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Clint Eastwood Investigates HD

Nov 1, 2006 8:00 AM, By Michael Goldman

As he began preparations to make back-to-back films about the historic World War II battle for Iwo Jima—Flags of our Fathers and the upcoming Letters from Iwo Jima—director Clint Eastwood reports that he seriously investigated using high-definition cameras to make the movies. Eastwood had DP Tom Stern’s camera team and HD camera operator Liz Radley conduct a series of tests to compare footage from various HD camera systems with 35mm film footage. At the end of the day, Eastwood chose to continue shooting film as he always has for the project, although he did bring both movies to Technicolor Digital Intermediates (TDI) for the first digital intermediates of his storied career. (See an upcoming issue of Millimeter for a detailed examination of the DI work done on both movies.)

Despite the decision to shoot film, however, Eastwood did decide to include some HDV POV-style footage in both movies for specific creative reasons. He says the overall experience has moved him closer to fully entering the HD acquisition universe.

“I looked at all the [available] digital cameras, and tested them against film to see if the digital age was here completely,” Eastwood recently told Millimeter. “I know, some day, that will be it. But for this project, I felt HD did not hold up quite enough compared to film for the way I wanted it to look. It obviously had some advantages, but I just felt I couldn’t control atmospheres as well—I couldn’t get quite as deep into the blacks as I wanted. So I decided to shoot film. It was almost like they needed to go another millimeter before HD gets to where I want it to be. I’m sure [manufacturers] will get there before long the way things are progressing. They are already so close. But for me anyway, the main advantage I’m looking for is portability—small cameras. Some of the systems we tested were really big. I’m looking for the day they can be as small as [a tape recorder] and still look great on the screen. That’s kind of what I was thinking about when I had the idea of using HD cameras [to capture frenetic battle footage].”

What Eastwood asked his colleagues to do was come up with a methodology of allowing him to capture what DP Tom Stern calls the “accidental subjectivity” that flows from the chaos resulting when filming American soldiers storming the beaches of Iwo Jima in a hail of maddening gunfire, or Japanese soldiers fleeing as American bombs descend on their heads. And he wanted that footage captured with long-running cameras that would not interfere with his streamlined shooting style on location, while still being of a good enough quality to be processed and seamlessly combined with 35mm material.

His team came up with something Eastwood calls “my trashcan shots,” made with what Radley dubbed “CrashCams.” Basically, his team eventually settled on HDV cameras as their only viable option to meet Eastwood’s requirements. They sealed and stabilized a series of Sony HVR-Z1U HDV cameras inside prop 50-caliber machine-gun ammunition cases, operated them with out-of-the-box remote controls that come with those cameras, and gave the machine-gun cases to several extras acting in particular battle scenes. They then captured wild footage that editor Joel Cox eventually mixed into the movie.

“We cut the front out [of the ammunition boxes], put these digital cameras in there [inside soft, waterproof housings and wrapped in bubble-wrap and foam], shooting 25 frames [per second], and I gave them to some extras,” says Eastwood. “I just told them to carry the boxes, and not to pay any attention to them. If an explosion went off, they could drop them. I even had them make them waterproof, so they could just drop them in the water. But I didn’t tell the extras why we wanted them to carry the boxes. I didn’t want them to start thinking about it, because that would ruin what we were trying to capture. We eventually filmed out those shots, and they came out real nice.”

Radley says the production tested a variety of SD, HD, and HDV cameras before settling on the HVR-Z1U units. At the time, she points out, she was hoping for a system with fewer compression artifacts for a feature film application, but says higher-end HD cameras were too large, standard-def cameras simply did not have sufficient resolution, and only the Sony HDV system was set up to meet their shooting requirements at the time.

“We are interested in [Panasonic’s] HVX-200 with the P2 cards and the FireStore [recording] system, but it wasn’t available when we were shooting Flags,” she says. “We could get those cameras by the time we got into Letters, but even with 8-gig P2 cards, the run time was not sufficient for the way Clint was shooting this stuff, and the FireStore was not yet available. So we stayed with the Sony cameras for both movies. HDV is obviously not comparable to 35mm film and anamorphic lenses, but with the process we used, followed by the digital intermediate, the footage mixed great with the rest of the movie.”

After shooting, Radley and HD coordinator Alexander Nicksay digitized selects into their Powerbooks in their hotel rooms. Later, they exported the selects as still frames, then used a proprietary system to de-interlace them and minimize MPEG-2 compression and color artifacts. After Eastwood picked shots he liked and editor Joel Cox added them to the evolving cut of each movie, the shots were then touched up further at Digital Domain, the main visual effects vendor on the project. The footage was later color-corrected and touched up further at TDI during the DI process.

Radley says each frame was transferred 1:1, ignoring a 3 percent speed change between the 25fps original footage and the 24fps running speed of the movie. “As these action shots didn’t need lip synch, the difference is essentially invisible,” she explains.

(For more from Millimeter’s interview with Clint Eastwood and his collaborators on both films, see the upcoming issue of Millimeter.)

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.