Cooke Lenses Create The Magic Kingdom Of Netflix’s Fate: The Winx Saga
DP Frida Wendel FSF, used Cooke S7/i Full Frame Plus lenses to shoot Fate: The Winx Saga, the live-action TV adaptation of Nickelodeon’s animated series Winx Club. Following its Netflix launch in January, the show quickly shot to number one in the U.S. and number three in the U.K.
The series follows a fairy called Bloom (Abigail Cowen) who moves to the fairy school Alfea where she needs to learn to control her dangerous magic powers. At school she meets Stella, a light fairy (Hannah van der Westhuysen), Aisha a water fairy (Precious Mustapha), Terra, an earth fairy, (Eliot Salt), and Musa, a mind fairy, (Elisha Applebaum). With the help of her four new friends, Bloom starts to learn more about her past. The magic universe takes the audience across a range of genres, from horror to romance through thrilling moments and humour.
Filming took place in County Wicklow on the east coast of Ireland, with locations in the ancient woodland and rocky coastline on the Irish Sea, creating the right historical and natural atmosphere for the magical universe to be developed.
Cinematographer Frida Wendel FSF used an ARRI ALEXA Mini LF, and chose the Cooke S7/i Full Frame Plus series, using focal lengths 18, 25, 32, 40, 50, 75, 100 and 135mm.
“There are five main characters, each representing different elements, so a very important conversation we engaged in during preproduction was how each fairy should be represented and how to play around with VFX,” said Wendel. “We wanted Fate to be crisp and clean. That is when the camera and the Cooke lenses came in. We had so much VFX and so many interactive lights that these lenses stood out instantly, as I think the Cooke lenses have the most beautiful and subtle flares. I love the shallow depth of field you get with the full frame and also found it very exciting to have so much information to play around with in grade. Quite impressive.”
The first season of six episodes of Fate: The Winx Saga is now available to watch on Netflix.
You might also like...
Monitoring & Compliance In Broadcast: Monitoring Cloud Infrastructure
If we take cloud infrastructures to their extreme, that is, their physical locality is unknown to us, then monitoring them becomes a whole new ball game, especially as dispersed teams use them for production.
Phil Rhodes Image Capture NAB 2025 Show Floor Report
Our resident image capture expert Phil Rhodes offers up his own personal impressions of the technology he encountered walking the halls at the 2025 NAB Show.
The DOP As Sound Recordist: 32-BIT Float Is Our Godsend
As a cinematographer with several decades of experience on feature films and large broadcast projects, my current work on smaller productions and documentaries has increasingly added the duties of a sound recordist, and with it a greater appreciation for 32-bit…
Microphones: Part 9 - The Science Of Stereo Capture & Reproduction
Here we look at the science of using a matched pair of microphones positioned as a coincident pair to capture stereo sound images.
Monitoring & Compliance In Broadcast: Monitoring Cloud Networks
Networks, by their very definition are dispersed. But some are more dispersed than others, especially when we look at the challenges multi-site and remote teams face.