--
From Amazon Studios, Late Night, directed by Nisha Ganatra from a screenplay by Mindy Kaling, follows late-night talk show host Katherine Newbury (Emma Thompson) teams up with new writer, Molly Patel (Kaling), to help revitalize the program and her career. The comedy feature, which had its premiere at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, was shot by cinematographer Matthew Clark (Pitch Perfect 3, Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates) with the VariCam 35 camera.
Clark got involved with Late Nightthrough Ganatra, whom he had worked with on several projects since they both attended NYU Tisch School of the Arts years before. For Clark, one of the toughest tasks in shooting comedy is to make it look and feel natural for the audience while allowing the space for them to laugh. The visuals has to have some depth to them, but you need to let the actors work things out on screen, he explains. That was a big part for this film knowing the way Nisha likes to work. She's visual but she's also very actor oriented, so one of the things I wanted to do was make our technical footprint as small as possible to give the actors room to work and to find those comic moments.
For Late Night, Clark describes the look as heightened naturalism. He created a look book that contained images from still photographers Gregory Crewdson's artificial reality to Robert Frank's super naturalism images. He also worked with Light Iron colorists Corinne Bogdanowicz in Los Angeles and Sean Dunckley in New York to develop the look during prep. There were three distinct kind of looks we wanted, describes Clark. One was for Catherine's home, which was more elegant with warm tones. The television studio needed to be crisp and clean with more neutral tones and for the writers' room office, the look was more chaotic and business-like with blue or cooler tones.
Late Nightwas shot with the VariCam 35 with a small crew in a short 25-day schedule. During prep, Clark, gaffer Ken Shibata and key grip Tommy Kerwick, Jr. decided that if they went with a traditional lighting and grip package, there would not be enough man power to complete the days since they would be shooting sometimes three to four locations on the same day.
We didn't have the money to put up condors three blocks away with four generators, so we went with the idea of going with the VariCam because of its native 5000 ISO, explains Clark. The camera allowed us to move fast and have a good base when we moved out to those night exteriors and even the night interiors. For example, working with a China ball, we could light an entire room. It's a valuable resource to have if you need to shoot that way and in this instance we did. We were able to get that base and still have time to make it better on top of that, as well as allow for motion in and out of the light.
With the VariCam 35, Clark captured 4K 12-bit 444 AVC Intra files in V-log. With Bogdanowicz, he developed a basic 709 LUT. For any night exterior or interior, Clark utilized the VariCam's native 5000 ISO and for daytime sequences, he captured at native 800 ISO. For lenses, he used 70s era Superspeeds and Ultraspeeds from Panavision, which he feels added warmth and took some of the digital edge off. My ACs, Pedro Corcega and Adriana Brunetto-Lipman, were so on it, explains Clark. When you're shooting with a 100mm lens and you're on your fourth location of the day, people can get pretty tired, but they were always on top of things. Clark occasionally made use of an 11 - 1 Primo zoom, which delivered a similar look to his primes.
Clark and Shibata cut generators out of their lighting package and went with smaller instruments that they could plug into a wall socket or run off a portable Putt-Putt. They mainly lit with small LED lights and an ARRI M18 1.8K open faced lamp. We did it as lo-fi as possible, explains Clark. We had one day where we had a 4K and that was because we had a big window outside this house, and I wanted to light it from outside at night with no lights inside.
Perhaps the most challenging location to light was the writers' room office set, since they were several stories up and there were two half walls that were windows.
Whenever we wanted to have light come from one side, explains Clark, we put up ND 3 and ND 6 hard gels that we'd either stack on one side and then allow the light to come in clean from the other side. It gives you that contrast so instead of getting two sides with a lot of light, you can expose for the outside, open up, and the light is coming in from one side of the building giving you your key light. When we turned around and looked towards those windows then you could move the hard gels to the other side.
For shooting New York City night exteriors, Clark used a China ball for walk-and-talks. New York street lamps used to be orange sodium vapor but now they're changing everything out for these LED street lights that are super bright white and they're hard, reveals Clark. There's no romance about them. That was hard because they would sometimes overpower the 5000 ISO sensitivity and you'd have to figure out how to get something up on that light or when they walk under, you had to swing something out over them. We often picked streets based on the street lights they were going to walk under because we really couldn't fix that in the middle of the night.
At 5000, you see everything so it's about shaping what you see, continues Clark. You can shoot 5000 ISO at night under a street light, so your ratios have to be there. You still have to light it, but you don't have to pull out big instruments to give you a good exposure. It's more about figuring out where you need to be and then shape that exposure.
Proper pre-planning with post made the color grade more effe
Most recent headlines
01/01/2026
Latin Grammy Cultural Foundation Announces 2026 Noel Schajris Scholarship The scholarship will cover tuition and housing for one Berklee College of Music stud...
01/01/2026
New year, new games, all with RTX 5080-powered cloud energy. GeForce NOW is kicking off 2026 by looking back at an unforgettable year of wins and wildly high fr...
31/12/2025
Back to All News
NFL Christmas Gameday on Netflix Scores Again With the Lions-V...
30/12/2025
As the College Football Playoff Enters the Quarterfinals, ESPN Blows Out Its Meg...
30/12/2025
SVG's Best of 2025: Original ArticlesTake a look back at all our coverage of big-time productions, game-changing technologies, and state-of-the-art new faci...
30/12/2025
MELBOURNE, Fla., Dec. 30, 2025 - L3Harris Technologies (NYSE: LHX) will release its fourth quarter 2025 financial results before the market opens on Thursday, J...
30/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
30/12/2025
It marked the first civilian operational authorization for a HAPS flight in Europe, led by Space42's subsidiary, Mira Aerospace
The flight demonstrated HAP...
29/12/2025
San Francisco 49ers Strike Gold With Halftime Laser SpectacularStunning display caps $200 million renovation of Levi's Stadium techBy Dan Daley, Audio Edito...
29/12/2025
The Cup's Around the Corner: An Inside Look at Broadcast Preparations for th...
29/12/2025
SVG's Best of 2025: Longform VideoWatch the standout keynote conversations, deep dives, and panel discussions from the year for free on SVG PLAY!By Brandon ...
29/12/2025
From crisper Lossless audio and immersive music videos in beta to new Audiobooks+ plans, custom transitions between tracks, and in-app Messages, we keep levelin...
29/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
27/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
26/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
26/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
25/12/2025
Holiday lights are twinkling, hot cocoa's on the stove and gamers are settling in for a well-earned break.
Whether staying in or heading on a winter getawa...
24/12/2025
What is AI good for? Posted by MTI Film on December 24, 2025
What is AI good for?
What is AI good for?
It's been three years since ChatGPT first cap...
24/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
24/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
24/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
24/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
24/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
24/12/2025
Back to All News
The Boyfriend' Season 2 Unveils Heartwarming Trailer, Key...
24/12/2025
Back to All News
Love, Fights, and Everything in Between: Badly in Love' Returns for Season 2
Entertainment
24 December 2025
GlobalJapan
Link copied t...
24/12/2025
Scripps Research study links sleep variability with sleep apnea and hypertension How consumers' digital activity trackers could enable personalized health s...
23/12/2025
How guilas Cibae as Dominican Winter League Games Are Locally Produced for Glob...
23/12/2025
BitFire's Jim Akimchuk on Supplying Scalability and Customization in the Clo...
23/12/2025
CAMB.AI Enables European Athletics to Offer Multi-Language SupportPlan is to eventually offer translation into all languages spoken in EuropeBy Ken Kerschbaumer...
23/12/2025
Analysis: As sports media values trend negative, scarcity and quality are king By Callum McCarthy, Editor-at-Large
Monday, December 22, 2025 - 14:08
Print ...
23/12/2025
ESPN, Disney, and NBA Return to the Animated Altcast Fray With Second Edition of...
23/12/2025
End the Year on a High Note and Donate to the Sports Broadcasting Fund Today!By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director
Tuesday, December 23, 2025 - 12:25 pm
P...
23/12/2025
The year is winding down, the weather outside is frightful, and it's the perfect time to escape into a story that warms the heart. For listeners looking for...
23/12/2025
A Zeus motor is hot fire tested at L3Harris' Camden, Arkansas, solid rocket ...
23/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
23/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
23/12/2025
Lightware will exhibit several major product innovations at ISE 2026, including the new USB-C BOOSTER-V1, Google Meet. integration for various Taurus UCX models...
23/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
23/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
23/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
23/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
23/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
23/12/2025
Taking the Stage at Carnegie Hall-On a Global Scale Boston Conservatory Orchestra students reflect on their epic concert marking the 80th session of the UN Gene...
23/12/2025
Back to All News
Netflix's The Great Flood and Culinary Class Wars 2 Top Gl...
23/12/2025
Back to All News
Stranger Things By the Numbers: How the Global Phenomenon Shap...
23/12/2025
Experience the power of WO Automation for Radio's newest service, the System Effectiveness Review. Designed to help you achieve more, a System Effectiveness...
23/12/2025
23 Dec 2025
VEON's Beeline Kazakhstan and Rakuten Symphony Collaborate to A...
23/12/2025
Back to All News
How Steamy Can It Get? Single's Inferno' Season 5 Pre...
23/12/2025
Back to All News
33 Million Global Viewers on Netflix Watched Jake Paul vs. Ant...
-- 
