Dark (2017-2020) (with Nicolas Leu)

Twisting and travelling back and forth (and then back again) is Episode 71 of the podcast, which has Chris and Alex visit the fictional German town of Winden for Dark (Baran bo Odar & Jantje Friese, 2017-2020), Netflix’s hugely successful science-fiction series that tells the story of supernatural activity and conspiracy set against the backdrop of interconnected family trees and time-space conundrums. Joining them is the programme’s VFX Production Supervisor Nicolas Leu, whose film and television work beyond Dark as part of the RISE Visual Effects Studio also includes Game of Thrones (David Benioff & D.B. Weiss, 2011-2019), Marvel features Captain America: The Winter Soldier (Anthony Russo & Joe Russo, 2014) and Doctor Strange (Scott Derrickson, 2016), Creed (Ryan Coogler, 2015), The Fate of the Furious (F. Gary Gray, 2017), American Renegades (Steven Quale, 2017), and Dumbo (Tom Burton, 2019). Listen as they discuss Dark’s landmark status as Netflix’s first German-language series; digital compositing as an industrial process with the VFX production pipeline; forms of ‘digital chaos’ as a way of thinking through both Dark’s narrative of doubling and causality, but also its layering of live-action/CG spaces; the materality and black matter of time travel; and what Dark has to say about how what it means to ‘do’ science through fiction via a fiction that is, itself, scientific.