Charlie Corwin, the CEO of New York-based Original Media, sold his idea for the TLC reality series Miami Ink as “Taxicab Confessions in a tattoo parlor.” The show quickly found viewership among the tattooed, un-tattooed and simply tattoo-curious. It then expanded into a franchise with the West Coast-based spin-off LA Ink. As Corwin predicted, tattoo parlors are rife with colorful, compelling characters with unusual anecdotes.
“People usually get tattoos to commemorate a crossroads in their lives,” Corwin explains. “Sometimes it’s sad like they want to memorialize someone who died; other times, it’s a happy event like a marriage. People get tattoos to commemorate kicking drugs. All those things become important, and the tattoo bed in a sense becomes a confessional with the tattoo artist acting basically like a pop-culture priest taking confession. There is also a good amount of physical pain that goes on in the process, and in some ways the pain is cathartic and allows the person getting the tattoo to unburden themselves.”
ABOVE: Under the watchful eye of the camera, series star Kat Von D starts work on a client.
As is Miami Ink (now in its fourth season), LA Ink is shot inside a working tattoo parlor — High Voltage Tattoo on La Brea Ave. — so director of photography Aaron Krummel has very limited ability to alter his lighting during production. His solution was to outfit the place with eight 4-Bank and three 2-Bank Kino Flo units overhanging the shop. They are mounted inside boxes so that they fit in with the environment and don’t look out of place. The soft illumination is then teased down with black Duvateen skirts. “On a lot of reality shows,” Krummel explains, “the ceiling is a big dead zone, but we don’t mind shooting upwards. That makes it convenient.”
ABOVE: Aaron Krummel discusses camera placement with fill-in operator Kevin Wong.
The shop’s main room was painted a reddish-pink at the suggestion of tattoo artist and show lead Kat Von D, who loves the bold color. “I was happy with anything at all but white!” Krummel says, explaining that photographing bright white can wreak havoc on contrast, especially in video. The walls of the shop are adorned with artwork and guitars, which Krummel helps to stand out with a series of tungsten spotlights to boost certain items just over a stop hotter than the rest of the room. The High Voltage artists — Kat, Hannah Aitchison, Corey Miller and Kim Saigh — also use individual work lights while practicing their craft, which burn out white and add an interesting look to the shots.
The tattooing scenes are covered by two or three operators (generally Krummel and operator Brian Kuennen) using Panasonic 2/3” three-CCD AJ-SDX900 camcorders with Canon zooms, recording to DVCPRO tape in the 720 24p format. This complement is also utilized to create the significant amount of B-roll that the show’s editors use as connective tissue to keep each episode moving.
ABOVE: Krummel aims Panasonic HVX900 at a just-inked client and artist Corey Miller.
After the High Voltage clients are inked, they proceed to an apartment next door and are interviewed on-camera by a segment producer. They are shot using a 1/3” CMOS sensor Sony HVR-V1U HDV camcorder in the HDV format at 24p. These pieces could look pretty bad given that they are shot inside a cramped 8’x8’ room, but to create the illusion that the interviews transpire inside the shop and to give them a feeling of depth beyond the limitations of the location, the wall behind the subject is painted and decorated like the walls of the shop. Even with the iris wide open on the V1U, the focal length (limited both by its small chip and the scant space between camera and subject) would not allow Krummel to limit his depth of field nearly enough to provide the selective focus he desired. The solution was to stretch a large sheet of Hampshire Frost on a frame and hang that between the subject and the wall, throwing the decorations behind the freshly inked person into soft focus. “The key,” Krummel says of the illusion, “is to hang the Frost as far from the background — or as close to the lens — as possible.”
There’s a fine line, he adds, between having a shot that looks like it has depth to it and having the big sheet of Frost become obvious. Stretching it in the frame properly is also a key, as the material will ripple in the slightest breeze.
ABOVE: Producers monitor picture and audio in a tiny control room located in the back of High Voltage.
When shooting the tattooing sessions, Krummel likes to mix up sizes and framing. “Some reality shows just stick with medium shots,” he says, “but we’ll go wide sometimes and then other times we’ll go in real tight. I think it makes it more interesting.” He notes that he has plenty of light in the shop to always dial in ND on the cameras to alter the stop on the lens without having to change light levels. “We’ll often be all the way open to a T1.9,” he says, “but if we’re going in on a tight shot with fine detail, I’ll stop down so I can just dial in less ND and go to a stop of about a T5.6."
“The biggest thing is the storytelling,” Krummel attests. “If someone is telling a good story, we don’t want to be doing [tricks] with the camera. The stories are the most important aspect of the show.”
The resulting DVCPRO and HDV tapes are shipped to Original Media in New York, where a team of seven editors, assistants and turning producers collaborate to build each episode. “One very good thing about this show,” says editor John Higgins, “is that it’s multi-camera. Not all reality shows are. I worked on Kathy Griffin’s show [My Life on the D-List] and a lot of that was single-camera, and it’s harder to work with material shot that way. I think that’s why a lot of reality shows seem more ‘cutty.’ They have to cheat more — use more cutaways and put things together that don’t always feel right — because they don’t have the material to work with.”
ABOVE: Fill-in operator Brian Allen gets in close as Kat sketches out one of her designs.
When LA Ink began, Higgins explains, “We wanted to make it different from a lot of other reality shows. The pacing would be different, which also changed the shooting style. We try not to do a lot of swish pans and quick zooming in and out. The stories of the tattoos exist on their own. We’re documenting individual stories and cutting them down to size. We’re not manipulating their stories.”
The editing process begins with assistants digitizing all the material at the fairly low-resolution 15:1 compression format onto an Avid Unity server connected via fibre to the seven editing rooms and their Avid Media Composer 2.7 workstations. Even that compressed, there is generally about 8 terabytes (TB) of picture and sound to work with for each episode. The Unity, Higgins says, “is definitely crucial to our being able to have seven editing rooms going at once. We can all use the same B-roll. It’s very helpful.”
The process of sifting through the material starts with the shooting producers, who provide notes with the camera reports about potentially good material. “There is a rating system for each client,” Higgins says. “‘This person has a great story.’ ‘That person is funny.’ ‘She’s dull.’ ‘He’s hard to listen to.’ And we get notes that something interesting happens — for instance, ‘a client’s children come in at this time code.’ Our transcribers write every word that’s said so producers can read through portions or search for a certain word or phrase.
“The transcripts are hundreds of pages long,” Higgins continues. “So then the turning producer will skim through them and do a paper edit. They then hand that off to the editors. I usually have my assistant set up [my Avid] so that I can work with the group-clips function [that lines up different angles with identical time code on the editors’ monitors] but different editors work differently. The first cut [of a segment] from the paper edit will then run long — maybe 12 or 15 minutes — and then we trim the fat to give about 5 to 7 minutes to a client.”
When picture is locked, the assistants use an Avid Symphony system to re-digitize those sections of tape included in the EDL. The Symphony then spits out almost a complete online. “We have an older system,” Higgins notes, “so a small number of the effects don’t translate to its graphics card and have to be re-created. But only a few.”
Viewers aren’t the only ones fascinated by the goings-on at High Voltage Tattoo. Higgins reveals that the people and the world of LA Ink have interested him in more than just a professional way. “I don’t have tattoos,” he confesses, “but like a lot of people, I’ve had the idea in the back of my mind for long time. I’m just afraid to get my first one. I think that seeing [others get inked] might make it easier for me to go through with it. I know what I’m in for. I didn’t know — do they ink you right there? How long does it take? Now, I feel more comfortable about the whole thing.”
Photos by Jon Silberg.