Photographic Techniques
How Severance Filmed One of the Best Scenes of the Last Decade

A week or so ago, my girlfriend and I sat down to watch the season two premiere of one of our favorite shows, Severance. Upon starting the show, we were met with a ~2-minute montage of Adam Scott’s character running through the narrow corridors of Lumen Industries. My girlfriend, a talented writer and producer for TV and film, and I, a photographer with a deep appreciation for cinematography, watched silently as the camera moved with the character with such effortless ease. When the 2+ minute segment finally cut, we both looked at each other and said, “How did they do that?” simultaneously. Since then, I’ve watched this scene another dozen times, investigating how it worked and why it might be one of the greatest shots in modern television history. Given that we are a production gear renting company, I decided to discuss it.
Very, very small, limited spoilers for season 2 of Severance ahead. You won’t likely have anything spoiled for you, but I just wanted to make a note in case you’re a fan of the show and want to go into season 2 completely blind.
The shot opens up with Adam Scott’s character taking the elevator up as his character changes into his Innie – the person who works in the office outside of his personal life. In season 1, we saw this change several times, though it’s worth talking about cause it’s filmed in such an interesting way. As the elevator moves up, so does the perspective of the camera, both zooming into Adam Scott’s face as the camera is pulled away from the subject. This technique, commonly called a dolly zoom, will give a subtle perspective shift, as barrel distortion alters the face slightly while the shot’s framing is kept relatively the same.
The dolly zoom is a technique first made famous in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo in 1958, and made famous again in Steven Speilberg’s Jaws in 1975. The effect makes the subject appear the same size while the background and foreground change in perspective, giving a feeling of unease to your subject. Severance has used this technique all the way back in Season 1 to help distinguish between characters going into and out of the Lumen Industries office. Studio Binder has a detailed article on the topic, which provides a detailed breakdown of how a dolly zoom is done.
Shot on a Sony Venice II camera and the 19-90mm Panavision zoom, this simple effect is a subtle way of showing the shift from one location (and one character) into another. As Severance cinematographer Jessica Lee Gange explains, “What’s different from a lot of motion control stuff though is that it’s half operated by a human, half by this computer. So it works with a laser, and if you’re pushing the dolly forward, which is human-operated, it’s calculating a distance on the ground and mapping out the distance while compensating with the zoom”.
Returning to the opening shot in Season 2, we’re immediately met with some quick panning and rotating around Adam Scott’s character once the elevator is open. This is done with a Bolt high-speed camera arm from Mark Roberts Motion Control. At roughly $100K, these robotic arms enable incredibly precise and fast camera movements—used for only the most choreographed camera movements. The shot makes several rotations around Adam Scott’s character before following him out of the elevator and making several passes over his character in precise and, frankly, jarring movements.
Believe it or not, we’ve actually been asked if we would ever carry a Bolt Robotic Arm in our inventory. We’d absolutely love to, but at nearly 1,000 lbs, it doesn’t feel like something FedEx or UPS would want to ship to our customers. Additionally, the general strength and movement of the robotic arm would be a liability nightmare for any rental house. So, alas, we’ll have to save any work done with the Bolt Robotic Arm for the biggest film and TV productions.
The camera then moves into a chase camera as Scott’s character runs through the claustrophobic and confusing maze of the Lumen Industries corridors. While there are cuts throughout this section, it’s shot in a way where the cuts are hidden. When filming this portion of the opening sequence, a Sony FX3 was used on a handheld pogo stick gimbal, along with Panavision H Series lenses. Opting for a pogo stick gimbal system instead of a handheld steady-cam system like the DJI RS4 Gimbalwas because, as director Ben Stiller states, “a gimbal is too hard to run [with] this fast…it’s very cumbersome.”
The entire shot is only a couple of minutes long, but it took nearly 6 months of filming and choreographing to get right. With much of Severance’s confusing corridors staying largely intact during the entire filming process, the cast and crew were able to intricately coordinate this “one-shot” to create one of the more interesting filming experiences of the last decade.
All of the footage above is Copyrighted by Apple TV. Special thanks to Vanity Fair and the Go Creative Show for the detailed breakdowns of how this was filmed. Severance is available on Apple TV and airs on Thursdays at 6 pm EST.
Author: Zach Sutton
I’m Zach and I’m the editor and a frequent writer here at Lensrentals.com. I’m also a commercial beauty photographer in Los Angeles, CA, and offer educational workshops on photography and lighting all over North America.-
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