Transcription by Oli Lewington of Olilewington.co.uk
Original post with audio interview here
PHILIP BLOOM
Hi, this is Philip Bloom and I just want apologise for the absolutely atrocious voice that I’ve got right now, mainly down to an acute case of severe laryngitis that I’m recovering from. Nothing to do with smoking huge amounts of Cuban cigars or my fantastic Rod Stewart impersonations at karaoke, which obviously with this voice I’m really quite excelling at.
I want to bring you this really fascinating interview with Greg Yaitanes, the exec. producer and also the director of the season finale of ‘House MD’. This episode of ‘House’ is very special because it was shot entirely with the Canon 5DMkII DSLR. So let’s have a listen to this conversation: thankfully my voice is minimal in this – Greg says all the interesting stuff and his voice is just fine.
INTERVIEW STARTS
PHILIP BLOOM
Obviously, congratulations on the show, there’s huge amounts of buzz. I guess what most people are asking – certainly asking me – is what made you go down this road, using the Canon 5D for the finale?
GREG YAITANES
Couple of things: one is we’re going to do – I’m trying to gather up the troops to do a kind of a live chat on Twitter. I’m trying to put together Gale and myself, our post-production guru and possibly a couple of other voices just to answer some of the more technical questions that have been coming up because I can only really speak for where I came from which is completely on an aesthetic level combined with its compact size.
Gale had shown me – I want to say it was either some footage he shot for a commercial – it was something he was doing with it for Canon and we’d actually shown it to Hugh for his episode for episode 17 which aired last week – the first couple of minutes of it, or the first few images were shot on the 5D. And because mostly we were dealing with a newborn baby and we just thought the idea of being able to get close to the baby without the physical risk of something so heavy was just the right thing to do and then Hugh had really liked the look of it, also.
And for me, I was blown away by the depth of field. I think that was the thing that attracted me the most was the idea that the 100mm macro, which is a gorgeous lens and the lens that we used in various spots of the finale is one of the things that drew me to it.
The idea that gone was the endless depth of field that I had encountered when I had first used hi-def, which was back on ‘Children of Dune’ we’d used those really Sony Beta cameras and those were a disaster. But I like the aesthetic and actually, as someone who came up not in the time of Super8 film, but in the time of camcorders and VHS and all that stuff, I’m now very comfortable in what was previously video and now called digital.
So I really was drawn to the DV aesthetic which was beyond a cinematic look, it just gave a new level of being able to pull the actors out of the background and pull them in right to your face and give an intimacy that I hadn’t seen in digital or film.
So that was the first part to answer the question, the second also came from I knew physically that the finale would require us to be in some compact spaces and the idea of something that could get us in there and create a very authentic set was also really appealing.
Where we got the camera in the finale and the sets we were able to build because of it were unbelievable. I mean, we could be in a space the size of my office desk here and we could put three cameras in, it was great – we didn’t need to pull walls, we didn’t need to build set with the idea that they were going to have to come apart, we could build very, very authentic spaces for the actors to exist in that wouldn’t have previously been possible because just the gear alone would’ve inhibited that.
So the actors actually had a really enjoyable time being able to be in a space that would give them a very realistic environment and not one that would be working for the camera equipment in fact everything was working for the actors.
So I feel these cameras really give a great tribute to the actor in a way, because I feel like the way the lenses sculpt the faces, the way that the background drops off, the way that you can be now in an environment that isn’t with all the noise and the hammers as they’re pulling the sets apart, I mean, there’s no reason for it, we didn’t need to do any of that and it was so exciting to have that freedom again. It reminded me of being back in film school, just the idea that it was just you and a camera.
If I could put a guy – safely – somewhere, the camera could go with him, that wasn’t even a consideration it was more, “If you could be there, the camera could be there,” and that’s a luxury you don’t always have in film. That’s the long answer.
PHILIP BLOOM
Yeah, I was with Robert Rodriguez a few weeks back as SXSW and we had a long chat and he was saying that he’s just got a 5D and he said it felt like being back in his ‘El Mariachi’ days, just being able to pull out a camera and be so small and lightweight it a freeing experience for him.
GREG YAITANES
Yeah, and it’s funny because El Mariachi was such a game-changer. I know for me when I was coming up I had just made my short film and I was just thinking about the fact that I had shot it on Panavision and it was on 35mm and I found just the physical size of the camera kind of cool back then, but right when I had finished it, ‘El Mariachi’ had come out and this guy had made a whole feature film for $7,000.
And now that isn’t that crazy to do. This is part of the great democracy because it eliminates the first big hurdle that I had when I was coming in, which was getting your hands on the equipment, either in film school or afterwards professionally.
Getting your hands on a camera, getting an insurance policy, getting all these things you needed in order to acquire this equipment often sometimes didn’t allow the best storytellers to come forward, but allowed people that could get their hands on equipment, which isn’t always the case.
Now, the fact that I can go on Amazon and go buy this thing for $2-3000, depending on what lenses I’m going to want, allows really almost anybody to get access to it, to get over that first hurdle. And then, with that behind them, where are the storytellers emerging?
I would’ve been beyond excited if this format was acceptable, the fact that we’re the most popular show in the world right now and to have been able to use something like this as a tool and that’s really what everything should be.
I feel like this was something that was needed for us in order to free us and be able to accomplish what we wanted to accomplish with the story. There’s a real physical intimacy to the story that I wanted to make sure we could capture. And these are the goals you have and then, when you have those goals, that’s why I have such a great team with me, with Gale and with Allen and to have people that can then translate your goal and wishes, because not being the most tech-savvy I can explain what I’m after and then we can put out in front of us the way we want to do it. In fact, as we go on with this interview I can walk you through exactly how it kind of evolved, because it wasn’t just an all-in decision at first.
PHILIP BLOOM
What excites a lot of people that speak to me is they bought this camera and they’re seeing ‘House’ – as you say, the most popular show out there – has shot an episode on it and they have their cameras in their bedrooms and they’re like, “This is insane.” What do you traditionally shoot on with ‘House’?
GREG YAITANES
We shoot on various systems, we shoot on film. We do it for a lot of reasons. I came in as co-executive producer at the end of Season 5 and I’ve directed the show since the very, very beginning. And going back – this was 6 years ago – most shows were shooting film. I mean, digital, you were always waiting for it to catch up. And when you have a show that is shooting film, some shows are crossing over and changing it over and going to another system and for us it’s really about image quality and storytelling – what is the best way to accomplish the show every week? We have found that film still remains, for a lot of our needs, a very good medium for us to work in.
The things I loved about the Canon addressed so much of what has frustrated me over the years. I’m not a big – I have a respect for, but I’m not a fan of the relationship of the DIT to the DP or the director. I find that, in a way, I compare it often to the mistress in a marriage. I’ve found that I’ve really been hindered – I got a phone call about a DP that I’ve worked with on a show that has shot digital and I couldn’t give him a recommendation because I frankly didn’t have a relationship with him. He was under a tent with the DIT and there wasn’t an opportunity to have the collaboration that I feed off of, which is to have that great relationship with my cameramen.
And I just found that, if this is what we’re doing, how is this better than what we’re doing? The idea of being tethered, the fear factor of, “Oh my God, we’re going to unplug, we’re going to un-tether,” and I found that the DIT was often running the show and kind of in a fear-based way a lot times – that if it didn’t plug into this giant box with a guy under a tent then what was going to happen!? And on that show I actually unplugged us to go do a couple of things, much to everybody’s fear, and then – surprise – everything was fine.
So I feel like now, with the advancements in post-production there’s so much available to correct and be able just to take the raw image and be able to do so much in colour timing even if all three cameras aren’t exactly calibrated it’s easy to adjust – and I’m not talking about the Canon.
So when we got to the Canon, the idea that we could be un-tethered and that there’d be no DIT and that we could go anywhere that we could go and physically, actually knowing what we had to accomplish in the finale, if a guy could get somewhere we wanted to make sure the equipment could follow; we weren’t hauling film, hauling bags of lenses, hauling, hauling, hauling. I wanted to keep us as lean as possible. That was very, very exciting, just the idea that you are unencumbered, that there’s not wires going to a central brain and then off of that everybody’s going somewhere.
When I shot ‘Dune’ it was all stage-based so that actually all the thick cabling and everything else that was going on was actually quite easy to manage, but I just found that this was giving me a look but it’s not something practical for me to take into the field. And the Canon, there was just something raw about it that we embraced in both the style that we shot the piece in – the imagery supports what the camera was doing, we played into its strengths and embraced its weaknesses.
PHILIP BLOOM
So as the director of that episode, how were you actually watching what was being shot?
GREG YAITANES
We pulled a feed off of the camera itself. So what we would do is…. I’m sorry, that’s not true. The focus pullers would have – and the operator – would operate…. Let me back up here, I’m getting ahead of myself.
The way that we structured it, we shot three cameras during the entire finale. The first camera, our ‘A’ camera, we had the 5D and we had an external, on-board monitor that we took a feed off of that was, I believe, was standard-def. And then off of that monitor the focus puller pulled a monitor and then we pulled off to video village, either transmitting or hard-wired depending on what the circumstances were. Because they were standard-def images and because the focus was such a challenge on the 5D we structured everything a little bit differently.
So ‘A’ camera was kind of his own man and the ‘A’ camera focus puller was off with a remote focus with a very large, very good-quality monitor as best as he could get so he could eye the focus to the best of his ability. ‘B’ camera, same set up but had what looked like a kind of a Preston-type set-up next to the operator, that’s how he preferred to work, that was ‘B’ camera.
And then ‘C’ camera, we called him ‘Ninja Chris’ because we had Chris be entirely his own man and I shot totally blind with Chris. So Chris would have the 5D and the lens of his choosing and the magnifier on the end of it so that he could be looking at a hi-def image. And he would take his own focus and he would get wherever he could get, so his instructions were “Go find something interesting”. We would give some guidance as to what we were after, but ultimately I had to know that if it was really critical I had it on the ‘A’ and ‘B’ camera and if there was something I was looking for, and as that dialogue kept going, I had Chris on a camera that didn’t take any video feeds, so my third camera I went at blind.
And interesting – I’d never not worked with a tap, I’ve always had that available to me as I came up in the business and was working – and I actually found that incredibly freeing, it was great just to have that dialogue and be able to have a style that supported being able to tell the operator, “This is what I’m looking for,” and to know that I was getting it and to trust that there was an artist behind that lens, not a technician, which sometimes I feel like with the advent of video monitors sometimes I feel like operators get treated that way when in fact they are really out there on the front lines being great storytellers.
In our case, we’ve got two great operators, Tony Gaudioz and Rob Carlson, again, had to participate even more than they normally do and also get used to a new way of doing things. The traditional thing is to have your eye on the eye-piece, which for Tony I know shuts out the rest of the world, so actually looking at the monitor, or an on-board monitor, was actually pulling him out for about a day and then he completely kind of got into it, sort of embraced it, because he felt like he was around the whole environment that we were doing, he was participating in the story and the result is a style where the operators feel very much a part of whatever’s happening, they feel like they are included in the event that’s taking place.
As you see the finale – as I’m obviously excited for everyone to see on May 17th – you’ll see that we played into a style that is unique in the sense that it include both the audience in a way, because of the lensing that just pulls you in a very subtle level that you might not know why you feel engaged a little bit more, but I find that all the pluses of the system really work on the audience in a way that is quite moving.
PHILIP BLOOM
How did you find the camera operators’ transition to these cameras? Had they used them before, was it all new to them?
GREG YAITANES
It was – we’d had done that very small scene in episode 17 and everybody had to recalibrate and it’s interesting, it really speaks volumes of the talent we have working here, because everybody adapted so quickly. And I think our focus pullers had the hardest jobs of everybody and I’ll explain what that is later.
To go through a whole season of TV and on your very last episode completely change the game and to have everybody do it with a, “We’re going to do this,”, “Yeah, I feel like I’m part of something, this is exciting,” and that fact that everybody was game and not rolling their eyes says, you know, that we’ve got people here that really are engaged in the process and want to go tell the story.
And I’ve got to say everybody loved the ease in which they could work, that they weren’t physically wrestling with the equipment, they weren’t physically encumbered by the equipment. To go from Rob Carlson, who’s our Steadicam operator down to basically a monopod that this thing can rest on and you can kind of carry it around and create your own new sort of Steadicam vibe is exciting.
In fact, Hugh Laurie, when we were shooting, Rob preferred to put the camera often on a monopod just to get some stability because I wasn’t – we kept the cameras loose but I wasn’t trying to go for some kind of shaky-cam handheld style, I just wanted the camera to exist in the space very organically. Hugh had actually suggested to Rob, “Why don’t we get one of those straps that flag holders use in a marching band?” And that was a legitimate and go-to piece of equipment for us, we had props grab one, you know those little straps with a cup on it, became one of the main ways we could get around. You’re trading something that was a few ounces for something that was almost 90lbs.
PHILIP BLOOM
So Hugh himself was totally into it?
GREG YAITANES
Yeah, I’d say the only… this’ll get to a bigger issue. Everybody got involved; everybody got involved and embraced it. I know, the actors it took – the first day of work we had done a lot of… We often have an overlap day on our shows, meaning that what is the first day of shooting for a particular episode is actually the ninth day of shooting for the episode before, so often the first day of work on a show is all the actors that aren’t being used on the other unit. So in our case it was mostly that Hugh was being used on the other unit that day and we did most of the stuff with the other cast and all of them, it was a trip for them – it looked like a bunch of paparazzi or something trying to take their pictures. There was all of a sudden three still cameras right in front of them.
And again, Chris could get to places that we don’t normally get to without pulling our walls, we were right in there. At most we used the Pee-Wee dolly to put the camera on, but otherwise we used very consumer tripods, we didn’t use anything that you couldn’t just walk to the camera store and go get anywhere. With the exception of a couple of times, just for convenience, we had it on the dolly, but otherwise we mostly tried to do it in a way that felt, you know, we tried to strip down, to see how far could we take this?
I’d say the only draw back with it, Hugh was really game – which was terrific, you know, he’s an exec producer on the show as well – and he is your quarterback and his voice needs to be heard and he needs to be in an environment with equipment that he’s comfortable with. Because he had actually directed with these cameras on episode 17 he was really excited about the idea and also I framed it to him in such a way that it would allow him to enhance his work to be able to stay in some of these moments and not feel like we have to cut – we’re not going to roll out, we’re not going to have to be in your face with a tape measure. For him he found it very freeing.
I’d say the only drawback was – and the only thing that frustrated all of us at some point in the process – was the focus. The Canon 5D, which is an amazing camera and I can’t speak enough how it gave me what it gave me and in my list I could give you 30 things that I love off the top of my head and I have 3 things that would drive me a little bit crazy that I just need and would want this camera to provide, because I feel that it is quite, almost by accident, so far ahead of the game of everybody else.
The first is not being able to pull a hi-def feed off the camera while you’re rolling, that was a bit frustrating for us. We would have loved to look at the image in HD at the monitor, so the focus puller is given the challenges, because the depth of field is so small, would have also loved to be able to – by eye – take a hi-def focus.
So the camera’s still very much an individual experience. Chris probably had the best luck because he was able to take his own focus, so in a way he was more a photographer than he was the traditional operator on something. And because of that individual experience it hasn’t really been designed for the cine experience.
The lenses haven’t been calibrated as such, these are auto-focus lenses – the space between zero and infinity is just a couple of inches – whereas on our cine lenses we have the full barrel to work with so that we can properly take focus measures and be able to deal with people moving to you and from you and the camera’s moving while the people are moving and you can coordinate all that mathematically so that the focus element of it isn’t there and everybody can be kind of freed up to do their good work.
And I think the only thing that ever worried me along the way is that we would lose focus and that we would go soft and it would be hard to pull and you can’t do the 5x and 10x punch in while you’re rolling, you have to have done that ahead of time. And you’re dealing with – by and large – we shot cameras handheld with an actor who has – with a character, rather – who has a limp, so the gait that he’s moving and the operator, it was really the only way to take focus was really by eye and then the focus pullers became having to anticipate what the actors might do and to watch the scenes.
And we went every single day and as we got over that first day learning curve, everybody shined. I mean, if you look at the cut and you see the episode when it airs, there’ll be times where we dip in and out of focus but really that’s part of the style of it. And when we’re more grounded – the camera’s more grounded and the people are a little more grounded – it’s never an issue.
But what attracted me to it was that one-quarter depth of field versus film that was really appealing. Now that made it a true challenge all the way across with the focus. So, yeah, an actor never wants to feel that he’s going to give an incredible performance – whether he verbalizes this or not – and then have it be missed because we just didn’t get it. You never really want to be in the space and the focus pullers have a very hard job as it is because they’re expected to do their job 100%, 100% of the time.
PHILIP BLOOM
Yeah, I was lucky enough to catch up with Gale at Vegas last week and, for everybody that doesn’t know, Gale Tattersall is like one of the living legends. And I asked him why the 5D when if you took the 1D you could get an HD image for monitoring and he said he wanted it as shallow as possible, even knowing that the monitoring that the monitoring issue would cause his focus pullers hell. Was it not a consideration to go with the 1D?
GREG YAITANES
You know, when everything came to me in terms of how we were going to do this, the 5D seemed to be the weapon of choice. I believe that – and correct me if I’m wrong – that the sensor on the 1D and the 7D are not as big and that was also something that we wanted. We wanted the biggest image that we could acquire as well as providing the cinema of it. We wanted it to have a very rich look. And also I never felt – I know the 1D is very good with low light and I just never felt that that was something we were going to need.
We do, we have lit some scenes very, very organically and authentically and I never found that I wasn’t able to get what I wanted out of the 5D, I think the focus was a challenge, but everything had a trade off. There needs to be, really, some sort of hybrid between the three models that everybody talks about that can give everybody everything. The sensor size was incredibly appealing for us, the slow-mo on the 7D was appealing but with that the image quality dropped and it was just a question of can you – you always want to get something that you can’t get from film and so when we felt like we weren’t in that ballpark there wasn’t really a point, it would get into, “Well, why are we doing this, then? If it’s not as good as what we are normally doing?”
Interestingly, for Gale, we put the biggest obstacle in front of us and that’s something that I love about Gale, that he’s fearless, that we both went there. Part of the surprise when we look back on this, we were surprised a bit about the reaction – I don’t think when you’re in the middle of doing something that makes history of sorts within a certain medium you think about what you’re doing while you doing it, it’s just after the fact that there was tremendous interest.
And interestingly, we started realising there was interest in the fact that there was… we got a little bit squashed: we are a Universal show and Universal have a deal with Panasonic and any kind of heavy publicity while we were shooting on a Canon system was a real conflict for them because they didn’t want to jeopardize their relationship with Panasonic and understandably so – you’re getting into tricky ground as this new equipment becomes available.
So it was a little bit frustrating while we were doing it that when people were interested in coming to set or to cover it or to take pictures of it there isn’t a lot available out there because there was concern that would upset that relationship. And the sad part is that we should all be working together, that each of these things should be pushing us to new levels and look at it from a positive stand point, look at it that we can all advance rather than worry that someone’s going to be offended by somebody else trying to push the bar. Because what I’d love is that Panasonic comes back and raises the bar and we keep working that way. That’s why I think there’s been such advancement, because everybody is trying to one-up the next system in a way that’s very positive. I think it’s a good kind of competition that exists out there.
PHILIP BLOOM
Yeah, I think competition is certainly essential. I’ve been shooting for Lucasfilm on a movie at the moment where the main cameras are F35s and my camera’s been mainly the 1D purely because of the focusing/monitoring issue and I wanted to give my focus puller a chance to actually see what he was doing. Gale was telling me you were shooting wide open, you were using 50mm 1.0s, 50mm 1.2s, 85mm 1.2s – how on earth were your focus pullers not having nervous breakdowns?
GREG YAITANES
First of all, Paul and Don – Paul Janossy and Don Carlson, brother of Rob Carlson – are phenomenal focus pullers. There were days when we could see that their level of concentration, their focus is tremendous and they just got it. They’ve also worked with Hugh, they’ve also been in that space with him, so they understood and were anticipating his movement.
We did not do big sweeping crane moves and so forth, I abandoned most of that kind of stuff once we really saw the set and then the story unfolded. The choice to do all this came back out of necessity.
Once I was hearing about this particular episode – where it was set and what it would be about – the wheels were turning and when it came time to how we were going to shoot this – much to Gale’s shock – I kept saying let’s take it further, what else can we add it to? Because we’re actually very happy with it. We started testing it on episode 19, which I was directing, and we would run the 5D next to our film cameras just to see how the 5D was reacting to our lighting, what our sets looked like, how the actors looked, anything we kind of needed to be aware of.
And we were very happy with these tests – they weren’t for anything other than just to get to know the camera – but what started to happen by accident was, “God, look how great our sets look on this camera,” “Look how good everything is.” And we did experiments where we intercut it with film to see what it would look like, to see it if it was legit. We did experiments where we would do a scene cut on the 5D, we would throw the test footage up to the editors, they would cut the scene together, we would watch it – how a 5D scene would look against a film scene. So, let’s say, Scene A was on film, Scene B was on the 5D so we would alternate just to see how does the switching back and forth aesthetic look because I knew – because of the compact nature of the sets – I knew that 60, 65, 75% of the sets were going to be tight spaces and by tight spaces I just mean small areas in which to work.
The excitement of, “OK, well this will allow us to achieve these shots,”, “OK, check,”, “What about this location?”, “OK, that’s good because we can put a few cameras in there, check.” And as we went through it we kind of came up with basically 75% of the episode we wanted to do with this system, mostly because I knew I was going to be physically very close to the actors and I also wanted the shallow depth of field and I needed the camera to be small, so those two things were really working for me.
So that left really the biggest portion of – the big chunk of the episode – which we knew took place on this set that was potentially going to tap into the Achilles heals of any digital format, which was going to be a lot of bright lights at the lenses and smoke and things like that would be happening, so the idea was that we would try to recreate some of the conditions we’d be up against and see how the camera would work.
There was a lot of back-and-forth on email between Gale and I – can we do this, is it going to work? – And then we just kept diving in; it was like, “Why not, why not give it a try?” So we recreated these conditions that we thought the rest of the episode would be under and we were really happy. And the studio found them to be totally acceptable for broadcast and off we went. So then we were going in with the whole episode.
But it wasn’t, “Oh my God, let’s shoot the whole episode on the 5D,” it was, “Alright let’s shoot these scenes on the 5D,” then it was, “Well, if we’re going to shoot those scenes, why don’t we shoot these scenes?” Then it’s, “Well, if we’re going to do that, the hospital we already know looks great from all the tests that we did, so why don’t we just do the hospital as well?” And then it just kept building from there until there was no excuses any more and we were totally game. But with anything it looks like, “Oh my God, we totally dived in with both feet,” and we did, but it took about 3 days of working ourselves up to it by completely embracing it. Because, you know, we really hadn’t done anything all-out digital on the show before and to kind of make a left turn like that, it’s great.
It’s testament to Katie Jacobs, who’s one of my partners here, the fact that we showed it to her and her company owns this show and she was like, “Yeah, these look amazing, let’s do it.” Everybody got on board with it because it was going to be a one-off, we didn’t know necessarily what we were going to do on Season 7 – if we were going to take the show digital in Season 7 – and it was the end of the season, we opted to not completely change our post-production workflow. I think money saved from not shooting film went into the fact that we still had this intermediate step and we still used a lab and we still did the more traditional things.
The thing that did excite me was the fact that we could take these chips out, dump them to a hard drive, take the hard drive upstairs and start working – like that is my dream scenario here, that we could be entirely in-house. The idea that we have such a luxury that a lot of shows don’t have is that all our stages are within a hundred yards of the production office, the writers office, the editorial, everything. So we could, in theory, be our own little community here and be able to shoot and go post and do everything right here without having to send anything away. That’s exiting to take control and be able to streamline yourself so that certain delays and things that you’ve had to depend on aren’t there any more. The idea that you can immediately start editing an episode will help deal with the increased volume of footage that comes from not cutting as you go and do these resets, because it’d be easier to keep the actors in the moment than to cut the camera and start all over again.
PHILIP BLOOM
From myself and from a lot of other people we’ve had issues from broadcasters saying that these cameras are not adequate for 100% acquisition. Are you saying you had no issues with the network at all?
GREG YAITANES
We had all approvals worked out for broadcast. We got the go-ahead from the studio and off we went. If we went around to every single individual place it would give people an opportunity to say no. I think the reality is we started shooting 16:9 at the end of last season and everybody was like “Whoa” this and “territories” and “what about…” and so far, not a complaint. The reality is the show’s very popular, people want the show, people watching the show want the show, so I kind of think that’s going to trump everything.
As far as we …going into it there was no discussion that this would ever be an issue in terms of it. It passed every standard that we have at the studio based on the tests that we had done and that would be fine. I think this is one of the most gorgeous episodes of TV and I can say that because the producer has it on right now and I think Gale has done a beautiful job in the lighting of it and I think it’s better than most things out there. I don’t know why anybody would look to this camera system and say, “Well, that’s not acceptable to be acquired, that’s not acceptable for broadcast.” Because it’s gorgeous and at the end, you know what it is? It allowed us to tell a story that we’ve never told before.
PHILIP BLOOM
It always comes down to the story – that’s what everybody forgets. The technology is there to help you tell a story, not the other way around.
GREG YAITANES
Right.
PHILIP BLOOM
When it comes to the compression, did you have any issues? I mean, we all want uncompressed outs for these cameras so we can get the best possible image, but you had no real issues with that?
GREG YAITANES
I can only speak from my standpoint. I don’t know what the full post-production challenges, if any, have been. I know we struggled in a couple of places with banding and I can tell you what that is when I look at it, but I couldn’t give you all the technical stuff behind it. That was every once in a while and frankly, it’s part of a look.
You can try to fight these things away and wish they weren’t there, but then you’re just comparing that aesthetic to something else. I’m not looking to create a film, aesthetic, I’m looking to create its own aesthetic, I want this to be its own look, its own style. And that if there’s some banding, some this or some motion blur, for me – who cares? I feel like the story trumps all.
These are, again, tools, these are, again, things that give you a look and I’m just so thankful that there is a camera system like this that is acceptable to people as a format. I wish film, when I was coming up, was not the only medium people in which would look at something. I mean, back then no on would take something you shot on video seriously in terms of a narrative.
And now the fact that we’ve done this with the biggest show in the world is kind of exciting and I think if it gives anything to people – I know when people are writing me on Twitter and I’ve been asking people to tag the hashtag #5Dfinale into their questions so basically I can bring a small group of people together and I’ve love for you to drop in on that, and be able to have a community experience – a world-wide community experience – in which we all try to help each other.
I think the fact that we took a big step forward, I think if we were probably more educated on some of the stuff that you’re talking about and some of the stuff I’ve heard since – I know Gale came back and was like, “Oh my God, I heard at NAB, people are asking me all these questions and these problems” and at the end of the day, we dove in as much as we could and did it and it worked. And I think the proof will be in how people react to it.
I’ll be very excited to see people picking apart the episode from a technical standpoint and grabbing frames and evaluating – were we successful? Did we accomplish what we were after? And I know Martin Scorsese had been a big influence on me growing up and he never sort of paid attention to continuity, he went with the energy of the piece. I think if you dissect the episode when it airs you’ll find, “Oh God, they went out of focus there,” or, “This went a little soft here,” or maybe, “This had some banding,” but, who cares? I think it’s just a “who cares.”
PHILIP BLOOM
Exactly. I think you find that with anything. I mean, did you have any idea what you were entering into by shooting with this camera? Just how fanatical people are – not just the ones who love the cameras, but the ones who are dead set against them?
GREG YAITANES
Dead set against them?
PHILIP BLOOM
Yeah. In just that they’re not good enough for broadcast, you can’t use them for movies. And then there’s the other camp, like myself and Lucasfilm and the thousands of people who are out there shooting right now with these cameras who say, ‘It looks great! That’s all that matters.”
GREG YAITANES
I’ve got to say that I would love to know the actual percentage of people that are naysayers on digital and on this particular format, I wonder how many of those people are actually out there in a very practical sense using these things. I think a lot of people speak from a place of looking at specs on a computer or doing stuff. And they’re rarely out there in the field doing that.
PHILIP BLOOM
Yeah.
GREG YAITANES
And those are really the only people I really feel like having that conversation with. I mean, somebody could sit there and say to me, “Well, you know, I looked at the specs and this doesn’t line up and this and that,” and it’s like, “Well, you know what, we were out there in the field and we put something on this and put imagery and told a story and people have had an emotional reaction to that story,” and, frankly, again, that trumps everything. Anybody who starts detracting it and saying it’s not that good – our visual effects team was comfortable using this to achieve anything in the visual effects area that we needed to do that we’d done. So we engaged everybody as a team and everybody signed off on it and was excited about the possibility of going further.
PHILIP BLOOM
I think what you find is mostly the ones who are complaining are the ones who are the number crunchers sitting behind their computer screens – they aren’t out shooting and actually doing stuff. Back in January, myself and Bob Primes, ASC and Gary Adcock and Zacuto did a big test where we pitted the DSLRs against Kodak and Fujinon films, just to see just how close they were getting. And obviously film came out on top in terms of latitude and resolution.
GREG YAITANES
Right.
PHILIP BLOOM
But we were absolutely amazed at just how good the DSLRs were looking. And we were putting this through proper 2K timing suites and putting it on a big screen and saying, “Holy crap, is that really the 5D?” And then we were flicking between the 35mm and the 5D and saying, “Actually, it looks better on that bit there. And that bit looks better there.”
GREG YAITANES
Yeah.
PHILIP BLOOM
And it was amazing that when we saw it on the big screen it looked so much better than on a computer screen and that’s one of the most interesting things. And we managed to pull out about 11 stops of latitude out of the Canon DSLRs, which was incredible. I mean, it’s not getting close to film, but it’s not far off.
GREG YAITANES
Right. On which one, on which camera?
PHILIP BLOOM
We found the 1D probably had the best latitude, but the 5D was very close. And also we were shooting in some crazy low-light situations, which you could never ever dream to do with film. We shot at 2500 ISO with just a Bic lighter and over-exposing an old man’s face and his hand from one, small Bic lighter. It was insane, and it opens up creative avenues for people like yourself and myself in that we can go and film and light in places we could never normally use. And that’s the creative freedom that these cameras are giving us.
GREG YAITANES
I know. That’s what gets me excited, is what’s next? And that’s the thing – the conversation we’re having right now is the conversation that I feel like people should have when they’re out in the field. Because, you know, there might be other systems that do something better and that’s great and that’s a discussion to have – that, “Oh, you know what? This is actually great,” because I think that somebody somewhere will make the kind of all-star version – take the best features of all the best cameras and basically deliver something that will finally, once and for all, as film goes away.
There is a real romance to film from an aesthetic, but the reality is that it’s a great medium to capture your images in. Obviously, you can’t look at a hundred years of it and think otherwise. But to that end I think there’s new things for us to romance and new things for us to get excited. The only way to further those things is to go do them.
So I guess I’ve gotten only positive and kind of excitement and I’ve only been privy to that via Twitter. I was so busy getting the season wrapped up on my end and of course getting the finale, which required all our focus, that I haven’t seen any backlash against the system, I’ve only really found people worldwide to be incredibly excited. In fact, I have to say I found that startling. You know, there’s a lot of ‘House’ fans that follow me, but the reality was that when the word started getting out about this that even friends of mine have been saying that people have been talking about House and the fact that we shot this thing, in circles and places that they normally would never talk about it. I think it goes to kind of an overall philosophy that has kept at this show, which is “stay relevant”.
PHILIP BLOOM
You’ll be very surprised to learn that there are actually people out there who are saying you didn’t shoot on the 5D, it’s BS and that it’s a publicity stunt. Those are the sort of comments that people are saying. It’s absolutely insane.
GREG YAITANES
Well I’m sure there’s not – everybody can say whatever they want to say. Ultimately, when we do the live chat I’m hoping to put up a couple pictures of us with it that I took on my iPhone; they’re not very good quality, but, you know. To anybody that wants to think that we didn’t do something obviously doesn’t know us.
PHILIP BLOOM
I don’t think you realize how big the movement is. I personally think that you could book some movie theatres for May 17th and project it and people would pay to go and see it because they’d be so amazed to actually see the quality on the big screen, because most people haven’t seen 5D on the big screen like I have and some other people.
GREG YAITANES
Really?
PHILIP BLOOM
And I’m pretty certain that if you booked a few theatres, like in LA and New York and Chicago you would fill them with people, like myself, who are so into these cameras and also you can take people who are skeptical about whether this is possible and say, “OK, it may look fine on the television at home,” but take them to a big screen and put it on a big screen and they will be slack-jawed.
GREG YAITANES
I do hope that there’s some light after the episode airs. I do hope as many people as possible do see the show in HD when it does air on May 17th. And afterwards, I would be, more than anybody, would love to see what this thing looks like on the big screen and it would be terrific to be able to do something after it airs for people to enjoy it. I don’t know what that is and then the needs of the show and so forth and what sort of dictates it on that. But if there is a real push and people are really interested in it I’m sure that, you know, Gale will continue to take questions and people will really wonder about it. It was good.
And again, like I said, especially in Season 6’s first show and going into Season 7, what do we do to stay relevant? And what do we do to sort of be out there? I think you can look at the popularity of the show and it takes place in a hospital and you know that these things are there, but I think when you see the finale, you see the conditions in which we shot with it, I think we’ll also have a layer of excitement.
We’ll be up against the physical things we did with the camera and the way we went at it. I feel like we like we took a number of conditions, everything from lighting something with simply a flashlight to taking it into a sense of real scope that the camera has given us. I’m excited to come out the other side of the finale to emerge and find people excited about the tools that we were using. I think ultimately if you can see the episode and you connect to it emotionally that’s what really counts.
But I think the fact that we took something that you could say “Is it ready?” and we made it ready. You can’t look at the episode and not think that this camera can do anything else that anything else offers out there. Can some things do it better, can you get more blacks with this, can you go with this method? I’m sure, no doubt. And I’m sure you can have that discussion about the RED and the Arri and the Canon and the Sony and you can have that discussion all day and it would come down to an aesthetic just the way that a DP can talk about what lenses he likes and what film stock he prefers and so much of it is subjective. I just know that when I saw this episode I had a deep emotional connection with the characters, I was very taken by the story and I was continually moved as I was on the day that I shot certain scenes.
PHILIP BLOOM
Absolutely – every camera has its flaws and if you are aware of what the camera is good at and what a camera’s not good at you simply work around it, it’s the same with every single camera, from film through to the 5D. So where do you see yourself, you’re going to be using it, I’m assuming, again as a tool within the next season, but I’m assuming you’re going to still stick with film as your predominant medium.
GREG YAITANES
I think there’s an on-going discussion with Gale and with the show. Again, what I want to make clear is that this was the exact tool we needed to accomplish the story that we wanted to tell. It was not the other way around. It wasn’t like, “Let’s gain momentum in a technical area by shooting the finale on this sort of ‘buzz’ format.” It strictly was dictated by the needs of the story.
And like I said we have, I have come up against – there are some technical challenges that, again, were outweighed by the way it helped us tell this particular story. In a normal episode on a day-to-day ‘House’, those are things that I would really love to have fixed. I would never want on a normal day-to-day ‘House’, where film has worked so well for us, [to] do anything less than that. The show deserves our best at all times and our best foot forward and that goes, also, for having everybody’s trust. You don’t want to have everybody struggling with a format just to struggle with it, you know?
The fact that it was freeing us up on the finale in so many ways was exciting. There are storylines coming down in Season 7 that are just merely talk right now that, in the back of my mind, I think, “Oh, you know what, that might be good, that might be a good spot to explore something like that.” And I know that Gale and I would continue to research and develop and check all formats. The Canon was able to give us what we wanted and what is a great story and I have no doubt it’ll be in our tool box throughout the season.
I just like to always find stories that support adding something to our vocabulary. Either a particular teaser to an episode, maybe an arc that we are exploring, but it’d be great, you know, like you can. There’s a lot of factors in that, too. I’m one of several great creative voices here, with Katie, with Hugh, with David Shore and Gale and Gerrit van de Meer and there’s a collective – these kind of things aren’t done in a vacuum, they’re done so that everyone can enhance and do the best for the best show.
I work here because I’m a fan of the show. I love not only what I work on, but I enjoy what this show is and get to do that. And again, I would never rule out the fact that the Canon is going to become – we have a soft place for it here at the show and then it’ll no doubt remain in our tool box.
I do hope that they actually come in with some entry into the field that’s actually designed that takes the best features of all their cameras and gives us something that is compact and competitive with everything else. I think it would be unbelievable. I do hope that in the next year we see some real advancement. That Canon, a giant corporation, has taken note of the fact that people have adopted this and being able to make it affordable, compact, beautiful imagery, actual cine-style camera would be huge and I would love to be first in line to use it.
PHILIP BLOOM
I mean, both myself and Lucasfilm, we put together a ten page list of, “This is what we want on the camera, can you make it happen?” And it’s interesting because Panasonic are bringing out a camera at the end of the year, which is taking a sensor which isn’t far off a Super35mm sensor into a more traditional body, and Sony have just announced a camera of similar specs so I think we are getting there. And we’ve also got lenses from both Leica and Zeiss, which are giving us proper focus marks and proper cine-action, which is going to make my life a lot easier. We use the CP2s on set on ‘Red Tails’ and they were certainly a lot easier to focus, but we didn’t have the range of lenses that we certainly had with the Canon lenses.
GREG YAITANES
Right.
PHILIP BLOOM
So we ended up using the Canon lenses the most because we wanted the longer lenses and the macro lens, as you say, is a beautiful lens.
GREG YAITANES
I’ve gotta say the 50mm, the 85mm prime were two that I loved and the 24-70mm, the 70-200mm and specifically the 100mm macro were in our vocabulary quite a bit. And because, just for speed, while the primes gave us even more of the depth of field, the speed at which we could move with the zooms, just not having to take off the lens, take off the focus gear and do all that, we really came to rely on those lenses and feel good about them. So it’s a beautiful format.
I wish there was more on there, but what ends up happening is – the other thing is, I worry, too, that I hope that’s kind of in the spirit of things: what I loved is the sense of community that surrounds Canon and the SLRs and that world. I do hope that that translates out. I do hope that the RED doesn’t try to make themselves look better by somehow, you know, RED advocates don’t try to make themselves look better by cutting down DSLR. I do hope we all use the strengths of each of these systems because they all have their own strengths and their own weaknesses. And I do hope we each use those to reach, so that as all filmmakers and storytellers we can continue to better the tools we have.
PHILIP BLOOM
Yeah, because we don’t want to have the “mine is better than yours”, it doesn’t need to be like that. It’s like, there’s nothing stopping us using one camera or even two, three cameras in the same show from different manufacturers. It is, as you’ve said, it’s using the right tool for the right job and as me, as someone who uses a huge variety of cameras, it really comes down to: somebody tells me what the job is, what the story is and I will say, “Well, we need to use this camera.” So as long as you’re not tunnel-visioned with these things and say, “Well, I use this camera and I’m not going to look at anything else.” And that’s what you need to try and avoid.
GREG YAITANES
I agree, I couldn’t agree more, I think there’s such a rich world waiting out there. The exciting thing for me is just the speed in which it’s evolving. I love that the Arri Alexa came out, and, “What’s it going to be like?” And then the Epic and, “What is Canon going to do?”
We did almost the same thing you did, which was keep a list of all the things we wanted. We had a Canon tech with us while we were shooting who was enormously helpful, enormously; a real asset to us and it was just a great place to keep that ongoing dialogue so that first hand, in the field, we could see what we were up against and what the obstacles were that we were doing. And it is, it’s like a 2-page list of all the things you wish it can do. And it’s mostly, “We’d like this to do it better.” And that’s what we should all reach for.
I know here, with our team, we’re always looking for how can we do it, how can we do it better, how can we do it more efficient and it’s exciting when a device comes along that gives you all those things, that gives you that compete experience. And then someone else’ll keep upping that, but I hope in the meantime that we continue to push and we do it together with a sense of what we all are, which is storytellers all after the same thing, being able to get people to connect to our characters to be able to tell our stories and then how to we do that?
PHILIP BLOOM
Yeah, I think we are in the most exciting times. I, certainly, in the 20-odd years I’ve been doing it, I’ve never seen things move so fast and been so excited about things that are coming out. I think the interest in the show is going to be absolutely massive from people who’ve probably never even watched the show but are just so excited to see what it’s capable of. And it’s going to be great for you guys because it will introduce them to the show as well and I think the idea of doing a Twitter chat for the millions of questions which I’ve not asked already is a great idea.
GREG YAITANES
I think what I’m going to do is sort of do a preliminary, quick – I think there’ll be two of these. We’ve been trying to accumulate questions on Twitter so that we can answer everybody’s questions and then I feel like there’ll be something after the groundswell that happens around the episode itself and the episode airs and people get chance to digest it and I think there’s a further discussion to be had once everybody feels included.
Right now I feel like as much as I can talk about it, it’s still a little bit one-way because people can’t see the physical example now for basically another month to put it in context and put the things I’m saying in context. So I hope that people will go back and either listen to this interview or read this interview and put it in the actual context of the episode afterwards. And then we’re going to make ourselves available to do another chat so that we can do this, because I feel like it’s important as filmmakers that we all help each other and be able to – if somebody’s done something, that’s great, and I will lean on that person that is doing that thing one day as well and hope that it’s all reciprocated.
PHILIP BLOOM
The best thing that you’ve done, Greg, is that you have opened the door for myself and so many other people to use these tools for shows which normally would’ve said, “Don’t be silly,” because we can now hold up May 17th, ‘House’ finale, 5D and it’s going to quiet the critics. So this is a groundbreaking game-changer for many, many people and I personally can’t wait to actually watch it. It’s annoying that I’m actually going to be in Norway on the day that it goes out so that I won’t be able to see it live in the States, but I’ll certainly be keeping abreast of the chat about it.
GREG YAITANES
I know that it’ll be available in HD on iTunes the day after.
PHILIP BLOOM
Yeah – I will be downloading it, definitely.
GREG YAITANES
I’d love to know your thoughts and I’d like to continue to hear feedback on things and just see. I think now there being a concrete thing, the episode in its entirety being shot on this allows also to be able to use this as a tool, you know? It’s like, afterwards you can look at it and go, “Well that’s not what I want,” or, “These aren’t aesthetic choices that I want to embrace,” and that’s exactly what it should be for. It should be either, like, it should excite you or it should rule out certain things so that you know that this is the right tool when you come across it. There’s really, again, nothing that I think it can’t handle and be accomplished. And it requires everybody to keep their mind sharp, the ingenuity – it seems so simple, but Hugh Laurie saying put a flagpole strap around your neck to put the monopod in was genius. That’s the kind of thinking you want – it’s thinking smaller, thinking leaner.
And I know at a pilot level, if I’m one day not here with the show and I go back into pilots and I’m doing something, I think that’s really where the real movement can happen with digital. I don’t believe I would ever go back to film on a new series. I feel like there’s so much available out there to embrace now digitally and I feel like a genesis is where in television it really needs to happen. It’s a lot harder to take something that has been doing something a certain way for so many seasons and change the ship fully, versus just starting with it that way at the very beginning and that’s how you go about it. And from there, that’s how you shoot your show and you shoot your show in a style that embraces that particular tool and that particular piece of equipment and then that’s how it starts. And then more TV shows, and more TV shows go from there. So I think that’s a great place and I think I would absolutely want to explore the Canon again when that time comes.