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HD Adventure Down Under

Oct 24, 2006 12:25 PM, By Craig Erpelding

The Discovery Channel is continuing to lead the way in producing high-end HD-based documentaries for broadcast with its Discovery HD Theater strategy of premiering high-end documentary broadcast fare in HD. Discovery HD Theater’s latest creation is Discovery Atlas, which aims to take viewers across the globe to intimately experience faraway people and regions through the use of HD imagery, cutting-edge special effects, and remarkable storytelling. Each episode weaves intimate stories about people and places in each featured country. Recent episodes have focused on China, Brazil, and Italy, and Discovery Atlas: Australia Revealed is the most recent addition.

HD Focus recently chatted with Geoff Fitzpatrick, executive producer at Beyond Productions, which produced the episode about Australia, regarding the use of HD technology on the venture. He explained how the production evolved into a multi-format show, with multiple HD and film formats each being chosen for specific tasks as the production wended its way across the massive Australian continent.

Since its inception in 1984, Beyond has produced and/or co-produced nearly 2,000 hours of programming, including information and documentary programs such as Mythbusters, one of Discovery’s flagship series, as well as a variety of other shows.

For Discovery Atlas: Australia Revealed, Fitzpatrick’s challenge was to capture the entire spectrum of the continent’s extreme environments—from the desert center to the verdant tropical northern fringes to every mile of the ocean surrounding the world’s biggest island. At the same time, the show is about more than landscapes. Fitzpatrick’s team also had to acquaint viewers with the inhabitants of these regions by showing how humans interact and relate to their environmental circumstances.

Since Australia is a popular documentary subject and tourist destination—and its wildlife, landscapes, reefs, and characters are already well known around the world—Beyond’s challenge on behalf of Discovery was to show the country from a different perspective.

“I think we achieved [that perspective] visually through the extensive integrations of our aerials and superb photography on the ground,” Fitzpatrick says. “HD really brings people’s faces to life. The detail enhances intimacy. We wanted to capture the relationship Australians have to their landscape by setting out to render the intimate within epic.”

To accomplish that fusion of intimate with epic, Beyond’s team, under the supervision of DPs Pieter De Vries, ACS, and Max Polley, plus director Chris Thorburn, started in the sky, where HD proved to be the best response to the challenge. They extensively used a helicopter-mounted Gyron 935 Hi Def gimbal stabilizer system configured with a split-box Sony HDW-F900H CineAlta camera system—fitting the camera prism inside the ball while the rest of the camera body sat inside the helicopter. They flew more than 5,000 miles of helicopter runs during production on the piece—more footage than if they had taped the entire vista between Los Angeles and New York.

“We were fortunate: Australia looks almost other-worldly from the air,” Fitzpatrick says. “The vivid red, flat landscapes to the horizon could be from Mars. The aqua/blue waters of the Great Barrier Reef could be from Atlantis. The dense rainforest and wetlands could be from Jurassic Park.”

Capturing these landscapes wasn’t easy. The crew used five different helicopters and pilots, and had to transport the flying HD camera system between airports via large commercial flights.

“The Gyron ball [about 2.5ft. in diameter] is packaged in a huge flight case, so it’s basically a volume issue,” Fitzpatrick says. “It physically won’t fit in the hold of a 737. Thus we had to book freight on 767s and 747s.”

In order to acquire massive amounts of footage, Fitzpatrick says the two constants on the aerial shots were Gyron operator Adam Huddlestone and director Chris Thorburn.

“They virtually became one mind, communicating through headsets for days on end, orchestrating moves, zooms, and ramping shots, which became the signature for the Australian episode,” Fitzpatrick says. “All this while flying to some of the remotest regions on the planet, refueling in isolated outposts, and knowing if there was a problem, help was a long way away.”

But Australians have always battled what Fitzpatrick calls “the tyranny of distance.” The country’s square mileage nearly equals that of the United States, but it has less than one-tenth the population, which congregates sparsely in urban centers with great distances in between. To shoot Australia and its people adequately meant the crew had to travel extensively.

“And travel, and travel, and travel,” Fitzpatrick adds. “By the time we were done, our crew had traveled the equivalent of two and a half times around the globe, with some locations taking four days to reach.”

Besides the travel, there was the heat. The crew found itself in 100-plus degree temperatures in the desert during summer, which was coupled with high humidity ratings when stationed in tropical regions. Thus, the crew needed an HD camera system that could weather those conditions, and they chose the Sony’s HDCAM-F900H CineAlta system with a 2.2-megapixel FIT CCD, shooting 24-frame progressive HD at 1080 resolution.

“Our DPs needed to be scrupulously protective of their hardware, which performed admirably in even the most extreme temperatures and conditions,” says Fitzpatrick. “Our Steadicam unit was embedded in the hottest, most dusty cattle drive you could imagine. The Steadicam was bolted to the front bull-bar of a late-model Toyota Land Cruiser with the operator strapped to the front bull-bar and hood—thrashing through sand while chasing cattle across the wilderness.”

But the immense commitment of resources paid off handsomely, Fitzpatrick says. He claims the images acquired are stunning, proving the tactic was the perfect way to weave the vast landscapes into the lives of characters featured on the show.

To provide more intimate perspectives of Australia’s native population, the production captured rare footage such things as Aboriginal spirit dances. For that material, Fitzpatrick and his directorial team chose to shoot with the Panasonic AJ-HDC27 Varicam (native 720p), because of its ability to vary frame rates from 24fps to 60fps at the touch of a button, thus enabling operators to drop in and out of slow motion.

To capture the beauty and power of the ocean surf, focusing on the Aussie Life Savers who hurl themselves into that ocean, the crew discovered they needed to shoot even higher speeds. So, for some of those sequences, they used film, using an Arriflex 16SR 3 system, shooting Super 16 at 200fps.

When it came to shooting inside a crammed surfboat, with only enough room for a four-man crew, they chose a Milliken DBM-4 film camera for its small size and durable casing—and the fact it can be cranked up to 400fps.

“The Milliken and its operator, a surf shoot specialist, were thrown out of the boat on several occasions,” Fitzpatrick says. “But the bruising was worth the high-speed, intimate elegance we captured as Aussie Life Savers pounded into the ocean swells.”

The acquisition and post path followed a mostly traditional 24p (PAL) path, with offline work done on an Avid Media Composer and the online finish and color grading work done in an Avid DS Nitris suite. The non-traditional aspect of the workflow involved finishing to 1080 24p HD, which was cross-converted to 59.94 for broadcast.

“Our color grade was done inhouse at Beyond Productions [located in Sydney, Australia] by our resident guru, Anthony Toy, on an Avid DS Nitris,” Fitzpatrick says. “There was no other digital enhancement other than the odd stabilized shot. Again, in post, the Gyron aerials paid off. The images were so steady, we could ramp any shot at will, screaming down from 3,000ft. to a 500ft. elevation, or pulling out from 100ft. to 2,000ft.—a kind of mini-Google Earth experience, but with dynamic images.”

According to officials at Discovery, viewers can expect still more dynamic imagery from around the globe, as the network plans to spend approximately $65 million over the next few years on several more Discovery Atlas episodes. Among those planned at press time were adventures into Mexico, France, and India.

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.