Kiefer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer returns to 24 this month with what may well be his worst day ever—a domestic terrorism plotline that the show’s cinematographer, Rodney Charters, ASC, proclaims “the most frightening season yet. This time it’s about terrorists planting devices in crowded areas in America. I don’t say the previous storylines were impossible, but sometimes we may have been skating a thin edge. This year, it’s about something terrifyingly possible.”

Of course, every season of this enduring hit series is built around a single 24-hour crisis—nuclear and biological terrorism, an assassination attempt—and Bauer’s attempts to avert catastrophe. Stories unfold more or less in real time inside the bowels of secret agencies, in the halls of power, at many other locations and in the cars, planes and helicopters that whisk Bauer and his colleagues wherever they need to be.

“We try to be a documentary/drama,” says Charters of the show’s style. “We will go into sets and locations that are lit, but we will otherwise not do a lot to the lighting from shot to shot except maybe bring somebody into a nice cross light or modify something that looks really bad. We always shoot with two cameras. A-camera, operated by Guy Skinner, is always handheld and B-camera, operated by Jay Herron, is always on a dolly. The two are usually 90 degrees apart, which makes it difficult to light too specifically. Frequently we’ll also have a C-camera floating around. We go through whole scenes from beginning to end and then do the scene again with the two cameras in different positions. We don’t worry about the line [of axis]. We don’t believe in it. We cross the line all the time.”

Charters has worked with Panavision’s Genesis cameras on other projects (and experimented with it on 24) and has used Sony’s DSR-PD150 Mini DV camcorder, and now JVC’s GY-HD110 ProHD camera, to generate background plates and material that appears on the myriad TV and monitor screens seen on the show, but he continues to shoot the actual show on film—about four and a half million feet of it per season.

“I like the look of film,” he says. “I like the grain.” Charters shoots everything on Kodak’s 5229 500T stock, which yields less saturated colors and less contrast than most other stocks. Cinematographers have used 5229 for its intrinsic softness, but its qualities are especially conducive to shows that are finished digitally. “People in the feature world are also realizing that having the broad latitude of these stocks is like shooting raw [format] on a digital still camera,” Charters says. “You do not give yourself any advantages by shooting with the 5218. It has significantly more contrast. We can add contrast in post, but if you lose information on the negative, you can never get it back again.”

His only problem with the stock, which is transferred to D5 video at Level 3 Post in Santa Monica and then colored there in a D5-to-D5 tape-to-tape process, is that “the dailies don’t look very good. We want to preserve most of what’s there in the [telecine session] so that Senior Colorist Larry Field still has a lot to work with. Later, we ramp the gamma, blow the highlights out and crush the blacks, but by being able to decide where that happens—by riding a zone up and down the actual exposure curve—you get much more latitude to deal with difficult situations. But that means we don’t want to put too much of the look into the dailies. We’re always stopping people from the network who try to grab footage and put it on the air for promotions or whatever without the grade on it.”

24 is shot in 3-perf Super 35 format with Panavision XL cameras mounted with Primo zooms, generally in the medium-to-telephoto range. Scenes are composed for 16:9 and the operators protect for 4:3. “For the past few years, the show has been broadcast in 16:9,” notes Charters, “and that is by far the best way to see it.”

Aside from issues such as grain and texture, Charters likes the freedom he gets from the latitude of a stock like 5229, which allows him to capture a wider range of tones between shadows and highlights than he’s seen done with any currently available digital system. “We may have an interior where someone comes in from outside, where it’s very bright, and there are huge windows everywhere,” he says. “On a feature, where you might be shooting two pages a day, you can plan the time of day you’re going to shoot that scene, but we have to shoot eight or nine pages a day to make up for an amazing stunt or car chase or something similar.

“With this stock, that isn’t such a challenge because I can expose for the darker areas, and the highlights, if they’re really excessive, can be dealt with in post by placing a PowerWindow over them and bringing them down. But I still have detail in the dark areas, too,” he continues. “Right now, film can handle those situations better than any kind of video. I’ve shot our own show and another show with the Genesis, and it was pretty good but not the same as the film.”

Nominally a 500-speed film, Charters rates the Kodak 5229 500T stock at EI 400 in the studio and 250 for day exteriors with a gel pack behind the lens consisting of an 85, some ND and an Antique Suede filter, “to give L.A. a lightly warm, dusty look.” For night work, he will rate the stock closer to EI 800 or push it to 1,000.

Shortly after the much-discussed use of the Sony F900 and Viper cameras on Michael Mann’s Collateral (shot primarily by Dion Beebe, ASC, ACS), Charters and the producers decided to try doing some night work on the show digitally. “It was a night shoot with two helicopters landing in downtown L.A.,” he recalls. “We thought that, à la Collateral, we’d be able to dig into the cityscape without having to light it more. It didn’t work, really, because the chip in the F900 and Viper has a better response to underexposure than the Genesis. If you push the gain in those cameras, you see some interesting things in the shadows, but the Genesis did not respond the same way. The 5229 pushed a stop actually did better than the Genesis.

“The Genesis material looked good,” he’s quick to add. “It was intercut with the film and I don’t think anybody could tell. And recently, Panavision has re-orchestrated the matrixing controls and it’s even better.” He notes that Viper and the F900 have a serious drawback for him—the chip size—despite their famous low-light abilities. “I just don’t like the look of the 2/3-inch chip,” he says. “I like the full size of 35mm film or the Genesis. I don’t want all that depth of field.”

Where Charters does make use of video technology is in the creation of the images that appear on all the screens within the show. He also uses video for background elements used in the rear-screen projection behind the studio-bound cars and helicopters. PAL images (the greater number of lines makes PAL more conducive than NTSC to being re-photographed) from Sony’s PD150 Mini DV cameras have been the standard for the show, but Charters has also thrown JVC’s GY-HD110 24p ProHD camcorder into the mix.

“I really like the way it feels,” he says. “It handles like a real camera. “It takes a real Fujinon lens that you can focus manually. And even though the [ProHD] signal is downconverted to DV or to QuickTime DVI for playback, it still looks really good.”

He has used the cameras to create back plates when time at a location has run out. He adds, “With the JVC camera, I might be more tempted to shoot even a stationary plate, which is a lot more difficult to sell than a moving one. There are still limitations when you’re combining it with film images, and you generally want to be moving and on the long end of the lens so the background goes a little soft and you’re not showing too much.”

All the traveling sequences are shot in the studio using Eike digital projectors and rear-projection screens positioned behind the actors. “We run around town with up to nine little video cameras mounted on a car. Then, when we go into the studio and shoot our car interior, we can get an almost 100-degree pan inside the car and it’s all on the soundstage.”

This is a huge advantage over shooting greenscreen and compositing the background in later, says Charters. “When you’re done, you’re done. Nobody has to look at the shots and approve the look. We’ve all seen what it looks like. Also, the actors can see where they are, how they’re driving, how to turn. It’s much more realistic for them. And there’s also the economic advantage. For the cost of setting up this greenscreen stage, we can blow through five vehicle shots a day. It goes straight off to dailies and nobody has to do anything more to get the effect.”

Charters notes that the series’ longstanding success ultimately comes from compelling storylines and powerful acting. “When Kiefer’s on screen, you really don’t think about much else,” Charters says. “He drives the show with such intensity. As long as he’s in the frame and sharp, you just go with it. Everything else we do is really in support of that.”