Behind the Scenes with Jim Chressanthis at The Cape

Jim Chressanthis has vivid memories of the day he saw John Glenn ride the Mercury spacecraft into orbit. The students at his elementary school in Philadelphia were gathered in an assembly hall. It was the first time most of them saw a color TV set. He remembers the wait and thrill of watching the launch. He was a confirmed "spacenik."

Glenn is now a U.S. Senator, but there are plenty of new heroes in the space program. Just ask Chressanthis, who filmed the debut season of The Cape. The first-run syndicated series is produced by MTM in association with ZM Productions. The pilot and 21 episodes were filmed at the Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Before becoming a filmmaker, Chressanthis earned undergraduate and master's degrees in fine arts. He was an assistant professor at Western Michigan University, where he headed the sculpture curriculum. During the summer of 1979, he and his wife, Robin, traveled to Greece and visited the high mountain village where his maternal grandparent was born. The following year they returned for four months to make a 16 mm film about the harvest cycle.

Remembrance of a Journey to a Village won prizes at film festivals, and was aired on the PBS network. In 1984, Chressanthis took a sabbatical, and enrolled at the American Film Institute. In 1985, he gave up the security of tenure and returned to AFI.

Chressanthis interned with Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC on The Witches of Eastwick. Cinematographer Amir Mokri recommended that he shoot music videos to gain experience. Chressanthis compiled almost 100 video credits with top artists like M.C. Hammer, Harry Connick, Jr., James Brown, Bobby McFerrin and others. His eclectic body of work includes documentaries, TV movies, independent features, and all 21 episodes of Nowhere Man, a visually poetic TV series. Three episodes were directed by Ian Toynton. When Toynton was hired to direct the pilot for The Cape, he asked Chressanthis to shoot it.

"Like most people, I'd become blasé about the space program," he says. "We had the luxury of six weeks to prepare. I visited every corner of The Cape, and even climbed inside the Endeavor while it was on the launch pad. I watched films in the NASA archives, explored the web site, and spoke with the engineers and astronauts."

Chressanthis used the space center like it was a character in the series.

"We shot a rusted gantry and the launching pad where fire killed the Apollo I astronauts," he says. "In one episode there's a shot in the Vehicle Assembly Building, where the camera was 34 stories high looking down. The people on the floor looked like ants. The camera tips up slowly and reveals the space shuttle, ready to be rolled out. A lone figure walks across a catwalk. It's Corbin Bernsen, who plays 'Bull' Eckert, who'll command the next mission. It's like he's kicking the tires, before taking the car out for a drive. You can't build a set like that. It's a billion dollar shot."

Prepping for the pilot, Chressanthis defined three looks to differentiate between the astronauts' personal lives, their work at the base, and outer space. In scenes focusing on their personal lives, he muted colors, made them a little softer with diffusion.

"We wanted space to be razor sharp," he says. "On Earth, their lives have more texture and tonality; it's more gritty. I used atmosphere when it could be motivated. For instance, we have a permanent set for a bar frequented by astronauts. All the props, including pictures on the walls, are authentic. There's always light smoke hanging in the air.

"We wanted a different feeling when the editor cuts from launch control to a scene in the bar and then to the space shuttle," he continues. "Mostly we did it with diffusion, the focal length of lenses, and the choice of camera films.

"During the pilot (which was shot in 35 mm format), I used the Eastman (EXR 52)87 film for most exteriors," he says. " The quality of light in Florida is very contrasty, especially during summer. It (the film) handled the contrast between bright sunlight and shade. It's also a softer look, more forgiving, and more pleasing on faces. I used (Eastman EXR 52)93 film for space and background plates that were elements of composite shots because they had to be crisp and free of grain."

Sets were built in a former warehouse for Titan rockets. They included a flawless mockup of the shuttle flight deck, mid-deck, and parts of the payload bay, which had working airlocks. Sets could be rotated and mated together so the actors could move from one onto another one.

Most of the people in launch control scenes are real NASA technicians. The character who strapped actors Corbin Bernsen and Adam Baldwin into their seats before a launch sequence had done the same for the real Apollo astronauts.

"We hardly ever shot full master shots in the pilot," Chressanthis says. "The camera was always moving. Ian (Toynton) has a beautiful way of blocking action, so we didn't reveal everything at once. We'd start out with one or two characters. They would take the camera to another character, who would take it to the edge of the frame."

The two hour pilot was shot mainly with 11:1 or 3:1 Primo zoom lenses on a Panaflex camera. He mainly stayed with the range of 75, 100 and 150 mm, and longer, focal lengths. "When we cut to a true wide shot, it had a tremendous effect," Chressanthis says.

Because of the longer lenses, most of the movement came from tracking shots on dollies, augmented by the occasional use of a Steadicam. "There's a sequence in the pilot with two people walking and talking, and we were dollying fast with them across the tarmac to some jet planes," he says. "It was a 100 millimeter lens. We kept the camera back and really focused the audience's attention on the two actors and what they were saying."

After the pilot, Chressanthis shot the series in 16 mm format. He was among the first cinematographers to use the new 16 mm Kodak Vision 500 and 320 speed films.

"It made a big difference," he says. "There's much less grain and more latitude. You can underexpose without worrying about areas becoming grainy."

Chressanthis rented an Aaton 16 mm camera from Panavision Hollywood. "I've used it for documentaries and knew it's extremely steady," he says. "Mainly, I used the Angenieux 11.5-138 mm zoom lens."

In one episode, there was a two-minute walking and talking shot on a street in Cocoa Village. The actors were moving from brilliant sunlight into deep shadows under awnings and trees. It was impossible to light except with bounce cards at the end mark.

"Part of the problem was that we often had to shoot with the sun directly overhead," he says. I found that the Vision 320T film is very forgiving in these situations."

Chressanthis also likes the way the new films render blacks, reds and whites in props and costumes. He used to avoid those colors in 16 mm narrative filming because they looked too harsh. Now, there's much more latitude at the top end.

"I used to automatically over-expose 16 mm film to improve the grain structure," he says. "You had to watch your highlights and hot backlights. I was always concerned about grain and losing details in the shadows so I used a bit more fill light than I normally would for a 35 mm program. But, by the end of the series, I was lighting it like a 35 mm program, and was even using negative fill to subtract ambient bounce light."

One difference was that he used less diffusion in 16 mm format, but that was mainly because the lenses are softer in contrast.

Film for the pilot was processed at Deluxe Labs, and the 16 mm footage at FotoKem, both in Los Angeles. Encore, in Los Angeles, did the compositing and telecine work. MTM sent Chressanthis to oversee color correction for the pilot. That enabled him to integrate the look of composites with live-action and stock footage.

Toward the end of the series, Chressanthis was one of the first cinematographers to use the new Kodak Primetime film in 16 mm format. The first generation of Primetime was introduced last year in 35 mm format. The film is rated for a 640 exposure index in tungsten light, and its imaging characteristics are optimized for the TV system.

He only had enough of the new film to shoot three or four shots in an episode called Hurricane. An astronaut, his ex-girlfriend and their son are riding out the storm in a house. It's night. There's ambient light motivated by the moon and occasional flashes of lightning coming through windows. Two characters are carrying tube lanterns and the other has a flashlight.

"We rigged each lantern with a single 9-inch KinoFlo tube on the opposite side, away from camera," he explains. "When the actors moved, they lit themselves. It's been done before, but the KinoFlo tubes added a new touch because their output was so low. I made a mental note to watch out for the lantern scene in dailies to make sure it wasn't under-exposed when the actors moved in and out of the light. You can see details in the darkest shadows. One lantern was put on a counter at waist-level. When a character was close, their face was two to three stops underexposed with no objectionable grain."

Chressanthis observes it's a fact of life that TV budgets are being squeezed below the line but he believes you can be both fast and good.

"You are shooting a 44-minute movie in seven days," he says. "There's never enough time. The sun is going down, or an actor has to catch a plane when we're trying to perfect something in the lighting or a move. Inevitably someone says, 'It's just television.' That's when I tell my crew, 'Remember, they are going to be downloading this film off the Internet forever.' You have to surround yourself with people who share that feeling."

His final thought on shooting The Cape: "I believe when people remember America in the distant future, they'll say NASA and the astronauts landing on the moon were among our most important accomplishments."