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MillimeterSpeaking of Film
May 1, 2002 12:00 PM, by Michael Goldman
 Conspiracy |
Atinge of irony surrounds Roger Deakins' feelings about the growing sophistication and flexibility of digital post technology. On the one hand, Deakins helped pioneer the groundbreaking digital intermediate finishing process during the making of O Brother, Where Art Thou? On the other hand, he sometimes wonders if such technical breakthroughs could eventually encourage “producers and studios to reduce the role of the DP during the post phase.”
Deakins, a five-time Oscar nominee, including this year for The Man Who Wasn't There, and other DPs with similar pedigrees, probably don't have to worry about being phased out of care taking their beloved film images in post any time soon. Nevertheless, according to Steven Poster, president of the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC), the arrival of the digital intermediate process, and other digital breakthroughs permitting quicker, easier, and more flexible manipulations of film-originated images, do require cinema-tographers to be more vigilant than ever before about staying involved throughout postproduction.
 West Wing |
“While the digital intermediate process gives you greater control [in post], it also creates a greater venue for misuse of the tools to subvert the original meaning of the image,” Poster points out. “So, I think cinematographers are starting to figure out that they better be involved throughout the process.”
Indeed, Poster, Deakins, and many other cinematographers focus less on the highly publicized arrival of high-resolution, digital acquisition technology, and consider the digital intermediate process to be the true digital advancement that will fundamentally impact the art of cinematography in the years to come.
 E.T. |
After all, the ability to scan an entire motion picture into the digital world for electronic color timing and editing was proven financially viable (under certain circumstances) by Deakins' team at Cinesite, Hollywood, in 1999 and 2000 during the making of O Brother. Since then, the process has become fairly common, so much so that Deakins says, “studios are now pushing it, partly because of business pressures as many facilities go digital.” But he reiterated his concern about the technique's proliferation: “If the DP is not available, they now have the technical ability to alter the images anyway, sometimes in an extreme manner.”
That's one of several important issues that concern today's high-profile cinematographers who now have an unprecedented number of options in stock, format, equipment, and digital post, along with an increased ability to mix tools and techniques. Millimeter recently surveyed six well-known DPs to get their thoughts about issues, trends, and recent innovations in film-based acquisition for both feature film and television. Those DPs include Deakins, Poster, five-time Oscar nominee Allen Daviau, Stephen Goldblatt, a two-time Oscar, two-time ASC, and one-time Emmy nominee, James Chressanthis, a former Emmy nominee, and Tom Del Ruth, winner of three Emmys and four ASC awards, including this year for his work on The West Wing.
 Alan Daviau |
Creative Control
Digital intermediate is one of many reasons cinematographers continue to talk about the age-old issue of creative control. Deakins is concerned about the proliferation of the digital process not because he's not impressed by its potential — after all, he largely pioneered it — but rather, because he fears seeing digital intermediate become a producer's “post choice du jour” for business, rather than creative, reasons. He would prefer to see such post choices made the same way he makes film stock and camera choices: based on each project's creative needs. In the past year, for instance, Deakins made a conscious choice not to use the digital intermediate process for either The Man Who Wasn't There or A Beautiful Mind.
“The issue is resolution,” he explains. “At the moment, the standard for digital intermediate has been set at 2k. It is possible to work at 4k, but there are huge cost issues associated with being able to store that much digital imagery. It's a scientific fact that 2k is not full film resolution. For O Brother, that was OK, because sharpness was not what we were looking for. There, we wanted the look of a faded, '20s postcard, like a tinted photograph from that period, and the only way we could color the film in that unique way was to do it digitally. The Man Who Wasn't There, on the other hand, was a black-and-white movie, and we wanted a very sharp, clean, low-grain image. Processing the negative traditionally, in the laboratory, was more than adequate for that, and it gave us better resolution. How to use digital intermediate, and when to use it, is a huge issue right now for cinematographers.”
 Roger Deakins |
Building on Deakins' point, Allen Daviau — known as being one of the industry's most open minds when it comes to testing digital acquisition and postproduction techniques — wonders why the industry would want to rush to replace “old” approaches with “new” ones.
“Finishing a picture through the normal chain, looking at it with a color timer, doing an answer print, interpositive, dupe negatives, and release prints — what's wrong with that?” he asks. “Until digital distribution becomes the norm, the traditional method works fine for most material, except where there are extensive effects or where you want a particular look. I think we are still a long way from having digital intermediate be a standard for all feature films. In the meantime, we'll live in a hybrid world.”
 James Chressanthis |
For television, digital mastering also has huge implications. Tom Del Ruth thinks that's precisely why TV cinematographers should insist on the right to be deeply involved in the digital mastering phase.
“The digital intermediate process is starting to catch on for television, and it holds great promise,” says Del Ruth. “After all, the concept gives us the best of both worlds, in my view: the ability to shoot on film, which lets us capture and hold contrast, the ability to change the look of film with different stocks, and then the ability to go into the telecine room and digital post and create various effects, composites, and subtle changes. But cinematographers should insist on absolute control over the final image. They should insist on the full creative right to adjust contrast or color without anyone else riding herd on them. We originate the image, and therefore, we should be the final arbiters when it comes to the final look of those images, in accordance with the director's vision.”
 Steve Poster |
Many DPs express similar concern about maintaining creative input during the remastering process used on older feature films for re-release and DVD, whether relying on digital or traditional lab techniques. Daviau recently completed supervision of the traditional remastering of E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial, which he shot for Steven Spielberg back in 1981, and the creation of an HD master for DVD release. He reports that remastering experience was “extremely positive” because studios Amblin/DreamWorks and Universal “had the foresight to maintain the original E.T. negative in pristine condition,” and happily encouraged his participation.
Still, some DPs express concern about having their earlier work altered without their participation, and sometimes, without their knowledge.
 Tom Del Ruth |
“I get lots of calls about doing new masters of my work,” says Deakins. “On the other hand, sometimes, they don't call at all, and some of my films were remastered without involving me in any way in the color retiming. If they aren't contractually obligated to call you, they won't always do so. That's definitely an issue for DPs, something we're sensitive about. I mean, what if they remastered O Brother and changed the whole scheme by going back to the original negative and not the original digital master? Since the original negative is colored differently, it would look nothing like the original movie. Or, what if they remastered The Man Who Wasn't There in color, though we shot it on a color negative before processing it in black-and-white? Those kind of problems are why the original DP must be involved.”
Poster puts it another way: “The DP is the only one who understands the restraint and taste that went into collaborating with the director to make the original image. If you re-master that material, and take him out of that equation, it would be very difficult to maintain the original intent.”
Old is New Again
The use of black-and-white imagery in feature films continues to be a niche area for filmmakers, as old as the art form itself. But it's also a good example of how today's cinematographers are advancing established film acquisition techniques. In the past year, for instance, Deakins opened eyes in the cinematography community with his method for The Man Who Wasn't There. Winning an award from his ASC peers for that work and nominated for an Oscar, Deakins used what Daviau describes as “a pioneering approach.”
“The film has obvious film noir and B-movie references,” Deakins explains. “To achieve the full tonal range of grays and to maintain a rich black and a clean white, which were important to give particular scenes a variety of looks, I performed several tests. In the end, I found that by using a medium speed, lower contrast color stock (Kodak 5277) and printing onto a black-and-white, high-contrast title stock (Kodak 5369), I could get the black-and-white image with silky mid-tones and the tight grain structure that we wanted.”
Daviau raves about his colleague's work because he feels Deakins, in partnership with Deluxe Hollywood film labs, “developed a whole new science to go with his art when it comes to black-and-white. He proved that by using modern color emulsion stock as his original, and then finding a way to make title stock (5369) work at proper contrast ranges to print the color negative out in black-and-white, he could get a crisp and unique look. He came up with a way to extend the life of black-and-white in the modern era.”
Venerable Super 16mm film stock was likewise involved in a high-profile project during the last year. Stephen Goldblatt, a former documentary filmmaker, won praise from his peers for shooting the HBO telemovie, Conspiracy, for director Frank Pierson using Super 16 (Kodak Vision 200 stock), and then manipulating those images digitally at Cinesite, Los Angeles.
“I was attracted to Super 16 for this project [about the historical meeting in which Nazi bureaucrats planned details of the Final Solution] for creative reasons because most of the film takes place in one room,” says Goldblatt. “We wanted a documentary nature to the piece, handheld, and Super 16 was perfect for that. It was a much better choice than HD, since we wanted the film to resemble older footage of that era, not modern video. The choice gave me a clean negative, and yet, we had the opportunity to do our blowup to 35mm digitally. That was crucial, because in the past, the drawback of Super 16 was the difficulty in doing an optical blowup. But with the digital intermediate process, we avoided that problem completely. We got a lot of compliments on the 35mm blowup.”
Goldblatt emphasizes that blending film types and stocks is also a growing trend, thanks to today's ability to digitally mix and match imagery. That's the approach James Chressanthis took shooting the remake of Brian's Song for ABC. Chressanthis, nominated for an Emmy in 2001 for his work shooting Life With Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows, shot many of the Brian's Song football sequences in Super 8mm, sprinkling that material into a 35mm movie.
“We shot 8mm [Pro 8 Film, engineered from Kodak Vision stock] for the football games at 9fps, which is an odd frame rate, and then we telecined it at 9fps to digital Betacam,” explains Chressanthis. “The digital Betacam was then blown up to a 35mm negative [and the film was finished at 35mm]. That approach gave us a blurred, streaming, poetic, extremely subjective kind of treatment for those shots, which still intercut well with the ultra-sharp, 35mm photography. We didn't use 16mm because that was too close to 35mm for the look we wanted. We also used 8mm for traditional home-movie scenes, and for scenes where the actor [Sean Maher] playing Brian Piccolo is receiving chemotherapy. There, we utilized 8mm with an extreme distorting lens to show the agony he was going through.”
Chressanthis adds that he had such a “positive experience” blowing the 8mm images up to 35mm that “I'd like to film an entire movie in 8mm someday.”
“After all, with all the digital formats making so much news these days and even major filmmakers experimenting with mini-DV to make movies, I think it's cool that this 70-year-old medium — 8mm — that many people think is obsolete, still has professional value,” he says. “I've blown up 8mm, and it looks as good, if not better, at 35mm than mini-DV, so why not do an entire movie that way?”
Chressanthis also filmed actress Judy Davis during certain portions of his Emmy-nominated work on Judy Garland in black-and-white — part of an attempt to craft images similar in nature to the way the real Judy Garland was filmed decades ago.
“We used film very similar to what they were using 50 years ago — Kodak Plus-X black-and-white stock,” says Chressanthis. “It gave us a silvery, pearlescent quality, very similar to old footage of Garland, which met the creative goal for those sequences.”
Prints, Lenses, Projections
Another topic concerning film DPs is a lack of diversity when it comes to film print stocks. According to Steven Poster, while the current generation of origination stocks is “brilliant,” the same cannot be said of print stocks.
“There has been a lack of development in print stocks,” says Poster. “Right now, they are pretty limited — we essentially have a choice of contrasty and contrastier. We've been talking to Kodak about this, but right now, they have limited the less contrasty stocks at the same time they have been doing better with shooting stocks.”
Allen Daviau explains, “Kodak 5386 was the previous standard for normal contrast print stock, but they dropped it and replaced it with regular Vision stock, which is a higher contrast print stock. Many of us wish they were still offering a normal contrast print stock, because regular Vision stock has more contrast and color saturation than a normal print stock. This means the cinematographer is often forced to change his or her lighting style to accommodate the print stock, and that's not the best way to do things. If Kodak provided another normal contrast print stock, that would give us more choices.”
On the lens' front, cinematographers are impressed with recent advances in the development of Prime lenses and other tools for shooting HD that have partially narrowed the gap between film and video, but Poster worries that much of this development has been done in response to the arrival of digital acquisition technology, and not enough development is being done in the anamorphic universe.
“We have not seen a lot of developmental work in recent years on anamorphic lenses,” says Poster. “That's a big loss, because we need newer and better anamorphic lenses. With the science and technology available today in optical design, I'm sure there are brilliant things that could be done with anamorphic lenses that are not taking place, and that's too bad.”
Cinematographers are also closely following digital projection developments, and some have concerns about digital projection that mirror their traditional complaints about the lack of uniformity among answer prints projected in cinemas throughout the world.
Deakins says the problem is simple: In the same way that the quality and condition of answer prints can vary wildly over time, from cinema to cinema, depending on use and conditions, so potentially can the quality of digital projection systems.
“It's true that answer prints can look lousy over time, and cinematographers have always been concerned about this,” says Deakins, “but the same principal applies with digital projectors. After all, how do we know each projection system will be maintained to give the optimal image once they eventually become commonplace? I saw a demo recently where there were dropout specks appearing on the screen, created because the projector got tainted somehow, either by a technical flaw or dirt or something else getting into the system. There were color artifacts all over the screen. So, the idea that digital projections will always be pristine isn't realistic. Any projection system, over time, will produce artifacts of one type or another. So, what's the difference between a film artifact and a digital artifact? Either way, the original image is altered.”
Cinematic TV
According to some television DPs, the look of many episodic dramas and TV movies has evolved in recent years into the cinematic realm, all during a period in which budgets have tightened and film has faced competition from HD.
“For one thing, we're shooting in lower light levels these days,” says Del Ruth. “We also have a wider range of Kodak and Fuji stocks to choose from to illustrate any mood you can imagine, much like feature film people. So, in that sense, shooting for TV has moved closer to the feature film world, where we can find affordable tools to produce desired emotional responses. The evolution of lenses, and improvements in the weight and flexibility of film cameras, have also contributed to this trend.”
Goldblatt, currently shooting a six-hour, two-part HBO film for director Mike Nichols based on the Angels in America stage play, agrees, and he suggests the evolution of film-related technology gets less ink than HD technology, but deserves more.
“HD cameras are still big and heavy, and they don't have the same quality in the highlights or the shadows,” says Goldblatt. “Right now, I'm shooting at night in Central Park, shooting around 800 ASA with extraordinary results on film. Some shots we're creating are so wide [that] we need every ounce of film speed we can get. Plus, I'm using the small Panavision Millennium cameras, which permit us to get onto tiny sets without umbilical cords. Don't forget that film is at a pretty advanced stage of development compared to HD technology.”
In any case, an obstacle faced by television DPs is the fact that TV images are often unintentionally altered after post, during broadcast, due to the nature of the transmission process required to send TV signals to homes. Therefore, Del Ruth says there can no longer be “final control” over TV images in telecine, the edit suite, or anywhere else.
“Most DPs get 98% of what they want into the final TV master, but once that master is sent to the network, it's uplinked and sent by satellite to downlinks all over the country, which distribute those images to cable companies, who dominate most American TV sets right now,” he says. “Each of those downloaded images can still be adjusted electronically at the download site — they can control brightness, remove colors, and so on, and they can do it automatically. But they can't possibly know what was in the mind of the people shooting the material originally. So, sometimes, what the viewing public sees has little relationship to what was originally done in the telecine room. I'm actually a little shocked that our industry is not more careful with its representative imagery.”
