American Cinematographer - November 2012 - 86

This year’s Emmy-nominated cinematographers enjoy their turns in the spotlight.
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Left: Steven Silver, ASC poses in the press room with his 7-year-old son, Kai, after the pair went onstage together to accept Silver’s Emmy. Right: Director Tim Van Patten (left) and Jonathan Freeman, ASC on the set of Boardwalk Empire.

t this year’s Emmy Awards, top honors went to Steven Silver, ASC, for the multi-camera series Two and a Half Men; Jonathan Freeman, ASC, for the single-camera series Boardwalk Empire; Florian Hoffmeister, for the miniseries Great Expectations; the cinematography team from the nonfiction series Frozen Planet; and the cinematography team from the reality series Deadliest Catch. Reflecting upon his trip to the podium, Silver told AC, “On the 220 or so shows we’ve completed, the week of production on ‘Sips, Sonnets and Sodomy’ posed more inherent challenges than any script we’ve had, and over the years, we have had some huge shows. The main task was to light the show for daytime during a supposed power outage. The producers wanted the atmosphere of a storm so big and dark that the characters would be forced to light candles indoors. There were several references and jokes that required candlelight to be the main source of illumination and not just a decoration in the background. That balance between stormy day and candle source light is a tricky one; it required us to re-light every main set on the stage from scratch. We also had four exterior scenes in the thick of the storm on the Pacific Coast Highway. The rain had to be so strong that cars were believably floating down the road. I should also note that those deep, dark, stormy exteriors were shot on a bright, sunny day.” Freeman described his Emmy win as “very humbling, considering the many deserving candidates.” On the first season of Boardwalk Empire, he shared cinematography duties with fellow ASC members Stuart Dryburgh and Kramer Morgenthau during Season 2, he alternated episodes with David Franco and William Coleman. In our Sept. ’10 article about the series (“Mob Money”), Freeman noted that the
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American Cinematographer

Emmy photos courtesy of The Picture Group. Boardwalk Empire photo by Abbot Genser, courtesy of HBO. Florian Hoffmeister photo by Julieta Sans, courtesy of PBS.

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show’s team approach to cinematography is a wise strategy: “It’s like you’re prepping a mini-movie with the director. There’s less money wasted because you’re getting exactly the equipment you need, and you save time because you’ve done preliminaries ahead of time.” Taking cues from Dryburgh’s work on the pilot, Freeman and director/producer Tim Van Patten found further inspiration in the artwork of the Ashcan school. Freeman added that he often strives to push the show’s chiaroscuro look, heightening contrast “not just in deeper shadows, but in higher highlights, so the skin tone sometimes becomes alabaster. Ironically, because modern film stocks are so great at retaining highlights, that’s actually hard to achieve.” Hoffmeister notes that he had 12 days to shoot each hour-long episode of the three-part Great Expectations. “With Brian Kirk, the director, I watched Citizen Kane as inspiration, which sums up the gap between ambition and the time we had to shoot each episode,” he says with a laugh. “Dickens’ work was quite popular literature in its time, so we put the emphasis on creating an entertaining story. We configured it as a single-camera show and shot on the Arri Alexa. We shot most of it with an old set of Cooke S2 lenses; I used shortfocal-length lenses close to the characters, trying to be right in there, subjective and emotionally compelling. I’m an advocate of in-camera effects and in-camera filtration, so I used a lot of that as well. “I’ve been working in these larger-scale television projects for four or five years now, and in this particular case, I’m really pleased with the outcome of the miniseries,” Hoffmeister adds. “To be recognized for something you feel close to is really special.”

American Cinematographer - November 2012

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