NO PLACE LIKE HOME VIDEO  

Director Jane Schoeburn called for a neon-drenched and nineties-inspired visual identity to portray the visceral blending of the real and the fantasy in I Saw the TV Glow.   

Eric Yue, having previously lensed The Giant and A Thousand and One, was deemed the perfect choice to shoot Schoeburn’s colourful vision of Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy’s (Brigette Lundy-Paine) journey through adolescence. The isolated characters find each other thorough a shared obsession with a fictional TV show, The Pink Opaque. The show becomes increasingly intertwined into the the two teens’ reality, and aesthetically into the visual language of I Saw the TV Glow, as their situations become more dire.  

The Queens-born cinematographer felt a resonance with the film’s concept, having a particular affinity with the nineties world of home video. “I feel like I’m still firmly of the home video generation. Terminator 2 was one of the first big ones. It had this special box and behind the scenes stuff on it and I was like, ‘Whoa, this is what goes into making a movie?!’” Yue also fondly recalls spending time in his youth at Kim’s Video in Manhattan, “I didn’t have any money, but I’d just go there and browse the Criterion Collection for hours.” 

This eclectic taste made Yue a perfect collaborator for Jane Schoeburn. “Jane is a massive cinephile and much more into kind of underground films, but also has a really deep knowledge of cinema. She is definitely of the home video generation too, with that sitting in a room for hours and putting on movies vibe.” This extensive love of cinema led to a thorough prep process for I Saw the TV Glow.  

“Jane made this huge 100-page document, with everything from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Under the Naked Sky. I had never worked with someone who had everything so planned out. A lot of these seemingly disparate references that were somehow tied together cohesively so we could maintain these repetitive motifs in the film.” 

Picking the palette 

Some of the standout motifs revolve around strong colour choices, partially inspired by Kieślowski’s Blue, as Yue loves “the heightened expression of colour”. One of the film’s most visually stunning scenes occurs when Owen watches The Pink Opaque at Maddy’s house, sleeping over in her basement which is lit by a striking green fish tank. 

“I think our production designer Brandon [Tonner-Connolly] thought of the fish tank, but I knew that I needed to put a light in it to motivate it.” Yue first experimented with a blueish tone, but “it just wasn’t feeling romantic enough. Then it hit me, and I was like, ‘change it to green’.” The DP cites Gaston Bachelard’s book The Poetics of Space when describing the scene’s ethereal quality. “The attic represents logic, whereas the subterranean is illogical. The basement has this magical kind of quality to it. It’s a place for secrets.” 

This “fish tank green” amplifies the sense of surrealism in the scene and at significant points throughout the film. A standout shot sees the green paired with a neon pink in a shroud of smoke engulfing an ice-cream truck, which Yue and Schoeburn would jokingly refer to as the Goosebumps palette.  

As Owen ages and his world gets bleaker as the noughties approach, Yue wanted to signify this change through the colour of the film: “The colour palette is totally different when he’s older. I wanted to give a fun idea of the visual delineation of the ‘90s versus the 2000s.” Owen’s visual world becomes much colder as he ages, “there’s no filtration on it, and I lit scenes so everything was just more blue and a little bit more realistic.” This contrast between the two halves of the film was further accentuated by most sequences in the first half, shot on Kodak 5219 stock, being pushed one step and those in the second half, shot on Kodak 5207 stock, being pulled one step. 

Yue opted to use the Arricam LT as it’s “is the smallest, most reliable and versatile 35mm film camera and I am very comfortable with working with it.” As for lens choices, Yue elaborated: “we used Zeiss Master Primes as our main lenses because I knew that we would need focal lengths between 12mm and 18mm on many of the shots after our extensive scouts. I wanted wide lenses that would remain sharp at T1.3 and keep its resolution after pushing the film stock in developing. I was worried if I went with vintage glass I would feel the lenses breathe and not many had the wider focal lengths that i was looking for.” 

Yue also enlisted the help of ARRI and their facilities to do camera tests for creating the ‘90s television static lighting effect that punctuates key moments of I Saw the TV Glow. Along with gaffer Matthew Atwood, the cinematographer went through a rigorous process to find the right lighting combination to bring the static effect to life. “We had programmed different levels of flickering, so for each scene we could seek these different sequences depending on the intensity.” The lights in question were mostly Astera tubes, covered in pool noodles to “diffuse the light and create this softer level of flickering.” 

A huge point of discussion with director Jane Schoeburn was how to recreate the VHS look so synonymous with the ‘90s when showing clips of The Pink Opaque. “The original idea was that we weren’t going to change anything. There was going to be no obvious visual difference between their reality and the TV show.” 

Eventually they decided on an intricate process of running the film through VHS and Betamax for degradation purposes, then using VFX to enhance prosthetic and emotional detail where the degradation was deemed too severe. This makes The Pink Opaque segments feel hyper authentic and even more impactful when the fuzzy ‘90s world of the TV show and the real-world start melting together visually.