On Sunday September 7th at 12 noon ET/PT, Help Desk makes its series premiere on Oprah Winfrey’s OWN TV Network. I served as Director of Photography for the last eight episodes that this co-production between Harpo Studios and Generate produced.
I shot the premiere episode with Deepak Chopra so please watch it! We filmed across several weekends in February and March of 2014 in downtown Los Angeles, Long Beach, Hermosa Beach, San Francisco, and Portland, Oregon. I also lensed Michael Bernard Beckwith, Devon Franklin, Caroline Myss, Panache Desai, Cheryl Strayed, Gary Zukov, and Rob Bell.
The weekly show answers the question, “What happens when you set up a desk in a busy public place and let the public ask today’s most celebrated leaders anything?”
The pilot used Sony EX-3 cameras with minimal grip gear on a fortuitously cloudy Venice day in June of 2013. In lieu of a single Director of Photography, they hired three amazing camera operators who are individually all accomplished cinematographers: Jeycob Carlson, Jato C. Smith, and Justin Talley. Fortunately, they all returned for the subsequent Los Angeles area episodes.
The New York City and Washington, D.C. episodes followed a similar path with the EX-3s, but the total operators jumped up to 6. Shooting two episodes in a single day required dedicated cameras to gather B-roll of the city, man-on-the-street interviews, and post-mortem interviews with the help desk participants.
After D.C., the director, Mark Rinehart requested a roaming fourth camera to cover the main interview set-up. In reality, it became an 8 or 9 camera shoot because 1 to 2 GoPro Hero3 Black cameras captured time lapse shots of our work day from a high angle!
In gearing up for the Los Angeles days, the producer, Danny Harris and I brainstormed ways to further elevate the final product.
In the end, we upgraded the cameras to Canon C-300’s and secured a 4-person grip team along with a 3-ton grip truck. A condensed post schedule prohibited us from capitalizing on the bonus latitude afforded by C-Log due to the extra time required to color correct. Regardless, the C300’s plus L-series zoom lenses greatly outperformed the EX’s.
Pleased with those adjustments, the C-300’s and I reunited in San Francisco and Portland to complete the remainder of the season.
The show’s format required that each episode adhere to a strict shooting order: teleprompted intros/outros with the series host Gotham Chopra, pre-interview with the spiritual advisor, 1-on-1 Help Desk sessions with participants & advisor, group exercise with advisor and participants, and then an exit interview with the spiritual advisor. We had the luxury of knowing precisely when we’d shoot each element of our day since Danny would diligently hold us to his schedule.
On the location scouts, Mark and I used our smartphones to select portions of our set that were most favorable to the sun’s path. My poor Sunto hasn’t left my house in ages!
Picking which side of the table our expert would occupy was also paramount. Whenever possible I kept both subjects backlit, but logistically we often had to have the sun blasting into our participant’s eyes. Thankfully the sun doesn’t travel unpleasantly overhead in the late winter months.
To help balance out the contrast ratios, we utilized a variety of 4’x4′ shiny boards, gel frames, and bounce cards, 6’x6′ frames of ultra bounce and 1/2 (China) silk, and a 12’x12′ frame of silver/gold lemay. The brief delay between participants on the help desk enabled me to run on set with my gaffer’s glass every 30 minutes or so to dial-in the various bounces.
The only continuity throughout all of my episodes was my operation of the wide master on a 10′ Dana Dolly speed rail slider. Danny hired all of our local camera operators with the exception of my B-camera op in Los Angeles, Chun Ming Huang. The three of us all previously shared a set on the XBox/Dance Central 3 commercial.
I look forward to seeing how the half-hour show comes together. If you need help locating OWN TV on your local cable/satellite provider, please click here.
Help Desk is an all-new series hosted by award-winning journalist and filmmaker Gotham Chopra, Deepak Chopra’s son, as he introduces today’s top thought leaders who bring their spiritual wisdom to the streets in different cities across the country, offering life-changing answers to hard-hitting questions about relationships, health, spirituality and personal transformation. These are challenging times and there is a deepening hunger among people for meaning and purpose. Where do they go for guidance? The simple truth is that spiritual advice has more impact when it’s given to real people who have real questions. So, that sparked an idea; set up a desk in a busy public place, sit down with today’s most celebrated spiritual teachers, and let the public ask them whatever is on their mind.
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