My partner on the doc, Tamsin Rawady, and I wrote an article for Documentary Magazine about our very liberal use of the Fair Use Doctrine and I thought it would be a good read for many of you guys facing this issue in your own documentary work.

Clip Show: A Practical Guide to Fair Use

 by Alex Buono & Tamsin Rawady

Filmmaking is a constant struggle between creative vision and budgetary restraint. In the production of our documentary, Bigger Stronger Faster*, no issue better demonstrated this tug-of-war than our use of archival footage. As writers/producers, we quickly learned about an important tool called the Fair Use Doctrine, which could help us balance the conflict between our goal of being legally and fiscally responsible, and telling the most honest and accurate version of our story.

The first problem we encountered is that it seemed like Fair Use was sort of an urban legend: Does it really exist? Can you really use archival clips without licensing them? And does anyone understand how this all works? We spoke with many producers, who seemed to fall into two camps: those who never evoke the Fair Use Doctrine because they heard it is so complicated to wage your legal argument, and those who cavalierly claim “Fair Use!” for every clip in their film and then cross their fingers. Three years later, we managed to finish, sell and distribute a film containing over 800 archival clips with hundreds of cases of the Fair Use Doctrine being practiced, and we decided to share some of the practical lessons we learned about Fair Use with other filmmakers.

“Bigger Stronger Faster*” is the story of our director, Chris Bell, and his two brothers who grew up during the ’80s under the influence of muscular action stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and Hulk Hogan. The American Way was being projected to these young, impressionable boys as a win-at-all-cost mentality, and we were interested in how that affected their decision to use performance-enhancing drugs later in life. To truly examine the impact popular culture had on these three brothers, we knew we had to use archival footage from the time period. We also knew we could never effectively tell this story without actually showing clips from professional sports. As we broke down our wish list of archival footage, it was full of movie and television clips from some of the most high-profile and notoriously litigious corporations in the world, including the International Olympic Committee, Major League Baseball, the National Football League and World Wrestling Entertainment—all of whom did not want their brand associated with a movie about performance-enhancing drugs. When they all denied us the right to license footage from them, it was easy to become discouraged.

Thankfully, we had a dedicated archival team (Andy Zare, Pamela Aguilar and Susan Ricketts), and a legal team that specializes in the application of the Fair Use Doctrine. You must find an attorney familiar with Fair Use. In our case, attorneys Michael Donaldson and Lisa Callif (Donaldson & Callif) soon became two of the most valuable members of our team; additional critical advice came from veteran archive producers Prue Arndt, Deborah Ricketts and Barbara Gregson. What follows is a list of steps and tips that we learned along the way.

Babe Ruth sets the home run record in 1927.

The Rough Cut—Organizing the Footage

The first decision we had to make was whether to include clips in our rough cut that we knew we could never license. One philosophy is to only use timecoded clips from legit archive houses so that when it’s time to picture-lock and finish your film, the process is relatively straightforward. The other philosophy (which we adopted) is to explore any and every possible editorial option—clearances be damned! We decided it was more important to edit the film without creative restrictions, and thus we ended up digitizing footage from traditional archive sources whenever possible, but also from every other imaginable source: DVDs, YouTube videos, TiVo’d news programs, old VHS tapes, etc. But it was far from reckless abandon. Our archival team implemented an organization system to timecode and track every piece of footage through a Filemaker Pro database. Since this approach resulted in hundreds of hours of archival footage, we had a team of interns constantly logging new footage into our database, and an apprentice editor working the night shift digitizing footage.

The Legal Review

Once we had a relatively coherent rough cut, we output a timecoded DVD with a corresponding log of the archival clips in the cut, identifying the copyright holder, current licensing status, and whether we anticipated making a Fair Use argument for the clip. This DVD/log went to Donaldson & Callif for review. They examined the context of every archive clip we had marked as Fair Use, and gave us their legal opinion on the strength of each case. In all honesty, we were anticipating an “Us-vs-Them” kind of relationship where the lawyers were going to try to stop us from exerting our creativity with an overly conservative approach to the law. On the contrary, the goal of our attorneys was to exercise the Fair Use Doctrine as often as possible—not just as a Plan B if the clip license is denied. If our use of a clip falls within the definition of Fair Use, we would use the doctrine—and quite often not even approach the copyright holder at all.

Fair Use or Not Fair Use?

This is not to say that our attorneys let us off easy. They denied Fair Use for as many archive clips as they approved. They were very strict about the necessity for the clip to be contextualized, rather than just an entertaining cutaway. For example, in one scene we explore the use of amphetamines by Air Force pilots. As a fun introduction, we tried to use that memorable clip from Top Gun: “I feel the need for speed!” Funny? Yes. Fair Use? No. Our attorneys told us that if we wanted to use the clip here, we would have to obtain the license from the movie studio as well as the talent releases from the actors in the scene (including Tom Cruise).

Baseball slugger Mark McGwire testifies before Congress in 2005 about allegations of steroid use, insisting, “I’m not going to talk about the past.”

Making the Case—and the Story—Stronger

Donaldson & Callif provided not just a list of approvals and denials, but also notes about how we could alter the rough cut in order to make Fair Use arguments. Does that sound like creative notes coming from your lawyer? Well, we were surprised to learn that by accepting their advice and better contextualizing a clip, we not only waged a better Fair Use argument, but we quite often made a clearer story point. For example, there was a clip of Hulk Hogan delivering his wonderfully over-the-top motto: “Train, say your prayers and eat your vitamins…Be a real American!” We thought the clip was hilarious, but on the advice of our attorneys, we added voiceover before the clip explaining how much that motto meant to Bell and his brothers as children. The result was a stronger defense for Fair Use as well as a much more meaningful scene.

When to Hire an Attorney

Another important point to understand about our relationship with our Fair Use attorneys is that we brought them into the process very early—six months before we finished editing. It was essential to get their advice while we still had time to re-cut scenes—even re-think scenes, if need be. It would have been an enormous mistake to limit the value of their input by waiting until picture lock before involving them.

The Downside of Fair Use

One of the benefits of licensing a clip, in lieu of applying Fair Use, is that you also get access to a high-quality master. With Fair Use, you are on your own to find the highest-quality copy of the footage, which can take weeks and requires a great deal of manpower. We ended up “mastering” from sources as degraded as old VHS recordings of TV shows that we bought second-hand and from low-res online downloads for which no master source even existed. Post-production became more difficult as we had to convert and up-res all of these different formats to high-def. In a few cases, we actually decided to pay for the license of clips for which we knew we could employ Fair Use, simply to get the high-quality master.

E&O Insurance    

 E&O Insurance is another important factor when considering Fair Use, as there are currently only a few insurance providers that will cover it, and it’s safe to assume that they will need a little extra explanation before they dive in—and may even ask you to alter your edit before they will agree to insure your film. Our Fair Use attorneys were vital in these steps as well.

The Distribution Stage

When it comes time to sell your film, bear in mind that many distributors are still clueless about the application of Fair Use. We would recommend allowing money in your budget for your attorney to talk through your archive clearances with your distributor’s legal department. The Fair Use Doctrine is also a little more difficult to apply when marketing the film. This makes it tricky when your distributor is producing the trailer, for example. You’ll need to approve the trailer to make sure they are not using any Fair Use footage out of context, lest it lead to a lawsuit from the copyright holder and affect the release of your film. Remember, as the independent producer, you are responsible for claims made against your film, not your distributor.

When Copyright Holders Attack

After the film has been released, expect to get calls from copyright holders upset about your use of their footage. Most copyright holders have never heard of Fair Use, and you should allow some money in your budget to have your attorney call and talk through the evidence you have. If you have been responsible in your Fair Use decisions, most complaints will only require one phone call from your attorney to make them go away. We encountered a handful of copyright holders from some very large corporations who were not pleased that their clips had been used in our film, but we were well prepared by our attorneys and had no problem avoiding any legal claims.

Know Your Rights

On a final note, Fair Use is still an area of law that only a limited number of professionals have a solid handle on. The legal departments of the major studios and television networks are prone to roll over and settle with copyright holders, rather than defend their Fair Use cases. This makes it especially difficult for the independent producer, but if filmmakers were more confident in their knowledge of the Fair Use Doctrine, they could tell their stories as truly intended. In truth, it can be very stressful to challenge a copyright holder’s right to their own footage, but it can be done, and your best resources are a good attorney—and a strong antacid.

Alex Buono and Tamsin Rawady at the Sundance premiere of “Bigger Stronger Faster*”

Original fan-art created by Isaac Bidwell, available at Gallery1988.

As someone who spent the first 12 years of his education at Jesuit Catholic schools and the last 14 seasons at SNL, I thought the script was an inspired and overdue satire of Quentin Tarantino movies (and not a deliberate satire of Christianity).  On that note, I think this review by TV critic James Poniewozik sums it up perfectly: (“Djesus Uncrossed”: Grievance, and How Satire Actually Works”):

“Djesus Uncrossed” is unmistakably a satire. A satire of Quentin Tarantino, not Jesus. It’s Tarantino’s violence, his gore, his taste for folksy mayhem and liberal doses of buckshot and the n-word that’s exaggerated here and made ludicrous…On the other hand, the skit plays off Jesus’s most positive associations: forgiveness, peaceability, love.  In fact, the joke can’t work any other way–the entire premise is that Tarantino is so bloodthirsty a moviemaker that he’d even turn Jesus into an action-movie killer. It’s only funny if it reinforces the idea that the actual Jesus, outside the skit, is/was the antithesis of Djesus.”

With that said, I understand that some viewers unfortunately find this spot offensive regardless, so I’d also like to point out that this discussion is specifically about the incredibly difficult technical feat involved in producing this entire spot in one extremely long, never-ending day.

CUT TO:

9AM – THURSDAY MORNING, 30 ROCK

I’m reading the script for the first time, thinking – “We’re supposed to shoot all of this…TOMORROW?”  The script was written by Zach Kanin and Colin Jost – two of my favorite writers at the show – and the scale of the spot was massive.  It was essentially: Ancient Rome and the Holy Land, to be shot in New York City with a few hours of scouting.  On top of that, it was a mashup of Tarantino movies, starring Tarantino’s own Oscar-winning regular and Host of the show, Christoph Waltz — which adds another layer of complexity (and fun!).  Tarantino’s cinematographer is Robert Richardson, ASC – one of my all-time biggest influences.  For me, this was a crazy challenge that I couldn’t wait to take on.

Step One was breaking down the script with director Rhys Thomas and the team, trying to get our heads around how to approach so many locations.  We considered finding a Donald Trump-esque ornate interior that could double as the Roman interior sets but quickly decided that we’d be left SOL for all the other locations.  Our only move was to build most of the locations on stage.  However, we knew that if we could shoot a few scenes outside it would really upscale the whole spot.  We set out to find exterior locations for the Pontius Pilate / Roman Balcony location as well as the Basterds / St. Peter sequence.  Rhys had the inspired idea to check out the Brooklyn Navy Yard – which includes a whole hillside of disused WWII barracks that, after years of abandonment, look strikingly like a bombed-out European town, a la “Inglorious Basterds”.  The huge coup was in finding a grand old Admiral’s office building featuring stone columns that – with a bit of a clean-up and set dressing – could be turned into Pontius Pilate’s balcony.  Not only was the Brooklyn Navy Yard a pretty remarkable “this is definitely NOT New York” exterior, but it was a stone’s throw to Steiner Studios – one of the premiere sound stages in New York, where we could build our sets.  Boo-ya!

Location scouting Brooklyn-for-Rome

With the location/stage figured out, Art Director Andrea Purcigliotti went to work designing all the sets and Rhys and I started building our shotlist.  Since this was a send-up of the entire Tarantino revenge-thriller canon, we had to ask ourselves: what are the most signature Tarantino shots/visuals that will sell this satire?  I had just seen “Django Unchained” and I ended up speed-viewing “Kill Bill Vol 1” and “Inglorious Basterds”, trying to pull out visual touchstones like snap-zooms, large soft key lights, bold primary colors, extreme angle / three-point perspective shots…and a whole lot of blood.

Another thing that I already knew about emulating the look of a Bob Richardson movie: that guy lives on the crane.  Seriously: just Google Image Search “Robert Richardson” — in literally every photo he’s either accepting an Oscar or sitting on a camera crane.  Bad ass.  But we almost never rent cranes at SNL.  A camera crane is a great tool if you have the time to design and execute proper crane shots – but that rarely happens at SNL.  Well, despite all that, Rhys and I decided right away that if we were going to attempt Tarantino/Richardson, we needed a crane.

CUT TO:

8AM – FRIDAY, STEINER STUDIOS

We had a late call (it’s normally 5am) because host Christoph Waltz was going to be in rehearsals all day and unavailable to the film unit until after 9pm, so it was gonna be a late night.  But at the same time, we knew we could shoot out all of the non-Christoph parts during the day, plus get all the stage work prepped.  Thus, my day began with a rigging crew who were busy assembling the sets and starting to prelight the stage, based on overhead diagrams that I had spent all night creating to rough-in the set lighting.

11AM – FRIDAY, BROOKLYN NAVY YARD

Shooting began at the Admiral’s building for Kenan’s amazing Ving Rhames-as-Pontius Pilate impression.  First shot up: 23’ Technocrane sweeping up the columns to reveal Kenan, landing in a close up: “…I’m gonna get Old Testament on his ass.”   A word about Technocranes, which is a crane with a telescoping arm (in this case we used a 23′ Scorpio Telescoping Crane, but any telescoping crane can be referred to as a “Techno” in my book).  Yes – they cost more to rent than a normal, non-telescoping crane.  And yes, they require additional specialized crew members to operate.  But in my experience, the Techno pays for itself.  First of all, it rolls off the trailer already built, as opposed to the massive tinker-toy setup of most other cranes that come in fifty pieces and require assembly onset – which always feels like it takes hours.  Second, the speed at which you can execute moves on a telescoping arm far outpaces the speed of placing a traditional crane on track and physically moving the entire chasse around for every shot.  On a shoot like this one, time saved using the Techno equaled overtime for the entire crew saved at the end of a very long day.

Camera-wise, I knew that Tarantino and Richardson are diehard film guys and all of their collaborations have been shot on 35mm filmstock with Panavision cameras and Primo anamorphic lenses…which is all a big no-can-do on our budget and schedule, so we went to the next best thing for a filmic look: the Arri Alexa.  (Micro-overview: I like the Alexa for a filmic look, the Epic when I need 4K and high frame rates and the C500 when I need 4K, light-weight body and low-light performance).  We had a set of Leica Summilux-C lenses but since we knew we would be snap-zooming as well, we had an Optimo 24-290mm.  This was a 2-camera shoot so we actually had two Alexa bodies sharing the same set of lenses, with one of the cameras living on the crane with the zoom.  The Alexa records internally to SSD cards in a few different flavors of ProRes.  We always shoot ProRes HQ in Log-C color space.  To emulate the anamorphic format of Tarantino’s films, we framed for 2:35 aspect ratio.  I considered anamorphic lenses for about a half second, but I knew I would need the fast T1.4 stop on the Leicas; anamorphics tend to be slower and optically  less-than-optimal if shooting faster than T2.8.

At the same location, we shot Taran Killam doing his uncanny Brad Pitt-as-Aldo Raine-as-St. Peter speech.  This sequence was basically a shot-for-shot remake of the same scene from “Basterds”.   Since I already had the camera on the Technocrane, I used the telescoping arm as a dolly, tracking with Taran as he marshals his Apostles, and then simply telescoping up to a high angle for the dramatic bird’s eye view opening of the scene.  Again, the Technocrane proved to be a much faster solution than setting dolly track and a scaffolding or ladder for the high angle.  Lighting-wise: I was prepared to light this scene with a 12K HMI through 12’x12’ muslin but the sun was doing an even better job so we shot with natural light.

Next up: we loved the idea of getting a “Django”-style snap-zoom of Djesus riding into town on his white stallion but Christoph’s rehearsal schedule meant we’d never see him during daylight hours.  Solution: we would shoot a wide shot with a photo-double and on the snap-zoom we would cut to a matching snap-zoom of Christoph on the same horse against a greenscreen on stage.  I would be remiss if I did not mention that this horse shot was a huge bone of contention all Thursday during our prep.  We technically had no business monkeying around with a horse on our insane schedule and with deep regret, Rhys agreed to give up the horse shot.  It wasn’t until about 11pm on Thursday night as we reviewed the shotlist that Rhys decided he MUST have the horse shot.  He stuck to his guns and made it happen – and it really up’ed the ante on the whole spot.  That’s a great lesson that sometimes you have to ignore your warning light and just go with your gut.  The “horse shot” is now short-hand for us, referring to a seemingly impossible shot that we’re still gonna go for, logic be damned.

About a hundred yards from the Admiral’s building was an old dilapidated warehouse that we thought would be perfect for the “Apostles-as-Basterds” montage of Roman-killing.  By this point we were running out of daylight so we rushed our shots, using a Kino VistaBeam 600 through a 4×4 frame of 216 to give the fading natural light some shape.

6PM – FRIDAY, STEINER STUDIOS

Once we lost daylight we made the move a few hundred yards away to our stage at Steiner, where my rigging crew had transitioned into my shooting crew and the stage was relatively pre-lit.  We had a handful of shots we could get with our Djesus photo-double, and then Christoph would finally arrive for his shots.

First up we shot the silhouette sword-fight scene, modeled after the Crazy-88 fight scene from “Kill Bill Vol 1”.  The idea was simple enough: primary colored background silhouetting a foregrounded fight scene.  We had a team of stunt guys practicing a sword fight routine for a few hours so they were good to go.  Problem was, my lighting plan was a total FAIL.  Let me step back and explain: I sometimes have the pleasure of working with an amazing lighting designer named Mike Baldassari.  Mike lights Broadway shows and also the big budget movie-versions of Broadway shows, like NINE and ROCK OF AGES.  When he’s not doing that he is sometimes available to help me when I need a theatrical look.  He’s taught me a lot about theatrical-lighting and how it’s completely different from cinematic-lighting.  Different tools, different techniques, even a different color wheel.  Generally speaking: theatrical lighting uses the additive color wheel, mixing  red/green/blue primaries to create colored light, whereas cine-style lighting is based on the subtractive color wheel via gels and filters to create color by subtracting wavelengths.

Point is: Mike was not on this job but I thought I would try my hand at theatrical lighting without him.  To create the huge primary-color background, we hung a 20’x30’ bleached muslin and lined the top and bottom with 6’ DMX-controlled ColorBlaze LED strips – just like how we lit our recent “Charlie Brown Christmas” spot.  By using LED color strips, we could quickly and easily change the color of the entire 40’ wall with the touch of a button.  The idea is to skim the LED light up and down the surface of the muslin, creating a perfectly uniform wash of color.  At least that’s what happens when Mike is on the job…In this case, I was looking at a mostly dark muslin with patches of spotty colored light – and I panicked: why isn’t this working?!  Turns out the rental house sent us a combination of two different types of LED strips: ColorBlaze and ColorForce – and the mixture wasn’t playing nice.  Well, we were out of time and had to shoot so I needed a quick fix.  Amazingly, our production manager Justus McLarty happened to take a peak behind the muslin at the white cyc stage wall and said, “hey – this looks pretty good back here…”.  We pulled the muslin down and discovered that while the whole ‘skip the light up the muslin’ idea wasn’t working for us, we had (inadvertently) lit the cyc with colored light!  It wasn’t as saturated or even as the muslin would have been, but this was a huge stroke of luck and we were able to start shooting moments later.  We staged the scene on an 8″ steel deck surfaced with 4′x8′ sheets of glossy masonite to reflect the silhouette while hiding the bottom row of LEDs.  The choreographed sword fight looked great, with splatters of blood added in post.

“Kill Bill Vol 1″ versus “Djesus Uncrossed”

Next up: Djesus rises from the grave.  The tomb and tombstone were made out of sculpted foam and probably looked pretty fake in broad daylight, but with dark, contrasty lighting, they looked totally authentic.  I simply setup a 20’x10’ unbleached muslin with a T12 Fresnel blasting into it, right at the camera.  The warm, soft light punched around the edges of the stone, just like desert sunlight.

10PM – FRIDAY, STEINER STUDIOS

By this point, Christoph Waltz had arrived on set for the reverse shot – revealing Christoph-as-Djesus exiting his tomb and then snap-zooming back to a wide shot on, “Guess who’s back.”  I used two 6k spacelights to light a broad area as if from skylight.  We setup across the stage and zoomed in, then just manually snapped out wide.  No need for greenscreen around the cave – our compositor, Todd Sarsfield, would just blend the edges of our small cave into the background plate of a mountainside.  I say all this in hindsight; at the time I was thinking: uh…this is gonna work, right??

Then we invited our horse to join us onstage to shoot with Christoph against a greenscreen – and here was my next terrible idea.  My theory was that the LED-lit muslin would work perfectly as a greenscreen; all we had to do was dial-in green on the DMX mixer.  But since the muslin was a total bust, we were now stuck with the LEDs lighting a white cyc – and instead of a perfectly smooth, saturated key screen, I had created a spotty, pale yellow-green wall.  Well, that’s how we shot it and it was up to our poor compositor to somehow make it work – and I still feel embarrassed about it…sorry about that, Todd!

For the Market scene where Djesus mows down Roman soldiers, I lit this set very broadly with another two space lights and a huge 20K Fresnel through a 20’x20’ unbleached muslin, which created a super soft, warm light.  For a backlight, I had a T12 Fresnel on a small articulating lift, reaching out over the set.  For the bullet-hits, our SPFX guy, Richie Tache, was shooting paintballs filled with zirconium – called “zirc hits” — that create a big spark on impact.  Then we rolled in the Technocrane and I thought: wow – is this still just a parody shoot?  This had officially become the biggest production I’d ever worked on at SNL…

We lit the Roman Council Chamber with the same lighting setup: 20K into 20′x20′ unbleached muslin.  The set was designed with a balcony opening up to a greenscreen – which would be composited with an exterior plate so I also had a 9-light maxi hung up very high on the grid as a sunny backlight.  For the reverse shot on Djesus, we simply flipped the actors around on the same set, closed the gap to hide the greenscreen, and I had pre-rigged 6′ MR-16 cyc strips with Magic Gadget flicker boxes to emulate flickering torchlight.

As for the amazingly grotesque and oh-so-Tarantino splitting of Fred Armisen’s head following the punchline, “…the ‘H’ is silent…” — I’ve said it before: we have the best Makeup Department in the biz.  This prosthetic was made by our Key Makeup wizard Louie Zakarian in less than a day.

4AM – SATURDAY MORNING, STEINER STAGES

We’re on our last big setup – the squib-shot where Djesus shotgun blasts a huge hole in Judas Iscariot.  How we got to this point is all a blur.  Everyone is completely exhausted and running on fumes.  We had just released Christoph, who had to rehearse more live sketches and then host the show later this same day.  This is our only squib shot in the entire spot and it seems to take forever to setup.  We’re only going to do it once so we set both cameras at 120fps and Rhys tells our SPFX guy to just go for it – full load, extra large blood pack.  My 1^st AC, Nick Demas, covers every inch of our cameras with plastic bags because the blood is gonna spray everywhere.  The blast goes off perfectly and even in our punch-drunk state, everyone gleefully gathers around the monitors to celebrate the glorious slo-mo action.  The shot looks great and by 4:30am we hear the magic words…THAT’S A WRAP ON DJESUS!

What happened over the course of the next 15 hours is a whole other miracle.  Somehow Rhys and editor Adam Epstein transformed our 20+ hour shoot day into a finished trailer, and colorist Emery Wells added the final gloss.  I think just seeing Adam’s Premiere timeline tells the story (and makes a pretty cool piece of pop art all on it’s own!)

I watched the spot air live that same night from my home in Venice, California and I felt incredibly lucky for the opportunity to work on such gonzo scripts, and incredibly proud to work with such a great team.  Then I finally went to bed.

*****

If you’re interested in learning A LOT MORE about how I like to work, check out my workshop tour this summer.  It’s called the VISUAL STORYTELLING TOUR and I’ll be visiting 31 cities between June and July.

In the script, written by Co-Head Writer Colin Jost, Keenan Thompson plays a workaholic executive who can’t stand wasting even a moment of time by taking a toilet break.  Lucky for him, now there’s the “Bathroom Businessman” – a new product that turns any toilet stall into a multi-function office suite so that Keenan never has to miss a moment of work-time.  (If you’ve seen the spot, you know there’s also a twist at the end that turns the absurd script into a perfectly observed commentary.)  From a practical perspective, it seemed pretty straightforward: one actor (with a quick appearance by Nasim) in two locations  – which sounded pretty do-able, even considering that we only had 2 days to produce it.

Since most of this script takes place inside a bathroom stall, my director, Rhys Thomas, decided right away that we’d have to build the stall on stage rather than try to shoot on location.  A real stall is just too small and impractical; we needed to get a camera inside the stall, which meant pulling the stall apart.  Once we pulled the trigger on a set build, we decided to build the office on stage, too.  We could have shot the office on location, but finding an office with a nice view of the city and scheduling to shoot it at the right time of day for the view – not to mention dealing with changing light and weather – plus making a company move from a practical office to a stage within our single shoot day was never gonna happen…The one thing we decided to shoot on location was a few transition shots to sell the illusion that the office and bathrooms are real.  So we found a nice bathroom within our building at 30 Rock for an establishing shot, along with an office corridor where we could establish Keenan walking from his office to the bathroom, and where he has a funny line of dialogue with his secretary, played by Nasim.

Bear in mind, these decisions all had to happen on Wednesday night so that our Art Director, Andrea Purcigliotti, could quickly design the sets for the set shop to start building first thing on Thursday morning.  The sets would be loaded into the stage Thursday night, and that’s when Andrea and Production Manager Justus McLarty got to stay up all night with the rigging grips and scenics, making sure the sets are assembled, painted and ready by our 5:30am Call Time on Friday morning.  You’d think that getting two large sets banged out in one day would be the big challenge but who knew: the hardest design element was finding the hardware to build the bathroom stalls!  Andrea and our Set Decorator Ipek Celik spent most of the prep day scouring the city for stall fittings that would match our practical bathroom.  That’s a great example of a challenge you just can’t anticipate when you read a script.

The office was designed with a large window about 16’ wide.  One of the trickiest things about shooting a scene on stage with a large window is: what do we see outside the window?  Sometimes we use translights – large photo-backdrops that we either front-light or backlight – but I think these rarely look convincing and with a 16’ window, the translight would have to be enormous to accommodate all the different angles of view within the room.  It’s easy to make the mistake of thinking that a 20’x20’ backdrop will be large enough to cover a 16’ window, but you have to keep in mind that you need to back the drop away from the window in order to light it, and unless you’re only looking through the window from one angle, you’ll soon realize that you need something more like 40’ wide or more.

We’re also limited to whichever translights we can find available on our single prep day – which are often pretty limited and sadly dated.  For that reason, I’ve become a big fan of shooting greenscreen outside windows and having our editor, Adam Epstein, composite the shot in post with hi-rez background plates that I often shoot myself.  For this spot, I just stuck my 5DmII out the window at 30 Rock and shot a skyline plate that worked perfectly for outside our executive office.

On the camera side, we decided to shoot this spot with a Canon C500.  We chose the C500 because we wanted to finish the spot in 4K for archival reasons, and we also thought that the smaller, lightweight camera body would make shooting inside the bathroom stalls a little easier.  We’ve also found that the C500 has a very crisp look with exceptionally accurate color, which I thought would work well for this spot.  The next question is: what kind of lenses to use?  In the past, I often used Angenieux Optimo zooms for everything at SNL, since they’re beautiful lenses and allow us to move so quickly.  But lately Rhys and I have become obsessed with the discipline of composing with prime lenses.  Our go-to lenses this season have been the Leica Summilux-C primes and the Arri/Zeiss Master Primes.  As a very broad rule of thumb, we use the Leicas when we need a warm cosmetic look and the Master Primes when we need a colder, harder look.  Reasonable alternatives that I also like are the Cooke S4s for a warm look and Ultra Primes for a cold look.

For this spot, we chose Master Primes.  I try to reduce the set to 5 or 6 lenses to keep a consistent look (and also since they’re so expensive to rent!).  I normally go with traditional focal lengths: 18mm, 25mm, 35mm, 50mm, 75mm, 100mm.  But for this one, we wanted to go with a wide-angle look so I went with: 16mm, 21mm, 27mm, 40mm, 65mm.  I also grabbed the 100mm just to be safe.

My 1^st AC, Nick Demas, surprised me with a new feature on the C500 build: the Canon WiFi Adapter (the official, very sexy name is the “WFT-E6A”).  With this little device, Nick could interface with the camera via iPad, giving him control over start/stop, color temperature, ISO, shutter angle, etc.  I’m always game for trying out a cool new device if it’s appropriate for the job, and in this case, the iPad controller came in handy because we decided to use a jib arm to get some high-angle shots over the bathroom stall so we needed the remote on/off control.

Since we were buildling the camera on a jib arm, it occurred to me that we could drop the lens inside the stall from above using a periscope lens, which could help us move even faster, because we could squeeze the lens inside the stall without having to remove any stall-walls – so we rented a Century Periscope 2000.  I’ve used the T-Rex periscope on other jobs at SNL and it’s superior in many ways, but it comes with it’s own lenses and would not accommodate our Master Primes, so I decided against it.

Well, this whole “periscope idea” turned out to be a better hypothesis than a practical theory.  We quickly discovered that maneuvering and stabilizing a long jib arm over the set with a periscope lens was way too complicated and time-consuming.  We started falling behind on our schedule and had to punt: we pulled the camera off the jib, I threw it on my shoulder and we shot most of the spot handheld!  This is a great lesson in keeping things simple – a lesson that I seem to keep forgetting and have to re-learn the hard way.

From a lighting perspective, I wanted to keep the spot soft and contrasty, with no hard light or shafts of sunlight.  Our location bathroom that we were matching was very modern with a low-key, slate gray underlit vibe that reminded me of a David Fincher movie, so I decided to go with that kind of look.  That probably sounds absurd for a commercial about a guy using a bathroom stall for an office but I try to give myself rules and keep a strong look in mind – even if I often don’t have the time to completely pull it off.

My Key Grip on this shoot was Archie Ciotti; he rigged a greenscreen semi-circle around the window-set that was 40’ wide by 20’ deep that my Gaffer, Sean Sheridan, lit with five 2K skypans.  In the past I’ve used 5K skypans to light greenscreens, especially back in the 35mm filmstock days, but now that all these new cameras have such high native ISOs, I often find that 2K skypans are more than enough.  I also used to light greenscreens to be AT KEY via reflected light meter, i.e. – if I’m shooting at a T2.8, the screen would read 2.8 reflected.  However, with new digital cameras and compositing software, I’ve learned from my friends on the visual effects side that lighting a greenscreen to be a stop underexposed is better for everyone: the color is more saturated and also reflects less green spill all over the set.

We lit the office interior with three 5Ks bouncing into a 10’x20’ overhead bleached muslin outside the office window to look like skylight.  I gelled with 1/8 CTB and 1/8 PlusGreen, to subtly look like it was being filtered through a highrise office window.  Inside the office I hung a couple Image80 Kinos from the grid to toplight like natural fluorescent office light.  For a soft key, I used a Kino VistaBeam600 through a 6’x6’ Full Grid, skirted to keep it off the walls.  No fill light – I wanted to keep it contrasty and natural looking.  One of the first problems I ran into was that the windows, which were fitted with 4’x8’ sheets of plexi, were reflecting my key light right back at the camera.  The windows were so large that there was virtually no angle I could place my light to avoid the reflections.  Yet I couldn’t pull the plexi out of the windows without pulling the entire set apart.  So out came the skill saws as my grips literally cut the plexi out of the window frames.  As a general rule – another one I seem to keep forgetting: if you’re shooting greenscreen plates, it’s a lot easier to build your set without glass/plexi in the windows.  Your compositor can easily add a reflective opacity layer that looks like glass in post.

For the bathroom set, I rigged a row of 4’ 4-bank Kinos on a 20’ pipe mounted to rolling stands – a rig called a “goal post” – that I placed over the stalls.  I had another goal post with Kinos out in front of the stalls.  Finally, for our transition shots on location, I was trying out a new type of light from a company called Hive Lighting.  We used their 2-Light “Killer Maxi” and their “Wasp Par”, and I thought they were amazing.  The lights have a plasma source and a huge output while drawing almost no power and zero flicker at any frame rate.  The 2-Light Maxi gave me the equivalent of a 1.2k HMI while only drawing about 4.5amps.  Think about that for a second: you could plug four of these lights into a 20amp circuit and have nearly the equivalent output of a 6k HMI on house-power!  The daylight-balanced light was incredibly clean and pleasing.  The ballasts are also built into the light so you’re not dragging around extra ballasts and header cables.  Very cool new instruments for location lighting when you need a lot of light but want to use house-power and avoid a generator / tie-in.  A word of caution: these lights do not hot re-strike and require warm-up time similar to working with HMIs, yet during that time, they don’t strike at all, which can leave you anxious since nothing appears to be happening.  I suggested to Hive that they consider adding an otherwise non-functioning green LED that turns on when you strike the light just to make us feel better!

I like pointing out the unsung heroes of a shoot and for this one, our Set Decorator Ipek and our Prop Department were the stars: Rob Ackerman, Paul Kineke, Giff Meyer and Vlada Joseph.  For me, this spot works because the actual product is so well realized as a prop.  Don’t get me wrong: I love getting so much credit when a spot looks great, but in truth, on the big reveal-shot/punchline, my contribution was a Kino Flo lighting the set from the top; everything else was the Art and Prop Departments, plus a very funny dude named Keenan.

No 4k-shoot description would be complete without addressing the challenge of a 4k workflow.  The C500 records 1080 MPEG-2 internally to compact flash cards while outputting 4k in the Canon raw .RMF format through the SDI outputs to a third party external recorder.  There are a few options for external recorders and I’ll cover my thoughts on them in my next post – which is a much longer discussion.  The workflow for this job involved recording an edit-proxy to the internal compact flash cards while recording the raw 4k media to the Gemini 4:4:4 by Convergent Design.  The raw files were sent to our colorist, Emery Wells at Katabatic, while the proxy files were sent to our editor, Adam Epstein.  Adam and Rhys (our director) started cutting around 8pm and had a rough cut finished by about 2am, at which point they emailed the EDL to Emery, who then processed the raw footage (he technically “debayered” the raw footage) and output 4k ProRes, conforming the EDL on Saturday morning.  Emery, Rhys and I spent Saturday afternoon emailing still frames back and forth, discussing the color correction.  By around 6pm, Emery exported both a 4k ProRes version and a 1080 ProRes HQ version for broadcast, which went back to Adam on hard drive.  Adam was meanwhile spending Saturday afternoon working on the greenscreen composites, adding sound fx, music and motion graphics.  He then overcut the new colored footage back into his timeline.  The final ProRes HQ version was output and delivered to the Live Show by 8pm, just in time for the Dress Rehearsal!

As I’ve stated before, this description only scratches the surface of what happens each week at SNL and I can only speak for my small role in the Film Unit.  As for the real magic trick of how the Live Show comes together – I have no idea how they pull that off!

Once again, if you’re interested in learning A LOT MORE about how I like to work, check out my workshop tour this summer.  It’s called the VISUAL STORYTELLING TOUR and I’ll be visiting 31 cities between June and July.

For starters, let’s talk about the weekly schedule at SNL. The writers and cast members have to reinvent the show every week with new material, leading up to a table reading on Wednesday afternoon. By Wednesday evening, a dozen or so sketches will be chosen for the show that week and that’s when the Film Unit director/producer Rhys Thomas gets the green light for the film piece we’re shooting that week. For my part, I’ll receive the script on Wednesday night, at which point I’ll pack my bags and head for the airport. (Believe it or not, I live in LA and commute to NY each show week.) The 11:30pm redeye from LAX to JFK is now a rote part of my weekly existence. I arrive in NYC around 7:45am, grab a quick shower in the Delta SkyClub at the airport – no joke! – and catch a cab to the office where Rhys, our Production Manager, Justus McLarty, and the rest of the team have already started the mad scramble of our single prep day. In general, we prep Thursday and shoot Friday for broadcast on Saturday. I’ll keep mentioning the timeline as I walk through the spot, since the turn-around schedule is by far the biggest pressure we face.

“History of Punk” was actually the second script that we were handed to produce on Friday. The first script was “Al Pacino HBO Biopics” – a tour de force of Bill Hader’s supreme Al Pacino impression, for which we had to create at least 10 different looks on the same courtroom set. That alone would normally be a big challenge so the additional script was a little overwhelming at first. But the “Punk” script was just so good, we were all immediately up for it. The short film is a mockumentary about punk legend Ian Rubbish (Fred Armisen in the mold of Johnny Rotten), who parted ways with his band The Bizzaros (Bill Hader and Taran Killam) over his controversial support of Margaret Thatcher. Written by Fred Armisen and Seth Meyers in the wake of Margaret Thatcher’s death last week, the script is about the coolest and classiest tribute I can imagine. For me it was extra fun because I also make documentary films when I’m not working for SNL, so making a “Spinal Tap”-style mockumentary is completely up my alley.

The biggest challenge of this spot was trying to figure out how we were going to accomplish so many different dated looks and sets in our incredibly short timeframe. There were multiple period punk concerts, still photo montages, modern day interviews, a setup at 10 Downing Street with Margaret Thatcher and a recreation of the infamous 1976 Bill Grundy interview with the Sex Pistols… Schedule-wise, we’d start Friday morning with the “Punk” spot, but “Pacino” was also huge so we thought we’d have to finish shooting EVERYTHING on “Punk” by midday. At first glance I thought there’s just no way – it’s an 11-page short film!

The first decision was to shoot the concert footage on Thursday night – the day of our prep. This was risky since we were prepping two jobs at once, so throwing in a shoot as well meant losing prep time for both spots. But we quickly decided it was the only solution. Rhys suggested a bar on the Lower East Side called Arlene’s Grocery – we didn’t even have time to scout it — and they agreed we could show up at 5pm but had to be gone by 7pm. 2 hours? Uh…okay – I guess we can do that.

The next question was camera formats. We looked at a lot of Sex Pistols concert footage along with clips from their documentary, “The Filth and the Fury”. Right away we knew we wanted a grungy 16mm handheld look, with hard contrasty lighting and strong primary colors that screamed that late 70s period. We certainly weren’t going to shoot with an actual 16mm camera – no time for processing on this schedule and I don’t think there’s even a lab in New York that still processes 16mm. My first thought was to use a 4/3” sensor camera like the Black Magic, with some beat-up old 16mm lenses. But I’ve never worked with the BMCC and this didn’t seem like the right job to throw a new workflow into the mix, so I decided to use an Epic, windowing the sensor down to 2K. One of the unique things about the Epic is the way it changes the active sensor size and crop factor when you change resolutions. I normally find this a tad annoying, but in this case I figured that the smaller sensor size would give me the appropriate depth of field for a 16mm look. I also boosted the ISO to 1600 to pickup a little extra noise.

Red Epic sensor formats compared to Super16mm

Next up I had to decide on glass. I wanted old 16mm lenses to give me a flare-y, slightly soft image and circa 1977 look. Our rental house on this job was TCS, where my longtime 1st AC, Nick Demas, found an old Cooke 9-50mm zoom that sounded great, along with a set of old Canon K35 primes: 18mm, 24mm, 35mm, 55mm, 85mm. The K35’s are the perfect era but they’re 35mm lenses so on the Epic’s 2K sensor, they’d effectively double in focal length, which would be way too long. I went with the old 16mm zoom that fit the sensor’s target size much closer and it looked AMAZING. It was pretty fast for a zoom (T2.5) and I could manually snap the zoom with one hand. It gave us huge flares and natural softness, and the 9mm focal length was ideal for the look.

In addition to the “fake 16mm-Epic”, we did the unthinkable and shot some footage with…an iPhone! Rhys has an iPhone 5 with the 8mm app by Nexvio, so this B-camera rental cost us a whopping $1.99! Totally absurd, but it looked shockingly good. I’ve had the app on my phone for a while and goofed around with it a bit but never considered it for a professional shoot until I heard that some of the scenes in this year’s Oscar-winning documentary “Searching for Sugar Man” were shot with the app after the director ran out of money and had to finish his film somehow. I would have never guessed. (That’s an amazing doc, by the way – well worth your time!)

We also wanted to shoot still photos to further drive the documentary style, so after covering a song with the Epic, we’d then do it again with a 5DmIII with an L-series 50mm. I was amazed out how well those shots fell right into place – mostly due to how perfect Fred, Bill and Taran looked in those costumes and hair & makeup. I have long believed that the most impressive thing about SNL is the hair & makeup team. What they accomplish in the time they’re given is pure magic. Hair, makeup and wardrobe are departments that often seem to get short changed as the lion’s share of credit for the “look” of a spot goes to the camera and lighting departments, but if you want a great look, don’t make the mistake of overlooking “the vanities”.  In this case, those unsung heroes are: Jodi Mancuso and Alison Wadsworth in Hair & Makeup (respectively), Brian Hemesath in Costumes and Munee Hayes in Wardrobe.

I also want to note that Fred, Bill and Taran are actually playing those songs live. We didn’t have time to pre-record those tracks and shoot music video style. I knew that Fred had spent years as a drummer in a real punk band back in the late 80s/early 90s and SNL sometimes finds a way to showcase his legit musical skills, but I had no idea that Bill and Taran could also play. Seth wrote the lyrics to the songs and Fred even recorded a full-length version of “Hey Maggie Thatcher”.  UPDATE: YOU CAN KNOW DOWNLOAD FULL VERSIONS OF IAN RUBBISH SONGS AT www.ianrubbish.com.

Next up we had to figure out how to recreate the “Bill Grundy” TV interview look. My father-in-law is a former live-television director so I showed him the Grundy/Sex Pistols clip and asked him what kind of camera they were likely using. He knew that ITV produced the show and they would have been using PYE studio video cameras. Look it up – they’re hilariously enormous. For our purposes, my new goal was to find a sufficiently dated standard def video camera that we could push further in post – maybe we’d dub the footage to VHS and then re-ingest to get that signature degraded-tape archival look. It soon became clear just how far we’ve all come from the SD world. The last thing we wanted to deal with on the post end was some archaic tape format – let alone try to source something like BetaSP stock! I ended up deciding that my old faithful Panasonic HVX200 in SD mode would do the trick. I spent three years shooting my documentary, “Bigger Stronger Faster” with an HVX200 and I know that camera inside and out – I was totally comfortable that it would give us a sufficiently dated SD look. I also can’t stress enough how great it is to work with a director like Rhys at a place like SNL where they’re totally game for broadcasting clips in 4:3 aspect ratio to get the right look – I know plenty of other shows would have insisted on 16:9 for everything regardless.

By far, the secret weapon for the look of the TV interview set is our Art Director, Andrea Purcigliotti. She created an exact replica of the Grundy set, printed out on gator board, which she then setup in a half-dome with those perfect period chairs and props. All I had to do was add a bunch of hard fresnel light to emulate the period TV-lighting style. We used a half dozen Tweenies as backlights and rigged four 1k-Baby fresnels on a pipe over the set as the keys, along with a couple of old-school 2k zip soft lights bashing from the front. We setup three HVX200 cameras in SD mode and it all just fell into place. We did very little post processing. We planned on further degrading the footage through a VHS or Beta deck but soon realized we didn’t really need it.

The 1976 Bill Grundy interview with The Sex Pistols compared to the SNL recreation of the Grundy set

For the Margaret Thatcher set, we went back to the fake-16mm Epic look. The set was a little two-wall living room with two large windows – based on some photos that Rhys had pulled of Margaret Thatcher publicity photos. My Key Grip, Mort Korn, hung a 20’x20’ bleached muslin outside the set that my Gaffer, Sean Sheridan, lit it up with three 5k skypans to blow out the windows, and we also skinned the windows with opal diffusion to make sure you couldn’t see any detail through the sheer curtains. We hung a 4’ 4-bank Kino over each window to carry the window light into the room and then used an Image80 Kino through a 6’x6’ Full Grid as the key. No fill light – I brought in a 12’x12’ solid as negative fill to create a more “real” contrasty look.

Finally we had to shoot the modern-day interviews. We set up the Bill Hader interview in the upstairs loft of the soundstage – which happened to look amazing with a ton of natural light and really great exposed beams & bricks. We were going for a stark, very filmic, sorta old-school BBC-style doc look, so we dragged our Image80 and 6’x6’ Full Grid upstairs and went with the natural feeling of the room, lighting for a soft window-lit but contrasty interview. Camera-wise, we used the same Epic but went back to a normal 4k sensor size and I upgraded to my favorite Leica Summilux primes, shooting wide-open on a 50mm and a 100mm, which – at ISO800 – required an ND9. I also used a diffusion filter to slightly soften the image. I like both Tiffen SoftFX and Pancro Mitchell diffusion. Mitchell is definitely more old school so I felt that was appropriate – using a Mitchell A. I certainly don’t think the Leica lenses need diffusion but sometimes a little diffusion is helpful when dealing with wigs and ageing makeup. We shot another interview on the Margaret Thatcher set, but shooting on the opposite wall, avoiding the windows, so it looked like a completely different environment.

Right about then we got word that Fred Armisen had reached out to THE Steve Jones from the Sex Pistols – who said he’d be happy to record a line for the spot. Problem is: he lives in Beverly Hills! It was 3pm by this point and I scrambled to find a shooter in LA who could jump on this. Luckily my friend Jon Carr answered the call and was willing to drop whatever he was doing and race over to Steve Jones’ house with his Epic and a LightPanel. He shot the interview, uploaded the footage to DropBox and we were looking at it onset before the end of the day – amazing.

By this point, we were deep into lighting the “Pacino” spot, yet still had a few other interviews to shoot for “Punk”. We briefly considered shooting them on Saturday morning but that was sounding crazy even to us. So we reached out to DP Jason Vandermeer, who was just wrapping another SNL shoot with an Alexa package. He had a set of Cooke S4s, which I thought would be a decent match to the look of the Leica lenses, so I sent him still frames of our setups along with our focal lengths and basic lighting strategy and he picked up the remaining interviews back at 30 Rock.

On the post-side, Rhys and editor Alex Serpico hammered this out in one long 14-hour session starting Saturday morning. Most of the footage was already sufficiently beat-up and didn’t require a ton of manipulation. The only footage that we had graded is the modern day interview footage. I asked our colorist, Emery Wells at Katabatic, to take the edge off the modern look and give it a filmy-feeling, which he created with a slight desaturation, a rounded-rectangle vignette to emulate a film gate and then layering the color into the image to give it depth by setting explicit qualifiers for the shadows, mids and highlights separately. In Emery’s words: “Even though a 3-way color corrector is split into shadows, mids and highlights by default, images are never exposed in such a perfectly ideal distribution. So I split the image up into my own luma ranges based on how it was exposed and then use the shadows, mids and highlight controls on the board within each my qualifiers. That essentially gives me nine levels of control.”

SNL is a pretty special place to work and as you may have guessed, it’s impossible to accurately convey how it all really happens; my goal with this blog is simply to translate some of the lessons that I learn each week – often by trial-and-error – into practical advice for whatever you’re shooting. I’ll write a new HOW WE DID IT article for the prior’s week’s spot, “Bathroom Businessman” and post it later this week.

Finally, if you’re interested in learning A LOT MORE about how I like to work, check out my workshop tour this summer. It’s called the VISUAL STORYTELLING TOUR and I’ll be visiting 31 cities across America between June and July. Tickets go on sale this week!

For three years I’ve been talking about building a proper website but I’ve never had time to actually do it.  Then in the last month, the stars aligned with a 3-week hiatus from SNL (Saturday Night Live), a few slaps in the face from some web-savvy friends and a collaboration with an amazing designer and developer named Rebecca Goodwin… and here we are!

What you can expect from this blog: my main goal is to offer some insight about what I do and I how I do it.

For example, I shot an SNL spot called “History of Punk” that aired this weekend.  In my next post, I’d like to go over in detail exactly how we shot it; the unexpected challenges of this particular shoot; how the timeline went down; my concept for the lighting, the gear and workflow we used and how we finished it in less than two days… Hopefully I’ll convince some of my conspirators to chime in — I think it would be great  to hear from our director, Rhys Thomas, about striking the right tone in a mockumentary that’s also a tribute to Margaret Thatcher; and/or from our colorist, Emery Wells, about the challenges of re-creating the look of archival footage circa 1977.  The SNL Film Unit has been an amazing experiment in film style that I’m always excited to talk about.

As most of you know, any production no matter the scale usually has a great behind-the-scenes story to tell – sometimes better than the script!  I also plan on going back through my reel and telling some of the often hilarious, always ridiculous stories behind the shoots.  Like how the Louis CK “Lincoln” spot was shot just days after Hurricane Sandy and during a city-wide black-out.  Or how we were still shooting green screen shots for “Djesus Uncrossed” at 4am on Saturday morning – the same day the finished spot was broadcast…I also plan on including my feature and documentary work, where I can go beyond the DP-side of things and talk about writing and producing.  At all times, you can expect to hear about the incredible teams that I get to work with; filmmaking is a collaborative art form and I’m constantly learning from my talented friends.

Hopefully some of these posts will be helpful to you and not just my own nostalgia!  I’d also love to hear from you — you can go to the Contact Me page and suggest what topics you’d like to read about.