Ascent Execute Post For BBC's Garrow's Law

Ascent 142 has completed the full post production on BBC One's four-part legal drama Garrow's Law inspired by the life of pioneering barrister William Garrow and starring Andrew Buchan.
Garrow's Law is set in the Old Bailey of Georgian London and is based on real legal cases from the late 18th century. Each one-hour episode investigates a court case, taken from the Old Bailey archives and follows the investigations of William Garrow (Buchan) and his associate Southouse (Alun Armstrong).
The drama was shot on Sony's F35 high definition camera by director of photography Lukas Streble. Director Peter Lydon, along with producer Dominic Barlow, who remained at Ascent 142's premises during the twelve-week process, worked closely with Ascent to ensure the right look and sound was achieved.
Paul Staples, Colourist at Ascent 142, graded Garrow's Law using the Digital Vision Nucoda. He worked with Streble in a pre-production grading session, where the DoP provided a framework of stills to give the colourist an idea of his vision. He said: "From our first meeting Lukas had a very strong sense of what he was trying to achieve with Garrow's Law. A high proportion of the production is set in the courtroom and so it was important to make it look as visually interesting as possible. This was helped by Lukas' choice to shoot on the new Sony F35, which provided a perfect foundation for us to work with as its huge latitude extended above expectation."
The production was graded at a ratio of 4:4:4 using the Nucoda's toolset. One technique employed was to push colour tones into the areas of shadow and to take the warmer hues into the highlights, whilst maintaining some moments of discretion to influence the emotion of the trial.
Meanwhile, in the sound department, Mixer Alan Sallabank found the dialogue soundtrack, recorded by Brian Miliken, to be invaluable when it came to constructing the audio. He said: "This is a dialogue heavy drama and Brian and his team did an incredible job achieving such high quality on the sound production - it gave us a very clean palette to work with, enabling us to build up the sound texture around the dialogue in such a way that we could quite easily dictate the setting."
The production was shot in a studio in Scotland, but the brief for the audio team was to make it sound as though it were in a raucous 18th century courtroom with a busy city just beyond its windows.
Sallabank added: "We certainly had to do a fair but of work on the exterior sound' filtering out traffic noise and any contemporary sounds. But we also had to ensure there were snippets of outside noise coming through to the interior. You also have to bear in mind that in those days, noise would carry much further because there was less noise pollution." An interesting point for the audio team, was that the location of Newgate Prison, where prisoners were held before trial, was chosen purposefully to reinforce the gravity of their situation - being able to hear the outside world without being able to participate. For the exterior soundtrack Louise Sinclair, Sound FX Editor, worked closely with the director to capture the right sounds, adding effects such as the tolling of Big Ben, to geographically place the drama.
Garrow's Law is due to be broadcast on BBC1 on November 1.
(KMcA/BMcC)