Victor Nhat Nguyen
Well-known member
Wow no questions? allright I'll start. What's your lighting scheme for the terrierist sketch. Seems like large side soft light?
Key & Peele - Behind the Scenes with DP Charles Papert
- Thread starter CharlesPapert
- Start date
hscully
Veteran
Yeah, not sure how I missed this thread. That Les Mis spoof is amazing. I was so caught in how great it looked that it took me a while before I started getting the joke. Wow. I would love to know what those big soft sources are in there? They stayed so consistent through the blocking and camera moves. I thought the set was lit beautifully.
"You all dont want any of this Ozzamatazz"... great! I loved the West. You're able to achieve so many disparate looks. How'd you get those flares? Is that a True Streak Schneider filter? Do you prefer to do filtering in post or in camera?
Same question for the Terrierist Interogation as the Les Mis scene, what are the big soft sources? I also thought the set was lit beautifully, what was behind that fan and also how did you get that great split ray in the background?
This is really funny stuff and you guys do such a fantastic job with the lighting and production design.
"You all dont want any of this Ozzamatazz"... great! I loved the West. You're able to achieve so many disparate looks. How'd you get those flares? Is that a True Streak Schneider filter? Do you prefer to do filtering in post or in camera?
Same question for the Terrierist Interogation as the Les Mis scene, what are the big soft sources? I also thought the set was lit beautifully, what was behind that fan and also how did you get that great split ray in the background?
This is really funny stuff and you guys do such a fantastic job with the lighting and production design.
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CharlesPapert
Director of Photography
The sketch was based on an interrogation scene that appears early on in Zero Dark Thirty and I used the lighting design of that as a jumping off point. That set featured a window perpendicular to the actors but unfortunately our location did not, so I had to create the effect of it for the coverage angles. I used a Mactech 360 LED unit (comparable to an Image 80) as the window key, augmented with a Joker 800 into a floor bounce from the same direction which wrapped underneath the actor's faces. Departing from the look of the movie, the director requested shafts of light in the background which we made with an M18 on the master angle (Hscully's split ray, shaped by existing holes from pipes entering the wall) and a JoLeko 800 on the terriorists side. I always wrestle with the tendency of units that replicate sunlight to make non-parallel beams since they are mere feet away as opposed to, you know, 92 million miles (another typical example is pushing them through venetian blinds, where the angle of the slats will splay out from top to bottom), but obviously it's not something that the average viewer will ever notice.
One curveball that I was thrown was that we had only talked about shooting the two sides of coverage with no 50-50 (side angle) or big wide master, since we didn't have that practical window. However, at a certain point during the shoot the director asked if I could give him that angle anyway. I had noticed a big industrial fan that the art department had brought in that we fortunately hadn't already established, and I set it up on apple boxes a couple of feet from the wall, put diffusion on the back and pushed light into it from behind (maybe another Joker)--suddenly we had a believable window source that wasn't just a big blown out square
50). Also I remember now that there was a little jog in the room just beyond that which featured a lot of great pipes strung together, so I had the guys take a Kino back there and rake it back along the pipes to add some more background texture (visible to the left of the fan at 1:32). Considering that this was all a last minute, unplanned set of choices, it's actually one of my favorite shots in the piece!Once the actors move to the wooden box, I added some more units making the hot splashes on the back wall and cross back keys for the actors. When the female character enters, she's sidelit from outside by an M18 through diffusion and the JoLeko filling the downside just enough to read her face. Outside of that I used little to no fill in this piece, opting to keep it contrasty and true to the source material.
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CharlesPapert
Director of Photography
Thanks! It was an epic night for us, it came at the end of our first week of shooting this season and I will admit that it was a relief when we wrapped that night!
We shot "Les Mis" on the Universal backlot, it was a relatively minor build for our amazing art department as a lot of it was already in place (they added some signs, small set pieces and wall sconces). Originally this sketch was planned to be shot for day as that seemed simpler, but my key grip reported that half of the facades were literally that and they wouldn't be able to tie silks to the top, so I wouldn't be able to maintain consistent light throughout the hours needed to shoot the sketch. I suggested then that we move it to night. That choice, born out of practicality, resulted in what I think is a much more effective version of the sketch (it's hard to now imagine the opening playing as well in a soft diffused daylight look!)
This did present the challenge of what to use for the primary lighting source. From studying a comparable scene in the movie I could see that a soft cyan top source was in effect, and after a lot of discussion of options that ranged from an HMI balloon (too expensive) to a 20x20 Ultrabounce on a Condor with units on the ground firing up into it (a little clunky), we landed on the 20 by on the Condor with five 2K blondes rigged above it. The blondes were gelled with Lee 241. It took the guys a few hours to build and position the rig, and as the sun went down it slowly moved into place and went up in the air. I was admittedly nervous at our gamble (did we use enough heads, would it provide enough stop, etc) but once it landed I could see that it was doing exactly what I wanted and the level was perfect.
I augmented with Barger Baglights positioned up on a staircase that helped get light in the eyes, and a few units hidden around the set. The sconces were straight incandescent and thus they photographed quite warm against the blue/green key. When I needed to augment them, such as the backlght on the girl when she first appears, I used various incandescent fresnels and small Chimeras with 1/4 CTO. To continue the toplight down the street where the soldiers march in, we added a Gem ball gelled with the 241.
In a perfect world the art department would have been able to scenic the walls and street to make them darker and dirtier, but budgetary constraints prevented. I ended up having to do a fair amount of windowing in color correction to achieve this, and we were pretty successful although I still would have loved to see the cobblestones disappear more. Of course with the top light, there was no way to knock them down on set.
Camerwise we were mostly Steadicam with some handheld and stayed on Master Primes, especially the 18mm, to duplicate the shallow look of the film (I believe I shot around T1.8 for the wide stuff and up to 2.8 for the longer lens).
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CharlesPapert
Director of Photography
That was an Optefex Blue Streak Filter, I believe the #2. For the recording studio I positioned a series of par cans of different sizes and intensity around the room pointing back at the cameras, and also pulled a "Star Trek", i.e. raked a Xenon flashlight back into the lens, raising and lowering it during the shot so the flare would sweep up and down. We wanted to change things up for the second half (with the girls on the bikes) which was a different location, and I suggested worklights which would go along with the industrial feel of the space. I left the daylight as is (an M40 on scaffold pushed through the window) to make a nice color contrast against the warm worklights.
I do a combination of filtering on the lens and in camera, depending on the desired effect. We've done post flares before on the show, this was our first time using the filter and while I've been a little mixed on the results with those filters in the past (they never really duplicate the true look of classic anamorphic lens flare), they were great for this video. I sometimes use Classic Softs here and there for diffusion and highlight glows but a lot of the time I prefer to experiment with the look in post and dial it in more precisely than we have time to on set. It also helps avoid issues like flaring and highlight reflection with stacked filters etc.
hscully
Veteran
The floor bounces work so well with that MacTech 360. I couldn't figure out how you were getting all that wrap and still keeping those gorgeous shadows. The bounce! Nice. LOVE the fan! Great call. It makes that 2 shot. I don't know if it worked as the back light on the terrierist but when you see it it pulls that in too. I think the light beams look fantastic in that shot as a part of the composition of that shot. It really works. I can't tell you how helpful it is to get this setup from you. Thanks, Charles.
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hscully
Veteran
The streaks look great with the work lights and the Star Trek gag. I don't have a streak filter but I've seen them. It looks great horizontally. They seem a little taller than anamorphic ones. Really gorgeous. I think about grabbing a ProMist and an ultra contrast for camera. I don't usually have the budget for the specialty ones so I hope to do that stuff in post.
That's a great picture of the set. I can see the edge of that top light. The cyan from that huge light gets picked up slightly in the whites. It looks fantastic. You get that with the skin tones holding so well. Offah! So you used windowing in post to knock down some spill... oh, Man, this is a clinic.
Frankly, I like your stedi better than some of the moves in the original
That's a great picture of the set. I can see the edge of that top light. The cyan from that huge light gets picked up slightly in the whites. It looks fantastic. You get that with the skin tones holding so well. Offah! So you used windowing in post to knock down some spill... oh, Man, this is a clinic.
Frankly, I like your stedi better than some of the moves in the original
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CharlesPapert
Director of Photography
Prep is really compressed on Key & Peele. Our typical schedule is a week of prep followed by two weeks of shooting, rinse and repeat. We average a bit better than 2 sketches a day, so a typical prep period will cover 20-25 sketches. We scout on Monday, have production meeting on Tuesday then have the rest of the week to finish prep. Most of my heavy lifting comes on the scout day, where we drive all over the city and are hustled in and out of locations with very little time in each.
There are days when we shoot up to three sketches and a very few when we will shoot only one, Les Mis being in the latter category. That one was about 2.5 hours of setup and 7 hours of shooting--actually quite an efficient day.
It is, to be honest, quite a whirlwind for all involved. Revolving through constantly changing genres and looks plus company moves nearly every day is a challenge, but it's also what makes the show great and certainly never boring!
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CharlesPapert
Director of Photography
Someone asked me yesterday about the crane shot at the end of "Les Mis". That was actually a ramp we built for our Steadicam operator which he simply backed up (I say simply, but it's a testimony to his skill that it looks like a crane shot)! And the barricade is a typical example of the kind of cheats we need to do for budget; whereas the one in the movie was 100 ft wide and 20 ft tall, ours was a humble 6' x 2'...! We did a few versions of the pullback without it, then it was added halfway up the ramp and we repeated the end of the pullback. Nearly every inch of it is in the final shot. I love that stuff.
GaryNattrass
Veteran
Superb and always a pleasure to see your work Charles, thank you for sharing this with us as it gives a true insight into the hard work that goes into creating our on screen entertainment!
CharlesPapert
Director of Photography
One from a recent episode:
While this was obviously a parody of "The Usual Suspects", we didn't make an attempt to copy the look of that scene. For one thing, the location we were using had a different layout. The room was quite small and knowing that we were going to shoot towards the door for entrances and exits, we decided to keep things simple and not add extra shooting directions so we kept the windows at our back.
In a scenario like this I will usually try to key from the opposite side of camera, but in this instance that would have led me to a lighting scheme that would be motivated by overhead office lighting, then blacking out the windows to create contrast on the camera side. I felt this would be a little bland so I went for the more risky lighting-through-the-windows scenario. The windows themselves traversed the width of the room but they had a metal awning that ran across the top half, limiting placement and height of the units outside. I used an M40 and M18 for Jordan's side (the Kevin Spacey character), crossed, with one creating the pattern on the back wall and the other sidelighting Jordan. The venetian blinds were recreated via papertape gobo on an 18x24 frame just inside the window, and individual pieces of paper tape on the window helped knock out hotspots on the background. A 1x1 lightpanel on the floor pushed a little extra light onto the dark filing cabinets in the corner, and provided a touch of fill for Jordan's down side.
On Keegan's side, towards the desk, the actual venetian blinds worked fine, but you can see that the low placement of the head created upwards-orientated shadows from the blinds--a little unrealistic in real life, but could happen if the sun was reflecting off a car outside the window, etc. To create more contrast, I added a Joker HMI in the corner to edge Keegan. A few bounces and direct pushes outside in the hallway helped continue the sunny day vibe (it was actually rather murky that day).
We shot on Master Primes at T1.8 to deliver a more cinematic feel and to isolate the characters from the walls, so that you wouldn't read the posters before they became relevant.
Some nicely designed and timed dolly moves in this one, via our most excellent director Peter Atencio. The opening move that pivots around Jordan was not easy to get right--dolly and actor have to exactly in sync to keep the foreground head in the right place in the frame. Took us a few tries.
While this was obviously a parody of "The Usual Suspects", we didn't make an attempt to copy the look of that scene. For one thing, the location we were using had a different layout. The room was quite small and knowing that we were going to shoot towards the door for entrances and exits, we decided to keep things simple and not add extra shooting directions so we kept the windows at our back.
In a scenario like this I will usually try to key from the opposite side of camera, but in this instance that would have led me to a lighting scheme that would be motivated by overhead office lighting, then blacking out the windows to create contrast on the camera side. I felt this would be a little bland so I went for the more risky lighting-through-the-windows scenario. The windows themselves traversed the width of the room but they had a metal awning that ran across the top half, limiting placement and height of the units outside. I used an M40 and M18 for Jordan's side (the Kevin Spacey character), crossed, with one creating the pattern on the back wall and the other sidelighting Jordan. The venetian blinds were recreated via papertape gobo on an 18x24 frame just inside the window, and individual pieces of paper tape on the window helped knock out hotspots on the background. A 1x1 lightpanel on the floor pushed a little extra light onto the dark filing cabinets in the corner, and provided a touch of fill for Jordan's down side.
On Keegan's side, towards the desk, the actual venetian blinds worked fine, but you can see that the low placement of the head created upwards-orientated shadows from the blinds--a little unrealistic in real life, but could happen if the sun was reflecting off a car outside the window, etc. To create more contrast, I added a Joker HMI in the corner to edge Keegan. A few bounces and direct pushes outside in the hallway helped continue the sunny day vibe (it was actually rather murky that day).
We shot on Master Primes at T1.8 to deliver a more cinematic feel and to isolate the characters from the walls, so that you wouldn't read the posters before they became relevant.
Some nicely designed and timed dolly moves in this one, via our most excellent director Peter Atencio. The opening move that pivots around Jordan was not easy to get right--dolly and actor have to exactly in sync to keep the foreground head in the right place in the frame. Took us a few tries.
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FrameFarmMedia
Veteran
Gotta say not only is Key and Peele one of the funnest sketch shows I've seen but the bonus of coming on here and learning after laughing is priceless.
Thanks Charles for taking the time to break it down for us.
Thanks Charles for taking the time to break it down for us.
CharlesPapert
Director of Photography
Happily it's been a busy month and I haven't gotten around to posting about recently aired sketches. Here's a couple:
Lando's Fan was one I was excited about from when I first read the script; what could be more fun than recreating something from the Star Wars universe? I was always a fan of "Empire Strikes Back", I think it was the best-looking of the series. I'd shot a few projects on this particular spaceship set, originally built for "Power Rangers" and moved to Laurel Canyon Stages in Arleta. Director Peter Atencio and I had decided on a color palette seen in the carbon freeze room (where Han Solo was turned into a wall ornament), which was primarily deep blue against orange. While we had no freezing chamber under the floor, I thought we could suggest the idea with an orange upglow similar to that in the movie. I was able to get a rigging crew approved which really saved us (very unusual on our show--possibly the first time in three seasons). The guys set a series of two 4x4 Kino tubes gelled orange laid underneath the plastic grid milk-crate floor panels to create the upglow, plus they focused the toplights above the set which were mostly 2K fresnels. Some of these played through similar grid panels which delivered a nice shadow pattern against the top of the walls.
On the day we added sidelights through openings in the walls and refined the color scheme. The piece opens in what is normally the bridge or control room which our art department had dressed with lots of interesting objects including the multiple fans. One thing that was not set ahead of time was what imagery was going to be comped outside the windows, so we had to take a guess that it would be "space-like" and thus I used blue backlights pushing through the windows. Sadly, the background element turned out to be primarily orange, so there is a bit of visual disconnect here! Can't win 'em all.
We taped a tungsten Literibbon card under the mattebox of the camera (mounted on Steadicam for this scene) with matching orange gel, which gave a consistent base level during the walk-and-talk portions. The Literibbon gives a lot of punch, is fully dimmable and weighs virtually nothing, so it's great for this application.
As the characters approach the elevator, I introduced a bit of white light to suggest that we were heading into a different section of the ship. Two Literibbons mounted into channels were taped on either side of the door to illuminate inside the elevator. Our effects department had rigged up the gag light seen in the back wall of the elevator with a series of Tweenies stacked on top of each other fed into a smaller dimmer panel set to a chase pattern. Very old school but it worked!
We were running late so I had to make a very quick turnaround on the hallway leading up to the elevator for the final part of the scene, which is suppose to be a completely different floor. The original idea was to shoot the initial part of the scene facing the opposite direction with the elevator at our backs, so as to help disguise the re-used hallway. We nixed that for time and I just shuffled levels around a bit and replaced the orange gels on the 2K's pushing through the side wall to blue gels.
As far as I'm concerned, the best part of the sketch is where Jordan waves his hand in front of the elevator to keep it from closing, much to Keegan/Lando's exasperation...
"Tackle and Grapple" was and is an absolute guilty pleasure for me. I don't know why I find it so satisfying to shoot "badly" on purpose, but it amuses me to no end. We used the JVC KY-1900 tube camera on this that I talked about in East/West Bowl Rap above and just banged in a couple of redheads with no diffusion straight at the set. If you look closely you'll see one of the light stands on the edge of frame, which I kept literally pushing INTO the shot. The crappier, the better. The tube cameras made another appearance on the Funk Music Show sketch (
) with four point star filters added (the rental house had to go out and buy them for us--not so popular these days, I guess). Having learned that the JVC's require a simply staggering amount of light--a rough test showed something like EI 40!!--I had to really pull out the guns for the studio lighting. I keyed the guys with an M18 and a 4K through full CTO and 4x4 frames of 250, which was a lot of front light to eye but still just gave us around a T2.8 (natively on the Alexa, it would have been over T11, wow). The tungsten 2K's we rigged as backlights turned out to be barely enough at that exposure level. In retrospect, I should have gone with 5K's which is more typical of the instruments used back in the pre-solid state days. TV studios were once very bright places!
As seen in the pic attached, we rigged out the 1900's to all but absurd levels to give the operators a chance: outboard monitor, Microforce zoom controls (we couldn't source old-school zoom controls that could interface with the original lenses), AC's pulling focus remotely via Preston FIZ and probably a couple of other things I can't remember. We recorded into Nnovia DV recorders.
Above: B camera operator Nick Franco manning the "embellished" KY1900
Lando's Fan was one I was excited about from when I first read the script; what could be more fun than recreating something from the Star Wars universe? I was always a fan of "Empire Strikes Back", I think it was the best-looking of the series. I'd shot a few projects on this particular spaceship set, originally built for "Power Rangers" and moved to Laurel Canyon Stages in Arleta. Director Peter Atencio and I had decided on a color palette seen in the carbon freeze room (where Han Solo was turned into a wall ornament), which was primarily deep blue against orange. While we had no freezing chamber under the floor, I thought we could suggest the idea with an orange upglow similar to that in the movie. I was able to get a rigging crew approved which really saved us (very unusual on our show--possibly the first time in three seasons). The guys set a series of two 4x4 Kino tubes gelled orange laid underneath the plastic grid milk-crate floor panels to create the upglow, plus they focused the toplights above the set which were mostly 2K fresnels. Some of these played through similar grid panels which delivered a nice shadow pattern against the top of the walls.
On the day we added sidelights through openings in the walls and refined the color scheme. The piece opens in what is normally the bridge or control room which our art department had dressed with lots of interesting objects including the multiple fans. One thing that was not set ahead of time was what imagery was going to be comped outside the windows, so we had to take a guess that it would be "space-like" and thus I used blue backlights pushing through the windows. Sadly, the background element turned out to be primarily orange, so there is a bit of visual disconnect here! Can't win 'em all.
We taped a tungsten Literibbon card under the mattebox of the camera (mounted on Steadicam for this scene) with matching orange gel, which gave a consistent base level during the walk-and-talk portions. The Literibbon gives a lot of punch, is fully dimmable and weighs virtually nothing, so it's great for this application.
As the characters approach the elevator, I introduced a bit of white light to suggest that we were heading into a different section of the ship. Two Literibbons mounted into channels were taped on either side of the door to illuminate inside the elevator. Our effects department had rigged up the gag light seen in the back wall of the elevator with a series of Tweenies stacked on top of each other fed into a smaller dimmer panel set to a chase pattern. Very old school but it worked!
We were running late so I had to make a very quick turnaround on the hallway leading up to the elevator for the final part of the scene, which is suppose to be a completely different floor. The original idea was to shoot the initial part of the scene facing the opposite direction with the elevator at our backs, so as to help disguise the re-used hallway. We nixed that for time and I just shuffled levels around a bit and replaced the orange gels on the 2K's pushing through the side wall to blue gels.
As far as I'm concerned, the best part of the sketch is where Jordan waves his hand in front of the elevator to keep it from closing, much to Keegan/Lando's exasperation...
"Tackle and Grapple" was and is an absolute guilty pleasure for me. I don't know why I find it so satisfying to shoot "badly" on purpose, but it amuses me to no end. We used the JVC KY-1900 tube camera on this that I talked about in East/West Bowl Rap above and just banged in a couple of redheads with no diffusion straight at the set. If you look closely you'll see one of the light stands on the edge of frame, which I kept literally pushing INTO the shot. The crappier, the better. The tube cameras made another appearance on the Funk Music Show sketch (
As seen in the pic attached, we rigged out the 1900's to all but absurd levels to give the operators a chance: outboard monitor, Microforce zoom controls (we couldn't source old-school zoom controls that could interface with the original lenses), AC's pulling focus remotely via Preston FIZ and probably a couple of other things I can't remember. We recorded into Nnovia DV recorders.
Above: B camera operator Nick Franco manning the "embellished" KY1900
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CharlesPapert
Director of Photography
I just found the project I noted above that I shot on the same spaceship set as the Lando sketch, kind of a fun comparison:
https://vimeo.com/21780728
https://vimeo.com/21780728
