Editing Black Doves is all about trigger points for emotion

RedShark News

How would you define Black Doves, Netflix’ new thriller series? For editor Simon Brasse, “It’s a buddy movie wrapped in a spy movie wrapped in a romance. It's definitely got those elements but for me it’s more about spies and friendship.”

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Just as Die Hard is definitely a holiday movie, so Black Doves, created and written by Joe Barton (Giri/Haji, The Lazarus Project), is set at Christmas, the cozy gift-giving season at counter to the assassins, drugs, mystery, violence and black humour that runs amok around London.

Brasse edited the pilot and the third of the six episodes for director Alex Gabassi, a friend since working together on The ABC Murders, a 2017 BBC One adaptation of the Agatha Christie mystery. They both worked on several series of Netflix The Crown although not on the same episodes.

“Getting an opportunity to work with Alex and taking on the challenge of creating a story world that has been shown many times before but it in a way that keeps you off balance, was the draw for me,” he explains. “That and being able to have a big say in the music.

“One of the things I realized quite quickly with feedback from Alex who I was sending edits to was that we needed not to be too reverential to the thought processes of our characters in the plotting moments. The pacing should be quick fire, jumping from one place to another. I had to allow myself the freedom to pull out shots that were not necessarily intended to go where they ended up on the timeline in order to deliver information that was impactful and full of energy.”

He cites a sequence in episode one where politician’s wife Helen Webb (Keira Knightley) is unwrapping the present she received from Jason, with whom she has been having an affair.

“This could have been presented showing her tentatively opening the gift, then sitting with it and having an emotional reaction to it. Played in real time it would probably last a couple of minutes on screen.

“What we ended up doing was using it as a trigger point to get to the emotional impact of what Jason represented for Helen, to then give her momentum to go to his flat. We next see Helen in his flat, looking through his thing, bringing in flashes of their romance. Then we go back to that scene of Helen unpacking the gift and showing all the emotion that came with that.

“Since at that moment Helen can’t talk to anyone about her feelings (the only person she should could talk to is the icy Black Doves boss Reed played by Sarah Lancashire) she is very alone, so how do you do convey emotion with images?

“None of this was scripted that way, but the result encapsulates what’s going on in her mind and gives her the agency that we needed from her character. She wasn't overly pining, morose or mournful but resolves to kick ass and extract her revenge. We needed to power that.”

Unusually, the editors were given pretty free reign to source needle drops that play throughout the show. Typically, these are Christmas songs to enhance the show’s seasonal setting.

“Only the first song (Pogues’ ‘Fairy Tale of New York’) was in the script. Everything else was left up to us in the edit and apart from maybe one track I was able to keep everything that I selected, which I’m really happy about.”

In episode one when Helen is in the back of a taxi lost in her own thoughts after the shock of discovering that her lover is dead, Brasse makes a sharp pivot to introduce the series’ other lead character, Sam, a suave, Champagne-drinking assassin (Ben Whishaw).

“We’re alone with Helen’s mental state at that moment in the taxi when she's surrounded by her family but unable to talk to them, and we wanted to do a really quick pivot to the fun that underpins so much of what this show has to offer. The Elvis Presley ‘I’m Coming Home’ track is one that perfectly fitted that moment. The lyrics are melancholic about loneliness but the rhythm and its tone and instrumentation is fun and quintessentially Christmas, plus it just perfectly timed with the runway we had to go from finding Sam, him driving to a hotel room and meeting Reed.”

Another track segueing from Sam leaving Liberties and arriving at a flat for a dinner party is by jazz improv artist Kamaal Williams “not particularly Christmassy, but one of my favourite tracks which I was able to sneak in.”

For Brasse, shows including Severance and Fargo were the go-to for references for music. “With Fargo I thought there were there were elements that shared Alex's visual palette. While there are brutal moments, there’s also something that's just fun and essentially human that makes it easy to watch.  And Fargo’s music's a big part of that. We’re also choosing music with rhythm and percussion so it sits in a slightly heightened space.”

Black Doves’ narrative contains lots of flashbacks, integral to Barton’s script but which were reordered and fleshed out in the edit. “Often flashbacks are used to give us just enough emotion that will motivate the next scene or the current one. For example, for dinner party scene at the end of Ep. 1 we put some flashes in there of Sam’s bloodied face or him punching someone, just enough to make sure that the audience were unsettled by who Sam is and what his past was and also to tease to what might be coming up.”

The show’s blend of comedy, romance and action thriller proved tricky to balance. “I got it wrong in the beginning for sure,” Brasse says. “I remember those first few days being too reverential and allowing shots to linger too long. We had to figure out when to slow the show down in the moments that mattered to give our characters maximum impact. Their motivation was the key.

Everything else was just foot to the floor and not letting up on the pace. There was definitely a push and pull, whether we were going too far one way or the other, but once we got that pacing right and we figured out how to join scenes together, such as the emotional pivot we make in the taxi from Helen to Sam, the rest came together pretty swiftly.”

 

Behind the Scenes: Disclaimer

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Editor Adam Gough explains that for all the slippery perspectives in psychological thriller Disclaimer the truth is lying in plain sight.

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Psychological thriller Disclaimer carries its own disclaimer in the opening minutes of episode one which warns the audience to beware of narrative and form. “It can bring us closer to the truth, but also has the great power to manipulate" intones the voiceover which of course is what director Alfonso Cuarón attempts to do over the seven-part Apple TV+ series he adapted from the novel by Renée Knight.

Two storylines are told in the present day. The first revolves around Catherine (Cate Blanchett) and her affluent family — husband, Robert (Sacha Baron Cohen) and son Nicholas (Kodi Smit-McPhee) —and the second follows Stephen Brigstocke, a widowed, retired teacher portrayed by Kevin Kline. A third storyline plays out in the past and is predominantly expressed in the form of a novel that Stephen sends to Catherine that seems to document events that transpired over 20 years ago.

Each has a different perspective on those events with the truth lying in plain sight.

“The narrative form is not Rashomon-like in which everyone is lying,” says editor Adam Gough, ACE, BFE in his second collaboration as editor with Cuarón following Roma. “I think viewers would take a lot away from a second watch because all the detail is there. What it plays into most is the additional perspective of you, the viewer. The way the story is presented allows you to make your own choices and feelings on characters as the chapters unfold.”

The viewer’s perspective

To balance the structure and shape of the first episode and therefore of the series, Gough pulled in scenes that were originally intended for episodes two and three.

“It took a lot of time to get the arc of the first four chapters in place,” he explains. “It’s not until midway through the second chapter that the timelines start linking up. At the beginning we deliberately don’t tell the story in the correct order. We trust the audience a lot with this. There was a note that came through from Apple at one point about wanting to put time lines on screen to make it easier for the audience to follow. We pushed back on that. The point is that it’s meant to be a little confusing so the audience has to work to unravel the truth.

“It’s more satisfying as a viewer when you make that connection. You learn while watching rather than being told. If we provide enough intrigue, we can keep their attention. What was important was not making the audience feel cheated. The information is there to be found even if it's incredibly minimal.”

Towards the end of the editorial process they introduced an iris-like transition to help differentiate elements of the story which are told via the novel. “There was a little bit of a confusion between some of Stephen’s flashback and what the novel is telling us so sometimes put in a hard cut or a little bit of black to resemble an iris to help define that.”

Dark and intimate content 

The story presents several fairly explicit sex scenes and also gets considerably darker in content and tone towards the end.  Intimacy coordinator Samantha Murray was brought on board to ensure that the pair of actors involved (Louis Partridge and Leila George) had the additional support they required.

“We invited Samantha into editorial because it was important that we created a professional environment for dealing with this footage,” Gough says. “If anyone felt uncomfortable we wanted them to have an open conversation.”

That includes Gough himself who knew from his experience cutting Spike Lee’s docu-series NYC Epicenters about the black lives matter movement researching the deaths of men at the hands of the police, quite how affected he could become by the material.

“I was very fortunate that my crew was majority women,” he says. This includes additional editor Caitlin Squyres, associate editor Stephanie Tighe, assistants Natalie Hume and Chloe Laing, second assistant Ellie McDonnell and trainee Zainab Alhameed.

“I have a very good relationship with Alfonso when it comes to heavy content. I remember when we edited the still birth sequence in Roma, we did so in silence. It was pretty much looks and nods between ourselves when we were going through the dailies. On Disclaimer there was a very professional tone in our room of just how we were communicating.”

The dailies lab were forewarned that there would be nudity or other challenging footage coming their way. “It was very important for me to have this structure and professionality in place on this project. For Leila it was important. She was going to be doing ADR and would likely be in a suite surrounded by men watching scenes of her nudity during the recording. We felt she might be more comfortable if those scenes were modesty blurred.”

It's the first time Gough had cut sex scenes. “There were moments where I'd have to loop breaths. That's surprisingly difficult when you're focusing on a tiny little detail, trying to make sure that when someone is orgasming the rhythm of the breaths builds up in the right way.”

Cutting all seven chapters

Unusually for episodic drama, director and editor took the lead on every episode. It was a tough assignment that stretched over two years.

“When Alfonso said he wanted me to edit everything I was very aware of what the demands are for episodic TV,” Gough says. “I suggested having another editor working with me, but Alfonso insisted he only wanted to interact with me. If that's how the dynamic was going to work I knew I’d just be spending a lot of my time delegating so I felt it was easier for me to work directly with him.

“In the beginning there was definitely this element of ego - of me loving the idea of doing all of it and then very quickly realising it was a stupid mistake. Even Alfonso would agree that committing to directing all the episodes was too much hard work. What I do appreciate is the consistency that we found in the narrative, the style, the grammar and the stylistic elements.”

Sound of the fridge

Cuarón’s attention to detail extends to sound design. Gough edited in 5.1 in part to help the viewer navigate the geography of scenes featuring panning shots. Stephen’s apartment, for example, features a refrigerator the ominous sound of which was written into the script.

“I immediately knew this is important to Alfonso. I got in contact with [supervising sound editor] Craig Henighan before we started shooting to give me ideas for the rattle and hum of the fridge. I want it in the edit as soon as possible. We went 7.1 at the end because we were finding we needed more clarity in the surrounds when panning and to enhance the noise of the refrigerator.”

Gough explains that he likes to try and get the sound working early on in editorial so that directors do not have to design everything on a costly mixing stage.

“My process in the cutting room with a director is that when anything comes up on screen be it sound, music, VFX, I'm always noting those ideas down, getting them to the right departments and trying to get some update on those quickly. Developing ideas as soon as we can in the edit allows more time to experiment. I'm incredibly proud of the sound design in Disclaimer.”

Gough is currently editing the feature Klara and the Sun for writer/director Taika Waititi.

Lighting for dual DPs

Cuarón took the unusual approach of working with two cinematographers, Emmanuel ‘Chivo’ Lubezki (in their seventh collaboration after work including Children of Men and Gravity) and Bruno Delbonnel, a regular collaborator of Tim Burton (Big Eyes) and Joel Coen (The Tragedy of Macbeth).

His idea was to develop a visual language for the storylines told from the points of view of Catherine (shot by Lubezki) and Stephen (lensed by Delbonnel).

To avoid ‘pollution of ideas’ both cinematographers worked in isolation, never filming in tandem on set.

Delbonnel says, “For Stephen’s point of view, in terms of lighting, Alfonso wanted something quite raw, reflecting the working class neighbourhood where he was living. Since it’s always Stephen’s point of view, I tried to focus on his face as if he was always the centre of everything. To achieve this I tried to get a big fall off of the light. Sunlight never fully lights the interior of the house, it’s always dark behind him.”

To establish continuity they had to be clear about the times of the day, as many scenes happen linearly, cutting from character to character and from and to different points of view.

“If it rains outside what is the light inside the two different houses?” notes Delbonnel. “Being a Parisian, a city where it rains a lot, my feeling is that the light never really penetrates, interiors are dark and gloomy, the sky is low and grey. But was it the same for Chivo? If not, how can we make the two scenes work in order to avoid the audience being lost.”

While natural light unites both Stephen and Catherine’s story worlds, it may surprise that Disclaimer was shot almost entirely on sound stages at Enfield Studios. Building the illusion of sunlight required large exterior light panels diffused with cloth that were strong enough to penetrate the set windows and reach the actors inside.

On set Lubezki used every set decoration light — from desk lamps to ceiling fixtures — to maximise the light opportunities. Sets were also constructed with shifting walls, and in place of green and blue screens outside the windows, gray screens were used to reduce bounce and enhance the natural feel. Production designer Neil Lamont created panels in ceilings that had a partial paint coat on them to allow light to permeate through to give the room a general glow whilst retaining a ceiling.

Cuarón was intentional about the spaces inhabited by Catherine and Stephen because they say something about their social strata and character. Catherine resides in an affluent area of Notting Hill with exteriors was filmed at a Georgian property on Notting Hill’s Elgin Crescent. The outside of Stephen’s property was a red brick Victorian terrace house on Dresden Road in Archway.

The production also filmed in Cape Town; Pisa, Venice and the Tuscan seaside town of Forte dei Marmi, for the flashback sequences. Gough is currently editing the feature Klara and the Sun for writer/director Taika Waititi.

 

PDC World Darts Championship: Sky Sports on the oche for ‘the Nuke’s’ return

SVG Europe

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Luke ‘the Nuke’ Littler lit a rocket under darts when the 16-year-old astonished and delighted fans in his storming run to the PDC World Darts Championship final last year.

He may have narrowly lost to Luke Humphries but in turn that sealed a sporting rivalry that seems set to run for years. At the same time Littler’s remarkable story turned a mainstream media spotlight onto the sport and solidified the Worlds as a fixture in the seasonal calendar.

“For Sky, the Worlds have always been huge along with football over that festive period, and over the past couple years darts has been on a rise,” says Joe Clark Smith, lead producer Sky Sports Darts. “We’ve seen our audience figures increasing since 2022 and then this time last year Luke Littler entered the scene and interest just kind of exploded.

“There’s always a niggle that it’s a flash in the pan and maybe people’s interest peaks during the Christmas period then fades away, but that’s not been the case whatsoever. The PDC put Luke Littler into the Premier League, which is an extremely prestigious invitational event, generating record viewing figures for our coverage of that event.”

The 2025 PDC World Darts Championship is taking place at Alexandra Palace in London from 13 December 2024 to 3 January 2025. Finalists will be whittled down from the 96 entrants competing for the Sid Waddell Trophy and £2.5 million in prize money.

The Littler ‘halo’ has seen all Sky darts events grow their audience during 2024 and Clark Smith says the same has been true for non-Sky darts broadcasts, including on ITV.

“What Littler has done is he’s brought eyes onto darts that are then sticking around to watch it. All of that has meant that this year the excitement and hype as we build towards the Worlds has been like no other year,” he says.

Clark Smith explains how Sky reacted to Littler’s meteoric rise to the top of the nation’s consciousness. “As soon as we saw those viewing numbers rising last year – and it grew every match that he played – we sought insights from the team at Sky. They broke down the demographics of the viewers so we knew there were a lot of under 21s and under 16s that were tuning in. We immediately changed our plans for the final which would have been a slightly longer build up and actual play starting later. We recognised that there were these younger audiences and since the final was on a Wednesday night we wanted them to be able to enjoy it and get to bed before school. We wanted the kids to be talking about it in the playground the next day.

“We rescheduled it a little earlier and we also asked our on-screen team to be a bit more accessible in their language. A lot of people new to the sport weren’t going to know what a big fish is or a champagne-finish, a nine darter or Shanghai. We’ve tried to continue that inclusivity throughout the year.

“The beauty of darts is even though you might be slightly baffled by the scoring system, it’s a very simple game to understand because of the graphics that we put on screen, how the commentators tell the story and the way the crowd reacts in the venue as well. As the excitement builds it’s a very easy sport to watch.”

Sky Sports is always refining its darts production, recently using split screens to show two angles at once and adding on-screen graphics displaying at-a-glance averages and even the time it takes each player on the oche.

“If a player is playing a lot slower than another player that again just adds to the story,” he says.

Returning is the FanCam, a handheld camera with shallow depth of field whose operator is permitted to join the players on stage for the last few practice darts and at the end of each match.

“That’s all about bringing player reactions right into the living room,” says Clark Smith.

New for this year is a Sky Sports backstage area for flash interviews with players before matches and a challenge area for celebs and VIPs to throw some arrows.

“We’ve lounge seating too for celebs, VIPs and players to relax and do some interviews in a slightly different way,” he continues. “That’s mainly social-first content led by reporters Joe Thomlinson and 12-year-old darts prodigy Jayden Walker (labelled the ‘next Luke Littler’) who brings in a younger audience.”

The production is also looking at utilising the decibel levels of applause in the arena this year which might be thrown on screen as a fun piece of information to compare the walk-ons of the players. This is being tested pre-Christmas with the hopes of using it live post-Christmas.

A crucial aspect of darts play is speed. It is a surprisingly fast sport but one that modern players seem intent on accelerating.

“It was a tricky sport to cover even in the 90s and 2000s but players have just got faster and faster. Michael Smith (current world number 2) can hit a three dart 180 in about one and a half seconds,” he adds.

“This new generation of players don’t go the traditional routes either. They go wacky routes maybe hitting the bull twice, they’ll do double tops twice and it can really throw even those who are used to the game.”

This year’s spotters, calling the next dart on talkback to the camera ops and director based on their expert knowledge of the game and of a particular player, are led by Keith Deller and Richard Ashdown.

Clark Smith continues: “Nobody’s perfect, and the players themselves will sometimes miscount. That’s the trickiness of covering darts because you’ve got the spotter saying treble 19, double 10. Then that goes to the cameras who need to get in position. Then the director needs to cut those cameras live. All of that had to happen in an extremely short amount of time to make sure we don’t miss a dart. Once you go remote the fractional latency that that entails would make darts very hard to cover. Going remote risks missing lots of darts hitting the board which is why we are still completely on site as an OB.”

That said, the graphics team at AE Live orchestrating the score and clock are remote at their base in Hemel Hempstead.

Because of the necessity to switch in a fraction of a second this is one of the few events where the director is also vision mixing.

“Not all directors can vision mix without looking down and that’s what you need to be able to do on darts,” says Clark Smith. “You can’t look away from your monitor stack for a second and miss something, so you have to be very, very adept at using the vision mixing desk and the remote control system where you can punch into the right shot.”

The robotic system has every segment of the dartboard programmed for camera move. The camera team sits just behind the stage listening to the spotter and as soon as the spotter calls it they punch in and the remote cameras quickly zoom in.

“One of the things that we’re always trying to maintain is the balance of making sure that we’re doing a show for the venue, so that the crowd in the venue keep that energy up and stay engaged while being aware that there’s a hundred times that many people watching at home expecting the Sky Sports treatment. Sound is a very, very important aspect of that,” he says.

“The crowds at Ally Pally can be rowdy with their songs and chanting which is all part of the unique atmosphere of the event. Some of the players can get very animated, and we want to hear their celebrations echoing around the arena. Then there’s the iconic thud of the dart hitting the board.”

Aside from live coverage of all 28 sessions across the Championship, totalling around 110 hours, Sky is also producing highlights of every session which are available on-demand and will also populate the Sky Sports Darts channel during 24-26 December and New Year’s Eve when there is no live play.

“We’ve also got a lot of long-form content we’ve been creating throughout this year (including a Luke vs Luke: A Date with Destiny interview with the two players who made last year’s final) and tons of archive from 31 years covering this event,” he adds.

Sky also has a new three-part documentary series Game of Throws: Inside Darts transmitting now which goes behind the scenes of the 2023 finals.

With heightened scrutiny on the Championships this year does Clark Smith find time to rest over the three-week period?

“You get into a bubble, in the zone, and really it’s your team that helps get you through it,” he says. “One of the beauties of everybody being on site is you can share that energy of everyone being together and collaborating.

“Seeing how much coverage the sport was getting was incredible too. Seeing darts on the front page as well as the back page gives you so much energy to keep going.

“Those three days off over Christmas help the players who can go home and have a little bit of a time to switch off. It’s the same for the production crew. Just being able to recharge the batteries for that final push from the 27 onwards.”

ITN: Fighting to keep trust in news

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News organisations face an increasing arms race against AI companies to protect the authenticity of the content reaching audiences through their channels. AI-powered deepfake content risks polluting the entire information ecosystem, says ITN’s Tami Hoffman, “What happens when people just don’t believe what they see?

Evidence reported by the Alan Turing Institute identified just 16 viral cases of AI-enabled disinformation or deepfakes during the UK general election last July. It found only 11 viral cases in this year’s EU and French elections combined, volumes that are far lower than many people had feared, it said.

“With the explosion of generative AI we were braced for deepfakes around the UK election,” says Tami Hoffman, Director of News Distribution and Commercial Innovation. “We were almost surprised that there wasn’t more of a problem around deepfakes.”

The few that arose tended to be audio deepfakes, perhaps because there are fewer signals on which to raise red flags than of a person speaking in a fake video. Wes Streeting was the victim of one such fake.

They were quickly spotted. “It was quite easy to go back to sources and ask them what they said or didn’t say,” Hoffman says. “So to some extent journalists are already quite well prepared for dealing with deepfakes because we’ve always had to deal with misinformation, with propaganda or people saying untrue things. It’s in a journalist’s DNA to double check a source if things look suspicious.

“That said, the level of sophistication is increasing exponentially. We used to talk about a ‘news antenna’ being able to detect if something feels a little bit off; that’s obviously far harder now when we’re in a kind of arms race with AI companies. No sooner do we establish ‘tells’ for spotting anomalies in a manipulated image then the AI tools get better and bad actors will use that knowledge to produce something that looks pretty slick.”

Detecting deepfakes

ITN has looked into software tools to help detect deepfakes but they aren’t failsafe. Hoffman says news teams are concerned about relying on technology when it’s not foolproof.

“Most tools come up with confidence percentages rather than ‘yes’ or ‘no’,” she says. “We want our journalists to continue using traditional journalistic practices. There is a role for technology to be helpful in flagging things or when your news antenna has been raised for running it through that software for a second opinion. But technology is not going to be the sole solution.”

The majority of footage ITN uses is either self-generated or acquired through affiliate network partners or agencies like Reuters or AP. User generated content (UGC) comprises a relatively small amount, which is why manual checking is routine and doesn’t need to be scaled; although as Hoffman points out, those manual checks are now more important.

Hoffman highlights a potentially bigger issue surrounding the distribution of deepfakes. “We are understandably suspicious when things don’t come through the conventional channels. That puts quite a lot of onus on news agencies to be on top of the UGC they are syndicating.

“It’s definitely putting a lot of responsibility on news organisations to make sure that we don’t become conduits for legitimising deepfakes. Were we to let a deepfake go out on a reputable news channel, that would give [the deepfake content] so much more additional credibility.”

 

“It’s definitely putting a lot of responsibility on news organisations to make sure that we don’t become conduits for legitimising deepfakes”

Reputational damage

Arguably the greatest threat for newsrooms is reputational. On-screen journalists and presenters have been used in deepfake videos, either to sell commercial products or to defame their reputation, sometimes out of pure malice.

Channel 4 News presenter Cathy Newman was the subject of a deepfake porn video; ITV news presenter Mary Nightingale and Dua Lipa had footage of them manipulated into promoting an investment app; ITV News Political Editor Robert Peston has had several fake stories appear on Facebook. Celebrities including Chris Tarrant, Zoe Ball and Jeremy Clarkson have also appeared in fake interviews designed in a BBC News template published on Facebook.

Although these have been flagged to social media companies and eventually get taken down, they can quite easily resurface.

“Having our audience-facing staff being used in deepfakes is deeply concerning to us from both a personal and reputational point of view as an organisation. We are urging social media companies to put processes in place to spot these and take them down much earlier.

“It wouldn’t take you very long to work out that that presenter would never have done something like that but if you’re glancing at it on a small phone screen, people can be fooled.”

Social media companies argue that they are platforms not publishers and therefore tend to abdicate responsibility for what is distributed over their network.

“We would say that they have far more responsibility,” Hoffman says. “I wouldn’t say that all social media companies are the same. Some take their responsibilities more seriously than others. Having human beings working at these companies in safety roles is paramount. [Elon Musk’s] X has dismantled many of its safety teams, and if you can’t get hold of human beings there’s no recourse, no process. YouTube puts the onus on creators to self-certify the content they publish.

“The legal wheels move very, very slowly. We would much prefer if the platforms as a first step took responsibility themselves and realised the huge power they have in being the gateway for pumping out this information.”

 “Deepfakes are so dangerous because they risk polluting the entire information ecosystem and eroding people’s notion of trust”

Content credentials

The BBC is leading development of a ‘content credentials’ feature, which confirms where an image or video has come from and how its authenticity has been verified. It also uses new technology to embed this information within the image or video itself, helping to counter disinformation when the content is shared outside the BBC.

ITN is monitoring C2PA but has yet to join. BBC News has not implemented it either.

“It’s an ongoing piece of work and it’s not perfect,” Hoffman says. “It requires the good faith of actors right the way through the process. It would need a lot of upfront resource in terms of hardware, as well as additional resource to implement it throughout an entire newsroom’s workflow. This is holding a lot of newsrooms back.”

There are questions about its efficacy too. “Someone could screen grab an image of a video (or record a video on their own computer) and the metadata chain is broken. They could then repost that media online. That’s a loophole that needs closing.

“We absolutely applaud efforts to try and find a universal solution but we don’t think that it’s going to be an easy thing to actually roll out.”

The existential threat is to the public’s trust in a news brand like ITN. If it is tainted by deepfakes it may be impossible to recover from.

Hoffman says, “Deepfakes are so dangerous because they risk polluting the entire information ecosystem and eroding people’s notion of trust. Then we move into a world where facts aren’t believed, nothing is to be trusted and where objectivity can be knocked down.

“AI has made plausible deniability much easier. As Donald Trump would say, ‘fake news’. That is probably the biggest problem that we as a news industry are going to have to deal with. What happens when people just don’t believe what they see?”

 

Sujo conveys the stark reality of Mexico’s drug war

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Winner of the Grand Jury Prize for World Cinema at Sundance this year and Mexico’s entry for Best International Film at the Oscars, Sujo is a coming-of-age crime drama set amid the violence of the drug wars.

Directors Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez’s bleak and tender drama is about a four-year-old boy whose cartel gunman father is murdered. The orphan is raised by his aunts Nemesia and Rosalía in a shack on the outskirts of a city in central Mexico and confronts us with the dilemma of children who have grown up in such a blood-soaked legacy.

To film Sujo, Rondero and Valadez returned to the state of Guanajuato, a rural region of Mexico where they made 2020’s Identifying Features which highlighted the issue of human migration. It is also one of the country’s most dangerous regions.

It is very important for us that the victims of all this violence and the orphans created by this war have a voice and are seen, which is why the film is dedicated to them,” explains cinematographer Ximena Amann, who also shot Rondero’s previous film, The Darkest Days of Us. “Sujo’s narrative speaks to us from another place, where anyone can come from a place that speaks of innocence, childhood, and love.”

Amann’s collaboration with Rondero and Valadez dates back to their time together at film school. “Our collaboration is based on friendship, which has been essential in our creative process,” she says. “Astrid is a multifaceted artist who not only directs beautifully but also writes, composes the music, and draws each frame of the film. Filming with her is very enriching.

“Fernanda has exceptional creative and technical skills. Our discussions with her focused on elevating the creative level and maximizing the benefits of the equipment we had for the story.”

In the film, Sujo is exposed both to the vastness of nature and to his Aunt Nemesia’s nurturing spirit, which is infused with a mysticism rooted in Mexico’s ancient culture. Amman and her directors went to great lengths to incorporate natural elements such as water, fire, and wind, throughout the story.

“We wanted to create the feeling of ancient magic where nature was the main element,” Amann explains. “We also agreed on how to avoid interfering with the natural world, with the children, and our non-professional actors. This included using only two cameras and a minimum of artificial lighting so our main sources of light were natural or present in the scene.”

This aesthetic was challenging because Amman also wanted to preserve the atmosphere and quality of light in each space. She studied the locations carefully, observed the light, and calculated the best time to film each sequence. “We designed Nemesia's house so that the windows, doors, and ceiling were oriented in a way that the sun would shine through them at different times of the day. To shoot at night, we sought subtle moonlight. We studied the lunar calendar so we would have as many full moons as possible and complemented this with on-screen light sources or moonlight that only illuminated the background and framed our characters.”

The filmmaker’s A camera was RED V-RAPTOR, chosen because of its latitude, color response and contrast. “The V-RAPTOR’s exceptional response to low light made it a great ally. We also loved the camera's compact size and portability, which allowed us to work in small spaces.

“KOMODO was an excellent choice for B-camera, given its good color and contrast match with the V-RAPTOR, as well as its portability.”

Lenses were a crucial aspect of their research since they wanted each of the film’s four ‘chapters’ to have a distinct look.

“We chose the Zeiss Jena lenses for Part I ‘The Eight’ to achieve a specific level of contrast. The father is always lit from behind, a silhouette, becoming a nostalgic image of childhood memories.

“The Minolta Rokkor lenses had a warm quality, with a wide aperture that created magical flares, which worked beautifully with the ‘Nemesia’ chapter.”

Canon FD lenses enhanced the look of electric lights used in Part III. “It wasn’t until this ‘Jeremy and Jai’ chapter that we more firmly integrated practical light, and we wanted this difference to be felt. The glow created around the lights set a special and attractive atmosphere.

“A set of Leica R lenses provided continuity in the image, reproducing the colors of Mexico City very faithfully. Their size, sharpness, and neutrality allowed us to capture all the different environments created in Mexico City in the final chapter where Sujo meets literature teacher and mentor Susan.”

For certain sequences Amann employed slow motion “to capture a moment of rupture in time and convey that something extraordinary was happening,” she says. “V-RAPTOR gave us this opportunity to shoot with the best quality.

“Much of the look came from the camera,” she adds. “We wanted to respect the colors of the landscapes and skin tones as interpreted by the lenses. That’s why we were very careful in choosing them. Most of the effects in the more abstract parts were done in-camera or composed very simply in the editing. We think that gives the film a feeling of closeness to some kind of magic.”

Nemesia, Rosalía and Susan are strong female characters illustrative of the resistance to violence led by women in Mexican communities. This resonated with Amman.

“The motherhood of Nemesia and Rosalía is close to me, endearing, loving, and compassionate,” says Amman. “It confronts me with how, as mothers and people, we are leading others by the hand—people who could have a bright future or not.

“For all these reasons, Sujo was a turning point for me, and for that, I will be eternally grateful to Astrid and Fernanda.”

RSIFF: Kingdom underlines ambitions to become filmmaking powerhouse

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Saudi Araia's cinema market is experiencing a cultural renaissance, driven by increasing local productions and a growing appetite for diverse storytelling, reports Adrian Pennington from the Red Sea International Film Festival

Since lifting its 35-year ban on cinema in 2018 the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has set about positioning itself as a potent international film production centre. The oil rich state has invested heavily in building an indigenous industry from scratch. It includes film and TV sound stages at Neom and Al-Ula, a generous 40% cash rebate on inward productions, and a film festival which aims to unite Hollywood with regional talent.

“The goal is a thriving economy,” explains Zaid Shaker, Acting Executive Director at regional film body Film AlUla. “It’s diversification. This is a national target and the cinema sector is an industry by itself. By inviting international productions, the growth and training of local talent and local players is a natural byproduct. The more mature that it is, the more international productions you can bring in.”

It's not as if Saudi creative talent was hiding under a rock. Over sixty percent of the country’s 33 million population are under 30 years old and in recent years they’ve turned to content creating for YouTube. Shaker calls them the “catalysts” and points to the government led training initiatives that are aiming to build capacity.

“Every single young person is an ambassador and we see potential at each and every one of them,” he says. “That is why this industry is also built on cinema culture.”

The pent-up demand for watching films in cinemas can be tallied by the meteoric rise of the local box office. The kingdom has quickly become the market leader in the MENA region with revenue projected to reach $572m in 2024 and growing at 5.17% a year to 2029.

“Prior to the country opening up there were a lot of creators but they were using the internet as a platform,” Shivani Pandya Malhotra, Managing Director of the Red Sea Film Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation which organises the RSIFF.  “We have a lot of YouTubers and a creative community working for different social media formats. What [the government] has done is now is to put the focus on the film and entertainment industry to really encourage this creative community to build and to produce longer form content.”

In 2023, the feature film Norah was the first Saudi film ever selected for the Cannes Film Festival, a landmark event for the country. The movie, which explores artistic repression in 1990s Saudi Arabia, was backed by the Red Sea Fund, was filmed entirely in AlUla with an all-Saudi cast and a crew that was 40% local.

“This is all at nascent stages, but there is a huge ambition,” Malhotra says. “Since Saudi has been open we've done incredibly well in terms of seeing the productions number of films that are getting made.”

Saudi’s large domestic market can support local content and in a language that a major diaspora speak around the world. With the backing of state investment in content and infrastructure there is every foundation for success but this is dependent on the kingdom’s ability to cultivate local talent and to scale up the industry.

“There’s a focus on assisting Saudi storytellers to create content which sells internationally,” Shaker says. “This is pivotal because if we are to build a sustainable ecosystem and for the industry to grow, the productions have to make revenue. Distribution on international platforms is a key part of that. We are trying to increase the export of local stories, of Saudi stories. It's a cultural exchange at the end of the day.”

He continues, “This is about communication and behaviour change because if you are from my generation, if you're not an engineer or a doctor, you were always frowned upon. Now, we’re talking about introducing lots of new careers - being a cameraman, a Grip, being a data wrangler. It’s important that we show to the youth that this is something sustainable, that they can build on.

“It's a long process,” he adds. “The most important thing is that the youth are very receptive. At Film AlUla, this is baked into every activity we do. For example, during November we had two extensive below the line training workshops that engaged more than 18 students and resulted in the creation of six short films. We have monthly seminars. Within the productions we attract, we design incentives specifically tailored to do this. When we have an international production shooting in Al-Ula there are local interns, local crew.”

He adds, “We have access to finance, we have the best locations in the world, we have world class facilities. But even if you have the best strategy, if you don't have a good base of local crew, you will still be losing.”

Red Sea Film Festival

Now in its fourth year and based in Jeddah, the Red Sea International Film Festival (RSIFF) is seeking to establish itself as a destination for filmmakers across the Middle East and beyond. A companion Red Sea Fund has doled out development finance, up to $15m a time, to over 250+ films since 2021.

“Our ambition was always to be championing Arab, Africa, and Asian content and talent,” says Malhotra. “That's meant to be our USB to the world.  That was the mandate when we started out in year one. We have created the base framework and gone from strength to strength.”

Half of the 121 films showing at RSIFF this year are either world or international premieres. Of those, 34 are Saudi produced, six of which are in the competition section.

“What’s exciting is that [regional] films as well as international films distributed here are getting good box office,” she says. “When Saudi opened up and cinema theatres were built was the point at which the industry started. We've seen that it's rapidly growing and a local audience for local content is being created.”

“It's very organic but we're already seeing results,” she says.  “We're seeing the infrastructure ramp up quite significantly to support the local and regional filmmakers.”

Speaking on a panel session, Zeinab Abul Al Samh, General Manager of Saudi-owned broadcaster MBC Studios said, “I say this with so much humbleness, I promise you, but Saudi is the next big thing. Everything that we do becomes the first thing that we've ever done. Comedy films have broken the box office here. Then drama breaks the box office. We're so hungry for different genres. There isn't a genre that we shy away from or a genre that we can’t do because it didn't work in the past. We don't have [a past].”

Alsamh, oversees the production and development of new projects, and is also CEO of MBC Academy, which discovers and nurtures emerging talent. Some 23,000 Saudis have graduated from its training programs.

“We have a young population with so much ambition and so much appetite. This population has global taste and demands very high standards. Even if Saudi isn't the next big thing in the world, it's definitely the next big thing in our region.”

 

Focus on female filmmakers

Kaleem Aftab, the festival’s director of international programming, is particularly proud that seven of the competition’s 16 features are by female filmmakers: Denise Fernandes’ Hanami; Kurdwin Ayub’s Moon; Taghrid Abouelhassan’s Snow White; Maksud Hossain’s Saba; Reema Kagti’s Superboys Of Malegaon; and Xiaoxuan Jiang’s To Kill A Mongolian Horse.

“That's not through any quota that's because they are the best films that we found,” he says. “It’s an incredible achievement and it's going to be very inspiring to a lot of women in the Arab world to get into film and to follow the film programs.

Aftab, a former film journalist, is British of Pakistani heritage and grew up in a traditional Muslim family. Asked about whether his selections had to be sensitive to censorship he explained, “What I try and do is push the envelope and see what is acceptable in public spaces. My first priority is to show the best films. Also, we are also looking at how we can build the Saudi market, so often I am led by what films have been picked by distributors in the region because we want to elevate those films.”

He picks out coming of age drama Hanami, a Swiss, Portugal and Cape Verde co-pro “about a young girl who doesn't know if she should stay on the island or should venture out into the world to fulfil her dreams. That’s a universal subject.

To Kill A Mongolian Horse is the first Asian film funded by the Red Sea Film Foundation. “The battle between tradition and modernity [depicted in the film] will really hit home.”

Director Kurdwin Ayub was born in Iraq and grew up in Austria. Her film, Moon, is about a female MMA fighter set in Austria and Jordan and is another about female freedom.

Also screening for the first time in MENA is Sima’s Song directed by Afghan filmmaker Roya Sadat, a drama that explores the evolution of women's rights during the Russian occupation in the 1970s.

Jeddah born actress and director Ahd Hassan Kamel, who starred in BBC Two’s Collateral (2018), premiered her new film My Driver and I. It’s the first UK produced film to have shot on location in Jeddah, and is also backed by the Red Sea Fund.

Oscar winning actor Michelle Yeoh (Everything Everywhere All at Once) and fellow stars including Emily Blunt, Eva Longoria, Cynthia Erivo and Catherine Zeta-Jones attended a Women In Cinema event, in support of women’s careers in film both on and behind the camera in MENA.

Yeoh reminded any cynics that Hollywood has yet to get its own house in order in delivering equal opportunities.

“Open the gates and let us in!” she pleaded. “As storytellers, as filmmakers, especially as women, what we’re saying is let us prove ourselves. If we can’t have a seat at the table because we’re not capable, that’s one thing; but we’re not even given the opportunity to try, and that’s not good.”

“I’ve kicked my way to shatter the glass ceilings,” Yeoh added. “I don’t think the challenges are over. We are beginning to see changes, we are beginning to welcome more diversity, we are beginning to see more women especially behind the cameras.”

To nail that point home, actor Viola Davis (The Woman King, Fences) and Egyptian actor and producer Mona Zaki were honoured with special awards at RSIFF and competition jury president Spike Lee (BlacKKKlansman) said he was here keeping an open mind.

“It’s not like a know these filmmakers and what their work is like,” he told Screen. “I’m coming here with no bias. It’s rare to get the opportunity to be so totally open and fresh.”

Locations and studios

Film AlUla and Neom are the two principal and purpose-built filmmaking hubs in KSA and both were heavily represented at the RSIFF.

AlUla’s facilities include two 26,000 sqft soundstages, a production building housing wardrobe and makeup rooms and a 61,500-sqft backlot. It is AlUla’s location though in an almost pristine site of natural and historic landscape that particularly attracts filmmakers.

“AlUla is a cinematic wonder,” says Shaker, who lives there. “We refer to AlUla as the world's largest living museum. Protection of the local area is at the core of everything we do. There's a very delicate balance in terms of how we build our ecosystem.”

High-profile projects such as Kandahar starring Gerard Butler and Cherry starring Tom Holland directed by the Russo brothers have shot there. Rapper Anderson .Paak’s feature debut feature ‘K-PopS’ was partially shot in AlUla. It’s produced by Stampede Ventures, run by former WBD executive Greg Silverman, as part of a $350 million deal with Film AlUla for 10 projects to be made over three years. 

Neom is part of the $500 billion megacity under construction in northwest Saudi Arabia. Its facilities include Media Village and Bajdah Desert Studios, a 45-minute drive apart and intended to be part of a larger 50 stage media hub. Rupert Wyatt’s $150m epic Desert Warrior, Antara from Con Air director Simon West, and TV drama series Rise Of The Witches are among productions to have used its studios.

“We are all partners in the same market,” says Shaker of apparent rivalry with Neom. “We are not in competition. Any production that bases in Neom or AL-Ula is good for Saudi film.”

TV a focus

The festival also has a strand focused on curating and developing episodic shows with a number of TV projects pitched at the Souk.

Traditional Ramadan serials have been produced since the 1960s in the region with one episode per day of the Muslim holy month. This format has recently been overhauled, cutting the number episodes in half and boosting production values. As a result, Netflix acquired recent Arab hits, such as 20x45 minute period drama Mohammed Ali Road and 15x30 minute contemporary drama The Sculptor.

“The production of HETV has played a significant role to increase the annual GDP for different countries, so TV is definitely part of the equation for Saudi,” Shaker says.

Local titles dominate Saudi streaming

Streaming preferences in Saudi Arabia are shifting. During the first quarter of 2024, 71% of online media consumers in KSA reported watching locally produced content in the previous three months. This shift in Saudi streaming trends is reshaping the market and affecting the distribution of market share across platforms, according to Juliana Tartara of analysts BB Media.

Over the past two years, Saudi Arabia's streaming trends have evolved as users turn to local providers and geographically relevant platforms. In 2022, foreign companies dominated, accounting for four out of the Top five platforms, with Netflix leading in market penetration. As of 1Q 2024, however, Shahid, a Saudi Arabia-based streaming service, had taken the top spot, followed by STC TV, another local platform.

Only 4% of Netflix’s catalogue in Saudi Arabia features Arabic-language titles, highlighting the challenge Netflix faces in catering to local preferences. In response Netflix announced plans to expand its Arabic slate. New seasons of fan-favourite shows such as Al Rawabi School for Girls, Finding Ola, Dubai Bling, and The Exchange are in the works, alongside new releases like Honeymoonish, Basma, Echoes of the Past, and Love Is Blind, Habibi.

“This expansion reflects Netflix's commitment to investing in content that resonates with audiences in the MENA region, aiming to stay competitive with local platforms like Shahid,” said Tartara.

Opening to Asia and to TV

After exclusively curating Arabic and African content, the Festival has now started to champion and develop Asian content. A quarter of the 38 submissions to the festival’s marketplace for projects pitching for funding or distribution, originate from across Asia with titles from Taiwan, India and Indonesia.

The film market, styled as the Souk, featured 75 stands (up from 65 in 2023) representing 18 countries and includes postproduction, kit supply and VFX companies like Egypt’s Trend VFX and Specter which is based in Riyadh and Jordanian producer The Imaginarium Films

Industry talks curated by CAA Media Finance discussed topics on indie filmmaking, creating content that translates across borders, and production of drama series. There is even a session on how to become a film critic.

“We’re helping local filmmakers find out what works for different parts of the world and how they can collaborate with international producers to build co-productions,” says Malhotra. “That is really important to the growth of the industry here.”

Palestinian drama To A Land Unknown presented in the market here in 2022, landed finance and went on to premiere at Cannes Directors’ Fortnight.

There are no Isreali film screened here, perhaps unsurprisingly, with festival programmer Antonine Khalife telling Screen that he cannot answer if it would be possible for an Isreali picture to be selected.

Behind the Scenes: Conclave

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A game of thrones in the Vatican lensed by cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine

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For the man who is deemed to be God’s representative on earth the route to the top is a naked grab for power. The secretive process by which this is decided among a group of Cardinals in the Vatican is called conclave, and its structure forms the spine of a new murder mystery from director Edward Berger (All Quite On The Western Front) teaming up with French cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine (Ammonite, Jackie)

It is based on the novel by thriller writer Robert Harris but Fontaine says he didn’t think of the film as a whodunnit.

“The moment you start to think in terms of genre your mind is suddenly closing doors or opening others. I always want to start from a much wider approach.”

One of the first conversations he had with Berger was about The Parallax View the bleak conspiracy thriller from 1974 by Alan J Pakula. “Edward didn’t want to mimic it at all but just to notice the way this film in particular and more generally 1970s American movies are able to convey a sense of claustrophobia and paranoia.

“I never thought in terms of mystery or suspense but in terms of tension and expression of doubt as seen exclusively from the point of view of Cardinal Lawrence.

Lawrence, played by Ralph Fiennes is the Cardinal charged with leading the Papal selection. It’s clear that he struggles with the weight of responsibility and begins to question his faith.

The opening scenes include a 360-degree Steadicam showing the chaos that Lawrence is facing but after this the film’s language is much more restrained.

“The sense of power had to be translated by the composition of the frames. We had to suggest as opposed to stress what we thought viewers should know. We wanted to translate the sense of unease caused by this somewhat suffocating atmosphere into the visuals. We extensively used the widescreen 2.40:1 aspect ratio, either by packing the frames or by isolating characters.”

Aside from an oblique reference to The Parallax View and the opening of The Godfather, Fontaine says he avoided other movie or paintings.

“I try to shy away from having too strong references – they can box you in,” he says. “I did watch The Two Popes (a fact based Papal succession drama from 2019 starring Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce) and luckily it had nothing to do with what we had in mind. The other reason why I wouldn’t want too many references is you get easily overwhelmed by how good a reference can be making it hard to move forward.”

On an early morning private tour of the Sistine Chapel he was amazed by a strong sense of presence “weight of history” that inspired the shape of light in the movie.

“When you receive a script in which there’s a church in every other scene the temptation is to use the familiar images in our head,” he says. “Wouldn’t it be great to have shafts of light and haze from the stained glass? But the moment you do that it doesn’t feel right. Instead, we went for an almost documentary look helped by fact that the blinds and veils in each room were down, so there was barely any daylight coming through.”

However, filming in the real Sistine Chapel is out of bounds so sets were built at nearby Cinecittà studios. Founded in 1937 with the help of Benito Mussolini to support the Italian film industry, it was partially destroyed by Allied bombs during World War II. Rebuilt by the 1950s, it became one of Europe’s premiere studios and the largest studio on the continent.

“We didn’t mind building our own Vatican even if we were using some old fascist architecture,” Fontaine says in an oblique hint to the film’s critique of male dominated political power structures.

The production design team were able to restore an existing Vatican set in storage at Cinecittà.  According to production designer Suzie Davies, “Rome and the Vatican are beautiful, traditional, ornate, gilded and ancient but we also incorporated the very symmetrical, sharp-edged designs of the fascist era in Italy. The contrast between them is visually arresting.”

The movie version of the Casa Santa Marta, the residence housing cardinals during the conclave, is intended to feel almost like a posh prison. Fontaine enhances a hermetically sealed feeling using shallow depth of field and film noir techniques.

“My biggest challenge was the fact that the cardinals are not only locked down inside the Vatican but that even daylight barely comes in through the shutters. The nuances in the lighting style depended on the level of intimacy that Cardinal Lawrence has with each of the protagonists.”

Davies worked with Fontaine to help deliver the idea of opposing themes which balance light and dark, honesty and lies, gold and silver, contemporary and traditional, male and female. Casa Santa Marta is a visually darker world with linear patterns and darker lighting. In contrast, the Sistine Chapel was lighter and had a sense of freedom.

Having shot on Red cameras since lensing Rust And Bone on a Red Epic in 2012, choosing the latest model, V-Raptor 8K VV came naturally. To take the edge off the camera’s sharp resolution he carried a set of Tribe7 Blackwing 20.7mm to 137mm vintage lenses and added in a layer of film look grain in post.

“During prep we were thinking about how to show small humans in front of massive architecture. “I use the widescreen aspect ratio 2.40 to do this and often using framing characters in negative space that remind you of their scale of their environment. Since the cardinals and sisters are used to behaving well and keeping their feelings hidden, a good way to see how they express their feelings is by showing how they use their hands, which is why we have a lot of close-ups of hands.”

Vying for Papal supremacy are Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Sergio Castellitto and Lucian Msamati playing a Nigerian priest, who could become the first African pontiff in history.  A Catholic priest from Afghanistan (played by Carlos Diehz) also awakens racial prejudice. Isabella Rossellini’s nun pricks the conscience of the Church’s male hierarchy.

“Cinecittà blew me away,” Fontaine says. “You can just feel the history when standing on the stages and knowing that Fellini and Antonioni and Roberto Rossellini – (Isabella’s father) - shot there.”

A sequence in which more than 100 cardinals cast their votes over three days presented the filmmakers with a challenge. Since each cardinal writes a name and drops a ballot in an urn the question was how to make it compelling each time?  “We storyboarded and pre-vized so ensure that each of the six sequences would be unique,” he explains.

A shot of the cardinals under umbrellas during rain is perhaps the film’s most iconic image. The location was a French property in Rome called Villa Medici, home of the French Academy’s artists residency. They didn’t have enough actors or extras dressed as cardinals so Fontaine shot a number of different plates and comped them together in post “to make them look like a sea of cardinals all in forward movement together.”

The scene was also intended to be far longer he says, “but ended up in the movie reduced to this image, which perhaps gives it a stronger resonance.”

 

BTS: Wicked

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In the second shot of return to Oz musical Wicked children run through fields of tulips. These are real plants, about 9 million of them, grown on a real field in Norfolk. Each row has a specific colour and all are oriented to a specific sunlight pattern that could only exist in a studio.

“The way the farmer would normally line up the tulip bulbs wouldn’t work for the sun pass we were going to need for Munchkinland,” explains cinematographer Alice Brooks ASC who visited the Norfolk farm to explain what they needed. “We planned the shot in Unreal Engine in August for the tulips to bloom in April.”

Come April and the production got a call from the farmer that the plants were going to bloom early. “I mean, it’s like having a baby,” says Brooks, who quickly arranged for drone shots of the fields that they would later match with footage shot on a giant backlot at Sky Studios Elstree.

That extraordinary attention to detail marks Wicked as one of Hollywood’s latest hurrahs to the golden days of epic studio filmmaking. Gladiator II being epic of spectacular sets.

Brooks likens the attempt that she and director Jon Chu (Crazy Rich Asians) were making to the likes of Cleopatra (1963) and Spartacus (1960).

Production was doubly complex because of Universal Picture’s decision to split the story into two and maximise its $145m budget. Wicked: Part Two is due out next year having been photographed over a mammoth 155-day shoot alongside Part One.

“We shot it as if it were one film in many ways,” says Brooks. “None of us had done anything of this scale before. Hollywood rarely does anything on this scale anymore.  Jon asked me what my goal for the movie was and I said it would be the greatest love story ever told between two women. I wanted it to be Casablanca or The English Patient where two true friends fall in love and are then ripped apart. It’s such a strong tale of female friendship that I don't think any film has ever had before.”

Wicked is an adaptation of the hit stage musical which in turn was based on the 1995 novel of the same name derived characters from L. Frank Baum's classic novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.  The film stars Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba, a misunderstood young woman born with green skin who later becomes the Wicked Witch of the West. The all-star cast includes Ariana Grande as Glinda the Good Witch and Michelle Yeoh, Jeff Goldblum, Jonathan Bailey and Peter Dinklage.

Prep began four years ago during the pandemic when key heads of department were communicating via zoom. Principal photography began in June 2022 preceded by a mammoth 18 weeks of tests.

Alice Brooks had known Chu since their days at film school together including on musical feature In The Heights. She also photographed the musical Tick, Tick, Boom! The first thing that she did after landing in London for the shoot was to go see the musical theater production in the West End along with Chu, choreographer Nathan Crowley, VFX supervisor Pablo Helman and production designer Chris Scott.

“What really struck me while watching the musical was that here we all, finally after Covid, sitting together in the dark and feeling like we are linked to arm and arm about to walk down the yellow brick road. The whole ensemble was such an incredible camaraderie.”

MGM’s 1939 version of Wizard of Oz famously burst into Technicolor but the Wicked filmmakers chose to refer back to Baum’s books. “Every single paragraph has such rich colour descriptions and each colour means something. They tell us about character,” Brooks says.

Sets for the centrepiece Ozdust Ballroom were made of clear resin allowing Brooks to light it with any colour of the rainbow. They backlit the walls to mix the palette and during tests she noticed that anytime Erivo in green makeup was near a cyan blue backdrop her colour popped.

“When Elphaba walks down the stairs in the Ozdust Ballroom, Jon really wanted her to feel as if everyone was laughing at her and looking at her. I wanted her green to pop out more than anywhere else in the movie so then I started exploring blue options for the world around her.”

Brooks used every colour of the rainbow for different scenes in the movie but a chief challenge throughout was lighting the two central characters, one of whom is a platinum blonde dressed in shades of pink and the other is green skinned, dressed in black with a huge black hat.

“That colour relationship between pink and green is so challenging because you've got two opposing colours in the same frame for most of the movie.”

Camera and lighting tests began in week two of prep with costume designer Paul Tazewell and hair/makeup/prosthetics designer Frances Hannon. “The green changed under every colour light but then Frances found this neon paint that allowed me to light Elphaba’s skin as if it were natural skin. It made the biggest difference in the world to me because suddenly I didn't need to light a certain colour temperature for the skin nor have to rely on power windows in the grade. Instead, we were able to light both women within the same frame.”

Early on they considered shooting as a virtual production and toured the Manhattan Beach stages where Avatar was shot. After lengthy discussions Chu decided he wanted a practical set build.

“John is a very tangible director. He likes to be able to touch real things and when we stood on the set at Manhattan Beach it just didn’t work for him that he couldn't touch or walk around objects [displayed virtually]

“We considered blue screen but then sets started to be built. And they got bigger and bigger and bigger going from the floor to the rafters. It's a dream as a cinematographer. I had real practical sets and huge spaces to light.”

The production ended up shooting 17 sound stages; 2 at Warner Leavesden, 2 at Platinum in Pinewood and 10 at Sky Studios Elstree including exterior sets for Emerald City which were the size of four American football fields.

“With the stage show you have your proscenium and you never get to have your beautiful close-ups. What we wanted to do was shoot many scenes in 360 degrees which is a part of the story you can’t see in the stage show.

Brooks says she worked seven days a week during the five month shoot, using the weekends when she could have had time off to go onto sets and pre-light, rig and program with Gaffer David Smith. He ended up programming 6000 lightning cues across the two movies.

“I could take the script and walk around and feel what it would be like to be Elphaba or Glinda in that space and then create my lighting and lens and angle choices from there,” the DP says. “I am a very emotional storyteller and so is Jon. We don't talk about technical stuff for most of our prep process. It's all about themes, emotions and relationships. Jon would give me the intention of the scene in one word, like ‘yearning’ or ‘longing’ or ‘power’ and those words sort of seep into me.

“For instance, we talked a lot about the idea that in Wicked, good is not good and evil is not evil. The light is not the light. The darkness is not the darkness. One night, in the middle of prep, I suddenly woke up with this idea that the light from the sun should always set for Elphaba and always be rising for Glinda. I called Jon up and said, ‘do you mind if I make some time of day suggestions for the script?’ He agreed. So now the last 40 minutes of the movie is all one long sunset. The song ‘Popular’ is a 15-minute sequence that starts pre-dawn and leads into a pink sunrise.  These decisions didn’t stem from anything technical, they came from the concept of what we want light and darkness to mean for our characters.”

While they decided against a Volume for photography, Brooks leaned heavily into Epic’s Unreal Engine for shaping the lighting and adjusting the set design.

This helped for instance in filming the throne room. “People assume this was a set extension, but it's all real,” she says. “The set went all the way up to the ceiling in concentric circles that get smaller and smaller almost like a tornado. Originally, there was not enough space to put all the Skypanels in I wanted. We were able to worked this out with the art department after designing it in Unreal. Likewise, holes for the lighting rig at just the right angle were built into the construction of the library set after we had pre-lit it in Unreal.”

To film an establishing scene of Emerald City they had planned a long Steadicam shot in which the camera operator would step onto a crane and capture a big high and wide view. Unable to walk the set while it was still being constructed, Brooks flew a virtual camera in Unreal and found that that high wide angle wouldn’t work.

“What we needed to do was actually be low and look up at the height of the world around our characters to see the full scope of the scene and to hint at where the story will end. We start out in this incredibly joyous moment and we end the movie up on the highest tower of Emerald City in Elphaba's darkest moment as she starts walking up the staircase towards the setting sun. This would not have been possible without Unreal.”

Camera tests convinced Brooks to shoot on Alexa 65 with Panavision’s lens guru Dan Sasaki her first call when it came to the film’s optics. At that point, in 2021, Sasaki was developing a new set of anamorphics with a 1.3 squeeze.

“I knew that the Panavision anamorphic blue flare would not work with the green and the pink but Dan was able to custom make lenses with a beautiful soft amber flare.”

Wicked may be the only film ever to be shot on these prototype lenses since Panavision’s later release of the Ultra Panatar 2s were altered from Brooks’ unique specifications.

Instead of matching lenses for close-ups, a 65mm became Elphaba’s hero lens while used a 75mm for Glinda. The 2.40 aspect ratio was preferred for framing the central pair.

“For the Ozdust Ballroom Jon wanted Cynthia to walk down the stairs for the very first time and feel what it was like to be there. So we had no rehearsal. Our focus puller  (Lewis Hume) didn’t have a rehearsal, neither did our Steadicam operator or our dimmer board op who has 500 lighting changes to coordinate in this scene. This was really challenging for me. Elphaba is wearing this huge brim hat, the camera is spinning around her at 360 degrees for takes of 10 minutes at a time.

“It all worth it in the end because we got the tear dripping down Cynthia’s face and Ariana wiping it away – that wasn’t in the script. The focus pulling in that moment of the story is just so beautiful. He wasn’t checking the monitor, he was doing such a technical job but intuitively knew when to move in close.”

 Myron Kerstein ACE talks editing Wicked

In his sixth project with Chu, editor Myron Kerstein ACE read early drafts of the scripts having seen the stage production a number of times on Broadway.

“This was not only the biggest films in my career, but I wanted to deliver for Jon, the producer Marc Platt who optioned the book and produced the stage production, the studio who was betting big on us, and of course the fans,” he says.

“The script also had the lyrics written into the pages, so I really tried to absorb every vocal as dialogue in scenes. I had the songs on repeat in the car, which was pretty easy because my kids were fans of the music as well!”

About a year before production started he sat down with Wyatt Smith, editor of musicals including The Little Mermaid, to get a crash course on editing VFX heavy movies.

“Practically every shot was going to have VFX, and I had little to no experiences cutting a film with many, let alone the 2,500 we would end up in the film. He gave me as much info he thought I needed, and that was immensely helpful before I started production. It was a huge learning curve but I was excited to use my instincts in smaller films and apply it to this scale.”

Moving into production, Kerstein also took over the editing of additional storyboards and pre-vis sequences liaising with department heads including Brooks, VFX Supervisor Pablo Hellman, and music supervisor Maggie Rodford.

“Those key department heads would be operating as one unit, flowing back and forth between production and post.”