TEENAGE KICKS

Heartstopper’s deft portrait of teenage LGBTQ+ romance has charmed viewers young and old. Bringing her trademark eye for colour to the production was London-based Ukrainian cinematographer Diana Olifirova, who shares her lensing choices.

It’s the ultimate meet-cute: teenagers Charlie and Nick are serendipitously seated at the same school desk and sparks fly as soon as they lock eyes. But their love story, which blossoms against the backdrop of their strait-laced British grammar school, isn’t without its challenges: Charlie is the school’s only openly gay pupil, while Nick is a popular rugby player secretly tackling his own sexuality.  

This sensitive portrayal of the rollercoaster of young love has earned Heartstopper a legion of fans. Two more seasons have already been confirmed and the show has even earned a coveted Rotten Tomatoes critics’ score of 100%. Adapted from Alice Oseman’s eponymous graphic novel and directed by Euros Lyn, it features an exciting LGBTQ+ young cast including Yasmin Finney, a trans actor set to join Doctor Who in 2023.  

“It was important to keep it fun for the young actors, and help them to be open, emotional and vulnerable,” says cinematographer Diana Olifirova, “[and] not to create an atmosphere that was too much about precision in lighting and composition – to let that go.” 

Heartstopper marks Kyiv-born Olifirova’s second TV series, following Muslim punk rock sitcom We Are Lady Parts and a variety of shorts, music videos, and commercials. She took on the project after a lively interview with director Euros Lyn: “It was a great collaboration mix because he has so much more experience than me, and very clever ideas and solutions – he’s done it all. For me, it was my first long show; it was fresh, it was new. I’m not that experienced but I brought lots of quirky ideas that he might not have thought of, and he really embraced my creativity.” 

Principal photography spanned 54 days in 2021. Heartstopper’s storyline stretches from winter to summer, and Charlie and Nick’s relationship heats up with the changing seasons. “I changed the white balance throughout the show to make it warmer by the end,” says Olifirova. “I also used pearlescent filters, changing the gradation of them throughout so it’s less soft at the beginning and much softer at the end.” 

School scenes were shot in Slough, but it was Hampton Court House School in London, used for the pivotal party scenes, that captured Olifirova’s imagination. “We had lots of options for party scenes, and we looked at three, but I was so excited by that one. It was amazing; something about it being so old, beautiful and romantic. Just expensive-looking is not what we wanted – we wanted some mystery.”  

Other locations, like the bowling alley, were more challenging but a lighting choice inspired by the bisexual flag charmed fans. She remembers: “The schedule was quite tight. When we arrived for the recce, the location looked terrible, because there were lots of white lights and games that just shone everywhere. I looked at the ceiling and there were pink and blue neon strips, so I thought, let’s just make it simple and put these two colours everywhere. It worked because it was a simple concept that was not overdone.” 

Camera-wise, Olifirova opted for ALEXA Mini LFs with Canon K35 vintage lenses from Pixipixel. “It was not a very straightforward choice because I was aware that those lenses could be inconsistent in the colour, but the set we got was pretty good. I don’t mind a little inconsistency in general because if I have to choose between something super perfect and something not perfect, I will go for the latter because I think it’s something you can play with and there’s something unexpected.”  

Olifirova has an affinity for handheld shots. “I felt like I really connected to the characters,” she says. “I chose a lot of wide lenses and went really close. I’m quite an empathetic person so I was connecting to what they feel, breathe and trying to be in sync with them via camera movement.” 

The more frantic rugby scenes proved a fun challenge. “That was crazy! I was in “ninja-mode”, as the director described. It was about being free and capturing things. I think I really gained a lot of strength in that show, there’s a lot of crazy running around with kids. It was a challenge for me to pull it off – I was throwing myself around and learned the rules of the game.”  

Colour plays a big part in Olifirova’s signature style and the palette from the books (orange, turquoise, pink, and yellow) was adhered to in her lensing, although she played around with hints of colour – “a bright pink here, a blue there”. A long-time collaborator of colourist Toby Tompkins at Cheat, the pair worked closely on Heartstopper, creating a show LUT for the dailies and on-set. Olifirova says: “The hardest part with the grades was we wanted the shot to go from winter to summer, cold and murky at the beginning to bright and sunny at the end, yet for the opening of the show we still wanted it to be nice and flashy. That was one of the biggest challenges, to make it appealing but still make it cold.”  

Tompkins adds: “Diana did so much in-camera with colour, it was really just a case of harmonising and enhancing what we had.” 

The series is defined by ‘Heartstopper moments’; often a key kiss or confession, when animations such as leaves dance around the shot. Originally, it was going to be animation-led but Olifirova naturally wanted to do something in-camera too. “In a way, it’s very magical realism. It’s nice to have that little transition to start from that in-camera thing and go to animation. We would try different things for each moment – a Cinefade on one, lighting changes on the other.” The playful result is a hat-tip to Heartstopper’s graphic novel origins.