Those responsible for ‘The Last of Us’ knew very well that several scenes in the series were going to be very dark, but they did not want to make the same mistake made first by ‘Game of Thrones’ and later by ‘The House of Dragon’ . Eben Bolterdirector of photography for the next three episodes of the series on HBO Max was well aware of this and has now explained the techniques he used to avoid this problem.
The limitations are obvious
Bolter has spoken with Slashfilm about the challenge of achieving something like this in a series in which lighting sources are quite limited by the particularities of this universe. On this specific point, the cinematographer comments the following:
The obvious limitations of “The Last of Us” have to do with light sources. When there is electricity, it is through generators, it is a precious commodity and electricity is a finite resource in this world.
You have to deal with 20 year old fixtures, shoddy light bulbs, and little electricity when you have it. The rest of the time you’re going to have to deal with natural light, so basically you’ve got the sun, you’ve got the moon, you’ve got lightning.
Maybe you have a fire, but there aren’t many motivations for light sources, you know? It was a lot of conversations about, ‘How can we create a cinematic set? How can we use the elements we have?
That led him to ask this question: “How can we create an environment that feels totally real, like we’ve just arrived and that’s the way it is, but is totally controlled so that we can shoot in it all day without ever changing?“. The solution he came up with was the following:
I knew that as long as it had a strong backlight and a very soft, subtle toplight, it was always going to look dark and moonlit, but we were always going to have definition so we could see what’s going on and the characters. Talk about “How dark is too dark?” it is somewhat subjective. But we wanted to present a moonlight where you could objectively see what’s going on. That was important to us.
For my part, the question that remains is if they will have also taken into account the compression suffered by the episodes on HBO Max and how that later affects the definition of the image. We won’t take long to find out, because the first episode with Bolter’s photography premieres this coming Sunday. Shortly after we will also know if her amazing success continues to grow.
In Espinof: