Lighting the episode-long single takes of Adolescence

The darkest deeds are sometimes committed by the seemingly most innocent of culprits. That’s the premise of Netflix’s hit limited series Adolescence, which presents a blow-by-blow account of British law enforcement’s investigation into a juvenile suspect in a murder case. Rather than using cuts to transition between characters and scenes, Adolescence eschews traditional television storytelling. Each of its four episodes unfolds in real time, following a phase of the investigation in one uninterrupted, continuous take, captured with a single camera.

The show’s director of photography, Matthew Lewis, and gaffer Max Hodgkinson cut their teeth mastering the single-take approach on the 2021 feature Boiling Point. The skills they learned paid dividends during the shooting of Adolescence, which has garnered critical praise and multiple Emmy nominations, including for Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series and Outstanding Cinematography for a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie. Panalux, which provided the production’s lighting package through the company’s facility in Manchester, recently spoke with Lewis and Hodgkinson about their long-running collaboration and the unique creative challenges and opportunities Adolescence presented.

Panalux: How did you two start working together?

Matthew Lewis: I was a camera trainee on a short film that Max was a spark on. We got along on the project, and I remembered him a couple of years later when I was going to shoot a low-budget feature. I called him up and asked, 'Do you want to do it?' So we did Villain, an East London gangster flick. We learned so much of it along the way. We were playing and working it out. We work really well together, and we’ve worked on so many projects together now, and we still don’t hate each other. There’s so much good blood between us.

Max Hodgkinson: We always spoke about how we were dreaming of big projects where we’d have the money to do everything that we wanted to do. Now we have more budget to do things, and we look back and go, ‘Oh, that was so great to have so much freedom to get things wrong!’

Were there any visual references or films that provided inspiration as you prepared for Adolescence, particularly on the lighting side?

Lewis: It was weird trying to find references for the show because everything we looked at had more of an opportunity to light than we were going to have. We had references for things that we like the look of, movement-wise, like Children of Men and films where they’ve done longer [single-take] sequences. But we’ve developed a look that we like. We’ve worked together for years now, and the look when we shoot dramas has been fairly consistent. We like a certain amount of shape; we don’t like to overly backlight stuff. So, for Adolescence, it was bringing that consistency into this. We didn’t lean into references too much. It was really just working it out ourselves.

Hodgkinson: Because of doing Boiling Point and the one-take thing in the past, we had built up techniques for how to do it. So we incorporated everything that we’d done using those techniques to make it work.

How did that continuous-take approach influence the choices you had to make with your lighting?

Lewis: Lighting the whole show was a completely different ball game than anything traditional. There are maybe only a couple of times where we actually put a light on a stand on the ground in a scene.

Hodgkinson: There were a few lights on the stands outside the windows in the school, but other than that, everything was rigged and hidden away.

Lewis: Our blocking was very precise. We knew where we were looking with the camera, but even then, there weren’t any opportunities to put stuff down to shape light in the traditional way. The shaping of the light and the sources all had to come from what felt like natural, environmental places. A lot of it was down to intricacies of the angle of the blinds and at what angle the light would come in. We would bounce off a bit of floor or a piece of paper on the table, all those sorts of things. From the ground up, we had to work out how to look in every direction but still have the shape that we wanted all the way through. We didn’t want it to feel so realistic that we’re at the mercy of the flatness of the room. We always wanted the shape on the face, trying to find that and gently nudge the light that way without obstructing what we needed to do storytelling-wise.

Hodgkinson: I’d say other than Episode Four, where we’re in the house and the car, we did have a lot of freedom. Episodes One and Three were mainly in studios, so we worked a lot with Adam Tomlinson, our production designer, on placing windows, placing lamps, and deciding how we wanted to build the sets from a lighting point of view. The school had so many rooms, and within reason, we did say some wouldn’t work and some would — we had a bit of choice there. A lot of it came from planning early on, asking, ‘Are these spaces going to work for lighting and hiding lights within it?’ We used lots of [Panalux] Tektiles built into the rooms and other bits hidden around.

How did the lighting change from episode to episode as you were working in different environments?

Lewis: Some episodes we were very much on a set, and others we were at the mercy of being outside a lot, so we had to be smart about how we were doing each episode individually. Episode Three is all in one room, so that was quite a unique beast in itself. But the goal stayed the same. If we were doing active lighting changes, it was moving them around the scene without people noticing it. When we’re working with the sun, it was about choosing the right time of day, fundamental stuff. It was critical to get it right because that dictated everything. If we turned over another half hour later, the sun would be totally different, and we’d have a different look. Even when we were going from inside to outside in Episode One and Episode Four, we had to keep an eye on what the weather was doing. You can’t have it look sunny inside when it’s overcast outside.

So there are all these things that you have a plan for and have a backup, depending on the conditions and when the clouds are coming in and out. Do we try and light this scene inside overcast when it's partly cloudy outside? Normally the answer was yes because when we're overcast inside, it looked pretty good for us, and it meant that there was less hard light, more space to move. It was wrapping our heads together and working it out.

Hodgkinson: Before each take, I'd ask, 'Is this the one where instead of coming this side of the line, you just sit that side a bit more?' Or, 'Do you want me to dim down those lights more than the last take because there are some clouds coming over?' Or, 'Should we go to a different ISO?' All those sorts of things that happen in the last 20 minutes before going for a take.

It's been reported that you'd shoot two full takes of an episode per day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Were you able to stick to that schedule?

Lewis: We did stick to that. I think three takes a day would have been knackering. There was one day, for the school episode, where we only did one take because we needed the morning to rehearse the drone move. We had to lose a take in the morning, but then we got a take in the afternoon. Other than that, we did two takes a day. You get it in the bag, you think you’ve made something monumental, and then you’re looking ahead and you’re like, ‘We’ve got to do it again!’ 

Essentially it was three weeks per episode: two weeks of rehearsal and one week to shoot. Occasionally, depending on how we were doing in rehearsals, the last two days of rehearsals might have been takes as well, so then we had another four takes [to choose from], potentially, for some episodes.

Apart from the Tektile fixtures, were there any other specific fixtures you made regular use of throughout the show?

Hodgkinson: We’ve done a lot of transitions in our lighting with long takes where we have lights dim up and down in the shot, so we’ve worked out the ones that work well. The Astera products are absolutely brilliant for this — we used loads of Titan Tubes and HydraPanels and Helios Tubes tucked in places. One of the great things about the Astera gear is you can power them and get data from their ‘brains.’ We had brains dotted all over the place, so we could say, ‘We need a light here,’ and we would just drill a hole in the wall, put a new light in, and run a cable to the nearest brain because we had them all over. We also used a bunch of [Creamsource] Vortexes going through windows.

For Episode Three, because we were in one room for the whole thing, we were trying to work out how we could make it more interesting visually. We played with the idea of having weather transitions throughout the shot. It starts sunny and gets a bit rainy and all sorts of things. One of the lights that we used for that was the Velvet Kosmos because you can spot and flood the Fresnel over DMX, so the shape of the light coming through the windows would physically change as these transitions happened. We had a bunch of other lights coming through textiles, and some without textiles, so we could soften it and make it harder.

The tops of the sets were covered in distro, DMX, because we didn't want to use wireless CRMX. Even though it rarely does go wrong, we couldn't risk one of the takes getting screwed up because we lost signal from the desk.

Lewis: In Episode Three, as well as those weather changes, we also had our soft box above the set, which was dressed as a skylight. We see it briefly in one of the wides. During the take, we were rotating around the table, in one direction the whole time, apart from right at the end. We were just gently lowering the foreground [lighting] and lifting the background at all times, constantly maintaining shape. You can see shadows move, but they’re moving at the right time and at the right speed, so they’re very unnoticeable. Obviously lighting technicians will see the shadow move, but the public won’t spot it unless we point it out — like Max did in an Instagram post.

Hodgkinson: There were like 40 cues throughout [the episode], and we had them linked to lines [of dialogue] — we almost had to learn the scripts as well. You’d go, ‘Okay, that’s happening, now you hit the next cue.’ For basically every episode other than Episode Four, we had lightning cues changing throughout the shot.

Can you share any tricks for how you managed to control eyelights within your single-take strategy?

Hodgkinson: We’d realize that we needed eyelights for things in tight corners of rooms and other places where there seemed to be nowhere to hide it. One of the main ones is in Episode Three, where a PC tower at the desk behind Erin Doherty’s character [Briony] was exactly where we needed an eyelight for Owen [Cooper, playing Jamie] when he slaps the cup and stands up and stares at her. We gutted this PC, put a HydraPanel brick in it, put the egg crate on the front of it, and it looked exactly like the other PC that’s next to it. It fit perfectly. When the camera pans away from that, you bring it up to put the little twinkle in his eye.

Lewis: There was also an A4 piece of paper on a wall in the police station, which was again where we wanted an eyelight to be. So behind that flyer, we cut out the wall and put an LED lamp through it. When we were looking at it, the light was off, and it was just a piece of paper on a wall. When you turned away from it, you dimmed the light up, and then we could have slightly more than an eyelight, a fill.

Were there any lessons learned on Adolescence that you’ll carry with you to future projects?

Lewis: Adolescence was the ultimate demonstrator that sometimes you can do a little less. It’s easy to overlight scenarios because we like lighting things. But if there’s a good-sized window on one side of a room and the walls are painted dark blue, it’s going to look good. The cameras look good, the lenses do a lot. It’s about the actors and their faces; it’s not necessarily about putting stuff everywhere and closing up a room. We recognized that there were times when we twisted the blinds the other way and that’s all we needed to do if it was the right time of day. As long as those blinds are set the right way and no one touches them, it’s going to look good.

Hodgkinson: We like embracing constraints. If you don’t have time to light, work with what you’ve got.

Watch Adolescence now, streaming only on Netflix.

Unit photography by Ben Blackall. Additional images from Max Hodgkinson. Toutes les images sont reproduites avec l'autorisation de Netflix.