BEHIND THE SHOT
special effects team in the wider shot,” she recalls. Then, the crew designed the camera moves around key emotional beats, before bringing in operators Erdem Ertal and Aymae Sulick to coordinate movement with the actors, props and background action. It was captured on two ARRI ALEXA Mini LF cameras with Angénieux lenses, with both operators shooting handheld around the operating table while a ZeeGee rig followed Robby through the room. Coelho describes the show as functioning like a live theatre, with the team aiming to shoot a scene from beginning to end without interruption. The set was built to work as a 360° lighting set-up, mostly coming from overhead and bouncing back from the hospital’s white wall. “Every time
we use additional lighting for their faces, they have to be moving lights: either a battery-operated DMG DASH light on a pole, or our custom onboard camera lights, bicolour and fully controllable,” she elaborates. Because of the stark white surrounds, the team wanted to introduce colour contrast to distinguish different areas on-set. “We have warm cans (3200K) around the main area, but for the trauma room I wanted a cooler feel,” she explains. “We decided to use cooler cans (5000K) than our camera white-balance (4000K) to give a more intense, serious feel. These rooms are equipped with real trauma boom lights used for surgery.” While being amazing for realism, these came with the added challenge of being ‘extremely bright with a strange
frequency’, which the team didn’t have much control over since they couldn’t actually be adjusted. “When shooting with them, we had to come up with a special look setting. To help the brightness, we raised the whole light level of our set one stop brighter, we put an ND 0.3 in our cameras to keep the same T-stop (T4 at 800 ISO) and adjusted the camera shutter. We call it The Trauma Look.” Looking back on this moment and the series in its entirety, Coelho’s proudest achievement is how it says so much with so few words: “It tells you a lot without too much dialogue. It really is about the intimacy of the camera with the amazing acting of Noah Wyle.” The Pitt is streaming now on HBO Max in the US and Now or Sky in the UK
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