When executives at Comedy Central first discussed the concept that would become The Sarah Silverman Program, they were concerned about the costs involved in giving the proposed series the same polished look that the makers of Silverman’s 2005 theatrical feature Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic had obtained by shooting on film. This concern pleased Director of Photography Rhet Bear, who shot that feature and went on to work as the cinematographer on the Silverman series primarily because he hadn’t shot Jesus is Magic on film. He’d instead used standard-definition Panasonic AJ-SDX900 cameras in the DVCPRO50 format, with the result subsequently upresed at IVC for film-out. If Bear could get such attractive results in SD, he knew he could do that much more using Panasonic VariCam 720p HD cameras for the planned weekly half-hour series.

Now entering its second season, The Sarah Silverman Program follows the adventures of the irreverent “Sarah,” a woman blissfully trapped in very arrested development who approaches every situation as a pure, uninhibited and incredibly selfish id that would make Freud proud. Sister Laura Silverman and comics Brian Posehn and Steve Agee round out the cast as her slightly more mature enablers. After exploiting the sympathies of AIDS activists, sleeping with God and mocking militant lesbianism in season one, Sarah returns in the second season true to form by cussing out a priest in front of his congregation. Later, Posehn and Agee perform an ill-conceived raid on an abortion clinic in one of the series’ many nods to genre films popular with the nerdy Comic-Con set.

The bulk of Bear’s experience has been shooting film—for commercials and music videos. He says he likes the AJ-HDC27 VariCam in part because of its ability to shoot off-speed—something that he frequently did with film and correctly expected would be done for some parts of the series (when it references music video style, or in set pieces like the one last season in which Posehn’s character practices kung fu on a ghost).

Series co-creator Rob Schrab, who also serves as a writer, executive producer and director of most of the episodes, says specifically he didn’t want the show to seem too much like Seinfeld. Instead of Silverman’s character being a stand-up comic, they created a very self-centered, childlike character “who has a tremendous amount of free time and gets in everyone’s hair—and, in the end, everything always works out for her.”

Schrab is used to digital filmmaking. He had spent about a decade as a writer, primarily, he says, on “a lot of pilots that didn’t get picked up,” so at one point he grabbed some consumer-grade DV cameras and started making his own shows for Internet “network” Channel 101. “It was just as YouTube started opening up, and it was great experience,” he says. “I’d worked in the business for 10 years and had been so close with some pilots but never saw them picked up. So I said, ‘I’m going to shoot a show and put it on the Internet—at least then it exists.’ I made my mistakes over those two years on my own time and with my own money.”

Aside from its variable-frame-rate capabilities, Bear says that his selection of the VariCam F (the newer H model, with its expanded dynamic range, replaced the F model for the current season) was an aesthetic one. “We looked at the Sony F900, the [Panavision] Genesis—which was about to come out—and even the ARRI D-20,” he says. “We just liked the look of the VariCam. It had a softness that looked to all of us like film.” Bear admits that this “softness” is likely due in part to the lower resolution of the VariCam’s chip compared to the other cameras tested, but that wasn’t an issue and Bear found the picture most desirable.

“I’ve become a fan of the Panasonic line,” says Bear. “The DVX and the SDX are amazing cameras, too. Our sound man owns an HVX200 [P2] camera, which acts as our C-camera a lot of the time. We shoot in the native 720p and convert it like the other footage, and it looks great. I wouldn’t use a 1/3-inch-chip camera on faces—too much depth of field—but it’s perfect for inserts of feet tripping over cords or a doorknob opening. And the P2 cards are great for post, even though it makes producers a little worried to have no tape to work with. We’re very interested in the HVX500, Panasonic’s new 2/3-inch camera that uses P2 cards. In two years, I think everything will be hard drive- or card-based, and I’d love to be one of the first scripted shows to be in that format.”

The Silverman production shoots each half-hour episode in five days, generally spending three at Hollywood Center Studios—with standing sets such as Sarah’s apartment and Romansky’s Café—and two on locations throughout Los Angeles. “I’m a film guy,” says Bear, “so I don’t like to do ‘sitcom’ lighting. When we’re on our standing sets, we almost never hang anything from a grid. I try to treat it like a location and light through windows or from the floor. Almost all the lighting is on the ground with us.”

Romansky’s Café, Bear adds, was a real location in the early episodes, but it proved difficult to work with as often as they wanted to. The cinematographer had essentially let the exterior go almost totally white at the real location; he continued this practice on the stage to preserve continuity in the look and to help disguise the fact that the outside street scene is a forced-perspective backdrop with cars cut out of foam core. “We only have 10 feet outside the window,” he says, “so we don’t focus too much on what’s out there. If actors stand next to the window, they look really big. I try to shoot wide open to limit the depth of field, and I have 15 space lights on the background itself to help it blow out the way it would if we were looking out onto a real street.”

Bear uses one or two of the VariCams at a time and cables everything to DIT Jonah Torreano’s workstation. Torreano uses a Panasonic AJ-EC3 paintbox/camera control unit, a 24-inch Sony CRT monitor for critical viewing, a waveform monitor that Bear can use for lighting in a hurry to see if he’s got all the information, and a series of converters. “I’ve been told it isn’t really a DIT station,” Bear observes. “It’s small and functional and very portable so it can move fast. Some DIT stations are these massive racks of equipment that I just don’t think would work well the way we shoot.”

The DVCPRO tapes from the VariCams are imported into Editor Larry Bock’s Apple Final Cut Pro system and simultaneously upconverted from 720p to the 1080p Apple Pro format using an AJA Video Kona 3 card. “When we first started,” says Bear, “I thought, as someone who understands Final Cut Pro, it was crazy to upres and edit in 1080 because not long ago the bays were not fast enough. But that hasn’t been a problem and we’ve all fallen in love with the look of the show in 1080.”

Bear adds that because so many of the people involved are old hands at Final Cut Pro—including himself, Schrab and digital compositor/animator Sevan Najarian—a lot of post work can be done in-house. “I shot one scene of Brian Posehn and Steve Agee doing a sort of stakeout, and I deliberately used a very wide-angle lens for an effect. But the lens vignetted in the corners. So I took the files home over the weekend and stretched the image out a bit to get rid of that. We can do things like that without having to go to a post house and spend a fortune.”

The cinematographer credits rental house Clairmont Camera for helping to at least tame one of the biggest challenges he’s found shooting HD. “I really don’t like that the cameras have to be tethered,” Bear attests. “With film, I can pretty much get a stop and shoot. But we have so many cables [video, audio, timecode, paintbox and more] that on the first season it was like spaghetti coming off the back of the camera. So Clairmont built us a single cable that combines all the necessary functions and goes between the camera and the DIT station—and that has made a significant difference. We couldn’t afford to use fiber optics, so this is sort of our fiber optics system without the fiber optics.”