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SHOOT STORY LOST IN SPACE
underpinned by certain disciplines in shooting. Sam’s experience crosses features and television so he is ideally placed to comment on the differences in shooting. “You take on something like Lost in Space and you get that immediate feeling of having to get a lot of coverage to be able to cut it down to fit into a certain slot,” he explains. “But it is different with Netflix as you’re not stuck making room for commercial breaks; you can make your single hour just an hour or an hour and two minutes. You’re also allowed to shoot it the way you want to shoot it, you don’t have to over- cover your shots. “Having discipline in the way you shoot automatically can give you a sense of style. Generally, we purposely stayed away from handheld, we stayed away from Steadicam. The camera only moved when people moved in shot; as we were in nice big open spaces we were more prone to keep a frame open and let the action happen within it. Then when it came to coverage we made that conscious effort of saying if we’re out on a wide shot, it’s single camera unless there’s a second wide that is offering something interesting. All our coverage from then
away from it as we didn’t want to disorientate people but wanted to keep everyone grounded and enjoying the setting. Only as the series progressed could it get a little bit frantic, a bit more edgy – we could change the drama of the camera work. “By the time you got to episode ten, where it’s mass panic in space, you could then take it up a notch or two and play a lot of it handheld. You’ve seen the landscape and the environment and we felt by then we could take the audience somewhere else. For me it was really challenging, we knew we wanted a feature film look and would try not to deviate often from that. We all understood that TV now is watched on a variety of devices but at the same time needs to remain exciting to watch. But we never wanted to lose that sense of scale and that sense of being somewhere very different. It was always a fine balance of big close-ups because of the television factor but also one of being with the family all the time.” TV VERSUS FILM COVERAGE This insight into how the specialist episodic crews tune their work to appeal to viewer’s habits is
would physically move in so it wasn’t about bringing lenses from a distance trying to get coverage. “So other than when we were getting into heavy drama we would be out on 12s, 17s for the wide shot but then we would physically move into the next size. Nine times out of ten that would be around the 32 or 40 mark; we probably never really went any longer than 65mm, that would only be if the ‘B’ camera was picking up profile work. I personally didn’t work with any zooms even when we were on cranes. We tried to make it work within fixed lenses. This gave us a discipline to work with as well as the actors having a similar discipline. “Staying away from the Steadicam where you tend to follow everything indiscriminately was part of that discipline, we’d plot and plan things through on a Dolly and Dance floor to make sure everything was structured properly. For me it made a big difference because it instils a little bit
ABOVE The pilot and early episodes introduce the family
to the viewer. BELOW As the
series progresses, things get darker.
DEFINITION JULY 2018
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