PRODUCTION 3 BODY PROBLEM
“It needed a lot of figuring out from a storytelling perspective; how to build up the mystery of what was being done, then also revealing it happening as well as finding the right level of detail.” A storyboard artist designed ‘some gruesome ways to be sliced’, but the showrunners and director Minkie Spiro dialled that down. “We’re setting it up for a shockingly violent way to die, but letting the imagination do the rest,” he says. This scene, in keeping with the rest of the series, stretches the boundaries of our known physical world, rooting the fantastical elements in some level of scientific understanding. Ahlgren plotted camera moves for the scene using LED pixel tape before moving to the backlot where production design had built a large, to-scale section of the tanker – complete with a helicopter pad. “The idea is that the nanofiber technology is cutting at a molecular level, WE HAD TO FIGURE OUT at what speed THE NANOFIBER WOULD MOVE in relation to the ship ”
SETTING THE SCENE Creating the right balance of mystery and revelation was key in depicting shocking scenes such as the gory nanofiber attack, and the VR game world’s eerie uncanniness
so unless gravity is doing something to the object or person, we don’t show its effect. We show cutting paper and when the ship hits the bank of the canal it topples like a stack of plates, but the technology itself is not revealed. “We had to figure out at what speed the nanofiber would move, in relation to the ship’s movement and that of the camera. We decided that it moves slowly enough for someone to run away from it
if they can, and that becomes a big part of the drama.” The series was shot at Shepperton Studios over nine months, ending in August 2022. Most was filmed in England using locations in and around London, as well as in Portsmouth, Kent, Oxford, Sussex and Bedfordshire. Other locations included a mountain ridge near Cáceres in Spain, site of the Chinese radar station, and Cape Canaveral in Florida. Director Derek Tsang ( Better Days ), a Chinese native, had drawn on his own experiences of hearing stories about people who lived through the Cultural Revolution in order to picture the series’ opening scenes. “His own memory of that time period is from images that are shot on Ektachrome,” says Freeman. “We opted not to go full Ektachrome in our look since that would give us bright primary colours and everything else would be muted. We go in between to yield that period feeling, pulling back on the primaries, but without becoming a distraction for the rest of the story that follows.”
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