Shona Heath and James Price
AS: Was that set interior/exterior, in that you could walk from the outside into it?
SH: Yes, you could walk up the London street into the house, around the house everywhere and then out the garden and into the garage as well. It was all 360º. There was one door that lead to nothingness but everything else led to an actual room.
AS: Every set in the movie seemed to have a floor and highly-detailed ceiling.
JP: We knew those fish-eye lenses were going to make an appearance. But we also knew that he would never tell us when that would be. We were aware that at any moment the fish-eye lens could be used and that was why there was so much time and effort put into ceilings. It took a little while for everyone to get on board. In Blender the boys built a fish-eye lens off a camera and we would look at all of the sets–we needed to know they would still look great through the fish-eye lens.
AS: Was the DP Robbie Ryan brought on board during all that planning?
SH: Robbie was right there from the concept phase. He’s local. It was nice actually because we were all in London. Yorgos was in London at that point as well. I think Robbie was challenged because this kind of world is not normally the world he shoots. And I think that’s also why we ended up building everything. He’s always been on locations, whether it’s on a street or in a grotty council flat.
JP: He’s intuitive and goes with the moment. He’s very much an instinctive DP. So the planning was doing his head in! He was like, Get me out of the planning! When we moved to Budapest he would spend a lot of time in the Jonas/Antonio room looking at the Blender models. We eventually took stuff into Unreal too. For camera Unreal was way better with the natural lighting and for running simulations of what the lighting would be.
AS: You didn’t use Unreal with the LED walls during filming, did you?
JP: No, we decided early on that we’d use the LED walls as if they were just traditional backdrops that moved and we never did the parallax thing. We mainly used that for the ship and then we did some with the carriages from inside looking out, but again that was with a 2D plane so the carriage would just go straight past and you wouldn’t have any parallax.
AS: With the boat you’d have the water going by on the LED screens?
JP: Yes, exactly. They still needed to fill in the top and bottom with visual effects because they were on super-wide. But anything close was all in-camera.
SH: Our LED screen was enormous. It’s hard to believe we were always seeing off the edge of it.
JP: It was thirty-six feet high and about a hundred-fifty feet long. It was bloody long. It had come from Germany because that was the only place with the best resolution of pixel that you could get on an LED screen. It cost an absolute arm and a leg.
AS: Are the two of you planning on collaborating on future projects? Are you working on anything now together?
SH: Not at the moment, we’re both doing our own thing, but I wouldn’t say no! I don’t know about James, he won’t answer me!