3 BODY PROBLEM PRODUCTION
we needed glass with a vintage look but also a way of making it feel modern at the same time.” That balance was found in the ARRI ALFA, a lens set purposely detuned for Greig Fraser, ASC, who was at the time shooting them for The Batman . “It had almost exactly what I was looking for,” Freeman says. “A vintage feel surrounding the edges of the lens, but sharp in the centre so we could cut between any period from late-sixties China to modern-day London smoothly and effortlessly.” In contrast, the VR scenes appear extraordinarily sharp – a factor of being filmed with ARRI’s spherical DNA range. “Technically, they are a bit purer, which was an advantage to the VFX team who needed to produce some very complex environments in the VR world.” The VR world, which was engineered by extraterrestrials in the story, takes the player from the Shang dynasty in China to Tudor England to post-apocalyptic deserts. These were filmed against a large 180° wall consisting of ARRI SkyPanel LEDs filtered through and hidden behind a Rosco scrim. “We spent a long time developing ideas for how to shoot these imaginary worlds,” explains Richard Donnelly, ISC,
who also shot episodes 1 and 2, joining the project a little later after shooting The Nevers . “Our board operators could control any kind of colour we wanted. It was fantastic as it enabled us to light the actors as we wanted to, for instance with the sun rising, instead of it being led by VFX. We augmented the set with many other lights, but that wall was us lighting the actors. It’s almost the reverse of volumetric capture in which you use plates filmed on location to light the live action. Here, it was the other way around.” For example, a scene set in a VR desert in episode 2 introduces the AI child character Follower and the concept of dehydration. The characters hide under a rock to escape the rising sun. Donnelly lit the scene with the wall and a ceiling rig of Vortex lights. “All the long shadows are real. It’s almost like shooting back in the forties where you’re creating all these shadows in camera on-set and it’s not a heavy FX world.” Swedish cinematographer Martin Ahlgren, ASC ( The Plot Against America ) lensed the three-episode block following Freeman and Donnelly. This included the startling scene in episode 5 in which a container ship and everyone onboard is silently ripped to shreds by ‘nanofibers’.
VAST LANDSCAPES The contrast between sharp and soft lensing allowed the creators to flit between different periods and realities
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