Sometimes it’s hard to talk about modern TV, streaming or otherwise, without discussing the perpetual headache of night scenes. Changes in stylistic approaches to grading or pushes for realism have made the odd prospect of watching anything happen after the sun falls in a show have a 50/50 chance of actually being legible. Fantasy TV, of course, infamously had this debate a few years ago with Game of Thrones‘ climactic battle for Winterfell. So when it came to Rings of Power‘s turn to bring its biggest action setpiece so far to the screen, it’s safe to say there was a lot of pressure to get things right.
“I remember the first day, it was like in September, and I go with Alex [Disenhof, Rings of Power‘s cinematographer] into a field and then say ‘We actually have to start building in January, and this is where it’s going to take place.’ And it was just… a very, very boring field.” director Charlotte Brändström—who has directed the bulk of Rings of Power‘s episodes at this point, including season one’s similarly climactic battle episode, “Udun”—told io9 of how work began preparing for the battle of Eregion in episode seven. “I said… I just stare at it and I say ‘My god, we’re going to have to… I mean everything, we have to create everything from scratch here.’”
“But we were working with our incredible production designer that we haven’t mentioned enough, Kristian Milsted, and he had plans and designs for it, and obviously we knew what Eregion was supposed to look like. We built a lot of miniatures so we could actually, in my office, discuss when we were reading the script, discuss the battle and move around small figures and see where they were standing. And then little by little, it came to life, and Alex was making sure that the set was in the right direction for the sun as much as possible.”
The scale of Eregion, in both its creation and its eventual destruction when Adar’s armies come to besiege it, required a sense of scale even beyond what was just being captured on screen. “Just logistically working with every department to… you know, we don’t travel light on Lord of the Rings, and so just our equipment, and our footprint is so big and just that alone coordinating,” Disenhof added. “‘Okay, here’s the set, here’s where we need to get our gear in this muddy riverbank that we’re creating.’ We created our own problems in a way. We needed this riverbank that drained the river, so everything was meant to be muddy. So whenever we moved the equipment around, I mean it was just not carried around. We were sinking into it. I think we even had birds we had to protect at one point? There’s environmental things. There’s all sorts of kind of unexpected challenges that come with building a sequence like that. And logistically, you know, it was an enormous amount.”
“Collaboration,” Disenhof continued, was key to making sure everything went smoothly as the shoot got into filming Eregion’s fall. “Between all the departments the key is to be communicating, being in touch with everybody and listening to everybody.”
“For us, it was really to create interesting character moments, because action cannot be interesting if it’s not character-driven,” Brändström added, explaining what she wanted to get out of the climactic battle. “That involved breaking it down into little small pieces. Because when you do read it on the page, it certainly can get overwhelming. You read, like I said, just one line of the script is actually dozens of shots, three days to film.”
All that effort in both logistic and narrative preparation, however, falls flat if audiences find themselves with an end product they can’t see, however. Much of the Siege of Eregion takes place at night, as Elrond’s reinforcements dig in to their counterattack against Adar while trying to hold out for dawn, and the planned arrival of dwarven support. As such, Brändström and Disenhof needed to ensure as much as possible that there was a level of clarity to the action they wanted to convey.
“It starts with understanding the perspective of the characters and where the camera is going to be, and the direction that they need to be moving,” Disenhof said of filming at night. “If we can establish that to let the audience know where they are in relation to each other, that’s your first kind of goal in terms of logistics as a filmmaker.”
But the Rings of Power team had, in hindsight, a very simple tool granted to them by the narrative in terms of keeping everything visible: Adar’s armies had set most of Eregion on fire by nightfall. “From a lighting perspective, we had the advantage of having bombed the city with fireballs,” Disenhof jokingly continued. “So there was a lot of fire involved, a lot of real fire involved, but then also we could use that as motivation. So if I needed a little bit more light on an actor, I could always just say, ‘Hey, can you light a fire six feet over there?’ to the special effects department. And they would! We had really large overhead lights filling in, like, a moonlight ambient look. But for the most part, it was motivated by that firelight and it allowed us to keep everything still dark, moody, gritty, but ultimately something where you can see what’s going on.”
“You have to be able to imagine it because when nothing was lit and the lights were not on, you couldn’t see anything,” Brändström concluded. “So often I would say, ‘Alex, can you light the torches so I can see what I’m doing here?’”
Fire: the cause of, and solution to, all of a fantasy show filmmaker’s problems. Less so the case for the poor denizens and defenders of Eregion, however.
Rings of Power season two is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
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