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Shantaram

DP Chat: Stefan Duscio on Apple TV’s Shantaram

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Apple TV+’s Shantaram, starring Charlie Hunnam, is a 1980s drama that follows a fugitive who escapes prison and reinvents himself as a doctor in the slums of Bombay. It’s based on the Gregory David Roberts novel of the same name.

DP Stefan Duscio

As the lead DP on the series, Stefan Duscio, ACS, shot six episodes out of the 12-episode series (1, 2, 3, 7, 8, 9). The series is led by showrunner Steve Lightfoot and directed by Bharat Nalluri, Iain B. MacDonald and Bronwen Hughes.

Shot on ARRI Alexa Mini LF using Panavision Ultra Panatar lenses, Shantaram is the first Apple TV+ series that uses anamorphic lenses and frame in a 2.40 aspect ratio.

When shooting the series, Duscio pursued smooth camera movement and wide-screen anamorphic because, in his own words, “I wanted you to fall in love with Bombay and unashamedly present it in a romantic way.”

Let’s find out more from Duscio…

What were the challenges of shooting in Bombay?
Actually, due to the pandemic and the fact that the Delta variant was spreading, we couldn’t film in India in 2021 during the bulk of principal photography. We instead formulated a plan to film Shantaram across Australia and Thailand and then worked with a second unit in 2022 to achieve all of our Mumbai landscapes and plates. As with many productions during the time, the pandemic provided a huge challenge for us to overcome. COVID restrictions and lockdowns were in full force across Melbourne and Bangkok. Every location where we were permitted to film felt tenuous, and every week of continued filming felt like a gift.

What were the challenges of recreating 1980s Bombay?
At first, we were all disheartened that we couldn’t shoot the main unit work in India, but in retrospect, having ultimate control over large backlot-like areas in Bangkok worked really well for us. For one, on a COVID-safe level, we needed to be isolated and removed from the public. And two, our incredible art departments could spend time and effort making every detail as period-correct as possible.

ShantaramYou shot the first episode that set the tone for the series. Can you talk about that?
I worked extensively with showrunner Steve Lightfoot and setup director Bharat Nalluri to discuss the tone and look for the series. A lot of our conversations were about what sort of story we were telling, what films inspired us and how we wanted the audience to feel when watching this wild tale.

Our production designer, Chris Kennedy, was also an incredible resource, and his influence on the entire series can’t be overstated enough. Chris has spent a lot of time in India, including on the Garth Davis film Lion, and has done an incredible amount of research on the time period and place. We all poured over hundreds of photographs from books and magazines as well as archival footage.

Steve said he didn’t want to be afraid of the word “romance” in the series, and Bharat and I took that to heart, creating a photographic language that moved between naturalism and romanticism. I wanted the audience to fall in love with Bombay — its places and its people — in the same way I have when traveling, wide-eyed in wonder, looking at exotic new places for the first time.

Why did you decide to shoot with anamorphic lenses and frame in a 2.40 aspect ratio?
Bharat and I love the look and character of anamorphic lenses, and this felt like an epic action-adventure tale worthy of the 2.40 canvas. We did test both 2×1 versus 2.40 on many location stills during all of our scouting, and we all soon agreed that wide screen suited the occasion of the story. We ultimately chose Panavision Ultra Panatar large-format anamorphic lenses that provide a unique 1.3x squeeze, which is well-suited to the Alexa Mini LF sensor.

Shantaram

DP Stefan Duscio behind camera

Did you use the same camera for the entire show?
Yes, we shot the entire series on Alexa Mini LF with Ultra Panatar lenses. There was the occasional use of a 50mm Panavision H-Series spherical lens for more impressionistic work, but we generally stuck to the package.

How did you work with the director and colorist to get the look you wanted? Were there on-set LUTs?
We generally used one LUT for the show, and our on-set DITs (Sam Winzar in Melbourne and Thian Temcharoensuk in Thailand) would adjust color from there. I worked extensively with dailies colorist Christopher Rudkin all year on the series, and we devised a secure remote system to view and color the dailies on wrap each evening. He was based in Budapest during production, though the time difference worked quite well for our workflow.

When we were wrapping in Melbourne or Bangkok, Chris was starting his day in Europe and had already received the first half of the day’s work. He would then send his work to editorial in Los Angeles when complete. It was quite a remarkable, around-the-world workflow, and I credit post facility Soundfirm in Melbourne, post producer David Jeffrey and Paramount TV for trusting us to design something so elaborate.

Can you talk lighting? Any happy accidents along the way?
Lighting this world was so much fun. We generally embraced a warmer color temperature for present-day India scenes and employed cooler and more neutral tones for Melbourne flashbacks. I set up a lot of the looks, colors and temperatures with Australian-based gaffer Ruru Reedy and his incredible team. I’ve been working with Reedy for many years, and it’s amazing to see how far lighting technology has come in that time. He ran a completely wireless set, and his lighting board operator could either be with us in the DIT tent or mobile.

It was such a freeing experience for me, and we were able to shape, dim and color our lighting very efficiently with this technique. We used a combination of ARRI Skypanels, LiteMat Spectrums, Asteras and traditional HMI and tungsten units. We also made custom LED globes that could be seen in-shot, looked period-correct and were controllable. It was really the best of using both modern wireless LED technology and leaning on beautiful fresnels for harder lights.

ShantaramWhen I got to Thailand, I worked with an incredible local gaffer Wirot [Sittiwech]to carry on the look. We had large canvases to work on, whether it was our Bombay streets backlot or our Sagar Wada slum. Both major sets required a huge amount of resources and collaboration with the art department. They were both blank canvases, which was both exciting and daunting, and we endeavored to install as much practical lighting as possible in the sets before using larger moonboxes or swathes or sodium streetlights to fill the holes.

How did you become interested in cinematography?
I grew up loving comics, animation and movies — and always had an appreciation for visual storytelling. I studied media arts at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, which was a fine arts course with a focus on exhibition-based work. After university, I worked many jobs trying to figure out what I wanted to focus on: a camera assistant to photographers and cinematographers, a graphic designer for DVD covers, a storyboard artist.

Slowly, I fell morShantarame and more in love with the film industry, even though I found the work daunting and challenging. Eventually, after throwing myself into every experience possible, I started to become more comfortable and creative on a film set.

What inspires you artistically?
Inspiration is a constantly moving target, and you never seem to find it in the same place twice. I have some wonderful cinematographer friends who I find deeply inspiring, and that shared community of knowledge is really important to me. I love following photographers’ work, as their styles can often be more unique and personal without the machine of a film set influencing them.

How do you simultaneously stay on top of advancing technology?
In terms of technology, I spend a lot of time reading industry press and performing my own practical tests when new technology arrives. I do a lot of work in commercials, and they’re often a great playground to test emerging technologies and techniques before employing them in long-form work.

ShantaramWhat new technology has changed the way you work?
I would point to LED lighting as being a huge change in the way I work now. The ability to subtly dim and color lighting fixtures and run many of them back to affordable dimming systems is really game-changing. We can paint the set with such a delicate brush now, particularly with more and more sensitive digital cameras emerging every year.

What are some of your best practices or rules you try to follow on each job?
Try to get in the director’s head as much as possible and develop a strong partnership on-set. Do a page turn together, build references together, agree on the style of the shoot together — before stepping onto set. Shoot and grade your own tests and present them to the director and producers to pitch the look well before shooting commences so there are no surprises on week one.

ShantaramExplain your ideal collaboration with the director or showrunner when starting a new project.
Ideally, we would discuss story and tone first before discussing visual strategies. I love to know the intention of a story and how it should make us feel before making visual decisions.

What’s your go-to gear – things you can’t live without?
I shoot mostly on ARRI Alexa Mini LF these days, though I regularly mix up what lenses I use from job to job. I shoot all my preproduction stills on Canon 5D Mk4 and sometimes on 35mm and 120 film. I spend a lot of time in Adobe Lightroom organizing scout photos and grading looks.

Color Enhances Storytelling in Live-Action Mulan

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The makers of Disney’s live-action Mulan devoted an enormous amount of time and creativity to planning and executing the way color would be used to enhance the storytelling and evoke each scene’s emotional content. The feast of color that audiences experienced watching Mulan was the culmination of preparation from director Niki Caro; cinematographer Mandy Walker, ASC, ACS; production designer Grant Major and colorist Natasha Leonnet of Company 3.

Natasha Leonnet

“The film was a colorist’s dream,” says Leonnet, who worked on Blackmagic’s DaVinci Resolve 16 in her grading theater in Hollywood while collaborating remotely with Caro and Walker, neither of whom were able to be physically present. The director and cinematographer, Leonnet says, “were always after something that was extraordinarily beautiful, but not over the top. There is a very strong color ‘arc,’ which helped make it a particularly inspiring film for me to work on.”

Planning for Mulan‘s look commenced in 2017, when New Zealand-based Caro began prepping the film, which stars Yifei Liu, Jet Li and Jason Scott Lee. “We went through the script and talked about the emotional journey of the character,” the director recalls. “That’s where I always take my cues. Then when we start talking about each scene; we discuss giving it a sense of place.”

Director Niki Caro (left) on set

Caro spent a great deal of time researching the use of color in Chinese art and movies as conceptualizations about locations, production design, costume design and lighting started taking shape. “It was so clear that red was Mulan’s color,” she says. “In any culture, red suggests passion, love and strength. Even while some of the epic battle sequences are very monochromatic, we knew it was important for the defiant Mulan to stand out in the scene in her red costume.”

Caro was also clear from the start that despite Disney’s previous animated version of the story and the elements of magic in Mulan’s tale, this film would be grounded in a real-feeling approach to its environment. “Because of where I’m from and my history as a filmmaker I’m very preoccupied with the natural world,” says the director, whose breakthrough film was Whale Rider. “I always knew I wanted to shoot on real locations, doing as much in-camera as possible.”

“Niki always said she wants the audience to feel they’re in a real place,” says Walker. “It’s also very helpful for the actors that they feel they’re not in a greenscreen world. They are in a physical world. Aside from some work for some big battles and a few other places, we used production design and costumes and lighting to build the look. Then we worked with Natasha in post to fine-tune that look.”

Walker, who shot on ARRI Alexa 65, recalls being inspired by the epic Lawrence of Arabia, which was shot on 65mm film. “What’s interesting about that film and what we worked to achieve in Mulan was the combination of epic images and intimacy,” she says. “By shooting with such a large sensor, we could show these very big battle sequences with a lot of detail but still bring the attention of the viewer to one character in the foreground. For scenes of just two or three people, the shallower depth-of-field characteristics (inherent in the focal lengths used to cover the 65mm image area) allow us to focus in on a very small portion of the frame, which can bring more intimacy to a scene.”

By the spring of 2017, Caro says, “We had a ‘war room’ in our production offices in Auckland, New Zealand. There was a huge table that seated 50 people where we would have all our meetings. You could walk around and basically go on the journey of the film, through a lot of the still images, scenic art and representations of scenes to come.”

This “tour” of the film’s world was designed to reflect what Caro explains as “my desire that the film keep opening up and opening out, growing and changing. We had some geothermal and underwater images. It was designed to present a feeling of what all those environments look like. You could walk through this room and feel [the space] grow and change and see all the places a young Chinese girl from a small village would never see herself. It was exciting for me to take people on that journey as a filmmaker before we started shooting.”

“That room was a perfect way to work out the visual language of the film and the whole arc of the story,” says Walker. “It was a collaboration with Niki, the art department, makeup, costume and me all adding ideas. We used a lot of photographs I’d taken in China and various paintings and images.”

“Sometimes we were inspired by a location, and then we recreated it,” says Walker. “For the fight between Mulan and the witch, we loved this highly unusual geothermal volcanic lake that we saw in China. It had beautiful, otherworldly colors, but we couldn’t actually shoot there, so we recreated it in New Zealand. The color and look was a wonderful place for us to set a battle between what appears to be good and evil, natural and supernatural.”

In other cases, the production carefully scouted for the perfect location and then shot in the space. “We had a choice of two deserts,” Walker recalls. “One had a kind of warm glow with a kind of orange-colored sand. The other had white sand that looked more like you think of when you think of the Sahara. We chose to shoot in the one with the warm sand because we felt it just made the scenes slightly warmer-looking.”

When it came time for final color grading, Leonnet worked remotely with Caro and Walker, who was in Australia prepping her next film. The colorist was on the Disney lot in nearby Burbank until the final weeks, when they were able to sit together.

“We all work from a place of feeling,” says Caro of Walker, Leonnet and herself. “It’s a very feeling film. Some of it was a really effortless communication with Natasha. I could describe something in berserk terms,” she laughs. “‘This red feels a little ‘pithy” to me, or something like that. I don’t think I was even using the right word, but Natasha knew exactly what I meant and made the change right away.

“The reds especially presented an interesting challenge in the DI,” she adds. “They were sometimes just screamers. We knew Natasha would have to restrain them — to find a sweet spot where the red is bold and undeniable and iconic and punchy, but it’s not just screaming at you!”

Cinematographer Mandy Walker (center) on the set of Mulan

Walker concurs, adding, “We shot in situations where the natural light would undergo changes, whether you’re at dusk or sunset, or it becomes overcast. And part of Natasha’s job, of course, is making tweaks that maintain consistency throughout, and particularly in the color red, which was so important. At one stage she said she needed a day to do a red pass — to make sure the red was consistent throughout the entire film — and I’m glad she did. The color is so important to the feeling of so many scenes.”

Colorist Leonnet, according to Walker, “did a lot of work to ensure that patterns and fabric and leather work was clearly visible and didn’t just turn into a solid [mass], which can easily happen if you’re not working with a colorist of her skill.”

For scenes of Mulan at home, “we wanted it to feel really warm with a feeling of love and closeness, and that gave me the key to lighting those scenes,” describes Walker.

“I’ve worked with Mandy many times,” says Leonnet, “and I always feel like I’m working with a master — a true artist. She has a wonderful way of creating color separation in very warm scenes like those of Mulan at home. By cooling down the ‘toe’ — the low end — you still feel like everything is bathed in beautiful, warm lamplight, but subconsciously you feel that there is color separation in the scene. It’s not just a wash over everything. It’s something very subtle but really powerful that she did with the lighting and that was the basis of how I graded all those scenes.”

“Color contrast creates a third dimension to the images,” Walker elaborates. “So if people are lit by firelight, or it’s a sunset shot, I’ll have a tiny bit of cooler light on the shadow side of characters’ faces. Otherwise, it can look like you just put an orange filter on the image, and there’s no color contrast at all.”

“From the time Mulan joins the military,” says Leonnet, “each battle scene has its own color palette. All the adventures she has and all the challenges she has on road to becoming a warrior are represented in part through the color. The film really has a lot of variations in its palette, probably more than any film I’ve ever worked on.”