbutt
The Jetty premieres on 15th July on BBC One and iPlayer.