By Daniel Restuccio
The Stand is a post-apocalyptic survival story about a pandemic that instigates a confrontation between the forces of evil, personified in the character of Randall Flagg (Alexander Skarsgård), and good, embodied in the presence of Mother Abagail (Whoopi Goldberg).
Ben Cavell
The limited series, based on the Stephen King novel, was in development for over 10 years. Julie McNamara, former EVP/head of programming for then CBS All-Access and now Paramount+ (the transition happened back in early March), hired veteran showrunner Ben Cavell (Justified, Homeland, Sneaky Pete, SEAL Team) to executive produce the show when the project evolved into a nine-episode limited series.
We caught up with writer and showrunner Cavell, post producer Stephen Welke and VFX producer Phillip Hoffman to talk about the show. Let’s start with Cavell.
When did you start working with The Stand EP Josh Boone?
Cavell: When the decision was made to tell the story as a limited series rather than a feature, I got a call asking if I’d be interested in taking it on. Josh had been trying to get a feature version off the ground for years, but he’d be the first to tell you he’s a filmmaker, not a showrunner.
When he peeled off to focus on the two episodes he directed and produced (the premiere and the last one), I was able to bring in my old friend and Justified collaborator Taylor Elmore to help me shepherd the show through production. We had a lot of talented directors on this show — Josh, Tucker Gates, Bridget Savage Cole, Danielle Krudy, Chris Fisher and Vincenzo Natali — but because there were so many Taylor and I had to work hard to keep the show tonally and stylistically consistent.
Stephen King and his son Owen were very involved with this. What kind of notes did they give early in production? Were they also involved in the post?
Cavell: Owen wasn’t just giving notes; he was in the writers’ room from the beginning helping to craft the series, and he ended up writing or co-writing several of our episodes.
Stephen was in the position of giving notes/approvals throughout, including during post — although, happily, I don’t ever remember him objecting to anything we wanted to do.
You had four editors on the show: Matthew Rundell, Robb Sullivan, Rob Bonz and Marc Clark. What were some of those challenges?
Cavell: The Stand is already an enormous challenge editorially just because of the number of main characters and separate storylines — and that’s before we add the further challenge of telling a story in multiple timelines. We needed editors who not only knew the book, but who were also capable of keeping so many balls in the air at once.
In addition, because most of the editing process would take place after the directors finished their individual cuts, when Taylor Elmore and I would spend months crafting the series into a coherent whole, it was important that our editorial team be able to work together without getting territorial. With that in mind, we loved the idea of hiring a group of editors who had worked together in the past in various permutations and would therefore come to this project with an existing shorthand and mode of collaboration.
They all worked on Avid Media Composers in Los Angeles. During the shutdown they transitioned to working from home and used Evercast for remote editorial (and VFX reviews). [More on this later!]
How surreal was it to be posting the show during an actual pandemic?
Cavell: I don’t think of The Stand as being about a pandemic, but you’re certainly right to use the word surreal. The moment that stands out most in my memory was during the night we spent filming our overflowing New York hospital, when someone pulled up laptop video of the eerily similar scenes coming out of Italy.
Early in post there was a discussion about whether to try to incorporate COVID into our narrative — i.e., by adding off-camera lines in which people would say about Captain Trips, “This is even worse than COVID” but I nixed that pretty quickly. For one thing, so much of the horror of The Stand comes from the idea of a plague descending on an unsuspecting world. Also, a number of our early scenes, in which people cough or sniffle and no one thinks anything of it, felt like they’d play very differently in a world that had already experienced an airborne pandemic.
Josh Boone said the style of the show would be ‘70s Steven Spielberg and ‘90s Oliver Stone. How did those style concepts translate practically to the production of the episodes?
Cavell: I think Josh was referring to the two he directed, both of which begin with a kind of gold-filtered, first-act-of-Jaws innocence and descend into a much cooler, harshly bright, JFK-style paranoia. The conversations I had with our other directors about visual touchstones varied widely — from gas, food and lodging to The Rocky Horror Picture Show — although it’s true that the film Jake Braver and I referenced most when we were designing the “Hand of God” climax that ends Episode 8 was Raiders of the Lost Ark.
VFX supervisor Jake Braver said you created a rulebook for society in New Vegas, which directly influenced the design process. What were some of those rules?
Cavell: The main rule from a design perspective was the notion that Flagg would have his work crews systematically covering up any logos that weren’t his, which, in a city famous for its neon logos, is quite an extensive job.
A lot of the other rules may not have influenced the design as directly but were important in helping us figure out what it should feel like to be there. Above all, we knew Vegas needed to be a place that was believably functional.
Post and VFX
Can you trace the workflow of the production from camera to final conform and color grading? For example, you shot on Sony Venice. What informed that choice?
Welke: The camera was chosen because it allowed us to shoot 4K in the 2.39 aspect ratio. It can also shoot 6K large-format, which was necessary for some of the VFX sequences, and the 2500 ISO was helpful in shooting night scenes with no power (a story point) and only moonlight or candlelight for the source.
Stephen Welke
You shot 4K and delivered a 4K master. Was it also HDR?
Welke: We worked at 4096×1716 in EXR. Encore Video (which is now Company 3) built our timeline in 4096×1716 in EXR. We colored on the DaVinci Resolve in HDR Dolby Vision, with Encore adding mattes x222 top and x222 bottom to bring us to 4096×2160 for the final deliverable.
How many cameras did you shoot scenes with?
Welke: We had three primary cameras, with additional cameras as needed, and up to five for one sequence. We also shot with the Phantom and ARRI cameras on drones and special camera arrays for driving plates.
I’m guessing you were editing during production. Did post start in Vancouver, where it was shot, and move to LA?
Welke: Post started in Los Angeles when production started in Canada. There were plans to have editorial near set, but they were never put into motion, so editorial remained in LA for the entire shoot and finish.
The editors used Media Composer?
Welke: Yes, editorial worked Avid Media Composers hooked up to Nexis at the start and changed to remote editing after the pandemic shut everything down. We moved Avids into personal residences. Since we were finished with principal photography, we transferred the media from Nexis onto separate RAID drives for each editor and assistant and used Resillio to keep up to eight systems connected with matching media. We did this instead of remoting in to our Nexis, as the offices came off rental due to non-use and budgetary savings.
What was the editorial turnaround per episode?
Welke: The editorial turnaround per episode varied due to a number of factors. Editorial was given an average of 10 days after principal photography to assemble the editor’s cut. Directors were also given around the same amount of time; however, some episodes were block-shot — 101-109, 102, 103-104, 105-106 and 107-108.
The overlap with editors working on multiple episodes meant that some later episodes were delayed in the producer’s review to allow for work on earlier episodes. This was done for a couple of reasons — to facilitate visual effect scene locks so work could begin on the bigger VFX builds and to accommodate international marketing of Episodes 101 and 102 and other schedule requirements. At the start of production, no release date for the series had been established, so production responsibilities on set allowed post to stretch out to accommodate producer shoot responsibilities.
The pandemic impacted the show because our Las Vegas shoot was put on hold, moving from May to eventually September. Principal photography had finished through Episode 108, but the delay in shooting the Las Vegas material allowed more time for producer and studio/network reviews, which normally would not have occurred in our schedule. On average, producer review took four to five weeks, and then studio/network review had around that same amount of time as we waited for shooting to become safe enough to finish scenes and elements in Las Vegas. We couldn’t finish the series without Las Vegas, so it gave us additional time to work on every episode.
The visual effects crew on the series appears to be quite large — feature-film large. How many effects shots on average were in the episodes, and how did you wrangle all that work?
Hoffman: We had 2,146 shots across the nine episodes, with an average of 238 per episode. Wrangling all that work required a lot of coordination from the entire VFX team, and every person on the crew had a lot to wrangle. Short answer is that we all spoke every day, and each person had very specific tasks to keep on top of to make sure we had everything under control. That includes the VFX editor and assistant editor, production manager, coordinator, producer and supervisor.
Welke: Then the visual effects teams coordinated with associate producer Robert Egami to deliver the finished visual effects using Synapse for drop-ins, which were supervised by both post production and visual effects.
Can you talk about the final conforming of episodes, color correction and sound mixing and editing?
Welke: After locking episodes, EDLs were turned over to Encore/Company 3, where the timeline was assembled. Our online happened after the pandemic occurred, so splits and check sessions were handled using Streambox and Clearview for online, VFX and color reviews. Our colorist, Jill Bogdanowicz, took a pass with episodic notes from our primary DP, Thomas Yatsko, and then I, Jake Braver (VFX super) and Thomas would review with Jill before bringing in producers for a final review. We did get into the facility at times between COVID surges when it was deemed safe. This was helpful since we were able to review on calibrated monitors at the mastering resolution. When it was not safe to go in, remote viewing was required. Since there were so many VFX in each episode, we had a lot of check sessions as VFX were approved and dropped in after initial color review sessions with the VFX team, who was tracking shot status for every episode.
Final sound was at Westwind Media. Due to the pandemic, most sound work was done remotely, with co-sound supervisor Sean Massey handling dialogue and ADR and co-sound supervisor Warren Hendriks handling sound design. The long lead time between lock and the final mix gave sound additional time to create signature effects. ADR happened at facilities worldwide, with remote kits being shipped directly to talent and recorded at a local facility and/or through Source-Connect to Parabolic, who supplied the kits.
A benefit due to the pandemic was that we were able to record actors’ entire series ADR in one session, sometimes doing five or six episodes in a single session. Group ADR was set up remotely using Source-Connect, and separate actors — up to 10 — also used Source-Connect to record remotely to a single recordist using Avid Pro Tools, with Holly Dorff supervising.
The final mix was handled by re-recording mixers Warren Hendriks and Karol Urban using Clearview to allow remote viewing for producers and studio/network.
Daniel Restuccio is a writer/director with Realwork Entertainment and part of the Visual Arts faculty at California Lutheran University. He is a former Disney Imagineer. You can reach him at dansweb451@gmail.com.
