Shooting a news show pilot for Chinese TV

I was recently hired to D.P. a pilot for the Chinese network, CCTV. It's a news program call I Cheng , starring reporter Gloria Cheng Ai. The show is mostly interviews with politicians, economists and world leaders. There are also stand ups with Gloria, as well as man on the street' interviews and a lot of B-roll. Locations included the JFK school of government at Harvard University in Cambridge MA, Columbia University in NYC, as well as numerous offices and hotels around Manhattan.

The really challenging part of this shoot was the amount of locations that we had each day, and how little time we had between them. Luckily I had a second camera operator to help with set up and break down. This also allowed me to send out that operator to grab B-roll beauty shots of the city, while I concentrated on stand ups and man on the street interviews with the main talent. For the first day's shoot at Harvard, I used Two Diva lights as keys, combined with natural daylight from a window, and a third Diva as fill for both subjects. We used two Sony AG-HPX500P cameras, and I can't say enough good things about this camera. Because it uses P2 memory cards instead of disc or tape, there are no moving parts to drain the battery rapidly. As a result, we were able to shoot for almost the entire day on one brick battery. It also has 4 P2 slots that accommodate 32 Gig memory cards, because we were using PAL 4:3 HD format, this came in very handy and gave us hours of recording capacity.

After seeing how tight our time constraints were the first day, I opted to go with four 1'x1 LED Litepanels instead of the Divas. This allowed me to quickly set up and vary the color temperature without having to swap bulbs. I kept an Arri tungsten kit with me that had two 650 and two 300 watt fresnels. This came in handy for background lighting when needed. The Litepanels are so lightweight and easy to set up, plus they stay cool, which is a big advantage in small spaces where heat build up can be a big issue. All the sit down interviews were shot with two cameras, and because the Director wanted a very shallow focus look, we were usually wide open with heavy ND filter selected. My main concern was keeping the lighting flattering for Gloria and her background soft in the close ups.

One of the other challenges on this job was working with a young Chinese director, who is a student at New York Film Academy, and barely speaks English. Fortunately we had an interpreter and Gloria speaks English fluently, so this was just a minor inconvenience which was easily overcome. The job lasted for six days, and by mid week, we understood each other and worked together quite well. In the coming months, Reuters will be building them a studio in NYC and we have already discussed the possibility of me coming in to L.D. the studio portion of it as well. All in all, it was a great experience and we produced a great looking pilot that will hopefully become a long running series in China.

LINK:	http://www.ferroproductions.com/shooting-a-news-show-pilot-for-chinese...
	See more stories from ferro

Most recent headlines