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- [00:06]
A
Welcome to Pluribus, the official podcast, an intimate insider conversation about the making of the Apple TV series with the cast and creators behind the show. My name is Chris McCaleb. I'm one of the editors of Pluribus and the host of this podcast. And this is our second bonus episode that these are typically one on one conversations as opposed to the roundtable conversations that we have on the regular podcasts, which I think is exciting because we're able to include more people's voices and their stories, often cast and crew people who can't be physically in Los Angeles when we do our recording sessions. So for this second bonus episode, we have a familiar guest. For fans of Better Call Saul plus, please welcome to the podcast director of photography for episodes one, two, four, six, and eight, Marshall Adams. Marshall, thanks a lot for joining us on the podcast today.
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B
Absolutely, my pleasure, Chris. It's good to be here, man.
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A
Yeah, it's been. It's been a while. Yeah. I haven't. I'm trying to remember the last time I would have seen you. I'm sure something Better Call Saul related.
- [01:13]
B
Yeah, yeah. It might have been even a podcast or. Yeah. Or it's the only thing I could think of, probably.
- [01:19]
A
Right. So the first thing I wanted to talk about, we're releasing this with 102, but I do want to talk about that oner in 101, that where Carol is in the truck and she's driving through the wreckage of Albuquerque. And that is such a dynamic, exciting, crazy, ballsy thing. And eagle eyed viewers will notice a cameo appearance from one of the writers of Better Call Saul, Tom Schnauzer. That shot, I mean, how. Accomplishing it. And I've heard a few things, but I'd love to hear it from you. Accomplishing. How do you even start? Like, how do you set that up? And it's many blocks and. Yeah, it's. Talk to me about the. The mechanics and the pulling that off.
- [02:05]
B
Well, it started out kind of with us with an idea that Vince obviously had and developed and just got bigger and bigger and bigger. One of the things that Vince wanted to do was to be close and wide on Ray as much as we could. So that meant the camera was fairly close to her. And what that meant for me was that we were going to have camera shadows from the street lights almost throughout. So one of the things that I started to play with was originally putting a projector up there. Eventually ended up with a whole LED system. So we surrounded the whole front of that car with a truck with an LED panel that was probably 12ft wide and 5ft tall.
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A
Whoa.
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B
Yeah, it was pretty crazy. And then we used the A camera to shoot the shot and the B camera facing forward and had to fine tune the lens just so that Ray could interact with her surroundings. So she had a live image, which is what we used to light her with, essentially from the LED screen. So she had a live image that literally the moment things disappeared off the LED screen, they would appear in her peripheral vision because I didn't want to obviously take that away from her. She needed to be able to react to the things that worked front of her the whole time. So.
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A
So that's crazy. So. So all of that was creating all of the reflections, the ref. And. And also enabling her to actually see what was going on, because she's not movie magic. She's not actually driving that truck.
- [03:33]
B
Yeah, yeah, it was on the Biscuit. I guess it was developed for Seabiscuit, but it's essentially a stripped down Tesla with a very flat bed that you can put, you know, a vehicle on so that it rides low and it's electric, super quiet, and can carry a necessary people that can watch the video and be there to see it go down. So we started out with a kind of a. A small idea and grew and grew until it was a huge, huge production.
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A
And then how do you light that? I mean, how. That it's such a huge section. There's, there's practical, there's fire, there's. I don't, I don't know how many extras are in that scene. How do you go about planning to light it? How do you go about blocking it? I mean, how, how does that talk me through that process?
- [04:18]
B
So I literally drove down there with my car a number of times and shot video driving forward on that side of the street and then would play it backwards and watch the lights and the lighting that was there in the middle of the night so that we could accentuate what we wanted to add a little bit. But for the most part it's practical, which is the issue that I had with the shadows, with the camera shadows. So that's essentially why I had to take it away. So the screen is, you know, all across the front of the truck, sitting on the hood, and then there's a duvety lid on it to keep it from, you know, keep the shadows. Light from kind of getting into the windshield. So all the lighting that you see, all the interactive lighting is from the screens themselves.
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A
Right, right. But even, but in the, you know, because we are definitely Seeing the background.
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B
Oh, yeah.
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A
I mean, are you augmenting those lights? Are you. You're like swapping bulbs out or anything? Or is it just street lights?
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B
No, it's just street lights and then extra lights that we added down some of the buildings and up some of the buildings and, you know, all over the place. Because we wanted to make sure we saw the guy kind of run in. In the background or hop in, as you say. And a couple of other necessary moments. The other one was. That was kind of an interesting surprise was the water that, you know, came across because the fire hydrant shot off.
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A
Right.
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B
And we obviously couldn't do that onto the LED screen. So we literally had an effects guy riding on the car with us who hit the windshield. At the moment we see it kind of go past or just in it. So it feels like it's organic.
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A
That's. I had no idea. That's so. Like, I. I've seen the daily, but mostly I'm familiar with the cut of it. What's kind of amazing about that shot is I think most people aren't even thinking about the complexity. You're like, wait a second, how is this happening?
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B
Like, how is this.
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A
But it. But it's real. And she's not driving against a green screen. Like you said, it's practical. And you kind of start to forget about the complexity of it because you figured out a way that we could really just focus on her performance.
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B
Well, hopefully that's my job in a nutshell. You know, it really is to kind of take all that stuff away if. If it exists so that it feels like you're there and you're in it.
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A
You know, my hat is off to you on that. It's. That is so incredible. You know, you've been working with Vince for years now through Better Call Saul, and you shot El Camino, right?
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B
I did, I did, yeah.
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A
Yeah. Great looking movie. And so talk about the. The different look of this show. You know, sort of dialing in this. I've heard it described as like a Kodachrome look.
- [06:46]
B
Yeah, in a lot of ways. I mean, we used the same camera system. The. The Kodachrome idea was an idea that Vince had early on that we kind of explored and with Denise, our production designer, some of the ideas of giving it a kind of a stylized feel. But one of the things that Vince wanted to make sure was that it didn't start until actually the beginning of episode two. So episode one has kind of a normal color on it, and then it dials in once the World changes. That. That's when it kind of appears and. And you feel it throughout the rest. I mean, it's fairly subtle, but it definitely has a Kodachrome kind of vibe to it. It's an accentuated kind of reddish colors and a little desaturated in some of the other colors. It's. It's a very cool idea. And it was a. It's a great look. And it has a. I don't know, kind of a timeless quality to it that you. You don't even realize that you recognize from, you know, from pictures, old photographs and things like that. So.
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A
And how do you really, like, narrow in on what that's going to be? I mean, are you doing tests? And we have this great colorist, Dave Cole, who also did El Camino, and then, of course, Diane Mercer, our executive producer who runs post production. And Vince. And you, like, what is the process like? Is there a trial and error? Is there like, oh, let's tweak the colors a bit this way, or the saturation, or what's that process like?
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B
Well, Dave makes a lot of those calls on the fly once. I mean, once he gets the dailies. Nothing ever fits perfectly for all scenarios, so you have to. You have to tweak it a little bit. But, yeah, we shot tests. We brought a camera out and we shot some tests on the corner over by where the stage is. And all of us went to LA from Albuquerque, obviously, and took a look at the test and tweaked some ideas. Dave had a whole number of pitches, some different qualities and different ideas, and we came up with something that we thought really fit well. And for the most part, I think it applied really well.
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A
Oh, yeah. The show looks. I'm so happy with the way this show looks. There's been a lot on this show. There's. Especially in this episode. There's a lot of airplane business. There's the C130. There's Air Force One. I had heard something about modeling the composite of the C130 over the background, the sort of wreckage footage. Do you want to talk about how you accomplished making that seem completely real?
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B
Well, obviously, it's a team effort, but I had this idea. I think it actually came from Denise originally. We obviously couldn't put the wreckage on the Runway, and we wanted it.
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A
It's our production designer, Denise.
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B
Yeah, we wanted it to match lighting wise and background wise, and really feel like it was there once they placed it in. So the thought was. Or actually what we ended up with, it was a taxiway which is directly next to the actual Runway we would use for the wreckage. But it came all the way to the far end. The thing about runways is that they're almost a mile long. So we knew that the camera couldn't be on the Runway and was probably at least a half a mile away from the takeoff point. So that it was going to be an extremely long lens. Geez, yeah, it was 750 mils, I want to say. It was.
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A
Oh my God.
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B
Yeah, it was a really long lens. But what that meant was when we put the crash site at the end of the taxiway, the second camera, what we wanted to do was shoot the two cameras simultaneously. So we had the exact same lightings, exact same conditions. So they built the green screen and all the wreckage on the taxiway. And what that meant was I had to back the camera up this equal distance from our takeoff point from where the other camera was, which was literally like 50ft from running into a fence that was the fence line of the airport property. But we got extremely lucky with that. So I built a SketchUp model of the airport and plopped the two cameras down and figured out what the exact GPS coordinates of the second camera would be.
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A
What?
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B
And we took it out in the middle of this field up on parallel, so that it could be even level with the Runway. And it's a half mile away from the wreckage. You had to match the other camera lens size. So we had two of these 20 to 1 zoom lenses so that we could pick our size, you know, that we wanted and everything. Yeah, it was pretty involved.
- [11:06]
A
Now, they weren't being shot at simultaneously, right?
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B
They were. They absolutely were. Yeah. They were shot at the same time, literally from the two camera positions that are facing the same direction. Exactly. So they were lined up perfectly. It was pretty incredible. It took us a while to get it together, as you can imagine, but. But they were literally shot at the.
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A
Same time, and that's incredible. The model that you built, was that a digital model or was it like Back to the Future three, where they have. They build all the trains and stuff like that.
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B
So I use a program called SketchUp, which is a 3D modeler, and I can download things. I've used it. I used it on SOL quite a bit.
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A
I remember seeing that.
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B
Yeah. So this was the first time I really used it for like GPS coordinates and the actual placement, because I could draw a line from what we were told would be the takeoff point of the C130. And to use that line and move it over to the to the taxiway and see exactly how far away the other camera needed to be. So. And it turned out to be, you know, pretty precise. It actually worked out really, really well. I was happy with it.
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A
You know, I think we keep talking about it on the show in previous series that we worked on with Vince and Peter Gould. The level, the attention to detail that goes in. I mean, every little thing. I mean, just the fact that you were mapping out GPS coordinates so two cameras could simultaneously record. I can't believe you did that simultaneously. That's wild. Also, Air Force One, I know we talk about it a bit on the main podcast. Denise talked about how they built that thing and how like, for example, when. When the actors are like walking up and Samba as Mr. Diabate is up there in the door, how some of that is extended with visual effects. What is that like for you? The process of shooting parts of the frame or, I mean, you see, the dailies are. I'm sure somebody will put it out there at some point how what that really looks like. Because it's kind of funny what goes into the planning of framing those shots, knowing you only have like a little tiny piece of the set or a little tiny piece of what it's going to be, and that we're then going to extend the set or we're going to replace the background. You know, what challenges does that present to you as a director of photography who is so precise with your imaging and your framing? Talk to me about what that's like for you.
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B
Well, again, interestingly enough, I kind of, just to wrap my head around it, I built the Air Force One in Sketchup, again sitting on the Runway and imagining kind of what it would look like, where camera positions would be, you know, would show it off and things like that. And then in coordinating with visual effects, obviously they were giving us ideas about how much green we needed for green screen on certain angles, how much we needed coverage around the plane and what bits and pieces. But it was pretty cool and very efficient. I mean, even, you know, the stair machine that rolls in was live. We had to cover that with green as much as we could so it could pull up. So, you know, Vince, luckily, you know, he. It all laid out as he always does. He does his, what he calls his homework. And so we know where the camera positions and the width of all of the shots and we stick to it. We really do. So that. That makes it much easier on my part to. To kind of plot things out and figure out what we need. And then we obviously have A lot of extra green and. And a big grip crew that's ready to fill things in as necessary.
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A
The level of effort that goes into this, it just never, never fails to amaze me.
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B
Yeah, yeah. This show was definitely one of the biggest things that I've ever been involved in, you know, in planning wise and execution. You know, some of the things that the art department built. I mean, the inside of Air Force One, even, you know, with that meeting room, which is a set and matching genuinely what is there.
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A
Right.
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B
For real. So there are lots of photographs and video of that, the inside of that thing. So we had to obviously follow that.
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A
As best we could as the dp. How, like, how closely are you working with Denise, the production designer, or just in general with production designers with a set like that? It seems like the lighting just seems so practical. It just seems so. Oh, well, of course, that's just how Air Force One is lit. But of course it's all fake. I mean, it's completely a fabricated set of pieces. And, you know, you've lit it to appear to be real, but also cinematic. What is the process of working with a production designer like that? When does that start?
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B
Oh, it starts right away, during. In prep. I mean, you know, obviously that was something that was going to be a big set and be involved right from the beginning. So she and I started working together from the get go. And, you know, because that look has already been so established and people kind of know it or can look it up very easily, we wanted to stick to it as much as we could. So that involved for us actually was, with Denise's help, leaving a lot of space so that we could put a lot of color, changing LED systems in there so that we could change colors. We could, you know, we could develop areas that were hotter once they were off camera, using them for key lights, if you wanted to bring it off to one side or around the front or, you know, so it gave me a lot of options. And yet still was, you know, staying true to the actual place, which is important. I mean, luckily they've shot so much video in there and they use that room on the real Air Force One for meetings that they want to talk about that it has to be lit to a certain extent so that they can do that. So that helps a lot also.
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A
And we've seen it, we know what things look like, so it has to match our kind of memory of what that looks like.
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B
Yeah. Not to mention the fact that I've never been big on taking license when things like that. Things like having shafts of light in a hospital where people don't come on. Yeah, exactly.
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A
All the lights are off.
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B
Like.
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A
Or I was thinking about that in, like, in courtrooms or like csi, when it's like, this is a science lab, like, I think they turn some lights on.
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B
Yeah, right, exactly, exactly. That's all they would have on, you know, so they could. So they don't miss anything. Right? Yeah, no, it's. So, yeah, I mean, you get lots of great opportunities to do fun stuff lighting wise, but. But yeah, you got to. I mean, in my mind, it's just my own personal opinion, but you got to stay true to whatever the actual set is. You just have to.
- [17:37]
A
That's. I. I love that. Well, the one last scene I want to talk about is when we talked about it also on the main pod, but the scene where Carol has lunch with all of the. Sort of the remaining people and the others, and they're doing this and it's. What are there? I forget how many people are around that table.
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B
14, 15, something like that, maybe.
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A
It's a very long scene, a dialogue scene, multiple perspectives. But ultimately, we're always kind of seeing things through camera. Carol's eyes talk about the challenge. And Vince did talk about how. I mean, he has so many shots that he's planned and if he can. He doesn't like in the edit, he doesn't like to repeat shots. If he doesn't have to talk about the challenges of shooting a scene like that, which I think is. Is deceptively complex because it feels effortless. It feels just like. Well, of course the camera would be here, and of course this is how you would frame that person, talking to this person. But can you talk about the challenges of shooting a scene like that? Especially over the course of days where the light is changing?
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B
That was the big thing. I mean, it was from the beginning, I kind of pitched that I felt like we needed to have some sort of COVID over the top of them. You know, whether it was a, you know, one of those kind of canvas wind covers or. And then what that developed into through Denise. And her genius was to actually make that. The little building as an outbuilding from the hotel that we were shooting at, which is, you know, the Hotel Ituragi in Spain. So, yeah, that was an entire week of shooting to get that scene. And we had lots of different weather patterns, rain, sun, as you can imagine. Got a little help from visual effects, kind of matching some of the, you know, the background skies, but with the overhang that kind of gave us A scenario where we could add a little bit of light and not necessarily feel like it was lit and also didn't have to contend with changing sun, you know, every day, all day.
- [19:38]
A
One last question. I know we should wrap it up, but when a director comes to you and says, okay, here are the shots, I mean, Vince maybe is an exception, but I guess in general, when a director says, okay, here's how. Here are the shots I want, what is the process for you of working with that director as far as saying, okay, are you saying that's going to take X amount of time? Are you looking at it and budgeting out the time? What's the process like working with directors, episodic directors, when they come in?
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B
Well, it's always a little different. They all was, you know, they all have different approaches. Vince is very, very prepared. So. And I learned a long time ago, I mean, I typically try to pitch directors on ideas that I have or that the camera operator has, and occasionally, you know, you'll get one or two or three. And that's, you know, that's. That's great with Vince, you know, he has thought through every shot on so many levels that it's kind of a non starter. So there's been, you know, a couple of times that Paul and I've been very proud of kind of tweaking a shot just enough to kind of make it our own. But we stick to the plan with Vince. I mean, that's the genius with him. So you get lots of prep time with him, and you're able to really think them through and make them great in whatever way you want to, whether that's framing or lighting or something that you potentially want to add. As far as the process with other directors go, it just depends on whether they like to do prep, whether they like to do shot lists. Sometimes we storyboard depending on the complexity of the scene, but it's always a different game depending on their background is and how they've gotten used to working. And I try to adjust to that as much as I can, so it makes that as comfortable and painless as possible for them.
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A
Well, I'm excited for everybody to see the work that you did with the other directors this season. And thank you very much for coming and talking about the show.
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B
My absolute pleasure. Chris, it was great being here. Great talking to you again, man. Really, very cool. Absolutely.
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A
All right, thanks to Marshall Adams for joining us on this bonus episode for 102. And thank you for listening to Pluribus, the official podcast, an Apple TV podcast produced by Highbridge Productions and Sony Pictures Television. Be sure to follow on Apple Podcasts to get the next episode in your feed and watch Pluribus on Apple TV where available. Our editor and mixer, it's Nicholas Tsai. Theme music by Dave Porter. Associate producers are Alana Hoffman, Justin Verbese and Nicholas Tsai. Executive producers are Jen Carroll and me. Your host, Chris McCaleb. Follow and listen on Apple Podcasts.