Digital Video magazine — January 2014
‘Spoils of Babylon’: Creating a Rich Visual Vocabulary for the IFC Series

Billed as the most celebrated achievement in television history, IFC‘s miniseries parody, The Spoils of Babylon, chronicles the dramatic lives of the Morehouse family from their meager beginnings in the Texas oil fields to the opulent boardrooms of New York City.

The all-star cast, led by Tobey Maguire, Tim Robbins and Kristen Wiig, includes Jessica Alba, Will Ferrell, Val Kilmer, Haley Joel Osment and Michael Sheen. Produced by Funny or Die for IFC, The Spoils of Babylon is executive produced by Ferrell, Adam McKay, Matt Piedmont, Andrew Steele and Nate Young. Steele and Piedmont created and wrote the six-part series, which Piedmont directed, and which kicks off January 9 with two back-to-back half-hour episodes.

The Spoils of Babylon begins in the Great Depression and First World War, then travels through the sixties and seventies, and on into the eighties. With a storyline spanning the bulk of the 20th century, cinematographer Giles Dunning collaborated closely with Piedmont and production designer Mark Snelgrove to create distinct looks for the project that nonetheless remain firmly rooted in a 1970’s aesthetic. “It’s kind of like The Prisoner meets H.R. Pufnstuf,” Dunning says. “It’s meant for television, but we wanted it to be as cinematic as possible.”

Shot over four weeks, The Spoils of Babylon was filmed using RED Epic-M cameras outfitted with C Series Anamorphic Prime Lenses from Panavision, with color correction handled by Company 3 colorist Beau Leon. Dunning and camera assistant Devon Doyle assembled diffusion and filter packs tailored to visually represent each era. “The philosophy behind the project was that it was all shot in the seventies but trying to project these different feels. We did some testing at Panavision and came up with different packs for different scenes, combinations of color and diffusion that we would change for each time period,” Dunning relates. “We started off with more of a brown tone, using antique suede in the twenties and thirties. For the seventies, we used low-con filters, which were very popular back then. The low-con is such a classic seventies look, and there were times where I wondered if we’d gone too far but when I see the piece together it’s like, ‘wow,’ it’s so beautiful.” (Read full story…)