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MillimeterThe Dirt (Literally) on Survivor in HD
Oct 14, 2008 12:00 PM, By Craig Erpelding
Everyone who has stood behind an upscale HD camcorder or sat in an editing suite cutting high-end high-def imagery over the past decade knows the footage looks absolutely spectacular—like nothing seen prior. And while shooting HD for television purposes is, again, nothing new, I recently had the opportunity to sit down with some of the postproduction team using an Avid-based post workflow for Survivor: Gabon—the first Survivor series to be shot and delivered in HD. The conversation provided some interesting insight on just exactly how the HD format has benefitted the production of what some call the granddaddy of all reality shows and how the format may affect the reality shows of the future.
“It brings the experience much more viscerally—there’s much more truth to it,” says Tim Atzinger, a creative editor on Survivor: Gabon. “With reality TV, HD is especially a great application because you want to see the temples on people’s faces and you want to see the scratches on their legs. You want to see the insects crawling in their ears and you want to see the pieces of dry dirt ground in their clothes.
“For what we’re doing, the articulation that HD gives us tells our story so much better. It’s ideal,” Atzinger says. “In the past, viewers may have thought ‘Is that real… are they really that hungry and dirty?’ And I think HD gives the viewer a much truer sense of how really difficult the Survivor experience is.”
To give an idea of the type of “reality” the HD footage is helping provide for this next-generation Survivor viewer experience, Atzinger verbalizes what many armchair onlookers can sense.
“These camps they stink—kind of like homeless people's camps. And none of that comes across because in some ways television makes it seem cleaner and easier than it is,” Atzinger says. “I think the greatest advantage of the HD conversion has been that it gives viewers a truer sense of what the gritty, dirty experience is like. And it’s weird, it’s like it stops being a radio play that you’re watching and you get really immersed in the location. That was my experience and that’s been the feedback we’ve gotten from the network and from the audience; from the fans and everybody here in house. I think the first time we saw a cold open, with the hippos and the savannah, it was literally jaw-dropping. With HD, it’s a nice marriage between the material that we’re portraying and the medium.”
But for production and post staff, the TV medium is not the same as the HDTV medium—especially with how the shots are framed.
“We shoot widescreen so there’s a lot more surface area and picture to contend with. But because everyone in America is still making the transition, we’re still cutting everything in the 4:3 aspect ratio,” Atzinger says. “So you have this dual mentality when you’re cutting—you’re looking for singles and shots that work, but your left and right frame lines aren’t as reliably on- or off-screen. You know, depending on what television you’re on, people could walk off or walk on too early.”
Also providing new issues to the production is the increased resolution and clarity in non-optimal conditions.
“We have to watch out for things like ‘lip flap’ like never before,” Atzinger says. “And not to say there aren’t booms or cameras used in the making of Survivor, but they did occasionally show up in shots. And with the trees and other backgrounds in [standard def], oftentimes you couldn’t see them—whereas now we really have to be careful about what we’re cutting.
“But, probably the most drastic difference has been in our aerial shots,” Atzinger says. “Aerial shots have always been a dynamic, great part of Survivor. Literally when things are up-rezzed you want to watch them for like 15 seconds. You don’t want a short shot of them. The amount of details you can now see—in the grasses, the backs of the animals that are hundreds and hundreds of feet away. It’s been really cool.”
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
