Digital Video - August 2008 - (Page 12)

CLOSE-UP REAL MEDICINE VIDEOGRAPHER ISAAC MATHES REVEALS A HOSPITAL’S INNER WORKING IN HOPKINS. BY JON SILBERG E ight years ago, ABC News presented an intimate look inside the famous Johns Hopkins Hospital with the very well-received series Hopkins 24/7. Now, Executive Producer Terrence Wrong has returned with Senior Executive Producer Rudy Bednar, Supervising Producers Brad Herbert and Alex Piper and a crew of field producers and videographers for the six-part Hopkins, currently running on ABC. Videographer Isaac Mathes is a veteran of reality programming — he even followed Dog the Bounty Hunter around with a camera — but nothing that came before matched the intensity of the four months he shot traumas, transplants, surgeries and the effect of it all on doctors, patients and patients’ friends and relatives. “On this show,” Mathes says, “as opposed to many others, you see the fusion of ethics and aesthetics. The stakes are very high, often life and death. Emotions are running high. The doctors are trying to save someone’s life and relate to them in a respectful manner. We’re in the same room with a patient’s wife, and she’s on the edge of her seat waiting for information about her husband and there’s no greater intimacy or access to a person than when they’re in that kind of vulnerable position. “That translates into the aesthetics,” he continues. “You often want to zoom in from far away, not invade people’s space. We had a great deal of freedom to shoot because the people at Johns Hopkins knew they could trust Terrence and that nothing would be used that our producers didn’t get a release for.” It’s important under such circumstances for a videographer to keep a low profile. Particular doctors would be covered singlecamera style — two cameras would end up covering a procedure or event if two of the doctors intersected — and the cameras used were Sony’s three-sensor (1⁄4" CMOS) HVR-V1U HDV camcorders. “We wanted HDV and looked at the Z1U, but we liked that the V1U was a bit smaller,” Mathes notes, elaborating that everything was shot in 30-frame progressive mode. Zoom, focus and exposure, he says, “were all manual all the time. I always tried when I could to be zoomed in far enough that I could throw the foreground or the background out of focus.” The videographers focused to the onboard LCD monitor or LCD viewfinder. Camcorders were never tethered to picture or wavedv august 2008 form monitors. “We always had to be free to roam about,” he says. “Thank goodness we didn’t [have to be tethered to anything] because a trauma bay is filled with machines that have cables strung between them, and to try to move around in there when it’s crowded with a patient, doctors, nurses and assistants would have been a disaster.” The videographers had to work with the available light, which consisted of a variety of differently colored fluorescents. “As most people know,” he says, “fluorescent lighting comes in a range of pastels, from kind of pretty blues to pinks and greens that do all kinds of things to skin tones. That was fun to navigate. We took two approaches to dealing with the color issue. In some cases, we would manually white balance and store that information in a preset. So I could have presets for the trauma bay and the triage area in the emergency department and just go from one to the other. Sony also has a function where you can manually change the color temperature in degrees Kelvin, and sometimes it just worked better to adjust that on the fly.” He also made use of a Sony onboard light that clips into a microphone shoe. “It’s a little bulkier than the little plastic light everyone knows. It has 21 LEDs in its face and it comes with a set of barn doors. It’s dimmable, and if you open up the barn doors and put on some diffusion, it’s like working with a 6x12 softbox to spread the light out further and soften it. I really liked it for scenes inside an ambulance or out on the street.” The four months Mathes spent at Hopkins were an intense time for the videographer. He says he had to think like a director and an editor and anticipate what angles would be needed to make a scene cut together. And, unlike some other shows that are about “reality,” this was the real thing. “We couldn’t ask the doctors what they were doing,” he says. “You couldn’t ask them to back up and walk through the doorway again. In a situation like this, you’ve got one chance to get it right, just like the doctors do.” DV www.dv.com 12 http://www.dv.com

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

Digital Video - August 2008 Contents DV Update My Studio Close-Up Wristshot HV30 Camcorder Tiffen DFX Bench Test PCM-D50 & R-09HR Recorders Camera Cradle Instant Expert My Passport Elite High School Confidential The Ultimate DIY Raid DV101 Click to Play Production Diary

Digital Video - August 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.