A Symphony of Success: Emmy Nominees Talk VFX, Composing, and Editing
We had the pleasure of hosting two panels this year—check out our first panel here— ahead of the 2024 Emmy Awards, which will be held live on ABC on Sunday, September 15, from 8-11 ET. For our second panel, our Emmy nominees came from a wide-ranging group of shows—Lessons in Chemistry‘s ace director Millicent Shelton, nominated for directing episode 6, “Poirot,” Shōgun‘s visual effects supervisor Michael Cliett, nominated for the entire series, The Tattooist of Auschwitz‘s composer Kara Talve, nominated for episode 1, for original music and lyrics for her song “Love Will Survive,” which she worked on with Hans Zimmer, Walter Afanasieff, and Charlie Midnight, and Only Murders in the Building‘s ace editors Shelly Westerman and Payton Koch, nominated for season 3’s most deliciously zany episode, “Sitzprobe.”
Director Millicent Shelton was able to tell us about capturing multiple decades and their varying looks in her stellar work in Lessons in Chemistry. This period piece, set primarily in the 1950s, tracks a budding chemist named Elizabeth Zott (Brie Larson), who is thwarted in her work by male colleagues who put politics and patriarchy above credible scientific achievement, forcing Elizabeth into unfamiliar territory—television.
The Tattooist of Auschwitz is centered on the real-life story of Lali Sokolov (Jonah Hauer-King), a Jewish prisoner forced to tattoo ID numbers on prisoners’ arms in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp during World War II, and the woman he met there and fell in love with. Composer Kara Talve’s got her own incredible story to go with her sensational work on the series—a piano Talve used in her Emmy-nominated compositions came from her grandmother, a woman who survived the Nazi invasion and takeover of Paris by hiding in her piano teacher’s apartment. Her piano teacher, working with the French resistance, hid Talve’s grandmother—9 at the time—for the duration of the war. When her grandmother was in her 20s and came to America, she brought the piano, which Talve inherited and made the centerpiece of the score.
Visual effects supervisor Michael Cliett wasn’t just tasked with capturing some of the biggest, boldest moments in the visually astonishing Shōgun but also the quieter sequences set in 17th-century Japan with passionate attention to the tiniest details. Cliett’s meticulous work befits a series that garnered 25 nominations in all, leading all shows.
And finally, for the zany, insanely lovable joyride that is Only Murders in the Building, editors Shelly Westerman and Payton Koch have a reasonable claim that they cut the craziest episode in the series thus far, the emotional rollercoaster that was season 3’s eighth episode, “Sitzprobe,” when Oliver’s (Martin Short) musical, which features his friend Charles-Haden Savage (Steven Martin) in an impossible lead role meant to recite an ear-wormy but mind-meltingly daft song, is set to unravel along with Oliver’s health.
Check out our full panel here:
