'Severance' director and EP Ben Stiller breaks down the opening scene from Season 2 alongside star Adam Scott. Ben provides an explanation of how they captured the precise movement and momentum using a bolt arm, working across 4 or 5 months for the scene that looks so seamless, and all the running–and Gatorade–that Adam needed to take on.
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00:00I always knew when someone would come up to me and say,
00:02what was your favorite color of Gatorade again?
00:05And I would just know like,
00:06we're doing some more running tomorrow.
00:08Hi, I'm Ben Stiller.
00:09I'm Adam Scott.
00:10And this is Notes on a Scene for Severance season two.
00:19This is the first scene of season two,
00:22picking up any mark,
00:23the second after he said she's alive.
00:25And when he comes back to consciousness
00:27and he's in the elevator at Lumen
00:29with this new information.
00:37I remember asking you like,
00:39what do you think your first instinct would be?
00:40Yeah, and I just thought I would just run
00:43and try to find Miss Casey,
00:45who is Gemma in the outside world.
00:47Tell her this information, see if she knows anything.
00:50I don't even think consciously has a plan of any sort.
00:53He just needs to find her.
00:55That was sort of the impetus for the idea of the shot.
00:57And then it immediately made me think
00:58what we could do sort of an homage
01:00to our first Innie shot with Mark in season one,
01:04where we meet him on the inside
01:05and he walks through all the hallways to get to MDR.
01:08So we thought, why don't we do like a souped up,
01:11you know, version of this,
01:12running as fast as he can
01:14through all the crazy hallways of Lumens.
01:16So basically this is like our Zali move
01:18that we used to show the transition
01:21from Innie to Outie or Outie to Innie.
01:23If it's Outie to Innie,
01:25the camera's zooming out on Adam while it's pushing in
01:29to end up with a wider lens image of Adam.
01:31If it's going from Innie to Outie,
01:34it's starting in on a wider lens
01:37and going out and zooming in.
01:38So the camera's pushing back,
01:39but the lens is getting tighter.
01:41This is not something that we invented.
01:43Alfred Hitchcock used it in Vertigo.
01:45Steven Spielberg, one of the greatest shots
01:47in film history in Jaws.
01:49And then what Adam does with his eyes.
01:52How do you do that with your eyes?
01:53I just roll them back.
01:54That was actually your idea.
01:55We did a lot of trial and error trying to figure out
01:58how exactly to portray this transition
02:01from Outie to Innie or vice versa.
02:03You had the idea of the eyes maybe rolling back
02:05and that seemed to work.
02:06And we just eventually found it.
02:08And there's your change in your sort of a physicality
02:11from the Innie to the Outie or the Outie to the Innie.
02:14The difference, I guess, between Innie and Outie Mark
02:16is where we started was Innie Marks
02:18is like two and a half years old.
02:20Outie Mark has kind of the weight of the world
02:22on his shoulders and is just in this period of his life
02:25where he's sort of more kind of weighed down and-
02:28Like me.
02:29Doesn't have great posture.
02:30I'm more like Outie Mark.
02:31Like me, too.
02:32I have terrible posture.
02:33And then Innie Mark is kind of brand new to the world
02:37and believes in this company and just is sort of all,
02:41everything's forward thinking.
02:42And every time you would do the transition
02:44from Outie Mark to Innie Mark,
02:45I'd always kind of like do it.
02:47You would?
02:47Yeah, because I realized I have such bad posture.
02:49["In the Hall of the Mountain King"]
02:55There was this piece of equipment called the bolt arm
02:57that we had actually experimented with in season one
03:00to do the severed transition
03:01and decided it was too big and kind of cumbersome.
03:04And it's a motion control robotic arm
03:06that can really do these precise moves with the camera.
03:09And it's a very big piece of equipment,
03:12but it has a long arm.
03:13And so basically this opening shot on Adam,
03:16if I was the base of the bolt arm,
03:17I'm here and it has an arm like this
03:20and it kind of goes around behind Adam
03:21as he walks out and pushes behind him.
03:23It's huge.
03:24Yeah, and it's scary because once it's programmed,
03:27you can't really stop it.
03:29So there are a lot of safety checks you do beforehand.
03:32We had to rehearse it many, many times.
03:34So I knew exactly where to be at any given moment
03:37because this thing would just go right through.
03:39We don't like to use visual effects too much in the show
03:42in terms of creating backgrounds and environments,
03:44but we needed to for this shot
03:46because of the bolt arm taking up all this space.
03:48So really like everything you see here behind Adam,
03:52this is all computer generated.
03:54And really when he comes out,
03:56that's all green screen behind him.
03:59And then the bolt arm's going around Adam's head here
04:02and then pushing behind him.
04:04This is all real, but then here,
04:06all of this is all computer generated behind Adam also.
04:10And you did that because you needed that room?
04:12Because the bolt arm is over here
04:14and there's like a big piece of equipment the camera's on.
04:17So this all had to be recreated.
04:24Now right there is about where the transition happens
04:26to the next piece of the shot.
04:28So now we're on this sort of pogo stick gimbal
04:32that we had a great camera operator who was strong and tall
04:37and was running, chasing you down the hallway.
04:39Why did you choose that rather than Steadicam?
04:41It's just too hard to run this fast with a Steadicam
04:44because the Steadicam's connected to the waist
04:47of the operator on a whole gyroscope arm.
04:50It's very cumbersome.
04:51So to run full speed, it's easier for a cameraman
04:55to hold a camera, a lightweight camera on a kind of a stick
04:59that he can just literally be running full speed,
05:02chasing you.
05:03And if it was the opposite, when he's running away from you,
05:07then he has to be holding it behind him.
05:09And he was going really fast.
05:15That's what Jeff Richman, our editor, called the Superman,
05:18where Mark opens up that.
05:19And we realized we had to pick a moment.
05:21At some point I had to unbutton the jacket.
05:23And you were like, just do it on that first straight hallway.
05:26We'll get it over with, it's gonna be a long run.
05:35The 10 or so different pieces of this shot
05:38were done across four or five months,
05:40depending on when in the schedule we could fit it in
05:42with our specific setup of the hallway sets,
05:46because we usually keep all the hallways completely intact.
05:49It's almost like you're in a real maze of hallways.
05:51Our set is very claustrophobic and weird that way.
05:54You often get lost on your way to set.
05:56When we figured out what the run was gonna be,
05:58we mapped it out on the sets that we have.
06:01Sat down with Jessica Lee Garnier, our cinematographer,
06:04and Jeremy Hindle, our production designer,
06:07and started to think about how we could devise a shot
06:10that would take Mark through all these different hallways,
06:13this maze of hallways that we've never seen, really,
06:15the route to wellness.
06:16And Jessica and I did overheads
06:19of what the different pieces of the run would be.
06:21Then we did what we call a pre-vis,
06:22which is sort of a rudimentary animation of the shot.
06:26The visual effects team and us
06:28and our cinematographer, everybody,
06:29we all break the shot up into as many pieces
06:32as we need to to complete it.
06:33We figure out, okay, for this part of the shot,
06:35there's no way we're gonna be able to use a real set.
06:37We're gonna have to pull out all those walls
06:40so we know we can't do that part
06:42until we have time to do that.
06:44So we'll do that in, you know, in February.
06:46And this part we can do next week
06:48because we already have the set.
06:49I always knew something was coming
06:51when someone would come up to me and say,
06:53wait, what was your favorite color of Gatorade again?
06:56And I would just know, like,
06:57okay, I guess we're doing some more running tomorrow.
07:00♪♪
07:04And now we're in POV and he swings around,
07:06again, on the pogo stick, pulling him right about here.
07:09It's gonna transition to this shot.
07:10So, like, this shot and this shot are different.
07:15But you can't tell because our VFX people
07:17made sure to, you know, fill it in in between
07:20but also not blur it so it feels like
07:22you're not noticing that it's a different shot.
07:24♪♪
07:28Get it!
07:30♪♪
07:35This is all real here.
07:37And then the second we come to right here,
07:41basically here now, this is all completely CG.
07:45That's right.
07:45Adam's running on a treadmill on a green screen stage
07:48with no set whatsoever.
07:49So the camera can actually get in front of him,
07:51but he's in place running on the treadmill.
07:52And I actually had a harness
07:54so I could be running as fast as possible.
07:57To match what you were doing in real life.
07:59Yeah, and also just to not make it look like
08:01you're on a treadmill because on a treadmill
08:03you start running at a set pace.
08:05But when you're running, even as fast as you can,
08:08your pace is constantly changing.
08:10And it's a little weird, little uncanny valley thing
08:13that a viewer, something would feel off
08:16and artificial about it if we hadn't
08:19kind of corrected for that.
08:20♪♪
08:29Now we're back on our bolt arm
08:31and the camera's going to do a crazy spin move around
08:34while Adam is countering, going the other way
08:36to create this sense of just like, you know, where are we?
08:39Now that bolt arm, before when I stop
08:42and kind of look around,
08:44then look the other way as the bolt arm's kind of,
08:46that took a while, I remember, to really perfect.
08:49And also it really helps just to do it over and over again
08:53because what I wanted to try and do
08:55and what I think we achieved was
08:57with that kind of whip around and looking,
08:59and then when I finally kind of whip around
09:01and try to launch off and actually start running,
09:04it felt like we really wanted some momentum
09:07to start happening and to have me and the camera
09:11kind of both be in sync to try and launch off together.
09:15And the speed that this machine on the track had to have,
09:18because it's all motion control,
09:20which means the computer controls it,
09:22to really ramp up to your speed of running,
09:25that getting that timing right takes a number of takes.
09:30Oh my God.
09:42Breaking the shot up into different sections
09:45was really important because once we had conceived
09:48of what it was gonna be,
09:49it was really all about the logistics
09:51of getting the shot done.
09:52There was a lot to shoot.
09:53It's like, well, why can't he just be running down,
09:55you know, a couple of hauls and turn around
09:57and then he's there?
09:58And we always felt that we really wanted
10:00to kick off the season in a way
10:03that would be exciting and fun
10:05and kind of give an indication
10:07of where we were going for season two.
10:08It almost felt like a side project to work on
10:11as we're making the season.
10:13It was all the more rewarding when we finished it
10:15and we kind of had our own little wrap party
10:19because it was like just a group of people
10:23broken off from the main crew to come work on this thing.
10:26So when we finally kind of wrapped it up,
10:28it was really fun.
10:29Yeah.
10:56There's a guy back there.
11:08It looks kind of like you, but not really.
11:14You can't see his face.
11:16The basis of this whole story is that
11:21Mark's emotional life and his, you know,
11:25trying to figure out how to become a whole person.
11:27And I think that's, you know,
11:30ultimately the goal of the show
11:32is to complete that journey with Mark.
11:34Yeah. And you know, the season two really
11:37kind of widens the scope of the show
11:40and widens the scope of the characters as well.
11:42Every character kind of goes through something new
11:46and kind of goes through a lot of things
11:49and kind of goes through something new
11:51and we learn more about each one of them.
11:53Yeah. And that's why I thought the shot
11:54was important to kick off the season
11:56because it felt like, all right,
11:58we're going to indicate to the audience
12:00that there's some new stuff happening.
12:03Yeah.