When Melrose Place returned to the air after a 10-year absence from American popular culture, it was important not only that the show have an alluring but moody look befitting its themes of sex and murder, but also that it capture the feeling of glitzy Los Angeles locations. Picking up where the pilot, shot by Checco Varese, left off, DP Chris Faloona uses Sony’s F35 CineAlta camera – and sometimes the PMW-EX3 XDCAM! – to see into the dark as well as capture the sunniness of L.A. lifestyles. F&V asked him about making the transition to HD from his film-based work.

FILM & VIDEO: Tell me about the choice of the F35 and how it influenced the look of the show, or vice versa.

CHRIS FALOONA: This is my venture into the digital look. I’ve been shooting for 17 or 18 years, and always on film. Obviously, I’ve tested the [HD] cameras a lot. But I never went into an entire series that was going to be shot on HD video. The look was basically derived from the pilot, which Checco Varese shot, and we wanted to keep that style. The producers liked that feel, very moody and contrasty. You’d think of it as a high-key show but it’s really not. It has a lot of grit and style and a very dramatic look, which I liked.

Because I’m familiar with the Panavision system and lenses, I went with the Sony F35 because it uses the Panavision Primo lenses. The Primos are, in my opinion, the best lenses you can get. I feel comfortable with them, and I’ve been using them for years. I know how they react to each other, their color saturation, color matching, everything. And the F35 is a really great camera. This is Sony’s version of the Genesis, and they do such a great job with the interface and the software for it. The way the image from the chip is processed is really well-done.

And the size of the chip is really important.

It’s generally the same size as 35mm. It’s actually a little smaller, but it’s bigger than the first generation of HD – the Sony 900 and the Viper, which were closer to a 16mm chip. What I love about the new cameras is you’re using real 35mm lenses and getting film’s depth of field, going out of focus on long lenses. You can input certain curves, and you can crush the blacks a certain way, so that it looks like film even though you’re shooting HD. When you have your DIT on the set with you, there’s so much painting you can do on the set. Some DPs actually lock in their look while they’re shooting it, and that’s what they record. I tend to record just the raw image, which gives me a lot of latitude to make changes later.

Do you manage to be involved with color grading?

Absolutely. We send LUTs to our timers so he can match the look I’m going for. The final colorist has the LUTs to look at. Every show, I give notes on [the look] before it’s timed. Because we have a one-DP system, I can’t actually sit in the timing sessions. But when they’re finished, they give me a copy and I go through it at least two times making notes. This wall is too bright, let’s put a power window on it. This scene is too dark. This is too bright; let’s make it yellow. The colorist redoes it and makes sure I’m happy with it, and then it goes to air.

Are you looking at an HD copy or a DVD?

I’m looking at an NTSC DVD. For the very first show, I took off a day to go and sit in on the timing session, where you’re actually seeing HD. That way I knew where my levels were falling, where my blacks fell off and where they didn’t. I used that as a reference for the rest of the show.

HD is pretty amazing. It has a really great look and the cameras react really well. The only fallback I’m finding with HD as opposed to film is the high end. The low end is amazing. You can shoot into the dark and get pretty close to the same latitude as film on the low end, if not maybe a little bit better. But on the high end it can’t deal with highlights the way film can. Believe it or not, day exterior is one of your biggest challenges. You have to balance much more than you did on film. Film, you can let the highlights go and the film will just suck it up and eat it and spit out something beautiful. Video just can’t do it that well. A lot of guys early on would shoot everything with HD except for their day exteriors. But with all the new contracts and actors agreements with SAG and AFTRA we’re not even allowed to shoot film.

What percentage of Melrose Place is outside in the daylight?

The thing about Melrose Place is not only the style, and the actors being beautiful and looking slick and pretty, but they want to show iconic Los Angeles. To do that, you’ve got to go outside. You gotta see the Cinerama Dome, you’ve gotta see the Hollywood sign and Sunset Boulevard. You’ve got to see the beach. We’ve done that night and day. But to show iconic L.A. to the rest of America, you need to be outside, and obviously a lot of that is day exteriors.

So what can you do to mitigate the problem? Do you just throw a lot of light onto the scenes?

The big thing you have to do when you shot exteriors that I’ve found – I’m still learning a lot, and I enjoy that – you have to balance your light to dark areas much more than you would with film. If you have a hot white wall on the set – you can’t control all your lighting situations, because sometimes time dictates you can’t – you have to balance your foreground to that or it completely clips out. That doesn’t look good. It looks very noisy and electronic. So sometimes it’s a matter of just blasting a ton of light in to balance you background. In prep I try to determine what’s the best direction to shoot at this time of day. You would do that on film anyway, but on video you really want to do that. You’ve really got to catch the sunlight at the right time and silk the areas you can to combat that problem.

So you’re being even more precise …

Yes, much more diligent on chasing the sun and controlling the sun. I’ve always done that on features, because you’re allotted a little more time and they expect that. But on a TV show, when you’re shooting seven, eight, nine pages a day, sacrifices have to be made. But you still want to be more diligent than you would be with film.

You used the EX3 on this show, too, for scenes involving the filmmaker character, right?

Yes. The EX3 works great with the F35. The character of Jonah Miller, played by Michael Rady, is actually a filmmaker on the show. He shoots videos and documentariess and music videos that get introduced later in a couple of the episodes. We’ll let him film with it and then sometimes we’ll grab it and shoot stuff. We actually use it for scenes sometimes. We’ve used it for inserts, and shooting underwater. HydroFlex makes a housing for it. It sits in there with a follow-focus system. It’s incredible. If you need to do any underwater video, this new housing system is just fantastic. And the image quality is pretty amazing. It matches up. When you pan fast or anything is moving quickly, you get a little bit of strobing. But for inserts or lock-offs where people are moving normally or you’re panning normally

That’s the other little bit of a drawback on video as opposed to film – strobing. Even on the F35, you do get much nore strobing with panning and moving individuals than you would in film.

Is there anything you can do to combat that?

I’m checking with other DPs. I’m always asking questions: what works better, what’s easier, what alleviates the problems? At this point I just try not to whip pan too much unless we’re going for that effect. I do want to experiment more with shutter angles and see what helps. We’ve done that with other things like getting rid of flickering fluorescents.

Is there anything else you’ve done specifically to try and get a special Melrose Place look?

One of the things I pushed for was to really make the cast look beautiful. That’s something we really strive for with the producers. They agree that the most important thing about the show is, number one, that it has a good, slick, contrasty, moody, stylized cinematic feel, but also that the cast always looks as beautiful as possible. I use really big soft sources all the time when I can, even on smaller sets, and really take the extra time to make the women look beautiful. I do use filtration on a lot of the women to take away that hard-edged video feel. For episode three, we shot outside the Cinerama Dome and we used a lot of flashing lights, constantly, just to keep the interest moving and give it that high-glitz-L.A. kind of feel, and then we pull back and see the Cinerama Dome, with the blue-topped dome and flickering lights. On the closeups I had all the really out-of-focus cars on coverage. We went to a superlong lens for all the coverage on Robbie and Jonah, which is Jessica [Lucas] and Michael, so the cars driving either towards us or away from us are really out of focus, and it gives us such a glittery, colorful feel of Los Angeles.

One of the biggest things on the show, something that executive producer Greg Beeman came up with, was “pretty, not gritty.” A lot of shows are gritty. Ours is the exact opposite.