By Jon Silberg, October 15, 2008
Web series Sanctuary has migrated to the "big screen"--television--with a season of 13 one-hour episodes currently running on the Sci Fi Channel. Cinematographer David A. Geddes came onboard to shoot the series partly because it was set to shoot with RED Digital Cinema's RED ONE camera, and he felt it was important to get some real experience on the much-discussed tool.
Like the Web series, a significant portion of the television episodes would be shot in a studio (in Vancouver) against greenscreen, with a great deal of the background sets--not just futuristic cityscapes but apartment interiors and simple street scenes--being created with digital 3D animation in post. But with an HDCAM delivery format, resolution requirements would be higher than they had been for the Web.
In fact, the RED's 4K (Bayer pattern) sensor represented a large degree of oversampling compared to the HDCAM delivery spec, but the people at Anthem Studios in Vancouver--where all of the soundstages, editorial, 3D effects workstations and color correction were collocated--wanted the options the camera and its format offered. "The biggest advantage to the production was really in compositing and visual effects," Geddes says. "They had so much [picture information] to work with. But to take advantage of it, they had to put together a workflow for everybody involved in each aspect of the show."
Geddes, whose previous work was mostly on film and who says he feels more comfortable using film-style methods, used bodies with PL mounts and Cooke S4 series prime lenses and Optimo zooms. Using the same incident meter he would for a film shoot--"We had LCD monitors that were fine as a reference but not something I would ever light to," he notes--the cinematographer rated the RED's sensor EI 320 for straightforward shooting and 200 (giving images a bit more exposure) for the greenscreen sections. He was very impressed with the sensor's latitude. "We'd lose information in the highlights sooner than in the shadows," he says, noting this is generally true for all digital imagers, "but I felt comfortable at least two stops over [key] and four under."
The DP learned about the RED primarily from reading and absorbing as much as he could as quickly as he could. There was no digital imaging technician on the show, so it was really up to him to figure things out. One issue that concerns some people is the camera's constantly changing firmware. "It was on Build 15 when we started the series," he notes, "so that's what we stuck with. Build 16 came out while were shooting, but everything I read suggested that switching can affect things all the way down the line through post, so we decided to just stay with 15."
Geddes reports that the cameras did what he'd expected with very few glitches and nothing that cost significant downtime. "We shot quickly--an hour episode in seven days, where eight is the standard," he says. "We even did one in five days, but that was unusual in that the style was something like the film Cloverfield. Where that was supposed to have been shot all on a Handycam, this episode was supposed to have been shot all on a single news camera, so everything was a oner. We had 32 setups for the whole episode."
Generally, he would cover scenes with two cameras, wide and tight, and often a third on Steadicam. "I'd say about 70 percent of the show was shot on the greenscreen set," Geddes says. "We would often have printouts of artist's renderings that we could pass around to the cast and crew and say, 'This is what the room looks like,' or 'This is what you're looking at.' We would sometimes paint off an area, let's say 60 feet by 40 feet on the greenscreen stage, and say, 'This is the library. Here's where the tables will be. Here's where the bookcases will be.' We had tracking marks everywhere for the animators and compositors to reference
. That's how we worked for most of the show."
All the editing and the color grading was done in-house at Anthem Effects in Final Cut Pro and Color, respectively. Geddes found that the RED footage had a significant amount of room for manipulation in post. "We found that footage from one of the cameras was coming back slightly greener than the other two," he says, "but it was a very simple thing to 'time' that out in post."
He was impressed with Apple's Color. "There was nothing I wanted that it couldn't do," he says. But the cinematographer stresses that, though the software is inexpensive and relatively simple to operate, "it's very important to have a dedicated colorist doing this work. Being a colorist is a real craft that takes a lot of training. As a cinematographer, I'm still learning a lot of what's involved in that craft. I learned how Color works so I would know what I could ask for, but it would be a mistake to try to do it without a real colorist."
Geddes explains that there were some strong advantages to bringing everything under one roof. "If there was a problem and I wasn't sure about something from the downconverted image in the monitors, I could go to editorial and see the 4K files right away," he says. "Usually, by the afternoon, they were editing what we'd shot that morning. If there was a shot we didn't get or that could work better--the director could get an idea of how something was coming together very quickly."
The proximity paid off in another way during a shoot set aboard a sinking submarine. "We'd set up the electronics to arc and explode," Geddes says. "So we shot it and it looked good, but we do our version of a 'gate check,' where the first assistant will look at part of the clip. Usually not the whole clip, just a part of it. Well, we were getting set up for the next shot and the assistant came up and said, 'You better take a look at this.' So we played it back, and as soon as we had the explosion, the image turned blue and stayed blue for the rest of the shot. So I showed it to the director and we did another take. And the same thing happened to take two! This was weird and none of us could figure out why it was happening. If it was affecting the recording, we didn't know why. So we quickly downloaded it and editorial opened the 4K and, lo and behold, nothing turned blue. We never figured out why, but it only had that effect on playback in the camera. We knew very quickly that we had the shot, whether it had that strange effect during playback or not. But if editorial was in some other facility far away, it could have taken long enough to find that out that it would have impacted our tight schedule."
This single unexplained phenomenon notwithstanding, Geddes says the RED camera did everything he expected in terms of user-friendliness, image quality and the ability of the postproduction department to pull so many keys off his greenscreens. "I just had to learn about the camera and use it," he says. "The important thing I tell people who ask me about it is that you have to figure out how you're going to work with it in post. If people are working with a post house that doesn't know how to work with the files, that's where the trouble can happen.
"Since I've done the show," he adds, "I've talked to some people who have used it on shows where the post house wasn't set up to work with the files, so they subcontracted it to someone else and everybody's getting panicked phone calls in the middle of the night. I don't know what to tell these people. We didn't have those problems. If they're not set up to work with the camera, maybe they should be. This is the wave of the future. All of us on Sanctuary went into this without knowing anything about the RED, and we rented it and learned what we needed to learn and got the hardware and software we needed and were able to shoot, edit and do all of the post to get it ready for air in-house."
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