I also changed the lenses because I wanted to keep the retro feel, the dystopian future, but still retro feel. I chose slightly different lenses to give me a wider vision feeling. I talked to my director, Michael Dinner, and we talked about how sometimes, as brilliant as season one was, it was a little theatrical and a little presentational. Here's the silo, here's the silo, here's the silo…. So what you want to do is stop worrying about the silo. It's incredible and it's in the back of every shot. We wanted to make it more intuitive. There was much more action to come. The beginning of episode one is a straight up battle. Apple has released the first five minutes on Apple. It actually stops at a very critical point, but you can tell it's the previous world of the other Silo 17.
We still wanted to see the scope and scale. As a cameraman you have to understand something very unusual: the silo is vertical. When we photograph things, we go outside, everything is horizontal. So as a cameraman you think horizontally, you frame the skyline, you frame the buildings. But in the silo, it's all up there and it's all down there, but it doesn't exist. Some of the set exists, but you have to go, oh, okay, what can I see if I point the camera here, what will VFX brilliantly give me? What can I see down there? So that was another big discussion.
Ars Technica: When you talk about wanting to make it more visceral, what does that mean specifically in a cinematic context?
Baz Irvine: It's just such a beautiful word. Season one had an almost European aesthetic. It was a lot of beautiful, slowly developing recordings. Of course it was world building. It was the first time the silo appeared on screen. So as a filmmaker you have a certain responsibility to give the audience an idea of where you are. Season two, we know where we stand. Well, not at the other silo, but we'll find out. For me, this role meant that I was not the head of the action. So with Rebecca Ferguson's character Juliet, we discover what she sees in her, rather than showing it up front. We try to be a point of view, almost in hand. When she runs, we run with her. When she tries to smash her helmet, we are very much with her.