The Pendle Gallows
Every day some of us will unknowingly come close to places where, in the past, there were exceutions by hanging or burning at the stake.
Many places have a Gallows Hill, even though it may not be called that
now. Time perhaps sanitises the horror of these events. Simply saying that
someone was hanged does not necessarily illicit the horror of actually
seeing it, of being there all those centuries ago.
It's not our job to bring you that horror so
we had to
decide how best to depict the hanging of the
Pendle Witches.
As usual, breaking it down to basic elements is the
best way to begin. So we needed a gallows and
Lancaster Castle, some ground surface, and for
artistic license, a thunderstorm! |
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We decided on a misty yellow colour palette, and relied on the
depth offered by the mist effects to reveal the shape of the
castle.
The shot would begin on the castle, pull-back through a noose
and come to rest showing the full gallows framing the castle.
All the while with flickering lightning and mist drifting across the
middle-ground.
More than three were hanged in this notorious tale, and we
attempted gallows with more nooses, and several gallows, but
none of them worked as well as this. So as I said earlier, it
comes to the decision on implying the event, the atmosphere,
rather than absolute historical accuracy, which in many cases
is difficult or impossible to establish anyway. |
As we have said on previous shots for earlier episodes, cgi is very much
about illusion. It's all about knowing what the shot is going to look like
beforehand, establishing a line of sight, and building only what you will
see.
In the screengrab above, the church (in the top left), the castle and the
gallows are all on 'floating' islands. They make no sense viewed like this,
but when seen from that one camera angle all the elements come together
and create the illusion we were after.
You can see on the right how the disparate church and castle work well
enough when viewed from that angle, and with the addition of mist the
illusion is complete. |
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Having completed the 3D elements and rendered them, it remains to
paint and blend together all the layers that create the stormy sky.
The sky is made from two part-photographed and part-painted images
while the lightning bolt is a painting. In the 3D scene we set two lights
to illuminate the scene like lightning, adjusting their intensity over a few
frames to simulate flickering lightning, then in the final stages we timed
the lightning bolt to match this flickering.
Click Here to see the Final Gallows Shot! |
