Key & Peele - Behind the Scenes with DP Charles Papert

Actually I should have qualified what you meant by "key to background ratio". I was referring to key to fill ratio for the extra fill beyond the top light on the principles. I'm sure there are parts of the frame that are 5 stops under and reading as no detail.
 
CharlesPapert said:
Tonight, the new season of "Key & Peele" premieres on Comedy Central, at 10:30/9:30C for a ten-episode run.

For those who may not be familiar with the show, it's a sketch comedy premise with an accent on high production values and a cinematic feel. Our daunting challenge is to achieve this on a basic-cable budget and a schedule of two to three sketches a day; my colleagues in the art, makeup, hair and wardrobe departments hit it out of the park every time, along with our talented and tireless director Peter Atencio. A sampling of last year's sketches can be seen here.

For this season we moved from the F3 to the Alexa, which gave us more exposure headroom and streamlined our workflow--the post department was VERY pleased to receive footage already in ProRes422HQ rather than last year's XDCAM which had to then be transcoded. We also debuted my DIT's super-cart, which featured HDLINK Pro's controlled by Livegrade for on-set LUT building. The LUT's were applied for dailies and editing and we are just now doing the final color correction using the LUT's as reference. Each of the 68 sketches we shot this year have a unique look and it has been very beneficial to have these (or an approximation therof) in place from the moment of shooting.

While my G/E crew was sizable by indie standards (full-time 5+5, with additionals as required), it was still slightly undersize compared to network shows that largely shoot on stage--we shoot 100% on location, sometimes with multiple company moves in a day. Our HMI package had two 6K pars and two M18's plus some Jokers, and we brought in 18K's for a week on the Universal backlot. Tungsten up to 5K with a couple of Ruby 7's and the usual assortment of smaller units, plus lots of PAR cans for daylight hits and accents, Source 4's in both tungsten and JoLeko configurations, Kinos and Parabeams and covered wagons.

Camera-wise, the Alexas were fitted with the 18-80 and 45-250 Alura zooms and the 16-42 and 30-80 Optimo DP's. Very little specialty gear this year, although for one sketch that is supposed to be home video footage from the 80's, I used a period video camera (the type originally used with an over-the-shoulder VHS deck) built into a shoulder configuration with DP4 viewfinder and Nnovia A2D hard drive recorder. That was a lot of fun and the look is amazing--it feels very much like found footage! We got the C300 for one sketch as a third body but never had the chance to shoot anything on it, sadly. We shot the stage wraparounds on five F800's recording to XDCAM disc.

Will be happy to hear your thoughts on the show, good bad or indifferent.
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I love Key & Peele. It is one of the greatest sketch shows ever made. They say to watch pros and how they work in order to get better as a beginner. I watched hours of Key & Peele. Worthless. I learned nothing. I did however watch four hours of the show and laughed like I haven't in years. 20 minutes of sending Carlito sit in the chair to friends who were confused, but thankful. Style analysis was like trying to nail down water. It felt like the actors were doing impressions and you were too, but of other genres rather than voices and mannerisms even if it always felt comedy in presentation. Every sketch was like you said different. Some sketches felt like Training Day and others a Holiday Inn commercial. I enjoyed the exercise even if I didn't learn a lot (still can't in my brain picture what the set looks like or how to set up any kind of shot, People call me a Jack but that's just as a cont blocking and lighting frustrate me endlessly). It is one of my favorite shows ever made and thanks for making it. I went through your IMDB after reading this and it is filled with some of my favorite comedies of all time. Drew Carey, Scrubs, and a personal favorite forgotten classic 3000 Miles to Graceland from your crew section. I love that weird state police duel with Kevin Costner as Elvis, which sounds like gibberish but isn't even the weirdest thing in that movie. The cinematographer stuff that I loved in addition to Key & Peele would be Children's Hospital, Burning Love, and Garfunkel and Oates (I was however the one who was upset about Sport Go Sports, but that is because I don't like it when people make fun of sports. They're fun. Too soon.). I like all of these things more than brown paper packages tied up in strings. Thanks for making them.

TLDR thoughts on show: Top 5 sketch comedy show of all time for me. Monty Python, Chapelle Show, Key & Peele, SNL, Carol Burnett.
 
Broomcorns said:
I love Key & Peele. It is one of the greatest sketch shows ever made. They say to watch pros and how they work in order to get better as a beginner. I watched hours of Key & Peele. Worthless. I learned nothing.
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Haha! I get it, honestly. There is so much variety there and the director and I were so into embracing genre. Honestly a dream job for me, and to circle back to your point: to emulate the references, I needed to study them and tear them down not only into how they were most likely done in the first place, but also how we could recreate those looks on our meager Comedy Central budget. After a while I got pretty good at it, faster certainly, so I'd just have to say--practice makes perfect. A lot of that I talk about in the posts here.
Broomcorns said:
I went through your IMDB after reading this and it is filled with some of my favorite comedies of all time. Drew Carey, Scrubs, and a personal favorite forgotten classic 3000 Miles to Graceland from your crew section. I love that weird state police duel with Kevin Costner as Elvis, which sounds like gibberish but isn't even the weirdest thing in that movie. The cinematographer stuff that I loved in addition to Key & Peele would be Children's Hospital, Burning Love, and Garfunkel and Oates (I was however the one who was upset about Sport Go Sports, but that is because I don't like it when people make fun of sports. They're fun. Too soon.). I like all of these things more than brown paper packages tied up in strings. Thanks for making them.
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Burning Love might as well have been a page out of Key & Peele. Director Ken Marino told me "watch the first season of The Bachelor and make it look like that". Dutifully I did so (although I got the formula after the second episode so I stopped there), but was lightly terrified in that once again we had a minuscule budget (notably smaller than K&P) compared to the actual series, so it was a tall order of business to rig out the mansion to match.

What I'd really suggest to practice is to take a representative frame grab from something you like and attempt to recreate it with your own camera and lights. Pay attention to not only framing and color, but light quality and direction. Don't worry about your lights being smaller than the relatively grand package I listed above; just spin up that ISO if you need to. As your brain learns how to reverse-engineer lighting, it is also cataloguing what all of those choices and options mean--what will raising or lowering this light do to the cheekbones, the eye sockets etc? For blocking, maybe take frame captures and arrange them in order from wide to tight and think about shooting order, efficiency, light direction etc.

Thanks for checking in!

btw, 3000 Miles to Graceland was a wild and weird shoot. I was just on the Vegas section for a couple of weeks, the rest of the movie was shot in Canada. The shootout in the casino was bonkers, it was a working and open casino and we'd have little blue hair ladies playing slots 20 feet away from our guns and squibs. The guys were all pretty cool to work with, and Courtney's blue eyes were pretty mesmerizing!

Garfunkel and Oates, I did a bunch of their earlier stuff, the last thing was Sports Go Sports (just the two of them, me and an AC running around the city with a C300). They were fun. Did you ever see the series of 5 shorts we did for HBO? I think this was their peak era. https://play.hbomax.com/show/49c912e3-431d-41e2-9361-f04a25929846
 
Here you have been talking about this show and I never saw it until recently. Brilliant! The wife and I have been enjoying a few shows. What talented guys they are.

How is it you-all were able to put so much production value into these skits? The settings, costume, hair, makeup, lighting, shots. It all seems so expensive for a comedy show.
 
I thought I responded to Paul's post?? Weird.

Well, the budget did go up a little, from shoestring to...slightly longer shoestring. I never got a per-episode figure but I seem to remember it was about 1/4 of a typical network half hour comedy at most. Even by the last season, we were still a basic cable comedy and no-one was throwing much money at us. We just learned how to stretch a buck in all departments, basically a sleight of hand!

This is obviously a long thread, but I'm so glad to have it as a resource as I never made notes anywhere else, and much of the nuggets contained here I'd surely not be able to recall today.
 
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