00:00Hello, I'm Armando Salas.
00:01I'm the Director of Photography on the limited series Griselda.
00:05♪
00:15I heard that you like my product.
00:17We can make a lot of money together.
00:20Who is the one in charge?
00:24In my early conversations with Andy, the director,
00:27we wanted to create something very unique.
00:29The color science was actually based on Polaroids
00:31that we were taking in pre-production.
00:33And so I brought those Polaroids very early on
00:36to my colorist, Ian, at Light Iron,
00:39and we landed on a very aggressive,
00:45Polaroid-inspired, two-tone look for the late 70s,
00:49and a slightly broader color palette for the early 80s.
00:55Because the look was so aggressive,
00:56it was important for me to be viewing that on set.
00:59And so we lit to that LUT religiously.
01:02We treated it like a film negative.
01:04So by the time we got into final color,
01:06we weren't really discovering or playing
01:09with what the look will be.
01:10We'd all been living with it for a long time.
01:13It became much more about finesse
01:15and about focusing the eye and making sure
01:18the audience was brought along from scene to scene
01:21without any distractions.
01:22Beautiful.
01:23It was like shoving a fucking coca plant up my nose.
01:27We tested several cameras and landed on shooting
01:30the show on the RED V-Raptor.
01:33At the time, it was so new, we could actually only get one,
01:37and we tested the Panavision DXL-2 against it.
01:41And after some color tests and some color correction,
01:44we felt really confident in the matching.
01:47The majority of the show was shot single camera,
01:50so I'd say 70% was shot with the Raptor.
01:53We were going to be shooting in very tight
01:55practical locations throughout Los Angeles.
01:58The way we were going to be shooting most of the show
02:00was on a compact remote head,
02:02and so having a small form factor for the whole thing
02:05so my AC could take it from a dolly to a crane
02:09to a jib very quickly was important
02:11because it was an ambitious schedule.
02:14And we paired the camera with Panavision Panaspeed lenses,
02:19although I love many of the characteristics
02:22of older vintage lenses.
02:25I was going to be so aggressive with the lighting on Griselda
02:28that I needed the performance and the consistency
02:33of the Panaspeeds, but paired with how gentle
02:36they were on skin tones, it was the right balance for the show.
02:39I'll fucking drink to that.
02:42One of the things that made this episode so exciting
02:45was there were visual elements that were a motif
02:48woven into the fabric of the episode,
02:50and those are water and fire.
02:52The episode begins with her and her son in a car wash.
02:57There's no dialogue.
02:58She's just processing and reliving the betrayals of the past
03:02and everything that's put her at this point,
03:04and it's essentially washing the slate clean
03:08as she moves forward into this new chapter of her life
03:13as she goes to war with the dealers
03:16and essentially with the Ochoas.
03:18The last shot of that sequence is the blowers
03:20moving the water off the windshield,
03:22revealing her face and the title card for the episode.
03:26This sets us on our path to war.
03:29Just as Griselda believes she's getting the upper hand,
03:32her Miami home is burned to the ground,
03:34and several of her friends and confidants are killed.
03:37Dario shows up to see the house in flames
03:40and Griselda's best friends murdered on the front lawn.
03:43Unlike the cocaine scene,
03:44we couldn't actually burn this house to the ground,
03:46so we revealed the house with Dario pulling up in his car
03:51and bringing us into the scene.
03:53We placed dozens of maxi brutes,
03:56both in condors and on the ground,
03:58some in the shot to actually create
04:00the right interaction of light with the lens,
04:03creating a halation around some of the characters at key moments,
04:06and used a ton of smoke in the front lawn
04:09and then some real fire elements that were controllable
04:12without putting the house or any of the characters in danger.
04:16And then Andrew Sepperle, our VFX producer,
04:18was in charge of taking all those elements,
04:21the interactivity of the light, the color,
04:24and actually adding the majority of the fire to that scene.
04:31That night, a rainstorm begins that moves across several scenes,
04:36and it leads to one of my favorite shots of the episode.
04:39There's no dialogue.
04:40It's Dario telling Griselda that her friends have been killed,
04:44and it's her against the windows of her estate
04:47where she's holed up in with the rain coming down,
04:50and it's all just Sofia's performance and body language absorbing the news.
04:54As part of that rain sequence,
04:56she calls Rivi, who's hiding out in the California desert.
05:00It's the first time you see the motif kind of back and forth,
05:04especially in terms of color,
05:06because she's in her Palm Beach home at night,
05:09rain on the windows,
05:11and he's standing at the patio of his desert motel at sunset.
05:15So the sky is essentially the color of the fire,
05:18and she is crying.
05:21The water is a metaphor for tears, right,
05:24for her sorrow that she has brought this upon herself.
05:27And he's essentially giving her the courage to fight on,
05:30you know, to bring the fire back.
05:32That is what leads us to the moment
05:35when she decides that she's taking this all for herself,
05:38and she's going to continue to fight,
05:40and the bonfire of cocaine in essentially an empty pool,
05:45you know, to continue that back and forth between water and fire.
06:00So much of the story and Griselda's journey
06:03is this balance of being a mother and a caregiver
06:06and the importance of family,
06:07but also being essentially this ruthless drug kingpin,
06:11or that's what she aspires to be at this point.
06:13So much of that duality is dealt with
06:16both in color and in framing.
06:18So we do quite a bit of two-tone color,
06:22of gold and amber representing the glamour that she aspires for,
06:26and this kind of olive base that balances it out.
06:29In this episode, we get into more blues and greens
06:34that expand the palette,
06:35both to represent the shift in location
06:38as she hunkers down in this fort,
06:40essentially, you know, this defended home in Palm Beach,
06:43but also to show the expanded ambition.
06:46As she's laying in the sofa, she has her hand over her stomach
06:50because we've just found out that she's pregnant,
06:53and she's having her fourth child,
06:55and she's balancing the decisions
06:58she's making for her family against her ambition.
07:01We get our answer immediately
07:03when we see a giant mound of cocaine pallets
07:07in an empty swimming pool being doused with gasoline.
07:11This is all the drugs that she and her army of marielitos
07:14have stolen mid-shipment from the Ochoas,
07:17and she's about to burn it.
07:19-♪♪
07:22Earlier in this episode, when she's first finding
07:25the dynamics of how she's going to go about achieving her goals,
07:30the camera is much more fluid, much more roving,
07:33feeling the presence of those around her.
07:36By the time we get to this moment,
07:38the camera work becomes more centered.
07:43The world revolves around her.
07:45There's very little movement other than the opening frame
07:48that shows the mound of coke
07:50with gasoline being poured over it
07:52and the bottom of this large swimming pool.
07:55So we're on a 30-foot techno crane
07:58moving across the cocaine and revealing the scene
08:01and showing just how many people are there.
08:03And Dario, her partner, her lover, and her muscle,
08:09who's advised her to not take this route,
08:11you can see he's diminished in the background
08:13or he's off to the side.
08:15So it's a very operatic moment, and it's a rebirth by fire.
08:21She's essentially burning down the power structure
08:24that exists at that time,
08:27and she's establishing a new power in Miami.
08:31This is the moment, essentially, where she becomes the godmother.
08:42Andy and I were adamant to do as much of it practically as possible.
08:47And a fire that big presents some challenges,
08:51obviously from a safety standpoint.
08:53Everyone around the pool in proximity to the fire was a stunt player.
08:57And we were shooting from a techno crane,
08:59so there was no camera personnel close to the fire.
09:02But we still wanted a rather large fire, 10, 12, 15 feet, if we could have it.
09:06And so in our conversations with our department at Special Effects,
09:10we came up with the ability to reproduce it as quickly as possible
09:14without having to rebuild the mound of coke.
09:17So all of those what looks like thousands of kilos of coke
09:20are all essentially made out of metal
09:24so that we could pipe a gas fire in, turn it on,
09:27bring it up to the correct height,
09:30and not have to worry about fumes and gases
09:33and replacing everything that burned inside the pool.
09:36It's just a quick cleanup.
09:38The lighting challenges that that creates is that as she's giving her speech,
09:41the fire hasn't kicked on yet.
09:43And when it does, there's going to be a dramatic change in exposure,
09:47and of course the flame is going to burn very bright.
09:50So we built up quite a bit of exposure for our night exterior.
09:53I think I had an ND9 in the camera,
09:56so we were using quite a bit of light out there.
09:59It looked like we were shooting night for day, actually to the eye,
10:02so that I didn't have to rebalance once the flames kicked on.
10:05Even still, the fire burns very hot,
10:08even with that much neutral density in front of the lens.
10:11The only shot that essentially is CG fire is the overhead drone,
10:15and that was due to the downdraft of the drone
10:18shooting the final shot in the sequence.
10:21And so we had to recreate the interactive lighting for that moment.
10:25So the mound of metal cocaine bricks was removed from the pool,
10:30and we put in four 12-light Maxi Brutes in a circle,
10:36run through the dimmer board on a flicker pattern.
10:39And just referencing our previous shots,
10:42we just matched the color intensity and frequency of the flicker as best we could,
10:47and it all blends in pretty well.
10:57Cinema is a very collaborative art form,
11:00and so we're constantly refining between departments.
11:05And a sequence like this requires both the craft and artistry, and also logistics.
11:14I have this idea in my mind of what the images will be,
11:17and I judge success by how close to that ideal we get.
11:22With Griselda, we got there more often than not,
11:25so I think we're all very pleased with the way it turned out.
11:43© transcript Emily Beynon
