“Did you solve this one?” the neighbor asks.

After thoughtful pause, Black replies, “No, no, I didn’t.”

Millennium is produced in Vancouver, Canada, by 20th Century Fox and Ten Thirteen Productions, the same people who create The X-Files. The production company is headed by Chris Carter (Executive Producer/Writer), John Kousakis (Supervising Producer) and David Nutter (Producer/Director).

The central character is Black, a former Seattle detective and recent FBI profiler. Black has a talent for seeing and feeling what’s in the minds of criminals at the scenes of crimes. He gained fame by capturing a serial murderer. Black now lives in Seattle with his wife Catherine (Megan Gallagher) and seven-year-old daughter Jordan (Brittany Tiplady). He is a consultant to The Millennium Group, former law enforcement officers who believe that an evil force is driving people to commit violent crimes as the millennium approaches.

Director of Photography, Rob McLachlan CSC, studied fine art at the University of British Columbia, and enrolled in film courses at Simon Fraser University. He has produced, shot, directed and edited TV commercials, documentaries and corporate films, as well as environmental documentaries about animal rights issues. McLachlan shot his first narrative film in 1985. His subsequent credits include “a pile of TV movies,” Canadian episodic programs and such US series as The Commish and Strange Luck.

“Chris Carter and David Nutter have specific ideas about the Millennium look,” McLachlan says. “They want a film noir look. The farther Frank Black roams from his safe haven at home, the more desaturated the look gets. About three episodes into the series, I realized that what works best is lighting this show like it’s a black-and-white film. If you just suck all the color out of normally-lit film in telecine, it just goes flat and muddy.”

McLachlan favors working with minimal lighting equipment.

“I like shooting Millennium because we’re painting with light, but hopefully the brush strokes aren’t evident,” he says.

The film is processed at Gastown Labs, in Vancouver. McLachlan credits Phil Azenzer, “an absolutely fabulous tape-to-tape guy” at Encore Film & Video in Los Angeles, with maintaining the look in postproduction.

“Phil know I want my blacks and shadows to fall off very quickly into darkness,” he says. “He knows the scenes where we want to pull some color out, and where we want to bring the chroma up. i want to keep all my sources, highlights and headlights as close to 100 IRE as we possibly can, and we have the bottom end drop off like a rock.

continued . . .