Digital Video - November 2007 - (Page 36) Q& A INTERVIEW BY DAVID E. WILLIAMS On shooting with the Panasonic VariCam: “The camera is capable of a very natural-looking color palette and very film-like distribution of tones.” WORLD VIEW T he move to high-quality digital acquisition has been a boon to wildlife documentary filmmakers, allowing them to explore the world in ways not possible with traditional film-based production methods—at least not without vast expense. This was the experience of producer-director Mark Linfield (The Life of Mammals), whose stunning and highly successful nature series Planet Earth recently received four Creative Arts Emmy awards, including honors for Outstanding Non-Fiction Series (for Linfield, executive producer Maureen Lemire and series producer Alastair Fothergill) and Outstanding Cinematography for Non-Fiction Programming (for cinematographers Doug Allan, Martyn Colbeck, Paul Stewart, Simon King, Michael Kelem and Wade Fairley). Here, Linfield discusses the complex Planet Earth production (which used nine different digital acquisition formats employed over 4,000 shooting days, including spectacular high-speed footage achieved with Panasonic’s VariCam system), how the series stands as a new visual standard for such work, and how that approach has been carried on by its new companion project that he co-directed with Fothergill, the theatrically released feature Earth. Producer-director Mark Linfield, who earned Creative Arts Emmy honors for the Planet Earth series. 36 dv november 2007 www.dv.com http://www.dv.com
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