Today I will break down some scenes from the series The Handmaid’s Tale, created by Bruce Miller. These breakdowns are based on information I found on the internet. Still, I also had the chance to speak with the cinematographer Colin Watkinson, who worked as a cinematographer for the first season, and he was kind and gracious to give me the plans for the last two scenes.  Let’s get started!

SCENE N°01

I did my research; as you already know, if you read the previous article, I follow almost every channel that talks about cinematography on YouTube, and one day I came across an outline show given by Indy Mogul, and they talked about this scene. I will summarize everything they talked about regarding the setting of this scene.

Colin Watkinson: “Not only we had the sunlight coming through the window, but we also got our ambient, and then we’ve got our background to light as well. Just for that, just for the window bit, we’ve got those three things to light.”

Here, they used a 10K Molebeam.

“It’s basically what comes through the window. We took a long time to get the right flavor in beams. We would net some of them, and we would chop down the amount of light onto the blind there, so it was just the right amount of light, and the blind didn’t burn too much.”

So what about the ambient light?

“We got another window on the right. We had light coming in from that window to create the amount of ambient in the room. Even though you don’t even see that window, that’s where the ambience comes from. And then the right amount of atmosphere to get that feeling….” 

Here the atmosphere he mentioned is the use of haze so that the beam light emitted by the 10K molebeam is visible. And it’s not over yet, and there are a few more.

“And then there be another 12k bouncing into a white flat on the left-hand side… Also, every single window had a sky panel on top here as well. Every Window had a Skypanel so we could make a skylight.”

Here’s a complete lighting plan to illustrate them all:

SCENE N°02

For this scene, Colin Watkinson was kind enough to give me the setup. As with the first scene, they had three things to light; the first was for the background, i.e., the windows, the house, namely the room tone, and then the actress.

For the windows, they chose two 20K mole beams, thus imitating the sun.
For the room tone, they bounced an Arri L10 on the ceiling; it’s pretty basic but efficient.
Since there is this flame on the right side of the screen, they technically had to light the actress so that it was this flame that lit her up. To do this, they used the Skypanel LED with the flame effect.

To add fill light, Colin Watkinson used the technique called Book Light. An Arri L10 bounced off a reflective surface and then diffused with an LCD grid (8×8 Midgrey), so why Grey Diffusion and not White? Colin Watkinson gives us the following answer:

“Because I knew I wanted to take it, keep it down, and I just found that when I use a lot of white diffusions, there’s a lot of blooming, and I do a lot of work in trying to control the amount of white spill that goes everywhere.….”

Here’s a complete lighting plan

SCENE N°03

Here we have a shot that is quite spectacular, if I may say so. This is called an establishing shot which indicates where and when the scenes take place. This is usually the most challenging shot to light, but of course, it all depends on the location and the context you want to convey to your viewers.

To get here, they used three 20K mole beams through the windows. And as you already know, for the rays emitted by the mole ray to be visible, they used the power of haze, a lot of haze. It’s so unique because it’s like the sun does everything. In any case, I am amazed by this shot. Here’s a quick diagram

I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you are new to the world of cinematography and want to learn a lot more, here are some books that helped me to learn cinematography without going to film school.

Save this article for reference and share it with your cinematographer friends so they can learn. Thank you!

See you soon for a new episode. Tchaouuuuu !!!