Toronto director of photography Derick Underschultz had to recreate a natural disaster that grips New Orleans in the tv movie On Hostile Ground, which debuted on the Turner Broadcasting System Superstation June 11, and will be repeated June 17 and 24. The film, a coproduction of tbs and Citadel Entertainment, a Los Angeles division of Alliance Atlantis, stars John Corbett (Northern Exposure) and Jessica Steen (Armageddon).

Corbett plays Matt Andrews, a geologist who is approached by his girlfriend, city official Allison Beauchamp (Steen), to investigate a tunnel accident that had killed a city worker. Andrews comes to believe the city’s French Quarter, gearing up for Mardi Gras, is about to collapse under a sinkhole. He figures this rare geological occurrence has been caused by an underground fire that has eaten away at the peat beneath the surface on which the area is supported.

Underschultz is no stranger to effects-heavy pieces. The Calgary native won a 1999 Gemini Award for the ‘Restitution’ episode of the Total Recall 2070 series, and he recently completed Jason x, the latest installment in the Friday the 13th franchise, which this time shifts its venue to outer space. He also collaborated with ohg director, Canadian Mario Azzopardi, on last year’s tbs fantasy thriller The TimeShifters. ohg not only called on their effects experience, but also presented the formidable task of shooting a story set in New Orleans in and around Toronto.

The five-week shoot on ohg was slightly delayed and did not begin until late November 1999, making the substitution of Toronto for the city of bourbon and jazz in the spring especially difficult.

‘Nights were dipping virtually to the freezing mark, and the extras running around the streets couldn’t be entirely dressed up,’ Underschultz explains. ‘They had to be clothed as though they were in humid 20-degree weather at Mardi Gras.’

Some aspects of the discrepancy in climates could not be overcome – the actors’ breath is often visible – but the cinematographer credits producer Frank Siracusa and Alliance Atlantis Television executive Ian McDougall with steering the shoot away from some very noticeable winter weather.

‘On our second-to-last night of shooting they made a very gutsy and brilliant producer call,’ recalls Underschultz. ‘They kept us shooting in overtime to finish up all our night stuff, and then brought us back in early to do a bit of day stuff we had, and that was it. On [that second] day there was supposed to be a big rain storm. So, at an additional expense to the production, we got all that stuff done, and [later that] day was almost like the beginning of winter. It would have caused problems, because we would have been trying to shoot in rain and sleet.’

Underschultz was completing another project when Azzopardi, the producers and production designer Gavin Mitchell all went down to Louisiana for location scouting. When they returned to Toronto, they selected locations to match what they had seen, and so, for example, the front of Osgoode Hall was transformed into New Orleans’ famed Jackson Square. In February, with principal photography over, Underschultz brought a crew to New Orleans for four days’ shooting, which yielded Mardi Gras footage as well as wider establishing shots with actors’ photo doubles.

One way for Underschultz to downplay the production’s Toronto origins was to shoot with longer lenses (75mm or above). Their narrow depth of field throws the background out-of-focus, drawing viewers’ attention to the figures in the foreground. The cinematographer adds that staying with a longer lens also helped him somewhat fake the weather.

‘In a wide shot, it gives the feeling of more heat, because of the compressed nature of the lens,’ he points out. ‘Viewers can take that as maybe heat shimmer, instead of just the shallow focus the lens is giving.’

Underschultz worked with the new Zeiss Ultra Prime lenses, even though he did not have a complete set because they had yet to come out on the market. He relates his satisfaction with their performance, noting, ‘I think they are going to be the lenses for all other manufacturers to try to match in the future.’

Equipment supplier PS Production Services provided the crew with an Arri 535B for its A-camera. The 535 performs well with the Ultra Primes, as the lenses were developed in a collaboration between Zeiss and Arri, and the camera also let Underschultz achieve some of the off-speed work that was required. Since two-camera shoots are common in the hurried world of tv production – as well as being Azzopardi’s preferred working method – the crew used an Arri bl4 as b-camera.

Underschultz’s look

Every cinematographer has a particular look he or she likes, and Underschultz achieves his by usually shooting Kodak 5274 Vision 200T negative stock.

‘That’s normally what I shoot, even for exterior nights,’ he says. ‘I think it’s the most natural-looking film stock. It doesn’t see into areas you don’t want to see into, whereas high-speed stocks look into shadow areas your eye wouldn’t notice. The 200 shoots the way my eye sees.’

In ohg, Underschultz used the Vision 200 stock for some interior studio shots that would be composited with daylight exterior material originated on 5246 Vision 250D. The Vision 200 assured he would get a fine grain to match the 250D. And despite his reservations about using the 5279 Vision 500T stock, it enabled him to shoot with an Angenieux 25-250mm zoom lens in some night exteriors.

The dop feels fortunate in that the footage shot in New Orleans was done under the same cloudy skies as most of the Toronto material with which it was intercut, although there were some matching problems.

‘There were a couple of beautiful fall days here where it was just so bright and crisp and blue and there wasn’t anything I could do about it,’ he recalls.

But with tv movies, post-production is handled in the digital domain, which allowed Underschultz extensive color correction in the film-to-video transfer, which was performed at Toronto post house Medallion-PFA.

Uxbridge stands in

The production’s most complicated set was an entire New Orleans street they built north of the city in an Uxbridge gravel pit, allowing them to collapse buildings as shooting progressed. Construction on the set, which was based on diagrams and sketches by production designer Gavin Mitchell, took place while Underschultz and the crew filmed in Toronto.

A very un-New Orleans background of mountains and trees was visible just off the Uxbridge set, which dictated some of the cinematographer’s camera angles.

‘During the day we kept stuff contained to the street, and at night, on our wider shots, we played it such that you couldn’t really see beyond the buildings within our street – [the background] was just black sky,’ he says.

(For those shots where the background was more prominent, Toronto visual effects house gvfx, using Discreet Inferno and Flame, composited shots from the Uxbridge set with matching still plates they had photographed in New Orleans. gvfx also provided disaster effects using miniatures in front of blue or green screens, and they built cg tunnels. Alliance Atlantis-owned Calibre Digital Pictures was responsible for crowd duplication, as well as creating computer cracks in the earth, a 3D helicopter, a car sinking in the ground and computer and video displays.)

The Uxbridge set began in immaculate shape, and then the crew worked its way down one side of the street, filming some destruction of the buildings one at a time as the sinkhole started to take effect. Eventually one side of the street represented the town before the disaster, and the other showed the aftermath. To allow out-of-sequence shooting pre- and post-sinkhole on the night-heavy shoot, the crew had three Condor lifts with 24 1K Dino lights on either side pointing at both sides of the street, and left or right on either side.

‘It was just a question of turning on one or turning on the other, depending on which direction we were shooting,’ Underschultz explains.

Gaffer Craig Wright devised a system of distributing the massive amount of cables needed both in the sinkhole pit the crew had created as well as above ground, accommodating the various camera angles Azzopardi wanted.

‘What we did was lower them behind the [building] facades or bring them back up,’ Underschultz says, ‘and literally within 20 to 30 minutes we could do a complete turnaround on that street and be lit the other direction for an entire city block and ready to shoot.’

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