“EKTACHROME is a contrasty stock,” he says. “It only has a latitude of only about four to five stops. But if you light it well, you get wonderful, deep shadows and beautiful colors in exchange. It’s also a grainier stock, especially if you cross process it, so the resolution is less. Plus, your highlights can blow out easily, but in such a creamy and beautiful way that, in some cases, it’s great to embrace. It can give you a certain kind of emotionality if you use it right. It’s a 100 ISO stock, meaning it needs an enormous amount of light, and you have to light it very soft, with lots of fill light. So, whenever we switched stock in the camera, I had a totally opposite approach to lighting. That was a big challenge, but it paid off, I think.”
Gaffer Danny Durr adds that among the show’s lighting requirements was the need to “be able to shoot for either stock at a moment’s notice. With the amount of light needed for the EKTACHROME, this obviously created some challenges technically and logistically for us, but thanks to a superb rigging team, we always had ample power and units ready.”
Durr says his lighting package largely consisted of “a lot of LED units that we had full control of because of all the on-the-spot dimming cues we did throughout the season, combined with bigger tungsten and HMI units. For a lot of stage work, we used Skypanel bounces through half grids for softboxes and Litegear tile lights through full grid softboxes if the set didn’t require RGB. We also used a mixture of large HMI bounces with direct tungsten sources for the daytime stage interiors, while night exteriors were often done with 18k Arrimax or M90’s on large Condors to give us a base backlight, with many different types of overhead softboxes as fill sources.”
Season two of “Euphoria” is streaming now on HBO Max.
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