Heated Rivalry used green screens when they were unable to duplicate the scenery in Ontario. Two of the moments were the rooftop scene in 1x01 and the beach scene in 1x05.
📌 Studio 550 550 Evans Ave., Toronto ON (Etobicoke)
Cinematographer Jackson Parnell talks to American Cinematographer Magazine about how he did the lighting for the Sunset scene which was filmed on a VR wall stage just like I mentioned above.
The sunset shot was all done on the VR-wall stage. We looked through hundreds of options, trying to find an appropriate background plate. We couldn’t shoot our own, due to schedule and budgetary constraints, and we needed to find a plate that could last long enough to both carry the scene and the length of the credits, which was important to Jacob [Tierney, the show’s creator]. It also had to match the geography of where we were supposed to be, which was in cottage country in Quebec, Canada. We found a plate with the low sun coming through the trees on the left. We wanted to introduce more realistic lighting effects and aberrations into the image to make it look more like the real world; we worked to isolate the section of the background plate where the sun was strobing through the trees, and we paired that and pixel-mapped it to one of our Aputure Electro Storm XT26 LED lights that could strobe, matching the lights passing through the trees as we drove through it. As the vehicle moves through the tree-filled section of the road, the key light flashes as if it's the sun passing through the trees. To light the shot as a whole, I started by determining how much light I could get off the volume itself. Then, we brought a secondary LED wall in on the non-key side and played the plate closer to bring more of that interactive lighting in. An array of Vortexes provided back-lighting for the vehicle and the passengers, giving some separation from the wall, as well as sky and edge light. The primary key light — the Astera Storm — was pixel-mapped to basically wherever the sun was on the plate. An Arri SkyPanel S360-C provided some soft fill here and there, but most of it was played off the wall. I worked on the concept of pixel-mapping to the driving plate shot with Loreen Ruddock, our head lighting technician, and our lighting-board operator, Claire Wall, was excellent. Claire really made the show for us and was part of the reason we were able to move so fast and play with so much color. We collaborated with the team at Dark Slope in Toronto to create the volume-wall assets via Unreal Engine; that really enabled us to add scope to the series, because we didn’t have access to locations like Las Vegas, the beach in Tampa, or Sochi, Russia. I’ve found that one of the pitfalls of working with volumes is not having enough input on the Unreal Engine assets early on. On Heated Rivalry, I was adamant about working with the Unreal Engine team early in the design process, and during my prep period, I was lucky to have a lot of time to really develop everything to do with a scene — the textures, the lighting, the ambient occlusion. Kyle Brunet integrated his Pomfort Livegrade system into [Dark Slope’s] video processor so I could live-grade the wall as we were filming. That was the best decision we could have made. We were shooting massive page counts each day: Our Sochi ice-cream shop work, Tampa sunset scene, Vegas penthouse scene, driving interiors, Ilya's brothers' apartment work, hotel interiors, and airport-terminal work was all shot on the VR wall. So, decisions about the wall and the set, colors and lights needed to happen really quickly. With our method, I could make quick adjustments involving less people.
You can read Jackson's full interview HERE. To see the rest of my posts about the filming of Heated Rivalry, please check HERE.