A computer spanning the globe. What does that look like exactly? Well, the 3 Body Problem shows exactly what it looks like with both beauty and terror, thanks in part to Emmy-nominated cinematographer Martin Ahlgren. The episode “Judgement Day” introduced the proton-sized super computer, and it was one of the many dazzling sights in the science-fiction series.
The computer is introduced in a virtual space to Jin Cheng (Jess Hong) and Thomas Wade (Liam Cunningham), and then, to the rest of the world. One of the many questions about the computer, on a technical level, how does it light actors? How does it affect the environment? And how did Ahlgren want to use light to introduce the sophon?
In an upcoming interview with Immersive’s editor-in-chief, Jack Giroux, the cinematographer answered a few of those questions:
Well, one thing about that is that at this point in the show, the virtual computer game journey they’ve been playing is basically over. But the writers decided to do was to use that mechanism for telling the story of what we call the Sophon journey, which is the creation of this computer and how it travels to earth.
In the books, it’s done slightly differently. It’s actually described from the aliens’ point of view, but I think this was a smart way of doing it. It also meant that we lived in the world of this VR computer game, like this highly realistic virtual reality computer game, basically. As in the previous iterations of it, it’s not a representation of either what the aliens look like or what their world looks like.
Because we were using the same wall that was built for those sequences, we had an incredible ability to really design what the light was going to be. So, there are a lot of things happening in it. We spent time before the shoot to program basically low-resolution video images of what’s happening in the sky to be this interactive light on the actors for that.
One of the reasons it was done on this light wall created with LED panels as opposed to a video wall, which has been very successful in the last few years with the volume thing, is it doesn’t require you have all the assets built in advance. That wasn’t possible with the schedule. There was no way that visual effects were going to be able to be created in advance.
So, in that sense, it was a traditional approach to shooting it, shooting the actors against blue screen, but the more high-tech scenario of it was that we had this very elaborate lighting wall to light them with.
3 Body Problem is available to stream on Netflix.
