American Cinematographer - June 2012 - 64b

“More importantly, I lean on
fi lm so heavily every day. I know
that I can blow out a highlight by
fi ve stops and it’s going to look
gorgeous. “
feature fi lm that way,” he says. “The combination of the Cookes
and the Angenieux zoom is one of the best I’ve found, but I still
prefer the look of the primes.”
An episode is usually shot in 10-15 days. The main format is 3-perf
35mm, usually shot with a single ARRICAM and KODAK VISION3
500T Color Negative Film 5219 and KODAK VISION3 250D Color
Negative Film 5207. But Klein notes they use a wide variety of
cameras and formats when the story requires.
“We’ve used a hand-cranked ARRIFLEX, CANON 5Ds, REDs, ARRI
235s and 435s,” says Klein. “Our stories contain many fl ashbacks,
and we use many different tools to depict them. We’ll sometimes
push one or two stops to add some contrast and grain, just
noticeable enough to make it dance — and that grain is wonderful.
It’s one of the best tools I have at my disposal. It’s something I really
miss when I shoot digitally. Grain can be an actress’s best friend.”
During season four, Klein used
the technique for a sequence that
fl ashed back to a 1920s Louisiana
sharecropper’s house at nighttime.
“I went all moonlight and oil-burning
lamps inside the house,” he says. “I
knew that I wanted to desaturate
the image and add grain, so I did
a two-stop push and asked my
dailies colorist to drop the color
out by 60 percent. The initial idea
was to shoot 16mm, but we wanted
to do something with our existing
equipment, and this was the solution.
The grain really sang. We were
already rating at 2,000 ASA, but at
times I underexposed the negative
even further.
“After lifting the image up, it was like
looking at a faded, old photograph from
that era. In fi nal color, we desaturated
everything that was brown and blue
a little further than anything else, so
the reds and skin tones held out the best. Suzuki Ingerslev, our
production designer, really helped me out with this by painting the
house very neutral and keeping most of the color out of the frame. It
really felt like a faded, color photograph from that era that had sat in
the sun for too long.”
After a series of cost comparisons, the production determined
that the choice of origination format was not a money issue.
“(Executive producer) Gregg Fienberg and I decided to keep the
show on fi lm,” says Klein. “The current crop of digital cameras is
amazing, but to switch a show from fi lm to digital will change the
look of the show. That was one of my main arguments: If you’re
happy with the way True Blood looks right now, then don’t change it.
“More importantly, I lean on fi lm so heavily every day,” he
says. “I know that I can blow out a highlight by fi ve stops and it’s
going to look gorgeous. I know that a certain actor’s face, when
lit one-and-a-half stops under, is going to glow perfectly. There’s
Photos:
Previous page/top: David Klein, ASC. Center: (L-R) Rutina Wesley and Anna Paquin.
This page: (L-R) Stephen Moyer and Romeo Tirone. (credit: John P. Johnson/HBO)
no monitor I have to babysit. I can light by eye, through the lens,
instead of going back and forth between the monitor and the set,
which takes time.
“Also, with fi lm, I can lock in the look by exposing the negative a
certain way, which you can’t currently do with digital. With digital,
you expose to capture all the information, and then you push it
around in post. You’re basically creating the entire look in a color
suite. I prefer to lock 90 percent of the look into the negative on
the set, and then fi ne tune it in the color suite.”
The post facility is Technicolor, where Peter Ritter serves as dailies
colorist and Scott Klein handles fi nal color. “They know what I mean
when I say, ‘Make this scene almost dark enough to get me fi red,’”
says Klein with a laugh.
Key grip Bud Scott introduced Klein to CHIMERA cloth, which he
uses for large, diffuse sources. “I tend to go somewhat big on the
show,” says Klein. “Vampires come out at night, so we have a lot of
night exteriors, and we often use Condors and big sources — last
week we had two 20K Fresnels — to simulate moonlight. CHIMERA
is one of the thickest diffusion materials I’ve used, so it takes a lot
of fi repower and manpower to make it soft, especially when we go
through two rags.”
True Blood provides the cinematographers and their crews with
an ever-shifting array of challenges and opportunities. Whether it’s
a modern-day scene shot on one of the show’s six stages on The Lot
at Santa Monica Boulevard and Formosa in Hollywood, or a 1920s
fl ashback on a remote location, they are ready.
“What keeps me most engaged in this show, and what is also
exhausting, is that we’re constantly given new storylines, new
fl ashbacks, new stories to tell within our story,” Klein says. “Every
episode has something that requires a different look. It defi nitely
keeps us on our toes.”
“It’s one of the best aspects of shooting a show about
vampires,” adds Tirone. “They have lived so long that it lets us
shoot fl ashbacks from any era.”
American Cinematographer - June 2012

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - June 2012
