GRISELDA PRODUCTION
During production for the 2006 documentary – which chronicles Miami’s drug trade in the eighties – he had even visited Blanco’s hitmen Rivi and Miguelito in federal prison, interviewing them as research while they served their life sentences. “I was very familiar with the world, some of the players – and with Griselda herself,” he explains. THAT SEVENTIES LOOK Across its six parts, the show does an incredible job of transporting us to seventies (and later eighties) Miami, exquisitely capturing the era’s gritty glamour in a haze of cigarette smoke and sequins. The note-perfect period setting was the result of a huge amount of work from the team, which took advantage of a lengthy pre-production phase in part caused by the pandemic. Director and DOP collaborated closely with the production designer (Knut Loewe) and costume designers (Sarah Evelyn and Safowa Bright Bitzelberger) for months before the cameras started rolling, collecting newspaper clippings, polaroids and other reference points until they were ‘steeped in it’. “The world-building, based on the research, was one part of it – but the other aspect was unifying all this in the look, lensing and colour palette that our digital film stock was going to create,” shares Salas. “I shot tests which I then presented back to the art and costume departments. Since it was a painterly interpretation of the real-world colours, there were certain bands of the spectrum that weren’t going to render accurately. It was making sure everyone knew how the colours would skew, and creating a unified look inspired by the seventies, but our own version of it – and we needed people to buy into this. It was important that the truth and essence of the world was accurate to itself.” The palette changes slightly as the narrative enters the eighties, so the team created two LUTs – one for 1978 and one for 1983 – with each capturing the visual influences of the respective eras. Then it was time to build in the halation and grain, with Salas previewing the look live on-set, and embedding it into the dailies and VFX workflow to ensure it was ‘very much ingrained into the project’.
MIAMI VICE The team used the photography of Miami-based Andy Sweet as inspiration when choosing locations for the series
In episode 4, Griselda takes a bath in her palatial Palm Beach home, and we see a huge mural of Salome by German artist Franz von Stuck, depicting the princess dancing with joy as she’s given the head of John the Baptist. The painting formed a part of the team’s reference wall and served as a huge inspiration to Salas. “It had this incredible combination of gold and green; I was fine-tuning the LUT during hair, makeup and wardrobe tests and that became an important ingredient of the look. There was an olive tint to the shadows and we incorporated a lot of gold into the highlights, by shifting amber hues more towards yellow in our lighting fixtures. We also looked at a photographer from the time period in Miami called Andy Sweet. That was more inspirational in terms of finding locations which felt like those pictures. It was a nice guide for us.” IN THE FRAME Adding to Griselda ’s unique look is the 1.66:1 aspect ratio, a lesser-used choice which allows for powerful close-ups. “We wanted the ability to isolate Griselda
and centre her, without having to get too close,” explains Salas. “So we can be in a medium-wide lens and either back up enough to include other characters or isolate her in the frame – and that was much easier to do in 1.66:1 than it would have been in a widescreen aspect ratio. “It also inspired us to think in this aspect ratio that we hadn’t really explored before, and to reinterpret the world that way – because we had both just done a lot of widescreen work. Lastly, it felt very close to the golden ratio, and it felt like many of the seventies photographs that we were looking at
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