By Randi Altman

The Disney+ series Loki, based on the Marvel character, is back with six new episodes. In this season, Loki and the Time Variance Authority are searching for Sylvie, Ravonna Renslayer and Miss Minutes. It once again stars Tom Hiddleston as the god of mischief.

DP Isaac Bauman joined the Loki team in Season 2, following up on the work of Season 1 director Kate Herron and DP Autumn Durald Arkapaw, ASC. The cinematographer, who has television, film and commercials to his credit, shot five of the six episodes.

Isaac Bauman

We reached out to him to find out more…

What was it like coming onto a successful series in its second season? Did you follow the look of the first or develop your own? A bit of both?
We reinvented the look of Loki for its second season. Fortunately, we had Season 1 production designer Kasra Farahani and costume designer Christine Wada returning to continue their incredible work, which established a much-needed degree of aesthetic continuity for us to shake things up around.

Season 1 director Kate Herron and cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw knocked it out of the park, so we knew we had a lot to live up to. The thing is, we realized what made their work on the first season so special was how much of their own voices they brought to it.

For long-time admirers of Autumn’s work (such as myself), it was immediately visible in the cinematography that this was her voice — no one else’s. And that’s what made the cinematography feel so fresh and exciting. Autumn did her thing, and we were all the better for it. But to continue with the rightfully acclaimed approach from the first season would have done a disservice to the show.

I’m not Autumn, and in fact, I’d say our individual bodies of work display remarkably little stylistic overlap. We are very, very different artists with entirely different interests and preferences.

Same deal with Justin Benson’s and Aaron Moorhead’s philosophy as directors. They’ve developed their own voice, their own approach to the craft. It’s theirs, and it has very little overlap with any other filmmakers I’m aware of.

To step into Loki and imitate the work of our predecessors felt like it would be a mistake. When we decided that certain things had to change, we realized that everything had to change. We had to develop an entirely new approach from the ground up.

At every step of the process, we had the support and feedback of our open-minded, brilliant executive producer Kevin Wright, as well as the whole gang at Marvel HQ. We felt 100% supported, and we are so deeply grateful for that.

How would you describe the look of this season, and how did the showrunners tell you what they wanted?
Tasteful, mature, elegant, organic and immersive. I developed the look alongside lead directors and executive producers Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead. They’ve made half a dozen indie films and have developed a very refined style together. They came in knowing a lot of what they wanted to do this season —specifically in regard to camera movement and framing — and I brought a lot of the lighting ideas into play. It was a true collaboration.

We switched from “studio mode” filmmaking (dolly, crane, remote head, Steadicam, etc.) to doc-style hand-held photography. I’ve traditionally been a studio-mode guy myself, but Justin and Aaron love hand-held and wanted the sense of immediacy, naturalism and immersiveness that you can only ever get from hand-held. They were 100% right, and I love what the raw, energetic, hand-held approach brings to the often polished world of the MCU. We also did a lot of zooms for a ’60s/’70s thriller aesthetic and to break up the hand-held work.

We changed the aspect ratio from 2.39 to 2.20. In my mind, 2.39 is not wide — it’s actually narrow — and those thick black bars on the top and bottom of the screen feel like wasted canvas. 2.20 maintains that feeling of “wide” cinematic scope while allowing for 10% more vertical compositional space.

Another thing we changed was eliminating the use of colorful lighting. You’ll notice in the first season that there are many sequences — usually at least one in each episode — that are light, with saturated and colorful sources. In our season, there are none. The idea was to homogenize the palette — really limit the scope of the range of looks as well as tools used — to create more of a feeling of aesthetic cohesion and discipline.

Did you shoot using the same kit as Season 1?
We switched from Sony Venice to the ARRI Alexa Mini LF. I like the Venice a lot, but the Alexa is still the champ, in my opinion. There is something about how it renders movement and motion blur.

We switched from anamorphic to spherical lenses. This is a personal preference. I find that anamorphics look stunningly gorgeous but less immersive and immediate than the more matter-of-fact spherical optics.

We switched from top-of-the-line Panavision lenses to what are essentially prosumer-oriented budget lenses: the Tokina Cinema Vistas. We tested just about every set of large-format spherical lenses Panavision and ARRI Rental London possessed, and the Tokinas best fit the look we were after, even after a lot of incredulous double-checking. The proof is in the pudding.

We switched from the longer focal lengths that are inherent to anamorphic cinematography to using (very) wide lenses almost exclusively. These cameras got right up in our actors’ faces all day, every day. Cheers to the cast for using matte box/tape eyelines and never complaining about it.

Did you have a DIT? If so, how did that help?
Jay Patel was our DIT, and he was an enormous help. Because of the complicated VFX pipeline, it was necessary to limit ourselves to a single LUT. That would’ve been tricky without Jay. Using CDLs, we made little tweaks to scenes and individual shots all the time. It’s important to go into editorial with the most final-looking image possible, and Jay and I worked as best we could to deliver that.

Matt Watson

Did you work with the colorist on the look? What is an example of a note you gave to the colorist?
We worked with Matt Watson, who works full-time as a colorist at Marvel Finishing. He played a huge role in developing the look of the season. First, working together, he and I developed a film emulation LUT. In the first season, they embraced a fresh, cutting-edge aesthetic, whereas we were more interested in a vintage, throwback look — as if Loki was shot on the same film stock as 2001: A Space Odyssey.

We also added pretty heavy in-camera and digital/post-filtration (in addition to the heavy level of haze present on the sets) to make the image feel as soft and smoked-out as we could. Matt contributed to these efforts as well, developing a proprietary diffusion filter for us in Resolve, and it really made the images sing. And we added a hell of a lot of 16mm grain, which Matt massaged into the image, often on a shot-by-shot basis.

You touched on this a bit earlier, but you chose to go hand-held when Loki goes through timeslips. Why was that the way to go? What view does that give the audience?
The idea behind the hand-held, in general, was to put the audience into the scene. We wanted the photography to be as immersive as possible, and hand-held felt like the best way to achieve that.

What about the lighting? You went old school with tungsten rather than the newer LEDs. Why was that?
In the first season, nearly everything was LED. For example, the iconic Chronomonitor Wing set (the main area where they watch the timeline monitor) was lit with SkyPanels. In Season 2, we switched to ARRI Arrilite 2000s. Again, this was to achieve a more convincing vintage aesthetic.

There are a lot of reasons — and I could talk about how much I love tungsten all day — but the main reason was the production design. If Kasra’s sets so lovingly evoke a late ‘60s/early ‘70s aesthetic, then why shouldn’t the lighting?

All these older films we love the look of (like 2001) used tungsten, so we did too. You can see the difference in how much warmer the TVA feels this season; it’s very rich and golden.

Can you walk us through the challenging World’s Fair scene?
The World’s Fair was a massive build that took many weeks and a huge construction crew. Due to the size of the set, the scope of the lighting became quite large as well. On shooting days, we had over 100 set lighting technicians with us.

The idea was to key the scene with light motivated by the Ferris wheel. Where the Ferris wheel would be added later on in post, we had an array of Wendy Lights — an old school, very powerful, multi-headed tungsten unit. You can think of a Wendy as the big, industrial-sized brother of a Maxi Brute. We had a large array of those — large enough to accurately emulate a source as large as a 130-foot-tall Ferris wheel. It was suspended from a large construction crane, with the bottom side roughly 60 feet in the air. That provided the key and a feel of directionality that carried down the entire depth of the approximately 180-foot-long set.

For fill light, we had three 40-foot by 40-foot overhead softboxes equipped with Vortex8 LED units suspended from construction cranes out over and along the center of the set. There were 20- to 30-foot gaps between the softboxes, but on camera they feel very much like a continuous source.

Around the outside of the set, we had 12 by 20 “letterbox” softboxes on Manitou telehandlers pointed down into the set at about 45 degrees. We used these for edges or to dig fill in at a lower angle where necessary.

There were also more than a thousand practical bare tungsten bulbs built into the set, which provided some fill. And there was the need for an insane amount of distro.

Loki features a number of visual effects. How did that affect your shooting, if at all?
Generally, VFX sequences are fairly easy from a DP perspective. You frame the shot you want, you light it the way you want, you add interactive lighting effects as instructed by the VFX supervisor, and you never let the characters drift off the bluescreen. That’s about it.

The most involved part is planning the lighting. If you’re shooting a bluescreen sequence and only have a very rough understanding of what the VFX world will look like eventually, it is essentially on the DP to determine what the lighting should be. Often in VFX sequences, the DP will be indecisive or want to allow VFX the most flexibility to determine lighting, so that’s why you get a lot of these CGI set pieces looking so flat, gray and wishy-washy.

The trick is to really plant your flag and make strong, decisive choices about the direction, intensity and color of the light in your VFX sequence. Fortunately, I had the full support and, more than that, the encouragement of VFX supervisor Chris Townsend in that approach.

What was the most challenging part of the series for you?
The biggest challenge on a production this size is maintaining consistency in the look. Shooting dozens of sets on a half dozen stages, working with a large ensemble cast and a crew of hundreds over the course of 18 weeks. Trying to unify the look of the show so footage shot on day 1 cuts seamlessly with something shot on day 90 and has a strong, unique sense of style… that’s the challenge.

Randi Altman is the founder and editor-in-chief of postPerspective. She has been covering production and post production for more than 25 years.