Capturing 'KAOS' with Cooke lenses

“A line appears, the order wanes, the family falls, and Kaos reigns”

KAOS is a recently released Netflix series created by Charlie Covell (‘The End of the F***ing World’). The show is a darkly comedic reimagining of Greek mythology with a modern twist, exploring the dysfunctional relationships and human-like flaws of the gods. The series mixes humour and drama to provide a fresh perspective on ancient myths by placing them in a contemporary context.

Familiar gods like Zeus, Hades, and Poseidon are portrayed in a way that emphasizes their human imperfections whilst also acting as a metaphor for the 0.0001% who have all the wealth and power. The show focuses on power, gender and life in both the mortal and divine realms, delving into how gods rule over humanity while dealing with their own personal struggles.

The central story revolves around Zeus’ growing paranoia after discovering an ominous prophecy about his downfall which sets off a chain of events that threaten both the heavens and the earth. Jeff Goldblum stars as Zeus, King of the Gods with Janet McTeer, David Thewlis, Aurora Perrineau, Nabhaan Rizwan and many others making up the large ensemble cast.

Cinematographer Kit Fraser set up the show and shot episodes 1-3, 5 & 8 with director Georgi Banks-Davies. He mixed spherical and anamorphic lenses from Cooke Optics, namely the S7/i FF and Anamorphic/i FF Special Flair range to capture this stunning series. Cooke spoke with Fraser about his stellar work on the show.

For Fraser, this was his first time working with Banks-Davies on a project and initial interview came to him through his agent. Producer Katie Carpenter along with Banks-Davies had seen his work on the Persian-language psychological horror film ‘Under the Shadow’ (2016, dir. Babak Anvari). Fraser’s work with director Craig Roberts – ‘Eternal Beauty’ (2019) and ‘Phantom of the Open’ (2021) had contained comedic moments, but this would be Fraser’s first long form comedy series.

Initial interviews led to the sharing of visual references and digging into the look of the three worlds the series depicts. Mount Olympus, Earth and the Underworld.

“What we wanted to do was find a different look for each world so that as an audience you could really distinguish between them even when we cut around throughout the show. It was really about finding a thread between all three worlds but at the same time showing a difference each time you came to it.”

One of Banks-Davies’ key references early on for the Earth sections was Baz Luhrmann’s ‘Romeo + Juliet’ (1996, cine. Donald McAlpine ACS, ASC) with is quickly moving camerawork, high contrast and saturation.

The desire was for Earth to feel the most raw and real compared to the other realms; it was to be grounded and gritty. This led the filmmakers down the path of having lots of handheld cameras paired with the Anamorphic/i FF Special Flair lenses. Supplementary grain was also added in post for these portions.

Mount Olympus was to be something different – a much more polished environment. The camera work is very considered with tracks, dollies and cranes serving as the foundation along with a deliberate lighting style that feels more orchestrated – reflective of how Zeus is attempting to control the world. Spherical lenses were used here, leading to a less obscured rendering of the characters’ surroundings. Colours still pop on Mount Olympus and there’s a sense the world is glowing, but the overall contrast is softer than Earth – it’s an idyllic place to be but this seems lost on Zeus as he frets over the prophecy.

The Underworld was also shot spherically but is rendered in black and white. This isn’t so much of an extended mid-tones feel but is quite high contrast to striking result. In general, compared to Mount Olympus, wider angle lenses are used and a slightly deeper depth of field is employed.

Despite mixing spherical and anamorphic lenses, the show is a constant 2.0:1 aspect ratio throughout. Fraser remembers:

“There was definitely a discussion about the option of changing aspect ratios between the worlds. Both Georgie and I love the medium format look, and when I say that I mean like 6×4.5 or 6×6. Those kinds of bigger gauges in the black and white world would have been beautiful and would have made such a distinction. But at the same time I think there’s always a slight disconnect when you jump aspect ratios – I guess what a regular audience would call the black bars changing. It can draw your attention more than it should.”

As such, the anamorphic sections are cropped left and right to reach the 2.0:1 aspect ratio. Fraser confirms that this means you do lose some of the edge aberrations and distortion, especially on the wider lenses but that didn’t faze him and he felt they still had enough character in them, especially when keeping the full vertical height and shooting with a close to wide open T-stop.

The series shot in Summer 2022 in just over 120 shooting days. Instead of shooting in two blocks scheduled one after the other, work would be divided within a shooting week across the two teams. Subsequently, both Fraser and cinematographer Pau Esteve Birba who shot episodes 4, 6 & 7 for director Runyararo Mapfumo, were present for the entire shooting period.

“I might shoot a five day week and then some weeks I might shoot a three day week and then have two days of recces, with obviously a lot of prep before that as well. We were both on board for the duration basically. They did it like a block two, they followed what we’d set. I much preferred it especially for a long job – this is by far the longest job I’ve done; I think I was out there for a total of about seven months including the prep and shoot. If you’re doing intense five-day weeks of shooting it is quite relentless, so I think being able to do a few days with recces amongst the shoots I actually really like that. If it was a film it’d be different because obviously I prefer just kind of getting it complete all in one time.”

Location shooting took place all over Italy and Spain and included Valencia, Almería and Madrid – the latter of which was also where extensive studio shooting took place on Netflix’s stages. Some sets were incredibly large including Hades’ underworld office and the labyrinth of prison cells.

“At one point I took my youngest son around for a little tour and it took us about two minutes to walk around the set it was so big! You can imagine a two-minute walk is a long time on a set.”

The Mount Olympus sequences were shot across studio and locations in Madrid but also in Italy just outside Naples. These sequences with Jeff Goldblum accounted for approximately a third of the shooting days and he also returned for a week of pickups, shot by Birba, once the edit was well underway. Fraser has fond memories of working with the eccentric and thoughtful star.

“He’s so funny behind the scenes regardless of what he’s doing on camera like even between takes he’s just such a funny guy. He’s got brilliant charisma. He’s really friendly as well. It’s rare to come across talent who can break their character so much and just be with the crew between takes. And he would be regularly cracking jokes, singing, playing the piano when there was one next to him. He’s a brilliant pianist. A really nice experience.”

Whilst on music – the series has quite the soundtrack with many iconic tracks featured sometimes as bookends to the episode, but also within the narrative where music serves to drive the story forwards. Most of these were decided upon in pre-production and Fraser and team informed of the choices to help build the rhythm of shots. On occasion, tracks would be played whilst on set for when the fit to the music had to be more precise.

The camera rental package was supplied by WeLab based out of Madrid. A and B cameras were Sony Venice 1s but there were regularly other cameras thrown into the mix for bigger sequences. The team always carried a Blackmagic 6K which would sometimes be used by the onset VFX team or for quickly mounting to a car. They also used Arri Alexa Mini LFs and RED cameras across the series.

“There were so many cameras for certain sequences. The big concert sequence at the end of episode one I think we might have had up to eight cameras that day and there’s lots of different formats. Partly because some of them we wanted to look like lower end news formats with smaller chips and flatter depth.”

Fraser loves operating and would operate himself when it was appropriate but also sings the praises of his Steadicam and B-camera operator José Antonio Santos who would sometimes take the lead.

Fraser also sings the praises of Rodrigo Gomez who was the digital imaging technician (DIT) for the entire series and worked with Fraser and his colourist in prep to build a variety of LUTs that covered each world. The production office in Spain had a very large exterior space, so in prep the team shot tests there with the same hard, unfiltered sunlight they’d encounter on the shoot which aided in building the LUTs.

“I had lots of LUTs because I try to treat them a little bit like film stock. So I say ‘I’ve got an interior and an exterior’ and often I do different ones and then even within that I’ll go day and night so I might have a day and night exterior, day and night interior and then obviously we have three worlds so I think we may have had up to 12 LUTs.”

Gomez handled the range of camera formats by having LUTs with different IDTs to achieve as much consistency across them as possible. CDLs were made by Gomez for each shot and Fraser had great faith in the DIT’s work.

“I entrusted him a lot, even after just week one. You realize with him and any decent DIT that they’re artists in their own right, they’re certainly not just data wranglers. Rodrigo had a great eye, I wouldn’t need to go to him and say ‘put that up or put that down’, he’d see it and he’d know what we were after and he’d be adjusting on the fly. He did all the CDLs and often I’d come to him maybe at lunch or just after lunch and have a look at the mornings rushes and then I’d always get stills to review at the end of every day.”

On-set, the main cameras usually had the exposure managed with iris handsets for any slight changes, with Fraser mainly using his light meter for setting the overall stop. For both the spherical and anamorphic lenses this tended to be around T2.8. This meant depth of field was less for the earth sequences (because of the employment of anamorphic lenses) and the characters felt more isolated. For the spherically shot Underworld and Mount Olympus T2.8 helped the focus pullers deal with the fast-shooting place but also showed off the amazing locations and sets with Fraser wanting to give a sense of scale and depth.

Fraser is no stranger to Cooke lenses and in his almost 20 years career has used many of the lenses Cooke has to offer.

“I would go as far as saying I’ve probably used every single Cooke lens they’ve made! A bold statement but I have a feeling I may well have done because across all the different films and ads that I’ve done I would say that probably 80-90% of my work has been with Cooke lenses. S2 Panchros, obviously the S4s loads, S5 and onwards – every single series since I started working which was over 18 years ago. I’ve used them across everything.”

The cinematographer had previously used the Anamorphic/i FF series, without the special flair, on ‘The Railway Children Return’ (2022, dir. Morgan Matthews) where he found they gave “classic anamorphic flares that are softer and have the characteristics of older lenses without being too intrusive on the picture” along with being “kinder on the skin for different actors, rendering images more softly while also maintaining sharpness.”

As such, he was keen to try the special flair versions. Director Banks-Davies also knew Cooke lenses inside out, so it was a very quick decision to utilise them for KAOS. Knowing the lenses were going to be consistent and reliable meant testing time could be used for exploring other aspects and became more all-encompassing by looking at different environment, costume and makeup options specifically through the S7/i FF and Anamorphic/i FF SF series. The production carried two full sets of each lens (four lens sets total) to cover the A, B and other cameras and this included the S7/i FF 60mm Macro and also 30-95 Varotal/I FF Zoom lens.

On the use of anamorphic to depict the real world, Fraser contemplates “there is an intimacy to close-ups in anamorphic because of that kind of rapid drop off in the focus but I think really we just loved the aberrations you get with it and I think that made it feel slightly rougher than the sphericals. Although they’re kind of round and soft they’re certainly not overly sharp like other lenses.”

When it came to lighting, Joaquín ‘Kino’ Sánchez served as Fraser’s gaffer and a large portion of pre-production time was based around developing the lighting approach for the large stages. Fraser remembers that the gaffer and his team were amazing and a critical part of the puzzle. The concert scene in particular required a lot of forward planning and involved a two-week pre-light. When working at that level Fraser couldn’t oversee every single lamp so would speak with Kino about the broader approach and references and from there the work would be broken down.

The lighting package mixed tungsten, HMI and LED. “I still love tungsten lighting and I’m still always going to be using it if I can but it’s not as flexible as LEDs, there’s good things about each type and we used each type throughout. For example, in a daylight exterior there aren’t LED sources that could give you the punch of an ArriMAX so sometimes you just need those bigger heads and you know likewise in the studio something like a tungsten Molebeam has such a beautiful quality to it that maybe doesn’t quite exist yet in led.”

“I think to be honest I’m always one for seeing people’s eyes regardless of if it’s a comedy or not. I do like to see their eyes, I love eye lights and I think big eye lights are really useful in comedy for readings people’s expressions. As a television audience you do want to see what’s going on a lot of the time. That’s not to say we went overly bright, but I think I didn’t try to put too much heavy contrast in especially on the in faces, but we still maintained a bit of bite to the image.”

Whilst shooting in the Spanish summer with minimal cloud cover offered much more consistent daylight than the UK, working with this high-altitude unfiltered light presented other challenges. For the desert sequences and large urban environments, it wasn’t always practical or possible to silk the entire area, so it became utilising the time the sun was lower in the sky as smartly as possible as well as bouncing the sunlight as appropriate.

VFX work on the series included set extensions, crowd duplications and creature FX. Cooke’s /i Technology data built into the lenses was used to provide important lens metadata to the post team to streamline the CGI processes.

KAOS is an enthralling, fresh take on Greek mythology that charmingly mixes comedy and drama across its eight episodes. Cinematographer Kit Fraser’s work on the series is sublime and successfully elevates the fantastical worlds depicted. All episodes of season one are now streaming on Netflix.