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Article Search Advanced Search ARRI D-20 on The Andromeda Strain: Data Drives the Production of A&E's Miniseries By Jon Silberg May 20, 2008, 09:28 A satellite crashes to earth containing an incredibly deadly pathogen and a team of top scientists must find a way to neutralize its effects before it can wipe out the human race. This was the premise of bestselling author Michael Crichton's first novel and Robert Wise's 1971 film adaptation, and now the story returns as a four-hour remake for A&E Network starring Benjamin Bratt, Eric McCormack and Christa Miller. Just as the new take on this science-fiction thriller updates some of the gadgets that wowed audiences four decades ago, the filmmakers made use of some cutting-edge camera technology, too, by shooting principally with the ARRI D-20 and making use of the high-speed Vision Research Phantom and the tiny Iconix HD camera. Mikael Salomon, who was a successful cinematographer on films such as Far and Away, Backdraft and The Abyss before he became a director, had been among the earliest users of ARRI's D-20 digital camera on the miniseries The Company, which he directed. The Andromeda Strain cinematographer Jon Joffin had shot seven shows for Solomon previously, though he had never used the D-20. One of the first things Joffin realized about the D-20 was that its imager, which can be rated at about EI 200, is slow. It's possible to boost that with gain, but that quickly introduces noise that defeats the strengths of the D-20's imager. And Joffin responded to those strengths. "When you shoot film with a slow ASA, you can get such a great reward in very rich, clean pictures," he says, "and I think you get the same thing with the D-20. You need more light, but the results are worth it." Joffin stresses that it is important to have a good digital imaging technician. Toronto-based DIT Jasper Vrakking, who had worked on The Company, brought his expertise to The Andromeda Strain to ensure that Joffin and Salomon could focus on the creative aspects of their jobs and not have to think about technical camera and workflow issues. "I'd like to work with him on everything I shoot digitally," Joffin enthuses. "He knew the gear. He always knew exactly what to do technically, but he never tried to push technical considerations on me. He'd say, 'If you want that window to blow out, you're good to go.' I'm from a film background, and he was my liaison to the HD world." Joffin adds that there were some things he did change about his work method based on Vrakking's suggestions. "We had the ARRI LCS [Lens Control System]," the cinematographer notes, "and I had control of the cameras' irises remotely. When we started shooting, Jasper said, 'You're going to want to pull the iris a lot,' and I told him, 'I'm never going to do that.' When you're shooting film, you just don't do that because you don't have a reliable reference, but when I saw how great a picture I was getting on the monitor, I started pulling the iris on the second shot we did. From then on my hand was never off the controller!" Salomon and Joffin both loved the ARRI Master Prime lenses they used. "I like to use limited depth of field to direct the viewer's eye," the director says, "and these lenses look as good at T2 or even T1.3 as they do stopped down. That allowed us to control depth of field even with wide lenses, and the extra stop helped to offset the fact that the chip is pretty slow. You need a focus puller who is on his game. Luckily, we had one in Simon Jori, who was excellent." The D-20 has the option of shooting in ARRI's proprietary log format or in linear space. Joffin had assumed that Salomon would want to shoot in log format, which is more film-like in its response and offers greater latitude. "We did tests and Mikael actually preferred the look of the linear mode," he recalls. "He wanted deep blacks and a contrasty look. We tried to see if we could record in log and then grade the images to look [like linear sampling] so we could have more control, but ultimately it just made more sense to shoot in the linear mode, and it ended up working well for us." The show was shot in and around Vancouver and inside the Vancouver Film Studios, where the large laboratory houses the film's team of scientists as they try to figure out how to save the world from this alien life form. To enable working quickly in this laboratory environment, the whole set had Kino Flo tubes placed throughout as working practicals. "It was quite an expensive thing to do," Joffin recalls. "It was a real battle. Kudos to Production Designer Jerry Wanek for being able to pull it off. We had one lab with 20 Image 80s under the floor, all built into the set. It got quite warm in there, but it has a really nice look and it paid off. We had big scenes in there--five or six people--and we needed a general light source that could work. Lighting was really about turning off some of the units to give shape to the light." Not only did the lab have to have enough light for the D-20's sensor, it also needed enough for the very light-intensive 150fps and 500fps shooting used in an early scene in which the scientists go through an extensive decontamination process involving backlit, slow-motion blasts of water. Joffin ran film through an ARRI 435 for the 150fps portions, but he used the digital Vision Research Phantom HD camera for the 500fps material. "The camera requires a special tech, and it only has a 2/3-inch chip," Joffin says, "but it did an excellent job. We had the actors backlit by the fluorescents and we could shoot this high-speed material and check it right away and move on. It's very hard and expensive to do something like that on film, and you go through so much film so quickly and don't know if you got it until it's processed. I don't think we could have done the shots at 500fps if we hadn't been able to use the Phantom." Much of the film involves events that one character sees on a monitor and camera/phone conversations between characters in different locations. The production team made extensive use of the Iconix HD camera for much of this work. "The Iconix is a tiny but amazing camera," Joffin says. "We used it throughout, but one scene that stands out is a shot [that takes place] inside an F16 jet in which the controls disintegrate as a helpless pilot tries to figure out what's happening." In this shot, the cockpit of the jet is the only part that's real--the rest is CGI--and there was really no room in the cramped space for any kind of normal camera to share space with the actress playing the pilot, but the scene called for images of the cockpit from the pilot's POV. "We decided to let the actress hold the little Iconix camera and point it where it needed to go," Joffin explains. "But she was in this very tight space and she was being thrown around and there was no way she could see a monitor or anything that would tell her where the camera was pointing. Mikael came up with the great idea of sticking a laser pointer on the front of the camera that she could use as a guide. Then [Prague-based effects company] UPP removed the red dots later using CG." Joffin and Salomon followed up Andromeda with a project shot on ARRI's new D-21. "I like the cameras," he says. "I've always been an ARRI guy, and it's great with those Master Primes. I'd use the cameras with other lenses, too, but the Master Primes look so good at T1.3 that it helps make up for the imagers' slowness. "I know that a lot of people say that working in HD is slower than shooting film," he adds, "but I didn't find that to be true. It may take a little longer to get set up with the cabling and the tent, but I found that once that's done, you move faster. With film, you're constantly taking readings and compensating your exposure, but [here] I could just see what was happening on the monitor and make adjustments on the fly from the tent, which really lets you move things along very quickly." Email this article  Printer friendly page