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Power Peralta

Mar 1, 2004 12:00 PM, By Beth Pinsker

Scary moments on Riding Giants

Preproduction on a documentary usually involves rudimentary tasks like culling through video archives and setting up interview times. For the crew of Riding Giants, the prep time for their film on the history of big-wave surfing was all about conquering their fears.

Director Stacy Peralta, who seemed fearless as a champion skateboarder in the archival footage of his first Sundance documentary, Dogtown and Z-Boys, got the scare of his life when he went out with legendary surf photographer Don King to shoot the great waves of Hawaii.

“Those were the biggest waves I've ever seen in my life,” Peralta says, wide-eyed under the brim of his ever-present baseball cap. “I surf, but I don't surf waves that big. I mean these things… they have a whole personality and character themselves. These guys put me on a Jet Ski and said, OK, here you go. I actually got up on the back of one of those boards, but I didn't get pulled into a wave. I just wanted to see how difficult it was.”

For the rest of his team, including producer Agi Orsi, editor Paul Crowder, cinematographer Peter Pilafian, and production manager Cecy Rangel, getting rolled under a wave while surfing in the morning before work was the initiation that helped them understand their subject matter. The tiny breaks on the beaches of Santa Monica are nothing compared to the 40ft. liquid mountains of Maui's Peahi or the dangerous jutting peaks of Mavericks near San Francisco, but they were enough to give this crew a taste of the adventure that spurred on their subjects.

“It really helps you get a sense of it,” says Crowder, a lanky Brit and former rock musician who took up the sport when he started this project. “Even in a 5ft. wave, you get the tumble-dry effect quite easily. You don't know which way is up.”

His terror channeled directly into a scene in the film about the difficulty surfers had reaching the waves at Mavericks, which is a quarter-mile out in Half Moon Bay through choppy, cold water in a field littered with massive rock cliffs and underwater reef dangers.

“There was a shot from the ocean of the surfers scratching up to get over a wave,” Crowder says. “I used to let them get over it every time. And then I realized I should just stop the shot right at the top, just slow it down and have it freeze. That's kind of how it feels, like uhhhhgggg, I'm not going to do it.” Crowder waves his hands frantically over his head as if he's paddling in a panic. “I didn't want to give away if anyone made it, because that's how you feel.”

Snowblind

Sitting in a hotel suite in Park City, Utah, a few days after Riding Giants premiered as the first documentary ever to lead off the Sundance Film Festival, the whole group has that mystified look of having accomplished something after a panic. Getting the film financed, produced, and into the theater for the gala opening night hosted by Robert Redford was a nine-month sprint that had so many crashes that the team constantly thought they weren't going to make it.

After the success of Dogtown and Z-Boys, which won the audience and director's prizes at the 2002 Sundance Festival and the Independent Spirit award for best documentary and went on to gross $1.3 million in theaters on a release from Sony Pictures Classics, money shouldn't have been that big an issue. Surfing was just the next logical topic for Peralta and his team after skateboarding.

After a couple of false starts, they hit upon the idea to focus on the big-wave movement, which is surfing's version of climbing Mount Everest. They planned to start shooting in November 2002, when the good swells started to roll in Hawaii and Northern California, but they had no financing in place. Peralta called the top action photographers and told them what he was up to, but he wasn't able to go out with them to shoot, or even to give them shot lists. So they basically shot on spec.

“They did for us what they would have done for us anyway,” says Peralta of the dramatic modern action shots he eventually included as part of the mix. He wasn't concerned, he adds, because he decided early on that the entire film could be told through the interviews. “It was more about the story and the people and less about reinventing a whole new style of shooting.”

When the team finally got started in earnest in May 2003, they still didn't have financing, but they were in a rush to make the Sundance submission deadline. Orsi says, “We trusted our executives to get us the financing, so we self-financed the first round of interviews.”

In the meantime, Peralta studied up and got his plan in place. He put together storyboards and shot lists. He broke down the history into three main parts: the development of big-wave culture in Hawaii and California, the breakthroughs and downfalls in Northern California that changed the sport, and the current-day adventurers in Hawaii. That finally led them to Laird Hamilton, surfing's current hero, who had a deal for a film in place with the French production company Studio Canal. They merged projects, and Riding Giants took to the seas.

Peralta's first charge was to work with cinematographer Pilafian on getting a different look for each section's interviews, which were shot on an Aaton XTR super 16 with Canon 8-64mm lenses.

For the historical section, Pilafian used Kodak 7250 Ektachrome. “It's extremely contrasty,” he says, which gave him the look of the early colorized Life magazines from the 1950s. “It was crude, and almost looked kind of hand-tinted, like watercolor. I wanted to come as close as I could to that.”

For the Northern California section, which is anchored at the surfing area known as Mavericks, he used Kodak's Double X Negative 7222, a black-and-white stock, with the intention of making it darker, colder, and grittier than the rest of the film. “It's more of a chiaroscuro,” he says.

For the modern-day Hawaii interviews, he wanted to give a lush cinematic feel, but the original plan to shoot 35mm fell by the wayside because of budget concerns, and they shot on the Aaton with Kodak 7245. “We did feature-film lighting as much as possible, using overhead silks, large key sources, softer and stronger edging, and appropriate filters to give it that more lush feeling,” he says.

The actual shooting style matched what Pilafian and Peralta developed for Dogtown, which was an aggressive, loose style to energize the talking-head sessions. All the shots were handheld and on a fairly long lens, with the motion controlled by a zoom motor and a moderate amount of rotation. “I approached it like jazz improv,” Pilafian says. “I'd feel musical rhythms of the person talking. The little nuances and bumps would be all psychically connected with his statements.”

Stepping Back in Time

In between shooting the interviewers, Peralta culled through archival footage himself so he would have an intimate feel for the material. Some of the original reels were in such bad shape that he couldn't even scroll through them to look for what he wanted. He set up an old flatbed editing table in the room next to the editing suite and just taped up the rolls as he went through them so the telecine house could transfer them.

At first, Peralta thought this was the nightmare technical challenge. But there were a lot more scary nights to come trying to work with the different formats of footage, from still photographs to Super 8, regular 16mm, Digital Betacam, MiniDV, and even 3/4in. video. In the early days of shooting surfing video, the filmmakers stayed on the beaches and shot with long lenses, or they shot from airplanes through the windows, leaving shadows and glares. The first photographer to go out on the water was Bud Browne, who built his own water housings for the cameras, but there were still lots of bumps and jags on the film. None of that earlier footage matched the work of today's action photographers, who have the benefit of such innovations as modern helicopter mounts and waterproof HD cameras fixed on jet skis.

Pilafian tried to set up parameters from the beginning so that the old footage would match his interviews and any new action shots. “I wanted to make sure we had a standardized approach to a look and to a framing standard,” he says. So he tried to fix the ratio at 1:1.85 to avoid any confusion about the top and bottom frame lines. This was especially important with the early Super 8 and 16mm footage where the ratio was 4:3, and the footage was difficult to crop because of the big waves. “The way a lot of early footage was shot, it used full top and bottom of the frame in order to show size, and consequently, if you make it into 1:1.85 frame, you end up in a dilemma,” he says. If you blew up the image to fit the sides, the top and bottom would be cut off, and if you fit the top and bottom, you'd have black bars at the sides. It took careful planning to get it right, so there were no disrupted images in the final film.

Transfer Students

All that planning didn't begin to prepare the crew for the problems they would have transferring the footage to a common format in order to edit. They were trying to get everything to 24p HD. Because they couldn't find a place to transfer from Super 8 and other older formats directly to HD, they transferred that footage to Digital Betacam and then transferred the Digital Betacam to HD. On the small, low-resolution Avid monitor, everything looked fine.

Peralta and Crowder's working method is to shoot and edit at the same time. The film's three-act structure allowed Peralta to get ahead a little while constantly feeding footage to Crowder back at the office. They did the middle act first, covering the Northern California era, then early Hawaii, and then the current day.

“The great thing about cutting that piece first is that it got us so fired up. It let us see what we had,” says Crowder.

As they moved forward together, Crowder and Peralta were able to stylize the film even further, beyond just rotating film stocks. They added a laundry list of effects, teases, and goofs, some of them as low-tech as adding Jaws music to the opening of the section about the Hawaiian wave Peahi, also known as “Jaws.” The idea was to amp up the archival footage and also to be naturalistic about the process — like in Dogtown where they left in sound of Sean Penn's messing up a line of narration and clearing his throat.

“There's no reason documentaries can't be entertaining. There's such a stigma that docs are like a bitter pill. It shouldn't be that way,” says Peralta.

Part of this was that Peralta developed a style of shooting still photographs for Dogtown that he upgraded from Digital Betacam to HD for Riding Giants. (see “Standing Stills,” left). He also modified the sliding 3D picture effect from The Kid Stays in the Picture to animate postcards of ancient Hawaii surfing scenes.

“We got a couple of pictures and tried it. Our jaws dropped,” says Crowder.

When it came to trying to illustrate one of big-wave surfing's premiere moments, the first time anyone attempted to ride Waimea Bay on Oahu's North Shore, there was no still or video footage. Peralta and Crowder thought, why not try to get someone to draw it? They showed an artist the interview footage of Greg Noll talking about his experience, and they got a black-and-white drawing. They put that on motion-control rig and panned across it.

They did this again when they were trying to explain how it feels to be rolled under a wave at Mavericks, getting a storyboard artist to draw a sequence of panels that they photographed the same way.

“We could have gone the other way and created computer images, but Paul and I were like, well, let's see what people think,” Peralta says. “After every showing, we asked and everyone said, ‘Oh, I love it.’ It was a completely low-tech solution.”

Crowder also had fun working with some of the special effects available with his Avid system. He put a lens flare effect in Greg Noll's eye in one scene to make it gleam mischievously. He also used Saffire glow and motion blur effects to add to footage of one of the surfers fighting to get to the surface of the water.

“There's a lever in everybody, and when you pull too far, you lose them,” says Peralta. “We've been able to take chances with things that, when you think about them, might seem stupid. But we have pretty good bullshit detectors.”

Thowing Out the Bathwater… and the Baby

By Christmas, they were done. They sat down for a test screening to see how the digital projection would look in HD and see what they had on a big screen. Crowder was in England spending the holiday with his family. The premiere at Sundance was only three weeks away.

“It was a total, complete disaster,” Peralta says, so exasperated and exhausted that he's almost jubilant while telling the story. “The regular 8 footage looked like a Van Gogh painting. It was swirly.”

The transferred video footage was even worse. “All those video lines were freaking out. They were moving. Some were going left, and some were going right. You got loggerheads on everything,” says Crowder, who rushed back to California to deal with the damage.

“I was just imagining the premiere at Sundance, and people going, ‘Oh my god, this is awful,’” Peralta interjects. “We were thinking we had this great opportunity, and we're going to completely let them down. We were going to show up with this completely unwatchable film.”

“And on that big screen,” adds Orsi, referring to Park City's biggest theater, the Eccles, which seats 1200 people.

The problem was in downconverting and upconverting too many times. “Whenever you go up and down and start pulling it around, it doesn't know which field to deal with,” says Crowder.

The only transition that went smoothly was with PAL MiniDV footage, which they did using a slow transfer to Digital Betacam and then to 24p HD. “You just play it back at 24fps, and it's a straight one-to-one conversion, and it's crystal clear. There's no interpolation process whatsoever, no going from 30 frames to 24,” says Crowder.

In their panic, they didn't have time to find a new way to transfer to Digital Betacam again, and then to HD. They needed to find somebody to transfer all of their various formats directly to 24p HD. They called some old friends in the transfer world, including Richard Greenberg at Modern Videofilm, who had just bought the equipment to work with the Super 8 footage. Deluxe Video had just upgraded its equipment to do the MiniDV to 24p HD transfer.

Production manager Cecy Rangel then had to rush to get all the original material back from its owners and send it out again to the right transfer house. This time the clock was ticking, and nobody on the production team was really sure it was going to work.

“I'm sure it's a problem that a lot of people are having, particularly using archival video and mixed-cadence film material,” says Tim Carranza, studio operations manager at Deluxe. “Until recently, there wasn't a lot you could do about it.”

His $285,000 box of hardware, the Snell & Wilcox Alchemist Platinum, smooths out the process by creating 24 points in time out of 60-field video. Instead of skipping frames, it predicts what the image would have looked like, which leaves no jutter. “There is now an elegant solution to get you to 24p,” says Deluxe director of technology Jeff Dewolde. That is, he cautions, if you shoot in a 60-field mode instead of 30fps, in which case there is no elegant solution for getting to 24p.

With a documentary full of archival footage, re-transferring all the material could take weeks, and it did, right up to opening night. They got through all the important shots, but a few stragglers still remained. They put the film onto disks and sent it on the plane with Orsi. Because it had to go through the airport X-ray machine, they also express-mailed a copy directly to the festival.

On opening night, the film was a rousing success. Festival director Geoff Gilmore told them that several people in the audience even got motion sickness and threw up. As if they need any other measure of success, they also sold the film immediately to Sony Pictures Classic and are expecting a summer release.

Standing Still

Stacy Peralta's Forever Films office in Santa Monica was covered in water during the production of Riding Giants. The walls were lined from floor to ceiling with pictures of waves, breaks, white mist, and the calm tranquil ocean, with the surfers just tiny specs on the surface. This was both a filing system and a creative tool.

Director Stacy Peralta (see below) and editor Paul Crowder would scan the walls constantly, trying to figure out which of the 900 shots they should use in the film. When they identified one they wanted, all they had to do was look at the time code on the printout and find the tape on the shelf.

What was on those tapes, which amounted to some 31 hours, was endless footage by Peralta and cinematographer Peter Pilafian shooting the still photographs one by one from every possible angle. They shot primarily with a 24p HD camera, but also worked in 16mm and 35mm.

For some shots, Peralta and Pilafian used a motorized multiple-axis copy stand, which allowed them to pan across and around the photos and zoom in and out while using a joystick. The problem was that they couldn't find a production house with an HD setup. After one day of putting their camera on a Digital Betacam rig, they broke it, and they weren't allowed back. The solution was to tape each photo to the wall and move the cameraman around.

“I try to give Paul [the film's editor] every possibility to come in or exit the picture in any manner. So I'll shoot the crap out of each photo in different positions and speeds,” says Peralta. “Then there are times where we'll look at something and Paul will say we should really do it this other way. And I'll go back and reshoot to fit an edit or fix a mistake.”

It's possible now to digitize photographs and do all the panning and scanning with software, but Pilafian thinks that kills the organic feeling. “Hand-controlling the lenses, zooms, and camera movement makes it more personal, more stylish,” he says. “Stacy is a style king — that goes back to skateboarding days.”

The Fake Out

Director Stacy Peralta wasn't able to get all the footage he wanted for Riding Giants because some of it didn't even exist, so he had to get a little creative. To illustrate a scene where a big news article breaks about surfing culture and changes the course of the sport's history, he couldn't get his hands on the actual newspaper. Instead, they got stock footage of a 1950s-era paperboy throwing a paper onto a patio and started to work with that.

“I was cutting it with him throwing it, and you don't see it land,” says Paul Crowder, the editor. “I thought, let's see if we could do where you see it land. There was a great music hit, and I thought it would be great if the paper landed on that beat.”

Then Peralta found the newspaper archives online. He had an artist create a mock-up of the newspaper, and he took that and the crew over to his house. “We found a brick patio and threw the paper down about seven or eight times,” Peralta says. “And that was it.”

Well, except that the 16mm footage looked too new, so Crowder added some film damage in post.

“This is part of the process that we really enjoy doing,” says Peralta. “The film starts to dictate what it wants you to do to it. And we say, OK, let's back off and just see what happens.”

Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
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