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MillimeterGenesis Green
Jun 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
On June 30, Superman Returns will no doubt steal the focus from another technologically significant film that debuts that day. Like DP Newton Thomas Sigel, ASC, did on Superman, Dean Semler, ASC, used the Panavision Genesis digital camera system on the Adam Sandler vehicle Click, directed by Frank Coraci. The movie's visual effects supervisor, Pete Travers, from Sony Pictures Imageworks, says Genesis proved to be “a solid tool” for capturing greenscreen plates, and otherwise making the visual effects process more efficient.
Click tells the story of a man who obtains a remote control that gives him complete power over his past, present, and future. While not as effects-intensive as Superman Returns (for more on Superman Returns, see p. 26), Click does include about 300 visual effects shots, according to Peter Travers, the film's visual effects supervisor from the lead vendor on the project, Sony Pictures Imageworks (SPI), which also contributed shots to Superman Returns. Travers calls high-end HD technology like Genesis a solid tool for capturing greenscreen plates and making the visual effects process more efficient.
“In a general sense, obviously, it's great from a capturing standpoint because, instead of scanning film, we just capture direct off HD tapes,” he says. “That's an entire process that used to take a whole day, and now it takes an hour. That quick processing time is particularly helpful if you need to make changes quickly, and editorially, you can rework a shot without having to rescan and rematch all the work you have already done.
“We had to do a lot less color correction upfront on effects sequences before they go over to the DI. Usually, you have to align a sequence color-correction-wise with the rest of the film, but we have not had to do much of that. That's helping us reduce another step as well. Of course, that's probably not just because of the camera, but because of Dean Semler's excellent cinematography.” Travers adds that another aspect of the effects' pipeline that gets eliminated with the Genesis camera is the dustbusting and scratch-removal processes.
Speeding up certain steps was important for Click, Travers says, because other aspects of the work were extremely labor intensive — particularly various head replacements done for scenes where Adam Sandler's character sees an overweight, future version of himself and for the freeze-frame effects when Sandler's character uses the remote control's pause capabilities. SPI used image-averaging techniques to bring together plates of motionless actors in order to eliminate anomalies from each plate, but the cleaner the plates were to begin with, the easier the work was for SPI's compositing team.
“Those were tough comps, and this is mainly a 2D show anyway,” he says. “We did most of the work in Flame, and for the freeze-frame stuff, we needed to achieve a consistency between the plates. Normally, the greenscreen plates were very good, but it's still a digital camera. They do a great job emulating film grain with the way the system controls [video noise], but in some of those cases, we had to correct that grain — take it out and add our own synthetic film grain to get a consistent look with those plates. In the future, one thing that would be nice would be to have a way to more easily reduce that digital noise — sort of flipping a switch and shooting a greenscreen with little or no noise, and adding what we need later to make it consistent. That would make a compositor's day easier. Other than the fact that this is an HD image, and therefore, we have no room on the top or the bottom of the frame for maneuvering if we need it, that is about the only area we have to be careful with. The overall quality [of the plates] was quite good.”
