'Winning Time' DP Breaks Down Shooting the LA Lakers Season Montage in 16mm Film on Rollerblades
'Winning Time' DP Breaks Down Shooting the LA Lakers Season Montage in 16mm Film on Rollerblades
Variety Artisans presented by HBO
Variety Artisans presented by HBO
Category
✨
PeopleTranscript
00:00My name is Todd VanHazel, and I am the cinematographer on Winning Time.
00:19I got involved in Winning Time because I knew about the pilot, and it sounded like a really exciting project.
00:24Me and Adam McKay spoke about the pilot and had a really similar, exciting idea on how we wanted to do it, and we're really aligned.
00:32And once it went to series, I was just ready to kind of move forward and take it on to its full potential.
00:43The show is referencing a time in American culture that we all remember really well, and we remember it in images and in footage from that time period.
00:52So it felt like a really fun way to harken back to the period by trying to shoot on the formats that they actually used,
00:58like 16mm for archival and 8mm for real archival and 35mm for the show,
01:03and also the same video cameras that shot the basketball games on television actually using those cameras.
01:09So the bulk of the show is shot on Panavision 35mm cameras using Primo lenses, which are kind of like our hero base.
01:17They're telling the story the way that epic Showtime era wants to be told.
01:21But then beyond that, we're mixing in other formats such as 16mm in color and black and white to kind of strip it down and make it feel like archival or more emotional.
01:28And we're also shooting 8mm film to make it feel like even more true archival,
01:32like it was footage found in a little bin labeled Lakers 1985 that had been forgotten for 40 years, you know?
01:38And then we're also shooting on these tube cameras from the 70s that actually shot the basketball games.
01:43We're using those for narrative purposes.
01:45In Season 2, we started shooting on VHS cameras.
01:48We called it Dad Cam to make it feel like real kind of gross 80s archival.
01:53In this sequence, the spinning basketball shot on the rollerblades is shot on 16mm on a very wide lens,
01:59so it can be very close, something like a Zeiss 12 or 16mm lens.
02:03And then the second part of the sequence where we're spinning around the actors is shot on Steadicam on a very long lens,
02:09Primo 35mm, probably like 100mm or 125mm.
02:13We always wanted to push it so that the lens was almost too long to be operated on.
02:16It was almost too bumpy or too long or too hard to keep in focus
02:20so that you really feel like the camera's about to fall off the rails or something,
02:23and there's an energy in that, you know?
02:25It was kind of about creating a memory of what this footage looked like
02:28and then break it down into things that are more emotional.
02:32There's a lot of mythos about who Larry Bird was and where he came from,
02:35so the idea was to kind of film him like our big Western bad guy,
02:40but at the same time emotionally connect with him.
02:42So we kind of balanced between these low angle, wide kind of Western push-ins on him
02:46and also this very long lens documentary, very present with him.
02:50I think we always photographed Magic like the superstar that he felt he was.
02:55There was a joy in the camera buying into all the bravado that Magic had.
02:59There's either the big crane downs into him or it's the really long lens off axis.
03:04It was about showing him as cocky as possible and also as stripped down and human as possible.
03:10When we read the script, it was like one or two lines and it said,
03:13Magic and Bird make their way through the playoffs and it feels like they're playing each other.
03:18And I remember my director Sally and I looked at it and we said,
03:21this is two lines, but this is going to take like days of shooting.
03:24This is a huge sequence because it's like, how do you show them making their way up the ranks,
03:29moving through multiple teams, through and across a season?
03:32And that's how we started the idea of, oh, wow, what if it's like they're passing and shooting
03:38and playing literally to each other across games?
03:41So once we knew that, it became about planning how to actually accomplish that.
03:50In this sequence, we're tracking the real teams that they played, the way that the playoffs went.
03:55But at the same time, then we're kind of blurring it so that emotionally,
03:58it's like they were playing each other.
04:00The Rollerblade camera became our secret weapon. It was our way to keep up with the players.
04:05Not only we had a device that could really move at the pace and move inside the game,
04:08and we started actually blocking and rehearsing our Rollerblade operator like he was another player.
04:13So the Rollerblade camera is our operator, John Like, with a little backpack rig and a little 16mm camera.
04:18It's just a way for him to kind of be really in the game and fly around.
04:22It's 16mm so it can be more visceral and in the game and also kind of feel like archival footage,
04:28but then we're flying around with the players, so we're kind of breaking that rule.
04:32We're doing things that the archival camera couldn't actually do.
04:35This sequence in particular because it has to span all these different cut points
04:39where it looks like they're passing or shooting to each other.
04:41We'd get the plays up and rehearsed, then they'd show it to my director and I,
04:45and then we would look at it with our operators.
04:47We iPhone'd it very carefully and then actually edited it on an iPhone
04:51to make sure that all the hidden cut points would kind of work as glue.
04:55Two things needed to happen.
04:56One is you need to understand that you were traversing through multiple stadiums.
05:00You were moving between the garden or the forum,
05:02and it's not only like the basketball floor, which we switched out, or the seating,
05:06it's also the quality of light.
05:07The forum was like a Showtime white light, almost like it's a stage production
05:11or like a rock and roll show.
05:13And then the Celtics' garden was like this pissy amber-orange,
05:17you know, it's much older and it's in Boston.
05:19And we shot all the basketball on one single 360 green screen stage.
05:23We had LED lighting from above that was all like kind of hard LED lighting
05:27meant to replicate the most brutal, ugly stadium lighting we could push.
05:31Other thing is because our heroes were being put head-to-head,
05:34is we kind of took the lighting and just like amped it up.
05:36I kind of felt like we were trying to make it look like the lighting
05:38had been plugged into a car battery.
05:40Everyone's faces are like nearly blown out, everything's overexposed,
05:43too bright, four or five backlights at the same time.
05:45We're trying to light the sweat, really trying to be like the most violent as possible
05:50so that it was like the most exciting as possible.
05:54The sweat was one of the hardest challenges of the whole show, I think.
05:58The problem is if the sweat drips down onto the court,
06:01then the court's slippery, so you have to stop.
06:03There was also like a lot of magic going on in the makeup department
06:05of like kinds of sweat.
06:06There was kind of like a stickier, more like gluey sweat that didn't drip
06:09that felt like it would be very uncomfortable for our heroic actors,
06:12but it was a mix of that and actual spray.
06:14So, I don't know, it's just like an epic task getting these players
06:17to look the right kind of shine.
06:20You know, we're always running flashing photo lights
06:22when things are happening in the game that are exciting,
06:24but I think we quadrupled the amount of like the speed of the photo flashes.
06:29It's just everything is amped up so that it looks the way it feels for these two men.
06:33We limited ourselves to the kind of things that were photographically possible back then,
06:37so we underexposed the film, we post-processed the film,
06:40we didn't dust-bust the negatives, so all the hairs were left in the film,
06:44kind of the scratches and hairs, and then digitally we destroyed it kind of even further.
06:48You know, it was about kind of making it feel like
06:51it was all archival footage that we had rescued.
06:54Beyond that, it was about working with our visual effects team,
06:57who were so brilliant, because again, it was about making visual effects
07:00that not only look real, but they look real like the way
07:03they would have been photographed back in that era.
07:05For example, like all the photos of the games back then,
07:08the crowds are very dark, whereas the players on the court are very bright,
07:11and part of that is because the lights are so bright,
07:13the cameras that were filming them at the time couldn't expose
07:16to the crowds in the dark background.
07:19So it was about working with visual effects and making it so that it's
07:22not only do the crowds look real, but actually they look quite dark
07:25and quite hard to see, as if they were shot on cameras back at that time.
07:28I'm very critical of my work. I do think when I look at this sequence,
07:32I'm happy, because I remember how hard it was,
07:34and I know how many brilliant people it took to make it come together.
07:38Production design, my operators, the lighting, the editors,
07:42the visual effects, everyone came together to make this work.
07:45The amount of meetings and rehearsals to get it there,
07:47and when I look at it, it almost looks easy, like it almost looks invisible,
07:50which I think that that's what I'm proud of.
07:52You know, I'm proud of the whole team.