Serial Killers    Interview with Helen Lloyd


Syndicated interviews on the official site

20 October 2005

by Adam Buss

Interview with Helen Lloyd, video producer on "Serial Killers"

Helen Lloyd has worked as an actress, television presenter and producer and is currently working as the video producer of 'Heart of Hearts', the fictional soap that 'Serial Killers' is based around. Helen is the wife of one Derby Playhouse's most recognisable actors Ben Roberts, and here she talks about her current role.

What exactly does your role as Video Producer for Serial Killers entail?

It's almost like having a play within a play. There are nine short sections of video which are shown on the television during the play. Each of these is a bit of an episode, the cliffhanger moment from 'Heart of Hearts'. Although the same actors appear in the soap as on the stage, their roles are very different in many ways. The idea is to keep the two entities separate, and to allow the video sections to have an identity of their own. I have a background in working in both theatre and television so I am hopefully able to look at it from both sides.

How important is it for the filmed scenes to look authentic, so that audience members recognise them as being from an Australian soap?

It's not just about the locations. If you look at an Australian soap it is shot in quite a different way from a British soap. I've never had anything to do with an Australian soap, but fortunately most members of the cast have and I have used their knowledge to try and ensure that the clips look as realistic as possible. In Australia they tend to use three cameras and in Britain most soaps are shot using only one. If you watch Australian soaps you will notice that quite often you have an angled shot over someone's shoulder cut together with an angled shot over the shoulder of the person they are talking to, intercut with a mastershot from a third camera that shows the whole scene. The lighting is also very different, the majority of Australian soaps use overhead lighting so you get fantastically well lit hair! British soaps use far more diffused and naturalistic lighting. All the scenes have been shot on location, whereas in a real soap, they are more often done in a custom-built studio, but the locations have been fantastic, particularly the Queens Hospital in Burton-on-Trent. It would have been impossible to 'cheat' a hospital, only a real hospital corridor looked right.

How much time do you have to get all of the scenes filmed and edited?

We had a day and a half to film the scenes which made it pretty tight. This was partly to do with actors availability but was also due to the fact that the scenes needed to be edited by the time the tech week began (24 October). Although they're only short scenes, the setting up, dressing, lighting and planning, take almost as long for a short scene as a long one.

Serial Killers is a comedy. Are you using the locations and sets on the video production to emphasise the comedy of the script?

This is one of the discussions that we had very early on. You could take two routes, one is taking it 'seriously', the other is the 'Acorn Antiques' route. The soap scenes are funny because of the script and we didn't want to lose that. If you look at any soap what makes it work is the fact that the actors take it incredibly seriously and they want to do the best job they can. David Freeman, the director of the play, and I decided that we didn't want the video to be 'hammed up' in any way, the comedy stands on its own. We filmed it seriously and the actors resisted the temptation to overact (well almost), although it is acting with a capital 'A'.

You worked for many years as an announcer on Central television, before moving behind the camera as a documentary producer for Carlton. What prompted your move into production?

Before all of that I worked as an actress including here at Derby Playhouse. My last professional stage performance was here where I played Joanna in 'Present Laughter' in 1983. I was already working at Central at the time, I started there in 1981 and took time out to do the show which turned out to be my last stage appearance. After that I moved on to being a researcher at Central Television for a number of years until eventually I graduated into production at Central and then Carlton, firstly in the community department, then in education and finally in factual programmes. It was very much a natural progression.