Onyx Collective Series Reasonable Doubt Shot with Blackmagic Cinema Camera 6K

Camera’s compact size helps capture high quality images in scenes with limited space.

In the Onyx Collective hit drama series “Reasonable Doubt,” which is available on Hulu, attorney Jax Stewart is judged for her questionable ethics and wild interpretations of the law until you are the one in trouble. Then you will see her for what she is: the most brilliant and fearless defense attorney in Los Angeles who bucks the justice system at every chance she gets. Starring Emayatzy Corinealdi as Stewart, and created by Raamla Mohamed, the series is shot by cinematographer Robert E. Arnold using Blackmagic Cinema Camera 6K.

For Arnold, the move from season one to season two presented new challenges. “The second season needed to feel more dynamic than the first,” said Arnold. “We had a new courtroom and a fair amount of interior car scenes.”

No stranger to Blackmagic Design cameras, Arnold was open to trying out the full frame Blackmagic Cinema Camera 6K digital film camera. “I’ve used Blackmagic cameras on other productions and have loved the image quality that they bring. I figured it was now time to have them crossover into my episodic world,” he said.

To match other cameras and enable production to use the same lenses and accessories, Arnold asked Panavision to assist. “They built a camera cage to support their accessories and a lens mount to support our Panaspeeds for the season. The idea was to mimic our other camera when in studio mode,” he explained.

The Blackmagic Cinema Camera 6K came in handy particularly for interior car scenes where space was an issue, but image quality could not be sacrificed. “It was nice to have a camera that had a small size without having to carry around a hard drive or umbilical cord,” said Arnold.

The cameras were also employed in a new courtroom set, and their compact size allowed Arnold to cover the set with as many as four cameras.

Arnold found the quality and flexibility of the full frame Blackmagic Cinema Camera 6K to be valuable. “There’s nothing like maintaining the same aspect ratio and not having to sacrifice resolution to compensate for a camera’s lack of sensor size. And the color science matched the other cameras perfectly. My colorist Gareth Cook at The Foundation post production studio could not tell the difference between the other cameras and the Blackmagic RAW images. It was quite the compliment,” he concluded.