Pre-Production

Marshalling 200 years of the National Gallery’s history into a coherent narrative that works for video was daunting. The initial vision was for several short videos on clear themes - the collection, World War II, and architecture, for example. However, we soon sensed that a traditional timeline divided into 3 long videos would work best, with the collection positioned front and centre as the star attraction across the two centuries.

The process involved reading widely. Special mentions go to: Jonathan Conlin, ’The Nation's Mantelpiece: A History of the National Gallery’; former Director Sir Charles Suarez-Smith, ‘The National Gallery: A Short History’; Michael Wilson, ‘If The Paintings Could Talk’; Alan Crookham, ‘The National Gallery: An Illustrated History’; and Suzanne Bosman, ‘The National Gallery in Wartime’. As well as the incredible guidance and support of the Digital project leads at the National Gallery - Beks Leary (Senior Content Manager) and Baha Tansukalp (Content Producer) - we also had the opportunity to pick the brains of in-house experts Alan Crookham, Suzanne Bosman, and chief archivist Nicholas Smith.

From the sources and advice we garnered, we selected key historical moments to focus on. Some stood out immediately: the founding; the move to Trafalgar Square; the removal of works from the Gallery to a quarry during World War II; the theft of Goya’s painting of the Duke of Wellington; the controversy around the design and construction of the Sainsbury Wing. Others were teased out to provide a convincing narrative arc. And because the end product was a video series, not an essay or a book, we needed to weigh up potential stories in the context of the illustrations and photographic and film archives available to support the story-telling. Although the Gallery has a great deal of its own footage from the 1990s on, the more historical material was sourced from the archives of the BBC, ITN, and British Pathe.

In the end, 16 key works from the collection were included in the script across the three films. The logic for inclusion was typically related to a bequest (eg Unknown Artist, ‘Swabian, Portrait of a Woman of the Hofer Family’ from Prince Albert in 1863), an acquisition (eg Jan van Eyck’s ‘The Arnolfini Portrait’, acquired in 1842) or an extraordinary fund-raising effort (eg Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist in 1962). Or it could be due to its size (eg Anthony van Dyck's 'Equestrian Portrait of Charles I', acquired in 1885), or because it was vandalised (Diego Velázquez's 'The Toilet of Venus’ - known as the 'The Rokeby Venus' - acquired in 1906).

The rest of the script would be delivered mostly by two key contributors, Alan Crookham and Susanna Avery-Quash, who possess an encyclopaedic knowledge of the history of the gallery, supported by a cast of specialists who could address particular subjects, such as the representation of female artists in the collection, the gallery’s links to the trans-Atlantic slave-trade, and recent gifts.

Script-writing for an institution like the National Gallery requires some decisions around tone. We sensed that it should feel mannerly and un-opinionated, but honest and with that quintessential British trait of self-deprecation mixed with humour. After all, stories like the stolen Goya, slipped out through the Gent’s toilet window by a former bus driver who was disgruntled with the cost of the BBC television licence, but returned undamaged, have a very British ring to them.

Once we had developed the script across 200 years of the gallery’s history, we looked to see how we could split the narrative into three films, each with their own distinct arc. We landed on

I. Foundations 1824-1900
II. Towards Modernity 1900-1945
III. The People’s Gallery 1945-2024


The scripts were locked down, so they could be delivered - with a few exceptions - by autocue, and we also explored sequences that would take us outside of the gallery spaces and the interview set-up in NextShoot’s studio in Camden.

Filming

There is a familiar routine with filming at the National Gallery that starts with a 06.30 call time at the ‘Goods In’ entrance on Orange Street. Of course, any filming in the gallery spaces needs to be completed before the public arrives at 10.00, so efficiency - and some luck with fire alarm tests, floor polishers, and picture hangers - is required.

The priority for filming in the gallery spaces was on the key works. For each of these a curator appeared on camera in front of the painting (and one ‘tapestry’) in question to share their insights on the artwork. The focus of their ‘piece-to-camera’ was less on artistic techniques and more about the historical context or interesting tidbits of information that our art-educated audience might not already know. For example, with Sebastiano del Piombo's 'Raising of Lazarus' curator Maria Alambritis discussed the work in the context of the rivalry between Michelangelo and Raphael. Van Dyke’s equestrian portrait of Charles I was included not on account of its acquisition in 1885, but because it features prominently in stills and film of the gallery’s artworks being transported to a disused quarry in Wales in World War II. Black and white footage shows the enormous triangular wooden crate, given the moniker ‘the elephant case’, that protected the painting just squeezing under a bridge near Blaenau Ffestiniog. Of course, it was important to capture b-roll of the curator and of the painting also for each key work discussed.

We were fortunate to catch Paul Cézanne’s ‘Bathers’ (‘Les Grandes Baigneuses’) in the conservation department with curator Chris Riopelle, and we made an effort to include ‘pieces to camera’ in other interesting environments also. These included sequences in the gallery’s library with archivist Nichols Smith and PHD researcher Sean Cham, exploring the Anrep mosaics in the vestibule of the main hall with curatorial fellow Annabel Bai Jackson, and with Art Fund Chairman Chris Smith at their offices in King’s Cross. It felt important to include some original documentation, which included the reward posters related to the theft of the Duke of Wellington's portrait and the sealed envelope containing the identity of the ‘anonymous donor’, whose contribution of £40,000 saved Hans Holbein’s ‘Christina of Denmark’ for the nation in 1909.

For the interviews in our studio, we benchmarked several looks. We went for a greeny-blue, hand-painted, 12-foot backdrop and a textured greyish-blue, white-fringed rug. The objective was to have two shot sizes in which the contributor appeared to be speaking directly to the camera - a medium close-up, and a wide shot that showed the whole body of the contributor, the rug on the floor and the studio space and equipment beyond the backdrop - and then a side shot. We knew that the contributors would be on screen a lot of the time, and these three shots gave us a variety of sizes and angles to cut between, with a behind-the-scenes feel on the wide.

Despite a limited number of filming days, and the requirement to work around the busy schedules of the curators, experts, and Director, and the demands made on the gallery space, we managed to capture strong footage of everything we set out to film. Years of shooting in the gallery space with many of the same contributors undoubtedly made the process a smooth one.

Post-Production

The benefit of working with a script that’s delivered via autocue is that once recorded these ‘pieces-to-camera’ slot together fairly quickly in post-production to give you the backbone of the videos.

By the time our senior editor, Alessandro, received the interview and b-roll material, we had already put the stills and archive footage we planned to use in place. Working with archive is both painful and joyful. It is hard to manage the numerous sources of material on a project of this nature (just take a look at the credits), and the associated costs. Thank goodness for the experience and patience of our intrepid archive researcher, Val Evans. The joy comes from the way the shape, colour and format of the material helps to set it in time. The fashions, the cars, even the way people speak become signifiers of years gone by that are familiar in ways, but also utterly different from the present day. What feels timeless, impervious to the passing of recent decades, is the artwork - whether it’s the film footage of Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington, returned three years after it was stolen, or the still of Leonardo’s cartoon on display during fundraising in the gallery in 1962, surrounded by members of the public including men in trilbys and even a bowler hat.

Music choices - so subjective - can derail an edit. We mainly chose not to go with period music, but rather instrumental music with the right sentiment. This approach matched the tone of the content and allowed those moments where the newsreel archive, with the voiceover delivery and musical score typical of the period, to stand out.

The finishing touches to the videos were the simple branding and complex credits provided by the gallery and a colour grade to even out the mixture of materials that go into a project of this nature. The objective, as ever, is to make the story and the visuals that support it feel seamless, logical, even inevitable. By the end of the process, anyone who has worked closely on the project feels incapable of judging where it has landed, and so you trust that the thoughtfulness, skill and effort of all those involved have ensured that it’s in the right spot for our audience.