THE UMBRELLA ACADEMY | DRAMA
The show was made in the huge Kipling Avenue studio, which is part of Cinespace Film Studios in Toronto
was brought in to produce the chimp and it was great to work with them to get the realism of Pogo (see our Pogo panel on page 46 to find out more about the character building). It was amazing to see Pogo come alive when Weta showed us the first demo. “Weta took our lighting cues and then replicated them in post; if there was any confusion they would come back to us and ask what were we thinking at any particular scene, for instance if we wanted more light in the eyes at that point or wanted to take light away from the eyes. Any time there was any doubts you would just speak to them about it.” In planning, the Weta team described what requirements they needed from the DOPs Neville and Craig; for instance the witness cameras had to be in 4K to capture a high enough resolution. “We started on Sony F5 cameras to be run either side, giving us full-length actor shots so they could apply that to the chimp character they were making.” This was the first Netflix show that Weta had worked on. They brought their experience of working on Planet of the Apes to the character. To get this level of movie VFX expertise on Netflix shows how attractive the streaming services have become to predominately movie-only VFX houses. ALTERED CARBON – SAME AGAIN Fresh from shooting the Netflix show Altered Carbon , Neville wanted to use the same cameras-and-lens combination. This meant
The Umbrella Academy – Luther, Diego, Allison, Vanya, Klaus and Number Five – as they work together to solve their father Reginald Hargreeves’ mysterious death, while coming apart at the seams due to their divergent personalities and abilities. The show was made in the huge Kipling Avenue studio, which is part of Cinespace Studios in Toronto, where shows like Handmaid’s Tale and Titans were shot. Kipling is another post-industrial conversion, this time from an old glass factory, one of many studios in Toronto to house the huge explosion of production in the city. BLACK HUMOUR If you have watched Fargo you’ll know that black humour wrapped up the violence, almost sanitising it, but not quite; Steve Blackman was a writer on Fargo and brings that same humour to this new show. Neville sets the scene: “Gerard Way fromMy Chemical Romance wrote the novel about 20 years ago and it became a cult classic in the US. Steve explained to me that they wanted to keep it very ‘Wes Anderson’ but in my head it’s more like Wes Anderson meets Battle Royale but with the Fargo dark humour. “Visually we wanted to give it that Wes Anderson spin because of the dysfunctional family angle. But we wanted to adjust that and give it our own aesthetics. It’s a VFX- heavy show with one of the main characters, called Pogo, being a CG chimp. Weta Digital
ABOVE The Umbrella Academy uses techniques of black humour mixed in with violence
that all his experimentation with the Arri Alexa 65 on that show would help with this one. “We wanted to have that same look and luckily Arri was happy to do a deal with the Alexa 65 for us to use that camera again. The great thing was that we started off using the Alexa Mini as our C camera and then the LF camera came out, so for the last half of the show we were filming with two Alexa 65s and an LF. “I think we were the first show to combine the 65s and the new LF. Arri came out and looked at what we were doing with the two cameras so it was great working in collaboration with them for what helps us with the LF; the LF is a fantastic camera as well as the 65. “It has a slightly smaller sensor than the 65 but it punches above its weight. We
IMAGES The show follows a dysfunctional family of superheroes through a series of (mis)adventures
MARCH 20 1 9 | DEF I N I T ION 39
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