It was November 2023, and I was standing in the middle of a gigantic, empty warehouse in Arborfield Studios, about an hour west of London. The space felt enormous- big enough to fit a football field or more. This was going to be the set for Khofar, the forested planet that our Jedi team lands on in episode 4 of The Acolyte in order to search for a long-lost companion named Kelnacca, a wookie Jedi. But at the moment, I was pacing through it. It was just concrete, steel, and nothingness. I walked it back and forth, end to end, totally perplexed, trying to imagine what a forest would look and feel like in this space, trying to recall my own experiences walking through Redwood forests in California. How high would the stage trees go? How can I make realistic daylight that looks as though it is penetrating through a tree canopy hundreds of feet tall when the ceilings are a mere 40 feet high? I kept returning to the warehouse, sometimes with my gaffer Jonny Franklin, and we would stare at the structure, trying to imagine what would be there, and propose different ideas — adding moving lights to certain rafters, or concentrating our soft boxes in specific locations to create a sense of there being small openings within the canopy. How to Cheat a Sense of DistanceI was convinced that we needed to get our sources of light as far away from the floor as possible, to try...
Published By: NoFilmSchool - Wednesday, 28 May