DEFINITION May 2018

FEATURE ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT

no issues when swapping lenses out during a shoot. “These are perfect lenses for handheld shooting,” says Patrick. “They’re not too large or heavy and so don’t become a burden to carry for long periods. The picture they produce is pin sharp corner to corner and they’re very reliable and rugged. They’re also as well balanced as they could possibly be, which is not easy when you consider that most of the glass is at the front and could potentially make it top heavy. 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, and this is a set-up you could use for 20-minute scenes and still come away at the end not feeling tired. “One further point is that pretty much any professional camera operator will know them intimately and so they’re a known quantity if I’m not operating the camera myself. In a three-camera situation you might have the 19-90mm fitted to two of them, using the zoom to adjust your prime distance, and maybe the 85- 300mm employed on the other if you needed a tight shot.”

about 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 into a dark living room and pretend it’s daytime, it doesn’t feel right,” explains Patrick. “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.” For the majority of the time the VariCam LT was paired with Patrick’s personal set of Fujinon Cabrio lenses, comprising the 19-90mm, 14-35mm and 85-300mm. They’re amongst his favourite lenses and proved to be perfect for the job. All of them offer the same maximum aperture of T2.9 (with the 85-300mm rising to T4 at the longer focal lengths) and all are perfectly colour matched to ensure

“and wasn’t sure whether we’d shoot with the Sony FS7 camera, which is like the F55 but with a smaller body. However, after carrying out some really tough tests I was astonished at what the Panasonic had to offer. “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 VariCam but still wasn’t convinced about shooting at ISO 5000. We ended up shooting all the exteriors at 800 but all the stage work was shot at 5000 knocked down to 2500. “Anyway, I looked very carefully at the 5000 as I was very nervous

ABOVE AND RIGHT Fujinon Cabrio lenses on the Panasonic VariCam LT cameras on the

set of Arrested Development.

BELOW AND FAR RIGHT A 20-minute scene with the Fujinon Cabrio and Panasonic VariCam LT combo isn’t tiring reports DOP Patrick Stewart.

DEFINITION MAY 2018

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