Tag Archives: Netflix

Creating Titles for Netflix’s Avatar: The Last Airbender

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Method Studios collaborated with Netflix on the recently released live-action adaptation of the series, Avatar: The Last Airbender. The series, developed by Albert Kim, follows the adventures of a young Airbender named Aang, and his friends, as they fight to end the Fire Nation’s war and bring balance to the world. Director and executive producer Jabbar Raisani approached Method Studios to create visually striking title cards for each episode — titles that not only nodded to the original animated series, but also lived up to the visuals of the new adaptation.

The team at Method Studios, led by creative director Wes Ebelhar, concepted and pitched several different directions for the title before deciding to move forward with one called Martial Arts.

“We loved the idea of abstracting the movements and ‘bending’ forms of the characters through three-dimensional brushstrokes,” says Ebelhar. “We also wanted to create separate animations to really highlight the differences between the elements of air, earth, fire and water. For example, with ‘Air,’ we created this swirling vortex, while ‘Earth’ was very angular and rigid. The 3D brushstrokes were also a perfect way to incorporate the different elemental glyphs from the opening of the original series.”

Giving life to the different elemental brushstrokes was no easy task, “We created a custom procedural setup in Houdini to generate the brushstrokes, which was vital for giving us the detail and level of control we needed. Once we had that system built, we were able to pipe in our original previz , and they matched the timing and layouts perfectly. The animations were then rendered with Redshift and brought into After Effects for compositing. The compositing ended up being a huge task as well,” explains Ebelhar. “It wasn’t enough to just have different brush animations for each element, we wanted the whole environment to feel unique for each — the Fire title should feel like its hanging above a raging bonfire, while Water should feel submerged with caustics playing across its surface.”

Ebelhar says many people were involved in bringing these titles to life and gives “a special shout out to Johnny Likens, David Derwin, Max Strizich, Alejandro Robledo Mejia, Michael Decaprio and our producer Claire Dorwart.”

Scoop

FutureWorks Uses Next-Gen Color Workflow on Netflix’s Scoop

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Mumbai, India’s FutureWorks created a new pipeline for Netflix India courtroom drama Scoop, taking imaging data all the way from the set to the edit suite. As well as creating a new workflow that boosts efficiency while ensuring quality visuals, FutureWorks also covered the entire picture post process and rental services on Scoop – including dallies, the online, grade, VFX and finish.

Produced by Matchbox Shots, the Hindi-language series was directed by Hansal Mehta, with Pratham Mehta serving as director of photography and Michele Ricossa as lead colorist. The show follows a prominent crime journalist implicated in the murder of a rival reporter.

ScoopFutureWorks began to develop this workflow following its live color grading work on the 2022 film Jersey. Based on the challenges experienced on Jersey and taking advantage of the lull in productions during the pandemic, the studio started to evolve its DIT process to enable the team to work more efficiently. This is particularly important on-set. The aim was to empower the colorist to work with the DP and director while they’re still on set, so that any issues could be flagged before reaching the edit suite.

“We needed a process that would support everybody,” says Rahul Purav, head of color at FutureWorks. “So, we started to think about extending the imaging process beyond just color. We focused on creating an on-set monitoring process, as well as QC.”

“With Rahul, we managed the workflow of the DIT setup prior to the shooting,” explains Ricossa. “I was on set the first two or three days of the shoot to check with the DP and the DIT team on how to work on the dailies and if the look was working as intended. After that, I had a short session at FutureWorks to review some of the footage on the HDR setup. A few weeks later I went on-set one more time to a different location to check if everything was holding up properly look wise. Then, I reviewed the dailies on the private cloud streaming service, giving minor notes to the DP and to the DIT team. Everything went smoothly.”

Ricossa graded Scoop using FilmLight’s colorspace T-log/E-gamut. Only VFX shots were converted in ACES to facilitate the VFX workflow. “The look of the show, and the grade of individual clips later on, was shared with the VFX team thanks to the Baselight’s BLG system. When possible, we had a few back and forths between the DI and the VFX to fix issues and get the best out of it,” explains Ricossa. “The most challenging part of the show was to match some of the stock footage. Baselight’s tools and color management system helped a lot to achieve the grade I had in mind.”

In FutureWorks’ workflow, everything is done remotely. During shooting, the systems record and monitor video signals wirelessly. This means that there’s no distraction or interruption for the cinematographer, but when required, they can talk to FutureWorks’ on-set DIT who has a studio-grade monitor under their control. This helps the directorial team to verify that everything they’re shooting is correct, while they’re still on-set. This includes color, but also extends to other areas like lenses, focus, and exposure levels.

Transcoding is monitored throughout the process to highlight any areas of concern. If there are issues, such as reflections or unwanted props in the shot, these can be dealt with at the time of shooting or flagged for fixing by the VFX team. Everything is captured as an Movie file with embedded metadata so that all of the data from the shoot ends up with editorial. “It’s like there’s a third eye watching you and helping you while you’re shooting and editing,” says Rahul. “As a colorist, I think it’s imperative that everybody in the chain is aware of what’s happening on the shoot, right from the beginning to the very end. This makes communication much more efficient, as notes from the cinematographer can be embedded into the metadata of the particular shot, which is very helpful later on in the process.”

This new process was absolutely key for the shoot on Scoop, which lasted for 100 days. A team of four people tested the system first, with FutureWorks having since streamlined the crew to three — one experienced DIT technician for on-set QC and another two for data management. All team members are very experienced and have trained for a long time so that they can integrate with each other on the shoot, ensuring that all the necessary data is captured and transcoded.

“When you take that experience on location, it’s an asset to the cinematographer, the director, and the production as a whole,” explains Purav. “Throughout the shoot on Scoop, the director and cinematographer continually came over to verify shots on the imaging cart, demonstrating that our new pipeline is already proving to be useful for the directorial team.”

The revamped pipeline — which had to meet the specifications required by Netflix productions — includes Livegrade Studio, Codex and Silverstack for transcoding, and FilmLight Daylight for rendering dailies. One of the key challenges in implementing the new workflow was understanding the protocols of each camera. If certain protocols didn’t work with the new system, the team had to find different ways to sync the data. FutureWorks also collaborated closely with manufacturers and vendors, including Sony and Codex, to troubleshoot any problems.

“While we had a few teething problems initially, we were able to work them out within a couple of days, and it was smooth sailing from that point on,” says Purav.

Since its successful debut on Scoop, FutureWorks has rolled out the new imaging process on several other projects.

 

Emmys: Wednesday‘s VFX Supervisor and Producer

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The Netflix series Wednesday is a modern take on the class TV show, The Addams Family. It stars Jenna Ortega and Wednesday Addams, who while attending Nevermore Academy, attempts to master her emerging psychic ability, stop a killing spree and solve the mystery that embroiled her parents 25 years ago. Setting the series’ tone, the first four episodes were directed by filmmaker Tim Burton.

Wednesday

Tom Turnbull

Wednesday was nominated for 12 Emmy Awards, including one for Burton for direction and one for visual effects. VFX supervisor Tom Turnbull and VFX producer Kent Johnson were just two of the team who have been recognized for their work. We spoke to them about the show and its visual effects.

How many shots did each episode have, typically? 
Kent Johnson: They ranged, per episode, from as many as 311 to as little as 97 with an average of 184 shots per episode.

Tom Turnbull: Yes. Roughly 300 shots per episode, which is not super high, but working within a budget and schedule we deliberately focused our resources on shots that count rather than shot count. If a shot did not move the story forward, support the characters or provide emotional impact we did not do it.

What are some of the key VFX in the series?
Turnbull: Thing was the effect that was most important and that most interested me going in. I knew, done right, Thing would be incredibly popular and critical to the character of Wednesday. He needed to be as perfect as we could make him.

Kent Johnson

Nevermore Academy was also a critical, only partially existing as a location, it needed to be created digitally such that is would be accepted as fully real. The creature work, of course, was key and very tricky to pull off on a television budget and schedule.   

Johnson: I agree. The most prominent VFX in the series was likely Thing, the disembodied hand who was usually a 2D effect removing the actor but often a completely 3D CG character. Other effects include set extensions of a castle in the Carpathian mountains of Romania to make it into Nevermore Academy, the CG creatures Hyde Monster, Enid Werewolf, piranhas, Kent the siren/merman and spectacular particle effects in the appearance and destruction of the villain Crackstone.

Did you use virtual production or real-time VFX?
Turnbull: We did not entertain real-time VFX on the show. There was a strong feeling that we needed to ground the look of the show in real-world locations and filmmaking, and that virtual production would not be in keeping with our aesthetic. We did consider virtual production for some driving sequences, but logistically during the height of the pandemic, it was very difficult to orchestrate from Romania. We did use real-time rendering for Nevermore previs with Unreal, allowing us to explore its layout and design and to quickly design shots.

How many different vendors do you use, and what is the turnaround time like? Is it like a traditional television schedule or do you have more time?
Turnbull: There were four main vendors who worked on the complex hero effects and about six or seven secondary vendors who provided support. One of the great things about working with the Netflix model of releasing an entire season on one day is that it allows time to really work the material for early episodes. There is less pressure on hitting a date and some flexibility of dropping in upgraded effects after the mix and color are complete.

Episodes 101 and 102 effectively had eight months to complete, which you would never get on a traditional TV schedule.  This pays dividends in developing looks and procedures that can be applied to later episodes that have a much shorter delivery.   I hope never to see a TV schedule again.  The streaming model provides better creative opportunities.

Johnson: In the end, we relied on 11 different VFX houses. The delivery schedule varied wildly. Some of the more complex sequences took as much as five months from turnover to final delivery while simpler effects were knocked out in days or weeks. Although the turnovers and deliveries were highly fluid, we gave each episode a VFX production schedule of about 100 days in our planning of post.

What about the pipeline? Can you describe it?
Turnbull: On the production side we managed our workflow with Filmmaker databases and spreadsheets. We took the approach that we needed to provide post with as much data and reference as possible, scanning sets, performers and props along with a vast number of digital stills. Managing that much data is a task unto itself. During post we kept a shadow edit on Resolve to manage and assess shot work in context.

Production shot on an ARRI Alexa LF with Signature primes.

Johnson: When we had a locked edit, the editorial department would provide the vendor a QuickTime of the VFX shots in context as a reference. They would then order EXRs of the relevant frames plus 24 frame handles from the post facility using an automated process. The EXRs are posted to the specific vendor’s Aspera accounts for them to download. When the visual effects are approved as final by all of the stakeholders, the final EXRs are then sent from the vendors to the colorist for final grading.

What were the biggest challenges this season? 
Turnbull: To me, the biggest challenge of the season was the sheer volume and variety of the VFX work required. I had worked with Miles and Al before and was familiar with the density and scope of what they put down on the page. It was common to get to page 10 of a script and already be well over what would be considered normal for episodic, both for plot and visual effects. There was no singular effect that I did not have confidence in delivering, it was the number of different effects necessary to tell the story.

There were very few days where VFX was not on-set doing some kind of major effect. It made for a very high-energy, dynamic filming situation, which fortunately, I enjoy. We put a lot of effort into managing the volume of work and in collaboration with Tim and the showrunners, Miles and Al, managed to refine it to its essence. If we had not done that we would have been significantly over budget and the show would have suffered for it.  Less is more as they say.

Johnson: Nevermore Academy was a complex CG asset that required a great deal of time to design, redesign, adapt, model and tweak from shot to shot. The 3D CG Hyde monster was a new creature from the mind of Tim Burton. It required a few different concept artists approaching it from different artistic sensibilities to land on Tim’s vision and then a great deal of time to make such an outlandish creature appear photoreal in both appearance and movement.

 

What were the tools that you used, and why did you choose them for this project? 
Johnson: As the VFX producer, the tools that I personally used were Adobe Acrobat for scripts, Adobe Photoshop to sketch on and annotate tech scout stills, Microsoft Excel and FileMaker Pro for budgeting, DaVinci Resolve to edit Thing’s rehearsals and Adobe’s Frame.io to view previsualizations of virtual drone shots around Nevermore Academy. I’m very pleased that Tim Burton chose to use a physical miniature of the Addams Family house for a flashback where Wednesday buries her deceased pet scorpion in the family’s pet cemetery. Our vendors used Nuke, Maya, ZBrush, Houdini, Adobe After Effects and other software tools.

What was it about this particular episode that made it Emmy consideration worthy? 
Turnbull: Variety. Episode 108 has a bit of everything in it, Thing, Nevermore, Hyde and Enid Werewolf, along with a host of new effects surrounding Crackstone’s incarnation and demise. It also features complex creature work, including transformations, much more than any of the previous episodes.

We were also under considerable time pressure to wrap principal photography, and it was a minor miracle that we managed to get it in the can. A lot of the visual effects work was, as a result, created entirely in post. No one within the Academy voting membership will ever know or appreciate the team effort that went into that, but I do. The biggest achievements are often the ones that are not noticeable.

Johnson: The episode submitted was the Season 1 finale. With almost 300 shots, it showcased all the best VFX of Wednesday, including Thing, Nevermore Academy, the fight between two fully CG creatures of the Hyde Monster and Enid Werewolf. The battle between Wednesday and her nemesis, the pilgrim Crackstone, brought back from the dead and ultimately destroyed with complex dynamic particle effects and finally the poetic defeat of Christina Ricci’s character by a swarm of animated bees controlled by telekinesis.

Emmy-Nominated Director Paris Barclay on The Jeffrey Dahmer Story

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By Iain Blair

Paris Barclay is one of television’s most successful and honored directors. A two-time Emmy Award winner, he’s directed nearly 200 episodes of television, including such series as The West Wing, ER, Glee, CSI, The Shield, Scandal and NYPD Blue. He received his ninth Emmy nomination for an episode of the Netflix show Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story. 

Paris Barclay

The 10-part true crime series, created by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, dramatizes the life and death of notorious serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer (Evan Peters). It received six Emmy nominations. Barclay’s nod was for Episode 6, “Silenced.”

I recently spoke with Barclay about making the harrowing show, the challenges, his love of post and the importance of sound.

What were the challenges of directing your episodes — 6 and 10 — and how did you prepare?
I got the scripts a couple of weeks before I had to start official preparation, so I was able to ruminate on it and imagine it. What I kept coming back to was music — not the music that would play on the show but the whole thing as a kind of musical system. That was my private touchstone. I didn’t really express that to everyone else, but I’m also a composer, and I think of things in terms of beats, silences and crescendos, and the blessing of different instruments. So I tried to sort of play it like I’d play a score that I loved. That was the over-arching design.

Then we got technical, and there was a period of thousands and thousands of meetings. What would the slice of meat look like that appears in the final scenes? That was probably seven meetings just for that. How would we do Tony’s story, and would it be different in terms of the style we were doing for the rest of the show? How would we be able to bring Evan to that period and also a brighter mood than we see with him in the past? So in meetings with Ryan and the writers and producers we gradually hashed out all of these things, bit by bit. And then we changed them, constantly, because that’s the way it goes.

Talk about working with your DP John O’Connor.
He was my DP on both episodes, and we began working on the template that had been established on the first episode by director Carl Franklin and DP Jason McCormick. Jason was sort of our visual stylist for the whole series, and working with Ryan he conceived how the show would look. He left the rule book — basically, one page of different visual rules we had to adhere to, which we then had to deviate from. It was great to have the rule book, and we used it like I used the music. It became something that we blocked in and out depending on the scene and the circumstances.

The show has a great look. What cameras and lenses did you shoot on?
We shot on the Sony Venice, and we used the Blackwing 7 series of lenses created by Bradford Young and others that have that very particular patina and have that bokeh and certain fall-off and glow. And, of course, those lenses were undoubtedly tweaked by Jason to make sure they were exactly what we wanted. I believe we used two sets of the Blackwing 7 series of lenses, one that was a little bit more traditional in the Blackwing style, and one that was a little bit moiré distorted that we used in certain moments.

Tell us about the shoot.
We shot it all here in LA at Raleigh Studios, and the shooting schedule depended on various factors. So while I was shooting Episode 6, we were also cleaning up parts of Episode 1 and other episodes, so the schedule went a bit longer than usual.

I shot for about 18 days on Episode 6, and Episode 10 was a bit more efficient, shooting for about 14 days. They were definitely longer than normal TV as we shot cinematically, and it takes extra time to do all the setups and get the beautiful look we were hoping for. I think we did get the look we wanted.

Did you start integrating post during the shoot?
Oh yeah. I was super-fortunate to have Taylor Joy Mason as my editor. She was brilliant and came up with lots of great ideas. We were on the phone a lot about the things I was delivering, and she was trying things that were somewhat experimental and not necessarily in the traditional style of the show, which opened it up.

For instance, like the flutter-cutting between Dahmer and Tony when we go back to him telling his parents he met a good friend, and then we go back to the club. That was a real editorial collaboration from the get-go. Then there was the strobe lighting that made it intermittent and allowed us to go back and forth between experiences. Taylor and I were talking all along, and also talking about sound, as it plays such a critical role in this. We recorded sound everywhere, but then it was a matter of, which scenes are we really going to drop the sound out of?

We didn’t plan to use sound everywhere, but at least we had it – and thank God we did as some of the scenes that had been scripted as silent actually ended up with dialogue in them, and some of the scenes that had dialogue ended up without it. So it was a constant back and forth process, which lasted all the way through to the final mix.

How involved were you in all the post and who was on the team?
I was already involved in another Ryan Murphy series, The Watchmen, so I had Alexis Martin Woodall, president of Ryan Murphy Productions who’s brilliant in post, and she’s a former post supervisor, and is our secret weapon.

Then there’s Regis Kimble, who’s the post supervising editor, and he cut some of the episodes and also worked closely with all the editors to make sure the tone and style and look were consistent. Not every show has this, but having Regis was a godsend.

Then Todd Nenninger, a producer and post supervisor, was doing everything from dealing with the editors and the colorist to the VFX houses and locking in the sound on a day-to-day basis, and we’ve worked together on every Ryan show I’ve done going back to Glee. And he works closely with Scott James, the co-producer. They’re the people who actually executed my dreams on the stage and traveled this thing from start to finish, and I trust them completely.

I was already involved in another Ryan Murphy series, The Watchmen, so I had Alexis Martin Woodall, president of Ryan Murphy Productions, who’s brilliant in post. She’s a former post supervisor and our secret weapon. On some shows, I worry about post, but this team always makes things better. And directing this was very interesting from a post perspective, because Episode 6 starts with a very different look. It’s generally a brighter, sunnier look, and even the nights are not quite as dark and quite as yellow, because we’re living in Tony Hughes’ world. So the club scenes are more alive and have more vibrant colors. But then, as Dahmer intrudes into this world, we began to come back to some of the visual vocabulary, color and style that you associated with him before.

So when he considers crushing the pillows and trying to drug Tony, you see it go back to the style you’ve gotten used to. He’s center-punched in the middle of the frame in very tight focus, and the colors of yellow and despair that we’ve associated with him come back. And all that ends up with the final scene where we’re surrounded in the darkness of his apartment by dank yellows, until finally he’s enclosed completely in black. And the orchestra’s playing the cello line intermittently though the entire episode, and that cello line keeps getting stronger and stronger until at the end when the cello becomes a bass, and the sound drops out of the bottom. So all that’s part of the mix of that particular episode.

What was involved in terms of VFX?
There were very few visual effects in Episode 6. The main ones were for the baby in the first scene, to keep it animated and alive, as some of the baby footage wasn’t of a real baby. We also did some production and period clean-up. This was done by Fuse FX.

For Episode 10, where we see Dahmer being killed in prison, we used a lot of VFX to make it all as vivid as we needed. We had to change his face a bit, add blood and sometimes detract blood, so all that was a VFX surgery and redo to make sure it was all balanced and worked the way we wanted.

What about the DI?
Doug Delaney at Picture Shop was our final colorist, and he did all 10 episodes in the series. He’s brilliant. For instance, he brought in some of the brighter tones that lifted Tony Hughes’ world and all the optimism and took it back to Dahmer’s yellow, dark world in the end.

You’ve directed so many great shows. How do you rate this experience?
It was the most challenging because of the subject matter and my personal feelings about Dahmer, and the complexities of dealing with deaf actors, and also the sound issues.

The sound team from Formosa Group handled the sound mix, and we had a great team — supervising sound editor Gary Megregian, and re-recording mixers Laura Wiest, Jamie Hardt and Joe Barnett. This was really a sound show, and that made it more complicated than Glee with all the music. So you ask, exactly when do you lose the sound, and what replaces it? What about creating the sound of what a deaf person might hear? They created this roar that had a feel and flavor to it, that wasn’t quite a plane or air, that had to be imagined by people, and they did a terrific job.

Industry insider Iain Blair has been interviewing the biggest directors in Hollywood and around the world for years. He is a regular contributor to Variety and has written for such outlets as Reuters, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.

Emmys: The Umbrella Academy VFX Supervisor Everett Burrell

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Netflix’s The Umbrella Academy, which is streaming all three seasons on Netflix, features a ton of visual effects, mostly overt. In fact, the series and its VFX supervisor Everett Burrell have gotten three Emmy nominations for its visual effects since the show’s inception, including this year.

Everett Burrell

Burrell, who has six noms and one Emmy win under his belt (for makeup on Babylon 5), took some time out to answer a few questions about the show. Let’s find out more…

You’ve been on the show since the beginning. How have the visual effects evolved during that time — from a creative and technical standpoint? 
Yes, I have been with the The Umbrella Academy team since the beginning. We started prep on Season 1 in October of 2017. I am blown away that it has been six years of truly the best creative experience of my career.

The visual effects have really gone through some big changes. We keep trying to top ourselves every season. Bigger and more complicated visual effects, more superpowers, Pogo (created by Weta VFX) has changed every season, tons of new complicated effects simulations and huge new environments.

Are you using virtual production or real-time VFX these days?
We do not use any virtual production tools or any game engine renders. We are a very traditional VFX pipeline.

How many shots does each episode have, typically?
On average we are around 150 to 200 shots per episode.

How many different vendors do you use, and what is the turnaround time like? Is it like a traditional television schedule (short!), or do you have more time?
We use between eight and 10 visual effects companies around the world. It takes us 18 months to prep, shoot and finish all the post for each season. We have a much better schedule then a network TV show.

What about the pipeline?
We use ShotGrid to track all the visual effect shots and assets in the show. We collect over 400GB of data, HDRI, witness cameras and reference stills for each season. It’s a huge task to keep organized and get ready to go out to each VFX vendor.

What were the biggest challenges this season?
The new Pogo in this timeline was very complicated. The Kugleblitz required a ton of revisions before we were all happy with it. The Universe Machine in the final episode took a lot of concept art and design work. All this was very complicated work during the height of COVID and a dealing with a remote workflow.

Can you name the software used to create Pogo?
Maya is the main software but a lot of special custom software tools designed by Weta FX.

What was it about this particular episode that made it Emmy consideration worthy?
I think new Pogo designs, the Harlan and Viktor Power up moments at the drive in. Plus, all the Kugleblitz moments of the world being slowly atomized.

What haven’t I asked that’s important?
I think we are very fortunate to have built a really amazing team over the years. Working so closely with all the VFX companies has created a bond of trust and a wonderful creative partnership.

BlueBolt’s VFX for Finale of Netflix’s The Last Kingdom

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London’s BlueBolt recently completed work on Seven Kings Must Die, the feature-length, final chapter of Netflix’ historical drama The Last Kingdom. As the sole VFX studio, BlueBolt had also created visual effects for all five previous seasons.

BlueBolt delivered over 3,500 VFX shots over the past eight years, working in close collaboration with producers Carnival Films and director Edward Bazalgette to help create the world of Dark Ages 10th century Britain, where The Last Kingdom is set. The series tells the story of protagonist Uhtred of Bebbanburg and is based on the novels of Bernard Cornwell’s “The Saxon Stories.”

Led by VFX supervisor Richard Frazer, who also supervised the three preceding series of The Last Kingdom, BlueBolt created and choreographed complex CG battle scenes and army formations, CG horses and historically accurate CG ships. Additionally, BlueBolt created elaborate environments, including turning Budapest into ancient Britain, recreating Northumberland’s Bebbanburg Castle, and bringing to life scenes from Valhalla at the climax of the film.

“As part of the climax for Seven Kings Must Die, BlueBolt undertook one of the biggest battle scenes we’ve ever done for the series,” explains Frazer. “This involved many different armies with distinct uniforms that needed to register when seen in wide aerial shots. The opposing sides were crushed together in various shield-wall formations, so we used our in-house motion capture suits to do bespoke body tracking for their actions, but it still stretched the capabilities of our crowd simulation software, Golaem. The CG characters would also be very close to camera, but our library of assets – built up over the course of the series — is now so lifelike and our libraries of motion capture data so extensive that we used them right alongside our real actors.”

In addition to its proprietary tools, Blue Bolt called on Foundry Nuke and Maya.

Seven Kings Must Die and all five seasons of The Last Kingdom are streaming on Netflix.

 

 

Composer Adam Blau on Scoring Netflix’s Dead to Me

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Adam Blau is a composer and songwriter whose work spans film, television, theatrical productions and podcasts. As the composer for Netflix’s Dead to Me, created by Liz Feldman, he created a musical palette that infuses the show’s offbeat mystery with suspense and emotion.

Dead to Me

Adam Blau

“Composing music to picture is an art that combines several different disciplines that I’ve been drawn to for most of my life,” he says.

We reached out to Blau, whose credits also include the FX show You’re the Worst and the IFC sitcom Brockmire, to discuss his work on Dead to Me, a Netflix series that is streaming its final season and stars Christina Applegate, Linda Cardellini and James Marsden.

Before we jump into your work on Dead to Me, let’s talk about what the role of composer means.
First and foremost, it’s about writing music that’s unique to a given project, helping to shape the tone and define the musical world in which the characters and action exist. This is almost always more than just a matter of writing a few concept pieces of music (though doing so can be helpful) — as a media composer I work with producers and directors to try to determine their view of what the score needs to accomplish, even if they don’t initially have a clear musical concept.

It’s a question, too, of figuring out not just how a score will sound, but how the music should be placed within a scene — How does it sit around a punchline or a particular bit of action? At what point will the music reveal a particular emotion or plot point?

What about your experience on Dead to Me?
Working on Dead to Me, our showrunner Liz Feldman always had a very clear view of what the music needs to evoke. Even if our conversations weren’t in musical terms exactly, part of my job as composer was listen when Liz talked about a scene and provide her artistic vision a musical voice.

There is also a significant technical aspect to the job, particularly when syncing music and action in a given scene. There’s a surprising amount of math involved. For example, if I’m working on a scene and I get a new cut that shifts the internal timings, it’s important go through and adjust tempos so the synced moments land where they’re supposed to… all while keeping things sounding musical.

And of course, in today’s world, it’s vital to wear a number of hats as a composer: creating mockups, mixing, orchestrating and composing in a number of styles all within a timeframe that is usually very compressed, particularly when working on a television schedule. It’s this variety and combination of disciplines that I love so much when working on a project.

What is your process when starting a job?
While every project is different and every collaborator has their own way of working, I find that it’s always ideal to get as much insight as possible into a show creator’s vision — communication is key, and I try to get as much time with a showrunner or director as I can because these initial conversations can provide overarching insight into the tone of a project.

I’ll read scripts, look at any concept art and listen to any reference tracks that might give an indication of the musical vibe we’re looking for. While it’s sometimes a divisive topic, I find it’s often quite helpful to have a temp music track of scores cut in from other projects, particularly when working on a tight television schedule. Even if the temp track doesn’t exactly fit the bill, it’s usually a helpful starting point for conversations surrounding music — rather than throwing darts blindly, we’re working off a common reference that can provide a decent shortcut to the best end result.

And for Dead to Me?
On Dead to Me I had done a couple demo tracks for some scenes to help get the job, so that thankfully gave me a good sense of the direction we were going in. I knew Liz liked those tracks, so I was able to extrapolate from there and work with her and the rest of the production team to flesh out the musical landscape of the show — with all its mysterious twists and turns, as well as letting the more emotional moments blossom from those early seeds we planted in the first couple of episodes.

How do you prefer to work with a showrunner?
As I mentioned before, I am a fan of getting as much information as early as I can. On some projects, the creators want to keep early edits close to the chest, only releasing cuts to the composer once picture is locked, or close to it — but I find that if I can see the episodes as they evolve, it can be very informative in terms of figuring out the musical flow not just within an episode, but throughout a whole season overall.

When working on Dead to Me, I was usually able to read the script by the time an episode got to me and had seen an early cut or two. Once we fell into a routine on the show, the editors and directors will have temped the episode with existing music, sometimes from other projects but ideally from my own catalog.

We’d meet with showrunner Liz, music supervisor Tricia Halloran, music editor Amber Funk and the stellar editorial team on the show, and we’d figure out exactly what the music needed to accomplish across the episode, both on a macro and micro level. Sometimes these would be longer discussions, but by the third season, it really did evolve into a shorthand — the feel of the show became so clear in our heads that we’d sometimes watch a clip and all say “yep” or “I know what to do,” and leave it at that.

I’ll usually average about a week to work on each episode of Dead to Me. If the schedule allowed, sometimes I’d take a bit more time, and if we were in a rare crunch, I’d work more frantically over a couple days, but we always made sure the music got the time it needed to make us all happy. Over that week, I’d send over demo cues to the cutting room, revise as needed, then mix, stem out the music cues, and send them over to the dub stage to be integrated with the rest of the sound in the show.

Are they typically open to any and all suggestions?
During productions, I usually have a discussion with the showrunner to flag any unconventional on-screen music moments that need addressing. In Dead to Me, we had an on-screen kids’ show choir that I did the vocal arrangements for, and I’d work with the team to produce the recording sessions. This type of musical moment requires a fair bit of advance work, so I try to determine these as early as I can.

On other shows I’ve composed for, like Stephen Falk’s You’re the Worst, there were a large number of in-show songs that required not only composing but teaching music to the actors, recording them ahead of time, and making sure all went smoothly on shoot days.

It’s definitely different from composing a score in my studio, but coming from the world of theater, working in person with performers on songs is something I really enjoy doing, and it adds to the variety of the job.

Do you write based on project – spot, game, film, TV — or do you just write?
While I do enjoy just writing music for myself, music for television and film scoring projects are by definition a bit more collaborative and therefore unique to each project. The music provides the aural identity of the show’s world, and it’s important as a composer to key into what that world is for each project.

For example, some directors/producers, like Stephen Falk, get into the specifics of the instruments and musical styles, weaving music into the show’s environment through in-show songs, musical punchlines and theme episodes.

On Dead to Me, it was important to Liz Feldman that we musically strike the balance between playful mystery, emotion, and comedy to create a sonic template for the show. It became clear early on that for a show as incredibly funny as Dead to Me, we needed to avoid any overt “comedy music” around the action.

Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini are both so magnetically funny themselves that playing a traditional comedic score ended up detracting from the humor between them. Instead, Liz quickly set a tone in which we let the score play up the drama and mystery side of things, letting it heighten the dramatic stakes so that the fantastic chemistry between the two leads could shine through amidst a backdrop of tension.

If you weren’t doing this, what would you be doing instead?
Great question! It’s hard for me to imagine a life outside of the musical world, so in all likelihood I’d still end up doing something in music — maybe music-directing theatrical productions, as I have always been passionate about live theater.

I love working on big, social, collaborative projects with lots of variation and moving pieces, so theater seems like a good fit and something I’ve enjoyed doing in the past.

I also enjoy tinkering — I used the pandemic lockdown to teach myself to solder and learn a bit more about electronics, even making some basic synth components, so maybe I’d do something in that field, too. I’m also puzzle- and crossword-obsessed, so maybe I’d end up dedicating my time to something in that world. Heck, maybe I still will!

Did you come from a musical family?
That’s a big yes. My mother, Nancy, is a piano teacher who worked out of our house, so my background soundtrack growing up was nonstop piano music — some of those pieces are just embedded in my ears. I learned so much from my mom, not just the technical aspects of playing the piano, but also about how much fun music can be.

Our house was the place where friends would come over for big singalongs around the piano. People pulled out all kinds of instruments to sing everything from old show tunes to ‘80s pop hits and everything in between. It’s a mentality I carry through to this day, and it’s not uncommon for my family and I to still get a group of friends together to call out songs and sing whatever’s on our minds, like live-action karaoke.

My stepfather, Herb Deutsch, is another musical part of my family. Herb was the co-inventor of the Moog synthesizer along with Bob Moog, among other things. He’s the one credited with the idea of putting an actual keyboard on the synthesizer. Herb, along with his music and synths, has been a significant presence in my life.

I’ve also enjoyed collaborating on musical projects with my brother Daniel Rogge, and we’ve even written a stage musical together that had a brief run in New York. I love getting to create music with the people I love, so I’m grateful for these opportunities, and I’m enjoying seeing my own young kids be a joyful part of it as well.

What are your favorite instruments to write with?
While I don’t necessarily have a single instrument I like to write with, I often gravitate toward the piano since it’s my primary instrument and the one I’m most comfortable playing. Being surrounded by computers and synths all day long, I find it refreshing to detach and just let the music be music at the piano, independent of picture, focusing on creating the sound by itself and then bringing it back to my computer to record after the fact.

That said, I do like to play around with new sound libraries on my computer, and I try to incorporate new and unique elements into each score I do. I took advantage of some of Spitfire Audio’s boutique string libraries for Dead to Me, giving the more suspenseful parts a hushed, mysterious air. For You’re the Worst, I spent a fair amount of time coming up with unique synth patches, often improvising on a modular synth for hours and chopping the recordings up into pieces to be integrated into the score.

I’ve learned over the years that I can think best when I’m physically in motion — not exactly ideal for someone sitting in a studio chair for hours on end — and so I find that it can be a huge benefit to go on a long walk with a voice recorder and just sing or hum parts that I’ll later flesh out into proper songs or score cues. I probably have hours and hours of these voice recordings, which is only really an issue when I accidentally switch them on in my car and my family has to suffer through bizarre mumblings of half melodies. But I think they’re pretty much used to it by now.

My Year of Dicks

Can you name some other recent projects?
I recently enjoyed scoring an incredibly fun alternative animation project by Sara Gunnarsdottir and Pamela Ribon with the very colorfully named film My Year of Dicks. The film is a coming-of-age comedy that takes place in the ‘90s, and it incorporates a wide variety of animation styles and musical genres. It’s a touching, funny and innovative project that’s been winning all kinds of awards on the festival circuit.

I also recently wrote music for a Stephen Colbert-/Funny or Die-produced comedy special for Comic Relief on CBS called Pickled. It involved writing some sports-/Olympics-style orchestral pieces for a very silly celebrity tournament, so I got to draw on some of the work I did arranging music for films like We Are Marshall, The Express and The Longshots as well as from my experience composing music for the baseball comedy Brockmire.

I have an audio drama project I’m scoring that’s in the works from a major studio. It has yet to be officially announced, but I’m excited for people to listen sometime in the coming year.

Composer Johannes Ringen on Scoring Netflix Film Troll

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Norwegian-born film composer Johannes Ringen is known for his eclectic approach to music. His recent work includes an action-packed score for Netflix’s original film Troll, dark ominous music for the disaster movie The Quake and a symphonic score for the quirky Viking comedy show Norsemen on Netflix.

Troll

Johannes Ringen

Since making the move to Los Angeles, Ringen has worked on a number of major film franchises, contributing music and/or arrangements to Marvel’s Avengers: Age of Ultron, Furious 7 and The Fate of the Furious, as well as TV shows such as MacGyver and Hawaii Five-0.

He is a graduate of the film scoring program at the University of Southern California. He says that being a film composer is all about serving the movie by telling stories through music. “I talk to the director about what we are trying to achieve scene by scene, as well as for the movie as a whole. The score can have quite a few functions, and you’d be surprised how little time we spend on discussing the music itself compared to moods, atmospheres and characters. It’s all about storytelling.”

We reached out to Ringen to talk about his process and creating music for Troll — one of Netflix’s most popular non-English films of all time. It’s a story about an explosion in the Norwegian mountains that awakens an ancient troll, and officials appoint a paleontologist to stop it from wreaking deadly havoc.

What is your process? How do you begin on a project?
I begin with finding the right ingredients for the project. Sometimes it’s very obvious — like when an orchestral score is called for. Other times, figuring out the instrumentation and style is half the job. I love to tinker with sounds, and that’s the part of the process I find the most inspiring and fun. I always try to incorporate some unusual instruments to give the score some sort of edge and uniqueness.

What about for Troll?
On Troll, we recorded Hardanger fiddle, nyckelharpa, langeleik — all traditional Nordic instruments to give the score some Nordic color.

Can you walk us through your workflow?
My preferred way is to start early and get as many ideas out as possible. Film is a collaborative process, and it doesn’t matter how good you think your ideas are if no one else on the team agrees. So I spend time making sure that I’m on the right track by reading the script and discussing and testing material with the director.

I try to be ahead of the game by making a bank of solid material that the director is on board with and that I feed the picture editors while they are cutting. Once they put temp music (placeholder music) in, there is no way back — it will color the final product. Therefore, it’s a huge advantage if they have a decent amount of original music from me to work with. I find that half the battle is won right there. After that, the hard work begins — solving all the puzzles.

How would you describe the sound of the Troll soundtrack?
I would describe it as a modern, orchestral, adventurous action score with Scandinavian colors!

What direction were you given on the score for Troll?
The film’s director, Roar Uthaug, wanted a big, modern orchestral score at the core. So the challenge was finding out how we could give it some Scandinavian colors. We recorded quite a few Nordic instruments (Hardanger fiddle, nyckelharpa, langeleik, as I mentioned earlier).
We also thought it would be fun to do a little twist on “In the Hall of the Mountain King” by Edvard Grieg. The Mountain King is a troll king in Henrik Ibsen’s play “Peer Gynt.” We thought it would be fun to tap into this historical piece of music that everyone knows, but do it without being too “on the nose.” There are quite a few bits and pieces and hints to that piece throughout the movie, but it’s quite subtle before it reveals itself in all its glory toward the end of the film.

Troll is one of Netflix’s most popular non-English films of all time. What was it about the project that made it so appealing to audiences?
It’s fair to say that Troll’s success went beyond everyone’s expectations. I’ve always been surprised that so many people around the world are familiar with trolls from Scandinavian folklore, so I was not surprised that there would be people watching. But reaching the most popular non-English film of all time on Netflix — that’s much more than anyone can hope for.

Now for some more general questions…

Do you write based on project – spot, game, film, TV — or do you just write?
I approach it the same way, basically, but every medium has some specific considerations I factor in. For instance, I’m always careful on relying too much on deep bass sounds when writing for TV, since the vast majority of the audience will be watching on TVs that don’t reproduce bass frequencies that well.

For games, a lot of the music is delivered in layers and arranged on the spot by the game engine based on the action on the screen. That means I don’t have to tailor the music to the picture as closely as, for instance, an action movie. On the other hand, all the layers have to work when played in isolation — something I don’t even think about when scoring a movie.

If you weren’t doing this, what would you be doing instead?
I honestly find it hard to imagine doing anything else. I come from a family with several generations of teachers on both sides, so I did consider being a teacher at some point, though.

So your family wasn’t musical?
We had a piano at home, but no one in my family is a professional musician. I took piano lessons, and I remember very vividly playing piano with my grandad. I still remember those pieces to this day.

DP Chat: Firefly Lane’s Vincent De Paula on Tackling Multiple Decades

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By Randi Altman

Based on the best-selling novel by Kristin Hannah, Netflix’s Firefly Lane follows two best friends, Kate and Tully, over the course of three decades. The series is now streaming its second season.

Vincent De Paula

Vincent De Paula

DP Vincent De Paula, CSC — who has extensive feature and television credits — has been on the show since its inception, working with showrunner Maggie Friedman to get the right look for the many time frames the show depicts.

You were the sole DP on Season 1 and Season 2. How early did you get involved, and how did that help?
I met with showrunner Maggie Friedman early on, when there was just one pilot script. We had a great meeting. We clicked right away while talking about the look and style I had in mind for the show.

I thought it was a fascinating story about friendship with American culture and history as our canvas. We could cover many topics as the background of our story and emphasize how things have changed for women regarding equality and rights from the ‘70s to today.

I also connected with this story a lot; I need to have a connection with the stories I am working on. I remember growing up in Spain with my best friend and how everything back then was about creating adventures, exploring life, dreaming about the future. All these memories and experiences were a key factor in how I saw this story from a teenager’s perspective.

When I was hired for the job, some of the real locations had already been chosen, so sadly, I didn’t have much input on those, and some have proven to be quite challenging logistically. But I had enough time to develop the look and style I had in mind.

What were the challenges (or benefits) of being the only DP?
Because I was the only cinematographer on the show, I didn’t really have time to prepare episodes with the upcoming directors or scout locations properly, but we tackled this show as a long feature film, with a specific look that would change between all the different timelines. And having just the one voice behind the camera allows for a very unified and consistent flow throughout the episodes.

Did anything change significantly from S1 to S2?
I decided to change lenses for Season 2. We had Cooke S4s in Season 1, and we moved to Panavision Panaspeeds this season. These weren’t available for us when we started filming last season. I used Panaspeeds while on the TV series Maid, and they have become one of my favorite lenses. I have used Panavision Primos extensively in my career when shooting with spherical lenses, but they are very popular and weren’t available for us last season.

Vincent De Paula

Vincent De Paula

The Panaspeed spherical primes are a high-speed, large-format companion to 35mm-format spherical Primo optics.

We had created a style and look in Season 1 through lighting, framing and camera movement that we carried on this season. Season 2 has some very strong dramatic moments, and we introduced new plots that required their own style of shooting. We also briefly introduced the 1990s as another timeline on the show that had its own style.

One of the main differences is that we built more sets this season instead of relying so much on location shooting, which we did in Season 1. Our 1970s interiors, the 1980s apartment in Seattle, and the 1980s news station were built on stages in Vancouver, BC.

When it comes to period stories, smoke/haze also plays a part, especially in the 1970s and 1980s. Unfortunately, COVID and other factors prohibited us from using as much haze or smoke as we wanted.

Can you give more detail about the looks you established for each time period?
I wanted the different decades to have distinctive looks, although we did not want the different periods to be too radically different. Of course, when filming a period drama, everyone interprets how these different decades should look based on history, culture, films, photographs and experiences. But I wanted to approach these different looks from an emotional and character perspective rather than just a period-accurate perspective. Transitions also play a huge part in our visual vocabulary, especially when transitioning between different periods, so we are always trying to find interesting ways to create these.

The core of our main story lives in the 1970s, 1980s and early 2000s.

The 1970s has the warmest look in the whole series. It is our happy and warm period. This is a time when our girls get to know each other and explore youth together. In the ‘70s, yellows and greens are very prominent, with milky blacks suggesting a pastel feel.

For the characters, it should be about exploration, hope, adventure, youth, friendship and learning, creating an environment that should generally feel safe and warm. It should be the time that the girls would always look back to, their special moment, dreaming about an amazing life ahead of them, before they would grow to experience the reality of life.

To help achieve this overall tone for the period, I had stockings in the lenses and an 81EF filter at all times. There was almost always a hard and warm light coming in through the windows. As both characters have very different personalities, I also wanted a different approach for our camera movement and framing for this period. I introduced a more dynamic feeling to young Tully’s character (played by Ali Skovbye), contrasting with a more still and isolated feeling to that of young Kate (played by Roan Curtis). It was more obvious earlier in Season 1, and as her relationship with Tully matures, they will share the frame more.

What about the ‘80s?
The 1980s have a deeper contrast with a more saturated palette since the ‘80s had more vivid colors and a particular look when it comes to clothing and hairstyle. Therefore, I introduced a different filtration for the 1980s using Schneider Classic Soft filters of different strengths.

At this point, our characters are experiencing the real world, first jobs, relationships, etc. Everyone at this age has a higher energy that should also be part of this style, so the camera movement can get even more dynamic. Here we are not so much observers of two girls growing up together as we are participants, so I feel we have now moved in closer to our characters. The use of wider focal lengths closer to our subjects helped achieve that feeling. We want to feel like we are there with them, helping them transition into adulthood and the real world.

Instead of casting different actors for this period, like in the 1970s, Katherine Heigl (Tully) and Sarah Chalke (Kate) played themselves in the 1980s too, so we were doing de-aging in post production to help sell their younger selves.

What about the 2000s?
We treated the 2000s as our “present” period. In Season 1, we showed how Tully had had a successful career, contrasting with Kate, who is struggling career-wise but who managed to start a family. Framing for this period is more dramatic, and some scenes feel like the framing is calling for a more short-sighted composition. Until now, we have seen our girls growing and becoming women, and we have witnessed the development of their strong relationships. But now, in this period, we see more of the ups and downs of two mature women dealing with the routines of everyday life.

Overall, it feels more current, and the camera movement is looser for this period. I had a subtler filtration for this period, with the use of light Black Satin filters (or none at all, at times) and softer lighting coming through windows. The images have a more desaturated palette overall.

What direction did the showrunner give you about the look she wanted this season (and last)?
Our showrunner, Maggie Friedman, is not only a great leader in our show, but the writing she brought to all the scripts was just so good that it was amazing to be able to translate those words into visuals. We had a great collaboration together that I hope will carry on in the future. When I am presented with such quality scripts, it makes my job so much easier, and it allows me to dream bigger when prepping the episodes.

Did you work with a look book?
I always work with a look book. Last season I was gathering references from photography and other shows as a way to communicate our visual language to the directors and crew. I look at photography a lot for references and inspiration. Saul Leiter, Stephen Shore, André Kertész, Alex Webb and Todd Hido, among many others, are always present in my visual language as inspiration.

This season I used images from Season 1 to create a visual lookbook for Season 2 and a bunch of references for some new periods we were about to cover.

How did you work with the directors and colorist to achieve the intended look?
All the directors that came in this season were also fans of the show, and they knew it really well. We established a specific look in Season 1 that we continued this season, so everyone coming in was familiar with it and knew the look we were trying to achieve. I also shared my look book with everyone, and it was a pretty flawless process overall.

Company 3 has been taking care of our dailies and color timing for the whole show since last season. Claudio Sepulveda was our colorist, and Chad Band was our dailies colorist.

Prior to Season 1 of Firefly Lane, I shot the feature film 2 Hearts, where I also had the same team doing the color correction for me. So I knew the team very well, and it was a great collaboration again.

Were there on-set LUTs? DIT?
I always use just one LUT on every project, and I light for that LUT. Every now and then, we would make some subtle CDL adjustments that would go straight to our dailies colorist at Company 3. But I always try to get the look in-camera as close to delivery as I can.

Brian Scholz was our DIT on Season 1, and he came back for the remainder of the series. He knew the show so well, and it was an amazing collaboration once again.

Where was it shot, and how long was the shoot?
The series was shot in Vancouver, BC. We only filmed 10 episodes in Season 1. For this season we had 16 episodes to film over nine months, plus about four to five weeks of preproduction. Netflix is splitting Season 2 into two parts. Part 1 released on December 2, and part 2 will be released sometime in 2023.

How did you go about choosing the right camera?
Last season, Netflix’s mandate to originate in 4K ruled out my camera of choice, which is an ARRI Alexa, so I tested the Panavision DXL2 and the Sony Venice. I already knew what I could get out of the Venice, but I was pleasantly surprised by the images coming out of the DXL2. I also love its ergonomics and especially the viewfinder.

I also introduced the idea of filming the series for a 2×1 aspect ratio in Season 1, as it would fit these two characters’ stories, allowing us to frame them together and have them share the screen more often than not.

Can you talk about using lighting and framing to emphasize the emotional weight of the scenes?
As I described earlier, every period has its own approach toward lighting and framing, though I like to play this in a pretty subtle way between all the timelines. But the camera work is definitely more dynamic in the 1970s and especially in the 1980s. We used the Steadicam for those eras more often than any other periods.

The 2000s timeline feels a bit more static and somewhat the camera is a bit looser. The framing is also less “centered” than in other periods.

Vincent De Paula

Vincent De Paula

Lighting-wise, I used harder and warmer lighting for the 1970s to evoke emotions from that time, when our girls are still teenagers. I gradually change to a softer approach for the ‘80s and a cooler, more neutral tone for the 2000s.

There are times in the 2000s when we wanted to isolate some characters due to the emotional scenes they were playing. I tend to short-sight the compositions and use wider lenses that allow us to identify with the environment that surrounds the characters.

Any happy accidents to talk about?
There are always happy accidents on a film set, and I am the first one who will embrace them.

I remember there was a scene we were filming in the 1970s timeline, when young Tully is visiting her mom “Cloud” in jail, and eventually they would be sitting together in a table in the middle of the room. I wasn’t planning on having a two-shot with the window in the background, but as the camera was rolling into the set, it was pointing at this window and table with the stand-ins sitting there. I noticed how powerful it could be to actually let them be in a silhouette against that window, so I decided to light them that way instead, and it was only because I just happened to look at the monitor as the camera and dolly were getting to set and were “accidentally” pointed at this table.

Vincent De Paula

Any challenging scenes that you are particularly proud of or found most challenging?
Filming in Vancouver in the fall and winter has its challenges. In addition to the seasonal rain, it gets dark pretty quickly. Many times, I had to film night for day, and some of the locations were quite challenging in order to pull this off.

Earlier on in Season 2, Tully is filming a documentary in which she is trying to trace her father’s past and whereabouts. There was a scene where they all visit a restaurant with the camera crew, where they believed Tully’s father had worked in the past.

Due to scheduling reasons, we had to shoot at this location in the evening when it was already dark. There were windows all along one side of the restaurant. We had shot another scene there for the 1980s that plays in the same episode, and in that scene, I was able to feature those windows fully. But for this scene, sadly, there was no room to place any lights outside those windows, as the restaurant was over the ocean. So any lighting had to come from inside the room.

My approach was to deny seeing that part of the restaurant and place the fixtures inside the room as close as possible to those windows. In the background there was a door leading to a patio area where there would be more tables for customers, so I had a bigger light over there to recreate where the sun would be coming from. Overall, it looked really good, and to this day, no one can tell that it was actually night when we shot this.

Also, not being able to scout this real location beforehand brought more challenges because I had to come up with a very quick plan to light the space with its limitations, and I was only able to see this location on the actual shooting day.

Now more general questions….

How did you become interested in cinematography?
I was born in Galicia, in northern Spain, where the film industry is almost nonexistent. There is no film background in my family, so it wasn’t the path my parents probably expected for me. So when I mentioned my desire to be involved in the “movies,” it was pretty clear that I would have to move elsewhere.

After I moved to London, I got involved in documentaries, music videos and many commercials early on in my career and then I slowly got into more narrative work.

The rest, as they say, is history.

I was always watching films as a kid, and I remember thinking that I would always get something out of any film I would watch. Even if it wasn’t a great film, there would always be a message or a great adventure to witness. That sparked my attention, and like everyone else, I wanted to be a director, but I quickly discovered the importance of an image and all the things I could say with the use of light and composition, so I decided I wanted to be a cinematographer.

When I moved to the UK, I started working mainly on documentaries, and this taught me so much about using natural light and how to use what was available to tell a story. It allowed me to develop a naturalistic approach that I still always prioritize today.

When I started doing more narrative, commercials and music videos, I was able to apply that naturalistic approach.

I tried to enhance it to help the story in a more dramatic way, which I have since been calling a “poetic realism” approach. I knew I wanted to do this for the rest of my life, being able to paint and write with light and composition to tell a story.

Short films were my introduction to narrative. I also learned how wonderful the collaboration with the director, the production designer, the gaffer and all crew members could be.

Vincent De Paula

Vincent De Paula

It’s always important to be bold and push your creativity in every project you do, and I have been learning new things all the time. I was at a point where I was filming mainly on 35mm and S16mm, even though digital already had a presence. But learning to expose and work in a film environment is the best school. All the projects I did early on in my career were telling me that I had found my path.

What inspires you artistically?
I am constantly looking at photography and painting as main sources of inspiration. I think I have more than a couple of hundred books on photographers and painters. Saul Leiter, Stephen Shore, Gordon Parks, André Kertész, William Eggleston, Alex Webb, Roy DeCarava, Todd Hido and Fan Ho are some of the photographers I always reference.

I also love the masterly treatment of light by painters like Vermeer, the use of color and perspectives of de Hooch, the chiaroscuro of Caravaggio or Monet and the Impressionist style.

I always learn so much and find so much inspiration from the work of cinematographers like Conrad Hall, Gordon Willis, Sven Nykvist, Nestor Almendros, Ed Lachman, Robby Müller, Chris Doyle, Robert Richardson, Janusz Kaminski, Roger Deakins, Emmanuel Lubezki, Rodrigo Prieto, Linus Sandgren, Greig Fraser, Bradford Young and Natasha Braier, to name just a few.

And away from any visual references, I am always listening to music. I think if I wasn’t a cinematographer, I would have tried to become a musician.

Literature is also a huge influence for me, and I am pretty obsessed with the Beat Generation.

What are some of your best practices or rules you try to follow on each job?
I like “fixing things in preproduction,” and I always do a lot of research on the subject or themes I am filming. I think that one always has to have a plan. Even if it is a very small scene with very little time to prepare, you always want to have a plan to execute, or at least have an idea that usually develops into something bigger when on-set on the day.

I always have so much fun on the job, and I think the cast and crew feeds from it. I am very passionate about my job. I believe I have the best job in the world, I love what I do, and I am not shy to show that on-set.

Explain your ideal collaboration with the director or showrunner when starting a new project.
When I first read a script, I don’t want to immediately have an idea of what I want the film or series to look like. Naturally, as I read it and react emotionally to the story, I start to develop ideas in my head, but I like to come to my first meetings with showrunners and directors with a blank page that I will gradually fill with references and ideas to a look that I present to everyone involved. But I do want to hear their initial thoughts too.

Communication is key, and looking at references — discussing films, photography, painting, etc. — is part of that initial process. Even if one wants to have a very distinctive look, there is always room to look at other forms of art for inspiration.

It’s also very important to connect personally with the director I’m working with. I don’t mean we need to become best friends, but I have learned to read people quite well, and I like to know what goes on inside everyone’s head when working together on a project.

What’s your go-to gear (camera, lens, mount/accessories) – things you can’t live without?
I became a cinematographer in England, and at that time, digital was starting to be very present, but I was lucky to shoot on film early in my career. Learning to expose for film has taught me so much and has given me great confidence in my work as a cinematographer. I still love to shoot on film, and I think of it as another pencil with which to write a book.

Lately, I have been mainly shooting on ARRI Alexas, and it is my favorite sensor to shoot on. I think it is still the closest look to film to date. I love Panavision glass. I have been working with Panavision on 90% of all the projects in my career, and it is such a wonderful collaboration with them. They have always had my back, from my time in London to the US and Canada and beyond.

When it comes to anamorphic, which is really my preferred format, I love the Panavision C series and T series. I have shot with both on my last two feature films. One of them luckily had a large theatrical release worldwide where you can really appreciate the larger aspect ratio.

I genuinely think the wider screen from an anamorphic image can also be a really intimate format. You can frame two actors in a medium close-up in the same frame and let things play, and it allows the camera to move in a way that doesn’t force you into as much cutting.

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

Marvel and Netflix: How Studio Operations Manage Media

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By Oliver Peters

Large studios once personified by major theatrical releases have given way to modern hybrids with a presence in both the motion picture and streaming worlds. This business model includes companies like Netflix and Disney, among others. Gone are the days of storing film in vaults — replaced by the benefits of nimble access to digital assets. Those storage systems and procedures become the heartbeat of the operation.

Evan Jacobs

Marvel Studios
Under the Disney corporate banner and the Disney+ service, Marvel has been able to create streaming series and films based on the broader cinematic universe of its beloved characters. The logistics are shepherded by Marvel Studios. Evan Jacobs (VP, finishing, Marvel Studios) and Matt Walters (director of production technology, Disney) took time out of their busy schedules to discussed what goes into all of this.

How does Marvel handle the media assets for all these properties?
Evan Jacobs: Marvel Studios is a separate entity under the Disney umbrella. We have our own management team, but we’re on the Disney lot in Burbank working with other Disney departments. For instance, Matt works for Disney and supports our Marvel Finishing Department.

There are a couple of different ways that we approach projects. Marvel Finishing is our in-house DI group, and they handle all of our streaming content. They are a boutique operation — 12 people plus the engineers. The theatrical features go through outside vendors for finishing, with Company 3 doing the majority of that work.

Matt Walters

The conform editorial staff on the finishing side are full-time Marvel employees, but the creative editorial teams on the shows and films are hired on a per-project basis. When it comes to the equipment that the creative teams use, such as Avid Media Composer and Nexis storage, some is gear we own, while some is rented.

How does Marvel handle the media assets for all these properties?
Jacobs: Marvel Studios is the clearinghouse for all of the media that’s created. But first, let me add some background. Marvel started as a production company, just like many others. There was literally a drive array on somebody’s desk with the whole movie on it. As time went on, the consistency of the number of shows we were producing got more reliable. We’re talking the era from the first Iron Man to the first Avengers. The increased workload generated interest in bringing an enterprise level of support to this technology.

We currently rely on fast Quantum storage for finishing. Default storage for everything else is [Dell EMC] Isilon, along with some cloud services. At first, we had Isilon storage with every project on its own node, but as we produced more projects, we had to come up with a different strategy. We would be running out of storage on one show and have extra storage on another. Four or five years ago, we took a hard look at rethinking our storage footprint here at the studio and creating a very robust system for all the Marvel projects.

Moon Knight

Can you expand on that?
Jacobs: There are multiple levels. There’s the main in-production storage, which is fast. Then you have archive storage, because every single show that we’ve done is on spinning disk. We keep everything live because we tell such interconnected stories.

When you say live, are you talking just about the finished, edited version of a movie?
Jacobs: All of it. Today, every visual effects vendor, every stereo conversion vendor, every bit of camera original footage, everything that gets created as part of making one of our films comes to our storage. If it’s a DI vendor like Company 3, we’ll supply them with the elements they’ll need. With our internal finishing team, what’s cool is that we don’t have to move anything because we have direct access to everything here.

Wandavision

Matt Walters: From the final IMF that’s sent to Disney+ to final VFX and all the interim versions to the original plates. I can get Evan shots from the movies [completed] six years ago in a couple of minutes because we know where it is and can pipe it directly to them.

Jacobs: Same with assets. We’re talking about something like an Iron Man CGI model from 10 years ago.

That takes a lot of capacity, right?
Walters: There are different stages. In finishing, we have about a petabyte of fast storage. In Raw Cam, where we keep all the OCF storage of active shows, that will be around 30PB by the end of next year. Right now, it’s at 12PB, and we’re doubling it. Show storage for VFX shots gets into another 30PB for all the past shows. Then you add onto that the disaster recovery and safety copies, which is another whole tier. We treat our storage like a private, internal cloud. We can then make sure everyone has access, wherever they’re at and however they need it.

Moon Knight

On top of that, do you also use LTO backups?
Walters: Yes, we have LTO dual-tier backups of everything, as well. Internally, we have different generations of LTO readers going back to LTO4. So we can read any tape from a past show in addition to having it on spinning disk.

How do you keep all of this straight?
Jacobs: It’s a sophisticated operation that’s very systemized. Unlike a lot of production companies, we have the benefit of doing a lot of the same kinds of things all the time. We are a very VFX-dependent studio, so we’re organized around that principle.

On the data engineering level, there are tools to find things. But the truth is, we’ve automated the way we store things, and we have standards. A show today looks the same as it did five years ago. If you opened it up, you would know where everything was. We don’t have one show organized by date and another one alphabetically, for example. So the organizational standards, coupled with some institutional knowledge, allow us to find pretty much anything you would need.

How does this strategy benefit your workflow?
Jacobs: We use [Blackmagic DaVinci] Resolve as our internal DI solution. We also keep our Resolve database completely live for every single project we’ve done. When we upgrade to a newer version of Resolve, it updates that database too. We can open up a grade from five years ago. We have the luxury of being well-supported by a big operation. So we can do things that other people probably wouldn’t want to do, and maybe wouldn’t benefit from, because all our stories are so interconnected.

She-Hulk

I went back and remastered all of the Marvel films back to Iron Man one. It’s like cutting a tree and counting the rings. On those early films, it’s amazing how little media there was compared to now. When you get to the older films, because we were remastering from SDR to HDR, we would discover things. Shots might be clipped or there might be other things that you didn’t notice in the older formats. With the more modern shows, I was able to go back to the sources, open up those visual effects shots, fix them and put them back into the remasters. It’s awesome when you can do that and not wait a week for somebody to find an LTO tape.

Netflix
Netflix has been on the forefront of elevating production and post standards that ripple through the entire industry. Their specs, such as true 4K (or better) camera acquisition and HDR mastering, are primarily intended for Netflix Originals. But they also influence procedures followed by projects that don’t necessarily stream on Netflix. In order to present these specs in a clear manner, Netflix Studios maintains a Partner Help Center website with guidance on a wide range of production and post workflows. This includes a section on how Netflix expects a producing partner to manage the media.

The Crown

As with any production, all media and data management starts on-set or on-location. Scripted fiction projects will often go through a dailies lab or post facility that is responsible for handling the original media until it’s time to turn it over. In the case of Netflix, this media would be delivered to the Netflix Content Hub at the end of the production.

The 3:2:1 Principle
The key recommendation is to use the 3:2:1 principle and checksum verification. Simply put, this means hold three copies of your original camera and audio files. Store these copies on two different types of media. Keep at least one of the backups in a different geographical location. When making these copies, Netflix recommends drive arrays in a RAID 5, 6 or 10 configuration, but not RAID 0 (except for temporary use). Of course, LTO6 through LTO9 (LTFS format) also qualifies.

Dead to Me

Checksum verification requires that you use duplication software like Hedge or ShotPut, which compares the copy to the original and mathematically verifies that no data has been lost or corrupted. In addition, Netflix recommends a visual inspection, i.e., scrubbing through the offloaded files to check for any issues.

Finally, for scripted fiction production, Netflix expects a complete quality control check (QC) with real-time playback of all camera files. And that QC check should be done at a minimum 4K UHD resolution (3840×2160), preferably in a controlled environment, like a color correction (DI) facility.

Guidelines for Reusing Original Recording Media
For most productions, it’s routine to offload the original camera files (OCF), reformat the camera cards and reuse them for further recording. Under Netflix’s guidelines, this should only happen once the editorial team has signed off on what they’ve received and only when the media matches all camera reports and script supervisor notes. And of course, making sure that three verified copies exist. If the turnaround time doesn’t allow for the editorial team to perform these tasks, then it should at least be cross-checked by the dailies lab.

Manifest

All of this is a process that takes time and care. Maintaining a chain of custody is important should any issues arise. In setting up the workflow, consider things like the speed of the camera cards, read/write speeds of the various devices in the chain and the generation of LTO being used. It is also recommended that the drives you copy to should not be slower than the source. In other words, it’s OK to copy from a slow card reader to a faster drive, but ideally never the other way around. Finally, make sure you have enough extra camera cards to go through the full 3:2:1 process with verification and inspection before it’s time to wipe and reuse the cards.

Oliver Peters is an award-winning editor/colorist working in commercials, corporate communications, television shows and films.   

Access:VFX Launches European Chapter to Promote Diversity

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Access:VFX, an industry-led nonprofit coalition of leading visual effects (VFX), animation and games studios, has launched a European chapter. With the help of new sponsorship from Netflix, the organization is building upon its mission to promote diversity within the VFX industry by expanding into Europe. The aim of the new chapter is to provide practical tools for up-and-coming creators across Europe that are essential to succeeding in the industry, including mock interviews, reel reviews, virtual events and e-mentorships.

The new chapter will be led by Glassworks COO Chris Kiser and supported by the studio’s people and culture coordinator Bianca Crichigno. The European VFX studio has offices in London, Amsterdam and Barcelona making it easy for Kiser and Crichigno to engage with creatives across Continental Europe.

The European chapter’s first steps will be to promote initiatives such as its e-mentoring scheme (sponsored by Foundry and Netflix), industry apprenticeships and awareness-building events. The team will also partner with local schools and organizations throughout Europe. The growing chapter hopes to extend its outreach not only to students within Europe but to those who are already working in the industry or who are re-entering after taking a break from the workplace.

Says Kiser, “The VFX, animation and games industries can be difficult to break into and we want to change that. Our goal is to introduce a new generation to the kinds of opportunities available within the VFX industry to further diversify and expand the pool of talent across all disciplines.”

Established in 2017 to encourage diversity under its four pillars of inspiration, education, mentoring and recruitment, Access:VFX includes 61 media and entertainment companies. Members include ILM, MPC, Epic Games, Cinesite, Foundry and Framestore alongside many more industry leaders. Together they run and participate in educational and industry events, such as the recent UCAS Create Your Future. Access:VFX reaches thousands of potential future employees of primary school age and above across the UK, USA, New Zealand, Australia and Canada – working with organizations including We Are Stripes, Luma Pictures, Zoic Studios,  Psyop, Into Film and NextGen Skills Academy.

Access:VFX’s European chapter joins Access locations across the UK and North America, including Montreal, New York, Chicago and the West Coast.

 

 

DP Alicia Robbins

DP Alicia Robbins: Dual ISO and Forests for Netflix’s Keep Breathing

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Netflix’s Keep Breathing is a character drama that deals with emotional struggle as well as mental health issues all wrapped in a survival series. It’s about a strong female lawyer, Liv, lost in the woods after her small plane goes down in the Canadian wilderness.

It was shot on a Sony Venice with Zeiss Supreme Prime Radiance lenses by DP Alicia Robbins, who captured both the beauty and dangers of the Canadian wilderness. It was shot all around Vancouver, including at Vancouver Film Studios and several practical locations in the city. The wilderness scenes were captured in forests from Squamish to Whistler.

Alicia Robbins

Known for her work on series Grey’s Anatomy and Soci Circle as well as feature films such as Babysplitters, Forever Not Maybe and The Wedding Invitation, Robbins took the time to talk to us about her work on this Netflix limited series.

Tell us about Keep Breathing? How early did you get involved in planning? What direction did you get about the look they wanted?
I was hired for Keep Breathing well before Block 1 even started. I knew I wouldn’t be coming in until Block 2 to shoot Episodes 4, 5 and 6, but I was already getting to have creative discussions with the producers about the direction I would take for the second block well in advance of my start date.

For my block of episodes, the storyline takes a dramatic shift as our character decides to brave the wilderness and begin a journey to find an escape. Therefore, the show creators and I wanted there to be a change in the style of cinematography. When Liv was on the move, the camera was on the move. We accomplished this with the use of many tools, such as Steadicam, Taurus-based telescoping cranes and wire cam in the forest.

For Episode 5, this is where the visuals take an even larger turn. Liv has fallen into a cave and hit her head badly, resulting in lucid dreaming. Her dreams begin to blend with the present and past. The forest starts to infiltrate her dreams, and her past shows up in unexpected places. For this episode, I was told by our producers to “go wild” with the visual design, so I did.

This episode is a visual whirlwind of flickering lights, camera transitions from her past to present, saturated colors and surreal lighting. Lighting cues were often used throughout the episode for light fluctuation, and lighting would come from areas that you wouldn’t expect and in colors that wouldn’t be natural to the environment. We had to be very planned out in how our scenes blended together. Many times you would see young Liv exit a scene, and then it would be adult Liv turning the corner of a hallway. Keeping these transitions fluid required detailed planning and shot-listing between me and the director, Rebecca Rodriguez.

How would you describe the look?
The intended look for Keep Breathing was very dramatic. We wanted to capture the haunting beauty of the Canadian wilderness. As scary as it would be to be lost in it, you can’t deny the beauty that surrounds Liv. We wanted to show that off — how there could be beauty in this solitude, and how this solitude forces Liv to address her past. We wanted to maintain a level of rich contrast throughout, playing with a lot of negative fill.

We also made sure that certain color palettes only became visible when we were addressing certain aspects of Liv’s life. For instance, the color red was representative of her mother, so red plays a role in several pieces of art direction that throws her back into remembering her mother as a child. Red becomes a stronger color in our palette as she begins to hallucinate, and she is forced to face her childhood trauma of her mother leaving her. By the time we get to the last episode, the color red is no longer prominent since she has let go of her mother as a painful memory.

How did you work with the colorist to achieve the intended look? Did you use on-set LUTs?
We worked with Jill Bogdanowicz at Company 3 for our final color. She is an extraordinary artist. One of the ways Jill works is that she sees the color and contrast that the DP is practically using on-set and enhances it, pushing the intentions of the DP’s visuals a bit further.

The episode we really had fun with was Episode 5. When I was shooting Episode 5, I could only take the surrealism to a certain level practically, but we knew we wanted to push the look in post once Jill had her hands on it. I had told her that I loved her work on Joker and John Wick and not to be shy about handling some of our colors in that way for Episode 5. What she came up with was a look reminiscent of cross-processed film. I loved it, so that was the direction we headed with that particular episode.

DP Alicia Robbins

It was exciting to see my work taken to a whole other level that I couldn’t achieve practically. On-set we worked with a very simple show LUT that got us in the ballpark of the contrast we were hoping for. But we really didn’t do much live grading. We knew we would have ample color time with Jill in post, so we reserved most of the color for those sessions.

Why was the Sony Venice the right camera for this project?
We chose the Sony Venice for its exceptional dynamic range, and the dual ISO made it essential to the night work we would do in the forest. We chose Zeiss Supreme Prime Radiance lenses as the workhorse lenses along with an 11:1 Angenieux Zoom. The Zeiss Radiance lenses have a very clean look with beautiful contrast. The flare of the Radiance is on the bluer side, which is very different than a lot of flares. They also have a beautiful 18mm lens that looked gorgeous on the full-frame sensor.

In the forest, having a wide lens like that — with undistorted edges — was key for showing off the space. (Now Zeiss has a 15mm Radiance, which I wish I had had when I was shooting this show.) Canon K35 lenses were also chosen for some flashback scenes, which were softer and had a warmer flare, giving it contrast to the forest, where we used the Zeiss Radiance primes. We also played with Lensbaby lenses for specific shots that needed a surrealistic look.

Can you describe the lighting?
I love using a large variety of lighting tools. You name it, we probably used it. For the daytime work, balloons were often used for negative fill, bounce or overhead silks if there was enough room. I loved using 10K Molebeams for beautiful, warm sunlight that would streak across the forest environment. Astera tubes were also very useful for eye lights and for creating the Northern Lights in the middle of the forest, which was a whole other challenge in itself.

Our workhorses were often ARRI S60s and S30s and sometimes an S360. We ran all of our LED units and tungsten units through a central DMX board that my gaffer could control right by my monitors. This was very helpful in Episode 5, when we had many lighting cues.

Were there any “happy accidents” captured?
I definitely had a happy accident in Episode 4, when I strategically placed Liv in an area of the forest where I knew the God rays would reveal themselves once we pumped in a little bit of atmosphere (provided there was no cloud cover). Sure enough, at the right time of day, the sun barely pushed through the trees, and a hit of atmosphere created one of the most iconic frames of the series.

Shooting on that terrain must have been challenging. Can you talk about that?
One of the main things that drew me to this project was the fact that it would be shot mostly in the Canadian wilderness. I love to camp, and I consider the forest one of my happy places. So I was incredibly excited to film in that location.

There were definitely challenges in the physicality of the space. Simply moving around with equipment and lighting was really tough, so everything had to be thought out precisely to know exactly what we should have where. Some of the locations were in areas that had never really been filmed before, so the only way to get to them was with off-road vehicles. But filming in these untouched areas truly gave the show a new look that hasn’t been seen before. Planning was key for filming in the forest locations.

One of the biggest challenges was how to accomplish the ending river sequence. We wanted to be in the water as our stunt actress braved the whitewater rapids of the river. This is where the Sony Venice was truly an amazing tool. We were able to go in Rialto mode, with the front end in a splash bag and the back end bagged on a whitewater raft. We hired an incredibly skilled whitewater camera team to follow our stunt actress down the river with the Sony Venice. This — in combination with strategically placed cameras on the riverbank, drone work and our main actress being filmed in a bluescreen water tank that had simulated rapid flow for her close-ups — created the show’s incredibly exciting ending sequence.

Any scenes that you are particularly proud of or found most challenging?
There was a sequence in Episode 6 where Liv sees the Aurora Borealis, and it is so bright that it lights up the forest around her. For this, I had ARRI S60s below in the ravine lighting the fronts of the trees, while behind Liv, I had 100 Astera tubes on the backs of the trees lighting up the rest of the forest. Then we had all of the lights in sync with each other, creating a wave of blues, greens and magenta to feel as if the Northern Lights were lighting up the forest. In combination with the VFX Aurora Borealis that they put in the sky, it was a very powerful visual since it’s really when Liv begins to accept the beauty of the forest around her. It was intended to have a magical quality to it, and I feel we pulled that off.

How did this shoot differ from others you’ve been on recently?
I was coming off Grey’s Anatomy, which as you know is a hospital drama. Shooting in the Canadian wilderness couldn’t be farther from this. I was up for several projects at the time I was interviewing for Keep Breathing, but in my heart, I knew this was the project for me. I knew it would be very challenging, but I was looking for something truly artistic to sink my teeth into.

DP Alicia RobbinsHow did you become interested in cinematography?
I first became interested in cinematography when I was a PA on a small movie that came through my hometown in Alabama. I was already interested in filmmaking but wasn’t completely sure what aspect I wanted to pursue. On that film, titled Rustin, the DP was Wally Pfister (ASC). This was before he really became a famous DP. I observed him and was so impressed by the way he commanded the set, and I was truly intrigued by the technical knowledge he had for the camera and lighting. I thought, “That looks like a really cool job.” He’s the one that guided me toward applying to AFI. The rest is history.

Are you always on the lookout for new technology to use in your craft?
I am fascinated by technology that will help advance a story. I am always striving to learn new techniques, new equipment, new ways of lighting and moving the camera. However, I don’t use gimmicks simply for the sake of using them. The technology has to serve the story and the character’s journey. I get really excited when I’ve found a new way to achieve a look and it captures the essence of the story.

What new technology has changed the way you work (looking back over the past few years)?
LED lighting and dual ISO! Wow, this has changed my life. I’ve always been a fan of LED lighting since some of the first units came out. But now the advancement of LED lighting is so good with the brightness and color rendition.

Alicia Robbins on-set (far right)

Also, the use of dual-ISO cameras such as the Sony Venice. I love being able to get a clean image at 2500 ISO and run my LED units in ranges from 1% to 10% intensity. As a result, you can keep the lighting levels so low that you don’t have light bouncing all around a space, so you don’t have to use excessive flags to keep the spill down. I can achieve a high-contrast look without too much grip gear simply by keeping the light levels very low. This is a technique that I’m using more and more, sometimes even for day interior work.

What are some best practices or rules you try to follow on each job?
I try to be as prepared as possible. Sometimes this is very difficult if scripts are coming in at the last minute, but having a solid plan going into a project before your first shoot day is key.

Explain your ideal collaboration with the director or showrunner when starting a new project.
It is always a pleasure when your director or showrunner is on the same page with you visually. I enjoy working with someone who is open to my ideas of how to tell the story visually. I know I have a solid understanding of what makes a story work through camera and lighting, and when I have collaborators that are open to my ideas, it works really well.

I’m not a DP that likes to be simply dictated to: “Camera goes here, moves this way, this lens, etc.” I don’t think any DP likes to work that way. I’m always looking for a collaboration on the visual design. However, I’ve also been in situations where I’m doing almost all the visual design on my own. This isn’t ideal either. It’s sometimes hard to find that collaboration with a director where you help each other out and it’s a fluid discussion of ideas.

You have to have a lot of meetings with your director beforehand to get a sense of what they like and what they respond to. Sometimes it isn’t talking about visuals at all, but just going for a hike or having lunch to get a sense of their personality. I like to get to know my directors as people. It helps me gauge how I need to handle my team and myself on-set once we’re in the thick of it.

What’s your go-to gear (camera, lens, mount/accessories) – things you can’t live without?
For shooting, it’s a camera that has dual ISO. I  always want the option to run a higher ISO and still have a clean image. For my personal gear, I carry around an Insta360 camera. This captures 360 video or stills in a high resolution. I use this tool for location scouting or to capture lighting setups that I’ve done. This little camera always lives in my backpack.

What about some tips for other females looking to get into cinematography?
It’s important to shoot your own content. You never know what project might get you your “break.” Even after years of pursuing your craft, you also have to be willing to do free passion projects if the story is something you’re drawn to or the collaboration could lead to other work.

My break came after 15 years of pursuing cinematography. I shot a free short for a friend I really wanted to collaborate with, and that short earned me an Emerging Cinematographer Award through the Local 600. Doors opened up after that.

Also, maintain connections with people you think will help you out down the line. It’s key to stay in touch with potential mentors. You have to remember that working DPs get very busy, so don’t be discouraged if someone you have reached out to doesn’t get back to you right away. Try again a few weeks later. If they are open to helping you out, they won’t see your persistence as a bother; they will see it as dedication.

The Tinder Swindler

Getting the Right Look for Netflix’s The Tinder Swindler

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By Adrian Pennington

Audiences were amazed by the depth of deception exposed in the Netflix true-crime story The Tinder Swindler. The film follows the victims of perpetrator Shimon Hayut, aka Simon Leviev, who posed as a billionaire diamond mogul on dating apps. He met multiple women and conned them out of thousands of dollars.

The Tinder Swindler“These women fall into a trap thinking that someone is in love with them,” says cinematographer Edgar Dubrovskiy. “Shimon Hayut is brutal, telling these women for months that they will buy a house together and have kids.”

The Tinder Swindler was produced for Netflix by Raw TV, the British indie that is credited with delivering cinematic production value to tough documentary stories.

Dubrovskiy and director Felicity Morris chose to acquire on Red, making this the first show for Netflix of any kind shot on the Komodo camera system. It was mastered in HDR in a predominantly ACES color-managed Dolby Vision workflow.

Ross Baker

The doc’s central story is told in interviews with Hayut’s victims, filmed in Sweden, Norway, Amsterdam, London and the United States. Interview footage was rounded out with stock footage, archive footage and dramatization, plus graphics of social media posts. Post production went through Molinare, where senior colorist Ross Baker handled the grade in FilmLight Baselight 4.

“From the first scene, it was clear Felicity and Edgar wanted to embrace a romantic and evocative world,” says Baker. “They achieved this with the soft warm tones from the interviews, using very minimal lighting. Edgar opted to just use practicals in the interviews to light the scene. The Komodo handled this with very little noise.”

Dubrovskiy sent Baker SDR stills as references for an approach that would distinguish the look between the victims and the journalists. Baker translated the SDR stills into HDR grade.

“Using Molinare’s proprietary streaming software, MoliStream, we shared the output with Edgar and explored our options, discussing the look live,” Baker says. “Here, we delved into how we could treat the images in different ways and how this would be perceived in each dynamic range.”

As many documentary filmmakers are experiencing HDR in production for the first time, it can be a massive learning curve for all involved. Baker says the extra dynamic range can sometimes be too much as it natively appears in ACES and HDR.  “Edgar liked the IPP2 roll-off that you see from the Red in SDR when you apply the soft tone-mapping and low-contrast options. This played nicely to the desired cinematic style required by Felicity. As these options are not available in ACES, I created a curve that would give us the same result while allowing a little extra head room to the highlights. I created a custom-grade stack that allows me to work with SDR content and push it to 1,000 nits (if desired) without breaking the images apart.”

The Tinder SwindlerDubrovskiy shot 6K RAW to fit Netflix deliverables, with the data overhead allowing Molinare’s finishing team to punch into the image as required.

“Blending the Komodo footage alongside a wide range of sources is always going to be tricky as image sensor quality and lens choices play a massive part in the final look,” Baker says. “I’m fortunate to have worked on many documentaries that have used lots of different media sources, so I’m able to draw on years of experience on what works.

“A big part of making the sources work together without compromising the ‘hero’ camera is to understand the difference in contrast and chroma and try to align them all together. It’s never plain sailing but with the Baselight you have the tools at hand to make the adjustments needed.”

For example, the social media posts and text messages, which assist in driving the story, shouldn’t jump out of the edit. “The graphics are predominantly bright white screens that could be jarring. Controlling the luminance and softly vignetting with a small amount of grain helped to maintain consistency with the interviews and reconstructions.”

Baker adds, “This was my first time working with Edgar, and he is a very creative and technically minded DP. He was very passionate that the right look be achieved.”

Adrian Pennington is a UK-based journalist, editor and commentator in the film and TV production space. He has co-written a book on stereoscopic 3D and edited several publications.

 

 

The Oscar-Nominated Sound Team for Netflix’s The Power of the Dog

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By M. Louis Gordon

Jane Campion is known to cinema as a boundary-breaker, pulling audiences into complex experiences with sexuality and lushly realized human portraits of dominion, love and abuse. Her latest film, The Power of the Dog, turns her lens on the masculine condition, and this diagonal step for the director is garnering some of her highest critical acclaim — including 12 Oscar nominations — since her 1993 feature, The Piano.

Robert Mackenzie

Based on the novel by Thomas Savage, the film is set in 1920s Montana, where the Burbank brothers, Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch) and George (Jesse Plemons), run a cattle ranch left to them by their socialite parents. When George brings home his new wife Rose (Kirsten Dunst), a modest widow and single mother, Phil makes her life on the ranch unbearable with insults and strongman mockery. Until Rose’s son Peter discovers Phil’s biggest secret.

Leading the task of post sound — which has been recognized with one of those many Oscar nominations for this quiet but potent film — was Robert Mackenzie, whose credits include slammers like Hacksaw Ridge, Mortal Kombat (2021) and Netflix’s The King. Though The Power of the Dog would seem a departure in style from Mackenzie’s action-packed fare, it’s more a result of the impeccable thoroughness and attention to detail that he, sound effects editor (and first-time re-recording mixer) Tara Webb and sound designer Dave Whitehead have built a reputation for.

Tara Webb

I got the chance to sit down with Mackenzie and Webb, who worked out of Sydney’s Spectrum Films, to talk about the team’s process.

How did you get involved with the project?
Robert Mackenzie: Tara and I were asked to come onto Top of the Lake [Jane Campion’s limited series]. We were a bit nervous because Jane’s made so many amazing movies – The Piano is one of my favorite films of all time — but she just invited us into her world on that show and then invited us back for The Power of the Dog. She’s the sort of person that’s there every day for the mixing and is endlessly curious about what we do.

How do you start working?
Tara Webb: Sometimes I’ll just start cutting effects straight away, but Dave Whitehead, our sound designer, spent a long time creating this huge library for us of effects, Foley, winds, etc.

The film was shot in New Zealand, and we were trying to create Montana, so he found this website of Montana sounds that had heaps of different birds and nature sounds that we could reference. We found prairie sounds and did some research into interesting birds that we could maybe put in as a drama point of focus. We pulled some grassy winds, some not-grassy winds. We put together a palette that we could pick from to have consistency across the film.

The Power of the DogSo you’ve built your library of effects. What was the editing workflow like?
Webb: Initially, we just split up the film. “You take the first few reels, and I’ll take the last few reels.” Then there were specific design moments throughout the whole film that Dave took on, so we were kind of working simultaneously. I was cutting certain scenes and then sending them to him. He was doing the same, and he would go out and do recordings as well. He had a lot of props that production sent to him, so he could then spend a couple of days in his studio recording the saddle, the boots, etc.

I was going through the location sound and picking things out. The scenes in the barn, for instance, had some awesome recordings that Richard Flynn (our production sound mixer) had done. I sent that to Dave, and it was a back-and-forth kind of thing. Then I’d jump into Rob’s studio and maybe do a quick little premix and send it to Rob. He would have a listen and then we’d send it off to editorial. It was the first time working with Dave, and he was awesome.

The Power of the DogWhat about the interior locations? Much of the reverb in the house and restaurant sound wonderfully real.
Mackenzie: The sets were really well-built for the starters. Richard was able to take advantage of the acoustics of the sets themselves, the natural echo in the rooms. New Zealand is also inherently a quiet place, which helps. We had a lot of production sound to use as Foley, but a lot of it was wide-miked; something we like to do is combine the Foley with the production sound and almost use the production sound as a reverb itself.

You’ve got the close detail of the Foley, but Foley can sound a bit unnatural. And reverb units, they’ve gotten better with Altiverb, but you can still kind of hear the sound of the speaker; you can still hear that artifice. So we used that combination of all three: dry Foley sound; Richard’s production effects that Tara sunk up, sample-accurate for every footstep and door creak; and then a bit of the Altiverb “indoor” as well.

Webb: Leah Katz, the dialog supervisor, would send through cleaned-up sync effects so I could have that as I was working, and I sent that to Dave as well. We had that great palette of sounds, so when Foley started, they could focus on the areas that hadn’t been hit yet or things that Jane perhaps hadn’t yet liked the sound of.

I’d always try to use production whenever we had Phil’s feet because it just had a great natural resonance to it. Dave recorded these amazing spur tings, which sounded fantastic, so we used them as a device as well.

Mackenzie: Initially we were making a big thing out of Phil’s boots, and then it was too much, so we’d pull back. As [director] Wan Kar-wai said to me once, “Rob, you’re kissing the audience with the same kiss every time.” So we try to adjust the balance of those elements to create some variation.

What did you use to mix the background elements outside — on the ranch, in the hills, etc.?
Mackenzie: I think there were multiple instances of Slapper on Tara’s session.

the Power of the dog

Webb: Reverb [plugins] can be amazing, but getting that natural kind of recording, there’s nothing like it.

There was one scene where Phil’s walking through the water. I was going through the location sound and there was a dog barking off somewhere, so I thought it might be cool to drop that in somewhere. I often go through the location sound and find things like that. I love those little snippets and stuff and try to drop them in when I can.

Mackenzie: That’s the type of thing Tara’s especially good at. She’ll find that one leaf that’s moving in the background and highlight it.

Another thing Dave Whitehead did was some worldizing in New Zealand. He got some of the loop group and re-recorded that through speakers next to a mountain. That helped a lot on the scenes with the cowboys — distant whistles or callouts through that opening cattle drive and in other areas.

The Power of the DogYou mentioned earlier that Jane was there every day for the mix.
Mackenzie: The way Tara and I work is to give editorial the sound as they’re cutting. We’ll do mix-downs of dialogue backgrounds and sound effects as stems and hand that over to editorial. Then if they add to it — they might delete our stems and then add more sound — we’ll get that back as an AAF and resupply the stems for the next cut.

Jane’s present at the final mix but also through the whole process, so we are getting feedback on all the material we’re supplying her throughout the picture edit. Jane was very particular about the way she wanted things to sound and how it would help the storytelling. Any sort of tonal drones or dramatic artifice that we might have put in early on — all of that was stripped back, and the drama came from those close-up details and background textures that were naturalistic.

Webb: By the time we get to the final mix, we’re usually in a really good place. Rob and Jane can then focus on the story and the drama rather than any kind of technical things. They didn’t have to spend time choosing between sync effects and Foley because that’s already done.

Mackenzie: When we sit down on the first day of the final mix, it’s playing the way Jane has heard it —the temp mixes have been in the cut, and she’s used to it. We mixed Reel 1, and then Jane said, “Oh no, it’s all a bit too much and overwhelming,” so we would break it down and then build it up again. We had three weeks for the final mix, which is pretty standard for us. But having Jane listening and giving feedback on the temp mixes up until that point gave us the luxury of time to be creative.

Could you break down one of my favorite scenes? Rose is practicing the piano in the drawing room, and Phil starts mocking her by noodling the same tune on his banjo from upstairs. The scene starts with Rose closing all the doors to the room to get some privacy.
Mackenzie: Oh yeah, it took a long time to get that wind through the crack in the door. That little “whoosh” as she’s closing it. Jane talked a lot about the wind. She had a whole concept for the wind, to hear the close wind around the house. And the idea of the house is almost that it’s a mausoleum. It’s sparsely furnished. It’s Phil’s domain.

Webb: Yeah. There’s no warmth in the house.

Mackenzie: You are hearing the wind come through the door, and then when the door’s closed it’s like a vacuum. Like Rose is sealed in the house and she’s sealed her fate. We know that Phil’s in the house and that he’s gone up the stairs. Rose doesn’t know that.

Webb: She thinks she’s in a little cocoon there. That wind was Dave Whitehead, our sound designer. We also did a lot of wood creeks and stuff as well, floorboards and that kind of thing, which we would sparsely place in between for moments.

Rose is playing, then we start hearing Phil’s banjo far off from upstairs.
Mackenzie: We did the banjo overdubbing almost like an ADR session. Jane directed the whole thing, and it took a day or two just to overdub the banjo for the film. Dave had to write parts based on the shapes that Benedict was playing, so we were mixing and matching between Benedict’s performance — because he learned to play the banjo — and Dave’s overdubbing.

Jane was really into Dolby Atmos, so I used the banjo as an object and put that in the back right corner, up in the roof. Then I slowly panned it forward as the camera zooms in on Rose and made the size of the object larger, eventually filling the room to get right into Rose’s headspace on the close-up.

Phil then pushes the door open, making sure Rose can hear him.
Mackenzie: We went back and forth a lot on how loud that footstep was going to be as he opens the door.

Webb: We initially cut it a lot louder. We did quite a few test screenings. When we were initially looking at just that scene, it sounded great to have his foot really stomp down. But when we watched the overall film, we ended up pulling back on most of those details. We left it with a naturalistic style.

Let’s talk about how frontal everything sounds. It’s such a sparse mix and you can make each thing feel grounded. Was there an approach or any tools you used to achieve that in the final mix?
Mackenzie: I went through a stage of using soft Neve compression on the entire final mix, but on this film, it was all in the box. We mixed on an Avid S6 at Spectrum Films here in Sydney, and it’s a great-sounding room. Compression is my favorite tool, and I use it on everything, but hopefully you don’t notice. We could talk forever about compression ratios and attack and release times. I used to love that, you know, the compression on the Neve Digital Film Console. When I first heard the EQ engaged on one of those, it was like my mind exploded. For this film, we tried to be subtle. We used Neve emulation plugins on the dialogue and music buses and tracks and things like that. Just to get that sound in there without you knowing.

What’s the biggest lesson you’ve each learned from this project?
Webb: Oh gosh, I learn something new on every project I do. This was my first time doing mixing on a big feature film, so I learned a lot.

For this film we went further than I thought we would go with how much we stripped out. And there were times when I was worried that we’d stripped out too much. I was thinking, “Is that going to translate. We’re pulling out so much. Is that going to feel too empty for the audience?” It was quite surprising by the end when we watched through. It felt right for the film. I think we found a good balance.

Mackenzie: That was a huge learning curve for me… trusting what you’re hearing. And Tara is really good at that. She’s really good at saying, “That doesn’t need to be loud. I like it like that.” “Don’t worry about that, the audience will hear that.” Not being too concerned about how it’s going to translate over people’s phones or TVs. It solidified my belief that you need to mix it so it sounds good dramatically and the rest will take care of itself.

When No Country for Old Men came out, I read an article where Skip Lievsay was talking about the night scene in the hotel. Josh Brolin’s character sits on the bed, shotgun pointed at the door, and from outside comes a very faint sound of a light bulb being unscrewed. I’m probably getting the story wrong, but they were in the mix, and Skip was saying to the Coen brothers, “You can’t have that sound so low. It’s not going to translate across different cinemas that might have loud air conditioning or people that are rustling their chip packets. People might not hear it.” And  one of them said, “Well, then the scene’s not going to work. It has to be like that for the scene to work. So let’s mix it low.”

That was in the back of my mind when we were mixing this movie. You need to trust in what you’re doing and that the audience is listening. And when I saw The Power of the Dog with an audience for the first time, that’s exactly what happened. Everyone got very quiet and leaned into the subtle moments. If we had forced those and made them any louder, any fuller, we’d deprive the audience of that experience.

M. Louis Gordon is a sound editor, designer and location sound mixer at Silver Sound NYC. He currently produces podcasts for the nonprofit, Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. His credits include Sundance 2016’s Equity, The CW’s Tough Mudder: The Challenge Within miniseries and Tribeca 2021’s limited series In the Cards. You can follow him on Instagram @mlouisgordon.

Don’t Look Up

Director Adam McKay and His Go-To Editor Hank Corwin on Don’t Look Up

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By Iain Blair

Writer/director Adam McKay has become one of the most successful filmmakers in Hollywood thanks to such hits as Anchorman, Step Brothers, Talladega Nights, The Big Short, Vice and Marvel’s Ant-Man. His new film is another comedy/drama/action mashup, the apocalyptic satire Don’t Look Up. The Netflix film stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence as two astronomers who discover a comet headed straight for Earth. There are A-listers galore — including Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett and Jonah Hill — tons of locations, ambitious set pieces and lots of visual effects. It was nominated for four Oscar Awards.

Don't Look Up

Director Adam McKay

McKay also assembled an equally stellar team behind the scenes, including his go-to editor Hank Corwin, ACE; DP Linus Sandgren, ASC, FSF; composer Nicholas Britell; and VFX supervisor Raymond Gieringer.

Editor Hank Corwin

I spoke with McKay about making the film, his love of post and awards season. Corwin, who was just nominated for an Oscar Award for his work on Don’t Look Up, joined the conversation.

What sort of film did you set out to make?
Adam McKay: When I was writing the script and talking to Hank about it before we even shot, the whole idea was to make a big comedy that dealt with how crazy and ridiculous our world is, and how we can’t even process the most basic information. Then at the end, when you’d normally have a traditional happy comedy ending, we’d shift tones to a big emotional one.

That was always our approach and how we went into it. And as I often joke with Hank, we always pick the most difficult blend of tones and subjects, and we ended up working 10, 12 hours every day for months in post trying to find the right balance. Any time you work with Hank you leave the door slightly ajar in terms of the tone, so it can shift when you make all these discoveries in post. And this was a very hard one, especially with its blend of ridiculous comedy and realistic space sequences. The goal was always to have it play to a big global audience.

Don't Look Up

Hank, how early did you come on board?
Hank Corwin: Adam was already talking to me about it when we were doing Vice. The way we work at this point is to play around with a lot of ideas as we go. Adam was shooting in Boston, and I’d just try different things. I’d take different slivers of music and work very closely with Nick Britell, our composer, and sometimes I’d use things not necessarily the way Adam had intended. It was a form of collage initially, putting stuff together and trying to figure it all out.

How early on did you start on post and visual effects?
McKay: We had a great VFX team headed by supervisor Raymond Gieringer and producer Dione Wood, who did Vice with me. They did a great job of giving us VFX temps early on that Hank could cut with. The crazy thing with this movie was — since we had to shut down for five months because of COVID — we got so much of it done early, as the VFX team just kept going during that time.

Corwin: They were really diligent, and I got VFX material far earlier than usual. When I was cutting the launch sequence, initially the only live-action footage we had was of some extras out on the Cape. Raymond and the team had already created a lot of mission control and the shuttles just so I could figure out how to cut it.

Don't Look Up

How much previz did you do?
McKay: Day For Nite did it and we used quite a lot, especially for sequences like the first and second launches, and then some for the comet at the end. Hank was playing with a lot of the previz, but as you know, the difference between the previz and the final shot is often night and day. It comes to life when it gets close to being finished, so we definitely had to use our imagination.

It was also tough with this one as a lot of it’s a comedy and we were test-screening it a fair amount. So it was really a big thrill for us when we got the finished VFX shots; they really lit up the ending of the movie and the whole middle launch sequence.

Tell us about post. Was it remote because of COVID? Where did you do it?
McKay: Hank began cutting at home in Malibu, and then we moved to the Sony lot, which was a ghost town because of COVID. It was very strange. Then we did all the sound and mixing up at Skywalker.

Hank, what were the main editing challenges? Finding the right tone?
Corwin: Absolutely. Initially, I think we all understood the tone and knew exactly where the film was going, but it was devilishly hard trying to balance all the elements. I hate to sound pretentious, but it was like quantum physics. You could never really find a place. It was like a cloud. You’d get a tone to a certain place, then 40 minutes later down the film, you’d realize the tone you’d established up front was no longer working or resonating. So we’d have to circle back. We spent untold hours trying to figure it all out.

What was the most difficult sequence to cut and why?
Corwin: It’ll surprise you, but it was the first Oval Office scene. On paper it doesn’t seem that complex, but you have some of the greatest actors covering the script, and then Adam gave them all two days to romp all over it and improvise. We were shooting with up to six cameras to cover all that, and then the tone was so difficult to pin down. It wasn’t a matter of trying to find good takes. It was like chess, figuring out the laughs and how they’d play later, and we were cutting that scene almost for the duration of the whole edit.

Don't Look Up

McKay: It was a case of triangulating how crazy the world actually is, how crazy the audience thinks it is and how crazy we think it is. That’s what we were trying to balance — everyone is living through this insane moment but dealing with it in very different ways. Some are in denial, others know it’s crazy but kind of normal, and some know it’s completely bonkers. When we first screened the sequence for a test audience, they felt it was just too crazy and absurd, so we went back and recut and recut to try to find some middle ground.

There are a lot of VFX. Who did them, and what was entailed?
McKay: I really enjoy working with VFX, and I’ve done a few movies with a decent amount of them, like Talladega Nights, The Other Guys, Vice, so I’ve learned through the years to draw all the shots and hire really good VFX supervisors, and then dial in your style and get it as close to photoreal as you can get. And don’t play it like the big superhero movie kind of thing, just keep it as real as you can. You’ll never get 100% there, but you can get very close.

Don't Look Up

We had a lot of vendors [Scanline, Framestore, Lola, Otomo, Picturemill, Instinctual] all working on different sequences, and some of the biggest VFX were crowd creation. Any time you see a crowd, it’s all VFX since we couldn’t have a real crowd because of COVID. I really laughed watching Hank — who’s cut such serious movies as JFK, Natural Born Killers, The Tree of Life — having to deal with rocket ships blasting into space and all the other VFX we had.

Corwin: (Laughs) I’d never dealt with VFX before. I knew nothing about them. Or comedy. I had to learn on the job.

What about the DI? Who was the colorist, and how closely did you work with them and the DP?
McKay: It was Matt Wallach at Company 3, who also did the dailies grading. He, Linus and I all worked very closely. We shot on film, as I still love that real film look, even though you’re obviously transferring it. Linus has such a great eye, and we went for an “artful” look, with shadows and depth, but also with a bit of a colorful pop to it.

So the goal was this sort of metropolitan, energetic look, but artfully done – and Linus just nailed it. It’s exactly what I wanted, and then we did some work enhancing and fixing stuff and balancing it all in the DI, which I love. A lot of it was dealing with the crowd VFX and making sure it all looked real, and the film turned out great.

Industry insider Iain Blair has been interviewing the biggest directors in Hollywood and around the world for years. He is a regular contributor to Variety and has written for such outlets as Reuters, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.

Editor Affonso Gonçalves on Netflix’s The Lost Daughter

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By Randi Altman

Maggie Gyllenhaal’s feature film directorial debut, The Lost Daughter, takes viewers on a journey that bridges the present and the past. Set in a European beach town, Olivia Colman plays a middle-aged professor on vacation who becomes obsessed with a group of Americans — in particular, a young mother (Dakota Johnson) and her daughter. This sets off a series of flashbacks to when her daughters were young, including some very difficult choices she made.

The Lost Daughter

Affonso Gonçalves

Shot by DP Hélène Louvart on ARRI Alexa Minis with Cooke S4 lenses, the film was edited by Affonso Gonçalves, ACE, who cut on Avid Media Composer.

Gyllenhaal sent Gonçalves the script in April of 2020. “I loved it,” he says. COVID necessitated pushing the film’s start date, but in the interim, Gonçalves cut a short film that Gyllenhaal directed (Penelope, part of a series of Netflix shorts called Homemade). “So when the time came to shoot The Lost Daughter, I knew I wanted to work with her.”

We reached out to Gonçalves, whose eclectic resume includes the feature films Carol, Winter’s Bone and Beasts of the Southern Wild, the documentary The Velvet Underground and the TV series True Detective. Let’s find out more…

What direction were you given in terms of the pacing for the edit?
There was no specific direction in terms of pace; I was responding to the footage that I was getting from the set. When Maggie joined me, we worked on that together.

Were you on set? Near set? Keeping up with camera?
They were shooting in Greece with very strict COVID protocols, so I don’t think I could’ve gone even if I’d wanted to. I was in LA, keeping up with camera as much as time allowed.

The Lost DaughterHow did you work with the Maggie Gyllenhaal? How often was she seeing footage?
Once she was back home in NYC, she was in the cutting room every day. I’m not sure how often she was watching the footage prior to coming to the cutting room, but once she was there, we would review performances and coverage.

Can you give an example of a note she gave?
The scene between Leda (Colman) and Nina (Johnson), after Leda finds Elena, is the first time they have a dialogue, and so much of that scene is told through looks. Maggie remembered a really specific performance from both Olivia and Dakota that she wanted to use.

The Lost Daughter

Maggie Gyllenhaal on set (masked) in Greece

This was Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut. As an experienced editor, did she lean on you a bit, or did she have a specific vision of what she wanted? Combination of both?
It was a combination of both. She did have a vision of what the movie should be, but we discovered and experimented quite a bit.

Do you think her experience on-camera played a role in how she wanted edits?
She’s an experienced actress, and she brought so much of the knowledge to the cutting room. I learned so much from her.

So much of the film rides on Olivia Colman’s facial expressions and eyes.  Can you talk about coverage? Did she shoot a lot of takes?
Maggie got really great coverage, and I loved the way cinematographer Hélène Louvart captured those moments. She has such a beautiful and intimate way to shoot her subjects. They didn’t shoot that many takes.

A lot of the film’s point of view is that of a voyeur, with Leda spying on this family.
When Leda first notices Nina and her daughter, it reminds her of her younger days with her two daughters. The affectionate moments between the two trigger memories of different times. From that moment on, Leda is taken by the family, but more specifically, Nina. And as events happen, she gets closer to her. The deeper their involvement and mutual fascination, the deeper Leda gets into her memories.

How did you bridge the past and the present?
That was pretty much the way it was scripted. We did play with which images would start and finish the “flashbacks.” There’s a very specific way to come in and get out of those memories.

One example is the very first time Leda has a flashback. The sound from the memory starts with her drinking water. The image of young Leda, Bianca and Martha is very loving and intimate, and yet at the very end, there’s a look of uncertainty on young Leda’s face. That look matches the look and feel of older Leda on the other side of that memory. Also, they’re both looking in the same direction, which I felt was important.

Were any scenes particularly challenging to edit?
The octopus scene between Leda and Lyle (Ed Harris, who plays the caretaker of the property Leda is staying in) was an interesting one. As it was shot, and in the script, it worked beautifully. First, they prepare and cook the octopus in the kitchen, then they eat it in the living room. But back to back, those scenes didn’t work the way we liked. We decided to experiment with combining those two scenes and moving back and forth. We found a nice balance on the dialogue, and we played with looks and small gestures. It felt like a dance. In the end, I think it worked pretty well.

Who was your assistant editor? Was your AE mostly technical, or did you show your edits, ask for opinions, let them edit?
I was very lucky that I could work with my old assistant, Ron Dulin. He’s an editor now, but I convinced him to come and “hang out” with me in the cutting room for those five months we were working. What’s fun about working with Ron is that we are constantly talking about movies and music. He’s a great source of ideas and has an amazing knowledge of film history.The Lost Daughter

I did give Ron some scenes to cut, and every time I finished a scene, I would show him the cut to get his opinions. It was really fun working together this one more time.

Finally, how do you avoid being pigeonholed as an editor? What advice do you have for others?
I think probably working on different genres, different projects and mediums. Keep working and keep experimenting with ways to tell a story.

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