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MillimeterOne for the Record Books
Jun 11, 2008 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
Speed Racer is the latest volley in a growing post-is-first production genre.
The epic track-racing sequences in Speed Racer were almost entirely computer-generated affairs as opposed to the rest of the movie and the rally races, which incorporated live-action photographic background elements. Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.
Visualizing, cutting
Staenberg's editing partner, Roger Barton, worked with Tattersall on the second Star Wars trilogy, and therefore, he was well familiar with all-digital workflows. (Speed Racer's editorial team used seven Avid Adrenalines hooked into 4TB of mirrored Unity storage on location in Germany during the greenscreen shoot, and added three more Adrenaline systems when the editorial process returned to the United States.) But as he divided up the work with Staenberg, who has now cut five movies for the Wachowski brothers, Barton says he realized the cutting style on Speed Racer was radically different from anything he has ever worked on.
“The idea behind it was to take all your selected takes and feel as though the camera was flying through the action, panning and zooming to find the next piece of action, so that whatever you wanted to reveal next was either stacked behind the foreground, or just out of frame,” Barton says. “And we'd have to design all these whips, zooms, and wipes — always keeping in mind where we wanted to go next.”
Because final shots were built during the editorial phase, however, it required the production to design a workflow that would allow filmmakers to visualize those shots on stage. The first part of that choice involved selecting the then-brand-new Sony F23 digital camera system as their primary acquisition tool, picking it from their then-available set of camera options largely because its single 2/3in. sensor allowed them to capture greater depth of field than they would have been able to capture with a film camera or other available digital cameras at the time.
They next chose to record an uncompressed 4:4:4 signal from the F23 to both Sony HDCAM SR tape and a Codex hard-drive recording system simultaneously, with the Codex being used as the platform for efficient file management to send data off to the various entities that needed it almost as soon as it was shot, including an on-set compositing system developed by Digital Domain engineer Brian Smith, dubbed “Sparky.”
“Sparky basically ran on a standard Intel-based videogame PC you might use for home gaming, running a Nvidia [8800] graphics card and a Blackmagic Design Decklink HD Extreme video card, and we developed code to take advantage of the incredible processing power of that modern GPU,” says Digital Domain's Kim Libreri. “That gave us an on-set compositing system to take the live feed out of the F23, and combine it with [a library of virtual backgrounds].”
The use of Codex hard-drive technology also allowed the production to instantly export DPX format data for the visual-effects team to use in building temp shots, and MXF format data for editorial to ingest efficiently and use for cutting without a lot of time wasted on format-conversion work.
“The Codex system, and its transparent ability to facilitate the data flow, while allowing us to operate in a more familiar way, was a linchpin to accomplishing the throughput of the photography,” Gaeta says. “That system, in combination with the F23, allowed the directors to make final decisions on stage, and that was really important.”
Later, in keeping with the theme of building the movie's final look in postproduction, the digital intermediate — handled in collaboration with colorist Maxine Gervais at Pacific Title — was where the movie's exaggerated spectrum of colors was executed.
“There was a lot of color in the light, in the set design, in the costumes, of course, but in the DI, we did gamma warping — using digital filters to manipulate the contrast in selective areas of the color space, which let us change contrast in certain places without affecting other parts of the frame,” Tattersall says. “That's how we baked the exaggerated color into the negative. There is an exaggeration to the color saturation that we added — beyond what is really possible in the photochemical world.”
Many backgrounds in the film were designed and built during the editorial process, using high-resolution digital still-photo image elements captured in places ranging from Europe to Northern Africa. Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.
Post first?
Among the end results of these processes used on Speed Racer is the fact that the approach has left a lasting impression on the people who made the movie. They point to the crossover approach as having infiltrated virtually every aspect of how Speed Racer got made. Digital Domain officials, for instance, point out that much of what would have once been considered classical art design essentially merged with visual effects. The film's lead concept designer for production, Jeff Julian, for example, also served as internal art director and spent much of the production integrated into the visual-effects team at Digital Domain, helping to design virtual environments, the race tracks seen in the movie, and so forth.
Barton, meanwhile, considers such moviemaking as so overwhelmingly collaborative that he says that Speed Racer “is neither directed by Larry or Andy, but rather, by one collective spirit.”
And fellow editor Staenberg says, philosophically, the whole concept “can't help but give you pause.”
“It seems likely to me that we have entered into an ‘age of postproduction,’ where post takes on a bigger role in production of the movie,” Staenberg says. “I'm not exactly predicting it, but it is possible. This kind of movie shows you can create things you couldn't create before, in terms of camera moves, shots, and making locations without going to them. That changes the dynamics of production and shifts the balance toward postproduction for certain kinds of movies.”
