The Day of the Jackal
Scene Deconstruction with Dale Elena McCready BSC NZCS
Born in New Zealand but now based in the UK, cinematographer Dale Elena McCready has a long history of working on high profile episodic productions including well known series such as Tin Star, The Witcher, and Belgravia. Always looking for new challenges she was very pleased to be given the role of director of photography for three episodes of The Day of the Jackal.
Produced for the UK’s Sky Atlantic and the USA’s Peacock channels The Day of the Jackal is a contemporary re-imagining of Frederick Forsyth’s novel and 1973 film of the same name. The original film is a classic in its own right. This new series stars Eddie Redmayne as the Jackal, an incredibly skilled sniper and hired assassin. The tense story follows both the Jackal and MI6 special agent Bianca, played by Lashana Lynch, as she tries to catch him before he murders another high-profile target. The series has already received two Golden Globe Award nominations, including Best Television Drama Series.
The other directors of photography for the series were Christopher Ross BSC, Laurie Rose BSC and Ashely Rowe BSC.
Key Insights
- Filming scenes with complex stunts can be particularly challenging as there may only be one opportunity to get the shots you need. Extra cameras allow a single piece of action to be shot from many angles both for safety and to provide the editors with more cutting options.
- When shooting very dark scenes there is a risk associated with judging exposure. If you have exposed too dark your footage may become noisy if made brighter in post-production. Footage that is a touch too bright, however, can easily be made darker.
- Day of The Jackal relied upon four cinematographers for its 10 episode first season with Dale inheriting many of the initial creative choices, such as preferred lenses and Sony’s 8K VENICE 2 camera. Building upon this work is balancing act between maintaining the show’s distinctive tone and making your own creative choices with the options provided by the script
VENICE 2 is very useful camera, particularly in terms of dynamic range, I mean you’ve got a great high resolution image to start off with but also it’s got dual ISO which allows you to push the exposure much harder.
Dale Elena McCready BSC NZCS
The Hit Scene
The MI6 team are sent to investigate a possible sighting of the Jackal, but at the same time one of the Jackal’s benefactors has sent a team of gunmen to intercept the MI6 agents.
A conference centre in Tallinn, Estonia was used to represent the Estonian British Embassy. In order to make the interior of this conference centre look more like an embassy, the rooms were dressed with furniture including office desks, computers and large monitors.
The ceilings had large skylights with daylight entering the space from above. To make the colour palette inside the space more interesting, Dale included warm tungsten balanced practical lights as part of the set dressing, adding warm colour contrast to the cool daylight from above.
The exterior part of the scene includes a complex stunt sequence involving gunfire and a speeding vehicle that eventually crashes over a small wall. One of the big challenges that Dale faced when shooting this was the way the sun moved across the sky as the busy shooting day progressed causing any shadows to change. However, even though there are differences in the shadow angles in the finished scene, her careful choice of camera angles along with sufficient light bouncing off the lightly coloured building walls, means that viewers are unlikely to notice these differences.
For the main stunt where the car crashes and rolls over a low wall, Dale knew she would only get one opportunity to shoot this, so she chose to shoot this with four cameras to provide four different angles of the dramatic crash. The use of multiple cameras protects against a technical failure and also provides the editors with more cutting choices.
Dale explains that small explosive charges called squibs were placed on the walls or vehicles to simulate the effects of bullet hits. Some would create sparks to simulate a bullet hitting metal, others would be packed with powder or small bits of debris to simulate a hit on concrete or the ground. These were all remotely controlled over wireless links with sequences designed to mimic singles shots or machine gun fire.
The Hiding Spot Scene
In this scene the Jackal attends a concert in a large music hall before hiding himself away in a crawl space above the auditorium. Dale says this scene required a lot of elaborate logistical planning. There was a real audience of 400 people at the piano concerto. As a part of the story, there are television crews filming the event for a live worldwide broadcast, plus of course Dale’s cinematography crew and equipment. The TV cameras are also feeding large LED screen inside the auditorium that are an important part of the scene. Dale and her crew went in several days ahead of the shoot to set up the lighting and then established lighting cues that could be memorised and recalled as needed, these cues were able to change all of the lights including the actual venue lights.
As the Jackal leaves the main auditorium to go to his hiding place, he goes up a flight of stairs before entering the equipment space above the auditorium. This equipment space is in fact a set with removable walls. The removable walls allowing the camera to track and follow the Jackal as he opens a hatch in the floor and enters a dark crawl space where he will hide.
“These sequences are quite tough really because you are ostensively in a really dark space where no one is meant to see him, but we want to see him, we want to know what he’s thinking,” Dale explains. “So, you’re creating a kind of false narrative of how dark it really is.”
Dale kept the light levels very low. There is a moment where the Jackal is in the crawl space and he looks at his phone, as he flips his phone over the screen illuminates his face in a subtle but dramatic way, an effect that Dale says she really loved. At the same time, she used hard lights above the grills in the top of the crawl space to create patterns of light that added contrast.
“The VENICE 2 camera, it’s a very useful camera, particularly in terms of dynamic range,” Dale says. “I mean you’ve got a great high resolution image to start off with but also it’s got dual ISO which allows you to push the exposure much harder.”
When trying to shoot night scenes it can be both expensive and time consuming to try to light large areas. But the high sensitivity and low noise of the VENICE 2 can make it possible to shoot urban night scenes without needed big lighting setups.
When discussing how darkly should you expose a scene like this, Dale comments that she would rather make that final brightness decisions in a nice postproduction suite where she can have a conversation with the producers. If it is a little bit too bright it can always be made darker. She feels it’s quite risky to light at a very low level only to then find that it’s considered too dark, in which case it might become noisy if you then try to lift the levels in post-production.
Hostage Scene
The Jackal has been held hostage by a farmer overnight and is now trying to escape. A large part of the scene takes place outside the farm buildings. For Dale this scene was an interesting one as there was a lot to shoot. They were using available light and the weather was atrocious going from dry to snowing to wet. For continuity they had to heat the roof of the farm building to get rid of some of the snow. The overcast sky produced a very flat light and Dale decided to just go with this rather than adding lots of light to shape things.
In the end she felt that the cold, grey, flat look ended up being just perfect for the scene as it made the place look more dangerous.
The use of a camera crane turned out to be a huge benefit. It allowed the camera to be swung into many different positions for different angles without needing to lay track on the wet and muddy ground.
There are many moments in the series where camera movement plays an important part in a scene or shot. Slow, distinct moves synonymous with the thriller movie genre are frequently used. Dale liked to hold a shot to allow a character to move or a moment to develop, but then as things become more intense or chaotic introduce more camera movement, perhaps even shaking the camera for added drama.
It’s really important to just go with the weather that’s in front of you rather than trying to change it, turning a sunny day into a cloudy day or force something that just doesn’t want to go there.
Dale Elena McCready BSC NZCS
The Disguise Scene
The MI6 agents are in a lift, in pursuit of the Jackal. Meanwhile the Jackal is in an apartment removing prosthetics and makeup that he’s used to help hide his identity.
Dale finds filming in lifts very challenging; they are very small spaces and often have mirrors or other reflective surfaces. For this shot she blacked out the mirrored rear wall of the lift and placed the camera against this wall.
The lift had glass doors, so by shooting towards the doors, you can see the floors of the building going past as the lift goes up. LED tube lights were added to the ceiling of the lift to add extra light, then the camera was locked off and the scene just allowed to play out as the lift went up.
The location provided by the art department for the Jackal’s apartment had a number of warm almost golden wall mounted lights. This scene was deliberately kept very dark. A lot of the series features a near duo tone palette, frequently mixing cool daylight with warm tones.
To maintain this look, and create some pleasing colour contrast for this scene, Dale placed daylight balanced lights in the ceiling of the apartment’s kitchen. This created a pool of bluer light to one side of the otherwise dark, but warmly lit bedroom. Much of the scene was shot so that the Jackal was backlit, the walls in the background washed with the warm light from the wall lamps and the cool blue light from the kitchen illuminating just a small part of one side of the Jackal. The look is both mysterious and dramatic.
Continuing this into the bathroom where the Jackal removes his disguise Dale gently lit the Jackal’s face with warm light as he looks into a mirror while at the same time there is cool, bluer light coming from behind to simulate light that might be coming from outside.
