PRODUCTION | THE CROWN
AMBITIOUS VFX You may not think of The Crown as a big VFX production, and you’d be right not to. It uses a lot of VFX, but it’s mostly invisible. That is, until Season 4, which saw the creation of a majestic, photo-real CG stag. “Even the production team didn’t believe it was digital,” says Standish Millennas, senior VFX producer at Framestore. The stag was the result of the production team’s evolving confidence in what VFX can convey. “For Aberfan, in Season 3, the team were initially nervous about having a CG landslide, because they didn’t want to risk taking the viewer away from the story,” she says. Nonetheless, the episode was a triumph, and any nerves the crew had surrounding VFX were squashed quickly. In total, Framestore contributed 230 frames to Season 4, with many attributed to the ‘invisible’ effects, such as for crowds and set extensions or replacements. Ollie Bersey, deputy head of 2D at Framestore, says that although creating a visual of New York was his favourite, it was definitely the toughest. “We turned Manchester into New York, and I did a lot of 2D work, stripping down the buildings and replacing them with photography. I also added in CG assets, such as lamp posts and traffic lights, and repainted the car extensions,” he explains. Blink and it’s easy to miss this sequence, yet, as Bersey says: “This is just the level of detail the producers of The Crown like to put into the show.” This also applies to crowd work, which increased for the fourth season. “It’s likely because Diana attracted more people,” says Millennas. In one sequence, the team turned a shot of 14 people against a green screen into a crowd of 5000, using various techniques to offset them in time and colour correct their outfits to look different. “It became a bit like Where’s Wally ?, albeit there were multiple Wallys,” Bersey jokes.
ABOVE Lady Di attracted more crowds than the rest of the royals, a painstaking task for the VFX crews who had to turn shots of 14 people into 5000
FAIRYTALES ARE THE SAME IN EVERY LANGUAGE Goldman reveals that out of all of them, he feels most proud of Season 4. Why is that? “For reasons that cannot be put into words,” he says simply. But after talking with him for some length of time, I understand why. The year 2020 was an unforgettable time for the whole world, and many productions have had their release schedules delayed due to Covid-19. “Despite this,” Goldman says, “and the struggle of working remotely to finish the post-production on the series, The Crown made it on to Netflix on 17 November as planned.” Incidentally, this is the same date Season 3 launched on the streaming service last year. He also describes the “lovely coincidence” of being able to shoot episodes 1 through to 5 consecutively – usually, episode 1 isn’t shot in the first block. Goldman elucidates: “We like to go for one of the middle episodes first, just to warm up a bit. But this still meant that I was there from day one to set up the season.” Going into the specifics of these latest episodes, Goldman reveals that Fairytale is his favourite as it best represents his tastes. The episode is about Prince Charles’ proposal to Lady Diana Spencer and their wedding, but it’s more ‘princess locked away in a tower’ than bride-to-be, with Charles away on tour and his love for Camilla Parker Bowles revealed to Spencer. Goldman says: “If the episode was in a language you couldn’t understand, you’d still be able to
understand the story just through watching the visuals. There’s a princely proposal, the princess prepping, the suffering, a wedding rehearsal and then finally, the wedding. It’s like a fairytale, albeit a very sad one.” In that episode, there is a scene that Goldman describes as “one of the most beautiful on The Crown ever”. Fireworks light up the inside of Buckingham Palace, casting different colours on the interiors and on the Queen’s face, as she passes by the window. It’s a dramatic light display, which aptly sums up the tensions between royal family members and can be attributed to a great partnership between Goldman’s cinematography and Ben Turner’s direction for VFX. Nonetheless, Goldman firmly believes that he and I wouldn’t be chatting, season after season, if it weren’t for Peter Morgan’s delicious content. “Cinematography can’t save a bad script,” he says. “Visuals are there to support the story; the reverse never works. When I work on The Crown , my challenge is to be as good as the material, to exceed myself and deliver something that is as high-end as what I’m reading. I don’t think the cinematography truly can be appreciated unless you also appreciate what you’re watching.” These concluding remarks are certainly difficult to argue with, because I wholeheartedly appreciated both. ALL SEASONS OF THE CROWN ARE CURRENTLY STREAMING ON NETFLIX WORLDWIDE
It should feel like a single-camera show, where its just me, my camera and my cast
08 DEF I N I T ION | JANUARY 202 1
Powered by FlippingBook