The Carnivàle Life

Director Scott Winant understands that it's taking too long to chop an actor's arm off, and he's a man pressed for time. Winant needs to get the bloody sequence right since it's crucial to the season finale of HBO's critically acclaimed series Carnivàle. The stylish show, currently midway through its second season, tells the story of dust-stained “carneys,” circus freaks, and the eternal struggle between good and evil. The shoot this day takes place in an extremely muggy, big-top tent with a sandy floor built on a large sound stage at Santa Clarita Studios in California — Carnivàle's home base.

Editor Leo Trombetta (left) works with co-producer Todd London during the offline editing process for a recent episode of Carnivàle.

But actor Clancy Brown's attempt to knock a prosthetic arm from a rig on the body of an extra isn't going according to plan, and Winant will need to leave the limb hanging if he's going to keep up with his already packed production schedule and wrap filming of Carnivàle's 2005 season. And besides, Brown will soon need to remove his pitch-black contact lenses designed to make his character, Brother Justin, look just a wee bit demonic. The lenses can only be worn for short periods without irritating the actor's eyes.

“I saw the blood spray nicely, but the arm didn't come off,” Winant mutters as he calls for a 15-minute delay before trying the shot again. “We may have to move on if we don't get it soon.”

Neither Winant nor his colleagues are particularly concerned with the problem — after all, this is the world of episodic television, and the important thing is to keep the set moving. “You just have to be prepared,” says Winant. “We're on a TV schedule, and we just have to adapt.”

Still, Carnivàle is hardly typical of episodic network television. HBO presented 12 initial episodes of the series last year, and another 12 — running January through March — were slated for this season. (At press time, six episodes had been finished at Encore Hollywood, with six more in the pipeline.) With a January debut this year, the program has a far longer lead time than most network shows could ever dream of, meaning that while principal photography on a typical episode lasts nine to 10 days, producers can take up to six or seven months to finalize the episode in post.

“Episode one this year, for instance, finished shooting in March [2004], and we locked the cut in October, so that is almost seven months,” says Howard Klein, co-executive producer of the show, as he watches Brown's futile attempts to slam his prop machete into the prosthetic arm over and over. “Therefore, this is not your typical television situation. We are allotted more time to spend in most departments — prep, shooting, and post. This gives us the chance to keep perfecting the look and little details, and I'm sure that has translated to the screen and contributed to the technical awards we won last year.”

(Carnivàle won several Emmys, two ASC awards, a Visual Effects Society Award, and art direction and costume design awards, among other honors, in its debut season last year.)

“In a 10-month window, we do 12 episodes. In that same time frame, most network TV shows would do 22 episodes,” says co-producer Todd London, who oversees postproduction on the show. “That is a real luxury.”

But it's a relative luxury since the production side of the equation doesn't get to participate in too much of that extra time allotment, as co-executive producer Daniel Hassid points out. He says the production uses a rotating two-crew/two-DP/multiple director methodology to shoot Carnivàle.

The primary mission of those crews is to achieve a cutting-edge, retro look. “Like an old movie from the 1930s, the era in which this story takes place,” says Dan Knauf, creator/executive producer/writer on the show. That “old movie look” is later completed with a state-of-the-art digital paint and effects job at Encore Hollywood.

“We didn't want to shoot it like a typical TV show,” explains Knauf. “We didn't want to go through a process of saying ‘get the master shot,’ ‘now get the close-ups,’ and so on. We didn't want to just get coverage. We wanted to get as much as we can in-camera using first-rate production design, costumes, acting, and so forth. In that spirit, we avoid overdoing it with a moving camera. In those days, it was difficult to move the camera around, and we don't like an unmotivated camera anyway. We have a little Steadicam on this episode we are shooting today, but that's actually fairly rare. We might bring out cranes and other tools they didn't have back in the '30s, but only for a specific creative reason on a particular shot. We don't get into much of that.

“And then, in post, color correction becomes very important to achieve the muted palette of the Dust Bowl era that we want. But in terms of effects and things, we mainly use them to remove 21st century elements from the shots and do sky and landscape replacements.”

The Carnivàle production model largely mimics the two-crew approach that HBO uses on other high-end series. While one director and one of the show's two DPs — Jeff Jur or Jim Denault, who took over for James Glennon this season — are shooting an episode, their counterparts are always prepping the next episode. But Hassid explains that, while this is the most efficient way to film a show of this nature, even with an extra day or two compared to typical network dramas, it remains a daunting challenge to keep the production on schedule.

“We get good lead time to prep, and then suddenly, the episode goes into production and we suddenly have to move an army of 150 to 200 people around, plus a lot of vehicles, on a daily basis,” says Hassid. “In that sense, our biggest enemy is time. Yes, we get nine-plus days to shoot usually around 60 pages of story, but those pages are often classic, ‘army storms the castle’ kind of stuff. We are often burning down stuff, dealing with about 170 extras.

“Today, for instance, we are filming a huge melee, with limbs flying, lots of prosthetic work, and aging makeup on characters, which requires hours of application. We solve some of those problems by consolidating the two locations where we shoot, but since, geographically, in the story they represent places worlds apart — California and Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl era — there are tons of things we have to do in-camera and later in post to make it work right.”

A day before the melee shoot, for instance, the production was in Simi Valley, Calif., shooting important sequences on the show's signature, vintage Ferris wheel. That shoot was initially conceived to pick up elements to combine with greenscreen shots of the actors, but instead, filmmakers brought along a series of cranes and remote heads not usually required by the production, and they ended up capturing most of their elements in-camera.

A typical night scene captured on Carnivàle's main stage. Filmmakers say their experience has led to improved techniques for capturing night exteriors on a stage.

“That was the most complicated stuff we did all season,” says Hassid. “We used an Akila crane and a Giraffe crane with a Sparrow head that we engineered and wrangled by remote control from a cart. This gave us cameras up on the Ferris wheel, right on the buckets where the actors were. But on a Ferris wheel, there is no one device to get coverage on all sections and angles evenly. So we used different devices, like the Sparrow head, to get frontal shots, and then something else to get dramatic side coverage. In other words, we captured two pieces of the pie, and then, each of the cranes were used in different ways to get side angles. The Ferris wheel is an accurate period set piece, and it is not very forgiving, so you have to be clever in terms of figuring out ways to get your coverage.”

On this day on the Santa Clarita stage, however, beyond the lack of a properly severed limb, the big debate revolves around the best way to light the melee scene, since it takes place during a crucial part of the story in which good and evil collide, resulting in some ominously colored and unique looking skies, among other things.

During the shoot, under DP Denault's direction, filmmakers are attempting to achieve what Klein refers to as a “mood weather thing in which we are spending a lot of extra time with gels and coloring here on-set.”

Denault says that this attempt to “impose an atmospheric look is being done mostly with light manipulation.” But he adds that once shooting wraps, they'll need to discuss what to do with that look once they get to the telecine process in order to make the skies ominous enough to match the creative intent of the scene.

Several weeks later, that discussion was well underway as London and Encore senior colorist Pankaj Bajpai conducted a series of color tests to prepare themselves for when this episode gets to the front of the color-timing queue.

“We are well experienced with sky replacements [because] the weather constantly changes every day we shoot on this show anyway, and because of that, we take into account during our prepping the need to run tests for imagery that will be coming our way later, like these sky shots,” London explained a few weeks after the scene was shot. “Our tests told us we'll have to treat the skies a certain way to get this look of the worlds coming together just right. So we'll probably pull a lot of the gels off the lights and do a sky treatment that Pankaj has been developing.”

Bajpai emphasizes that such sequences “never start from scratch when I get them — we have been planning for them for quite some time before they get here. In this case, we came up with a few options during the tests, and the producers and editors are now having a dialogue about which direction to go in based on those tests.”

Such creative production-or-post debates have been commonplace during the two years Carnivàle has been in production. As production on the final episode of season two winds down, producers explain that they have digested a host of lessons about how to create the show more efficiently without sacrificing their standards as their production model has evolved.

In particular, according to Hassid, the production has dramatically improved its ability to shoot night exteriors on a stage rather than on location — an important issue for a dark show like Carnivàle.

“We have a lot of exterior work anyway, but we have really tried to get better, for a lot of reasons, at shooting night exteriors on our stage,” says Hassid. “Obviously, it helps to shoot them on a stage in the sense of having a more controlled environment, but also, our production days are normally 12 to 14 hours long. This year, we are shooting in the summer, and we don't always have enough daylight or darkness in our shooting day for what we need. Therefore, we have become more skilled at taking our stage and making it work for night exteriors.

Extensive sky replacement and color correction work is crucial on Carnivàle, as exemplified by this scene.

“That took a lot of trial and error because you have to sell the depth of the night lighting to make it look real. We obviously have the ability to replace the night sky and put in stars and things and to composite certain elements in there to give it greater depth, so we concentrate on lighting and designing things to get the best elements to combine with sky replacement elements later.”

Still, the show, given its subject matter and geographical range, won't be getting away from complicated location shoots any time soon. Even as shooting officially wraps, producers are discussing how and when they can schedule a pickup shoot at a local cornfield since recent rains hampered previous attempts to shoot there.

Knauf points to a lonely scarecrow dumped into a corner of a dining area on a nearby stage and estimates that the production might find a way to get the prop to the cornfield in about a week or so. Hassid adds that capturing such a pickup shot wouldn't normally be a big deal because the two rotating crews normally pinch-hit for each other on missed shots, but in this particular case, the shooting season is about to end. “We'll find a way to get it done,” he says. “We always do.”

In fact, the production regularly uses the cornfield after giving up on trying to create one on the Carnivàle stage.

“Some things just can't be done realistically on a stage,” Hassid says. “We tried — we really tried to reproduce a cornfield. Last year, we rented thousands of silk corn stalks and tried to dress the stage in a realistic way. But it just didn't translate well enough. This show has won production design Emmys, so we had to go the extra mile and give it the right texture and feel.”

Either Denault or Jur shoots each episode, using Panavision G2 and Platinum camera bodies and Primo prime and zoom lenses, on 35mm, four-perf Kodak 5218 and 5248 stock. As film leaves the set and enters the post realm, attention quickly turns to the looming color correction process. According to Hassid, color correction is a huge component of what makes Carnivàle hum.

Part of this process is straightforward — like last season when all episodes were shot in California during the spring and summer and required an automatic re-working of most vegetation from green to Dust Bowl brown. Other parts, like dealing with the final episode's gloomy skies, are unique from episode to episode. But either way, attention must continually be paid to the muted palette, desaturation, dry mists, Dust Bowl, and the surreal, among other concepts.

Hassid says the DPs and a rotating group of directors have all experienced a learning curve in the last two years in restraining certain color impulses on-set, and being willing to allow it to instead happen in post.

“They learn over time,” he says. “When you first start, particularly directors who have not worked with us much, they tend to want to control more up front. This show is about, particularly, the color stuff. So much of the contrast and desaturation has to happen in post given our look — it's really crucial.”

According to London, the basic post chain begins when film arrives at Ascent Media, Burbank, Calif., for processing. It then travels to Encore Hollywood, where it is transferred on a Spirit DataCine to D5 tape — part of Encore's “video interpositive” (VIP) process.

“We then do a color corrected version of the dailies that get transferred to Digi Beta,” says London. “Simultaneously, Encore digitizes our dailies so that editorial can get started. We edit everything at our stages in Santa Clarita [on Avid Media Composers, with 2TB of Unity storage]. A big challenge there is we try hard to keep our shows online in their entirety because occasionally we use that footage. Therefore, the storage setup is pretty advanced at our offices. The editors [three editors and two assistants] get about 10 days on a cut, and then the producers come in and the edit evolves over about three weeks. During that period, we go through any visual effects storyboarded on-set, we greenlight them, and we add temp effects from Encore. Our episodes average about eight to 20 visual effects shots, with some of those shots being simple wire removal and others involving complete background or sky replacements.”

Animation and 3D work is usually done at Encore Hollywood under visual effects supervisor David Altenau, mainly using 3ds Max, Boujou, Digital Fusion, and After Effects. Most compositing is done on Infernos.

After the offline phase, HBO executives offer additional notes, pickups are shot and added, and the episode is locked. Artists at Encore then perform a traditional online tape-to-tape assembly, and then the main, tape-to-tape color-timing work begins.

London emphasizes that because color timing is so crucial for Carnivàle, each episode gets three eight-hour days, on average, of intense color timing. While three days may not sound impressive by feature film standards, it is far more than episodic television shows normally get, according to London. During those three days, London and Bajpai work as a team to finalize the look. Due to the show's schedule, DPs and directors are not normally able to participate in those sessions, but Denault says that while that situation can be frustrating for a cinematographer, it's unavoidable because of the people and procedures in place.

“This show has such an established look that it won't get changed too dramatically from what I have come to expect during color correction,” the DP says. “Those guys have been so involved for so long in making this look that I'm rarely surprised. I shoot scenes fully expecting they will run through the same process I have come to understand. It ends up as a good-looking show, it wins awards, so I can't complain. Besides, that is the nature of television.”

Bajpai uses his da Vinci 2k Plus color corrector on the imagery, and he uses it on practically every shot.

“Almost every shot gets Power Windows applied — either to help solve production problems like the grass being the wrong color or to make a nice, hot sky when it was shot at some other time of day,” says London. “Each daylight exterior, we usually apply three to four Power Windows to each of those shots to try to make it more cinematic. We make chroma, saturation, and contrast changes on almost every shot. One thing we learned when we tested film stocks early on is that the Vision stocks often give us too good of an image — the shots were so saturated that they often fought the overall look of the show. We are now shooting on stock that is not as saturated, and the contrast is much better, so now we use contrast and windows and shadows more. But for me, I'm all about desaturating the picture on this show to evoke that look of the 1930s, even though it was shot on the most modern stock available.”

Bajpai emphasizes his overall mission is to make virtually everything he color corrects surreal. “That's what Todd and I spend most of our time agonizing over,” Bajpai says. “Even with ordinary shots, we have to find something surreal in it. Our main goal is to transfer the viewer into a surreal space, given the storyline. It might be simple to do that in certain places, but in others, we have to do a lot of processing of the image to make that happen. We might do as many as six Power Windows at times to create a sense of depth and a feeling of illusion for that surreal element.”

Bajpai adds that, although the show has “brilliant art direction, makeup, costumes, and wonderful photography,” there are certain subtleties that need addressing due to the unique design of Carnivàle.

“We often just have to balance something out,” he explains. “There might be too much color in someone's hair, the light might be coming through a red curtain and make the shot too video-luminescent looking. These are things they usually can't control on-set. That's why almost all color, whether in hair or skin tones or mountains or grass, has to be altered somewhat on this show. The show is shot so well that this information is available in the negative usually, and we just have to bring it out.”

Eventually, London and Bajpai get input from producers and HBO executives, further tweaks are made, and the tape-to-tape color correction phase winds down. The audio mixing, sound design, sound effects, and ADR processes then begin at Sony Pictures Studios, Culver City, Calif., usually lasting 10 to 12 days. Each episode is mixed in full Dolby Digital 5.1.

“At that point, we take the audio and lay it back to our D5 24p master and our 1080i master,” says London. “The 1080i master serves as our main broadcast master, and then we deliver to HBO that 1080i master on D5, as well as 4×3 and 16×9 versions on Digi Beta for the other HBO networks to use.”

Meanwhile, back on set, crew members squirt fake blood onto the sandy floor of the bigtop set and prepare one more attempt to film the prosthetic arm's demise. Before they get too far, though, Winant decides he will move on. “A stalled set is never a good thing,” he says.

“Let's have Clancy take his eyes out, and we'll wait for him and then do a reversal,” Winant instructs his team. “Meantime, we'll set up A and B cameras and try to pick up inserts for the arm falling on the ground to buy us some time, or we'll just jump to the next shot and rehearse that, as well.”

Watching the proceedings, Knauf isn't surprised or worried by this turn of events. This happens all the time, especially in the world of high-end television production.

“Yesterday, it was a stupid phonograph we were trying to film — we just couldn't get the thing to work,” Knauf says with a chuckle. “Today, it's the prosthetic arm. These things can cost you a half hour here, an hour there. They can cost you a setup, so at some point, you have to move on. But it all comes out in the wash. Besides, when it comes to art, too much control isn't always a good thing. We want a degree of spontaneity and problem solving as we go along. Sometimes, the best things we get are the things we come up with at the last second. You always have to make allowances for happy accidents in this business.”