OUTSTANDING CINEMATOGRAPHY FOR A MINISERIES OR
MOVIE OF THE WEEK

Ian Wilson, BSC
A Christmas Carol

The Hallmark Entertainment production of A Christmas Carol opens with a shot of the London skyline that cranes down, passes through the roof of a house and ends up on a busy London street. However, the entire film was shot inside Ealing Studios. "We relied on digital effects," says British director of photography Ian Wilson, BSC. "We filmed the long shot of the city somewhere else and added an invisible wipe when the camera passed through the house. You don't see the top of the street in any shot, or else we would have had to matte in the sky."

Starring Patrick Stewart as Scrooge, A Christmas Carol marked the first time Wilson had worked with director David Jones, who tapped him after seeing his photography in Derek Jarman's Edward II. Wilson studied photography and graphic design at art school before moving over to film school. "In the 1960s in London, it was easy to get a job if you were young," he recalls. Rather than beginning as an assistant, he started immediately as a cameraman on features.

The first third of the famous Dickens holiday tale has a cold, dark mood and feel that mirrors Scrooge's miserable personality. After the character's spiritual conversion, however, everything becomes bright and joyous. Wilson used 250 daylight stock without any gels during the first part of the film, and added CTS filters to warm things up after Scrooge's rebirth.

"The visual effects were quite interesting," he notes. "Some of the effects, like the arrival of the first ghost, we did in-camera. But we did motion-control for the others. The main ghost was transparent."

One of the toughest obstacles Wilson faced was simply the low-key look he wanted. "Television engineers don't like low-key [images]," he remarks. "They are afraid the shadows will disappear, so I tend to do TV differently than I would a feature; I fill in the shadows more than I would with a film." After a moment's hesitation, he adds, "It's actually more of a problem in the United States. For whatever reason, British TV sets are better."

— J.O.