Behind the Scenes at Downton Abbey (5 page)

That focus translates into everything from making sure that the costume is coherent with the time of day (not as straightforward as it sounds, since Mr Carson the butler, for instance, would have changed into his eveningwear before Lord Grantham), to what items the servants should be carrying in the background.

The hierarchy, meanwhile, informs everything. ‘I got a bit carried away the other day,’ Sophie McShera revealed. ‘We had the extras in, and I’m really bolshie to the kitchen maids – I tell them it’s because I’m the sous chef. But I was being a bit bossy with the housemaids, too, and realised they are above me! I checked with Alastair and he said, “The kitchen is your domain, but you can’t be too cheeky to them.”’

The audience may not consciously be aware of these little accuracies, but added together they help transport us to a different world. ‘The viewers feel they are in the space, as they’re legitimately seeing the way a house like that would work,’ says Bruce.

When filming concludes, the post-production process begins – and if directing an episode has something in common with steering an ocean liner, the director returns to the editing suite with a much smaller crew. ‘Just me and Al Morrow [the series editor],’ laughs David Evans. ‘The director’s life is amazing. One day you’re at Highclere with 70 people asking you questions and Lady Carnarvon flitting round, the next it’s just two blokes with a computer, having a mid-morning banana!’

Their task, over roughly a fortnight, is to shape what has been filmed into a coherent whole. The producers will already have been looking at the ‘rushes’ (what has been filmed) every day and spotting anything that may need to be changed or re-shot – which is rare.

Nonetheless, whole scenes will be cut. The scripts are deliberately written long, so that the action has to be squeezed into the running time, creating pace and energy. ‘I like it that way, because then you are genuinely editing something,’ says Neame. ‘The script is a template, it is not the Bible. So when you go into editing, you’re essentially doing another draft of the script. We’re asking: “Does the story work without that scene?” or “Can we just have those four lines from the scene and make it much shorter?” It’s a fun part of the process. You’re going back to the story and you’re retelling it, but this time you’re doing it with pictures and performances, rather than with the words on the page.’

It is a team effort, which can produce as many as ten different iterations of the version, or ‘cut’, from the director and editor, as the producers give their feedback. Whole scenes will be taken out, put back in and switched in order, until Neame, Fellowes and Trubridge are satisfied and it is sent to ITV. Once all the executives involved have signed off the cut, it is ‘locked’. Since the edit process has been carried out on a flexible, digitised version of the film, the finished cut has to be reproduced using the original HD footage to produce the final, or ‘online’, product.

The grading can then take place, whereby the show’s colourist Aidan Farrell, at finishing facility The Farm, digitally enhances the images that have been shot. On a practical level he can make day look like night, or a summer shoot appear to have taken place in deep midwinter, if needed – but his role is really about adding further contrast, hue and texture to the footage, to strengthen the mood and atmosphere. Farrell sees this process as the driving factor behind
Downton
’s famously rich feel. ‘Going back to series one, at that time period dramas were quite brown, desaturated and old-looking,’ he notes. ‘We wanted a completely new look for the genre, so we went for really bold colours.’ Orchestrating the whole sequence of events is Jess Rundle, the post-production supervisor, who plans the viewings with the executives and makes sure the show comes in on budget and on time.

Finalising the visual aspect of the show is far from the end of this process, however. Just as what is seen on screen is dramatically refined, so is the audio aspect. Each episode is scored with around 20 to 25 minutes of music, made up of some 20 to 30 ‘cues’ – the individual pieces of music that underpin the drama. As a rule, comic scenes tend to use less music, while the more harrowing, emotional storylines demand more. Either way, the score acts as a key storytelling tool, says John Lunn, the Emmy Award-winning composer who has written for the show since its start. ‘I’m not trying to conjure up an era in the incidental music, although I’m not ignoring it either,’ he explains. ‘It’s not the function of the music. It is to tell the story and also, in a long-running series where people occasionally miss an episode, the music works as a shorthand, emotionally.’

As his music hinges so much on timings, he only works from the finished edit. He has a team helping with the recordings and orchestrating the music, but he writes it alone, improvising on a keyboard as he watches the action. The final versions are performed by a 35-piece orchestra conducted by Lunn at one of London’s iconic music studios: Abbey Road, Angel or Air.

Many themes and motifs recur in various forms. ‘The house has a theme, and there are quite a few themes for relationships, rather than specific people,’ notes Lunn. ‘Anna and Bates get about four or five, as their storyline keeps changing. Then there’s another four or five for Matthew and Mary.’ Even death does not signal an end to those. In Matthew’s absence, Lunn plans to use the music to ‘almost suggest his presence’ in his grieving family’s thoughts.

The most recognisable melody of all of course is the title music, which grew out of the very first episode of the show. It had no title sequence but simply plunged into the action with Bates in a train on his way to his new job at the Abbey. ‘You need to write music for an episode or two to get a flavour of what the show is,’ Lunn explains. ‘I was trying to find the feel of the train, so I came up with the fast, pulsating rhythm, and then you come to the shot of Bates looking out of the window. He has a past that we don’t know about and he’s very alone, so I came up with this solo piano, single note, which would go over the rhythm of the train.’

As we near the house, about to be thrown into chaos by the loss of the Abbey’s heir in the sinking of the
Titanic
, the melody retains its urgency. ‘The telegram is going to change everyone’s life and so there’s a lot of emotion,’ says Lunn. ‘These are all clues for the audience. Then finally you get the first sight of the house and that’s when the chords open out and it becomes elegiac and almost regal. I came to the next piece of music, when the house is waking up, and the same kind of music worked well. The rhythm of the train became the rhythm of the servants bustling about; the house works like a well-oiled machine, like the train.’

In contrast to the background music, the show’s source music – meaning that which the characters can hear – is very much of the time. Sometimes Julian Fellowes will suggest songs and sometimes it is Lunn, who for series four has been immersing himself in the music of jazz saxophonist Sidney Bechet and Irving Berlin, the great American songwriter.

On occasion, supplying the source music can mean the show’s composer ends up in front of the camera. ‘I have got involved in a lot of the music that is filmed on set,’ he says. ‘At the weddings, that was me playing the organ. Then when Shirley MacLaine sang in the third series, I played the piano for her. I had to wear a wig because my hair is too short, but I’m afraid I hit the cutting-room floor! You can hear me singing on it, though.’

The finished soundtrack, including the music, is woven together by the show’s re-recording mixer, Nigel Heath at Hackenbacker, a post-production facility specialising in audio. His starting material is the show’s dialogue track, which will have been recorded on set by the sound team, led by sound recordist Alistair Crocker. Their main task is to obtain crisp, clear dialogue. Each performer wears a radio microphone to capture the actor’s speech, and in addition the ‘boom’ track is recorded via a mic held just out of shot. As well as making sure no background sounds leak through – traffic or planes – Crocker also has to silence the set as best he can. For busy kitchen scenes, for instance, small pieces of foam are fixed to crockery, chairs and even the actors’ feet to reduce the clamour. ‘It’s easy to add in the sound of a plate being put on the table, but it’s difficult to get rid of it if it’s over somebody’s dialogue,’ he explains.

What is recorded on set is passed to Heath, who with his team carry out the automated dialogue recording (ADR), the process by which some lines are re-recorded – perhaps to obtain a crisper sound, cancelling out some background noise, or to reflect a tweak to the script. For this, actors come to Hackenbacker’s main studio in London to perform.