Frame & Reference Podcast - 121: "Loki" S2 Cinematographer Isaac Bauman

Episode Date: November 23, 2023

This week on the pod I'm thrilled to welcome Isaac Bauman, DP of the second season of Loki! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Follow F&R on all your favorite social platforms!⁠⁠⁠⁠��⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ You can directly support Frame & Reference by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Buying Me a Coffee⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Frame & Reference is supported by Filmtools and ProVideo Coalition. Filmtools is the West Coast's leading supplier of film equipment. From cameras and lights to grip and expendables, Filmtools has you covered for all your film gear needs. Check out ⁠⁠Filmtools.com⁠⁠ for more. ProVideo Coalition is a top news and reviews site focusing on all things production and post. Check out ⁠⁠ProVideoCoalition.com⁠⁠ for the latest news coming out of the industry.

Hello and welcome to this, another episode of frame and reference. I'm your host, Kenny McMillan, and you're listening to episode 121 with Isaac Bowman, DP of the second season of Loki. Enjoy. have you been uh have you been watching anything cool recently you know i actually just had a baby so suddenly watch input has dramatically declined however my wife and i uh typically watch one episode of television each night and we've been able to make in that uh during the baby we started watching the sopranos now in the second season had you not seen it before. Oh, I'd seen it before. Oh, okay. It was just time to get back in there.

Yeah, it's kind of, most of what we've watched together has been rewatches. You know, we did the whole Star Trek franchise. We just finished the X-Files, actually, which I'd seen before. And now we moved on to Sopranos. So all the classics. Yeah, me and my girlfriend did next generation. She didn't bite on Deep Space Nine. And then, uh, and then we did, uh, Doctor Who because we that's actually we started dating was on the hinge it was like I watched Doctor Who like like rewatch from the beginning like 1960s doc no just all the news so um Eccleston forward okay yeah yeah yeah those are those are always fun because then you get to talk about talk about it in like a few levels deeper way when someone's already seen it and like

thoroughly enjoys something versus showing something to someone for the first time a lot as you have to explain oh actually this is the reason why you know yeah yeah those shows i mean i know disney's all uh easter eggy but the star trek ones are you gotta sometimes you really got to understand like the geopolitics of an entire star system and you're like uh otherwise that doesn't he's not really a tailor he's an assassin helpful to watch it from the very beginning yeah yeah well what's funny is now the one that I've been answering when people ask me that it's like it's been your show not because they send me the screeners that does help but it's just i thought loki was one of

the the better products that disney's put out in a while um and season two was just it was the first one thank you very much yeah loki we're all really excited with how it turned out and we're excited that everybody's been feeling the same way as us yeah dude i was listening to a podcast you were on uh recently and then so you you went to college at USC that's right in uh what sounded like a frat house that wasn't a frat house i went to um USC from 2007 to 2009 pretty much the entire time i was there all of my roommates were um frat guys Gotcha. You know, it's a big Greek life school.

Yeah, yeah. So I kind of brace. I actually loved it at USC. I dropped out, but not because I didn't enjoy it there or I didn't like being in film school. I was in the production program there. And I met someone who's still one of my best friends. And he, long story short, he decided that he was going to leave school to make a movie. And he asked me if I wanted to make it.

with him and to need to be and and um i felt like i couldn't say no you know the whole point of film school is to set yourself up for a film career but if you can just start your career why not go for it yeah yeah no literally so i was going to ask if you had any advice about film school for people who are listening and kind of going into that although i have seen the demographics of this podcast and it does skew our age but in any case uh that's a hundred percent the way I feel like I went to ASU for film school so not as prestigious but uh one of my friends made bad choices later but one of my friends was like shooting tons and tons of music videos to the point where like he wasn't going to class and a bunch of the teachers would get

mad and then some of him were like honestly but if he's already doing it he doesn't need to learn it like he's already you're not hurting my feelings by not being in class and doing the thing you should be doing, you know, he's not partying. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, yeah, my advice for film school is, you know, it's, it's, I, I think you should go to film school if you want to go to college. Right. Yeah, 100%. Not going to get much out of it in terms of learning about filmmaking, maybe perfectly frank. Um, filmmaking is something that's learned on set. And film school sets are artificial fake sets because everyone there also doesn't know what they're doing. You learn from being on a set where other people, most of the other people do know what

they're doing, right? So there's some really good film programs. I mean, USC, for example, had an incredible critical studies program, not the production program itself, but learning about movies, not about making movies, but about movies. That's something I found very valuable. that I would have never gotten if I didn't go to film school. Yeah. And that's kind of the opposite of what you think,

because it's not the production program. But ultimately, I probably got more out of the studying movies part than I did out of the product learning, supposedly learning about production part of film school. I, uh, yeah, that checks out.

Yeah. I was, I was going to say, uh, the, uh, unfortunately like when I was in school, that people would always clown on the film and

Media Studies Department, but nowadays especially, you know, because that was like 2008, you know, you can learn the production part from like books and online, you know, it's not, it's the studies part that's a lot harder. There's not a ton of YouTube videos like critically looking at classics or even modern films in a way that, you know, doing it the academic way, let's call it, for lack of a better term, is usually better than just theories and fun. You know, because it'll, it teaches you how to make the movies, like how to make movies. Yeah, not how to make them, but how to make the movie part. That sounded, uh, dumb. You know what I mean? I know exactly what you mean, yeah. Yeah. So did that film that you did with your buddy, because I was checking out your, uh, your website,

you have like hundreds of music videos, uh, and commercials. Did that first film kind of launched the music video career, or did it come around a different way? Because normally everyone starts music videos and scenes. That's a good question. You know, that film actually ended up coming around in a different way. It took a long time, but it didn't lead to the launch of my actual career. No, it made that movie in fall of 2009. We prepped it over the summer.

And as soon as the movie was finished, you know, we were sure we had a hit on our hands and that, you know, our careers would be good to go. And so I was like, well, but just in case I'm going to buy DSLR at that time, the popular one was the 5D Mark 2. Oh, yeah, baby. And, you know, I'll be able to still do some gigs until this movie comes out and I'm, you know, one of the next biggest DPs in Hollywood. right uh so yeah sure enough that that dslar really came in handy uh i spent the next uh three years call it approximately three years shooting primarily lowish noish budget rap videos um and like craigslist short films which were often for like local la film programs that you know kind of like community college versions of film school like the new york film academy or the l a film

school that i taught it knife of okay yeah so i would shoot you know negative um an lafss stuff and and and and stuff like that and then just shorts that weren't coming out of one of those program but was just a filmmaker trying to get something off the ground and was looking to hire their crew on craigslist right it craigslist pretty hard um so i spent about three years doing that type of work until one of those jobs. It was just kind of another one of those jobs ended up being with the director who had a tremendous amount of potential. And luckily, you know, pure luck basically, the artist that we did the video for blew up. And that video was one of the things that served. That was ASAP Rocky's pay-so video. Oh, sure, yeah. And, and after

that I started getting some real traction eventually I mean it's a slow start but that video allowed myself and that director to do a more somewhat more professional

properly budgeted music video where the budget was $5,000 pay out of rat instead of zero in fact ASAP Rocky still owes us about $2,500 in airfare but um that is neither here nor there

but um we started doing you know we did another rap video that was a little bit bigger and then that one we started to do some not rap videos that were a little bit bigger you know we got a couple seven thousand dollar budget videos after that and still my career was just me and this director of teen biggeri um he was my only director that i was working with really at this time um only one who was building career-wise with me. And after we'd done a couple really good not rap videos, we both gained actual career traction. That was in the call it late spring 2012 at that point. That's when things started to really heat up and I started to have a real

career yeah the uh whenever i can't i think i was talking to rob yelman about this but the idea of working for free is a bad idea unless it isn't because you know there's no there's no other really way to break in so if you see an opportunity you're like well i guess i got to take that one and then you know you build a reel up whatever there's definitely like a thing out there like a me in the film community have never worked for free working for free is bad we need to end free work all that kind of stuff but the truth is i you know many of us would not have a career if we hadn't i worked for free for years you know or very low rates on jobs i wouldn't have done unless they were paying me a very low rate but anything that i did that was good i did for free the entirety

of the body of work that built the foundation of my career was done not just for free but putting money into it, you know. Right. So, um, I, I just, I guess I've got to preach what I practiced, which was, you know, rework. Yeah. Well, and to the other thing that, um, the thing I was talking about, I think it was Yellman. I got to interview, uh, I guess yours will, I think yours might come out before them, but in any case, I interviewed Rob Yelman and Rob Richardson back to back. And like, both of those conversations just melded together. And I'm like, I can't remember who. Anyway, it doesn't matter. It was just cool. It was exciting for me. But it was not only to take free work, but exactly like you said, happened to you, a lot of times on these, maybe not even free gigs, but like lower budgeted gigs that might, you know, be quote or below beneath you, you end up meeting someone who's also doing a lower budget gig that's beneath them. And if you guys mesh, you know, one can help the other leap frog up. Big time. And it's all about, you know, early on in your career forever for your entire career. But in early in your early in your. career is such a critical stage um collaboration is key you know filmmaking is a team sport and whenever

anyone asks me for advice an aspiring filmmaker director dp that the one piece of advice i give again and again and again and i never change is focus on building the team find like-minded individuals who share your tastes that are similar level in their journey through the film industry uh find people that you can create that synergy with and where when you make things together, it is greater than the sum of your two parts combined. You know, you're looking for an exponential effect with this other person. It's not one plus one equals two. You're looking for yourself plus this other person equals, you know, 100. Right. That is the key. And that's exactly what I found in a team Bagarian. I'll be forever grateful for that. Yeah. Yeah, it's, I think that's

another thing too that's hard right like you want to be given credit for your contribution but just your contribution in a vacuum oftentimes isn't enough to be credit worthy for instance i've said a million times on this podcast that uh you know the cinematographer often gets um credit for what the production designer did totally you know and they're they're you two are you know costuming everyone's elevating each other you can't just have one no one's looking at loki and going oh the cinematography is amazing when they're really thinking about sets or the cool jackets or whatever you know yeah it's funny i was talking to the production designer of loki casra farahani about this recently another film that i shot

deliver us which is actually what that first film i was speaking about it's what that eventually led to so i just we just put out a film called deliver us directed by leroy coons and crueyness the folks that i dropped out of usc with and it's spectacular and it's been well received and it looks really good. And we were talking about how good it looked, Casra and I was like, and you know, it's remarkable because we spent a very reasonable amount of money on it for how big the film looks. And, you know, everyone is always praising the cinematography and stuff,

but Casra was like, great locations. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's always my like film student advice is spend all your money on renting locations and getting good costumes because the, you know, anyone's going to have a camera you could borrow and it won't matter anymore. Not since the mini DVD days has it matters. Yeah, fair enough, yeah. But you're right, you're right, production design, the cinematographer often gets credit for the way that the image looks overall, you know, not just production design, but just in people's minds, the wardrobe, the color, grade um everything uh the ffx yeah no kidding the dp gets a lot of credit for that stuff but ultimately the

director is the one that gets the credit for everything so yeah uh well that's what this podcast is here to solve director i've had except for the ones that have been on this podcast they're cool everyone else uh yeah what was built at i do want to get to the color grade thing in a second um yeah That's always a topic. But what was kind of, what built your mental visual lexicon? Like how did you kind of hone your personal visual aesthetic? Because it is, you know, looking through your work, not exactly the same every time. But there is like, you know, it rhymes, as George's like you said.

Yeah. That's true. I think it does. I pride myself on that rhyming, as you say. I think I do have a consistent aesthetic that changes from project to project, but there's bones of this approach that kind of lurks beneath the surface of everything that are just always there. And that's a good question. Where did it come from? You know, I, it wasn't always there, and it was something that didn't form all at once.

It was something that it took shooting narrative to really understand and explore. because even though you correctly pointed it out that essentially I came up shooting music videos I've shot 118 music videos it's really hard to use music videos to develop a sense of style because something I realized early on was when I was because I've been fortunate enough

to shoot narrative for the entire length of my career really you know it started it takes time it really takes time whether it's in prep or in the weeks of photography to understand what something should look like and to settle into the style and to find it

and music videos and commercials they're so abbreviated in terms of the prep and the production phases so it was only through narrative that I was really able to have the time to sit and think about style and how important style was and voice and my voice

versus the voice of this project and what this project was calling for how what the project was calling for perhaps stood in opposition to the way I would normally do things and allowing for growth opportunities. You work with directors who want to do things that seem to be different than what the project is calling for and what you yourself would be interested in doing. And that's, but that's a good thing. That's a growth experience. You know, I've always, I think, been fortunate to have that mentality of when the director's pushing back on what I want to do

and when they're trying to push things in a direction that seems counterintuitive or it doesn't make sense at first that really getting inside their head seeing through their eyes, understanding their perspective, and using that to supplement and amplify my own knowledge of the craft. You know, it's now my knowledge of the craft and approach to things is now just expanded by having, you know, um, mind melded with them. And so, but I, so, so, you know, to get back to the question, yeah, I've learned a lot from different directors that I've worked with, you know, part of my style has come from taking this from that person or that from that person, people that I've worked with directly who were like, wanted to do things differently that I did, and I was sort of forced to do them, but in a good way, and then I understood that they were right all along, ultimately, and adopted their components of their approach. So there's a bit of, you know, this and that. There's also very formative, specific influences, you know, for example, early on in my career, tree of life came out. And I think that film, more than my lighting style and all that, it's not very like naturalistic-y and all that.

But I think I really was blown away by their usage of wide lenses. And they use wider lenses in that film that I've really, that I do personally, but just that concept of using wide lenses for everything. If it's a wide shot, if it's a medium shot, if it's a close-up, if it's an in. insert just always a wide lens that has stuck with me since tree of life came out interesting um i also spent countless hours shot listing films like i have my own version of shot deck on drop box i bet yeah i've got what too was almost frustrated that shot deck came out because i was like i just spent the last 10 years building this for myself now everyone gets to have it with zero effort Right.

But no, but really what I got out of that process was just that osmosis of seeing these thousands of images. And of course, you pause on the image that you want to capture. So every time there's something that feels, you know, definitive or important or striking in some way, you pause it and look at it and you take the time to capture it. And just going through hundreds and hundreds of films that way, even though I can't point to individual ones as much as I can, like with Tree of Life, that I think has informed where my look comes from. It's like the summation of all of these images that I've been studying

so closely for so long. Yeah. I mean, I've done the exact same thing. I got a Google Drive folder full of my favorite, you know, work. And tell me if this is what you did, because for me it was sounds like the same thing which was it was less about specific oh they use this light or put light here but you start to get drawn to stuff when you when you've um collected all the things that you like you see all the similarities and you go oh it's roughly it's this thing so when you get on a different set you can apply that thing without having to get too specific where it wouldn't naturally fit in that project absolutely yeah i think yes it's And you internalize it, you know, and it's not about us trying to create a specific thing

and a specific reference. It's just in what I think it really is. What I think happened to me and you may be saying happened to you is I feel that the process of grabbing all of those stills and studying them, I internalized a sense of style and tastefulness. Yeah. Because I think what I found was I was attracted to images that had a. refined, more refined, like, painterly type of quality. And I think one of the things that I try to bring to the table is a sense of elegance that isn't usually found in the type of work

that I do. And I think that it's done a lot of films that are not the type of films that I make, not genre films, just have this really elegant look that I'm kind of transposing on to the work that I do. Yeah. And, you know, I also saw on your website some really amazing photography. Um, do you, is that just an extension of your cinematography or are there specific photographers that you were drawn to? Do you have like photo books? I know photo. I got a shit ton of them, but I know those are pretty popular among cinematographers. I do. Yeah. I've, I always, you know, I kind of started my journey as a photographer in high school. I had a DSLR and I took tens of thousands of pictures. Uh, it was a lot more accessible than filmmaking. You know, I did filmmaking as well. high school, but I really took a ton of pictures. And so it's always been part of my DNA. And it, I've continued to do it because it allows me to create projects that are fully my own and don't require the support or the assistance of others or resources to execute. I've always felt inspired by looking at photography. And yeah, it's all blurred out, but that's actually my

photo book shelf right there. Oh, the giant black blob. And I, I, um, I, I, I really what struck me was documentary street photography. I know my favorite photo book of all time. I don't, I'm not good at favorites, really in general, but for whatever, always been like, this is the best one Subway by Bruce Davidson I thought you're going to say something I have but I don't have that. I also love Haiti by Bruce Gilden and so many but yeah that Subway by

Bruce Davidson really single-handed me re-energized my love of photography and my desire to do my own photography in about 20 me. I started shooting again more regularly in 2016. Yeah. I assume that's, I'm just going to hazard a guess. Is Subway in New York? It is. It is. Yeah. I'll figure. Yeah. Oh, that was what it was. Is it going back to the idea of production and design and stuff? Subways in the 80s in New York were production designed to shit.

Yeah. You really were. Yeah, the one, honestly, the, this, um, which one is it? you have this you got the uh the old byways I don't actually I don't got me excited was the Saul lighter book yeah the unseen because it's kind of I'm wondering if it's the same thing but it's a lot of this um a lot of windows but also a lot of this stuff a lot yeah the iconic saw lighter

yeah well that book's dead but yeah what are you a primarily digital film photography i i've tried and aborted to do film photography several times now three times um and i don't know why i keep coming back to it but i realize it's a huge mistake each time uh i i'm just one of those people that likes to shoot a lot of images and select you know i want to have like when i one day of photography i want to be like 500 images right um so film i love the way that it looks it just doesn't work for that cost wise i also like to i need not all my projects are this way this is the newer thing actually my first few projects if you look at the photo page are all like pretty deep stop well most of them

are um but i've started shooting shallower from i've gotten more into the large formaty aesthetic recently and my experience with medium format film cameras is that I love the way that they look when the focus hits but I'm absolutely like super compulsive about needing the eyes to be sharp right and shooting at the stop that I want shooting at the aperture I want just I'd never able to get anything in focus like the subject um which just drove me too crazy I not have to turn this into show and tell what it happens every time

this thing Fuji film let me the uh the GFX 100 the second yeah this is the best camera ever made like a photo camera

I have a hard time better than believing that it's better than the Canon R5 although it is it is all of my cinema cameras are Canon I love Canon all my photo cameras are Fuji

but But that thing is, and also it shoots like 8K Pro Rez that looks really nice. Cool. But to your point about eyes being in focus, I've been shooting that at 80mm F1.7, dialed every time. So that's a fun thing. Talk to talk to me about how, how did you get the Loki gig anyway? I'm sure you've asked it otherwise. Yeah, I haven't answered it.

A, um, Justin Benson and Aaron Moore had directed the second season of Loki and they, uh, I think they were in a situation where they needed to find a DEP rather quickly. And I think they did a lot. I don't know any of this. That's what I'm saying. I think a lot of interviews really quickly. And I have reason to believe they interviewed, like, a lot of people. And I think they were having a hard time differentiating those people from each other because it came so fast and so furious with all of the interviews and the need to hire someone so quickly. And I think that was giving them a pretty serious headache.

And they knew what an important decision it was. and they just kind of couldn't really make a choice based on all this endless smorgas board of people on Zoom and they were expressing, I think that they expressed that to a friend of mine, Evan Kat. And he is like, well, you know, I'm sure there's a lot of great people that you've been meeting and you can hire whoever you want.

But, you know, as long as you're struggling with the choice a little bit, you should talk to my good friend Isaac who shot Evan directed the fourth and final season of Channel Zero, the Dream Door, and which I shot with him. And so next thing I knew, I was on an official. First, I actually met with Marvel. I think they like had a meeting where they had to talk to the DP before they passed them on. Right. with the microchip in you. Yeah, exactly.

So I cleared the Marvel hurdle, which was lovely. That was one of my favorite Zoom meetings I've ever had. And it just felt like so casual and friendly the whole time. And then when I spoke to the guys I had arrived at the conclusion, the big question for DPs with interviews is this. Do you come prepared with the pitch deck or not? right um because a lot of times they'll ask you hey do you have anything you want to share or do you mind putting something together you know like 50% of the time they ask you something like that um and in my experience of the times that i've been asked to do it or done it it's backfired about 50%

of the time because if the images that you share aren't exactly what they're thinking all of a sudden you've totally blown it right they might not even know what they want they just know that what you're giving them is than it. And so it's kind of better. A lot of times the smarter strategy just kind of listen to the director saying, you know, uh-huh, uh-huh. And they just say it back to them,

but slightly more technically. Right. Well. And, but that's kind of a bullshit, you know, manipulative way to do an interview. Right. So the question that I think we face

is put ourselves out there and create a good chance of losing the job or just be, you know, manipulative basically and try to just tell the director whatever they want to hear based on the cues they've given you over the course of the interview and maybe get a overall better chance to get the job. Right. But the thing is, if you get those images right, then you've got the best chance of all to get the job. Right. You know, the best chance ever to get the job is if you do the images and you fucking nail.

Right. But you know, no idea what they're thinking and there's, you know, a million approaches to everything. So it's like, so I figured I had no chance of getting the job anyway, you know, because it was too big of a job. So I was like, all just, I will, I had stopped doing the images for a while. I hadn't done the images approach in an interview in a long time and I hadn't booked anything. And then I was like, all right, you know what? I'm going to do the deck. And so what I did was I put a deck together of sequences from the first season and how

they were shot and then a panel showing how I would have approached it myself to try to show how my style and my vision for the show was different than what the show had previously done. So I was I was going old. differentiated. Yeah. You know the successful thing? Fuck that.

Doing mine. But like I said, I didn't think I had a chance of getting the job anyway, so I might as well swing for the fences, which I knew it was. You know, I knew it was most likely going to lose me the job pretty quickly. Right. But, you know, nothing to lose. Sometimes when you have nothing to lose is when you make the boldest choices that end up, you know, giving you what you're at. Yeah. So, and it's funny because the guys, they just did not, no one on the call react.

They were all, it was, you know, they're really friendly and nice, but they weren't giving me much to work with. I think they were just playing their cards pretty close to their chest. Yeah. But yeah, by the time the call was over, I thought I'd blown it and that I, and that I never expected to hear from them again other than say, thank you for your time. know and as we were signing off you know saying goodbye i was like doing that thing it's like kind of like you know loki and have you seen the last episode yeah yeah yeah you know when he goes out the airlock to sacrifice himself and like he kind of gives that look to still yes like i'll see guys never again like right thank you so much but this is the end for us right

That's kind of how I felt when I was leaving the call. I was like, thank you guys. I know never going to get this job. So I'm going to say thank you in this like, never going to see you again kind of way. Peace. Right. That's hilarious. And then I ended up a few days later getting a call for my agent saying they wanted to book.

That's right. Yeah. Well, and you all, I mean, it does sound, it does feel like. There's a lot of examples of, you know, you always hear it about casting where like actors will go and be like, I was not going to get that job. So I just sent it. And they get it. Because I wonder if especially as being a DP, you know, now more than ever, it's easy to follow visual trends because the person who shot is probably very open with their lighting setups and all this, you know, and all that info is very attainable. So you end up with potentially a lot of sameness. So by especially showing how you would do something. different again that's pretty bold but I applaud it but just you know a lot of people probably came in to those interviews thinking like oh I got to show that I know what's trendy yeah probably gave them a lot of sameness generally what I find is pretty much everyone all of the time is just trying to make stuff look trendy like you see in work it's just trend trend trend trend trend trend

so under our commercials yeah exactly so it's actually not terribly difficult to distinguish yourself if you're bold enough to make that move. There's a lot of things you're self from. And what I learned later was that's what the guys wanted to do too. You know, they, I think Marvel really smartly, they knew that Loki was such a special show and that the first season had worked so wonderfully, but you kind of can't capture lightning in a bottle twice in a lot of ways and they knew to make it as good as possible. Maybe they needed to find the most creative team.

possible to get behind it and to take the reins and that type of person is never going to want to just continue to do what had been done before they're always going to the best and most creative people are always going to want to do their own specific vision right and that's what they found in justin and aaron you don't hire justin and aaron unless you want them to do what they do and what we do is very specific to them and it definitely was not at all like the first season of Loki. So Marvel had already made the decision to change the approach to season two dramatically. And I think that's how the guys sold themselves. They're like, look, if you hire us, we're going to do our thing. And it's a lot different than what the show had been doing before. So I think I actually kind of gave them the same pitch that they gave to Marvel. And I think that that's what Marvel was looking for in the first place anyway. So what were visually some of the things that Who was the first TV?

Madeline Gorker. No, she did. Auden Grawled Archipa. There you go. I DM'd her. She did not DM me back. I was trying to get her on the podcast last year. But what were some of the things that she was doing

that you kind of differentiated yourself by her? Because obviously I'm sure Marble didn't want you to do something wholly different. You know, now this is like WandaVision. But what were some of the things? the things that you kind of changed, left her with her style and some of the things that maybe you folded over that seemed to make sense for you guys, if anything? I think we changed everything. I don't think we left it from her style. We changed the camera from Sony Venice to Alexa mini LF. It changed the format from anamorphic to spherical. That was going to be the big one.

in aspect ratio from 239 to 220 we changed from using you know fancy panavision lenses to using prosumer lenses the tokina cinema vistas those are great fucking lenses though shout out to ryan avery they they uh we we um changed from using longer lenses to using much wider lenses which kind of goes along with the switch to spherical um and then one of the biggest things probably the biggest thing we changed was the the style of coverage the first season of loki is very formal you know there's static shots there's dolly shots there's crane shots we still have some crane work in season two but everything is handheld for the most part unless there's a in the tv a certainly everything is handheld or zoom like a slow creeping 70s zoom

So the handheld was the biggest shakeup, I think. It really gives the show an entirely different feel because the show was so formal and precise before. And now it's kind of like super energetic and loose. And we changed the lighting. All of the lighting was LED on the first season. Change it all to tungsten. Oh, interesting. Yeah.

I would have thought it was the other way. Yeah. And then on the first season, because a lot, you know, they were using LED. light so they could set whatever the color. There's a lot of colorful stuff in the first season. There's color all over the, there's no colorful lighting in the second season. We eradicated all colorful lighting from the second season. There's no pink Lamentis or the blue city on Lamentis or that super colorful train or, you know, the throne right, saturated cyan light. There's nothing like that in the second season. It's all just shades of white from cool to warm.

We started using a lot more in-camera filtration as well. We used in-camera filtration that was designed to be additive to the effect of the haze on the set. Because we were only allowed. Smoke filters? Yes, yeah, exactly. We were only really able to use so much haze because of the effects stuff. You know, haze kind of ears with blue screen and we wanted the haze level to be consistent. system. So we kind of figured out how

the heaviest that we could put the haze when we were shooting on our blue screen sets and then we matched it to that throughout all of the rest of the scenes, even if there wasn't blue screen to create that consistency. Then we had diffusion filtration, we had the smoke and then we did smoke

in post as well. The Guller at Watkins developed a in resolve complicated smoke filter than really a lot and yeah I mean we changed everything pretty much everything yeah well I guess to the to my point earlier in my head they still look kind of similar but we're going to have to chalk that up to the

production designer and the and the costuming and of course the actors being the same we had the same production designer and the same costume designer which really gave us that foundation that we could shake things up on top of or yeah totally that's actually great to hear too because that's uh i'll have to think about that thought but it does make me happy uh what uh what was your i can go three different directions here what was your relationship like with the colorist and what were you guys kind of doing in the grade to enhance the look you already mentioned the smoke but like um you know certainly some of the uh shots like especially in the um The control room, whatever you want to call it, you know, in front of the loom, are more heavily graded than other shots, you know.

So kind of when were you making those choices and how, you know, how heavy was the hand in certain situations versus more gentle and et cetera? In general, the first at Matt Watson, the colorist and I, the first thing that we did was build a lot, you know? right we knew we wanted the show to have a really heavy and definitive look going into it we were going for a film emulation thing right not just on the left but across the board i mean tungson was even part of that we wanted to create the look of an old school movie it's like old school movie emulation in addition to like film stock emulation right right um and um the idea was to make it look like 2001 a space odyssey or live and let die so we um We focused a lot of time and energy and conversation and testing and development and iteration on the Lut. And it's a lot that's based on 500T, but we made modifications to it to make it feel more vintage, like more desaturated, warmer. We led the warmth kind of infect the shadows a bit because 500T is actually pretty good at keeping the shadows clean and even a little cool. You know, you see a lot of Langer T emulation emphasizes cool shadows. So we kind of removed that component of it when in the opposite direction desaturated a bit.

It had something that was based on 500T, but actually feels more like a stock you might see in the early 70s. And it was really heavy as well. We wanted the lighting to feel in practice like lighting an old school movie. So in effect, the lighting pushed the stop down like 1.1. stops and then I rated the camera to 640 ISO on top of that which was like like 1.4 stops down and so we were we basically overexposed everything by a stop and a half right and the effect was we were shooting at about we were lighting for a four stop because that's what our our biggest zoom that we could use whatever we never knew when that was going to come

to play. It had to be on the table at all times. And I never want to relight a set just because we have to put on a zoom lens. I just light everything is assuming that the zoom is going to be used on that set. So we were lighting to a T4 and rating that at ISO 320. That is very much a light level that's consistent with what you would get on one of those older films. I expect 2001 of Space Odyssey and live and that die were actually probably lit to a fairly similar stop because they loved shooting it for back then and the stock was a lot slower than it is now. And so yeah, Matt and I developed a lot and then I worked with the colorist Jay Patel on who is

absolutely incredible and he had a lot of experience with Marvel. So he had a real insight not just into what it's like as an onset DIT, but how his work is used through the whole Marvel-specific pipeline. So he was an enormous help and a major consultant just on the whole workflow and the process. And we, I never done this before, but on that show, I did really get into live grading stuff and generating CDLs to push through a post. Because Marvel, they're very, very specific and precise about their post pipeline.

As you know, they do a tremendous amount of post work. Yeah. So they, the CDLs, they, they have it all worked out. It's anything you do in a CDL, you can be very confident is going to follow that footage through the pipeline. So we had the, you know, that knowledge that what we did with the live grade would be honored throughout. And yeah, we, the Lut wasn't exactly just drag and drop perfect for every single senior location. We often had to increase saturation. and the TVA we really had to do anything

but we discovered one of our lenses was a little darker than the other lenses or the 29 and some lenses were a little warmer, a little cooler. We kind of developed lens-specific adjust that we would make oh, this lens is going on, slap that guy out there and so on. So we did a lot of CDL work

as little as possible. You know, you never want to do that unless you have to, but we did a lot of that. And then in post, we got into post with Matt, who works full-time at Marvel finishing. It was really about just seeing things all the way through. Nothing was changed. The show actually pretty much looked

in terms of the color, the way that we were seeing it on set with certain exceptions. And I think you pointed out, did you say the temperate war? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I wish you weren't able to tell that, you know? Well, I will say I just saw a screenshot of OB and I was, and I was like, oh, that is a little, that's touched. But, you know. Yeah, yeah.

The thing is that one, we had a lot of trouble with the lighting on set. So we were in a situation where we needed to be emulating the light of the loom overheating at all times on that set. Right. But depending on what the shot was and where the actors went. Where they were moving, we had to use one of two entirely different lighting setups. Gotcha. That was where the lights were very close to that window. There was an array of lights that filled that window, approximately one meter out from the window.

And those lights, because they're so close, you really get hit by the inverse square alone. So if you have a shot up someone next that's close to the window, they're going to be super hot. And then someone in the background might be super, you know, not feeling. the light of the loom at all. Right. And you have to shoot those shots at the same time. Maybe you're using, we mostly just used one camera. But maybe you were using two cameras in that moment.

Or maybe the camera goes and has to find a character, follow them through the whole space. And you get some of them when they're dark, some of them are the not. We try to dial the lights up and down as they get closer and further from those lights. But it doesn't always work. You had situations where a character that should be bright just wasn't getting the light that they should have. been because for whatever reason, usually it has to do with VFX and what they need in that window. If they need it clear, if they need to see the blue screen back there, if there's weird

reflections. Right. It also depended on how much we needed to fill that space with light. We couldn't fill the room with loom light unless we used the close lights because the second lighting setup we had were those same lights, but a bigger array of them, vortex 8, much further further away. Yeah, they're amazing. So we had dozens and dozens of them hanging like 60 feet away.

That is much more accurate to the feel of a faraway source like the overheating loom. So in a lot of ways, that's ideal. Also, inverse square law problems go away. Because they are far enough away, the brightness of a subject at the window or at the back of the control room is similar enough that you don't need to dial up and down or worry about someone being dark in back or bright in front. Right. Because they're far away, they're getting cut by the window. So now what you have is the sides of the room are totally dark. And you just have this relatively narrower than you would think shaft of light down the center of the room.

So it's like, okay, now you have someone who's like close to the window, but just off to the side a little bit is completely dark. Right. So and we don't get to pick which lighting setup we get to use. because that's being determined by VFX needs. Oh, okay. So it's like, whichever one you use, you're introducing problems. And you can't even choose which one to use based on like the lighting needs of the shot. It's usually determined by the VFX needs of the shot.

Right. Sometimes, even though there's problems, whatever you do, sometimes the option that's best for the lighting is, is like the opposite of what you have to do for the VFX concerns. Right. at set so basically the bottom line is when that thing was cut together sometimes we got pretty lucky but sometimes you just did not feel the light of the loom enough on the subject's face so we had to enhance the feeling of warmth and brightness from time to time and i think that's probably what you saw on the still of obi yeah probably but also um i would not have guessed I just figured it was like, oh, that was the grade.

Like, I thought it was a creative decision more so than, oh, you were handed to a completely different lighting set up. Like, that didn't stand out at all. So I think you guys did a good job getting everything massaged in, you know. When we did realize that we would have to help that scene more than we had hoped in the grade, I did feel I was on team. Okay, well, we can, if we're going to do it anyway, let's use that to push. it a little bit further and for whatever reason I was feeling inspired by like the J.J. Abrams Star Trek. Yeah. And I was like you know let's just make it a little bit more like teal and orangey like blockbuster because there's something that's like a such a

blockbuster kind of moment. It fit what was happening in that seat. Well and that room does feel like a what do you call it? Bridge of the inner bridge. Thank you. Yeah. I was like you know what? Let's make it feel like Star Trek 2009 in there. Yeah. It is. I mean like I said the whole thing looks good I did see in another article that you because obviously all the lighting for anyone listening you can see there's no lights on the floor

you can see fucking everything in most of those shots that you had like a little boom pole with a like a light on it that someone was chasing the camera around to get some eye light or fill on the faces of people that's right yeah in the TVA

a lot of the lighting comes from above which can lead to characters, you know, not receiving proper light of their eyes or at least eye light, you know, because my philosophy is you want that ping of eye light in there 100% of the time. And so not only is your light coming from above, but the cameras on a wide lens, hand-held, doing these moving masters, all the characters are moving around. The actors, We tried to keep them moving and the spaces are big

and we're exploring the spaces. There's nowhere to hide. There's just no opportunity to put lights on the set, on the floor. There's nowhere to put a stand with an eye light because the character is going to move to another place anyway, right? So we adopted the approach

of having a battery powered in a backpack, eye light unit, a gem ball with LEDs, so that we could damn it up and down on a painter's pole and a spark was running around chasing actors with it trying to stay by the

camera and then we would try to mitigate its effect on the performer's face by dialing it up and down as we approached or receded from that. It was remarkably effective. If you, I think dare I say,

Loki season two is functions as a case study in excellent flawlessly executed. eyelighting under extreme difficult eye light circumstances. Hell yeah, dude. I'll mark it.

I'll back that up. It's funny is I did something. So I got a boom pole with a little clampy, and then I got one of those two-foot quasars, and then put a big umbrella on it. And I've been using, I've been kind of doing, not for eye light purposes, it's actually just for key light, but like for like walk and talks

outdoors and stuff, you know, where you've like maybe at night you've got. It's like having that. It's nice. It's a nice little thing. That's where LEDs do come in handy. Yeah, they sure do. Yeah.

So was the spark managing the exposure himself or was that someone else? No, no, that was our board operator who was usually in the DP 10, it was me, the gaffer, and the board op. And the gaffer, it's kind of funny. It's like, you know, it's just this hierarchical thing. But it's like, I'm really technically not supposed to tell the board up what to do. So I would, all three of us would be in there like a line. It would be like me asking the gaffer to do something. Who would then tell the board off I've had to do it?

Like it's when someone's met, tell Sidney, I don't like the way she dressed it. Sidney says she doesn't like the movie. But it's sometimes it feels silly. but other times you see how important it is to maintain that because if the gaffer gets cut out of that loop and they don't know and they see something that wasn't the way they thought it was or they left it it can cause all kinds of chaos and crossed wires you know so it's it's just it really is for the best that the gaffer

and all lighting instruction is relayed through the gaffer yeah yeah i mean absolutely was there um obviously you're in a couple different time eras. You're in obviously a couple different locations, sometimes different time eras in the same location. Were there really strong different approaches to, you know, for like

the World's Fair situation or like the 1800 or whatever that was versus more modern stuff or were you trying to keep the look, your approach to the look relatively consistent regardless of time? We tried to keep you know, that's a great question and it's a

balancing act. We wanted to differ each era with its own bespoke look while at the same time making sure that they fit harmoniously within the tapestry that was the overall look of season two so that means you know keeping certain things always the same and then changing other things uh but we tried to play around with focal length in the different eras and camera support platforms you know so you'll see Episode five, there's not nearly as much handheld. In episode three, when we go to the 1893 World's Fair, there's not nearly as much handheld. There's longer lenses.

For example, in 1893, we used our 65 mill a lot more because it just felt like an old-school, like, Degera-type portrait lens to us. It just has that aesthetic to it qualitatively. We're like, it just feels like that. You know, we're not going to get into too much detail other than that, but It feels right. It feels like a daguerre-type lens. So we're going to slap that thing on there as any chance we get.

And in the 80s, you know, we saturated the grade a lot more, like on set and the CDLs. We were like it just did it feel like the 80s until we were really getting those rich, you know, blues and reds and yellows and those primary colors. Yeah. muddy and brown and just kind of uniform but yes they i will leave it in general not just a loki i'll leave it any opportunity to create a little sub look for a certain part of the film or a location or a time period it's it's never just take the house style and drag it all the way across the board we're always looking opportunities to break out of that box sure did you uh what was the conversation this is a dumb question for nerds but

But how long was the conversation about how much grain to put in? He knew pretty quick that we wanted to do grain going back to the whole like 2001, late 60s, early 70s film thing. We knew that grain was going to be a big part of that. So the conversation about grain was literally had on day one of hard prep in London. And immediately everyone expressed support and interest. and we were told that we would probably be able to get away with it

we would just have to present some choices to Marvel and see how they were feeling about it and sure enough we shot some test footage through different levels of grain and other because the grain was always a package you know it comes with chromatic aberration and highlight halogen and gate weave and edge smudging and so on

So we kind of put together different combos of these things, kind of in a like one, two, three, light, medium, heavy presentation that was screened for certain Marvel executives. And they actually didn't have that strong of an opinion. They were just like, yeah, this looks cool. You know, I mean, always going to want. Yeah, it's always going to change. It's got to be really determined finally in post. But the sign off was there for, yes, you can do a version of this for sure. And then it was pretty remarkable to me because, you know, our instincts are always to push this film look as far as we can, and you're always worried that the studio is going to want to do a more moderate version of it. And we were told that much by people that, you know, knew of these things that had worked for Marvel for a long time. But ultimately, what ended up happening was we put heavier grain on the episode, episode three, 1893. They put significantly heavier grain on that episode. Like I was saying,

do something to differentiate it, you know, because I try to get it where we can. And they put 16 mil. It was 35 mil across the season. Then they put 16 mil grain on 1893. And when people at the studio saw it, they liked it so much. They were like, wow, the grain in that episode, though. That's great. Can we do that for the whole thing? And then they ended up taking that 16 mil look and applying it to the whole season. So there's no longer any differentiation there. But the good but the good thing is the whole season leaned much heavier into the grain yeah well because there was two thought one i i so i i'd freelance color so uh the um the 16 do you know if you were just using the stock resolve or like live grain or anything like that or pixel tool uh yeah

marvel so marvel um everything you see pretty much that marvel does like that is proprietary uh yeah they'd all screw around with licensing. Oh, I bet. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they have the resources to build all those elements proprietarily. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that is proprietary marvel.

Fair enough. Well, because that kind of goes into my second question, which is I know at least I have seen this patent where Netflix will add the grain at the user level because compression, I guess it like reads it, clean. and then post compression adds the grain. And so I was going to ask like did you guys have to consider how much it would be, how legible it would be

for the, for the viewer at the end of the pipeline. The pipeline, pipeline, pipeline, pipeline. Marvel doesn't not fuck around when it comes to the pipeline. They've got that thing perfected and they know all about how compression can ruin grain. So you'll see I think that the grain looks pretty nice and looks great. And there was

a battery of compression specific grain tests. You know, it wasn't what grain looked best in the suite. It's what grain looked best after was on Disney Plus. And that was tested thoroughly. Yeah. So, oh yeah.

We were well ahead of that one. Yeah, I was interviewing Gregory Middleton for Moon Night. And one thing that stuck out to me was, I was like, how do you, because I think I've interviewed maybe two or three more old TVs. And I was like, how do you guys keep the Marvel look consistent? And at one point, he was like, oh, they just got like a library of Luts you can use. I was like, what?

He's like, yeah, I can't remember what he said. And he's like, we went to one movie. We like, maybe it was like Winter Soldier, you know, whatever. And he goes, I think we grabbed that one and modified that one a little bit. And they were like, yeah, good, good for you know, it's like, it didn't occur to me that Marvel would keep all the CDLs and all the luts from all the products. But why wouldn't they? I never heard about this Lull library. Oh, you got to call Greg.

I actually did speak with Greg before. Oh, cool. He got a little bit of a debrief on what it was like to work with Marvel. Did he say anything you can share? He and I spoke for like three hours, so he might have said it. I mean, at this point, that was 18 months ago at this point. But I think he reassured me, you know, that the support and the infrastructure were there. he definitely tipped me off on some things

to look out for that I'm not going to share. Sure. But it was enormously helpful and very encouraging. Yeah. Greg's great, dude. Like I said, we were talking for like three hours and at one point one of us went like, hey, do you want to get dinner? Yeah. And then

like, separately, you know, we'll catch up later. And then took up. We're like, damn, that was a long one. Love that, dude. But I, you know, I don't want to keep in. I got a fresh kid and whatnot. But, you know, The show looks awesome and it's a lot of fun. And I'm glad, you know, Loki was like in my head, I don't want to

toot your horn too much. But Loki to me felt like the Marvel and or in that it was unique and like really compelling versus maybe a lot of not just Marvel shows, but I think a lot of stuff out there sometimes can get a little samey, you know. And Loki didn't feel that way at all. Yeah, thank you. I'd like to end then on just a little bit of advice for other people for Marvel, which is what Loki did in order to feel special, I believe, is accessible to every production. Marveler. It's not, Marvel doesn't have a look that they force you to emulate. You're allowed to pick your camera, pick your lenses, pick your

aspect ratio. I mean, no one had ever done 2-2-0 before. That's their animated show. I forget out what it's called. It's 2-0, but there's no live-action 2-0 Marvel. And the grain, you know, they wanted the grain heavier. You know, Marvel is

unbelievably accommodating to creatives, open-minded and supportive. It is on the creators to rise to the occasion and to develop a vision that's specific enough because it will be possible. It will be accepted. It will be encouraged and it will be supported. It's on you. You can do it. You just have to put that

thing together and you've got to get ahead of things. The key is to figure out what you want to do relatively early on in pre-production because I know for a fact there have been Marvel productions that have kind of worked their way into figuring out what they wanted to do as they progressed through production and post and that strategy that doesn't work as well they came out there was an article recently where they came out and basically some executive was like admitted that's what they were doing and they're like we're going to go with like showrunners and headwriters now and everyone's like you're going to now what well i'm only speaking of the visualization yeah yeah of any of the or you know development but with regard to the cinematography

it's possible to do whatever you want it's just important that that you come up with your ideas in a timely fashion and present them. And you had a massive Bible, didn't you? I do. 712 page Bible that was shared an earlier form of it. It eventually got to 700. Probably a 300 page version was shared with Marvel early on in the process. But yeah, it's on you.

Basically what I'm saying is it is on you. And I would hope that more and more. cinematographers will be rising to the occasion and giving really definitive stylistic looks to marble productions. Yeah, I hope for that as well. Well, like I said, man, I'll let you go, but it was fantastic chatting with you. I know you said you had something coming up, so maybe when you're done with that, you can come on back and chat with that. I do. I do. All right. Well, I hope to see you soon enough, man. You too, brother. Take care.

See what. production. It's produced and edited by me, Kenny McMillan, and distributed by pro video coalition. As this is an independently funded podcast, we rely on support from listeners like you. So if you'd like to help, you can go to buy me a coffee.com slash frame and ref pod. We really appreciate your support. And as always, thanks for listening. Thank you.