Digital Video - November 2007 - (Page 34) The Sarah Silverman camera crew. with standing sets such as Sarah’s apartment and Romansky’s Café—and two on locations throughout Los Angeles. “I’m a film guy,” says Bear, “so I don’t like to do ‘sitcom’ lighting. When we’re on our standing sets we almost never hang anything from a grid. I try to treat it like a location and light through windows or from the floor. Almost all the lighting is on the ground with us.” Romansky’s Café, Bear adds, was a real location in the early episodes but it proved difficult to work with as often as they wanted to. The cinematographer had essentially let the exterior , as seen through the windows, go almost totally white at the real location, and he continued this practice on the stage to preserve continuity in the look and also to help disguise the fact that the “I’M A FILM GUY,” SAYS DP RHET BEAR, “SO I DON’T LIKE TO DO ‘SITCOM’ LIGHTING. WHEN WE’RE ON OUR STANDING SETS, ALMOST ALL THE LIGHTING IS ON THE GROUND WITH US.” outside street scene is a forced-perspective backdrop with cars cut out of foam core. “We only have 10 feet outside the window,” he says, “so we don’t focus too much on what’s out there. If actors stand next to the window they look really big. I try to shoot wide open to limit the depth of field, and I have 15 space lights on the background to help it blow out the way it would if we were looking out onto a real street.” Bear uses one or two of the VariCams at a time and cables everything to DIT Jonah Torreano’s workstation. Torreano uses a Panasonic EC3 Paintbox/Video controller, a 24-in. Sony CRT monitor for critical viewing, a waveform monitor that Bear can use for lighting in a hurry to simply see if he’s got all the information, and 34 dv november 2007 a series of converters. “I’ve been told it isn’t really a DIT station,” Bear observes. “It’s small and functional and very portable, so it can be moved around quickly. Some DIT stations are these massive racks of equipment that I just don’t think would work well the way we shoot.” The DVCPRO tapes all are imported into editor Larry Bock’s Final Cut Pro system and simultaneously upconverted using an AJA Video Systems’ Kona 3 card from 720p to the 1080p Apple Pro format. “When we first started,” says Bear, “I thought as someone who understands Final Cut Pro, it was crazy to up-rez and edit in 1080 because not long ago the bays were not fast enough. But that hasn’t been a problem, and we’ve all fallen in love with the look of the show in 1080.” Bear adds that because so many of the people involved are old hands at Final Cut Pro—including himself, Schrab and digital compositor/animator Sevan Najarian—a lot of post work can be done in-house. “I shot one scene of Brian Posehn and Steve Agee doing a sort of stakeout, and I deliberately used a very wide-angle lens for an effect. But the lens vignetted in the corners. So I took the files home over the weekend and stretched the image out a bit to get rid of that. We can do things like that without having to go to a post house and spend a fortune.” The cinematographer credits North Hollywood-based rental house Clairmont Camera for helping to at least tame one of the biggest challenges he’s found shooting HD. “I really don’t like that the cameras have to be tethered,” Bear attests. “With film, I can pretty much get a stop and just shoot. But we have so many cables [video, audio, timecode, Paintbox, and more] that on the first season it was like spaghetti coming off the back of the camera. So Clairmont built us a single cable that combines all the necessary functions and goes between the camera and the DIT station—and that has made a significant difference. We couldn’t afford to use fiber optics, so this is sort of our fiber optics system without the fiber optics.” DV Film producer, photographer and writer Jon Silberg is a frequent contributor to DV sister publication Videography. www.dv.com MIRANDA LIU Funny GIRL http://www.dv.com
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