American Cinematographer - March 2009 - 35

The production’s biggest challenge was finding a location that didn’t include modern devices, such as ATMs. Fleder recalls, “I didn’t think it was possible, but we drove down Orchard Street [on the Lower East Side], and sure enough, there was a 2 1⁄2-block stretch that could pass for 1973 — if you squinted.” Morgenthau, Di Bona and Prinzi all praise Hendrickson’s production design for bringing 1970s New York to life. When he wasn’t designing studio sets, he was on location, dressing entire blocks of downtown Manhattan to look like Richard Nixon was still in office. “I had to find an architectural vernacular to represent the age and decay of New York in 1973,” says Hendrickson. “I did it by using architecture from the 19th century as a jumping-off point.” The city of the series is layered with brick, cast iron, old stucco and plaster, all chipped and distressed. Hendrickson tended toward darker settings, including basements and cellars, “because that’s rich and gives the cinematographers textures to light,” he says. The filmmakers were so clever in their efforts to avoid anachronisms that almost no digital effects were required to remove physical traces of 2008. (CG work is more often used to add buildings, such as the World Trade Center, to backgrounds.) For a scene set on a rooftop, Di Bona’s methods included shooting the actors against the dark night sky and cheating shots around telling parts of the skyline. Prinzi found that backlighting or using an extremely long lens to throw the background out of focus allowed him to shoot safely in almost any direction. It helped that both cinematographers are longtime New Yorkers and remember what the show’s neighborhoods looked like back then. At its core, Life on Mars is a science-fiction story, and when a “burp” in reality sends Tyler into a ASC member Kramer Morgenthau (pictured at work on another project) shot the Life on Mars pilot. different dimension, the production’s modern Panavision cameras are swapped for hand-cranked 35mm and Super 8mm cameras. (Most of the show is shot with Panaflex Platinums and Millennium XLs.) When Tyler first awakens in 1973, there’s a 360-degree camera move around him as he tries to process what has happened. Fleder had Morgenthau shoot the move with a Platinum and a Panavisionmodified hand-cranked Arri 2-C mounted side by side. “There’s some hand-cranked double-exposure stuff in that scene as well,” recalls Morgenthau. “I was thrilled that some of that stuff made it into the show.” The recurring flashbacks that show Tyler chasing a girl wearing a red dress through a forest are intended to be disorienting to the audience, so they were shot handheld in Super 8 on Fuji Reala 500D 8592 that had been re-cartridged by Pro8mm in Burbank. The final color for Life on Mars is set in the dailies by colorist Chris Gennarelli at Technicolor New York, and then taken a step further in the online by colorist Mike Sowa at LaserPacific in Hollywood. “Color is one of the things that gives away period,” notes Morgenthau. “Modern color stocks are vibrant, Photo by Gary Fleder, courtesy of Kramer Morgenthau. and if you look at color photographs from the 1970s, you’ll notice that the separation of colors was not as clean. I wanted color bleeding into the blacks.” Morgenthau took digital stills of his lighting setups and colored them in Adobe Lightroom before passing them on to Gennarelli. Prinzi and Di Bona work hand-in-hand with Technicolor to get the dailies as close as possible, but a lot of the final decisions are out of their hands; the production schedule often prevents them from giving notes on every shot. In the series’ second episode, Tyler made a list of 12 possible explanations for his mysterious predicament, and they included injury-induced coma and extraterrestrials. No one who spoke to AC knows which answer is the right one, or how long it will take Tyler to figure it out, but they don’t seem to be too bothered. They’re having such a good time they’re in no rush to spoil the mystery of the Martian Way. TECHNICAL SPECS 1.78:1 35mm, Super 8mm Panavision and Arri cameras Panavision Primo lenses Kodak Vision3 500T 5219, Vision 500T 5279, Vision2 500T 5260; Fuji Reala 500D 8592 ¢ American Cinematographer 35

American Cinematographer - March 2009

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - March 2009