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MillimeterConfiguring Comandante
Apr 1, 2003 12:00 PM, by Michael Goldman
Adventures in Editing Oliver Stone's Documentary
 Fidel Castro sat down for more than 30 hours of interviews with Oliver Stone. Editors later sifted through that material to produce the 99-minute documentary. |
Before bringing his video conversation with Cuba's Fidel Castro to HBO (at press time, HBO announced it was delaying the documentary's TV debut indefinitely) and the Sundance Film Festival, director Oliver Stone produced more than 30 hours of source material for offline, online, and sound editors to sort through. The first step in producing the documentary, Comandante, was having DP Rodrigo Prieto and operator Carlos Marcovich tape the unscripted chats using two Sony PD-150 MiniDV cameras. Stone then asked two editors to separately plow through that material, sprinkle in pieces of archival footage, and collaborate to produce a 99-minute rough cut, later finished by artists at Riot Santa Monica.
Offline
Editors Alex Marquez (Hyena Editorial, Santa Monica) and Elisa Bonora (Harley's House, Santa Monica) individually cut the piece on Avid Media Composer systems. Stone later met with them to merge their two visions into an official offline.
“We digitized all the footage twice, worked separately on our Avids, and then we periodically met and compared the work we each did,” says Bonora. “We actually worked as if we were separate editors, and then Oliver brought us together. I would argue for why I cut something a certain way, and Alex would do the same, and then Oliver would tell Alex to ‘do something’ with my cut, or vice versa, so that in the end, the material was truly a combination of our efforts.”
Bonora adds that she enjoyed the unorthodox collaboration because it gave her a chance to experience other approaches to the same work. “I always wonder, what would another editor do with the same footage, and this approach gave me a chance to find out. I know I definitely learned from Alex. It was interesting that we each were passionate and fought for cuts that we believed in, but in the end, the point was to present Oliver Stone's vision of his visit with Castro. So we both checked our egos at the door, and the result, in my view, is something we were all happy with.”
Online
Building separate HD and film masters of the documentary took about six months' worth of digital, tape-to-tape color correction, editing, titling, and 35mm film output work at Riot. Company artists first had to create a DV master, and then they up-rezzed that material to HD resolution and output it to film to build the film master that eventually premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January.
“This was a challenging documentary because we had to match everything — just matching the MiniDV material together was complicated,” says Clark Mueller, senior colorist on the tape-to-tape build of the video master. “I worked on it on our da Vinci 2k system, and the ability to tweak little bits in Power Windows was really crucial.”
Riot editor Randy Lauder eventually conformed the DV master after Mueller had finished. That master served as the benchmark for the film master that, although planned from the beginning, suddenly became an accelerated priority when Stone decided to premiere the piece at Sundance. In just a few weeks, according to Riot scanning and recording manager Matt McFarland, Riot up-rezzed the piece and recorded it to film in time for Stone to take the film version to Deluxe Laboratories for additional color tweaking.
“The idea was to hold up the integrity of the color-correction work that Clark did on the da Vinci for the original video master,” says McFarland. “We had to match that version, so there was a big issue in figuring out how to up-convert it all, and then, how to record out from high-def so that we had all the details right. Oliver was very particular about the shadows and how Castro appears. He didn't want to lose that detail in Castro's face, which was a concern regarding the up-rez, since they shot MiniDV and there were no movie lighting setups in Cuba.”
The up-rez solution was simply to use different conversion boxes for different pieces of the documentary, according to McFarland. “We used a combination of things, depending on the material in question. We used Discreet software — Fire — for some things and a UFC [universal format converter] for other pieces, mostly.”
In shooting the piece out to film, Riot chose a new film recorder — the Producer 2 Digital Cine Film Recorder from Lasergraphics, Irvine, Calif. “We chose that system because it's capable of recording high-resolution video to film at the rate of 1fps,” says McFarland. “Using it was really the only way we could make the Sundance deadline. The other important choice in going to film was the decision to shoot the piece out to 5245 Kodak stock, rather than the 5242 Intermediate stock usually used with laser recorders. We did that because we felt that stock would give Oliver a bit more of a color curve to play with in sitting through the traditional color-timing session at Deluxe to tweak the film.”
Sound Mix
Using an AMS Logic 2 console, mixer Mitch Dorf of POP Sound, Santa Monica, took charge of producing both the theatrical 5.1 surround mix and the two-track stereo mix for HBO. Dorf says Stone emphasized that the documentary was meant to be dialogue-driven. Therefore, Dorf had to concentrate on cleaning up, restoring, and matching pieces of the ongoing conversations, which came from different sound sources, recorded both to DAT and MiniDV tapes using lavalier, camera, and boom mics, as well as archival material. Dorf also had to make sure Castro's off-mic interpreter's voice became a seamless element in the conversation.
“The challenge was to find a uniform sound between these sources and make it as seamless as possible,” says Dorf. “For whatever audio that came from sources other than the lav mics, I had to rely on my sound-restoration tools to match material from those other sources with the primary dialogue tracks. The other big challenge was dealing with Castro's interpreter. The film has subtitles for Castro's dialogue, since he speaks only Spanish throughout the documentary. His interpreter, who has been with him for more than 30 years, is audible off-mic most of the time. At times, she seems to know what he's going to say, and interprets it even before he finishes speaking. It was amazing how she translated back and forth from Spanish to English, English to Spanish, while Castro and Oliver were still talking. There was rarely a pause where she wasn't audible. This made it extremely difficult to find easy places to edit.”
Dorf also had to handle the stock footage audio carefully because much of it came from old, grainy pieces of rare film.
“These were historic Castro speeches from very old sources,” says Dorf. “I tried to clean up those tracks, but when I'm involved in a documentary like this, I'm a firm believer in not taking away from the integrity of old, historic recordings. These recordings have a certain sound, and I tried to improve on their clarity without compromising their foundation. There was a lot of decision-making involved — analyzing each sound file and deciding how far to clean it up.”
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
