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Planning the cinematography of a production which is quite literally about darkness is a challenge. Shooting a documentary with a skeleton crew in a place where power cuts are every day is an even bigger challenge. Director of photography Miguel Angel Viñas faced all that and more on The Road Bad and the Place Dark, a documentary shot in Sierra Leone for medical charity Médecins du Monde.
Engineers and production crews help local TV stations maintain distancing and a sunny on-air personality.
The image of a director crouching to line up a shot with an optical viewfinder is one that’s been pushed aside somewhat by the less romantic modern image of a director squinting at an LCD monitor. The monitors have a lot to recommend them – in an ideal world, they can show color, exposure, and contrast in a way that’s close to how the final production will appear, for some value of “close.” It’s enough to make us forget that the cameras of decades past – film cameras – didn’t even need batteries to make a picture that has lots of extra look-around room, miles of resolution, no rolling shutter, a completely accurate depiction of lens flare and depth of field. And, of course, no issues handling all the dynamic range and color of the real world.
People are not just flocking to beaches and holiday resorts as lockdowns are eased but also to their TV screens for viewing of returning live sports.
In mid-May of this year, as countries such as Germany, England, and Spain considered easing COVID-19 restrictions to allow professional sports to resume, various professional sports leagues began discussions with broadcasters and production companies on the best way to televise games without fans in the seats. They’re called “ghost games” and finding the right recipe for presenting an engaging viewer experience was paramount.
Here we look at some of the origins of gamma in imaging and move on to introduce the peculiar characteristics of the cathode ray tube.
Broadcasters are far more upbeat about the impact 5G mobile networks will have on their services than they were in the case of 4G when that was introduced around a decade ago.
For anyone who’s seen the first series to bear the title, the name Penny Dreadful will conjure up images of occult happenings in a shadowy, late-Victorian world. After twenty-seven episodes across three highly successful seasons, Showtime aired the last episode of Penny Dreadful in June 2016. By November 2018, the network had ordered a successor: Penny Dreadful: City of Angels, which premiered in April 2020 and looks very different to its gothic predecessor.
