#the lighting

Some direct quotes from his February interview with Vulture:

Parrell hopes you’ll overanalyze his use of color. Heated Rivalry’s palette tracks the story: Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) and Ilya Rozanov’s (Connor Storrie) romance begins in dark hotel rooms and gradually moves into the light, a progression baked into both Tierney’s script and Reid’s novel. The rest is taste. “I wanted everything to look beautiful all the time,” Parrell says. With colorist Maxime Taimiot, he developed the show’s “full-fat” look — rich, saturated images that resist the muddy, flat aesthetic he associates with larger studio fare. “That’s not how I want to live,” he says.

Parrell organized each episode into “color chapters” with a distinct visual identity. “It’s like a fingerprint,” he says. “Line up every frame, and you’ll know exactly where you are just by the color.” Shane’s scenes with his girlfriend, Rose (Sophie Nélisse), for instance, are deliberately “very golden,” while the club sequence in episode four leans into the familiar “bisexual lighting” trope. It almost seemed too obvious — Shane and Ilya under pink, purple, and blue strobes, dancing with other people and staring at each other across the floor. “It was just the best look I could come up with,” Parrell says. “These colors look great together. There’s a reason they’re so heavily used.”

And some more quotes from his interview with It's Nice That:

Interviewer: Some of my favourite scenes in the whole thing are the opening montages, especially episode four’s. In them there’s so much mirroring going on between Shane and Ilya, but how did you create this sense of being in their separate worlds in such short bursts, making it distinct to like Montreal and Moscow, when you couldn't go there?

Parrell: A lot of that came from colour. I used similar camera styles for both – they’re all handheld. But funnily enough a lot of them were the same locations: like the gym that Ilya and Shane both are working out in in the episode four montage, we walked in there and knew we had one day to shoot all the gym montage beats. It was a massive gym. The lower floor is all windows, then the second floor is all these like alternating fluorescent light bands along the ceiling. So we differentiated these two spaces, we only shot Ilya up around these lights, and then down below we leant more into the window lighting, letting the blues define the Montreal gym.

Interviewer: I had noticed that Shane’s shot has this blue tint and Ilya’s has a warmer, redder tint. Was lighting really key?

Parrell: A lot is lighting, a lot is picking the right locations.

zombie looking ass 𖹭