The BritBox Original series Riot Women is set in the West Yorkshire town of Hebden Bridge, England, where a group of middle-age women come together to form a punk band for a local talent show. Beth (Joanna Scanlan) is a frustrated university professor, who feels invisible to her students and (adopted) adult son Tom (Jonny Green), who now has his own life and girlfriend. She is on the verge of committing suicide when childhood friend/pub owner Jess (Lorraine Ashbourne) calls her about the talent show, giving Beth a renewed sense of purpose.
Newly retired police officer Holly (Tamsin Greig) and her no-nonsense sister Yvonne (Amelia Bullmore) are coming to terms with their elderly mother’s dementia when Holly’s former patrol partner/background singer Nisha (Taj Atwal) recruits the pair to join the effort. Rounding out the band is Kitty (Rosalie Craig), the lead singer, who’s battling addiction and domestic abuse, and coincidently, was arrested by Nisha and Holly just before retiring. An added twist comes when Tom is found to be the baby that Kitty gave up for adoption decades ago. The band's performance at the talent show catches the eye of a local promoter, and now they must consider whether this was a one-time gig or something that could become much bigger.
Riot Women was created and written for television by Sally Wainwright, who also serves as the show’s executive producer and director on the first three episodes (Amanda Brotchie directed 4, 5 and 6). The show’s six episodes run roughly an hour each, and at press time Wainwright was working on the script for a second season.
CINEMATOGRAPHY
Simon Tindall (pictured) served as director of photography for the show’s first block of episodes (1, 2 and 3), working with Wainwright to establish a look and feel. Riot Women marked the first time he worked with the director, but he was keenly aware of her talents.
“It was a job that my agent brought to me,” Tindall recalls. “And I just really wanted to be involved. Sally is an amazing writer. She’s like a British institution. Whether it’s action or monsters or sci-fi…I’m interested in portraying a story. As long as you’ve got good [dialogue] and good actors, and Sally always brings those two things together.”
Production goes back to 2024, and Tindall says he did a lot of research into programs from the ‘70s that inspired the show’s creator, including 1976’s Rock Follies.
“It showed women being women and forming a punk band in the ‘70s,” he explains. “Sally locked onto it. I think it’s always been [in] the back of her mind…so I felt an incredible responsibility to make her dream real.”
Music, he notes, was always going to be a driving force in the series. In fact, the show’s cast spent time learning their respective instruments so they could create realistic on-screen performances.
Photo: Director Sally Wainwright, on-set
“I went to strong female music characters from across the decades,” Tindall explains. “We centered one scene especially around Courtney Love and Hole.”
The look of the series is more colorful than a typical, gray UK drama.
“Hebden Bridge, near where she’s from, she knows it. That’s where she shot Happy Valley,” he says of the director. “It (has) a very sort of hippie-ish kind of vibe to it. It’s a small village and she wanted to project that color, so we went with the (Arri) Alexa 35 to give us a filmic look. It’s what you do to it, rather than the camera itself. We went with Olympus OM lenses, which are older glass. They’ve been rehoused, but they’re an older glass and a slightly softer filmic look because Sally wanted the women to be real…It was a difficult balance because Sally was very adamant that she didn’t want any filtration or post work on people. She wanted it to be real, but also wanted to be kind to the lovely actors/actresses who were of a certain age and treat them kindly. We decided on OM lenses to give it a slightly soft (look), and then we pushed for using tungsten lighting.”
Tindall collaborated with colorist Jodie Davidson to set the grade, referencing US shows that have pops of color. He even shot test footage of the cast in their full makeup and costumes for reference and to help set the LUTs, which Wainwright could then view on-set during production.
Photo: Tamsin Greig and Sally Wainwright, during production
In the first three episodes that Tindall shot (Angus Mitchell shot Episodes 4, 5 and 6), he says the series’ opening sequence is the one that received the most planning and attention. In it, Beth is coming to terms with her life and the feeling of invisibility. She’s been drinking and is about to commit suicide by hanging herself in her home when the phone rings. It’s Jess, whose excitement about the talent show causes an immediate change of heart.
“We storyboarded it. Sally shot listed it. She had references,” says the DP. “She wanted it to look like a [gin & tonic] commercial — a drinks commercial — which turns into something darker, and I think we did that.”
He also points to the scene in which Beth first meets Kitty, who is singing karaoke at a pub after her stint in jail and a night of drinking. Her soulful voice draws Beth into the establishment for a closer look.
“Again, that was lots of references from Hole — from Courtney Love,” explains Tindall. “And that worked really well. We actually used a specific lens called a ‘dream lens.’”
The Canon version of Leicia’s Noctilux is super shallow, allowing the DP to only focus on Kitty’s eyes at times.
“There were lots of tricks and things that we did and we planned for, and it all worked.”
Currently, Tindall is working on the third season of the BBC crime drama Sherwood with director Clio Barnard, with whom he’s collaborated in the past. Production on the series wraps up in April and Tindall hopes scheduling will allow him to return to shoot a second season of Riot Women, should it move forward.
EDITING
For editor Mark Hermida (pictured, right), it was his past collaboration with Drama Republic, the producer of Riot Woman, that led to him coming onboard. Hermida served as editor on the 2021 British crime drama The Irregulars, which Drama Republic also produced. In the case of Riot Women, Hermida edited Episodes 1, 2 and 3, and also had a hand in fine tuning the series’ fifth episode.
After a preliminary meeting with Drama Republic executive producer Roanna Benn and show producer Jessica Taylor, Hermida was introduced to director Sally Wainwright.
“I went down to Oxfordshire, where [Sally] lives…and then we just kind of spent the afternoon together, talking about the script,” he recalls. “She was talking about the way she was going to shoot it, and we got on really well straight away.”
Anne Sopel would cut the latter half of the series, as was always the plan.
“If you were to do the first two episodes, and then do the next two, and then the next two, the schedule would just become very expensive,” says Hermida. “So the second editor is working a couple of weeks after the first editor starts, and you’re only ever a few weeks behind. You overlap and it shortens the schedule that way.”
During production in Hebden Bridge, Hermida spent roughly six weeks working from rented space just down the road.
“I went on-set for a couple of days while they were shooting,” he shares. “I was there if they needed to pick up a couple of shots, so it was useful to have me there because I knew what would work for the edit.”
After production wrapped, he moved to rented space in the Soho area of London. The show employed an Avid Media Composer workflow, which is Hermida’s preferred NLE.
“I’m always Media Composer. I literally don’t know how to use the others, so the second it stops being Media Composer, I’m in trouble,” he jokes. “With Media Composer, the thing it gives you is stability. It’s great for the creative. It does everything I want it to do. I did a show called The Wheel of Time for Amazon a couple of years ago. It’s like a big fantasy kind of series, and we had like seven editors and 10 assistants all working within the same set of projects. Media Composer is just such a tank. It can hold up to that many ins and outs, and it can deal with that amount of media. It’s very stable, so that’s why it’s always used in big productions.”
He worked with a Mac-based system for Riot Women, and was usually only a day behind when it came to assembling what had been shot.
“They shoot Day 1 and I come in on Day 1 and set up project, and then I edit Day 2, so I’m one day behind,” he explains. “And that way, if there’s a problem — a focus issue or whatever — or I feel like they’ve missed a shot, they’re usually still on that location, so they can pick me up a shot. Whereas if I was 10 weeks behind, they’d have to rebuild the location. It could get a lot more expensive.”
During production, Hermida would check in with Wainwright via text and quick calls each evening.
“Some directors really like that. They want to have a lot of contact,” he shares. “And some prefer to just kind of be hands off and not see anything until we edit. Sally and I talked a lot, and we socialized as well in the evening after shoots, so we were talking about what was going on. We were in constant contact. And then when the edit starts, she’s in there every day. It was her and I for six months — the two of us — occasionally with producers in the room as well. And then she was back and forth because there were two edits. Anne was next door, so Sally was kind of between the two us.”
When looking at the block of the show that he helped shape, Hermida points to Episode 3 as being one of the more challenging, specifically due to a nine-minute sequence involving Beth and Kitty. The two are out to dinner at a quiet restaurant where storylines intersect. Kitty reveals to Beth that her adopted son Tom may be the baby she gave up years ago. Beth realizes that Kitty could have only been a young teen at the time, and surmises that someone had abused her. And Kitty mentions coming across Beth’s suicide note, further adding to the tension.
“It’s the centerpiece of the episode, certainly,” says Hermida. “It was such a complicated scene, emotionally, because of what was going on for the two characters. But also, there was a lot of continuity there, because they’re eating dinner. All of that’s on-screen, and…when you get a scene that length, it’s got different kinds of rhythms inside it. Maybe with a two-minute dialog scene, it’s a single kind of rhythm to it, where you feel the arc of the conversation. But in a scene like that — where the information and the power and the emotion is kind of going back and forth between the two characters — you have to find the long-wave rhythm of the scene, as well as the short-wave rhythms within that. It doesn’t want to feel too even-paced. It wants to feel like it’s its own story in a way that you’ve got to know when to speed it up, when to slow it down, when to let the audience sit with the emotion of what’s happening. It becomes like making a little film inside a film. So that was a real challenge. That was the thing that took us days and days and days to get that right.”
Visual effects for the series were rather minimal, says Hermida. They included painting out crew and equipment, re-timing a drone shot, and adding blood to the opening supermarket scene where Kitty’s mouth gets cut.
Hermida is now onto his next project, which, coincidently, he’s editing in the same Soho space in which he cut Riot Women. He’s now editing
California Avenue, an upcoming BBC One television drama series from creator Hugo Blick that stars Bill Nighy, Erin Doherty, Helena Bonham Carter and Tom Burke.