Game Rant recently got a chance to interview Nicole Hirsch Whitaker, the cinematographer working on One Piece Live Action.
Highlights
- The cinematographer for Netflix’s One Piece Live Action series, Nicole Hirsch Whitaker, had an amazing experience working on the series, which she prepared for extensively during the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Whitaker drew heavily from her knowledge of the One Piece manga and anime when approaching the cinematography, aiming to strike a balance between honoring the source material and creating a more grounded, relatable world for the live-action adaptation.
- Special lenses were built specifically for the One Piece Live Action series by the company Vantage Hawk, allowing for a unique combination of anamorphic and spherical qualities. Whitaker and the director, Marc Jobst, carefully selected which iconic shots from the source material to recreate in the live-action series.
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Netflix’s One Piece Live Action series dropped recently today for all the fans to enjoy, finally, after years of wait. The series is the adaptation of the work of Eiichiro Oda’s Magnum Opus, One Piece. One Piece features the journey of a young pirate named Luffy, played in the live-action series by Inaki Godoy, who sets out to sea during the Great Pirate Era, when there is an influx of pirates, especially across a stretch of the ocean called the Grand Line. Luffy’s goal is to find the grand treasure called the One Piece. He establishes his Straw Hat Crew, which includes Zoro, Nami, Usopp, and Sanji in the East Blue, played by Arata Mackenyu, Emily Rudd, Jacob Romero Gibson, and Taz Skylar respectively.
These actors have done a great job in bringing their manga counterparts to life, however, there is quite a lot more to the One Piece Live Action series. Recently, Game Rant had the opportunity to talk with one of the cinematographers for Netflix’s One Piece Live Action series, Nicole Hirsch Whitaker. Nicole worked as the cinematographer for episode 1, “Romance Dawn,” and episode 2, “The Man In The Straw Hat.” Nicole revealed some very intriguing details about the process of filming for the series and how Oda’s story was brought to life. She also threw focus on how each shot was framed, and what lenses were used to make it as special as it is, among other things. Nicole also highlighted quite a lot of behind-the-scenes details that fans would not otherwise know about.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
GR: Hi, Nicole! It’s a pleasure to speak to you! First of all, congratulations on the release of the One Piece Live Action series. I, myself, am a huge fan of One Piece. So, for me, this is something that I’ve waited years for, and it certainly looks magnificent! You worked quite a lot on the One Piece Live Action. How has your experience been working on the series?
Nicole: Oh, I mean it was an amazing experience. We started prepping it during COVID, so the director and I had almost a year to get ready for the shooting and we had four months of prep actually on the ground in Africa before we started shooting. So, we really had a lot of time to prepare for how we were going to turn this incredible IP into something live action. And, I grew up as a parent with One Piece, so I already knew everything about everything about the show. I watched probably somewhere between three and four hundred episodes and then read all the books with my son, who read them in Japanese. He even has a tattoo! He’s got Trafalgar Law’s tattoos! I probably knew more than anyone my age, besides Matt, who’s younger than me, and Steve and some other people, but I knew so much about this before I even started that I was super excited to have been asked to work on something that I knew so much about.
GR: I was told that you did read quite a lot of One Piece and you also watched, as you mentioned, around 400 episodes. So, how did that influence the way you approached cinematography for this?
Nicole: Oh, yeah! Hugely, in terms of, just figuring out the type of lensing that we wanted to use. Obviously, the look is very different than the anime and the manga because we wanted to make it more grounded. The way that it was animated was very bright and lots of daytime flat. That’s just the world that Oda wanted to create, but we wanted to make it something that people could relate to and, relate to the characters and put them into real settings. So, I needed to find a really, really good balance between the two, honoring the manga and anime but also making it its own thing.
GR: Yeah. At the end of the day, these are two different media. So, you can’t just make it exactly like the anime or just paste the manga panels there. You have to take a different approach and find the right balance between the two. In that regard, I feel like you guys have done a great job!
GR: I was told that you decided to use some lenses that were made specifically for the One Piece Live Action series. I also read some tweets from the Director, Marc Jobst. He also talked a lot about your stellar work on the series. He talked about some lenses that you used, and I also was informed about it personally. Can you please tell us what lenses you went with, and why exactly you went with them?
Nicole: Yeah, so we actually had lenses built for the show. They’ve never been used before. There’s a company that I’ve been working with for many years, it’s called Vantage Hawk, and they’re based in Germany, and Peter Martin and Wolfgang are the two owners. And, when I first spoke to Marc about this show, we really wanted to shoot anamorphic but we knew, because of the way that the manga and the anime were lensed, that we couldn’t do that because with anamorphic, you don’t have close focus. We wanted to have close focus and also very deep focus, so that you could feel like you were engrossed in this world. So we knew we were going to have to shoot spherical. But, we were also heartbroken because we really wanted the bokeh of the anamorphic. So, we went to Hawk and I sent them all of our references and I told them what we were trying to do. We had used some of their lenses, called Mini Hawks, on another Netflix show and I loved them. They had an anamorphic bokeh even though they were spherical. Very, very fast lenses!
So, I asked them if they could build a large format version of these lenses. Hawk is very specific in terms that they don’t like to just adapt their lenses to something. So, they basically built them from the ground up for us. And, we were really lucky with all the prep because they were able to start building them six months before we started shooting. There was a lot of conference calling with Netflix to talk about this because it was a big hurdle and a big leap for them to trust having new lenses built just for the show, but they did it. And, we got the lenses a few weeks before we started shooting, and tested them. I knew they were going to be gorgeous. I knew that the Hawk was not going to do anything that wasn’t 10 times more incredible than I thought they would be, and they just were absolutely beautiful. So, we were very lucky. And they sent them with my name on them! So, very cool!
GR: Speaking of the work you did with Marc, he mentioned that with some frames that you guys did with your lenses, you paid tribute to the source material. Some shots are very similar to how they are in the manga/anime. I saw tweets about Gold Roger’s execution, which was framed similarly to how we see it in the anime and the manga. So, you’re trying to do your own thing but also keeping true to the roots that Oda basically set for the series. How did you manage to strike a balance between the two?
Nicole: Basically, we did a lot of prep and we chose the canons that we really wanted to represent, that we felt were so important. There’s just certain images from One Piece that everybody associates the show with. We knew with Luffy and Shanks, you had to nail that. And then, the Gold Roger scene was a huge one as well because that’s what sets up the whole show. We didn’t want to do it too much because if you did that, then it becomes a little heavy-handed. So, there was a lot of discussion between Marc, the showrunners and everybody, about production design, wardrobe, visual effects, and special effects. Everybody kind of came together. We had lots of discussions about how we were going to approach that and, at the end of the day, not everything necessarily made it into the cut, but I felt like they chose really strong imagery in the pilot that, even if you don’t know the show, made you feel like you were relating to the characters, just because they’re really strong images, even without knowing what they are.
GR: One Piece channels a grand sense of adventure when you see some shots. It’s very heartwarming, there’s comedy in there, it’s lighthearted, but at the same time, it flips to intense action. You see Zoro fighting in, I believe, Shell’s Town where they meet Morgan. And, it’s heartwarming at one moment and then it switches to intense action at another moment. How do you manage that?
Nicole: Yeah, that was a testament obviously to my Director, Marc, who spent a lot of time with the actors finding how they came together as a group and also finding how to juggle those emotions of talking about family, and your experience together, and then also being able to do fight scenes. We also had a wonderful Assistant Director too, Justin Vandermeer, who also scheduled things so that we would shoot, for five or six, or seven days, just a fight scene! And then the narrative beats that were more emotional, especially, with Colton, who played young Luffy. He was 13 years old and these are emotional scenes for him and they were very, very cognizant to make sure that there was enough time for the actors to rehearse ahead of time. With television, a lot of the times, you don’t have time. You don’t have time for the actors to spend time together, and Marc took them on trips. They would go together to do bonding as a group. It was really treated more like a theater piece, I think even than a television show, which, I think it really shows through in the episodes, especially in the pilot, getting to know them, how they feel like they’ve known each other for a long time.
GR: From your side, because you’re in charge of cinematography, did you have to do anything different when tackling these situations – one where, when the series is heartwarming, you take one approach when it comes to cinematography and then when it switches to combat you have to take a completely different approach. Juggling that must have been quite a challenge. From what I’ve seen so far, you’ve definitely surpassed all expectations!
Nicole: It’s funny, I’ve never been asked that question! I don’t think I approach story any differently than I approach stunts, or action, or visual effects. Yeah, I think once you come up with a way that you want to design the show, it all kind of folds in together. So I actually never thought about that. That’s really interesting! Now, I have to think about that in the future, because I wanted it all to feel seamless whether or not they’re in a fight. It should still feel like they’re in the same world, so I didn’t change anything. Obviously, the camera was different. We had an amazing stunt team and a camera operator who just worked with stunts for me behind the scenes. So, they worked out a lot of camera that I didn’t have time to work out. And then we would go in and we would amend it a little bit. So, we had so many wonderful people who were helping with all of that too.
GR: The episodes that you have worked on, from what I’ve seen, are lit very beautifully. I remember the shots with the Shanks where he places his hat on Luffy’s head for the first time. It’s lit very beautifully. Even with Roger’s execution – you can tell there’s palpable tension in the crowd when Roger is just staring at everyone and he laughs, and at the same time, you can see that something big is about to happen there. The same goes for Shanks, you can see the emotional tension there. There’s also another shot that really caught my eye that I believe is from one of your episodes. The Straw Hats seem to be sailing and then there’s a flare shot in the night sky and everything just shines bright red. The framing and lighting for that shot in particular impressed me quite a lot. How did you pull that off?
Nicole: Thanks for noticing! One of the things that I was nervous about this show before I started is that there’s a lot of exteriors and you’re on big ships, and you know you can you can’t control the sun and you can’t spin the big ships unless they’re in the water because a lot of them are in the parking lot. So, we would have to basically move around. When they were in the water, we could spin them. So, that was a lot easier to deal with, but you still had to deal with being in the water and we had huge platforms set up on the water. That particular scene, that is in episode two, was shot on stage and we knew that we couldn’t shoot that in the water. That had to be all staged. We had a lot of effects with the smoke and the mist and then the red, and all of that. So, we shot that all on stage. I have some really great behind-the-scenes photos, that will hopefully end up in one of the articles, that I took, and it was really a very cool set. We did a lot of prep and a lot of research for that to work as well as it did. So, we didn’t have to spend time doing it on the day. I think we did about four different test shoot days on that.
GR: Is there anything you’d like to add that you want One Piece fans to know?
Nicole: You know, it’s so funny. Pretty much just that, for me, it was such an honor to be able to work on this show. And, for all the fans, I’m excited for them to know how much of a fan I was too and that I wasn’t just a technician that was hired to come on the show. It means a lot to me. And, obviously, I think my son would have never spoken to me again if it didn’t turn out perfectly!
GR: You had extra pressure on you!
Nicole: Oh, more pressure from my family than even from the fans, probably! I feel like there’s a lot of support for the show that I was nervous that there would be a lot of people that were going to be skeptical and I feel like it’s the opposite. And, I think it says a lot about the fans that like One Piece. They’re also special. So, it’s very cool!
GR: The support has been overwhelming, honestly. A lot of people went into it with, I would say, some skepticism or careful optimism. But, with time, the more you see of the show, trailers, more clips being released, you just get to know that this is working, this is really good. We’re onto something here. Personally, I feel that whatever I’ve seen so far has been amazing. I can’t wait! I’m taking a day off work and I’ll be binging the entire thing! Congratulations, once again! I hope you get to work again on the show in the future. I will personally be waiting for more of your work. So, good luck for tomorrow!
Nicole: I’m excited! I haven’t seen everything finished. There were still a lot of visual effects being done so I get to see it for the first time completely done as well, so I’m really excited!
GR: So, you’ll be sharing that with the fans!
Nicole: Yeah, exactly!
One Piece Live Action is available to watch on Netflix.
Fuente: successacademy.edu.vn
Categorías: Anime
