Digital Video - May 2008 - (Page 33)

Bourdain (opposite page) takes the crew from his kitchen to small towns and remote locations around the world. underlit, moody places. And the food’s really fresh. It hasn’t been sitting under lights. The food really speaks for itself, and usually it’s inherently beautiful.” “You see how much work goes into preparing food for commercials,” Zamboni adds. “They’ll use a full lighting and grip crew, and shoot in a studio. We’ll pop into some roadside joint, wait a few minutes for somebody to whip up a bowl of soup or noodles and it looks beautiful. “I think beautiful light happens more often than you might think. It’s out there. When you’re doing a big lighting setup from scratch with a gaffer and a key grip and all kinds of equipment, you can forget that the world’s a beautiful place to start with. There’s so much beauty you can find. A couple of fluorescent lights in the right place or some naked tungsten bulbs hanging from somebody’s kiosk in a night market can be beautiful.” For a recent episode in Laos, they noticed a beautiful morning mist that burned off around 9:00 a.m. “We were in a pine forest up in the hills,” Zamboni recalls, “and there was this mist and shafts of sun were pouring through the trees. There was a breakfast scene planned for inside, but we quickly changed it to a table under some trees and because we were able to move so quickly, we could incorporate this light and the scene just looked incredible. We do things like that all the time. We can’t come in and light a room, but we’re constantly making small decisions about the available light to base our cinematography on.” They do bring some limited lighting instruments as well, primarily to cope with the contrast limitations that exist in any of the cameras in the V1U class. “If our subjects are under a tree or an umbrella or inside restaurants with windows, once we get a proper exposure on skin tone we often have to contend with blow out in the background,” explains Liebler. “The latitude is not good. If we wanted to bring up the interior to match, we’d need a 6K, which is out of the question.” Instead, they will use LED lights the two constructed themselves using eight 24"-long LED strips each. Their rig, he adds, gave them a better balance of weight, size and price than they could get from the manufactured LED panels on the market today. “They have an output of about two 4-bank Kino Flo units, and we can run them for about two hours off Anton/Bauer batteries,” Zamboni says, noting that while the units can’t bring light levels up to where they can close down enough to retain harsh www.dv.com highlights, they can help add some illumination and modeling to faces. “We can carry them and follow people for a walk and talk, which is very helpful.” Though some shooters will let this level of camera work on autofocus or auto exposure, Liebler says, “We don’t let the camera do anything! We focus and find a stop ourselves. Sometimes we’ll be conferring during a scene to make sure that our settings are the same and that we’re using the same picture profile settings.” Focus and exposure are entirely set to the camera’s LCD monitor, which the two always have shaded from extraneous light. “There’s no way we could do this show and be tethered to any kind of monitor,” Zamboni says. Coverage is catch as catch can. The two will work out coverage as they go, alternating between over-the-shoulder shots, singles and wider shots as the action unfolds before them. “We walk backwards in crowded market, and we trip sometimes,” he adds. “Anthony and the others keep moving. Sometimes they chuckle first and then move on. It’s unstoppable and real. That’s the heart of the show. It’s real, and Todd and I roll with it.” They will frequently shoot on the wide end of the fixed zoom and then add a 1.5x Century Optics wide-angle converter on the front to go wider still. “We shoot food all the time, and we’re inches away,” says Liebler. “For people, we back off and zoom in to avoid distortion. I think issues to do with focus are the hardest to deal with. Within the V1U, the optics are electronic, not manual, and we’re focusing to the small LCD image. Somebody watching the show in HD on a 42" plasma will notice extremely critical focus issues. These cameras were just not designed for HD critical focus and rapidly changing focus. But you can’t put a really high-res viewfinder on a prosumer camera, and you can’t just snap the lens in and out of focus on them like you can on higher-end HD cameras.” But the cameras, Liebler allows, are very robust pieces of machinery. “They are incredibly jostled around,” he says. “For one episode we spent a lot of time on the edge of the ocean getting hit by spray. For another, we were ankle deep in bat guano in the depths of a cave in Jamaica. We each had one hand on the ground and the other on the camera, and we had to switch hands constantly. The cameras are really being abused. It’s not our choice. It’s the nature of the show. These are prosumer cameras, but we beat them up as much as any professional!” DV dv may 2008 33 http://www.dv.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Digital Video - May 2008

Digital Video - May 2008 Contents DV Update Close-Up AJ-HPX3000 Camcorder Sidecar Raid Zoom H2 Recorder Instant Expert 324 Flat-Panel Display Extreme 35MM Adapter Type-S JIB How Slow Can You Go? Global Gastronome Mixing It UP Long-Distance Runaround Tools & Technology DV 101 Production Diary

Digital Video - May 2008

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