DEFINITION July 2018

SHOOT STORY LOST IN SPACE

I GOT TO THE POINT WHERE I LITERALLY DIDN’T BRING A LIGHT ON TO THE SET that I had complete control of. Because we had that control, all I did when we went in for coverage was actually turn things off for shaping. I was literally going in there with diffusion frames and negative. All we ever did was augment backgrounds from outside the ship; so we would put a bit of hard sun in the background or a moonlit night or overcast day. “I got to the point where I literally didn’t bring a light on to the set. That gave us all unbelievable freedom and it gave it its own sense of style and looked like it was practically lit. This makes the look a lot more natural like recent science fiction such as Rogue One and the recent Marvel movies. Sci-fi movies from the nineties were over-lit but that wasn’t particularly a bad thing, we’ve just moved on now with these incredible sensors. You can virtually light people with monitors that are on the wall for more intimate scenes. “It was fantastic and something I could never have done even a few years ago. It lends itself to a much more natural and easier approach for everybody. We could even tweak the colours in a scene when you thought somebody’s skin tone wasn’t quite right or not the same as the day before, out in the sun for instance. You can warm up or cool down a skin tone back in line with everyone else in the scene.”

afford shooting on anamorphic lenses, but we wanted an anamorphic-like flare. So we positioned the filter in the top third of the shot or maybe top eighth of the shot. Then Todd the gaffer would run a torch up and down the side of the mattebox just to accentuate the flares every once in a while, JJ Abrams-like. “We didn’t want everything to be so clear and sharp; something like flare lends more atmosphere. You’re just taking the edge off things and making it a bit cosier.” CAMERA AND LENSES When Lost in Space was planned the Netflix edict for only 4K cameras to be used for their productions was in full flow so Sam had to look at non-ARRI options. Sam had always been a big fan of RED cameras and the Helium sensor had just come out. Up to that point the camera had only shot big features and this Netflix episodic was its first TV job. “We had RED send a couple of Heliums up to Panavision as we loved the look,” says Sam. “Then for the lenses we chose the Leica Summiluxes. We went with them primarily because I had used them a number of times and found that you could literally get three or four different looks depending on the stop that you could allow yourself. “When you stop the lenses down to around T2.8 it starts taking on a kind of Master Prime feel to it. It gets a little sharper, the blacks get a little deeper so we used different stops a lot especially in the spaceship as I had that control over the lighting so could gain a stop or two – we were even able to shoot some high speed inside the ship. It also helped with close-ups to be able to put a little more light in there and bring the stop up to maybe 2.5 from a 1.6.”

Sam was using ARRI SkyPanels as their main daylight source but for the fixture and fittings they made their own sources. “We built these RGB and bi-colour wands which were 12 to 18 inches long and were just wooden cones that we wrapped the LED lights around. These would run wirelessly with their own power supply so we could hide them anywhere. We used them as accent lights, occasionally as beauty lights because you could get them to a low level. We’d also use them as flare lights. Something I’d done in the past was to take a set of blue streak filters, and we couldn’t

IMAGES Sam’s approach to lighting gives the series a modern, natural sci-fi look.

DEFINITION JULY 2018

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