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ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT FEATURE
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH
ARRESTEDDEVELOPMENT For the in-production fifth season of Arrested Development DOP Patrick Stewart went to extreme ISOs to chase the noise away
and Arrested is one of those shows that also comes from a long line of handheld shows, so it suits me. The Varicam LT body is just big enough to have some weight on the shoulder and enough mass to balance with a Fujinon Cabrio lens. Most of the time we shot with Cabrios, the 19-90mm. 14-35mm and 85-300mm. But we also used Rokinon Xeen prime lenses to really knock down the backgrounds. “The handheld camera work in this show doesn’t try and make itself present or one of the actors. The combination of the camera and those lenses works really well; when you’re shooting handheld it’s important to use zooms because you can just adjust your prime distance.”
WORDS JULIAN MITCHELL PICTURES NETFLIX
“Anyway, I looked very carefully at the 5000 as I was very nervous about a mid-range noise which can happen where it’s just mid-tones that don’t have any texture and the 1s and 0s don’t know where to go. But shooting at 5000 didn’t work; you can’t have an actor walking in to a dark living room and pretend it’s daytime, it doesn’t feel right. But I found that if we took 5000 but knocked it down to 2500, put in a level of ND, it was at about 28 foot candles which is pretty low but bright enough to be a house. “We did lots of testing with the post house, looked at the skin tones and the wall noise and everything, it was fantastic. There was a shot in a bar with not much light and there’s no noise and the colours and skin tones are great.” The show is also being shot handheld which suits Patrick and the Varicam LT. “I come from a long line of handheld television shows
OP Patrick Stewart did something very different for the fifth season of Arrested Development: or the reboot of
ABOVE Scene from Arrested Development Season 4.
the reboot, as he has called it. The difference was mostly to do with the dual ISO of the Varicam LT. “I did a lot of testing in the springtime and I wasn’t sure whether we’d shoot with the Sony FS7 camera, which is like the F55 but with a smaller body,” he says. “Also I wasn’t convinced of this whole ISO thing and did some really tough tests with those cameras – I was astounded by the Varicam LT. “Basically it has the same dynamic range as the ARRI ALEXA; the ALEXA has about 0.6 stops more at the top end and the Varicam LTs have about 0.6 stops on the low end. So I decided to go with the LT but still wasn’t convinced about shooting at 5000 ISO. We ended up shooting all the exteriors at 800 but all the stage work was shot at 5000 knocked down to 2500 ISO.
BELOW Jason Bateman on set as Michael Bluth.
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FEBRUARY 2018 DEFINITION
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