It’s a good thing that “Adolescence” and “The Studio” aren’t competing head to head for boldly filming every episode as one continuous shot: It’d be like comparing apples to oranges.
The Netflix limited series and Apple TV+ half-hour series are both favored to win Creative Arts Emmys for cinematography. But while Apple TV+’s Hollywood satire instills high anxiety, Netflix’s psychological crime drama, created by Jack Thorne and star Stephen Graham, which explores misogynist violence and cyberbullying, thrums with dread.
The four-episode series finds 13-year-old Jamie (Owen Cooper) arrested for the murder of classmate Katie (Emilia Holliday) and progressively reveals the tragic fallout. The continuous-shot technique, with the lightweight, unconventional Ronin 4D camera, puts us right beside the characters. We’re along for the ride, following them and surveying the surroundings with documentary-style realism.
“The camera is an exact mirror of what the characters are going through at any time,” said cinematographer Matthew Lewis. “And that’s really critical to making a one-shot feel like it is part of the language of the show and not a gimmick. For the audience, it acts as a remedy for our terrible attention spans by not cutting.”
Director Philip Barantini wanted it to be totally immersive: “By throwing the audience on a journey in real time for one hour, nonstop, and then pulling them back out again, we wanted [them] to feel like they were really experiencing it and living it, and they can’t take their eyes off the screen.” Achieving this ambition was a massive undertaking, requiring three weeks of rehearsals and meticulous planning in terms of logistics, timing and flow. Shooting primarily at a studio facility in England’s West Yorkshire region, each episode took five days to complete with a minimum of two takes per day. Coordinating the blocking from one room to another while maintaining a video feed so everyone could see what was happening on camera the whole time was a daily concern.
Episode 2, for which cinematographer Lewis was nominated, was the most technically complex. That’s because it takes place in Jamie’s mazelike school, where detectives Bascombe (Ashley Walters) and Frank (Faye Marsay) go searching for the murder weapon and motive. This was filmed at the nearby Minsthorpe Community College secondary school, with 350 students wrangled from room to room during summer vacation.
“Just in terms of the geography, the location that we span was worrying,” Lewis said. “Initially, we were going to use a much larger area of that school, and then in rehearsing and walking through the space, there was too much to cover and not enough material to cover it. So then it was a redesign of the whole school in terms of the route that we take through it.”
It was up to Thorne to rewrite the script to fit the new school route while peeling back the layers of what influenced Jamie. “It was about the school’s [institutional] chaos and how it failed him, and where Bascombe is taking us as we’re trying to tell this story,” he explained.
The three standout scenes are when Katie’s grieving best friend, Jade (Fatima Bojang), attacks Jamie’s friend, Ryan (Kaine Davis), for being part of the murder during a fire drill outside; Bascombe’s pursuit of Ryan when he flees the school after being asked about the murder weapon; and the ethereal drone shot that concludes the episode, surveying the town and landing on a close-up of Jamie’s dad, Eddie (Graham), who leaves flowers in honor of Katie at the murder site.
“The fire drill was a hard one to choreograph,” said Lewis, who operated the camera. “So we’re all moving backwards, and behind me there’s a grip spotting me and gently moving aside kids getting in the way. And just when the camera has to rush sideways with Jade before she punches Ryan in the face, it’s a quick move through gaps that we preformed in the crowd.”
For the chase, Lewis passed the camera through a classroom window to operator Lee David Brown, who ran after the actors. Lewis hopped onto a tracking vehicle and followed the action on a street with stunt vehicles. He then got the camera back from Brown and followed the actors into the dead-end alley, with the camera going into handheld simulation mode.
“There’s so much packed into such a small section, there’s so much to go wrong,” Lewis added. “And things did go wrong in other takes.”
Meanwhile, the drone shot, which was the brainchild of director Barantini, started out as a typical flyover but evolved into a close-up of Eddie thanks to the urging of executive producer Toby Bentley, who wanted Graham in the episode.
But first it needed testing. “I mounted the camera to the underside of a drone that was being held by two grips,” added Lewis. “Each of them had a side of the drone that came over my head. I clipped it into a mount underneath the drone.” It worked — once.
Yet on the day of the shoot, wind prevented the drone from taking off. They had one more shot on the last day of shooting, but it was still too windy in the morning.
“And then in the afternoon, it was like the heavens parted,” Barantini said. “It was the most beautiful day. So we did it. But we lost connection because it was too far away. So I sat in the monitor room sweating. And I got a call over the radio saying, ‘We got it!’ We came back and watched the footage and it’s what you see in the episode.”
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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