Behind the scenes: Rooster

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When Cinematographer Blake McClure signed on to shoot HBO’s new comedy Rooster, he wasn’t looking to reinvent the sitcom; he was looking for a way to stretch the visual language of comedy to integrate the intimacy of large format.

As an arena where dialogue often dominates, camera grammar in comedy is usually expected to stay politely out of the way. What emerged was a bold, large‑format aesthetic built around the Blackmagic URSA Cine 17K 65, a camera McClure initially doubted but ultimately used to redefine the show’s emotional texture.

“Comedy is driven by dialogue. It’s about timing, tone, the speed of the joke. There’s not a lot of air between lines so there’s less room for expressive camera language. You don’t get the lingering, the following of characters, the visual storytelling you get in drama,” he explains.

McClure has balanced a career shooting comedy (Miracle Workers, starring Daniel Radcliffe, Apple TV’s Loot and numerous segments for ​Saturday Night Live!) with drama (Ryan Murphy horror Grotesquerie, The Dropout starring Amanda Seyfried and psychological thriller Ratched).

“Rooster finally gave me the chance to merge those two worlds,” he says.

Rooster stars Steve Carrell as an author of pulp fiction teaching who lectures at an Ivy league university where his daughter is a professor. It’s the latest show from creators and showrunners Bill Lawrence and Matt Tarses whose back catalogue includes Scrubs, Spin City and Ted Lasso.

“While still a comedy at heart, Rooster is more character‑driven themes blending humour with more dramatic and personal themes,” McClure says.

The show’s visual identity began with Dream Scenario, a 2023 satire starring Nicolas Cage and shot in 16mm by DP Benjamin Loeb. McClure and director Jonathan Krisel initially explored Super 16 to emulate its contrast and texture but the idea quickly ran into practical and aesthetic limitations.

“Our sets were tight. We couldn’t throw backdrops out of focus. Super 16 has a deeper stop, so it wasn’t helping,” McClure recalls. “I started thinking: what’s the exact opposite? Medium‑format 65mm.”

Large‑format portraiture—epitomised by Hoyte van Hoytema’s work on Oppenheimer —had long fascinated McClure. “The emotional closeness, the lack of distortion, the way longer lenses compress space without pushing the camera back,” he says. “It felt right for Rooster’s character‑centric storytelling.”

There was just one problem: 65mm is rarely feasible in television. Multi‑camera setups, tight schedules, and data demands make it a luxury. ARRI’s Alexa 65 had been used to shoot The Revenant, Barbie and Dune: Part Two but was not an option for a TV budget.

But in Spring 2025 with Rooster in pre-production, Blackmagic announced the release of the URSA Cine 65, a camera McClure admits he initially dismissed.

“They’ve been very consumer‑oriented. I wasn’t sure it would hold up to a demanding TV schedule,” he says. “But the idea of 65mm portrait storytelling kept pulling me back.”

Camera placement in large format

The URSA Cine 65 didn’t just change the look it changed how McClure approached position and framing.

“I did initial tests to see if I even wanted to use the camera. Then I brought the director in for more tests. Finally, we did hair, makeup and wardrobe tests representing the show’s tonal range. That’s where we figured out focal lengths for over‑the‑shoulders. With the wide field of view, foreground shoulders sometimes looked too close or made actors feel far apart, so we often eliminated the foreground shoulder entirely and shot just inside the eyeline.”

They always ran two cameras, and about 80% of the time had a third. He shot with a full set of Camtec Falcons, mostly using a 55mm T1.3.

“Because the sensor is so big, I didn’t want to just use longer lenses and push the cameras far back—that defeats the purpose,” he says. “But being physically close created challenges with shadows and angles.

“We were also physically closer to the actors than they were used to. They’d look at the camera and say, ‘Why are you shooting an extreme close‑up?’ But it was actually a medium.”

For example, in scenes set in the College president’s office, he would sometimes put two cameras on the wall or cross‑shoot. “If an actor stood up, our close cameras couldn’t tilt without shooting up their nostrils, so we’d have a third camera higher up to maintain continuity. Sometimes that third camera became a profile shot. We had to rethink placement constantly.”

The 8K workflow

The URSA Cine 65 can shoot 17K, but McClure settled on 8K, balancing quality with practicality. Convincing HBO required transparency, but he had an ally: British DP John Brawley had already used Blackmagic’s 12K camera on Apple TV comedy Shrinking which was also made by Bill Lawrence’s production company Doozer Productions.

“It helped that DigitalFilm Tree was the same postproduction facility [as Shrinking] so they were familiar with Blackmagic RAW. Working with the URSA Cine 17K 65 wasn’t a huge leap for them. But studios don’t want to hear ‘8K’ because of data costs,” McClure says.

Even the idea of capturing to the camera’s 8 Terabyte media mags was off-putting because the hours it could potentially take to offload the footage would not be conducive to fast turnaround TV schedules.

Instead, Blackmagic advised the team to use CFexpress cards which hold about 1TB. “We used about 10 per camera and rotated them as the studio cleared media for deletion.”

Also making an 8K workflow viable was McClure’s choice of compression options offered by the camera.  

“We tested all the compression settings and landed on Q3 which uses a variable bit rate to encode only the moving parts of the frame,” he explains. “More specifically, Q3 allocates more data to areas of high detail and less to static parts of the frame, reducing the overall data rate. You don’t notice it visually, but it meant that our 8K files were actually smaller than an Alexa 35 show I’d just done. This made it an easier sell to the studio, since we weren’t asking them to approve a massive data storage footprint for the DIT or post production. Plus, it held up beautifully in grading.”

Delivery in 4K gave ample room for reframing in post. “We shot 8K using the full width of the sensor within our 2:1 aspect ratio. You can zoom into this camera 350% and it still holds up,” he says. “I’m fine with punch‑ins if they serve the story.

Lighting for naturalism

The script’s first line mentioned ‘New England fall colours’, so that became the guiding idea for the look of the show, despite shooting exteriors at The University of the Pacific’s Stockton campus near San Francisco and on stages in Los Angeles.

“We pushed as much sunlight‑feeling light as possible—20Ks, Molebeams, anything to create that fall atmosphere,” McClure says. “We embraced blown [overexposed] windows. That allowed us to use exterior light as bounce and fill, then augment with smaller sources inside.”

With colourist Josh Bohoskey, he referenced Dream Scenario for its blown‑highlight, high‑contrast look. “Josh built LUTs that brought the lifted shadows back down while keeping a slight lift. We also kept the palette warm, dialling out blue computer‑screen hues, for example. Production design was fantastic and set the foundation.”

He employed a LED colour contrast filter from Camtec. The Color-Con consists of a diffusion filter surrounded by LEDs in a filter holder that occupies two spaces in the mattebox. In addition to controlling colour and contrast, the LEDs can create a controllable, directional hot spot. McClure likens it to modern version of the Lightflex that Freddie Francis, BSC used on The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981) or the ARRI Varicon.

“With the sensor being so large, every lens naturally has a bit of shading toward the edges of frame. The Color-Con filter exaggerates that. I could focus more LED light on the centre of the filter. So it’s a little bit brighter in the centre and that enhances the shading. Depending on our stop, some shots almost look like there’s a hole punch while others are very gentle.

He explains, “It lifts the highlights and shadows, almost like shooting through smoke without needing smoke. I’m obsessed with baking-in as much of the look as possible; colour, tone, LUTs, everything.”

Lessons learned

Even now, finishing colour on the tenth and final Season 1 episode, McClure is still learning from the format.

“The biggest lesson is: don’t drift back into old habits. Sometimes I drifted back into lensing in instead of physically moving closer but then you lose the charm of the format. Staying committed to that closeness takes more time and sometimes means sacrificing coverage, but everyone agreed the results were worth it.”

It’s a testament to how a comedy series became a proving ground for large‑format storytelling.

“I wanted the show to feel like a portrait, intimate and relationship driven. I’ve always loved medium format photography, and this was the closest I’ve been to that in motion. The intimacy we got was worth every bit of problem‑solving.

“It’s not the right camera for every project—just like anamorphic or 65mm isn’t always right—but it now sits alongside Alexa and Venice as a legitimate tool. It should be considered seriously.”

Country music to comedy

Born in Nashville, Tennessee, McClure got his first spark of inspiration from an unlikely source, the Ernest movies (​Ernest Goes to Camp, Ernest Scared Stupid, ​etc.), because they filmed in and around his neighbourhood. Seeing crews moving about and setting up big lights revealed the world of filmmaking to McClure, who went on to attend and graduate from Watkins Film School.

His worked as a PA on the Coen Brothers’ ​O Brother, Where Art Thou? shot by Roger Deakins and credits those two months on set with Deakins with teaching him as much about cinematography as he learned in film school.

“When I first moved to Los Angeles, I had a reel full of country music videos. The first people I connected with happened to be comedy filmmakers, including Oz Rodriguez, who directed on Rooster. I started shooting shorts with that group, and as often happens in this business, one connection led to another. That was 15 years ago, and it built from there. I haven’t shot a music video since—but I’m shooting my first one since then this weekend, in Key West.”