Gabriel, an 11-episode Spanish-language miniseries about vampires starring the popular Puerto Rican pop star Chayanne, is ambitious in ways that go beyond the idea of shooting such a sprawling program on a limited budget. The show’s creators and producers at Megafilms, the filmed-entertainment division of the Spanish Broadcasting System, wanted to change the expectations for quality programming destined for the Hispanic market – which is often associated purely with the quick-and-dirty soap operas known as telenovelas. Looking for a foolproof on-set workflow, cinematographer Christoph Vitt settled on Sony’s XDCAM PDW-F350, an optical-disc camera system that allowed him to work just as if he were recording to tape. Armed with a set of six Canon cine prime lenses and one Canon cine zoom, Vitt arrived on location ready to raise the bar. F&V asked him about shooting HD at night, shunning gain, and getting that Super Technocrane shot without wrecking the church – watch the video, below, for a behind-the-scenes look at that very delicate crane shot, courtesy Megafilms, then read the Q&A to get the details.

What’s your background, and how did you get involved with Gabriel?

I’m from Germany, and I learned the business in Germany. I started in the late 1980s and early 1990s in a production house, and made my way through camera assistant to operator and DP. I shot more than 400 music videos and 250 commercials in the first 15 years of my career, and once I moved to the states I started shooting features. Earlier this year, Armando Castro, the producer from MegaFilms, approached me because we had worked together on the launch of Mega TV, the TV station that actually runs the show, and I did all the on-air promotion for them. So with my background of creating a nice look for music video and commercials, Armando and the director, Agustin, approached me and asked if I wanted to shoot Gabriel.

It’s an 11-episode miniseries, so we had to shoot almost nine or 10 hours.  Our total shoot was 109 days ‘ actually it was 109 nights, because it’s a vampire show. And, other than a few green-screen shots, it was all shot on location due to budget. It’s for the Latin market, and we’re not HBO, so we had some budget restrictions. We had maybe 10 percent of what an 11-episode show for ABC or HBO might have.

Everyone probably thinks telenovela right away when they hear “Spanish-language show.” But I really liked the approach. I wanted to do it in a cinematic style, hiring good, experienced actors and a good crew to shoot it, making it a new TV experience for the Spanish audience. That’s why I was brought in. I actually think Spanish people also deserve really excellent programming – not just telenovelas.

Anything you can do to make higher-quality television is a good thing.

People in South America and Spain also go to movie theaters and see Hollywood movies, and they like them a lot. Otherwise they wouldn’t sell over there. That tells me that they are really open for a TV show that looks much different from the average telenovela. You don’t need to shoot five episodes a day. So we went for this approach. The decision to shoot on HD was partly because of the time restriction. We had around 100 days to shoot 11 episodes, and that’s the time you would usually spend shooting a feature film.

A lot of people who are trying to save money want to shoot in HD. I like this format for television, but it’s very hard to explain to a producer that you have to have a crew that knows exactly what they’re doing if you shoot HD. If you don’t, you end up shooting too much footage. It can be big problem if you keep rolling tape on and on and on – it’s going to be a disaster for the editing room at the end when they have to go through all that footage.

Some directors like to just keep the tape rolling.

When I shoot on film, I rehearse the scene 10 times cold and then shoot it twice hot. I’ve got the scene, and for a one-minute scene I have maybe three minutes of footage. If you shoot on video, you can easily use 30 minutes of footage. And you have all this material sitting in the editing room and some poor editor has to go through it. Shooting on film is more precise than shooting on video, but it all depends on the crew you have. I approach the video camera as I would a film camera, using the light meter and setting everything up as I usually do – balance and contrast and color. Shooting on video seems really easy, but as a trained cinematographer with a film background, I think it requires more time. I know my Kodak stock and I know my Fuji stock, but when you shoot on video and you have more than one camera, you never get two cameras to look exactly the same. Even with the same settings, the same white balance, they can still look different. So you have to tweak the camera, and then you have two different monitors and they both look different. That just takes time. Time is a thing that costs a lot of money in moviemaking or tv making. These are restrictions that you have to overcome.

Gabriel came out really nice. I would have loved to do a color-correction in the end, but everything you see is as it was shot in camera. I had to really take care of everything and tune the lights to make sure everything worked out. It was a big issue. But we had six-day weeks, 12-hour days – we had a lot of time.

When you were shooting, did you know you would have to be so precise in camera?

We talked about doing color-correction, but I always try to get my image perfect, going as slow as I can. If I shoot on film and I know I’m going to go to telecine, I know I  can put a window on it a problem and fix it in the telecine. But I was expecting we didn’t have time for that here.

I understand you used the Sony XDCAM 350, so you were recording to optical disc.

Yes, we had two of those. We shot to a 34 GB disc. We had the option of shooting on Red. The production owns two Red cameras. But with that amount of data, shooting in a short time period ‘ and of course you would only shoot to hard drive with the amount of footage we were acquiring ‘ we needed to get a system that operates easily and actually stores everything on a disc or a tape. We tried different versions and came up with the XDCAM 350, which allows us to shoot slow-motion and time lapses. Each time the sun goes from day to night, because it was a vampire show, we needed time lapses of our different locations. We have a lot of slow-motion, also. It’s a small camera package that can take a lot of things and if you put a nice lens on it it looks really nice.

And you used the Canon cinematography lenses.

You can choose the Zeiss lenses or the Canon lenses. I’ve used the Zeiss lenses before, and they’re very nice lenses, but Canon approached us and I got a nice fixed-lens package that I was really happy with. The whole show was shot almost wide open. The lenses are 1.4. A lot of times I had to use 1.4, but I shot 2 and 2 ½ on the lenses thanks to my amazing camera assistant who made it possible to pull focus on all those shots. But because we wanted to create a cinematic look, I had to get the background out of focus. I tried to shoot as open as I could. And if you shoot at night, a lot of video cameras aren’t too happy. Blacks get very noisy, so having a good piece of glass in front of the camera always helps. The lens quality has to be good, and those lenses are very beautiful. I saw it on the big screen with an HD projector. They’re very pretty lenses.

Was there any specific shot or sequence that was a real challenge to get right in the camera?

In the opener of the show, where our hero Gabriel is introduced and meets the priest for the first time, there’s a shot where the camera tracks back and reveals the whole interior of the church. This was made with a 50-foot Super Technocrane, and we had to bring the crane into a church. The church obviously had steps. With our limited budget, we had to get a humongous forklift and lift the crane into the church, but my grip crew was only allowed to put half of the crane into the church because of weight restrictions – the church had a 50-year-old wood floor and was protected by Florida conservation laws. We had to use platforms. The front wheels of the crane were in the church and the rear wheels were on the concrete outside the church. We had to crane-lift our Technocrane onto the church entrance and then move it, with a lot of manpower, half-in and half-out of the church, to get that shot. That was a big undertaking.

And watching that shot, you’d never know how difficult the location was.

No, you’d never know. And on a project with that magnitude and so many shooting days, we did not shoot chronologically. We shot by location. In all of those 11 episodes there was a scene in the church. We had to grab 20 seconds here and 30 seconds there. It’s much nicer if you can shoot chronologically, but with that kind of budget it wasn’t possible. We had to just go and shoot for 20 days in the church. Sometimes you have to make fast decisions. Things happen on film sets. Actors get sick. You have to make changes on short notice, and the crane was one of those. It came out really nice. It’s dramatic, and everyone was really happy we got away with it.

It was an engineering effort as well as cinematography.

Definitely. You have people from the church standing there and watching, and we have to make sure we don’t break anything! Every night as we left the church, we had to clean everything out so they could have the service the next day. And on the weekends when they had the Sunday mass we had to change the church. We shot in a Lutheran church, but our church in the story is a Catholic church. We had a confessional in the church and a lot of crosses – a lot of things Lutheran churches don’t have. Each weekend the production design had to take everything out of the church and make it a Lutheran church again. The problem was there was no way to find a Catholic church that would have allowed us to shoot in it.

Does shooting at night help with HD?

For aesthetics, I absolutely prefer to shoot at night. I can control what I’m doing. If you shoot during the day, especially HD during the day, you have to deal with those highlights and you need a big lighting apparatus to actually hide those lights. Sometimes you need a bigger lighting truck than you would use on film, because the latitude on a video camera is not as good. On film, I can deal with 10 or 11 stops of exposure differences. If I do that on video, it looks really bad. I have to bring much more light outside during the day. At night, I could make it look as I wanted it to look – and how the producers and the director wanted it to look, of course. We had to balance. It was a first-time thing for Spanish TV, so we didn’t want it to look too gritty and too dark – which I would have loved. The median way we found is a pretty nice balance of light and dark.

The only issues you have shooting video at night is if you’re shooting on a location exterior, and you have, for example, city lights in the background. It’s very hard to keep those lights alive when you start lighting the set in the foreground without going too low-light. Even at 1.5 on the Canon lens, wide open, if I have a shot of downtown Miami and I have to light my foreground, I have to be very low-key in the foreground because I don’t want to lose the background lights. I don’t like to use gain on video cameras. It makes it very noisy, so we never actually touched the gain button. It was taped down so we couldn’t use it. If you’re editing and cutting from beautiful shot to beautiful shot and then you have one exterior shot that was pumped up with video grain, it just looks noisy and cheap. But everybody was very pleased and, luckily, they’re planning season two for next year. Hopefully, that will keep me busy here in Miami!

For more information: chayanneesgabriel.lamusica.com