Divergent

As seen in the June/July issue of ICG Magazine
By Kevin H. Martin
Photos by Sandy Morris / Apple

In Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” (originally titled “Two Roads”), the poet muses over possible routes one might take before ultimately electing to take the path less traveled, concluding, “and that has made all the difference.” In the new Apple TV+ limited series Dark Matter, physics teacher Jason Dessen (Joel Edgerton) has begun to wonder about his own life and career paths and those of his wife Daniella (Jennifer Connelly). He experiences a serious dose of alt-reality when he is abducted and transported to a parallel realm of existence, one where he never married, and where his doppelgänger – who is responsible for the kidnapping –  has pioneered astonishing breakthroughs in quantum mechanics. The result is a device capable of bridging all the various timelines in the multiverse, each splitting off from every decision Dessen has made in his lifetime. He then embarks on a series of adventures, entering multiple realities while seeking a way back to his true home and family. 

The narrative concept of a multiverse has been explored in series as wide-ranging as Star Trek and Family Guy (and every Marvel movie in between). What makes Dark Matter unique is how Showrunner Blake Crouch grounded the source novel in a way that created relatability for his readers. The project attracted the attention of significant creative talent, including director Jakob Verbruggen (Black Mirror, The Alienist) and Directors of Photography John Lindley, ASC, and Jeffrey Greeley, as well as Production Designer Patricio Farrell. I spoke with the creative team from Dark Matter, all shot in and around Chicago with a veteran local crew, to hear how they visualized all the “roads less taken” and where that brought them in the end.

Origin Story

Executive Producer Matt Tolmach: When Blake and I first started working together, in 2014, I had optioned the book as a partial manuscript, and we were developing the project as a movie. We tried that for several years. But the problem was that to reduce the story to two hours, we were compromising so much of what makes the book great, which is that it’s a true odyssey. We weren’t willing to lose all the many worlds that Jason had to travel/inhabit, as well as the emotional journeys of the other characters around him. Fortunately, the people at Sony TV – now at Apple TV+ – encouraged us to pivot to television, where we were able to expand on Blake’s vision and do the novel justice. We shot the show entirely in Chicago, and in some ways, it’s a love letter to that city. Blake came up with the idea for the novel while visiting a friend in Logan Square. Our decision to work with Jakob – who directed the first three episodes – was an easy one. He has an incredible eye for nuance and detail, as well as scope – and this show demands both. Jakob approaches everything with clarity and confidence, which is critical when telling a story as multi-dimensional and complex as Dark Matter.

Production Designer Patricio Farrell: I started the design process before there was a DP or director attached to the project, so Blake and I worked closely at the beginning of prep. Both Blake and the production team were incredibly welcoming, always open to listening and considering different ideas or approaches to the challenges that we faced through that whole year together. It is not every day that one has the chance to conjure up what kind of world would be on the other side of the door!

Director of Photography John Lindley, ASC: We chose the Sony VENICE up front. There are many great cameras out there, but I find it very solid and like its predictability. I chose the lenses. Jeff and I both went in early and had plenty of time to try things out. It was fun playing with the exposure index because you can intentionally create noise. Alternately, you can suppress it with noise reduction. I’d say that between the two of us, we had more than twenty LUT’s made up before the show even started, and after tweaking, wound up with at least thirty by the time we wrapped. There were certain LUT’s we used repeatedly and others that we used only in certain worlds, and only at certain times within those particular worlds. The concept at the outset was to make Jason’s real-world very warm and – I won’t use the word normal because I don’t think that ever was a goal – but at least inviting.

Director of Photography Jeff Greeley: I had just gotten off another Chicago job, Justified: City Primeval, which was also with John Lindley. I was looking forward to going back to my home in the Bay Area, but while flying back, I read the first few scripts, and wow! On that basis, plus the involvement of Joel Edgerton, I was sold on doing the show. I’ve known John for a long time, first operating for him and then as co-DP. We work similarly and have the same taste in crew, which made the process seamless. And since we were doing different episodes, we didn’t get to see each other much or work together at all, except for a few days in prep. The Sony VENICE 2 [using the VENICE 1 sensor] we used is a workhorse, and you can take it everywhere. The ND’s available let you scale from three to 120 at the click of a button. We did carry zooms but shot mainly with Cooke S4 primes throughout.

PF: When it comes to designing sets, there’s always an aesthetic side, as well as the emotional aspect and mechanical side. So, while I want the space to look fantastic, I also try to put myself in the crew’s place, and how to make the space work efficiently for them – different ways to get in and out, areas to place monitors, carts, video village, et cetera. Most of all, I like to make sure there are built-in opportunities for the DP to light the set in a natural way. Perhaps a window at the top of the stairs or transoms above hallway doors. Sometimes, those opportunities are used, other times not so much, but it is important to me that the opportunities are there. The same goes with the addition of pilasters and other elements to hide seams, so walls can fly away as easily as possible, or soffits that allow for ceilings to be raised and brought back down as needed.

Chief Lighting Technician Michael Kelly: This was the first show I’ve ever done without any standard tungsten units on the truck. We used some 20K’s for sunlight. We used a lot of Vortex Lighting and Fiilex products, and quite a few RuPixels. Because everybody remained receptive to new ideas, there was no pre-conceived agenda for using any one manufacturer. It really was an open palette, a matter of choosing the right instrument for the right moment. Scenes of the “real” home had us playing a lot in the 2800-degree range to get the softer, warmer look. MBS Chicago took very good care of us.

Boxed In

The major visual challenge of Dark Matter related to realizing the apparatus that allowed the “superposition” physics effect to be achieved. The exterior was a monolithic black box, while its interior featured a seemingly infinite corridor, which would require a combination of a large physical build and significant VFX set extension.

JL: My toughest lighting situation was the warehouse where the box lives. It’s supposed to be subterranean, so even during the day there’s no sunlight coming in. Looking into the darkness at a black box can be tricky. We actually used a lot of light, but very selectively, plus some atmosphere just to backlight it.    

MK: The box was supposed to be all black, but that concept works better for radio [laughs]. We tried with John, and especially with Jeff, to find lighting that didn’t make it look lit. Since the walls of the box were reflective, a lot of our lighting related to placement and how a particular angle would put a shine on the surface. We used a lot of Astera tubes for the box because we could move those around and shape the light more easily than we could with more specular sources. Finding a color that didn’t look like anything was also a challenge. We came up with a steel green that felt like it was coming from nowhere, very magical. As they entered, we had Asteras on all four sides inside the box, as there was a soffit to tuck them into this 10-by-10-foot area, before they entered the infinity corridor. 

PF: Because the box and the infinite corridor are completely devoid of windows or lighting sources, I knew it was going to be a challenge for the DP’s. I did set out to help as much as I could, having protruding corners to the box that add visual style and help break up the simple cube shape, but also provide a way to wild all walls in and out as needed. Something similar happened with the box’s ceiling; the raised element on top is not only visually pleasing but could be easily removed and replaced with a soft lighting panel or another camera port. All of these elements were then recreated along the infinite corridor.

JL: Production had started way ahead of me. But there were still a lot of things to figure out, like lighting the box and handling the “infinity” aspect. The basic shape had been determined by Patricio and the producing team. I was given an opportunity to amend the corridor. There were changes to doors and colors – they wanted it dark but to be able to see something. There are lighter values on the walls and the floor so they aren’t all just black. We shot tests to find a good balance of dark but not invisible.

JG: When I’m too old to keep on shooting and start to teach, one of my quizzes will revolve around our issue on this series: “How do you shoot a black man in an endless black corridor with no light?” [Laughs.] We benefited from the corridor construction, since it was metal, permitting us to attach battery-powered LED lights magnetically for fill and other needs. That was a real savior. We also had a little green top light coming down from above – it was that color because we needed to avoid blue out of the feel of daylight it might give off, and there was no day source that penetrated down to this chamber. I also changed up the lenses for scenes of the characters entering the box and going down the corridor, using uncoated Zeiss Super Speeds to give a slightly different look and feel. That came through, especially with the way their lantern spilled light on the walls and flared.  

MK: The lantern lamp Joel’s character carries took a lot of design work from props as well as our fixtures team. It had to look interesting while remaining a practical lighting source, and the build had to prove durable since it got beaten up a lot. We also didn’t want to have to go the old route of running cords down an actor’s leg to power it, so it was battery-powered and fully wireless. Joel Edgerton should get a credit in the lighting department, along with his other credits on the project. He is a genius with a flashlight.  

JL: We had hidden lights in the lantern base on the off-camera side so it projected more light than you got just from the bulb. Plus it had to pass muster with Blake, who didn’t want to have to give the character six flashlights and twelve lanterns. Our dimmer board operator could regulate the amount of light coming out of the lantern as well as how much illumination came from the base.

JG: In Episode 4, Alice Braga [Amanda] is freaking out in the corridor and starts running away. We used an e-car, building a ramp for it so we could pace her, and added a light alongside the camera to accentuate the effect of the lantern she is holding and how it registers on these weird dark walls as she sprints along this 80-foot stretch of tunnel, which was extended much further with green screen.

Unit Publicist Ernie Malik: We only considered using the box and corridor for EPK talent interviews, because each of those connecting sets are characters in-and-of themselves in the story. We could have also considered Patricio Farrell’s handsome Dessen house stage set for interviews, but it is crucial to shoot video interviews on the sets that best represent, thematically, the arc of the story. When planning the media marketing day, which we scheduled two weeks before wrap, I discussed my idea of the Box and Corridor with Blake Crouch and Executive Producer Don Kurt. Not only did they both embrace the idea, but Don suggested having Jeff Greeley assist in lighting the set so we could simulate the exact look as it appears in the story (as Jeff established the lighting in the episodes that introduces these sets). I also had a fantastic collaborator for EPK footage and interviews on this project in [Chicago-based] Camrin Petramale. I hope when audiences see the interviews, they will be wowed by the backdrops and how Camrin created the lighting to help bring these sets to life.

EPK Videographer Camrin Petramale: John and Jeff did such a wonderful job creating a really unique environment, and a diverse tone for the show. I was excited to get a chance to light the interviews in a space with such an established look.

Worlds Apart

JL: We had lengthy discussions about when or whether we should tip-off the audience to whether we were in the “real” original world or just one that was very close to that one. There are times Joel’s character goes out of the box and he is clearly not where he wants to be, like the apocalyptic version and the snow version. But the times when he steps out and thinks he has made it back – we wanted the audience to be fooled right along with him. They’d come to the realization at the same time he did. But then there were a few times when we wanted the audience to know instantly that this was a wrong turn. When they go to the utopian world in one of my episodes, I wanted it to be clear that this was a visually very different environment. It used to be that you’d be asked about your previous work that involved visual effects, but now it is practically a given. I’ve dealt with VFX in a pretty big way on films going back to Pleasantville and Legion, and in television with Pan-Am. I think the best relationship to establish is one where both teams acknowledge the strengths and weaknesses and work out a plan that maximizes the former while being realistic about the budget.  

JG: The first two episodes I did were 4 and 5, which featured these wildly different worlds with extremes of water, ash, and winter. The water world required a huge tank that we dropped the box into. It took three days to shoot what was on screen for maybe a minute and required a whole gantry setup, plus an underwater housing for the VENICE. When they went to the snow world, we had to build the top half of a house and then put it up against a hill. Shooting on a lake in a freezing Chicago winter presented its own challenges. Ash World was shot in Gary, Indiana. We shot the ash, while the big building collapse VFX stuff was planned out with an art department person who was good with the computer. He made up a previs so we’d know how the actors would be running and what the camera would need to do to capture them against green screen in a way that would allow VFX to deliver the big visual moments in frame at the right time. We storyboarded all the VFX stuff. That running shot was done from an E-car again, on a black arm using a Ronin. So we were racing ahead of them to keep the framing right. There was a particularly difficult shot later on, where they step out of the box and walk through a building where the roof has collapsed and go out onto the street. We used a small Technocrane to do this as a oner, including when they pass a revolving door.

EM: Ash World was one of the alt-realities Joel Edgerton’s character finds himself in during his odyssey to get back to his true life, and it was a dystopian version of Chicago. Without denigrating the Northwest Indiana town where we shot, its downtown has a battered, almost war-torn look that Location Manager Nick Rafferty presented to Patricio Farrell and Blake Crouch as an option to stage this eye-popping sequence. To create the ashen look, the show’s set decorators, led by Helen Britten, working with the SFX team, used the same compound many productions utilize when dusting a snowbound street. Here, the environmentally friendly material is gray, not white, thus giving the impression that Chicago has been consumed in ash. These types of scenes are ideal for BTS video coverage because it’s an exterior location that allows Camrin multiple shooting angles to capture the scene. Also, as soon as we arrived on the Downtown Gary street, we were blown away by the look created by Farrell’s art department to visualize this apocalyptic reality, which also included an abandoned bank building also buried in ash.

A-Camera/Steadicam Operator Ron Baldwin: There were certain types of moving shots that were hard to pull off when the dolly grips were carrying the Ronin. The issue is the way the Ronin interprets some unwanted movement, which I then have to counter, doing things backward to keep those moves from showing up. We were super lucky with our directors, a couple of whom really understood the camera. Alik Sakharov (ASC) – who was a director of photography on The Sopranos – directed our last two episodes, and he had a fantastic eye for framing in what was almost a Fincher-esque way. Alik didn’t do a lot of coverage but staged these meaningful masters that could get you feeling stressed over when operating. Because the shots were so ambitious, you get to thinking, “Am I going to get fired if this doesn’t work?!” But in support of such challenges, the crew in Chicago was amazing. There was nothing my Focus Puller Chris Wittenborn couldn’t do, while Key Grip Ed Titus was so far ahead of the game on everything that we never had to wait around.  

JL: The AC’s on this series were extraordinary, and, overall, the crew was as strong as any I’ve worked with. Our A-camera operator and gaffer came from Los Angeles, while our great key grip, Ed Titus, was a local Chicagoan. Second AC on A-camera, Eric Arndt, and Second AC Shannon DeWolfe are based in Chicago; Second AC on B-Camera Jonathan Kurt and B-Camera Operator Scott Thiele are also local to Chicago.

EM: I always get to know my Local 600 brothers and sisters on a show, even though my craft is publicity, not camera. I also ensure that the BTS video crew are IATSE union members, especially the EPK videographer. I have worked with a half-dozen Local 600 videographers here in Chicago, and they’re all great shooters. I did not know about Camrin before Dark Matter. Not only do I look forward to reuniting with him on a future project, but I would highly recommend him for other productions. Chicago has a wealth of camera talent. Maybe not in the same volume as one might find in bigger markets, but the locals whom I know and have worked with over the last four decades are as talented and as dedicated as any in the industry! This was my second project with Director of Photography John Lindley; the other was back in 2006 called Reservation Road (which also starred Jennifer Connelly). It was a joy not only to watch John ply his art and craft, but also to chat offset with him about union matters and career war stories, especially Field of Dreams, a film on which I would have loved to have worked.

Sliding Doors

JG: Our amazing color timer at Picture Shop was Pankaj Bajpai, who did a seamless job. He was dealing with multiple vendors and with elements coming in at separate times. When I was doing my look, it might be based on an image that has only a third of the total VFX in place. So I had to trust Pankaj to carry that through when the rest came in, and he always did.

JL: What Joel [Edgerton] did was quite extraordinary. Keeping track of which version of the character he was playing must have taken enormous concentration. He makes it look easy, but believe me, it’s not. When his character gets taken, we at first planned to have somebody else playing the kidnapper. But since both of them are Joel’s characters, he wanted to play the masked kidnapper as well as “our” character. How any given person moves is often a combination of very specific motions and actions, but we don’t necessarily tally up all the details in our minds. This made it more complex to shoot, but to his credit, Joel was right – his performance is very physical, and he sells it all the way through with every different version of his character. 

RB: Watching Joel’s performances – plural – was one of the joys of this project. It was a kind of homecoming, as Jeff and I both operated back on Season 1 of Grey’s Anatomy. I’d worked with John on Hunters as well as collaborating with him on safety issues through the union. I’ve always admired John’s dedication to this immensely important issue; he has always made his sets a safe place and will speak up more than any other DP I’ve ever worked with if something isn’t right or has the potential to go wrong. It’s such a pleasure having a boss who is so concerned about everybody’s well-being. Along those same lines, I remember how Blake was on set every single day, always writing. Even with all the pressures of being a first-time showrunner, he remained the nicest guy. 

Local 600 Crew

Main Unit
Directors of Photography: John Lindley, ASC, Jeff Greeley
A-Camera Operator: Ron Baldwin
A-Camera 1st AC: Chris Wittenborn
A-Camera 2nd AC: Eric Arndt
B-Camera Operator: Scott Thiele
B-Camera 1st AC: Hunter Whalen
B-Camera 2nd AC: Jonathan Kurt
Loader: Shannon DeWolfe
Utility: Chris Summers
Digital Utility: Brianna Cokley
Still Photographer: Sandy Morris
Unit Publicist: Ernie Malik
EPK Videographer: Camrin Petramale

2nd Unit
Director of Photography: William Rexer, ASC
Operators: Dave Chameides, SOC, Lawrence “Doc” Karman
1st ACs: Paul DeMarte, Betsy Peoples
2nd ACs: Joey Richardson, Melissa Pratt
Drone Operators: Michael Monar, Charles Anderson