Director of Photography Adam Newport-Berra and his L.A.-based camera team help fast-track Apple TV+’s hit comedy The Studio through filmland’s treacherous (and hilarious) executive suites.
by Kevin Martin / BTS Photos by Erin Simkin and Jessica Brooks / Framegrabs courtesy of Apple TV+
“The Peter Principle” is a management concept credited to the late educator Laurence J. Peter. His key takeaway is that “in a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.” Given some of the bewildering creative calls made down through the years in Hollywood – many of which have fueled the town’s mythology – the business of moviemaking reflects Peter’s principle. Apple TV+’s new series The Studio, created by longtime creative partners Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen [who also shared directing duties], along with Peter Huyck, Alex Gregory, and Frida Perez, begins with the ascendancy of Rogen’s Matt Remick to running Continental Studios, a floundering dream factory where he has toiled for two decades. While hilarity does ensue, it is both fueled and tempered by Remick’s emotional instabilities, which manifest as he realizes his love for movies is at odds with his new responsibilities.
“Hollywood is a place where people fail upwards,” Rogen declares. “It’s an industry that flies by the seat of its pants and one that is not based on logic as much as it is ‘feelings’ and ‘vibes.’ There are people in real Hollywood who are far less qualified and capable than Matt Remick who have ascended to greater heights. If anything, we’re trying to show that incredibly underqualified people are often given opportunities that are greatly beyond their abilities.”
This would not, however, be the case for the talented crew assembled by Goldberg and Rogen. “Choosing the right collaborators was crucial,” Rogen adds. “Director of Photography Adam Newport-Berra was someone whose work we were big fans of and who had a lot of experience doing prolonged takes.” This dovetailed nicely with the Goldberg/Rogen notion of shooting the show as a series of “oners” – in essence, the opening of Robert Altman’s classic Hollywood satire, The Player, on steroids.
“We came up with that idea early in the creative process and wrote the scripts in a way that was conducive to that style,” Rogen continues. “Adam seemed unintimidated by the prospect, and it wasn’t a burden for him to shoot this way. He presented us with a huge lookbook that perfectly encapsulated what we were going for with the show. And Adam came up with the idea of using a single lens for the entire series, which we loved – painting ourselves into a corner was, creatively, an exciting way to start.”
Newport-Berra, whose work includes the lauded Sundance feature The Last Black Man in San Francisco [ICG Magazine April 2019], as well as the initial episodes of The Bear and Outer Range, acknowledges The Player as a clear visual reference but felt a stronger influence from a much different film. “Soviet director Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes Are Flying is such a wonderful and inventive movie and a genuine inspiration for me,” Newport-Berra states. “Like his I Am Cuba, it features an incredible handheld camera. The Studio wasn’t just about doing a oner and not cutting – though Seth felt shooting it all in one would work to create more tension and paranoia. It was at least as much about the best way to tell the scene in this strange and complex Hollywood world.”
With all parties agreed on the single-lens approach, Newport-Berra tested a range of glass before settling on the 21-mm Master Prime. “The view was wide enough and had incredible close focus,” he reports, “but did not create a ton of distortion because it wasn’t so wide as to come off too bendy. We shot on the ALEXA 35, which I’ve used frequently for the last couple of years and love. It took me a while to come around to it because I’ve enjoyed their LF cameras. But the increased latitude and texture [of the ALEXA 35], as well as how it rendered skin tones, made it a perfect fit for this show. Plus, it was small enough to build into many different rigs, which was important given all the places we’d be following the actors – not just as they walked around but also from varying altitudes.”
Prep was done at Panavision Woodland Hills. First AC Lucas Deans says there were a few exceptions to the single-lens rule. “Whenever we see the characters watching movies, those films-within-scenes were shot using anamorphic glass,” he states. “When those scenes came up on the schedule, we’d just take whatever Panavision had available.”
A-Camera Operator Mark Goellnicht, SOC, says there was considerable discussion over the specifics of shooting the series. “The camera could have been observational, a fly-on-the-wall. But then they thought that approach, with dolly-like Steadicam moves, might be too smooth and traditionally cinematic, and elected to go for a greater sense of immediacy – like the camera was always racing to keep up with the characters,” he shares. “Adam loved the wobble and natural look of straight handheld – though he was often reminding me to be conscious of my breath control during these long takes. So, staying handheld throughout reflected the feeling they wanted, though there was a lot of care required for our movement because we didn’t want the camera to distract the audience from the story or to look like a war film.”
A huge two-story environment was built to represent the interior of Remick’s Continental Studios base. “Julie Berghoff, who we’ve worked with a few times in the past, was the perfect person for production design,” Rogen shares. “She was not only unbowed by our idea to have our main offices on the show be a ‘Frank Lloyd Wright’ building, she dove headfirst into the process of creating an entire fake 100-year history for the studio.”
The idea that Continental was founded and built back in the 1920s dovetailed with the legendary architect’s Mayan Revival period; this, combined with appropriate lighting, created a rich and distinctive look for the many scenes playing out there.
“Aesthetically, Seth wanted the show to have a visual through-line that maintained a sense of the beauty of Hollywood as well as a sense of its history,” Newport-Berra explains. “The show is, in part, a lament about what might become a dying art form, given what movies have meant and how that might go away if we aren’t careful about preserving what makes the art form so amazing. When I first saw the design for the studio interior, I worried that it was so beautiful, with such ornate detail, that it might create a discontinuity with the rest of the practical locations. That thought pushed Julie and me to find locations that lived up to the same sense of spectacle she had created with her stage build.”
An elaborate establishing shot of the studio interior incorporated various tools and techniques. “To show off all the old Hollywood splendor of its design, we come in from the outside and then go upstairs,” Goellnicht recounts. “To negotiate these steps, while also keeping up with the speed of these characters rushing around in their usual panic, we used a Ronin R2 gimbal rig that could attach to a crane via a magnetic lock system. I operated it independently while it went upstairs, holding the control on my shoulder [in Mimic mode] just like I would the camera – being careful to maintain the established handheld look – and then Jesse Cain would unhook the Ronin from the crane and carry the shot forward. There are safety mechanisms that have to get unhitched from the crane, so that made for a ton of work that went into all this beyond what is visible on camera. As many as ten people were involved just to get this shot.”
Goellnicht says the team had gone deep during preproduction, figuring out which devices and rigs they should – or could – employ to augment the handheld look, including EasyRigs and slingshots. “In certain situations, when we were moving very fast, we’d have a rickshaw dolly platform that I could be on when following an actor running down a corridor, then step off of to continue on foot with him into an office,” he adds. “We also kept in mind the need to modulate our field of view. There were times when we rushed from a wide shot into a tight close-up; but then, as the scene moved on to other issues, we’d ease our way back to a less restrictive view, which let us read the body language of the various actors. This was especially important with Kathryn Hahn’s character, whose performance was pitched at an interesting level; we tended to stay looser when we were on her to catch all the nuances and quirks she brought to each scene.”
The ambitious nature of the shoot weighed heavily, especially on Goellnicht. As Deans shares, “Mark is a big, strong man, but these shots took a physical toll. His work remained consistently amazing, especially when responding to adjustments during a take – Adam speaking on the comms about when and where to move. They often changed the staging – not just the order of how actors entered, but how they moved within a room. Once we all found the rhythm, it worked like clockwork, with Mark’s consistency showing take after take.”
Goellnicht says the most challenging aspect “was needing to learn everybody’s lines, which brought me back to early in my career when I was trying to become an actor. I needed to know the specific beats when the camera had to pan over to capture a specific reaction. If this connection between the visual and the material wasn’t on, then the comedy wouldn’t work. In a sense, it was like trying to get all the visual rhythms that you would otherwise be working out in editorial in the moment – and keep getting it right throughout these long takes. I also found that making choices by gut, if you will, worked a lot better than overintellectualizing.”
Newport-Berra shot with the lens wide open, always a challenge for focus pulling. “You’d go from some super-in-your-face close view to a whip focus out to eighteen feet,” Deans remembers. “For my part, Light Ranger was critical, because as you do the scenes, it lets you see the different depth distances on various people as you do the racking. I don’t know how I could have done the job without it.”
As Key Grip Adam Kolegas adds, “Adam always tried to light for 360 in broad strokes and then worked with gripping within the shot. I’d trail camera and have grips hiding with four-by-eight quarter silent grid diffusion, treating it like an Opal, so at certain times when the camera came around, we’d float diffusion up behind the camera to hide its shadow. Trying to make sure we didn’t get in our own way was the biggest challenge.” (A variable ND filter, operated via R/C, helped maintain balanced exposure during transitions from one lighting extreme to another.)
Preplanning how each oner would stitch together was a group effort. “For our editor, we went with Eric Kissack, whom we’ve known for years and worked with a few times in the past,” describes Rogen. “We needed someone with an impeccable sense for comedic timing as well as someone happy to physically be on set all day every day, because, due to the style of the show, we essentially needed to edit ‘live’ as we were shooting the actual scenes.” Newport-Berra’s crew were always on the lookout to find places to build the stitches – through pans or wipes – which gave Editorial the option to combine performances from separate takes.
Flexibility was the order of the day – every day. As Kolegas notes, “We’d often intend to carry things only so far, but then on the day have to find a way to carry the move so it ran that much longer and covered more territory. Implementing these changes into the choreography of the shot might mean bringing in steps for Mark or pulling a window or ramp. Once, we had all eight studio grips helping the shot; with the best boy also holding flags from the truck; I’d cue them the way a gaffer cues lighting changes, off the monitor. Dolly Grip Chris Thrasher was like a ballerina when it came to navigating for Mark as he walked backward. Chris would abandon his dolly and spot Mark, while another grip came in and grabbed the dolly and pulled it back into a hiding spot. At one point, when Matt chases the big boss around the scenics room, Chris had Mark step onto a platform so he could lift him up onto a dolly that booms him up onto a parallel.”
In episode two, “The Oner,” Matt invades the last day of shooting on a Sarah Polley-directed film and manages to repeatedly spoil her attempts to complete a massive oner. The hilltop location was found atop Silver Lake and proved taxing in many ways. “A lot of our trucks were gone,” Kolegas remembers, “and not having trucks on-site is always scary for a grip team. So we had to drop-load the necessary equipment up there. We were shooting late afternoon into sunset over a couple of days, so getting everything to match while moving in and through this huge house was tough. Fortunately, Adam is an amazing cinematographer who is very conscious of the time of day and was precise as well as clever in how we set up to do things. He chose the areas in which we shot based on the light direction as well as the story points. So, we’d know, based on geography, that we’d be able to light parts of the interior ourselves, while other times we’d need the sun.”
Newport-Berra describes the house as an architectural masterpiece plopped on the top of a hill, adding that “there was no flat ground. So, there was no place for the crew, which meant hiding people around every corner of the frame. This made things even more challenging, but it felt right in a way; we needed to push ourselves the way the fictional crew characters were being shown.”
Grids with dimmable set lights were mounted overhead, but to further shape the image, negative fill was employed manually. “I’d have someone walk in with a floppy,” shares Kolegas, “then, as we moved into a closeup, we’d deploy more of these to give some shape to the image. I used a lot of Velcro frames, four-by-eights, and eight-by-twelves, to take reflections down. There was this dancing with framesets to diffuse the light for camera shadow, too.”
Part of the Goldberg/Rogen imperative on the series was to have everything moving at considerable speed, evident when Matt roars up to the shooting location. “Whenever we walk, we walk fast, and whenever we drive, we drive fast,” Rogen laughs. “The powers that be generally don’t like actors driving, especially with cameras mounted on the hood of the car. But I always loved the look of it. I’m a very good driver; my father was a driving instructor for a few years, and I’ve done stunt driving training in the past, so I was comfortable. It also saved crucial time in resets because swapping out of drivers can become time-consuming.”
In terms of lighting units, Newport-Berra says he likes a blend. “I love LED lights, but the quality of tungsten lights is wonderful, plus the sheer power of HMI units can’t be beat,” he describes. “We even had older Molebeam tungsten units for creating strong shafts of light within the studio on the stage shoot. That particular older-school light creates an intensity with its beam that is impossible to replicate – so hard shafts through windows and backlighting somebody on stage deliver in a specific way. That was a big advantage of shooting in L.A. Those kinds of units are not common anymore, so being close to the vendors helped. This was my second consecutive project here in L.A., which is rare these days and that much more special. It’s kind of magical because you have access to the best crew people in the world, with everything else you might need or want, gear-wise, at your fingertips.”
The proximity to supplies and suppliers benefitted the grip team as well. “It’s very unusual as a key grip to get to use every vendor in town,” reports Kolegas. “But since we might have at most 45 minutes to an hour to figure things out, we needed all the tools that L.A. offers. One day we had Chapman, Elite, ProCam, Cinemoves, and TCC out, each with a different tool that we needed. And each of these companies provided amazing technicians to facilitate the process. A typical day might be going from a 75-foot Techno in the morning to a walk-off on Chapman’s Titan Nova. Then we’d move to a shoot atop a parking garage, requiring an EXO car and a 17-foot Technocrane. That was the workflow for the show, with us doing three or four of these shots every single day.”
Other episodes take place at the Golden Globe Awards and in Las Vegas, each of which offers unique challenges. “Most of what we used at the Globes was what they already had in place there,” Newport-Berra says. “We did put a lot of lights on the tables and bring in some architectural lighting to augment. I used a lot of crane work to move quickly to Matt and others at a table or back to the celebrities on the dais. In Vegas, we had to use a lot of available light for two reasons: one is that we didn’t have a lot of time beforehand, and two, because many of those locations didn’t permit us to bring lights inside.”
While visual effects played a part in papering over the occasional undesirable element, they also featured in showier moments. As Newport-Berra adds, “We start on a Porsche at one side of the studio, then boom way up, drift over the stages, then come down to follow another character at the other side. That was a long discussion with VFX Supervisor Sandro Blattner, and ended up being three or four stitched shots, going from Technocrane to drone and then Techno again. It was a lot of work on Sandro’s end, because the shadows didn’t line up on the drone shot the way they did on the Techno sections. We reimagined the Warner lot to a certain degree to Continentalize it, and ended up shooting at strange times of day to make the shadows appear to line up.”
Newport-Berra collaborated with Harbor Picture Company senior colorist Damien Vandercruyssen on the digital intermediate. “We had built a somewhat forgiving LUT based on references I had developed with Seth and Evan,” describes Newport-Berra, “which DIT Adrian Jebef kept an eye on throughout the shoot. We remained pretty true to what was shot, though Damien certainly enhanced the contrast and brought out a lot of detail. I think the final product was the closest I’ve ever had to what we got on set. That’s because we had a lot of very smart oversight from Seth and Evan. They wanted all the departments to lean into color coordination to help keep the look cohesive. There was also a special feel on the shoot that came through – it could only be pulled off if we were all fully present and engaged. It was a case where, if we didn’t get the shot, we didn’t have a show. I think that feeling fueled the effort and made people feel glad to be there and be a part of things.
“Seth and Evan have been in the business a long time,” he continues, “and have worked with some of the best filmmakers in the world; they understand the many complex processes employed by the various crafts. For example, if we were in a situation where I couldn’t figure out how to light things the way I felt they needed to be lit – it might just keep looking flat, or at the very least undynamic – I’d tell them, and they were always receptive to change. That could mean giving me additional time on the lighting or even re-blocking the scene. I appreciated that because they never treated it like they were pandering to accommodate some petty problem or inability on my part; they understood the why of the thing. The actors picked up on this aspect too, once they saw how Seth and Evan were choosing to move the camera and having us carefully light the sets. The humor of the show relies heavily on the camerawork and the timing of the dance between performer and lens.”
Rogen admits that the challenge he offered Newport-Berra was a double-edged sword. “We wanted naturalism in the visuals, but we also wanted to show the pressure of living up to the promise of the magic of Hollywood. Being in beautiful buildings, while having incredibly petty and ultimately silly arguments – with the highest of stakes ascribed to them – couldn’t be more representative of our experience.”
Local 600 Crew: The Studio
Director of Photography: Adam Newport-Berra
A-Camera Operator: Mark Goellnicht, SOC
A-Camera 1st AC: Lucas Deans
A -Camera 2nd AC: Robbie Julian
Ronin Operator/Additional Operator: Jesse Caine
Digital Imaging Technician: Adrian Jebef
Loader: Christoper Brooks
Utility: Justine Quinones
Unit Publicist: Charlie Pinto
Unit Stills Photographer: Erin Simkin