Set from 1913 to the early 1990s, HBO’s six-episode limited series I Know This Much is True required director Derek Cianfrance and cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes to make a choice: What would the show look like? They agreed that a cohesive, period look for the project would be the correct choice — as opposed to a contemporary look.
In the early aughts, in a small Iowa town, Alice — a student at the local Catholic high school — enjoys watching Titanic and testing her knowledge of movie titles with word scrambles played in online chat rooms. When one of her internet encounters takes an unexpected turn, she suddenly discovers there’s pleasure to be had in pleasuring oneself. Not long after, she attends a four-day Catholic retreat, where she struggles to reconcile her nascent urges with the prospect of eternal judgment
When Los Angeles-based cinematographer Quyen Tran was selected to shoot the new film Palm Springs she knew she had a short production schedule, which made her pre-production planning even more critical than usual.
When cinematographer Geoffrey Hall, ACS (Chopper, Red Dog: Escape from Pretoria) was asked to shoot Halifax: Retribution, a reboot of the popular Australian TV crime drama series, Halifax f.p. that ran from 1994-2001 on Channel Nine, he saw it as a challenge. “The original series always had exceptionally high production values – it was a quality show that enjoyed a good budget and featured the best actors,” said Hall. “For the new show, I wanted to carry on that feeling of quality and give it a big, glossy look. I was after a look that would put the series in a class of its own.”
When it came time start work on the long-anticipated TV adaptation of Eleanor Catton's Man Booker prize-winning novel, The Luminaries, the filmmakers knew that one of their biggest challenges was to recreate the universe portrayed in the book. Produced by the BBC, Working Title Television and Southern Light Films and adapted for the screen by Catton herself, the six-part mini-series tells an epic story of love, murder and revenge, as men and women travelled across the world to make their fortunes on New Zealand’s South Island in the boom years of the 1860s gold rush.
When it came time for cinematographer John Conroy to develop the look for Showtime’s Penny Dreadful: City of Angels spin-off, he had already shot eight episodes of the original Penny Dreadful under his belt.
Inspired by Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch novels, the Amazon Prime Video police-procedural series Bosch premiered its sixth season on April 17. The show has also been renewed for a seventh and final season, offering one last outing for the eponymous LAPD homicide detective. Cinematographer Patrick Cady, ASC has been behind the camera for roughly half of the show’s 60 episodes to date, going back to Season 1. From the beginning, Cady and his collaborators have sought to create a sense of realism grounded in the show’s Los Angeles locations.
When cinematographer Scott Peck first learned that he was going to be shooting Stargirl, a new series on the DC Universe streaming service, he started doing a lot of research about the original DC Comics character Stargirl and its creator Geoff Johns.
Making lead actors and actresses look their very best has been a challenge for cinematographers since the earliest days of film. So it was business as usual when series creator and showrunner Liz Feldman wanted her main actresses to look their best on screen for season two of her hit Netflix show Dead to Me. She brought in cinematographer Toby Oliver, ACS to handle the job.
After its first successful season the creative team behind the hit HBO series Insecure decided they wanted the show to have a more cinematic look. For that they turned to cinematographer Ava Berkofsky whose efforts have already earned her a primetime Emmy nomination in the category outstanding cinematography for a single-camera series.
