Setting In-Camera Looks on Fox’s Reunion

For DP Adam Kane (ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy) and director Jon Amiel (Entrapment, The Man Who Knew Too Little), establishing a distinct look and feel for each time period depicted in the flashback-heavy pilot for Fox’s Reunion was essential. "The audience needed very clearly to be in one era or the other," says Kane. "For the 80s flashbacks, we didn’t want a completely romantic look, but we wanted [the viewer] to feel a romantic heightened reality. We kept it a little extra warm, and the light flattering and beautiful, so that the memories of going back to high school were the most favorable ones."

For flashback close-ups, Schneider Classic Soft filters helped Kane smooth out skin. "I’ve just fallen in love with them," he says. "They diffuse the image in a way that doesn’t make it look out of focus, which is the problem with many diffusion filters. "

For present-day footage, Kane used a slightly desaturated, cooler feel to convey the changes in the group of high-school graduates the story follows. He lit with HMIs and was able to heighten drama by overexposing the highlights by two or three stops or blowing out the highlights in the transfer. "We tried to keep the blacks really solid when we were transferring- not crushing them, but keeping them level."

Kane used a three-camera package on the 13-day, 35mm pilot shoot: a Panavision Platinum, a Panavision Gold 2, and a Panaflex Lightweight for Steadicam work. While he used telecine rather than film stocks to differentiate eras, he had strong preferences in his stocks. He chose Kodak 5218 for interiors and 5274 for interiors with more window light, "particularly if I wanted to balance an interior location with a lot of windows so that you can see the exterior." The’74 cuts nicely with 5248, which was used for day exteriors. Kane is so partial to shooting with the’48, citing its grain structure and rendition of colors and skin tones, that he had the stock shipped to the set of the new movie he’s shooting in China, Shanghai Red, directed by Oscar Costo ( Asia doesn’t manufacture 5248). For daylight exteriors, Kane used an 85B filter, striving to achieve his look in-camera. "It makes life easier to have to not completely redefine the negative in color timing."

Still, he credits colorist Tony Smith of Riot, Santa Monica, with helping him achieve the right contrasts between the two eras. The pair paid special attention to capturing the golden-yellowish hue of the flashbacks. When venturing into the golden-yellow arena, the concern was that the broadcast would appear greenish when beamed to satellite downlinks. "Each downlink is staffed with operators who transmit with different biases in terms of brightness, saturation, and color hue," Kane explains. "We wanted to be sure that we didn’t venture too close to that yellow-green hue and risk the characters’ faces looking unappealing."

For HD dailies, the transfer was deliberately kept flat, allowing Kane and Smith to fully manipulate the look later. "You don’t want to commit to a look that you might have to backtrack from," Kane explains. To experiment with looks, the show took advantage of the VIP (short for video interpositive) system developed by dailies facility Encore Hollywood. Two signals are fed directly from the Spirit Datacine to the Da Vinci. "You’re spitting out two images simultaneously," explains Smith. "One gives you a high-def signal, and the other is DigiBeta."

"This allows us to experiment," says Kane. "For the interrogation scenes, for example, I wanted the highlights really hot because it was this modern environment. We were able to test-drive this during the dailies process [on DigiBeta] and then see if we wanted to take it further or pull back, without affecting the final [HDCAM] version."

Kane scaled back his wish list because of fiscal limitations, but ran into budgetary stumbling blocks anyway. One car crash scene was a particular trial. Kane shot the crash itself as an exterior, but shots showing the inside of the car were reconceived as "a rather elaborate blue-screen stage shoot" in Glendale. "Jon [Amiel] really wanted the hit to be shot on the interior of the car with the car spinning 90 degrees on stage, so you could feel the violence of the experience with the two characters. But because we were shooting and having to protect for 16×9 for the studios, and Jon wanted wide-angle lenses very close to the actors, I realized we needed 30 percent more set, or 30 percent more blue screen."

That unexpected cost became a subject of fevered conversations between Kane and the producers. Kane drew diagrams to illustrate the dilemma. The problem shot involved a 20mm lens, yet Amiel felt that a longer lens would compromise the immediacy of the footage. Kane agreed. "The producers would ask me to cut down the cost, and I would direct them to Jon. Jon would say he wanted the shot, and they’d make their way back to me, saying they didn’t have the money. Ultimately I said,‘I can’t change physics, or what the lens sees. You don’t want to get into rotoscoping. So you might want to talk to Jon again, because I’m not the director! I can’t make those decisions," he recalls with an exasperated laugh. Kane eventually got his blue screen, but he says he undersands the producers’ position.

"Everyone’s working under a budget when you do a pilot- they’re not throwing more money at pilots, that’s for sure. At the same time, it’s got to be a mutual decision between the director and the producers about where the money’s spent."