ICG Magazine - May 2021 - Light & Glass Issue

ICG MAGAZINE

THE

UNDERGROUND

RAILROAD

+

THEM

+

THE

WATER

MAN

+

HISTORY

OF

ANAMORPHICS

iPhones Production Monitors

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pictured: Alicia Robbins

contents LIGHT & GLASS ISSUE May 2021 / Vol. 92 No. 04

DEPARTMENTS gear guide ................ 18 replay ................ 22 depth of field ................ 26 exposure ................ 28 production credits ................ 102 stop motion .............. 112

SPECIAL History of Anamorphics ...... 88

34

FEATURE 01

BLACK LIKE ME Barry Jenkins and longtime collaborator, James Laxton, ASC, travel the road less taken for Amazon’s new limited series The Underground Railroad.

Photo by Kyle Kaplan

FEATURE 02 RIVER OF DREAMS Matthew J. Lloyd, ASC, CSC, forages the Oregon wilderness for David Oyelowo’s directing debut.

FEATURE O3 STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON Amazon’s new series, Them, mixes supernatural scares with even more terrifying everyday horrors.

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president's letter

Rising Up This month’s issue of ICG Magazine highlights projects by accomplished filmmakers whose work is already well known in acting, directing and cinematography. Our Local celebrates these artists whose projects, all of which were impacted by COVID-19 in some way, are supported by our skilled and talented camera crews. And as it has now been a little over a year since a microscopic virus changed the world, it feels like the time to begin to put the pandemic in our rear-view mirrors and once again turn our attention to telling important stories through moving images – like the ones featured in the magazine.

As our society examines the past and still grapples for equality in the present, planning for a better future becomes an imperative, and the stories our members help to tell can move society forward by including new ideas, new faces and new voices. The best visual storytelling informs and inspires; it supports our aspirations and provides hope as we emerge from this long hibernation. It was late last summer when our members bravely began to return to sets, working under comprehensive and rigorous safety protocols negotiated collectively by our industry’s guilds and unions. Our broadcast members and studio publicists never stopped working, and they were soon joined by many of our unscripted members – the first people back on sets. Those committed individuals helped connect the written protocols with experience on the ground. Since then, many of our members, in all genres and classifications, are safely back on the job.

When I became President last March, our Local’s efforts were focused entirely on ensuring the economic survival of this union. Now we are coming out of that crouch and can return to pursuing the initiatives envisioned before the pandemic brought our industry to a halt – goals like a new mentorship program and continued, sustained support for inclusion efforts, the fruits of which are tangibly spotlighted throughout this month’s ICG Magazine. Other priorities include improved safety, and the Local’s political program targets federal and state legislation for paid family leave while supporting political candidates who will fight for working families and preserve voting rights for all.

If this past year has shown us anything, it is how strong, resilient and caring we are as a Local, working in an industry that cares for its own. This month’s ICG Magazine celebrates the spirit that keeps our industry thriving and always relevant, even in the most difficult of times. I am very grateful for the tenacity that the filmmakers in the articles you’ll read about have exhibited. They reflect the best values of our society and our craft. And like the grit and compassion shown by our kin in this union during this past year, we applaud their stamina and creativity.

John Lindley, ASC National President International Cinematographers Guild IATSE Local 600

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CRUELLA

Publisher Teresa Muñoz Executive Editor David Geffner Art Director Wes Driver

STAFF WRITER Pauline Rogers

COMMUNICATIONS COORDINATOR

Tyler Bourdeau

COPY EDITORS

Peter Bonilla Maureen Kingsley

CONTRIBUTORS

Karen Ballard, SMPSP Anne Marie Fox David Geffner Kevin H. Martin Valentina Valentini

ACCOUNTING

Glenn Berger Dominique Ibarra

COMMUNICATIONS COMMITTEE

Spooky Stevens, Chair

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May 2021 vol. 92 no. 04

Local

600

International Cinematographers Guild

IATSE Local 600 NATIONAL PRESIDENT John Lindley, ASC VICE PRESIDENT Dejan Georgevich, ASC 1ST NATIONAL VICE PRESIDENT Christy Fiers 2ND NATIONAL VICE PRESIDENT Baird Steptoe NATIONAL SECRETARY-TREASURER Stephen Wong NATIONAL ASSISTANT SECRETARY-TREASURER Jamie Silverstein NATIONAL SERGEANT-AT-ARMS Deborah Lipman NATIONAL EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR Rebecca Rhine ASSOCIATE NATIONAL EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR Chaim Kantor

ADVERTISING POLICY: Readers should not assume that any products or services advertised in International Cinematographers Guild Magazine are endorsed by the International Cinematographers Guild. Although the Editorial staff adheres to standard industry practices in requiring advertisers to be “truthful and forthright,” there has been no extensive screening process by either International Cinematographers Guild Magazine or the International Cinematographers Guild.

EDITORIAL POLICY: The International Cinematographers Guild neither implicitly nor explicitly endorses opinions or political statements expressed in International Cinematographers Guild Magazine. ICG Magazine considers unsolicited material via email only, provided all submissions are within current Contributor Guideline standards. All published material is subject to editing for length, style and content, with inclusion at the discretion of the Executive Editor and Art Director.

Local 600, International Cinematographers Guild, retains all ancillary and expressed rights of content and photos published in ICG Magazine and icgmagazine.com, subject to any negotiated prior arrangement. ICG Magazine regrets that it cannot publish letters to the editor.

ICG (ISSN 1527-6007) Ten issues published annually by The International Cinematographers Guild 7755 Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood, CA, 90046, U.S.A. Periodical postage paid at Los Angeles, California.

POSTMASTER: Send address changes to ICG 7755 Sunset Boulevard Hollywood, California 90046 Copyright 2021, by Local 600, International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employes, Moving Picture Technicians, Artists and Allied Crafts of the United States and Canada. Entered as Periodical matter, September 30, 1930, at the Post Office at Los Angeles, California, under the act of March 3, 1879. Subscriptions: $88.00 of each International Cinematographers Guild member’s annual dues is allocated for an annual subscription to International Cinematographers Guild Magazine.

Non-members may purchase an annual subscription for $48.00 (U.S.), $82.00 (Foreign and Canada) surface mail and $117.00 air mail per year. Single Copy: $4.95 The International Cinematographers Guild Magazine has been published monthly since 1929.

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www.icgmagazine.com www.icg600.com

Photo by Sara Terry

wide angle

C

oming on the heels of the April verdict in the George Floyd trial, which many hope signifies a sea change for racial equity in this country, our May features showcase three projects created and directed

by Black men. What makes that notable, beyond the obvious lack of accessibility Black creatives have historically had in Hollywood, is when programming this issue, there was no imperative to find stories about Black Americans. The three projects – the indie feature The Water Man and two new series from Amazon Studios, The Underground Railroad and Them – were the most interesting, challenging, and emblematic examples of the skills of Local 600 camera team members on the film/TV horizon. That hardly means racial equity behind the camera has hit a tipping point (UCLA’s 2021 Hollywood Diversity Report revealed women and people of color did gain ground, but it only tracked lead actors, total cast, writers, and directors), but it may signify an entertainment culture truly intent on pursuing stories from diverse voices.

What is clear is that all three productions were shot by directors of photography – Oscar nominee James Laxton, ASC; Camerimage nominees Checco Varese, ASC, and Suki Medenčević, ASC; and Emmy nominees Xavier Grobet, ASC, AMC, and Matthew J. Lloyd, ASC, CSC – who enjoyed close creative partnerships with their directors and/or showrunners. Those included Oscarwinner Barry Jenkins (Exposure, page 28), Emmy- and Golden Globe-nominated actor David Oyelowo (making his directing debut), and SXSW-winning writer/producer Little Marvin.

The teaming on our cover story (Black Like Me, page 34) is particularly impressive, given that Laxton has shot all of Jenkins’ work since they met 20 years ago at Florida State University. The cinematography in their

last two (Oscar-winning) films – Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk – is notable for finding the visual poetry in their main characters’ journeys, while still conveying the social inequities inherent in each story. While The Underground Railroad takes a more savage route to visualize its real-life atrocities, it too still finds moments of supremely beautiful color, light, and framing in the lives of its subjugated 19th-Century Black Americans. It’s like Jenkins and Laxton are so perfectly in sync, the images are inseparable from the writing.

Being in sync was also the call for my article, River of Dreams (page 56). Oyelowo says he wanted The Water Man to be filled with the kind of adventure he remembers from the films of his youth – E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Goonies, and Stand By Me among them. So how do you do that on a $15-million budget in a protected forest outside Portland, OR? You hire a comic book franchise pro like Lloyd and secure a locally based Guild camera team that knows the terrain.

As Oyelowo describes in my story: “Matt had that rare combination of a big commercial eye and a guerilla filmmaking heartbeat, and this film needed both: cinematic scope for the forest and intimacy for the parent/son moments. Matt is also incredibly quick with lighting and camera setups – while everyone is meandering back from lunch, he’s the guy who has his team prepped and ready to go.”

Was Varese ready to go when Little Marvin wanted the many horror looks for Them (which revolves around a Black family’s relocation to Compton, CA in the early 1950s) captured incamera? Varese, who brought on Grobet to co-DP (and Medenčević for one complex episode for which Varese had to oversee a large LED wall shoot), says he reveled in the challenge of going old-school (with new-school gear).

“We had an extraordinary creator who had written a story that allowed us to use contemporary innovations in a way that amplified things without being distracting,” Varese shares in Straight Outta Compton (page 74). And he adds: “It’s been said that we in cinematography are the keepers of truth, but the truth is something that can be viewed through different prisms.”

ICG Magazine is honored to bring you this May issue that, in some small way, reflects the hard truths of racial inequity in our country.

CONTRIBUTORS

Karen Ballard , SMPSP River of Dreams, Stop Motion “I find great joy in conveying the work of the creative team who are involved in making a motion picture and telling the story. From writer to director, DP to talent, production designer, costume, hair and makeup and all the rest, a film is a true collaboration – to capture all of that in one still image is both the beauty and challenge of this job.”

Anne Marie Fox Straight Outta Compton “When Amazon Studios approached me for the period piece Them, little did I know how relevant and groundbreaking this series would be. As my first foray into classic horror, I was surprised at how dynamically the story unfolded. I’m moved by and gratified for my contribution as still photographer on a show that beautifully illustrates a family’s struggle to fit in while remaining fully authentic despite its gruesome challenges. The project’s social commentary reflects intrinsic holy terror that unfortunately colors many avenues of American history. I hope it sheds some long-overdue light and brings us together as a community.”

ICG MAGAZINE

THE

UNDERGROUND

RAILROAD

+

THEM

+

THE

WATER

MAN

+

HISTORY

OF

ANAMORPHICS

David Geffner Executive Editor

Email: david@icgmagazine.com

Cover photo by Atsushi Nishijima

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Source Four LED

Series 3

Infinitely Adjustable Highly Tunable Flicker Free Widest Gamut Bright

No joke. studio.etcconnect.com

visual environment technologies | etcconnect.com

GEAR GUIDE

Rosco DMG DASH $279 - POCKET LED KIT $1,250 - QUAD KIT WWW.DASH.ROSCO.COM

To make sure its new multi-talented, handheld light – the DMG DASH Kit – met expectations, Rosco gave a small number of filmmakers the chance to try it out, including Local 600 DP Graham Ehlers Sheldon, who says the modularity of the fixture “combined with the wide range of built-in digital Rosco gels we all know and love” is what caught his eye. “The QUAD DASH kit means the light doesn’t stay on the truck for larger scenes where you need more output, and the built-in battery and robust metal exterior means it will withstand the controlled chaos of a fast-paced doc or scripted shoot,” Ehlers adds. “I’ve used it as a key light on a single subject, edge for product, and accent background light; I’ve even mounted it to a garage door with the included magnetic ¼ 20-mount for another wide shot.” The DMG DASH Pocket LED Kit can be controlled by myMIX, is weatherproof and durable, and features a set of beamshaping accessories, including a flat diffuser panel, a dome diffuser, an egg crate, and a gel holder for adding any Rosco gel or diffusion material desired.

Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 6K Pro $2,495 (WITH EVF $495 AND BATTERY PRO GRIP $145) WWW.BLACKMAGICDESIGN.COM

With the new Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 6K Pro, users are getting more options for high-end cinematic images.

“Several upgrades have proven to be a big plus for me,” describes Local 600 DP Vance Burberry. “The tilting screen has allowed me to eliminate an onboard monitor, making the camera even more compact and versatile. The new electronic viewfinder is superb; it’s not harsh on the eye and delivers a high-quality image. Another great addition is the internal electronic ND filters, allowing me to eliminate a matte box in many situations, especially useful when rigging a camera in or on a car. Add the new dual mini XLR’s, the larger internal battery, and Blackmagic Generation 5 Color Science, and this camera is a force to be reckoned with.” The 6K Pro features a 6144 × 3456 high-resolution HDR sensor, dual native ISO, EF lens mount, and direct recording to USB-C disks. It includes an adjustable HDR touchscreen, built-in ND filters, and a larger battery for a longer run time. Add the Battery Pro Grip, with two extra NP-F570 batteries, or the Pro EVF for a high-quality viewfinder with a built-in proximity sensor, four-element glass diopter with -4 to +4 adjustment, built-in status information, and a digital focus chart for even more options.

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ARRI AMIRA Live FROM $24,140 TO $31,180 MULTI-CAMERA MONITOR BUNDLE $5,980 WWW.ARRI.COM

ARRI just announced AMIRA Live, a purpose-built Super 35mm camera for live TV. Designed specifically for multi-camera live broadcasts, AMIRA Live eliminates external cabling between the camera body and the fiber adapter, resulting in cleaner and more reliable configurations for live productions. Before the announcement, the German television show Factory of Dreams for David Guetta Productions put the camera to the test. “We had more than 10 of these cameras, so they made their premiere with the Ehrlich Brothers,” says the talk show’s director Rolf Sturm. “The camera left an amazing impression on me because of the quality, which nothing else compares to. The brilliance, the depth-of-field, the displayed images are unique to such an extent that all of us have to adapt because everything is visible in such detail.” With its cable-less design, AMIRA Live is comparable to live-broadcast cameras.” But instead of a 2/3-inch sensor, it uses ARRI’s legendary ALEV III Super 35 sensor – the same sensor design used in all ALEXA cameras. ARRI’s sophisticated color science allows AMIRA Live to broadcast live images on a par with high-end movies, TV series, and OTT productions.

DJI FPV $1,299 WWW.DJI.COM

Michael Izquierdo, Lead Pilot, Local 600 operator, Beverly Hills Aerials (Safer Skies, May 2020), says DJI’s new FPV readyto-fly drone offers “a safer, smaller footprint, and the ability to swap between FPV and stabilized mode, making this unit great for scouting and exploratory flights before flying larger cinema FPV and heavy lift drones. There is minimal time [on big shows] to switch between FPV drones and a Mavic 2 Pro, which is what I’ve been doing. So this drone gives everyone the FPV flight experience.” Drone pilots are “virtually” put into the air via DJI’s FPV Goggles V2. This hybrid drone blends capabilities from FPV drones along with DJI features such as hover-in-place, obstacle sensors, and more. Three new flight modes help break down barriers to make flying FPV drones easier, including a Basic mode that hovers in place to Full Manual mode. Capture footage with a 4K camera while a 1-axis gimbal and RockSteady EIS smooth out camera shake. Newly developed safety features include the Emergency Brake and Hover button and frontward/downward obstacle detection sensors. The top speed is 87 mph, and the drone can go from 0-62 mph in just two seconds. Pilots can also control it with a new single-handed motion controller that mimics hand movement.

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GEAR GUIDE

Sony FX3 $3,898 WWW.SONY.COM

Compact and lightweight, the FX3 is ideal for handheld shooting, gimbals, and drones. It has five ¼ 20 UNC threaded mounting points to directly attach accessories without needing a cage. It also comes with a detachable XKR handle with three additional mounting points. “The snug handle was very helpful because when operating handheld, I often carry the camera briefcase style,” says DP Vatsala Goel. “It was really easy for me to move with the talent, and I could continuously adjust the articulating screen to my convenience to still be able to look at the action, even outside in the sun.” FX3 features multiple advanced autofocus technologies, ultra-high sensitivity with ISO expandable to 409,600, and 15+ stops of dynamic range. “I was very impressed with the details in the highlights straight out of the camera without any grade or LUT applied,” Goel adds. “I pushed the sensor a fair bit as the talent was backlit with the sun and her face lit with scattered fill from the sky. Nearing twilight, despite the brightness contrast between her darker skin tone and the bright sun backlighting, there was enough detail in the exposure range in the darkest shadows and brightest highlights for us to pull from in the color grade. Also, filming by myself in documentary-style set-up, focus tracking and improved autofocus was a big help in keeping the action sharp.”

LEE ProGlass IRND $600 TO $800 WWW.LEEFILTERS.COM

Designed to meet the exacting needs of all DP’s, whether shooting digitally or on film, the ProGlass Cine IRND filters are remarkably neutral, eliminating infrared pollution and ensuring all colors remain accurate and true. This simplifies workflow, saves time, and enables DP’s to focus on their creative goals. These filters are manufactured from 4-mm-thick optically flat, scratch-resistant glass and edged with a metal rim; so they not only prevent focus shift, they are also durable and long-lasting. ProGlass Cine filters are available in seven different densities (1-7 stops) and in two sizes: 40 × 5.650 in. and 6.6 × 6.6 in.

“I love LEE’s ProGlass Cine IRND filters because you can have absolute trust in them. No matter what type of project you are making, the ability to have perfectly matched ND filters across all densities with absolute color rendition means that you don’t have to stress anymore about your filtration. It’s accurate at the point of capture, and for me that is everything,” says Jonathan Jones, Emmy Award-Winning DP, Creative Director Ember Films.

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Litepanels LYKOS+ bi-color mini $452 (LAMP) $2,090+ (FLIGHT KITS) WWW.LITEPANELS.COM

Taking the LED and lens technology found in the ASTRA 1×1 panel, Litepanels has shrunk everything down to create a broadcast-quality light that is just 10 ¼ × 6 in. and weighs just one pound. The product is light enough to take everywhere, small enough to fit anywhere. “At The Camera Mafia, we have a run-and-gun attitude with that movie feel,” says Local 600 DP Danny Alaniz, who specializes in reality, commercial, aerial and live events. “With the LYKOS+ we can get the camera into intimate spaces to get up close and personal for some unique perspectives, such as interiors of high-performance cars and private jets or going toe-to-toe with a boxer in the ring. We can mount, hand-hold, tape, or tie the LYKOS+ so that it’s always in the right place at the right time with outstanding, coloraccurate light.” Lightweight doesn’t mean low power. LYKOS+ delivers 2,000 lux of light at three feet with a CRI/TLCi of 96 and no flicker at any frame-rate, intensity from 100 percent to 0 percent, or color temperature from 3200K to 5600K. With over two hours of battery operation from an L-series battery, it won’t leave you in the dark.

IO 8KSDI $7,995 WWW.IOINDUSTRIES.COM

As IO’s new 8KSDI ppoint-of-view (POV) camera is readied for the 2021 Olympics in Japan, it’s paving the way for the next evolution of live broadcasting. The camera combines 8K (and UHDTV2) capture with live SDI output for live and video production, virtual reality, visual effects, and more. The singlepiece miniature video camera is designed for low latency connection over 12G/6G-SDI to other infrastructures such as video recorders, monitors or distribution equipment. At the heart of the unit is the XGS 4500, a new global shutter CMOS image sensor from ON Semiconductor. The sensor combines high resolution image quality and uniformity, eliminating motion artifacts and flash banding effects. In-camera processing features include manual or automatic exposure control, ISO and gamma settings, color and saturation adjustments, detail enhancement, and more. For applications not yet needing 8K, an in-camera scaling model enables 4K/UHD output at up to 60 fps via single-link 12G/6G-SDI. Cameras are available with two choices for factory-installed lens mount, either F-mount or Active EV-mount. The F-mount is a passive, mechanicalonly mount requiring manually adjustable F-mount lenses.

The Active EF-mount electronically controls any attached EFmount lenses, providing remote control over iris and focus.

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REPLAY

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05.2021

Generation

BY PAULINE ROGERS PHOTOS BY WARRICK PAGE / HBO MAX

The new ensemble dramedy Generation, from HBO Max, takes a hard-hitting look at a group of high school students as they explore their sexuality in the modern world. Helmed by Director of Photography Laura Merians Gonçalves and a diverse Guild camera team, the mandate is to capture the story “using handheld, two cameras, in the point-of-view of our characters,” she explains. “We’re using the RED Monstro, shooting 5K 2:1 with Panavised Canon K35s, some Panaspeeds, and a 65-millimeter Panavision Artiste lens, as well as a couple of adaptive optics from Dan Sasaki. We support our story with a variety of tools like the Biscuit Rig and many ridiculouslooking contraptions to support cell phones. We do everything our characters like to do: roof-topping, jumping in pools, driving around, hanging out in bathrooms, and, of course, being on their phones a lot,” Gonçalves smiles.

Lensing her first dramatic series, Gonçalves says one of the most interesting and challenging shots in the show is a “simple” driving sequence in Episode 8 (“The Last Shall Be First”), involving the entire cast (eight people) in a truck, at night, as they drive through the city in search of a fire station where they can safely surrender a baby one of the teen characters had just given birth to in a mall bathroom.

“We decided to do this practically so that we could shoot 360 degrees, in the cab and the bed of the truck panning to each character freely,” Gonçalves describes. “We used the Biscuit rig and moved the pod to three different positions over the course of three nights shooting on the streets of Reseda and Altadena. This involved a lot of planning and coordination with the camera, grip, lighting, transportation, and location teams.”

Although setting up the scene was a challenge, by episode 108, Gonçalves and Key Grip Anthony Marra had a handle on the many driving sequences.

As Marra shares: “When I was told about all the driving sequences we were going to have throughout the season, and that the director wanted to look forward as well as the standard front and side mounts, I realized we couldn’t use the standard process trailer hitched to a camera car. So, we had better book Allan Padelford’s Biscuit Jr. – a drivable process trailer that uses a unique pod driving system that can be mounted in various positions around the rig. The Biscuit Jr. would allow us to shoot in any direction while driving in controlled traffic. And Laura and [Creator/Writer/Director] Daniel Barnz drew out every camera angle to be used on a schematic of the truck on the Biscuit Jr. trailer. One or two cameras became no problem.”

B-Camera 1st AC Joe Cheung says the picture car was a Ford 150 Raptor. “Laura designed the sequence so that operators Orlando Duguay [SOC] and Eduardo Fierro were cross-covering and shooting swingles of the cast shooting from the passenger seat and driver seat while the Biscuit was driving from the front out of frame,” Cheung explains.

Marra says there were five actors in the cab of the truck, as well as three riding in the bed of the truck. All actors and camera operators were safely belt-harnessed in the bed of the truck, “and whenever we used the side camera platform, we modified the Biscuit a little, so the operator was safely belted in that position as well,” he recounts.

“The Biscuit Jr. is one of the things that will make this TV show stand out from the crowd.”

Operator Eduardo Fierro says he greatly appreciated the use of the Biscuit on the set. “As a camera operator or a DP, I want to be safe,” Fierro shares. “And I have seen examples where they’ll ask us to do French overs or side shots where the actor is really driving. And they may slam on the brakes because they are unaware of how much a camera weighs. Actors need to concentrate on their acting. Drivers need to drive. That makes it safe for everyone – including the operator. Laura’s choice of the Biscuit for this and many other shots helped ensure that.”

“The Biscuit rig gave us incredible freedom to point the camera 270 degrees, including at the actor who was pretending to drive the vehicle,” adds

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REPLAY

a chase effect down each tube, light passing down one side of the vehicle and then the other.”

Ghegan says using an RGB-CCT crossfade profile on the tubes provided the ability to emit any color or color temperature from the tubes. “We ended up programming sodium vapor, 4300K with added green, 2700K tungsten, and 5000K daylight looks,” he continues. “The Asteras were mounted in the back for the bed, one in the middle of the rear window and two to the left and right parallel, with the sides of the bed and above the actors’ heads.”

Control of the Titan tubes and interior LED was done using an ETC EOS/Nomad portable lighting console, enabling Gonçalves to call lighting changes on the fly. They also used two universes of DMX wireless data connection transmitting with two Lumen Radio FX transmitters on the dashboard of the follow-vehicle driven by a precision driver with Callesen in the back seat. Powering everything on the Biscuit were two Grip Trix 2.5-Wh battery systems with inverter.

“One of the first things I thought about when reading these scripts was how to deliver our visuals in an authentic language – safely,” Gonçalves concludes. “Thankfully, I have a team of first-class warriors behind me who have given me the ability to execute every ambitious episode.”

LOCAL 600 CREW Director of Photography Laura Merians Gonçalves A-Camera Operator Orlando Duguay, SOC A-Camera 1st AC Jon Jung A-Camera 2nd AC Brendan Devanie Orlando Duguay. “This was very important as it gave the actors the ability to focus on their performance.

Considering Eduardo and I were operating handheld in the bed of the pickup truck driving through live traffic, we had peace of mind knowing a professional driver was operating the Biscuit.”

Duguay says operating handheld in the bed of a pickup truck can be difficult while moving. “We had to ensure that a route was scouted in advance with the smoothest roads possible so that potholes and bumps in the pavement wouldn’t result in overly shaky camerawork,” he recalls.

Lighting for the tight moves was tricky as well.

Gonçalves worked with Chief Lighting Technician

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Dave Ghegan to create the right amount of light and still give everyone the freedom to move. The plan was to light the actors in the cab and the bed of the truck.

“I worked with my console programmer, Jon Callesen, to simulate and augment passing under street lights and light emitted from buildings as the truck passes, and also lift the ambient light in the cab interior,” Ghegan explains. “We decided on five four-foot Titan Astera LED tubes, and one LiteGear LiteMat Plus 2L mounted to the picture vehicle. The LiteMat was mounted on the roof of the cab in the center of the Raptor sunroof flanked by two Asteras; all pointed straight down into the cab. All tubes were put into 16-pixel mode to create

B-Camera Operator Eduardo Fierro B-Camera 1st AC Joe Cheung B-Camera 2nd AC Jenny Roh DIT James Notari Loader Naoe Jarmon Utility Daniel Asmelash Still Photographer Warrick Page

THE GLOBAL NETWORK OF LOCAL CREW & VENDORS. ProductionHUB is the go-to resource for finding exactly what you need for your production.

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DEPTH OF FIELD

BOWLING GREEN STATE UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR JEFF HALL USING THE LEARNING LIGHT / COURTESY OF F.J. WESTCOTT

F.J. Westcott LIGHTING THE SCHOOLS

It’s amazing what you can find through social media these days. When teacher Sharif Battle of James J. Ferris High School in New Jersey was online looking for different lighting ideas, he stumbled on a post by F. J. Westcott Lighting. It was an offer to donate their equipment to qualified schools for their classes.

Battle filled out the application immediately.

“Before the pandemic, I started a photography

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club. We were learning about DSLR cameras, the exposure triangle and composition,” Battle explains. “We had a small group of students who were excited about the class until the pandemic changed everything. This initiative will allow me to provide them the next progression in photography, and that’s learning light. This tool allows students to learn light practically and in four different ways.

When the schools reopen, the goal is to capture the pandemic in their point of view.”

“Knowing educational institutions were getting hit hard during the pandemic, we wanted to support their photography programs and help maintain the creative courses students have to learn from,” explains F. J. Westcott’s President Brandon Heiss.

“Starting ‘Lighting the Schools’ was a natural idea.

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“We set up a nomination page on our site, and, each month, we will continue to choose two schools based on their stories and need for learning tools,” he continues. “The schools that qualify will get Scott Kelby’s Learning Light. It is the perfect handheld tool to help educate beginner photographers about different lighting techniques and effects.”

Central Michigan University’s photojournalism classes will have a chance to experiment with the Learning Light tool, thanks to former Director of Photography for The Detroit News, Steve Fecht.

“Steve nominated us, and I’m excited that Wescott chose our school,” describes CMU’s Kent Curtis Miller. “I teach a studio and location lighting class for 35 students and, as Scott Kelby explains, the

because it is the first educational lighting device that will allow users to experiment with various lighting techniques without the need for complex or expensive equipment. It’s a simple tool that will not intimidate the beginner and offers interesting options as they become more sophisticated. The students at CMU and other schools will learn the basics quickly: how to switch between daylight and tungsten and experiment with direct lighting, diffusion, Fresnel, and gobos.

“When we connected with Mr. Battle at James J. Ferris High School and Kent Miller at CMU, both were so thrilled to provide learning tools for their students,” Heiss relates. “The mission of this initiative is to enhance lighting education and

creativity in the photography and film world. Without photography students, educators, and aspiring photographers/filmmakers, we wouldn't be where we are today, which is why we are honored to give back to them.”

By posting on social media and sending out their program via email, Westcott sees no end in sight for potential schools and educational venues to benefit from their equipment at no cost. The Lighting the Schools initiative is supported by the proceeds from Westcott Lighting sales. “When you purchase any lighting gear from an authorized Westcott dealer at fjwestcott.com, you will be supporting the donation of educational lighting tools for educators and students,” Heiss concludes. “We’re urging everyone

Learning Light is a tool made for photography educators and students.”

Westcott chose Kelby’s Learning Light

teach students about what can be accomplished through artificial lighting techniques. We’re excited to motivate beginner photographers and push

to join us in helping students by nominating a school or university through our website.” https://www.fjwestcott.com/light-schools

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Barry Jenkins WRITER/DIRECTOR THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD

BY VALENTINA VALENTINI PHOTOS BY KYLE KAPLAN

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EXPOSURE

T h ro u g h o u t 11 6 d ay s of f i l m i n g T h e Underground Railroad in Georgia, Writer/ Director Barry Jenkins would see red MAGA hats, about which he asks during our recent Zoom call for this story: “What was so great about America? For that phrase to spread so far and be so readily adopted, you have to have been able to ignore what America once was.”

A Miami native, Jenkins had completed two years at Florida State University before walking past a sign for the school’s College of Motion Picture Arts.

He was headed toward a degree in creative writing when he decided to add a film education to the mix.

And it was in film school that he formed the core creative team that would go on to help Jenkins earn Oscars – Director of Photography James Laxton, ASC; Producer Adele Romanski; and Editors Nat Sanders and Joi McMillon. “I took a year off [from film school] and created my own curriculum to prove to myself that I was as capable as these other kids of what they were doing,” Jenkins says amidst a flurry of praise for his classmates and the medium in general. “Yes, I was born poor and black and with a mom who was addicted to crack cocaine, but that wasn’t why I couldn’t do what they did. I just didn’t have the training.”

Talk, earned a second Best Adapted Screenplay nomination. Amazon Studios’ The Underground Railroad is Jenkins’ first foray into television, though he says having worked as a staff writer on Season 2 of The Leftovers helped him to understand that no matter how much prep is done in TV, much of the filmmaking has to happen in real-time.

ICG Magazine: You met James Laxton at film school, and that turned into a fruitful relationship.

Barry Jenkins: That’s exactly what it is – a relationship.

At this point, we’re a very old married couple, and every time we go to make a film, it’s that long Hawaiian vacation where it’s like, “Are we going to kill each other, or are we going to fall deeper in love?”

And which one was it for The Underground Railroad? This one was gravy. It was 116 days, 500 pages – you have to be in sync, and we were.

After graduating from FSU in 2003, Jenkins moved to Hollywood and wrote and directed his first feature, Medicine for Melancholy – produced in 2008 for $13,000 with five friends. The film premiered at SXSW and earned an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best First Feature. For the next eight years, Jenkins worked on branded

What was the source of your creative connection?

Part of it was luck. I was new to film and James was the only guy there from California, so we were both fish out of water. At that time, there were a lot of kids who wanted to be Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Wes Anderson, and James was

content in San Francisco, until Romanski called with the pitch for Moonlight. The small indie film ended up winning the Oscar for Best Picture (in a famous televised moment) and earned Jenkins an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay and a Best Director nomination. His follow-up, If Beale Street Could

like, “Hey man, have you seen this Wong Kar-wai movie In the Mood for Love?” And I’m like, “What’s a Wong Kar-wai?” [Laughs.] Before either of us had any expectations we could become adept at filmmaking, we bonded over a shared love of movies. We probably should have been out raging

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and having fun, but we were the guys you would find on a Friday at 3 a.m. watching our fourth Criterion Collection film.

Do you think you’ll ever work with a different DP? Here’s the thing: James is shooting many more things without me than he is with me. I can always tell when he comes back with a new toolset. So, maybe it’s not fair to him that I don’t go off and acquire a new toolset for when I come back to him.

At some point, James is going to get tired of me, and that’s fine.

What was going on in that eight-year break between your first feature and Moonlight? I was trying to develop a feature film at Focus Features with James Schamus and John Lyons about Stevie Wonder and time travel, which is not the best thing to develop after only making one feature film with a budget of $13,000. [Laughs.] I spun my wheels with that for about three and a half years, while I was directing a lot of branded content and trying to keep my muscles sharp. That was my Plan B. But if you have a Plan B, often it becomes the plan.

Did the long layoff hurt? Not at all. I think the lovely thing about having so much distance from the first feature is that there was no pressure. We just had fun with Moonlight – we shot that movie single camera over 25 days, and then it wins Best Picture. If you had told me that was what needed to happen when we were making the film, I don’t think I would’ve been able to do it. The process had been so free and pure; we were making the movie with the same energy and spirit as those kids who stayed up until 3 a.m. watching Criterion.

If Beale Street Could Talk was the follow-up to Moonlight – was there pressure on that film given Moonlight’s success? There was some pressure. I wrote it at the same as I was writing Moonlight, so I think they kind of go hand-in-hand.

But the feeling of making Beale Street wasn't as fluid as Moonlight, or this show. It’s nice that James and I have this four-feature – I’m calling Underground Railroad a feature – relationship spread over 14 years and that you can see how the language on screen has evolved, and how our language as a creative duo has evolved as well.

We were in therapy when we made Beale Street, and with Underground we were that happy couple of 48 years. I knew that this was the one that was going to see us all the way through.

Both Moonlight and The Underground Railroad contribute to the conversation of racial equity in America, which begs the question: Can movies make a difference? I have to think that they can. I still get messages from people who will say things as extreme as “This movie saved my life” or as wonderful as “This movie, as a filmmaker, gave me the strength to keep going.” If this movie did not exist, would there be something else to fill that cavity? Probably, but this film does exist, and so I think in that way, yes, I do believe these films can create change. It’s part of why I’ll continue to make them. Now I can’t let that dictate the artistry; for me, art that is specifically an activist tool affects the way I make the work, and that’s not what I’m about. I do think I make choices because I care what impact they might have on the world or people, but it can’t be the main driver.

Is it fair to say your films serve a broader educational purpose for future generations beyond just entertainment? I don’t think that’s their purpose, no. I do think that the human experience is so vast, wonderful, and evocative that in a way it’s bittersweet that we only get to experience it once.

And our experience is dictated by who we are, where we’re born, our family, et cetera, and then there’s this whole other realm of experience that we aren’t privy to. I’ll never know viscerally what it feels like to be a woman, but in watching the films of someone like Claire Denis or Agnes Varda or Ava DuVernay, I can maybe be invited in. And that will probably help me become a better man because I’ll have this understanding that’s been extended to me by these artists. The things I make function the same way. Up to this point, it’s been about Blackness – what it means to be a Black person in this world, how being a Black person in this world affects the way the world treats you, the way the world is. In that way, the contribution or the efficacy of this work I can’t see as important, because that then drives you towards making bad art. But I do think that element of it is necessary.

The Underground Railroad deals with a period in history that saw the brutal persecution of Black Americans. Do you think that term, persecution, is still relevant today? I think it is. These images aren’t prevalent in our textbooks and media, so whenever people talk about the institution of American slavery, they often compare them to images of the Holocaust. Perhaps because there have been so many movies made about the

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“It's as important today to remind people that these things happened. And, relevant to the cinematography, we tried to present these images as forthrightly as we could, to be honest about what it was without leaning into very salacious close-ups. We had to tell the truth.”

Holocaust and not nearly as many movies made about the condition of American slavery. Yet any time these images are about to be presented, it’s like, “Oh, do we need to see another movie depicting the brutality of American slavery?” And my answer is yes, we need to remind people that this is the foundation of this country. The associative trauma is so great that two things happen: it’s traumatic for me because I was on the damn set directing. But it also allows the perpetrators of these atrocities to go unseen. I do think that it is as important today as it may have been in the day to remind people that these things happened. And, relevant to the cinematography, we tried to present these images as forthrightly as we could, to be honest about what it was without leaning into very salacious close-ups.

We had to tell the truth.

The sound design – often not connected to the photography – is some of the eeriest and powerful I’ve ever heard. What place does sound occupy in your approach to visual storytelling?

When I was in film school, I had a professor named Richard Portman. He was the first person I ever met who’d won an Oscar [Deer Hunter, 1979]. He said, “Look, you guys don’t know shit, you’re just starting.

So I’m here to tell you that everybody thinks a film is 98 percent image and two percent sound. It’s not.

It’s 50-50. And if you wait until 98 percent of your capital is spent and invest two percent into sound, your movie is not going to work.” That’s always stuck with me, as the one thing you can do fairly inexpensively is the sound finishing, as long as you put enough time into it. Knowing this series would

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not be seen in a movie theater, it felt extremely important that we do whatever we could to heighten the experience. When you watch television, you don’t expect to be surrounded by sound, for sound to be used in a narrative or thematic way. Our whole sound team, but especially our re-recording mixers Onnalee Blank and Matthew Waters – who also did Beale Street with us, a pass on Moonlight, and Game of Thrones – know exactly how much sound can add to the experience of viewing on the small screen.

We understood that while people can’t approximate a 30-foot screen, they can create a surround-sound environment in their living rooms, and a lot of people do. So, the sound was even more important in this case than it would be in a feature because of the control it offered.

There are scenes in this show that I had to skip over – they were just so difficult and upsetting.

Having said that, it’s my responsibility as a white person to keep my eyes open. In Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste, she talks about the postcards of lynchings white people would send to their loved ones as memorial tokens… Well, this is what I’m talking about. There are some hard images in this show, but they aren’t even remotely as hard as what happened. It makes me wonder about the stories that remain to be told in the world of slavery. In 2015, László Nemes made Son of Saul [shot by Mátyás Erdély], a wonderful, beautiful film, with a trajectory of images about a man whose sole job is to cremate corpses. And this beautiful story arises out of that horrible reality simply because the main character wants to give his child a proper

burial. The horrors of Nazi Germany were so vast, but so much of it has been covered that now this very small story can house an entirely new work of art. After we finished filming Underground Railroad – because I don’t watch references during production – I watched Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave again. I had no idea that the book had been adapted

by Gordon Parks in the 1980s, and it just happened to be on Criterion Channel for Black History Month.

To create the context with which Mr. Parks made his film at the time he made it, and then the freedom that I believe granted Steve McQueen in telling the same story with a very different imagistic style maybe 18 years later. I don’t think you can just get to Steve’s version of 12 Years a Slave without having come through the roots of Mr. Parks’ version of that same memoir.

One has to lead the other… Yes, and in that same respect the images in this show stand on the shoulders of those that came before. And I think somebody is going to come after me, and eventually we’ll get to the point where there’ll be an entire film that’s just about an enslaved person on one of the ships that sail from the west coast of Africa to the Caribbean, and he’s done these journeys so often and he’s gotten so good at it that he’s become a deckhand, and on this one trip, he goes down into the hole and realizes that someone in his family is there. I’m pitching Son of Saul, now, essentially, but I think if I made that right now, I don’t know that we’re ready for it. We have to get to that point because those people existed, and we have to tell their stories.

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THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD A N UPCOMING AMERICAN HISTORICAL FICTION D R A M A STREAMING TELEVISION LIMITED SERIES D IRECTED BY BARRY JENKINS BASED ON THE

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N O V E L OF THE SAME NAME BY COLSON WHITEHEAD.

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Barry Jenkins and longtime collaborator, James Laxton, ASC, travel the road less taken for Amazon’s new limited series The Underground Railroad.

by Valentina Valentini | photos by Kyle Kaplan & Atsushi Nishijima / Amazon Studios

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ME

In one of the first frames of the new Amazon series The Underground Railroad, Cora – deftly played by Thuso Mbedu in her first American role – stares straight into the camera while her voiceover narrates the seedlings of the story. It’s a powerful moment, and though we’re only seconds into a 10-episode series, it forces you to pay attention.

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The visual motif repeats throughout The Underground Railroad, urging the viewer to look at the story’s characters – enslaved African Americans on a southern plantation; well-dressed Black men and women on display for white people’s manipulation; free-born and enslaved escapees on a black-owned farm – by panning the camera across their murallike setups, all of them staring back into the camera. Teetering on (if not breaking entirely) the fourth wall is a risky move, but Director of Photography James Laxton, ASC, thinks Writer/Director Barry Jenkins has earned that license.

“Putting the camera inside the characters’ minds invites us into their journeys,” describes Laxton, who met Jenkins studying film at Florida State University some 20 years ago. “A

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different filmmaker might feel too shy to do that, but it’s something that Barry does very well – riding this fine line of being stylistic and maintaining a specific visual language.”

The Underground Railroad is Jenkins’ adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that builds a fictional world around the real-life 19th-century underground railroad – a network of subterranean passages traveled by foot that allowed enslaved people to escape to free states and Canada. The script, written by Jenkins, Jackie Hoyt, Nathan C. Parker, Allison Davis, Adrienne Rush, and Jihan Crowther, with Jenkins directing all 10 episodes, is led

by Cora (Mbedu) with a host of characters

she meets along her journey north, as she tries to escape the slave catcher Ridgeway (Joel Edgerton) and his child sidekick, Homer (Chase W. Dillon).

It’s a story filled with “hard imagery,” a term Jenkins uses deliberately to describe the horrors, atrocities, and brutality his ancestors endured. And yet there is also textural softness throughout – the sun caressing breeze-touched curtains, yellow swathes of light covering fluffy green fields, black faces illuminated only by flickering candlelight. Even in the most violent scenes, flames dance and smoke billows; grey mist swirls and dissipates around scorchedblack trees. Laxton, who’d received the novel from Jenkins years before production began, reminds us with his camera and lighting that

enslaved people fell in love, had families and friendships, and built communities, despite all they were forced to endure.

Laxton, who used the ALEXA LF and ALEXA Mini LF and did extensive testing with Panavision’s Dan Sasaki to tweak the Primo 70 series and T-Series Anamorphics to his specifications, shares that, “our job as filmmakers was to paint with a fine brush nuanced scenes of Cora falling in love or having fun at a corn-shucking festival on Valentine Farm.”

Though the whole series is shot in Georgia, where the first and last episodes take place on the Randall Plantation, Cora’s journey takes her to South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Indiana. There’s a challenge inherent with shooting five states in one, and

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It was no small task to create entirely disparate locales using existing locations in Georgia, but Laxton and his team, cognizant that new characters and new spaces alone wouldn’t cut it, also helped to build separate visual worlds by treating the color palette differently in each state and creating a unique LUT for each episode. Starting with Chapter 1, “Georgia,” Laxton and his longtime colorist, Alex Bickel, at New York City-based Color Collective, used a Kodak emulation; for Chapter 2, “South Carolina,” it was an Anscochrome LUT with E6 chemicals to emulate the same combination of stock and processing Still Photographer Gordon Parks used in his Segregation Story series. Laxton says “this one was special, as it had never been used before.”

Chapter 3 and Chapter 7, both set in North Carolina, used a Fuji Film LUT; Chapter 4, “The Great Spirit” was Ektachrome; “Tennessee: Exodus” was three-strip Technicolor with a modified white point based on Erwin Olaf ’s Keyhole series; and for “Tennessee Proverbs,” back to Ektachrome. Chapter 8 “Indiana: Autumn” was Technicolor three-strip again but modified to emulate blues and greens in reference to photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue; “Indiana: Winter” was Agfa; and finally, for Chapter 10, “Mabel,” the filmmakers used two different LUT’s – the first half of the episode was Bleached Kodak, and the second half was Ektachrome with inkier blacks. Because of Laxton and Jenkins’ feature-film background, they were keen to preserve a cinematic language even while working on a TV series together for the first time. And Bickel, who has colored all of Laxton’s features, helped to maintain a visual through-line in post.

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Laxton and Jenkins both credit the art direction team and Production Designer Mark Friedberg, who also designed Jenkins’ Oscar-winning If Beale Street Could Talk and many other distinctive features, including Joker, Synecdoche, New York, and Far From Heaven.

“Coming out of the writers’ room and into prep with James,” Jenkins adds, “We knew that this was a television show, [but really] it’s a road movie. So, every time Cora reaches a new state, we have full creative license to completely reorient the visual language, whether it be the color or [framing, et cetera].”

“IT’S A ROAD MOVIE. SO, EVERY TIME CORA REACHES A NEW STATE, WE HAVE FULL CREATIVE LICENSE TO COMPLETELY REORIENT THE VISUAL LANGUAGE.” WRITER/DIRECTOR BARRY JENKINS L IGHT & GLA S S I S S UE

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LEFT / PAGES 43/44: COSTUME DESIGNER CAROLINE ESELIN TESTED TEXTURES, COLORS AND FABRICS WITH LAXTON AND PRODUCTION DESIGNER FRIEDBERG TO ENSURE WARDROBES, WHICH RANGED FROM THE 1830’S TO THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY, TONALLY MATCHED THE NARRATIVE.

ABOVE RIGHT: LAXTON (LEFT) WITH JENKINS ON SET SAYS THE WRITER/ DIRECTOR HAS EARNED THE LICENSE TO PUT THE CAMERA "INSIDE THE CHARACTERS’ MINDS" AND INVITE US INTO THEIR JOURNEYS.

“ Television is so cinematic now,” continues Jenkins, “so the distinction isn’t as sharp as it once was. But we still wanted to step into this realm and put our footprint on it while understanding that it will be viewed on a smaller [screen]. There’s a certain amount of control the audience has when watching TV, there are also variations in image quality and color representation, so we had to think of it from a technical standpoint to decide that we were not making 10 individual movies but rather telling a story that threads from beginning to end.”

Laxton’s conversations with Jenkins were often about the subtlety between the truth of American slavery mixed with the symbolism of the story’s narrative structure, like the underground railroad being an actual steam engine running through tunnels. Laxton grew up reading Joseph Campbell and other mythology writers; he watched films like Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon and The Wizard of Oz, which use myth as a motif. He says these stories he watched as a child helped to shape the artist he became.

“Sometimes I feel like myths can be more impactful than history,” the Oscar nominee describes. “And the language we’re using with this production, within cinematography specifically, is to touch on that heightened sensibility with a powerful arc that somewhere in the frame we always will have a truth about our history as Americans. The horrors Cora experiences are always going to be omnipresent – no matter what I do with the camera, we are going to see those atrocities on screen. We thought about how to shape

those moments to make Cora’s journey feel richer, to have a larger spectrum of emotional connection than just distilling it down to, ‘This was slavery in America.’”

Though the show’s name suggests the viewer might be literally “underground and on a train,” only a quarter of the scenes take place there. Yet Friedberg’s team still built an entire tunnel above ground as if it were below ground. And instead of building a train on a soundstage, the designer went to the source – the Georgia State Railroad Museum in Savannah allowed filming on periodspecific trains on a 150-foot section of their private train track. Safety and control were paramount, and this provided both. Friedberg then built the tunnel around those train tracks using both real rocks and foam.

Costume designer Caroline Eselin, who worked on Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk, tested textures and colors with Laxton and Friedberg early on, wanting to make sure her looks, which had to jump around and blend styles from the 1830s to the early 20th century, tonally matched the narrative, as well as the goals of the camera and design teams. Jenkins says he didn’t want to use other shows as visual references, as it was all about Cora’s journey and the shift in genres present in Whitehead’s book. In that respect, still photographs were the prime visual references, as evidenced in the LUT’s. The first images shown to Eselin were from Parks’ Segregation Story.

“Our Black women at the Griffin Institute of Negro Progress in South Carolina wear an institutional dress in their daily work

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“ SOMETIMES I FEEL LIKE MYTHS CAN BE MORE IMPACTFUL THAN HISTORY.” DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY JAMES LAXTON, ASC

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WITH SAFETY AND CONTROL PARAMOUNT, PRODUCTION DESIGNER MARK FRIEDBERG APPROACHED THE GEORGIA STATE RAILROAD MUSEUM, SHOOTING ON PERIOD-SPECIFIC TRAINS ON A PRIVATE 150-FOOT SECTION OF TRACK.

and schooling activities,” Eselin recalls. “I showed James and Barry blue and green fabric swatches only for the dresses to honor and achieve those teals and greens in the photographs. In the first episode in Georgia, we start with straightforward 1850s as it’s written in the novel – the costumes were sun-bleached, worn, washed, and rewashed with a muted color palette on our enslaved people of the plantation, which was a terrible, fearful place. We wanted a clear difference of perceived optimism jumping to the 1880s future of South Carolina. For North Carolina, which comes next in Cora’s journey, we used an 1830s silhouette with rough fabrics, almost like burlap for the white characters, and a much darker color palette to mark a regression from South Carolina.”

Cora’s consciousness provides the narrative framework, but the 1850s is the realworld period within which the show takes place, and Eselin often used hybrid periods and time travel for her looks to complement Jenkins’ overall aesthetic.

“All our periods and costume choices are there for a reason,” she continues, explaining that on Valentine Farm in Indiana, the Black community hailed from all over the southern states. “In that episode, we had some earlier period silhouettes, but mostly we put our Black population in the future – the 1880s to the turn of the century. The farm is a forwardthinking community; we wanted it to be lush and beautiful and to also have a feeling of optimism – florals and prints, jewel tones, and lived-in feelings of freedom and prosperity. We kept our white population in the 1850s only [to make it clear they were stuck in the past].”

To keep with the authenticity of enslaved Americans’ surroundings, Laxton chose to

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light scenes as if there was no electricity in Georgia and Indiana but to add electricity into the look of South Carolina and the big train stations. Chief Lighting Technician Kiva Knight had the challenge of lighting a series often grounded in the absence of light. “I felt this show pushed the envelope in terms of how dark we could go with exposure,” offers Knight, who worked on Jenkins’ two other features.

“This was the only show I’ve done where the majority was set pre-electricity for the bulk of the shoot. That meant we were relying solely on the moon, gas-powered lanterns, and fire as our motivational sources for night. Exterior day work was mostly natural light and bounce to augment.”

For scenes on the Randall Plantation and the Valentine Farm, where Knight and his team needed to light landscapes at night the size of a football field, an HMI Bebee light was the main backlight with a 1/8+ Green. To further bring out the environment in areas the Bebee wasn’t lighting, an 80-foot Condor with two ARRIMAX lights with 1/8+ Green pushing through a five-by-ten frame of onequarter grid was used. Knight would also place two 80-foot Condors with SkyPanel 360s in six-by-six Chimeras with a quarter grid to sculpt and augment the light while moving around for coverage. Whenever possible his team would bring in an 18-by-18 Softbox that housed 28 Titan tubes, put through a quarter grid, and added some grading from the console to match the HMI’s. If there was fire, as in the nighttime party scene in Chapter 1, Knight augmented with ARRI SkyPanel S60s or Titan tubes in 8-pixel mode. Astera AX10 Pars were also used to light various parts of the background for exterior nights, which Knight likes as they’re battery-powered and controlled via wireless DMX. “So often the camera is floating 360

“BARRY AND JAMES EMPOWER THE WHOLE CREW TO BE EMOTIONALLY INVESTED.”

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A-CAMERA/STEADICAM OPERATOR JARRETT MORGAN, SOC

degrees in this series,” Knight continues. “It’s par for the course with Barry to give the actors lots of room to perform. And there can’t be any waiting on us; if we bring something in to light with, it’s minimal – one or two quick things off the floor to make the talent shine, and that’s it.

Our approach is to light from above or further away so that [everyone] has room to breathe.”

A-Camera/Steadicam Operator Jarrett Morgan, SOC, a native Georgian and new to Jenkins’ creative team, had a front-row seat to the director’s intimate style of filmmaking.

Laxton’s directive for the camera movement came from the desire to minimize cuts and tricks, connect action, connect characters and connect emotional through-lines, which he knew would (literally) fall on Morgan’s shoulders.

“Barry and James empower the whole crew to be emotionally invested,” describes Morgan, who operated on FX’s Atlanta for two seasons. “I was allowed the freedom to make my own choices about where I was going with the characters and what I was framing.

Often, Barry would let a scene roll long past when he might have called cut, and those were the times where I did some of my best work.

But, also, by allowing us to feel that emotion and go on that journey with a character, the horror we’re [portraying] in this story is truly visceral.”

In one example in Chapter 5, Morgan was filming Joel Edgerton’s character, Ridgeway, on horseback on a Tennessee road, Dillon driving the wagon and horses with Mbedu in the back.

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In the scene, a man gallops by in the other direction and Ridgeway turns to ride after him, leaving the frame. As Ridgeway comes back, Morgan is following him on Steadicam, but no one hears cut, so they all keep going.

“I’ve never worked with an actor more aware than Joel,” recalls Morgan. “He knew to stay in character but also knew to pay attention to what I was doing. He was on the other side of the wagon on a horse, so I tracked him over the side of the wagon, tipping up to see Chase in the front seat, wrapped around to Joel’s horse, and pulled with him another 15 feet. The whole company was only about 40 feet beyond us, so I kept tipped up to keep them out. That blocking was not planned, and it was the kind of thing that happened multiple times a week.

We got incredible footage because we were just staying in the emotion of the scene.”

Indeed, it was Laxton and Jenkins’ greatest goal for The Underground Railroad to treat every frame with that type of care and honesty. By being forthright about the “hard images” in this story, Jenkins felt it created an “emphatic assertion” of the softer images.

“This story is about endurance and survival,” Jenkins concludes. “And it’s important for these characters to experience rapture or even just moments of normalcy – an enslaved man sitting on a porch sewing a doll for a child that is not his is an extremely powerful image. It’s not the kind of thing I’ve seen associated with a story set in this world.

And yet, we also had to tell the truth about the more horrific images as well.”

P H OTO BY K Y L E K A P L A N

“OUR APPROACH IS TO LIGHT FROM ABOVE OR FURTHER AWAY SO THAT [EVERYONE] HAS ROOM TO BREATHE.” CHIEF LIGHTING TECHNICIAN KIVA KNIGHT

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LOCAL 600 CREW Director of Photography James Laxton, ASC A-Camera Operator/Steadicam Jarrett Morgan, SOC A-Camera 1st AC Alan Newcomb A-Camera 2nd AC Callie Moore B-Camera Operators/Steadicam Matthew A. Petrosky, SOC Ramon Engle, SOC B-Camera 1st AC Warren “War Dog” Brace B-Camera 2nd AC Chris Dawson DIT Ryland Jones Loader Dumaine Babcock Utilities Brody Docar Beau Bellanich Becca Thompson Still Photographers Atsushi Nishijima Kyle Kaplan Publicist Denise Godoy Gregarek Photo by Kyle Kaplan

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THE WATER MAN A 2020 AMERICAN DRAMA F I L M D I R E C T E D B Y DAVID OYELOWO, IN HIS FEAT U R E D I R E C T O R I A L DEBUT, FROM A SCREENPLAY B Y E M M A N E E D E L L .

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of dre Matthew J. Lloyd, ASC,

by David Geffner | photos by Karen

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eams CSC, forages the Oregon wilderness for David Oyelowo’s directing debut.

Ballard, SMPSP / RLJE Films

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When we first meet thirteenyear-old Gunner Boone (Lonnie Chavis, best known as young Randall Pearson on NBC’s Emmywinning drama This Is Us) in the indie feature The Water Man, he’s a man on a mission.

Gunner’s passion for writing and drawing an original graphic novel (which takes him to a stranger’s funeral for research) is only bested by his desire to find a cure for his mother’s leukemia. Coursing through the legacy of the small mining town where Gunner’s father, Amos Boone (David Oyelowo, who also makes his directing debut), has recently moved his family, is the spooky legend of “The Water Man,” aka Edward Schaal, a 19th Century miner who may have the kryptonite needed to save Gunner’s mom (Rosario Dawson).

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As Gunner learns from a local mortician (Alfred Molina), soon after Schaal mined igneous rock with a magical glow, his town of Wildhorse was wiped out by a flood – with Schaal and his wife, Sarah, both victims. As recounted in an animated sequence meant to mirror Gunner’s artistic aspirations, the grandfather of Molina’s character had to pronounce each victim of the flood deceased except for Edward Schaal, who was miraculously revived by the rock’s cellregenerating properties. One hundred and sixty years later, “The Water Man” is still searching the depth of Wildhorse Lake for his wife’s body, with the magical rock around his neck that may hold life-saving properties.

“Matt and I had done a short film that [regular Lloyd collaborator] Paul Hunter directed,” recounts Oyelowo from Portishead,

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U.K., where he is in quarantine before his third film shot under COVID safety protocols. “Matt was, literally, coming off a plane from having just shot Spider-Man [Far From Home], and I couldn’t believe how nimble and malleable he was with this crazy, low-budget film shot in five days.”

Oyelowo says he loved Lloyd’s combination “of a big commercial eye” and a guerilla filmmaking heartbeat. “I knew for The Water Man we needed both,” he adds. “Cinematic scope for all of the scenes in the forest, and that indie touch for the intimate mother/son moments. I didn’t want to have to pick one or the other, and Matt brought it all to the table.

He’s also incredibly quick with lighting and camera setups – while everyone’s meandering back from lunch, Matt’s that guy who has his team prepped and ready to go.”

The original script by Emma Needell appealed to Oyelowo’s inner “Steven Spielberg,” even if his directing debut would be a lowbudget indie shot in the Oregon wilderness.

“The story reminded me of all those Amblin films I loved growing up,” Oyelowo continues.

“E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Goonies, and Stand By Me – they never patronized or undermined my emotional intelligence.

They could tackle weighty stuff, while still appealing to that kid- sense of adventure. As a parent, now, I feel a lot of [family] films are too dependent on CGI and big budgets. In that sense, The Water Man is rooted in nostalgia and my own cinematic experiences as a child.”

Lloyd, currently working on Director/ Executive Producer Ava DuVernay’s futuristic mini-series DMZ in Atlanta, is quick to praise his 100-percent Oregon-based Guild camera

MIDDLE PHOTO: OYELOWO (R) SAYS HE LOVED MATT LLOYD’S (L) COMBINATION “OF A BIG COMMERCIAL EYE AND A GUERILLA FILMMAKING HEARTBEAT.”

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“ YOU WOULD THINK SHOOTING IN THE FOREST WOULD BE GREAT, WITH THIS BEAUTIFUL DIFFUSE LIGHT AND COLOR PALETTE. BUT IT’S VERY CHALLENGING TO CREATE DIMENSION...AND DEPTH.” MATTHEW J. LLOYD, ASC, CSC

team for being the difference-maker under The Water Man’s challenging conditions.

“The way [Local 600’s] membership has migrated regionally,” he offers, “anywhere you go, these days, you can pick up a fabulous union crew. This show required moving a lot of gear by hand, into and out of protected wilderness areas where no vehicles are allowed, so the local knowledge of my Oregon-based team was key.”

Lloyd captured The Water Man in ProRes at 2K with ALEXA Minis, “except for the VFX sequences,” he notes, “which were shot RAW. You would think shooting in the forest would be great, with this beautiful diffuse light and color palette. But it’s very challenging to create dimension, to know where you are, visually speaking, at any given time. The trees create these endless, flat lines, and spherical lenses can highlight that lack of depth. That’s why we used Cooke Anamorphic /i Prime lenses, which helped with the depth and dimensionality when our characters are in the woods. The Cookes came out of Koerner Camera in Portland, which has a lens summit every year, and I was able to attend prior to filming.

Koerner’s a special rental house – everything feels carefully curated.”

Curated describes Oyelowo’s approach to Gunner’s home life, particularly after we find out his mother is undergoing chemotherapy.

Atypical for films of this ilk, the home is swathed in deep shadows, with only a smattering of (warm) practical lights. Lloyd

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remembers that “on our first scout, David had written on the front of his script, ‘This is an adventure!’ With many [adventure] films, where you begin in the character’s home for a short time before taking off, the mystery and intrigue is not present, or not given much consideration. David was insistent that should be there right from the start.”

There’s also an unsettling quality to these early scenes (before Gunner teams up with a runaway teen – Jo, played by Amiah Miller – and heads off into the forest to find the Water Man). As Lloyd continues, “This is a warm and loving family, so the lighting on them reflects that, but the corners are dark and mysterious.

When I know I’m doing a sizable amount of work at a location, I’ll front-load with a bigger rig than is typical for a movie of that size to provide speed and flexibility on the day.

“Key Grip Sean Devine and [Chief Lighting Technician] Ted Barnes gave us everything we needed outside the house,” Lloyd continues.

“We had large, diffused ARRIMAX 360s pushing in through the windows to give that soft, single-source, Northwest feel. They also rigged the ceilings inside with smaller LED’s, like LiteMats and covered wagons, to give the actors freedom to move around and not be stuck in front of a window. The entire house interior was wrapped in a negative lightweight matte black fabric to maintain contrast, which can quickly be pulled back when it’s in a shot. That was helpful as David wanted to shoot in story order inside the house. Part of our mission was to allow him and the actors to bounce easily between rooms, and this

approach [to lighting] did that.”

Oyelowo adds that “to have the forest feel like a grand adventure for Gunner, we had to take that away from him at the start.

We not only wanted those scenes at home to feel more oppressive but also like a place that would help inspire his imagination. A lot of the conversations Matt and I had were about the feelings the cinematography would invoke, and these early scenes are a perfect example.”

Quickly shifting visual gears is one of The Water Man’s strengths. A great example is the riveting scene of Gunner and Jo’s first night in the woods. We’ve already seen the teen using his headlamp to write his graphic novel under the covers in his room at night, and as darkness falls on the forest, his headlamp becomes the focal point of an encounter with something… or someone.

“I’ll remember that scene for the rest of my life,” Lloyd smiles. “My default mode was to have this open area prepped for night, with a big HMI source up high. We’d be able to see a little into the forest and then fake the headlamp. But David wanted more density and true darkness, so I asked if he wanted to hike deeper into the woods and just use the headlamp! I brought a high-powered LED flashlight to walk with [Chavis], while a grip trailed with a reflector and bounced that light off of the sword Lonnie’s character has for protection. You’re never going to get there trying to create more scope and depth with movie lighting, so I’m forever grateful to David for challenging me.”

When recalling the edgy headlamp scene,

Oyelowo laughs and says, “Well sometimes ignorance really is bliss. I had an image in my mind of how dark I wanted that scene, and I didn’t know lighting a forest at night with just a headlamp was an insane idea. But, when I looked through the lens at this giant light Matt had originally put on a crane to simulate moonlight, I just knew, instinctively, it wasn’t right. I had just changed the scene the night before from Jo being the person who is creeping up on him to, ‘No. I want to keep the audience guessing as to whether the Water Man is real or not.’ I remember [Writer/Director] Chris McQuarrie telling me some 10 years ago on Jack Reacher: ‘David, don’t get seduced [by the artifice of Hollywood moviemaking]. If you don’t see it through the lens, it’s not there.’ So, I told Matt we need to pull it all apart and try a different way.”

Falling apart is a plot point Gunner and Jo are not privy to when their adventure begins – the camera arcs high above the trees to reveal a forest fire approaching. Lloyd says that in his other life – shooting large VFX films – the

expense of CG-created fire is never a problem.

“However, when you know the methodology [of a VFX fire burn], and what works and doesn’t work on a large scale, you can be much more targeted about your shot count on a smallerbudgeted film,” he reflects.

That was the case for the large fire sequence at the end of the film when Oyelowo’s character races in after the kids. As Lloyd describes: “You don’t need to see fire if you’re in a hand-held close-up. You can use a flame bar in the corner, put up some large Maxi Brutes for a fire effect in broad daylight, use lots of practical smoke, and shoot when there’s no direct sun. All of that will free up Production to invest more for the handful of large CG fire shots that are needed. And Pixomondo, who was the only VFX vendor on the show, did a fantastic job. We did the opposite of my comicbook franchise experience, which is usually ‘shoot everything clean and add the effects in post.’”

Company 3 Colorist Sean Coleman, who is based in Los Angeles and has worked on many of Lloyd’s projects, says that “taking the forest down to this smokey, desaturated place,” was

the main objective in the large fire scenes.

“We were always trying to bring down the brightness, bending out those lush forest greens to preserve that ominous feeling that a large fire was approaching,” explains Coleman, who cites one shot from the water as particularly memorable. “The camera is looking up at the surface, as David and the kids have to swim across the lake,” he recounts.

“It’s got that strange collision of the warm light from the fire and the cool tones of the water, which make it special. Matt and I did a lot with color saturation and contrast in this film we don’t typically do, so keeping those rich blacks under control and in service to the story was different and fun.”

Per many other recent projects, the final color grade was remote due to the onset of COVID-19 just after production was completed.

“We did a Rec.709 pass first, which is the opposite of how you work in features,” Coleman recalls, “with me at the Company 3 facility and Matt in his house. Matt was working off an iPad Pro, and he had my virtual feed – the latency’s less than a second, so it’s almost like we’re in the room together.

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Coleman adds that “we reversed the LUT on the Rec. 709, and I did a P3 pass in the theater. Our LUT’s and color science are so tight that going backward – from Rec. 709 to P3 – absolutely worked. Matt and I did the same process on Robot and Frank, so we had some history with it. He’s unlike any other DP I’ve worked with – very old-school in that he likes control of the image, but also totally collaborative and open to ideas. And Matt’s super proficient in any color space – we rendered out TIFF’s from the grades we streamed to his iPad, and then he’d re-grade those [in Adobe Lightroom]. He’s even taught himself Da Vinci Resolve to do color passes on

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his own time!”

Lloyd says he’s had such a “variety of experiences” with Coleman, “the shorthand we have together is super productive. I tend to spend a lot of time building the CDL’s in dailies, usually with the DIT,” he adds. “That way Sean can get a first pass out to the director and producers early, so there are no surprises down the line. It’s quick and fluid when you have a long-standing relationship with one colorist.”

As to the benefits (and challenges) of shooting in protected wilderness, Oyelowo says the story, originally set in Montana, needed

locations that conveyed a “sense of magic and adventure” without having to create that feeling in post. “After looking at images from all over the U.S.," he describes, “I felt the Pacific Northwest was truly unique. The moss-covered trees, the translucent greens, and these rocks that feel like they’ve been thrown down by ancient orcs are hard to beat.

“I also liked that not a ton of movies had been shot there,” he adds. “Stand By Me and Twilight are two that come to mind. But the Oregon Film Council is quite judicious in the projects they let in, and to have them be so amenable to us was huge. Also, the local crew is second to none – from Lawrence Bennett, an

“ WE WERE CAREFUL TO SEND OXYGEN TO THE BIG [TRAILER] MOMENTS...AND TO HAVE COLLABORATORS LIKE MATT, WHO HAVE WORKED ON A MUCH BIGGER SCALE AND KNOW HOW/WHERE TO DIRECT RESOURCES.” DAVID OYELOWO

Oscar-nominated production designer, to Ime Etuk, our First A.D. – Oregon’s crew base is so deep and skilled.”

That Pacific Northwest magic comes into play in two standout scenes – early on when Gunner and Jo mistake falling ash for “snow in July,” and a bit later when a band of wild horses (racing to escape the fire) chases the teens through the forest. Of the “snow in July” scene, Lloyd is quick to praise Steadicam Operator Moriarty, noting that “the whole middle of the film is basically a day exterior walk-and-talk, and the challenging work Matt did cannot be overemphasized.”

Moriarty says the “snow” sequence needed

a feeling of wonderment. “Steadicam was a great tool to get into the world of these kids,” he says, “slowly wrapping around them as they experience these mysterious particles dancing in the air.” Lloyd adds, “we couldn’t get in a jib because it was a quarter-mile hike uphill.

So we used a Matthews MAX Menace Arm, which the grips use a lot for lighting, and put on a Mo-Sys two-axis remote head. That gave us this kind of DIY jib move for the high shot looking down on the kids as the ash is falling.”

“Kids see ash falling and inherently believe it can be snow in July,” Oyelowo observes, “so it was essential to see these scenes from their perspective. The shot was inspired by

that beautiful moment in The Shawshank Redemption with Tim Robbins looking up at the sky and the rain falling. The ash was actually flakes made of corn, and we had to pause each time Lonnie needed the flakes flushed from his eyes.”

Moriarty’s contributions on the horse stampede were equally essential.

“Obviously the kids can’t be put in front of racing horses,” Lloyd explains. “And to green screen them for a few hundred yards through the woods would have been extremely difficult.

Fortunately, Oregon has some of the best animal wranglers I’ve ever seen. New Mexico, Texas, Alberta – all major horse locations I’ve

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shot – and the wranglers in Oregon are right up there with the best. They had about 15 horses moving in unison, at speed, with the stunt doubles riding bareback upfront. Matt and the grips came up with this great rig where the kids would be running (in place) on the back of an electric car, safely harnessed, with the horses off to the side. The lead and follow shots Matt did on the e-car were amazing.

Other than some rebuilding of the path and tiling of the horses, there was very little VFX augmentation required.”

Moriarty remembers Oyelowo gathering “our little core group to express this sense that we all owed the sequence something more than we’d given it up to that point. I smiled, sensing where he was going since we’d already embraced this language of putting the audience in with Gunner through thick and thin. I said: “You mean like be right in Gunner’s face with the horses behind him?” And David was like “Yes! How on earth do we do that?"

Key Grip Sean Devine and his grip team built a “shark cage” barrier around Chavis at the back of the electric cart, giving Moriarty “ a bit of room to pan and tilt before I saw the rigging,” he adds. “We strapped Lonnie in front of my lens and I spent a few minutes working out a convincing ‘fake run’ with him, which I helped with a little extra camera shake, and

working out the cues where I yell ‘look’ and he quickly looks back at the horses.

“Next thing we know,” Moriarty continues, “we’re in the middle of the path and the stampede is barreling down on us. I yell ‘go’ into the headset and we start flying down that path. On the first take the horses came right up to the barrier and paced our car, four or five abreast, with Lonnie flapping his arms with real terror on his face – yet completely safe inside his mobile shark cage. The [sequence] was a great lesson in why camera crews need to invest a lot of energy in being good on take one, because those horses didn’t come nearly as close to the shark cage on subsequent takes.”

Oyelowo says one lesson learned from the larger-budgeted projects he’s been involved with is the importance of such “trailer moments” to entice people into the theater.

“Like the train scene in Stand By Me, when your heart is in your mouth,” he says. “Not only are you invested in the characters, but you’ve been taken on a journey. We were careful to send oxygen to those moments in The Water Man – the horses, the big fire burn, the log crossing over the river – and to have great collaborators like Matt, who have worked on a much bigger scale and know how and where to direct your resources.”

As to what makes the actor-director hyphenate unique, Oyelowo adds: “If you’ve been blessed to have a long career, like Ron Howard, for example, you’ve already been on more sets than many highly experienced directors have. Being able to see so many other directors, cinematographers, production designers, costume and makeup heads at work –I’m on my third film in less than a year right now – is the best film school imaginable. The trick is you have to always pay close attention and ask a lot of questions.”

Lloyd says the night campfire scenes, when Gunner and Jo enter the forest, are stellar examples of what can be accomplished with limited resources and an experienced local crew. “The nature of our locations would never have allowed us to do those scenes night for night,” he concludes. “So we used black tenting over the action, with large Maxi Brutes on dimmer boards, coming from the same direction as the on-camera campfire.

You can then iris-down the camera, and those large Tungsten units, which overwhelm the ambient light and look like a forest fire raging to your eyes, will appear as soft blue moonlight, with a lighting ratio that will look correct for night. Challenges that appear on paper to be overwhelming become solvable problems with the right people and mindset.”

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LOCAL 600 CREW Director of Photography Matthew J. Lloyd, ASC, CSC A-Camera Operator/Steadicam Matt Moriarty, SOC A-Camera 1st AC Kyril Cvetkov A-Camera 2nd AC Michael Crockett B-Camera Operator Philip A. Anderson, SOC B-Camera 1st AC Jerry Turner B-Camera 2nd AC Patrick LaValley DIT Sean Rawls Digital Utility Jasmine Karcey Still Photographer Karen Ballard, SMPSP

DRONE UNIT Drone Operator Mikel Cook Drone 1st AC Justin O’Shaughnessy Drone 2nd AC Danielle Eddington

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LLOYD SAYS HAVING TO MOVE “A LOT OF GEAR

BY HAND” INTO AND OUT OF PROTECTED WILDERNESS AREAS WHERE NO VEHICLES WERE ALLOWED, “MEANT THE LOCAL KNOWLEDGE OF OUR OREGON-BASED TEAM WAS ABSOLUTELY KEY.”

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THEM AN AMERICAN HORROR DRAMA STRE AMING TELEVISION ANTHOLOGY SERIES CREATED BY L ITTLE MARVIN AND EXECUTIVE PRODUCED BY LENA WA ITHE.

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by Kevin H. Martin | photos by An

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cares with even more terrifying everyday horrors.

nne Marie Fox / Amazon Studios

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In 1968, filmmaker George A. Romero’s ultra-low-budget quickie Night of the Living Dead electrified audiences with its raw, explicit horror. But the film broke ground in other ways, including the casting of the lead actor, AfricanAmerican Duane Jones as Ben, who has to face down both human and zombie opposition. Amazon’s new series, Them, created by Little Marvin and executive produced by Lena Waithe, likewise draws on real-world horrors as much as the supernatural kind, but further explores race and class distinctions through the lens of the 1950s Eisenhower era.

Escaping the site of a family tragedy, Henry and Lucky Emory (Ashley Thomas and Deborah Ayorinde) move with their children across the country to California, settling in the then-all-Caucasian neighborhood of Compton.

The Emorys are immediately confronted by psychological baiting from neighbor Betty (Alison Pill), a situation compounded by the presence of something unworldly that manifests in their basement.

Little Marvin cites a diverse range of influences for Them, ranging from William Friedkin’s The Exorcist to filmmakers like Sam Peckinpah, Brian DePalma, Stanley Kubrick, and even Douglas Sirk and MGM musicals. “If

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you think back to films of the ’60s and ’70s,” he states, “what makes them so frightening is the notion that what you can’t see is always much scarier, and I concur with that. We strove for something that felt more uncanny than overt.”

That idea clicked with Director of Photography Checco Varese, ASC (ICG Magazine November 2015), who worked with Little Marvin to linger on the visual aspects the audience doesn’t see. “2.39 lent itself gently to all this negative space in black frames,” Varese shares, “so [viewers] wonder what is just outside the edges or hiding in the darkness.

Amazon was very supportive of Little Marvin’s visual approach and let us do extensive camera

testing, which helped us to flesh-out the look: our philosophy was that this is a 1950s movie shot through the eyes of a 1970s-era filmmaker but using contemporary camera technology.”

With the selection of Hawk’s V-lite lenses, Varese says anamorphic was the call, “but it can also limit the kinds of moves you do,” he continues. “You can’t start a shot from halfway across the living room and move into an extreme close-up. So we wanted the flare and look of anamorphic without any of its limitations, and [Vantage] MiniHawks have that bokeh and beautiful distortion of anamorphic, due to their iris which is a cat’s eye form, two ellipses, closing, rather than

CLOCKWISE FROM BOTTOM LEFT: LEAD DP CHECCO VARESE, ASC, DIRECTOR NELSON CRAGG (ASC). SUKI MEDENCEVIC, ASC, AND XAVIER GROBET, ASC BELOW: WRITER/CREATOR LITTLE MARVIN

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eight or ten blades. I shot It: Chapter Two with the first set. You can start on a 28mm from half-a-mile off and end up under somebody’s nose.”

Given their limited production, Varese says he was lucky to get two sets of MiniHawks, courtesy of Hawk and Keslow Cameras. “We shot everything that had to look anamorphic with those,” he adds. “But there are no zooms that match, so the closest thing I could find was my beloved Angénieux short zooms, which offer creamy soft focus and the same attitude about the light.” Acquisition was with Sony VENICE, which offered unique lowlight possibilities to accentuate the dramatics inherent in darkness.

Another key collaborator was former Local 600 DP-turned-director Nelson Cragg, ASC, a veteran of many Ryan Murphy shows, including Ratched, Pose, and American Horror Story. Cragg, who directed the opener and three other installments of Them’s tenepisode first season, says “the goal was to tell of the damage racism does to all parties, but through a horror lens. The show asks: what does it feel like to be ‘the other?’ It makes you wonder how to deal with the world when you’re not even safe in your own home.”

Cragg also found that depicting horror amid the bright mid-century environment presented an interesting dichotomy. “The show retains that 1950s postwar glow,” he adds. “But we’re seeing that from the standpoint of a Black family, rarely centered in these kinds of stories. What does the gloss and chrome mean to them?”

Varese’s experience shooting pilots and parts of series helped to make the speedy TV schedule. “My background as a news and documentary cameraman helped me in the task of many exteriors and natural locations,” he shares. “Growing up in Latin America, where resources were often scarce, I learned to make do with what is at hand, which might just be two lights and a flag.

When the sun is your source, you shoot one way in the morning and do reverses in the afternoon. The real issue with our exteriors was that Compton didn’t yet have grown trees in the 1950s [they shot Pomona for Compton, using 40-year-old trees], and some work had to be done on location and in VFX to see beyond the Palmer Drive environment, which functioned as our backlot.” Most of the interiors were built on stage, with views outside usually achieved with translights and the occasional green screen.

Managing the look fell to DIT and dailies colorist Daniele Colombera (ICG Magazine October 2020) who worked with Varese and Stefan Sonnenfeld at Company 3 to set the show LUT during preproduction. “I wanted to start from a neutral and cinematic look,” Colombera explains, “so that I had the most

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“ THE GOAL WAS TO TELL OF THE DAMAGE RACISM DOES TO ALL PARTIES, BUT THROUGH A HORROR LENS.” DIRECTOR NELSON CRAGG, ASC

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“ WHAT MAKES [1960’S/70’S-ERA FILMS] SO FRIGHTENING IS THE NOTION THAT WHAT YOU CAN’T SEE IS ALWAYS MUCH SCARIER...WE STROVE FOR SOMETHING THAT FELT MORE UNCANNY THAN OVERT.” WRITER/CREATOR LITTLE MARVIN

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flexibility to massage the color one way or the other.”

The DIT was tasked with working with multiple cameras, formats, specialty lenses, and filters. “My grade wasn’t just a basic color correction to match different shots captured on location and on soundstage,” he smiles. “It was more like a small DI on set, so that the dailies would channel the filmmakers’ vision as close as possible to the final result.”

Colombera adds that “the VENICE captures a great color depth, and we rarely desaturated to avoid detracting from the powerful energy of the sets, costumes, hair and makeup. I find an exploration with vivid color hues achieves results that aren’t just a homage to classic Hollywood, but, rather, an exploration of a more modern look that can take advantage of the full potential of 4K, HDR, and the deep black of modern displays.” To further facilitate integrity throughout, all monitors during production were Sony OLED’s, provided

by Colombera and Keslow, and calibrated by Company 3.

Varese split his duties with Xavier Grobet, ASC, who embraced the in-camera mindset. “There were a lot of camera tricks that felt integral to the storytelling,” Grobet observes. One such example is in Episode 2 when Betty is shocked to discover her neighbors will be moving away. “When Betty finds out, the camera just kind of floats off,” Little Marvin describes. “I am very visual on the page, but the idea that you could make that disassociation feel real – like Betty’s whole grip on the neighborhood is becoming untethered – and convey it with the camera was incredible. That showed: while it starts on the page, [the series] is being written with every single shot.”

Grobet says the visual approach “was about getting psychological effects through the camera and was necessary to root the horror in the human aspect first.”

He used extreme wide angles to emphasize the moment, and even had the actress looking straight into the lens at times. “We also put down a dance floor and used a zoom lens/dolly combination to register how this is all hitting her,” he adds. “We had the camera on a Dutch head to add some wobble in addition to the optical distortion.”

The use of the zoom/dolly move signaled a 1970s rawness that Cragg felt was appropriate. He recounts how some days actors would see dozens of racist dolls and messages of hate written in fire burned into the lawn as they came to the set, “and they’d just break down before our cameras even rolled,” Cragg recalls.

“Part of my job is to help them register the emotions in the right tenor and intensity at the precise moment, but the other key was keeping tension levels high and never letting the audience become comfortable. Our characters are in danger from the moment they first drive down that street.”

As pressures at Henry’s new job mount, Cragg describes a scene where the character is “subtly attacked in the workplace and can’t say anything. So he goes to the men’s room and grabs a hunk of tissue to stick in his mouth to try to stifle his scream of utter angst.

We tried rapidly shaking the camera while shooting him in close-up. We vibrated the camera slowly at first, then faster and faster, to convey that sensation of being trapped yet needing to express yourself. I was working with Checco and Xavier all the time to develop new approaches, since every episode required fresh

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techniques to capture and convey terror.”

On another occasion in his workplace, Henry has a vision of events that have haunted him since World War II. “He’s standing in a long hallway and we needed a dramatic lighting cue that would change and pulsate as he remembers his mustard gas experience,” Grobet reports. “I asked the art department to design slots where the overhead lighting would go. Then I had [Chief Lighting Technician] Nicholas Kaat put in our own LED lights on dimmers to get the desired effect. VFX wound up extending the hallway, so it wasn’t all incamera, but they mimicked our practical color change on their part of the image.”

Episode 3 features a scene on a public bus that required the use of an LED wall for exterior backgrounds and considerable preplanning. To focus on the LED wall shoot, Varese ceded the bulk of cinematography in the episode to Suki Medencevic, ASC, who welcomed the different toolsets Varese and Grobet were using. “They were using split-diopters, which are staples of Brian DePalma’s work,” Medencevic recounts.

“These take you out of the realm of typical anamorphic shallow focus and compressed space imagery. It’s like going in the opposite direction from anamorphic, where your subject stands out. It was kind of extraordinary

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to have the anamorphic feel – but with total depth of field.”

Before her memorable bus ride – that climaxes with a terrifying entity manifesting out of the darkness – Lucky visits some family in a Watts walk-up. “The script indicated a random, home-movie feel to the party,” Medencevic reveals. “So how do you light for 360 degrees without knowing where the action is taking place or when you’ll wind up with somebody in a corner? There was a partial ceiling on the set, beyond which there was an opening that let us bring in light from directly above using China balls for soft ambient fill. More directional light was provided by SkyPanels, which helped with faces on people who were seated on sofas or around the table.

I had a 4-inch LED clipped on the matte box above the lens, so when we pass three feet or closer from a character, it would give some eye light – that was my secret weapon in the corners and darker parts of the set.”

To enhance the spontaneous feel, the operators had no camera rehearsals, and no idea of how the action – spanning two rooms and involving twenty cast members – would play out. A-Camera/Steadicam Operator Joseph Arena says he and B-Camera Operator Joshua Turner, shot the scene “handheld so we could

give the right amount of energy and be able to move with the actors.” Turner adds that, “Production knew we might wind up shooting each other sometimes. But we found a rhythm as to who would cover any given story point.

It’s a gift having the freedom to frame on the fly and know whatever I point to will be sharp.

The skills of our AC’s really shine through on this show.”

First AC Lawrence Nielsen, who describes himself as an “old-school assistant” always working on the lens, transitioned to pulling focus from the monitor. “The only exception to that was Steadicam shots,” he shares. “For those, I would still be up close to Joe, so I could get a feel for what he might do. Relying on just the monitor, you don’t see the action outside of the frame, and you can’t always anticipate properly.

We had more of that kind of work on the bus, using ARRI’s Trinity with the gimbal head, which was operated by Niels Lindelien [SOC].

It was interesting to watch him work, going sideways while the rig kept the horizon steady.”

Varese’s prep for the bus included arranging for rain effects as well as a slew of programmed lighting effects. “There is this myth that you can just put the LED wall up and

shoot as-is, but that’s not the case,” he states.

“The wall is like rear projection, where you have to incorporate interactive lighting. We created a line of LED lighting on a longitudinal axis within the bus, plus some others in front, all of which had to sync-up with the light sources visible on the wall. It took two days to rig it and a full day to program everything with the video wall company. Doing so much in-camera not only looks better, but it can also save thousands on VFX, with those funds gaining production value elsewhere.”

Such was the case when Lucky is driven home by a police officer after the bus incident.

A night shoot was scheduled to do the exteriors of the vehicle and plate work for later studio interiors. However, with a few hours left over, Medencevic suggested shooting the interiors on location. “We had a Technocrane, which made it easy to stage the shots as long as we stayed outside the car for all coverage,” he shares. “And we could do our 180-degree moves around the actors with the Techno, letting us get very close to [Ayorinde] in the backseat on the right, which was important to show her heavy emotional state.”

Medencevic remembers doing “the wide take first that got everyone excited,” and then, using different focal lengths for the coverage,

“we eventually tried a 100mm with a diopter #2 for a super-tight Sergio Leone go-around,” he adds. “Thanks to [focus puller Nielsen] it worked.

In post, they were able to combine different passes as moving split screens that looked like diopter shots, which reinforced the stylistic approach we’d seen earlier while also building on the barrier between our two characters.”

Varese had used the Revolution system on commercials and music videos and availed himself of it here. “It’s like a snorkel and gives you endless depth of field assuming you light at a 5.6 or 7,” he elaborates. “With the VENICE, I used it to get these weird deep-focus shots.”

Turner says the Dutch head combined with the Revolution “allowed us to roll and spin the frame, floating all around with these compound moves. When Keslow bought Clairmont Camera, they acquired a lot of old stuff, including this 6-by-6 matte box with warped plexiglass trays.

There were two motors attached that spun these trays while moving them up and down, so that gave us this great in-camera warping effect.”

Them’s cast was key in accommodating the technical challenges. “For a lot of our interesting stuff to work,” Turner continues, “they had to understand what we were going for and adjust their actions. For the split-diopter shots, we’d show the actors what the frame looked like

with stand-ins through the monitors, so they’d realize, ‘I can’t move my arm that way or it will cross over the split.’

Arena says his first instinct was “to be wide and close” with the actors throughout their journey. “The biggest challenge was using the anamorphic lenses with the minimum focus limitations, especially when in motion with Steadicam or handheld,” he describes. “The script did offer some great opportunities to create interesting Steadicam ‘oners,’ as well as being able to combine the Technocrane moves with the zoom. We always aimed for non-academic framing, while at the same time being non-invasive to the storyline. The cast all became so camera-savvy, and the synergy we reached with [the actors] was phenomenal.”

Them is notable for being able to portray the banality of everyday evil alongside that of a supernatural nature, which ultimately meant a reliance on practical creature work.

Little Marvin says one of his best creative partnerships was with Head of Make-Up Howard Berger. “I knew these entities would have to be rooted very deeply in the emotional/ psychological lives of our characters,” Little Marvin explains, “and wanted to achieve them

BELOW | OPPOSITE: FOR A KEY SCENE ON A BUS VARESE SAYS “THERE’S THIS MYTH THAT YOU CAN JUST PUT THE LED WALL UP AND SHOOT AS-IS, BUT THAT’S NOT THE CASE. THE WALL IS LIKE REAR PROJECTION, WHERE YOU NEED TO INCORPORATE INTERACTIVE LIGHTING. WE ADDED LEDS ON A LONGITUDINAL AXIS WITHIN THE BUS THAT HAD TO SYNCUP WITH THE LIGHT SOURCES VISIBLE ON THE WALL.”

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practically on set.”

Berger brought in visual references from Italian horror films of the 1970s, which Little Marvin loved. “I was excited to try a desaturated makeup on one supernatural character that was almost monochromatic, but once we shot, it didn’t work,” Berger recalls. “Checco suggested warming up the skin, so I painted the next version in realistic flesh tones and that did the trick.” Berger also sought out VFX Producer Glorivette Somoza for any added post touches, noting that “there was always a good back-andforth between departments about what was needed and time to get it worked out, which isn’t always the case.”

Creature designs by Berger also feature in episode 8, which takes place in the 19th century and provides a harrowing history for the soil that decades later holds the Emory home.

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While Little Marvin wanted the episode shot in black and white, Amazon mandated color. That meant, as Varese, recounts, “I needed to shoot and light in a way that it would still look good when converted [to black and white] in post.

Mexican cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa created beautiful images with these long shadows, and we applied that kind of treatment.

I used very harsh light, to the point that people were asking, ‘Do you want it looking this way?’ and I’d be, ‘Fine, fine, leave it that way!’ I knew there was a high chance Little Marvin would get his way, so we rolled the dice with this approach and it worked, aided greatly by Stefan Sonnenfeld, who did his usual amazing job.”

With Amazon committed to at least two seasons, Little Marvin is excited by the future possibilities of the series. “Each season will feature a different period and locale,” he

teases. “And the focus will remain on those marginalized by history – and also marginalized away from the center of the frame in the classic thrillers and horror films I have enjoyed since being a kid. They’ll be front and center each season.”

Varese looks back on Them as a rewarding shoot in many ways. “We had an extraordinary creator who was willing to give us carte blanche and had written a story that allowed us to use contemporary innovations in a way that amplified things without being distracting,” he concludes. “And getting to shoot Los Angeles for Los Angeles was a real treat! So many times you wind up doing things like shooting Atlanta for Reykjavik [laughs.] It has been said that we in cinematography are the keepers of truth, but the truth is something that can be viewed through different prisms.”

LOCAL 600 CREW Directors of Photography Checco Varese, ASC Xavier Grobet, ASC A-Camera Operator Joseph Arena, SOC A-Camera 1st ACs Larry Nielsen Bryan DeLorenzo A-Camera 2nd ACs Austin Swenson Michael Nie B-Camera Operator Joshua Turner B-Camera 1st AC Kira Murdock B-Camera 2nd AC Jonathan Kurt DIT Daniele Colombera Loader Courtney Miller Still Photographer Anne Marie Fox

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The history of anamorphic lenses is a mirror to the creative arc of filmmaking. by Pauline Rogers

“ONCE YOU SEE ANAM YOU CAN’T GO BA Joe Dunton

THE ROBE (1953) SHOT BY LEON SHAMROY, ASC, WITH HYPERGONAR CINEMASCOPE LENSES ORIGINATED BY HENRI CHRÉTIEN FRAMEGRAB: T WENTIETH CENTURY FOX

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MORPHIC, ACK!”

It’s a quote that lens pioneer Joe Dunton often voices, and that, over the years, filmmaking converts – from documentarians to commercial, television, and, of course, feature lensers – have echoed as well. Why is the “window to the world” that anamorphic glass provides so enticing to so many filmmakers, and how did it get started?

To serve up a complete history of anamorphic lenses would take several books. But an overview from lens experts like Joe Dunton and Panavision’s Dan Sasaki, along with some key manufacturers, and most importantly, enthusiastic users, is doable. And perhaps the best way to start is with the format’s foundation. In basic terms, an anamorphic lens system uses cylindrical optics or prisms to compress or expand an image in either a horizontal or vertical direction, with the outcome being a disproportionate magnification of the image.

As a counterpoint, a spherical lens uses optics that compress or magnify the image in a rotationally symmetric manner. And while that may be an oversimplified definition, one only has to go back to the format’s roots, and a lens created by Professor Henri Chrétien in 1926 – the Hypergonar anamorphic lens system – to understand the building blocks of anamorphic.

It was Chrétien who first used an optical trick to produce an image twice as wide as those captured with traditional lenses. His system compressed and dilated the image laterally, and, with the help of an optical system that featured different magnifications, created a distorted image – anamorphic. The first film – Construire un feu – had an aspect ratio of 2.66:1.

Fast-forward a few decades to 1952, when 20th Century Fox began making lenses by Bausch & Lomb with improvements on the Chrétien formula via a 35mm process called CinemaScope, which the studio patented.

These new lenses and processes were first used on the Oscar-winning Roman epic The Robe (shot by Leon Shamroy, ASC). The Robe was initially slated for Technicolor threestrip before production was halted so it could be produced in CinemaScope. The Robe’s combined lens design brought together the “prime” lens and the anamorphic in one unit.

Appearing grand and sweeping to an early 1950s audience about to transition to television, early CinemaScope had one small problem – something known as “the anamorphic mumps.” In essence, cinematographers had to be extremely careful when placing characters in the frame, as those too close to the edge would appear to stretch horizontally. Mumps aside, CinemaScope and the new anamorphic format began to catch on – with innovators around the world taking up the mantle to design their versions.

Joe Dunton was one of those early independent designers – a young engineer

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working at Samuelson Film Service, supplying cameras for black-and-white video production. “I used to sneak in and see the rushes of Oliver!, the musical, and became fascinated by the images,” recalls Dunton, who later started his own camera rental company. Intrigued by the possibilities of anamorphic, Dunton reached out to lens manufacturers, including a Japanese inventor (rumored to assemble his wares in a little tin shack) by the name of Shiga. “I found an Englishspeaking agent in Japan, bought several of the first fax machines, and began designing lenses, sending schematics back and forth to Japan, until we had the first set of Dunton lenses,” he recounts. Dunton’s formula adapted spherical lenses to anamorphic by adding a cylindrical element. One of the first to use the new Dunton lenses was Chris Menges, ASC, BSC, on Roland Joffé’s The Mission, for which Menges won the Oscar for Best Cinematography.

Perhaps the easiest way to understand Dunton’s impact on anamorphic lensing is to reference his collaboration with Fred Elmes, ASC, on the 1986 David Lynch classic, Blue Velvet. The film had a relatively small budget – but, as Dunton says, “by squeezing the picture onto the negative and then un-squeezing it in the cinema, we got the widescreen effect. We also took advantage of using the whole frame, so the quality was great. It looked bigger – making the budget look bigger.”

Elmes says he and Lynch had seen Dunton’s anamorphic lenses and decided it was a perfect way to portray the mystery of the small town. “The wide frame would allow me to light areas where we wanted the audience’s attention to go, and keep big sections of the frame dark,” Elmes recalls. “I remember when we put the Dunton lenses on the Steadicam and walked up the stairs with it on our first shooting day – it was a real adventure.” Adds Blue Velvet Steadicam operator Dan Kneece, SOC: “The rig was so heavy, it dragged me down the stairs of the fire escape where we were shooting. Joe’s lens weighed about seven pounds, and add that to an ARRI 35 BL III, which he fitted with a BNCR lens mount; it was something to handle. But it didn’t matter. I instantly fell in love with the anamorphic format and still use it whenever I can.”

Today, Dunton’s most popular lenses are the Xtal Xpress – built by Shiga from old Cooke S2/S3 and Panchro lenses. Dunton’s company has also adapted Zeiss Super Speeds and Standards as well as Canon lenses. Other manufacturers who have left their

LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962) SHOT BY FREDDIE YOUNG, OBE, BSC, WITH SUPER PANAVISION FRAMEGRAB: COLUMBIA PICTURES

BARB AND STAR GO TO VISTA DEL MAR (2021) SHOT BY TOBY OLIVER, ASC, USED COOKE /I SF ANAMORPHIC LENSES FOR A “CLEAN, MODERN” LOOK WITH LITTLE DISTORTION. COURTESY OF COOKE OPTICS

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N 70 LENSES

PHOTO COURTESY OF FRED ELMES, ASC

“THE WIDE FRAME WOULD ALLOW ME TO LIGHT AREAS WHERE WE WANTED THE AUDIENCE’S ATTENTION TO GO, AND KEEP BIG SECTIONS OF THE FRAME DARK.” Fred Elmes, ASC on shooting Blue Velvet (above)

OSCAR-WINNER THE MISSION (1986) SHOT BY CHRIS MENGES, BSC, ASC, WAS THE FIRST TO USE JOE DUNTON’S ANAMORPHIC LENS (BASED ON JAPAN-BASED SHIGA OPTICS DESIGN).

FRAMEGRAB: WARNER BROS.

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footprints in the anamorphic world include Vantage Hawk, Zeiss, Cooke, Angénieux, and Panavision, which purchased Dunton in 2007 and helped the format take another great leap.

(More on that later.)

Vantage Films, formed almost 30 years ago, came up with Hawk V-Lite Anamorphics – still used today. Since then, Hawk anamorphics range from 16 to 65 mm, with squeeze factors at 1.3x and 2x. Yet the 1974 option delivers older flare, contrast, and color traits, most recently seen in the V-Lite 1.3x employed in Taika Waititi’s Oscar-winning Jojo Rabbit, shot by Mihai Mălaimare Jr. Another recent addition to the anamorphic canon is the Master Anamorphic lens line, developed jointly by Carl Zeiss AG and ARRI in 2012, which provides minimum distortion and a super-fast T1.9 aperture.

Cooke began its journey in 2013 with the announcement of Anamorphic/i T2.3 primes. The company’s innovative design featured a true, front anamorphic lens – all equipped with /i Squared Technology. Its most recent Anamorphic/i SF (Special Flare) offers a coating that gives cinematographers more options for anamorphic character.

Angénieux, best known for its zoom lenses, approached anamorphics with a front attachment built by Franscope and used as far back as Nouvelle Vague movies like Lola (1961) and Jules and Jim (1962).

As for Panavision, the company’s adaptation of its 10x zoom for anamorphic productions led to seminal Oscar-winning films like The Graduate (1967), McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), and Jaws (1975). Dan Sasaki, Panavision’s senior vice president of optical engineering and a foremost leader on anamorphic lens design, says Panavision’s journey into anamorphics started in projection, where the process of “learning what manners of compressing an image worked more efficiently and more effectively,” he observes.

In 1958, Panavision introduced the 35mm format Auto Panatar series of anamorphic lenses, which eliminated the distortions present in the earlier Bausch & Lomb lenses. But their first leap into anamorphic

began four years earlier, in 1954, with the Super Panatar variable-prism projection lens, which enabled projectionists to easily adjust the projected aspect ratio from 2.66:1 to 1.33:1 with the turn of a knob and allowed for the widespread theatrical adoption of the CinemaScope format.

“The standard in which the anamorphic format was created and propagated was largely informed by the great technical influencers at Panavision, including Tak Miyagishima, George Kramer, Walter Wallin, and Dave Kenig,” Sasaki adds. “They were key to developing the language we use today. One of the most interesting battles these technicians faced around the late 1950s was the anamorphic ‘mumps,’ a very interesting case in itself.”

Sasaki says the company’s anamorphic systems are continuously evolving.

“Even our older legacy anamorphic lenses have been updated to reflect the various capture mediums and trends over the decades,” he continues. “For years, the fundamental squeeze ratio of 2x had remained a standard that all our anamorphic lenses were built to. Once the perforations associated with traditional 35-millimeter film no longer governed size and aspect ratio, our anamorphic inventory began to evolve. These changes included variations in compression ratio, image illumination diagonal, and degree of aberration correction. There was a time when we would try to hide the lenses’ vulnerability to horizontal flares, aiming for an image with maximum acuity. Interestingly, as sensor sizes got bigger, the amount of structural aberrations we allow back into the imaging characteristics of anamorphics has increased.”

FRAMEGRAB: MGM HOME ENTERTAINMENT

What makes Panavision’s approach to anamorphic lens development unique is the alignment to feedback and ideas posed by the end-user. Take the T-Series and Ultra Vista anamorphic lenses. The T-Series lenses are a product of direct customer feedback on the previous series. Sasaki notes that “the Ultra Vista lenses were originally inspired by the technical merits of a modified-squeeze

FRAMEGRAB: WARNER BROS.

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FRAMEGRAB: UNIVERSAL PICTURES

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: OSCAR WINNERS THE GRADUATE (1967), SHOT BY ROBERT SURTEES, ASC, AND JAWS (1975), SHOT BY BILL BUTLER, ASC, AND OSCAR NOMINEE BLADE RUNNER (1982), SHOT BY JORDAN CRONENWETH, ASC, ALL USED PANAVISION’S POPULAR C SERIES LENSES, ADAPTED FROM ITS 10X SPHERICAL ZOOMS.

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PANAVISION SUPER PANATAR PROJECTION ATTACHMENT (1954) / COURTESY OF PANAVISION

SET OF COOKE ANAMORPHIC /I FULL FRAME PLUS PRIMES / COURT

PANAV ANAM

ANAMORPHIC MUMPS CLOSE-UPS COMPARISON TEST, SHOWING PANAVISION’S ANAMORPHIC TAKING LENS VERSUS A CINEMASCOPE LENS (1950’S) / COURTESY OF PANAVISION

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NEW XTAL EXPRES COMPACT ANAMORPHIC LENS FOR DRONES & HA

TESY OF COOKE OPTICS

anamorphic lens married to the native aspect ratio associated with the largerformat sensors” [referencing the fact that digital sensors, because of their wider than 1.33:1 native aspect ratios, require significant cropping when paired with 2x anamorphic lenses]. “Once the proof of concept was developed, feedback from our customers helped shape how the image characteristics of this series would evolve,” he adds. “The inspiration from our customers started to influence our take on how this format and other anamorphic derivatives could fit into future formats and capture technologies.”

Nowadays, with a strong resurgence in the anamorphic look, lenses are ever-changing – especially as cameras and formats change.

The current trend is anamorphics paired with large-format cameras. “The increased sensor height combined with expanded anamorphic lenses has led to increased flexibility both artistically and technically, which has given anamorphic lenses a boost that is apparent in all the various viewing venues,” Sasaki comments. “Additionally, modified squeeze ratios have maximized the use of the available pixel area on a sensor while still offering an aesthetic that separates itself from the proportionate magnification of spherical

photography.”

As capture changes, so will the technical approaches to modifying anamorphics, i.e., using the pixels available within a sensor to achieve the desired aspect ratio. According to Sasaki, anamorphics are going to be able to be scaled equally well in both the theatrical big-screen world and the streaming-platform area. “What’s also interesting,” Sasaki points out, “is that as the gaming world begins to crash into the motion-picture world, the modified versions of anamorphic lenses could help bridge a path that will blend the virtual and real worlds to create a more immersive experience.”

As for the end-user, the cinematographers on set, Dunton says, “Once you have shot anamorphics, it’s hard to go back to spherical.”

In the early days of the format, Dunton says he had to lure filmmakers in. “They would come into our place to rent a camera,” he continues, “and I’d ask all sorts of questions – what they were going to do with the film and such. Then, I’d lend them a camera and lenses to do a test piece. A few days later – they were hooked!”

That’s certainly what Dunton did with Natasha Braier, ASC, when she was shooting her graduation film Sand at the National Film and Television School in London. “He was right. I

VISION ALZ10 MORPHIC ZOOM

ANDHELD / COURTESY OF JOE DUNTON

HAWK 65 VINTAGE74 PRIMES / COURTESY OF VANTAGE

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AUTUMN DURALD ARKAPAW (RIGHT) HAS USED PANAVISION’S C SERIES ANAMORPHICS ON THREE FEATURES, INCLUDING LOKI (BOTTOM).

“IT’S AMAZING TO WORK WITH SOMEONE SO TALENTED [PANAVISION’S DAN SASAKI] WHO COLLABORATES WITH YOU TO ADVANCE THE STORY THROUGH THE LENS BUILD.” TOP: PHOTO COURTESY OF ADA BOTTOM: FRAMEGRAB: MARVEL STUDIOS /DISNEY +

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got hooked,” laughs Braier, who has since used the Xtal Expres lenses on Neon Demon and Honey Boy, as well as commercials and music videos.

For Ken Seng, whose résumé includes Deadpool and Terminator: Dark Fate, anamorphics have become an essential tool of the trade. “The look of the Panavision C Series, the Todd-AO’s, Cineovision, and the Xtal Expres lenses all have an iconic presence that defines the project,” Seng shares. “For Jason Bateman’s The Family Fang, we used a set of Panavision B Series Auto Panatars that have a nostalgic feel we needed when the grown children travel back to their family home. For Tim Miller’s Terminator: Dark Fate, we used a Frankenstein set of Xtal Expres and Cineovision lenses to establish the idea of home and family for our lead character before the future came into her life, and then switched to clean, perfect Master Anamorphics after the Terminators arrived. This allowed us to aesthetically sell the idea of home in the first few minutes of the film before her whole life changes. We as cinematographers are constantly trying to establish empathy quickly, and vintage anamorphic lenses are one of the greatest tools to achieve that. It instills similar feelings to looking at old film prints, Polaroids, or Super 8 film.”

Toby Oliver, ACS, says shooting anamorphic on the Lionsgate feature Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar was director Josh Greenbaum’s idea. “He came from television and had a strong desire to shoot

anamorphic for the first time,” Oliver explains. “We tested different lenses in a beachside setting that evoked the environment of our ‘Vista del Mar’ in the film. We wanted anamorphic but not too ‘vintage’ or too much distortion. That’s what led us to the Cooke /i SF anamorphic lenses. The SF gave us a little more characteristic flaring than the regular Cooke lenses.

Overall, they exhibited less distortion and were sharper than the other anamorphic brands. And they paired well with Sony VENICE for a 4K finish.”

Autumn Durald Arkapaw, whose upcoming Loki aspires to be another large feather in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) cap, says her love for anamorphics runs deep, “and my love for Panavision anamorphics runs even deeper,” she laughs. “I’ve shot three features with the Panavision C Series anamorphics, but the most fun I’ve had was working with Dan Sasaki on Loki. We had some beautiful film references that we started with and explored other lens characteristics from there. It’s amazing to work with someone so talented who collaborates with you to advance the story through the lens build. Choosing the right lens for the story is the first thing I think about when I sign on to a project.”

Longtime Guild DP Brandon Trost, who recently directed his first feature (ICG Magazine September 2020), admits that anamorphics are usually “my very first thought when I approach a story. The anamorphic

“THERE IS SOMETHING ABOUT THE SCOPE, THE FOCUS, THE TEXTURE, THE FLAWS. YOU CAN CREATE GRAND, SWEEPING IMAGES, OR YOU CAN DISTILL A SMALL INTIMATE MOMENT INTO A WONDERFUL CINEMATIC EXPERIENCE.” Brandon Trost

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format immediately announces to me that I’m watching a ‘movie,’” shares Trost, whose slew of indie festival hits includes The Disaster Artist, The Diary of a Teenage Girl, and Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile. “There is something about the scope, the focus, the texture, the flaws. You can create grand, sweeping images, or you can distill a small intimate moment into a wonderful cinematic experience.

“I’ve used many different anamorphic lenses, from Panavision, Hawk, Cooke, Zeiss, Xtal Expres, Todd-AO, Kowa, and others,” Trost continues. “I’ve even used an old anamorphic projector lens that was adapted for shooting – sort of. I’m not interested in flawless edge-to-edge sharpness. So often the ‘weaknesses’ of a certain lens is the reason why I like it. I like character, so I’m always on the hunt for a different version of anamorphic lenses.”

Polly Morgan, ASC, BSC (ICG Magazine April 2020), also shops different characteristics when she’s making an anamorphic decision. “I’ve used all different kinds: Cooke, Kowa, Todd-AO, Hawk, and Panavision anamorphics. Each set will have different artifacts that create a unique image. It’s all about squeezing and de-squeezing the image,” she relates.

“One of the most interesting are the Xtal Expres,” adds Morgan. “I used them for Six Balloons, a movie shot mostly at night in downtown L.A. about a heroin addict. I wanted the practical lights to bleed into the image in an impressionistic way to help create the feeling of what it’s like to get high. For A Quiet Place 2, a nostalgic film, I went for the Panavision T Series, to create a classic look that followed on from the C Series used in A Quiet Place, but allowed us to shoot at T2.8 with good close focus.

“We’ve used many different sets of anamorphic lenses on the TV series Legion,” Morgan continues.

“On one episode directed by Ellen Kuras [ASC], we decided to use Hawk 74 lenses, as we wanted to give the lead actress’s backstory a softer vintage look. I’m looking forward to exploring the new anamorphics

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for large-format sensors. Modern optics give us the ability to shoot anamorphic with a wider aperture.”

Recently, Markus Förderer, ASC, explored the Atlas Orion anamorphic lens for his Amazon project Bliss.

Förderer says he created two distinct looks to give the audience “visual clues of where the characters are in the movie. The story starts gritty, bleak and ugly and transitions to the beautiful, vibrant Bliss-world,” he describes. “We chose Atlas Orion because they have beautiful anamorphic characteristics without showing too much distortion. The contrast between the Angénieux lenses for Bliss-world and the Atlas for the gritty bleak world created the feel we wanted.

It’s something audiences can’t quite put their finger on, but it works on a subconscious level. I associate spherical lenses closer to the way we perceive the world with our eyes, whereas anamorphic lenses can create a dream-like quality.”

Gavin Struthers, ASC, BSC, brings this anamorphic tale full circle. In preparing Superman and Lois, Struthers and director Lee Toland Krieger were looking for an anamorphic set “bursting with historical character,” Struthers describes. “Dunton’s Xtal Xpres offered what we were looking for. They’re packed with character, echoing the many movies they’ve been used on. The softer color reproduction and lower contrast meant less work achieving the look on set and minimal adjustment in the DI. This glass took us to within 90 percent of where we wanted to be. The final look of Superman and Lois is a testament to the partnership of those lenses, combined with Panavision’s DXL2/RED Monstro VV sensor.”

While this journey through what has made anamorphic glass so beloved by so many filmmakers over the years was hardly comprehensive, it does support Joe Dunton’s oft-repeated claim that “once you see anamorphic, you’ll never go back.” As for Dunton, he’s got a brand-new anamorphic lens coming to market this year, the Compact Xtal Expres, that is – wait for it – designed for handheld and drones!

PHOTO BY JONNY COURNOYER

THE INTRUDER (2019) SHOT BY DANIEL PEARL, ASC WITH HAWK’S “MINI-HAWK” T 1.7 ANAMORPHIC HYBRID LENS PHOTO COURTESY OF VANTAGE / HAWK

POLLY MORGAN, ASC, BSC (ABOVE LEFT), WHO USED PANAVISION T SERIES ANAMORPHICS FOR A QUIET PLACE II (ABOVE) SAYS “IT’S ALL ABOUT SQUEEZING AND DE-SQUEEZING THE IMAGE,” AS EACH LENS SET WILL HAVE DIFFERENT ARTIFACTS THAT CREATE A UNIQUE IMAGE. FRAMEGRAB: PARAMOUNT PICTURES

L IGHT & GLA S S I S S UE

101

PRODUCTION CREDITS COMPILED BY TERESA MUÑOZ The input of Local 600 members is of the utmost importance, and we rely on our membership as the prime (and often the only) source of information in compiling this section. In order for us to continue to provide this service, we ask that Guild members submitting information take note of the following requests: Please provide up-to-date and complete crew information (including that the deadline for the Production Credits is on the first of the preceding cover month (excluding weekends & holidays).

Submit your jobs online by visiting: www.icg600.com/MY600/Report-Your-Job Any questions regarding the Production Credits should be addressed to Teresa Muñoz at teresa@icgmagazine.com 102

M AY 2021

First Man / Photo by Daniel McFadden

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20TH CENTURY FOX

“AMERICAN HORROR STORY #B” SEASON 10

ABC STUDIOS

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: JOAQUIN SEDILLO, ASC

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: ANDREW MITCHELL

DIRECTORS OF PHOTOGRAPHY: ALICIA ROBBINS,

“911” SEASON 4

OPERATORS: RICK STEVENS, SOC DUANE MIELIWOCKI, SOC, DALE VANCE, JR., SOC ASSISTANTS: KEN LITTLE, CLAUDIO BANKS, ERIC GUERIN, DAVID STELLHORN, ERIC WHEELER, JIHANE MRAD STEADICAM OPERATOR: DALE VANCE, JR., SOC STEADICAM ASSISTANT: ERIC WHEELER CAMERA UTILITY: PAULINA GOMEZ

OPERATORS: CHRISTOPHER HOOD, BRIAN BERNSTEIN, MICHAEL VEJAR ASSISTANTS: PENNY SPRAGUE, SAMUEL BUTT, RYAN PILON, BEN PERRY, NATHAN LEWIS, GARY JOHNSON CAMERA UTILITY: BRANDON GUTIERREZ DIGITAL UTILITY: LAURA SPOUTZ

DIGITAL UTILITY: DUSTIN LEBOUEF

“THE ORVILLE” SEASON 3

“9-1-1: LONE STAR” SEASON 2

OPERATORS: BILL BRUMMOND, GARY TACHELL,

DIRECTORS OF PHOTOGRAPHY: ANDY STRAHORN, JOE BRODERICK, DOUG HOLGATE OPERATORS: BRICE REID, DEAN MORIN, MIKE VEJAR ASSISTANTS: JAMES RYDINGS, KAORU ISHIZUKA, CARLOS DOERR, KELSEY CASTELLITTO, CHRIS BURKET, RON ELLIOTT, KOJI KOJIMA STEADICAM OPERATOR: BRICE REID DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: PETER RUSS CAMERA UTILITY: JOE PACELLA DIGITAL UTILITY: BASSEM BALAA TECHNOCRANE OPERATOR: NAZARIY HATAK TECHNOCRANE TECH: JAY SHEVECK REMOTE HEAD TECH/OPERATOR: BRICE REID

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: JEFF C. MYGATT MICHAEL SHARP ASSISTANTS: DENNIS SEAWRIGHT, STEVEN MAGRATH, BUTCH PIERSON, DALE WHITE, DUSTIN KELLER,

“GREY’S ANATOMY” SEASON 17 STEVEN FRACOL OPERATORS: ERIC FLETCHER, MARCIS COLE, JEANNE TYSON ASSISTANTS: NICK MCLEAN, FORREST THURMAN, CHRIS JONES, KIRK BLOOM, LISA BONACCORSO, J.P. RODRIGUEZ STEADICAM OPERATOR: MARCIS COLE STEADICAM ASSISTANTS: FORREST THURMAN, LISA BONACCORSO CAMERA UTILITY: MARTE POST DIGITAL UTILITY: SPENCER ROBINS CRANE TECH: STEVE MCDONAGH STILL PHOTOGRAPHER: LISA ROSE

KYLE SAUER

“GROWN-ISH” SEASON 4

STEADICAM OPERATOR: BILL BRUMMOND

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: MARK DOERING-POWELL

STEADICAM ASSISTANT: DENNIS SEAWRIGHT

OPERATORS: KEN GLASSING, JESSICA LOPEZ, SOC

LOADER: BROOKE MAGRATH

ASSISTANTS: ROBERT SCHIERER, MICHAEL KLEIMAN,

DIGITAL UTILITY: JORDAN SCHUSTER

GEORGE HESSE, WILLIAM DICENSO, RYAN CAMPBELL

REMOTE HEAD TECH/OPERATOR: DUSTIN KELLER

CAMERA UTIITY: ANDREW OLIVER

“WU-TANG: AN AMERICAN SAGA” SEASON 2

DIGITAL UTILITY: ZAC PRANGE

“JIMMY KIMMEL LIVE!” SEASON 18

DIRECTORS OF PHOTOGRAPHY: DAVID TUTTMAN,

LIGHTING DIRECTOR: CHRISTIAN HIBBARD

GAVIN KELLY

OPERATORS: GREG GROUWINKEL, PARKER BARTLETT,

OPERATORS: ELI ARONOFF, BLAKE JOHNSON

GARRETT HURT, MARK GONZALES

ASSISTANTS: DEAN MARTINEZ,

STEADICAM OPERATOR: KRIS WILSON

CHRISTOPHER WIEZOREK, BRIAN GRANT, JR.,

JIB OPERATORS: MARC HUNTER, RANDY GOMEZ, JR.,

ADAM DEREZENDEZ LOADER: JAMES ABAMONT

MAY 2021 PRODUCTION CREDITS

103

“OUTER RANGE” SEASON 1 DIRECTORS OF PHOTOGRAPHY: ADAM NEWPORT-BERRA,

Large Format Directors Viewfinder

DREW DANIELS

Full Format in all its Glory

OPERATORS: MATT HARSHBARGER, PAUL ELLIOTT ASSISTANTS: GABE PFEIFFER, KINGSLEA BUELTEL, TAYLOR HILBURN, JASON SEIGEL STEADICAM OPERATOR: MATT HARSHBARGER STEADICAM ASSISTANT: GABE PFEIFFER DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: TIM GREGOIRE LOADER: GENESIS HERNANDEZ DIGITAL UTILITY: LINDSAY HEATLEY

A VERY GOOD PRODUCTION, INC. & WAD PRODUCTIONS

“THE ELLEN DEGENERES SHOW” SEASON 18 LIGHTING DIRECTOR: TOM BECK

“

PED OPERATORS: DAVID WEEKS, PAUL WILEMAN,

While recently shooting The Pursuit of Love on the Alexa LF with Signature Primes, I was able to view the full scope of this beautiful format in all its glory. Light and easy to handle, the Lindsey Optics Large Format Directors Finder was a great tool on set when it came to discussing framing options with the director.

”

Zac Nicholson, BSC

TIM O’NEILL HANDHELD OPERATOR: CHIP FRASER JIB OPERATOR: DAVID RHEA STEADICAM OPERATOR: DONOVAN GILBUENA VIDEO CONTROLLER: JAMES MORAN HEAD UTILITY: CRAIG “ZZO” MARAZZO UTILITIES: ARLO GILBUENA, WALLY LANCASTER, DIEGO AVALOS

BEACHWOOD SERVICES

“DAYS OF OUR LIVES” SEASON 57 DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: VINCE STEIB OPERATORS: MARK WARSHAW, MICHAEL J. DENTON, JOHNNY BROMBEREK, STEVE CLARK CAMERA UTILITIES: STEVE BAGDADI, GARY CYPHER

www.lindseyoptics.com • +1.661.522.7101

VIDEO CONTROLLER: ALEXIS DELLAR HANSON

BLACK LABEL MEDIA NICK GOMEZ

ASSISTANTS: TONY SCHULTZ, HANNAH LEVIN,

CAMERA UTILITIES: CHARLES FERNANDEZ,

WILLIAM MARTI, GAYLE HILARY,

SCOTT SPIEGEL, TRAVIS WILSON, DAVID FERNANDEZ,

GREG WILLIAMS, TIM MCCARTHY

ADAM BARKER

STEADICAM OPERATOR: RON SCHLAEGER

VIDEO CONTROLLER: GUY JONES

STEADICAM ASSISTANT: TONY SCHULTZ

STILL PHOTOGRAPHERS: KAREN NEAL,

DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: ANDREW LEMON

MICHAEL DESMOND

UTILITIES: GEORGE MONTEJANO, III, ROBERTO RUELAS

2ND UNIT

SPLINTER UNIT

DIRECTORS OF PHOTOGRAPHY: BERND REINBARDT,

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: BRIAN GARBELINNI

STEVE GARRETT

“REBEL” SEASON 1 DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: TODD A. DOS REIS, ASC OPERATORS: IAN DODD, DEMIAN SCOTT VAUGHS, ERIC DYSON ASSISTANTS: JAMIE STEPHENS, JASON GARCIA, MELISSA FISHER, OLIVER PONCE, RICHARD KENT, LANI WASSERMAN STEADICAM OPERATOR: DEMIAN SCOTT VAUGHS STEADICAM ASSISTANT: JASON GARCIA DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: SAM MCCONVILLE

ABOVE AVERAGE

“LIZA ON DEMAND” SEASON 3

“DEVOTION”

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: ERIK MESSERSCHIDT, ASC OPERATORS: BRIAN OSMOND, JESSICA CLARKE-NASH ASSISTANTS: ALEX SCOTT, BRIAN WELLS, NICHOLE FIREBAUGH, LAUREN GENTRY DIGITAL UTILITY: KYLE FORD STILL PHOTOGRAPHER: ELI ADE 2ND UNIT DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: MICHAEL FITZMAURICE OPERATOR: JASON LA FARGO ASSISTANTS: JOSEPH CANON, LUIS SUAREZ, CHRIS MARIUS JONES, CHAD NAGEL DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: CALVIN REIBMAN

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: TROY SMITH

LOADER: NICOLA CARUSO

OPERATORS: JONATHAN GOLDFISHER, JOSH SCHNOSE

DIGITAL UTILITY: ALEX NIETO

ASSISTANTS: LOU DEMARCO, BEN SHURTLEFF, TONY MULLER, JULIUS GRAHAM DIGITAL LOADER: JUAN PABLO JARA CAMERA UTILITY: EDUARDOBILL GONZALEZ

AMAZON STUDIOS/REUNION PACIFIC

BROADWAY VIDEO

“MIRACLE WORKERS” SEASON 3 DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: BLAKE MCCLURE OPERATORS: NICK MEDRUD, SCOTT DROPKIN, MICHELLE GONZALES

LOADER: ANNIE LI

“FORGET NORMAL” SEASON 1

DIGITAL UTILITY: ALEXA HEGRE

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: TIM BELLEN

MARIA VALLETTA,

STILL PHOTOGRAPHER: KAREN BALLARD

OPERATORS: DAVID HIRSHMANN, SOC,

JOSHUA ROBERT COTE, SEATON TROTTER

CHRIS HAIFLEY, KRISTY TULLY

DIGITAL LOADER: TOSHADEVA PALANI

“STATION 19” SEASON 4

ASSISTANTS: STEVE BELLEN, ERIK EMERSON,

UTILITY: EMMA MASSALONE

DIRECTORS OF PHOTOGRAPHY: DARYN OKADA, ASC,

JIM NYGREN, JESSICA RAMOS, JENNIFER STUART,

SPENCER COMBS

KRISTINA LECHUGA

OPERATORS: RON SCHLAEGER, MARIANA ANTUNANO,

DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: SCOTT STEPHENS

BRIAN GARBELLINI

DIGITAL UTILITY: RYAN MCGRATH

ASSISTANTS: JASON WITTENBERG, DAN MARINO, TIFFANY MURRAY,

CBS

“ENTERTAINMENT TONIGHT” SEASON 40 DESIGNER: DARREN LANGER DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: KURT BRAUN

104

MAY 2021 PRODUCTION CREDITS

LIGHTING

OPERATORS: JAMES B. PATRICK, ALLEN VOSS,

KEVIN MICHEL, JEFF JOHNSON

REMOTE HEAD TECH/OPERATOR: SEAN FOLKL

ED SARTORI, HENRY ZINMAN, BOB CAMPI,

JIB OPERATOR: RANDY GOMEZ

STILL PHOTOGRAPHER: ALISON ROSA

RODNEY MCMAHON, ANTHONY SALERNO

HEAD UTILITY: CHARLES FERNANDEZ

JIB OPERATOR: JAIMIE CANTRELL

UTILITIES: MIKE BUSHNER, DOUG BAIN,

CAMERA UTILITY: TERRY AHERN

DEAN FRIZZEL, BILL GREINER, JON ZUCCARO

VIDEO CONTROLLERS: MIKE DOYLE, PETER STENDAL

VIDEO CONTROLLER: RICHARD STROCK STILL PHOTOGRAPHER: RON JAFFE

“EVIL” SEASON 2 DIRECTORS OF PHOTOGRAPHY: PETR HLINOMAZ, FRED MURPHY, ASC

“UNTITLED LAKERS PROJECT” DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: TODD BANHAZL, MIHAI MALAIMARE OPERATORS: CHRIS HAARHOFF, SARAH LEVY, JUSTIN CAMERON

CLOVER GROVE, LLC

OPERATORS: AIKEN WEISS, KATE LAROSE,

“HUMMINGBIRD”

PARRIS MAYHEW

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: JOHN TANZER

ASSISTANTS: ROBERT BECCHIO, RENE CROUT,

OPERATORS: JOSHUA FRIZ, DEREK EDWARDS,

ALISA COLLEY, VINCENT LARAWAY

LISA STACILAUSKAS

LOADERS: TONI SHEPPARD, HOLDEN HLINOMAZ

ASSISTANTS: CAMILLE FREER, JAKE ROSENBLATT,

STILL PHOTOGRAPHER: ELIZABETH FISHER

SAL VEGA, JAMES DUNHAM, HOLDEN LORENZ, DAVID ROSS

ASSISTANTS: DAVID EDSALL, SCOTT JOHNSON, GARY BEVANS, JASON ALEGRE, ARTURO ROJAS, MIMI PHAM STEADICAM OPERATOR: CHRIS HAARHOFF STEADICAM ASSISTANT: DAVID EDSALL LOADER: EMILY GOODWIN DIGITAL UTILITY: MARIO ALLEN STILL PHOTOGRAPHER: WARRICK PAGE

“THE GOOD FIGHT” SEASON 5

DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: TYLER OWENS

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: TIMOTHY GUINNESS

TECHNOCRANE OPERATOR: CHARLES ESHBAUGH

OPERATORS: PETER NOLAN, WILLIAM HAYS

REMOTE HEAD TECH/OPERATOR: JAY SHEVECK

“ALONG FOR THE RIDE”

ASSISTANTS: RENE CROUT, ROB KOCH,

STILL PHOTOGRAPHER: PETER IOVINO

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: LUCA DEL PUPPO OPERATOR: JOHN LEHMAN

ELIZABETH HEDGES, SANCHEEV RAVICHANDRAN LOADERS: ROBERT STACHOWICZ, KATIE GREAVES STILL PHOTOGRAPHER: PATRICK HARBRON

“THE TALK” SEASON 11 LIGHTING DIRECTOR: MARISA DAVIS PED OPERATORS: ART TAYLOR, MARK GONZALES, ED STAEBLER HANDHELD OPERATORS: RON BARNES,

CRANETOWN MEDIA, LLC

COOLER WATER PRODUCTIONS, LLC “GILDED AGE” SEASON 1

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: VANJA CERNJUL, ASC OPERATORS: OLIVER CARY, PYARE FORTUNATO ASSISTANTS: JOHN OLIVERI, MICHAEL BURKE, SARAH MAY GUENTHER, MABEL SANTOS HAUGEN STEADICAM OPERATOR: PYARE FORTUNATO DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: MATT SELKIRK LOADERS: CALEB MURPHY, BRIAN CARDENAS

ASSISTANTS: PATRICK BOROWIAK, ROY KNAUF CAMERA UTILITY: CATARINA MENDEZ LOADER: JILL AUTRY STILL PHOTOGRAPHER: EMILY ARAGONES

“AWKWAFINA IS NORA FROM QUEENS” SEASON 2 DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: KYLE WULLSCHLEGER OPERATORS: CHRIS ARAN, ASHTON HARREWYN

MAY 2021 PRODUCTION CREDITS

105

ASSISTANTS: CAROLYN PENDER, CONNOR LAWSON,

STEADICAM ASSISTANT: JUSTIN DEGUIRE

TIM GUFFIN, MATT GAUMER, TRICIA COYNE,

ALEX DUBOIS, KYLE PARSONS

LOADER: TREY VOLPE

SYDNEY COX

LOADER: MATTHEW ELDRIDGE

DIGITAL UTILITY: RYAN ST CLAIR

STEADICAM OPERATORS: MANOLO ROJAS

STILL PHOTOGRAPHER: EMILY ARAGONES

DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: KYLE HOEKSTRA 2ND UNIT

DICKINSON 1, LLC

“DICKINSON” SEASON 3 DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: TIM ORR OPERATORS: JEFFREY DUTEMPLE, ARTHUR AFRICANO, TODD ARMITAGE ASSISTANTS: BRADLEY GRANT, EMMA REES-SCANLON, SUREN KARAPETYAN, COREY LICAMELI, KELSEY MIDDLETON, TROY SOLA DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: JESSICA TA LOADER: KYLE TERBOSS

EYE PRODUCTIONS, INC.

“BLUE BLOODS” SEASON 11

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: ANDY FISHER OPERATORS: CHRISTIAN SATRAZEMIS,

“I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER” SEASON 1

ASSISTANTS: JACKSON MCDONALD, CLAIRE PAPEVIES,

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: ANKA MALATYNSKA

TAYLOR CASE, MATT EVANS, STERLING WIGGINS,

OPERATORS: SERGIO DE LUCA, JOSH TURNER

TRISHA SOLYN

ASSISTANTS: PATRICK BLANCHET, NIGEL NALLY,

STEADICAM OPERATOR: CHRISTIAN SATRAZEMIS

RYAN CHARLTON-HALWEG, MICHAEL CRUICKSHANK

DIGITAL UTILITY: TREY VOLPE

DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: GAYLEN NEBEKER

UTILITY: ERIC GAVLINSKI

LOADER: GEOFF LAU DIGITAL UTILITY: KRISTINA ZAZUETA

GHOST PRODUCTIONS. INC.

STILL PHOTOGRAPHER: MICHAEL DESMOND

DIRECTORS OF PHOTOGRAPHY: NIELS ALPERT,

MIXED BAG PRODUCTIONS, INC.

“POWER BOOK II: GHOST” SEASON 2 AARON MEDICK

“THE RIGHTEOUS GEMSTONES” SEASON 2

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: DONALD THORIN, JR.

OPERATORS: ALAN MEHLBRECH, CHRIS SCARAFILE

OPERATORS: STEPHEN CONSENTINO, GEOFF FROST

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: MICHAEL SIMMONDS

ASSISTANTS: MICHAEL GAROFALO,

ASSISTANTS: GRAHAM BURT, JACOB STAHLMAN,

OPERATORS: PAUL DALEY, PETER VIETRO-HANNUM

CHARLIE FOERSCHNER, RODRIGO MILLAN GARCE,

MARTIN PETERSON, KENNETH MARTELL

ASSISTANTS: JUSTIN SIMPSON, MATTHEW MEBANE,

SCOTT GAROFALO

LOADER: JONATHAN SCHAEFER

EMILY RUDY, NICHOLAS BROWN

DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: ROB MUIA

DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: CHANDLER TUCKER

LOADERS: BRIANNA MORRISON, TREVOR BARCUS

STILL PHOTOGRAPHERS: RYAN GREEN, JACKSON DAVIS

FIREFIGHT PRODUCTIONS, LLC “THE GRAY MAN”

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: STEPHEN WINDON

STILL PHOTOGRAPHER: MYLES ARONOWITZ

GOOD NURSE PRODUCTIONS, LLC

OPERATORS: GEOFF HALEY, MAURICE MCGUIRE

“THE GOOD NURSE”

ASSISTANTS: TAYLOR MATHESON, JEFF LORENZ,

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: JODY LEE LIPES

ALEXANDRA MATHESON, JERRY PATTON

OPERATOR: SAM ELLISON

STEADICAM OPERATOR: GEOFF HALEY

ASSISTANTS: REBECCA RAJADNYA,

DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: CHRIS CAVANAUGH

JEFFREY MAKARAUSKAS, EVE STRICKMAN

LOADER: ALEXANDRA COYLE

DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: ANTHONY HECHANOVA

DIGITAL UTILITY: MARSHALL HENDERSHOT

LOADER: KATE NAHVI

PUBLICIST: NICOLA GRAYDON HARRIS

STILL PHOTOGRAPHER: JOJO WHILDEN

EPK: SEAN RICIGLIANO

MONKEYPAW PRODUCTIONS “THE LAST O.G.” SEASON 4

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: ROBERT GANTZ OPERATORS: VINCE VENNITTI, JULIAN DELACRUZ ASSISTANTS: JUSTIN WHITACRE, JOSHUA WATERMAN, NICHOLAS DEEG, JONATHAN SCHAEFER DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: DAVE SATIN LOADERS: MATEO GONZALEZ, BABETTE JOHNSON STILL PHOTOGRAPHERS: BENNETT RAGLIN, KC BAILEY

KANAN PRODUCTIONS, INC.

NADIA PRODUCTIONS, LLC

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: GREG BALDI

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: HERNAN OTANO

OPERATORS: WYLDA BAYRON, DEVON CATUCCI

ASSISTANTS: TULIO DUENAS, KEVIN SUN

OPERATORS: FRANCIS SPIELDENNER, GREGORY FINKEL

ASSISTANTS: ROSSANA RIZZO, JASON RIHALY,

DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: NATE KALUSHNER

ASSISTANTS: MARK FERGUSON,

EDDIE GOLDBLATT, DYLAN ENDYKE

LOADER: CRISS DAVIS

EMMA REESE-SCANLON, MARC LOFORTE,

DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: TIFFANY ARMOUR-TEJADA

GREGORY PACE

LOADER: BRITTANY JELINSKI

DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: BJORN JACKSON

STILL PHOTOGRAPHER: CARA HOWE

2ND UNIT

FOX ALTERNATIVE, LLC

“LET’S BE REAL” SEASON 1 DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: KEVIN ATKINSON OPERATORS: MICHAEL BRIAN HART, GABRIEL DINIZ, CORY GERYAK ASSISTANTS: CHUCK WHELAN, DAVID ERICKSON, KEN BENDER, STEPHEN FRANKLIN DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: DAN MOSES

“RAISING KANAN” SEASON 1

FUQUA FILMS

“THE RESIDENT” SEASON 4 DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: BART TAU OPERATORS: MATT DOLL, ANDY FISHER, CHRISTIAN SATRAZEMIS ASSISTANTS: JUSTIN DEGUIRE, TAYLOR CASE, APRIL RUANE CROWLEY, MIKE FISHER, JENNIFER RANKINE, GRACE PRELLER CHAMBERS STEADICAM OPERATOR: MATT DOLL

STILL PHOTOGRAPHERS: ZACH DILGARD, PAUL SCHIRALDI PUBLICIST: SABRINA LAUFER

NARGLE PAINT STUDIO INC. “PAINT”

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: PATRICK CADY

KICK FIVE PRODUCTIONS, LLC

ASSISTANT: RICHARD MARTIN DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: IMANUEL SMITH

“SPACEMAN”

OPERATORS: MATTHEW PEBLER, PETER AGLIATA

NBC

ASSISTANTS: MICHAEL BURKE, TOSHIRO YAMAGUCHI,

“BROOKLYN NINE-NINE” SEASON 8

CONNIE HUANG, EVE STRICKMAN

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: RICK PAGE

DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: JEFFREY HAGERMAN

OPERATORS: PHIL MASTRELLA, JOEL TALLBUT,

HEAD TECHS: SEAN FOLKL, LANCE MAYER

MARQUES SMITH, SOC

STILL PHOTOGRAPHER: JON PACK

ASSISTANTS: JAY LEVY, BILL GERARDO, WILLIAM SCHMIDT, JEREMY HILL, CHRIS CARLSON

LIONSGATE

“SHOTGUN WEDDING” DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: PETER DEMING, ASC OPERATORS: MANOLO ROJAS, PAUL SANCHEZ ASSISTANTS: PATRICK MCARDLE, DWIGHT CAMPBELL,

MAY 2021 PRODUCTION CREDITS

“RUSSIAN DOLL” SEASON 2

LOADERS: KEITH ANDERSON, JESSICA CELE-NAZARIO

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: JAKOB IHRE

106

MESQUITE PRODUCTIONS

MICHAEL GFELNER, COOPER DUNN

DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: NICK GILBERT DIGITAL UTILITY: MIKE RUSH STILL PHOTOGRAPHER: JOHN P. FLEENOR

“CHICAGO MED” SEASON 6

“FBI: MOST WANTED” SEASON 2

DIGITAL UTILITY: DEEPAK ADHIKARY

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: LEX DUPONT, ASC

DIRECTORS OF PHOTOGRAPHY: LUDOVIC LITTEE,

STILL PHOTOGRAPHER: JORDIN ALTHAUS

OPERATORS: FAIRES ANDERSON SEKIYA,

DANIEL PATTERSON

JOE TOLITANO, BENJAMIN SPEK

OPERATORS: CHRISTOPHER MOONE, REBECCA ARNDT

ASSISTANTS: GEORGE OLSON, KEITH HUEFFMEIER,

ASSISTANTS: BRADEN BELMONTE, JAMES DALY,

SAM KNAPP, PATRICK DOOLEY, JOEY RICHARDSON,

RACHAEL DOUGHTY, CAROLYN WILLS,

MATT BROWN

STORR TODD

STEADICAM OPERATOR: FAIRES ANDERSON SEKIYA

LOADER: AUSTIN RESTREPO

LOADER: CHRIS SUMMERS

STILL PHOTOGRAPHER: MARK SCHAFER

UTILITY: ELIJAH WILBORN STILL PHOTOGRAPHER: ELIZABETH SISSON

“CHICAGO PD” SEASON 8 DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: JAMES ZUCAL OPERATORS: VICTOR MACIAS, DARRYL MILLER, SETH THOMAS ASSISTANTS: JOHN YOUNG, DON CARLSON, DAVID WIGHTMAN, JAMISON ACKER, KYLE BELOUSEK, NICK WILSON STEADICAM OPERATOR: VICTOR MACIAS

“GIRLS5EVA” SEASON 1 DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: JOHN INWOOD OPERATORS: DAVID TAICHER, ROBERT PAGLIARO ASSISTANTS: DOUGLAS FOOTE, CHRISTOPHER WIEZOREK, AMBER ROSALES, PATRICK BRACEY LOADERS: CHARLOTTE SKUTCH, ARIEL WATSON STILL PHOTOGRAPHERS: ANNE JOYCE, HEIDI GUTMAN

“NEW AMSTERDAM” SEASON 3 DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: ANDREW VOEGELI OPERATORS: SCOTT TINSLEY, GARETH MANWARING ASSISTANTS: PEDRO CORCEGA, JAMES MADRID, MATTHEW MONTALTO, ROBERT WRASE LOADERS: ANABEL CAICEDO, KATHERINE RIVERA

“THE EQUALIZER” SEASON 1 DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: GAVIN KELLY OPERATORS: DAVID ISERN, RACHAEL LEVINE, SOC, BLAKE JOHNSON ASSISTANTS: BEN SPANER, KATHERINE RIVERA, FILIPP PENSON, ROBERT CLINE, JIEUN SHIM, DARNELL MCDONALD DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: TIFFANY ARMOUR-TEJADA LOADERS: PETER PERLMAN, IVANA BERNAL

LOADER: MARION TUCKER

“GOOD GIRLS” SEASON 4

STILL PHOTOGRAPHERS: BARBARA NITKE,

DIGITAL UTILITIES: CHRIS POLMANSKI, STEVE CLAY

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: JASON OLDAK

MICHAEL GREENBERG

OPERATORS: MIKA LEVIN, BRIAN OUTLAND,

“F.B.I.” SEASON 3

SHELLY GURZI

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: MARC RITZEMA

ASSISTANTS: JOHN RUIZ, PATRICK BLANCHET,

“UNTITLED TRACY OLIVER AKA HARLEM” SEASON 1

OPERATORS: AFTON GRANT, JAMIE SILVERSTEIN

JENNA HOFFMAN, ROBYN BUCHANAN, CARTER SMITH,

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: MATTHEW EDWARDS

ASSISTANTS: LEE VICKERY, YURI INOUE,

JONNIE MENTZER

OPERATORS: MATTHEW FLEISCHMANN, ERIC ROBINSON

GEORGE LOOKSHIRE, NKEM UMENYI

LOADER: MATT SCHOUTEN

ASSISTANTS: BLAKE ALCANTARA, VANESSA MORRISON,

STEADICAM OPERATOR: AFTON GRANT

STEADICAM OPERATOR: MIKA LEVIN

JORGE DEL TORO, MIGUEL GONZALEZ

LOADERS: RAUL MARTINEZ, CONNOR LYNCH

STEADICAM ASSISTANT: JOHN RUIZ

DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: JEFFREY HAGERMAN

CAMERA UTILITY: GLEN LANDRY

LOADERS: FRANCES DE RUBERTIS, DAVID DIAZ STILL PHOTOGRAPHER: SARAH SHATZ

MAY 2021 PRODUCTION CREDITS

107

NEXT STEP PRODUCTIONS

POSSIBLE PRODUCTIONS

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: JAIME REYNOSO, AMC,

DIRECTORS OF PHOTOGRAPHY: GIORGIO SCALI, ASC,

OPERATOR: MARK EVANS

JAMES HAWKINSON

“SNOWPIERCER” SEASON 3

“BILLIONS” SEASON 5

OPERATORS: JONATHAN BECK, JENNIE JEDDRY

ORANGE CONE PRODUCTIONS

ASSISTANTS: CAI HALL, LEONARDO GOMEZ, II,

DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: PATRICK CECILIAN LOADERS: CHRIS MALENFANT, MATTIE HAMER STILL PHOTOGRAPHER: SEACIA PAVAO

SONY

PATRICK BRACEY, SEAN MCNAMARA

“JEOPARDY!” SEASON 36

LOADERS: DONALD GAMBLE, LYNSEY WATSON,

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: JEFF ENGEL

DIRECTORS OF PHOTOGRAPHY: JOHN SMITH,

AARON CHAMPAGNE

OPERATORS: DIANE L. FARRELL, SOC,

MICHAEL KARASICK

STILL PHOTOGRAPHER: DOUGLAS MEILS

MIKE TRIBBLE, JEFF SCHUSTER,

“LEGACIES” SEASON 3

OPERATORS: BRIAN DAVIS, SOC, STEWART SMITH, SOC ASSISTANTS: GERAN DANIELS, KELLY POOR, BENJAMIN EADES, SAGAR DESAI STEADICAM OPERATOR: STEWART SMITH, SOC DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: BILL MUELLER LOADER: JESSE EAGLE DIGITAL UTILITIES: AMANDA KOPEC, EMILY GIBSON

L. DAVID IRETE

ROCART, INC.

“SIDE HUSTLE” SEASON 1 DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: MICHAEL FRANKS OPERATORS: BOB MCCALL, CHRIS HINOJOSA, DAVID DECHANT, JACK CHISOLM TECHNOJIB OPERATOR: ELI FRANKS

JIB ARM OPERATOR: MARC HUNTER HEAD UTILITY: TINO MARQUEZ CAMERA UTILITY: RAY THOMPSON VIDEO CONTROLLER: GARY TAILLON STILL PHOTOGRAPHER: CAROL KAELSON

TECHNOJIB TECH: CHRIS COBB, JEFF CAROLAN

“WHEEL OF FORTUNE” SEASON 37

ASSISTANT: VERONICA DAVIDSON

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: JEFF ENGEL

CAMERA UTILITIES: MICHAEL ECKLEBERRY, ERINN BELL,

OPERATORS: DIANE L. FARRELL, SOC,

MONICA SCHAAD

L.DAVID IRETE, RAY GONZALES, MIKE TRIBBLE

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: SIMON DENNIS, BSC

DIGITAL IMAGING TECHS: DEREK LANTZ, ED MOORE

CAMERA UTILITY: RAY THOMPSON

OPERATORS: ERIC SCHILLING, JAMIE STERBA

VIDEO CONTROLLER: BARRY LONG

HEAD UTILITY: TINO MARQUEZ

PACIFIC 2/1 ENTERTAINMENT GROUP, INC. “AMERICAN CRIME STORY: IMPEACHMENT” SEASON 4

ASSISTANTS: DAVID LEB, NATHAN CRUM, ROB MONROY, JARED WILSON STEADICAM OPERATOR: ERIC SCHILLING DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: SPENCER SHWETZ DIGITAL UTILITY: SHANNON VAN METRE

“DOPESTICK” SEASON 1 DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: CHECCO VARESE, ASC OPERATORS: JOSEPH ARENA, JOSEPH CICIO ASSISTANTS: MARK STRASBURG, EZRA BASSIN HILL, ERIC AMUNDSEN, KYRA KILFEATHER DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: DANIELE COLOMBERA LOADER: BEN LEMONS

VIDEO CONTROLLER: GARY TAILLON

ROUND SHRUB PRODUCTIONS, LLC

“FLATBUSH MISDEMEANORS” SEASON 1 OPERATOR: KERWIN DEVONISH ASSISTANTS: CHRIS GLEATON, ADRIANA BRUNETTO-LIPMAN, YVES WILSON, NATHALIE RODRIGUEZ LOADERS: XAVIER VENOSTA, DAVID GLEATON

SAN VICENTE PRODUCTIONS, INC. “THE BLACKLIST” SEASON 8

DIRECTORS OF PHOTOGRAPHY: SAADE MUSTAFA,

PAPA AL PRODUCTIONS

OPERATORS: DEREK WALKER, DEVIN LADD,

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: MACEO BISHOP OPERATORS: SAM ELLISON, LUCAS OWEN ASSISTANTS: GAVIN FERNANDEZ, RANDY MALDONADO GALARZA, AUSTIN RESTREPO, RACHEL FEDORKOVA CAMERA UTILITY: RUBEN HERRERA DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: LEWIS ROTHENBERG STILL PHOTOGRAPHER: MARY CYBULSKI

JIB ARM OPERATOR: MARC HUNTER STILL PHOTOGRAPHER: CAROL KAELSON

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: CLIFFORD CHARLES

STILL PHOTOGRAPHERS: ANTONY PLATT, GENE PAGE

“UNTITLED RR PROJECT”

MICHAEL CARACCIOLO

SOURDOUGH PRODUCTIONS, LLC “SUCCESSION” SEASON 3

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: PATRICK CAPONE OPERATORS: GREGOR TAVENNER, ALAN PIERCE ASSISTANTS: ETHAN BORSUK, CORY STAMBLER, BRENDAN RUSSELL, ALEC NICKEL LOADERS: JOSHUA BOTE, NAIMA NOGUERA STILL PHOTOGRAPHER: MACALL POLAY

STALWART PRODUCTIONS

PETER RENIERS

“61ST STREET” SEASON 2

ASSISTANTS: DANIEL CASEY, MIKE GUASPARI,

DIRECTORS OF PHOTOGRAPHY: GLENN BROWN,

JAMES GOURLEY, EDGAR VELEZ, EDWIN HERRERA, KATHERYN

ABE MARTINEZ

IUELE

OPERATORS: CHRIS CUEVAS, PARRISH LEWIS,

STEADICAM OPERATOR: DEVIN LADD

SCOTT THIELE

STEADICAM ASSISTANT: MIKE GUASPARI

ASSISTANTS: CHRIS WITTENBORN, HUNTER WHALEN,

LOADERS: HAROLD ERKINS, MARK BOYLE

ERIC ARNDT, SHANNON DEWOLFE

STILL PHOTOGRAPHER: WILL HART

DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: PAUL SCHILENS DIGITAL UTILITIES: MIKKI DICK, CHRIS SUMMERS

SALT SPRING MEDIA, INC.

STILL PHOTOGRAPHER: JAMES WASHINGTON

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: JESSICA LEE GAGNE

“FEAR THE WALKING DEAD” SEASON 7

OPERATORS: SAM ELLISON, STANLEY FERNANDEZ,

DIRECTORS OF PHOTOGRAPHY: FERNANDO ARGÜELLES, ASC,

JENNIE JEDDRY

JAN RICHTER-FRIIS

ASSISTANTS: ERIC SWANEK, MIKE GUTHRIE,

OPERATORS: RAMON ENGLE, KRIS HARDY

HAFFE ACOSTA, TYLER SWANEK, VINCE TUTHS,

ASSISTANTS: MARK BOYLE, SAM PEARCY,

FRANK MILEA

GRIFFIN MCCANN, DON HOWE

DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: LUKE TAYLOR

STEADICAM OPERATOR: RAMON ENGLE

LOADER: KANSAS BALLESTEROS

DIGITAL IMAGING TECHS: JAMIE METZGER,

PICROW STREAMING, INC.

LIBRA HEAD TECHS: DAN SHEATS, SEBASTIAN ALMEIDA

ADRIAN HATTINGH

DIRECTORS OF PHOTOGRAPHY: ALEX NEPOMNIASCHY, ASC,

“DEXTER AKA MARBLE” SEASON 9

TECHNOCRANE OPERATOR: JOE DATRI

DIRECTORS OF PHOTOGRAPHY: MICHAEL WATSON, HILLARY

TECHNOCRANE TECH: RYAN CROCI

SPERA

REMOTE HEAD TECH/OPERATOR: JOE DATRI

OPERATORS: THOMAS SCHNAIDT, TOM FITZGERALD,

STILL PHOTOGRAPHER: LOUIS SMITH

PATRICK RUTH

PUBLICIST: SHARA STORCH

PARAMOUNT PICTURES “BLACK SNOW”

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: PEDRO LUQUE OPERATOR: QUENELL JONES ASSISTANTS: CHERYN PARK, BRETT ROEDEL, AMANDA HEBBLETHWAITE CAMERA UTILITY: CATARINA MENDEZ DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: ZACHARY SAINZ

“THE MARVELOUS MRS. MAISEL” SEASON 4 DAVID MULLEN, ASC OPERATORS: JIM MCCONKEY, GREGORY PRINCIPATO ASSISTANTS: ANTHONY CAPPELLO, NIKNAZ TAVAKOLIAN, KELLON INNOCENT, JAMES DRUMMOND DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: MICHAEL MAIATICO LOADER: BRANDON BABBIT STILL PHOTOGRAPHER: KC BAILEY

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RICHELLE TOPPING

MAY 2021 PRODUCTION CREDITS

“SEVERANCE” SEASON 1

SHOWTIME PICTURES

ASSISTANTS: ANDREW JUHL, KALI RILEY, JILL TUFTS, YALE GROPMAN, ANDY HENSLER,

LOADER: LOUIS WATT DIGITAL UTILITIES: JASON HEAD, FIONNA MOGFORD

CREW PHOTO 20TH CENTURY FOX “MAGGIE” PILOT

LEFT TO RIGHT, FRONT TO BACK

DAWN NAKAMURA B-CAMERA 2ND AC BEN KASULKE DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY GRETCHEN HATZ A-CAMERA 1ST AC EMILIO MEJIA DIGITAL LOADER MARC CARTER A-CAMERA OPERATOR TOMOKA “TOMMY” IZUMI A-CAMERA 2ND AC JOHANNA CERATI B-CAMERA OPERATOR JAMES BARELA B-CAMERA 1ST AC ONYX MORGAN DIGITAL UTILITY LITONG ZHEN DIGITAL UTILITY PHOTO BY RICHARD CARTWRIGHT

“THE WALKING DEAD: WORLD BEYOND” SEASON 2

DIGITAL UTILITY: KALIA PRESCOTT

DIRECTORS OF PHOTOGRAPHY: ROSS RIEGE,

STILL PHOTOGRAPHER: MERRICK MORTON

MAGNI AGUSTSSON OPERATORS: CRAIG COCKERILL, JOEL PERKAL ASSISTANTS: LIZ SILVER, SEAN SUTPHIN, ERIC EATON, CALEB PLUTZER, RINNY WILSON STEADICAM OPERATOR: CRAIG COCKERILL DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: JOHN-MICHAEL SENG-WHEELER LOADER: DREW STORCKS DIGITAL UTILITY: PATRICK JOHNSON

TCF US PRODUCTIONS 81 INC.

“PRODIGAL SON” SEASON 2

DIRECTORS OF PHOTOGRAPHY: ANTHONY WOLBERG,

UNIVERSAL

“LAW & ORDER: ORGANIZED CRIME” SEASON 1 DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: JIM DENAULT OPERATORS: JON BEATTIE, JOHN PIROZZI ASSISTANTS: IAN AXILROD, NICHOLAS HAHN, AMBER R0SALES, DERRICK DAWKINS LOADERS: LORENZO ZANINI, PATRICK ARELLANO STILL PHOTOGRAPHER: DAVID GIESBRECHT

“CHEAPER BY THE DOZEN”

“LAW & ORDER: SVU” SEASON 22

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: MITCH AMUNDSEN

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: MICHAEL GREEN

OPERATORS: JAMES GOLDMAN, JOSH MEDAK

OPERATORS: JONATHAN HERRON, MICHAEL LATINO

ASSISTANTS: CRAIG GROSSMUELLER,

ASSISTANTS: CHRISTOPHER DEL SORDO,

ANDRAE CRAWFORD, MILAN JANICIN,

MATTHEW BALZARINI, JUSTIN ZVERIN, EMILY DUMBRILL

ROCHELLE BROWN

LOADERS: MAX SCHWARZ, JASON GAINES

STEADICAM OPERATOR: JAMES GOLDMAN

STILL PHOTOGRAPHER: MICHAEL PARMELEE

DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: KAI BORSON-PAINE

VERTICAL HOLD PRODUCTIONS, LLC CHRISTOPHER RAYMOND OPERATORS: PHILIP J. MARTINEZ, MALCOLM PURNELL, BRIAN JACKSON ASSISTANTS: ALEX WATERSTON, HAMILTON LONGYEAR, WARIS SUPANPONG, KEVIN HOWARD, KATIE WAALKES, RANDY SCHWARTZ LOADERS: AJ STRAUMAN-SCOTT, HOLLY MCCARTHY STILL PHOTOGRAPHER: PHILLIP CARUSO

WARNER BROS

“ALL AMERICAN” SEASON 3 DIRECTORS OF PHOTOGRAPHY: NIKHIL PANIZ OPERATORS: ERIC LAUDADIO, DANIEL WURSCHL ASSISTANTS: JON LINDSAY, BLAKE COLLINS, GREG DELLERSON, JESSICA PINNS DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: URBAN OLSSON

LOADER: ERNEST DICKERSON

MAY 2021 PRODUCTION CREDITS

109

“ALL RISE” SEASON 2

STEADICAM OPERATOR: REID RUSSELL

“AT&T”

DIRECTORS OF PHOTOGRAPHY: DAVID HARP,

DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: JEFFERSON FUGITT

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: KAI SAUL

AMANDA TREYZ

LOADER: GOBE HIRATA

OPERATOR: TOM ARSENAULT

OPERATORS: TIM ROARKE, STEPHEN CLANCY,

DIGITAL UTILITY: SONIA BARRIENTOS

ASSISTANTS: NICOLAS MARTIN, DAVID E. THOMAS, JR.,

SHANELE ALVAREZ

STILL PHOTOGRAPHER: EDDY CHEN

ALAN CERTEZA, RENNI POLLOCK

ASSISTANTS: MATT GUIZA, KRISTI ARNDS,

DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: BEN HOPKINS

RANDY SHANOFSKY, ADAM TSANG,

INFINITE MEDIA

COLLEEN LINDL, BENNY BAILEY STEADICAM OPERATOR: STEPHEN CLANCY

“ZWIFT”

STEADICAM ASSISTANT: KRISTI ARNDS

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: PIETER VERMEER

LOADER: PETER PEI

ASSISTANTS: LILA BYALL, LAURA GOLDBERG,

DIGITAL UTILITIES: MORGAN JENKINS, KAREN CLANCY

GAVIN GROSSI, DAISY SMITH STEADICAM OPERATOR: CHRIS CUNNINGHAM

“BOB HEARTS ABISHOLA” SEASON 2

DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: BRETT SUDING

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: PATTI LEE, ASC OPERATORS: MARK DAVISON, CHRIS HINOJOSA,

MERMAN

JON PURDY, MICHELLE CRENSHAW ASSISTANTS: JEFF JOHNSON, VITO DE PALMA, MARIANNE FRANCO, ADAN TORRES, LISA ANDERSON, ALICIA BRAUNS, LANCE MITCHELL, JORDAN HRISTOV VIDEO CONTROLLER: JOHN O’BRIEN DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: T. BRETT FEENEY STILL PHOTOGRAPHER: MICHAEL YARISH PUBLICISTS: KATHLEEN TANJI, MARC KLEIN

“B POSITIVE” SEASON 1 DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: GARY BAUM, ASC OPERATORS: ALEC ELIZONDO, TRAVERS HILL, LANCE BILLITZER, EDDIE FINE ASSISTANTS: ADRIAN LICCIARDI, MICHELE MCKINLEY, JEFF ROTH, CLINT PALMER, JASON HERRING DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: DEREK LANTZ VIDEO CONTROLLER: JOHN O’BRIEN UTILITIES: RICHARD FINE, DAN LORENZE

“THE SEX LIVES OF COLLEGE GIRLS” SEASON 1 DIRECTORS OF PHOTOGRAPHY: RICK PAGE, CHUCK OZEAS OPERATORS: JON PURDY, LAUREN GADD, KENNY BROWN, HILTON GORING ASSISTANTS: JAY LEVY, YEN NGUYEN, DUSTIN MILLER, TOM GLEASON, JEREMY HILL, DAVE BERRYMAN, GRACE THOMAS, SCOTT MARTINEZ STEADICAM OPERATOR: KENNY BROWN

COMMERCIALS

“HOME GOODS”

“FEDEX”

ASSISTANTS: HEATHER LEA LEROY, LUIS SUAREZ,

BISCUIT FILMWORKS

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: ERIC SCHMIDT OPERATOR: ALAN CAUDILLO ASSISTANTS: LILA BYALL, LAURA GOLDBERG, NICK LANTZ, BRITTA RICHARDSON

“COMMUNITY FILMS” DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: TAMI REIKER, ASC OPERATOR: CHRIS BOTTOMS ASSISTANTS: DANIEL HANYCH, HEATHER LEA LEROY, MILES CUSTER DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: BRET SUDING

DIVISION 7

“WALMART” DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: KARINA SILVA ASSISTANTS: ERICK AGUILAR, ANGELO GENTILE DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: NICK FRY

FARM LEAGUE “DRIP DROP”

OPERATOR: DAVID WILLIAM MCDONALD ASSISTANTS: BRAD ROCHLITZER, TRAVIS DAKING

“YOUNG SHELDON” SEASON 4

FURLINED

STEADICAM OPERATOR: AARON SCHUH STEADICAM ASSISTANT: GRANT YELLEN DIGITAL LOADERS: BAILEY SOFTNESS,

TECHNOCRANE OPERATOR: CHRIS BOTTOMS

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: LINUS SANDGREN, ASC

STILL PHOTOGRAPHER: KATRINA MARCINOWSKI

BRAD GILSON, JR., JAMES COBB

DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: BRET SUDING

CAPS

DIGITALUTILITY: KURT LEVY

ASSISTANTS: MATTHEW DEL RUTH, GRANT YELLEN,

VANESSA WARD, RUSSELL MILLER

MJZ

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: AMADO STACHENFELD

OPERATORS: NEIL TOUSSAINT, SOC, AARON SCHUH

OPERATOR: CHRIS BOTTOMS

DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: JOHN SPELLMAN

DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: RYAN DEGRAZZIO

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: BUZZ FEITSHANS, IV

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: ROSS RICHARDSON

“AWS”

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: TIM HUDSON, ACS ASSISTANTS: ERIK STAPELFELDT, DAISY SMITH DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: ERIC YU

GRAVY

“HEINZ” ASSISTANTS: JORGE SANCHEZ, ARIEN HATCH, LISA GUERRIERO STEADICAM OPERATOR: BRIAN FREESH DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: KEVIN ZANIT LOADER: PHILIP VOLKOFF

“JIMMY JOHN’S” DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: DARIUSZ WOLSKI, ASC ASSISTANTS: JAMES GOLDMAN, SERGIUS NAFA, LISA GUERRIERO DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: JASON BAUER LOADER: PHIL VOLKOFF

O POSITIVE

“SPECTRUM” DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: TAMI REIKER, ASC OPERATOR: CHRIS BOTTOMS ASSISTANTS: DANIEL HANYCH, REED KOPPEN, JORDAN MARTIN DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: BRET SUDING

PARK PICTURES “VRBO”

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: NORM LI OPERATOR: JOSHUA ZUCKER-PLUDA ASSISTANTS: SAL CONIGLIO, NICK INFIELD, MIKE PANCZENKO

JENISE WHITEHEAD

“XIIDRA”

STILL PHOTOGRAPHERS: ROBERT VOETS,

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: ERIC SCHMIDT

STILL PHOTOGRAPHERS: ERIC WILLIAMS,

MICHAEL DESMOND, DARREN MICHAELS,

OPERATOR: JOHN PINGRY

RYAN HACKETT

NICOLE WILDER

ASSISTANTS: MIKE GRATZMILLER, NOAH GLAZER

BEHIND-THE-SCENES: JED HERNANDEZ

LOADER: LISA GUERRIERO

DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: JOHN SPELLMAN

WARNER HORIZONTAL SCRIPTED “ANIMAL KINGDOM” SEASON 6

HUNGRY MAN, INC.

“NIKE”

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: ANTHONY VIETRO

“APARTMENTS.COM”

OPERATORS: REID RUSSELL, BROOKS ROBINSON

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: JOHN BARR

OPERATOR: VINCENT FOEILLET, DAREN CRAWFORD

ASSISTANTS: DAVE EGERSTROM, ERIC GUTHRIE,

OPERATOR: JUNE ZANDONA

ASSISTANTS: ETHAN MCDONALD, CHRIS STRAUSER,

PATRICK BENSIMMON, KIRSTEN LAUBE

ASSISTANTS: MICHAEL ASHE, DAISY SMITH

LOREN ELKINS, MARCUS DEL NEGRO, JORDAN MARTIN,

DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: SCOTT STEPHENS

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PULSE FILMS

MAY 2021 PRODUCTION CREDITS

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: AUTUMN DURALD

SERIAL PICTURES

CHRISTIAN KESSLER STEADICAM OPERATOR: CHRIS CUNNINGHAM

“BURGER KING”

LOADER: LISA GUERRIERO

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: NEIL SHAPIRO ASSISTANTS: MICHAEL ASHE, DAISY SMITH

RAUCOUS CONTENT

DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: COLIN WEINBERG

“OTEZLA”

SUPERPRIME

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: ERIC ZIMMERMAN ASSISTANTS: DIONA MAVIS, STEVE MATTSON,

“DELONGHI”

JOHN RONEY

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: LINUS SANDGREN, ASC

STEADICAM OPERATOR: TWOJAY DHILLON

OPERATORS: ADAM FRISCH, ROMAN JAKOBI

DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: CASEY SHERRIER

ASSISTANTS: JORGE SANCHEZ, LUCAS DEANS,

REMOTE HEAD TECH/OPERATOR: STEVE MILLER

REED KOPPEN, COURTNEY MILLER, EDGAR GONZALEZ LOADER: LISA GUERRIERO

RESET

REMOTE HEAD TECH/OPERATOR: ROB PETRIN

“CACTI” DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: JARIN BLASCHKE OPERATOR: VINCENT FOEILLET ASSISTANTS: DANIEL FERRELL, LUCAS DEANS, HENRY NGUYEN LOADER: LISA GUERRIERO REMOTE HEAD TECH/OPERATOR: WILL PIPKINS

SANCTUARY CONTENT “MGM/BELLAGIO”

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: DANIEL BOMBELL ASSISTANTS: JOSEPH CANON, CHRIS MARIUS JONES STEADICAM OPERATOR: CHRIS CUNNINGHAM DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: MATTHEW LOVE TECHNOCRANE OPERATOR: CHRISTIAN HURLEY TECHNOCRANE TECH: BRETT FOLK

“RESET” DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: DANIEL BOMBELL ASSISTANTS: PAUL SANTONI, NOAH THOMSON DIGITAL IMAGING TECH: NATHAN PENA

Advertisers Index COMPANY PAGE

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URL

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ADVERTISING REPRESENTATIVES WEST COAST & CANADA ROMBEAU INC. Sharon Rombeau Tel: (818) 762-6020 Fax: (818) 760-0860 Email: sharonrombeau@gmail.com

EAST COAST & EUROPE ALAN BRADEN INC. Alan Braden Tel: (818) 850-9398 Email: alanbradenmedia@gmail.com

MAY 2021 PRODUCTION CREDITS

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05.2021

Karen Ballard, SMPSP UNIT STILL PHOTOGRAPHER THE WATER MAN

Working on The Water Man with Director David Oyelowo and the lovely cast and fantastic crew in Oregon was an absolute dream job! Not only did it return me to a state I dearly love and had lived in years ago as a young photojournalist, it also returned me to the forests and landscapes that make childhood dreams come to life. This BTS shot is from one of our early wild days out near the river’s edge on “Fish Creek,” near Estacada, where Jo (Amiah Miller) and Gunner (Lonnie Chavis) face a raging river and decide if they will attempt to cross.

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