“It’s really like a magician’s trick,” reveals Markus Förderer about the many secrets of the trade that cinematographers deploy on complex shoots like sci-fi thriller “Constellation.” For our recent webchat he adds, “When I was a child, I was really fascinated with magic and even did my own magic tricks. I’m always trying to see if we can incorporate some of those techniques in filmmaking, because filmmaking itself is an illusion; it only counts what’s in the frame, right?” Watch our exclusive video interview above.
SEE Exclusive Video Interview: Doug Larmour (‘Constellation’ visual effects supervisor)
“Constellation” was created by Peter Harness, based on a concept by Sean Jablonski, starring BAFTA nominee Noomi Rapace (“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”) as a lone European Space Agency astronaut who is forced to make a harrowing journey back to Earth after a fatal accident occurs on board the International Space Station (ISS). When she ultimately returns to Earth with the body of her dead crewmate, she finds that key parts of her life, including her young daughter, have changed, are missing or as not the same as she remembers them. The Apple TV+ sci-fi psychological thriller co-stars Emmy nominee Jonathan Banks (“Better Call Saul”), James D’Arcy, Julian Looman, Henry David, William Catlett and Barbara Sukowa.
Förderer was tasked with lensing the first two episodes of the season, which happened to be the most technically complex, given that most scenes were either on the ISS, orbiting Earth from the vastness of space, in the middle of a blizzard in remote Scandinavia, or in a huge Russian spaceport in Kazakhstan (which was actually in Morocco, dressed up to look like the Baikonur Cosmodrome). The D.P. says it was the scenes on the ISS that were unsurprisingly the most difficult to get right. “They were some of the most challenging sequences, because it’s quite complex,” he declares about shooting scenes set in zero gravity. “I was really fascinated by the aesthetic of trying to capture the story in a way that it feels like our camera operators are part of the crew and just documenting what happens,” he explains, adding “that was quite technical as we had to deal with like wire rigs and different [other] rigs to make the actors float.”
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