American Cinematographer - March 2008 - (Page 62)

Making Sitcoms “Sexy” Right: Producer Danny Arnold takes five with Dibie on the set of Barney Miller, the cinematographer’s big break. Below: Dibie enjoys a cigar while setting up a shot. TV is a medium of close-ups, and to light those angles, Dibie made extensive use of Obies, the beauty light credited to cinematographer Lucien Ballard, ASC and named for his wife, actress Merle Oberon. “I have used Obies all my life,” says Dibie. He would position them on the camera and heavily diffuse them to avoid casting any telltale shadows. Whether shooting film or video, he always ran cable for these lights — one for each camera — to a dimmer board, where he could bring them up or down as needed, scrupulously keeping track of the Obie’s settings at each point in the script so he could duplicate the look. “Usually, we’d do the show the whole way through without the audience, then they would bring in the audience and we’d do it again. I would go through the script breakdown and mark it up so we could re-create with the audience what we’d done earlier. Otherwise, shots wouldn’t cut together.” While Dibie was under con- tract to Warner Bros. and serving as a lighting consultant to all their shows, he sometimes came across cinematographers who overdid it with the Obies. One, he recalls, “had the Obie so bright that the colorist would bring down everything and people were wondering why the backgrounds were so dark. [The light] had no feeling. So I marked [the dimmer board] and said, ‘You cannot go past this mark.’” Dibie also liked to make extensive use of subtle diffusion in front of or behind the lens. “Hi-defvideo manufacturers like to talk about how sharp their pictures are, but I don’t know any cinematographer who worries about making the picture sharper,” he notes. Cinematographers, he says, want to tell stories and usually want to make the performers look good, and extreme sharpness can be the enemy of both objectives. He found that a lot of the available filters didn’t suit his needs. For a show to cut together, he had to use the same material on all four cameras, and a filter that works well 62 March 2008

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - March 2008

American Cinematographer - March 2008 Contents Editor’s Note Short Takes: Bill Viola’s Ocean Without a Shore Production Slate: 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days Production Slate: Chantal: A Night at the Pyramids Magical Mystery Tour Some Kind of Monster Tantalizing Television Making Sitcoms “Sexy” Post Focus: Mega Playground Helps Set Look for Sibling Post Focus: Visual Effects Society Launches White Paper New Products & Services International Marketplace Classified Ads Ad Index In Memoriam: John McPherson, ASC ASC Membership Roster Clubhouse News ASC Close-Up: Wayne Kennan

American Cinematographer - March 2008

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