Behind the Scenes: The Acolyte goes old school to capture original Star Wars grit

The production of recent Star Wars TV spin-offs have taken different paths. While The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett, and Ahsoka were filmed largely on Industrial Light & Magic’s StageCraft video wall, Andor was filmed at Pinewood and locations throughout the UK. That’s the route taken by The Acolyte too in a bid, it seems, to capture the pre-CGI analogue quality of the original films.

“It was decided very early on that The Acolyte was not going to be a Volume show,” explains Chris Teague who photographed four of the season’s eight episodes. “Sets and locations would fit really well with an aesthetic that was a little bit more handmade, if you will. More textural, less glossy and clean, basically.”

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This is Teague’s first foray into the Star Wars universe, as it is for series showrunner Leslye Headland with whom he shot episodes of Netflix drama Russian Doll. He is a fan, though, and like many, he reveres The Empire Strikes Back as the best of the franchise’s features.

“I remember having this distinct feeling as a kid watching how it ends on this downbeat note which was striking and surprising to me,” he says. “I didn’t know you could tell a story that way.

“Plus, I just loved the look of it. It’s this futuristic world but at the same time, everything feels very rough around the edges.

“The colour palette resonated too. The original films tend to have this mix of organic neutral tones, browns and greens, and then very solid washes of colour for the lightsabers or, as at the end of Empire Strikes Back, with strong oranges and intense blues. Those colours contrast with each other and it’s a palette Leslye and I wanted to bring to The Acolyte.”

Shared vision

Eschewing virtual production, they shot on sets at Shinfield Studios in Berkshire and Arborfield Studios, Wokingham. Teague talks of a close collaboration between camera and art department to structure the sets so that they could be lit and photographed properly.

“When you walk onto a show with a bunch of different department heads who you’ve never worked with before and who come from very different experiences you just never know creatively if you’re going to end up on the same page.”

With production designer Kevin Jenkins and second unit director Christopher Cowan (Teague calls him “action designer”) the DOP felt they were all working towards the same goal.

“The enthusiasm level was through the roof. My camera operators were just so excited to have been part of the experience. People just love Star Wars. So to end up able to be a part of it was a lifelong goal for a lot of people.”

In episode 1 there’s a dream sequence where Osha (Amandla Stenberg) meets her twin sister Mae and the environment around her changes from snowy landscape to dark forest to forest on fire. It’s hard to believe it was created in-camera and not using LED walls.

“A lot of the transitions in those dream scenes are done simply through editing, or through match cuts, where one camera’s traveling left to right and then it cuts with another camera, traveling left to right. There’s also a beautiful visual effects shot where we transition from the snowy planet of Carlac to a forest at night. But we also used very old school methods of transitioning. At the end of that sequence, when Osha is looking at the younger version of her sister, the world goes white behind her. For that we used a piece of white gauze and dimmed the lights so when there’s no light on it, it basically looks invisible. As we bring the lights up on it, it illuminates to create an in-camera effect.”

They also used locations in Wales and the Portuguese island of Madeira, chosen for its dramatic and distinctive terrain. “We could be on one side of the island shooting one planet and on the beach on the other side shooting another planet the next day.”

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Martial arts

The fight scenes were designed to blend familiar Star Wars action with Asian martial arts – dubbed Force Fu. Fight choreography was planned in a 3D environment then put into a 3D model of the set and virtually photographed.

“We iterate the virtual photography of the scene to the point where we have a pre-visualization of the whole action sequence. We knew cut-to-cut exactly what we were going for. That didn’t mean we couldn’t modify things to some extent on set. We’d make micro-adjustments to camera, or put on a slightly different lens to amp up the look as much as possible.

Some scenes were storyboarded top to bottom based on artwork by storyboard artist Jim Cornish. “A lot of times with storyboards you do end up deviating from them more than virtual previz because they’re a little bit more atmospheric.”

“For other scenes, when the sets were built, Leslye and I would go onto the set with our stand-ins and we shoot photographs of every setup so we could see what our backgrounds would be and how the blocking would work out.”

Lucasfilm were open to camera testing with Teague opting to shoot with Sony Venice 2, a camera on which he shot multiple episodes of Disney+ comedy Only Murders In The Building.

“There are so many excellent cameras out there that make fantastic images which means you kind of can’t go wrong in your choice.”

He paired the large format sensor with anamorphic lenses “because that just felt like the language of Star Wars.”

The Arri Alfas are a 2x squeeze anamorphic glass modified to deliver “an exceptionally crisp central image” but with a focus fall off around the edges which Teague liked.

“Being able to modulate the depth of field with large format, where you could really pull backgrounds slightly out of focus and give them that kind of magical anamorphic look was really helpful and I think attributed a lot to the look of the show.”

Light work

Teague lit the sets as naturalistically as possible working with LEDs for convenience and flexibility.

“For day interiors the lights tend to look more realistic the further away from the camera you can put them. For some sequences including the opening episode’s cantina sequence, we relied a lot on old school Tungsten lighting and arrays of smaller focussed Wendy Lights. When you put a group of them together they created a beautiful beam of sunlight that has this great quality of being both kind of hard and punchy and spread out at the same time. That was something that my gaffer Jonny Franklin introduced me to and was an essential component to the look of that scene.”

Episode four plays out as a race against the night as Osha and a crew of Jedi hunt for Mae through the jungle terrain of Wookiee planet Khofar. The daylight lowers until it ends up as a setting sun.

“That was a really fun effect to create on a stage. We put two Tungsten 20K lights up on cranes and created a sunset effect live in-camera. That’s something I had never done before, but I felt it worked beautifully.”

The overall ethos of Teague’s work is ‘less is more’. “When we move the camera, it is motivated,” he says. “If we don’t need to move the camera, then we’re not going to. Hopefully that has a bigger impact on the audience. I think that that simplicity was very present in the original films.

“Star Wars is also about the ensemble, a team coming together with a common goal even though they come from different places with different motivations,” he says. “That was something we really focused on in the way that we framed our group shots and strove for dynamic group scenes that showed the effort behind the mission.”

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