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Prime Suspect: Todd McMullen on-set with the Arri Alexa. "It's portable and we are 100 percent handheld." PRIME SUSPECT Todd McMullen is cinematographer on the new NBC series Prime Suspect, a crime drama starring Maria Bello, who plays a tough detec- tive trying to solve murders and at the same time gain respect in a male-dominated field. Directed by Peter Berg and produced by his Film 44, the first season will include 13 episodes. When we caught up with McMul- len, the production was halfway through Episode 6, and he was gearing up for a nighttime shoot. The pilot for Prime Suspect was shot on location in New York City. The production team is now faced with recreating that big-city look on an LA stage and sur- rounding locations. McMullen is shooting Prime Suspect with Alexa. He worked with Berg on Friday Night Lights, a series that was shot on 16mm, so this new project represents his first experience with the Arri digital camera. "The Alexa is a great system," he says of his experi- ence thus far. "It's portable, and we are 100 percent handheld. This camera balances well, the operators like it and it's able to get into smaller spots." The series initially shot eight days per episode, but that number has since come down to seven. McMullen uses two Alexas full time, which they rent from Panavision in Woodland Hills. Sometimes they have a third. He'll also use a Canon 5D for foot-chase sequences. "We did shoot the pilot in New York," he recalls. "We utilized a lot those locations and made it look like the city that it's supposed to be for this story. We are shooting the series in Los Angeles and we are obviously trying to make Los Angeles look as much like New York City as we can, and I think we've been able to accomplish that." The Alexas are capturing footage in the QuickTime ProRes 444 format onto SxS cards. "As far as I am concerned, it's the best format out there," McMullen says of the Alexa. "Workflow wise, it's very user friendly. It's a wonderful format for television." While the show is cut very tightly and without any long, continu- ous shots, McMullen says they will often run a scene from the top in order to give the actors some momentum. Each SxS card can record 14 minutes of footage, and "that's plenty of time," he says. He describes the show's workflow as "pretty streamlined" and opted not to have a DIT on the series because a look had already been established in final color. "We kind of had this style that Peter Berg referenced when we started shooting — Last Tango in Paris," explains McMullen. "We tried to keep the pilot that way as much as we could. It's not overly saturated. It's not soft lighting and colors. It's not glossy or glamorous, but a real look." "We did some tests with it and I was immediately blown away because of the latitude and ease of use of the camera," McMullen notes. "It's the most filmic like camera on the market. It's not about all the Ks — 2K, 3K, 4K, 5K. It wasn't about the attachments or some big show using it. It was about a camera you could pick up and go shoot good images with. The images had contrast and depth, and had an organic feel. "I don't do a lot of in-camera stuff," he continues. "That's the great thing about the Alexa: the latitude and the way it captures the images digitally is so close to film that it's just amazing. I get a nice exposure and set a color temperature that I like, and we shoot. I established a look with preproduction." A digital loader will grab the SxS cards after they are used and offload them into a Mac tower. "He offloads them to three separate drives," explains McMullen. "One shuttle will go to post. Another is a backup drive, and then he has our master backup in his tower in case he needs to access anything. We've got double redundancy." From set, the files go to Universal Digital Services, located on the lot across from the show's production office. They will create the dailies and color that was established early on. Universal Digital Ser- vices will create the Avid files for editorial, also located on the Uni- versal lot, and upload them to a system that allows for review and approval. The show is not visual effects heavy, but does require post for inserting elements that reinforce the New York setting and to pull out the occasional palm tree captured during an LA shoot. www.postmagazine.com Post • October 2011 19