American Cinematographer - March 2013 - 33

His lighting for Californication
doesn’t involve a lot of gags or elaborate
setups. “I try to keep it simple. We use a
lot of Kino Flos, especially Image 80s,
and we use a lot of 18Ks or 20Ks
through windows. We have a lot of very
beautiful people on the show, which
makes that part of the job a lot easier.
Natascha McElhone is probably the
only one I take a different approach to,
and that’s because Moody keeps Karen
high on a pedestal. To accentuate that,
we try to treat her with a little more oldschool glamour lighting, something
square between the eyes. David is a real
movie star and can take any type of
lighting; bounce a light off the floor, and
he looks great.”
Weaver has collaborated with his
key crew on Californication, including
A-camera operator Andy Graham, Bcamera operator Tim Bellen and key
grip Vidal Cohen, for many years. He
adds, “I worked with gaffer David
Morton for the first five seasons of the
show, until he retired, and Frank
Jacobellis joined me for season six. We’re
a pretty tight-knit crew.”
Last season’s ASC Awardwinning episode, “Suicide Solution,”
was directed by Duchovny. “David and I
work well together — we finish each
other’s sentences like an old married
couple,” says Weaver. “He is a very visual
director, and he comes in with a great
game plan. There’s a dream sequence in
that episode where Moody is writing a
letter to his daughter, and we mixed
16mm, HD, black-and-white and color
to create it. We mounted a Canon
[EOS] 7D to David’s body to get that
kind of surreal feeling. It was a lot of
fun.”
Weaver has also taken his own
turn in the director’s chair, so far for four
episodes. “I can’t say that directing is a
career transition for me, because I really
love being a cinematographer. Directing
means putting on a different creative
cap and approaching storytelling from a
different direction, and I think that
strengthens me as a cinematographer.”
— Jay Holben

A firefighter has a close call in Chicago Fire.

Chicago Fire (NBC)
Cinematographer: Lisa Wiegand
“I’m a real believer that the best
fire effect is fire itself,” says Lisa
Wiegand, director of photography on
Chicago Fire, a series about the firefighters and rescue personnel of Chicago
Firehouse 51. Created by Dick Wolf,
the NBC series places a high premium
on authenticity, and this is reflected in
its locations, its vérité-inflected camerawork and its conflagrations, which are
ignited on a burn stage at Cinespace
Chicago Film Studios.
“I have to say, this is the most
challenging show I’ve ever done,” says
Wiegand, who had just finished shooting in a fierce December blizzard when
she spoke to AC. (“That was brutal, but
it’s important for people to realize we’re
not shooting San Bernardino for
Chicago,” she notes.) She was brought
aboard Chicago Fire by pilot director
Jeffrey Nachmanoff, with whom she
had worked on the series Detroit 1-8-7
(AC March ’11), and she has shot all
episodes of the series so far.
Wolf issued several commandments to the creative team. The first:
Make the city a character. The second:
Never get ahead of your characters. “It’s
easy for a director who’s new to the
show to suggest we place the cameras in
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one location and have all the trucks
drive up [to it],” says Wiegand. “I have
to remind them that we have to be in
the trucks with the guys instead. That’s
not easy; it takes more time to arrive
with the characters. But it ups the
dramatic stakes, because these guys
never know what they’re in for when
they arrive at a scene.”
To enhance her own understanding of what firefighters encounter and
how fires behave, Wiegand obsessively
watches videos of fires. Some are
provided by the production’s technical
adviser, Steve Chikerotis, a battalion
chief on Chicago’s South Side. Others
she finds on YouTube, recorded by firefighters wearing helmet cameras who
use them as learning tools.
The first lesson they provided,
she says, is that fire produces a lot of
thick, black smoke that makes visibility
nil. That’s not good for television, where
audiences need to see the actors’ faces.
Since the show’s inception, the production team has been on a quest to perfect
ways of making the fire scenes credible
while keeping the acting legible. They
tested fire, smoke and fuel. “Propylene is
really beautiful when you burn it or
make a fireball,” Wiegand says. “It’s got
a lot of texture and creates black smoke
within the fireball itself, but it’s dirty.
Propane is cleaner and burns easier, so
March 2013

33
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American Cinematographer - March 2013

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