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Chasing the Perfect Pipeline

Jan 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman

How Craig Brewer, Amy Vincent, and Billy Fox Nailed their Workflow.

 Exclusive Sundance Podcasts
With Director Craig Brewer
With Editor Billy Fox
With Colorist Walter Volpatto

The digital post workflow philosophy behind Craig Brewer's new psycho-sexual drama, Black Snake Moan, which premiered at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, slowly evolved over the course of several years into what producer John Singleton calls “the best way to make movies.”

“We now have high-end HD dailies and previews, and those previews are phenomenal,” Singleton says. “Back in the day, when I started, everything was analog and on film, and you had to send stuff to the lab and wait a couple days to see how the optical would turn out. Now, all that has changed. This project exemplifies the interesting things that have happened with post in the last seven or eight years. You can do what took months in weeks now, you can greatly reduce post time, and do all your color correction digitally — basically never going back to touch the negative again. Now, the negative is just a springboard for everything else. It's a big improvement, and this is definitely how I always want to work.”

The Approach

The basic approach Singleton is describing, as manifested on Black Snake Moan, involves shooting the movie on Super 35 and going tapeless from telecine onward — transferring HD dailies to hard drives for periodic remote viewing and collaboration; editing picture and sound in Apple Final Cut Pro; constantly creating and exhibiting test versions of the movie in HD; and eventually performing a digital intermediate under the same roof and infrastructure as the HD dailies and preview versions.

One central pillar of this approach was Brewer's and Singleton's editor/technical guru Billy Fox, to whom Singleton refers as the team's “secret weapon” and the man who spearheaded the project's pipeline design. The second was a close partnership with FotoKem, Burbank, Calif., where virtually the entire movie was pieced together following principal photography. Fox says this methodology has roots that go back a few years.

“The template goes back to [Michael Schultz's film], Woman Thou Art Loosed [2004], for which we used Avid Xpress Pro and [standard-def] digital dailies, with temp dubs all out of the box, and then a DI,” Fox says. “When I got together with John and Craig, we applied it to Hustle & Flow [2005]. For that one, we shot 16mm, and still used Avid and standard-def dailies, but we brought the whole process, including the DI, to FotoKem, and we all had a very good experience. When Black Snake Moan came along, we decided to go back to working this way, but with the variation of switching over to Final Cut Pro and finally doing true HD dailies for the first time. Final Cut Pro offered us the chance to do pro-quality soundtrack work through Final Cut Studio, and the technology dovetails nicely with Soundtrack Pro for sound work and Motion software for title design.

“We now telecine dailies to HD, … and we edit in HD the rest of the way, also doing audio out of the box, using 20 tracks of audio. We now have the possibility of editing the movie on Monday morning and showing it on a big-screen in a theater on Tuesday night. … Working with FotoKem, we [hope to eventually] be able to digitize during telecine, and that will be yet another step forward in terms of doing things more efficiently.”

Brewer, who is directing his second consecutive film for the producing team of Singleton and Stephanie Allain following Hustle & Flow, says this last point of efficiency cannot be understated. “The big advancement, from my point of view as the director, was doing HD dailies this time,” he says. “I got crystal-clear DVD dailies, where we could see [DP Amy Vincent's] gorgeous work up front. Before this, the problem with digital dailies was the fact that it was distracting seeing burn-ins and artifacts. The way we always wanted to edit was to put in music and sound and write at the same time we are editing, and then seeing a complete picture of all that in front of us. Now we have the ability to do that. Then, you can project it digitally for an audience and get instant reaction that you can immediately take back to the editing room. When you are striving for a specific look, this is an invaluable way of working. It put us right into our comfort zone, and I think the movie benefited. This workflow is an example of a way that you can make smaller-budget movies look more expensive — or at least embrace the kind of narrative that lends itself to your story without spending more than you have available.”

The Look

Brewer and his colleagues were particularly concerned about the nuanced details of their imagery, because they designed a very specific look for the piece. The movie is set in the Deep South, and stylized imagery befitting that setting and the experiences of the characters was crucial to telling the story. Brewer says he was inspired by gritty photographs illustrating hot, muggy southern days and nights, and particular colors that were emphasized in those photographs, such as orange.

“There is nothing like summer in the South — so much moisture in the air, putting a kind of saturation into all the colors — a heightened realism,” Vincent says. “It was important to both Craig and I to make sure we did not have the feeling of hard sunlight. If you visit the rural South in the summer, there is almost 100-percent humidity, and that gives light a softer quality. Shooting in an exterior farm location [in Mississippi], that was a bit of a challenge. I used a large [lighting] grid as an overhead diffusion device on a construction crane for certain day exterior scenes to ensure that we captured that humid, high level of particles in the air, through soft light.”

Vincent shot the film on Super 35, four-perf, Kodak Vision2 5212 film stock for day exterior work and 5218 for interiors and night exteriors, using Panavision PFX-P Platinum Panaflex cameras, and, almost exclusively, Panavision prime lenses, rather than zooms. The decision to shoot Super 35, she says, was largely a creative decision due to the nature of the story.

“Christina Ricci's character is lying down for probably half of the movie, and the prone human form lends itself compositionally to the widescreen format,” Vincent says. “Everything from Samuel L. Jackson's guitar to a double-wide trailer in the middle of nowhere — lots of things informed that choice.”

Although Vincent says there was never any discussion of shooting the movie with digital cameras, she says the project benefited greatly from the HD dailies approach. “What FotoKem did was develop a way to take those HD dailies and turn them into QuickTime files,” Vincent says. “They calibrated my 23in. Apple Cinema Display monitor, and sent me DVDs with the HD dailies as QuickTime files for loading each day into my Mac G5 computer, which only took about 10 minutes per disc. I could then view them as QuickTime files. The other cool thing was that I could store the entire movie on my computer, up to what I was shooting on a particular day. With the privilege of having color-timed some test footage at FotoKem photochemically, I could always use that as a ground-zero reference point, to evaluate the work accurately — far better than I could viewing [film] dailies at an independent theater whose projection facility was not quite up to snuff. What I learned working with FotoKem this way was that if you pay attention to details each step of the way, from calibration of the monitor to communication with your colorist, you can evaluate things [digitally] with absolute commitment and understanding, rather than having it be a leap of faith.”

The DI

With this workflow, plugging the digital intermediate into the process was seamless, according to filmmakers, and crucial to the final look of the film. At one point, using FotoKem's monitor calibration prowess, Vincent even participated in the DI remotely when she was traveling on another project — part of a process FotoKem officials say the company is developing for future projects. That process involved further calibrating her 23in. Apple Cinema Display monitor to view specially treated still frames passed through a proprietary LUT and containing metadata, allowing her monitor to display them in close proximity to what colorist Walter Volpatto and others were viewing in the DI suite at FotoKem.

“[The quality of the imagery was] more than enough to get me to be able to sign off on a first pass of preliminary color correction, allowing Walter to then proceed without me if I was traveling,” Vincent says. As it turned out, however, Vincent did not have to use the remote system extensively on the project, because her travel burden eased up early in the DI process. But Fox — who worked closely with Paul Chapman, FotoKem's senior VP of technology, to develop the process — says the method has great potential for keeping traveling cinematographers and others involved in the DI process after principal photography is complete, even when their travel schedules would normally interfere.

“FotoKem did it utilizing TruLight color management and proprietary software information embedded in the actual files, so that they could be sent as still frames, on a frame-by-frame basis, to the DP for approval,” Fox says. “The files are encrypted and sent through any quality broadband connection to an FTP site. DPs often have to travel to their next job during the DI, so this is an opportunity to keep them involved while allowing them to see the same thing the colorist is seeing. That can be a very positive development on projects like this one.”

A similar approach was used for debating and approving various color schemes during the editorial phase, when Fox would lay down a template for final color correction in Final Cut Pro, and also create font, color, and size templates for titles while editing the movie. All of these things were part of FotoKem's attempt to move the project into what Fox calls “finishing mode” early in the editorial process.

By the time the movie was handed off to Volpatto for the DI, he was able to perform all conforming and color-correction work within his Quantel Pablo (iQ-based) system. Rand Gladden, FotoKem's senior VP, says the company developed the notion of using iQ as the single conform/asset management/color correction tool for the DI even before Pablo came to the facility.

“This movie was turned over to us for the DI on a Friday and, by the end of the next week, they were starting to finalize the color correction,” Gladden says. “The DI might still take as much time for color as it did in the past, but now, more of that time is used for creative purposes, as opposed to waiting for paint to dry.”

And there were lots of creative tweaks performed on Black Snake Moan during the DI process. Brewer refers to pushing much of the imagery — attempting to make what he calls “the lush greenness” of the locations a bit darker, among other things.

But the biggest DI tweak on the project, by far, was a drug hallucination scene involving Ricci's character as she leaves a party. “The character is pounding back cough pills and syrup,” Brewer says. “People talk about a heavy blue hue across the eyes — everything a deep blue — when in a drug haze, and we wanted to create that. She is hearing people as though they are far away, and so on. We used the DI to create that effect, so that the audience would feel that buzz, so to speak. Amy Vincent, Billy Fox, and Walter Volpatto were the heroes of how that came together.”

Fox explains that this blue hue look was initially conceptualized during the editorial phase, creating a highly evolved template for the DI. “Craig Brewer and I first created this look with the color correction tools in Final Cut Pro,” Fox says. “It was very close to what was later finalized in the DI. We used the FCP version for all of our previews, and it proved to be very effective. When it came time to move into the DI, we merely put up the 720p FCP output and used that as a starting point. In the past, you would be looking at another monitor, probably standard-def, and say that this is ‘kind of’ what were looking for. In this process, it was up on the big screen, and we were able to say, ‘This is exactly what we want, and how can you improve it from here?’ It was a major time-saver and a creative conduit that worked perfectly.”

Still, Volpatto explains, building on an HD foundation for DI work on such scenes requires the colorist to labor to get the right look. “You basically try to find the best compromise in terms of color and quality that you possibly can in terms of achieving what [filmmakers] had in mind,” he says. “In that [drug] flashback scene, the blue they chose [in HD] was very deep — a very pure blue. That kind of blue simply does not exist in film. So we slightly changed the hue of that blue in the DI to find another version we could replicate very well that would be close enough to the original creative intent of the decision they made with the HD dailies.”

Volpatto also emphasizes how important the Quantel Pablo system was to his efforts. “I do the conform and the color correction myself, and by being able to tweak edits, visual effects or graphics myself in one platform, rather than having to spread out jobs to different rooms and different facilities, we can be a lot more flexible,” he says. “I recall one scene they shot in a club with people singing and dancing, and during the DI, we saw something they didn't see while editing the movie — a crew member was visible in a window and had to be removed. In another facility, that is a visual effect. In our case, I did the replacement myself and we never had to stop and move to another room for that little fix.”

Fox also raves about FotoKem's ability using its Imagica XE Advanced scanner to efficiently scan film throughout the editorial process, long before picture was locked. He says this ability gave him the advantage of swiftly moving conformed reels to the sound department for syncing purposes. “That lets [the sound department] make judgments based on the highest-quality version available, and that really sped things up,” he says. “It's the start of where we want to go in the future, and we're working with FotoKem to achieve that — to scan during telecine, and to have less of a dividing line between the editorial process and the DI process, bringing those two worlds closer together. That way, visual effects and especially sound can start up long before we lock anything. That's the direction we are going with this workflow — it's not so much a handoff as it is a connected flow between [editorial] and the finishing phase.”

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.