In Fear the Walking Dead, AMC’s spinoff to the hit series The Walking Dead, the zombie apocalypse has just begun to affect Los Angeles. In the six-episode first season, L.A. residents try to survive as the military loses containment and the power grid goes down. Leading up to the pilot, cinematographer Michael McDonough, ASC, BSC saw an opportunity to employ the anamorphic format for a series.
A road movie tinged with science-fiction, Midnight Special is a simple story of a father's love for his son that is wrapped in complexity and nuance.
Rodrigo Prieto, ASC, AMC was at the camera for Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, a tale of greed and excess in the go-go 1980s financial rackets. This time, the duo went back a decade earlier to present a story set in the music industry of the 1970s, as it evolved from kid stuff into big business. The two-hour pilot for the HBO series Vinyl touches on the entire culture of the period – business, fashion, society, and art are all in a state of flux.
The explosion in popularity of the anamorphic format certainly has taxed the anamorphic lens reserves as of late, which left cinematographer Mitchell Amundsen, a die-hard anamorphic and Panavision user, without his favorites for the action-comedy Ride Along 2.
The Big Short dramatizes the 2007-‘10 financial crisis through the story of a group of countercultural whiz kids who bet against the housing and credit markets and won.
When J.J. Abrams and Dan Mindel, ASC, BSC took on Star Wars: The Force Awakens, they knew they were handling a cultural touchstone. As they did with Star Trek and Star Trek Into Darkness, they wanted to respect the antecedent while making a great, entertaining film for today’s audiences. So when it came to choosing format, lenses and the right look, they began by researching how the original Star Wars films were made.
In the winter of 1820, the crew of the whaling ship Essex battled a monster – a massive sperm whale driven by aggression and vengeance that wreaked havoc upon them. The survivors then battled storms, despair and each other while trying to hunt it down. This shockingly real maritime event inspired Herman Melville to write “Moby-Dick.” Nearly 150 years later, Nathaniel Philbrick's book on the subject, In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, inspired director Ron Howard to bring the story to the screen.
Truth retells the 2004 episode that ended in newsman Dan Rather’s exit from CBS after 43 years with the network. Rather reported documents critical of U.S. President George W. Bush’s Texas Air National Guard service, and after the authenticity of the documents was questioned by bloggers, a media firestorm and investigations ensued. Producer Mary Mapes was fired and Rather eventually retired under duress. The story is often cited as a turning point in the weakening of network journalism in the U.S. and the rise of online, amateur newsgathering.
