It’s becoming increasingly common to film in one location which subs for another. That was the situation Director of Photography Oliver Bokelberg ASC found himself in on the set of the hit ABC series RJ Decker. Bokelberg was challenged with getting the overcast skies of Wilmington, North Carolina to resemble the sunny skies of Florida. We caught up with Bokelberg who shared details on how “Ballad of a Small Player” helped inspire his approach for turning overcast skies into the bright skies of the sunshine state, his process when developing a successful television episodic and his experience working with Senior Colorist Tony D’Amore.

Here is more from Oliver Bokelberg ASC in his own words:

Bokelberg: RJ Decker is the fifth pilot that I have created together with director Paul McGuigan. Our previous collaborations were Scandal, Devious Maids, Big Sky and Will Trent. Paul is a great creative force, who pushes the best in all of us.  

RJ Decker is set in Fort Lauderdale, Florida - the sunshine state. And the sun became a key motivating factor to our visual design. We wanted to feel the sun. It should be bright, flaring the lens at points, sometimes we put our light source directly into frame, we wanted to feel the heat. It should feel warm, and colorful - even a little popcorn. We filmed the pilot in Wilmington, North Carolina, in July and August, and traveled for a couple of days to Fort Lauderdale, to capture some Fort Lauderdale landmarks.  

When building a pilot, we design our look in prep. We have about a month where we go location scouting, collect images and film references. There are paintings that come to mind, and ShotDeck is an invaluable tool. Once we have found our visual direction, I move towards analyzing and implementing our approach. My partner now becomes my Gaffer Tommy Sullivan, whom I fill into our desires, and we decide on the lighting instruments that we feel most useful to us. My favorite choice we made here was to light much of the daylight exteriors with tungsten lights. We used maxi brutes and mole beams. It’s almost like there is a constant golden hour blessing Florida.  

My next collaborator becomes my colorist, Tony D’Amore. We hadn’t worked together before, but I was well familiar with his work, and thrilled to tackle this project together. I shared our look book with Tony, and we get talking about film, look, latitudes, contrast, color separation, and dislikes. Fully aware that we are a network show, we discuss how far we want to push our look, or how well behaved we might want to be. My constant reminder is the warm sun, the bright, the salt and sand in the air. I share that I am using the ARRI Alexa Mini LF for the pilot, and task Tony to build some LUTs that fit our bill. Now the collaboration expands, and we include our DIT Andy Bader into the process. Andy shares some technical specs with Tony and a few days later we receive three LUTs, that we get to experiment with while shooting a small preliminary camera test.  

We picked one of these LUTs as our favorite. Together with Tony, we looked at the dailies together, and tweaked the LUT a bit further, adding a little more saturation, a bit more contrast, and cleaning up the skin color away from too much red. We used this improved LUT, to shoot our Make Up and Hair test, and were happy with it. The first couple of shoot days, we were able to see our LUT behave in a real-world setting and found some minor issues. Our reds were turning pink when reaching the shoulder of the curve. And we felt too crushed when shooting night work. Tony and Andy fixed this, and we continued with this LUT through the end of the pilot, and further on took it to series. I enjoy dialing the color wheels on the set. Ever since leaving film behind, I feel that on-set color is a great and addition to our palette of tools. Even though my corrections are fairly basic, staying within primary colors and contrast, it acts as great support of my lighting tools in creating an individual atmosphere to a given scene. And serves as a great fall back and checkpoint for Tony when in final color. And final color is when we finally are able to sit in the same room together. Until now all communication happened remotely.

Tony prepped the show impeccably well. He made all of the scenes look consistent, and most of all, I still recognized my intent. Some colorists might be a little too aggressive in this first stage, adding windows to the point, where I hardly recognize my work. But Tony had us in a perfect spot.  

From there, basically I guided Tony a little deeper into our look. Be a little grittier here, or a little brighter there. I love watching colorists at work, you see how they dial the knobs and what direction they pursue. You watch the pace they take, and what priorities they set. I like the taste and confidence that Tony brings to the session. We like to push each other sometimes out of our safety and comfort zones, but it’s part of the process, and sometimes the path to a less tired result. The final pilot worked well. It is very close to the look book that we created in our prep phase. The network ordered our show into season.  

A couple of months later, we are getting the team back together to go into production. We are back in North Carolina and when arriving at the at the airport, we came to the quick realization that the seasons were changing. No longer eternal summer, the trees are beginning to turn colors and lose their leaves. We were scheduled to shoot through winter. This no longer looks like Florida. It is definitely becoming a big job for our location and green departments. At this point, I am glad that we decided to use the tungsten lights for our daylight scenes.  

This helps us go after the warm sunlight. But as the weather was changing, and big rainstorms and heavy clouds moved across our studio, I couldn’t help but get slightly concerned on how to manage continuity. This was the time that the first Academy screeners were uploaded, and I watched a film every night for inspiration. One night I saw my friend Edward Berger’s film ‘Ballad of a Small Player’, beautifully photographed by James Friend, ASC. I noticed a few scenes filmed on the water near Lamma Island and I loved the coloring. There was a layer of cyan looming over the images. I felt that this approach might help us survive an overcast day, and still infuse a sense of Florida colors. Maybe not the same as a sunny day, but another look that would supplement our palette. I shared the idea with Tony, who built another LUT to support this idea. This new LUT had extra contrast and a heavier cyan shift in the midtones and blacks. Shortly after, when shooting an exterior on an overcast day, I had a hard time getting to a successful result and asked our DIT Andy to apply Tony’s new LUT. All of the sudden the image popped. Some of the gray sky seemed to disappear, and even appeared blue. I am not calling it a miracle, we got here because of a solid prep and great teamwork but we certainly felt like we won the battle. Thank You, Tony! You made us look good!

As a DP, I am aware that colorist don’t always love us using multiple LUTs for the same show. It can become an annoyance during post. But I do think, for dailies it can be helpful in achieving the best resemblance of our intent. And this is what directors and editors become used to seeing in their bay, and even the studios and producers. I like my process to have the dailies be very close to the final intent. This way nobody gets used to the wrong ideas.