By Randi Altman

Since its arrival on Netflix in 2016, The Crown has been an obsession for many on both sides of the pond. Based on real events, the series, which is streaming its fourth season now, offers viewers a glimpse of what the royals might actually be like behind closed doors.

The show has famously changed casts every two seasons in order to move the story along as the characters age. Season 1 introduced us to a young Elizabeth and traced her path to the crown. This most recent season — shot by cinematographers Adriano Goldman (ASC, ABC, BSC), Stuart Howell and Ben Wilson — put a lot of focus on Prince Charles and Princess Diana, which sparked interest from fans and condemnation from the royals.

Asa Shoul, a colorist at Warner Bros. De Lane Lea in London, has worked on each season of The Crown. We recently reached out to him to talk process, working remotely and how the series’ look has evolved over the years.

Can you talk about how the look of the show has evolved with the cast changes/different decades?
We started with a cooler look overall in Season 1 and have become subtly more saturated and wider in color palette to reflect the diversity of the different characters’ stories and ages.

Can you describe how each season evolved or how each episode evolves, depending on the story?
Season 1 had a consistently cool and dark look. We wanted to show the young queen isolated, small and vulnerable, often away from the light source. As the seasons progressed, we sought out different looks depending on the mood of each episode, the locations and power of each character. Powerful characters would often be in semi-silhouette or harder to read.

What has remained since the first season?
We made a rule in Season 1 that we’d go with the natural light wherever possible and not be afraid to have the actors in the shadows. We called this “putting them in the room.”

What is the show shot on? Has that changed over the years?
Seasons 1 through 3 were shot on Sony 55s. Season 4 was Sony Venice, which we would have used on Season 3, but they didn’t have five Venice cameras available.

There are a lot of gray skies in the show. Is this captured in-camera, or are you tasked with enhancing the gray?
That’s interesting, as often in the UK filmmakers become obsessed with getting more detail from a white sky. We often do sky replacements and, occasionally, do this on The Crown, but mostly we soften off the brightness.

This season, with HDR being the primary grade, we’ve explored a greater dynamic range, which helps greatly with bright skies, where we now find more detail and range.

Did this last season and the addition of Lady Di bring with it a brighter look?
We tried to let the clothes do that, and her brilliant blue eyes. But in the episode where she moves into Buckingham Palace, we made her apartment as dark and somber as possible, other than highlighting the ever-growing flower arrangements. In the scene where she first meets Charles, we softened the contrast to create a dreamlike quality.

How does your job change from episode to episode, if at all?
I see one of my primary duties as creating a continuity to the look of the series whilst exploring the boundaries with each director and cinematographer team. Sometimes I’m surprised at how diverse the look of each episode can be whilst still very much being in our world.

There was a ton of sunshine in Australia, and the New York scenes had a gritty feel. Can you talk about that?
Australia was a great location to embrace a saturated, glossy, dreamlike journey that then descends into nightmare for Diana. New York (shot in the UK, I believe) was a brilliant combination of emulating the gray and brown tones in the grade with the VFX, which included her night arrival in the city to a dinner engagement, where we added sparkling highlights to her dress and the Twin Towers on the horizon of a poor, run-down neighborhood.

How early on do you get involved in each season, and how do you work with the showrunners/DP?
I watch the early cuts of each episode and start to talk to the director and DP of each block. The execs are completely hands-off during the grade, and writer/creator Peter Morgan sends an occasional note, but it’s a wonderfully trusting show to work on.

What kind of references do they provide?
This varies greatly. Sometimes we’ll talk through the story and emotional points we want to hit, and other times we’ll look at reference photographs from the moments in history, such as Suez, WWII, the Falklands or magazine images of the royal family through the last 80 years.

Was some of this done during the pandemic?
The whole of Season 4 was graded during the pandemic. We used a new remote viewing system called Clearview so that the director and DP could view from home. I’ve even had sessions when the DP was on a boat somewhere.

Were you working remotely as well?
I was lucky enough to work from Soho, just me and a couple of security guards in the building for seven months. The rest of my team worked from home, and it’s a credit to them and our engineering team that we’ve completed the project.

How did the remote collaboration work?
I’d complete a first pass of each episode on my own, in HDR, then complete a Dolby analysis and trim pass to SDR (at present, Clearview is only SDR). Then I’d do a first day with the clients, with them viewing on iPad Pros with specific settings and the Clearview app. We also completed multiple VFX sessions, in which up to 30 clients would have feeds from my FilmLight Baselight and a Microsoft Teams conference call to collaborate.

Were you asked to do more than color this season?
Yes. One drawback to my team working from home is that they couldn’t play back the renders for each episode, so I had to watch through multiple deliverable files. I know this series very, very well!

What has been the biggest challenge doing the series in general? What about this latest season?
I thought it would be the constant return to the same locations and rooms — for example, the queen’s audience chamber, where she meets her many prime ministers — but we decided to change the look of each one subtly to keep it visually interesting.

Adriano Goldman and the other DPs also helped this greatly by changing the lighting and blocking. Add the changes to costume and design each year, and it keeps everything fresh.

You work on Baselight?
Yes. I’ve used it since it was first built at Framestore CFC, where I first worked in feature film grading.

What about your monitor?
We use the Sony x300. I have two of these side by side and use them with the dual output of the Baselight when grading HDR and SDR.

Randi Altman is the founder and editor-in-chief of postPerspective. She has been covering production and post production for more than 20 years.