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MillimeterJunkyard Filmmaking
Jan 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
Michel Gondry and Ellen Kuras take a minimalist approach for another quirky comedy.
Robocop is one of the fake movies-within-a-movie that the film’s characters shoot themselves on VHS. In order to make it look convincing, Gondry and Kuras actually used a Panasonic VHS camcorder (although the characters use a prop RCA VHS camcorder in the film).
Effects
Thus, according to both Gondry and Kuras, very little about the fake movie clips was altered during the digital intermediate process handled by EFilm, Hollywood. To accommodate Kuras' schedule — as she wrapped Be Kind, Rewind in the New York area, she immediately transitioned into shooting footage for Martin Scorsese's upcoming Rolling Stones documentary Shine a Light (as one of several prominent DPs who participated in that project) and working on her own documentary film Nerakhoon (The Betrayal) — EFilm set up a mobile DI unit that mimicked its Hollywood configuration to let colorist Natasha Leonnet work closely with Gondry and Kuras at Post Factory, the New York-based facility that handled the film's editorial work.
The 35mm anamorphic footage was scanned in at 2K, while VHS material was up-rezzed to HD for editing and color correction during the DI and was later transferred to film at Deluxe Laboratories, Hollywood.
“I used the DI to establish certain looks,” Kuras says. “The VHS material remained, as much as possible, in the spirit of the VHS look, but the anamorphic film elements — this look was determined in the DI in terms of color palette and basic contrast and the overall look. Michel and I liked the ability to go into secondary color correction and use the DI to change the character of the blacks and the highlights in ways we couldn't do with a photochemical process. We don't use the DI to fix things as much as to create a certain look. As much as possible, we created the effects that you see in the [remake movies] in-camera.”
Indeed, while the film has a handful of CG shots (created at BUF Paris) early on — such as the opening helicopter shot and shots that explain how Black's character became magnetized and destroyed the video store's entire inventory — virtually all the jitters, scratches, and tweaks seen in the bizarre movie clips shot on VHS were created on set. That included such tricks as shooting through a whirling radiator fan to fake the look of scratches on the film from the fake Fats Waller documentary.
“It was a weird kind of rig — a fan we built to emulate the shutter of old movies,” Kuras says. “Again, it was all made from parts from the junkyard. We had wires hanging in front of the VHS rig on the skateboard to simulate scratches on the film, and we shot through the turning fan, which came from a radiator and operated with a 12V motor that we took from a little hand drill to emulate the blinking of a film shutter.”
Material shot this way was cut together into a movie clip that is screened inside the video store near the end of the movie. Kuras also filmed the climactic sequence, showing a neighborhood audience viewing the characters' movie through digital projection, on location in a practical way. The team screened the video movie for an audience of extras using a Christie LX25 XGA 2500-lumen projector, although a prop projector was used for shots where the projector is seen in the frame. For shots of the audience watching intently, Kuras projected the beam of the projection onto shiny boards, reflecting the projection back onto the faces of the characters to highlight their reactions.
“I really liked how we filmed [that sequence],” Gondry says. “That was how we got the joy in the eyes of the people in the scene. They were watching their own work, their own participation, and we showed [in that scene] how these people felt about what they had done.”
