Exploring New Horizons

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Ron Garcia, ASC is exploring new options for creating nuanced images that are artfully weaved into the stories told each week on the CBS television series Numb3rs. After studying fine arts at the Los Angeles Art Center College of Design, Garcia launched his career at NASA when Apollo was sending extraordinary images to Earth during its journey into outer space.
“The engineers were doing amazing things with circuit board design,” he recalls, “but around 1967 I decided to explore the possibilities of becoming a filmmaker.”
Garcia has subsequently compiled some 60 cinematography credits. The ASC has nominated him four times for Outstanding Achievement Awards and he’s earned two Emmy nominations for his work on telefilms and episodic series. Garcia also has credits as an editor, producer, director, art director, writer and a sound technician.
His unique background and innate curiosity have frequently led him to investigate possibilities for leveraging new technologies as creative tools.
“Cinematography is a visual language,” Garcia comments. “Instead of choosing the right words to tell our stories, we use colors, tones, light and darkness, framing and camera movement to create a sense of time and place and amplify emotions.”
When the KODAK VISION2 HD System was introduced earlier this year, Garcia was the first to embrace the possibilities for using it as a tool. The hybrid system couples a scan-only film with a Kodak HD digital processor. That combination enables cinematographers to use the same negative to emulate colors, tones and other imaging characteristics of current and discontinued emulsions.
The standard scan-only film designed for the system is in Super 16 format. Garcia asked Kodak to provide it in three-perf 35 mm format instead. That format trims approximately 25 percent of 35 mm negative and lab costs.
Numb3rs is a crime drama that revolves around the relationships linking two brothers and their father with various interesting characters who enter their lives. Don Eppes, played by Robb Morrow, is an FBI agent. His brother Charlie, portrayed by David Krumholtz, is an eccentric mathematician, who uses his extraordinary ability to help his brother solve crimes. Judd Hirsch plays their father Alan.
Garcia believes that the HD film system can provide enormous flexibility for creating artful stories within the limits of television budgets and production schedules.
“Today’s films provide an amazing range of latitude,” he says. “Even if part of a frame is four or five stops overexposed, we can still see details the way our eyes do even in the brightest part of the frame. There is a broad choice of emulsions with different imaging characteristics, including how tones and colors are rendered on the negative. This system gives us the flexibility of using one film in every circumstance.”
The dailies timer at The Post Group uses Garcia’s camera report as a guideline for pushing buttons on the Kodak processor box, which converts the data to the red, green, blue centrimetric curves of the stock(s) that he has chosen to emulate with various options. The HD film can be rated for an exposure index of either 320 or 500. Garcia also indicates whether he wants to have an 85 color correction filter on the lens.
Other options include under- or overexposing the emulsion by one or two stops and a highlight enhancer. Garcia cites how he used the highlight enhancer on a shot where the reflection of bright sunlight was glaring on windows of a downtown building. He told the timer to use the system to reduce glare and reveal details in the highlights.
Garcia uses Final Cut Pro and Photoshop to color correct still frames from dailies provided by The Post Group. He has the flexibility of isolating elements of frames to saturate or desaturate colors, taking the contrast up or down, etc.
Garcia believes this is just the beginning of a journey for exploring new horizons.