Tales From the Loop DP talks large-format and natural light

PostPerspective 

“Not everything in life makes sense,” a woman tells a little girl in the first episode of Amazon’s series Tales From the Loop. Sage advice from any adult to a child, but in this case the pair are both versions of the same character caught in a time-travelling paradox.

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“This is an adventure with a lot of sci-fi nuances, but the story itself is about humanity,” says Jeff Cronenweth, ASC, who shot the pilot episode for director/producer Mark Romanek. “We are representing the idea that life is little different from the norm. There are time changes that our characters are unaware of, and we wanted the audience’s attention to detail. We didn’t want the visuals to be a distraction.”

Inspired by the retro-futurist paintings of Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag, Tales from the Loop gravitates around characters in a rural North American community and the emotional connection some of them feel toward artefacts from a clandestine government facility that litter the landscape.

Rather than going full Stranger Things and having a narrative that inexorably unlocks the dark mysteries of the experimental lab, writer Nathaniel Halpern (Legion) and producer Matt Reeves (director of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and The Batman), construct “The Loop” as a series of individual loosely connected short stories.

The tone and pace are different too, as Cronenweth explains. “Simon’s artwork is the foundation for the story, and it elicits a certain emotion, but some of his pieces we felt were overly strong in color or saturated in a way that would overwhelm a live-action piece. Our jumping-off points were his use of light and staging of action, which often depicts rusting, broken-down bipedal robots or buildings located in the background. What is striking is that the people in the paintings — and the characters in our show — treat these objects as a matter of fact of daily life.”

Near the beginning of Episode 1, a young girl runs through woods across snowy ground. Filmed as a continuous shot and edited into two separate shots in the final piece, the child has lost her mother and spends the rest of the story trying to find her. “We can all relate to being 9 years old and finding yourself alone,” Cronenweth explains. “We begin by establishing the scale of the environment. This is flat rural Ohio in the middle of winter.”

Photography took place during early 2019 in southwest Winnipeg in Canada (standing in for Ohio) and in sub-zero temperatures. “Our dilemma was shooting in winter with short daylight hours and at night where it reaches minus 32. Child actors are in 80 percent of scenes and the time you can legally shoot with them is limited to eight hours per day, plus you need weather breaks, or your fingers will break off. The idea of shooting over 10 consecutive nights became problematic. During location scouting, I noticed that the twilight seemed longer than normal and was really very beautiful, so we made the decision to switch our night scenes to magic hour to prolong our shoot time and take advantage of this light.”

He continues, “We had a condor [cherry picker] and lights on standby in case we couldn’t make it. We rehearsed two-camera setups, and once the light was perfect, we shot. It surprised everybody how much we could accomplish in that amount of time.”

Working in low, natural light; maximizing time with child actors and establishing figures isolated in a landscape were among the factors that led to the decision to shoot large-format digital.

Cronenweth drew on his vast experience shooting Red cameras on films for David Fincher, including Gone Girl, The Social Network and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Cronenweth was Oscar nominated for the latter of those two films. His experience with Red and his preference for lenses led him to the Panavision’s Millennium DXL2 with the Red Monstro 8K VV full-frame sensor, which offers a 46.31 mm (diagonal) canvas and 16 bits of color.

“It was important for us to use a format with 70mm glass and a large-format camera to give scale to the drama on the small screen,” he says.

Another vital consideration was to have great control over depth of field. A set of Primo 70s were mainly for second unit and plate work while Panaspeeds (typically 65mm, 125mm and 200mm) allowed him to shoot at T1.4 (aided by 1st AC Jeff Hammerback).

“The Monstro sensor combined with shooting wide open made depth very shallow in order to make our character more isolated as she tries to find what was taken away from her,” explains Cronenweth. “We also want to be with the characters all the time, so the camera movement is considerable. In telling this story, the camera is fluid, allowing viewers to be more present with the character.”

There is very little Steadicam, but he deployed a variety of technocranes, tracks and vehicles to keep the camera moving. “The camera movement is always very deliberate and tied to the actor.”

Shooting against blinding white snow might have been an issue for older generations of digital sensors, but the Monstro “has so much latitude it can handle high-contrast situations,” says Cronenweth. “We’d shoot exteriors at the beginning or end of the day to mitigate extreme daylight brightness. The quality of light we captured at those times was soft and diffused. That, plus a combination of lens choice, filtration and some manipulation in the DI process, gave us our look.”

Cronenweth was able to draw on his experience working camera on eight pictures for fabled Swedish cinematographer Sven Nykvist, ASC, FSF, (Sleepless in Seattle, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape). Other tonal references were the films of Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky (Stalker) and Polish genius Krzysztof Kieslowski (notably his 10-hour TV series Dekalog).

“I was motivated by Sven’s style of lighting on this,” he says. “We were trying to get the long shadows, to create drama photographically as much as we could to add weight to the story.”

Cronenweth’s year spent shooting Dragon Tattoo in Sweden also came into play. “The way exteriors should look and how to embrace the natural soft light all came flooding back. From Bergman, Tarkovsky and Kieslowski, we leaned into the ‘Scandinavian’ approach of tempered and methodological filmmaking.”

The color palette is suitably muted: cold blues and greys melding with warm yellows and browns. Cronenweth tuned the footage using the DXL2’s built-in color film LUT, which is tuned to the latest Red IPP2 color processing incorporated in the Monstro sensor.

Cronenweth recalls, “In talking with [Light Iron supervising colorist] Ian Vertovec about the DI for Tales From the Loop, he explained that Light Iron had manufactured that LUT from a combination of work we’d done together on The Social Network and Dragon Tattoo. That was why this particular LUT was so appealing to me in tonality and color for this show — I was already familiar with it!”

“I’ve had the good fortune of working with Jeff Cronenweth on several feature films. This would be the first project that’ve we’ve done together that would be delivering for HDR,” reports Vertovec. “I started building the show LUT using the camera LUT for the DXL2 that I made, but I needed to rebuild it for HDR. I knew we would want to control skin tones from going too ruddy and also keep the green grass from getting to bright and electric. When Jeff came into grade, he asked to increase the contrast a bit and keep the blacks nice and rich.”

The pilot of Tales From the Loop is helmed by Romanek, for whom Cronenweth has worked for over two decades on music videos as well as Romanek’s first feature, One Hour Photo. The remaining episodes of Tales From the Loop were shot by Ole Bratt Birkeland; Luc Montpellier, CSC; and Craig Wrobleski, CSC, for directors So Yong Kim, Andrew Stanton and Jodie Foster, among others.