American Cinematographer - May 2016 - 68

Family, Friends and Infection

Top: Dr. Sabine Lommers (Claudia Black, left) and officer Lex Carnahan (David Gyasi)
work together to keep order and contain the epidemic. Bottom: B-camera 1st AC Josh Hancher
(left) and cinematographer William Wages, ASC prep one of the production's
Panasonic VariCam 35 cameras.

bulbs with tungsten and rewired the
fixtures, "including the sockets, and we
could dim all or part of them."
The production also employed
emergency vehicles with flashers that
were augmented by LEDs. "I have some
individual units that had previously
been used on out-of-commission police
cars," McLean says. "Also, props
supplied entire roof units that we put on
stands and could move just out of shot
or see in the background, as if a police
68

May 2016

car was just over the bend and all we
could see were the lights on top."
Many scenes take place in hospitals and labs, which challenged Cragg to
keep things visually interesting.
"Someone standing in a tiny white
room can be boring and flat," he says.
He was particularly determined to
make the most of a hospital interior
where a young doctor dies just after the
disease has been identified. "That image
of her with the blood on her face, lying
American Cinematographer

dead and motionless, is the hero shot,
showing the consequences of the whole
series," Cragg notes. "The production
designer built these great glass viewing
portals, which we could shoot through
and would give us some depth, and
David was bold enough to let me light
it with fluorescents. I lit pretty much
with overhead fluorescents, which were
built into the set to give that blue-green
feeling. I timed those shots to really pop
the blood, because that red looked great
in contrast to the blue-green light."
"Nelson did such a fantastic job
on the pilot," enthuses Smith. He and
Wages predominantly based the look of
the following episodes on Cragg's work
while also referencing the Belgian
series. "We wanted you to feel as if you'd
walked off the street to our location,"
Smith continues, "and you were watching this unfold right before your eyes."
When Wages and Smith signed
on to shoot the rest of the series, they
met independently with Plec and,
unbeknownst to one another, each
pitched shooting with Panasonic's
VariCam 35 camera. Released in 2014,
the VariCam 35 incorporates a Super
35mm-sized sensor. The camera also
boasts dual native ISO ratings of 800
and 5,000, allowing for clean images to
be captured in extremely low light. "We
have both an 800 ISO path and a 5,000
ISO path on the same sensor," explains
Panasonic's Barry Russo. "When you go
from native 800 to native 5,000, you're
literally switching channels on the
sensor. It has to do with a photon readout and how we store them - the
5,000 path can read photons much
faster, so the sensitivity goes up without
adding noise."
According to Smith, the 800 and
5,000 are nearly identical in terms of
image quality, with 5,000 being just a
touch more noisy. For Wages, it was
definitely the 5,000 ISO feature that
helped him most throughout the series.
"The 5,000 looks spectacular," he says,
"and we were able to cut down on our
lighting package in the studio and for
night work in the city. It really helped
things go much faster."

Bottom photo courtesy of Panasonic.

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American Cinematographer - May 2016

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