British Cinematographer issue 51 - Imago

British Cinematographer
Covering International Cinematography
www.britishcinematographer.co.uk
Issue 051 ––– May 2012 34
Live & Let DI
–––Who’s dialling-in
the DI grades
Plan-DI
Company 3 London
Who said 2012 was going to be a slow year? Now that
Wrath Of The Titans has hit cinemas, and already passed
the $200 worldwide box office mark, the Soho facility has
moved its attention to dailies work for Les Miserables,
through 142, before the film returns to CO3 for a full DI
later in the summer. In addition, the company continues
its long-standing relationship with James Bond 007, the
film-world’s longest-running film franchise, currently
shooting its 23rd thrilling adventure.
The latest Tim Burton feature, Frankenweenie, is also
currently at CO3 in London with Rob Pizzey working on
this prestigious title. Adam Glasman recently completed
Hyde Park On Hudson, lensed by Lol Crawley BSC.
Set in New York State at the end of the 1930s, it tells
of the love affair between US president FDR and a
distant cousin. It stars the ever-fabulous Bill Murray and
Laura Linley, plus the UK’s very own Olivia Coleman.
Glasman is now working on the preview grades of
Anna Karenina for Seamus McGarvey BSC ASC and
director Joe Wright. Other recent features passing
through CO3 London include the British Independent
feature uwantme2killhim? lensed by Tim Wooster and
coloured by Rob Pizzey. CO3’s suites have also been
visited by Sir Ridley Scott as the company created ‘live’
grading sessions between London and Los Angeles for
Prometheus. Using this system directors and DPs can
be in London, New York or LA watching live sessions
performed in CO3 suites in other global locations.
Technicolor
Technicolor continues to inject talent into its UK operations
with the appointment of Greg Barrett and Mitch Mitchell
to key roles in Soho and Pinewood. Barrett has been
appointed director for film and post production services
at Technicolor Creative Services UK. He has extensive
experience in managing film, post production and digital
operations, having worked with Midnight Transfer, Deluxe,
Framestore, Reliance Mediaworks and most recently
at Sohonet. As head of film at Midnight Transfer and
Deluxe, Barrett was responsible for business development
across all feature film post production services including
dailies, DI and DCP and video deliverables. As the chief
strategy officer at Sohonet, he developed Sohonet’s
product portfolio, and coordinated activities across sales,
engineering and production.
Meanwhile, Mitchell is the new head of imaging
and archive services. Reporting to Barrett, Mitchell
will lead and manage the restoration, scanning and
film-out departments across Technicolor’s Pinewood
and Soho facilities. Mitchell’s career in visual effects,
scanning and recording saw him working with the BBC,
MPC and most recently for nine years at Cinesite, where
he was involved in several high-profile productions,
including Harry Potter, Sherlock Holmes and The DaVinci
Code. Mitchell has also lectured on special effects and
imaging technologies. He was made a fellow of the
Royal Photographic Society in 1997 and appointed
professor of advanced imaging at Bournemouth
University in 1998.
Molinare... created a “neon noir”
look for Welcome To The Punch.
Toby Tomkins... worked with DP
Gary Shaw with multi-format
source materials on Ben Drew’s
debut feature Ill Manors.
Lipsync Post... worked on the
Munich air-disaster United.
Company 3 London... pulled out
the stops for Frankenweenie.
Molinare
Molinare grader Asa Shoul used Baselight to help
enhance the look on action/crime thriller Welcome To
The Punch, lensed by Ed Wild, using ARRI Alexa, scheduled
for a September release. The show was directed by Eran
Creevy, with Ben Pugh, Rory Aitken and Brian Kavanaugh-
Jones producing, Ridley Scott the executive producer, and
James McAvoy, Mark Strong and Andrea Riseborough
in the lead roles. As Icelandic criminal Jacob Sternwood
(Strong) comes out of hiding to save his son when a heist
goes wrong, London detective Max Lewinsky (McAvoy)
jumps at the chance to finally take down the man who
has always evaded him.
But during their cat-and-mouse game the two
become unlikely allies. “With a film predominantly shot at
night, or in low levels of daylight, it has been fascinating
to see how much shadow detail we could pull from the
Alexa,” says Shoul. “We’ve been really impressed by its
lack of noise. The ProRes has held up very well on the big
screen and translated beautifully to film to create the
‘neon noir’ look the director wanted.”
Lipsync
Lipsync has won the contract to provide post-production
services for Falcón a £6million, 4x60min crime drama
produced by Mammoth Screen for Sky Atlantic.
The series, due for transmission later in 2012, is based
on the best-selling novels by Robert Wilson, and follows
Javier Falcón, a chief inspector in the Seville police
whose personal and professional life is as dark as some
of the crimes he investigates. The first two episodes are
being directed by Pete Travis (Vantage Point, Endgame).
The producer is Julia Stannard, who worked with LipSync
on BBC2’s poignant Munich air-crash drama United.
35
Toby Tomkins
Toby Tomkins of TJT Film is one of the growing band
of small DI practitioners. After finishing the grade on
January, a British independent thriller by FaceFilms, shot
on the RED MX by DP Gary Shaw, Tomkins come on
board as colourist on Ill Manors, the debut feature of Ben
Drew’s (from Plan-B), which was lensed by Shaw too.
Tomkins was also the online editor on Ill Manors,
which he says made for a daunting first meeting with the
post team after they began listing the range formats this
film was shot on, including RED, ARRI Alexa, Super 16mm,
8mm, CCTV footage, DSLR timelapse and some HDCAM
shot material, not to mention around 100 VFX shots.
“Normally with RED footage, as we used on January
with great success, I would decode the RED files using the
RedLogFilm gamma curve, giving us a log film-scan-like
image to work with,” says Tomkins. “But with the range
of source formats and colour spaces on Ill Manors we
decided to conform everything non-RED to 2K, 16:9,
Rec709 before starting. The VFX team (from Envy) began
VFX work at 1920x1080, so these were carefully upscaled
along with all non-RED media, mostly using DaVinci’s builtin
‘optical quality’ scaling. All the RED media was graded
natively with a full-res premium debayer, scaled to 2K.”
Tomkins graded the film at Tate Post in a DaVinci
Resolve V8 grading suite he has set up there with a 2010
Dual CPU MacPro with a Cubix PCIe Expander housing 3
NVidia GTX 480 graphics cards and a RedRocket card,
monitoring via a Decklink HD Extreme 3D to a Sony OLED
broadcast reference monitor. For storage he used a
24TB 8-drive SAS RAID array from RentARaid.co.uk. For
grading control he used a Tangent Wave control panel
and a Wacom Intuos tablet.
“This was Ben Drew’s (AKA Plan-B) first feature, and
during the first stages of the grade we experimented a
lot and set various looks to experiment with later. After
Gary got involved we began to form a look together
that was dramatically interesting and fairly high contrast,
but which kept a natural feel to complement Gary’s
handheld camerawork and the story. Some of the more
dramatic scenes were given special attention and have
a much stronger look inspired by films like City Of God
and Sexy Beast,” says Tomkins.
There were some matching issues with the different
source formats and some of the VFX shots, but these
were smoothed out over several passes using DaVinci’s
custom curves.
“There was one particularly difficult scene, which was
shot in daylight with ND but without an IR filter, and the
blacks had different tints dependent on the IR radiation.
The real difficulty was in the added exposure this gave
the blacks. To compensate we made the scene fairly
high contrast and keyed the tint where strongest.
Unfortunately, due to the high amount of movement in
the scene and character interaction, we had to do a
shot wide selection and so some pink/purple clothing
lost some saturation but the result was a better balanced
image that suited the scene,” he explains.
There were several screenings throughout the
grading process and so the film was output several times
and reconformed several times. There were also editorial
changes made half way into the grade. DaVinci’s
reconform tools and XML support helped to streamline
the process, letting Tomkins and Shaw focus on the
grade more then the reconforms.
In total the online, grade and conform took 40 days.
For final preview Tomkins set up the DaVinci suite at Soho
Screening Rooms (Mr Youngs) in Screen 1, a 44 seat 2K
DCI Barco Projector Cinema, and spent a day putting
the final touches on.
“It was a real treat to grade in a cinema with DCI
projection on a large screen and it really helped us fine
tune the film for theatrical release,” he says.
The DCP was handled by Arts Alliance Media who
did the 3D LUT conversion from the 2K Rec709 master.
Technicolor is handling the film-out, also from the 2k 709
master. The film releases on June 4th 2012.
British Cinematographer
Covering International Cinematography
www.britishcinematographer.co.uk
Issue 051 ––– May 2012
FotoKem
FotoKem has appointed Joseph Slomka as its VP and
principal colour scientist for digital post-production and
creative picture services.
Slomka will spearhead the execution of color
science, management and best practices for FotoKem’s
extensive picture production chain, from location
services to distribution masters. Before joining the
FotoKem team, Slomka served for six years as colour
scientist at Sony Pictures Imageworks, managing
the colour pipeline for over 30 major studio pictures
in addition to multiple facility projects. His extensive
industry experience also includes working closely with
the Science and Technology Council of the Academy
of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in the development
of the Image Interchange Framework (IIF) and the
Academy Color Encoding Specifications (ACES).
Company 3 LA
Stefan Sonnenfeld graded Universal Pictures’ Battleship,
lensed by Tobias Schliessler with Peter Berg directing,
and Paramount Pictures’ G.I. Joe: Retaliation, lensed by
Stephen Windon ACS with Jon M. Chu at the helm. For
Prometheus, director Ridley Scott has returned to the
world of outer-space horror that was the setting of his first
breakout feature Alien.
The film, starring Charlize Theron and Michael
Fassbender, and shot in 3D by Dariusz Wolski ASC, is set in
the shadowy darkness of deep space where something
scary could jump out at any moment. Company 3
LA Colorist Stephen Nakamura made use of DaVinci
Resolve’s aperture correction feature to add a little bit
of sharpening to small, isolated portions of the frame, a
technique he also used with Scott for Robin Hood.
“I could apply the effect to a face or an object
in the frame,” the colorist says, “and as soon as the
film cuts to that shot, your eye is drawn to that exact
spot. It’s almost like subliminally limiting the depth-offield
in the shot and it can be very effective. But whilst
the effect looks perfect through 3D glasses, it doesn’t
work the same for the 2D version. Those glasses soften
everything including the effect. For the 2D version, I
have to decrease the effect for every shot we used it
in, because without the glasses that level of sharpening
looks excessive and artificial.”
EFILM LA
EFILM LA’s Steve Scott worked with DP Bill Pope and
director Barry Sonnenfeld to grade Columbia Pictures’
Men In Black III, and with DP Seamus McGarvey BSC
ASC on Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures’ The Avengers
directed by Joss Whedon. Colourist Yvan Lucas graded
Universal Pictures’ Snow White And The Huntsman, lensed
by Greig Fraser ACS and directed by Rupert Sanders,
plus the DreamWorks picture People Like Us, shot by
Salvatore Totino and directed by Alex Kurtzman.
Meanwhile Natasha Leonnet, dialled in the DI grade
on the Kirk Jones-helmed What To Expect When You’re
Expecting for Lionsgate, shot by Xavier Pérez Grobet.
Soundfirm
Soundfirm, the renowned Australian feature soundmixing
and editing facility has invested in a Mistika 2K
finishing system with advanced DI colour grading and
stereo 3D options. Soundfirm is located at Fox Studios in
Sydney, and has premises in Melbourne and Beijing.
Digitaline
Digitaline, a cutting-edge visual effects post house,
based in the centre of Paris, has stepped up its colour
grading capabilities, by purchasing a Mistika HD and DI
post production system.
Film Factory
The Paris-based post house, helped to finish Relativity
Media’s recently released Mirror Mirror, Tarsem Singh’s
stylized retelling of the Snow White tale, lensed by
Brendan Galvin. Lionel Kopp, founder of Film Factory and
one of the world’s leading colourists, used Digital Vision’s
Nucoda Film Master, which marries a powerful on-set
solution to the final colour pass. The Film Master system,
which included a SAN and Nucoda Fuse assist station,
was installed on set in Montreal. From the set, Kopp
did a grading pass of the Sony F35 dailies, which were
then sent to the editing room with the colour settings. In
some cases, a further grading took place prior to dailies
screening in the DI suite with the director and crew.
Designing this system meant that the dailies – from the
set through screening and ultimately delivery – were kept
in a closely matched, carefully monitored environment.
Kopp graded every take from the first day of dailies
through to the completion of the DI. Colourist Marc
Boucrot also worked on the project for Film Factory.
There were nearly 1,300 visual effects shots in the
movie, and Kopp states, “The Nucoda enabled us to
have one central hub, where dailies colour settings,
visual effects and eventually the DI was managed. There
were VFX vendors from all over the world, but the VFX
Supervisor, Tom Wood, was in house with us in Montreal
during the shoot, and in the post production building
at Wildfire Studios in Los Angeles where editing, sound
editing and mixing, and DI rooms were all together. As
VFX shots came in, we were able to look at them in the
DI rooms and see how they were working. The ability to
have all of these activities going on in one location, our
facility, was crucial given the timeframe and the visual
style of the movie. Helping Tarsem execute his vision
for Mirror Mirror was our first priority. Every project we
undertake is an artistic and technical process, and we
plan and execute how to do that in the best way, from
day one to the final delivery.”