Behind the shot: Andor Season 2
Posted on Jun 6, 2025 by Admin
Christophe Nuyens, SBC captures a magic-hour rave in Andor Season 2
Words Nicola Foley | Images Lucasfilm/Disney+
A prequel to the events of 2016’s Rogue One, Disney+’s Andor – which premiered in 2022 – quickly became a favourite in the Star Wars canon, and the recently released second season has just raised the bar even higher. With the first season widely praised for its cinematic ambition and richly layered worldbuilding, the second instalment returns to continue the story of Cassian Andor’s transformation from aimless thief to rebel spy.
Cinematographer Christophe Nuyens, SBC was behind the lens for several episodes of the latest season, including number three, Harvest, which features a sequence unlike anything else in the rest of the series so far.
“I chose this shot because of the scene it was a part of in the show – the wedding,” begins Nuyens. “The wedding was a very different setting compared to the other worlds and sets. It had to be shiny and chic, but also had to explode with the energy of a rave or nightclub – all of this created an exciting challenge.”
Initially, Nuyens and director Ariel Kleiman both imagined the sequence as a night scene, but showrunner Tony Gilroy had other ideas. “He said, ‘no – this has to be a day scene’, and that totally changed how we approached it. We had to find a way to capture that same intensity and atmosphere, but in daylight.”
Their idea was to lean into the magic-hour light and embrace lens flare – something notoriously difficult to achieve on a green-screen-heavy show like Andor – but they eventually found a solution in using a painted backdrop.
The party sequence was shot using multiple cameras, each choreographed to move with the dancers. “Several things had to be in sync,” says Nuyens. “We had two Steadicams and one Technocrane for the wide shots. One Steadicam had a 50mm, while the other used a 75-210mm zoom – it’s a huge lens for that set-up, but it really worked.”
That particular zoom lens made its first appearance here, but would later come into heavier use. “In Andor, we actually used a lot of zoom lenses, and our use of this technique increased in episodes 4, 5 and 6 because, to me, those episodes had to feel like a spy movie; the zoom lens creates that look,” Nuyens explains.
“For this shot and specific episode, we started to use that zoom lens a little, especially as the character goes into her trance during the wedding party. We used them very specifically, not making them too obvious, to introduce that look in this episode to support the transition in storytelling for the next three.”
Prepping the scene meant working closely with Kleiman and the wider team: “We did a lot of shot listing, researching many references, and from that we decided on the lenses – as well as that we wanted to do beautiful lens flares,” he explains. “Ari and I went to the rehearsals for the scene, and during those I just started shooting on my iPhone! We played around with framing and camera movement, seeing what worked. And we shot listed it right there in the rehearsals.”
The whole sequence plays into the broader visual language of the season: “Season 2’s theme is the three-episode arc; after every three episodes, everything comes together,” reveals Nuyens. “There’s also a parallel edit, so we have two stories happening at the same time and we’re connecting them visually. For instance, we had these flares in the wedding party, then we used them with Cassian in the TIE fighter, which connects the scenes in a visual way. It’s something we were always aiming to do.”
Ultimately, the experience was a happy blend of planning things to a tee and embracing the unexpected: “When working with flares, you have to look for them, and every lens flares a little differently. Every actor dances differently. So, for this scene, we did a lot of takes in the setting we created and looked for those lucky moments,” he muses. “That’s also why we used the zoom, to capture the nice things we saw. It’s a combination of luck and planning to have those lucky accidents.”
For more on visual storytelling, take a look behind the shot of Daredevil: Born Again.
This story appears in the May/June 2025 issue of Definition
