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MillimeterLumet Goes Genesis
Sep 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
DP Ron Fortunato and colleagues detail an HD pipeline.
On Director Sidney Lumet's latest project, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, DP Ron Fortunato (left, with Lumet) lobbied for a change in workflow from previous HD shoots with Lumet. This time, they shot with two Panavision Genesis cameras outfitted with Primo Primes and Primo zoom lenses, giving Fortunato film-style lenses and depth of field qualities more closely resembling 35mm.
Because 83-year-old Sidney Lumet is among cinema's most veteran high-definition players, having first jumped into the fray in 2001 for several episodes of the A&E TV series 100 Centre Street, it's no surprise that he shot his new $18-million independent film, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, in HD. At the urging of Cinematographer Ron Fortunato, however, Lumet did make a major change to his HD workflow for the project. After using Panavised versions of Sony's HDW-F900 system on 100 Centre Street; HBO's Strip Search (2004); a French-language theatrical short in 2004 called Rachel, quand du seigneur; and Find Me Guilty, a 2006 theatrical feature, Lumet switched to the Panavision Genesis digital movie camera this time around.
Eager to use Primo lenses and to have depth of field that more closely emulates 35mm film qualities, Fortunato lobbied for Genesis early on, and he conducted a series of tests with Panavision New York that eventually convinced Lumet to move into the Genesis realm.
“It was Sidney's idea early on [in 2000] to use 24p cameras for 100 Centre Street,” Fortunato says. “It was still an emerging technology then, and I was concerned about trying it, but I always wanted to work with Sidney, so when he called, it was kind of a double-edged thing — I wanted to work with him, but it was video, and I had never shot video before. But, since then, we've done tons of HD, and we wanted to keep doing it. We were happy with the 900 [on previous projects], but I felt Genesis was a stronger system, and when Sidney, myself, and [digital imaging technician (DIT)] Abby Levine got together and did some early tests, Sidney was very happy with those results. It's different than using the 900 because you use look-up tables to do dailies, rather than having an engineer do [initial color correction on set]. But you get used to all that.”
DP Ron Fortunato says working with the Genesis system is far closer to the 35mm experience than previous HD systems he has used.
Shooting style
The project used two Genesis cameras outfitted with Panavision Primo Primes and Primo zoom lenses, usually recording 4:4:4 RGB data to HDSR tape via onboard Sony SRW-1 recorders, but occasionally recording to off-board recorders when the cameras were used in small spaces, such as inside vehicles.
Levine, serving as DIT, operated from a monitoring cart outfitted with a 24in. Sony BVM-D24 CRT monitor, while Lumet and Fortunato viewed imagery on set that corresponded to the basic LUT for the movie designed at Technicolor New York, the facility where both dailies and the final DI were handled. Levine processed the data on set, using a Mac PowerBook computer running Panavision Gamma Display Processor (GDP) software.
“Ron would come to [the monitoring cart] and look at the video — the basic wide-latitude image that they set up for the camera to record, running through the LUT that we designed,” Levine says. “Ron could also examine the [Leader LV-5750] waveform monitor, and working this way, he could be comfortable we were not underexposing or overexposing anything, and if something was not right, we could bypass the LUT box, and show Ron that we still held onto the detail we needed, and he could get that back during the DI. So it was a fairly basic way of working, and after the iterative testing process that we went through, there weren't too many demands on me in terms of camera painting and adjusting, because of how the system is set up to capture a full HD picture. All the final color work could then be done to it later in the DI, by reapplying our viewing/dailies LUT, and making final tweaks, as per Ron's instructions.”
Fortunato says he and Lumet enjoyed what he calls the “immediacy” of shooting with the Genesis. “We know exactly what we are getting by looking at the monitor and the other instruments,” the DP says. “We can play with the image, the waveform monitor, see how it develops. It's like painting — you develop it in front of your eyes, and there is no guesswork involved. Some people prefer the filmic process, but for us, it's so immediate — and that works better for someone like Sidney and how he prefers to work.”
Indeed, Brian Linse, the producer who helped set up the production pipeline, says that the HD workflow used on the movie is particularly well suited to Lumet's directing style, given the director's television background.
“One advantage we had shooting with Genesis was that we often had two cameras going at all times, and often, Sidney would shoot a single take with two cameras in the same position, using two different focal lengths,” Linse says. “He would also cover two actors from different angles in a single take. Sidney's background is in multicamera TV, and that is the way he used to work back in those days. He had the advantage of working in a way that was familiar to him, and he did not have the fear of a new technology, because he has been dealing with HD since [100 Centre Street]. So the specific thing of our director being Sidney Lumet, combined with using Genesis, worked out very well — it was beyond the typical advantages you expect to get from HD, like speed of shooting or the ability to monitor and check the shot instantly on set. The system was also perfect for the naturalistic approach that Sidney prefers with art direction and lighting. He likes that HD offers a naturalistic color space — the color you see is the actual color your eye sees, not the chemical colors of film.”
Fortunato says the shoot at Hellgate Studios in New York went smoothly and served to further enhance the comfort level of Lumet's team in the HD experience.
“There are things that I don't like, such as having the [video monitoring tent] to deal with — that makes you a little removed from the camera at times, and as the DP, you have to find ways to bridge that gap,” he says. “But this camera system is so sensitive — definitely 500 ASA, and it could easily go to 1500 ASA by pushing the gain or opening the shutter more. You get to use 35mm lenses with the full-frame sensor, but without worrying about the [increased] depth of field that flattens things out with smaller-sized HD sensors. So, really, I look at Genesis as 35mm all the way — sort of like using the Pro35 [digital adapter, which helps create depth of field and focus mimicking 35mm for various digital camera systems], except you don't need the adapter itself, which costs you two stops of light.”
The result, he adds, was imagery that played strongly to Lumet's preferred aesthetic. “Naturalism is the basis of all the lighting, and that is in keeping with the exaggerated feel of melodramas, which this movie is,” Fortunato says.
DI phase
The DI — involving a close collaboration between Lumet, Fortunato, and Technicolor Colorist Joe Gawler — was similarly straightforward in the sense that the look for the movie was already well established during early tests and the dailies process. Playing back imagery from a DVS Clipster system through a JVC IS8 projector and a customized LUT-emulating standard Kodak Vision print stock, Gawler color-graded the piece using a Da Vinci 2K system in the DI theater at Technicolor New York.
During that process, Fortunato oversaw certain subtle, but important, changes in order to emphasize Lumet's approach to the imagery.
“After the first pass, I decided to exaggerate some of the hot daylight exteriors by exaggerating the contrast a little bit,” Fortunato says. “We shot in bright sun in New York City in the summer, so some of that is very contrasty. We just went with it, and then, in post, Joe and I picked up highlights and lifted them a bit. That exaggerated things a bit, but that is what we wanted. The birth of that thought was one shot of [actor] Philip Seymour Hoffman leaving an apartment building. He was hit by direct sun, and the building behind him was way too dark. I was horrified when we shot it, thinking it was way too contrasty. But when we watched dailies, I realized this was much better for the film. So I didn't run away from that contrasty look, and we enhanced it when we needed to in post.”
Linse adds that raw Genesis imagery is particularly well suited for a smooth digital intermediate experience, especially in the current hybrid world in which, increasingly, images are captured digitally, treated in post digitally, and then, ironically, still exhibited on film for the moviegoing public.
“The [DI] process is the same whether you shoot film or digitally, but as people transition from one medium to the another they are making choices about how to shoot HD so that you best preserve the look you originally designed and captured,” Linse says. “If you shoot HD, and there are any kind of digital artifacts, or anything else that looks like video, it won't go away as you go through the DI process and later output to film for release prints. The key thing about the Genesis is that it captures original imaging without a lot of digital artifacting or giving the feeling of video to things. You add, on top of that, the fact that you have such great control these days over the color-correction process in terms of color saturation, contrast, and all those other factors, before you output to film, and you have a healthy situation. In our case, Sidney captured the color space he wanted, and in any digital screenings, or when the DVD comes out, that will actually be the truest color space and representation of what Sidney actually wanted. But even when exhibited on film, back in film color space, we know we minimized any possibility of digital artifacts creeping into things.”
