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PRACTICE PERFECT
elevator and corridor, a local watering hole, as well as apartments for the cast-plus two totally different court- rooms. “They were built user friendly,” Smith explains. “They were designed with a cameraman in mind. Jack DeGovia created the sets for the pilot and Lee Fisher carried on his work brilliantly for the first season. They are both great veterans to work with who couldn’t have made me any happier if they tried.
“Boston Municipal, for example, features more colour, more places to light from and more places to hide lights. There are two huge windows and contoured tiles up to the high ceilings. Although we can’t bring light in through the windows because the walls are too steep, we can do a hard and warm top light, something like Gordon Willis did on the original Godfather.
“I use a strong sky blue for fill light to continue the blue which is a part of the look of the show. To fill in the faces, I use half blue and half CTB. We even let the shad- ows go into the faces, occasionally giving the actors rac- coon eyes. It’s a distinctive, real look that the actors like, and totally different from the other courtroom.”
The Superior Court, on the other hand, is totally dif- ferent. “It features windows and moldings, sculptures, and real oak doors with trim. We also have an oak judge’s bench. This amount of wood and detail gives us interesting angles, and is beautiful to light. We can approach this set in different ways, although I prefer a window source. That’s where the light is for about 80 per cent of the shots. We don’t go outside a lot, so we have to remind the audience there is a world out there.”
To do this, Smith is working with Rosco’s mural computer-generated backings. He was in on the design along with production designer Charlie Lagola, working on the density scale, even creating a city haze, and deciding how dark the blacks would be.
“Backing plates are never shot in ideal situations,” he says from lots of previous experience. “You need to eyeball what you get, and create the look that will play best through the windows you are using.”
To light these specially constructed backings, Smith uses a wall of Skypans with half blue to keep the outside look cold. He usually shoots at 2.8 on the sets. He shoots the backings at one and one half to two stops hot for day. “For night, it is a question of mood,” he says.
“With the Rosco backings, you can use a combina- tion of front and back light to create any time of dusk, day or dawn you want. We have cross light from full blue Babies on the front of the backing Babies, and a variety of lights for ambience. We also use many smaller units behind the backing to highlight the areas we want to see for the particular shot we are doing.”
Dennis Smith could go on, explaining the various sets, locations rigs, and challenges of shooting a series that keys off challenges of shooting a series that keys off character interplay, however, as he says, “it’s all been done before, one way or another.”
At the moment, though, he’s particularly excited about a very special episode that brings him back to his roots, some 20 years ago. Smith started out in the indus- try as a news and documentary cameraman, spending ten years at ABC in the early 1970s. Five of the projects he shot have won Emmy Awards and two projects won the prestigious George Foster Peabody Award, televi- sion’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize.
“In documentaries, you learn to do certain things quickly,” he says. “You learn to use available light to your very best advantage, rather than look at it as a dis- advantage. You use it as a base, instead of trying to start from scratch,” added Smith.
A perfect library of knowledge for The Practice’s ‘break out of the ordinary’ episode - an intense hour involving a documentary crew following the lawyers as they try to get a last minute stay of execution for their client before he is put to death by lethal injection.
When the show’s producers and director Michael Shultz brought this story to Smith, they discussed how to support the story. “From my years at ABC, I knew that there is a certain way to get the documentary look and still make the actors have a film presence,” he says. “We spent many days testing cameras and lenses. Do we use primes? What stock? The key was to keep it authentic.”
To define that look, Smith chose to shoot Super 16mm with an Aaton camera. “Panavision came up with three different camera/lens packages for me to exam- ine,” he says. “I decided we were going to use Zoom lenses, so we tried each package and found that the contrast of the Canon zoom was better for us than the Angenieux and Zeiss.”
Smith also decided that he wanted to flash the stock before shooting, “pre- exposing Fuji’s 8671, 8661, and 8631 would give us the gritty and grainy 16mm documentary look,” he explains. “The degree of flashing was crucial. I started with as lit-
tle as a four stop underexposed in pre-flash, using
a thunder gray card soft focused to avoid any
detail being picked up in the flashing process.
We went to as much as one full stop under on all
of the different film stocks. I decided that each
of the films needed their own degree of pre-flash. The faster films needed less flash and the slower finer grain stocks needed more.
“It was an interesting episode to shoot,” Smith admits. “Out of the ordinary, for a television show, yet something that you would normally see on television if you were looking at a documentary. I really enjoyed bal- ancing the drama with the shooting of a documentary about this intense subject.” ■ COURTESY OF FUJIFILM USA
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