When the Apple TV+ crime drama Defending Jacob begins, viewers meet the seemingly perfect Barber family — assistant DA Andy, teacher Laurie and their teenage son, Jacob. Fairly quickly, things start falling apart after a local boy is found murdered in a park, and Jacob becomes the prime suspect.

Jonathan Freeman

Andy and Laurie both lose their jobs, and the family is ostracized as Jacob is presumed guilty before his trial even begins. The series, which stars Chris Evans, Michelle Dockery and Jaeden Martell, keeps viewers asking, “Did he or didn’t he?” until the very end.

For the most part, Defending Jacob takes place in winter, and the look of the show reflects that cold. To find out more about Defending Jacob’s look, we reached out to the show’s cinematographer, Jonathan Freeman, ASC, (Game of Thrones, Boardwalk Empire) to talk about working with the show’s director, Morten Tyldum, and showrunner Mark Bomback.

The show is set in an affluent suburb of Boston. Where did you shoot?
The series was shot in many of the locations that take place in the story. We were inspired by real locations and had tremendous support by our local crew. The lighting, grip and camera team worked extremely fast, often shooting the rehearsals. We rarely had to shoot a take again for technical reasons. I can honestly say it was one of the best production teams I’ve ever worked with. And our cast was phenomenal. Capturing performance was the most critical aspect of our storytelling.

What cameras did you use, and did you do camera tests?
We used the Panavision DXL2. We also tested the Sony Venice and ARRI Alexa LF (both beautiful cameras as well), but the DXL2 provided the most resolution, which was needed for Apple’s delivery, once the anamorphic image was unsqueezed.

Can you talk about shooting with multiple cameras?
Working on television shows like Game of Thrones and Boardwalk Empire, we had to achieve quite a lot in a short period of time. On GoT we shot only 10-hour days with almost no overtime, so I got used to shooting with multiple cameras. That experience helped me when capturing the scenes in Defending Jacob, which is primarily a character-driven story.

It was important for director Morten Tyldum and I to have as many simultaneously running cameras as possible in order to capture performances. Shooting this without it feeling like conventional television was a challenge because we often wanted the camera to be physically close to the characters; finding a second camera angle when shooting a close-up of an actor was sometimes difficult.

When we were not able to get a strong camera angle for the B camera, they would either pick up a detail of that same performance or prep for the next setup. This leapfrogging helped us immensely, but one key motif we frequently used the B camera for was shooting close-ups, where the camera was just a few inches higher than the character’s eyeline. It created a very intimate feeling — almost as if we were sharing the character’s perspective.

Can you talk about lenses?
These internal close-ups became a critical element in our storytelling. For Morten and me, the optical quality of the glass, the lenses, was paramount. We chose to shoot with anamorphic lenses. Even though we composed for a 2:1 aspect ratio, we wanted the benefits anamorphic provides aesthetically.

Since so much of our storytelling would be close-ups of our actors, anamorphic served three critical aspects. The anamorphic bokeh (out of focus distortion) became a skewed backdrop, a subtle depiction of their deteriorating world. It also smoothed out the inherent crispness of digital cinematography. And, frankly, it just looked more cinematic.

Panavision was extremely helpful in getting us the G series, which are particularly beautiful and unique in character. And Apple was very supportive throughout the process, working with us to ensure we kept the aesthetic vision Morten and I had while also delivering the highest-quality image.

You brought up the characters’ perspectives earlier. Can you expand on that?
Because the story is such an internal piece, Morten wanted the audience to experience the story through the characters’ eyes. We became very committed to POV. We referenced films like Michael Clayton, Mystic River and the films of Bergman and Polanski.

For every scene, we determined whose perspective we wanted to take. So in a scene with Andy, we might have shot with the camera close to him and potentially wrapping around him, over his shoulder, to see the rest of the scene play out from his perspective. We would often take the same approach with Laurie. But the critical difference that Morten wanted to convey was how the audience saw Jacob.

As the story unfolded, we wanted to create an enigma around him, just as the characters in our story start to wonder whether Jacob is guilty or innocent. We maintained a less subjective perspective with Jacob by keeping the camera more distant. If we did occasionally come in for a close-up, it was to capture another beautifully ambiguous performance by our actor playing Jacob, Jaeden Martell. We hoped this approach translated a sense of uncertainty for the audience.

Can you talk about the look and tone?
Mark Bomback’s scripts were so compelling. I read almost the entire eight hours in one sitting. Even though it was set in contemporary Boston, in the most familiar settings, it had a somber, elegiac quality to it — like a requiem. For the look and tone, we were inspired by Nordic paintings and the films of Bergman — a cool, wintery chiaroscuro light. To amplify a sense of isolation, we framed our characters against windows showing the world they were increasingly being separated from. We also shot our characters through layers of glass or partially obscured them from view using architecture, emphasizing their prison.

What about the lighting?
We wanted to take a naturalistic approach but with a slightly heightened reality — slightly expressionistic. So a cold, rainy day might be pushed toward cyan a bit more and the color desaturated. And since much of our storytelling would be conveyed by the performances of our brilliant actors, it was important to capture performance but also reflect that tone in their close-ups. Light might fall off to shadow more dynamically, but it was always critical to retain detail in the eyes of the actors.

Defending Jacob was the first production where I shot almost entirely with LEDs. The advancement of LED lighting has been a game-changer for me. I often use mini dimmer boards, where I can adjust the key and fill light ratio on the fly. This was more challenging when shooting with tungsten — as the light dimmed, the color temperature shifted warmer. Before LED, I wasn’t able to do the dynamic adjustments that I can now. It also means that I feel more comfortable shooting a rehearsal wherein I can adjust to the actors’ positions immediately without disrupting the set by tweaking between takes.

ARRI SkyPanels were the workhorses for our lighting, often bouncing them through book lights or lighting sections of our night exteriors. We also used Litepanels through diffusion as key or fill in tight spaces. My gaffer, Josh Dreyfus, introduced me to Quasar tubes, which became very versatile. We would use them in the standard way one would use tubes for lighting, but Josh and our key grip, Woody Bell, built substantial softboxes made of eight-foot Quasars, which we used instead of 18K HMIs through diffusion in cherry pickers. They weighed slightly less, drew less power, were aesthetically more pleasing, and were fully RGB and dimmable.

Talk about the color workflow.
When setting a look, I like to keep the variables to a minimum. By limiting the LUTs, I feel it helps reduce inconsistency across the workflow. Luckily, I had a fantastic team of people who translated the look that we captured on set down to the final color. DIT Nic Pasquariello and I established a few basic LUTs during testing and tweaked them slightly on set from scene to scene.

Jonathan Freeman

One was slightly cool, another slightly warm, but we made them all denser than the standard Rec. 709. I prefer to have darker LUTs, like rating the ASA of a film stock lower to get more exposure in a negative. This ensures that we were capturing more detail in the shadows, so when we got to the final color, we could “print down” most of the image but still extract information we wanted through power windows.

The workflow was seamless between our on-set look and dailies, which was graded by Rob Bessette from Finish Post in Boston. Rob and Nic were in constant communication, ensuring what we were seeing on set was delivered accurately to the editorial department. They were extremely consistent, which helped us greatly when it came to doing the final color timing with Joe Finley at Chainsaw in LA, with whom I have worked over numerous projects, including Game of Thrones.

Morten has a very strong eye, so for him, having great latitude in the color grade was as important as shooting, which was another reason why a dense capture was critical. One addition to the look that Morten made in post was creating a subtle color adjustment to the cool look we established in the dailies. He added yellow to the highlights, which gave it a gritty, almost aged quality and provided a color contrast to the overall cool tone.