November 28, 2025

DP Jess Hall’s retro look on The Fantastic Four: First Steps

The Cinematography Podcast Episode 335: Jess Hall

Cinematographer Jess Hall, ASC, BSC reunited with director Matt Shakman to bring the retro-future world of The Fantastic Four: First Steps to life. The two had collaborated on several projects together, such as Marvel’s Wandavision. “I have a lot of faith in Matt Shakman,” says Jess. “I went into it with a lot of goodwill behind me. I was very aware that this was one of the original Marvel, it is the first family of Marvel, so I took that responsibility very seriously. I got very well prepared and I made sure that I was making choices that I thought would bring success to the project as well as tell the story that Matt wanted to tell.”

Fantastic Four: First Steps required a higher level of pre-production planning than most, involving intense collaboration with the special effects team and production design. Many complicated sequences were prevised to meticulously establish the intended 1960s aesthetic. Jess achieved this period look through his lighting, camerawork, and lens choices. For the majority of the cinematography, he chose the relatively new Panavision Ultra Panatar II lenses, which coved the IMAX camera and were customized to his specifications. He also used a 16mm camera and Hasselblad lenses for some of the newsreel sequences.

Color was crucial for establishing the 1960s aesthetic, and Jess infused it with a comic book vibrancy. He was inspired by a 1968 Fantastic Four comic book, creating a unified color palette for the LUT that featured blue, green, orange, and pale blue.

Complex lighting setups were essential, incorporating miniatures, bluescreens, blackscreens, and motion capture performances. Jess opted for tungsten lights on Mr. Fantastic’s (Pedro Pascal) lab set—a deliberate, retro choice that grounds the technology in the past. He found controlling the light challenging on bluescreen and blackscreen stages, as the lack of background required him to carefully conceive and control the light sources to maintain a sense of photorealistic depth.

The production team prioritized creating as much of the film practically as possible to achieve the photoreal look director Matt Shakman wanted, with characters and scenes enhanced with VFX in post. Both Ben Grimm “The Thing” (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) and the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner) performed in motion capture suits. Rather than working on a volume stage, blue screens and black screens were used for the space sequences. A miniature scale model of the Fantastic Four’s ship helped bring it to life, while a realistic 1960’s Times Square set was built for the New York action sequences. For the planet-eater Galactus, Jess had a unique practical concept: treating him like a miniature. An extremely detailed costume was constructed, and Galactus moved through a small-scale set. Jess used specialized lighting and camerawork on his suit to create the illusion of the villain’s immense, terrifying size.

Find Jess Hall: Instagram: @metrorat
See The Fantastic Four: First Steps streaming on Disney+

SHOW RUNDOWN:
01:56 Close Focus
13:10-59:54 Interview
01:00:08 Short Ends
01:10:09 Wrap up/Credits

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

By Illya Friedman

.

In Cinematography Podcast, Latest Posts, Podcast Episodes

.


0 comments

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

By Illya Friedman

.

In Cinematography Podcast, Latest Posts, Podcast Episodes

.


0 comments

January 18, 2023

Russell Carpenter, ASC on Avatar: The Way of Water, working with James Cameron, creating realistic lighting for a virtual world

Our guest Russell Carpenter, ASC comes back for a second time on the podcast to talk about Avatar: The Way of Water.

When cinematographer Russell Carpenter began working on Avatar: The Way of Water, it was much different from any other film experience he’d had. Russell had previously worked with director Jim Cameron on True Lies and Titanic, which won him the Academy Award for Best Cinematography. He began working on Avatar: The Way of Water before they even rolled cameras, testing and integrating the world of live action capture with completely virtual images. The process was like a huge layer cake of world creation, with writing, concept art and production design all being developed simultaneously.

As the cinematographer, Russell’s primary concern was making sure that the lighting design on the live, motion captured actors looked real and played well with the CGI generated world. It’s hard to fool the eye when people instinctively know what sunlight, water and shade in a forest should look like, so every scene with a live person and a Na’vi person had to be exactly right. It was important to Cameron that everything on Pandora be grounded in reality. The animals had to move realistically and the interplay of shade and light in the forests needed to feel real to an audience so that they would have an emotional connection, rather than watching an alien-feeling, fake-looking science fiction world.

The entire process of making Avatar: The Way of Water was a huge puzzle, with a small army of teams working on different parts of the movie and simply trying different things. As the writing and story development continued, Cameron would decide they needed a certain scenario or plot point, and he would ask the teams to creatively figure out how to make it happen. After the locations were computer generated, several virtual cameras were used to shoot multiple angles to get an idea of the blocking, lighting and camera placement for the CGI action. Finally, the actors came in to do motion capture and read their lines. Russell thought he’d start to see scenes coming together, but everything was such a piecemeal process that he watched the virtual camera material to get an idea of how the lighting was matching and coming together. They would move lights around on automated overhead trusses in the studio to change the lighting for each scene and to keep as many lights out of the blue screen shots as possible.

You can see Avatar: The Way of Water in a variety of formats in theaters everywhere.

Find Russell Carpenter: Instagram @russellcarpenterasc
Hear Cinepod’s first interview with Russell Carpenter, ASC: https://www.camnoir.com/ep40/

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

By Illya Friedman

.

In Cinematography Podcast, Latest Posts, Podcast Episodes

.


0 comments