Westworld season 4

I can't believe it was just over a year ago that we were out shooting plates for Westworld. For the new season, they knew they would have scenes on a train and that the train car would be a standing set. Rather than shoot green screen and composite in later, they had us shoot the train plates ahead of time so they could do LED walls for interactive lighting.

Seeing as how they would be train height and potentially see out of multiple windows on any given side of the train car, we shot with 3 RED Komodos on Ronins (for smoothness) with 14mm Sigma Art primes, which would cover a 180° field of view with enough overlap to stitch the cameras together. These were all built on a truck at train window height with the run/stop synchronized via a Tilta Nucleus. By setting the Nucleus motor on each camera to the same channel, a single handset could control the iris (which we wanted to match between cameras) and run/stop on all three units.

We shot a few locations for the show, some in the desert, some on the freeway between Glendale and Eagle Rock, and a bit near downtown.

We did discover that the Komodos don't like having their exhaust vent facing upwind, as the incoming air would fight against the fan blowing the opposite direction and create a sort of air-pressure stalemate, causing them to overheat quickly. We solved the issue by taking a small piece of foam board, folding it into a "V", and taping the "tent" over the the exhaust port, effectively keeping the upwind air from pushing against the fan, but letting the hot air vent out the top and bottom of the tents. After that, we had no temperature issues at all.

I haven't seen all of the new season, so haven't found where the downtown footage we shot has been used yet, but we did the desert background plates for these shots:

As well as the arrival of the train to the city, shot on the 134 going up and down the hill between Glendale and Eagle Rock, as seen in these shots:

It was a pretty fun shoot and interesting in that we shot these before the main unit had even started filming the show, whereas I'm used to us shooting either concurrent with the main unit or, for a lot of the network TV shows that shoot their cars on green screen, well after they've shot their episode.

Hacks season 2

Having shot some VFX driving plates as well as some establishing shots for Hacks season 1, we were hired to do some shooting for the second season as well. While season 1 focused on the Las Vegas residency, at the end of the season the characters decide to take the show on the road, which brings us to season 2. For this, production wanted shots of the tour bus driving all over America. So we rigged up a camera car and set out with the tour bus, starting in New Mexico and traveling up through northern Texas and Oklahoma, then over to Tennessee before heading north through Minnesota and eventually ending in Illinois.

It was a lot of driving and, shooting the end of January into February, got extremely cold as we made our way north to Chicago. This introduced some technical challenges that I don't encounter in Los Angeles, mainly that the vibration isolator for the Ronin 2 uses rubber rings that get progressively stiffer as it gets colder, which makes it so they don't remove the road vibration anymore. We ended up buying a bunch of hand warmers that we could strap to the rings and wrap up with insulation to get the rubber flexible again (being careful to keep the rings clear enough that they wouldn't be impeded by the fix). Working in freezing temps always reminds me to appreciate the typically warm weather I enjoy back home.

For gear, we used a new prototype hitch mounted hydraulic arm for attaching the Flowcine Black Arm. The hydraulic arm let us raise the camera from just off the ground to about 9' in the air with a simple remote control. On the Black Arm, we had RED's new V-Raptor flying on a DJI Ronin 2. Lenses were some customized-just-for-the-show Panavision Primo 70 Series primes (we mostly used the 35mm).

You can check out the trailer below:

Hacks - Latitude Talent Agency establishing shots

Edit: While watching Hacks season 2 I finally saw the establishing shots we did. I had originally thought they were for Hacks, as we shot them soon after the Las Vegas driving plates for season 1. I don't recall them getting used in that season, so I thought maybe the plates were for one of the other shows we shoot for. But then there they were, being used as establishing shots for the talent agency where Jimmy works. You can see the symmetrical buildings I took the BTS photo of in the background.

Sometimes I'm tasked with shooting a couple establishing shots for a TV show. The strange thing about the work I do is sometimes I have no idea what show I'm shooting for and I have no clue if this show ever came out, and if it did, what shots they used (it's been long enough that the show would have aired already). This shoot consisted of just some simple building establishing shots. We opted for the Sigma Art Cine 14mm and a couple of Zeiss Super Speeds (25mm and 35mm) to capture the large scale of the buildings.

The client had pulled some stills that they really liked so we were mostly matching the reference angles, though one was particularly challenging. Construction had started since the reference photos were taken and one of the shots would have put us smack in the middle of a huge work zone. So, with a little creativity, and tucking the camera right up against the barrier wall, we managed to get a shot that was very similar.

Since we were hiking around with our hands full of camera gear, I didn't get my usual BTS photos, other than taking a bonus shot of one of the buildings, but I like the symmetry.

Hacks HBO Max additional driving plates

I found the other episode we shot driving plates for in episode 7. This was a nighttime shoot, so we used a different LUT and mounted the cameras at a normal height rather than the elevated height for the double decker bus shots. We also had one camera mounted on the front, facing forward and up to capture reflection plates for the windshield. These shots were a little more simple, as they were background plates for a car driving scene.

The road was pretty rough, as construction had just started and they were tearing up the road (as you can see from the traffic cones in my shot of the monitor), but production needed to comp in the background of them driving up to the wedding chapel. Thank goodness for post-stabilization!

Hacks HBO Max series plates

Earlier this year I went up to Las Vegas to shoot some driving plates for a show called Hacks. I had no idea what it was, but knew we had to rig the camera array 13' up in the air to match the second story of a double decker bus. We used a triple RED Gemini array, controlled through a router so we could roll and cut all 3 cameras at exactly the same time.

We did runs on both the Panavision lenses they shot the series on -to exactly match the optical characteristics- as well as 14mm Sigma Art Cine primes to give them larger field of view options. Better to give them both options and not need one than shoot one option and need the other that wasn't shot.

I was pretty surprised when a couple months later I saw ads for a new HBO Max show called Hacks. And dang it, it looked pretty funny. So these plates worked in episode 3 and, while I know they shot some of it practical, obviously plates were needed for other parts. Watching the show, since I knew plates were being used in the scene, I kept a close eye on stray hair strands, as that's usually the biggest way to notice VFX backgrounds. Whatever they did, they did nice work. There were a few instances where I think I can tell it's VFX backgrounds, but overall they did a really good job compositing everything together.

We shot plates for another scene as well, but I haven't seen them appear in the show yet. I'll keep an eye out for them and share once they're up. In the meantime, if you haven't see the series, I recommend it.