DRAMA | THE UMBRELLA ACADEMY
“We wanted the warmth of the past to come across; because of the different timelines we wanted the past to feel like a much better place compared to the future. We used our grading to signal that.” “I made the decision early on to make all the street lights white. Normally street lights are warmer, with more of an orange coming through, but now white light was the characters’ night-time, with street lights coming in to the basements and everything. There’s a basement set which is like a kids’ 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 light flooding in to that room really worked.” WIDE SCOPE “The Alexa 65 camera gives you such a wide scope, giving your lenses a great way to see the world. And it made our operators life easier, they could see everything but could quickly run out of set. So the benefit of giving them a 360˚ was fantastic for the camera. The Alexa 65 when it moves around the set sees the world in a different way that other cameras just don’t see. Aesthetically it looks stunning and for me you get a kind of beautiful realismmoving that camera through the Umbrella Academy world, even though the world was completely made up. “Because the sets were all joined we could move the camera from one set to
great time just squeezing asmuch light as we could through the openings. We used Arri Skypanels with softboxes in the ceiling skylights so that looked like daylight coming through. Because we were on Skypanels we could change that to night at a press of a button. “All the lights are now coming through the board so every single light you see is controllable, including the daylight. On the production I’m doing now the gaffer is coming in with an iPad Pro and he is using it as a remote, so he’s standing with you going over all the settings. It’s so quick and easy, when you consider less than ten years ago we were putting people on ladders changing the gels, it took forever. “Back then you had to think about the logistics of whether it was daytime or night- time and if you wanted something slightly warmer, for instance, you had to send someone up to do it manually. ALTERNATIVE WORLD With The Umbrella Academy Neville wanted to show how different the world was, how mixed compared to the real world. “We’re two degrees different. There’s no mobile phones, no internet, no connection with anything real: so Kennedy was never shot, for instance. We wanted to make it feel as if world you are watching is the same world, but just slightly different. The mix of lighting worked so well for that, you could just combine Tungsten with LED and then just aesthetically mix everything up with fluorescent tube lighting as well.
another. We did a lot of flashbacks to the past which we did in one continuous take on a Steadicam. We wanted to do that to contact aesthetically with the more Wes Anderson The Alexa 65 gives you such a wide scope, giving your lenses a great way to see the world
ABOVE Members of The Umbrella Academy don’t always have to carry umbrellas...
42 DEF I N I T ION | MARCH 20 1 9
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