Twenty years ago, there was a clear divide between how you shot and finished a project for Cinema compared to the typical workflows used in broadcast TV. With the advent of streaming services that provide 4K/UHD to a broad audience the lines are now blurred between these two worlds.
Most film and TV jobs start with some simple questions, as Gregory Irwin puts it. “What is it, where is it, when is it.” In April 2018 Irwin found himself asking those questions of cinematographer Lawrence Sher, with whom he’d collaborated on five previous films beginning with John Hamburg’s I Love You, Man in 2009, as well as the 2019 production Godzilla: King of the Monsters, directed by Michael Dougherty, and the three Hangover films by director Todd Phillips. Sher’s call concerned another Phillips collaboration which would go on to gross over a billion dollars; it was to star Joaquin Phoenix and titled simply Joker.
Need a live shot from inside an unmarked moving rental sedan during a thunderstorm? No problem.
Gamma is a topic that pervades almost all forms of image portrayal, including film, television and computers. Gamma has become a tradition, which means that its origins are not understood, and it is not questioned. Perhaps it is time that it was.
The global lockdowns have come just too soon for 5G mobile services to help mitigate disruption to production and content creation.
_DD_460_291_70.jpg)
Glasgow in December is a place and a time with a particular look, and The Nest is a production which enthusiastically embraces that aesthetic. Broadcast in the UK beginning in March 2020, it was produced for the BBC by Studio Lambert as five one-hour episodes featuring a couple, played by Martin Compston and Sophie Rundle, trying to start a family via a surrogate, played by Mirren Mack in her first leading role. The final two episodes were photographed by director of photography Tim Palmer, BSC, whose credit history begins in the late 90s and includes a choice selection of British television, including Life on Mars, Silent Witness, Hustle, Being Human, Line of Duty, Critical and Doctor Who, and many more.
The current social and medical situation with lockdowns and distancing is unleashing new ideas at local TV stations. Some will become the new normal.
It’s one thing to be confronted by a big pile of technology and to be confused by it. It’s another to know something about that technology and conclude that things could be a lot simpler than they are. That’s the reaction a lot of people have to color and brightness handling in modern cameras which offer more than enough options to make things confusing. Clearly, we need standardization, but with each camera manufacturer keen to promote the benefits of its proprietary approach, it seems pretty unlikely that we’ll one day find that every camera is outputting signals and files that can be treated identically.
