How a motion control robot camera, greenscreen plates, a treadmill and digital visual effects helped capture that frenetic season 2 opening oner. An excerpt from befores & afters magazine.
The second season of Severance opens with Mark (Adam Scott) reawakening in the elevator on the severed floor of Lumon Industries in a distressed state. He runs throughout the white hallways of the building, the camera following him with precision moves—also as a oner—as he searches for the wellness room of Ms. Casey (Dichen Lachman), who he now knows is also his wife.
The incredible sequence was one that executive producer and director Ben Stiller imagined early on, as production visual effects supervisor Eric Leven, from Industrial Light & Magic, related to befores & afters. “Ben had an idea for the very beginning of the season where he had this really cool 540-degree circle around the actor, and then a push out of the elevator, and then on down the hall.”
On-set visual effects supervisor Alex Lemke from east side effects made up an overhead view of the multiple stages in New York City where the running was filmed. “It was a version that looked a little like Pac-Man,” he shares. “It was looking top-down to get an idea for the orientation. Then The Third Floor came in and did some previs for it.”
The intention of the previs was, says Leven, “to convey Mark’s sense of confusion and panic. He knows his wife Gemma is alive now. For the previs, it was, ‘Don’t worry about how we would shoot it,’ instead it was, ‘Just make something that looks cool.’ We went through many, many rounds of that with Ben and showrunner Dan Erickson and the team. And then we’d break it down, piece by piece.”
That break down included a discussion about how each piece of Mark running would be filmed, and how the pieces would be stitched together to look like one coherent, although frenetic, scene.
“My first instinct was, where can we hide the wipes?” recalls Leven. “But to Ben’s credit, he really wanted to make sure we did not make it obvious. He felt that audiences are sophisticated to the point now where they’re going to recognize where those wipes are. Everyone knows the tricks that you’re doing. So Ben said, ‘Let’s come up with some new tricks.’”
“For example,” continues Leven, “we were really careful when Mark goes around a corner. We thought, let’s not lose him around that corner, let’s make sure you see a little bit of his ankle. So, if there was a stitch around the corner, we would either sometimes paint the ankle back in just to make it look like there was no stitch where there was a stitch.”
As soon as Mark reawakens in the elevator, the camera does a 540 degree move around his head. DOP Jessica Lee Gagné, who captured the sequence with a combination of the Sony VENICE 2 and FX3, designed that move and others during the sequence to be mechanical in nature, something that was achieved by shooting partly with a Bolt X Cinebot. The high-speed robotic motion control camera was implemented by motion control operator Dan Gottesman and The Garage during filming. Scott completed the opening moment against greenscreen (for the elevator side) standing in the same position, but looking around himself frantically. ILM would then composite in the elevator parts and doors.
For this move around Mark’s head, an initial concern was how close the entire camera body and robot arm could get to Scott’s face. “In the end,” says Leven, “we worked very carefully with the stunts coordinator Dean Neistat to make absolutely certain that the moves could be achieved safely, and Adam was a real trooper to let that thing get so close to him.”
As soon as Mark sets out into the corridor, the first stitch was required. This was because the Bolt X was on a track and the next stage of the shot has Mark running a fair distance. To achieve this moment, then, the Bolt X was used for the first part of the shot of Mark starting the run. For the second part, which involved a camera operator holding a pogo stick following Scott on the run, the actor re-did the run out from the elevator area.
“The blend we did there is right in front of your face,” remarks Leven. “I was really excited about it. What made it work, to be honest, is the fact that Adam Scott ran out of the hallway exactly the same both times, which made it a really successful stitch.”
Leven notes that some later parts of the run also involved Mark running, and stopping, with the camera booming around him, but these were not possible by completely trucking behind the actor and going into a 360 or 540 move. So, Scott was therefore filmed with the Bolt X while running on a treadmill (with a stunt safety wire) in a greenscreen-backed stage. ILM then generated a completely CG hallway that matched the practical hallway set, seamlessly blending to the shot footage without any particular Lidar scans or texture shoots.
Another camera move achieved with the Bolt X follows Mark as he runs down a hallway. Here, Scott had to run in time with the camera. In that instance, ILM was required to replace the side of the hallway where the Bolt and track lay, in particular. Leven says the team was so successful at matching the real hallway and walls with CG versions that Stiller sought to make other changes to the environments in the running scenes.
Behind the scenes of s2 of ‘Severance’ in the latest magazine!
“Once we realized we had this really good-looking CG set, it gave Ben the flexibility to start moving doors around and put door knobs on the other side of the door, say, where he wanted the door to open a different way or take the vent off the top of this door and put it over here. I could see him, when we were starting to review the opening run, things that weren’t planned for, he’d say, ‘Oh, now make that hallway deeper, make that sharper.’ That was really nice that we could do that.”
“There was one part of the run,” adds Leven, “where the real set was just a big flat white wall. Ben said, ‘Can you make that an entire glass office with CG furniture?’ And we did. It was about making Mark’s perspective come to life in the sense that it’s all confusing. He doesn’t know what’s going on. I think what works great about the sequence is that we combined a lot of techniques. People don’t know which is which, and eventually just decide it’s all real.”
