Shooting mud, fog and firelight in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms

0:00Gustav Danielsson: I'm Gustav Danielsson and I'm on Cinepod, the cinematography podcast. The mud was made, basically we sprinkled water on this surface and then you get the mud. But when the crew and actors start walking around on this, quite soon, this mud develops into almost like a concrete pavement. Oh man. So, especially not in front of it, but around, where you have all these gear and trucks and Manitou's moving, it's like a concrete. So you line up a shot like that, and then I start talking to the special effects department, and you say, Hey guys, this is our next shot. And they start getting up their hacks, and they start hacking up the earth, like 10 farms, digging in the ground, and then spraying more water and preparing that mud because that mud had to be prepared all the time for every shot.

0:54Owen Harris: This is CinePod, the cinematography podcast, a program about the art, craft and philosophy of the moving image presented by Hot Rod Cameras. I'm your host, Ilya Friedman, and today on our show, I speak with Gustav Danielson, one of the cinematographers behind HBO's A Night of the Seven Kingdoms. Gustav is nominated for an Emmy Award for his work on Episode 5 of the series. We dive into how Gustav and director Owen Harris plan the show's nighttime, firelight-driven look, beginning their shoot day at dusk to catch the natural blue hour light in the wide shots before moving into closer setups. Pulling off the massive dueling tournament in Episode 5, using practical fog and mud to set the mood.

1:42Owen Harris: The Sinister Grey Mist was chosen as a practical solution to use fewer extras, and added to the atmosphere of dread as it obscured the combatants. As for the mud, it looked great, but the production team had to adjust as it quickly became hard as concrete when it dried. Using a Ronin IV-D rigged to an operator's chest for the helmet POV shots, rather than adding digital effects, the second unit shot the visceral Mace Impact perspective entirely in camera. Shooting the flashback sequences on Panavision's T-Series anamorphic lenses to distinguish it from the present-day story without adjusting the color grade.

2:24Owen Harris: After the interview, stick around for our short ends, our pet obsessions of the week. But first, find out what's going on in the world of entertainment in our segment called Close Focus.

2:39Owen Harris: all right ben it is our close focus it's the time we talk about what's going on in the world of entertainment what is going on this week uh well we had uh uh let's just say theatrical theatrical is back baby we had uh one of the biggest movie theater no one goes to the movies no one goes cinema's dead i've been hearing it for uh basically since the covid pandemic that no one wants to go see movies in a theater. And yet, somehow, miraculously, we had two movies all at once. We had a Spider-Man movie and we had, you know, The Odyssey still kicking ass. Little movie. And, I mean, we have, you know, there's a lot of other pretty big movies still kind of kicking around.

3:23Owen Harris: I think Toy Story 5 is still in theaters. Like, there's still a lot of big stuff going on. And Spider-Man opened either the biggest theatrical gross for a weekend ever or second biggest. Do you know which? Very, very close either way. I think they're still sorting it out. But$360 million over the weekend. And in six days past a billion dollars. So only to be ever outdone, it sounds like, by the Marvel's Endgame movie. But I will say that this movie seems to have really come at just the right time. It seems like audiences, like, you don't get this number of people going to see a movie unless they have also recently been to the movies.

4:10Owen Harris: They are getting into the habit. It's like they probably saw Odyssey. Then they saw Spider-Man. Maybe they saw Toy Story. It's like people are going back to the theater. They're liking this experience in some way, which is fantastic. And if we can continue this trend and, you know, note to Hollywood, you have to actually make good movies that people really want to see and market them appropriately to those people. But if they can just do that, it sounds like people are going to turn up and spend money to have this. So here's what I don't get about Spider-Man and I haven't seen it. I like I like the Spider-Man movies just fine.

4:42Owen Harris: But again, right alongside with people saying, you know, the theatrical experience is dead. No one wants to go to the theaters. Yada, yada. uh all i ever hear is superhero fatigue superhero fatigue superhero fatigue and uh last year we had a an okay performing superman didn't didn't blow the doors off the movie theaters but it did okay then this year we had a flop a rooney with super girl and uh and i'm just kind of wondering and again i haven't seen the new spider-man that's how i call it spider-man i haven't seen the new Spider-Man. I like the other ones. I don't think I saw the last one in the theater, mostly because I was dealing with having a young kid at the time and just didn't get out to it.

5:29Owen Harris: But I don't get why Spider-Man is doing so much bigger than every other superhero-ish thing we've had, including the Captain America with the Red Hulk that we had last year or Thunderbolts. I just don't understand what makes Spider-Man so much more powerful as a franchise than literally everything else. I can tell you a little bit. And there's a reason that Sony hangs on to it with, you know, both clutches with both hands. It's like consistent, consistently great stories that go back to the dawn of Spider-Man. Spider-Man is a little different than a lot of other comic books. I'm not saying they've never had any misses or anything like that.

6:14Owen Harris: but Spider-Man is a hero who's filled with self-doubt. That's not usually the heroic dichotomy. It's usually maybe a reluctant hero or maybe it's a conflicted hero or an angry hero or a just hero or whatever it is. I think Spider-Man relates to people because Spider-Man is inherently unsure if what they're doing is actually the right thing at any given moment. And I think that that's part of the universal appeal. I also think that we got burned out on some of these franchises because they were just turning them around so fast. And Spider-Man, we haven't had a Spider-Man movie, I think, in like, what, four years?

6:55Owen Harris: I don't know when the last animated Spider-Man was. Well, I'm not counting into the Spider-Verse, but even that I think has been at least two years. It's been a couple of years, and it keeps getting delayed. But I will tell you that Spider-Man does a good job of reinventing itself. not usually overwhelming people with too much stuff. And I think that they continue to up the ante in a way that really responds to, or audiences really respond to. Audiences really seem to like what Spider-Man is selling. And the people who are holding the reins on Spider-Man continue to do a really good job and up the ante without it becoming crazy, ridiculous, and a parody of itself.

7:32Owen Harris: Yeah, and I mean, we haven't really spoken. I mean, I guess we talked a little bit about last week about the Odyssey, But, you know, I feel like you're absolutely right in that the Odyssey, it's not just the Odyssey, though. It's Obsession. It's Backrooms. We've had it's Project Hail Mary. We've had a good run of original movies. And in fact, Spider-Man is really the only franchise on that list. Late lately, for sure. Yeah. Of the movies I just named. I mean, you know, I mean, obviously Toy Story five is an enormous hit, too. um and yeah maybe you're right we're just getting people reaccustomed to going to movies you know uh it's funny to think about you know how the pandemic just kind of broke that habit in so many people and then the movie theaters have been like bending over backwards and twisting themselves into pretzels to make the experience more premium the the regal by my house put in like all recliner leather seats that would make a fine bed you could have a good night's sleep in any of these theater seats and made it so that and there's like a wall behind each row so that like the people behind you can't bug you yada yada it's it's it's a much better more premium experience but my question was always like well like we just have to want to see what's on the screen i mean like they gotta we gotta have the inventory and i i feel like uh at some point i i heard i read a story or something last year where they were saying like theatrical wasn't as bad as people were making it sound like it's just there weren't as many movies and i to that i i i don't want to blame the strikes because i think the strikes were a good thing but it's like the movies that were coming out last year were the movies that would have been greenlit during the strikes so inventory was lower and this year we've got kind of like a i don't know i i haven't i haven't a bumper cry i haven't done a study but yeah i'd say probably a normal amount of movies because you know i mean like last year we still had stuff like sinners and weapons and you know there are movies that did really well.

9:30Owen Harris: I do think that we can look and go like there are certain franchises, like when they tried to do another Indiana Jones movie or Mission Impossible, like audiences, I think are like kind of saying like, hey, thanks for the Mission Impossibles. And I think we're done, you know, and I do think it if I were making a movie right now, I would I'm not saying play it all safe and boring, but I would say make the choices that are going to be the most audience-facing, that are going to please an audience? I think it's really interesting. We haven't actually seen more franchise mashups, the Freddy's versus Jason's, the Alien versus Predator.

10:06Owen Harris: I am expecting, though, that as we've sort of now, you know, on the decline, I think, on some of these franchises, have not seen like our, you know, Saw meets Fast and Furious. The Devil Wears Prada meets Backrooms. Exactly right. So Backrooms, not yet a franchise. I mean, let's be honest. Backrooms is a franchise. It's not a theatrical franchise. It is not Backrooms 2 or 3. Just to wait. All right, Ben, I think we should probably get to the interview now with Gustav Danielson. All right.

10:45Owen Harris: I'm joined now by Gustav Danielson, the cinematographer, or one of the two cinematographers of A Night of the Seven Kingdoms, currently streaming on HBO, and congratulations, nominated for an Emmy Award. Welcome to the Cinematography Podcast.

10:59Gustav Danielsson: Thank you, Ilia. Thank you very much. It's nice to be here.

11:03Owen Harris: I'm really glad to get to chat with you for several reasons, but number one, I love this series. This series is so great. It is, you know, I'm going to say I watched all of the Game of Thrones series, But this one is my personal favorite. And you do such an incredible job with setting the look of the show because you did episodes one and two and you didn't do episode six. But episode five is truly the climax of the season. And I can go on and on about, you know, what makes this show interesting and original and unique to me. But I love the fact that it's about a 30 minute episode, more or less a 30 minute episode.

11:44Owen Harris: and it is tight and it flows and it is smart, but never feels hurried or rushed. Part of that, I got to give credit to the editor and the director, but a huge part of something not feeling rushed is, of course, the job of the cinematographer, the job of the person who's putting together all the visuals of this show. Can you talk just a little bit about pacing? How do you make a show that's so tight that never feels hurried?

12:12Gustav Danielsson: Oh, good question. I mean, it's definitely something that you take care of in the edit after we are done. And it's also very much a director's thing when we're on set. I mean, this show in particular had so many elements moving in the scene all the time, which made it very, very complicated. I mean the fight scenes in particular but just like a normal walk and talk scene leading a couple of horses through the village is like really complicated because every time when you have to reshoot a shot or change an angle you need to just set all these extras, have the horses walking a long way around. So it's very, very, very, it takes time to shoot every setup.

13:03Gustav Danielsson: And it also takes lots and lots of time planning. That we kind of, that was something we had to rely on quite a lot. Just planning really hard the setups, where to put people. And when we start shooting night stuff and all of that, where should we have our lamps, the lights, light the sequences? I mean we wanted to have rich full images with lots of movement and people and all of that and that takes time

13:35Owen Harris: yeah for sure it definitely it takes a ton of time to set that up but when I'm talking about sort of like the unhurried aspect of it you've got a lot of even starting off in the first episode these beautiful vistas it starts off essentially there's a burial going on but we know nothing about the characters We know nothing about the situation. It's all, you know, essentially it seems like it should be exposition. It doesn't feel like exposition. We feel like we get all these insights. And then also there's a, you know, there's a rather like, you know, lowbrow, you know, poop joke right in the first like, you know, four minutes of the show, which I think in some ways kind of gives the audience this idea like, I don't know what I'm in for.

14:20Owen Harris: Like, I don't know what I'm about to see. I feel like, you know, in some of the ways that like, you know, Peter Dinklage would always get this incredible, you know, dry comic relief and sort of like humor from the original Game of Thrones series. Like all of that is getting poured into A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. When you're reading the script for the first time of this, how much of the humor is jumping off the page at you? Is this an incredibly funny thing? Is it not funny? I'm curious what it looks like from your perspective to judge the tone of this show.

14:55Gustav Danielsson: I think when I read the script, it is humorous, but not as humorous as it got when we had the actors in, you know, we had Peter Claffey playing Dunk and we had Dexter Salt and Cell playing Egg and their chemistry. that is something that you can maybe wish for when you just read the script to have a chemistry that good between two actors but I mean they were quite quite magical I'd say so it got more fun and I remember reading this script it starts out also very very slow and kind of as you say there's not a lot of drama in this. So from the start that was a little bit of a worry for me and for the director like how do we capture the audience in this slow-paced drama where there's not too much exciting going on except for a friendship emerging between this the older knight Dunk and the kid egg which I think is kind of exciting from the very very start when you see it and yeah so it starts out that's I mean so that's when we filmed this we wanted it to be kind of classical in a way that we we didn't move the camera in very fancy way to obstruct the viewer from what you're actually viewing.

16:30Gustav Danielsson: And we let the landscape and all the scenery kind of do its talking instead of us trying to be fancy with cameras.

16:40Owen Harris: It's really successful. You really do pull off like this incredible montage at the beginning of these landscape shots and landscape shots. And, you know, Dunk has no one to talk to, but his horses. And there's really just really one character talking to his horses for, you know, a big chunk of the early part of the show but at no point is it not visually interesting if i recall correctly there's a a shot of him like reclining in a field where you see you know the hills stretched out behind him and a giant cloud sliding in like over the hillside and i'm assuming that was all done in post but holy crap is it it's like no no it's practical you you happen to catch

17:25Gustav Danielsson: in some, that was one of the really beneficial things about this show. We were in some really beautiful places up in Northern Ireland. It was beautiful, but also very challenging because up in those mountains, we couldn't bring much gear and it was a national park. So we had to be really careful with everything on the ground where we put stuff. So it was like quite tricky to shoot stuff there, but we planned it out really well. and if you've seen the show, you know, it starts in rain and the second day it's sunny. So we were up there and we had the opportunity to switch days just because of the weather.

18:06Gustav Danielsson: Because the weather in these big, big images, it plays quite a big character in this, in the landscapes. But so when we were about to shoot this, we used to realize the first day it's going to be more clouds and the second day it's going to be more sun. So we decided let's do the rain the first day and we did that and we had the rain towers and of course there's a little bit of the effects used to make the sky was a little bit bluer and stuff like that but it's mostly in camera all that stuff we shot and I remember we were standing there it was quite windy so you could see the clouds coming over the landscape and I'm not sure I think that shot we're talking about because we did a few lock-offs where you lock the camera on the character and then you haven't played the scene.

18:54Gustav Danielsson: But then you can also wait for that cloud to pass in the background so you can match the cloud to the actual scene you had. Because I think one of those... I'm glad you noted it. I don't know how we ended up doing it, technically. I'm going to ask post. But I remember when we were up there, Yeah, we got a few of these really fast tracking clouds over that landscape, which I think is just it's just beautiful.

19:23Owen Harris: I agree. And that is and that is what I keep thinking when I think back about, you know, I started to rewatch when I knew that we were going to do this interview. I started to rewatch the series and yes, it is such an understatedly gorgeous show. There is not a lot of like trying to draw attention to itself and the scenery plays such a huge part and the art direction and, you know, the costumes and everything else that's going on. There's a lot of there's a lot of stuff to look at without ever saying, look at me. And we've got it. Look, there's, of course, no electricity in Game of Thrones. Everything is firelight when it's at night and there's tons of fire and there's tons of people being uplit and side lit and all this stuff.

20:10Owen Harris: But it's so incredibly perfect and gorgeous. Can you talk a little bit about how the fire was going to, like, anytime you see it, there's all the sequences, all the stuff that takes place in the camp before the tournament, and it's all lit by torches or firelight or whatever it is. I know that you couldn't actually be doing it all. There's the practicals on the set, and then you have to manage your exposure to make sure that you have enough ambient light that those torches aren't blowing out. But can you talk a little bit about how you make the firelight work and how you make the fire the key and the fill in the back for all these people?

20:49Gustav Danielsson: Yeah, I can talk lots about that. I'm glad you asked. We can start about the camp, for example, where you have a situation where you're shooting a kid and you're shooting a kid at night, which is tricky because of loss. You can't really, I don't know the exact hours, but you can't really shoot a kid at night in England. It's not legal. so we had that little trick to pull off and also we had to balance all the lights. So what we're trying to do for a lot of night scenes is that if we have a chance to shoot to start the scene at dusk, we will start the scene at dusk or at least start when you have blue in the sky.

21:41Gustav Danielsson: And you get a couple of setups. You have two cameras shooting. So you get a couple of setups with that nice blue feel. Or even brighter if you wanted to have that feeling. And then we're moving closer to the characters. And I said the main lens on the show were the ultra panatars. And they are stopped to 2.8. and but we have to stop them down in third. We used to get that the sharpness we wanted so we were probably closer to a four which means you need quite a lot of light to to get the exposure. So for these night shots I switched lenses for the VA lenses. Also Panavision VA lenses, they are spherical but they open up to 1.4.

22:33Gustav Danielsson: I mean you get so much more light inside the camera which means you get a more natural feeling from where the light sources comes. So basically if we have a fire and you have a wide shot of that, we don't want to light it from big lights from the outside because the light comes from the wrong direction. So you have the fire and then we start hiding lights around the fire and then we also start hiding fill lights for the characters so we can balance the actual fire light so it's not too overexposed with the light on the characters faces. Yeah, so that was one trick we pulled. And as we lose the light in the sky, we're just moving closer.

23:27Gustav Danielsson: We replace the light from the sky with big cranes, just giving that nice feel on people and on the background. And then we can keep on shooting as long as we can. And when we were shooting Egg, Dexter, the young boy, we couldn't shoot that long. So it's a challenge, but also there's a challenge to use to shoot night stuff by itself. And a lot of times we try to do the trick, start shooting in dusk and then the whites in dusk and then do the close-ups uh afterwards and i'm very happy that i have a director owen harris who is willing to do that i'm happy to have a director that is uh very uh into the image himself i definitely think that that's really important um when you're

24:22Owen Harris: working with a director who uh understands your vision and understands their vision and understands how those two things can can can play together um when you were working with owen did you feel that uh you guys were uh on the same page from the get-go or did kind of feel your way out over

24:43Gustav Danielsson: the episodes i spent months and months talking about this before we started shooting with owen Owen is a director I work with on several occasions. We've shot, for example, three Black Mirror episodes. So we know each other. And this little trick about shooting dusk shots, I'm not the only DOP who shoots in the dusk. Everybody loves to shoot in the dusk. But you need to have a director that's all into that, just to get the beauty of the light. Yeah, but to set the tone of the show, I mean, we talked immensely about other shows we liked. We talked about, of course, we talked about the original Game of Thrones, what we liked about that.

25:36Gustav Danielsson: Because, I mean, I really like Game of Thrones and I think it looks good, too. It was a really good, for what it was, it was a really good looking show, I think.

25:45Owen Harris: I agree.

25:46Gustav Danielsson: Very, very, nothing, you know, quite classical, but beautiful show. But we didn't want our show to mimic Game of Thrones, but it's not that we wanted to do something completely different. But so I think what we did was something more, a little bit more naturalistic in terms of how we lit things and how things look. It's a little bit earthy and gritty and especially night stuff. You can feel that it's not, you don't have that strong moonlight, for example. You have just a little bit of moon and a little bit of light, but mainly it's lit by actual sources you see in shot. So I guess that's something that was important for us to get this really naturalistic look on this show.

26:48Yeah.

26:49Owen Harris: One of the things we talk about a lot in this show is that relationship between the director and the DP. And I know Owen Harris, he works, he's done a ton of great, great television over the years, including Mrs. Davis and Brave New World and other projects as well. And I'm just curious, is that how you came on to A Night of the Seven Kingdoms? Was Owen booked and he said, I want to do this with Gustav? How did you come to be?

27:16Gustav Danielsson: Well, exactly like that. Basically, I was shooting a show in Sweden because I tried to mix working in Sweden with working abroad. I was shooting a show in Sweden and he sent me a WhatsApp text saying, do you want to shoot a spin of the game of thrones and i was like whoa what is this and i started texting with him the fun fact i just re-watched the whole game of thrones with my family and everyone loves it of course of course so everyone was like you have to do it so i i did exit that swedish show a little bit sooner than i was supposed to and then I went to Ireland and we started prepping for these episodes and yeah I mean we spent a lot of time so not you know I talked to him a lot I mean when I pick lenses I talked to him and I show him this is what this lens is this is what we get from that one I want to do this i want to do this set i think most of the decisions i make he knows what i'm doing and i think we have the same taste when it comes to lighting i think we have the same taste when it comes to framing because when you're shooting a show like this framing can also it's it's quite intuitive how you want to do stuff it's not like you're sitting and you know adding uh the one third there and one third there.

28:53Gustav Danielsson: You line up the camera and then you both realize we should back up a little bit or we should go in and do that and do that. And I also... So I mean we talk a lot and I think that we always synchronize ourselves when we shoot a project so we both have the same idea of we're gonna do. And he gives me space when it comes to lighting. He knows if something is tricky and I need to light something and I give him space when it comes to acting for example. If you know, you know, maybe you wanna... maybe the light isn't just that perfect but you know we need to capture that actor doing that right now. It could be schedule-wise, it could be used that.

29:46So I think they have a very good collaboration, you know.

29:52Owen Harris: That's fantastic. Well, it definitely comes across on the screen. And I kind of want to go back to this thought I had, particularly about A Night of the Seven Kingdoms, about how it's not hurried. Never when I'm watching it, does it feel like it's a 30 minute show to me. And I feel like when the end of every episode comes, it left me wanting more. It's got to be one of the most bingeable shows I've ever seen because it's like as soon as that episode ends, I want to move on to the next one. Was reading the script similar for you? Did you fly through it? I know we talked a little about the humor and how the humor definitely once the actors got involved, but was there a table read or something that you can think of in particular where then you got the inkling of how the humor came through and how quickly it moves from one thing to another?

30:39Gustav Danielsson: No, I mean, the table read was quite late in the process. So I think I got the idea way ahead of that. And I mean, I got sent the scripts, all of them. And they're not very long, so I read them all. And I remember reading one and two and three and thinking, this is good, but it's quite slow and then I read episode five and I was like wow this is the what an episode and I'm like it's such a bummer I won't shoot this because we're block one and we're gonna shoot episode one two and three so I'm like oh and I read the whole I read I read all the scripts it's amazing but it's such a pity we can't shoot five and he's like well you know I got to choose what episode I want to shoot.

31:28Gustav Danielsson: So we're shooting one, two and five. So since he was the first director on the project, also executive producer, he got the juice, which I'm very glad. We got the cherries in the cake. Not saying that the other episodes are not good, but I think it was really nice to establish the show in one and two. But then also really do that big change of mood in episode five, which also is the episode almost everyone talks about.

32:01Owen Harris: It is. And it's the episode that you got nominated for for an Emmy, too, as well. I think we should talk about episode five. Episode five. Let's do it. It starts off with a lot of anticipation. It's just before this giant. Well, I should say it's not a giant battle, but it's a battle amongst, you know, So it's like six on six or something like that, this big night contest. And it's overcast and misty. And we barely get into it and we go to flashback. And then we have a big section of that show, which is all flashback to Dunk's life. Can you talk a little bit about the visual planning of putting this thing out?

32:47Owen Harris: Because it's television at the highest level. It's done so well to put it all together. Talk a little bit about how the sequence comes to be.

32:57Gustav Danielsson: It was actually a seven on seven.

32:59Owen Harris: Seven on seven. Excuse me. Seven on seven.

33:01Gustav Danielsson: Seven on seven. And I remember when we planned this, I mean, we planned this for a long time and it was storyboarded for a very long time. And then the storyboard was divided in between main unit and second unit and all of that. So it was a massive job. then we knew that we, I think we had to shoot it in a little bit, like two weeks, this whole sequence. And we also were thinking about the decisions, like, should we shoot this morning, like, should we have the look of a morning light, the mist, and the month? Because it's all quite, when you see it, when you see the final product, you can say directly, well, that was the right choice.

33:50Gustav Danielsson: It made so much for the mood of that sequence. But I remember we were thinking, are we going to manage this? Because all these elements, the dawn light and the mist and the mud added a lot of complication to the shoot. For example, the whole fog thing. the whole fog thing started out also being a money thing that we did not afford to have thousands of extras standing around that field all the time so the idea was okay let's do it in the fog so you don't see anything that was one of the reasons for having fog when you see this you don't really think about it because the fog adds so much more the fog adds i mean it's sinister feeling, it adds this confusion when you look out through that ice-lit and you see grey and you see shapes coming towards you when you see your opponents, the other knights, just dark shapes coming towards you.

34:57Gustav Danielsson: So it adds to this claustrophobic feeling. So I think this fog was very important. But if you've ever been on a big field trying to get an even amount of fog. Oh my goodness. You know how absolutely it's almost impossible. I've done it in different parts of the world and our special effects floor manager Tom Lloyd, he and his crew were working their butts off, just running around trying to get a nice even smoke and sometimes we managed but sometimes we didn't and those shots we had our VFX unit there VFX supervisor Aaron Rueck who just said all right just make sure you have smoke there and we take care of the rest and they did an absolutely amazing job cleaning up the smoke they did a lot of work on that episode that looks like it's in camera which kind of it's the goal is what it should look like exactly and no one can really tell how much they did but they did

36:18Owen Harris: a really really great work cleaning that up it's a big battlefield that's huge i how large yeah it's

36:25Gustav Danielsson: like a it's almost like a soccer field maybe slightly smaller than a soccer field but it's big yeah and uh and every time you set up a shot you have horses different horses doing this so it's really really really complicated but i think uh we had a fantastic crew doing this i had my operators a camera operators operator sebastian barriclaw he's just brilliant, does the wheels. He does everything perfectly. And you have big camera operator, Peter Byrne, also brilliant. And we have the first AC, Andy Gardner, who takes care of everything and is really focused and really good.

37:10Owen Harris: I do want to go back a little bit though, to shooting in the fog. Like I've done a little bit of work on set where we had to create fog and whatnot and uh never in something that that large of space uh were you guys setting up uh wind baffles breaks of like like giant uh flags and whatnot to try to prevent wind from blowing it all away were you kind of naturally in a valley how do you how do you how much time do you get before that smoke and haze just completely dissipates uh it is it's so much much depends on

37:43Gustav Danielsson: what day you're shooting. And used to answer your question about if we had big windbreakers or anything like that. No, we didn't. We were in a valley. There was a forest on one side. And sometimes when the wind was coming down the valley, you can get an even amount of fog going. And when we started this battle sequence, we were quite lucky on the starting day. Everything was going really well. And we thought, this is going to be a smooth ride. But then like midday, the wind changes and it changes in a way that you can't really, unless you fill the air up with smoke, you don't realize how the wind changes all the time.

38:29Gustav Danielsson: You have a feeling that the wind is coming from the West and it's going to be coming from the West all the time, but it doesn't. I guess it was partly because we were in a valley. So it was just like the wind comes from the west, it turns and then you have a lot of smoke just adding up on one place and then nothing on the other side. And you have someone running out with an autumn, filling it up. And then you start shooting a shot. And if you're lucky, it looks good all the way. But sometimes it doesn't look as good as you want to. So it was a really, really hardcore battle to get this.

39:09Owen Harris: I imagine. I mean, yeah, it's like you sometimes get seconds before the atmosphere is ruined. I got to ask you, how do you go about, you know, this is a foggy day. It's supposed to be huge amounts of fog. It's exteriors. How do you massage the light? How do you end up working with the sun? And is the sun cooperating? cooperating? Is it a sunny day and you've got giant fly swatters set up? How do you keep this even and continue to perpetuate the fiction that it's a foggy, lots of fog hanging in the air early morning throughout this entire sequence? Because I know it took you weeks to do. So how do you keep that even?

39:59Gustav Danielsson: It's a very tricky question. Basically, that was a lot of what my work was about. You can plan, you can start trying to shoot as much backlit as possible all the time. So if you get a little bit of sun in shot, it doesn't look as unflattering or as sunny as if you have sun coming from the front and from next to the camera. So you can plan your schedule trying to shoot as much backlit as possible. And then we controlled the light and then I had my gaffer, Seamus Lynch, who is a really great gaffer locally from Northern Ireland. He had And four big manitos with fly swatters mounted on big frames.

40:55Gustav Danielsson: 20 by 12, I think. And if you wanted to add contrast, you have black fly swatters. But sometimes you don't want to... If you block out the sun with only blacks, then it gets too dark. And you might want to keep the direction of the sun, but you want to have it softer. So then you can have like a double net and then you can add a double net and a white diffusion. And you just have the sun being blocked by that. And the light coming through looks then like it's cloudy light. But this means also you have all the time, you have all these gear lining up on this field. And it could restrict the camera operation, but you always have to plan this out.

41:42Owen Harris: I mean, because when you've got something the size of a football pitch and you've got all of that gear and all of that stuff going on, I mean, we're talking about major coordination, major operation. I mean, in a sequence like this, about how many pages of this battle would you say you're getting through on a typical day?

42:04Gustav Danielsson: I don't think maybe not even a half I think it goes very slow because you have and also in Ireland as I say weather-wise you have four seasons in a day it can start out sunny and then it starts raining and then the sun comes out again and then you have you don't have snow maybe the same day but almost like that. So it's... We didn't... It was quite time-consuming, this. And also one thing that you might not notice when you see this about the mud. The mud was made... Basically, we sprinkled water on this surface and then you get the mud. But when the crew and actors start walking around on this, quite soon, this mud develops into almost like a concrete pavement.

42:55Gustav Danielsson: Oh, man. So, especially not in front, but around, where you have all these gear and trucks and Manitou's moving. It's like a concrete. So you line up a shot like that, and then I start talking to the special effects department, and you say, hey, guys, this is our next shot. And they start getting up their hacks, and they start hacking up the earth like that, like 10, you know, what do you call them? farmers digging in the ground just and then spraying more water and preparing that mud because that mud had to be prepared all the time for every shop. So that was also something that was like very cumbersome and very hard work and just meant that people had to, you know, 10 hours a day working hard as a farmer, sweating on that field.

43:48Gustav Danielsson: But I'm glad we had such an amazing crew and such an amazing spirit when we shot this so everyone worked this through i i think working in

43:58Owen Harris: mud is incredibly difficult for everyone because you got to have the appropriate uh the appropriate boots and gear on too because it's just like you know and trying to keep everything clean it's like you have to you have to uh i yes i wanted to we talked a little bit before we before we started recording this episode before, before, you know, just about one shot that is, it's used a few times during this giant battle, but it's such a great shot. And I have to bring it up during this conversation, which is POV shots from inside Sir Dunk's helmet. And you see, you know, a giant mace, a morning star swinging it and then whacking straight into the helmet, which then of of course, causes, you know, the, you know, transition to the flashback.

44:48Owen Harris: And then later on, too, because when he when he comes to, he gets whacked again. Can you talk a little bit about how you guys got this incredible POV from inside the helmet?

44:59Gustav Danielsson: Yes. I mean, there were lots of discussions on how we should do this. Should we add the visor in post? Should we do this in camera? and we decided to do this in camera. This shot was executed by our second unit team, second unit director Rob Inch and stunt coordinator Florian Robin. But it was used with a quite small camera. It's a Ronin 4D that you mount on a... You take it away from the camera body. So you basically have a camera the size of my fist and you have it on a small balanced arm and then you can rig that on a stick or you can rig it on the chest of an operator and then you basically rig the visor in front of it.

45:44Gustav Danielsson: So it's like most of the stuff we talked about here, shot in camera, mounted on chest on the rider, riding on an operator, riding towards another rider with a mace like that. Of course, that mace is not a heavy mace. It's a very lightweight one. It looks heavy and it sounds heavy. so it's not as dangerous as it looks when we record it but i think it's a very very effective shot that stunt unit pulled off very very nicely oh yeah it's uh it it's it's visceral

46:20Owen Harris: you know as an audience member you get the you get the feeling as far as especially when the uh the sound effects and everything is added and i think there's a at one point too there's a little bit of like red obstructing the vision it almost looks like you're looking through like like blood And, like, of course, Sir Dunk's eye is swollen up, too. So, like, you can see even less through the helmet. But it's super effective. And then you hear the sound of Sir Dunk's, you know, breath, like, really, really heavy. This...

46:46Gustav Danielsson: Yeah, I think the breathing adds to this so much.

46:50Owen Harris: It's really fun.

46:53Gustav Danielsson: Yeah, I think I really love that, what happens in this fight. That we have, you know, he starts out wide and then we go close into Dunk. and then we're in this world and we see everything very subjectively and you can kind of feel what he's feeling because you're inside his helmet, you hear him breathing, you see what he's not seeing for example and then your clothes were handheld so it feels a little bit rough and sloppy. It's not a very beautiful fight, especially Dunk is not an elegant fighter, it's just you know strength. He's big, he's strong, and he's got the righteousness on his side for what to say.

47:40Yeah.

47:41Gustav Danielsson: And I know when I saw this with my family, I hadn't spoiled, because I enjoy watching what I've done with my family as an audience to see if they like it or not. And they did really love this show. And they were horrified when they saw this fight.

47:58Owen Harris: Oh, wow.

48:00Gustav Danielsson: So that was, yeah.

48:03Owen Harris: And it is horrific because there's a lot of blood and there's a lot of poor Sir Dunk gets really put through the wringer, as happens in most shows where you've got a protagonist who has to face difficult odds. They sometimes really, really get physically wounded in a way. And Sir Dunk gets physically wounded repeatedly. And actually in the flashback, you see him receive a dire wound and kind of starts this whole journey. So during this incredible, you know, climactic battle, early on, there is it's almost like a tease because we get taken out of it when Sir Dunk is knocked unconscious. And now we're back to his childhood.

48:49Owen Harris: He's got this, you know, it's a pretty good chunk of the show. It's like maybe almost a quarter, a third of the show, this flashback sequence, which informs all of Sir Dunk's story after this. So you get to see it. This show is so incredible how it's character driven. There's still this big plot and story going on, but you don't really think of like a Game of Thrones series being character driven. And this is character driven. Can you talk a little bit about the sequence? Can you talk about how you get in and out? And it definitely has a different look. I would say almost a cleaner look than the normal timeline versus the flashback.

49:29Owen Harris: Can you talk about this juxtaposition?

49:33Gustav Danielsson: Yes. Good question. I really liked the flashback when I read the script. It's something that is added that is not in the original book, I'm pretty sure, but it adds just so much context to this story. It adds a background and it also broadens this very, very small universe. And it makes it bigger because it starts out in the capital of Westeros and down in Fribottom. Actually, it starts on the red field on a battlefield and you follow Dunk when he's young. And you see the backstory on how he gets to be Sir Arlen's O 'Penetri's...

50:25Owen Harris: Squire.

50:26Gustav Danielsson: Squire, exactly. And I like it because I think I like the kid playing the role. I like what we did to that sequence. We talked about how should we make this look, because it's definitely not in our timeline. It's later, sorry, it's earlier in the show. And so we were thinking, should we give this like a slightly different grading or something? But we decided, no, we don't want to do that because we don't want to... This was a show that was quite naturalistic in the way it looked. We didn't want to have anything artificial in post. So we decided to shoot this on another set of lenses and actually it was just one lens.

51:10Gustav Danielsson: It was the Panavision T-series Anamorphic. That lens is built for a smaller sensor than the Mini LF. So basically, we used the larger sensor. You start shooting outside the sweet spot of this lens, and you get this nice fall-off of sharpness towards the edges, and you get a little bit of darkness in the side. So it's a little bit different. And also it's quite clean as you said, it's a much more modern lens, but also it gets like really nice bouquet, like really organic bouquet to the shots when you shoot them. And we started out shooting, I don't know if you've seen this because not every shot is like that.

52:01Gustav Danielsson: But I mean, in the beginning we had the idea we should shoot every shot locked off. And if you look at this closely, quite a lot of shots are locked off but then we steered away from that because it wasn't that effective as we thought. But it was the camera thing, it was also the actually used how when we portrayed the Westeros world we just travel around Northern Ireland and just went to all these nice hills, this thick thick forest where we shoot some night stuff which I really loved. I think that is one of the most beautiful shots in this show is when young Dunk is being sick in the forest and you see Sir Arland in the background sitting by the fire and he's sharpening his sword.

52:49Gustav Danielsson: I think it looks like a really nice painting almost but it's still very naturalistic. So yeah that whole flashback sequence is something that I really like from the very start and I think we pulled off really nice and I think actually then when you return to the fight you kind of give you know a few seconds in that fight again you forget you've been in that flashback and then you're back in the fight with new energy and I think the whole fighting sequence benefits from this and you know you have the epic get up moment when he reaches out with his hands and say that all up or stuff like this.

53:36Owen Harris: It's a wonderful tool to fool the audience because the first time, you know, he said, yeah, you see Sir Arlen of Pennytree leaning over Dunk, you know, it's in the flashback. But then it cuts to the battlefield and in basically the same situation. And so then you realize that you've got some sort of like vision that's been playing in Dunk's head. And then even a few minutes later, Dunk is rendered unconscious again in the battle. And there's a shorter callback to the same thing. It's really effective. It's really well put together. And we don't actually get to hear very much from Arlen of Pennytree, except like really in this episode.

54:20Owen Harris: Like there's really like there's a lot that we get to hear from him. So that's great.

54:26Gustav Danielsson: I think the actor playing Sir Arlen, Danny Webb, is just absolutely brilliant. He's funny. He invents stuff all the time, always doing some funny tricks. This is just a small scene of him walking through an alley. And he kicks this barrel of apples and it falls behind him. That was something that he just made up. So when we shot it, he said to the ex-traum, I'm just going to kick your apples there. And, you know, all this fun stuff all the time. Really funny guy.

55:00Owen Harris: You know, I feel like there's a few different sort of improvisational or unintended moments, too. I think there's the gentleman who wears the stag crown. I can't think of his name right now. Sir Lionel. Sir Lionel, thank you. Sir Lionel climbs over this picnic table in his tent. And then as he's getting down, his antlers catch on a chandelier, which causes it to shake. And he says, sorry. And I feel like Sir Lionel's apologizing. No, he was saying sorry to the crew because he thought he was going to have to do that again. But yet it gets used in the episode. This is my read on it. I can't imagine he was supposed to knock the chandelier.

55:45Gustav Danielsson: I remember when he shot that I think the first time you're probably right but he was in character it was definitely a mistake him doing that but he just kept on doing it because it's fun and it kind of suits the scene they're drunk yeah lots of fun actors actually on this show and especially of course Peter Claffey and Dexter

56:10Owen Harris: so nice to work with them Yeah, their chemistry is incredible. And there's so much restraint to this could have so easily been over the top in one way or another, but it's not. And it's played just tonally pitch perfect. It's really amazing how the show has come together. And I'm excited that there is going to be more in the future. So that's all something to look forward to. Okay. I want to shift gears just a little bit about this because I'm curious more about how you got your start. How did you get into this crazy business? What is your path here? How did you decide that being a cinematographer was a job that you could do?

56:57Gustav Danielsson: when I was young I wanted to be a painter but I realized that was not a job that was almost like a dream so I started to study architecture but on the side I started filming and then that filming just took over so I went to film school and started to be a director and that was a starting film and I started my apprenticeship with a very famous Swedish director Roy Andersson. I don't know if you heard his name but he was in the 90s and 2000 very famous. Everything he did premiered in Cannes. So I started to work with him and pretty soon I became his DP and we started shooting some commercials and then I shot my first feature film.

57:49Gustav Danielsson: You the Living. And that is how I kind of started my career as a DP. I was always in the beginning, you know, DPing and directing, but I always kind of tended to like DPing more. And also, yeah, so I started to shoot. So I shot that film, You the Living. And on the weekends, I shot, you know uh music videos and stuff like that she used to kind of get you know uh lots of basically because i just loved filming i would film anything anyone throwed at me and uh well that led me to my international career uh also and i started shooting Black Mirror episodes with Owen Harris and other different stuff.

58:46Gustav Danielsson: So now I kind of juggle between international projects and projects in Sweden because I have a family and kids and it's just kind of a good way to not be absent all the time.

59:03Owen Harris: Is it really difficult then to manage the international work along with the domestic work? I mean, because I'm assuming Knight of the Seven Kingdoms takes you away for a good chunk of time. Some DPs I know, they bring their families with them. Others, you know, arrange for visits. Others take breaks and disappear for a little while. How do you do it?

59:24Gustav Danielsson: Well, now my sons are getting quite old so they can kind of manage without me better. but well I take them with me especially during prep and weekends but but you know when you start shooting it's not you don't have much time for a family when you're abroad it's just basically that's a good part for me when I'm shooting abroad I work almost constantly you know you shoot in the weekends and in the weeks and then you plan in the weekends and so basically I you know I bring my family over just so they can see nice locations and you know if I'm in a fun part of the world. It'd be nice to bring my family, but I can't really have them there for a long time when I'm shooting because I'm, you know, I'm just into work too much.

1:00:10Owen Harris: Okay. Well, I think it's interesting. I like talking to people in different parts of the world because the way that production flows is different. People have different systems. It's very different. And everyone loves to talk about French hours, but what are the hours like in Sweden? Are they more like America? Are they more like France, somewhere in the middle? What's it like?

1:00:31Gustav Danielsson: I haven't worked in France yet. No, Sweden is very, it's like eight hour days, five days a week. Or it's 10 hour days, four days a week. So it's quite good for the crew, I say. And sometimes if you do shorter projects, you can kind of juggle the hours. You can kind of, you know, push all the hours into two weeks and then you have a little bit less the other ones. But it's compared to my work in England and in US work, very much less hours. Sweden is, I'm sorry, I'm getting a little bit out of topic, but in terms of just comparing myself to my international colleagues. In Sweden, men have, you know, we have paternity leave, we are, you're supposed to be at home as much as your spouse.

1:01:23Gustav Danielsson: and which of course makes it a little bit more complicated if you're working abroad.

1:01:28Owen Harris: I always think it's really interesting. Like my follow-up question is like, okay, so you can work five days a week, eight hours a day, which sounds like I'm sure a dream to many people in America who can't comprehend what those sorts of days and hours are like. You guys still get your projects done in a reasonable time too. It's not taking you like two or three times as long to make stuff. So how is it so much more efficient in Sweden than elsewhere?

1:01:58Gustav Danielsson: It's fun because, you know, I've been doing these big projects abroad and I've been doing the smaller projects in Sweden, even big projects in Sweden. And it would be so nice to invite, you know, an international crew. Just as I like working abroad, it would be nice to invite an international crew in Sweden to see how we work because it's a little bit more, I guess, like you do it in the indie films in America. You're trying to be very inventive all the time and trying to get the most out of money. And, you know, it sounds weird. We don't do as big stuff in Sweden as you do in Hollywood. That's how you can manage to do quite a lot in this time.

1:02:41But it's, yeah, I mean, for my fellow colleagues here in Sweden,

1:02:46Gustav Danielsson: I don't want this to change. I think lots of people in Sweden that work these hours are very happy. They can lead a normal life on the side. And not everyone is, you know, lucky like me that can go abroad. You know, when I'm abroad, I spend every waking hour working on a project. And then I go back to Sweden and I can take it a little bit softer. Of course, I don't work these hours. I work much longer hours than the rest of the crew normally because you prep and you go in advance to a set and stuff like that. But I think there's good in both worlds.

1:03:25Owen Harris: This has been a fantastic conversation. Gustav, is there a place online where people can find you if they want to get in touch? Do you have a website or social media? Do any of those things?

1:03:35Gustav Danielsson: I do have a website. My son built it for me. is just my name, Gustav Danielson.com. And I don't know if it's horribly updated, but you can find me there. I have my email there. You can find my agents there. And yeah, if you have any questions, just send me a mail.

1:04:04Owen Harris: Well, you're in good company because most every DP we have on the show has a website that's out of date. That's just sort of like, that's the joke. It's nobody who's working has time. Yeah, if it's too updated. You can't have it too updated.

1:04:21Gustav Danielsson: That's a warning sign.

1:04:24Owen Harris: Well, Gustav, this has been a great time.

1:04:25Gustav Danielsson: No, actually, I'm so happy about that site because it's my son who did it. He constructed it. So I'm happy for that.

1:04:33Owen Harris: That's excellent. All right. You should go there. Well, I will. I'll go check it out. Thank you so much for being on the show. I can't wait to see what you do next.

1:04:41Gustav Danielsson: Thank you, Elia.

1:04:45Owen Harris: All right, that was Gustav Danielson. Gustav, thank you so much for being on the show. I am so enjoying re-watching A Night of the Seven Kingdoms, which everyone should go watch right now on HBO Max. Stop listening to this podcast and go watch it on HBO Max right now. It is so good. I love the show. It's really, really good. I can't wait for more of that.

1:05:08Owen Harris: Hey, Ben. it is time for our short ends time of the show it's the time we talk about pet obsessions what is your obsession well um uh there's a new movie uh uh that uh is coming out i believe this week and it was the mystery movie monday at regal yesterday i didn't go um it's eli roth's new movie called ice cream man and there's a little bit of controversy coming out about it and uh several of my horror friends have reached out to me now i'm gonna preface this by saying even as a massive horror fan eli roth never really been my speed i've given him a lot of chances and after a while i was like i don't eli roth seems to be doing just fine without me uh i i wish him no ill will so i i didn't go to it but the the controversy that's come up is it's a six million dollar movie and apparently it's loaded with generative ai and that almost makes me want to see it because I want to see if it truly is loaded with generative AI and if our eyes, I guess in this case, my eyes have gotten keen enough to spot it.

1:06:12Owen Harris: Because my question to everyone who's told me that is like, do we know it's generative AI or is it just CGI that doesn't look all that great? Or is it CGI that looks kind of photo real in a weird way, but somehow it doesn't jive? Now I rewatched the trailer and there were a couple of shots that I was like, yeah, that looks like gen AI, i think but also you could convince me otherwise and i feel like that the the the uh the exact positioning of gen ai in the uncanny valley uh has fooled us for a little while because we weren't used to the uncanny valley is a large valley it is a large valley for sure and we've been used to hanging out in the south end where the cgi lives but now we're in the north end where the AI, the generative AI is.

1:07:03Owen Harris: And it does something wrong in a different way from CGI. And often CGI doesn't do anything wrong because it's invisible. Like, you know, there's tons of CGI in the Odyssey. And it's mostly invisible because Christopher Nolan does things like, hey, I'm going to have a giant whirlpool, but let's have some jet skiers do a bunch of donuts in the ocean right there right before we do it so that the CGI thing will actually have a natural wake that we can blend it in. Very smart. Smart, smart, smart. And there's a lot. I'm sure that if I go see the new Spider-Man movie, that's just going to be wall-to-wall CGI.

1:07:40Owen Harris: There's going to be all kinds of CGI. And into that, I'm also lumping compositing and, you know, a million other things. And CGI, you know, over the last several years has expanded to include things like Unreal Engine and the stuff that Greg Fraser pioneered for Mandalorian. but uh and even in late night with the devil a movie i love it caught some flack for having uh title cards that came up that were like the old johnny carson title cards that said more to come they did that but they used gen ai to to create those instead of hiring a real person and it caught a weird amount of flack for that which i thought was like eh who cares but i wonder what having actual like somebody one of the shots again uh this came from a friend of mine who saw it there's like a shot where kids playing baseball and they just didn't get the shot they needed so they used gen ai to generate a shot of the kid running for a baseball and i'm like that didn't look right that's lazy um and uh according to the internet which we all know is 100 % reliable.

1:08:49Owen Harris: The movie cost$6 million. And$6 million, and it was shot in LA. $6 million, shot in LA. That's a pretty low-budget movie, especially for somebody like Eli Roth, who made a$120 million Borderlands movie two years ago. I still feel like in$6 million, you got enough money to pick the goddamn camera up and go over to the baseball diamond. And if the kid that you need isn't available, you get another kid and just shoot it from the further away forearm up or yeah exactly you know there's a way to get your shot inside that budget and i just i wonder a is the movie going to do well b how much pushback is the gen ai stuff going to get in in that movie and uh you know watching the trailer i'll say again i don't think this movie's for me so uh even as even as a horror nerd uh eli roth is just a different kind of horror nerd than me and uh you know the world the world is a rich and wonderful place with people who do things differently and that's fine i'm not i'm not down on eli roth i just uh have no interest in this movie but i'm almost interested just to see this i was come out this friday so i believe it does yeah yeah people can go if they're ai curious if you go on youtube and look at the out of theater responses it's mostly people just lighting it up and with hate like it doesn't seem to be uh pleasing the audience it is uh designed to please but who the hell knows interesting okay very very interesting yeah yep so uh check it out or don't i don't know how about yourself ilia what's what's your uh what's your thing this week man i'm gonna i'm gonna do something that i've never done on this show before i'm going to say that my pet obsession this week is California, the state of California, specifically privacy.ca.gov forward slash drop.

1:10:45Owen Harris: Are you familiar with us? Not in the least. No, what the hell? I live here. Don't scare me. California is where I keep all my stuff. It is where you keep all your stuff, but including a tremendous amount of metadata, tracking data, personal data that exists about you online. And you may not be aware of this, But California has just made it really, really effing easy for you to request to have that information deleted from data brokers. And as a matter of fact, they have this system now where you enter your information and they make the request with 642 different data brokers online. And it tells you who's got your data, who's responded to the request, who's deleted the request.

1:11:30Owen Harris: What's this website again? Come on. it's privacy.ca.gov forward slash drop it's called uh delete request and opt out platform drop delete done and this basically allows you to put in like here here's the thing like i didn't even know this there's a tracking number for you inside of your iphone and inside of your android that is personalized to you they they actually give you instructions on how to look up and find it and so of course you know when you have to go through like seven menus to find it it's a it's a thing it's privacy.ca.gov.gov that drop forwards forward slash drop not not dot forward slash got it oh there we go yeah and so there's a whole thing explains how it works how to get your information uh sorted and uh as as a as a former california resident uh look uh it says that if you have recently left and you've got data in california you can you can do this and so i i put in my last known address and all of my information there and so i am just waiting to see all these data brokers uh start deleting my information we'll see what happens i've heard stories that uh they can like they monitor your iphone use while you're driving and your insurance rates can go up as a result and i'm like who is the middle man there yeah uh i don't know about that one specifically but uh there's also an option for you to look up the tracking number inside your smart TV and then request the smart TV data brokers to delete that data too.

1:13:03Owen Harris: So I didn't do that. There's also vehicle identification number. You can put in your VIN number to see who's tracking you by your VIN and then request to have that information deleted. Okay. Well, I mean, I know this has nothing to do with filmmaking, but this is just a little shocking. Okay, cool. Yeah, it's a little shocking but not really because typically the the uh the old story goes if you're not paying for something and you're wondering you know who the what the product is or how you're getting this for free chances are it's because of you it's because your personal information is being sold your data your your your whatever it might be it could be something very benign like you know your demographics or it could be something extremely personal but basically once that data is out of your possession someone else particularly unscrupulous people can do all kinds of things with it including get wealthy so there's 642 or 43 data brokers on here who are probably selling and trading and making income based on your personal information and now california has taken a stand and said you know what if this bothers you if you don't want your information out there there's a way there's a way to do something about it and i'll be very interested to see what other states follow damn you candy crush i don't know anyway so yeah the The official website of the state of California's drop, delete, done, it says here.

1:14:20Owen Harris: Yeah. Hell, I'm totally doing that. I'm fascinated now. Cool. Well, Ben, that just about does it for this episode. Where can people find you if they want to get in touch? Hey, you can find me at the newly revamped benrock.com. I've actually put some time into it. So did you use AI? I did not use AI. I used my brain and Squarespace. And there is an AI in Squarespace. which I did not use. I just tried to make it into a better, cleaner, more directly accessible portfolio site. I'm still messing with it, but please, hey, anybody, anybody listening to the sound of my voice, go to benrock.com. I would just like to know your opinion of my site and if you're able to navigate around easily and see my work.

1:15:04Owen Harris: I realized that I had kind of a convoluted mess on there where I was trying to get fancy with, you know, where they have the carousels and stuff, and i'm like no one's using that i just need to have a bunch of video that you can look at and maybe a slight description of it and uh and so yeah i and i tried to divide it into uh film stuff corporate stuff theater stuff commercial stuff which actually repeats some of the film stuff and audio stuff of which this is audio stuff that i do and so uh the cinematography podcast is in fact on there awesome that's great yep and how about yourself ilia where can people find you.

1:15:44Owen Harris: You can find me over at HotRideCameras, hotridecameras.com, a sponsor of this program. And also lately, we've been helping out a lot of universities, a lot of high schools. So all kinds of educational programs have been buying their gear from Hot Rod. So if you are a school or represent a school out there, hit us up. There's a good chance we've got what you need and we can probably help you in ways you haven't even dreamed of. So what if I represent the School of Hard Knocks? School of Hard Knocks is always welcome. I also attended that school. So I've had one or two over the years all right so ben uh who do we have to thank who made this show possible uh well we absolutely have to thank alana cody who's uh who just conducted an interview herself today so i can't wait to hear that and uh and she's uh lining up all kinds of stuff i uh last week i i talked about motor city guess who i just talked to who john matashak dp of motor city thank you alana that's perfect i know you're really excited about that love that movie and uh then we also have to thank uh k's al-atrakshi our uh composer who composed all the music that you hear uh check out k's website k's labs.com also a youtube channel where k's fixes uh synthesizers also go to musicbyk's.com and get k's to compose the score for you awesome all right man uh that just about does it for this episode i'll take us out yay thanks for tuning in this has been cinepod the cinematography podcast presented by Hot Rod Cameras.

1:17:11Owen Harris: Find your next camera, lens, or accessory at hotrodcameras.com. Watch and subscribe to our show on YouTube or listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow and interact with us on Instagram, threads, Facebook, Blue Sky, and LinkedIn. But not X. Don't do that. Thanks for tuning in.