December 18, 2024

Lawrence Sher, ASC on ShotDeck, Joker: Folie à Deux

Cinematographer Lawrence Sher, ASC has a career that spans indie favorites like Garden State to blockbuster hits like the Hangover movies and Joker. But it was the arduous process of creating lookbooks for Garden State that sparked an idea: a comprehensive, searchable database of cinematic images. This idea evolved into ShotDeck, a powerful tool for filmmakers and creatives alike.

Larry’s initial struggle involved manually grabbing screenshots from DVDs and tapes. Google Images offered some help, but the images lacked the cinematic quality he sought. By 2015, he began working with a computer engineer to build a solution, realizing that if he found such a library valuable, his colleagues would too. After years of beta testing, ShotDeck officially launched as a company in 2020.

ShotDeck can also be used beyond pre-production pitch decks. “In my day to day, what I realized was every director I communicated with, across all the other departments, we were constantly in need of communicating creative ideas,” Larry says. “It’s difficult to communicate creative ideas with words. Having images that you can point to with a director is the easiest way.”

Larry would like ShotDeck to become the “visual IMDb,” housing an exhaustive collection of cinematic imagery. Recently, ShotDeck partnered with Canva, integrating its library directly into the design platform. This allows Canva users to seamlessly access and incorporate over 1.5 million high-definition film stills into their projects, streamlining workflows for filmmakers, designers, and content creators.

For Joker: Folie à Deux, Larry and director Todd Phillips continued their 15 year collaboration. Certain scenes of the movie were partly influenced by The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour. Larry had to rely on using screen grabs from the show’s DVDs as visual references, since they weren’t inputted into ShotDeck yet. Joker: Folie à Deux maintains a visual connection to the first Joker, but expands on the original by embracing more fantastical elements. They scaled up the stages and sets, which provided greater flexibility in lighting and camera movement. Larry was able to use more color and a wider range of lighting techniques during the musical sequences, as Arthur Fleck becomes more and more detached from reality. He sees Joker: Folie à Deux as an operatic tragedy, exploring the internal conflict of a person battling their shadow self and delving into the complexities of love and its potential to drive someone to the edge.

Larry defends director Todd Phillips’s creative vision for the sequel. “When you make a sequel, you have to have a new approach to the material, otherwise why do a sequel to anything?” he points out. “This idea that Todd just took $200 million and just lit it on fire is absurd. The greatest thing about Todd as a filmmaker is he’s at heart a gambler. He’s a gambler in the way that the movie business should be a gamble. What are we doing this for if not to continue to express something that isn’t simply trying to service the audience? We’re giving something that you might not have asked for.” He continues, “The movie we made and the way we approached it, it’s exactly what we were trying to do.”

Find Lawrence Sher: Instagram @lawrencesherdp

Hear our previous interview with Lawrence Sher on Joker: https://www.camnoir.com/ep56/

You can see Joker: Folie a Deux currently streaming on Max.

Shotdeck is now available on Canva.

Sponsored by Hot Rod Cameras: https://hotrodcameras.com/
Sponsored by ARRI: https://www.arri.com/en

The Cinematography Podcast website: www.camnoir.com
YouTube: @TheCinematographyPodcast
Facebook: @cinepod
Instagram: @thecinepod
Blue Sky: @thecinepod.bsky.social

February 1, 2023

Award-winning Sundance films Bad Press and The Persian Version

We kick off our Sundance Film Festival 2023 interviews with the documentary Bad Press and the dramatic comedy, The Persian Version.

Bad Press follows the battle for a free press on the Muscogee Creek Nation reservation in Oklahoma. As a sovereign nation, the Muscogee are not bound by the U.S. Constitution to guarantee freedom of the press. When local journalists for the tribal paper Mvskoke Media discover that the tribe’s “Free Press Act” will be repealed, they begin demanding that freedom of the press be written into the tribe’s constitution, led by Mvskoke Media reporter Angel Ellis. The Free Press Act does get repealed, and immediately the newspaper is in danger and put under the control of the tribal government. The tribal council began censoring the news and preventing the community access to free and fair reporting, which reporter Angel Ellis knew would impact the upcoming tribal elections.

Filmmaker Rebecca Landsberry-Baker is a citizen of the Muscogee Creek Nation and a journalist, so the people in the film are her people. Co-director and editor Joe Peeler was an acquaintance with a background in documentary filmmaking, so he came on board right away. Cinematographer Tyler Graim was brought on to the project when Joe had had enough of shooting everything himself, allowing him to focus more on what was happening as a director. They wanted the footage in the documentary to give people an accurate feeling of what it’s like to be on the reservation, and the oppressive heat of an Oklahoma summer. Becca, Joe and Tyler agreed that they also wanted Bad Press to have a distinctive look, and were influenced by newspaper movies such as All the President’s Men.

They made a conscious choice for viewers to make the larger connections of what is happening to free press from within the microcosm of the Native American community, to the macrocosm of what’s happening to media in the outside world. A free press supports tribal sovereignty, because it supports an engaged and informed electorate and the movement to ensure a free press by writing it into tribal constitutions is spreading in Indian Country.

Bad Press won the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Freedom of Expression at the Sundance Film Festival and is seeking distribution.

Find Bad Press on social media: #BadPressFilm

The Persian Version is a dramatic comedy that follows Leila, a young Iranian American woman who grew up in New York and New Jersey with 8 older brothers. Leila is determined to forge her own path and has a tumultuous relationship with her immigrant mother. When her father is hospitalized for a heart transplant, she must return home to help care for her grandmother and uncovers a secret about her mother’s past.

Director and writer Maryam Keshavarz chose to make The Persian Version semi-autobiographical. While much of the story is true, the film had to take artistic liberties for it to fit within two hours and also stay funny. Maryam wanted the past and present within the film to feel similar, but for all of the storytellers in the movie to have a point of view, so there is a tonal shift within the film when Leila’s mother’s narrative begins. Maryam felt like her cast was family, and as they rehearsed, she rewrote the script as needed.

Maryam’s first feature film, Circumstance, also won the Sundance audience award, and she went on to make a bigger-budget feature, Viper Club in 2018, starring Susan Sarandon. But Maryam found that she wanted to feel more personally connected to the cast and crew during the filmmaking process, so she returned to independently writing and directing with The Persian Version. She feels that films from her standpoint in the world as an Iranian-American hold a large place in her heart. Maryam enjoyed making a film that was both meaningful, funny and reflective of current and past societal and political views.

The Persian Version won the U.S. Dramatic Audience Award & The Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award in U.S. Dramatic Competition and is seeking distribution.

Find Maryam Keshavarz: Marakesh Films http://www.maryamkeshavarz.com/
Instagram: @TheTPVFilm

Sponsored by Hot Rod Cameras: www.hotrodcameras.com
Sponsored by Greentree Creative: https://www.growwithgreentree.com/

The Cinematography Podcast website: www.camnoir.com
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheCinematographyPodcast
Facebook: @cinepod
Instagram: @thecinepod
Twitter: @ShortEndz

January 25, 2023

Yule Log director Casper Kelly and cinematographer Alex Allgood

Yule Log is a crazy, surreal, comedic horror movie written and directed by Casper Kelly and with cinematography by Alex Allgood, made for Adult Swim and available on HBO Max. Even though it’s a month past Christmas, fire up Yule Log if you haven’t seen it already- it’s bound to be one of the weirdest and most original movies you’ve seen in awhile.

For Yule Log, Casper and cinematographer Alex Allgood decided to keep the camera locked off on the fireplace logs for as long as possible, so people might think it was just a recording of a fireplace for holiday ambiance, before introducing more action around (and inside) the fireplace and in the cabin, as people enter and events unfold. The movie takes place in a cabin, but over multiple timelines that overlap and combine different genres from comedy to horror to Lynchian-style surrealism.

Alex liked the script, and felt that even though the movie leads with the long lockoff shot on the fireplace that the dialog kept everything going. He only had about three weeks to prep the movie, and they shot Yule Log in about 14 days. He enjoyed working with Casper and combining so many different creative elements into the movie. Alex always sees projects in terms of lighting first and camera second, so he tried to create a cohesive look with the lighting on the film throughout each scene, using a lot of firelight of course.

Casper has always enjoyed taking risks and seeing things that he hasn’t seen before vs. following a formula. His first job was on the low budget horror movie Basket Case 3, and he wrote and directed another short dark comedy spoof TV show for Adult Swim called Too Many Cooks. With his previous experience and relationship with Adult Swim, Casper pitched Yule Log and was paid to make it- he thinks if he had done it as a spec script, no one would have given him money to make such a crazy film. Casper wasn’t sure the many, many ideas in Yule Log were all going to work, but he wanted to go for it and take risks. But everyone was on board through all the crazy twists and turns the story takes.

You can see Yule Log on HBO Max.
Find Casper’s short for Adult Swim, Too Many Cooks, on YouTube.

Find Casper Kelly: Twitter & Instagram: @heycasperkelly
Find Alex Allgood: Instagram @alexisallgood

Sponsored by Hot Rod Cameras: www.hotrodcameras.com
Sponsored by Greentree Creative: https://www.growwithgreentree.com/

The Cinematography Podcast website: www.camnoir.com
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheCinematographyPodcast
Facebook: @cinepod
Instagram: @thecinepod
Twitter: @ShortEndz

December 15, 2022

Cinematographer Abraham Martinez on Queen of the South, the Disney+ show National Treasure: Edge of History, the upcoming Netflix series Obliterated and more

On our 250th episode, we welcome returning guest and longtime friend of the show, cinematographer Abe Martinez, who catches up with Ben and Illya about his work around the world for the past few years.

Most recently, Abe completed the new Disney+ show National Treasure: Edge of History and a new Netflix action-comedy series, Obliterated, by the creators of Cobra Kai. Abe has been learning and perfecting his technique of using video walls for action on big sets, creating a version of “poor man’s process” to shoot cars and figuring out the exact size video walls needed. They coined the phrase “middle class process” because it looks much better than the old poor man’s process. Using video walls requires a lot of math and tech setup, but it also offers plenty of opportunities for creativity without spending a lot of money to actually go to locations. Abe enjoys the challenge of trying to create realism with the proper lighting and angles.

After working as a loader and camera operator on many films, Abe began working on the series Queen of the South on USA Network. Working on Queen of the South launched Abe’s career into director of photography work, where he became the lead DP in season 3 and worked on the show for the next three years. As a Latino person who grew up in a rougher area, Abe felt he could really relate to the storylines about gangs. He also sees a throughline from his real life as a nomadic world traveler to the storytelling he’s drawn to lately- many of the shows he has been shooting are about characters who are being displaced, or who feel displaced.

Abe’s passion is doing street photography everywhere he goes. He enjoys exploring color and movement and experimenting with different film stocks or digital color science. This often gives him the creative spark for shots and compositions to use in his work. You can see Abe’s street photography on Instagram.

Find Abe Martinez: https://www.abemartinez.com/
Instagram: @abe.martinez.dp

National Treasure: Edge of History is currently showing on Disney+
Obliterated is coming to Netflix in 2023.

Sponsored by Hot Rod Cameras: www.hotrodcameras.com

The Cinematography Podcast website: www.camnoir.com
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheCinematographyPodcast
Facebook: @cinepod
Instagram: @thecinepod
Twitter: @ShortEndz

December 7, 2022

Florian Hoffmeister, BSC on TÁR, working with director Todd Field and Cate Blanchett

In TÁR, Cate Blanchett plays Lydia Tár, a fictional world famous female conductor and composer whose life takes a dramatic downturn after serious allegations are made against her. Cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister and director Todd Field made a conscious choice to “not put a hat on a hat”- keeping the cinematography very restrained and still throughout most of the film. The focus remained on the music and the performances, with little camera movement save for a few orchestra scenes and the finale of the movie. Florian found Field to have a very precise visual sensitivity so he was able to light the space and still allow the actors to have freedom of movement within the scene while shaping the light more precisely as needed.

Florian wanted the precision of his cinematography to reflect the precision of the orchestra. His work also aided the storytelling- carefully deciding where to place the camera and what to focus on allows TÁR to unfold in a slow burn, as the movie purposefully omits information and significant details at first. Florian feels that really good cinema leaves room for reflection and allows us to develop our own perceptions about the story. TÁR allows the audience to see itself and think about the time we’re living in, and it feels both timeless and contemporary. He found it an equal privilege to work with an actor like Cate Blanchett because she has a dedication to her craft and a focus on getting the best out of every single shot. She has a good understanding of the technical elements necessary to showcase the best performances.

Florian is currently shooting the new season of HBO’s True Detective in Iceland.
TÁR is currently playing in theaters

Find Florian Hoffmeister: http://florianhoffmeister.de/
Instagram: @florian.hoffmeister
Sponsored by Hot Rod Cameras: www.hotrodcameras.com

The Cinematography Podcast website: www.camnoir.com
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheCinematographyPodcast
Facebook: @cinepod
Instagram: @thecinepod
Twitter: @ShortEndz

November 30, 2022

Autumn Durald Arkapaw, ASC on Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Loki, and more

Unsurprisingly, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever has been a huge hit, and cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw was excited to join the crew. She had worked with Marvel on the Disney+ series Loki and felt her creative vision on the show was really supported there. Autumn felt ready to step into a huge movie like Black Panther: Wakanda Forever after she spoke with original Black Panther DP Rachel Morrison and meeting with director Ryan Coogler. Rachel and Autumn were friends from AFI, and Rachel was not available to shoot the sequel as she has been transitioning into directing. Director Ryan Coogler had Autumn join the Black Panther team early for storyboarding and previs for the movie. She and Coogler had lots of time to discuss the images and were on the same page visually. Even though the movie has a huge scope and a massive amount of people making the film, Autumn felt like her ideas were supported and her images were well represented on screen.

Early in her career, Autumn worked on many projects for free both during and after film school, so that anyone could find her and see who she was through her visual approach. She approaches each film with passion, putting all of her creative energy into her work. Autumn’s breakout early work was on director Gia Coppola’s indie film, Palo Alto. The two bonded and worked together on more projects, and Autumn met director Spike Jonze through her. She worked with Jonze on Aziz Ansari: Right Now, a Netflix standup special, and Beastie Boys Story, a 2020 documentary about the band.

Autumn enjoys framing her shots with symmetry and low angles, with a lower eyeline, pointing towards the ceiling rather than the floor. For the series Loki on Disney+, she shot a lot of scenes from below, but the production designer Kasra Farahani embraced it, creating visually interesting ceilings that could be rigged with controlled lighting. They worked together to create a space in the Time Variance Authority (TVA) that felt full, with motivated light. Building practical ceilings was a big part of their design discussions during production meetings. Normally on a set, the ceiling is not built and isn’t ever seen, so adding it to the set design always adds to the cost. Autumn knew that shooting low in those spaces would create the desired effect of something looming over you.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is currently playing in theaters

Sponsored by Hot Rod Cameras: www.hotrodcameras.com

The Cinematography Podcast website: www.camnoir.com
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheCinematographyPodcast
Facebook: @cinepod
Instagram: @thecinepod
Twitter: @ShortEndz

October 5, 2022

Mike Prickett, Emmy-winning surf cinematographer of HBOs 100 Foot Wave

The six part HBO documentary 100 Foot Wave is the story of big wave surfer Garrett McNamara, as he learns about the biggest waves in the world in Nazaré, Portugal. Then, with help from the town of Nazaré, he and his team set up a safety and support system and invite surfers to come from all over the world to surf. The series captures the amazing power of the ocean, and the passion of surfers chasing big waves and putting themselves at risk of serious injury and death.

Surf and ocean cinematographer Mike Prickett was the perfect DP for 100 Foot Wave. Mike has decades of experience shooting in the water, following Garrett and many other big wave surfers around the world. He’s shot documentaries Riding Giants, Step Into Liquid and the biopic Chasing Mavericks. As a kid growing up on the island of Oahu, Hawaii, Mike took advantage of living in a tourist spot. He had his own camera, took pictures of the tourists, developed and printed the pictures while they did glass bottom boat tours, and then sold the photos to them when they returned. He soon figured out how to take photos underwater with his camera in a water housing, then got a 16mm Bolex camera and started shooting movies. Mike learned how to surf and began filming the top surfers around the world, developing new and better camera systems as the technology progressed.

On a shoot in Tahiti in 2012, Mike saved a diver who got caught in a current that pushed him down at least 220 feet underwater. As Mike swam back up with the diver, they began to run out of air and had to surface quickly. Mike got the bends, which has left his legs partially paralyzed. But he’s kept right on shooting, developing different and exciting ways to further the technology of water cinematography. Mike says that even if you can’t use your legs very well, it doesn’t matter when you’re out there. He’s able to shoot from the cliffs, use remote controlled jet skis and drones, and fly in helicopters, ride jet skis or boats on the ocean.

For 100 Foot Wave, Nazaré, Portugal presented some unique challenges as a location, because the waves are so big and the area gets so foggy. The surfers and the camera crew wait all year for the big waves to come to Nazaré by November and December, and they must be ready to go and shoot at a moment’s notice. Shooting is a massive undertaking, with at least 15 camera people on the waves to catch the action. The crew caught the action with long lenses from the cliffs, the beach, and with waterproof drones, but when it was foggy, they needed to have people in the water. Mike and the team built a special remote controlled electric jet ski with a gimbal system that could be controlled by an operator from the cliffs- basically inventing a way to do smooth dolly shots on the water.

Mike Prickett just won a Creative Arts Emmy for episode four of 100 Foot Wave.

100 Foot Wave is streaming on HBOMax.

Find Mike Prickett: https://saltnairstudios.com/
Instagram: @mikeprickett_

Find out even more about this episode, with extensive show notes and links: https://camnoir.com/ep186/

Sponsored by DZOFilm: https://www.dzofilm.com/
Sponsored by Hot Rod Cameras: www.hotrodcameras.com

The Cinematography Podcast website: www.camnoir.com
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheCinematographyPodcast
Facebook: @cinepod
Instagram: @thecinepod
Twitter: @ShortEndz

August 24, 2022

Cinematographer Cybel Martin on A League of Their Own, Black As Night, horror movies and more

Cinematographer Cybel Martin believes that great cinematography comes from a place of trust between the director, DP and crew. Great art can be created when someone says: this is my vision and I trust you to make it happen. Cybel especially loves horror movies, because it’s the best genre for cinematographers to try out visuals that are not based in reality. The opening scene always establishes the visual rules, no matter how weird. You start from scratch and play with how you see the story, and with a good script you can naturally visualize the world. Horror films underscore symbolism and dramatize emotions even more than dramas, and good horror movies still have solid character development even without a supernatural element.

Cybel had the opportunity to work in the horror genre on the show American Horror Stories (Season 1) and most recently on the Amazon Prime movie, Black As Night. Black As Night is about an African American teenage girl who battles a band of vampires who prey on the homeless and drug addicted in New Orleans. Cybel wanted to lean into the richness, color and texture of New Orleans and was inspired by the thematic colors of purple, green, and gold.

The new Amazon Prime series, A League of Their Own, is an historic drama and comedy about the first women’s professional baseball league in the 1940’s. Though the series has the same name as the 1992 movie, the production team never wanted to replicate the film. Their reference material was all of the historical research, photographs, and real stories from the time. Cybel is interested in 1940’s films, sports, and female athletes so there were many elements in the show that she was excited to explore. She shot three of the episodes and her favorite one, “Over the Rainbow” features one of the characters going to an underground speakeasy. Cybel loves the idea of speakeasies and house parties- a place that is secret, where you can be bold, naughty and intimate, but also have a place for community. They shot the speakeasy scenes in just a day and a half, with two steadicam operators, and played with shutter angles and color palette in the dance sequences, with In The Mood For Love as an inspiration for the colors. As a painter and photographer, Cybel was also grateful she could bring her own aesthetic to the project.

Cybel’s latest project is Beacon 23, a new futuristic sci-fi series set to air in 2023.

Find Cybel Martin: https://www.cybeldp.com/
Instagram & Twitter: @cybeldp

Find out even more about this episode, with extensive show notes and links: https://camnoir.com/ep180/

Sponsored by Hot Rod Cameras: www.hotrodcameras.com

The Cinematography Podcast website: www.camnoir.com
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheCinematographyPodcast
Facebook: @cinepod
Instagram: @thecinepod
Twitter: @ShortEndz

May 25, 2022

Filmmakers James Lee Hernandez and Brian Lazarte on their new documentary series, The Big Conn

James Lee Hernandez and Brian Lazarte are Emmy-nominated documentary directors and producers for the HBO documentary series, McMillion$. Brian and James return to Cinepod to talk about their latest documentary, The Big Conn, now airing on Apple TV+.

The Big Conn is a four-part documentary series that tells the unbelievable true story of larger-than-life attorney, Eric C. Conn. Conn stole over half a billion dollars from the government and taxpayers in the largest Social Security fraud case in United States history. Conn got away with it for more than 10 years before two whistleblowers told the FBI what he was doing and Conn went on the run.

Documentary filmmaking has grown and elevated as an art over the years, and James and Brian take a cinematic approach to the form. Their previous documentary series, McMillion$ had a thread of comedy throughout, with such interesting characters that it reminded them of a Coen brothers movie. For The Big Conn, Brian and James took a similar approach. They dive deep into Eric Conn’s life, using comedy to hold the audience’s interest, but underneath it’s a very serious exposé about the broken American Social Security system.

To put together such sprawling stories, James and Brian create a story outline, determine who the interviewees should be, interview the characters, write a script and then decide where they need to put in animated graphics, archival footage and recreations during the editing process. Talented cinematographer Jeff Dolan has worked with the team for years, shooting both interviews and recreations on The Big Conn and McMillion$. Brian and James planned out and put together a guide for lighting and shot composition for the look of the interviews, based on shots from scripted movies they love.

The Big Conn is a 4-part documentary series currently airing on Apple TV+.

James and Brian have a podcast to accompany The Big Conn, diving deeper into the story and subject matter. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-big-conn-the-official-podcast/id1621583098

Fun Meter, James and Brian’s production company: https://www.funmetermedia.com/
Instagram: @funmeterofficial

James Lee Hernandez: @iamthejlh
Brian Lazarte: @bdlazarte

Find out even more about this episode, with extensive show notes and links: https://camnoir.com//ep169/

Sponsored by Hot Rod Cameras: www.hotrodcameras.com
Sponsored by Aputure: https://www.aputure.com/

The Cinematography Podcast website: www.camnoir.com
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheCinematographyPodcast
Facebook: @cinepod
Instagram: @thecinepod
Twitter: @ShortEndz

February 2, 2022

Cinematographers Daniel Grant, CSC and Steve Cosens, CSC on shooting the series Station Eleven on HBOMax

Station Eleven is an HBOMax series based on the book by Emily St. John Mandel. The story focuses on several characters who are survivors of a devastating flu pandemic that wipes out most of the human population, completely collapsing modern civilization. The series mixes together the storylines of characters whose past and present timelines interconnect, weaving together the time during the pandemic, the days and months afterward, and then how the characters have adapted twenty years into the future. Art, music and theater have thrived in a small band of actors and musicians known as the Traveling Symphony. Kirsten, played by Mackenzie Davis, is the main character and a lead actor in the Traveling Symphony, going from settlement to settlement performing Shakespeare. Each community still remains under threat of hostile invaders, and a dangerous cult whose beliefs are based on a story from a graphic novel written before the pandemic appears to be on the rise.

Daniel Grant, CSC and Steve Cosens, CSC, both Canadian cinematographers, were hired as DPs for four episodes apiece for Station Eleven. They were happy to know that they’d be working closely together because they were familiar with each other’s work and comfortable with each other’s aesthetic. Executive producer Hiro Murai directed the first block of episodes- Episodes 1 and 3- with Christian Sprenger as the director of photography, and they established the initial look of the show. Murai and Sprenger shot two episodes in Chicago as COVID hit, and then production shut down for several months. Daniel and Steve were brought on to shoot the next blocks in Toronto, Canada, which felt weird and surreal as they developed the look and feel of a fictional post-pandemic world, while living through a real global pandemic.

As Daniel and Steve began prep, they were able to contribute their own ideas for the look and feel of Year 20 in Station Eleven’s post-pandemic world. Steve noted that the pacing of the show was very deliberate, and they would purposefully let shots hold for several beats. Each shot was nicely framed and the lighting was very naturalistic and organic- it was not a slick show with fast edits. With less humans around, they wanted to depict the earth returning to the natural world in the future, instead of the typical post-apocalyptic barren scorched landscape look. They wanted Station Eleven to feel positive and life-affirming, although still fraught with potential dangers.

Since the main storyline follows a roving band of theatrical performers, the show was always on the move with many different locations, and Daniel and Steve had to fuse the challenges of the logistics with the creative. Many episodes required different seasons or the same location dressed for different years. The hardest episodes and locations to shoot took place at the airport, set during Station Eleven’s pre-pandemic and then twenty years after the pandemic. The two cinematographers stayed in close contact and were true collaborators, sharing information and communicating to make it easier for each other as they switched off shooting in the airport location. Steve and Daniel would often have early morning phone calls to constantly feed each other information about the shoot day, and would watch each other’s dailies to match each other’s shots.

Find Daniel Grant: https://www.danielgrantdp.com/
Instagram: @danielgrant_dp

Find Steve Cosens: https://www.stevecosens.com/
Instagram: @cosenssteve

You can see all episodes of Station Eleven on HBOMax

Find out even more about this episode, with extensive show notes and links: https://camnoir.com//ep157/

Sponsored by Hot Rod Cameras: www.hotrodcameras.com

Sponsored by Assemble: Assemble has amazing production management software. Use the code cinepod to try a month for free! https://www.assemble.tv/
Be sure to watch our YouTube video of Nate Watkin showing how Assemble works! https://youtu.be/IlpismVjab8

The Cinematography Podcast website: www.camnoir.com
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheCinematographyPodcast
Facebook: @cinepod
Instagram: @thecinepod
Twitter: @ShortEndz