COMEDY | AVENUE 5
RIGHT Actors Hugh Laurie, Josh Gad and Suzy Nakamura in Avenue 5’s atrium set
for evening and then repeat it for night. It was a long process, but meant we could just press a button and the scene lighting was called up. You just tweaked things as a scene developed.” NO REHEARSAL With the instruction to shoot in a loose fashion in order to catch golden improvisations, the pressure for the operators was immense. “You had to react on the fly as it was such a performance-led show. The way Armando works with actors is so free,” explains Bolter. “He would always rehearse to an extent, there was always a discussion of what we were going to do, but basically we’d never do a rehearsal on camera. We’d have to just jump straight in on take one and then see what happened. I had really great focus pullers, great operators, really good gaffer and we’d all just have to be alive to what was happening, you had to just react and be in tune with what was happening.” He continues: “I tend to operate and shoot single camera. I love being involved and close to the actors. It’s good to make decisions very quickly without having to run it by anybody. This was unique for me as I decided I couldn’t operate with four cameras shooting at all times – I needed to have eyes on all four. Doug Walsh has been my Steadicam operator for around seven or eight years now. We’ve come up together and he was the first to come aboard as Steadicam/A camera operator. “For the other cameras, I got a bit creative. I was looking for not just operators, but the ones with the ability to think like a DOP at times, about how the light was going to affect things. We were also going to have some breakout shoots, some second unit shoots and some stunt shoots, so I wanted operators on those days to be able to step up and be a second unit DOP,” he explains. For this, Bolter chose two upcoming DOPs who are friends of his, James Rhodes and Aaron Rogers. They both wanted the experience of being on a big HBO series like Avenue 5 and became the B and C camera operators, although both of them DOP’d parts of the show towards the end of the We’d never do a rehearsal on camera. We’d have to jump straight in on take one and then see what happened
GRADING SPACE TECHNICOLOR’S DAN COLES DESCRIBES HIS EXPERIENCE COLOUR GRADING THIS SPACE COMEDY EPIC
design, locations, costume, makeup and the broader concept of the look that he and Armando wanted to achieve. We looked at several cinematic references during this process. With all this in mind, we set about creating him a specific LUT to use on-set and in the dailies pipeline. The LUT that resulted from this gave Eben a very pleasing starting point from which to view his material. Integrated lighting was built into the sets at Leavesden, and used in conjunction with Skypanels above the set where he could hide them. All the lighting was controlled remotely from an iPad – everything was LED, and completely colour- and level- dimmable. With this high degree of control achievable in the on-set lighting, the show LUT was all that was used in the dailies colour pipeline. When it came to the final grade, our timeline was an exact match of the offline grade, which gave us the perfect starting point in the grade, too! Eben also encouraged me to visit the set, which I did – it truly was a fantastic set and the integrated lighting was incredible – and, of course, extremely helpful to have seen it for real! Obviously, Eben was mindful of the HDR delivery requirement from pre-production. Our devised colour pipeline was created to make the HDR deliverable requirement seamless – it was just a case of deciding how far we wanted to push the colour, brightness and contrast.
Embarking on a large-scale Armando Iannucci multicam comedy show in a spaceship-sized set, with a thousand- strong cast and fully integrated lighting – this was a unique opportunity for Eben Bolter to do something exciting and different. He certainly seemed to enjoy the grading process, and embraced the opportunity to add a layer of polish, and further enhance his lighting and storytelling for the different worlds of Avenue 5 . From the beginning, we always looked at how we keep things visually interesting over the course of the whole series. A lot of sci-fi tends to be sort of desaturated and cold, but we decided to go rich and colourful. In terms of the shoot, the idea was to create three main looks to give the audience a visual shortcut to where they are, and what the atmosphere is. The first is in space at the front of the ship – rich, luxurious and opulent. The second is the back of the ship, which has a grungier look and, in lighting terms, was more industrial with hard sources. The third look is Earth – around 40 years in the future, this had a more naturalistic feel. In terms of the grade, we enhanced the three different worlds and created a seamlessness across the multicam footage. We essentially embraced the bold filmic image – keeping it all rich in contrast and colour, but in a naturalistic style. Eben and I got together for pre- production meetings, during which time we discussed lighting, lenses, set
38 DEF I N I T ION | FEBRUARY 2020
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