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MillimeterRiding the Digital Range
Sep 1, 2003 12:00 PM, by Michael Goldman
Costner and Muro on Digital Intermediate
Kevin Costner wasn't exactly itching to do a digital intermediate on his new film — Touchstone Pictures' Open Range — when the project got underway last year. He didn't even know, or care, what exactly a digital intermediate was. However, as the film's producer/director and star working with a modest budget for a studio film (just over $20 million), Costner did care about how to best use visual elements to tell the story about a pair of aging cowpokes and their search for frontier justice. His goal: “To use angles, colors, wide open spaces, and interesting framing to show the total experience of being on the open range, and showing the reality of a major gunfight.”
Costner picked a first-time DP to shoot the piece — industry Steadicam veteran Jimmy Muro (see the May 2003 issue of Millimeter for more on Muro) who, like him, had never been involved with a digital intermediate. Costner says he deferred the decision about whether to use the process to Muro. That decision caused Costner occasional consternation during the year-plus it took to make Open Range, and he remains, by no means, a digital intermediate zealot. He will admit, however, now that the experience is over, that the movie benefited from the decision.
“First of all, it obviously helped my DP in lots of ways, and if Jimmy says it helped him make the film look the way it does, as someone who is not highly technical, I have to respect that, and that is why I went with the process to begin with,” Costner told Millimeter. “Second, I was seriously interested in shooting this film in HD originally — I've been thinking about it since The Postman. The reason for that is, on both films, I had this desire to make skies different colors, play with other things. For both films, I chickened out when it comes to shooting HD, but Jimmy felt we could achieve most of those goals using this process. It also allowed us to work faster. We had very short nights up in Canada and a couple of key scenes at dawn. We were looking at five-hour workdays in the evening. If I didn't get the ultimate dawn when shooting, then the ability to do final manipulation on those shots obviously made a big difference because we didn't have the luxury of staying up there until we had the perfect sky.”
Big Decision
Costner and Muro did not arrive at the decision to perform a digital intermediate lightly. In fact, since Open Range was meant to be an organic and realistic period piece designed to evoke classic Westerns of the past, and with only minor special effects, there appeared to be no overwhelming need to perform a digital intermediate or to deviate in any significant way from the traditional photochemical color-timing processes that both men were intimately familiar with.
 Director Kevin Costner wanted Open Range's pivital rain sequences to have a dark, gritty, realistic look, and they therefore received close attention during the digital intermediate phase. |
On the other hand, the film was shot on a tight schedule with limited money on the prairies of Alberta, where nights were extremely short and weather and skies were constantly changing. The story also required extensive practical effects work to create massive rainstorms and flooding in an old-time Western town constructed specially for the project. These requirements could benefit from a digital intermediate.
At the end of the day, Costner says he left the decision to Muro for a reason rarely discussed in filmmaking circles — namely, that directors need to satisfy the needs of their key creative collaborators, as well as having their own needs met.
“We had only so much money on this film, and I definitely did not want to get bogged down in technical stuff myself,” says Costner. “I wanted to focus on angles and my story as the director, and with my producer's hat on, I had to watch the money. I sat down with Jimmy, and he said he wanted to do the digital intermediate. I have a lot of faith in him, and he promised we'd have the beautiful scenes I wanted. He felt the process would help him get the job done, so I agreed.”
 In particular, colorist Marc Wielage faced challenges maintaining "blues at just the right shade." |
Muro believes he and Costner probably could have achieved the same combination of raw, gritty, dark rain sequences, wind-swept prairie shots, and painterly skies without resorting to a digital intermediate, but he insists the grueling shoot in Canada made the process a more practical choice and gave him more flexibility during production.
“I felt I could make the sky better, get away with modest light in some places, and work faster overall on set, which was important because our nights were short, we had scenes at dawn, and we did not have unlimited time or money to light the piece,” says Muro. “But probably the biggest value we got with the digital intermediate was the ability to selectively frame the film here and there, and shoot Super 35 with confidence that a digital extraction would turn out better than an optical blowup, letting us recompose shots during color-timing if necessary. I really feel the digital intermediate process has eliminated the reason many filmmakers have for staying away from Super 35 — the complexities of the optical blowup. More people are shooting Super 35 now than ever before because this process renders that problem moot.”
Muro opted to shoot Kodak 5279 for night sequences, often pushing a couple of stops in processing, and Kodak 5274 for all daytime scenes. He planned to generally underexpose exteriors in order to retain the option to tweak them during the digital intermediate phase. Muro brought the film to Cinesite, Hollywood, where colorist Marc Wielage worked with Costner and Muro to digitally color-time the movie.
Cinesite scanned the film's original Super 35mm negative to an array of hard drives with a combination of Philips' Spirit and Lightning II scanners. Wielage says the entire negative was scanned full-aperture at 2048×1556, using Cinesite's proprietary one-light settings to retain highlight and lowlight details. The digital files were then pushed through a Philips Virtual Datacine (VDC), where each scene was confirmed and matched frame-by-frame to offline HD cassettes under supervision of assistant editor Tracey Wadmore-Smith and data operators Ed Thompson and Pete Moc, who made sure the VDC produced the equivalent of a timeline conformed to the Avid offline cassettes.
Wielage then color-timed Open Range on a Pandora Pogle Platinum MegaDef system, using proprietary Kodak look-up tables (LUTs). Filmmakers viewed the images using a JVC DLA-QX1 digital projector, modified by Cinesite engineers with their proprietary LUTs to approximate the look of a film print. The QX1 boasts JVC's proprietary D-ILA technology, featuring 10-bit digital color processing and 12-bit gamma correction.
HD Version
Muro says the nature of the location shoot and the project's budget required filmmakers to use HD dailies. The movie was shot mainly at the Stoney Nakoda First Nations Reserve near Calgary, Alberta, making it cost-prohibitive to produce and transport film dailies on a timely basis. Instead, film was sent to Toybox, Vancouver, which transferred the Super 35mm film images to HD, relying on digital still photos shot by Muro and manipulated in Photoshop as a primary color guide. Toybox sent the HD dailies on Sony HDCAM tape back to Muro and Costner on location the next day, where the production team viewed them on a 20in. Sony HD monitor.
Those same HD daily tapes, however, were also used during the post phase to serve as the foundation for a rough and beautiful HD master of the entire film, according to Muro. That HD version — essentially a conformed, online version of the movie in HD — was built by colorist Greg Hamlin at LaserPacific, Hollywood, after production and offline editing and before the digital intermediate phase began at Cinesite. The primary purpose of the HD version was to permit filmmakers to screen the film cost-effectively for test audiences and, later, for an early digital screening at the Cannes Film Festival.
 Costner directed with a goal to visualize the "total experience" of the open range — a plan which was aided by the digital intermediate process in terms of color and sky enhancements. |
While the creation of HD test versions of movies shot on film is growing increasingly popular, it's still relatively new to do it for feature films that will be going through the digital intermediate process. (Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl is another recent example. An HD version was built at Complete Post, Hollywood, and then a digital intermediate was done at Technique, Burbank.) Since video and film color space are quite different, the HD version cannot be directly used as a guide for performing color correction on the film version of a movie. “We essentially have to start from scratch when color correcting the film in its final form,” says Cinesite's Marc Wielage.
But Muro says he found the workflow from the on-set viewing of HD dailies to the creation of an HD test version to the final digital intermediate phase useful in understanding how the film would look overall. He adds that LaserPacific's expertise with HD mastering and their HD theater made it “the perfect place” to build an HD template of the movie. He adds that this template was occasionally referred to during the digital intermediate process, but more importantly, “the HD version was a beautiful example of our movie all by itself.”
Costner agrees that the HD version of the film came out nicely, but he also admits he had some trepidation about whether the theatrical version of the movie would resemble the HD version or not. Plus, he adds, he had trouble during production getting used to HD dailies to begin with.
“Our first dailies were horrible to look at — one of the worst nights of my life was the first night viewing dailies,” Costner admits. “We didn't have the sound synched, a few of our crew even walked out. What concerned me the most was seeing material that I did not have confidence would look the way I wanted it to when we got the whole picture together. It didn't look like what I was planning on. But Jim and I sat down and just worked all that out. He worked hard to fix the problems we were having and to reassure me he understood the process and explained how he knew things would match up. As it turned out, his work paid off, and our most beautiful scenes and our budget benefited from doing it this way.”
Muro agrees that the process had some kinks in the beginning. “There was a lot of confusion early on with our HD dailies system, but that is not much different than printing dailies on film, where you initially have to get used to your color timer. There is always a learning curve, which is why research and tests are so important,” he says. “But someone like Kevin just wants to know what his images will look like and not be bogged down with all those details about look-up tables and things. So I have to give him a lot of credit for trusting me on this.
“[After production wrapped], we projected [the HD version of the film] at LaserPacific in an anamorphic frame using rented Christie HD projectors, and it looked great. The video color space, of course, is different than film, and at the time we were posting this movie, only a handful of movies had tried the digital intermediate process, so it wasn't like we had a standardized work method to follow. But it was a useful tool overall as we went through this process.”
Cinesite's Wielage, meanwhile, thinks the HD test version probably helped Muro and Costner more than it did him during the digital color-timing phase for the movie, though he did refer back to that version occasionally. In his opinion, the digital intermediate process will mature when the colorist and facility involved in the digital intermediate are also involved, either directly or indirectly, in the creation of HD dailies at a production's outset — much as visual effects supervisors have evolved out of the post category and into key roles on set during production.
“My belief is that for future digital intermediate projects, it would be a good idea for our facility to be more closely involved with the digital dailies process from the get-go,” says Wielage. “There should be more cross-pollination, so that the company doing the digital intermediate has a hand in color correction of the dailies, or at least consulting on it. That way, HD versions of movies that are going back to film would be more useful as guides or templates for colorists like myself.”
(Cinesite's parent, Kodak, acquired LaserPacific in July, after this project was finished. Wielage believes that putting the two facilities under the same corporate umbrella will lead to better cross-pollination on jobs in which both facilities are involved in different capacities.)
Benefits
From a strictly creative point of view, Costner believes that the digital intermediate process on this project worked primarily because he had faith in Muro to ensure that the images matched his creative vision. He remains cautious, however, about “whether I'm seeing exactly what it will look like on film” while the process is ongoing. He also says he would decide case by case whether he would use the process again on future films, largely depending on whether he had the same level of faith in another team that he had in Muro and Cinesite.
Wielage points to a handful of key scenes that were effectively altered at Cinesite to achieve the sometimes gritty, sometimes painterly look that Costner was searching for.
“There is a scene where Kevin's character [cowboy Charley Waite] is digging a grave,” Wielage explains. “The original photography had a deep blue sky present. We changed this to an amber-orange morning sunrise, adding a subtle gradiated filter effect to enhance the morning effect. We had other scenes that were shot night-for-day, like the scene where Boss Spearman [Robert Duvall's character] buys supplies in the general store. There we helped smooth out the lighting to match the day shots to the point where I think the differences were imperceptible.”
 Costner was particularly concerned during color-timing sessions about achieving the look of dawn for a scene in which his character interacts with Annette Bening's on the porch of her home — a scene that was digitally enhanced. |
Because he was deeply involved in the creation of the HD version and in the final film-out process (also performed at Cinesite using Lightning II laser film recorders, with final release prints done at Technicolor, Burbank), Costner largely left details of the digital intermediate phase to Muro and Wielage. He was involved a few times, however, particularly for the scene in which his character bids farewell to Sue Barlow (Annette Bening) on her porch at dawn, just before departing for the film's climactic gunfight.
“Kevin was nervous about that scene because he really wanted it to look like dawn, and it wasn't shot right at dawn,” says Muro. “He personally color-timed much of that sequence, actually.”
Wielage adds that the night rain sequences in the film also benefited from the digital color-timing approach. “Most of the rain sequences, except for one early in the movie, take place at night,” says Wielage. “Keeping the blues at just the right shade was tough and required a day or two of testing to make sure they weren't too intense — neither too magenta-purple nor too greenish-cyan, yet still looking natural and believable.”
Even the gunfight, a 20-minute scene that Costner and Muro labored over on location in order to illustrate the angles and closeness of the combatants in such battles, benefited from the digital intermediate process.
“We spent a good three or four days just on that sequence alone,” says Wielage. “There were nearly 600 cuts in this one 2,000ft. reel of film, along with slow-motion effects, cloud effects, and rapid-fire violence that kept the movie at a fairly intense level. From a color standpoint, the biggest difficulty was in keeping everything consistent, both overall and shot-by-shot. Because this sequence cuts back and forth from exteriors to interiors, from effects shots to camera negative shots, all photographed over a period of several weeks, we had to jump through a few hoops to make it all look like everything happened within the same hour.”
Lighting Issues
In terms of lighting, knowledge of a pending digital intermediate was a double-edged sword during the shoot, particularly given that Open Range has numerous nighttime exterior scenes that Costner wanted to realistically replicate the darkness and quiet of being in the woods at night or in the middle of a driving rainstorm at night. In some cases, Muro “could get away with less light and make it right later,” but in others, he had no room for error.
“There is no question in my mind that if we had not done a digital intermediate, I would have had to spend more time lighting throughout filming,” says Muro. “In some of the interior scenes in the doctor's house where people are walking around with candles, I wasn't too worried because I knew I could brighten those shots up a bit with the digital intermediate. And I loved the fact that in [a scene showing a confrontation in a small café], I was able to darken some of the frame around Robert Duvall's and Kevin's characters and let them be in a pool of light. I could control things like that, but that is not to say I felt the digital intermediate should be used as a special effect. I had to be very careful lighting, recognizing on the one hand that I would have leeway to make adjustments later, and at the same time, struggling to be careful that I didn't go too dark since it would be tough to dial it brighter later. It was a very fine line.”
An ambush sequence around a campfire typifies that fine line. Costner demanded the scene look authentic — in other words, giving only the impression of firelight since it takes place in the middle of nowhere. “The ambush scene in particular had people nervous because there just didn't seem to be enough light,” Muro recalls. “My gaffer said he could find no value, nothing, on his light meter. I was a first-time DP, so a few people thought maybe I was messing up by not bringing much light out to the forest for that scene. But in reality I was obeying my boss, who wanted the characters to be sneaking around in the black woods. The whole scene was shot with small, battery-strip firelights and my Steadicam.
“This particular scene, we couldn't mess with at all during the digital intermediate. Digital post won't fix it if there is no light. So, this sequence was a good example of where we had to get a good negative to begin with, using our skills. It turned out to be one of the better scenes in the movie, but we knew we had no room for error when we shot it.”
Overall, however, Muro says he learned to err on the bright side when supervising a digital intermediate.
The reason for that, he says, is an often-overlooked point. “The digital intermediate isn't really the final step,” he points out. “After that step, we still had to do the final release-printing step at Technicolor, which presented yet another opportunity to make minor color changes. Therefore, it's better to leave things a bit too bright than bring it down too much since you can fix one photochemically, but not the other. That just comes down to a cost and time issue, about whether you can afford to sit down again during the printing stage with a color-timer, but at least you have that option. Still, the digital intermediate kept me from having to worry about that too much. It gave me opportunities to fix mistakes I made, and I really appreciated that. One shot where Charley steps out in a storm at night, I made a mistake, for instance — it was a little too bright. We had a lamp too close to Kevin when we shot him. I was able to nicely and efficiently dial that down in the digital post process.”
At press time, the movie was getting generally good reviews, with numerous notations about the quality of Muro's cinematography. Costner is gratified by that turn of events, and notes the bottom line: “The film turned out the way I envisioned it.” But that doesn't mean the filmmaker has yet become vested in the digital intermediate process, despite his success with it and its rapidly growing acceptance by the filmmaking community.
Rather, Costner insists, any decision to try another digital intermediate would be “something I would have to hash out with my DP again, just like I did with Jimmy. I do like collaboration though, and there is no doubt this process requires a major collaboration by all key players. We'll see how that goes. I'm aware there are more skilled filmmakers out there than me, and people far more technically proficient, but at the end of the day, it's all about the story and the images that tell that story. We got it right on this project, so obviously we made the right decisions.
“I still want to shoot HD, though. I'll try that sooner or later, when I find a project that meets the economics of the whole thing.”
Next issue: A look at how Robert Benton and his collaborators applied the digital intermediate process to his new film, The Human Stain.
