American Cinematographer - March 2009 - 40

Cutting-Edge Camerawork pher shies away from, I found them to be a blessing. We’re normally in the kitchen in the mornings or during the day, and I found I could really underlight the interior and have a lot of light blasting outside on our TransLite and Chromatrans backings. I try to light them to about 3 to 5 stops over key, reflected reading. I shoot on 5229, and I’m amazed at how much detail holds in the highlights and the blacks. Because the drops are highly reflective, we found that any unit on the floor could cause a really bad glare, so we rigged cycstrips on pipes far above the drops. We have I-beams on chain motors that hold our ‘sun,’ which we made with a 20K tungsten and 12-Light MaxiBrutes in season one. For season two, we’ve replaced them with BigEye 10Ks with T-12 globes and Leonetti’s Master Blasters, single fixtures with four 1K FCM globes; they’re really punchy but take up less space.” With the overexposure outside the windows, Jensen will set the interior exposure as much as 2 stops under. “I also tend to fill inside with 1⁄4 CTB, and we use a lot of smoke in the kitchen to add atmosphere and a sense of humidity. It works well. “So much of the first season of a show is trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t,” he concludes. “It’s really a process because you rarely have time for extensive testing. You need four or five episodes to figure out how the actors photograph, what effects look realistic, how dark the night should be and so forth. We try to continue to refine the look to keep it fresh for us and the audience.” TECHNICAL SPECS 1.78:1 35mm (3-perf) Arricam System Cooke S4, Angenieux Optimo lenses Kodak Vision2 200T 5217, Expression 500T 5229 40 March 2009 The police-precinct set on The Unusuals has fixed walls and ceilings, which requires series cinematographer Roy Wagner, ASC to light shots very precisely with less equipment. The Unusuals by Patricia Thomson Tonally, the new ABC/Sony Pictures Television cop show The Unusuals harks back to the 1970s, taking M*A*S*H’s seriocomic sensibility as its model. In technique, however, the series is a harbinger of the future. Using Sony’s PMW-EX3 and F23 4:4:4 side-by-side, the show is among the first to combine prosumer and professional-grade high-definition video cameras on a daily basis. Shot on location in Manhattan and at Brooklyn’s Steiner Studios, the show follows police detectives in a Lower East Side precinct. When a new officer is transferred to Homicide, she begins to learn the secrets and idiosyncrasies of her colleagues, who include a publicity-craving officer who steals cases, a detective with a brain tumor who repeatedly steps in harm’s way, and the afflicted officer’s paranoid partner, who won’t remove his bulletproof vest. When Noah Hawley, The Unusuals’ executive producer and writer, pitched the show to ABC, he stressed it was “a cop show, not a procedural,” he says. “That means it’s about character. The crimes exist to solve the character, not the other way around. The other thing I said was, ‘This show is M*A*S*H. This is what happens when you put relatively sane people into a crazy world that’s trying to kill them; the only sane response is to be a little crazy.’” He also added a dose of New York attitude. “That’s funny to me, and it was missing on TV. There’s a humorlessness to a lot of law enforcement on TV.” The pilot, which will air April 8, was directed by Stephen Hopkins and shot by his longtime collaborator, Peter Levy, ASC, ACS. Their previous pilots include 24 and Californication. “When I asked Stephen what we were going for, he pointed to M*A*S*H, a lighthearted treatment of a serious subject, and he also said he wanted to avoid the clichéd gritty New York look — he wanted colors,” says Levy. “The script was pretty flip, so we didn’t want to impose an overly serious style.” Levy shot the pilot in 3-perf 1.78:1 with cameras supplied by The Unusuals photos by Patrick Harbron, courtesy of Sony Pictures Television.

American Cinematographer - March 2009

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