Post Magazine

October 09

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— which marks his own entr y into HD production, having spent most of his career shooting film. Post caught up with Cernjul right after he finished shooting Season 1, which began airing in June. "I'm a freelancer and I had a chance to wor k with Edie when she was a guest star on 30 Rock," he explains. "That's how I met her. I think it was my work with 30 Rock that got them interested [for this series]. "My prior experience with HD was ver y limited. My background was mostly 35mm film and the only experience I had before this was a pilot I shot with the Genesis for CBS, and a pilot for ABC in Los Ange- les called Bad Mother's Handbook." Cernjul says the D21's optical viewfinder attracted him to the camera. "Because of my background with film, I wasn't used to lighting by the monitor.The optical viewfinder was a very important tool for me. Most HD cameras have digital viewfinders, which you can't see very much.They are not very reliable in terms of color and contrast. Basically, you can see what's in the frame and what's out of frame, so the optical viewfinder was something that immediately got me interested. I did a little test with the camera and I was very pleased with how the skin tomes came out right from the camera, without being processed or anything." He adds that the image the camera captured ap- peared to be the most flattering for the show's star. Nurse Jackie shoots four days at Kaufman Astoria Studios and one day on location. For Season 2 the show gets a new stage that allows for more sets. The first season included only the large hospital set and Jackie's apartment. "I was shooting everything," Cernjul says of the first season. "We had very little second unit. We had an in- ser t unit because there are a lot of macro shots and surreal shots whenever Jackie was using drugs. So these shots were usually shot by my B camera opera- tor, who then became a DP for inserts." Nurse Jackie is a single-camera show, but three D21s are on hand at any given time. "We have three camera bodies and we used two whenever we could. The third body was basically a back-up body and a Steadicam body." The Arri D21s are rented from Arri CSC, and footage is shot to Sony SRW-1 tape. "We shot in Log C and the master is 4:4:4," says Cernjul."Then we color correct in 4:2:2.We did a test and realized that it would be much easier for every- body and we didn't think we lost much information." PostWorks in Manhattan handles picture and sound finishing on the series, including dailies, online and color cor- rection. "It's like my second home now," jokes Cernjul. The show is edited as a commercial-free, 30- minute episode. Colorist John Crowley uses Pandora Pogle to achieve the final look. The show is delivered as a 1080i master. "One thing that we are hoping to do is spend more time on location," Cernjul says of the upcoming season. "We've also improved the monitoring situa- tion. We are using Barco monitors, which, for me, is a great improvement. We started when CRTs were no longer available, and have been looking for the right monitors for a long time and now. We finally have something that we are happy with.They come closest to the CRT and now I feel that I am looking at the same image that colorist John Crowley is looking at." T H E C L E A N E R A&E's The Cleaner, which stars Benjamin Bratt as William Banks, was inspired by the true story of ex- treme inter ventionist Warren Boyd. The show, pro- duced by CBS Paramount, centers around Bratt's re- covering addict character, who is faced with balancing his effor ts to help others get clean, with his own rocky personal life and the ghosts of his addictions. It recently concluded after its second season. Jay Silverman was an executive pro- ducer on the show, and is also www.postmagazine.com October 2009 • Post 17 According to Abraham Park, associate producer for the ABC comedy Cougar Town, the show is shooting with the Panavision Genesis at Culver Studios. Andy Rawson is DP on the show, which is edited by John Michel and Roger Bondelli, ACE, using Final Cut Stu- dio 7. Patrick Woodard handles color correc- tion using Apple's Color. DigitalFilm Tree (www.digitalfilmtree.com) provides post.

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