written by Rachel Elspeth Gross, Forbes

The cinematographer and costume designer for the show’s second season explain how collaboration, between every department, allowed this show to become a believable universe we want to crawl into.

“Can I talk about my favourite shot of the entire season?” Jules O'Loughlin, cinematographer of Percy Jackson and the Olympians, asked.

Lovely reader, that is a question this writer could never say ‘no’ too.

“It's the opening of the chariot race,” he said, “when they're all lined up on the field and the camera tracks past all of the characters in the chariots and it gets tighter. And then there's this push in on Leah, the actress who plays Annabeth, in that gold costume. And I'm not even looking at the chariot. I'm looking at the gold of her costume. That shot is my favourite shot in the entire series. Leah looks so gorgeous. But it's the costume, Cate, that just jumps off the screen. And I remember you gave me that helmet.”

The second season’s costume designer, Catherine Adair, had given him a helmet one of the characters had worn, a piece he kept on his desk throughout all of filming Season Two. It was Annabeth’s, from the same scene he was telling me about.

“It's just every time I see it, I just kind of squeal with delight,” the cinematographer told me. “And that, to me, was Season Two of Percy Jackson and the Olympians. It's that shot that summed up the whole show, how exciting it was, how beautiful it was. But also what an amazing job Cate did with costumes on the season.”

That chariot race is a point of pride for everyone who worked on this series, and when I met with O'Loughlin and Adair, when I understood its complexity, my admiration for this excellent series grew exponentially.

“I was very, very, very lucky in the support that I got from the other departments,” Adair told me of her work on the series, “including the stunt department, who said that the actors needed better protection. And the role models in Percy are really solid. They’re flawed and they have their vulnerabilities. They're beautifully written and they deserve, for the audience and for their generations of people who have been inspired by those characters; they deserve to be dressed properly. It's just that simple. You don't want them in dumb clothes, and audiences, the generation that is coming up, are visually very smart. They know when it's not real. They know when it doesn't make sense.”

“There's so much more to your job than just the clothes,” O'Loughlin said to Adair. “That whole sequence, our young actors in the chariots and how we shot that, you had to consider the safety aspects, being a costume designer. We could not injure these kids. They had to be in armor that looked amazing on camera, but that was also safe as well. And we had to photograph them with chariots at horse drawn chariots behind them. We had to put them on a process trailer and we had to keep them safe. But at the same time, it had to look amazing. It had to look exciting. It had to look incredible. We had to do justice to this sequence in the books, for all the fans that were expecting it, but also we had to dip our hats to what had come before. Like Ben-Hur in 1925, Ben-Hur 1959, two iconic films, one of which won more Academy Awards than any other film in 1959. And the most iconic sequence in that film is the chariot sequence. And so there was so much going on that it was like it's amazing that we had time to do anything else.”

Like any exceptional piece of filmmaking, the success of such a complex scene is never because of one single person, and the cinematographer and costume designer I was speaking to were quick to point out the contributions of their colleagues in other departments.

“Dan Hennah, our production designer, is extraordinary,” Adair explained. “And while I didn't have the privilege of designing Season One, in watching it and then meeting with our showrunners, what really resonated for me is that while it's grounded, there's also almost a sparkle to it. Not really fairy dust, but it's a place you want to visit. You want to believe that you can go there. I think Jules shot it beautifully, because Dan's sets are enormous, they're massive. The scale and the scope of the sets, and the detail that the set decorators bring to it, you want to go and stay there.”

“As a cinematographer,” O'Loughlin explained, “my job is principally to photograph what is presented in front of me. There are a lot of discussions beforehand that Cate has to go through, and the production designer has to go through, before anything is even presented to me to photograph. But as I always say, the cinematographer and the production designer and the costume designer all have to fit hand in glove. We all have to be on the same journey together to make it work. Otherwise, it can become a kind of a patchwork quilt of colors and designs and ideas. And it all starts, you know, with Percy Jackson, it started with the books.”

Filming Costumes In Candlelight

Percy Jackson and the Olympians is based on the world created by author, and series co-writer and executive producer, Rick Riordan. These are beloved books, they have been since the first one was published in 2005, and a lot of dedicated people put in thousands of hours of work to do the books justice on screen.

Because telling stories is collaborative by nature, there are rarely any decisions or choices made by one person or department behind the scenes. All of the creative components affect each other, maybe even feed each other. The lighting, scenery, costumes and cinematography, any work that requires so much making that it gets a department all to itself, all of these factors are inextricably interrelated. And in a show like Percy Jackson it seems like this collaborative work creates a working environment reminiscent of found family.

This is a story which reimagines Greek mythology, so when any scene is candlelit it feels very natural to the audience. But while watching the second season I kept wondering about the logistics, this writer knows exactly enough about filmmaking to suspect that filming firelight would be a very specific challenge, maybe especially for the costumes. Because lighting affects what a camera captures, it can change what color or tone a textile appears to be. I very much wanted to know how, practically, the cinematographer and costume designer achieved the seemingly effortless final product, a series I enjoyed watching so very much.

“The thing with candlelight,” O'Loughlin explained, “or with any light, is that it has a temperature. It has a color to it. And that's expressed in kelvins. It's really important, when Cate's designing a costume, she has to know what kind of conditions it is going to be shot under. Like, is it going to be out in the middle of the day, where the color temperature of the sun is 5600 degrees Kelvin? Or, is it going to be shot in Poseidon's cabin at night, under candlelight, where the color temperature of the candle is 2800 degrees Kelvin, which is much, much warmer. That really affects the color of the costume. Our eyes, mixed with our human brain, have this incredible knack of neutralizing colors, and a camera doesn't have that ability to do that. And so it's very much dictated by the temperature of the light that's hitting the object, that’s how the camera sees. And Cate is all over that.”

I learned that their process was even more collaborative than I already assumed it to be. For any given scene, when Adair was ready to produce a specific design, it was her habit to come to the cinematographer. She would show him a swatch, or swatches, of the fabric she wanted to use and ask O'Loughlin what he thought and if he wanted to test it before she got to the making part.

“You know you're in great hands,” he explained to me with a grin, “when the designer, whether it be the production designer or the costume designer, is coming to you and talking about the scene with respect to the color of the light that's written on the page. To me, it says that this is a person who is really in control of their craft. And they're really thinking well beyond the textiles or the materials that they're using. They're thinking about the photography. These are conversations that happen sometimes in pre-production, and sometimes while you're shooting. Because pre-production is an ongoing thing, it goes throughout the entire season.”

When O'Loughlin finished, he looked to the costume designer, giving her space to talk about her work in a way that was natural and organic. I think that was the moment that I understood I was talking to people whose admiration for each other’s craftsmanship was genuine and earnest. It was a simple, involuntary movement, but it perfectly explained why this series is so good; behind the camera, every department is cheerleading their counterparts.

Exceptional Costumes for Exceptional Young Actors

I asked for an example, a costume or a scene that would show me what the cinematographer had just explained, and would help me better explain that transmogrification to my Lovely Readers.

“Certainly,” Adair said to me graciously, and then she told me about this process as it related to Grover's wedding dress.

“I knew it was going to be shot inside and I knew I wanted it to look as though it had been through a bit of a journey. But one of my pet peeves is what we call ‘bad breakdown’ or bad aging on things. In defense of costume designers and the costumers who back costume designers up, often the schedule is such that you don't have the time to give it due diligence. So next time you watch something, and you think it was badly done, remember that they may have only had five minutes.”

“But because Grover's wedding dress is such a pivotal piece,” she continued, “for the fans, for the books, I knew I wanted it to look as though it had got wet, to look as though it was part of an old trousseau that had been shipwrecked. I started with the base fabric and we just kept working on it and working on it and working on it. Taking it by degrees until we felt that it was going to do what it needed to do. And in some of the scenes, like when they're in the cabinet, it reads differently than it does in the cave, for obvious reasons.”

“I mean, it had to work for an environment inside the cabin during that sequence, which is at sea,” O'Loughlin added. “So there's all this kind of grey overcast cool light coming through the door and the windows. But it also had to work inside Poseidon's cave, where it was firelight and warm, with light coming through the top hole of the cave itself. That's no easy feat.”

The costume designer took the compliment in stride, and then she continued to explain her process.

“The other thing I do, and it's something I got taught years and years ago, but I don't think everybody does; I talked to Jules at length and then took fabric swatches and we did color boards for mood and texture. Because everything depends on the set, it all depends on the environment. To Jules' point about the light, like with Annabeth's jacket, which was made. I know people think I shopped it, but I didn't. We played with a bunch of different colors until we found one that we liked that worked well. That had the warmth I wanted it to have, but also worked really nicely on the actress. That jacket was inspired by three different vintage jackets. And because it was leather, we had to get enough patina in it, given that Jules and I both knew it was going to do a lot of dark interior work.”

“Her costume is so rad,” the cinematographer said, “I love it.”

Leah Sava’ Jeffries, the actress who plays Annabeth Chase, she’s one of many impressive young actors in Percy Jackson. It’s not often that an audience is treated with so many excellent performances, literally across the board, from a cast who are simply not old enough to have decades of experience. The cinematographer and costume designer both told me how impressed they were with the young cast. One of the (many) very good things about Percy Jackson and the Olympians is how inclusive it is, how it contributes to the very necessary expansion of what beauty means in our culture. It is patently obvious that the showrunners picked the best possible performer for each role, and never relied on any other metric.

Hiding Clues In Plain Sight

Though an episodic series has much more time to tell a story than a film, there are many things which remain true of the medium regardless of format.

One immutable fact about filmmaking is that there are many times when information must be passed on to the audience without using words. Because sometimes saying something outright would ruin a moment, there are times when clues are like breadcrumbs cleverly leading us to an important reveal. It is the creative departments, on any production, whose responsibility it is to translate information into something visual. Shows like Percy Jackson make a point of hiring masters of silent communication, artisans who know how to deftly insert Easter Eggs so that we might not catch on at first, even when they are staring straight at us. A designer of Catherine Adair’s caliber knows how to literally and figuratively weave clues and cues into the costumes.

When we meet Circe midway through the second season, it is delightful to see how a character who has been ubiquitous in literature long before someone wrote down Homer’s Odyssey, has been innovated upon. And we see her in paisley, which instantly caused my historically-obsessed antenna to vibrate.

Let me explain. There is a legend about this Persian pattern, mostly unverified, but which persists nonetheless. Supposedly, back when the Silk Road was the global superhighway for trade, paisley was used by emissaries and spies who needed to pass information to people they could not meet in person. The complex teardrops and whorls, intricate in their ornament, may have been busy enough for messages to be hidden in them without attracting attention.

Regardless of how factual this story may be, its romance has allowed the tale to survive across centuries, and seeing Circe wear paisley felt far too intentional to have happened without forethought. So, knowing I could be reading far too deeply into something that wasn’t there, I asked the costume designer about this choice, which stood out in a show where the textiles don’t often have patterns of any sort.

“Yeah,” O'Loughlin said with a giant smile, “I’m very interested in this.”

“I love my showrunners,” Adair told me, “and one of them and one of them is visually cued in the best possible way, because it gives you guidance, but he's not big on prints. With all my designs, I start with the silhouette, with a line drawing. It was important to me that I did Circe in these fabulous fluid palazzo pants and top, and some of that was very much inspired by the set and the color scheme. Then I went hunting for fabric, and sometimes I'll change something dramatically based on who the casting is.”

“I knew Rosemarie DeWitt’s work,” the designer continued, “I knew that she has this fluid grace to her. And our set had a fluid grace to it too. Circe is a sorceress and that is going to be a lot more interesting, if it's well hidden. You don't want to put her in some tight piece of spandex, looking like she's ready to pull a sword. You want her to be charming and inviting and cool and fluid. And I knew that Rosemarie could do that. We tried on the beginnings of the costume, then it got refined; the arms got narrowed up through the shoulder. And then her shell, which I coordinated with the props department on, was originally going to be around her neck. But it was too heavy, there was a big conversation and after we redesigned and put it on the belt. Jules was a part of that.”

Making Something Truly Innovative

Since our conversation had begun with the cinematographer’s favorite scene, I wanted to be sure I asked the costume designer about hers, what Adair was especially proud of accomplishing.

“With the sirens,” she told me, “which my crew did an amazing job on, there was some concept art that was very graphic and it was very different at the start.”

The costume designer went to Hennah, the production designer, to talk it out.

“I said, I know we're not CGI-ing any of this,” Adair explained “because the big difference between Season One and Season Two is all of our creatures and monsters in Season Two are all real. When I came on board, I didn't know whether that was going to be the case. But oh, my gosh, as a costume designer, yum. No one is in a green suit with little dots on them. But that's where, especially with the sirens, coming to Jules and working with the art department was so important. So that we could make sure that they looked like rock, but that you could still see the three dimensions of them. And we were filming outside and it was raining, right, Jules?”

“Oh, my God,” he laughed, “it didn't stop raining.”

“It was all hands on deck,” the costume designer said. “That was a big journey for all of us. Especially given that the sirens were flying, and we were outside and it was raining. What we pulled off with the sirens, I mean, technically, I've never done anything quite like that before. The collaboration, and then actually standing there in the rain and seeing it come to life, against all odds honestly. And the amount of making from my crew; the shells and the limpets and the set, all the art department carving, making their rocks smaller so that my sirens could move more. And then changing the angles so that they had more scope. Then the stunt people coming in and wiring them the way they did. And those three women are extraordinary stunt women. I mean, it was all of us, we even had hair and makeup in there. It really is the one piece where, when you look at it on camera, every single person, every single department had a huge piece of making that happen. And not one piece of it is CGI.”

You can find all episodes of ‘Percy Jackson and the Olympians’ on Disney+, and the final episode of the second season debuts January 21.

Featuring Work by Editor Stewart Schill, ACE

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Stewart Schill, ACE

Creating Real Magic For Season Two Of ‘Percy Jackson And The Olympians’, Featuring Costume Designer Catherine Adair and Work by Editor Stewart Schill, ACE

Stewart Schill, ACE Biography