November 15, 2005
Cinematographer Bobby Bukowski has established himself in the industry with his work on indie feature films, but when Director Brian Dannelly—with whom Bukowski had worked on the controversial comedy Saved!—offered him the chance to shoot a television series in HD for Showtime, Bukowski was eager to take it on. A film shooter his whole career, Bukowski has been fascinated by the possibilities of HD, and Weeds would give him the opportunity to learn firsthand the format's strengths and weaknesses. He'd also been curious about the world of television series work.
Starring Mary-Louise Parker as a normal suburban mom who also happens to be a big-time pot dealer, Weeds had the potential to express a sensibility similar to the offbeat, daring feature films Bukowski had shot. Bukowski was also impressed with the creative players. "I know Brian's work," says the cinematographer, "and with people like Mary-Louise Parker and Elizabeth Perkins in it—performers I really admire—I agreed to take it on because there were elements there that could make the show artistic."
The show would be shot using Panavised Sony HDW-F900 CineAlta HDCAM camcorders with an assortment of digital Primo lenses, mostly zooms. Coming from many years of shooting film, Bukowski was concerned about HD's reputation for being harsh on its subjects, particularly actresses. "HD is a very scrutinizing medium," he says. "It can look brittle. I was worried about losing the softness I'm used to with film and film grain. The actresses are beautiful women, but they're not 20 years old. I wouldn't have been as concerned on a film show, but HD can be less flattering."
He found that using diffusing filtration, such as Glimmer Glass in daylight situations and Black Pro-Mist for subdued interiors and night exteriors, helped compensate for some of this harshness, as did frequent use of Kino Flo's ring lights around the lens during close-ups.
Still, he found that HD could bring out imperfections, both natural and from makeup, that film would be more gentle with. "A little color on a face went a long way," he observes. "I felt like the makeup needed to be much more blended than it would for film. It seemed that if the makeup artist put a little bit of cover-up on a blemish or something, it was more likely to be noticeable in HD."
Almost immediately upon starting the pilot, Bukowski found himself up against one of cinematographers' biggest concerns about HD: the medium's difficulty holding detail in extreme highlights. "In the first episode," he says, "a lot of the story involves two moms watching a soccer game in the middle of summer—the sun is high in the sky and there's no shade in sight. It was just a very high-contrast situation that I knew would be very difficult to pull off in HD, so I suggested putting the characters under tents. The tents also made sense for the actors' comfort and worked within the story because these women wouldn't sit in the hot sun to watch this game. So I won that battle and at least I wouldn't have to shoot with such hard light and deep shadows."
Still, he says, it takes more big lights—PARs and such—aimed into shadow areas to shoot sunny exteriors in HD. The bright lights reduce the extreme contrast between areas hit by direct sunlight and those in deep shadow.
Bukowski soon realized how much less lighting contrast he'd want for day interiors as well, compared to his approach for film work. He explains, "Something I like doing a lot in film is creating values in the flesh tones that are not always lit at key and having [the darker flesh tones] play with a very bright background. You can deal with a four or five stop ratio of key to fill on film, but I found that I had to pump in a lot more fill light than I'm used to in those same situations in HD. If I wanted to put someone against a bright window [in HD], I was always having to add fill light to keep the shadows from becoming completely muddy. The problem with that is that once you start adding fill to the actor, then you're also lighting the walls around the actor, so we tried to have the walls painted fairly dark, subdued colors so they wouldn't reflect too much light."
HD proponents' answer to complaints about its handling of highlights has always been, "But look at the shadow detail!" On that front, Bukowski is sold. Bukowski says, "What I was really surprised about [with HD] was the low light levels you could work in. That was a big learning curve for me. I tended to over-light at first. Then one day I was walking around the set with the gaffer and I said, 'Hey, this is looking pretty good right now.' He replied, 'But all the lights are off!' And it was true. The only illumination was a very diffuse light coming through the window from the adjacent set that struck me as interesting. I said, 'That's the kind of light I want from now on—complete ambient light.' I began lighting the set pretty flat and letting tonality and color play up the contrast."
Bukowski elaborates on a setup that he soon became reliant on. "We were bouncing PAR lights off unbleached muslin and sending that light through more muslin. The process created a beautiful light with a soft, creamy quality that gained some warmth because of the unbleached muslin. It was about as soft a light as you can imagine. The actors would walk on set and say, 'Where's the light?'"
Because of his use of diffuse illumination, lighting for night became simpler in HD than it would have been for a film show. "The production designer and I worked very closely to achieve optimal use of practical lighting," says the cinematographer. "
He put track lighting in certain areas of characters' houses; you could go into a nighttime interior and turn on those lights and almost be lit and ready to roll. Sometimes we'd put a 40-watt light bulb on a dimmer on a C-stand and use that as our fill light because the HD camera sees so deeply into darkness."
Bukowski enjoyed another feature HD offers that film does not: the ability to make subtle alterations to the image during a take, guided by the monitor's HD image. He notes, "If an actor moves into a deep shadow and you want to see him, you can change the contrast or the exposure on the fly. That's a really exciting possibility. On film, you'd have to shoot another take because you'd have lost the actor when he moved into the shadow. In HD, you can sometimes fix levels on the fly, and you can make changes to the color, which was helpful because we often used multiple cameras and didn't have much time to match them to one another. While we were shooting, I could make an adjustment like tweaking the flesh tone. I really enjoyed that ability."
The director of photography still enjoys shooting film and hopes to continue doing so for many years to come. He enjoyed the chance to become proficient in HD production and is proud of his work on the eight episodes of Weeds that he shot.
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