I stumbled upon this article on American Cinematographer while searching for historical articles about German Expressionist films of the 1920's.
-NW

Rock ‘n’ Roll Filmmaking: A Hard Day’s Night
David E. Williams
American Cinematographer
November 26, 2022

[snip]

A rushed script. Faulty camera gear. Benzedrine. Gilbert Taylor, BSC on shooting with The Beatles.​

In late 1961, 47-year-old British cinematographer Gilbert Taylor, BSC teamed with 29-year-old American director Richard Lester on his first feature, It’s Trad, Dad! (1962), a humorous — if slightly surreal — youth film about the interest in traditional, or “Dixieland,” jazz that was sweeping England at the time. Patterned after 1950s American rock ‘n’ roll movies, Trad features misunderstood teens, stuffy adults and plenty of musical performance sequences.

“Dick’s enthusiasm for music and filmmaking blended together in mad unison appealed to my mental and physical state at the time,” Taylor told American Cinematographer in 2006, noting that Trad became a sort of template for one of his most popular and often-imitated films, A Hard Day’s Night: “In 1964, when the Beatles came of age, I was given a poor script by Dick and told we basically had to make it up as we went along. The only thing set was the music, the rest we had to invent daily!

(Here I substituted the movie trailer to A Hard Day's Night that is viewable on YouTube instead the shorter Vimeo clip referenced in the article that I could not embed.)
-NW

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pbg8T9r1DiQ

Ready or not, production began on March 2 of that year, with the film released in the U.K. just months later, on July 6, and the U.S. on August 11.

The modestly budgeted and poorly planned film designed to quickly cash in on Beatlemania is now a classic in its own right.

Hastily written by Alun Owen after he spent time on the road with the band to understand their distinct personalities, the script’s narrative shortcoming partially explains the finished film’s disjointed structure, but it was Lester and Taylor’s decision to shoot in a documentary-style fashion on live locations that helps keep Hard Day’s Night energetic and fresh. The Fab Four were hardly acting and the real world surrounding them gives this pop “day in the life” snapshot of the band an air of authenticity that was a rarity in its day.

Visually, this mood is set with the opening credits sequence, as Paul, Ringo, John and George are chased through the Marylebone train station by a frantic pack of female fans afflicted with Beatlemania. The action was captured with multiple cameras, each fitted with a 10:1 zoom, which allowed Taylor’s crack operating team to cover the scene much like a sporting event.

“There was very little lighting of any sort as the authorities would not allow us to control the station in any way — no stands, not even a tripod, usually,” he remembered. “We also had a very limited budget and couldn’t afford generators, so any fill was just coming from a little handheld, battery-powered lamp. They wouldn’t have let us bring generators or cables onto the platform, anyways. Things were not the same in England as they were in the U.S. — public spaces were not easily used for filming.”

“The boys had terribly rough edges and weren’t really adept and memorizing lines. So the real locations kept life in each shot.”
— Gilbert Taylor, BSC