Big Sensors, Big Ideas And Even Bigger Images; Bringing The Cinema To Comedy

HBO/Max produced by Bill Lawrence’s Doozer Productions and starring Steve Carell.

Finding new ways to shoot what might seem to be familiar subjects is one of the joys of cinematography, and one reason why practitioners are so interested in finding new approaches. Cinematographer Blake McClure tells us how developing a cinematic feel to US comedy-drama Rooster added character to the whole environment.

Rooster is a new comedy series for HBO Max starring Steve Carell and with cinematography by Blake McClure, ASC, who approached the job with an inclination for novelty very much in mind.

“Comedy was never the intent, TV was never the intent,” McClure begins. “I came [to Los Angeles] to do features, then I got into the comedy world, and now most of the shows I work on are comedies. Rooster was my first show for HBO, my first show for Doozer – it fit the worlds I’d been developing for the last few years.” Rooster, though, immediately revealed itself as an opportunity for a hybrid approach. “It's a bit more of a dramedy, it’s a combination.”

The script, McClure tells us, lost no time in describing the production’s world and how it might look. “On the first page it mentioned the warmth of the trees. It’s fall, it’s New England. The campus was discussed a lot behind the scenes – it’s old world. Part of the storyline is that they built the student center that’s new-agey, gross, boring architecture. It’s how the old world meets the new world. That’s what I had to run with.”

A principal challenge, then, would be depicting autumn and winter in the American northeast while shooting entirely in California. “There were talks about how we’re going to make Los Angeles look like Massachusetts,” McClure says. “It was all shot in LA in the summer heat, but it was set in Massachusetts in the winter! I wanted it to feel warm and cozy and have this familiar, timeless feel to it – because it is kind of timeless. It does look like a film stock, but it’s not.”

Climate challenges aside, the production would shoot six days per episode, “and I shot all ten episodes,” McClure reports. “We started prepping in April and in May we started shooting. Poor Steve was wearing five layers of winter clothes and it was ninety-five degrees outside! All the interiors were on stage at Warner Bros. and exteriors were a combination of a few different campuses – USC, Occidental, and we went up to Stockton for University of the Pacific.”

Big Chips For Big Scenes

Keen eyes will notice an unusual relationship between field of view and depth of field, especially on exteriors, and that’s related to one route McClure took to a unique result. “One thing that’s different with this show is that we shot with a larger sensor, equivalent to 65mm,” he says. “We used the Blackmagic URSA Cine, the 17K. When that camera came out, a DIT friend of mine sent me a link to an article and a few days later I saw the DP John Brawley, who was shooting Shrinking, also for Doozer, posted on Instagram. I hit him up and he was shooting on the Blackmagic 12K LF.”

Blake McClure, ASC. Credit Katrina Marcinowski.

McClure’s interest in finding a different approach provoked choices which were unusual for comedy. “HBO, Brawley and I had this big meeting,” McClure recalled. “We had to reassure HBO; we had to do some compression tests and it was very easy. Everyone came on board and championed this. I don’t know why. Nobody knew me, everyone was excited.”

The differing geometry of such large-sensor images – larger than full frame, even – meant that familiar working practices had to change at least somewhat. “We knew it was going to be tricky,” McClure says. “I didn’t know it was going to be this tricky. The first few weeks were trial and error. When you get the camera too close to the actor, like over the shoulder, it almost feels like they’re super far away from each other. There’s more field of view and we had to get used to that. I could have put a longer lens on and slid back, but I wanted to feel that proximity.”

At the same time, the combination of longer focal lengths and wider fields of view facilitated something McClure had always wanted to achieve. “It opened up this world – it allowed us to get the camera closer to the actor but not to go to a wider lens. We wanted the acting to happen within the frame and feel very much like portraiture. Where we’d normally use an 18mm or maybe a 25mm lens, which is pretty wide, everything would be in focus – but with this sensor, this camera that’s more like a 55mm lens, all [the background] stuff falls off and draws your eye to the actors.”

The lenses were at once familiar – and, because the large sensor used so much more of the lens’ image, unfamiliar at the same time. “They were Camtec’s Falcons,” McClure says. “They’re rehoused Canon K35 and FD glass, but you’re normally shooting through the middle of that lens, and here we’re shooting edge to edge. Camtec had to grind down the housing to get rid of the vignettes. The 24 was our widest lens and there was some hard clipping, so we had to crop in on that lens maybe three per cent, so we used the entire lens. We also had the 35, 55, 85 and 135mm.”

That selection, McClure reflects, represented a smaller lens set you’re used to on TV.

“So you move the camera,” he says. “You watch some of the best movies and think ‘I think they shot the entire thing on the same lens.’ I love that idea.”

Ultimately, that particular combination of equipment provoked reconsideration of familiar approaches: “In the end, what we liked was eliminating the shoulder and going into a single. In moments like that, we’d try to sneak in another camera on the reverse. Sometimes we’d have two cameras next to each other getting two sizes and the third was leapfrogging to another setup. But yes, it did affect us, because we were closer to the actors…avoiding casting shadows on actors was the hardest part.”

Blake McClure, ASC.

A Rich Palette

Moving so quickly and with such ambition meant a careful approach to lighting both on location and on the stages at Warner. McClure describes the basics: “We were able to push artificial sunlight – which looked like real sunlight – into the set and let it scatter around, which gave us a good base stop. We had practicals, and we worked with the art dept to get those rewired and outfitted for LEDs so we could mess with them on the fly or set a cue.

“We were mostly at an f/2 or two-and-a-half, which is the sweet spot on the lens – which is still pretty shallow,” McClure says, with no small understatement. Still, the camera’s sensitivity made life easier. “ISO was in the 1600 to 2000 range, and I was never afraid to bump it up and down. I went to 3200 on some night scenes. We recorded at 8K and we used the Q3 compression. The way we sold it, the data rate was equivalent to Alexa 35 at whatever compression we used for the last show I shot.”

Perhaps the most significant contribution to the colorimetry of McClure’s work, meanwhile, was a combination of bold filtration and a corresponding lookup table. “We built a LUT in combination with this color contrast filter I used in front of the lens. It’s a variable contrast filter so it illuminates the filter and it lifts the shadows. If we needed a little extra fill light, I could dial it up. We stretched it quite a bit.

“We built the LUT knowing I was doing that,” McClure emphasizes. “It’s about four stops darker. If I turned the filter off, the LUT would be almost black. We had a backup LUT which emulated [that result] but it never really got there on its own. It was built in such a way that the highlights would be blooming. On stage we had four to six feet outside those windows. We knew that on that sensor we could drop it out of focus and, with the LUT, blow it out.”

Rooster wrapped production in August 2025. In the grade, McClure remembers, “we really killed a lot of the lower-end shadow. The log with the color contrast filter is crazy flat – there’s so little detail – and we were able to get so much richness out of this image. And we keyed stuff, we shifted things, I got rid of all the blue in color at least in the latter episodes. When we found our rhythm with the color I was shifting things left and right. It held up and it never fell apart.”

Bringing The Style

McClure is keen to emphasize that bringing a cinematic feel to a comedy-drama is far from prejudicial to its primary function: “It’s still about the joke. The edits are tight, there’s not a lot of breathing room, there’s not a lot of time for the camera to linger…It's all about dialogue. That’s never gonna change.” Even so, he concludes, “I never understood why comedies looked the way they did. It’s as if someone suddenly said, ‘comedies need to be bright and boring!’ – that never stuck with me.”

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