The Amazon Studios film Troop Zero follows a bright and quirky young girl named Christmas and her eccentric friends on their quest to become a Birdie Scout troop and travel to Jamboree to take part in a science competition. Christmas’ mother nurtured her into believing that meteors and shooting stars were messages from the heavens above, so when NASA announces the Golden Record program at Jamboree, she knows she needs to infiltrate the high-and-mighty Birdie Scout youth group in order to enter the talent show and get the chance to win and to have her voice heard throughout the stars.
James Whitaker
This comedy-drama, which stars Viola Davis, Allison Janney, Jim Gaffigan and Mckenna Grace, is helmed by the female directing team Bert and Bertie from a screenplay written by the Oscar-winning Beasts of the Southern Wild co-writer Lucy Alibar. It was inspired by Alibar’s 2010 play Christmas and Jubilee Behold the Meteor Shower.
The small-budget Troop Zero was captured over 28 days across multiple locations around New Orleans in settings made to look and feel like the sweltering summer experience common in rural Georgia during the mid-‘70s.
DP James Whitaker, ASC, (The Cooler, Captain America: Civil War, Thank You for Smoking, Patriot), knowing they had limited budget and time, meticulously scouted out the locations ahead of time, blocking scenes and planning the lens choices to best address the style and action the directors wanted to convey during the shoot. Working closely with a camera team consisting of veterans first AC Bryan DeLorenzo, key grip Charles Lenz and gaffer Allen Parks, they were able to light the way and set the mood for the production. Troop Zero’s main camera was an ARRI Alexa SXT.
“Using a lookup table that had been gifted to me by Sean Coleman at CO3 as a starting point, I worked closely with the digital imaging technician, Adrian Jebef, to shape this into our show LUT,” explains Whitaker. “Adrian then applied the LUT across a Sony 24-inch calibrated monitor and then routed this signal to the director’s monitors, including to the video village and the video assist.
“The signal was sent to the entire set so that the established look was presented to everyone — from hair and makeup to costume and wardrobe — to make sure there were no questions on what the picture would look like,” he continues. “With limited time and multiple locations, Adrian would adjust the looks from scene to scene with CDLs or Printer Light adjustments, and these looks were given to dailies colorist Alex Garcia from Light Iron, working near set on location on Resolve. Alex would balance these looks across the multiple cameras and keep things consistent. These looks were then delivered to editorial and posted to PIX for review.”
Whitaker enjoyed working with Bert and Bertie — sometimes Bert would be directing the talent while Bertie would be able to discuss the camera moves for the next setup, and the next day they might switch roles. “The Berts were really into the idea of formal framing, but they also wanted to mix it up,” he explains.
“We looked at a bunch of different films as references but didn’t really find what we liked, so we created a visual language of our own. I used the Vantage MiniHawk lenses. They have an anamorphic look and come with all the good things I wanted — they are fast, and they are light. They actually have two apertures that allow you to have anamorphic-like distortion in the bokeh, but they are actually spherical lenses. This allowed me to use a short focal length lens for a wide shot and have the actors run into closeup. The close focus is basically the front element of the lens, which is amazing.”
There’s a particularly great food fight scene between the members of the titular Troop Zero and the rival group of Birdie Scouts, wherein the use of slow motion perfectly captures how a group of precocious misfits would envision the experience. It’s like an epic battle in the World War of Girl Scouts, with flour raining down around everyone as someone runs by wielding a soaked eggbeater, spraying everyone in range with rapid-fire batter bullets, while another scout takes a bowl of rainbow sprinkles to the face. The slow-motion intensity was captured at high frame rate with the ARRI Alexa SXT camera system using the Codex SXR capture media. Using a combination of dolly and hand-held shots that move the viewer through the action, the motion feels smooth and the images are in focus throughout.
“When I first sat down with the Berts and Corrine Bogdanowicz at Light Iron to grade Troop Zero, we had so much range in the image. This is why ARRI cameras are my first choice,” he says. “You have this large 3.4K filmic image in raw that we could push wherever we wanted. We started warming it up, making it less saturated and windowing various parts of the skies and faces. After a bit of this, we sat back and said, ‘This doesn’t feel like it is servicing the story we wanted to tell.’ Sometimes you need to simply go back to basics.
“We started from the beginning using the same LUT that we had on set, and then Corinne did a basic Printer Light grade (in Resolve) to start, and it looked pretty much like what we had viewed on the monitors during the shoot. We skewed a bit from the original CDL values, but the overall feel of the look was very close in the end.”
“Working with a Codex raw workflow is an easy sell for me. The earlier concerns from a producer about the cost of the capture drives and the time it takes a DIT to back up the data have seemingly gone away. Codex is so fast and robust that I never get a pushback in shooting raw on a production. The last two TV shows I shot — Season 2 of Patriot and Perpetual Grace, LTD — were both captured on Codex in ARRIRAW. I just bought an ARRI Alexa Mini LF with the new compact drives, and I am looking forward to using this when we get back to work.”
