With four episodes in the rearview mirror, all eyes are on tonight's monumental episode five, which might be one of the most anticipated - and most mysterious - installments of MCU television in recent memory. While we don't have any teasers ahead of the episode's debut tonight, we did manage to track down cinematographer Isaac Bauman (Servant; Channel Zero) to talk about his stunning work on the acclaimed Marvel Studios series.
Bauman and I get super technical in our conversation, as he explains at length what really goes into lighting and shooting a Marvel series, his relationship with directors, what it's actually like to shoot CGI characters like Miss Minutes, lighting super dark scenes like the hallway ambush sequence, and crafting intricate oners like the shot he used to end episode four's jaw-dropping cliffhanger, amongst other things.
Watch and/or read on for our full interview with cinematographer Isaac Bauman below, and please remember to SUBSCRIBE to my YouTube channel for more exclusive content!
ROHAN: When you first sign on for a show like Loki, what are the first steps in your process? Are you breaking down the script? Are you in conversation with the directors about what kind of shots they want? Are you suggesting things? What’s your go-to starting point?
ISAAC: Yeah, you know, the first thing that comes to mind is, ‘Hey, what do we want this to look like?’ And, just see what happens. I mean, it's not a very good question, but sometimes it can elicit very specific responses. But, generally, yeah, I'm very focused on lighting, and I find directors are often more particular about camera stuff. The cinematographer's job isn't - well, the way I think of it, is to execute the director's vision.
Oftentimes, directors want to co-create that vision with the cinematographer and the cinematographer brings a lot to the table, but really, it's our job to get inside the head of the director and to understand how they feel about filmmaking, to understand how they think, you know, so my first mission was really to absorb the way Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead understood their craft and understood cinema as an art form, and given that understanding, how they chose to approach things. So, I studied their work. Fortunately, they had a pretty big body of work. They've directed like five independent films, and a bunch of TV. Then, I spoke with them, and what I discovered was they actually have a very different philosophy and approach than I had, so what I realized was that I had a learning opportunity.
But, I realized that I had a lot to learn because their approach was so different from me. Traditionally, I had been more of studio mode, which is dolly, cranes, Steadicam, you know, these more cinematic types of camera platforms, and more static shots and focusing on finding like a big, wide, super beautiful frame, whereas they kind of love movies that have been made that way, but they're like, you know what, that's the way the first season was made as well. Like, if they hadn't been the directors then this season would have looked a lot more like the first season than it ended up, right? They were like, we're gonna throw all that stuff out, and we're gonna basically pretend like this is a documentary, there's a camera person that's really a human that's there, that has the camera and they're finding this stuff, as it happens in the moment, like a war photographer, one of the major references was battlefield war photography, like actual movie camera war photography, not stills photography. And, that's really where the conversation began. It was, this is through the lens of a war photographer, and then it was just building on top of that.
ROHAN: Since this is a Marvel Studios project, which understandably has a heavy dose of CGI involved. What’s your approach when you’re lighting for scenes with a lot of CGI or characters like Miss Minutes? How does that work out?
ISAAC: That's a good question. Sequences that have a lot of CGI, like the set pieces are always pre-vis, so it's pretty, pretty clear what we're doing and what we need to get and why and what all the different elements will be. And, then we have our VFX supervisor, Mr. Chris Townsend, who's brilliant, there with us helping hold our hand through this process of getting all the materials and he's always trying to make sure we're getting what he needs to build his world in post-production. But, in general, the truth is that shooting VFX sequences is not nearly as complicated as it looks in the finished product, because when you're seeing it, it's like, oh my god, this is insane.
But, really, it just comes down to the classic elements of filmmaking. What shot size is it? Is it a wide shot? Is it a full body shot? Is it a medium shot? Or is it a close up? You know, it's gonna be one of those. You're just always in one of those. Is the camera moving? If so, is it pulling back with the characters and following the character? Is it panning between two characters? It's just the same fundamentals you're always dealing with in a scene that doesn't have VFX photography, it's just that there's going to be this whole crazy world in the background, or whatever, something zooming through the frame.
And, so it's really as simple as just shoot the shots that you want to get, light it the way that you want it to be lit. Obviously, depending on what environment the effects will be placing in the background, the lighting has to take cues from that, but really, the lighting in that environment gets constructed around the lighting that you do on set, so there's not even as much of a lighting component to these VFX sequences as you’d think because you were actually deciding what the lighting in the VFX will be later on set, right? And, VFX supervisors love that.
They want the DP to have really decisive, specific lighting so that when they're doing their VFX, it's clear what the light source needs to be, you know, they can actually get in trouble if you try to do just generic wishy washy lighting, because then they're like, well, where's the light coming from in the background, you know, but yeah, it's pretty much as easy as plan the shots you want, light them the way that you want to light them, and then just don't do any big no-nos, like having a character's head go off of the blue screen or something, because there's lights above the blue screen, and people always want low angles. There actually is quite, no matter how big your blue screen is, the rule is, it's never big enough. You know, if you had a 360 degree blue screen, you would still somehow suddenly be seeing off the top of it, even if we're 60-feet tall, it's insane. There is no way to get as much coverage as you need ever with blue screen, so that's one thing you're always battling.
ROHAN: This show has a very unique color palette and utilizes a lot of green and brown. How are the colors you’re working with on set sort of incorporated in your thought process? Is there anything you’re thinking about to make sure they look as good as possible?
ISAAC: Colors and lighting have a close relationship and Kasra Farahani, the production designer and I worked together just to make sure that the colors were coming across the right way, the way that they were supposed to. I mean, first of all, the LUT is a big part of that. The LUT is like the color settings that you usually do in post-production and the color grade, you can actually do a lot of that stuff, and load it into the camera, so that when you're shooting, you're actually seeing how your color grade is gonna look later.
So, that LUT, for example, had to be adjusted quite a bit to make sure that the colors were coming across, right, you know, like those iconic orange typewriters and the chrono monitor wing, or the yellow computers that they use, like, we talked a lot about the rendition of those specific colors, and others and made sure that the LUT was allowing them to shine through appropriately. At the same time, lighting is a part of that as well. The general rule is warm colors look good in warm lighting, and cool colors look good with cooler or wider lighting.
You'll notice in the upper levels of the TVA where everything is kind of brown and beige, and orange and yellow, the lighting is quite warm. And then when we get to the engineering level, where OB works, for example, the colors of the set are more teals and mints and things of the blue-green shades, so we cool down the lighting. The lighting is quite white, you know, if I had tried to light that engineering level with the warm light that you see on the upper levels, that blue would have looked grey, and the green would have looked yellow, and so on. So, it's a delicate balance. You can't just do whatever you want, you have to be very carefully considered in every decision.
ROHAN: There’s a fun little oner near the end of episode four, where you’re panning from Loki to OB and just showing everyone’s reaction to Victor Timely - what goes behind setting up a shot like that? What goes into making a great oner?
ISAAC: Yeah, you know, I think I do. I actually watched episode four last night. That sequence, I was actually thinking the same thing as you when I was watching and I was like, wow, there's a lot of cool - it's not just that one, there's a couple of shots that are kind of cool sequences, and that is just reflective of the approach that we took all season. It's just that, in this case, those moments were allowed to play without cutting a little bit longer than usual, but actually, in every single scene, every single scene the first shot we shoot is a oner. We shoot the entire scene in one shot with a handheld camera, just going around and picking up every piece and it can feel really awkward, like you can see it almost feels awkward in that sequence, in a way that we love, where the camera is just kind of like bouncing as it walks like all the way across the room to the next character.
But, the idea there is to make it - we want you to feel the presence of the camera operator, we want you to feel that there's a human being holding that camera. Again going back to the war photography thing, it's because it almost feels more real when you just accept the fact that there is a person holding the camera. It says this isn't an illusion, like this is a thing that's really happening, and we were there documenting it with the camera. Also, in general, whether the camera’s handheld or not, the longer you hold a shot without cutting, the more you're suggesting to the audience that this is really happening. This is really unfolding. Because, you know, the artifice of cinema, at the most fundamental level is the edit, it's the cut, right? When you cut from one thing to another, you're telling the audience this could have been three days later, like the crew took a break, everyone was drinking coffee, like this is a thing that's constructed from different pieces that are being like spliced together. That's what you're telling an audience, very subconsciously, every single time there's an edit or so the argument goes. When you don't have those edits, when you keep the shop going, you're telling them this is real, these characters are real, this place is real, and you're really here with them.
ROHAN: There’s a great hallway sequence in episode four where Loki and Sylvie ambush Hunter X-05, which is a really dark scene, but it looks great. Speaking from experience, I’ve always had trouble taking photographs or shooting video in dark rooms, so how do you go about lighting that kind of dark sequence?
ISAAC: It's interesting. I mean, look, the bottom line is that big studios, like Marvel are always concerned about, is something going to be too dark or not? So, when you shoot these scenes that are supposed to be dark, like it says it's dark in the script, you’re kind of like, okay, well, how do we honor the mood of the scene that's been necessitated by, you know, the tone of the script, and what happens in it, and the fact that everyone is going to be very concerned with, is it too dark? Can we see the performances? So, we figured out a workaround, we figured out something that would let us make scenes as dark as we wanted, while feeling very, very safe and protected, and like we could always, you know, bring up whatever we needed to, which is, it's a technique in filmmaking called overexposure, that's where you give more light to the piece of film or the digital sensor than you want it to finally actually look like in the final image.
So, if you want to shoot a dark scene, you actually shoot it really bright, and then you bring it down in post. It's important to have the footage on set and in the edit room, which comes directly from the set, look right and look dark enough. So, what we decided to do was overexpose the image, but kind of secretly in a way where no one would know how much we were over exposing it. So, we took that LUT that I was talking about, and we made it really, really, really dark, so anytime things look really dark, it's actually way darker than they really looked on the exposure. It's just because the LUT was making it look dark.
When we shoot these dark sequences, we're lighting them exactly as dark as we want, like what you see in the final edit is kind of the way that it was on set. We get to feel like totally free to make it as dark as we want, because we know secretly, it's not at all dark in the base exposure that we're recording into the camera, and that's also why you kind of see that it's really dark, but you can see everything because it's really bright, you're actually getting detail on everything, so even though you're bringing the image down, so it's super dark. There is technically an exposure there and there's detail there that wouldn't be there if you'd actually shot the scene that dark with like the level of lighting, if that makes sense.
"Loki” Season 2 picks up in the aftermath of the shocking season finale when Loki finds himself in a battle for the soul of the Time Variance Authority. Along with Mobius, Hunter B-15 and a team of new and returning characters, Loki navigates an ever-expanding and increasingly dangerous multiverse in search of Sylvie, Judge Renslayer, Miss Minutes and the truth of what it means to possess free will and glorious purpose.
Loki episodes 1-4 are now streaming on Disney+!