The book Light , the acclaimed modern youth classic by writer Annet Schaap,can be seen from Tuesday as a four-part TV series. How did the makers manageto translate the idiosyncratic, dark, fairytale-like world from the book tothe canvas?
Jette PellemansDecember 5, 20222:35 pm
It was a dear friend who tipped producer Iris Otten about the book in 2018_Light_ by Annet Schaap. You have to film this, she said. Otten read the bookand immediately thought it was a wonderful story. But film? Impossible.
What was impossible about it? “Everything! Really everything. Well, veryconcretely: the story takes place about a hundred years ago, so you can’t useanything from contemporary society as a set. Point two: is there a boy oftwelve, thirteen who is capable of playing the role of a mermaid boy, walkingaround with a latex fish tail for the entire series? Which child wants and cando that?”
Iris Otten starts talking faster. “There is a scene, an important scene, inwhich the main characters jump out of a tower room and end up in a deep seawhere a storm is raging. There are boats, pirates, a lighthouse in the sea, anaquarium in which a mermaid woman is murdered. In a normal series you have onesuch element, but in this book everything was like that. So I said to thatfriend: it’s a fantastic story, unique and universal. But about all thoseelements around it, I thought: yes, really, how?”
Budget of 4.5 million euros
Five years later, the impossible has turned out to be possible. From December6 Light can be seen on NPO Plus. The series is made by the new productionlabel Juliet, founded by Iris Otten and Nathalie van der Burg and part of thelarger Pupkin.
The cast of ‘Lampje’.Image VPRO
What has changed, as a result of which Otten was now convinced? “First of all,there was a new policy from the NPO to focus more on high-quality dramaseries. That’s why we could Light finance with a total budget of 4.5 millioneuros, considerably more than similar youth series that we have previouslymade for around 2 million euros.”
With the gathering of the crew, confidence started to grow more and more, saysIris Otten. “The director Margien Rogaar, script writer Mieke de Jong, Robbievan Brussel as cameraman: they all had so much energy and optimism to solveall those puzzles from the story piece by piece. And I myself thought more andmore: if we succeed in getting this story to the screen, it will beunparalleled.”
Grand, adventurous and dark story
The story of Light is about an eleven-year-old girl, Emilia – but everyonecalls her Lampje. She is the daughter of the lighthouse keeper and lights thelamp high in the lighthouse every evening with a match. On a stormy night, thematches get wet and everything goes wrong. Lampie is sent away and has to livein the Black House as punishment, where she finds a monstrous creature with afish tail in the attic: Fish. That all happens in episode 1. It is thebeginning of a grand, adventurous and dark story in which Lampje and Viseventually go in search of Vis’s mother.
The lighthouse was immediately a first puzzle where the Light crew wasallowed to grit his teeth. The lighthouse is an important element in the book;it is not for nothing that it is on the front of the book, drawn by AnnetSchaap herself. But where can you find such a tall, tall pillar on a peninsulaby the sea, with high cliffs in the background?
“At a certain point I knew all the lighthouses in the Netherlands by heart,but there wasn’t the perfect one,” says Robbie van Brussel. He is thecameraman of the series, although he always finds that a somewhat unfortunateterm in Dutch. Correct in English director of photography better; he is thedirector of how the story comes into the picture. “In the end, we assembledthe lighthouse ourselves in the visual post-processing from the substructureof the IJmuiden lighthouse and the top of the lighthouse in Vlaardingen.”
Van Brussel had to look a little further for the cliffs. “We considered makingthe cliffs entirely in the computer with visual effects. Or to recreate thecliffs in miniature for the overview shots. But we had to shoot too manyscenes where the camera had to be able to look in all directions. As a vieweryou feel it when it is not real.”
So Van Brussel and production designer Barbara Westra went through GoogleMaps, increasingly south along the coastline. Finally, they found a clifftoplocation in Normandy that suited them; the visual effects department taped ina 3D model of the lighthouse for the shots from afar. The scenes on the beachwere shot in Belgium, the scenes at the front door of the lighthouse inIJmuiden. Van Brussel: “I think it’s one of the most complex, but coolproductions I’ve ever filmed. But the funny thing is: in the final edit itlooks so good that I can hardly imagine that the lighthouse was not reallythere.”
Waves of wood with hands
Finding or putting together the locations is one thing; translating thatfairytale, poetic yet dark atmosphere from the book – for which Annet Schaapwon the Gouden Griffel for good reason – is a second.
The lighthouse was finally found in Normandy.Image VPRO
“That was a difficult translation, yes,” says cameraman Van Brussel. “Forexample, at the beginning of the book there is the sentence: ‘The wavesgrabbed her legs’. How do you translate something like that? Do we make ittheatrical in which we make waves of wood with hands that grab her legs? Arewe doing something with special effects? Or should we mainly show how someoneis caught by the water and can no longer escape it? In the end, we went forthe latter and let the poetic, fairytale-like come back in other moments.”
Producer Iris Otten explains which elements you can use for this. “You can doa lot with light; so we’ve been thinking about that for a long time. We wantedthat larger than life grab feeling; grand, dreamy and spherical. Forexample, in the scenes when Lampje looks longingly at the rotating light ofthe lighthouse from the attic window of the Black House.”
Cameraman Robbie van Brussel adds: “Realistically, that should be a completelyblack image, because it is dark. But here we filmed it during the day andturned it into a dark blue night in post-processing, so you can look very farand deep and see everything in detail. That evokes a dreamy and fairytalefeeling.”
“Why did we want this again?”
Coming up with solutions to all these puzzles caused Iris Otten to regularlyhave sleepless nights during the first year of production. “I felt enormouslyresponsible. To Annet (Schaap, ed.) And to the readers. People who _Light_have read and talk about the book, often sigh: oh yes, Lampje – and then stareinto space half in love. It is such a precious, special story to them. Andthen we have to turn that into something just as brilliant. I often thought:why did we want to do this again?”
But the end result is now on the table and Iris Otten is “super proud”. Shewas relieved that the test audiences who recently saw the series respondedunanimously enthusiastically. “So we managed to translate a story that onlyexisted in someone’s imagination into a world of images in which peoplebelieve 100 percent that Fish is a mermaid boy! I am very happy with that,yes.”
The VPRO series Light can be seen from Tuesday 6 December on NPO Plus andfrom Monday 2 to Thursday 5 January in four parts on NPO Zapp at 19.20.
Read also: ** ‘ Lampje’ is a great book**
Annet Schaap debuts with a fantastic imaginative story about the daughter ofthe lighthouse keeper.