Whether it's his earlier work on film or contemporary blockbusters, cinematographer Jaron Presant has never been one to shy away from new tech. For over twenty years, Presant has enjoyed a successful career as a cinematographer on movies such as Looper, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Aquaman, San Andreas, and Rampage. We got a hold of Presant while he was busy on-site in Serbia shooting Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery to hear how he's embraced our cloud-based Instant Digital Dailies platform, Flow Capture (formerly Moxion).
During our chat, Presant tells us more about the unique problems cloud-based workflows can help solve on-set, including his recent work on the Apple TV+ show Mr. Corman alongside longtime collaborator Joseph Gordon-Levit. Check out the full story with Jaron Presant below, only on AREA.
Yes, so I still work exactly the same as I did on film. I still light with ratios, everything's with a light meter. And if I have a film project, I do the same work on digital acquisition as on a film acquisition. To me, the two things are interchangeable. Our challenge with digital is authoring the images the same way we would with film. It's interesting because people tend to write off all the technology that went into physical film. But some scientists worked for 100 years on that technology. It just happened to be an organic technology. So that potential is the same; you just have to harness that technology. And that's one of the big parts of our job.
After all, the biggest step forward for filmmaking wasn't digital acquisition but the digital pipeline. Because even if you're shooting film today, you're still in a digital pipeline. The digital pipeline was a massive leap forward in terms of image design and control. It changed the game because we could now control contrast. We have absolute, minute finesse control, which we never could do with film. What we can do with a digital pipeline is massive and exciting.
I can speak to the finishing and review end of it, which is what impressed me the most. [For Mr. Corman], we were doing the post pipeline with a post-facility in LA and a post-facility in Wellington – all working on the same shows. What impressed me was that I could have my colorist in LA line up the iPad with Flow Capture to both the HDR and SDR monitors and give me an assessment of which settings would line up most accurately.
Interestingly enough, the SDR setting on Flow Capture lined up with the HDR monitor, not the HDR settings. So if I had the standardized brightness setting on the SDR setting, that was a pretty good replica of HDR correction. That's what we used for most of our HDR reviews. We did an SDR review upstream of that, which was a live SDR review. But we corrected the whole show between all of those reviews, notes, and back and forth. I'm really happy with how it looks. Flow Capture served everything that I wanted it to serve.
It always depends on the person. Joe is extremely technical, so he really understands it. Some directors don't. And you walk them through. You help them to conceive of the thing. But when people – even if they aren't very technical – start to understand what they can do if they harness some of this technical knowledge. They start to open up creatively. One of those things that I've really loved about this business is it's so collaborative. I love back-and-forth collaboration where I can help somebody see how we get to an end goal. Then they start to see what that could mean creatively and throw out another idea. Those back and forths are the moments I live for in this business.
Cinematographers, by their nature, always lean towards technology and understanding it. To me, it's an amazing time when technology is booming. What we can do is so exciting. I mean, it's a lot of work, but it pays off. People are doing such amazing work, and so much of that is dependent upon digital pipelines. We're in the infancy of computational photography, and our processes for image design are transitioning from entirely on-set – with little bits in post – to spreading between actual physical production and post-production.
If we want to harness all those tools, we have to actually harness both sides of the entire image pipeline. You can't just say: "OK, well, we're going to expose on set, then we'll find out what happened later on when we get down to a color correction that we haven't followed the image through." The process of shepherding that image from conception to delivery? That's all image design. That process requires that you manage the image pipeline down through post. It all comes down to the concept of image design and what story you're trying to tell visually. And each [story] has its own challenges.
To say, "I don't have to do the work because I'm working on a big green screen stage," belies the complexities that can yield amazing images. If you really dig deep into that, you can do amazing work, but you have to conceive of the whole image and add a layer because the image doesn't exist when you're photographing it. The image you're creating when you're photographing is an image that demands further steps, and you have to conceive of those steps. If you haven't, you'll make mistakes, and you won't get to the end goal. So you actually have to have a larger perspective on the image you're making versus photographing an entirely real moment. But the entirely real moment has different challenges because you can't put a light where you might want to put a light. After all, there might be a wall there, right? Each project has its own challenges, and surmounting them is part of the fun of this entire process. So I come to it from that perspective. It's the job that I initially fell in love with, and that's the job that I do.
*This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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