Apple is on a marketing blitz for its hit Apple TV+ show, Severance, which aired its highly anticipated season two finale last week. To celebrate the end of season two (and season three’s greenlighting), Apple released a behind-the-scenes look at how Severance is created and edited. The company also, in unusual fashion, added a Severance-inspired product to its online store, the Lumon Terminal Pro.
Spoiler Warning: Some specific scenes and thematic elements from the season two finale of ‘Severance’ are shown and discussed in this article.
Modeled after the terminal computers used by severed workers at the Lumon corporation in Severance, the Lumon Terminal Pro gets Apple’s standard product photography and marketing pitch. However, unfortunately, Severance fans can’t actually purchase the charming vintage-styled computer. People itching to do some macrodata refinement of their own with its large trackball and monochromatic monitor are out of luck. It’s interesting to wonder how much such a device might cost. Perhaps it would just require someone to split their consciousness, a small price to pay for such a striking computer.
As for how talented artists like writer Dan Erickson, frequent director and producer Ben Stiller, cinematographer Jessica Lee Gagné, and supervising editor Geoffrey Richman, to name just some of the fantastic minds behind Severance, bring the show to life, Apple has new info about that, too. They don’t use the Lumon Terminal Pro, unfortunately.
In the latest edition of Apple’s ongoing “Stories” series, which shows how creators use Apple products in their work, Stiller and Richman discuss how they bring the dystopian workplace thriller to televisions worldwide.
“For the finale, there was a lot of experimenting with structure and testing out different ideas about how to play out different scenes,” Richman says. “It was a constant flow of ideas and my Mac setup allowed for such a smooth experience.”
“In cutting the marching band, there were about 70 angles and takes to choose from, so we synced them all up in one multicam clip with banks of nine [3×3 arrays],” Richman continues.
“Being able to play nine angles simultaneously in real-time — and switch quickly between all the different options — made it a whole lot easier to find what we wanted at any given moment.”
Like the severed workers at Lumon, Richman descends a level for work each day. He goes to a lower floor in his apartment to edit on an iMac, which is remotely connected to a Mac mini located at a post-production facility in Manhattan that is running Avid video editing software.
“I can work on my laptop and I can work on my iMac, and I can work at the post facility or I can work at Ben’s office,” Richman says. “And as long as I’m logged into my account, everything I do shows up everywhere.”
Richman, a longtime Mac user, lauds the platform for how well Apple’s different devices communicate with each other. Richman characterizes his workflow as seamless, no matter where he is that day. Sometimes he’s at home, other times, he’s on location, and he frequently meets with Stiller to share the latest cuts.
Alongside working very closely with Ben Stiller during the entire shooting and editing process, Richman works tightly with Severance‘s composer, Theodore Shapiro.
“Music is such a big part of enhancing the show,” explains Richman. “You can actually shift a scene into a darker tone based purely on the music. Even though everything about the scene would otherwise look pretty light, the music can bring you into the way a character is feeling as opposed to what you’re seeing onscreen.”
Richman says the season two finale’s marching band scene was a significant editing challenge. He needed to sync all his visual cuts with the songs Shapiro composed. All the instruments viewers saw needed to match what they heard.
“Those were definitely scenes where I was jotting down notes on my iPhone and then — to get a different perspective — I’d work on my MacBook Pro, sketching ideas while sitting on my couch or in bed, before bringing those thoughts back to my iMac,” Richman says, noting that there were hundreds of different ways he could have cut the scenes.
Fortunately for Richman and everyone else working on Severance, they had powerful Macs to work with instead of the Lumon Terminal Pro, as charming as the fictional computer is.
Image credits: Apple
