Ousama Rawi started his career in cinematography in the U.K. shooting newsreels for TV, but soon went freelance and began shooting commercials and feature films out of London. A trip to Canada to shoot a U.K./Canadian co-production changed his life when a commercial production company there offered him a 12-month contract. He went and stayed for almost 12 years. By 1994, he decided to move back into long-form and moved to Los Angeles. His credits include Avenging Angelo, Vinegar Hill, Parting Shots and Family Sins.

Watch a Showtime trailer for The Tudors, below, and then read F&V's Q&A with Rawi.

When did you get the job on The Tudors? What were the initial conversations about the look you wanted to achieve? What were the producers going for?

I was contacted by Showtime, for whom I had shot a cable movie before. They said they had a big project to do and wanted to check my availability and interest. When they mentioned it was The Tudors, I got really excited. I had read in the trades that they were going to produce The Tudors and they had got Michael Hirst, who wrote Elizabeth [1989] writing it and it was a 10-part series. Within a few weeks, we came to a deal.

The look evolved. It was never “This is what we want.” I know the period – every English person does since it was pounded into us in school. Every educated English person will tell you that Tudor period created the Church of England. It was a period of profound change in England.

Then they told me that Joan Bergin is doing the costumes. She’s immensely talented; I know her by reputation but had never worked with her before. And Tom Conroy was the production designer. It all looked right, it would all be authentic.

Did you know up front that you would be shooting digitally?

Their policy has been digital only for a few years. With that, I went into it wholeheartedly, knowing it would be a digital shoot.

Showtime was so behind The Tudors. They wanted everything to be absolutely right without going crazy with the budget. You have to work with the budget, and they had one. But given that budget, they wanted the best possible and I wasn’t going to shortchange them in any way.

Showtime said, "If you want the Panavision Genesis – and we can afford it – go for it." Panavision tried very hard, they had a good deal. But there aren’t that many Genesis cameras and they’re always busy. When none of them are sitting on a shelf, it’s difficult to rent it at a fraction of its normal cost. But they did give us a good break.

And I needed four cameras, because I needed two for the main unit, one for the second unit, and a back-up camera because we’re out in Dublin, and if I have an electronic camera to break down, I don’t want to have to wait two days. The fourth camera was never in use but we needed to have it there.

We ended up with the Sony F900, which wasn’t my first choice. It has been superceded with newer cameras with better tolerances and full 4:4:4 color space, so my colors were compressed, but there was nothing I could do-except try to cheat the chip into giving me great color. But I’d be dishonest if I said I felt constrained [by the camera]. I felt constrained only when it came to highlights. The weather in Dublin was so changeable that when we were in interior locations with windows, I’d balance the interior lighting having measured the gray day. And then when I was ready to shoot, the clouds break up and it’s bright and sunny. If I were shooting film, it’s no big deal. If I were shooting with the Genesis, it can really take it. The F900? Forget it. It goes off the chart and we start having windows that are at an illegal level. That’s where my problems were. I had to be ready for quick changes in the balance.

How did you handle the challenges of the constantly changing light?

When we were in castles in the middle of Dublin where we were 40 feet off the ground, I couldn’t build towers reaching 40 feet off the ground, so grips or stagehands could run up and put gels on or off the windows. It was either increasing or decreasing my lighting inside to match what was going on in the window. I would have double or triple the lights I needed and either switch them on or turn them off, as the light changed. In the first week, the crew had to learn what was going on, but once they got the hang of it, it became second nature, shorthand, to move really. really fast.

A lot of the show was shot inside Ardmore Studios, where we had 3 stages. The larger one is where we had the Whitehall set, which was a composite of many other sets, like the King’s throne room, his bedchambers, Catherine of Aragon’s bedchambers. We also had C and E stages, and other smaller sets were built there. Under those conditions, I had 100 percent control, so to balance the view outside the window was in my control and I had zero problems. I could literally paint the look I wanted.

Did you use pre-sets on the camera to help you adjust quickly to the changing light?

I stuck to a gamma of .45. That was the most pleasing when I did the camera tests, for the kind of look I wanted. I really restricted the presets to four, and they were just for the knee adjustments, when a window really did blast. Or if I was doing an exterior with a blue sky and all of a sudden a white cloud went into shot. That cloud played havoc with the F900, so I had to dial in a knee setting and play with it until the clipping was a bit more controllable. We were doing close to 30 set-ups a day. That was our average. Day one of the shoot, we did 46 set-ups. That was very interesting.

I understand you used Gamma & Density’s 3CP package. How did you hear about this product and how did you use it on The Tudors?

This was the first time I’d used it. I’d seen several demonstrations at their offices and at NAB. I was very interested in it all along and was looking for a project when it came in handy. For this project, it was going to be a low-keyed shoot and therefore very tricky to appreciate unless it’s seen correctly. If it were going to be transferred light, the dailies would look horrible. If they were transferred too dark, you wouldn’t be able to see faces. I was very concerned that the dailies looked nearly as close as possible to the final product. Gamma & Density’s 3CP helped me immensely. At the end of each day, one of my camera assistants was in charge of the monitor side of things. I had a Leader 5700 waveform monitor, which has a compact Flash card slot in the back. I could save an image that was coming into my monitor onto that card. I had one of my camera assistants save an image from every set-up. At the end of the day, I’d have 30 images that I would then feed into the 3CP station I had at home in my living room and I would tweak whatever needed to be tweaked. When I saw the image on the Cinema Display looking exactly the way I wanted to look, I’d save the data for that scene. And when I had every set-up done for the evening, I’d burn a CD, and the CD and the daily takes would go to the Technicolor lab in Toronto. The dailies timer, Ross Cole, is a master timer and also did the final timing session. This man lived the entire project like I did, from dailies to finishing, and that was a godsend to me. I told him what I was going to do and we agreed how we would communicate. 3CP was our shorthand. From there the dailies went to all the editors, producers and whoever else was receiving it, including online, because Showtime uses the DAX dailies system so anyone with a password can watch the dailies online.

No matter what format, the dailies looked the way [the footage] was supposed to look. For the entire five months, I never got one phone call or one question. I never had to field a single query or worry. I’ve never had an experience like this. Usually someone will call and ask, did you mean for it to look like XYZ and I’ll have to say, no, it was timed wrong. For me, the 3CP saved oodles of time.

What was your lighting package?

This brings us back to your original question: how the look was established. Showtime said they would have five directors and it was up to the production designer, cinematographer and costume designer to maintain the look of the show. That was our brief from Showtime. Maintain a look. They wanted it to look rich, lush, period and beautiful. And I said, "Okay, I know how to do that." Joan and Tom and I were in constant, constant communication throughout the shooting. In fact, Joan was at the high-def monitor every day. Tom, when he wasn’t off designing, would do the same. And we discussed everything. That helped a lot. The three of us maintained a consistent look no matter who was directing.

Without wishing to sound presumptuous, I resorted to old paintings [for inspiration]. The paintings I saw during Henry VIII’s period, 16th century England, were not directional. The lighting was flat, very flat. So that was out ‘ I wasn’t going to emulate that because we’d have the most boring-looking show. I went back to a different time period, a little further on – Caravaggio, who was famous for his dramatic single-source lighting. He had paintings where the light is hitting a wall somewhere above people, and the people are totally in shadow, and it’s a huge painting. I started looking at those and thought, wouldn’t it be nice if I could try to at least come close to doing something like that. Emulate him – and if I get anywhere near him, I’m a lucky person.

My lighting package was quite large. I had a package that was on the truck that never came off the truck. When we were on the road on locations, we didn’t have to take anything out of the studio. In the studio, I had two sets of lights, one was fixed for all our interior day scenes, and another lot was sometimes the exact duplicate, but for interior night. Because the lights for night were gelled to correspond to the temperature of the candles I’d selected, I didn’t have to spend a lot of time waiting for the electrician to change or add or remove gels. Give or take a few inches, they were in the right spot. I knew we’d be doing a scene in Cromwell’s chambers, for example, and it’s a day scene, and the window is bright, followed by another scene at night. I would place the scene for the night, where he’s lit by the fireplace, the candelabras and candles. Those lamps were waiting to be switched on. We’d do the day, and then go back to night, and it was just a matter of pushing the day scene lights off and putting the night scene lights on, and just tweaking here and there.

Ninety percent of the time, two cameras were going, so we got two different angles, and I was determined not to compromise the lighting. I got A camera and B camera to roll, so we were ahead of schedule, but not having to compromise the lighting so one gets a good image and the other gets a flat one. The odd time when I really couldn’t but compromise, I was able to say, let’s not roll on B camera.

I understand that The Tudors did not undergo a DI for the Showtime TV release. Was this a budgetary decision?

It was going straight out, tape-to-tape. It wasn’t going out to film, so DI was no longer necessary. We did do a tape-to-tape color correction and it took half the allotted time. I honestly think that Gamma & Density’s 3CP had a lot to do with it. First, Ross saw what I was after, and the other thing about the 3CP is that it gives the metadata. So in theory Ross could dial in those corrections and it should look exactly correct. He didn’t actually have to do that. Ross is very talented and highly experienced, and I didn’t have to explain anything. It was all there. The first run at it, when I was invited to come in and start with Episode 1, we ran it through as it was, the whole hour’s show, and I turned to Ross and said, we don’t have a lot to do, just tweaking. And that’s what happened for every episode.

What was the most challenging aspect of shooting The Tudors?

To keep the pace over 114 shooting days, with no hiatus and no break, with five directors. Director #1 would finish, and director #2 would start the next morning. My own personal promise to myself was that I’m not shooting episodic TV, I’m shooting feature film that happens to have an episodic schedule. The fact that it’s only 10 days plus two per episode should not deter me from achieving a feature film look. Second, to take it a step further, I was determined it wouldn’t look digital. Not that I have anything against digital, but when the [critics] want to bad-mouth something, they say, it looks digital. I’ve never understood that, but for the time being, I didn’t want that to happen to this, especially since it was digital.

I learned how the F-900 chip behaved with the lighting, so I would say to myself, I want a certain look that was in my mind’s eye. Because I knew how it was going to behave, I’d light it differently from the way I would have lit a Kodak or Fuji stock shoot, which wouldn’t have come out looking the same. I teased the chip to give me the look I wanted it to give me. And, to the eye, I was hoping that’s what film looks like

What will you be working on next ‘ and will you shoot in HD?

I’m off to Dublin to do Season Two of The Tudors. We’ll start shooting the first week in June. I’m re-renting the F-900s and selecting the lenses, getting all the pieces together, and sending the package next week. We re-visisted the Genesis idea again, and again Panavision has a shortage of them. They now have just over 100 Genesis, and last year when I was trying, they only had 70. But I still couldn’t get the budget to work within my camera budget. But I’m comfortable wiht the F-900, and my entire Irish crew now knows how to handle it.

Therefore I’m not at all anxious, in any way. Even my crew, for whom the F-900 was new a year ago, are seasoned experts.