IN THE ARENA: SERENA WILLIAMS PRODUCTION
ESPN’s Man in the Arena: Tom Brady , the second series follows a similar visual style, though Baraka wanted Serena’s story to stand apart. “Serena is a different person; and her sport is different. When preserving her legacy, we took a different approach – Gotham Chopra, Lauren Fisher, Meg Cirillo and I,” she says of the directors and showrunner, respectively. During the hiring process, Baraka came prepared with a full deck. “I had my own ideas. It’s just great that they resonated with them and were in alignment with what they had in mind. I left feeling confident,” she recalls. Later, she met with Serena herself, explaining her vision for the series: to ‘capture tenderness, strength, intimacy’ and ‘preserve the integrity of skin hue, while creating softness and creaminess in the overall image’. LIGHTS PLEASE Lighting was a key aspect of Baraka’s job for In the Arena . Having shot Alicia Keys documentary Uncharted , which
premiered last year, Baraka is all too familiar with the challenges involved in illuminating Black skin. To prepare, Baraka “looked at a tonne of photos of Serena and came to understand her face and what she can handle.” Then, she auditioned various cameras before settling on the ARRI ALEXA Mini LF. For glass, Baraka wanted to ensure a good fit for Serena’s face shape; she landed on Cooke anamorphic full- frames and Leitz SUMMILUX-Cs. Baraka went for a 360° set-up that allowed her to ‘be very specific about where the light was hitting Serena’, who was pregnant throughout the shoot. “I knew that we would have to shape the light as she went through her pregnancy a little bit differently,” explains Baraka, who was constantly searching for that delicate balance between highlights and shadows. “It’s not like a Rembrandt where you have one light source, and then you have this light under the eye. It’s more like this gradient that falls off, and then we could shape that gradient based on where she was in her pregnancy.”
A SPORTING ACE Baraka shot on an ARRI ALEXA Mini LF with Cooke anamorphics and Leitz SUMMILUX-Cs
45
definitionmags
Powered by FlippingBook