In The Arena: Serena Williams
Posted on Sep 12, 2024 by Katie Kasperson
Game, Set, Match
DOP Ayana Baraka discusses her role on Serena Williams docuseries In the Arena, preserving her legacy as one of sport’s true champions
Words Katie Kasperson
One of the all-time tennis greats, Serena Williams had an outrageously impressive career in singles and doubles, ranking number one for 319 weeks and winning a remarkable 23 Grand Slam singles tournaments. It’s no wonder that her achievements attracted ESPN to create a docuseries titled In the Arena: Serena Williams, with eight episodes that plunge the viewer into the legendary athlete’s personal and professional life.
Shot by New Jersey native Ayana Baraka, In the Arena blends found footage with interviews in traditional documentary fashion. Preceded by ESPN’s Man in the Arena: Tom Brady, the second series follows a similar visual style, though Baraka wanted Serena’s story to stand apart. “Serena is a different person; and her sport is different. When preserving her legacy, we took a different approach – Gotham Chopra, Lauren Fisher, Meg Cirillo and I,” she says of the directors and showrunner, respectively.
During the hiring process, Baraka came prepared with a full deck. “I had my own ideas. It’s just great that they resonated with them and were in alignment with what they had in mind. I left feeling confident,” she recalls. Later, she met with Serena herself, explaining her vision for the series: to ‘capture tenderness, strength, intimacy’ and ‘preserve the integrity of skin hue, while creating softness and creaminess in the overall image’.
Lights please
Lighting was a key aspect of Baraka’s job for In the Arena. Having shot Alicia Keys documentary Uncharted, which premiered last year, Baraka is all too familiar with the challenges involved in illuminating Black skin.
To prepare, Baraka “looked at a tonne of photos of Serena and came to understand her face and what she can handle.” Then, she auditioned various cameras before settling on the ARRI ALEXA Mini LF. For glass, Baraka wanted to ensure a good fit for Serena’s face shape; she landed on Cooke anamorphic full-frames and Leitz SUMMILUX-Cs.
Baraka went for a 360° set-up that allowed her to ‘be very specific about where the light was hitting Serena’, who was pregnant throughout the shoot. “I knew that we would have to shape the light as she went through her pregnancy a little bit differently,” explains Baraka, who was constantly searching for that delicate balance between highlights and shadows. “It’s not like a Rembrandt where you have one light source, and then you have this light under the eye. It’s more like this gradient that falls off, and then we could shape that gradient based on where she was in her pregnancy.”
To preserve the pink undertones in Serena’s skin and avoid overlighting, Baraka called upon John Tindall, who manufactures the Brokeh Lighting System. “I knew that I wanted to break up the spectrum of light because, in past experiences, when I put a colour in front of the light, it would break it up in a beautiful way, especially on deeper hues,” Baraka states. Tindall’s Brokeh rags “break up the particles of light so that it’s more like the sun; it’s bouncing off everything and never this direct source.
“He sent them to me, and I tested all of them with my first AC along with the lenses,” she continues. After creating a custom LUT for Serena, Baraka and her team came up with the ‘perfect combination’ of lenses, filters, type and quality of light and Brokeh rags. “You see the nuance in her skin; that’s because of everything we did to prepare.”
The whole scoop
To tell the full Serena story, Baraka filmed one-on-one, direct-to-camera interviews using an EyeDirect. “Essentially, it’s like a mirror, so that when she’s looking down the barrel of the lens, she can see the interviewer.” The series’ director, Chopra, conducted all the interviews from ‘his own little space’, but he and Serena couldn’t see each other from straight on.
In the Arena’s team also incorporated custom backdrops, which they draped behind Serena. “As her story unfolds, the draping becomes more taut,” describes Baraka, who found this the most difficult aspect of the shoot. “The draping took longer than the lighting. It was difficult to get it to do what we envisioned.”
Unlike Tom Brady’s season, In the Arena added a second camera angle to capture more intimate moments via ‘in-your-face’ close-ups. Baraka, Fisher and Cirillo conceptualised this not only to vary the visual rhythm, but also ‘differentiate between Serena’s interviews and the supplemental interviews’. To cushion the episodes, Baraka shot B roll while the crew created graphics and colour graded all the footage, resulting in one seamless, cohesive project.
Do-it-yourself
Formally trained in filmmaking and having attended universities in both New York and Los Angeles, Baraka is a storyteller. One of just six Black female DOPs in the IATSE Local 600, she largely carves out her own opportunities. “It’s just about creating – you’re already passionate so it’s about creating the work,” she reveals, having moved to Arkansas to make ‘a VR project about Black Wall Street and the Tulsa race massacre’ called Greenwood Avenue. Whilst there, she also shot commercials with Nike, Adidas, Target and Nordstrom.
Baraka brings that DIY attitude wherever she goes, creating her own thing whenever possible. While she’s fond of documentary filmmaking – “they are very much in-the-moment and about listening and problem-solving” – she enjoys working with scripted content. “I love the process of reading a script and creating the visual language for it – texture and colour and shape and shadow,” she beams.
Serving as an assistant camera operator to DOP Tobias Schliessler (All the Light We Cannot See, Dreamgirls), Baraka has been there for big decisions. “This is stuff I do for fun on a Saturday,” she admits. “I feel like I’m ready.”
Lately, she’s been writing and working on passion projects. “Right now, no one’s going to give me a major feature film to shoot,” she supposes, “so I need to create my own. If you’re already a moving train, people are attracted to you, and I never let myself be stagnant.”
In the Arena: Serena Williams is available now on ESPN+ in the US.
This feature was first published in the September 2024 issue of Definition.
