Syriana


Tourné à 100% en caméra épaule, Syriana vise le réalisme.
Extrait d'une longue interview de Roger Elswit.
Source: Cameraguild.com

The film was shot in 80 days entirely on location, half in Baltimore and Washington D.C. and the other half in Morocco, Switzerland, Dubai and the United Arab Emirates. This was a marked contrast to Good Night, and Good Luck, which was shot almost exclusively on sets built at CBS Radford in Studio City. According to Elswit, because of the actors’ tight schedules, there was little time for location scouting and pre-production with Syriana. “We were very rushed in prep and found ourselves still running around securing locations while we were shooting,” says Elswit.
Though they knew the style of Syriana would be vastly different, Elswit and Gaghan screened seminal 1970s thrillers Three Days of the Condor and Klute for inspiration. Elswit also drew inspiration from The Insider, with its fluid integration of handheld shots and classically designed set-ups. “Michael Mann does it better than anybody,” says Elswit. “I think we’ve all been stealing from him for years.”
The creative challenge of Syriana was maintaining a sense of visual unity while subtly differentiating among the five distinct storylines. Gaghan and Elswit knew from the outset they wanted to avoid highly stylized color manipulations that had been used to great effect in films like Traffic and The Constant Gardener. “We wanted to minimize the contrast between the West (the U.S. and Geneva) and the Middle East, but not to exaggerate the difference,” says Elswit. “Stephen wanted the storylines and all of the locations to feel connected.”
Instead of creating a reductive color-palette where certain colors always represent certain locales, (for example, blue in the West and yellow in the Middle East), Gaghan wanted a documentary style that didn’t use lighting or color to distinguish between the stories or locations. “We knew the locations would look wildly different from one another anyway,” says Elswit. “If anything, Steven wanted the visual style of the film to emphasize their similarities.”
In his conception of Syriana, Gaghan knew he wanted to shoot the entire film handheld, in widescreen and use two cameras as much as possible. In the end, he achieved his goals. Elswit originally considered shooting anamorphic, but instead decided on Super 35 owing to the greater depth-of-field of the lenses. “It was more practical to shoot Super 35 because it gave us more options in staging and a greater variety of choices given the way Steven wanted to shoot the film,” says Elswit. “Anamorphic forces a certain staging and design on a movie and we wanted to do something a bit more spontaneous in Syriana.” (Elswit is however, tentatively planning on shooting handheld anamorphic for his next film, Michael Clayton, another thriller starring George Clooney.)
Elswit and Gaghan wanted to tell the story in a very subjective way through the eyes of the characters, but without the deliberate reframing and shakiness that marks some documentary-style movies. Aside from a few specially mounted shots and a bit of aerial footage, Syriana was 100% handheld, as opposed to Good Night, and Good Luck, where nearly every shot required a dolly. This presented a dilemma not only for Elswit, but also for his operator, Colin Anderson, and his camera assistants, Barry “Baz” Idoine and Gregor Tavenner. “Pulling focus was very challenging,” says Elswit, “especially when you have a film that moves to this many places, and you’re trying to shoot two cameras without adequate rehearsals and marks… Both Gregor and Baz were exceptional.”
Unlike Good Night, and Good Luck, which was all done with an 11:1 zoom, almost every scene in Syriana was shot with two Panavision Millennium XL cameras using Primo lenses ranging from the 40mm all the way up to the 150mm. Elswit likes the compressed, contemporary look of the medium-long focal length and finds that it makes it easier to shoot with two cameras. “We didn’t do a lot of wide angle set-ups and we didn’t do any wide angle close-ups,” says Elswit. “We played with it for a while but it didn’t seem right. The 25mm close-ups seemed wrong for this film. They were too theatrical.”
In keeping with the documentary style, Syriana was shot with next to no filtration, just the occasional polarizer, and Elswit used only one stock, Kodak 5218 (500 ASA), rated at 320. “I think it’s the nicest of the Vision stocks for low light,” says Elswit. “To try to go into these interiors and make them look like we didn’t light them, you need to use a fast film and not to vary the film.”
Elswit and his gaffers, Mike Ballman in the U.S. and Jim Plannette abroad, relied on whatever incandescent lights were built into the locations and “a huge mix of almost everything you could use in a movie: 18Ks, Kino Flos, HMIs,” he says. “The attempt in each of these locations was to make them feel like we hadn’t actually done any lighting.”
Elswit avoided theatrical and dramatic lighting effects, and lit the interiors sparingly to match the quality of light outside. In the Middle East, he generally used HMIs to replicate outdoor color temperature while in Geneva, he relied more on daylight-balanced Kino Flos to light the interiors. “We wanted to light the spaces as naturally as we could and let each location dictate the quality and color of the light,” says Elswit.
Sometimes he got lucky and sometimes he didn’t. In one quietly agonizing scene where Bryan (Matt Damon) and his wife watch as their youngest son plays by a fountain not long after their other son has died in a freak accident, Elswit was cursed with a sunny day. “It seemed wrong for the mood of the scene and, of course, it’s impossible to keep the look consistent during 8 hours of shooting,” says Elswit.
In some of the scenes in the Geneva hotel, Elswit swears that if it had been an overcast day, we would have been able to see out the windows. “I didn’t have the equipment or the time to control the windows in Geneva,” he says. “Sometimes we got lucky with the weather and, and other times the windows just blew out.”
Because of the extraordinary number of locations, maintaining the rigorous shooting schedule required an enormous amount of pre-rigging. “It wasn’t the kind of movie where you stay in one place for a week. The longest we spent in one location was three days—mostly we were in and out in one day,” says Elswit, who praises his grip and electric crew, led by key grips Mike Kenner in the U.S. and Tommaso Mele abroad, for keeping up with the hectic pace.
The scene where George Clooney is interviewed in a situation room in the bowels of the White House was a typical one-day shoot. A four-page scene with 12 people sitting around a table and shots looking in four directions, Elswit knew he had to have lighting units ready to go.
“Steven was wonderful about committing ahead of time to basic staging for scenes where we had no time to light after a rehearsal,” says Elswit. “In that kind of a situation, it’s important to be able to turn the lights on when you walk in. After you look at a rehearsal, if you hate it, or the staging changes, you have a better chance of having the time to fix it.” Hanging from the grid were approximately 15 Leikos, 15 Source 4s and 15 Rifas. He aimed the Source 4s and Leikos straight down at the table and used the Rifas as backlights.
Shooting with two cameras sometimes created lighting problems as one angle might have contrast while the other was flat. Especially outdoors, Elswit tried to play the real spaces and find shots that felt haphazard, random and very subjective. “Even though we’re looking at things in a dispassionate way, we want it to feel like you’re seeing it from the character’s point of view,” says Elswit.
For example, throughout Syriana up-and-coming lawyer Bennett Holiday (Jeffrey Wright) is almost never foregrounded since he’s a pawn, batted around by more powerful individuals. The first time he appears on screen, he is standing in the background, out of focus, as the founder of his law firm prunes a rose bush in the foreground. “We wanted to convey what it was like to be a young lawyer in the presence of one of the most powerful lawyers in Washington,” says Elswit. Only toward the film’s conclusion is he foregrounded, when he has learned to play the game and sells out his boss.
“We did the same thing with Matt Damon’s character a little bit,” says Elswit. “The torture scene too. We really wanted to feel what Clooney’s experience was. We would ask ourselves that stuff all the time. It kept us from making arbitrary decisions. Steve wanted to find a subjective POV with each storyline. Our only rule was to try to discover a clear point of view through the staging and shooting that would reflect this. The lighting and décor would feel naturalistic but our camera placement and blocking would hopefully create the personal perspective that he wanted for each story.”
Elswit knew from the beginning the film would have a DI so digital dailies were a natural choice but the overseas production meant few labs could keep up with dailies at the rate Syriana was shooting. The film was processed and scanned at Technicolor New York while production was in the U.S. and at Technicolor London when abroad. “There just aren’t enough people who know how to do it,” says Elswit. “When shooting with two cameras, it’s easy to print 10,000 or 20,000 feet per day. One person supervising the telecine transfer simply can’t complete it all in one shift. Because of how quickly we were moving this became a real problem.
“The irony of digital dailies is that it takes longer to transfer your dailies because unlike film dailies, they’re scanned in real time,” continues Elswit. “In the end, you may save time and money in post-production, but during the actual shooting of the film we found ourselves as much as two weeks behind with dailies. It’s a horrible trade off and a frightening proposition for any director and cinematographer.” Elswit was able to print a limited amount of footage every week, and it was projected wherever a space could be found: a screening room, a university, even a local cineplex in Dubai.
Elswit is currently color timing the movie with colorist Stephen Nakamura at Technicolor Digital Intermediate in Burbank. There’s been little manipulation except to pull out some of the chroma where the colors are very saturated owing to weather or time of day. “In a very simple way, we’re trying to get all these places to appear the way we shot them,” says Elswit.
Still, a little digital manipulation doesn’t hurt. The opening scene of the movie, identified by a title card as Tehran, was actually shot early in the morning from the window of Elswit’s hotel room in Casablanca, Morocco and the mountains of Iran were added during post-production.
It all plays into Gaghan’s vision of creating an onscreen world where cultures transcend national boundaries. Even the film’s title reflects this idea. Though it’s never explained in the movie (that scene was left on the cutting room floor), Syriana is an ancient name, fused together from three very real countries, Syria, Iraq and Iran, and it refers to the Middle East’s centuries-old familial and tribal alliances, which defy and often complicate the region’s artificial, colonial boundaries. “I think Stephen would have been happy,” says Elswit, “if the Middle East and the West had looked and felt exactly the same.”

 

Shooting Munich


Le chef op Janus Kaminski s'est à nouveau dépassé pour restituer les atmosphères contrastées du dernier Spielberg, "Munich". Zooms, couleur rouge sang, "bleach bypass".
Extraits des propos de Kaminski.
Source: cinemareview.com



The story of Munich unfolds in three separate realms: the extremely public events of the Munich Olympics which took place under the glare of the international media, the extremely secretive and shadow-laden world of the Mossad and its unacknowledged hit squads operating around the world under an opaque cloak, and the internal worlds of the five diverse assassins themselves as they take on the psychological twists and turns of their unprecedented assignment.
To capture all of this visually, Steven Spielberg turned to one of his longtime trusted collaborators, the two-time Academy Award®-winning cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, who has worked with Spielberg on nine previous films. A Polish teenager in 1972, Kaminski watched the events of Munich from a somewhat different perspective—through the veil of the Iron Curtain. “In Poland it was seen of course as a tragic event, as it was all over the world,” he says, “but the news that we got through official sources indicated a certain bias.”
Yet the cinematographer believes that one of the most fascinating elements of turning the events surrounding Munich into a motion picture is that nearly everybody has both a uniquely personal memory of it. “We all have our own experience with this event,” he says. “Even if you weren’t born yet, you’ve seen bits of it on television or in history books. Or you’ve been introduced to it through recent events. But whichever way you come at it, it is very relevant.”
Working in the usual manner of their unique collaboration, Kaminski’s initial action was to shoot a series of photographic tests to find a look that he and Spielberg felt suited the intense mood and suspenseful structure of the film—one that they hoped would echo some of the classic paranoid thrillers of the ’70s but with a contemporary edge.
“Steven and I are at a point in our relationship right now that we have to discuss things very little,” Kaminski notes. “He knows and trusts my judgment and I know his aesthetic sense very well. We converse a little, mostly about what we really shouldn’t do, but pretty much the visual style is left for me to determine. So I went to Paris in 2004 and started experimenting with various color schemes, various filters, various lenses, various lighting and various chemical processes.”
In further developing the film’s visual style, Kaminski looked at the story through the prism of a world map. “There are 8 different countries in the film, and I decided to give each a different look, very subtly, and each with a somewhat different color palette. This way each country has its own individuality, even though most of them were shot in Malta and Hungary,” he says. “So everything that happens in the Middle East is more colorful, warmer, sunnier. But once we leave that part of the world for Paris, Frankfurt, London and Rome the colors become cooler and more de-saturated. And even each of those European cities have their own character and colors.”
For example, Kaminski points out that for the scenes in Cyprus he emphasizes more vibrant, sun-baked yellow tones, while in Athens the color palette veers towards Aegean blues, and then in Paris, the palette becomes much softer with an ambience of rainy skies. The lighting also shifts in the film, starting with a friendlier tone as the hit squad first gets to know one another at an intimate dinner and moving to a harsher photo-chemical process full of darker shadows that reflect the characters’ inner turmoil as their mission becomes more frightening and filled with doubts.
Each one of the assassinations is also shot in a unique manner, which is how Spielberg envisioned the film unfolding. “I wanted every assassination to be different, because as the team experiences each one, their views about what they’re doing change, the group dynamics shift, they change their feelings about themselves and each other, and there’s more and more stress, anxiety and pressure,” Spielberg explains. “So each of the missions has its own personal character.”
The choice of lenses was influenced by Spielberg’s desire to hearken back to a grittier, ’70s style of filmmaking. “Steven insisted, rightfully, that we use zoom lenses,” Kaminski notes. “He felt that ’70s cinema was so full of zooms that if you start zooming in and out you’re allowing the viewers to feel like they’re watching a film made in that time. It’s a very effective way of creating the sense of period.” Kaminski cites such realistic thrillers as The French Connection, Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor as inspirations for his work on Munich.
One of the biggest challenges for the cast and crew, including Kaminski, was re-creating the Olympic hostage situation with accuracy and riveting suspense. Scenes from the Munich Olympics open the film but are then revealed in much greater detail through flashback sequences that merge dramatic re-creations of the events with vintage documentary footage.
Spielberg felt that the flashback sequences would keep the emotional motivation behind all the events palpable throughout the film. “I felt there needed to be a constant reminder of what this story is hinging on, lest we forget what started this round of blood-for-blood,” he notes.
But shooting the re-creations was very emotional and wrenching. “You can imagine how difficult it was,” he says. “I hired Arab actors to play the Palestinians and Israelis to play Israelis . . . and they took it very much to heart. It was a very emotional catharsis and I wasn’t thinking so much of technique as I was about just holding this cast and crew together and keeping everybody on an even keel. It was a rugged couple of weeks.”
For the opening sequence, Kaminski focused on a searing, unadorned realism—“it’s a little bit flat, almost void of color,” he explains—but for the flashbacks he used a process known as “skip bleach” (most recently seen in the contemporary war film Jarhead) which gives a very harsh, grainy, color-saturated appearance to the scenes. “The flashbacks are darker, grainier, more foreboding. I wanted them to feel quite different from the present time,” the director of photography explains.
Comments Spielberg, “The bleach bypass is particularly effective in this film because it is inter-cut with the rosy grace notes of more standard lighting and set-ups. It tells you that you’re going somewhere else, inside Avner’s head and back into the past.”
When it came to the violence in the film, Kaminski understood that Spielberg did not want to hide the brutal nature of any of the events involved. “I think in this film, violence is purposely presented to the audience without any abstractions,” he says. “If you think of Saving Private Ryan, that movie was also extremely graphic but the audience realized it was there to convey the tragedy, the horror of those historical events.”
He continues: “I think this is a movie that tries to deal with a very serious subject in a mature and objective way. But it’s also a suspenseful movie, so that also created a very important need to stage the scenes in an unusual way. The way Steven created certain scenes was really amazing because he can convey suspense in just three shots. He uses zooms, he uses reflections, he uses extensive blocking, he uses cars wiping the frame revealing another portion of the scene. He’s a very skillful director when it comes to the camera.”

 

Les plus beaux films de 2004 


Un grand chef op US a donné ses préférés: les plus beaux films du point de vue de l'image. A vous de voir. 

"The Aviator" and "Sky Captain of the World of Tomorrow" for their obvious
love of 1930's Hollywood cinema.
"Hidalgo" for its classic anamorphic landscape photography as well as some
lovely low-key interior lighting, particularly during the Buffalo Bill Wild
West Show section.
"Man on Fire" for its use of hand-cranked cameras and other techniques to
abstract the image.
"A Very Long Engagement" for sheer beauty.
"Hero" (a sixth film, if allowed) for its dazzling color stylization.

Runners-up: "Alexander", "Collateral", "The Passion of the Christ" (or as
someone on the Kubrick newsgroup has called it, "Jesus Chainsaw Massacre"),
"Phanton of the Opera", "The Terminal", "The Village", "Exorcist: The
Beginning", "Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events", "Harry Potter
and the Prisoner of Azkaban", "Van Helsing", "House of Flying Daggers".

I was working a lot this year and missed some films like "Motorcycle
Diaries" (but I liked what little I saw of that) or "Birth".

Movies I liked as overall movies this year: "Farenheit 9/11", "Kitchen
Stories", "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind", "Battle of Algiers"
(revival), "The Terminal", "Spider-Man 2", "Collateral", "Hero", "House of
Flying Daggers", "Shawn of the Dead", "Intimate Strangers", "The
Incredibles", "Kinsey", "Finding Neverland", "Sideways", "A Very Long
Engagement", "The Aviator".

David Mullen, ASC
Los Angeles 

 

Timing Alexander  


Interview intéressante pour comprendre les possibilités du "digital intermediate" (film>scan>traitement numérique>shoot sur film)

During postproduction on Alexander, Rodrigo Prieto, ASC, AMC collaborated on the film’s digital intermediate with colorist Yvan Lucas at Éclair Laboratories near Paris. Prieto is well-acquainted with the DI process, having digitally graded Frida, 25th Hour, 8 Mile and some shots in 21 Grams. Nevertheless, he faced new challenges on Alexander, notably with infrared and bleach-bypass footage. 

by Benjamin Bergery

American Cinematographer: Yvan, you’ve worked with many top cinematographers. What do you think of Mr. Prieto?

Lucas: Rodrigo knows exactly what he wants. Usually I interpret what the cinematographer says and do my own little cuisine. But not with Rodrigo — he’ll call me on it and say, “Didn’t we say magenta, not red?” [Laughter.]

Just how big is Alexander?

Lucas: Huge. Last time we counted there were 3,300 shots. A normal film may involve from 500 to 2,000 shots. By the way, I was assisted in the grading by Isabelle Julien.

Rodrigo, why did you choose to go DI?

Prieto: We had a lot of day exteriors with many cameras and no control of when you shoot. It could be sunny, cloudy, you name it. Even in interiors, there were a lot of continuous Steadicam takes with 360-degree coverage, making it difficult to control contrast for every angle. So I let some things go on the set, knowing that I would be able to correct them later.

What do you like about DI?

Prieto: Beyond the windows and all these extra controls, I like the interactivity. For me, that’s the best thing about DI. Here in this suite, I can see the difference immediately between one and two points of yellow.

You don’t have to wait for tomorrow?

Prieto: Exactly, because by tomorrow my perception will have changed; I will have gone out to the street and I won’t notice the difference. I like to use DI for those very subtle changes. You might think digital grading is great for big manipulations of the image, but I think it’s best for the subtleties.

As a cinematographer, do you always want to use a DI?

Prieto: Not necessarily. I just finished a film with Ang Lee called Brokeback Mountain, and we won’t be using a DI because we don’t feel  it’s necessary. It was a much more controlled shoot. The shooting style was stoic and simple, like the cowboy characters.

What kinds of corrections are you doing to Alexander?

Prieto: Most of the time we’ve been dealing with the primary color correction. I prefer that, because sometimes when you push things too much, it looks electronic.

Prieto and Lucas pause in their grading to watch a reel of “digital dailies,” a short 35mm positive with selected images. Digital dailies are used throughout the grading process to check how the DI will look on film. 

There seems to be a slight difference between the same scene on the digital projector and on the digital dailies.

Prieto: The one thing you can’t see completely accurately on the digital projector is contrast. It lacks the blacks of the print. It’s sometimes difficult to tell whether the grading is correct until you see the digital dailies.

Lucas: We want deep blacks in projection, as with ENR. However, the contrast of the projected film is not created by the negative, but by the positive.

So you have to make a mental note that the image you see in DI will have more contrast on the print?

Prieto: That’s the most difficult thing about the process. The danger is pushing it too much. On 8 Mile I brightened stuff to see detail that was hard to see in the digital 1K projection during grading, but when I saw the print I found I didn’t need to because it was already there.

Lucas: That’s where you may get a surprise when you see digital dailies. The color match between film and the digital projection is very accurate, but it’s less so with the blacks. The contrast also has to do with the resolution of the digital projector. A 2K image will appear to be more brilliant than 1K because there’s more detail.

We look at an image with a subtle darkening around the edges, created by a soft-bordered Power Window at the center of the frame. The effect is similar to vignetting, a technical problem with some lenses that transmit more light in the center than on the edges.

Vignetting is usually considered a problem, but here you are actually adding vignetting to the image?

Prieto: Yes. We have sometimes put in vignetting with masks to enhance the sensation of darkness, while keeping the center of the frame the same density.

Prieto and Lucas grade Alexander’s Macedonian wedding. Lucas adds a mask to offset the soft shadow of the camera on the veiled bride’s face as the camera tracks out. Other shots have color changes.

What are you doing to the color in this sequence?

Prieto: The weather was very cloudy during the shoot, and we didn’t have enough exposure to use the chocolate filter I was using for that segment of the film, so we had to put it in afterwards.

Why use a filter at all, knowing that you could add a virtual filter in the grading?

Prieto: I wanted the filters to be incorporated into the image while Oliver was editing. I knew that if I didn’t use the filters, he might grow to like the image without a filter as he looked at the footage over and over. The same is true of bleach bypass. If you don’t do it on the negative, you can change your mind later.

Is it difficult to deal with bleach bypass in DI?

Prieto: Scanning the 35mm is very difficult. On 25th Hour we had to rescan several shots. The contrast is so great that sometimes the highlights were okay but we couldn’t darken it enough — we would darken but get no detail. So we had to rescan it and tilt the scale toward the darks.

Lucas: We’re using a Northlight to scan this film.

How are you grading the bleach bypass?

Prieto: Most of the time we’ve been adding saturation, like in the Indian palace, where the concept of the scene is the contrast of color as well as the contrast of light and dark. We used bleach bypass for the pure contrast, but we brought back the color with grading.

That’s a new approach to bleach bypass. With traditional film grading, bleach bypass has often been used to desaturate the image. Now, that is easily done in DI. What else do you like about bleach bypass?

Prieto: The grain comes alive. Perhaps the grain also becomes more apparent when you exaggerate contrast digitally, but I feel the grain structure is more organic when it’s integrated into the negative.

What print stock are you using?

Prieto: That’s a problem area. I find Kodak Vision Premier [2393] to be far superior to the 2383, particularly in terms of the blacks.

But it’s more expensive.

Prieto: Yes, it’s been a big issue on every movie that I’ve done a DI on; usually the studio doesn’t want to pay for a massive release on Premier. So I have to do a big negotiation, and sometimes I’m faced with doing some prints on 93 and the rest on another stock. I don’t know if a new stock should be created for DI or how else to resolve this issue, but it has become very frustrating.

Any final words on DI?

Prieto: Some people say that it’s not real photography. To me, that’s equivalent to saying that using a color or grad filter on the camera is cheating as well. For me, it’s the same thought process as doing it in camera; it’s just doing it at a different moment. DI is just an extra tool that you’re using for cinematography. It’s one more step in the photography of the movie. 

 

Two Brothers Color Grading 


Dreujou observes that photochemical grading takes roughly one week, during which the cinematographer attends projections, gives notes to the color timer, and only comes back to see the next print. Digitally grading Two Brothers took almost two months of Dreujou’s time; the ability to stay on one shot and grade any area of the frame means that the dialogue between cinematographer and timer is much more detailed than it has to be in traditional timing.
 


Jean-Marie Dreujou, AFC and colorist Yvan Lucas detail the digital intermediate on Two Brothers.

by Benjamin Bergery
Photos courtesy of Universal Studios and Éclair Laboratories


Music is playing softly in a big, darkened room. Seated in the penumbra, three men watch a tiger roar silently on an 8-foot screen. Colorist Yvan Lucas clicks a computer mouse and the image freezes. “A little cold?” asks director of photography Jean-Marie Dreujou, AFC. “I’ll add a couple points of yellow,” Lucas answers. He clicks the keyboard twice and the image warms up. “Looks better,” comments colorist Bruno Patin, who is sitting nearby.

Inside a digital-intermediate (DI) suite at Éclair Laboratories outside Paris, Dreujou is timing the high-definition video/35mm hybrid Two Brothers (see AC July ’04) with Lucas, assisted by Patin. Lucas is using Discreet’s Lustre to grade the digital image and a Barco DLP 50 projector to display it large-scale. Later, the graded digital file will be transferred to an intermediate film stock using an Arrilaser film recorder.

Dreujou’s cinematography credits include Last Trading Post in India, The Children of the Marais, Little Chinese Seamstress and The Man on the Train. He has been nominated twice for France’s Cesar, for The Whims of a River in 1996 and Girl on a Bridge (which was graded by Lucas). Two Brothers was his first HD project; he has since photographed two more.

Lucas is a pioneering color timer with 40 features to his credit, including Delicatessen, City of Lost Children and Seven (all shot by Darius Khondji, ASC, AFC), as well as Amélie (shot by Bruno Delbonnel, AFC).

About 50 films made in France last year, roughly one quarter of the national output, made use of the DI process, and Éclair has established itself as a leader in the field. Two Brothers presented some unique challenges in that it was shot mostly in HD; 35mm was used for about 15 percent of the picture.

Philippe Soeiro, creative director at Éclair, explains that the postproduction workflow for Two Brothers was designed to treat the project “as if it were shot entirely on film.” First, all of the 35mm and HD footage was transferred to a Discreet Smoke workstation. The HDCam image was converted from its native YUV video format to RGB, the computer standard.

Digital-effects supervisor Frederic Moreau notes that Two Brothers has almost 550 visual-effects shots, many combining HD, 35mm and computer-generated (CG) elements. To create uniformity between HD and film, the 35mm images were scaled down to the HD size of 1920x1080 pixels and then transferred to the HD depth of 8 bits per color. In addition, grain was removed from some of the film footage. Moreau explains that the effects sequences were composited and “pre-graded” before they were transferred to the Lustre for final grading.

Before use in the Lustre, all of the HD images were transferred from linear to 10-bit log format. Soeiro notes that this colorspace conversion was “one of the delicate steps” in the post process, and that the conversion look-up table (LUT) was fine-tuned to allow for more detail in the dark areas. He explains that the log format enables the cinematographer and colorist to work using film-style “printer points” when grading on the Lustre, whereas the linear format does not. Dreujou cautions that perhaps because of the conversions, the raw Lustre HD footage needed work before it resembled the images he had seen on the hi-def monitor during production.

Both Dreujou and Lucas were delighted to work with the same yellow, cyan and magenta points that are used in photochemical color timing. “My origins are in photochemistry,” notes Lucas. “I came to digital because I wanted to follow the evolution of the technology, but my heart still beats for photochemical treatments. I hope one day to combine digital and photochemical techniques to create a new look.”

Two Brothers’ final graded image file was transferred from the Lustre to the Arrilaser, where it was recorded onto Eastman 2242 intermediate film. The Arrilaser output six 15- to 20-minute reels that served as a “negative” for a traditional photochemical process that involved contact printing to an interpositive (IP) and internegative (IN), all on 2242. The release prints were then made on Kodak Vision 2383.

Soeiro explains that Two Brothers was graded using Lustre “proxy” images that had lower resolution than but identical color values to the HD originals. These smaller proxy images were sized to match the 1280-pixel width of the “1K” Barco DLP 50 projector. The proxy images were manipulated in real time on the Lustre, while the original HD images were conformed offline by a “render farm.”

DIs would not be possible if the projected digital images did not accurately represent the final result on film. Soeiro credits the 3-D Display LUTs that Éclair developed in-house for enabling great precision in mimicking the way the image will look on positive film stock. Whereas a “normal” (2-D) LUT transforms individual red, green or blue values from one colorspace to the other, a 3-D LUT establishes correspondences between actual colors defined by triads of red, green and blue. Notes Soerio, “With this method, you can decide, for example, that the oranges in the digital color space should be displaced more toward the red of the film color space, without displacing the other colors nearby. This kind of thing is impossible in 2-D LUTs, where each red, green or blue component is treated separately. Only 3-D LUTs enable you to make two colorspaces coincide perceptually.”

“What’s pleasant about the digital projector,” observes Dreujou, “is that it’s on a big scale, so you can more accurately adjust the volumes in the image. What’s unpleasant is that the image quality is soft because it lacks definition.” Although the digital-proxy projection was remarkably close to 35mm, Dreujou noticed some subtle differences in contrast and saturation. “We found we had to augment the contrast and saturation slightly in the digital image in order to get the desired result in film,” says the cinematographer. “Also, we ended up with something slightly too blue in digital projection to get what we wanted in film projection.” He adds that the film projection also revealed more detail in the blacks than the digital one did.

The time it takes to get film out of an Arrilaser marks a key difference between digital and traditional grading. At 1.5 to 2.5 seconds per frame, it takes 12-15 hours to record a 20-minute reel of film with the Arrilaser, whereas a traditional film reprint is done in real time. Because many film projects are competing for valuable Arrilaser time, Éclair has instituted the practice of “digital dailies,” two- to three-minute rolls of selected excerpts. These serve as a regular check of the film output of the grading process and are short enough so that it is practical to produce them every couple of days.







Dreujou notes that although digital dailies can alert filmmakers to potential problems, they can be downright frustrating. “You don’t have time to really get into a sequence,” he says. “It’s a way to check that everything is okay, but it goes too fast. Also, you’re often selecting the problem scenes because you want to check them, so most of what you see needs work. After a while, it can get pretty depressing.” After days of effort on Two Brothers, Dreujou remembers the moment when he finally saw an entire 20-minute reel output to film. “Seeing Reel 2 in its entirety was happiness! All of a sudden, I could breathe more freely. You don’t really see things until you get an entire reel, and then you can really enter into the film. However, you have to be sure of what you’ve done before you send a reel off to be recorded on film. You don’t want to have to re-record the entire reel!”

Adds Lucas, “In digital grading, you tend to work reel by reel, so you stay on one reel for a long time. When I finally see the entire film, I may want to tweak the reels so they match — one might be greener than another because we did it two weeks later, for example, so I may adjust the end of one reel and the beginning of another.” Lucas often does these final adjustments directly on 35mm with 35mm color timing.

In photochemical color timing, there are three controls, one each for the amount of red, green and blue light that will shine through the negative and onto the positive print. Changing all three printer lights together adjusts the density or brightness of the image. One look at the dozen buttons and complex menus of the Lustre makes it clear that there is more at work here than just three printer lights. “The tool has completely changed,” agrees Lucas, “but the way of working is the same because I can work on a machine that has the same color points and density points as with film. Now, however, there is a new parameter: contrast. I work at removing undesired variations in contrast between shots. Another big difference is that we can now work with zones inside the image, but inside each zone, we work the same way we do with film.”

Lucas defines the zones with roughly sketched polygon or oval “windows” and then varies the color, brightness or contrast values inside the window. These windows (also known as mattes) can be programmed to move within a shot, follow an actor, or, in this case, follow a tiger across the frame. Lucas notes that the control of saturation is another feature that distinguishes digital grading from film grading; although there are ways to desaturate the image photochemically, such as ENR, these are complicated processes.

The two tiger images shown on page 78 exemplify the hybrid nature of Two Brothers. The wider shot was filmed in HD, while the close-up was filmed in 35mm. Both shots contain virtual CGI elements: in the wide shot, some of the flames and smoke are virtual, and so is the circle of flames seen in the eyes in the close-up. Lucas explains, “Here, as elsewhere, we accentuated the color of the tiger’s fur. We added saturation overall and yellowed the image significantly, but kept the greens of the vegetation. This could have been done in classical timing because we didn’t use windows.

“In the day interior shown here,” he continues, “we redid the backlight. I brightened the shot and used a window to darken the people and the walls. For the image of the Buddhist woman praying, we added density and saturation to an image that was shot during the day to create more of a dusk feeling. In the interior, we used windows to brighten some shadows and warm up her face and the area behind the bamboo. We used windows in about one-third of the shots, including many effects shots. We typically used them to boost the green of the jungle and the color of the tiger’s fur — we had to match the color of 30 different tigers! We also used windows to bring down the HD skies.”

The greater capabilities of digital grading have made postproduction a more protracted process, and many cinematographers are concerned that productions are not allowing for a lengthy digital timing when they make deals with directors of photography. Dreujou observes that photochemical grading takes roughly one week, during which the cinematographer attends projections, gives notes to the color timer, and only comes back to see the next print. Digitally grading Two Brothers took almost two months of Dreujou’s time; the ability to stay on one shot and grade any area of the frame means that the dialogue between cinematographer and timer is much more detailed than it has to be in traditional timing. “If you truly want to leave your signature on the film, you have to organize your schedule so you can be available — even if it means turning down other films,” he says.

Digital grading is changing the nature of cinematography by creating a kind of “virtual cinematography,” whereby the cinematographer can use software in post to create virtual filters, flags or T-stop changes. “Because of these tools, I will sometimes live with certain problems during shooting because I know I will be able to fix them in post,” says Dreujou. “Say, for example, that the walls are too bright. It may be complicated to set up a bunch of flags, and it will take time to adjust them. I now know that I will be able to darken the walls very easily in post, so I may not take a half-hour to solve the problem on the set. However, if the cinematographer isn’t there to make that change in post, it won’t get done, and then the image won’t be what he or she wanted. In general, it’s dangerous to not be present during post.”

Dreujou adds that a cinematographer needs to have clear objectives in order to avoid getting lost in the endless possibilities of digital grading. “If you don’t go in with firm intentions, your image can end up all over the place. Now that I have more experience, I think a lot about the timing during the shoot. Usually, I want to reproduce what I have created on the set.”

Dreujou confesses that he now relies on virtual grad filters instead of putting the real thing in front of his lens. “I used to use a lot of grads, but now I use hardly any. It’s complicated to move a grad during a shot, but it’s very simple in post. I still use 85s and colored filters because I don’t want to deliver a neutral image. In some cases, it might be easier to not use filters during the shoot, but I’m deeply attached to the notion of giving an intention to the image on set. Time is precious in production, but as cinematographers, we’ve been asked to put a story in images, and we must do that from the very beginning until the very end.”

TECHNICAL SPECS

Format: 2.40:1 extraction from Super 35 and HD

HD capture: Sony HDW-F900 and HDW-F950, Digital Primos

Film capture: Arri 435, Primo lenses

Original elements: HDCam videotape and 35mm Kodak and Fuji negatives

Effects image format: 1920 x 1080 pixels, RGB, 8bit linear

Grading image format: 1920 x 1080 pixels, RGB, 10bit log

Tools used: Phillips Spirit DataCine
Discreet Smoke, Flame & Inferno,
Discreet Lustre, Éclair 3D Display LUT,
Barco DLP 50 projector,
Arrilaser Film Recorder

Intermediate Film: Eastman Kodak 2242

Printed on: Kodak Vision 2383

  

 

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, the first live-action feature film produced entirely from blue-screen composites and CG animation 


Some filmmakers wish to eschew practical shooting altogether and build an entire cinematic world from virtual scratch. That’s exactly what director Kerry Conran and cinematographer Eric Adkins have done for Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, the first live-action feature film produced entirely from blue-screen composites and CG animation.

After ten months of preproduction in a Van Nuys warehouse, principal photography commenced with three Sony HDW-F900/3 CineAlta cameras shooting on a trio of giant blue-screen stages at England’s Elstree Studios (the largest comprising over 16,000 square feet with 50-foot ceilings). 



ICG spoke with Eric Adkins (DoP) over the phone about his pioneering project.

ICG: You have a background in special effects cinematography, from blending CGI in commercials and music videos to doing stop motion work in features (Mars Attacks) and television (The PJs). How did this prepare you for Sky Captain?

ADKINS: On The PJs, we had six directors, forty-seven 35mm Mitchell cameras and sixty miniature sets in a 50,000 square foot building. So it involved a lot of organizational skills—troubleshooting, scheduling and figuring out efficient ways of shooting things. But you tend to take on extra responsibilities because you don’t want your crew to be relighting the same stuff all the time. So The PJs was a great training project for this blue-screen work on Sky Captain. Producers can say, “Well, the blue screen has no sets; you can shoot anything you want.” But even though you don’t have the physical reference, you still have to present lighting continuities with an efficient shooting order. The producers would have loved to get through 47 shots a day; we were consistently getting around 37 per day, which is still a lot of shots. It’s very interesting when you can take something from another job that was so unusual, and bring it to this job, which is also unusual, and really make it work for you in ways that aren’t typical to your job title.

ICG: Ten months of preproduction is certainly atypical.



ADKINS: When you’re shooting entirely on blue-screen and there are no physical sets, the process of discovery is so intensive in the front end to meet the challenges of believability and tactile involvement. You have to visualize how the imaginary place would feel, as opposed to just look. I was employed for ten months ahead of time to figure out all these obstacles to help with the believability, to help with understanding each “location,” to give a feeling from one room to the other. It’s even more make-believe than normal filmmaking; you inherit nothing, you have to create absolutely everything.

The first thing I did was go out and do some Los Angeles-based reference shooting with a [Nikon D1-X digital] still camera, going on roofs, looking at old marquees—essentially location scouting. All of the background plates that were not archival photographs, matte paintings or CG animations, I shot with Darin Hollings, [Visual Effects Supervisor] with this digital camera and no crew. We brought help in for some places like Radio City Music Hall in New York, but that wasn’t a crew for lighting—it was more like, “Hey Moe, can you stand over there as a reference?”

Also, if we wanted higher resolution, all we had to do was take a grid of digital photographs that overlay each other and then stitch them together. Meaning I would take one shot with an ideal framing; then I would tilt up the camera like half the width of the viewfinder and take another picture, and then pan over half the width of the viewfinder and so on—essentially getting nine photographs to make a much bigger square. We couldn’t use too wide of a lens—if you went any wider than a 32mm, the distortion would make it hard to stitch them together naturally. But with this stitching, you’ve exponentially increased the resolution, so then you could actually create “moving” shots; pans and tilts and 2-D zooms on the background plates. We didn’t even have any motion background plates on this film.

ICG: What previsualization techniques did you use?

ADKINS: Well, originally we were planning a lot more 2D and 2-and-a-half-D shots, where we might have a still or archival photograph and layer it on top of a slight 3D model. We were also planning to shoot most of the story in a dry rehearsal on the Van Nuys stage, so we would have a sort of live animatic. But when Angelina Jolie was hired and the backgrounds changed to be seventy-five to eighty percent 3-D, Kerry decided he was going to previsualize absolutely everything. So we decided to do the animatic all digitally.

Steve Yamamoto, the animation supervisor, would go through all the shots inventing dimensional storyboards, asking my opinion and using me as a bouncing board before he took it to Kerry. If there were especially dynamic shots, he would bring them to my attention and say, ‘Do you like this better, or do you like this?’ It was kind of like working with a camera operator, where you’re using the talents of someone who understands the equipment really well, and you work with them as a tool.

At the same time, I would study those previsualizations like they were a set and anticipate how the actors might be blocked based on conversations with Kerry. Then from that, I could tell where windows or doors or practical lights might be in the set and add lighting input such as which direction I might key from. I used these keylight notes to help organize how we were going to shoot it.

It didn’t always work. For example, when we were doing tech rehearsals on a mock-up of Sky Captain’s cockpit, [the animatic] would have us sticking cameras in physically impossible places given which camera rig we needed to use, or given the fact that the lens is so many millimeters long. In that case we actually had to throw the previsualized CG shots of the cockpit away. So before we had to send the plane off in a storage bin to England, we got our stand-ins back in there and did shots in every conceivable direction, so that the editor could then cut them [into the animatic].

ICG: How did you translate these animatic camera angles into physical setups on the blue-screen stage?



ADKINS: On a normal film you’d have the art director’s floor plan, and you’d sketch in where all your cameras and lights are. What we could do on the computer is essentially ‘highjack’ all the virtual cameras from the shots in that animatic sequence, and import them into a top-view floor plan of the virtual “set.” Then we could see exactly what our camera placements were going to be, and I would sit down with our tracking people and have them separate the scene into “clumps” of forward and reverse angles. Once we had those clumps together and made sure that they all fit in the blue screen field, we would lock and rotate them all together in relative space so I could arrange them according to how it would be easiest to light. For example, if the key light was going to come from 3/4 back on the right side, I needed to position that “clump” where I would have access to enough space in the blue screen to light from that direction. But I wouldn’t want to be dragging lights out onto the blue screen for the reverse; what we would do then was just essentially rotate everything around on the virtual floor plan and shoot it the other way.

ICG: How did the blue-screen shooting affect your lens choice and camerawork?

ADKINS: We originally planned to use Zeiss’s new HD primes. But we discovered that the true nodal point of these primes was different somewhere out on each lens, and so with every physical lens change, we would have a different offset that we would have to calculate into the computer design as pre-visualised. To avoid confusion, we didn’t want to recalculate for a lens change on the stage floor. Since all line-ups for composite must be measured from the nodal point and not the focal plane, when measuring the cameras distance and height. So I said, “You know what? The [Fujinon 5-50mm T2.4] zoom lens isn’t the newest lens out there, but it seems to be very consistent nodally through out the range, and when you follow focus, it doesn’t breathe at all.” So we used those zooms for the whole show.

We were also discovering some very “anamorphic”-looking noise in the [camera’s] blue channel—if you were shooting film you would call it “grain”—which was stretched out and kind of had a halo to it. The blue channel is so noisy because it’s the last chip at the end of the prism and it’s working so much harder to sense the light through all those layers of glass. We set the camera’s gain control to -3Db—which is essentially making it work less hard to sense the light, the opposite of pushing a film stock—and all of a sudden the blue channel became normal looking. Which was great, but by doing that we lost another two-thirds of the light. So we found ourselves down to shooting at a 2.8. But some people shoot HD wide open anyway, to gain a little bit more of a 35mm look in terms of depth-of-field.

We never shot three cameras at the same time; the third camera was purely for pre-setting on another set to buy us time for relighting. We also knew we were going to do A-B type camera set ups, but there were times early on where we actually spent more time trying to make a setup work for both shots simultaneously than we would have if we just shot one after the other. So I had the idea to use that same amount of time to set up an A and B camera, but not always shoot an A and B camera. You could set up one camera that might actually be in the shot of the second camera, but because it was on a crane with a remote head, you could shoot that camera and then say, “OK, that’s done” and lift it out into the sky. Now you’re ready to shoot the next shot, which is already set up.

There was no motion control on this whole show. Instead we had this thing called a “camera orientation device” that Darin’s brother made for him in the welding shop. It looked like an antenna, and by mounting it on the camera, you could tell that it was tilting or panning so many degrees and how high it was off the ground. With a regular surveying laser pointer, they were able to ping every single spot on that targeting device, and we were able to track any moving shot on computer software back in post.

There was even one shot where we needed a very accurate matte, and we actually turned the HD camera sideways on the full-body shot of a guy standing there. You get all this extra edge detail that is much higher resolution than the vertical resolution. So you can actually use the horizontal resolution as the vertical in blue-screen, because there’s no up or down.

ICG: What other tools did you use to establish the look of the film?



ADKINS: I couldn’t soften the images traditionally, because it’s blue screen—you want them to be as crisp as possible. But I wanted a softer look on the faces; I didn’t want the sharp, harsh, highlight tones that a digital chip gives you. So I decided to shoot the whole film with a polarizing filter. When you’re side lighting and backlighting, it takes the harsh glare away, but doesn’t get rid of the source. It makes it more velvety, like some of these old silver nitrate prints from way back when. Of course, you also immediately lose almost two stops of light—on top of what you lose from shooting at -3Db—so you have to light things brighter. I tested it out to see if we had enough light, and it didn’t change anything technically that would have hurt pulling the keys.

ICG: How did your lighting differ from a traditionally shot film?

ADKINS: Some of the early press seemed to be saying, “You can practically light this all in the computer.” Well, I knew that wasn’t going to be the case and so did the director. At first it was thought maybe we could light flatter [than normal], but that was proven not to be true. We needed a much better, more realistic lighting solution because this was film noir: There’s a lot of back light and side light and silhouette. If you have someone walking in a scene, going in and out of light, it’s so difficult to recreate that realistically in a 2-D lighting session in the composite stage. If you put that task onto the compositor to recreate, it wouldn’t be afforded for the whole film.

At the same time, to get an ideal key, you want to light for your blue screen. You want it to be even and consistent, and therefore you base everything on that [exposure]. From the T-stop that you get, you’re only going to mess around with it plus or minus two thirds of a stop. And then if you can, turn the blue screen off so you can light the characters. That’s one of the best tips you can say to anyone lighting blue screen, because they can get so disoriented by it that they don’t even feel through the blue. Once you get it right, why don’t you turn it off? You already know your T-stop, so then just begin to light.

ICG: Did lighting for the blue screen pose any special challenges?



ADKINS: I knew that I wanted a larger radius base ramp, than most contractors like to build for reasons of amount of materials used.  But if the ramp is too tight light gets amplified, like in a cylinder, which gives a horizontal highlight, behind the actors’ legs, in your blue screen.

You also have to consider the fact that you’re also lighting the blue screen floor that they’re standing on. It’d be easy if everything was a medium shot and you had a blue screen that everyone was standing in front of on a platform. But you have to take into consideration that the actors are walking on the same blue floor that they have to be keyed on, and you want it to match the wall behind them.

However, you don’t want the movie to just be technically lit to be good for key. There are times when you do have to sacrifice a perfect key pull for drama’s sake. You learn to rank things in terms of importance. For example, in one scene the characters were supposed to be walking through a mineshaft. That was some of the ugliest blue-screen floor lighting you can think of, but everything from their knees up was in a nice blue field and everything down lower was essentially unlit anyway, so it was essentially a silhouette and they could pull a key off of that. You want it as clean as possible, but if the action was good, moving on is a good thing to do. That’s what’s good about having a director who knows what he’s doing in the digital composite world.

ICG: Can you describe your lighting for one scene in particular?

ADKINS: There’s a scene set in Sky Captain’s office where Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow meet for the first time. We actually shot it a whole half a week early; it was supposed to be a rehearsal, but everybody was just ready to do it. This was my only opportunity to test with the real actors, without the pressures of actually having to live with it in the movie; I was taking more chances with the dark, noir-y look. I wanted to be able to put Jude Law’s face in complete blackness with a slight edge around the back of his head leaning against the door frame.

We specifically designed this intimate scene to be some of the first shots because it was a close confined space. It was less about the walls; it was more about the desk and the doorway. It felt like theatre to the actors. For this tight room I had a 9-Light with 8x8 full grid diffusion boxed in so it didn’t spill on the bluescreen. What I wanted it to do was also light a large cabinet behind him, which was essentially a “wall” reference. Between the practical doorframe and the big cabinet, there was a gap where you saw into the bluescreen background behind. If I was on a real set or a location, I’d be forced to use an unnaturally high-angled light or put a light near his feet to illuminate the cabinet.

But this way, since there was no real wall there, I just had to angle the cabinet into that 9-Light coming through the space between it and the doorframe. It nicely rendered this really soft glow, and it was totally convincing that it was supposedly coming from that window in the office door. So I was able to use the fact that we were shooting on a blue screen to enhance the scene. 

 

Le format FilmStream utilisé dans Collateral 


60% de Collateral, le film de Michael Mann avec Tom Cruise, a été tourné avec la VIPER de Thomson. Le film comporte beaucoup d'extérieurs nuit, et cette caméra sensible qui capte en 4:4:4 sans compression était le meilleur moyen de filmer avec les lumières de la rue sans pour autant aboutir à des images "style DV".
Extrait d'un article sur les aspects techniques du tournage.
Source: Hollywood Reporter
lien vers l'article original 


Michael Mann road-tests the Viper camera on his mixed-media opus

Revving up digital cinematography


By Carolyn Giardina

Pictured: Director Michael Mann with the Viper FilmStream digital camera on the set of "Collateral"
Leave it to Michael Mann to shake up the system. The Oscar-nominated director famous for gritty yet visually dazzling depictions of urban life and an uncompromising attitude toward his craft is now ushering digital filmmaking from the extreme reaches of science fiction and low-budget indie into the realm of high-profile studio thriller. The director has elected to use Thomson Grass Valley's Viper FilmStream camera for his upcoming "Collateral," the Tom Cruise-starrer financed by DreamWorks and Paramount, scheduled for an Aug. 6 release.

As the first director to road-test the Viper -- much anticipated as the first cinema camera capable of storing images as data, directly to a hard drive -- Mann's choices are worth noting in a creative community coming to grips with the practicalities and pitfalls of digital imaging.

The Viper isn't the only camera Mann is using to shoot the movie, which he describes as a "multimedia" effort. He's using the Sony CineAlta high-definition camera, as well as shooting film, but of the roughly 80% of the finished film Mann estimates he's captured digitally, about 80% originated from the Viper.

Mann says his choice was driven by the film's creative needs. The story -- of a veteran hit man (Cruise) who hijacks a cab and forces the driver (Jamie Foxx) to traverse the streets of Los Angeles, transporting him from job to job until the LAPD and the FBI begin to pursue the vehicle -- seems well-suited to electronic cameras.

"Everything is pretty much driven by story, and this whole picture takes place at night," the director says. "I wanted to see into the night. I wanted the night to be alive so that it becomes very three-dimensional. That's what I was trying to get," says Mann, kicking back at the Santa Monica offices that house his production company, Forward Pass.

"There was a quality to the Viper cam that I responded to," says Mann, who is no stranger to digital cameras, having employed high-definition video for the opening sequences of his 2001 biopic "Ali." In particular, he says, the Viper's color imaging worked well for this particular film. "It had to do with the sensitivity of reds and yellows and oranges. This was not only seeing deeply into the night, seeing what you see with the naked eye and something more than you can see with the naked eye, but also the color information. It had an aesthetic that I wanted."

The Viper operates in several modes. At the high end is FilmStream, which captures unprocessed imagery -- no color correction, no compression -- in the 4:4:4 RGB color space, the full color range of an electronic image signal. (While analog film still offers significantly greater color sensitivity than any electronic medium, 4:4:4 RGB is the highest level currently offered in the electronic realm. Film scanned into the digital domain for effects manipulation or what have you is scanned at 4:4:4 RGB. By way of comparison, broadcast HD operates in a 4:2:2 YUV environment, subsampling in blue and red. The Viper also offers 4:2:2 options.)

Though other high-end digital cameras, including the CineAlta, also shoot in 4:4:4 RGB, Thomson vp strategic marketing and business development Jeff Rosica says that what sets the Viper apart is the proprietary CCDs that capture the image as well as the way the data, once acquired, is distributed. The CCDs capture 12-bit linear image, which is then transmitted and stored at 10-bit log space. "Because it's logarithmic, it actually emulates the most important properties of a 12-bit linear signal," says Rosica. The signal is then transferred to a recording device via a dual-link serial HD connection.

Mann and his team began an extensive testing phase by recording material in FilmStream onto a DVS digital disk recorder. "The total capacity was 55 minutes, and it took 35 hours to download (to videotape for dailies)," Mann says. "So obviously that wasn't ready for feature film production."

Next, they tested S.two digital mags to store the uncompressed raw data. "So our storage went down to something that was physically manageable in a much more compact hard drive," Mann says. "But what it posed upon us was a long-term storage capacity of 330 terabytes, which is economically unfeasible with the current limits of the drive technology." (A terabyte of storage costs about $50,000.)

Mann then decided "to see what would happen if we put a mild compression on (the images)" and switched to Viper's VideoStream mode, which offers a 10-bit 4:4:4 RGB video, as opposed to data, signal and provides light image processing allowing for truer color reproduction in the field. "With FilmStream you're getting raw data. VideoStream functions more like a normal high-def camera, which allowed him to control the ASA," says "Collateral" associate producer Bryan Carroll.

Both modes lens in 2.37:1 widescreen without any loss of vertical resolution.

"We took it all the way to the equivalent of a release print, so it's not like we were looking at something on a monitor and taking it on faith," Mann says.

While employing the latest in digital imaging technologies, Mann took care to note that his storytelling fundamentals are essentially unchanged. "In our system, we impose on everybody the grammar and syntax that we are shooting film. All the disciplines apply, and that's very important on the floor during production. We are mixing a digital culture with a film culture, and it has to be film grammar."

That approach drove the design of a massive workflow system that brought together the material from the film camera, Viper, and the other camera system Mann employed, Sony's CineAlta F900 HD. The HDCAM footage essentially had to be handled as camera negative. Everything that was shot -- film and digital -- was digitized into Avids for postproduction, during which a digital color grading session will take place.

Mann cites Carroll as well as Thomson's Mark Chiolis, Laser Pacific's Leon Silverman and Terry Brown and Panavision's Nolan Murdock as integral to working out the bugs in the system.

Prior to filming, a team including Mann and A-camera operator Gary Jay, (who has worked with Mann since 1992's "The Last of the Mohicans") guided modifications to the Viper.

"The camera body itself wasn't ergonomic for use on a production," Mann says. "We wanted weights added to the rear of the camera to increase the mass and balance back there. We needed rods for the matte box and focus-bracket system because we do a lot of hand-holding. The control buttons needed covers because you could unbalance the camera and not know you did it. This is small stuff, but it's major when you just got done having a take that's brilliant, or you think that the actors were brilliant and it looks perfect, and you find out you switched it to FilmStream."

With his arsenal of camera technology, production began and Mann focused his attention on directing. Dion Beebe ("Chicago") came on board as director of photography.

As 27 pages of the "Collateral" screenplay take place in a car, mobility was a priority. There were some limitations as the Viper was cabled to its recording deck. Mann says that when he wanted complete mobility for handheld work, the crew used the CineAlta F900 (which is configured more like a camcorder, recording to either standard Sony HDCAM or SW tapes).

"The benefit is that there is a 55-minute tape, so in that sense there are fewer interruptions," Mann says. "(With film) if you are hand holding and you have a 400-foot mag in there, every three minutes and 45 seconds you are having to stop." (There are third-party developers working on Viper recording options, including a portable drive to enable cinematographers to work untethered.)

Creatively, he says, "there's no silver bullet in all of this. ... You have to know what you want, more so than film. In film, you can rely on certain conventional looks, almost like a perceptual preset about what you're used to having. Not so in video, it's a much broader spectrum so you have to know what you want.

"What I like about the Viper is it sees colors, it sees things, in a different way," Mann says. "People are reaching for more expressive ways to visualize and have emotional impact. That's what it all comes down to, the emotional impact to tell a story."
 

 

Harry Potter film stock 


Mérites comparés de quelques émulsions choisies pas le chef op Michael Seresin.
Extrait d'un article d'American Cinematographer, juin 2004. 

That goal involved thousands of considerations. One of the first was film stock. Seresin had recently shot several pictures on Kodak's EXR 500T 5298, which he calls "my favorite film stock ever." During tests, the team ran it through the pipeline to a release print. (At that point, Warner Bros. had not yet committed to a digital intermediate, but at press time one was underway at a DI workstation set up in London by Warner's Advanced Media Services department in collaboration with colorist Peter Doyle.) "The concern was that it has a little patina," says Seresin. "Other people call it grain, but I love that patina." By the end, however, Seresin agreed that a finer grain was needed. "Literally within the space of a few days, Kodak phoned up and told us about its new stock, Vision2 [500T] 5218," recalls Seresin. "I was not a big fan of the previous Vision stocks, but 5218 was absolutely brilliant. I loved its blacks." The new stock also integrated well with the Vision 200T 5274 used by the model unit (which shot with an Arri 435 Advanced). Stone tested both stocks and jumbled them up during one screening session. "Seeing them intercut, you couldn't really tell them apart. But when you look at specific things - the dressing on the set, for instance - I felt that the grain was finer still on the 200," which he ultimately chose.

Because 5218 also worked well with bluescreen, it was used on all effects work except for miniatures. This greatly facilitated the integration of elements. "One of the issues we had was that we were going to be mixing effects and non-effects elements on the same sets because of the digital environments," Guyett explains. "Vision2 is a very fine-grained stock, and it seemed to perform well under most conditions. We used it for just about everything. Straight away, it gave us some degree of consistency." 

 

Ven. - Mai 28, 2004

Van Helsing: Interview Allan Daviau 


Abstract:

During their first meetings, Sommers, Ducsay and Daviau looked at many of the horror films from the 1930s while planning a visual grammar.

...It was obvious to Ducsay and Daviau that the visual effects shots and numerous scenes filmed in low key light made Van Helsing a candidate for finishing in a digital intermediate process.

...Daviau also used the black and white night backing while shooting tests for other scenes, because color is used in a restrained manner in Van Helsing with few exceptions.

...“The new film has a much finer grain structure (than other 500-speed emulsions) and an extended contrast range, which was good for both visual effects shots and scenes filmed in very low-key light.”

...Their tools included a Flying-Cam, a remote controlled helicopter that carries a 35mm motion picture camera, and a cable-cam, which was rigged to acquire point-of-view shots from the perspective of Dracula’s brides flying into a village, and for other dramatic sequences.

...“We decided to shoot this scene with the 5218 color negative, which is faster and has finer grain than the best black-and-white film,” Daviau says. “The lab printed dailies on a black-and-white film (5269) that Kodak makes for producing titles, using a technique that Beverly Wood (at Deluxe Labs) and Roger Deakins (ASC, BSC) developed for The Man Who Wasn’t There.

...Daviau says that Sommers wanted the energy of moving cameras almost all the time, including Steadicam shots and tracking with dollies, small cranes, 30 and 50 foot Technocranes usually with remote heads, and occasional Flying-Cam and cable-cam shots.

...Lighting for interior and night scenes was motivated by torchlight, oil lamps and cold, blue moonlight with only occasional splashes of color, including the elaborate vampires costume ball, which was filmed in an ancient cathedral.

...The snow-covered mountains in the background, clouds and vampires flying through the sky were all visual effects elements composited with live-action footage.

...“Many scenes included bats and other CG characters, as well as people who were filmed in front of a blue screen, maybe flying on a cable,” Daviau says.

...After principal photography was completed there was about two weeks of bluescreen work on a stage at the Hughes factory with different flying creatures, including leaping werewolves and wolf men, and Dracula’s brides on cables.

...He applied all of his knowledge to every shot he worked on. There are nuances in digital timing that you just can’t do any other way, but I’m not suggesting that we should shoot movies differently. 

Just about two years ago, give or take a few months, Allen Daviau, ASC received a telephone call from Sam Mercer. He asked if he was interested in meeting Stephen Sommers, who scripted and planned to direct a film featuring Dracula, other monsters and characters from the scary 1930s movies produced by Universal Studios. The executive producer explained that the story takes place during the late 19th century in Transylvania, where Gabriel Van Helsing is on a mission to find and destroy Count Dracula. Along the way he encounters Frankenstein, the Wolf Man, Mr. Hyde and other movie monsters. Daviau was intrigued. He was a fan of the 1930s Dracula, Frankenstein and other horror movies when they aired on late night television during the 1950s and 60s.

“I’ve carried memories of those beautiful images, the mythology and the tremendous performances around in my head for decades,” Daviau says. “When Sam sent me the script, my first impression was that it was a brilliant homage to those 1930s films.”

It was a different type of project for Daviau who has earned Oscar nominations for Bugsy, Avalon, The Color Purple, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Empire of the Sun. His other memorable credits include The Falcon and the Snowman and Fearless.

Sommers has previously written and directed such thrillers as The Scorpion King, The Mummy and The Mummy Returns. The last two of those films were edited by Bob Ducsay, one of the producers of Van Helsing. During his first meeting with Sommers and Ducsay, Daviau felt the bond of their shared passion for the story and genre.

The roots of Van Helsing trace back to a novel written by Irish author Abraham Stoker in 1897. His book was based on stories about a real Romanian prince named Vlad, who had a penchant for impaling his enemies and drinking their blood. Stoker’s book has inspired more than 200 films in a dozen languages with Dracula in the title.

“I still look at those 1930s films, including Dracula, shot by Karl Freund (ASC) and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Karl Struss (ASC), with a sense of awe,” Daviau says.

In the original story, Van Helsing was an older, academic type of scientist. In Sommers’ screenplay, he is a young mercenary employed by the Vatican. Van Helsing is accompanied on his mission by a monk named Carl, who is a scientific whiz.

“There’s a joy in Steve’s script,” he says. “I could tell how much he enjoyed the classic horror films. He doesn’t mind kidding with the genre, but there is also a tremendous depth to the characters. They are people whom you can understand, and that helps to sweep the audience into the story. He always had some little things going on that inject some humor into the movie. He’s not after big laughs. It’s quite subtle.”



Hugh Jackman plays Van Helsing, David Wenham portrays the monk and Dracula is played by Richard Roxburgh, a noted Australian actor.

“One of the things I loved about his (Roxburgh’s) performance was that he wasn’t afraid to quote Bella Lugosi,” Daviau recounts. “I think that’s one of Van Helsing’s strengths. It’s a modern film that is true to the spirit of the classics.”

Kate Beckinsale portrays Anna Valerious, whose family spawned Dracula some 400 years earlier. No one in her family can pass through the gates of heaven until Dracula is eliminated. “She is very beautiful, and also a very strong character who is used to having her own way,” Daviau observes. “We want the audience to see her beautiful eyes. She doesn’t use her smile a lot. It has a devastating effect when she does.”

Other main roles include Will Kemp as the Wolf Man, Shuler Hensley as Frankenstein, Samuel West as Victor Frankenstein who created the monster bearing his name, and Kevin J. O’Connor as Igor, his hapless servant. Elena Anaya, Silvia Colloca and Josie Maran play Dracula’s brides.

During their first meetings, Sommers, Ducsay and Daviau looked at many of the horror films from the 1930s while planning a visual grammar. They also conferred with production designer Allan Cameron, and created a palette consisting mainly of darkness and muted colors. “The only set that had color emphasis was the grand costume ball for the vampires,” Daviau says. “It’s golden in tone. Most other scenes are monochromatic.”

Hundreds of visual effects shots, with both CG and bluescreen elements, are woven into the fabric of the story. Daviau began collaborating with Scott Squires and Ben Snow, the visual effects supervisors from Industrial Light & Magic during preproduction. One of them was always present during live-action filming.

“They could look through the camera anytime,” Daviau says. “Sometimes they’d ask, is it possible to have more depth of field because they were going to composite a matte created by Richard Bluff in the background. If you’re going to shoot an effects picture, you’d better enjoy working with the effects people.”

While most of the visual effects came from ILM, Pacific Title and Art Studio, Illusion Arts and several other facilities also provided shots. It was obvious to Ducsay and Daviau that the visual effects shots and numerous scenes filmed in low key light made Van Helsing a candidate for finishing in a digital intermediate process. Sommers and the studio agreed to a test.

Daviau designed and shot the test footage, which was scanned and converted to digital files at EFILM in Los Angeles. Daviau timed and manipulated the images in conjunction with colorist Steve Scott. The outcome convinced everyone that there were sufficient advantages to justify the time and cost of finishing Van Helsing in a digital suite. Daviau committed to spending several months in postproduction.

“You have control over brightness, darkness, colors, contrast and the gamma anyplace in every frame,” Daviau says. “You can isolate a face, a bright spot on a wall or anything you choose, and manipulate that part of the image without changing anything else. Sometimes we darkened a wall in the background to draw attention to something brighter in the frame. It was a great tool for tying effects shots together with the live-action images, so every shot looks natural in the context of the story.”

Another early decision was made to frame Van Helsing in Academy aperture format (1.85:1 aspect ratio), in part to keep faith with the vertical framing of the 1930s films. It was an aesthetic decision also favored by Cameron. Daviau explains that the vertical frame is an integral part of the visual grammar. The architecture in the settings is dominated by vertical castles with high walls and towers. There are also important scenes where flying vampires and other creatures are seen from the perspective of villagers.

About half of the film was shot in and around Prague, which offered authentic locations for the Transylvanian settings, including castles, period streets and a cathedral that provided the setting for the costume ball. They also built sets on stages at Barrandov Studios, including a cave with shafts leading to the outside, and some castle interiors, and at Prague Studios where Cameron built a set utilizing a water tank.

Camera operators Paul Babin, SOC, and Tom Connole have worked regularly with Daviau since Fearless in 1993. The rest of the crew included operator Greg Schmidt, assistants Reggie Newkirk, Jimmy Jensen, Nick Shuster, Mark Santoni and Roger Wall, and film loader Tony Muller. Daviau was able to bring many of them to Prague. He also lauded Steadicam work by Craig Fikse when they were shooting in Los Angeles.

“It was very important for me to work with many people from my regular crew,” Daviau says. “There were many complex shots, often on a tight schedule, and Stephen (Sommers) likes to get his coverage on film with as few takes as possible.”



During scouting, it became obvious to Daviau that one of the challenges was creating the proper fire light effects in very large interior scenes. His gaffer, Larry Wallace, assembled a team that designed and built a torchlight using standard light bulbs, dipped in orange dye, which mimicked a CTO filter. It had a built-in flicker circuit that could be manipulated and a dimmer control compatible with both the 220-volt, 50-cycles electrical system used in Europe and the 120-volt, 60-cyceles electrical system used in the United States. Daviau combined the lamps with real torchlights in many scenes, including the costume ball, which was filmed in the cathedral.

Daviau notes that costumes designed by Gabriella Pescucci are true to the black, brown and grey tones and textures that were typical during the late 19th century.

“She designed a warm, black leather coat for Van Helsing, which had a luminous glow that is visible in scenes with a lot of contrast,” he says. “We used it throughout the picture with the exception of the costume ball. It’s a warm black with a gloss that glows. You can see it in very low key and dark scenes.”

Kodak introduced the first member of its new family of color negative films while Van Helsing was in preproduction. Kodak Vision 2 (5218) film is rated for a recommended exposure index of 500 in 3200 degree tungsten light. Daviau used the new film to shoot costume and makeup tests in combination with a black-and-white night backing.

He explains that Sommers envisioned shooting the opening scene in black and white. Daviau also used the black and white night backing while shooting tests for other scenes, because color is used in a restrained manner in Van Helsing with few exceptions.

“I remember getting the first print of a test I shot with Jennifer Wymore, who has perfect skin tones,” Daviau says. “The new film has a much finer grain structure (than other 500-speed emulsions) and an extended contrast range, which was good for both visual effects shots and scenes filmed in very low-key light.”

He decided to shoot the entire film with the new 5218 stock. Daviau chose to rate the negative for an exposure index of 400 most of the time because it gave him the printing light he wanted. Sometimes, mainly for effects shots, he rated it at E.I. 320.

“My green printing light at Technicolor Labs was 39 or 40 most of the time,” he says. “I based timing this film on printing on standard Kodak Vision stock, so we get the same contrast and desaturated look wherever it is projected.”

The package provided by Panavision, included Panaflex Platinum and XL cameras, and full sets of Primo prime and zoom lenses, along with an ARRI 435, which was mainly used for ramping slow-motion shots. The second unit led by Josh Bleibtreu was responsible for filming extensive footage, including establishing scenes and background elements for effects shots. Their tools included a Flying-Cam, a remote controlled helicopter that carries a 35mm motion picture camera, and a cable-cam, which was rigged to acquire point-of-view shots from the perspective of Dracula’s brides flying into a village, and for other dramatic sequences.

“Josh (Bleibtreu) is responsible for many of the finest images in this movie,” Daviau says. “The opening scene with those people who were storming the castle were all second unit filmed in the middle of the night. I’d tell him I wanted a shot to be gutsy with a lot of contrast and he would deliver. I can’t say enough good things about Josh. He brought an artful sensibility to some very challenging second unit work.”

Film dailies in Prague were provided by a lab operated by the studio. Daviau watched silent dailies in the mornings, both in Prague and Los Angeles. He viewed dailies again synched with sound in the afternoons along with Ducsay, and representatives of all departments, including costume and production design, in addition to members of his camera crew. Ducsay had transfers made for off-line digital editing.

“Film dailies were essential because they provided an accurate reference at a fixed gamma for exposure levels on our negative,” Daviau says. “We could see subtle details, including how makeup was working on Frankenstein and other characters. The dailies also provided an accurate reference for the visual effects team and for timing at EFILM.”



From the beginning, Sommers planned for the opening scene, which is about eight minutes in length, to be in black and white because he wanted it to feel like the 1930s films. In this scene, peasants are storming the castle with Dr. Frankenstein watching.

“We decided to shoot this scene with the 5218 color negative, which is faster and has finer grain than the best black-and-white film,” Daviau says. “The lab printed dailies on a black-and-white film (5269) that Kodak makes for producing titles, using a technique that Beverly Wood (at Deluxe Labs) and Roger Deakins (ASC, BSC) developed for The Man Who Wasn’t There. It gave us snappy, contrasty black-and-white images. The dailies also provided a visual reference when we digitized and converted the color images to black and white at EFILM.”

Daviau says that Sommers wanted the energy of moving cameras almost all the time, including Steadicam shots and tracking with dollies, small cranes, 30 and 50 foot Technocranes usually with remote heads, and occasional Flying-Cam and cable-cam shots. In one scene, the cable-cam captures Dracula’s brides making a surprise daylight assault on a village. It shows the audience the scene from the brides’ perspective as they fly towards the village. At one point, Van Helsing fires a missile at a flying vampire bride with a crossbow invented by the monk. The shot begins in front of the crossbow and it soars through the air, tracking the missile flying towards the vampire, getting closer and closer until it hits her.

“Each morning, we’d have a rehearsal and decisions were made very quickly about how each scene was going to be covered,” Daviau says. “We usually had A, B and sometimes C cameras rolling with different sized lenses from the same angle or plane. Steve knew what he wanted to accomplish, and it didn’t take a lot of setups. He’s very happy to do elaborate shots in one take.”

Lighting for interior and night scenes was motivated by torchlight, oil lamps and cold, blue moonlight with only occasional splashes of color, including the elaborate vampires costume ball, which was filmed in an ancient cathedral. Most of the costumes worn at the ball are black, but Valerious wore a red formal gown and Van Helsing and Carl also had bits of color in their outfits.

“The art department provided candle-shaped tubes that were filled with oil and provided a very bright flame which motivated the overall golden hue,” Daviau says. “We didn’t have to worry about candles burning down. We also used a tremendous amount of rock ‘n roll lighting trusses that you can raise and lower. You can mount equipment and have electricians walk on them when you don’t have a real green bed system. We had lights with gold gels every place we could hide them, including side altars and balconies. There was no way we could use flags, but we had cutters on the top of the wall. One of the advantages of the digital finish is that you can isolate and eliminate lights you can’t hide and anything else from shots.

“During my timing sessions with Steve Scott, we put a vignette over the top of all the walls in the cathedral, and darkened everything above the candelabras,” he explains. “We were backlighting character’s heads. There was no way to avoid getting some spill light on the floor. Steve solved that problem by darkening the floor around the actors.”

Cameron created a Transylvanian village about a 30 to 40 minute drive from Prague. Van Helsing arrives in time to see it being attacked by Dracula’s brides in broad daylight. The snow-covered mountains in the background, clouds and vampires flying through the sky were all visual effects elements composited with live-action footage.

Daviau also cites a close collaboration with assistant director Artist Robinson, who has frequently worked with Sommers. Weather was a factor. Daviau notes that when spring arrived, the foliage turned green, there were birds singing and the sun was out all day. There were scenes in the village that could best be shot at dawn and dusk. Robinson reserved the rest of the day for shooting interiors at practical locations and on stages.

“Each character has a motif or visual signature,” Daviau says. “The Frankenstein creature was wearing extraordinary makeup, so we didn’t want to get too much light on him, particularly in exteriors, where we used a lot of negative fill. We created stronger contrast on Dracula at all times with a hard key and very little fill. Jimmy Shelton, my key grip, was very aware of how to use negative fill to enhance shadows on characters.

“Hugh Jackman is a really handsome guy who can take all kinds of light,” notes Daviau. “That gave us a lot of flexibility. Kate Beckinsale is absolutely beautiful. She has long, dark hair, and liked the idea of letting it at least partially cover her face at times. Sometimes we had to fight to see both of her eyes. David Wenham (Carl) has a very adaptable face, which made our lives easier. We had a lot of makeup on Kevin O’Connor (Igor) and had to be careful not to show its texture.”

Daviau says that he mainly shot without optical diffusion except for close-ups of characters wearing heavy make-up. However, sometimes it wasn’t practical to go from a wide-shot to a close-up and then back to the wider angle. In those situations, he tended to shoot close-ups without diffusion. If necessary, Daviau did touch-ups to soften some faces during digital timing sessions. It’s not just the physical appearance of the actors, he stresses. It was also how emotions registered on the character’s face.

“Many scenes included bats and other CG characters, as well as people who were filmed in front of a blue screen, maybe flying on a cable,” Daviau says. “We used markers to show the actors on the set where to look and when, so their eyelines meshed with the positions of characters who were composited into scenes later. That was quite a challenge for the camera operators who performed admirably.”

About half of the film was shot in Los Angeles on stages built at the old Hughes aircraft manufacturing plant, and on a very large exterior lot at the old McDonnell Douglas factory in nearby Downey, California.

“A scene we filmed on that big lot in Downey was set in Dracula’s palace,” Daviau recalls. “It was a night scene with a huge bridge. We used an old-fashioned way of lighting that worked because the new stock enabled us to combine flame light with artificial, cold, blue moonlight. We used torches and other flames as sources, and moonlight came from a Beebe light at a far enough distance to turn the law of inverse square to our advantage.”

After principal photography was completed there was about two weeks of bluescreen work on a stage at the Hughes factory with different flying creatures, including leaping werewolves and wolf men, and Dracula’s brides on cables. Those elements were composited with live-action footage.

The film was scanned at 4K resolution at EFILM with pin registration used to lock each frame into place. Scott says that’s the minimum requirement for capturing the full dynamic range of tones, colors, contrast and textures captured on the negative.

“It avoids such artifacts as banding in both black and very bright areas, and aliasing that is noticeable at lower resolutions,” he says. “Allen and everyone else put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into this film, and they weren’t about to make compromises.”

The 4K files were “rezzed” down to 2K to speed up the timing process. That limitation is imposed by the time it takes to move the digital images through the system. Timing is basically an interactive process. Daviau was seated in a small theater with Scott at the control console. Images were projected on a big screen at 1K resolution.

“You don’t get true blacks at 1K, so at first, we recorded some scenes out to film,” Daviau says. “As I learned to make that adjustment in my mind, we did it less frequently. Steve Scott has a background as an illustrator and a painter, and he worked in special effects. He applied all of his knowledge to every shot he worked on. There are nuances in digital timing that you just can’t do any other way, but I’m not suggesting that we should shoot movies differently. I believe your dailies should reflect what your intentions are every day. But, now you can decide to frame a high angle shot, where it isn’t possible or practical to flag light off a building in the background, knowing that you can darken it later.”

Scott points out, “This project was in constant evolution. We loaded up all the images, and dropped in effects shot as we got them. The preview print contained rough animatics and pre-visualizations. Allen was making subtle adjustments every step of the way. He was very concerned with removing any telltale sign of artificial light. He really dug into the negative and pulled details out sometimes in radical ways, but usually it was very subtle. He’d say, ‘It looks a little too dense,’ and I’d interpret that by taking a little blue out and adding a little yellow until we reached the sense of density that he was after. Allen also listened very carefully and always welcomed a well-considered suggestion.”

Scott continues, “He was particularly meticulous about the vampires ball. The scene is stunningly beautiful. We brought the light on top of the cathedral walls down and brightened the floor where they are dancing using very articulated mattes that take on exactly the right shape for articulating around columns. It was like apprenticing to a great artist by helping to put the finishing touches on a canvas. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to do this without the guidance and direction of the cinematographer. It’s their vision.” 

Posted at 01:42 PM    

Dim. - Février 22, 2004

21 grammes - un exemple de "bleach bypass" 


Le procédé de tirage de copies "sans blanchiment" avait été popularisé par SEVEN. Couleurs désaturées, contrastes profonds sont aussi de la fête dans 21 GRAMMES.
Extraits d'interview de Rodrigo Prieto, chef op du film. 

Set-up lumière

No major sets were built for 21 Grams, which led Prieto to rely on small, flexible lighting sources, especially Kino Flos. "I was trying to be very practical about lighting sources, and we pre-lit every location as much as possible," he says. "We had to devise units that would allow us the freedom to shoot in basically any direction, and to move the camera around as we pleased. We designed all sorts of gadgets to control the Kino Flos. Sometimes the egg crates didn't make them directional enough, so we made our own egg crate devices: we lined the barndoors with Velcro to insert black cutters inside and control the spread of light." Key grip Joseph Dianda also created special softboxes, dubbed "Joey lights" in his honor. "They were 4-by-4 boxes made of foamcore that would take eight Kino Flos, spread out to fill the 4-foot square," the cinematographer explains. Velcro-lined barndoors and cutters were used to direct the light. "We could quickly set them up against any surface. We'd put them right up against the ceiling, and the whole softbox would come out only 4 or 5 inches; it was very easy to move them around and keep them out of frame."

Gaffer Robert Baumgartner made his own contribution: a handheld eyelight comprised of two diffused 2-foot Kino Flos on white backing. "It was like a 2-by-2 softbox, and Robby could change the diffusion on it and walk around with the actors, keeping the eyelight on them," says Prieto. "He became like a dancer with the actors, keeping out of shot and introducing it when he thought it was needed. Little things like that were invented to keep the camera and the actors free, while still allowing us to see their eyes."


Dominantes pas toujours contrôlables, couleurs désaturées, contrastes accentués: le procédé "sans blanchiment" convient bien aux drames poisseux.

Utilisation de divers stocks

"We also played with different film stocks to keep the grain structures in different contrasts as the stories developed," Prieto continues. "When things were looking up for the characters, we'd use a finer-grained stock." For Paul's story, that meant Kodak Vision 250D 5246 stock for the scenes following his transplant, and for most of his scenes with Cristina. (Night interiors involving these characters were shot with Kodak Vision 500T 5279.) "Then, as things get more complex, we go to a heavier grain [Kodak Vision 800T 5289]. The first third of Jack's story was 5279, and then we moved into 5289." In fact, the transition occurs in the midst of a sequence in which friends are gathered for Jack's birthday party, and the guest of honor is absent.

"Scenes that show the party happening without him were filmed on 5279, and the moment he arrives, we changed to 5289," says Prieto. "It's so subtle that it's likely no one will consciously notice it." When the characters converge in New Mexico for the film's climax, the scenes are rendered entirely with the heavy-grained 5289, made harsher by the bleach-bypass process.

For day exteriors in the New Mexico desert, Prieto was rating the 800-speed 5289 at 1,000 ISO to underexpose for the bleach bypass. "Because we were shooting at 1,000 ISO at noon in the desert, I had to use heavy, heavy [ND] filtration and Polarizers on the lens.

TECHNICAL SPECS

· 1.85:1
· Moviecam SL, Zeiss Ultra Primes
· Kodak Vision 250D 5246, Vision 500T 5279,  Vision 800T 5289
· CCE Process by Deluxe Labs, Digital Intermediate (select scenes) by EFilm
· Printed on Kodak Vision Premier 2393 

Posted at 12:49 AM    

Sam. - Février 21, 2004

Post-prod digitale de Blueberry 


Certaines copies du film ont un affreux look vidéo, d'autres sont OK. Détails sur les étapes de la création des images.
Source: AFC Cinéma 

Extrait des notes du chef op, Tetsuo Nagata (La Chambre des Officiers)

Dès le début, Jan et moi n'avions pas de doute : il fallait tourner en Super 35 pour des raisons pratiques, mais, la question cruciale, était toujours la finalisation du film. Nous ne voulions surtout pas faire ressentir l'emprise numérique dans l'image... Je sais, par expérience, combien il est difficile de mélanger le chimique au numérique qui était, pour ce film, indispensable, vu les effets spéciaux, le " matte-painting " et les images en 3D. Finalement le choix d'étalonnage en 2K (Lustre) s'est avéré juste pour obtenir, dans l'image, toutes les nuances d'un tableau. J'ai utilisé la pellicule Kodak 5248 pour les extérieurs et Kodak 500T 5279 pour le restant du film. Très souvent dans les scènes de nuit en extérieur, j'ai poussé d'un diaph la pellicule 5279 ainsi, avec l'étalonnage en Lustre, j'ai obtenu une texture de grain intéressante. Les conditions de tournage de Blueberry ont été extrêmes : dans le désert nous devions tourner toute la journée, midi inclus. A cause de cette chaleur et de la poussière, j'ai d'ailleurs vite abandonné l'idée d'utiliser des HMI dans le désert... le sable très fin et la température qui dépassait parfois les 45 degrés provoquaient constamment des problèmes électriques... Le combat contre le sable était notre souci quotidien. 

Posted at 01:20 AM    

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