[Editor’s Note: This article contains spoilers for Episode 1 of “Pluribus”]
Vince Gilligan’s new Apple TV series “Pluribus” begins with the world as we know it ending. To say more specifically about how and why would be to rob you of the cathartic… delight may be the wrong word, but the experience of seeing the “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul” creator, his stalwart New Mexico team, and his bonafide fictional hero Carol Sturva (Rhea Seehorn) take some big feelings about how hard it is to be a human being and translate it into one of the more expansive TV pilot setpieces since “The Last of Us.”
Doesn’t that sound like fun? Go watch the pilot and come back after the next paragraph break.
OK, great. Carol’s drive back from the hospital after the ‘joining’ of most of humanity into a collective, which turns into a bit of a mini-episode of “Zombies, Run!” is all covered in a single, at turns quite eerie, at turns bleakly hilarious take. It’s a great statement of purpose shot for the series, and required some clever engineering on the part of cinematographer Marshall Adams and his camera team to make it happen.
Adams drove the route through the warehouse-y section of Albuquerque that had been chosen for Scene 46, and saw that the way the shadows hit the car would inevitably create a shadow of the camera and of any lighting equipment on Seehorn’s face. Unable to use any available light for the shot, the next solution would be projections of some sort. From there, Adams planned the sequence and mapped a 3D version of the environment in SketchUp, and decided, in true “Pluribus” fashion, that the projections shouldn’t be separate from the car rig; they should all be a part of it.
“ We built this giant — I want to say it was 10 feet wide by five feet tall LED screen and covered the whole front of the truck, essentially,” Adams told IndieWire. “Then we put the truck on the biscuit, which is an electric tow rig, very low to the ground, so [Seehorn] wouldn’t have to actually drive, and we ended up with B-Camera shooting forward, and we matched the lenses, so the image was exactly what was happening. So, she could see it coming and react to it.”
The real-time feedback from the mini-LED wall allowed Gilligan and Seehorn, who directed the episode, to really focus on performance in the eight to 10 takes they shot of Carol’s long drive home. The ability to dial the light from the rig up or down allowed Adams to really finesse the moments and adjust the light levels to keep our attention on Carol, but also keep the background still alarmingly legible — RIP the birthday bus holding, among other folks, longtime “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul” writer Tom Schnauz.
“ The tricky part was matching for all the fire in the background and making sure that that didn’t blow out because fire can get really bright really quickly. And then the other thing that was interesting on the day was that Vince decided he wanted to add the fire hydrant going off across the truck as a tool, essentially, to be able to rack focus back to [Carol], which is exactly what my first AC Chris Norris did,” Adams said.
The spray on the windshield was a collaboration between camera and effects, as, of course, they couldn’t just hose down the giant LEDs. “ We had an effects person rig a whole thing on the windshield that they could spray separately from the fire hydrant. So they sprayed that, and then the effects people turned on the hydrant behind us after we’d passed, and then were able to duck out of frame before they were photographed. It took some tricky timing,” Adams said.
Seehorn, speaking about her experience of shooting the sequence, said that she’d never been on a driving rig quite like this one. “We did some free driving. We did some poor man’s process. We did almost everything in these driving scenes,” Seehorn said. “I had to kind of close my eyes. I started getting car sick when they would rewind or fast forward while I’m — because you couldn’t get out of the rig. But it was great. We had such a blast.”
Watch both Gilligan and Seehorn reflect on shooting the sequence below in this “Another Take” featurette below: