EMMY SPECIAL PRODUC T I ON .
85mm on the Supremes and 100mm on the S5s – and found them to be a perfect match together. The Supremes are so fast, too.” WHAT’S REAL? WHAT’S NOT? Kidd wanted to adopt a different approach to lighting. To make the imaginary world feel more ‘real’, the sets were lit from the outside in. “It was a challenge – albeit a fantastic one – to make the sets 360˚ by keeping the lighting on the outside. It made them feel like real houses, which helped the actors relax within the world of The Academy . We didn’t want it to be overly lit, although it made lighting much harder for myself and my gaffer, Terry Banting. We used
Arri Skypanels with softboxes in the ceiling skylights, so it looked like daylight coming through the windows. And because we were using Skypanels, we could change to night at the touch of a button,” he explains. Although the visual motive was to make audiences feel as if The Academy world is the same as ours, there are script differences Kidd was keen to show. “Our worlds are two degrees apart. There are no mobile phones, no internet, no connection with anything real: [John F.]Kennedy was never shot, for instance. Mixing Tungsten with LED lighting showed this contrast,” he explains. “I made the decision early on to make all the street lights white. Normally, they are warmer, with more of an orange tone coming through. There’s a basement set which is like a kid’s room where they all grew up. We wanted to make that a dark and gloomy place, but it had an atmosphere to it – the white street lights flooding in worked really well here.”
“We wanted the same look – and luckily Arri was happy to do a deal so we could use that camera again,” says Kidd. “The Alexa 65 provides such a wide scope, giving your lenses a great way to see the world. Aesthetically, it’s stunning, and it gave us beautiful realism in The Umbrella Academy world, even though it’s completely made up.” The Alexa 65 was used in combination with the Alexa LF, and from Season 2, Kidd also matched the Cooke lenses with Zeiss Supremes. “There are so many lens options for the 65 – but unfortunately, when we started shooting, we couldn’t get hold of any Supremes. I used them on Apple TV’s Amazing Stories with the Cooke S5s, though, shooting at up to
FAMILY FEUDS The six siblings of The Umbrella Academy (far left) are a dysfunctional lot. This includes the time-hopping Five (left) and flamboyant Klaus (below)
13. OCTOBER 2021
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