highdef magazine

by Steven DeRosa

Director of Photography and filmmaker Tom Curran likes to create an intimate relationship between the subject and his camera. Whether he’s shooting a scene on TLC’s hit reality series Little People, Big World or a sensitive and powerful interview with the victim of a pedophile deacon on a remote island in Alaska, Curran believes his camera should serve as another character in the story he’s telling.

To achieve this verité/reality style in HD, Curran employs a variety of techniques—shooting in 24p to give his images a more cinematic and timeless feel, primarily relying on handheld to obtain unique angles, and preferring a viewfinder to LCD screens to better control and compose his frame. Curran’s camera of choice is JVC.

Now in its fifth season, TLC’s Little People, Big World chronicles the lives of Matt and Amy Roloff and their four children—Jeremy and Zach (twins), Molly and Jacob. Matt, Amy and Zach are all little people (or dwarfs) and the series often highlights how they face the day-to-day challenges of being small in an average-sized world. Produced by Gay Rosenthal Productions, the popular series switched to HD after two seasons in SD, when Curran and his crew brought cameras from Sony, Panasonic, Canon, and JVC to the Roloffs’ 34-acre farm in Oregon where they performed rigorous tests. After reviewing the footage, the choice was clear and the show went into production on its third season with two JVC GY-HD250 and two GY-HD200 cameras.

“What JVC brought to the table with the 200 series was a beautiful image with very deep rich blacks and the ability to handle high-contrast well,” says Curran. “But what really set JVC apart for me was that you could put an incredible piece of glass in front of the camera and the form factor. We use the Fujinon 13x wide angle lens, which is very sharp and suits this camera beautifully. Ergonomically, the camera fits so comfortably on your shoulder and feels like the type of cameras I’ve been working with for years. You don’t have to search for little iris rings or focus knobs, you have a standard camera to operate with. It also helps that you’re not toting around a twenty-four pound camera. By the time this camera’s rigged out with a battery and a FireStore drive, you’re looking at about fourteen pounds. That ten pound difference is significant when you’re shooting twelve hour days.”

With a demanding shooting schedule that sometimes runs ten months out of the year, Little People, Big World, is no small undertaking and the intimate world created by Curran’s lensing has played a significant role in the show’s success. “Some of the principles on the show are around four feet tall, some are six feet tall, but we often try to shoot from a perspective of a little person. So I spend a lot of time shooting on stools or on my knees. I’m not sure you could do that all day with a heavier camera.”

The cameras also proved to be very rugged. “When we’re shooting up in Portland in the summer, there’s a lot of dust and it’s a tough environment. But these cameras have seen a lot of miles, too. We’ve been to the Bahamas, to the British Virgin Islands, to Hawaii, and this year we’ll be travelling extensively through Europe.”

“For the style of the show, it really is important for us to have the camera become, in effect, a family member,” says Curran. “We really try to be respectful of the family’s space but at the same time think, well, if I was one of the brothers sitting in on this scene, where would I sit? I want the camera to have that view of what’s happening between people, that relationship. A camera like JVC’s in combination with the Fujinon lens gives us a smaller profile that lets us get intimately involved with a scene. It’s a really special thing to be able to watch a family, in a sense, figure life out.”

As for workflow on Little People, Big World, Curran and his crew are doing dual acquisition to tape and to FireStore drives. “We use the tape originals as our main acquisition and the FireStore drives as back up, and they really give you a sense of confidence that you know you’ve got it. We have six of them on the show and we have a fulltime loader who basically handles the media and checks the tapes. The FireStore drives have worked out really well for us.”

Recently, Curran took JVC’s new GY-HM700 compact shoulder mount camera to St. Michael, Alaska. Together with co-director and co-producer Michael Bovee, Curran got a first-hand look at how the HM-700 performs in extreme environments. Just 200 miles south of the Arctic Circle, Curran encountered blizzard conditions and five below zero temperatures even though it was April, and both he and the HM700 performed well (although Curran may have had the edge, having shot seven Iditarods previously).

Curran also took a liking to the LCOS (Liquid Crystal on Silicon) viewfinder on the HM700, which has five times the resolution of typical color viewfinders. “It’s an enormous improvement. You have a much, much higher resolution, and again, I use the viewfinder almost exclusively. When you’re composing shots, you really define your world by what you’re shooting through that viewfinder. The closer that you can get to what you’re actually going to see in its finished form, really helps you. It helps you to compose, it helps you to understand what your color is, what your exposure is, and perhaps most critically, what your focus is. And when you’re working in HD, focus becomes really critical, and with some viewfinders, it’s really hard to find focus.”

Curran also experienced recording to SDHC memory. “I hadn’t worked SDHC cards before. We had four 16GB SDHC cards with us that held about an hour of footage each, and for me what was pretty remarkable was how fast they downloaded, how quickly we could manage the media with just a small two-person crew. Because the cost is so low, you could start to treat those cards as tape.”

Although Curran couldn’t be more pleased with the HD250 and HD200 cameras on Little People, Big World, he does see the networks are beginning to feel more comfortable with tapeless acquisition. “In terms of verité shooting and documentary shooting, JVC cameras have so many strengths that they’re a real contender, especially the HM700 because it has so many advantages for this format and it’s so easy to take care of and manage those SDHC cards.”