Cast & Crew Interviews - Kevin Flanagan (Lighting Co-Director)
1. Describe if you will, your "process" lighting the location for The House Between? What steps do you take (in what order) and how do you achieve the lighting effects? What is your collaboration like with Bobby Schweizer, your lighting co-director?
"The house at the end of the universe" is meant to be obscure and alien, two governing ideas that could arguably be applied to the process of lighting the sets for the show. On Season One, Bobby and I took stock of what equipment we had available for lighting the set. Conventional lighting was out the door. We did not even have the necessary trappings for a standard three-point lighting kit. Even if we did have access to the necessary number of photographer's lamps, gels, screens, and dispersers, the combined juice needed to run the equipment would likely overload the circuit breakers! So, armed with our minimal lighting rigs for our minimally set show (in the sense that there is little furniture and are few props), we decided to go for the big psychological effects. John's aesthetic ideas for the show happily coincided with ours. We decided to liberally use expressionistic lighting effects - especially to coincide with psychological terror or emerging character neuroses - and to otherwise play things fairly dark and minimal (except, of course, when a shot required facial nuance).
2. Describe your average day on The House Between (from start to finish). What's the most difficult part of the day? The best part?
Since our crew was small, Bobby and I also served as gaffers, grips, production assistants, and set-dressers. There was no typical day. Up by 7 a.m., work by 8 a.m., usually done after 11 p.m. The day oscillated between earnest attention and extended boredom (productive, in my case - THB has allowed me to read many books). Bobby and I, along with Rick, John, and Joe, were present for each setup and each scene. This meant a panoramic view of the raw material that would eventually comprise the show combined with an inability to fathom how it was all to be put together.
The day usually dragged the longest when dinner was late, the dialog got heavy, and any number of technological snags hit. For me, the satisfaction of wrapping a day with 20+ useable minutes of footage in the can was a consistent "best."
3. What is your favorite lighting set-up on the series (first season), and why? What was the most difficult scene to light?
My favorite setup/technique - and watch closely, because it appeared in at least two different rooms on several different occasions - involves a strong fill light positioned about the rotating blades of a fan (off camera, of course) such that the long, wide shadows of the blades constantly hit the character's faces. This shadow-turbine effect usually accompanied some kind of hysteria or flared emotion. This repeated setup was meant to compliment John's idea that the house could organically conform to the immediate situations in the house.
4. How do you think the lighting augments the tone of the series?
For better or worse, the show mostly plays on lo-fi computer screens, in lo-fi quality, off of digital stock which is made to look deliberately old, grainy, and, well, lo-fi. Our lighting - sometimes overstated, usually understated, but never totally uniform - is meant to heighten the lo-fi visuals. We hit more extremes in Season 2, making it a more schizophrenic looking series (rightfully so, as the episodes and their stories will show).
5. Which episode of Season One is your favorite, and why so?
I am partial to "Mirrored," even though it isn't the most technically polished or canonically important episode. It is the most carnivalesque, manic, and weird episode, so it holds a special place in my heart. It was written as a somewhat expendable story, which is a real strength and shows that the series and characters can successfully operate outside of the main narrative trajectory.
6. You also did camerawork and acted in an episode in the second season. Describe these experiences, if you would...
I was hesitant to act in The House Between. My background is in improvisational comedy, sketch comedy, and comedic roles in general. I felt as if my strengths would damage the serious fabric of the show (I can't take myself seriously, so how can everybody else?). Luckily I was buried underneath makeup and could play at least one of my roles for laughs (to the point where our director could hardly communicate why he was laughing at me...must have been my odor). It was liberating to play a monster and I would be lying if I didn't say that it was fun to terrorize the main cast of the show.
7. Without giving away any secrets, how do you think the second season of THB is different from the first?
It is more serious and more humorous. It has higher "highs" and lower "lows." I mentioned above that I found it schizophrenic, in a good way. It weaves a net of highbrow techno-jargon and lower brow, lusty emotion. I feel as if the technical aspects have improved, as has the acting. The actors now have very specific emotions, feelings, and memories attached to their characters thanks to the grueling Season 1 shoot. They were able to channel those things (from love and joy to contempt and bitterness) into grander, more epic characterizations.
8. What is the message and meaning, in your opinion, of the series? And how do you see the lighting scheme fitting into that message?
I won't venture to ascribe an actual meaning to the series, but will comment that what it stands for is embodied in how it was made, who made it, and for what reason. It is an alternative to a lot of the things that recent sci-fi series and shows have done or still do...which is to say, it feels like a reaction to a lot of what circulates as contemporary sci-fi. It is independent, talky, lo-fi (there's that word again!), private, and slightly amorphous. It won't give you any easy moral idioms or fortune-cookie answers. Then again, it has a heart and soul to it, but I think that the heart and soul are identified by the viewer, and not necessarily fixed by the producers. The lighting is didactic enough to support individual scenes without ham-handedly overwriting a total message.
9. What is the funniest thing you've seen happen shooting the series?
One of the funniest things that has ever happened to me is Lee Hansen. To isolate his brilliance would require a different interview altogether.