‘Appendage’ Cinematographer Powell Robinson Breaks Down Hulu’s Top Horror Movie
To the delight of many, at the beginning of September Hulu announced that their Halloween-themed programming slate “Huluween” was returning. This year’s slate features classics such as the complete miniseries of Stephen King’s Rose Red and the Leprechaun 30th Anniversary Film Collection, recently released films such as Cobweb and The Boogeyman, and original content such as The Mill, Fright Krewe, and The Other Black Girl.
Another original title worth mentioning is Appendage, which began garnering buzz at this year’s SXSW Film Festival. Directed by Anna Zlokovic, the film follows Hannah (Hadley Robinson), a young fashion designer, who seems fine on the surface, but secretly struggles with debilitating self-doubt. Soon these buried feelings begin to make Hannah physically sick and sprout into a ferocious growth on her body: The Appendage. As Hannah’s health declines, The Appendage begins to fuel her anxieties—her perceived lack of talent at work, her deteriorating relationships with her boyfriend and best friend, and her parents’ lack of love and understanding. At her breaking point, Hannah makes a shocking discovery—there are others out there like her.
Powell Robinson served as the film’s cinematographer and to learn more about his work on the film and what went into shooting The Appendage in its various states, we talked to him below.
Dread Central: How did you get involved with Appendage?
Powell Robinson: I’ve been working with Anna, the director since we met in college. She and I actually co-DP’d a thesis film 10 years ago before she began focusing more on directing. Obviously, it was a no-brainer when she asked me to hop on the Huluween short film version of Appendage, which very quickly led to us taking on the feature together. David Brooks, the head of 20th Digital/WorthenBrooks, actually came to the set on the second day of the short film shoot and told us he was interested in turning it into a feature. A year later we began principal photography.
DC: Did the director, Anna Zlokovic, know the shots she wanted going in?
PR: Oh yeah, Anna is incredibly prepared. Once we’ve gone through her detailed director’s shot list which is usually tied with her own hand-drawn storyboards for the effects sequences, we get into this fun hive-mind rhythm (that’s developed over the last decade) where, if things change radically or complications create a need for new shots, I’ll know exactly the frame she’s after and can get moving on it quickly without needing to over-communicate and lose valuable time. This helps a ton when we’re trying to get through 35 to 40 practical-puppet-fx, single-camera setups in a day.
DC: What did you do to prepare for your work on the film? Where did you get inspiration for the look of Appendage?
PR: Our prep was very involved. Anna and I were attached at the hip for the two weeks of on-location prep we had together. We had a schedule where we’d work through the shot list and storyboards for three to four hours a day while drawing digital overheads for each scene together. Then we’d go scout and take director’s viewfinder shots on Cadrage to compare to the plan-on-paper to see if the prep lined up with what the locations would allow, go over relevant stills from our reference films to tie into the lighting from the scout earlier in the day, rinse, and repeat until we were shooting.
We had a great selection of films that were the foundation for Appendage’s look: Black Swan, Fight Club, Don’t Breathe, Se7en, and The Fly. However, I can’t say we lifted anything specific directly from any of them. Appendage’s tone is such a unique blend of comedy, horror, and drama that there was no single reference that had everything we needed in it. So we cherry-picked little elements of each that all added up into something bizarre and new.
The most unexpected element was a pinch of Guillermo del Toro storybook or fairytale energy that Anna conveyed to both me and Michelle Patterson (the production designer) for select moments, to help create a tone that didn’t feel too self-serious or dour, and added to the magic of the practical effects and perhaps the storytelling in general.
DC: Can you tell us more about the Appendage shoot?
PR: Appendage is set in New York, but we filmed primarily in Wilmington, NC. We did do a little splinter day on the last day of production in NY itself where we shot a couple of exteriors as well as all the subway footage to help tie everything together geographically.
It was originally scheduled as two weeks of on-location pre-production, and a 20-day shoot, but we got slammed with a tropical storm in week one that shut us down for enough time over the course of our first few days that they added an additional day on the backend to compensate.
One of the tougher components of the shoot itself was that there were zero set builds. Everything was on location. A lot of the buildings didn’t have power so we were running our own generators and lines every day, which also meant with the crazy weather, we were often having to turn off our lights and get creative with re-lighting until the storm passed.
The location size and solely stair-based access also meant we had to get really thrifty and think outside the box with how we’d actually operate and move the camera. Only a few locations had enough space, or viable means to bring in, our Fisher 11 dolly. So we were putting our slider/dana-dolly all over the place, spanning stairs and countertops, rigged with a mixture of stands, apple boxes, and whatever desks or window ledges we could find that were stable enough. Our budget (let alone the practical location dimensions) couldn’t accommodate a crane so we got a ton of risers for the Fisher and used the hydraulic arm to get descending/ascending shots to give the film a sense of scope in some of our larger locations when possible.
DC: While Appendage falls into the horror genre, are there other genres you would like to work in?
PR: Definitely. Overall, I’m a big genre film fan, so anything in the sci-fi, horror, fantasy, thriller world would be very fun. I do know for sure I’m looking to work on a more singular-genre type of project. I had fun with horror-comedy, especially cause Anna and I share a very similar sense of humor. But I’d love to tackle something with one highly defined tone or mood. Dune, True Detective, Evil Dead (2013), Moonlight, Hereditary, Sunshine, Mad Max: Fury Road—all very different types of films but each one was so tightly handled, you can recall the exact feeling each film has on you.
In the end, I think it comes down to world-building or look-building. Coming up through indie features, music videos, and commercials all simultaneously meant I was constantly learning how to construct unique worlds for each of these projects, so nothing ever felt recycled. This is a skill I really enjoy bringing to larger-scale feature filmmaking as well. The best kind of project is one that inspires me to build a look that really serves the story and doesn’t just rely on things I’m comfortable doing.
DC: There are a lot of blue hues in the film, the bar scene being one example. Why was this coloring chosen?
PR: In prep for the film, Anna and I realized that with the tone being such a dance between genres, we needed some visual guidelines to follow to keep it cohesive. This came down to a color story we adhered to with lighting and color correction. Hannah’s own anxiety and mania were represented by warm/gold tones, the influence of the Appendage was green, and her friendship with Esther and sort of her comfort color was blue.
While the bar scene takes a turn for the worst, it starts with the intention of giving us a real look at Hannah and Esther’s relationship. It’s the last chance to show this off in the film before things really go sideways for them so we decided to push the blue-friend-color hard, which conveniently also provides a break from the tungsten vs. fluorescent that most of the rest of the film lives in.
DC: Can you talk about shooting the mini appendage? Was this practical or SFX?
PR: We called that little one the Stage One Appendage. It was really interesting to revisit this sequence since it was basically the entire Huluween short film we’d shot the previous year. We’d learned a lot about what worked vs didn’t with it, both on the cinematography end, as well on Amber Mari, our special effects department head’s, end.
In the short, the Appendage was done using a mix of practical and SFX. The mouth was animatronic but could only go up or down, the arms were animated using green rods operated from off-screen and painted out with SFX. The eyes were replaced with digital ones. The little arms requiring rods and SFX paint-outs limited the actor’s blocking/range of motion. It also meant we had to be totally locked off on the camera for any shot the Appendage was fully animated in so we could provide easy background plates that required no tracking for post.
So, with all that in mind for the feature, the Stage One Appendage became entirely practical. The eyes are real, they added eye, eyelid, and brow animatronic movement, the arms got turned into little nubs to negate the rod/blocking/shot-choice issue, and the mouth got a serious revamp with a mechanism connected to a microphone that translated the speaker’s dialogue and cadence more specifically.
This allowed us to go fully handheld to increase the tension in the scene and speed up our on-set shooting plan as she ran around the room without bumping up the SFX budget to accommodate all the roto-scoping. It also gave Hadley total freedom to act/move in the scene alongside this autonomous little creature that didn’t have any performance restrictions.
DC: What was your favorite sequence to shoot in the film? Why?
PR: Filming the ending in the attic, in particular the final frame of the whole film, was the most cathartic and fulfilling. The final wide shot was a composition I’d taken on the scout that just felt right, even in its iPhone photo form. We had to shift our original plans a lot of the time on other scenes to accommodate the wild conditions, but this was one scene that made it through unscathed from the planning process. When I saw how Michelle (PD) had decorated the space to enhance the space and how the time of day we were shooting gave blue reflections on the wood floor that matched our color story, it just all came together in the perfect moment.
DC: Appendage is based on a short film by Anna Zlokovic. Did she want the feature to resemble the short or go in a different direction?
PR: When we did the short, our approach was visually a touch campier and retro, I would say. There’s more added post-film grain and we pushed our individual tones/color contrast pretty far.
When the feature came around, the script had a more serious dramatic baseline, so it needed to feel more mature and earnest. But it still had the same kind of comedic relief woven in so it couldn’t shift too far in the opposite, dramatic direction. It required a tightrope walk between visual styles to make sure it supported the message of the film while also supporting its multi-genre tone.
You can see, however, how our hero Hannah’s colors—gold vs. green—were born in the short. Even if they were a little more broad-stroke and less justified subjectively with Hannah’s mental state.
Appendage is streaming now exclusively on Hulu.
Learn more about Powell here and follow him on Instagram!
Categorized:Interviews
