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Reader SurveyFincher Moves Forward
Feb 1, 2007 8:00 AM, By Michael Goldman
With his labor to bring Zodiac to the big screen complete (the movie arrives in theaters this week), director David Fincher is turning his attention to his next effort, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button—a 2008 release from Paramount.
Fincher, of course, spearheaded making Zodiac the first major studio feature captured entirely on hard drives using HD cameras, as previously discussed in both Millimeter and HD Focus. (For more details on the Zodiac pipeline and workflow, see Millimeter’s August/September, 2006 feature story; digitalcontentproducer.com/videoedsys/
revfeat/video_going_tapeless; an exclusive podcast interview with Fincher at digitalcontentproducer.com/podcasts/audio/
zodiaz_fincher; and previous HD Focus coverage from April 2006 at digitalcontentproducer.com/e-newsletters/hd_focus_041106.)
He says that Benjamin Button will use the same basic workflow as Zodiac, capturing imagery as data using Thomson Viper FilmStream cameras recording to D.Mag Digital Film Magazines from S.two of Reno, Nev., and backing up the data to LTO data tapes, creating eventual data file and HD masters of the entire project. The only significant difference this time around is the fact that his team has more experience in this method of filmmaking.
“In some ways, things have come a long way in a year [since I shot Zodiac],” Fincher recently told HD Focus. “I think everybody has a lot more confidence in ourselves and in the technology. The F.Dock (a chassis-like connection device used to load the D.Mag drives into the project’s storage network at the project’s editorial headquarters), for instance, is amazing technology. You don’t really have ‘dailies’ anymore this way—you have ‘hourlies.’ The Viper cameras and the D.Mag’s were tailored to our specifications during production [on Zodiac], so we are real happy with what he have going on for [Benjamin Button].
“But we did have some problems at the beginning of Benjamin Button with stuff we had taken for granted previously, because of software issues—software updates since we made Zodiac have basically made it impossible to use the exact same workflow. People have attempted to make things better, but sometimes, that makes parts of the pipeline a bit flakier. And there are still things that we aren’t always sure are going to work perfectly, but for the most part, everything is proceeding apace [on Benjamin Button]. Overall, in terms of iterations of the technology, things are looking so much better now than they were, or even looked like they were going to be, just two years ago. In that sense, with digital filmmaking finally getting some attention, and people putting money into it now, I feel it’s moving along nicely. It could be further along, but I also feel if you look at the evolution of digital intermediates since O Brother, Where Art Thou until now, I can say this whole tapeless workflow thing is proceeding at least as fast.”
And Fincher’s thirst to test new HD tools and related technologies going into Benjamin Button remained great, as his team checked out a variety of other tools before deciding to stay with the approach developed for Zodiac. But, he adds, he’s always looking at the digital landscape for ways to make his workflow more productive.
“We are continuing tape-free,” he says. “We are shooting more film [for speed-change shots] on this movie than we did on Zodiac, because we have to do stuff on boats and a lot of slow-motion stuff. And there is not yet a high-speed digital way to acquire images that we are comfortable with, so I’m looking forward to seeing what happens with that.
“But we did a lot of testing on other things. We looked at Dalsa [Origin] cameras, but decided they wouldn’t work for Benjamin Button because it is just too big a camera for the kind of shooting we wanted to do on location. I wasn’t satisfied that [Panavision’s] Genesis would work for us, though I like the idea of it, and the [Arri] D-20 wasn’t provided to us in time to test in 4:4:4 mode. We do like the Codex Digital [media recording system] a lot, though—that’s a beautiful piece of technology. In the end, where we were, we wanted to go with the S.two hard drives and the Viper cameras because we had experience with it already and were comfortable.”
The important thing, Fincher adds, is that such technologies are creating more options for filmmakers like him.
“In the future, we’ll be talking about workflow in terms of how do you want to work, as opposed to saying here’s the only way you can work in terms of what technology is available,” he says. “To me, that is a great thing. If we wanted to be self-important, we would say Zodiac changed things. But, I don’t look at it that way. I mean, the tool sets are pretty much the same—you use a camera and lenses and the rest depends on how you expose it, how you compose it, and if you are good enough to capture those key moments that your story requires. Digital filmmaking just allows you to think more flexibly, and that’s what I think is so great about these developments.”
