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DI for a Geisha

Dec 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman

How One Cinematographer Set His Look.

 Digital Content Producer's and Millimeter's coverage of past and present award nominees/winners

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Geisha Sounds

Dion Beebe, ASC, recently emerged from the jungles of Uruguay, where he had been shooting Miami Vice for director Michael Mann, just in time to fly to Los Angeles from Miami for a one-day visit. The point of the journey was to give Beebe a chance to check out the final filmout of his previous project — Rob Marshall's Memoirs of a Geisha.

It was Beebe's first chance to see Geisha after it emerged from the digital intermediate process — a process he had to jump in and out of due to his loaded shooting schedule.

The Geisha DI, performed at Technicolor Digital Intermediates (TDI), Burbank, Calif., however, still had Beebe's imprint on it, thanks to the construction of a template for the DI up front, involving Beebe, Marshall, editor Pietro Scalia, ACE, and colorist Scott Gregory. That effort involved two intense days at Technicolor early in the DI process, during which filmmakers set a look for each major scene. Gregory was then able to use those references throughout the color-correction process on his Da Vinci 2K system, supervised by Marshall and Scalia while Beebe was away.

“I flew to Los Angeles just before leaving for the Dominican Republic [to shoot Miami Vice],” Beebe told Millimeter during his Los Angeles visit, moments after finishing his check of the final Geisha reels at Deluxe Labs, Hollywood, Calif. “I spent the weekend with Scott Gregory and Rob Marshall going through selected shots. We color-timed specific shots from specific scenes, and then saved them in [TDI's framestore system within the Da Vinci's gallery function], and moved on to the next one. That is a great advantage of the DI technology — we can create reference frames, store them indefinitely, and be satisfied those references will be applied to other frames along the way. I was comfortable by the time I left for the Dominican Republic that we had our look set.”

That look involved a subtle, painterly use of specific colors and lighting approaches, dictated by particular environments and seasonal changes in 1930s Japan, where the story takes place.

“We wanted a visual style that evoked a lavish epic journey, but it had to have a sense of reality — not just beautiful images that lacked a sense of place,” says Beebe. “So we evolved the palette depending on the environment, which motivated color and light choices.”

Most of that look was well established on Beebe's original negative, captured primarily on Kodak Vision2 500T Color Negative Film 5218 and Vision 200T 5274 — especially since, at the outset, it was not clear that the film would be undergoing a digital intermediate. However, as it became apparent that a DI was in the offing, Beebe says it was important to resist the temptation to try every option available.

“You get so many more options suddenly, and we have lots of subtle colors that it would be tempting to experiment with,” he says. “There is the thought of amping up the color and adjusting contrast more, but I had stressed throughout production that I wanted to protect the mid tones, and that meant resisting that urge. It's a movie rich in texture, and a lot of work went into building the sets and costumes, and they gave us what we envisioned during production. During the DI, we mainly wanted to dig into those mid tones and make sure we didn't crush down the blacks and bring in too much chroma.”

This is not to say the same movie would have emerged from a photochemical color-timing approach. Gregory points out the DI was useful in several places for subtle, secondary color correction work, contrast adjustments, and assuring the filmic, painterly vision of the filmmakers was adhered to — more than what they were able to see using HD dailies, created at a different facility, during production.

“We opened up gamma a little bit in certain places, brought back detail into some shadows far more than the stark, contrasty look of the dailies,” says Gregory. “In several scenes, we also achieved more of a down mood by desaturating the entire frame, making it more flat and desaturated with the Da Vinci 2K. And then, of course, there was extensive use of Power Windows in frames where we had to enhance or de-enhance particular objects or characters. We did quite a bit of balancing out frames, particularly faces of key characters in the frames, including placing vignettes in certain master shots a few times. Beyond that, we fine-tuned lots of colors, rotating hues around to get them to where Rob and Dion wanted them.”

In particular, this approach helped filmmakers adjust close-ups on faces of women caked with white makeup in the style of the era, Gregory adds.

“The white makeup absorbed color of any light that was reflected on it,” he says. “So we spent quite a bit of time with Power Windows and secondary color correction and selective color balancing on those frames, meaning that we color-corrected the highlights more than any other part of the signal. That got the makeup more bluish-white, so that in a room of yellow or orange light, the color came through.

“Dion gave us such a beautiful negative to begin with, so the work we had to do was more subtle. The beauty of the DI is that we can use it in this way to help the cinematographer and director get closer to their original vision, largely because we have the control — the ability to stop, inspect, and change the frame in intimate detail.”

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Geisha Sounds

According to Wylie Stateman, supervising sound editor at Soundelux, Hollywood, Calif., the delicate care put into crafting imagery for Memoirs of a Geisha was matched by the work behind the film's soundtrack. Stateman says, “The soundtrack was handcrafted by a small, intimate team [less than a dozen artists] that paid the utmost attention to the smallest nuances, combining even the subtlest sound elements together seamlessly.”

As part of this effort, the sound team sometimes went to extreme lengths. For instance, Sateman explains, “[We chose microphones] based on the quality and tenor of each voice, matching subtle differences in microphone technology to specific voices.”

Among the mics selected for such wide-ranging applications were a Soundelux U-95S mic for ADR voiceover work, B&K omnidirectional mics in Crown Sass-B housing for recording crowds, Sonotrim lavalier and Sennheiser MKH 60 condensor mics for recording character dialogue, and a series of Neumann KMR 81 mics for recording foley.

Many of those choices revolved around what Stateman calls a particularly challenging dialogue situation. Since most of the principal actors did not speak English as their native language, Stateman says, “We had to try to integrate all of their delicate nuances to get them to pronounce English in a highly intelligible fashion.” Thus, Stateman and his team literally constructed words and sentences syllable by syllable.

“The dialogue is made up of syllables that were gathered from multiple sources during production and ADR recorded during production,” he says. “There is rarely an intact line from a single take. Our supervising dialogue editor, Renee Tondelli, working with [director] Rob Marshall, had a monumental job of literally crafting the dialogue track one syllable at a time. It was about placement and rhythms and examining and re-examining and polishing each performance.”

Stateman's team edited the soundtrack using a Pro Tools|HD 3 Accel system (v. 6.9.2) running on a dual-core 2.5GHz G5 workstation, while the entire film was mixed using a GLW Harrison MPC3-D digital film console.

“But the really interesting thing is how such a small crew was able to craft this soundtrack paying such attention to detail,” Stateman says. “For foley, for instance, our foley artist, Gary Hecker, spent four weeks recording sounds in a very disciplined way. We brought special wood surfaces to the foley stage and Japanese Tatami mats and Shoji screens and specific silk fabrics that we found — all designed to capture organic sound. We recorded sounds of rain falling on different surfaces over the course of more than 40 hours. It was a very disciplined effort, and it was one of very few times that I have seen people working collaboratively outside their immediate departments.”
Michael Goldman

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.