By Jon Silberg, June 22, 2009
British cinematographer Geoff Boyle also journeyed to Sweden, to shoot two episodes of the Swedish-language version of Wallander, also with the RED ONE. (The Swedish-language version has 13 episodes and airs on Sweden's TV4.) Boyle had previously worked with that camera as well as the Silicon Imaging SI-2K on the 3D indie Dark Country and liked the images both cameras produced, though he'd felt at the time of that production, in 2007, that SI was a bit further along than RED.
Boyle admits that the speed of RED's development, before and after that point, continues to surprise him. "When Jim Jannard first announced his plan for the camera at NAB, I said, 'Bollocks! You'll never deliver on that timetable.' We had a bit of a row, actually. I hadn't meant to single him and his company out. Every company has problems meeting early projections, and if they don't, their suppliers do." But Boyle notes he has so far been impressed, adding, "He and I have actually corresponded a lot since then."
Before Kenneth Branagh had convinced the BBC to come to Sweden and do the English-language version with him in the title role, the original Swedish series in that language and with a Swedish cast had been shot in 16mm. That ran to very good ratings in Germany and parts of Scandinavia in 2006 and 2007. When the company that originated the series saw the BBC version (which aired in England in 2008), they liked the new look Dod Mantle had achieved with the RED, and so they ordered their new episodes to be shot with that camera.
Boyle explains that he'd initially used his meter to light for the RED but soon learned to love the camera's internal histogram and to use the mantra many digital still photographers have developed regarding the histogram: "Expose to the right." Often, he explains, digital shooters worry so much about clipping highlights (the information on the right of the histogram) that they underexpose, to the detriment of the overall image. By giving the sensor more exposure—enough to just prevent clipping desired detail but no more—you "expose to the right" and make full use of an imager's dynamic range.
He had his live monitor set up so that he could flip back and forth between the raw image that was being captured—"I wanted to make sure I was exposing all the way to the right, where I was just starting to clip one channel"—and the REDspace version so he and his collaborators could see an approximate rendering of what the final image would look like after postproduction.
| |
 |
|
|
|
Boyle, too, found the camera to be at its best in daylight, both in terms of color temperature and actual illumination. "In daylight," he says, "everything looked great. There were no problems whatsoever and it was easy to work with. I did some tests with [Iridas] SpeedGrade OnSet to get an idea of how the image would hold up in post, and for any day exterior, I could just hit the de-log button [and simulate the behavior of printer lights in the photochemical world] and just get what I want with the R, G and B controls. But night scenes with lower exposure or some tungsten light went very muddy looking. You couldn't grade with printer lights alone. It wasn't all that difficult to fix it in a DI suite, but it certainly was more involved than the day exteriors."
Like Mantle, he found the accessorized RED a beast to handhold. But those caveats notwithstanding, Boyle is quick to rescind his initial proclamation about Jannard's camera. "I think he's done an amazing thing," the cinematographer declares. "The hype and the fan boys still drive me crazy, but he has put a rocket up the ass of the equipment manufacturing establishment, and I'm glad he has."
.
|