At the end of the workday, they enter an elevator that transforms them into their outside selves through some invisible means. Treated like children, they receive silly incentives like “waffle parties.” They live and breathe work because, as innies, that’s all there is. Trapped together, the workers sit in front of vintage computers and sort numbers into files to no discernable end. The windowless room has low ceilings that contribute to the claustrophobia. office with bare white walls and deep green carpeting. In the Macrodata Refinement (MDR) department, she meets her fellow workers Mark Scout (Adam Scott), Dylan George (Zack Cherry) and Irving Bailiff (John Turturro), who work in cubicles clustered in the center of an 80 ft. In a sense, the Lumon office is like a heavily monitored playground for her new self and others. In the meantime, she is kept under constant surveillance on the job. She is told she can elect to leave, which she chooses, but then finds she’s utterly unable to exit the building until the close of work. To begin this existence, she watches a video of herself from some time earlier, agreeing to participate in the severance program. The filmmakers considered that the birth of her innie self. On her first Lumon morning, Helly wakes to find herself splayed out on a conference table, with no memory of who she is or how she got there. IT’S NOT JUST ANOTHER DAY AT THE OFFICE FOR SEVERANCE August 30,2022 We created that overscale environment so that Terry would be the right size for being a chimp and then replaced him with our chimp, but we would get all of the interaction with the set.” The little girl that is hiding behind the sofa is 6′ foot 2” stuntwoman. We did a false perspective set where the props that were in the foreground were 30% bigger. I wanted him to have the clothing that our chimp has and the blood on his face because it was trying to play to the horror and how our chimp interacts with its environment.
I took the decision to not put him entirely in the full cap suits. We had five witness cameras around the set to document his movements. “Terry Notary performed Gordy and gave us amazing performances. “We made a full-frame photoreal chimp and filmed the whole scene from the point of view of our character, who is hiding under a table and sees the whole scene through a double layered semi-transparent silk tablecloth that diffuses the light and creates obscure things,” Rocheron states. Not everything takes place in the skies, as there is a flashback scene of a chimp named Gordy killing people on a television production set. “We shot plates at night of a house in the distance and comped those house lights into our day-for-night shots.” “By match moving the infrared and color film footage we were able to extract depth passes and modulate the visibility,” he says, adding that certain nighttime cues had to be incorporated. Infrared footage gives you perfectly black skies.” The film footage provided the color information.
We were like, ‘What if we try to synchronize an infrared and film camera together.’ We created a new rig where we took a Panavision 65mm film camera and mounted it on a 3D rig with an ARRI ALEXA 65 digital camera that was infrared. The cool thing is that it was a great collaboration with Hoyte. The only way to do this is day-for-night, where you shoot during the day and in post you try to give it a night look.
One thing that we realized when scouting at night in that big valley is if you turned all of the lights off, the human eye actually sees in the night. “Because all of the encounters happen in that valley at nighttime and cameras don’t see a lot at night,” explains Rocheron explains, “you have to put lights to see something.
All of the nighttime scenes were shot day-for-night.