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VARIETY TALK Full Frontal With Samantha Bee (TBS) ↑ The only nominated show hosted by a woman (it also earned a Critics’ Choice nom) landed a writing nom for the second straight year (it’s been 22 years since a variety show won without one). Two offshoots — Not the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and the show’s online incarnation — combined for another five. ↓ If voters reward a once-a-weeker, Last Week Tonight is the likeliest. Jimmy Kimmel Live! (ABC) ↑ Kimmel has been at the forefront of the cultural conversation in recent months, winning raves for hosting the Oscars (also Emmy-nominated) and for his emotional monologue about his son’s heart issues and the larger health care debate. Live!’s fourth consecutive series nom comes with two others and on the heels…
Behind the Headlines EMMY: THE RACE It has been a year filled with come-frombehind upsets — the Patriots won the Super Bowl, Moonlight took best picture and Trump is in the White House — but a new bar could be set if The Handmaid’s Tale wins the drama series Emmy and, in so doing, delivers Hulu a major series award before either of its higher-profile streaming competitors (Netflix and Amazon) manage to snag one. And you know what? It just might happen. Handmaid’s was adapted from Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel about a totalitarian society where infertility has skyrocketed and women are renamed and made to serve as sex slaves — or handmaids — for the ruling elite. (Elisabeth Moss stars as Offred, formerly June, who is one of those…
● COMEDY ● DRAMA ● LIMITED/TV MOVIE WHAT WAS THE MOST CHALLENGING SCENE TO PLAY? It was the moment of deciding against a plea bargain. [My character] Nasir is being pulled in different directions by his lawyers, prison inmates and his family. It’s the moment his own sense of agency truly emerges and does so at great risk. HOW DID YOU OVERCOME IT? It’s a tough thug to inhabit since the stakes are so astronomical; it’s hard to relate to. Thankfully I had interviewed lots of defense attorneys and prison inmates, as well as attended courtroom sessions, so I got a feel for what’s going through people’s minds. Ultimately, we make our biggest decisions with our gut, not our brains. With Naz I felt that this desire to break out…
Black Sails (STARZ) During a battle in this period story, one pirate gets tangled in the ship’s rigging and sinks beneath the sea. The live action was filmed in a shallow tank in South Africa that was only about 15 feet deep, but the narrative called for the sea to be much deeper. “We turned the camera on its side and moved it through the tank to make the actor appear to be sinking much deeper,” explains VFX supervisor Erik Henry. “We also had to have a virtual camera filming the CG background. This was complicated by the fact that up wasn’t up.” The actor was combined with the CG environment, which included digital cannonballs, blood, debris, the sea floor and lighting. The lead VFX house was appropriately named Important…
Genius (NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC) The entire production filmed in Prague, with additional locations in several surrounding cities and villages in the Czech Republic. So for locations that the production didn’t visit, visual effects representations were required. That included this fully CG shot of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate for the funeral of statesman Walther Rathenau. The entire location, as well as the people and funeral parade, were created by digital artists at UPP Prague. The work started with research, including historical photos of Brandenburg Gate as well as photos of a building in Prague that had to be added to the scene. “The actual location was too wide, so we cheated some to fit the frame,” explains VFX supervisor Eric Durst. The shot also involved a lot of crowd simulation, which started with…
More cinematographers with feature film credits are migrating to TV, as this year’s Emmy nominees for cinematography in a limited series or movie can attest. On HBO’s The Young Pope, for example, cinematographer Luca Bigazzi reteamed with director Paolo Sorrentino, for whom he has lensed films including Youth and The Great Beauty. The Young Pope was filmed mostly at real locations, primarily in Rome, with the production “striving to reconstruct the inaccessible Vatican complexities such as churches, chapels, secret rooms, offices but also gardens and wideopen spaces,” explains Bigazzi. “We tried to avoid indoor sets and stages; only the Sistine Chapel and the pope’s private chapel were reconstructed in the studios.” In terms of the series’ look, he says, “We immediately thought that the series should have strong contrasts, glaring…
