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Trapped on a farm in rural Georgia, a group of neighbours must put aside their differences and unite in the face of a mysterious and deadly threat.
This is ‘Teacup’, an upcoming American horror television series created by Ian McCulloch and taking inspiration from the novel ‘Stinger’ by Robert R McCammon. The first season premiered at Fantastic Fest in September 2024. Streaming began on Peacock from 10th October and will be followed by two new episodes every week through Halloween.
Cinematographer Isaac Bauman (‘Loki’ Season 2, ‘Deliver Us’ and ‘Haunting of the Queen Mary’) originated the show and lensed episodes one and two, shooting with Cooke Optics S8/i FF Prime lenses. Bauman spoke with Cooke about his work on the show.
E.L. Katz directed the first two episodes and is a close friend of Bauman’s. When the project seemed likely to be going ahead, the two agreed it would be exciting to team up to create the visual language of the series and they quickly found common ground.
“I think we both saw the same thing at the same time independently. The scripts were so beautifully written, and they were so clear so visually, it was immediately apparent what the project should look like. I think we were on the same page from before we even had a chance to talk about it.”
“As we discussed the visual approach, the production designer (Patti Podesta) was very integral towards developing the aesthetic of the show, and we wanted to make sure that the production design of the show was the same as the cinematography of the show. This a concept that I sometimes have a difficult time articulating – when I was shooting Loki season 2, I realised what I wanted was for the cinematography to look like the production design. We want the lensing, the lighting and the production design to all look like it’s the same aesthetic – as synergistic as possible.”
Bauman always favours Arri cameras, and opted to employ the Alexa35 for this shoot to properly delve into their most recent offering. This choice was more about using the Alexa35 for the expanded dynamic range the ALEV4 sensor offers compared to the ALEV3 and this was prioritised over shooting with a larger sensor.
“I wanted to use really hard hot light on daytime interiors. I wanted to have these shafts of light coming through the window and blasting the floor and hitting objects on their way as they cut through the room. I knew that with the Alexa35 and that extended dynamic range that we’d have a better chance of not blowing out all the highlights that I was going to create using my bright hard light.”
The cinematographer prefers to stick with one ISO when possible, to support a sense of consistency on set and to aid his team to light by eye. For most scenes this was ISO 640. The series also included “pretty massive” night exteriors, which would require lighting lifts placed many meters away from the shooting area to achieve natural fall off. For these sequences he rated the camera at ISO 2560 and employed the new ‘extended sensitivity mode’ in the Alexa35 that producers a cleaner image in low light scenarios.
Bauman framed the show in 1.5:1 – extracting this from the camera’s 16:9 mode for an image circle of 28.39mm. The show was supported by the Atlanta branch of Keslow Camera where Bauman did his initial round of lens testing.
“I tested the S8s exclusively against vintage lenses because we said we wanted a vintage look. At first, I was thinking that we were going to use vintage glass and then the more I thought about it, I liked the S8s – I just had a feeling about them.”
Bauman tested the S8s against various vintage lenses and found the S8s didn’t necessarily look as modern or overly sharp in comparison as he perhaps originally expected them to.
“It looked like they had just as much personality as the vintage lenses. There’s more focal lengths in the range and they have the modern housing and also they are more standardised in size and weight. So you get all of the upsides of what it’s like to work with modern lenses on set in your workflow with none of the downsides of the overly sharp, clinical looking image.
«That’s what the S8s represent to me. They represent all of the best things about vintage lenses and all of the best things about modern lenses. It’s the closest out of all lenses that exist to bring everything into one package.”
The show employed Steadicam throughout and Bauman found the S8/i FFs to pair well with the Alexa35 in this scenario, with rebalances being quick and easily repeatable. The show also carried a Ronin for use as a remote head for its entire run which Bauman notes has become a very common and reasonable ask of most line producers who might have previously baulked at the idea of carrying a more expensive remote head. The S8/i FF lenses complimented this setup perfectly.
The cinematographer favours wider lenses and reckons 99% of his shots are on a 40mm or wider, unless they’re macro inserts. As such, about 90% of the project was shot on focal lengths between 25mm and 32mm with the 27mm becoming a major hero lens for this project along with the 32mm.
From the outset there was a desire for a narrow depth of field which was aided by the S8/i FF lenses’ T1.4 wide open apertures. Bauman’s feeling about this look is that once you get to longer than a wide-angle focal length and to around 4-6ft focus distance, the background becomes indiscernible even at commonly employed shooting stops, say for example T2.8 – at this point then he’d rather make something of this aesthetic and employ it more fully by shooting wide open at T1.4.
Bauman also found the slight barrel distortion in S8 that brings the subject closer and the background feel further away further helped the aesthetic and introduced an organic quality to the images.
Although visual effects were minimal for this project Bauman is no stranger to VFX heavy productions and finds the /i data integrated into Cooke’s lenses to be “invaluable, because otherwise you have to have some kind of external module on the camera that’s recording all of the data.”
‘Teacup’ is available to stream now on Peacock.