When approaching his designs for Adolescence, production designer Adam Tomlinson says the most important aspect was to keep the flow going on set. Although filming an episode in a one shot is the job of a cinematographer, it would be impossible with poorly devised builds.
Adolescence follows the case of a 13-year-old boy charged with the murder of his classmate, and the people around him trying to find out what happened. Since each episode was filmed in a one shot style, meaning an uninterrupted shot without cuts or edits, Tomlinson needed to build the sets in a way that allowed for the characters, as well as the cameras, to easily navigate the floorplans.
DEADLINE: What is your approach to building the set to be able to film a one shot?
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ADAM TOMLINSON: I still approach it as I would any other drama to start off with. I’ll read the scripts, roughly scribble out a floor plan on paper. I’ve got a fantastic arts department that will do the digital side of things, but I’m very old school and I like to draw it down on paper. You start with something on paper to put it down, get your ideas across, then everybody’s influences come in then and we can pull that model apart. The thing that was obviously different for the one shot with the police station was you can’t cut to interior interview rooms or have a little standalone set which you’re coming in and out of. So, we had to map out where the conversations go. Whether that be charge desk down to the cells, we have to make sure we’ve got enough sets to keep people interested and the conversation doesn’t stop halfway down. We’ve got to make sure our corridors are long enough and then walking back up just to sort of keep the flow going on the set. So that was the challenge for us really of keeping the flow of the police station moving. We put an upstairs in there as well just so that everything wasn’t too convenient off the front charge desk so you just don’t go for a door over there and a door over there. It was safe just to keep that movement going at all times really. So that was our big challenge, just to keep it flowing and keep it interesting for everybody.
DEADLINE: Can you talk about the set for episode 3, where Jamie (Owen Cooper) is speaking with the therapist?
TOMLINSON: Yeah, we built both of the sets next to each other in the studio. That was our first challenge of getting them both in side by side. We didn’t have the luxury of building one set and being able to take it away and then put the other one in, because we filmed episode three first, which was the adolescence unit and then onto the police station, so we had to make sure we could fit them both within the studio. Again, Matt [Lewis, cinematographer] will tell you it’s a unique way of lighting for him that you can’t be bringing in stands to light scenes. We had to make sure we could accommodate that from our side, and his side.
With that set, we did build a full front reception on that first, and we were going for quite a colorful front-of-house sort of feel. But we wanted to feel, as you walk down the corridors then and go up in the lift to come up another floor, you get to the not-so-nice side of that set. So, we tried to take the color out of it, so when we end up in that end room there, we have a few beanbags in there, little pops of color but nothing too nice in there. That’s when it starts off with Erin [Doherty] right at the front lift, holding the pass up to camera, and going straight through those doors. And then, when we come through into the end room, just having the color drained away there and just with Owen [Cooper] and Erin being that focus in the middle. But you are hoping that the viewers will be engaged with what’s going on because it’s an incredible scene. I say scene, but it’s like a 40-page dialogue between the two of them.