WHAT LIES BENEATH

By Darek Kuźma

Seasoned cinematographer Mark Patten BSC brought texture, range and visual panache to Silo, the thinking-person’s science fiction offering, now on Apple TV+.

Even though, as a literary genre, science fiction offers endless possibilities for inventive worldbuilding, loaded with a myriad of emotions, dramas and reflections, there is still a frustrating scarcity of smart and captivating sci-fi shows that are not just about cool gadgetry and levels of visual extravaganza.

Silo is a creative adaptation of Hugh Howey’s novels about a post-apocalyptic society living for many generations in a self-sustaining, multi-storied underground compound, believing that what lies above is endlessly lethal. And it’s an exceptional case of cinematic sci-fi done right. With each episode we immerse ourselves in a multi-layered realm, exploring its hierarchy of power, warped class system, bizarre mythology, weird rituals and severe laws.

As we get to know this peculiar society and digest its arbitrary rules – that deem it a capital offence to even wonder what is outside – we sense that something is bubbling beneath the surface. Silo explores exactly what that is, taking viewers on an intense sci-fi journey.

Having shot second unit on The Martian (2015, DP Dariusz Wolski ASC) and leading several episodes of sci-fi shows like Raised By Wolves (2022), Patten was no stranger to the genre, yet he became lead DP on Silo through a twist of fate.

“I had just come off a project in Cape Town when I heard that Morten Tyldum was looking for a cinematographer as his original DP got pushed to another project. I read the scripts, talked with Morten via Zoom and flew straight into the project. It was a fantastic job, but little did I know that it would last for a year,” says Patten.

Silo’s debut season consists of ten episodes. Patten shot the first three (directed by Tyldum) and the last three (directed by Adam Bernstein), and also assisted DPs Laurie Rose and David Luther on the episodes in-between. The job occupied Patten for almost 140 shooting days between July 2021 and July 2022.

“Because of the pandemic, I pretty much shot with all the different directors on Silo. After finishing the first three, I began prepping the last ones, so when other DPs got sick, I was there to cover for them,” he recalls. “The challenging thing with these big streaming shows is to maintain visual continuity and coherent vision. You need a strong collaboration to create a strong backbone for everyone to work with. So I think getting a DP to bookend a series gives such ambitious projects a good structure.”

Patten laid the groundwork together with production designer Gavin Bocquet and Tyldum, who was adamant that because the viewers were going to spend ten hours of their lives in the silo, the arcane construction should become a character on its own.

“We had only one exterior location – a lone hill outside that people inside watched on a screen –and shot it on day one. The rest had to be built on stage. We created different zones within this milelong space. It’s almost like the train in Snowpiercer (2013, DP Hong Kyung-pyo), but instead of the X-axis the train was going through, we also worked on a Y-axis, to contend with,” he muses.

“We textured distinct environments to engage the audience and explore various layers of humanity in the silo, with the ruling elite living at the top and the proletariat working class at the bottom.”

Yet the structure of the underground warren could not overshadow the human characters, who either struggle to expose the truth or engage in a power struggle to control the future of its 10,000 inhabitants.

“The explosion of content being made in the UK meant there was no studio space to accommodate what we needed. So we commissioned a pack of old KFC warehouses in Hoddesdon, Hertfordshire. My gaffer, Brandon Evans, and his rigging team converted them into working studios whilst Morten, Gavin, VFX supervisor Daniel Rauchwerger and myself focussed on designing the look,” he says.

“The viewer is taken to these separate levels and it feels like a giant spaceship travelling slowly through time. Each zone has its own colour palette, top floors are cooler and brighter, and everything at the bottom is very muted, desaturated, mechanical, supplemented with strong yellows and reds.”

Patten knew that a multi-camera show like Silo would present a number of challenges and went on a search for the best camera and lenses.

“With as many as eight cameras running at the

I used the CRLS lighting system for the whole show

same time, it’s always a question of how you get the volume and continuity of glass. Morten wanted to shoot Anamorphic to depict the silo’s scope, and ARRI helped us immensely in getting a new set of Caldwell Chameleons. I matched them onto the ARRI LF sensor and knew I don’t have to look any further,” he recalls.

“The producers didn’t want to go to 2.39:1, so we framed at 2:1. Although I was losing all of the look of the Anamorphic edges, the Caldwells have a very nice fall-off from the subject to the background, and made the compositions rich and vibrant.”

Still, Patten did not want to be too obvious with Silo’s visuals. “A set of Caldwells is only six lenses – 32mm, 40mm, 50mm, 60mm, 75mm and 100mm. I pretty much played between the 40mm and the 50mm. We didn’t go super-long and went the old-school way – no zooms, all primes. I think you can see there is this nice symmetry to the way the show looks. By having that ‘problem’ of not having many focal lengths to choose from, you work around it and it becomes a part of the visual language.”

The same applied to the way Patten came at the shooting process. “I like to put a stamp on a look and don’t rely too much on the post. I had a basic LUT and worked with DIT Richard Newton and dailies colourist Louis Reggiardo to have a strong vision and push it through the whole year.”

The team went out of their way to make the sets as physical as possible. “Set decorator Amanda Bernstein knew about these huge merchant ships that are disassembled in Pakistan and brought massive chunks of them over to the UK to be rewired and sent to us. We only really had two levels of the main shaft constructed, anything up and down was VFX, so having this tangible industrial quality on the set was amazing.”

Sometimes, however, using VFX was the only way to go. “We’d shoot one level and the art department would then turn it into a different one, whilst we set-up and shot somewhere else. It was often hard to schedule, so I commissioned a blue level with a part of the shaft surrounded by a 360-degree bluescreen. Whenever the art department was running behind, we went there to shoot.”

The most tricky aspect of designing the massive subterranean city was the spiral staircase that connects all of its 144 levels with one long conduit.

“It had to be built first to rig all the lighting before doing the rest. Moving the camera was a kind of a nightmare – we used everything from a 45-foot crane to gimbals to handheld. Finally, we found that the smoothest way was to send our grips flying with a Ronin off a piece of scaffold to run up and down the stairwell. Key grip Tony Fabian, A-camera operator James Layton and B-camera operator Justin Hawkins did a great job,” he says. “Contrary to what we did with the colour palettes and light levels you encounter as you go down into different zones, we didn’t have rules for camera movement.”

One of the most impressive things about the way the subterranean city was designed 140 years before by a group of unknown people, is a monumental set of mirrors at the very top that sends light all the way down to help illuminate the different zones. Getting this ceiling of mirrors to look right was fundamental to Silo’s success.

“It’s a gigantic underground construction beneath the Earth’s surface, shaped like a heliotrope, that serves as the silo’s ceiling and source of light. It was an exercise in how to shape soft light throughout, especially as using hard light in the zones at the bottom was a no-no. I used the CRLS system, developed by a good friend of mine, Jakob Ballinger from Lightbridge, which is basically a series of high-precision reflective boards with which you can mimic, control and bounce soft light. Using it on Silo was the best decision. I used CRLS for the whole show, in a variety of situations, and it always helped me to create the mood I needed.”

“We had a 100 x 100ft softbox above our physical set and filled it with ARRI SkyPanels and other LED lights going back to a dimmer board. I bounced the light with CRLS reflectors to all kinds of surfaces. As I mastered the process, I realised you can have small units on the floor or bounce Dedolights into the lighting on the floor. With bigger units, I was putting Orbiters into reflective boards outside and then pushing those through the windows,” he adds.

“One episode sees the generator that powers the silo shut down for a while, and there is neartotal darkness. I took the key light from the ceiling, running at about 2%, to give the scene a night feel. Then I pushed several SkyPanel S60-Cs into two reflectors and modulated that light enough to get the edges of the characters. I must say, understanding the physics of reflected light was an enjoyable learning experience.”

Patten admits that the CRLS made a big impression on him and he intends to explore the system further in the near future.

“One of its most interesting features, something that I explored more in the later episodes, is the ability to push soft sources through reflectors. There are five levels of diffusion on a given reflector, so you can make a hard source softer with bigger diffusion but also push a soft source into the harder reflector and – unbelievably – be able to control the soft light. It was a brilliant thing to play with in a show with many levels of darkness.”

Apart from the CRLS system, Panalux provided the overall lighting package. The show’s look was polished in the DI, first by colourist Greg Fisher at Company 3 and then by Bill Ferwerda at Company 3 in Toronto.

In a nutshell, Silo is a nuanced, sharp, elegant sci-fi show filled with memorable characters, captivating scenes (just wait until you experience the sequence of repairing the silo’s generator), compelling symbolism and thought-provoking plot twists. Patten acknowledges that, despite the fact it was a long and arduous project to complete, he is satisfied with the work.

“I’m proud of the show’s look and getting a seamless balance between the physical sets and the VFX extensions so you don’t see where one ends and the other begins.”

Silo is one of the best-rated shows of 2023 and the second season is already under way. The foundations Patten laid may just make it one of the defining sci-fi works of the decade.