Tag: analog

The Secrets of Hillsong

The FX documentary series, The Secrets of Hillsong explores the scandals and criticisms of an American clout-priest and the Australian group’s religious founders he aligned with.

Our motivation for the concept and design of the episodic package came from the language of these franchised hype-churches, these digital revival tents. Where in the past spitting preachers were enough, now lights, lasers, LED panels and screens command the congregations.

We created a package primarily using in-camera, photographic effects. Real lasers, real smoke, real LED effects, real aberrations of light and lenses were captured and sequenced to deliver a predator and prey narrative, all in keeping with Sunday school traditions. Custom cut screens were intricately built to allow for novel transitions between cruciforms and live action plates. These screens echo the massive electronic onstage LED panels used by these church groups and also the low tech dividers of traditional church confessional booths. Further manipulations were performed with motorized acrylic and glass lens elements between live action plates and high output light setups. As the series exposes the charlatans as constructions, so too does this majority analog package we assembled for FX.

“You know there’s a lot of people wanting someone, to tell them what to do.”

Link to more stills, etc.

The Most Dangerous Animal of All

Beneath the outward facade of some families lay dark secrets. Gary Stewart’s family may have one of the darkest. Earlier this year we were kindly asked and tasked by folks at FX with reinterpreting the trope filled landscape of true crime series graphics for The Most Dangerous Animal of All. This four-part documentary based on Stewart’s best selling book of the same name focuses on the story of a man discovering the potential reality his own father was the notorious Zodiac killer.

We produced an episodic package composed of original photography and hand drawn ciphers, further manipulated with rips, tears, and abrasions to reinforce the menacing tone of the series.

Fortunately, for this project, the Impactist image archive was available to supply the needed textures and analog photography we would use to complete the package. Opportunities like this also reinforce what we feel is a good habit: to be continually making images and cataloging them for future needs.

Links to Stills and Credits.

AKA Jane Roe

The FX original documentary AKA Jane Roe has such an incredible range of focus, capturing it in an overall on-air package proves to be a specific challenge. Narrowly, this is a film about one woman’s story and how it affects an entire county. And yet zoomed out, this is a story concerning a country’s overall conversation about equality, choice, and internal politics. We appreciated the creative challenge this presented and the opportunity the kind folks at FX provided us.

Several concepts were explored with the final look being a photographic reinterpretation of imagery. We used unique and novel lensing techniques to recapture live action series footage and additional US Supreme Court location photography. Custom intermediate lenses crafted of polycarbonate and acrylic were created and combined with fast aperture primes to reinterpret and reframe sequences to be further manipulated via compositing and editing.

Links to Stills and Credits.