Key & Peele - Behind the Scenes with DP Charles Papert

I just had one of those yesterday in an old Victorian-era house with very tall windows covered with vintage sheers, and I wasn't able to rig anything above them due to location restrictions. I pushed an M18 from outside, high and from one side aimed at the top of the window. We papered the top 12" of the window with opal, which picked up the M18 and turned it into a glow, moved the curtain rod so that it started just below the opal and then bottomed the M18 off the sheers. To camera, the window read at appropriate exposure, with all of the hot stuff up above frame. This gave a nice back edge I was looking for.

MattRobertson said:
Could be a dumb question, but how do you guys go about location scouting? As a student filmmaker its crazy trying to get anything shot here in LA, but just curious how that works on a bigger scale when its a company like Comedy Central with permits and everything.
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Our location manager's job is exceptionally difficult on this show because not only do we shoot everything on location, we need to be able to shoot at least two sketches a day at the same location with minimal distance between them. It's a lot to coordinate. While we obviously have a handsome budget compared to student films, it's pretty humble compared to network television, so like all of the departments on the show she has to be quite creative and resourceful to pull this off.

Matt, if you have more specific questions I can pass them along to her and copy her response here.
 
I was just on a set with M18s. Man, they pack a punch! Did you diffuse the M18 before hitting that opal. I like opal because it still will cast a shadow but provide more of a glow.
 
No intermediate diffusion on the M18 that time. I needed the heat since the area of opal being lit was relatively small, and I also needed a hard cut.

I love the power of the M series HMI's, yes. And once you start turning the knob towards spot, the intensity picks up much faster than the change to the beam pattern. We carry three M18's, two M40's and two M90's which are total beasts!
 
Charles, any knowledge of the Joker 1600?

I have been pondering investing in an M18, but the last 2 times we rented we had issues powering them, and had to down lamp which kind of defeated the purpose.
 
Hi David:

I have heard good things about the 1600 for this type of application, particularly because they can be powered off house power. The M18's can potentially do the same but it is a crap shoot as you indicated. Most household outlets are rated to 15 amps regardless of an 20 amp breaker behind them. The reflectors on the M18's allow for fantastic light output, but the Jokers are not too shabby. I think they are a clear winner over the older 1.2 pars in that regard. If I was building a run and gun/doc package that would rely on house power, I'd probably check out the 1600 for sure. The main complaint I've had with the Jokers over the years is that they aren't as solidly built as the Arri's, which isn't to say that they are flimsy, just relatively standing up to the day in, day out abuse of the sets I work on. We use the Joker 400 and 800's almost exclusively in JoLeko configurations.
 

This one was a pretty simple setup, but often simple is best. A Dedo downlight with light CTB and plus green (probably 1/4 of each) onto the bed which made a creepy uplight bounce on the "kid", plus the tube in the headboard gelled to match. On the doctor's side, a 4x4 flo from the side and a 4x2 backlight on a menace arm (so it could be armed up for the low angle shots). That's pretty much it, except for whatever I did to the ward outside the window which is barely glimpsed. We used a cooled-off LUT for the overall look. Camera-wise, we brought in the venerable Cartoni dutch head which I hadn't used in years (enjoyed it's heyday in the 90's when everything went dutch and they have been moldering on rental house shelves since).

This season I've been making a concerted effort to strip down when appropriate, use fewer units and pare it down as so many of my favorite DP's do. In this instance the idea was to balance the look between naturalism (what a patient room might look like in a dimly-lit mode) yet still allowing for a creepy look on the patient.
 
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Damn, that was 20 mins shot. Videos are fantastic. I dare anyone to read this thread and not watch all the videos.
 
I think I said it before but I'll say it again: thanks a lot for everything you're sharing here. You rock.
 
Oh my goodness. That Make-A-Wish one terrifies me and makes me laugh at the same time! I love the simple lighting, especially the green tint.
 
Sometimes, a sketch calls for a look that is not about making pretty pictures. This one emulates the look of a direct-to-video cut-rate action flick from the late 80's/early 90's and it could not have been more fun to make. We rented SDX900's which aren't period appropriate, but dated enough to feel like another time. They also afforded us the working speed of using B4 zooms so we could avoid lens changes, which helped us make this tough day (we shot this all before lunch and moved on to a different sketch in the afternoon). What lighting I did do was mostly "bad", adding back edges where there shouldn't have been any. Plenty of bad zooms in this one, and they all make me laugh. I love this sketch.

 
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David W. Jones said:
Nice!

I have always enjoyed how nice the hair and makeup come out on this show with how quickly you have to turn them.
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That's why they keep getting nominated for Emmys!! They do an amazing job, as do wardrobe and art department. We have a helluva team.

One of my challenges though is that we rarely rehearse at the beginning of a sketch since the boys are "in the works", which sometimes means a re-light/re-block of one sort or another when they arrive on set. Not seeing the hair in advance can also be a conundrum. Fortunately I have much of my lighting on a dimmer system so making allowances for any and all kinds of hairdo surprises is usually pretty easy to accommodate.
 
Simple lil' thing today:


We shoot mostly on location but sometimes we land at stages that have pre-built sets, in this case a suite of hospital rooms. This was adjacent to where we shot the creepy Make-a-Wish sketch above. The room didn't have a window in it so we asked to have one cut into the side wall, as the director requested a daylit vibe. I was slightly at odds with this--the tone of the piece lent itself more to a low-key, somber look in my mind, but I welcomed the challenge.

A 2K blonde outside the window glowed the back of the blinds and sent a hot pattern across the back wall. I hung a 10ft piece of bleached muslin above the window, and set two Lekos on it from the far side of the bed. This created the soft ambient light in the room, backlighting Jordan and frontlighting Rashida. When we came around for Jordan's coverage, I put a bounce card against the wall to pick up the direct light from the 2K. And that's about it!

We used Master Primes at around T1.8 to keep things shallow, and I added a Classic Soft 1/2 to 1 depending on the shot.

You can see the setup in this clip, at 1:18.
 
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Love it!

It's quite interesting how you seem to film both series (the main sketches and the Van and Mike sketches) at the same time. How does that work; is it during breaks between setups (breaks, hah), or do you plan it precisely into the schedule? I'm talking about the cell-phone footage, of course.
 
The digital division of Comedy Central handles the Vandaveon and Mike material. Literally the only time I have seen them shoot those was this particular clip, because it was done on set (the others were all further behind the scenes where we weren't shooting). We took a 90 second break from filming, they did one take and that was that.
 

Good ol' Aerobics Meltdown.

In previous seasons we had shot period video on old 3-tube cameras that required a ton of light. Once I saw the pre-production renderings of this stage, I prepped my gaffer that we would be bringing in a bunch of big guns to light the space, something like 8-10 10K's. When we tech-scouted the stage we were to use, I found to my dismay that there was no pipe grid in place, just bare i-beams. I come up against this on a semi-regular basis--it's a little baffling to me why a stage with a hard cyc wouldn't have a resident grid, which is a relatively minor cost to install, but sadly there's plenty of them out there. In many cases with Key & Peele, we find a way to make it work with our lighting package and with minimal additional manpower, but in this instance we had to request a rigging day for both grip and electric, which would trigger an extra day stage rental plus the cost of the additional electric package. Our wonderful line producer who works hard to get us what we need had to draw the line at this one--no rigging day and smaller lighting package. Back to the drawing board.

The fallback I suggested was SD chip cameras, which wouldn't have the lovely tube artifacts but at least had more modern sensitivity, so we could minimize the lighting package significantly. We went down to three 5K's for backlight and two for front light. I still had to work out rigging; my amazing key grip sussed out a way to hang a couple of pipes for the backlights and we would use the two in-house scissor lifts for key lights. This represented a certain compromise, since the behind-the-scenes footage required the cameras to fall back from the stage considerably so we would be fighting one of the lifts the whole time, but the director and I worked out a scheme to shoot around it. On the day, once we had the lifts in position, we noticed a perfectly placed rigging point that we had missed on the tech scout and were able to hang one of the lights there, which solved all of our issues. Phew!

Once we got into the dramatic closeups I started re-shaping the levels on the guys to give a little counter to an otherwise appropriately flat look. For the background the art department used RGB light ribbon to simulate neon on the set and we placed a series of Colorblasts just behind it to light the cyc. We had dimmer control of all units and color control of the RGB units as well so we could dial in the desired fabulous 80's hues.

The clip opens with footage from the SD cameras (SDX900's feeding in KiPros); said footage had been recorded out to VHS in post two times over to give it the appropriate multi-generation look. Watch closely as the frame slowly morphs from 4:3 to 2.39, this was something the director came up and I think it's very clever. After the piece goes widescreen the SD footage becomes more pristine, without the VHS degradation, but still suggests that it was shot significantly in the past.

The studio cameras seen in the clip are from a prop house, they were once functional but now have surveillance cameras built into the studio lens housings that feed the viewfinder (which is now an LCD screen to avoid 24 frame issues). Clever design.
 
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The director wanted to suggest the pencil-stabbing scene from "Casino". I was excited to emulate the Bob Richardson "ring of fire" hair light look as well as cop some of the classic Scorcese camera moves.

I noticed from analyzing the original that the glowing backlights are perfectly centered for every shot, which requires a lot more tweaking than we had time for on the day. The restaurant we used didn't allow for much ceiling rigging, I was able to run one pipe behind the seated mobster for his backlight and then used two menace arms for the other side of coverage. I can't quite remember which units we used for backlights but I suspect they were Arrilite 750's for punch, although they could have been 650 fresnels. A couple of small chimeras on premie stands for side fill. In the background we changed out the globes in the hanging practicals above each table to spots and wrapped the heads to keep the glass shades from glowing, as I found that distracting. A few Dedolights here and there picked out details in the background. A black ProMist 1/2 provided the glowing effect.

We didn't make too much of an effort to duplicate the framing of shots but we thought it would be great to do the aggressive camera moves that is a hallmark of Scorcese's work from that era. The dolly in/zoom in combo on Keegan arriving at the door is my personal favorite. It took a bit to figure out the timing on it--the dolly starts first and the zoom kicks in halfway through--but once we landed on it, it brought a big smile to my face.
 
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Well done! I like the 4:3 aspect ratio. Looks like a cool manual zoom on the hero at the pool. Well thought out.
 
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