Digital Video magazine — August 2014
Hey, Ladies!: Achieving the Delightful, Dreamy Look on ‘Garfunkel and Oates’

Directed by Fred Savage, IFC’s satirical and saucy new series Garfunkel and Oates premiered in August, serving up ukulele and guitar-wielding comedy-folk duo Riki Lindhome (New Girl, HellBaby) and Kate Micucci (The Big Bang Theory, Raising Hope) as they try to make it big in Hollywood.

Awkward, flawed and not above a dirty joke, the underdog pair struggle to make their mark in the comedy world while muddling through life’s messy scenarios. Prone to dating comedians and other youthful disasters, the two women sometimes wind up on the short end, but still aren’t afraid to leverage an overactive gag reflex or gamely play the “hot slut” against Sir Ben Kingsley as occasion demands.

Cinematographer Jay Harper has served as Director of Photography on Garfunkel and Oates since its launch as a web series, in 2013. Harper met Lindhome while shooting Joss Whedon’s 2012 Much Ado About Nothing — on which she played Conrade — and the group quickly become friends.

While the black-and-white Shakespeare adaptation was shot with the RED Epic, for Garfunkel and Oates Harper elected to go with the ARRI Alexa. “The Alexa is my go-to camera for just about everything,” he comments. “It’s the best-looking, most stable, most user-friendly camera that exists right now. No matter what I’m shooting, it’s my number one choice of format these days.”

Like Much Ado, Garfunkel and Oates is mainly a handheld affair. “The director, Joss Whedon, had just shot The Avengers on the Alexa and he felt that the camera was very large, so [for Much Ado] he wanted a smaller camera that could fit in tinier spaces and be a little less unwieldy,” Harper relates. “The irony with these smaller cameras is that once you’ve put one together and added accessories it ends up larger than the Alexa. Sure, the base camera is tiny, but that’s before you put everything on it to make it work.” (Read full story…)