PRODUCTION. THE RIG
can key them out of,” Hawken explains. For The Rig , they had to build sets large enough to contain sections of an oil rig, and then have blue screens in the background large enough to cover all the camera angles. “Whether a production opts for blue or green screen, creating good edges is always part of the clean- up operation.” However, Hawken points out that Dune (2021), which scooped six Academy Awards last year, including for cinematography and visual effects, pioneering brown screens due to the intended landscape’s colour palette. “Because they had lots of scenes in the desert with sand everywhere, to improve the edge work of the keys they would use brown screens,” he explains. “It means that, colour-wise, the edges of the foreground would integrate more closely with the CG background. The bulk of the work with blue- and green-screen shots is achieving natural edges that blend with the background as well as cleaning up the colour contamination from the “The bulk of the work with blue- and green- screen shots is achieving natural edges that blend with the background”
background into the foreground. I think the work on Dune was fantastic.” SHORT-STAFFED The Rig was made at a time when there was plenty of work, though a scarcity of available artists. Hawken says that a lot of things were delayed, but the team doubled down to meet their deadlines. “We worked on the external shots with set extensions, microscope imagery and some internal footage, where we
added CG spores floating around. We had around 100 or so of those spore shots,” he explains. “They were quite simple, but it was hard to find people to work on them and we had to reach out internationally to seek artists. Thankfully, we managed to find some great talent in India. I think this shortage of artists contributed to the deadline being pushed back for many of the companies working on the show. It was also tricky to get feedback on the submitted shots. The production team
NORTH OF THE BORDER The Rig is the first original series from Amazon Prime Video to be filmed entirely in Scotland. A second series has already been green-lit
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