NAB
article here
Chris Miller and Phil Lord’s new AppleTV+ series doesn’t
disappoint cinefiles and murder-mystery fans alike.
The co-creators of The Lego Movie and Spider-Man:
Into the Spider-Verse, have conjured another slice of entertaining pop
culture.
Not only does every episode focuses on a different version
of the same events, Rashomon-style, but they're all defined by an artful
cinematic twist in execution.
Watching The Afterparty is like a game of
"spot the reference" Mashable sums up.
Every murder suspect's story is presented as their own,
personal ‘mind movie.’ The extended flashbacks that dominate the show’s
individual chapters are fashioned after whatever Hollywood genre best fits the
character's point of view.
In addition to directing, Miller serves as showrunner and is
executive producing alongside Lord through the pair’s production banner, Lord
Miller. The setup is the afterparty of a high school reunion, where a palatial
cliffside mansion becomes a crime scene with everyone a suspect. Oh, and it’s a
comedy. Among the stars are Tiffany Haddish, Sam Richardson, Ben Schwartz and
Ilana Glazer.
“Jokes aside: The Afterparty is a bonafide
whodunit,” says Mashable, delivering a growing pile of clues that challenge
viewers to develop their own theories. Apple's weekly release strategy is an
asset here, creating space for viewers to spend time thinking, rewatching, and
theorizing.”
Carl Herse was director of photography for the whole series.
He and Miller seemed to have a lot of fun discussing which movies could serve
as references for each genre, and what techniques they could use to perfect
each episode's aesthetic.
Different episodes deliberately evoke romcoms like Notting
Hill or Four Weddings and a Funeral; cool neon toned
thrillers like John Wick or Atomic Blonde, the musical genre by
way of West Side Story and La La Land, stylish thrillers in the
mode of Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train; and another that
apes frat boy comedy like Superbad and Project X. There’s even an
animated episode.
Once they had a list of cinematic references, they began
identifying similarities -- filtration, lenses, camera movement, styles
evocative of each genre.
For example, says Herse, “rom-coms has longer lenses, the camera will do more aspirational crane
moves, and have warm color situations with everyone lit cosmetically.
In the action genre, the camera is crazy and moving through
space with cooler and more electric vibes: “We tried to channel John Wick by
adding lots of neon and colored lights in the background that flared the lens.”
The final episode challenged the cinematographer to bring
each of the seven looks of the show together.
“We want it to all feel different, but you also want to feel
like a progression,” Herse tells Indiewire. “We go from wider aspect ratios at the beginning of the season to taller aspect
ratios by the end. But then when we got to Episode 8, Chris and I started
scratching our heads.”
The solution, they found, wasn’t to create a new look, but
to blend the styles they’d already spent time establishing. “We found that it
was important to start bleeding the different genres into one another. So [in
the finale] we’ve got Yasper (Ben Schwartz) moving through an environment, but
it’s lit and color corrected in the more de-saturated tones that you saw in the
[thriller episodes].”
Herse and Miller also started blending approaches to camera
movement in the finale, so that even within individual scenes it feels like the
voices of the characters, each with their own very stylized and defined visual
identity, start to clash.
“Anything where Danner is holding court is shot in a very
formal studio mode with tableaus and all the cast standing in depth. Whereas
whenever you’re with Aniq [Sam Richardson] and Yasper, it’s handheld because
they’re kind of scrambling around in the background,” Herse said.
This was all the more impressive because the series was shot
out of chronological order and needed to keep minute track of each episode’s
look. “We had kind of a cheat sheet for each genre that would say, ‘Okay, now
we’re in this format, we’re at this ISO, we’re using these lenses, this
filtration,'” Herse said. But, he added, “We would always end by going to this
wide shot. And then in the lighting and the tone and in the format, we would
return, and we had little invisible marks laid out in the set.”
Herse took special care to match the camera’s mark as well
as the actors, noting the height and angle of the lens, and figured out how to
make a shot that worked across the show’s different aspect ratios.
“The shots match up perfectly when they’re seen one after
the other in the final reveal, which feels to the viewer like incontrovertible
evidence of the truth,” Indiewire notes. “No matter how many different ways we
see the action and no matter how many different genres get draped over it, the
way the actors line up is gloriously, joyfully the same.”
To TVFanatic Herse added, “We had the present timeline, with
the interviews and everything happening in the present tense, which also had to
have its own strong look. We wanted that to have that Knives Out-style,
the "locked-room mystery" genre as it's called.
“For the different ways of achieving our flashback looks, we
would carry four different lens sets to rotate, different filtration, and
shooting with different aspects ratios.
“Then, from a lighting standpoint, it's all so different. On
a day of filming, and again we're shooting everything all at once, my gaffer
and I would have to light sets so that you were in a romantic comedy, and then
with the push of a button and a few minutes of tweaks, you were in a John Wick
movie.
“It was essential in pre-production to build all our looks
into the set, the moment you're rigging the stages, to plan it out. In the
moment, you rarely have much time, so it's really about jumping between looks.”
He revealed that his personal favorite episode was the
thriller (Episode 4) because, “What you're doing is not additive in the way
that’s you do a romantic comedy, with strong lighting looks and backlights. In
this episode, you're just stripping things away, making it mysterious, and
being expressive with things like rain, darkness, and shadow. It's really about
limiting yourself.”
According to an interview in The Wrap they turned to Lindsey Olivares, the production
designer of The Mitchells vs. The Machines, to design the characters for
animated episode (which ShadowMachine
then produced).
Apple has also announced that The Afterparty has been
renewed for season two.
No comments:
Post a Comment