American Cinematographer - March 2014 - 64

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Espionage, Payback and Laughs

Above: Thomas
and Buono
confer on the
set of "Now
That's What I
Call Christmas."
Right: Buono
frames cast
member Kate
McKinnon on a
New York City
street for the
show's title
sequence.

dynamic range is so much wider that I
can use less light, or we can shoot 4K so
we can have more latitude to reframe
shots in the edit. We often feel like,
'Aha! Someone just invented the perfect
camera for this thing we're doing. Let's
try it!'"
It wasn't always this way.
Following the series' debut in 1975, the
Film Unit spent decades shooting on
35mm and 16mm negatives. Digital
capture was introduced in a big way in
2005, when Andy Samberg joined the
cast and brought his Lonely Island
team, Akiva Schaffer and Jorma
Taccone, with him to create digital
shorts (many of which were shot by
64

March 2014

Aaron Phillips). As it happened, this
coincided with the rise of social media
and YouTube, which helped catapult
Samberg's shorts, such as "Lonely
Sunday" and "Dick in a Box," into the
stratosphere.
The Film Unit and the Digital
Shorts team often worked separately
from each other and from the livebroadcast team. The Film Unit's métier
was commercial parodies, while Digital
Shorts riffed on music videos and other
inspirations. "The digital shorts brought
a new energy to the show," says
Thomas. "We were shooting on film
with a more traditional visual language,
whereas they were creating a whole new
American Cinematographer

paradigm on digital video."
A new chapter began when SNL
mandated that the Film Unit switch to
HD capture for the 2005-2006 season,
which Thomas recalls as "a dark period."
He explains, "No one prepared us for
what that transition would mean. All
these cameras were coming out that
were really just ENG cameras, and
there was a race to see who could do
things cheaper and quicker, even within
the show. We were really playing catchup for a while."
A happier paradigm shift
occurred in 2009, when the Film Unit
began using DSLRs. To create the 2009
title sequence, Buono took to the streets
with a Canon EOS 5D Mark II for a
week of nighttime shoots, photographing each cast member in various spots
around town. "Suddenly, we had a tiny
little camera and could move so fast, and
the resulting images looked so much
more like film stock than the HD
camcorders we'd been using," says
Buono. The 2009-2010 season was
subsequently filled with Canon DSLR
shorts - "a fun time," Thomas recalls.
Buono adds, "It was like coming out of
a coma, the DVCam Dark Ages."
Since then, DSLRs have
remained a valuable tool for the
Film Unit, proving ideal for squeezing
inside a bathroom stall ("Bathroom
Businessman"), grabbing doc-style
shots on a subway platform ("Matchbox
3"), and mounting on a Movi rig to run
full-throttle through the streets after
Seth Meyers ("Stefon's Farewell").
With the emergence of higherresolution digital cameras such as the
Red Epic and the Arri Alexa, which the
show began using in the 2010-2011
season, "we were able to find our way
back to the filmic language that used to
be our signature," says Thomas. By all
accounts, the turning point was "British
Movie Trailer," shot on a Red One and
Canon 5D Mark II. Riffing off British
gangster movies such as Sexy Beast, it
starred Bill Hader as an ex-con pulled
back into the game. The joke is that no
one can understand the thick British
accents. Like any trailer, the spot
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