Like the story arc of the majority of boxing movies, Creed III had a number of challenges to overcome in its production journey. Firstly, even though the Creed movies were part of a expanded Rocky cinematic universe, this was the first in nine films that didn’t have the original character as a part of the plot; Rocky had left the story.

Flipping this negative into the positive feel of a new start gave newbie director and still star Michael B. Jordan a chance to reinvent how to shoot the boxing scenes in particular. An easy reference, subconsciously or not, was Scorsese’s Raging Bull as its fighting is stylistically different from everything else.

Also, a new POV suited the storyline of a fight between a retired Adonis Creed and a significant person reappearing from his past with major issues to resolve.

Previous Creed II cinematographer Kramer Morgenthau and Jordan laid plans for a new “in ring” aesthetic as Max Weinstein explains in American Cinematographer. “Settling into his duties as a director, Jordan determined early in prep that he and Morgenthau would need to take two ‘big artistic swings’ to fully engross audiences in Donnie’s next chapter.”

The intention was to aim for a heightened visual style. “Michael is hugely influenced by Japanese anime — that’s completely his stamp on the movie. So, he brought that into the way we cover the fights,” Morgenthau says. “There’s this thing we call ‘Adonis Vision,’ where you’re seeing subjective point-of-view from Adonis as he’s clocking each fight, and that plays out in an anime style, with these hyper-real close-ups.”

For that, they switched to very wide-angle lenses, a 12mm Panavision H Series and a 14mm VA. “That again was part of Michael’s vision from the beginning. It’s very much an anime approach.”

READ MORE: Creed III Takes Big Swings (American Cinematographer)

But the action in general had to seen from the inside, not the outside, which is the problem for most sports action movies.

The Panavision website described how the boxing was shot within reach of the fighters. On both Creed II and III, Morgenthau was joined in his corner by A-camera and Steadicam operator, Michael Heathcote. “Mike and I came in early during prep to work with [2nd-unit director and supervising stunt coordinator] Clayton Barber and [assistant stunt coordinator] Eric Brown to help design the moves for the fight choreography. There’s an arc to what happens in the fights and the stories happening in the corners and in the ringside seats. That was all carefully choreographed, like shooting a piece of dance.”

Working with Panavision Atlanta, Morgenthau chose to shoot Creed III with Panavised Sony Venice cameras and a lens package that included both anamorphic and spherical optics. “We shot all the dramatic scenes with T Series and C Series anamorphic lenses, and for the fights, which are in the 1.90:1 aspect ratio for IMAX, we used [prototype] spherical VA primes that we customized to add a bit more softness and help them match the look of our anamorphic lenses,” the cinematographer explains.

Morgenthau also shot certain sections of Donnie’s bouts with the Phantom Flex4K, whose high-speed capabilities enabled him to create an “ultra-slow-motion analysis of some of the major moments in the fights, where we wanted to be inside the boxers’ heads.”

Other cameras used included prep cameras to rehearse moves, “We prepped by shooting each fight with small digital cameras, and shooting sketches of what it should be, figuring out the most impactful places to place a camera and trying to show what it’s like to be in the ring from a boxer’s perspective.”

READ MORE: A Sweet Science (Panavision)

The other big “artistic swing” was the unveiling of a new taller aspect ratio to give the fighters almost god-like statue. “In the film’s dramatic scenes, intimate glimpses of Donnie’s and Dame’s out-of-the-ring lives are framed for the 2.39:1 aspect ratio, but whenever a match is underway, the frame is expanded to 1.90:1 Imax. The filmmakers opted to shoot most footage for both aspect ratios with Sony Venice cameras certified by the ‘Filmed for Imax’ program,” Weinstein notes in American Cinematographer.

With up to 26% more picture, this third installment in the Creed franchise became the first sports-based film included in the “Filmed for IMAX” program.

“It was really exciting to be able to integrate the IMAX cameras into the filmmaking process, especially the way we used them to open the world up and to make it very immersive and visceral for the flight sequences,” says Morgenthau, according to a report by ReelAdvice. “And that’s how we chose to use it; there was just something very magical, especially the scene at Dodger Stadium, where MBJ is walking out onto the field and the image aspect ratio expands in shot and the black bars recede, and you get this really tall, beautiful, powerful image. It just elevates everything, there is just something hyperreal about it. And to be the first sports movie doing that, it was a creative high.”

READ MORE: “Creed III” is the First Sports Movie Shot on IMAX Cameras (ReelAdvice)

Director and star Jordan, speaking to American Cinematographer, says “We were looking at these old photos of Muhammad Ali by Neil Leifer, and [we called] the shots that he would get of these outdoor fights ‘clouds to the canvas,’ where you can see everything in the frame. So, we just wanted to recapture that — get all that information up on the screen. Then, we’d ask, ‘Okay, when is it going to open up? When is it going to transition into that ratio?’ It was about picking those moments and balancing them.”

Morgenthau concluded with almost reverence for the sport and the fighters in an interview with Gary M. Kramer for Salon. “The way we photographed the bodies was like photographing sculpture. Their bodies are sculpted and beautiful, and covered in sweat and oil and very reflective. Shooting them was about how their bodies and faces were reflecting light and honoring their performances was showing them in their ‘best light,’ so to speak,” he said.

“I studied paintings by George Bellows, and the Ashcan school of painting was an inspiration. There was an Eakins painting in a museum in Philadelphia that I was looking at, and I referenced great boxing photography, like some of the Ali color photographs. These images inspired how we lit the boxers.”

READ MORE: “Like photographing sculpture”: Cinematographer reveals what makes “Creed III” look so good (Salon)

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LEARN MORE AT NAB SHOW: Resilience, Remote Collaboration and Creativity on “The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse”

The Oscar-winning short The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse is like receiving an “emotion bomb” when you first see it. If you have any pent-up sentiment left over from the pandemic, Charlie Mackesy’s animated story of a young boy and his animal friends might extract it from you, so be warned.

The award-winning animated story, now streaming on Apple TV+ and the BBC iPlayer, is the realization of Mackesy’s beautifully rendered ink and watercolor drawings, which were immortalized into an illustrated book that ended up topping the bestseller lists in both the United States and in the UK.

Filmmakers then approached Mackesy to take the story to the next level, but how do you turn heavily characterized pencil drawings into moving images and keep the signature style of the artist?

Initially, Mackesy’s intentions were less about the bottom line than more spiritual and Christian ambitions. He explained to Ryan Fleming at Deadline that helping people was his driving force and he thought the film would add to that.

That the book even became a hit shocked him, Mackesy said. “When the book came out, I got so many emails, like thousands of emails, telling me how the book had moved them or helped them, particularly in the pandemic,” he said. “I felt like if the book had done that, could a film reach people in the same way?”

He soon had his answer. After reading Mackesy’s book in 2019, producer Cara Speller said she “completely fell in love with it and got in touch with Charlie and his partner, Matthew Freud, and talked to them about what we could potentially do in turning it into a short film.” After a discussion with the creators, Speller contacted Peter Baynton, who was ready to join as director.

READ MORE: ‘The Boy, The Mole, The Fox And The Horse’ And The Team That Brought Charlie Mackesy’s Book To Life – Contenders Film: The Nominees (Deadline)

Speller told Jérémie Noyer at Animated Views how important it was to have Mackesy front and center in the process. “It was always really important to me right from the start that Charlie be at the center of any team that we put together to make the film. You can tell immediately from the book that he has incredibly strong instincts about what works. To me, it didn’t make any sense to try and make that without having him so closely involved.”

The animation team worked remotely because of COVID, with a shared goal of creating a look that reflected as closely as possible the drawings in the book, which were ink and watercolor. “We wanted to make those drawings basically move but keep the spirit of the fluidity of the ink and the line and the varying thickness of line,” Mackesy says.

Director Peter Bayton underlines the connection between Mackesy’s style and his animation team, “Charlie’s drawing is underpinned by a great knowledge of anatomy. So, even though he draws extremely quickly and quite impressionistically, you can tell he knows horse or boy or fox anatomy so well. For the mole, it’s a little bit different.

“It was important not to lose that lovely loose quality and make things stiff. So, we came down to a system where we would animate quite tightly on detailed models, and then, on the ink stage, we encouraged the artists to find that looser way of inking. It was about finding that very fine line that sort of drifts around the characters.”

“It was a very international crew,” noted Speller, “coming from 20 different countries. We started the work on the film in the middle of the Pandemic, so everyone was working remotely from their homes. We built the team in the same way you build any team on a production. You’re always looking for the most talented artists you can find; it doesn’t matter where they are in the world, as long as you think they’re the right fit for the project and for the team.”

READ MORE: A kind interview with the creators of The Boy, The Mole, The Fox And The Horse (Animated Views)

Frank Gladstone, executive director of ASIFA-Hollywood (the International Animated Film Society), pushed the team for more production details in an all-guild screening.

“The style warrants movement,” said Gladstone, “but how did you achieve it? The line halo that goes around the drawings, how is that translated to movement?” Director Pete Bayton explained the significance of the halos: “Charlie describes those lines as thinking lines and they’re very characteristic of his drawings,” he noted.

“The process is that we start with pencil rough character animation, to define the performance and then it goes through a clean-up stage where we adjust the model where everything looks like a model and then we go to an inking stage where we do these key ink drawings and at that point we would add these lines, these thinking lines or ‘thinkies,’” he continued.

“It was a careful balance as sometimes that would feel too stiff and attached like a wire so we found a way of making them dissipate and reappear.”

Art director Mike McCain summed up Mackesy’s style and how it was transferred to motion. “Charlie has such a beautiful economy with ink and the book has such a minimal approach to storytelling and it’s just what’s needed on the page,” he said. “As we were looking to bring that wilderness to life the biggest challenges were finding how to add and not to over add. Just put what’s needed on screen to make it feel like you’re surrounded by this world.”

Variety’s Peter Debruge calls the short “The Little Prince for a new generation.” He goes on to add, “Beautifully adapted from British illustrator Charlie Mackesy’s international bestseller. Those who know the book — a Jonathan Livingston Seagull-esque life preserver for many during the pandemic — will appreciate how the team managed to translate Mackesy’s unique ink-and-watercolor style, with its distinctive blend of thick brushstrokes and loose, unfinished lines.

“Isobel Waller-Bridge’s gentle score coaxes audiences into a receptive place, while the quartet of Jude Coward Nicoll (the Boy), Tom Hollander (the Mole), Idris Elba (the Fox) and Gabriel Byrne (the Horse) lend sincere voice to various affirmational ideas,” Debruge continues.

“Cynics may dismiss what one acquaintance called its ‘bumper sticker wisdom,’ but they miss how vital it is to plant ideas of this nature in the heads of young viewers: boosting their confidence and unpacking what it means to feel lost — or seen — before social media brainwashes them otherwise.”

READ MORE: ‘2023 Oscar Nominated Short Films: Animation’ Review: ‘The Boy’ and His Ilk Mark a High-Water Year (Variety)

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Last November The Weeknd, aka Abel Makkonen Tesfaye, put on a spectacular 90-minute plus show at Inglewood’s SoFi Stadium in LA. Both nights were recorded for an HBO concert special, The Weeknd: Live at SoFi Stadium, which is now streaming on HBO Max.

It was the last stop of the first leg of the “After Hours til Dawn” tour, and Tesfaye pulled out all the stops to reinforce his performance artist handle but still confound and confuse the critics as to what music genre to place him in.

Direction was by Micah Bickham, whose collaboration with the artist goes back to the Starboy album in 2015. He talked to NAB Amplify about how the show was created, recorded and broadcast.

“My focus with The Weeknd is particularly around live production,” Bickham said. “We have quite the partnership really from the Starboy era around 2015. It’s been a handful of years just to understand the world they’re creating from an album point of view and how that translates in to live.”

SoFi stadium was primarily chosen for the recording as The Weeknd was doing two nights there. Both nights would be recorded and then cut together. “Just thinking how I wanted to shoot it and present it, we had to shoot across the two nights, plus a handful of pickups that we ended up doing. Also being LA, it was just perfect.”

The discussion before the show about how they wanted the concert film to look took quite a few diversions but a cinematic theme was always front and center. “We talked a lot about cinematic integrity. Yes it’s a concert and yes it’s an artist performing these songs but with a world being created and shaped inside of it,” he said.

“We talked about what the DNA and visual language of this film was but in the end for me it had a lot to do with how we presented it more like a film and less like a concert. What I mean by that is when you watch the film the pace and the tension that the pace creates is pretty unusual for a typical concert film.

“We wanted you to sit with the artist and digest what was happening right in front of you not through an edit and cut that might pull you away too quickly. We wanted you to live in it, when you see it there’s something that resonates differently than a typical concert film.”

The Weeknd’s live shows have already made headlines, especially his 2021 Super Bowl halftime show, which he had reportedly underwritten to the tune of several million dollars. But the show was to be nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Variety Special (Live), Outstanding Lighting Design/Lighting Direction for a Variety Special, and Outstanding Technical Direction, Camerawork, Video Control for a Special.

The SoFi concerts were specifically staged to allow viewers see the most of The Weeknd. Tesfaye had the run of the center of the stadium with an apocalyptic Toronto skyline at one end and a huge suspended moon at the other. No sign of the band, who were hidden out of sight. Tesfaye was on his own apart from 33 dancers parading as red-shrouded sirens who walked as one.

Concert films can be free-running, sometimes allowing the camera positions to operate without timecodes, picking and choosing shots as they go. Bickham wanted a tighter regime for SoFi. “For this particular project there were a couple of differences, just because of the scale of it. It was important to me early on that if I just monitored the board and did a pure just shoot for capture and I didn’t create a line cut, my feeling was that we weren’t going to able to hold that many cameras accountable to each moment,” he said.

“So the way I directed it was a little bit of a hybrid in the sense that I did cut a line cut. When a director cuts a line cut there’s an immediacy that takes place from the operators that you’re working with. Everybody sits up a little straighter and there’s a little more tension than if I asked them to ‘just shoot and I’ll nudge you around.’

“Certainly there are times when that’s important and the best way to approach it. For this I felt creating a little bit of tension and immediacy was important so everyone stayed focused. It’s a long show, top to bottom it’s just under two hours. It’s an easy scenario even for the best team to kind of settle in and perhaps not necessarily to be on top of every single moment throughout the show. So yes, we cut it but with a series of pick ups too.”

These were mostly single close-up Steadicam shots featuring The Weeknd and the dancers. Adding them to the two nights at the stadium gave Bickham a substantial editing job, but inevitably it was all about finding the show. “We wanted to break it apart and understand the shape of the narrative and how we could build it in the edit.”

With around 25 Sony Venice cameras in play — both first- and second-generation, but mostly second — there was a lot of footage to work with. Lenses were primarily Angenieux and Canon Cine zooms, with a couple of prime lenses employed on handheld cameras. “They were all human-operated and were all on my Multiview and so we’re cutting the full volume of the 25 throughout the night,” Bickham detailed. “From night one to night two we augmented the positions of some of those 25 cameras just to enlarge out coverage. That gave us a slightly different mindset going in to night two. It would just accentuate what we had already done on the previous night.”

Designing the cut, it was always planned to let it breathe, especially around Tesfaye who was mostly alone in such a huge space. Bickham explains the thinking: “It was partly because it gives the audience an opportunity to be on stage with him. That’s a very unusual experience especially for a stadium film. Additionally by doing that it creates a tension. The audience are expecting you to cut, they’re expecting to be moved on to something wide or something different and when you don’t do that and you stay kind of locked in to that position something really interesting happens; it makes the next shot that much more impactful.

“So in other words, we kind of lingered even if the song ramped up and became more manic. We didn’t let the pace of the moment dictate the pace of the film.”

Bickham and Le Mar Taylor, The Weeknd’s creative director, had talked a lot about letting moments develop in front of the lens and not blasting through the coverage. “We wanted our performance to be more like a film edit.”

The concert film was meant to be celebratory career moment for Tesfaye and the means of capture was always up for discussion, with even IMAX put forward as a medium. “We did think about using 35mm film, in fact through our discussion we did end up partnering with a company called Live Grain,” Bickham recounted. “We wanted the concert film to have representation of the texture of film to push in to a space where you don’t particular see it. So that was a huge part of our decision making even through the grade and the finishing. It’s got a timelessness with this textural element to it and just feels different from a typical concert picture.”

The use of the Live Grain process is usually for digitally shot movies. NAB Amplify previously reported on Stephen Soderbergh’s No Sudden Move using the process, but for a live production it’s new.

READ MORE: “No Sudden Move:” The Lush Look of Steven Soderbergh’s Neo-Noir (NAB Amplify)

“The cameras didn’t have any filtration in place just to make sure the process wasn’t disrupted. Live Grain is essentially real time texture mapping. A lot of great films that were shot digitally used Live Grain to make it feel like it’s 35mm. In a multi-camera almost two hour production 35mm itself isn’t really practical with the mag changes and the amount of film you use.”

The use of Live Grain was in fact introduced by HBO, which has an ongoing relationship with the company. “It’s been tested by them many times on films but our film was maybe the first time being used for a live concert application or certainly one of the first.”

The post effect of film grain really nails the timeless cinematic effect, but was there ever an option to broadcast the concert live? “There was a time when we considered a one day IMAX special but when HBO got involved we realized we had a great partner for what eventually we wanted to do and it tied in with the upcoming The Idol drama series.

“Ultimately we were able to bring a more caring approach to it, we could take our time.”

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Not knowing what will happen is the ultimate tease for a grifter movie like Sharper — the darkness just adds to the mystery

The British director of Sharper, now streaming on Apple TV+, wanted his DP Charlotte Bruus Christensen to become the “Princess of Darkness” in homage to cinematographer Gordon Willis, who famously shot The Godfather and other movies in next to no light.

Rather obviously, Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson takes a romantic view of using film, unkindly describing the digital alternative’s look as “the plastic dullness of a toss-off digital Netflix thriller.” With Bruus Christensen’s film aesthetic, however, he warmly welcomed “the grain and light of what movies used to look like.”

READ MORE: Sharper Is a Wickedly Good Thriller That Reminds Us of Better Days (Vanity Fair)

In truth, Willis’ approach to lighting — particularly in the initial scene of The Godfather — occurred to him only at the last minute as a means to counter the strange makeup Marlon Brando was using. Just 20 minutes prior to the shoot, the only technique he could think of was to use a top light. Ultimately, this decision sealed the look of the movie from that point on. But maybe the die was already cast with his moody aesthetic for Klute, which he shot the year before, in 1971.

But Lawson’s coupling of the use of film with an old-fashioned con artist tale is understandable, clumsy as it might be, as Sharper is a thriller that revels in the use of shadows and underexposed long takes.

The director, Benjamin Caron, was new to feature films but had notable success in directing episodes of The Crown and Disney’s brilliant Star Wars episodic Andor. But for Sharper, he had asked Bruus Christensen “to think about these sophisticated compositions of using light and darkness,” as he told SlashFilm’s Ben Pearson. “But probably one of the biggest reference points for me was Klute. There was just something about the atmosphere of that film that I’ve always loved.”

Describing Willis’ work, Caron says, “He just basically infused every frame with meaning and atmosphere, and there was a beautiful delicacy to it. So it was a heavy leaning into the feeling of that film.” (As an aside, this 1971 film has been having a hell of a cultural resurgence as of late, BJ Colanelo notes at SlashFilm, with director Matt Reeves also citing the film as a massive influence on The Batman.)

READ MORE: Sharper Director Wanted His Cinematographer To Be ‘The Princess Of Darkness’ And Emulate Gordon Willis [Exclusive] (SlashFilm)

Caron also referenced The Color of Money, Drive and especially Fincher’s Seven. “What I loved about that film is that you were so claustrophobic for such a long period of time. You were held in that city. It was all mainly shot at night and it was rain, but then right at the very end of the film, you suddenly had this big desert expanse where there was nothing else.”

He could see that same scenario working for Sharper, he told Pearson. “We had all these characters penned into Manhattan, where the sight lines are limited and you can rarely see the horizon. But then, as in Seven, I love the end where suddenly you’re in this open space where you can see nothing but sky, and ultimately the characters have nowhere to hide.”

Apple’s own description of Sharper does harken back to thrillers of the past: “No one is who they seem. A neo-noir thriller of secrets and lies, set amongst New York City’s bedrooms, barrooms and boardrooms. Characters compete for riches and power in a high stakes game of ambition, greed, lust and jealousy that will keep audiences guessing until the final moment.”

Pete Hammond’s review of the film for Deadline describes the pull of this new swindler story. “Seeing the nifty grifter drama Sharper reminded me how rarely we encounter this kind of clever cat-and-mouse game that might fall into the noirish genre but really relies on diving into a world filled with characters who reveal slices of their lives that keep changing moment to moment,” he writes.

“It is the kind of movie I find enormously difficult to review because its ultimate success for a viewer is just watching it unfold, beat by beat, never quite knowing exactly where it is heading but still glued to the screen to find out,” Hammond continues.

“Written in a non-linear style and separated by chapters identified on the screen with character’s names, the focus keeps changing as we see events unfold, and eventually intertwine, as the story takes twists and turns and then twists right back again.”

READ MORE: ‘Sharper’ Review: Julianne Moore & Sebastian Stan In A Deliciously Twisty New York Noir Full Of Secrets And Lies (Deadline)

But it is director Caron, in his first feature, who kept the lid on what the characters were thinking, not wanting to clue the audience into the deceit. “Deception is definitely the defining feature of this film, and I’m always interested in character’s motivations and how people talk or flirt or lie or impersonate in terms of getting what they want,” he said to Pearson.

“I thought it was really important in this film that we never had a nod and a wink to the audience at any moment that something was about to happen. Sometimes I think there’s a tendency, whether it be from the storyteller or even from the performer, to show too much.

“And I think right from the very beginning, even in conversations with the actors, we wanted to hold all of that back. Because I really remember reading the script and I really remember those moments where I was floored and I was genuinely shocked and surprised. So it was really important they held onto that integrity.”

READ MORE: Sharper Director Benjamin Caron On His Twisty New Neo-Noir [Exclusive Interview] (SlashFilm)

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READ MORE: Mark Ritchie Brings Cinematic Experience to Amazon Prime Live Concert Film with Kendrick Lamar’s ‘The Big Steppers: Live From Paris’ (Sony Cine)

Camera technology that started out in the upper echelons of cinema have now become so accessible that the use of digital cine cameras and lenses is being use to photograph sports and music concerts too.

Normally, such cameras are used sparingly for cinematic depth of field cut-aways in live sports or in glossily post produced video concert footage.

The video production of the recent Kendrick Larmar tour took this to another level by using multiple digital cinema cameras in a livestreamed outside broadcast.

“Concerts shouldn’t look like a sporting event game,” said the production’s director, Mark Ritchie. “They shouldn’t be filmed like one either.”

Perhaps that isn’t surprising given an artist of Lamar’s caliber. The Big Steppers: Live From Paris, part of Lamar’s “Big Steppers Tour,” was streamed live exclusively on Amazon Music and Prime Video from the Accor Arena in Paris this past October.

“We didn’t want to just use a prefab camera plot,” Ritchie explains. “We really wanted to understand what would be dynamic, what would be a great storytelling device, what lenses would feel more immersive versus objective.”

The amount of technology used for the shoot was astonishing, as detailed in the Sony case study. An ARRI Trinity went from the stage to the floor for specifically choreographed moments. Two additional Steadicams, one on stage for fluid live moments, and one in the audience, captured moments with fans. They had a robotic rail-cam system “that acted like a sniper,” able to boom up and boom down precisely while maintaining a beautiful frame above stage height.

They also had a spidercam for very specific cinematic moments, a 25-foot tower camera and Technocrane gliding slowly over the audience that captured waves of hands as it made its way to the stage.

Principal photography was from 16 Sony Venice cameras and Sony’s new cinematic pan-tilt-zoom camera, the FR7.

Ritchie used the Venice at 6K in full-frame, along with lenses like Signature Zooms or Fujinon Premistas and primes.

“The beauty of full-frame is you can see a nice wide shot of a stadium or an arena, but stay focused on the person right there in front of you,” he said. “To be able to control someone’s attention with more shallow depth of field in certain moments is critical to the narrative. I can show you 80,000 people and a massive stage, and by using a shallow depth of field I can ensure the audience stays laser focused on the artist while still offering an epic sense of depth and grandeur.”

He also used Venice in Super 35 mode, allowing him to employ longer cinema zooms and converted broadcast lenses that can offer both tight and wide coverage from all angles.

“One of the biggest challenges in live spaces is distance to the subject,” says Ritchie. “Feature films happen between eight and 20 feet. However, it’s often challenging to maintain the inner ring of close coverage in a live space, especially when you have massive stages and catwalks in excess 120 feet, while trying not to impede on the audience experience. Having that second ring of coverage is crucial to maintain coverage throughout the film.”

Live Grade LUTs were applied, adjusting exposure and black levels and accounting for any variances between lenses and the environment, which as you can imagine means battling with constantly changing extreme contrasts, bright LED screens, and highly saturated lighting.

“We’re doing that with 16 to 20 cameras in the live space where every one of these needs to be as close to perfect as possible,” adds Ritchie.

“When you’re shooting for a film, you have the luxury of time and an edit. You can just shoot Log and tweak the exposure and color later. But in the live space it’s real-time. In line LUT boxes apply our base look and our truck RCPs control Iris as well as subtle variances between cameras. The cinematographer, DITs, LD and video engineers are all working in perfect sync, safeguarding the image through every crucial step.”

To make new television, it helps if you’ve watched a lot of old television. That’s a lesson evident in Poker Face, the crime-thriller series created by Rian Johnson and starring Natasha Lyonne, which makes its debut January 26 on Peacock.

Lyonne — creator and star of Netflix series Russian Doll — plays Charlie Cale, a woman employed by a casino with a preternatural ability to tell when people are lying.

As Johnson, the writer and director of Knives Out and Glass Onion, explained to Dave Itzkoff of The New York Times, the self-contained installments of Poker Face are a deliberate throwback to a style of TV storytelling that Johnson grew up with in the 1970s and ‘80s.

“That’s when I had control of the television,” Johnson said. “And it was typically hourlong, star-driven, case-of-the-week shows.”

They weren’t only detective programs like Columbo and Murder, She Wrote, he said, but also adventure series like Quantum Leap, The A Team, Highway to Heaven and The Incredible Hulk, which were notable for “the anchoring presence of a charismatic lead and a different set of guest stars and, in many cases, a totally different location, every single week.”

Those ever-changing elements kept things fresh and surprising, he said.

READ MORE: Natasha Lyonne and Rian Johnson Trace the TV Origins of ‘Poker Face’ (The New York Times)

In an interview with Alison Herman for The Ringer, Johnson was asked about similarities between Poker Face and Columbo. “I’d include The Rockford Files and Quantum Leap, but also Highway to Heaven and [the 1978 TV series] The Incredible Hulk,” he told Herman. “It’s kind of got the DNA of all that stuff. And that’s the stuff that I was sitting on the rug in front of my family’s TV watching reruns of every single afternoon as a kid. It’s the TV that I was raised on.”

READ MORE: Rian Johnson Mastered the Whodunit. Now He’s on to the “Howcatchem.” (The Ringer)

“The ‘DNA’ of these shows is certainly there when you watch an episode of Poker Face play out,” Ernesto Valenzuela writes at SlashFilm. “Bill Bixby’s man-on-the-run character of Bruce Banner in The Incredible Hulk, who helps bring justice to whatever town he ends up in, is recreated with a much less gloomy angle with Charlie’s fugitive status. And much like Jim Rockford in The Rockford Files, Charlie is also down on her luck, living in a mobile home in the first episode where she is very much not an officer of the law. Poker Face thrives off of its influences, and the structure’s repetitive nature isn’t a detriment to the show — it’s actually a big reason viewers should tune in every week.”

READ MORE: Rian Johnson Wanted Poker Face To Feel Like A Detective Throwback (SlashFilm)

The show’s resemblance to Colombo is a good thing for fans, Amos Barshad notes at Wired. Johnson, says Barshad, “tiptoed” around the issue at first but the jig was up following an interview in Vulture with The Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle: “I was probably bugging [Johnson] about something and he texted, ‘Want to talk to you about this TV show I’m doing with Natasha Lyonne. It’s basically Columbo with her as the detective,’” Darnielle said.

“To everyone who loves Columbo, this is a great thing,” Barshad writes. “Even beyond the unique format, with the murderer reveal happening first — which means it’s a howcatchem, not a whodunit — Poker Face embodies the rough, throwback, blaringly uncool charms of its spiritual antecedent. Like Columbo, Cale is often going after the rich and powerful, the kind of people who think they shouldn’t have to atone for their sins. Like Columbo, she’s constantly underestimated, a trait she finesses to her ends. Peter Falk’s portrayal of the fumbling detective is an all-timer; the way he pivots from buffoon to razor-sharp gumshoe is a thing of beauty and joy, which means Lyonne has her work cut out for her if she wants to put Cale up on the mantle with Columbo in the TV Sleuths Hall of Fame. But in the handful of episodes available so far (a new one dropped today), it’s clear Lyonne — salty, resilient, irrationally confident — is presenting a very unique kind of crimefighter.”

READ MORE: ‘Poker Face’ Is the New ‘Columbo’—and That’s a Good Thing for Fans (Wired)

In his review for The New York Times, chief television critic James Poniewozik calls Poker Face “the Best New Detective Show of 1973,” noting that Lyonne “has one of TV’s most distinctive presences, with an old-soul rasp and a hipster-next-door bearing that’s simultaneously down-to-earth and cosmic.”

He adds: “The logo may say Peacock — the streaming service that premieres the series on Thursday — but the vibe says NBC weeknights in the 1970s.”

The series, Poniewozik says, draws you in with its retro style, “but the vintage echoes are also deeply thematic. The ‘70s loved a beautiful loser, like James Garner’s Jim Rockford, the ex-con private eye whom the world gave the bum’s rush no matter how many cases he cracked.”

READ MORE: Review: ‘Poker Face’ Is the Best New Detective Show of 1973 (The New York Times)

Poker Face is not a whodunit but an “open mystery” because the audience starts out each episode by seeing who did it, how, and why, before Charlie begins to investigate. Johnson himself calls this mystery subgenre a “howcatchem,” where it’s very much about the detective versus the guest star of the episode, as Johnson also confirms to Brandy Clark at Collider: “These are not whodunits, these are howcatchems. Show the killing, and about Natasha [Lyonne] vs. the guest star.”

As Clark points out, the benefit of these types of shows is that a viewer can jump in at any time, without wondering or worrying if they need to see the previous episodes to understand the story or the plot.

READ MORE: Rian Johnson Explains ‘Poker Face’s Episodic Storytelling (Collider)

Of course, Columbo is the key reference point and an acknowledged part of Daniel Craig’s character Benoit Blanc in the Knives Out mysteries. Johnson told Rolling Stone’s Alan Sepinwall that he binged the entire series during lockdown.

“My big revelation from bingeing it is, I wasn’t coming back for the mysteries. Although the mysteries are fun, I was coming back to hang out with Peter Falk. And in that way, I feel like those shows have as much in common with sitcoms as they do anything else.”

He added, “It’s not really about the story or the content. It’s about just hanging out with somebody that you like, and the comforting rhythms of a repeated pattern over and over with a character that you really liked being with. That’s kind of what I saw when I watched Natasha in Russian Doll, that made me think this could be interesting.”

Lyonne also said that she loved characters such as Columbo, Elliott Gould’s Philip Marlowe in The Long Goodbye and Dennis Franz’s Andy Sipowicz in NYPD Blue, as reported by Deadline’s Peter White.

Speaking at NBCUniversal’s TCA press tour, Lyonne said that Charlie is “floating above a situation trying to crack a riddle, but also an everyman who has their nose to the grindstone and figuring out the sounds of the street.”

Once Johnson had decided to make her a human bullshit detector, rather than a detective or a mystery writer, he realized he had a problem, but this became the key to unlocking how the show might unfold.

“How was the show just not over within the first five minutes, if she can tell when people are lying?” he told Rolling Stone. “I had her give a speech in the pilot about how it’s less useful than you think because everyone’s always lying. It’s about looking for the subtlety of why is somebody lying about a specific thing. And we found really fun ways to play that at different episodes going forward.”

Although Johnson is red hot and you’d think people would be biting his hand to work with him, he says pitching a more old-fashioned TV format got push back.

“I was unprepared for the blank stares. And then the follow-up questions of, “Yes, but what’s the arc over the season?” I think there is right now this odd assumption that that’s what keeps people watching, just because there’s been so much of that in the streaming world that I think people equate the cliffhanger at the end of an episode with what gets people to click ‘Next.’ But TV before incredibly recently, was entirely in this episode mode. So I know it can work because I grew up tuning in every day for it.”

One reason it’s harder to do episodic case-of-the-week stories is the expense and the production challenge. For example, you keep have to bringing in new guests and visiting new locations.

“Holy crap, it was a headache,” Johnson admits to Rolling Stone. “I don’t think we even realized what we’re up against. No standing sets. No recurring characters besides Natasha and occasionally Benjamin Bratt. But we’re very purposefully going for the Columbo approach of big fish guest stars. So every single one of these episodes, we try and get somebody very exciting to play either the killer or the victim. And it was a lot.”

READ MORE: ‘Glass Onion’ Director Rian Johnson Is Giving Us a ‘Knives Out’-Style Mystery Every Week (Rolling Stone)

Indeed, the cast list across the season includes Adrien Brody, Ellen Barkin, Nick Nolte, Stephanie Hsu, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ron Perlman, Chloë Sevigny, Lil Rel Howery, Clea Duvall, Tim Blake Nelson, and many more.

Asked during a Q&A panel at the Winter Television Critics Association Presentation whether he writes specifically to those guest stars, he replied: “In the room, sometimes we’d have a placeholder actor, and it would end up being them, or surprisingly someone else. A benefit of this subgenre is that it is the guest star’s episode, and you see them go head-to-head with Natasha.”

Johnson continued to sing the praises of television in front of the ballroom full of television reporters and critics — saying he preferred the “pace” of this newfound process vs. film. Each hour-long Poker Face episode took about three weeks (one for prep, two for shooting) to complete. Compare that with making one film over the course of “several years,” as he put it.

READ MORE: ‘Poker Face’: “Endless Possibilities” For Natasha Lyonne’s Human BS Detector To Keep Solving Crimes Past Season 1 (Deadline)

“I loved that in each episode we’re in a different environment, it’s a whole new cast— it’s like making 10 mini movies,” Johnson told IndieWire’s Tony Maglio. “I literally dove into it like it was one of my movies. I really jumped completely into the deep end of the pool.”

READ MORE: Rian Johnson Now Thinks Making TV Is ‘Much More Fun’ Than Movies (IndieWire)

Johnson has previously directed for TV, notably on two episodes for Breaking Bad including the show finale “Ozymandias.” Episode two of Poker Face, which he directed, was shot in Albuquerque.

“I haven’t been back there since we shot ‘Ozymandias,’” he told Rolling Stone. “It was so much fun being back in town. A lot of the same Breaking Bad crew were on our crew, and it felt like a little homecoming.”

Johnson explained to Angela Watercutter at Wired that while Poker Face does have a throughline, any given episode is a standalone. That was “a hugely conscious choice,” he said, “something that I had no idea was gonna seem so radical to all the people we were pitching it to. The streaming serialized narrative has just become the gravity of a thousand suns to the point where everyone’s collective memory has been erased. That was not the mode of storytelling that kept people watching television for the vast history of TV. So it was not only a choice, it was a choice we really had to kind of fight for.”

READ MORE: Rian Johnson Knows Glass Onion’s Tech Bro Looks Very Familiar (Wired)

Johnson discussed director Robert Altman’s influence on the pilot episode of Poker Face in a Q&A with Joshua Encinias for MovieMaker Magazine:

“Altman’s Nashville was definitely a big reference point for me when I was approaching how to shoot the pilot. I will say each one of the episodes very much has its own personality. Colombo was set in Los Angeles, but he was diving into a different profession every single time, based on what the killer did. There’s an anthropological element to it, where you’re doing a little deep dive into a different world every time. That’s very much a part of the show going forward and we allow ourselves, tonally, to give ourselves over to that. There’s an episode, for instance, set in a regional dinner theater with Ellen Barkin and Tim Meadows that’s absolutely hilarious and very comedic in tone, almost like a Noises Off style. The one I did with Joseph Gordon-Levitt is set in this snowed-in motel within the Rockies and it’s almost more like a Coen Brothers horror movie. But yes, absolutely, in the pilot I was looking at a lot of Altman. Also in terms of the looseness of the style of shooting. It seemed like a fun route to go.”

Another Altman film also provided influence in Poker Face. “Janicza Bravo directed one of our episodes and I think she put a very subtle, intentional California Split reference in her episode,” Johnson said. “We talk about that movie a lot on set.”

READ MORE: We Gently Interrogate Poker Face Creator Rian Johnson, Laid-Back ‘70s Detective Style (MovieMaker Magazine)

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Perhaps it’s our underlying fear of what AI will lead to, or a horror jolt that we needed to kickstart our year, but the hit movie M3GAN is busting the $100 million worldwide ticket sales barrier on a $12 million production budget. Also, a generous PG-13 rating has lured in the teenage market with even younger kids finding a way into theaters to catch horror-comedy at its best.

Vanity Fair’s Julie Miller looked into the toy slayers and analyzed the genre. “The killer doll trope is nothing new — 60 years ago, a pigtailed doll in ribbons and ruffles named ‘Talky Tina’ took out an evil stepfather in a Twilight Zone episode,” she writes.

“In the decades since, there have been knife-wielding dolls, deranged puppets, demonic fetish figures, and diabolical porcelain dolls fronting horror films.” But maybe the effect is easily explained by Frank McAndrew, a psychologist who has researched the concept of creepiness.

“They have eyes and ears and heads and all of the things that normal human beings have,” explains Frank “But there’s something off — the deadness in their eyes, their blank stares. They’re cute and they’re supposed to be for children,” he says, but the human realism causes “our brain to give off conflicting signals. For some people that can be very discomforting.”

McAndrew further defines that dolls are especially effective horror-movie antagonists because murderous streaks seem so unlikely in a child’s toy.

READ MORE: M3GAN and the History of the Creepy Killer Doll Phenomenon (Vanity Fair)

But perhaps the most interesting aspect of M3GAN is how a seemingly CGI-laced movie was made for only $12 million. The mid-sized budget was perhaps a consequence of shooting in New Zealand during COVID — since at the time the country hadn’t yet been exposed to the pandemic. But it was also due to the skills of a young local actress, Amie Donald, who played the demented AI and ended up doing her own stunts.

Jen Yamato at the Los Angeles Times tracked down the actress’s movement coaches. “Casting local performer and international competitive dancer Donald, now 12, to physically embody M3GAN turned out to be fortuitous. Although it was her first film role, the actor, who has also since appeared on Sweet Tooth, was off book within a week and loved doing her own stunts. ‘She was just extraordinary,’ says director Gerard Johnstone,” Yamato reports.

“Working with movement coaches Jed Brophy (The Lord of the Rings) and Luke Hawker (Thor: Love and Thunder) and stunt coordinator Isaac ‘Ike’ Hamon (Black Adam), she developed M3GAN’s physicality, which becomes more humanlike the longer she’s around humans. She adopted barely perceptible movements — a slight cock of the head, a step a bit too close for comfort — to maximize the unsettling effect M3GAN has on people.”

Donald proved to the director how well she could do her own stunts and even on the first day of shooting, nailed the all-fours forest move you can see on the trailer after perfecting it at home. “All of a sudden we get this video from her mother, where Amie had just figured out how to do this on the carpet at home,” said Johnstone. “And she could run on all fours!”

READ MORE: Puppets, fake tears, a young dance phenomenon: How ‘M3GAN’s’ killer doll came to life (Los Angeles Times)

CGI was definitely minimized in the movie, but WETA Workshop contributed additional designs to the film, and Oscar-nominated Adrien Morot and Kathy Tse of Montreal-based Morot FX Studios were entrusted to smooth out the joins of animatronics, puppets, posable and stunt M3GANs, as well as Donald herself.

Director Gerard Johnstone was also keen to bring a level of humor to the movie and find ways to echo his own experience of parenthood, as he told Gregory Ellwood at The Playlist. “But what I brought to it was definitely my own sense of humor and my own experiences as a parent. I wanted to put as many of my own struggles and anxieties and frustrations that I was having as a parent into this movie. Parenting in the age of AI and iPads isn’t easy.”

READ MORE: ‘M3GAN’ Director Gerard Johnstone Loves That You Think It’s A Comedy, Talks Sequels & More [Interview] (The Playlist)

Speaking to Valerie Ettenhofer in an interview for Slash Film, Johnstone cited Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg’s rom-zom-com Shaun of the Dead as teaching him a significant lesson in style. “My big lesson from them when I first watched  Shaun of the Dead…  was just how seriously they took both genres,” the director shares. “If I was going to do this, I had to treat the horror as seriously as I did the comedy.”

Johnstone struck a balance between horror and comedy with his first film, Housebound, which he continued with M3GAN, Ettenhofer notes, “a movie that offsets its most violent and unsettling scenes with moments in which the titular android does a hair-twirling dance or breaks into spontaneous song.”

Johnstone also namedrops a few other greats that he considers fun horror touchstones. “I’m a big fan of Sam Raimi, Drag Me to Hell and The Evil Dead trilogy.” He also commends Wes Craven, plus the “very deadpan” films of Joel and Ethan Coen, which he says employ “just a very dry tone, but you can tell they’re secretly making comedies.”

READ MORE: M3GAN Director Gerard Johnstone Learned A Key Lesson From Shaun Of The Dead [Exclusive] (Slash Film)

All the film references in the world mean for nothing, however, when your movie becomes a litany of Internet memes, which M3GAN quickly generated. Karla Rodriguez at Complex put it to the director that once a part of your movie or a part of the trailer becomes a meme, you know you’ve struck gold.

“And they were amazing,” picked up Johnstone, “and I just couldn’t believe how many of them there were. But I thought they were giving too much away in the trailer of the dance scene. I was like, ‘I just want a hint of it, something weird happening to tease people.’ And Universal said, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’ And I didn’t know what I was talking about clearly because people just took it, recut it, put it to different music and it was just the gift that kept on giving.”

READ MORE: Director Gerard Johnstone Shares the Behind-the-Scenes Magic That Went Into Creating ‘M3GAN’ (Complex)

So where does that leave the psychotic M3GAN doll? A scary range of merch maybe, but definitely at least one sequel because, like artificial intelligence, we just can’t get enough of her. Producer Jason Blum has already said as much. “Blum did something he’d never done in his nearly 30-year career: He publicly admitted his desire to make a sequel before the movie even opened in theaters, Rebecca Rubin reports at Variety. “He just felt certain that audiences would instantly fall in love with M3GAN, short for Model 3 Generative Android, whose chaotic dance moves, pithy one-liners and killer tendencies turned her into an internet icon as soon as Universal debuted the first trailer.”

“We broke our cardinal rule,” he says. “I felt so bullish that we started entertaining a sequel earlier than we usually do.”

READ MORE: Why ‘M3GAN’ Convinced Horror Maven Jason Blum to Break His Cardinal Rule on Sequels (Variety)

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Troll from Netflix has seen some highly impressive viewing figures since its arrival on the platform and quickly became its best performing non-English film. This breakdown comes from Naman Ramachandran at Variety: “With a total of 128 million hours viewed and still counting, the film has taken the top spot on the non-English Netflix Top 10. It is in the Top 10 in 93 countries including Norway, France, Germany, the US, the UK, Japan, South Korea, Brazil and Mexico.”

READ MORE: ‘Troll’ Becomes Netflix’s Most Popular Non-English Film (Variety)

Monster movies have always had a wide fan base and Troll has all the attractions and tropes those fans like — a cityscape destruction, believable and well-executed VFX, a credible folklore backstory, and a monster with feelings and a purpose. Something that Renaldo Matadeen picked up on in his review for Comic Book Resources.

“The remains of his tribe got left in a palace under the Royal Palace, which means the troll king’s domain has been desecrated. So, he’s stomping his way to Oslo to destroy the place for what happened to his family and to crush the symbol of Christianity, politics and corruption.”

READ MORE: How Netflix’s Troll Dwarfs the MonsterVerse’s Kong & Godzilla (Comic Book Resources)

Yes, Troll was partly inspired by King Kong, including Godzilla vs. Kong, but don’t forget Cloverfield with its clever “monster in a city” reality. But one of the most important aspects of the production was to keep it very Norwegian notwithstanding the monster action at its core. Espen Horn, producer and CEO of Motion Blur, explained the vision. “It was a big and important dream for us. That we should use Norwegians as crew, SFX and VFX vendors as much as possible because we wanted to show the world that this was genuinely a Norwegian or Nordic film,” he said.

“That was very important as even as the film has a classic monster genre formula to it, as some people claim, it was important to us to maintain originality in terms of the characters, mythology and the nature of how we are as people. I think the audience were happy that we kept the Norwegian originality.”