The DI Dimension
Oct 1, 2003 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
Sidebars
Remembering Escoffier
Extending Escoffier's Cinematography
 Nicole Kidman's character on a gloomy, rainy day. Scene illustrates director Robert Benton's desire to use muted colors to create "intimate and personal portraits." |
Oscar-winning director Robert Benton was devastated at the death of cinematographer Jean-Yves Escoffier earlier this year from heart failure shortly after the two had completed working together on Benton's new film for Miramax, The Human Stain. This was the first time the pair had worked together, joining forces on shoots in Quebec and Massachusetts and then taking a “further journey,” as Benton puts it, in working with artists at Technicolor's Burbank-based digital intermediate division Technique, on the first digital intermediate for both men. By the end of that journey, Benton felt he had finally found a DP and creative partner to replace Nestor Almendros (who passed away in 1992), with whom Benton made five films, including Kramer vs. Kramer, which Benton won an Oscar for directing in 1979.
Therefore, Escoffier's untimely death in April at age 52 sadly forced Benton to search for another visual collaborator, one with whom he could share the kind of communication he had come to rely on.
“I developed the same kind of shorthand with Jean-Yves that I had with Nestor,” Benton says. “During filming [of The Human Stain], I did not suggest lenses, and I did not position the camera, and I only looked through the lens when Jean-Yves asked me to. That's how much I trusted him. And when he suggested at the beginning of the project that we should perform a digital intermediate, I agreed to do it even though I had never worked digitally before and didn't know much about it. He influenced me in that decision and beyond.”
Given his relationship with Escoffier, Benton was content to simply articulate his visual concept for the dark and complex story based on a Philip Roth novel about a college professor in a small New England town who has a secret. From that point forward, he let Escoffier dominate all technical issues, including the digital intermediate sessions at Technique, in collaboration with colorist Stephen Nakamura.
“What I told Jean-Yves was that I wanted the film to look like a handwritten postcard sent to a friend — that intimate and personal,” says Benton. “The idea was for the images to be beautiful, but not pretty. Not overdone. I did not want primary colors — I wanted the colors muted, for the most part. I wanted contrast between winter and spring, where winter is bleak and spring is bright and vivid. And I wanted the dramatic scenes at night to be dark and confrontational. But I left it all up to Jean-Yves how to get there. He told me he wanted to do the digital intermediate, and that was good enough for me. I was amazed by what they did during those sessions, and I'm a total convert now.”
DP's Vision
Escoffier was well acquainted with the tools and techniques of the digital color-timing process from his commercial work, but The Human Stain represented his first digital intermediate on a full-length motion picture. Nevertheless, according to his collaborators Benton, Nakamura, and “A” camera operator Jim McConkey, the DP was wholly committed to the principal that the process should be used to make “subtle changes to improve that five or ten percent of the film that would make the whole film better,” according to Nakamura, who has color-timed several major features in the last year (Seabiscuit and Kill Bill most recently).
“His belief, which is something I totally agree with and think more DPs and directors are beginning to understand, was that the process was not about ‘fixing it in post,’ though we obviously can and do fix things,” says Nakamura. “It's about extending the cinematography — continuing to work the images the DP creates. I think he felt it gave him the opportunity to be a better cinematographer because the process allowed us to adjust images to keep with his original vision. It wasn't about changing his work — it was about satisfying his vision.”
 Kidman and co-star Anthony Hopkins. Given Kidman's complexion, colorist Stephen Nakamura desaturated Hopkins' skin tone slightly during the digital intermediate for scene involving both actors. |
Tweaking that “five or ten percent” under Escoffier's watchful eye is what, primarily, The Human Stain digital intermediate was all about. The DP shot the film mainly using Kodak 5274 200 ASA stock, with some 5279 (500 ASA) mixed in for night sequences. Technique scanned the movie at 2K resolution on a Grass Valley Spirit DataCine, and then used a Grass Valley Spectre Virtual DataCine system to manage and play the data during the DI process. Nakamura color corrected the film on a da Vinci 2K system loaded with multi-channel power tiers, a frequently used defocus board, and several add-on tools such as Grass Valley Scream software, which helped with grain reduction. He painted to images projected by a Barco D-Cine Premiere DP50 projector, and filtered through a Walker Box attachment, built exclusively for Technique by engineer Dave Walker and programmed with Technique's proprietary look-up table (LUT) to mimic the eventual film look of the piece. The movie was later recorded back out to film using Arri Laser recorders.
According to Benton, several scenes in the film benefited from slight changes made at Technique during the digital intermediate “to invisibly impact the film,” as Benton describes it. The director feels this capability of the digital intermediate process “enriched the specificity of the locations, bringing out the best in the shots.”
“We have a scene, for instance, in which one of the characters [played by Ed Harris] comes to a farm late at night to confront [Anthony Hopkins' and Nicole Kidman's characters],” says Benton. “It's a dark scene, lit only with lights from a pickup truck. When we shot that, there was a piece of farm equipment and some light in the background, which Jean-Yves had them carefully take down in the digital intermediate, and then we enhanced the back-lighting in the scene [from the pickup truck's overhead lights]. Those changes insured that there was nothing visible in the shot that might detract from the characters. I learned through this process that there were lots of things we could do like that that the viewer would never think about, but which enhances the intent of what Jean-Yves was trying to do on location.”
 DP Jean-Yves Escoffier (left) and director Robert Benton during production of The Human Stain . Benton says Escoffier, who died earlier this year, was a "true
collaborator" who convinced him to try a digital intermediate. |
According to Nakamura, Escoffier worried about the confrontation scene because of his concern that blacks would be crushed too much as attempts were made to highlight the character's faces.
“Jean-Yves wanted that scene to be very dark,” Nakamura recalls. “At times, you can only see portions of Anthony Hopkins' face, for instance. Jean-Yves was worried there would be pools of black, crushed down, losing detail if we weren't careful. But we were able to hold the black detail by stretching just certain portions of the gamma curve in the shots, and that way, you can see the mid-tones he wanted to see. We used lots of Power Windows in that sequence to keep detail of the truck and some detail of their faces, while keeping everything else dark.
“That's the beauty of the digital intermediate process, as opposed to a photochemical process. With this technology, if you know what you are doing, you can change portions of an image rather than having to alter the entire image. That [farm equipment] off to the side of the shot, for example — there was some spill light hitting it, so we just pulled that portion of the frame down and made it black,” he says.
Nakamura adds that extensive work was done to brighten up the pickup truck's overhead lights to match the kind of lighting hitting the faces of Hopkins and Kidman in the scene.
“We have Power Windows on all those lights,” he says. “Brightening them up and adding more contrast. The truck's actual light was not that bright, so we just punched it all up to make the light hitting the actors seem more natural.”
Subtle Adjustments
And so it went throughout the process. During a visit with him at Technique, Nakamura excitedly detailed several scenes, explaining what was done and why, to help satisfy Escoffier's critical eye.
 Robert Benton (left) and Jean-Yves Escoffier discuess a shot. Benton says he did not suggest lenses or position the camera. "I only looked through the lens when Jean-Yves asked me to." |
Take the movie's opening sequence, for example, a portion of which replays later in the film. In the sequence, Hopkins and Kidman drive down a snow- and ice-covered country road next to a lake. “We wanted the bleak, deadness of winter both to contrast that scene with the next one, which takes place in spring at a New England college, and we also wanted the sequence bleak because it leads to an important death in the film,” Benton explains.
The big debate, however, which wasn't settled until late in the digital intermediate process, was the time of day that the sequence takes place. “They got some shots that were real bright like a mid-afternoon and others that were darker and looked more like an early, winter morning,” Nakamura says. “Robert and Jean-Yves debated that for quite a while, and we went back and forth on it. At one point, we had it pretty bright, but we backed off on that and went dark blue and gray all the way to the end, more like early morning. That sequence took a lot of work.”
A crucial flashback sequence was also creatively impacted by the technique. The sequence shows a young Coleman Silk (played by Wentworth Miller) involved in a boxing match while in college. Since the film largely revolves around Silk's feelings about race, there was a need to emphasize the difference in Miller's appearance and that of his black opponent. So Nakamura, under Escoffier's direction, took pains to subtly alter the environment without changing skin tone.
“Basically, we desaturated almost everything around him, outside of blood in the scene and the boxing gloves,” says Nakamura. “We made it all a chalky kind of look around them. The idea was to give the viewer the feeling that this is an old-time boxing match. If you watch black-and-white film of old boxing matches from the '20s and '30s, all you see is the two guys in the ring, maybe some spectators in the first row, and the ring lights above them. So, generally, we left skin tone alone, but desaturated almost everything else. It's a muted, older kind of a feeling. Jean-Yves wanted this kind of look from the beginning, but he knew if he shot and lit it a certain way, we could do the rest to achieve that vision once the digital intermediate came around.”
 Filmmakers experimented with the look of the opening scene during the digital intermediate, debating what time of day the car drives down the snowy road. They finally settled on dark, gloomy early morning. |
Ironically, the most radical change that the digital intermediate could have accomplished was never considered. In the story, Hopkins, who is Caucasian, plays a light-skinned black man who has spent his life denying his racial heritage. Benton says there was never any discussion of enhancing Hopkins' skin digitally to back up the racial premise. (The actor did wear green contacts to change his eye color in order to match the color of Miller's eyes.) In fact, Nakamura says Hopkins' skin tone had to be dialed down when he played scenes opposite Kidman. “Hopkins actually has lots of skin tone,” says Nakamura. “When he's next to Nicole, who is very pale, there were lots of shots where we actually had to desaturate his skin. When you film someone who has a tan or lots of skin tone, and you put them in really dark lighting as we have in this movie, then they get a lot redder. So for many shots, I actually pulled skin tone out of him.”
Other Benefits
Nakamura, of course, is highly experienced in the nuances of the digital intermediate, but he admits that working with Escoffier helped him refine his art as well. Escoffier's consistent theme, the colorist says, was to take whatever action necessary to make sure nothing interfered with maintaining the viewer's eye on the central object of his camera's attention in each frame.
“He had a very clear vision about what he wanted and how the scenes should be, even before we started,” says Nakamura. “Any shot with Nicole in it, he said to make sure the eye goes there, make sure we are paying attention to her. So if a light or something else interfered with that, we worked to rectify that. Where does your eye go when you shoot photography? That's what he was all about. At the dinner scene, if your eye wanders from the main character to the table, that's not a good thing. So that was the main goal.”
While meeting these creative goals was the primary role of The Human Stain digital intermediate, it is fair to say there were occasional fixes during the process, particularly in a couple of invisible effects shots and one key scene where the original negative appeared damaged.
 Gary Senise during a scene shot with a Steadicam at a pond near Montreal. |
According to Nakamura, the negative for a key flashback scene that takes place in a library inexplicably turned green. “It would have been extremely difficult to make that scene look normal photochemically, but with the digital intermediate, we were able to put focus back onto the actress' face, as well as fix the colors and things like that,” he says.
Nakamura also suggests that Escoffier's untimely death during the early phase of the creation of the film's DVD version could have interfered with translating the DP's exact vision to the home version of the movie — except for the fact that a digital intermediate had already been completed on the theatrical version. This, he suggests, is part of the digital intermediate revolution: Future versions of films can all stem from the same source, thus reflecting the DP's and the director's original vision whether they are present or not during the remastering process. Further, the remastering process no longer needs to be quite so time consuming and complex.
“For this DVD, we already had all the files color corrected, with Power Windows applied, defocus applied, all that stuff. A few years ago, the DVD had to be an entirely new version,” says Nakamura. “Now, Jean-Yves is gone, but the DVD will still reflect his vision of how the images should be treated because we are using the same files. The only real difference is putting it through a different look-up table to get it to video space and a few tweaks. But overall, all his defocus is there, his pans, his zooms, his reframing, and the same guy who worked with him — me — is color correcting it. His case is special because he passed away. But, really, for any filmmaker, now they can just move on after the digital intermediate is done. They don't have to spend weeks in yet another bay directing a new version.”
This, suggests Nakamura and others, is a huge evolution, taking place at an unprecedented rate in the feature film industry. “Remember, we at Technique only performed our first digital intermediate less than two years ago, in January of 2002 for Panic Room,” he says. “Since then, we've done several DIs, and between our facility and a few others, several major blockbusters in the past year were done with digital intermediate. Now the cost is coming down, and even independent movies like Thirteen are utilizing the process. It's becoming faster, and you can save money in shooting, not only with speed and lighting, but with film. You can shoot three-perf, if you want, and it doesn't matter to us because we can scan in three- or four-perf. That money you save, you can put into post, do a DI. You'll have a better product in the end.”
 Robert Benton directs Nicole Kidman in another scene featuring "modest" lighting. |
Benton, for his part, is convinced that he already has a better visual product, and he insists that is mainly because of Escoffier's in-camera contribution and his firm guidance of the digital intermediate process. But another contribution involved convincing a grizzled industry veteran, as Benton laughingly calls himself, that digital intermediate was the way to go.
“I'm definitely a believer in this process, and I would definitely like to do it again as long as my DP agreed,” the director says. “You might think if your cameraman is so talented, what can a digital process bring to the project? But the truth is, the process gives the cinematographer more control, more ability to refine his imagery. This movie is 90 percent what Jean-Yves captured in-camera, and about 10 percent what he and the guys at Technique did to improve things. But that's a valuable 10 percent. I just hope I can find that kind of DP again. Jean-Yves was a great DP and a great companion. I miss him terribly.”
Sidebar
Remembering Escoffier
The Human Stain was Jim McConkey's third film serving as
“A” camera/Steadicam operator under the direction of
Jean-Yves Escoffier, following Cradle Will Rock and 15
Minutes. Just as The Human Stain director Robert Benton was
mourning his loss of a director/DP partnership with Escoffier's death,
McConkey was mourning the loss of his DP/operator relationship with a
man he respectfully calls a perfectionist.
“On Cradle Will Rock, it took me about half the production to understand that while he was a perfectionist, it was also a communication thing. It just took him a while to trust that you had his vision at heart when you first started working with him. Once he understood that you understood what he wanted, he was easier to work with,” recalls McConkey. “His death was particularly devastating for me because it did take a long time to establish a close relationship with him. But once I did, working with him was very fulfilling. It's sad to lose him as a person, but also that working relationship. He was a very talented cinematographer.”
McConkey says Escoffier tended to light “very naturalistically, mainly trying to augment what was already there. It was always minimal, low, beautiful light.” He adds that Escoffier was in charge of his plan for the upcoming digital intermediate, even during the earliest days of the shoot.
“He had a plan for the whole concept,” says McConkey. “He was well aware what he could and couldn't do. And when we had certain problems, he was keenly aware what things he might have to re-shoot, and what things could be adjusted during the digital intermediate.”
One example is a key scene shot early in the production in which Gary Sinise's character confronts Ed Harris' character while he's ice fishing on a frozen lake. The scene, shot at a pond near Montreal on a particularly cold and windy day, was difficult for McConkey to film with his Steadicam due to the weather conditions.
“It was a long shot, following the actor as he walks down and
across the frozen ice,” explains McConkey. “It was cold and
blustery, and I was using as much image stabilization as I possibly
could, from gyro augmentation to weights on the camera to help balance
it. But no matter what I tried, the winds were so strong that at times,
I was really getting whacked, and the camera would shift and go
off-level. I felt pretty bad about it, but Jean-Yves came up to me and
told me not to worry about it because he could repair image
stabilization in the digital intermediate. I don't even know what,
exactly, they did to fix it, but he just put me completely at ease
after a difficult experience.”
— Michael Goldman
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