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7 days ago
- Entertainment
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‘The Americas' Creative Team Didn't Just Capture Some of the Best Sperm Whale Footage Ever, They Made a Landmark Discovery
There are nature documentaries that show you things you've never seen before. Then there's 'The Americas,' which shows its viewers something literally no human had ever seen before. Marine scientists had long speculated that sperm whales dive all the way to the ocean floor to hunt for food. But they had never actually observed the whales doing so. How could anyone? As the executive producer of 'The Americas' and creative director of the BBC Studios Natural History Unit Mike Gunton said to IndieWire as part of our USG University virtual panel series, 'Sperm whales kind of break all the rules of biology because it's so challenging for any living creature to go from the surface of the sea all the way down there — the pressure change is huge. And then the camera had to do the same thing.' More from IndieWire Nathan Fielder's 'The Rehearsal' Season 2 Will Submit in the Comedy Series Emmy Categories 'The Last of Us' Writers Share the Video Game Adaptations Hollywood Should Tackle Next The distance from the surface to the seafloor off the coast of Dominica in the Caribbean Sea is a half mile, which means that the camera, newly invented by the production team over two years leading up to the shoot, would have to sustain pressure 100 times that of the atmosphere. Gunton was joined for the discussion by fellow 'Americas' team members Giles Badger, who directed the sperm whale shoot, cinematographer Dan Beecham, and composers Anze Rozman and Kara Talve, all of whose efforts were directed toward not just telling a compelling documentary story but illuminating a scientific first that the entire production enabled. 'There are things that lots of people have seen but we've never been able to bring to an audience before,' Gunton said. 'This is something that nobody has ever seen, and that's kind of a holy grail of wildlife filmmaking.' The segment director, Badger, spearheaded the efforts to design the camera rig. No human could survive in the water at the depths sperm whales can plunge, so the camera would have to be attached directly to a whale via suction cups, and affixed to its back from a long pole held over the bow of the production team's boat. Then the whale itself would take the camera down to the ocean floor. 'Ultimately, the animals will write their own script,' Badger said. 'You never know exactly what you're going to get.' If the production team 'missed' and didn't affix the camera to the whale, it could be a full 40 minutes before the whale surfaced again and they'd have another opportunity. That was only the start of the challenge, though. The production team has a rule of not interfering in the lives of the animals it documents as much as possible. That meant they had it hard-wired in the camera's suction rigging that it would detach entirely from the whale after just five hours. A GPS tracker was attached to the camera, but the team would have to wait for it to wash ashore to retrieve it — hopefully before the battery on the geolocator had gone dead. 'You can go to all these lengths, you can spend two years building this camera, you can get it on a whale, you can record the footage, and then you lose the camera,' Badger said. 'So as that particular camera was out, we knew the battery was getting weaker and weaker, we knew that we only had a finite number of hours before we'd lost it forever. We managed to find it in the seaweed after five or six hours, and even at that point when the camera's been down and it's come up and you found it, you still don't know whether those tiny little cameras have got the images on them.' Just in case, Badger showed that a telephone number was imprinted on the camera with the promise of a reward for whoever should find it. By any standard, though, this is television production as playing the long game. For the cinematographer, Beecham, who was in a wetsuit and wearing a rebreather to capture footage of the whales closer to the surface of the water before their dive, it's almost as challenging. 'We went at a time of year where the ocean is supposed to be very, very calm, but I think the first 10 days or so of the shoot was very, very rough,' Beecham said. 'In this job, you get used to people always saying to you, 'Oh, you should have been here last week. The animals were amazing. The weather was amazing.' I've talked about getting T-shirts printed up with that one actually because that happens so much. And then you need the animals to actually be there when the weather gets good as well. And then you need the dive gear to work, you need the camera to work, you need the boat skipper to get the boat just in the right place so the whales don't get disturbed. And then I also need to not screw up when I go in and do my job as well. They're sort of these narrow windows of opportunity that we grab.' There's a particular psychology involved in swimming near whales that a cinematographer needs to keep in mind as well. 'The approach with whales is not how to get close to them, but it's how to position ourselves so they get close to us,' Beecham said. 'So we never approach a whale, we allow them to come to us. And very often they don't. Very often they'll dive, so then I'm swimming back to the boat, dejectedly saying, 'No shot. The whale dove. The whale turned off to the left or to the right.' But every now and again, it'll choose to come straight for you.' All of this may help to give a better sense of why 'The Americas,' as a 10-episode series, took five years to shoot and edit, even with multiple production teams spread out across the hemisphere. The sperm whale segment is just one out of dozens and dozens across that 10-hour runtime. The scientific discovery involved is impressive in its own terms, but this is also a TV show, and one of the key ways to convey the import of a segment such as this is through the music. Hans Zimmer composed the series' main theme, but Anže Rozman and Kara Talve composed the episodic music for moments such as the sperm whale's dive to the ocean floor. It's about finding an artistic expression for the wonder of what's being shown. 'With a project like 'The Americas,' where you have so many people that care and love what they do, and who want to share that with the world, you hope that the end product of so much care and love will be sharing that care and love with the audience and them caring about the environment and caring about these amazing creatures that inhabit our land,' Rozman said. As such, 'We work [on the music] in various stages of episode cuts, and we usually like to get cuts early so we can start getting immersed into the stories and the footage.' 'A lot of our job is making sure the instrumentation is portraying how big this animal feels,' Talve said. 'To convey how close up we are to them. 'Is this music narrating their relationship to their mother, perhaps?' But because of the cinematography, because of just how beautiful everything was, it's immediate inspiration.' The whale is diving to the ocean floor to hunt for food, which means she can then make milk for her calf. Rozman and Talve give some woodwinds at the beginning of the segment, to suggest the childlike quality of the calf, then there's some strings, and all of a sudden a little more urgency to the score, with a choir added, to convey the grandeur and mystery of when the mom makes her great dive. This is a wondrous discovery, and it's translated into the music. Another way the import comes across? Through the inquisitive narration provided by Tom Hanks. His own sense of curiosity and wonder that comes across through his voiceover is not just acting. 'When showing him the footage, he'd turn to the projectionist and say, 'Have you seen this, guys?'' Gunton said of Hanks's reaction to what he was watching. 'This sense of, 'I don't believe what I'm seeing. I want you to show more!' And I thought, 'That is perfect. That is exactly what we want. This enthusiastic explorer who knows quite a lot, but doesn't know everything and wants you to join him on that journey.'' That's an invitation that's easily accepted. IndieWire partnered with Universal Studio Group for USG University, a series of virtual panels celebrating the best in television art from the 2024-2025 TV season across NBC Universal's portfolio of shows. USG University (a Universal Studio Group program) is presented in partnership with Roybal Film & TV Magnet and IndieWire's Future of Filmmaking. Catch up on the latest USG University videos here. Best of IndieWire 2023 Emmy Predictions: Who Will Win at the Primetime Emmy Awards? 2023 Emmy Predictions: Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special 2023 Emmy Predictions: Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series
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7 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Hacks,' ‘Umbrella Academy,' ‘Four Seasons,' and More Filmmakers Invite Viewers Into Their Storytelling Process
A wide range of filmmakers gathered on the Universal lot on May 22 for IndieWire and USG University's 'Consider This' panel, an FYC event designed to showcase the art of storytelling on television from a variety of perspectives. 'A Man on the Inside' editor Sue Federman, 'Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist' showrunner and writer/executive producer Shaye Ogbonna, and 'Hacks' makeup department head Debra Schrey and hair department head Aubrey Marie joined 'The Umbrella Academy' visual effects supervisor Everett Burrell and 'The Four Seasons' art director Mailara Santana on stage to take a deep dive into their process. They spoke in front of an audience comprised of TV Academy and guild members as well as film students from Roybal Film and Television Magnet. More from IndieWire 'Hacks' Renewed for Season 5 at HBO Max 'The Americas' Creative Team Didn't Just Capture Some of the Best Sperm Whale Footage Ever, They Made a Landmark Discovery After beginning the conversation with a discussion of how they got their start in the business, the panel quickly moved to the topic of their role as cinematic storytellers. Ogbonna, who created 'Fight Night,' said that the key to getting the most out of his collaborators was recognizing them as artists and utilizing their specific talents. 'I was trained at AFI and [learned] from day one that everybody's a storyteller,' Ogbonna said. ' Some of the best ideas you might get from an editor, you might get from a DP, you might get from a prop master.' When it came time for Ogbonna to take charge of his first series as showrunner, he took that sensibility with him. 'When it was time to hire all those people, I always saw them as partners in the story,' he said. 'It's, look, here's what's on the page, here are the parameters, but let's have fun.' Ogbonna wanted to give his wardrobe, makeup, and hair departments the freedom and inspiration to recreate the early 1970s era in which the show takes place. 'We're talking about very specific cultural touchstones in a certain time. It was important that we got it right.' On 'The Four Seasons,' it was imperative that the art direction reveal something about character and give the actors tools to work with. In creating the rundown Puerto Rican resort where the vacationing middle-aged friends (played by the likes of Tina Fey and Will Forte) at the center of the series stay, Santana zeroed in on aspects that would make them uncomfortable. 'The characters were not into going down and dirty,' Santana said. 'They wanted to go to a nice hotel as usual. [Showrunner] Tina Fey was very explicit about not wanting it to be pristine.' To that end, Santana worked on making the resort seem old and uncomfortable while contrasting it with a nicer resort close by that most of the characters wish they were staying at. 'We had to do a lot of aging,' she said. 'Once the actors got there, it was exactly what they were hoping for, because it helped them get in tune with their characters. It helps them feel like, 'I don't have to force it. I see it. It's just my environment. This is not necessarily where I want to be.'' Like 'The Four Seasons,' 'Hacks' is a character-driven comedy in which filmmaking craft goes a long way toward letting the audience know who these people are and what stage they're at in their lives. ' I need to think about, 'Does this person know how to do their hair?'' Marie said. 'Do they spend any time on it? If you look at somebody and their hair is perfectly blown out, that tells you something different than if their hair is just air dried or dirty or in a ponytail.' In the case of Ava, the young writer whose career has taken a big jump in the most recent season, Marie wanted to give a sense of the character's elevated position. 'She's gotten this new job, she has new responsibility, new money, and she's trying to put herself together,' Marie said. In previous seasons, Ava straightened her hair, but the back wouldn't be done because she couldn't see it; now she's more polished, but as Marie noted, 'She's still a little misguided.' That misguided quality extends to a hilarious episode in which Ava tries to give herself a makeover to impress an old flame who is coming on her show. She doesn't quite pull it off. 'That was really fun,' Schrey said. 'Tragic and awkward and fun. She never wears makeup, so this was a big deal, and we got to have fun with her. We called it the Sephora look.' Like 'Hacks,' 'A Man on the Inside' is a comedy series that goes to rather dramatic places; while the tone is generally quite sprightly as widower Ted Danson finds a new lease on life by becoming an undercover detective, there are also moments of genuine poignancy depicting his overwhelming sense of loss. 'That's the fun for me, to try to embrace the comedy but also the grief,' Federman said, noting that the opening of the series, in which the slow pace of Danson's life is clearly established, was one of the biggest challenges. 'That was very tricky and it was a big swing, because if you start slow, the network is very scared,' Federman said. 'They don't want anybody turning it off in the first five minutes. But [creator] Mike [Schur] was just adamant, 'This is this guy's character,' and we have to set it up because if you're invested in this, then everything else will follow. It started much longer. My first cut of the first episode was 43 minutes, and we ended up at 27 minutes.' Like Federman, Burrell feels that he's responsible for helping to maintain a show's tone through his work. ' There are a lot of in-depth talks about how to serve the story from a variety of angles,' Burrell said. 'One of them is color, which is a really big deal on 'The Umbrella Academy.' We had a lot of discussions about palettes and tone. Part of my job is helping the new directors who come on board understand the tone from other seasons.' Burrell said that the key to getting everyone on the same page is being a part of the process from beginning to end. 'Being involved early on during prep and getting scripts early is a big deal,' he said. 'If you don't get the script, you don't understand what the story is.' IndieWire partnered with Universal Studio Group for USG University, a series of virtual panels celebrating the best in television art from the 2024-2025 TV season across NBC Universal's portfolio of shows. USG University (a Universal Studio Group program) is presented in partnership with Roybal Film & TV Magnet and IndieWire's Future of Filmmaking. Catch up on the latest USG University videos here. Best of IndieWire 2023 Emmy Predictions: Who Will Win at the Primetime Emmy Awards? 2023 Emmy Predictions: Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special 2023 Emmy Predictions: Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
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Universal Studio Group and IndieWire Present USG University: Consider This, a Celebration of TV Craft in Los Angeles on May 22
Emmy season is ramping up, and now's the time to dive deeper into the creation of some of your favorite shows. Join Universal Studio Group and IndieWire for 'USG University: Consider This, an evening celebrating the art of TV storytelling through craft on May 22. IndieWire will also be partnering with USG for its tentpole FYC campaign, USG University, which encompasses a slate of virtual panels with producers, actors, and artisans from shows such as 'The Four Seasons,' 'The Americas,' 'Saturday Night Live,' 'Hacks,' 'Happy's Place,' and more. The first virtual panel will launch on IndieWire on May 19, with two a week rolling out in the weeks after that. More from IndieWire Newport Beach TV Fest to Honor 'Landman' with Outstanding Drama Series Award Bingeing, Weekly, or Batches? Is There a Right Way to Roll Out a Series on Streaming? (Open to TV Academy and guild members.) This partnership aligns perfectly with IndieWire's in-depth, sharp awards coverage as well as Future of Filmmaking, our new content vertical and newsletter designed to help anyone in the film and TV industry to navigate a entertainment career. The May 22 event, moderated by IndieWire's Jim Hemphill, will take place in person in Los Angeles and gather talent from 'Hacks,' 'A Man on the Inside,' 'The Four Seasons,' 'Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist,' and 'The Umbrella Academy,' all NBC Universal-produced shows. A reception will immediately follow the panel event. USG University (a Universal Studio Group program) is presented in partnership with Roybal Film & TV Magnet and IndieWire's Future of Filmmaking. USG University is a vehicle to support Roybal, one of the finest High schools for preparing students for a career in below-the-line roles in film and TV, with immersive opportunities to learn about TV craft with an aim for helping students to picture themselves working as a TV artisan. The specific talent on hand for the May 22 event is Everett Burrell, visual effects supervisor of 'The Umbrella Academy'; Sue Federman, editor of 'A Man on the Inside'; Shaye Ogbonna, executive producer and writer of 'Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist'; Mailara Santana, art director of 'The Four Seasons'; and from 'Hacks,' makeup department head Debra Schrey and hair department head Aubrey Marie. Upon confirmation of your attendance, details will be provided to you about where the event is taking place. Doors will open at 4:15pm PT on the 22nd, with the panel discussion start at 5:00 and the reception following immediately of IndieWire Guillermo del Toro's Favorite Movies: 56 Films the Director Wants You to See 'Song of the South': 14 Things to Know About Disney's Most Controversial Movie The 55 Best LGBTQ Movies and TV Shows Streaming on Netflix Right Now
