The constantly moving camera, the zoom that doesn’t quite find the rack, and the unfocused shot – they’re all a dynamic match for 24, Fox’s weekly action-thriller that moves a complex storyline forward, hour by hour, in real-time segments. The series, which stars Kiefer Sutherland as counter-terrorism agent Jack Bauer, has a unique look among prime-time dramas. “Technical people who watch our show can’t quite figure out how we’re doing it,” notes cinematographer Rodney Charters, ASC, CSC, who’s been with the show since its first season

From the beginning, says Charters, the show resembled documentary filmmaking more than the typical TV episodic. Co-executive producer Stephen Hopkins directed 12 episodes that first season and stamped his look- random and realistic- on the show. " Stephen was clear that he wanted a handheld camera and the kind of aggressive moves, such as zooms that moved during takes, that were part of documentaries," Charters says. "He had a liking for those awkward moments in cinematography that have the energy and the fragile quality of being in the moment. Photographically, it left the viewer with the feeling that they were always secretly present, observing the action from behind something. You really were on the edge of your seat because the camera never settled."

At the time he was tapped to shoot 24, Charters had just concluded a stint as cinematographer on Fox’s Roswell, a considerably more traditional episodic shot on 16mm. Adapting to the more aggressive and unusual demands of 24, however, wasn’t outside of his experience- it simply required him to call on his self-reliance as a documentary cinematographer. In particular, he recalls a formative experience working in Northern Ireland the week after Bloody Sunday. "I was blindfolded and taken in a car to an undisclosed location where guns were shoved in my face," he says. "We did an interview with the local leader of the IRA, and there were British troops everywhere." Charters says he draws on that experience to identify with the show’s protagonist Jack Bauer (played by Kiefer Sutherland) and recreate a reality that he’s experienced to some degree traveling and shooting documentaries in countries like Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, China and the former Soviet Union.

24 has never been an easy show to shoot. The challenge to achieve and maintain that seat-of-the-pants look is set within a frenetic schedule that keeps the crew moving at a pace similar to that of 24‘s beleaguered Counter Terrorism Unit (CTU). To keep the show in Los Angeles, the production agreed to shave one day off of the typical shooting schedule, which means that two episodes are blocked and directed simultaneously every 15 days. This tight schedule is maintained by having two units overlap episodes one day during the schedule. This season, however, due to increasing scheduling difficulties and ongoing reshoots and elaborate stunts involving the U.S. Marine Corps with its Cobras and F-16s, the show has progressed to several more overlap days per episode, with all of the overlapping footage capably lensed by DP Jeff Mygatt.

24 is shot with two Panavision Millennium XL cameras using Kodak Vision2 Expression 5229 stock, which Charters loves for its enormous latitude to find detail in the shadows and highlights. "One of my secret weapons is that I never have to worry about the overexposure of highlights," he says. "I use this stock during the day and night. One of the issues for a show like ours is that we’re not fill-lighting as much as we might. I need the film to get the information for me." Using only one 500 ASA stock requires that a gel slot be available before the mirror in the optics so that the operators are not looking through the three to four stops of ND filters required for a sunny day exterior.

One continuing challenge has been convincing the show’s two focus pullers – A camera’s Jonathan Sharpe and B camera’s Bruce DeAragon – to pull unfocused shots. "When you’re born with a name like Sharpe, you have an extremely difficult time if the editors don’t use the sharpest takes," says Charters. In the first season, Hopkins insisted on those out-of-focus shots. Now, with a bit more muscle, the camera department sometimes negotiates with the editors to replace them with sharper takes. Sometimes the editors prevail in their attempt to tell the story the 24 way. "We’ve polished the show a bit, sometimes to the detriment of the story process," says Charters. "It was very raw in its first season, and we kind of unwound a bit and made it a bit more proper in the second and third season."

24 is a dream show for camera operators, who enjoy an autonomy not found on the typical Hollywood TV show. The operator is almost another character in the scene, since he physically steps into the actors’ space to create the fly-on-the-wall look. Every scene has numerous takes for a single scene- but they’re all different, as the operators completely cover the scene, focusing on different characters and elements depending on angle and lens.

So the show’s look depends dramatically on the work of camera operators Guy Skinner and Jay Herron. In what they shoot and how the editors put it together, the only given is the unexpected. "Traditionally, you never drift off someone talking," says Charters. "But we do it all the time. The camera operators have all the freedom in the world to interpret the scene instinctively. I do not talk to them via radio. We talk about the scene before and after, with input from the director and myself. But my guys are completely on their own. Ninety percent of the time, they give it to us naturally. We’ve progressed to the point where it’s intuitive."

A camera is handheld nearly all the time, with Skinner operating a 27mm-to-68mm short zoom with the thumb of his right hand and focus run remotely by focus-puller Sharpe. Skinner often utilizes a lightweight five-wheel dolly, the Creeper, which Skinner operates 90 percent of the time by using his feet to scoot across the floor while he shoots. "When he needs to drift across, he can do it immediately, without needing to communicate, to anyone – it’s instant and instinctual," notes Charters.

The A camera dolly grip Carlos Boiles, who shares design duties with Skinner on the Creeper, is there to guide Skinner physically around objects and actors by touch, tapping him onto the Creeper at the right moment. Charters lights so that Skinner and Herron have the freedom to cover the action unencumbered. The A camera moves so much that Sharpe uses as many as three read-outs for the Panatape ranging system. "That indicates the radical nature of how much the camera moves in a scene," says Charters.

B camera, operated by Herron, is usually on a Chapman Hustler dolly on 50 feet of track. But Charters notes that B camera’s images don’t read typically for those captured from a dolly. Herron’s B camera floats off to different angles, including often-opposing angles being shot simultaneously by A camera.

In the CTU set, Herron and DeAragon are mostly on an extremely long zoom lens (a 3:1 135mm-to-420 mm T2.8), which allows for them to stay back out of the way and shoot through objects to find the required close-ups. Images can be almost identical in size between A and B when Skinner is four feet away at the end of his zoom at 68mm, but Herron is 80 feet away at the end of his zoom at 420mm. The challenges here are immense. When an actor shifts his weight on his feet to gesture, Skinner can shift easily to accommodate the frame and keep the dirty over (a shot of a character either left or right of frame with an out-of-focus or "dirty" blob of shirt /ear/edge of hair blocking a clean image), but with B camera 80 feet away from the action, the dolly grip may have to drive it 10 feet to keep both eyes unobscured by the other character. B camera dolly grip Zoli "Sid" Hajdu, who works with a monitor, is an integral part of Herron’s ability to get those complex handoffs and sneaky peeks through, over and under the variety of out-of-focus objects the crew frames the images around.

DeAragon on B focus has an enormously difficult time with such a shallow depth of field but he nails it consistently. Then again, the "reality" look of 24 is also forgiving. "Often we only have one eye for awhile because we have run out of track or the actor is blocking it," he says. "It’s a physical manifestation of not being able to move it right away. But the editors latch onto it. Most shows would say,‘I only saw one eye, let’s go again.’ But on our show, we like that kind of thing."

"Our dolly grips are hugely important to the process of telling the story," Charters notes.

One of the original legacies from Stephen Hopkins is that every scene, be it one or five pages, is shot in its entirety, usually in only two camera set-ups each way. Kiefer Sutherland and Hopkins agreed on this approach in the first season, with Sutherland preferring it for getting and keeping a rhythm.

The camera crew rarely does pick-ups. Jon Cassar, the resident director/producer who took over from Hopkins, has achieved a minimalist efficiency that continues to drive the story process beyond its early successes. "We don’t break up the scene, regardless of how long it is," says Charters. The two cameras (sometimes three, for large-scale events) are positioned at 90-degree angles and shoot simultaneously to capture all the angles. One difficulty is hiding each camera from the other’s view.

But the biggest challenge is to light for two opposing points of view. Charters notes that the lighting approaches the problem of three-camera sitcoms, which shoot with opposing angles and require opposite lighting. "We have to mitigate the lighting for the other camera," he says. "I have to shift the key to minimize the beauty of the A camera to give some of the quality to the B camera. My gaffer David St. Onge and I do that all day- minimize the damage to the cameras because they’re off axis. Most anyone can light beautiful imagery in one direction. We try to give it a great look but when the cameras are vastly off axis."

What Charters "lives for" are scenes that step out of the ordinary for 24. "I was thrilled when we bombed CTU and I was able to bring sunlight through the roof," he says. "It was distinctive, fresh and I had fun with it. But that doesn’t happen all the time. And time in 24 terms is real."

Charters loves the LitePanels Minis, small battery-operated LED panel arrays he uses whenever he needs a small, hideable source to boost light on actors, especially around the monitors, to give their faces a slight blue glow. "We use them wherever we can to hide a light," he says. "And they’re more efficient than Kinos because they’re smaller." The production also uses very powerful Tiger flashlights both in the hands of actors and held by Charters or gaffer St. Onge to augment the light from the props in the scene. Numerous other lights look believable because they’re the real deal, including the Shurefire units built into most of the show’s SWAT weapons. "We use the same weaponry they’re using in Iraq," says Charters. He also uses a lot of Source 4s with patterns, Firestarter PARs, Kino Flos and a collection of LS Chimera softlights based on St. Onge’s 800 watt lamp, which uses four switchable 200 watt Pepper Bulbs. They do not use a Chimera without a honeycomb grid.

Driving sequences are shot the old-fashioned way, with a stationary vehicle on a stage. Shooting background plates with four Sony PD-150 PAL cameras shooting simultaneously to cover all the angles, the show has now garnered a large library of plates. "At night we tend to favor Van Nuys Blvd. because there are three streetlights on every lamppost so you get the light you need," he says. The PAL DVCAM tapes are overexposed for daylight scenes by 1.5 stops to give the image a hot quality outside the car window, and are played back on an extremely bright Eiki HMI projector with a 10,000 lumens output onto a rear screen positioned outside the car. "Cameramen who watch the show usually are surprised to learn that we don’t do everything on a tow rig," says Charters.

Charters got a chance to direct two episodes in the second season and one episode this season, an experience he calls "a roller-coaster ride." Camera operator Skinner replaced him as DP for the first episodes; this year Jeff Mygatt was the DP. But Charters notes that the ripple-down effect is detrimental to the efficiency of the show. Everyone moves up a notch and the ship gets a little unstable.

Beginning this season, 24 is broadcast in HD. Wardrobe, set dressing and makeup all needed to review their standards, as did the camera department. Charters feared that HD’s greater resolution would make it impossible to continue to use the show’s signature unfocused shots and hunkered down with the editors to see if the look would require tweaking. What the editors said was that dailies, downresed from the D-5 masters, looked better than ever. "I think it is even more acceptable to be out of focus now," says Charters. "The editors always look at the overall performance, and the soft shot or late focus rack have a rhythm and quality that’s fabulous. We have an ongoing battle with the focus pullers, but I think we’re winning. It’s important for our story process."

This approach to manipulating the way in which a viewer sees the show stands in contrast to the more formal capture of images in the frame. "We force you to watch it our way, so you do not have the luxury of quiet perusal of what is happening in the frame," says Charters." 24 imagery is stark and visceral, and whenever I get to operate I sense a rush of adrenaline at my direct participation in the unfolding of the scene, especially scenes with Kiefer whose relentless excellence drives us all. The images have life, they pulse with energy, they are edgy and singleminded in their need to tell the story. The photography is truthful and honest."

No one will ever accuse 24 of looking pretty- and, from Charters’ point of view, that means he’s doing his job right. "I always go back to being in that Irish pub interviewing the IRA leader," says Charters. "I feel like I know what Jack is going through and I think we do give it a stamp of authenticity that supports that view. We make it look the way it would to Jack."