Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1545081
8 0 P E R S P E C T I V E M AY / J U N E 2 0 2 6 the period, which was a critical driving force behind all our work. He was eager to recreate the Prohibition era as closely as possible in all ways, and to avoid giving the show a comic book look, grounding everything in gritty reality. One of the major and ongoing challenges the series faced was shooting in color vs black-and- white. Unless it's 1974s Chinatown, which seems to get a pass, film noir is generally black-and- white. In 1933, color film stocks existed but were fairly rare, so it made sense to conceive of our project in black-and-white. What soon came down from the studio, however, is that we'd have to shoot in color, because it would ultimately be released in BOTH. That meant that every frame, every wall color, every piece of fabric, poster or street sign had to be viewed using special camera lookup tables (LUTs), one for color, one for black- and-white, made available to the Art Department by cinematographer Darran Tiernan. For black- and-white, contrast is king. But pick the wrong shade of blue next to the wrong shade of red and you get the exact same shade of gray. For color, we crafted a special palette of high-vibrance, high-contrast hues that would look good after the LUTs crushed them during filming. Amazon and Sony call this color palette "True-Hue," as good a name as any. Of All the Gin Joints in All the Towns… Much of the action in Spider-Noir takes place in a speakeasy lounge called The Alcove, where the series' femme fatale, Cat Hardy, and the crime lord Silvermane, played by Li Jun Li and Brendan Gleeson, respectively, square off against Nicolas Cage's Ben Reilly, aka The Spider. The lavish set was designed by Set Designer Eugene Adamov, while I designed the wallcoverings and massive stained glass featured in the show's trailer. Heavily inspired by the Art Deco period, Warren decided to create custom wallpapers throughout the club's interior that evoked the shapes and styles of the time. We looked at landmark designs like the famous inlaid-wood fan contours of New York's Chrysler Building, among others. A moment's thought was given to actually inlaying wood, but then we all remembered, it's a TV show, there's no money or time for that! We managed to find a printable wallpaper substrate that gave just the right amount of reflection to suggest wood and gold metallic accents. The sprawling speakeasy at one end culminates in a triumphant stained-glass window arch, whose design A. GRAPHIC DESIGN LAYOUT OF ONE SECTION OF THE ALCOVE SPEAKEASY'S WALLPAPER. PRINTING ON REFLECTIVE, TEXTURED WALLPAPER MATERIAL SUGGESTED INLAID WOOD AND METAL MATERIALS. B. SET PHOTO OF ONE SIDE OF THE ALCOVE SPEAKEASY SET ON THE SONY LOT. THE WALL WAS PAINTED WOOD AND MDF, WITH PRINTED REFLECTIVE WALLPAPER MEANT TO APPEAR AS INLAID WOOD AND METAL.. C. GRAPHICS ELEVATION OF THE ALCOVE SPEAKEASY SET, FROM A DRAWING BY SET DESIGNER EUGENE ADAMOV. D. THE SPEAKEASY'S 18' WIDE STAINED-GLASS ARCH WAS PRINTED TEXTURED ACRYLIC, MADE IN THREE SECTIONS AND FITTED TIGHTLY TO A FRAME CUT BY CNC ROUTER. E. CLOSE-UP OF THE STAINED-GLASS ARCH DESIGN, IMITATING A PEBBLED GLASS AND PRINTED ON PEBBLED ACRYLIC. B A