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MillimeterOne-man Pipeline
Feb 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
James Longley Uses DV Camcorders, Final Cut Pro, and Ingenuity to Produce Sundance Award-winning Documentary.
Taking on the roles of director, cameraman, sound designer, co-editor, and co-producer, James Longley capitalized on affordable digital technologies to produce Sundance winner Iraq in Fragments.
While most of the attention paid to James Longley's documentary film Iraq in Fragments understandably revolves around the project's political nature and critical acclaim (the film won three Sundance Film Festival awards in the Independent Film and Documentary competitions), the technical hurdles the project grappled with are also significant. Longley directed, co-edited, co-produced, scored, shot, and recorded all audio for the documentary.
The movie won best documentary directing, cinematography, and editing honors at Sundance — quite an achievement considering Longley was limited to DV cameras, no audio or lighting package, and a single crew member (himself) during two years of taping in war-torn Iraq. The lessons he absorbed during production illustrate the innovative nature of documentary filmmaking.
“I needed cameras that were small enough not to attract undue attention and lightweight enough to run with,” he says. “And I only used available light — most of the time it would have been impossible [to light subjects] anyway. I was working without a crew, getting around in taxis, and there was no electricity at least half the time. Ironically, the constant power outages in Iraq actually worked to my technical advantage — when there is no electricity, the sound quality is much improved by the absence of noise from fans, air-conditioners, and the flickering of fluorescent lighting.”
Production in Iraq
Longley began production with a Panasonic AG-DVX100 MiniDV camcorder, and in 2004, he upgraded to the AG-DVX100A. A key reason for selecting these cameras was to capture at 24p in anticipation of an eventual 35mm filmout.
“I shot my previous documentary [Gaza Strip] using a Sony DSR-500 camcorder, which is a fine camera, but there are several drawbacks to using an expensive, on-the-shoulder camera for war-zone documentaries,” he says. “The first, obviously, is the fact that the camera is too large. For this film, I wanted something small and lightweight, and the DVX100 series was better in that regard, and it was less expensive, which meant I could bring more than one camera. In this kind of environment during a multi-year production period, you need camera redundancy in the field — certainly in a place like Iraq.
“The other big thing was the fact that I could shoot progressive-scan at true 24fps. Using the 24p Advanced Pulldown mode, letter-boxed, made perfect sense, since I wanted to master to HDCAM 24p and then record out to 35mm film. The blowups in this mode were superior, which has everything to do with progressive-scan imaging. … So I started with the DVX100 before the DVX100A was released, and, after recording a few hundred hours of material, I switched to the DVX100A in 2004. The biggest difference I saw with that switch was the fact that you notice immediately that the blacks are cleaner and the highlights don't blow out as easily. So I finished up with the DVX100A, but kept the DVX100 as a backup camera and as a digitizing deck.”
In order to ensure that he remained in 24p Advanced Pulldown mode throughout the shoot, Longley set his camera scene dial to the F6 setting and taped the switch down with gaffer tape. He adds that he managed to keep both cameras running with no maintenance help. “[This was] thanks largely to the self-cleaning heads on the cameras,” he says. “I never had to service the recording heads during my two years in Iraq, which was a good thing considering there was nowhere in Iraq to service them. It's a completely dust-filled environment, so I eventually took to taping all the openings in the camera closed with gaffer tape, and then peeling off the tape when I needed to change DV tapes. It was a meticulous and time-consuming process, but it did help keep the inside of the camera clean.”
Longley opted not to use any optical adapters for the standard DVX100 series lens, and he constantly kept a skylight filter over the lens. “I would clean the filter with a normal lens cleaning kit, and when the filter became scratched or abraded, I would just put on another one immediately, so I never touched the actual camera lens during cleaning,” he explains.
“I recorded all audio on the camera, using a Sony short shotgun microphone with a Rycote Softie wind-cover,” Longley says. “Sometimes, for interviews, I would use a wired Tram lavalier mic clipped to the subject. For recording music, I would occasionally use both microphones at once, recording onto both XLR channels of the camera. Because the DVX100 can record uncompressed 16-bit, 48kHz audio, the quality was excellent. I always set my levels manually, on the fly, to get a more naturalistic dynamic range.
“Then, in postproduction, I used a dense, layered approach to audio. I wanted to create complex, three-dimensional audio spaces for all scenes, so most of the time there is anywhere from eight to 24 channels of audio playing at once. At each filming location, I constructed several layers of location sound that we would later spread into the [left-right] and surround channels, and then, on top of those, there were multiple layers of music, dialogue, ambience, and so forth. We exported all audio as OMF files from our [Apple] Final Cut Pro timeline, and eventually brought it all to Bad Animals [Seattle], where they created a final Dolby Digital mix in [Digidesign] Pro Tools. The final mix lasted seven days, and whenever we ran into a section that felt a little empty, I would go back through my DV tape library and find location sound that fit the scene, prepare it in Logic Pro, and bring it to Bad Animals the next day, where they would add it to the mix. We wound up with huge folders of ambient location sound. It was probably a more complicated sound approach than most documentaries take, but I think it paid off.”
Editing
While still in Iraq, Longley began editing the movie using Final Cut Pro 4 on a 17in. Macintosh G4 laptop. He says that portion of the editing phase was particulary valuable for plotting out the film's general structure, and for logging and translating the dialogue for all the material he captured.
When he first went to Iraq, he brought with him four 500GB LaCie hard drives, so that he could work on more than 200 hours of digitized material at any one time at full resolution. Then, in April 2005, he returned to the United States and joined forces with Seattle-based editors and co-winners Fiona Otway and Billy McMillin to finish the edit.
“We added a G5 tower to the mix, upgraded to Final Cut Pro 5, divided the story into separate sections with different story lines and characters, and we each then took turns editing a section, trading off, switching sections, and making changes and improvements to each other's work,” Longley explains. “Each section of the film had its own 500GB LaCie drive, and a fat binder of translations and notes, with each sentence transcribed with timecode notations. That was required since the entire film is in Arabic and Kurdish [with English subtitles].”
As the editing process progressed, the Sundance Documentary Fund eventually stepped forward and gave Longley a production grant to finish the film. After locking the picture last November and putting all three chapters into a single Final Cut Pro timeline, Longley and his new editing team removed the scratch subtitles and rough color corrections they had previously created in Final Cut Pro, and exported the entire documentary out as an SD TIF sequence, amounting to 132,000 frames.
They brought those pieces to Modern Digital, Seattle, on a 250GB LaCie drive, and there the movie was upconverted to HD. Then, colorist Bill Lord put the whole movie through a final color correction pass using a Da Vinci 2K system.
Iraq in Fragments was then recorded out to HDCAM, and McMillin added all subtitles as HD-size TIFs in Modern Digital's Final Cut Pro suite.
“We then broke the whole thing into five reels for 35mm and exported off the timeline as 10-bit HD QuickTime files,” says Longley. “We took those QuickTime reels to Alpha Cine Labs [Seattle], where the 35mm record-out was performed, with a final print color grade added. The whole thing was married to the Dolby Digital optical track that we had previously mixed at Bad Animals and printed at NT Audio [Santa Monica, Calif.]”
Overall, Longley gives great credit to the Panasonic DVX cameras for his success with the project. But, that said, he hopes to shoot his next documentary in HD, possibly using the Panasonic HVX200 HD camcorder, as opposed to trying an HDV camera system.
“I'm less interested in cameras that use the inter-frame compression of HDV for the work I do,” he says. “I don't think the HDV format will hold up well enough in post to be ideal for [projects that finish to film]. But the HDVX200 camera presents its own set of production issues, as well. For example, anyone working for extended periods in the field with the HVX200 will have to develop a very solid, reliable system for archiving many terabytes of HD video data, and that's not an easy problem to solve. But for the superior results of high-quality HD recording, I think it will be worth the extra effort.”
Sundance ‘06
God Grew Tired of Us
Grand Jury Prize: Documentary
Audience Award: Documentary
Quinceañera
Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic
Audience Award: Dramatic
In the Pit
World Cinema Jury Prize: Documentary
13 Tzameti
World Cinema Jury Prize: Dramatic
De Nadie
World Cinema Audience Award: Documentary
No. 2
World Cinema Audience Award: Dramatic
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
