BTS: Squid Game 2

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The glossy, candy-coloured design of Squid Game is a huge part of its appeal luring players and audiences alike into a greater heart of darkness.

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In Squid Game, the show’s palette is more than just visual. It’s psychological warfare. Viewers have taken to social media dissecting the show’s hidden meanings, deliberately placed by show creator Hwang Dong-hyuk and his team including production designer Chae Kyoung-sun.

After making an explicit reference to The Matrix in ep. 202, Hwang and Chae double down on the red and blue iconography by having the player’s badged with the colours after voting to stay in the game. The choice to go down the rabbit hole is also recalled in the Daakji game played with blue and red origami envelopes.

The central narrative in S2 pits Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) venturing back into the rigged game world with revenge in mind but with Front Man / In-ho (Lee Byung-hun) the traitor in his midst.  Hwang likens In-ho to Darth Vader in Star Wars, and Gi-hun to a Jedi.

“While they have similar personalities and went through similar tragedies, one decides to take evil’s hand and the other refuses, and that sends the two on totally divergent paths,” he says in Netflix press notes. “I wanted to depict them like twins with the same roots.”

The sets designed by Chae, who won an Emmy for her work on the first series, are “grandiose, cool, and fairy tale-like”, according to Lee, speaking to Netflix. “But the things that happen in those fairy tale-like spaces are ferocious and merciless. That feeling of disorientation is what makes the world of Squid Game so unique.”

Just as the symbols on the guards’ masks resemble PlayStation buttons (the guards are being controlled as much as the players) so the show’s pastel colours aren’t just decorations, “they’re commands coded in ink and light”.

That’s according Beatrix Kondo who unpicks the visual battlefield in an illuminating post, as a war raging between CMYK and RGB. “While one is rooted in tradition, the other is rooted in modern manipulation. In this deadly game, however, neither offers escape.”

Further decoding the palette Kondo suggests the teal and white (Cyan) tracksuits hide the players like prey in deep waters; the guards are outfitted in a Magenta, a mix of red (violence) and pink (deception); and Yellow seduces with wealth and promises of freedom.  

The latest season broke Netflix’ record for show debuts when it topped the streamer’s charts with 68 million views in its opening week.  Principal photography took place over a year in Daejeon and was filmed back-to-back with the third season which is due later this year.

Hidden meanings in the production design

At the beginning of S2, Gi-hun is living in a run-down motel that he’s purchased as an operations hub in order to carry out his plans for finding the people responsible for the game. “Gi-hun has probably been consumed for years with thoughts of Squid Game and the players’ deaths. I thought the dominant colour in his head would be pink, the colour that would haunt him. So the Pink Motel is foreshadowing the conflict once again, going up against the pink in the future,” notes Chae.

She says didn’t use pink aggressively, but only in certain points for emphasis. The most notable being the pink sofa that Recruiter sits on in episode 201.  

For Gi-hun’s room, Chae wanted to give viewers a glimpse into his mind through the space’s design. In the bathroom, graphics of Los Angeles and the beach are included, alluding to his wife and daughter who have moved to LA. “There are sculpted, angled mirrors above his bed that allow him to see the surveillance cameras right away. It’s almost like while Gi-hun is watching someone, it also feels like he’s the one being watched.”

By adding details like dust settled on the inside of frames Gi-hun appears in, such as bathroom mirrors and motel windows, or water stains left behind, Chae says she aimed to create a stark contrast between the vivid colours filling the gaming zone and Gi-hun’s blurry, murky reality.

One of the most obvious changes to the player’s dormitory is the O-X demarcation that now bisects the floor but there are other tweaks too. In season one, pictograms of the games were painted on the player’s dormitory walls. This season, there’s a checkerboard of crosses like a graveyard that run horizontally across the wall. Says Chae, “I wanted to portray life facing death and the constant insecurity and anxious mental state of the players and the way they face death in this series.” Figures of men hanging from the ceiling also reflect the players’ psychological state: they’re hanging on by their fingernails.

Escher-like candy-coloured stairwells are the stage for a climactic player revolt in episode 207. In Season 1, they focused on creating a sense of vertical depth with continuous connections. This time, they designed the maze staircase to unfold horizontally, imagining wider layers while planning the movements for the shootout scenes. To make room for all the action, the stairwells were widened and another vertical layer was added.

“The set is about 1.5x bigger than before and built like a Lego module so it can be expanded, transformed, and re-built again,” says Chae who had in mind the repetitive structure of real-life Korean apartments and the defence designed into castles. “In war, a castle’s walls are protected from within, so the bridge was designed with those layers in mind. We referenced the inner court of a castle and the long hallways of apartment buildings and the symmetry between the rebels and the guards.”

As the rebels get closer to the control room the walls get noticeably darker. According to Chae, choosing the colour purple was an easy decision. “It’s a colour born out of red and blue, two complementary colours. It’s also historically been used as a colour for nobles or members of the upper class.”

The first new game in season two is ‘Six-Legged Pentathlon’ which recalls Sports Day’s at Korean elementary schools during the 1970s and ’80s and features two circular rainbow tracks.

In a BTS video, Chae revealed that the rainbow path was originally a plain circle. “People say the path to heaven is decorated with rainbow colours. As you know, we wrapped the coffins like gifts. That was kind of a reflection of our tough, competitive reality in this world where so many people fail. It was a way of wishing those who had passed away a peaceful afterlife, where there would be no more pain. I think the rainbows share the same meaning as the coffins."

Dong-hyuk previously revealed that the coffin colours (black with pink ribbons) as well as the pink and black tones of the ‘managers’ uniforms were inspired by K-pop girl group BLACKPINK.

“Because why not take a symbol of glamour and fame and turn it into a death trap? Black screams death, sacrifice, and control, while pink tries to sell you innocence, beauty, and sensuality,” observes TV commentator Beatrix Kondo.

The 17,791 sq ft set for Six Legged Pentathlon needed to accommodate roughly 360 players. To make it look like an actual school field, the surface area was filled with sand – all the better for blood splatters to be ground into the dirt and the childlike rainbow-coloured track

The set for the game of ‘Mingle’ referenced amusement parks. “I thought I’d create a spinning stage inspired by the merry-go-round and have the players run amok on top of it like horses. With the bright lights and the mix of different colours, I wanted to give the sense of horses who have lost their sense of direction.”

The orange platform is meant to give the feeling of “warmth, cosiness, happy memories, and festivals,” she adds. “The players must have had dreams once, so I wanted to express the colours of their lives by using a colour map of 50 high-saturation colours you’d find in a child’s Cray-Pas set [oil pastels] for the doors.”

Chae also spent a lot of time thinking about the colours for the Masked Soldiers’ space. The reason for using orange was to emphasise its more negative connotations. She told IndieWire, “I felt that deep orange is even more driven by desire and ambition than red, symbolising a strong urge to claim and conquer.”

The ‘Mingle’ set was fully practical with only minor CGI augmentations added in post. “There were going to be a lot of overhead shots but the height of the space was limited. We’d initially designed it like a carnival and there were layers of fabric like a circus tent that went to the ceiling, so instead we simplified things for the overhead shots, which were important to give viewers a sense of how the game was played.”

To make the platform spin, a wooden disc was installed on top of a steel plate that was tested to withstand the weight of more than 300 people. An electric motor was installed to allow the disc to rotate at adjustable speeds

 

Red Light, Green Light: Squid Game cinematography

Since the first two episodes take place outside of the game arena, director of photography Kim Ji-yong sought to mimic the lighting used in the games. “At first glance, viewers might not catch on,” he says. “But if they watch the series again, they might pick up on similarities in colour tone and mood, much like hidden clues. For example, in the dormitory this season, X is red and O is blue. I planted a lot of these contrasting colours in the nighttime scenes in episodes 201 and 202, especially in the club and the motel towards the end where they’re playing Russian Roulette. The lights match.”

He continues, “Until that scene, Recruiter had been like an object of curiosity, but when he began talking about himself, I wanted to give his character some sort of visual cue that alluded to a time in his past when he could have been in Gi-hun's shoes. I wanted some red lighting on his face, but it couldn’t be forced. Since this was in a motel room, I figured a reddish light seeping in from the outside made sense.”

In lighting ‘Red Light, Green Light’, Kim focused on three things: Repetition, “because viewers expect certain things from season one, some of the angles are intentionally identical”; Variation, “because replicating the same scenes is no fun!”; And new additions. “This time, since Gi-hun is aware of the rules and has a plan, I thought it would be fun to establish a rivalry between Gi-hun and Young-hee, as if the scene is arranged to highlight their battle. So Young-hee comes across as more of a character thanks to the camera positioning and the lighting.”

Three main camera angles or perspectives are used throughout the series. According to Kim, “while filming the first three games and the series overall, I considered the distance between the camera and the actor to be crucial. When the camera is positioned near the actors, the viewers tend to feel as if they’re active participants in the game, working through it together. Then comes the perspective of the security cameras in the control room. Then, there’s the bird’s eye or overhead shot that’s neither the participant nor the security camera footage, but that of the omniscient spectator. From the viewer’s perspective, I felt that the distance gave a sense of familiarity as if we were looking on a representation of our own selves.”

Since Gi-hun is no longer the bright or cheerful figure he was in S1 the DP chose to visualise that change by accentuating shadows on screen. “For instance, the dorm was a space where the brightest parts and the darkest corners underneath the beds coexisted, and its colours would shift strikingly when voting commenced.”

This contrast in shadows also extended to the maze-like stairwells where the climactic player revolt takes place. “The contrast and coexistence between light and darkness were a must, so the production designer and I had multiple discussions about this from the moment we chose the colour of that final space,” Kim says. “The composition of the purple staircase makes it difficult to use cinematic lighting, so we designed and set up prop lighting to minimise the use of cinematic lighting when filming. Purple permeates the entire screen in that scene.”

Squid Game’s Brexit / Maga satire

Season one sparked a great deal of discussion around its social commentary about capitalism and sss doubles down on this in S2. Where in S1, players had a chance to vote after the first round on whether they wanted to continue or stop the game, in S2, the voting process is no longer an option, but a requirement, and as a result, the survivors must split themselves into two sides. They become more vocal about the reasons behind their choices and the conflict and confrontation between the two sides intensifies.

“We can see this kind of division not just in Korea, but all over the world — the growing conflict and hatred due to religion, ideology, background, gender, or race,” Dong-hyuk explains. “I wanted to symbolically portray this by showing how players divide themselves into Team O and Team X, and how it leads them to stand against each other.

“Expressing hatred is so rampant, not just on the internet, but in real life as well, and we label each other as our opponents, our foes. So, physically labelling each other with an O or X in S2 was like recreating our society in miniature. Through the players in the game, I wanted to ask, Isn’t this what our society looks like now? Aren’t these people exactly who we are? Things that were bizarre and unrealistic a decade ago have sadly become very realistic now.”