Michael Ralph is a prolific production designer who has been behind some of your favorite television shows. His work has been most recently seen in Prime Video‘s Good Omens and she’s also the production designer in Prime Video’s upcoming Anansi Boys series.
Ralph was recently at the 2024 SCAD Savannah Film Festival where he spoke on the “Below the Line: The Art of Creating Magic” panel, speaking to SCAD students and festival attendees about bringing these projects to life.
With the target audience for the chat primarily being SCAD students studying production design, Ralph went into a detailed conversation with Lisa Ryan about the use of volume.
“Volume is a minefield full of trip hazards, right from the beginning,” he explained. “The most complicated thing about volume is the people that are using it, not necessarily the technology or the way it’s done. The greatest advantage you’ve got with volume that you haven’t got with green screen is the parallax shift and reflection. And those things are absolute wonderful things, but you might as well go that green screen if that’s what you’re looking for. You may not and should not use it if you can’t afford it because you’ve got 30 people sitting over there on computers shifting mountains and parallaxes. Then when you’re standing there on the day and you’ve got a certain amount to shoot and you’ve got a DOP, and you’ve got director, and you’ve got every other head of department that’s controlling some aspect of that volume, they all get involved with what they’re doing on the stage and the whole time runs away from you.”
“To be used properly, I’ve done concept art with volume and it’s beautiful,” he continued. ” And to put water on the ground or shine floor, like basically gloss a floor and get that whole thing happening in that floor, which you can’t get in green screen and you’ve got all these sort of framework you’ve got to do. With that, it’s an amazing thing. So, it should be used again by restriction, not exploitation. If you’re going to use volume, go in there and handcuff yourself to the concept of what it is you’re trying to do with it.”
He also spoke about the importance of having great working relationships with the other department heads and how he’s found much success because of these relationships.
“The guys I work with Good Omens, the VFX and DOP, it’s an honor to work with them as a team because they leave their egos to the door and they’re very inclusive in what they do and we just bounce each other with the craziest ideas,” he said. “You’ve got to be really confident and you’ve got to be really safe in a room with a bunch of people to say the stupidest thing. And you’ve got to be able to say the stupidest idea. If you restrict yourself from saying the stupidest idea that comes into your head, then you’ve just then, you’ve damaged the show because whatever that stupid idea was may have been exactly what was needed. And sometimes they’re the simplest ideas, and sometimes the simplest ideas are thrown away because they’re too simple. Because why didn’t we think of it? And that sounds too easy. But in fact, that is the answer. Many times we go back to where we were two weeks ago, when you’ve gone and sometimes you can see the clearing in the forest of where exactly what it is you’ve got to do straight away.”
Good Omens is set to end its run with a third season that will consist of a 90-minute series finale.
No word on when that, or the long-gestating Anansi Boys series, starring Malachi Kirby, Delroy Lindo, Amarah-Jae St. Aubyn, Whoopi Goldberg, Grace Saif, L. Scott Caldwell and more, will premiere.
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