With a body of international award-winning and premier festival-showing films, American Cinematographer David McFarland (“12 Mighty Orphans”, “Mafak”, “The Ballad of Lefty Brown”, “The Rambler”, “The Boy Next Door”) was a perfect choice to lens Netflix’s 2024 limited series docudrama “Testament”. No stranger to stories of survival against great odds that take place in Asia and the Middle East, McFarland has made a name for himself as a cinematographer willing to work off the beaten path. For “Testament” he relied on Astera to light the intimate spaces and dwellings Moses travels through on his journey to free the Hebrew people.
“Testament is a retelling of the story of the 10 Commandments,” explains McFarland. “Most people, at least in the West, know the story of Moses. Tackling something this big was a little daunting, but on a story level, “Testament” is a character-driven drama dealing with a person overcoming insane obstacles. That kind of project really speaks to me.” Filming took place over several months in Morocco across mountain and desert wilderness and inside giant set pieces and architectural sites, sometimes featuring hundreds of extras. McFarland worked hand in hand with director Benajmin Ross, to create the language of the film using camera movement and lighting.
Having come up through electric department, lighting is a paramount tool in McFarland’s storytelling kit, an essential part of shot composition and camera support. “With a period piece like Testament, I first and foremost go back to what lighting existed at the time. What are the motivating light sources in a story?” says McFarland. “For Moses there is sun, moon and fire. That right there shapes your direction regarding color temperature and where light comes from.” McFarland began to focus on what texture of light would be naturally generated, looking to Astera, for his go-to lighting tools.
Intimately Lighting Architecture
“Testament” expertly walks the line of a grand epic, featuring hundreds of extras and thousands of people on a historic journey, yet is grounded by personal interactions between characters. Lighting these intimate sequences between Moses and his brother, his wife, or the pharaoh, was a major priority for the cinematographer. “Typically, I light the space beforehand, to accommodate the specific set, but when it comes to how I’m going to light the actor’s faces, I like to work with the actors and give them the floor during blocking rehearsals. Then, with the help of Astera lights, I can react to the performance.”
“A few years back, while working in India, I came up with a technique which I employed in “Testament” to create lighting sources that are fast, mobile and soft but still have a beautiful falloff.” McFarland’s tool creates a twist on a Chinese lantern by placing an Astera Helios Tube or a LunaBulb inside plastic and rubber water canisters.
Comprised of 8 pixels which can be individually colored, flashed and programmed from the Astera App, the baton-shaped Helios Tube is a small (21.7″ x 1.7″/550mm x 43mm), highly controllable and versatile LED lighting solution. Easily maneuverable thanks to its small and narrow shape, the wireless Helios could be remotely dimmed or adjusted after McFarland placed them inside the canisters. When an even smaller solution was required, LunaBulbs, the wireless lightbulb lookalike LED from Astera, could be similarly set and adjusted remotely.
This improvised lantern was essential to McFarland’s approach when filming in actual Berber villages throughout the series. The architecture of the Berbers, a people dating back to 2000 BCE whose modern descendants still reside in Morocco, often feature tall square towers, with a central interior opening that allows a fire on the ground floor to heat the structure while smoke escapes through the roof. “The buildings have a soft sense of daylight, but it’s very dark inside,” describes McFarland.
To compensate, the cinematographer made use of his improvised lanterns complete with LunaBulb or Helios Tube. Using Astera’s built-in flicker effect, he could create and augment firelight. During each blocking rehearsal, McFarland repositioned the lights to better shape the actor, adapting to evolving performances. “I would take 5-6 of the lights and plastic canisters. Luckily because they are wireless, I could make critical lighting changes during the rehearsal. The Astera lights are so tough you can literally toss them where you want them to go.”
In one powerful scene, Moses reconnects with his biological mother. “It’s probably my favorite scene lighting-wise in the whole show. The Berber architecture is very vertical, with dark stone walls and a hole in the ceiling high above delivering a pale, but beautiful light. It created a heavy contrast situation, yet I didn’t want to over light this moment.” McFarland first lit the space generally, choosing to lean into this central shaft of ambient ‘moonlight,’ which cinematically mixes with the rising firelight and smoke. He bolstered the ray of light with large HMIs bounced downwards, using his modified LunaBulb and Helios Tube set ups to augment and cultivate the firelight.
“I love to play around with how much of the eyes we see in a scene. In this story people aren’t always who they seem, and I tried to subliminally play up that feeling, using a strong eye light for someone we might want to trust, less for someone whose intentions are unclear.” Exposed wooden beams inside the Berbers offered many rigging points for the improvised lanterns. Throughout the scene with his mother, careful lighting allowed the estranged family members to move between shadow and illumination, complementing the emotional dialogue.
Shooting Around Desert Wind
Portraying Moses’ journey frequently brought the crew to shoot the Moroccan desert at night. The fall of night brought high desert winds. This was a problem. McFarland explains, “We usually had a crane or a cherry picker that could hold heavy loads for lighting, but the wind was a real issue. I had to work with my gaffer, Arif Cizmeci, to create a low-profile solution that the wind could pass through.” The team found that they could create a 12x24x8 arrangement of Astera Titan Tubes fit inside a narrow softbox, as a large moonlight source that wouldn’t be buffeted around by the wind.
The big brother to Astera’s Helios, Titan Tubes (40.7″ x 1.7″/1035mm x 43mm) are another highly versatile 8-pixel LED. “Because the Titans aren’t omnidirectional, we could keep them very low profile. Where you would normally place a light at the top of the softbox, instead we put them towards the bottom of the box and used a thicker diffusion. That way we didn’t have a big black skirt catching in the wind.” McFarland and crew could tether this thin Titan Tube softbox much more easily than a larger light, which wouldn’t have been able to fly in the wind.
Creating the Camera Movement of “Testament”
“Testament” is noted for its purposeful and dynamic camera movement which guides the audience experience. “Director Ross had a very specific way he wanted the camera to move, almost floating and dreamlike,” McFarland explains. To achieve this style, the cinematographer would operate the A Camera, either mounted on a crane or sometimes handheld. “We carried three arms, a small jib-like arm, a medium sized crane, and a quite long fixed arm which we needed when dealing with mountainous terrain.” McFarland utilized a DGI Ronin paired with the ARRI Mini LF and DGI Master wheels to get three axes of motion control.
“I typically operate remotely with a set of master wheels, with the director standing right next to me watching the monitor. I find this keeps me in in touch with the actors and with the physical aspect of executing a given set up, while being close to the director allows me to respond to his body language and notes very quickly between takes.”
When Moses returns to Egypt, the camera movement and lighting get noticeably slicker. Representative of the power of this ancient kingdom, the show embraces greater depth and a more glamourous look. “The same motivating sources exist–sun, moon and firelight,” McFarland clarifies, “but we gave people more backlights and the light sources became more symmetrical.” Shot on stage at Atlas Studios, the crew employed HMIs to create the daylight but continued to rely on Astera to augment and amplify the firelight. “Because of their size factor, my gaffer would have Astera Tubes at hand, ready to quickly move in a small driven source for a shot.”
“Testament” was ravenously received following its premier on Netflix, quickly soaring to the streamer’s coveted No.1 position the week of its release. McFarland attributes the show’s success to its character-driven portrayal of the world-renowned story.
“I’ve tried to always take projects that really say something to me, both visually and culturally, and that’s led me to work all over the world,” he says. “These experiences have given me a strong understanding of how to make something look the way I want it to look as well as the choice and instrumentation to accomplish it. It’s inspiring when improvisation can be part of a professional arsenal of tools, and the mobility of the Astera lights really provided that.”
“Testament” is available to stream on Netflix.
To learn more about Astera: https://astera-led.com/
