While director of photography Crescenzo G.P. Notarile is shooting NBC’s new hour-long drama Hawaii on location in Oahu, Hawaii, Encore Hollywood colorist Pankaj Bajpai is an ocean away color-correcting. "It’s the most angst a DP has," says Notarile of not being present in the telecine suite. "You want to be there. You have a cellular phone on your waist at all times."
The phone must have worked (as well as other preventive measures Notarile put in place), because test audiences raved about the look of the pilot, prompting the network to ask Notarile to film the rest of the season. "DPs often won’t come back for the series," says Notarile, who shot the pilot for Fox’s Skin last year. "The pilot is a much bigger production because the network is trying to sell the show. You can go in full guns blazin’. When you do a series, it’s not so much about the look. It’s about the schedule and getting the days done. It’s easy to burn out." So friends were surprised when Notarile accepted the series. "They said I would have my heart broken every day. But I wanted to roll up my sleeves and get my tentacles out. It takes a director of photography with experience to know what battles to fight for."
Battle one came in preproduction when Notarile told the networks how he wanted to process his film stock. "When I heard the word Hawaii, the first thing that came to mind was shooting‘reversal for reversal,’ a method that enhances color structure in a more hyper-real fashion and gives the result a Kodachrome feel. I’ve never seen a TV show shot that way and it would’ve given the show a tremendous signature look."
Finding a laboratory to process reversal stock turned out to be a problem. Laboratories will cross-process reversal film stock in a negative bath, which enhances contrast and grain structure and alters color hues in what Notarile describes as a "surreal/abnormal fashion," but Notarile wanted to process the stock using reversal chemicals. He soon discovered that very few laboratories would do the process due to limited demand and profitability. Ultimately, for budget reasons, the network rejected his request.
"I was disappointed," Notarile admits, "but that’s when I started having major conversations with Pankaj at Encore. If I couldn’t do it originally on the film negative, then I would achieve the look through telecine."
Notarile first tested Kodak’s 5245 and 5246 stocks, both of which he found to be "wonderful daylight-balanced stocks," yet he and Bajpai eventually decided on the 5274. "The‘74 stock gave us much more latitude to play with our color palette in telecine."
In an effort to make the telecine more about "finessing the minutia rather than broad strokes" that he wasn’t present to oversee, Notarile physically supplied Bajpai ahead of time with a looseleaf book full of tear sheets, the same book he used to initially discuss the show with the director. "I take and supply photographs, sheets from fashion magazines, and then I write on these tear sheets what I like, what I don’t like, what I consider to be warm, what is cool. I also include composition, filtration, camera angles. If I say,‘Make the scene warm,’ there are so many directions you can go— orange, yellow, magenta. By looking at tear sheets, you get on the same language very quickly."
After discussing the tear sheets with Bajpai, Notarile shot tests. Encore processed the tests and the two were able to sit side by side in telecine and explore different looks and ranges. All this preproduction work helped keep them on the same page during production.
The show is a two-camera shoot, with both the A & B cameras Panavision Platinums. However, Notarile often finds himself pulling out a third camera, a high-speed/Varispeed Pan-Arri 435, for action and stunts. He’s shooting Super 35 and composing for a 1.77:1 aspect ratio. "The water, the mountains, the lushness of Hawaii - it’s very apropos to shoot 16x9 for high-def to incorporate the landscape within the frame," he explains.
During the dailies process, archiving for HD can become frustrating, Notarile points out. "You really can’t get your dailies the way you had originally expressed because then you’ll be locked in," he says. "That daily is now your master - a one-light, uncolor-corrected daily, very flat, with little color and contrast. This gives Pankaj and myself more latitude for the online color-correction, but you now have all these suits asking,‘Will it look like that? Is it going to be that flat? How come there’s no color there?’"
Fortunately, Encore provides Notarile with two sets of dailies on DVD. One is the master, and one is color-corrected so that he can show everyone exactly how it’s going to look. "When they see that we’re on track, then everyone starts to relax," he says. "They know that the machine is running."
So does Notarile feel his heart is in stable condition committing to a series? He’ll choose his battles along with his moments. "I could be like a kid in a candy store and make the colors very lush in every scene, but it won’t work long term," he reasons. "I have to find ways to keep it normal and real at times, so when I do have scenes that I want to enhance, the audience won’t be numb. Just as a writer writes, a cinematographer knows how to write the story with heightened color, or color reality. If you’re constantly making Hawaii very lush and very beautiful, then your senses might get a little mundane."
Hawaii Credits (Pilot)
Produced by NBC Studios
Creator: Jeff Eastin
Executive producer: Jeff Eastin
Co-executive producers: Jeff Reiner, Reed Steiner and Chris Black
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