BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH: It's event television.
To have something that you can sort of fix a target on
and go, "Well, this is... There are only three
"and we know that from these three
"we're going to have something to talk about,
"something to share and something to enjoy."
I do think that's what we do very well.
When you're doing something a while, it gets harder and harder
to be surprised and to surprise people.
So it's quite a tall order, actually, to surprise us.
If we lead people down to thinking that we have softened,
we want that because we're going to hit them
right in the solar plexus in Episode 3.
Sherlock getting shot was a fantastic thing to film.
It was just fun to be a part of, it's one of those ones
that I don't want to see until it actually airs because it will...
It will be majestic, I think, once it's all sewn together.
I hope it is. And you guys can be the judge of that.
B mark. Fifty frames.
We have a fantastic villain by the name of Charles Augustus Magnussen,
which Lars Mikkelsen plays with an amazing Danish cool.
I think he's left most of what we would recognise as feelings
behind years ago. (CHUCKLING)
This is blackmail.
Of course it isn't blackmail.
This is...ownership.
You do not own me.
MXKKELSEN". He doesn't apply to ethics and moral the way we do.
All the things that we can't do,
is just what he does, you know?
Mary, whatever he's got on you,
let me help.
Mary has a dark secret.
Magnussen knows the details of this dark secret and he's gonna hold it over her
and use it. I mean, he's basically a genius
at using information to manipulate people.
AMANDA ABBINGTON: When I was filming Episodes 1 and 2,
I didn't know what her story was going to be. I hadn't been told.
Amanda certainly wasn't imbuing it with "spirit of assassin".
I'm playing it all very innocently, which is... Which kind of helped.
I would have played her differently
had I known her story, her backstory.
Retrospectively, people will see Episode 3 and go,
"Yeah, there was that bit in Episode 1 that she was..."
But trust me, we weren't filming it like that.
Do you know what I mean? We weren't playing it like that.
ABBXNGTON". It's such a gift of a part, you know, it really is.
You think she's this quite innocent, sweet, loyal,
non-threatening girlfriend/wife.
But actually, she becomes this amazing, dangerous assassin.
And it's such a fantasticjourney.
What she is is a new best friend of Sherlock's,
as well as the most extraordinary partner for, um, this
danger-obsessed man that isjohn Watson.
I think that what's scary forjohn is obviously...
"Am I really so doomed to... My friend and my lover now,
"they're essentially psychopaths."
Do you know what I mean? A form of psychopath, you know.
Which isn't a great CV heading.
Look at you two. You should have got married.
-(BELL RINGING) - B mark. Fifty frames.
On Sherlock, as the DOP you want to push the images as far as you can,
make it as exciting, fast-paced, and as stylised as you can.
You're basically working on the best-looking show in TV.
So you want to keep the standard high.
That's my pressure and that's my challenge.
There's lots of bullet hits, there's lots of atmospheric effects.
And today, we're obviously here doing the rig that you see behind me.
Well, we had this fantastic rig, which meant that I could fall backwards,
something I think extrapolated from the brilliance
of McGuigan and Arwel in Series 2 in Episode 1.
Irene Adler, having drugged Sherlock,
takes him on an explanation of the backpacker
and how he died, and gets it.
And she says, "Genius. You got all that from one look?
"Clever really is the new sexy."
And I just try to respond to her and fall back, drugged, into a bed,
which we had on a hydraulic in the middle of a field,
it was just launched up.
I hit it on the pillow, we marked that spot
and there's sort of a plate shot and I put my head
in exactly the same position on the real bed,
on the real pillow in his bedroom.
It was just a very fluid, beautiful, balletic piece of filmmaking
and this has been the same.
HARGREAVES". This is a massive part of the episode, you know.
Sherlock's getting shot, you know. Does he survive, does he not?
And so what we were trying to do there was give him that kind of
tipping motion of a controlled move,
so that when he falls back, we can make the most of it
by giving the appearance that the whole room is tipping as well.
We measured Benedict very, very quickly
'cause he had to run off and shoot a scene.
Very quickly we drew an outline of his body
and then we just made this specific rig for it,
and it's a low-profile rig, which is designed to sort of fill
the contours of his legs and his back so it's comfortable for him.
And then it's on a manual kind of lever, really,
and it's got... One of my colleagues is outside the set
and he's operating it in a controlled move.
We wanted to take the mechanical edge away from that control
and had it as a manual operation,
just 'cause it just meant that we can get that really smooth move
rather than using a load of pistons and bits and pieces.
So, it was a lot more controllable that way.
Sherlockis a television series where the production team
try and achieve as much as they possibly can in camera.
And then look to visual effects to come in afterwards
and just try and enhance
what they have in order to help support the narrative.
It's one of those shows where the aim is to try and make the visual effects
appear completely real and seamless so that you don't really notice
that there's been any CG done on the show while you're watching it.
WOMAN: Action.
Sherlock's style is keeping the cameras moving,
very kind of dynamic shots that kind of immediately, you go,
"Wow, that's a great shot. That's a great composition!"
You're constantly visually stimulated as a viewer
and that goes along with the storylines
and keeps everything kind of racing along.
That's not Lady Smallwood, Mr Holmes.
Sherlock is dumbfounded because he's under the impression
that it's somebody else.
When Mary turns and it's her,
the first thing he thinks is, "I've got it wrong."
Secondly, he's like, "Oh, my God, it's Mary!"
And I think... Personally, I think he has a little bit of respect for her.
She's protecting john and also she can take care of herself
and she's cleverer than he thought she was.
(CLAPPERBOARD SNAPS)
RAN-CLAUDE DEGUARA". Mary pulls the gun up and shoots.
And we're going to do a tracking on a camera, very fast,
so that just the quicker the move is,
that when you play it back in slow motion
it feels like a nice moved camera.
So, this will be acting as a tracking marker.
There will be a CGI bullet that we'll then put into the gun.
That bullet willjust be moving through quite slowly
with a nice little trail behind it.
ELEANOR SUTTON". The gun's been shot, it was shot with a very high frame rate.
We're able to speed it up much faster than real time
where it was needed, and then for the bullet time section
we're able to slow it right down.
We made the 3D bullet
and animated it across so it matched
the shooting of the gun from the footage.
And we've done some air distortion.
This was made to follow the bullet.
It's a three-dimensional swirl.
So that then I would be able to distort the footage through that shape.
So then it gave the impression of air flow behind the bullet.
First of all, he gets shot, then immediately Molly is a voice
and Anderson is a voice coming to his mind as scientific advice
on the ballistics, on the entry wound, on the impact of the bullet.
On what he will die of and in that split milli-milli-millisecond,
he realises he has to fall backwards to stop the wound from haemorrhaging.
He's not going to die of the entry wound,
there's no shattering of a mirror behind him.
It's... The bullet's in him. He will die of blood loss.
So to stop that, it's better for him to fall on his back.
If you fall on your back, gravity's working for us.
Fall now.
CUMBERBATCH". So then the fall begins and within the fall,
all the other traumas start to kick in.
The pain of it, what's actually happening to him,
his body's going into shock as he's falling.
It's incredibly painful.
He's flying down corridors,
he's on a morgue table, he's seeing himself dead.
He's running away from himself with Molly saying,
"Don't panic. Whatever you do, don't panic."
I'm spending a lot of time in the mind palace in Episode 3.
So I'm out of focus a lot, which is great.
And, uh, I get to do some slappage.
I've been practising. Benedict mainly was holding his hand up
and having me slap his hand for a bit because I've got...
I've got sort of slight binocularity problems
and my distancejudgement's not ideal.
So, yeah. But it was all right, I have to slap him.
I've got some more slaps to do. I haven't done them all yet.
Two down, two to go.
So Benedict's bearing up.
(GASPING)
It's a lot of slapping and a lot of talk of bullets and whatnot.
I'm sorry, Sherlock.
We did the first bullet hit you see on Benedict.
It was a very particular effect.
Ordinarily, we'd just do a bullet hit with blood
but Nick the director was very...
Specifically he wanted to see the bullet hole first
and then a moment, a beat, and then start seeing the blood seep.
Maybe to give the audience, "Maybe he survived it," or whatever,
but then when you start seeing the blood you know he's really injured.
Obviously we didn't shoot him for real, so we had a padded pad,
that kicks and makes a hole in the clothing.
And then we had a blood tube pumping blood,
and that's what you saw, the little bit of blood pumping out.
This initial shot here we got from production.
He's already got a hole in his shirt and it already has some effects
done on set where the blood is actually coming out.
What the producers wanted was for there to be an effect
that when the blood comes out,
you can see the blood start absorbing into the shirt.
We did this by integrating just a small red patch
that we managed to feather out
and sort of get it to coincide with the moment
when the blood comes out of the shirt.
We're trying to think of ideas that are new as well,
because as technology changes,
we can introduce new camera ideas.
You know, the Matrix style kind of shots where we stop frame,
kind of 180 degrees in a fight sequence.
You would spend a lot of money having,
like, 50 cameras to get that same shot.
As technology improves, we can cheat it along with a bit of
will of the grips and the whole kind of team that we've got,
we've come up with new methods
to create those kind of shots
that would normally cost you tens of thousands of pounds.
SUE VERTUE: What's quite interesting about the directors,
we have three different directors here,
and it's sort of a healthy... Not competition as much
but they all want to do something that somebody hasn't done before.
So to Sherlock, each one wants to add something
fresh and new, a different kind of shot.
We just had one where this little wood goes round with a bicycle wheel
and, you know, it's lovely when you see something exciting and fresh
that you've never seen before.
The bicycle wheel idea came on with something I saw on YouTube.
I went to Nick, the director, and it was an idea of putting a small camera
on an electric fan and spinning it round.
And I looked at the footage and the footage was amazing.
But we could do it bigger and better.
So, we took the same ideas, same principles, applied it to bigger cameras
and made a whole rig and we spent weeks working out the best way of doing it,
trying to find a replacement for the fan, we came up with the bicycle wheel.
I think we're on, you know... The third version of the rig
was the one we finally used.
The bicycle rig was a beautiful thing as well.
As Mary shoots me, I go down, and then as the camera comes around again,
she's striking Magnussen and he falls to the ground.
I love all that. I love being balletic with the camera.
(CLICKING)
It was quite an important moment with the bicycle rig,
because it was the first outing, the first time we'd used it.
And we'd put a lot of planning into it. We tested it, it worked.
But there's a little bit of trepidation. Will it work on the day
when you've got all the actors in, you've got the director,
you've got the execs? And thankfully, it worked.
Very exciting, Benedict was on that thing...
that helps you fall over today, and I was devastated
that I wasn't allowed to play on it.
CUMBERBATCH". It's a lovely sensation.
The coat sort of flies up and you have time to think
and they have time to cut in for all of these segments as he's falling.
Then he hits the ground
and then we're back into reality. John's up the stairs, Mary's gone,
Magnussen's been struck to the floor but witnessed the shooting
so into the ambulance he goes.
This is a very strong visual show, Sherlock.
It pushes the boundaries of storytelling on television.
It's very modern, it's very slick
and everybody's really working together to push it in that direction.
CUMBERBATCH: It's one of those great combinations of writing,
brilliant directorial ideas from Nick
and phenomenal expertise in the art department.
And the SFX boys, as well, with this incredible rig.
Remarkable, really, really cool.
(ALARM BLARING)
SHERLOCK: What is that? What's happening?