Cinematographer Bill Pope, ASC turned to Panavision Sydney for the camera and lens package on the Marvel Studios feature Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. Over the course of production, Panavision Sydney supplied a total of 7,934 items — including cameras, lenses, and a vast array of accessories — to the project’s main, second, VFX and drone units.
Published in 2016, Colson Whitehead’s novel The Underground Railroad examines America’s history of slavery through a fictional lens that imbues the story’s terrible truths with a touch of mythology. After its main character, Cora, escapes from a plantation in Georgia, she embarks on an arduous journey northward, toward the promise of freedom. Cora travels on the Underground Railroad, which — unlike its real-world namesake — is depicted as an actual functioning railroad that wends from station to station through subterranean tunnels.
In 2002, when cinematographer Alice Brooks and director Jon M. Chu were still film students at the University of Southern California, they partnered for the short When the Kids Are Away, a musical about how a group of neighborhood moms spend their day after sending their children to school. During that collaboration, Chu interviewed Brooks on camera about the project, asking her why she wanted to shoot the short. As Brooks tells it, “I said, ‘I've always loved musicals. My mom was an actor, dancer and singer, my dad was a theater director and a playwright, and I grew up going to theater. When you handed me your script for a musical, I knew I had to do this.' We bonded over our love of musicals.”
When Godfather of Harlem Season 2 begins, it’s February 1964, and the series’ eponymous gangster, Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson (Forest Whitaker), has been in hiding for three months while notorious mafioso Vincent “Chin” Gigante (Vincent D’Onofrio) and his men scour New York City for him. Titled “The French Connection,” the season’s first episode opens with a disheveled-looking Bumpy driving headlong through nighttime streets with a carful of Chin’s thugs in hot pursuit. It’s a far cry from the powerful image Bumpy projected upon his return to Harlem after a stint in Alcatraz, but as he showed throughout Season 1, he’s endlessly resourceful, and one never knows what tricks he might have up his sleeve — or hidden in the trunk of his car.
The 10-episode series Tell Me Your Secrets interweaves the stories of three characters whose troubled pasts have set their moral compasses adrift and their destinies on a collision course. Following a stint in prison that stemmed from her relationship with a serial killer, Karen (Lily Rabe) has been placed in witness protection and given the name Emma. Meanwhile, in a no-holds-barred push to find her long-missing and likely deceased daughter, Mary (Amy Brenneman) sets John (Hamish Linklater) on a mission to unearth Karen’s whereabouts — an assignment that forces him to navigate between his equal desires to atone for his sordid past and give in to his baser criminal instincts.
Season 2 of A Discovery of Witches found cinematographer Adam Etherington, BSC partnering with director Farren Blackburn to continue the adventures of historian and witch Diana Bishop (Teresa Palmer) and her unlikely ally, the vampire Matthew Clairmont (Matthew Goode). Both Etherington and Blackburn were new additions to the series, and together they set out to build upon the visual language that had been established in Season 1 while embracing the opportunities afforded by a new twist in the narrative, which sends Diana and Matthew back in time to the Elizabethan era.
Arriving in movie theaters in the summer of 1988, Coming to America starred Eddie Murphy as Prince Akeem Joffer from the fictional African nation of Zamunda. Upon learning that his parents, King Jaffe (James Earl Jones) and Queen Aoleon (Madge Sinclair), had arranged for him to be married, Akeem and his aide Semmi (Arsenio Hall) embarked on a journey to find the prince a bride with whom he could connect both emotionally and intellectually. Naturally, Akeem’s quest for the future queen of his nation took him to Queens, New York, and it was there that he met and fell in love with Lisa McDowell (Shari Headley).
Cinematographer Alexis Zabé, ASC, AMC‘s interest in image making began to develop at an early age, while he was growing up in Mexico City. “I remember going into the darkroom with my dad,” he shares. “It was really entertaining for me, the darkness, the smells, seeing the photos appear and the rhythm of that very concentrated work.”
