(L-R) C.J. Thomason and Elaine Cassidy. (Photos by Rob McLachlan, ASC, CSC)

The first episode of Harper’s Island opens on a bright summer day during a festive outdoor wedding celebration on a small island off the coast of Seattle, Washington. The bride is a rich girl from the city who is marrying a popular local young man. They are surrounded by their families and friends. It’s a joyous occasion until one of the guests is murdered by an unknown assailant. The tension heightens as another murder is committed in each subsequent episode. Harper’s Island premiered on CBS-TV in the United States in mid-April.

Cinematographer Rob McLachlan, ASC, CSC likens the 13-episode series to an Agatha Christie mystery novel where the tension intensifies page by page until the end. He compares it to television programs where a different participant is told they are out of the game and have to leave the island each week. However, unlike the reality series, the characters on Harper’s Island don’t get to vote who dies. Neither the cast nor crew knows who is going to be the next victim until each episode concludes. The tension is tactile by the time the murderer is finally revealed at the end of the final episode.

The series was conceived by executive producer Jon Turteltaub, who also directed the pilot episode. It was produced as a co-venture by his company Junction Entertainment and CBS Paramount Network Television almost entirely at exterior locations on a small island off the coast of Vancouver, Canada.

“I remember reading a comment by the great cinematographer Freddie Young, who said, ‘The secret to taking beautiful photographs is to only take pictures of beautiful things,’” McLachlan recalls. “Everyone on the crew and in the cast appreciated shooting a series that takes place on a beautiful, forest-covered rural island.”

McLachlan describes the scripts as “very ambitious.” They didn’t have the luxury of shooting on sets and pre-lit locations. The cast and crew were constantly on the move. A Heritage House at the University of British Columbia overlooking the ocean was used as the exterior of a hotel. Other regular locations included the sheriff’s office, a local bar and a teahouse pavilion. A few hotel room sets were built on a stage.

If you watch all 13 episodes consecutively there is a cohesive visual arc from beginning to end. The first episode has a flat, warm, romantic look because it takes place in golden sunshine. McLachlan added a little saturation to the images to create a warm, golden, romantic aura by using diffusion filters on lenses.

“We made the locations a character in the story by heightening saturation,” he says. “I saturated the greens a bit because one of the things that stood out at that location were the green tones. We also enhanced the greens in final timing.” The images were composed in 4:3 aspect ratio and protected for 16:9.

“The story takes place over an eight-day period,” McLachlan recounts. “We started shooting in the late summer and ran into mid-winter in the Pacific Northwest when the days were shorter and darker. The easy part was doing justice to the young, beautiful actresses. The hard part was maintaining visual continuity, and making exteriors that we shot on dismal winter days look like fall. There is also a subtle increasingly scary look.”

An aerial unit shot footage that helped to establish the setting. As the story progresses, the power goes out on the island and the phone lines aren’t working. The assumption is that underwater power and phone cables were accidently disconnected by an anchor on a passing boat.

McLachlan gradually reduced color saturation in each new episode, partly with filtration on lamps that made the light increasingly a little cooler. He also added green tones to night scenes and made the lighting more neutral and cooler.

(L-R) Actors Katie Cassidy and Christopher Gorham in a scene from Harper’s Island where cinematographer Rob McLachlan, ASC, CSC created a warm, golden, romantic aura by using diffusion filters. (Photos by Rob McLachlan, ASC, CSC)

He studied fine arts and filmmaking at the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University, and began directing, shooting and editing television commercials when he was 20 years old. He segued from TV spots into producing and shooting environmental and animal rights documentaries for Greenpeace. That led to work as a camera operator and cinematographer on the television series Seahunt in 1987.

McLachlan has won nine Canadian Society of Cinematographers Awards and earned five more nominations, along with four ASC Outstanding Achievement Award nominations for motion pictures and television programs. His body of work includes more than 40 cinematography narrative credits. Harper’s Island was a new adventure for him and comprised his 300th episodic credit.

“I hadn’t shot a full television series since Millennium 10 years ago,” he says. “Things have radically changed. We had a very modest budget, including the set construction budget. Our only sets were a hotel lobby and a few rooms. At the same time, expectations are higher in terms of the production values that were expected.”

The pilot was filmed in 13 days, and most subsequent episodes in seven 12-hour days. McLachlan says they rarely covered fewer than 50 set-ups a day and frequently as many as 75 to 80 without compromising production values. “It was critical to get a lot of set-ups because in TV you really need them to build suspense since you don’t have that big screen to draw the viewer’s eye around or hide nasty surprises.

“My preference is always to use a single stock,” he adds. “We shot the entire series with KODAK VISION3 500T 5219 film. It is so fine grained that you can push exposures without affecting looks. The grain structure from shot to shot and scene to scene looks and feels more consistent than when you use different stocks. We shot some interior and most night scenes at E.I. 1,000 and covered large areas with incredibly low amounts of light. Producing Harper’s Island on film was a big advantage.”

Panavision in Vancouver provided an ARRICAM Studio and Lite, and McLachlan also used his own ARRI 435 camera, as well as Cooke S4i primes and Angenieux 28-75mm zoom lenses for handheld and Steadicam shots. He says, “The images rendered with the zoom are as sharp as prime lenses.”

Naturalistic

McLachlan generally covered scenes with the two ARRICAM cameras. Sometimes he had them at 90-degree angles, other times on the same axis, and occasionally they were almost looking straight at each other. In those situations, he adjusted lighting so it worked for both cameras. “This became easier as the series progressed because we began lighting less romantically and immaculately, and became more naturalistic,” explains McLachlan. “We lit the rooms and environments realistically and then let the actors play within them.

“On a series with this kind of schedule and demand for a lot of set-ups, there is just no place for a DP to do anything but try to get the director what he needs. I started out producing and editing my own stuff and if there is one thing I know, it is that four perfect shots are of no use if you need 10 good ones to make a scene really great. Could I have made the show look better? You bet. Would it have made it a better show? No way. My job is to serve the material the best way I can.”

The ARRI 435 camera was generally used for “grab” shots, which were often handheld to create an edgy look and feeling, as well as speed ramps and slow motion when needed. “My documentary experience was a big help,” he says. “There was a lot of running, gunning and grabbing shots to take advantage of natural light. Our camera operators had the freedom to go with the flow when happy accidents happened. Mike Wrinch has been with me since 1988 in one capacity or another, and I’ve worked with Trig Singer since I shot some episodes of the MacGyver series in 1991.”

McLachlan only had opportunities to scout locations for the pilot, and also for one other episode during a brief Christmas holiday hiatus. But, because the series was filmed on the island, they used the same locations multiple times in various episodes.

“One of the producers would take aside whoever was getting bumped off the next show and let them know that it would be their last episode,” he says. “The secrecy kept everyone else in the cast and the crew involved and wanting to know who was going to be murdered next and who the killer was. Gaffer Burton “Joe” Kuchera, key grip Fraser Boyle, and I got early copies of scripts before they were released to the actors. We needed the scripts early enough to decide if any special equipment was needed. We, along with the script supervisor, were sworn to secrecy.

Cinematographer Rob McLachlan, ASC, CSC on the set of Harper’s Island. (Photos by Rob McLachlan, ASC, CSC)

The balloons usually carried an HMI and a tungsten light. One model, the Hybrid, held two HMI lights and two tungsten globes. “You can use both HMI and tungsten lights or you can use just one of them in a variety of sizes,” he continues. “We used the Hybrid balloon light in the pilot episode where a couple of our characters go swimming at night. It’s very spooky if you’re looking out at the ocean from the shore with nothing in the background. It was like looking at black velvet.

“We found ways to create reflections in distant horizons,” reveals McLachlan. “We put an 8-foot diameter round lighting balloon and a small generator on one of our boats and took it way offshore in the background. The balloon light gave us a beautiful and believable moonlight reflection on the ocean with characters on the shore looking at it. That put life into a shot that otherwise would have looked like two little faces in a black ocean, because you can’t front light the ocean. Then, we brought another balloon in closer to provide our key light.”

Several directors were at the helm for two episodes, but not consecutive ones. Usually, the director of the next episode came by the set while McLachlan was shooting. “They had already met with the executive producers to discuss the script,” he says. “They would share those discussions with me. That’s when I decided if an episode called for any special tools. Every director had ideas but I also spoke with Jon (Turteltaub) and the other executive producers as production of the series progressed. We started out making heavy use of the dolly and progressed to more and more handheld shots. There aren’t a lot of unnecessary shaky camera shots because that would have sent the wrong message to the audience. We wanted a feature film look as much as possible. We wanted every technique we used to help tell the story better — not just for its own sake or expediency.”

McLachlan credits everyone on the crew with making creative contributions, in addition to enabling them to work quickly without compromising production values. “Mike (Wrinch) has a very unique way of putting a Fisher jib arm on a dolly and hand operating the camera from an under-slung head on the end of the arm. It is a very fluid style of shooting that allowed him to constantly adjust for the actors. It also sped things up because he could make adjustments on the run. He and the dolly grip created a very fluid up-and-down and organic feeling in shots where that was the right look.”

McLachlan took digital stills of every set up and used the Kodak Look Manager System (KLMS) and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom® to provide visual references for both the dailies timer and the colorist. McLachlan spent 30 to 60 minutes a day color correcting and emailing his digital stills to the dailies timer at Technicolor lab in Vancouver.

Both editing and post-production were done in Los Angeles. The timed dailies were sent to colorist Dan Judy at Modern VideoFilm who was faithful to the vision that McLachlan and Turteltaub shared while putting finishing touches on the look.

“I counted my blessings that we were shooting on film,” McLachlan concludes. “HD would have been an absolute nightmare given the logistics, the widely varying lighting environments, and the different looks we envisioned. If we had been tethered in any way to a DIT tent, there is just no way that we could have made such a good-looking, exciting show.”