HD For Indies

Hey all -

So way back in in 2005, I got an email from John August, screenwriter of Go, Big Fish, Charlie's Angels, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, yadda yadda.

He was looking to make a movie of his own, but wanted to keep costs contained, and keep the workflow flexible - so that if he wanted the option to do it as small as finishing inhouse, it would be possible, but also be able to scale it up to big dollar, high quality post facility workflows as well. He's a talented screenwriter, but also a techie/propellerhead type, and contacted me to discuss workflow for his proposed film.

Lately he's been putting up a lot of details about how the film was made, and there is LOTS of very useful info in this. One nice bit about all this is that he's an experienced professional, yet shares his info like most professionals don't bother to. Much appreciated.

SHOOTING

Lets start with the techie nitty gritty about the production and post on his film, The Nines (for context, here's the trailer and the one-sheet , and it is showing at the Nuart on the 31st)

johnaugust.com � Technical details on The Nines:

For Part One, my hope was to shoot HD. Even as I was finishing the script, I’d begun a conversation with Mike Curtis at HD for Indies about the potentials and pitfalls of various cameras and workflows. In case you ever doubt my the extent of my geekery, check out the four pages of flowcharts I made to map out the process we came up with: nines_workflow.pdf.

Mike was a big help in letting me talk through, and think through, my goals and priorities in the technical details of shooting movie. But how much of his advice did we end up using? Almost none.1 As it turned out, we didn’t shoot HD at all.

I really thought we would. But our d.p., Nancy Schreiber, quickly convinced me otherwise. She’s no Luddite — she’s won awards for her digitally-shot features. But when she visited our main location, with its vast expanses of glass, she made it clear that any savings we would have gained from shooting on HD would be lost by the extra time and expense it would take to control the light.

So out went the plan for tethered cameras and hard drives. Instead, we shot two sizes of film, and standard-def video.


Pardon my long quoting from his blog, but this makes a really good point - just because one team member makes a recommendation for some plausible sounding reasons* doesn't mean that you should stick to it. I'd recommended a particular setup for a particular set of needs and budget constraints, but I wasn't there to scout the location. I heard "indoors" and PRESUMED that lighting would be controllable environment. Nancy, the DP (whom I never had the pleasure to meet), scouted the location, saw all the big windows, and nixed my suggestion as ill-advised since I didn't know all the facts. This is a great example of the kind of collaboration required from a team. The producer would now need to get involved to help chug, quantify, and vote up/down on the potential cost changes for this kind of format change.

* (my suggestion at the time was to shoot tethered uncompressed HD to disk for higher quality, lower cost than HDCAM in a controlled, indoor environment not requiring a lot of camera movement with good power and space facilities nearby for an edit/capture room. He mentioned windows, but I figured some netting/flagging could address without seeing the location. Wrong! This experience, and similar ones, has led me to change my methodologies to recommend including the DP as early as possible in these "what are we shooting on" conversations with director/producer/filmmakers.)

Read on about how they shot Super-16 for part one (and why that was such a good idea, but the caveats involved), SDX-900 for part 2 (16:9 DVCPRO50 24p), and 3 perf 35mm for part three.

They wanted three different stories, three different looks. In our original early conversations, HD was going to be used for all three sections, and do check out that workflow PDF of the original-but-ditched plan - there was going to be a mix of F900 (or Varicam, budget depending) recorded tethered uncompressed directly into Final Cut Pro, then part 2 would have been Varicam or HVX200 (at the time John wanted a small camera that people wouldn't think much of on the street to be noticed), and part three I'd said defintely go film, 3 perf 35mm being my suggestion at the time as film was the only suitable recording media to deal with dappled sunlight in the woods and not get blown highlights and toasted shadows, as that would represent an extreme challenge to any media in terms of exposure lattitude.

In the end, Super-16, SDX-900 (standard def 24p), and 3 perf 35mm were used - so only part of my original suggestion was implemented.

This also points out that HD is not the best solution for everything, as Nancy said, in terms of overall budget, HD wouldn't give as good a result as 16mm.

WORKFLOW

I'd originally been suggesting, since John was a Final Cut Pro fan, and wanted the option to be able to do all the post inhouse if necessary, that shooting all these formats and converting to DVCPRO HD 720p23.976 would be the ideal way to get a decent quality rough HD edit done, and still be able to relink or uprez to 1080p for the mastering final - all within the same system. AND be able to screen decent looking HD during the process - storage is CHEAP these days, not at all the hindrance it was 5-10 years ago.

Besides the format changes, his award winning editor used Avid - so FCP was out the window at that point. But one interesting thing they did - all footage was transferred to HDCAM...and that became their master they worked from - NO matchback to negative to cut. They rented HDCAM decks (I presume the lowest cost J-H3 deck), and all footage was transferred from there. No going back to original source tapes, the color timed HDCAM was IT. Read on for why they did it, they had some good reasons but a few snags (shoulda gone 23.976, not 24.0 fps). D-5 would have been preferable, but at the time it appears it may have been a budget decision - D-5 is a MUCH more expensive deck, and there is no inexpensive capture deck available for that format as there is for HDCAM.

I'm proud that the "master from source digital" idea stuck from the beginning - it isn't the highest possible quality route, but in terms of quality per dollar, it is a helluva way to go. Our original intent had been to master from FCP (see the PDF again) from uncompressed or converted media, which wasn't feasible with the new workflow on the different system used, but their budget and confidence grew as they moved along and they had it all worked out. One thing I'd like about the FCP route was that it offered graceful scaling and degradation - if they'd needed to stay lower budget and finish inhouse, they could have. If they had the option to do a higher quality finish, they could "get there from here." The Avid route they went with worked, and worked well for them, but if they'd been budget constrained they would have run into some issues and problems doing a high quality finish on the system they could afford. Then again, their editor was an Avid guy, and an excellent editor, so that pretty much trumps a lot of decisions. Plus, higher end facilities tend to prefer to work with Avid for project hand-off - it is what they are used to. Avid can be limiting in some ways, but at least it limits you to the more viable choices. FCP offers tons of flexibility, including some options Avid doesn't offer, but it will let you make decisions that may bite you later moreso than Avid will, as a general rule of thumb.

As I usually recommend to festival bound clients, I say be READY to go out to film, but DON'T go out to film until you've already got your distribution deal signed. And at that point, what quality of DI, whether you go back to source film (if shot on film) for a re-transfer to better tape stock or scans; who pays for how much of what part of the process, what the budget is, etc. is all part of the discussion with the distribution company...to be determined LATER. If you have a budget of $500K, do you REALLY want to spend 10-15% of your budget going out to film, when considering that there were about 4000 films (of all lengths and types) submitted to Sundance, and perhaps 2-3 were actually "discovered" and bought at Sundance proper at BEST? From a business perspective, that is a poor use of your money.

Interesting to note, bit-head that John is, that he prefers the digital projection to the film (but he explains and gives caveats as to that answer).

LOCATION SCOUTING

johnaugust.com � Location scouting vs. reality

John finds some old locations scouting videos he took (and posts them!), discusses why videotaping is SOOOO much better than just snapping stills for location scouting, and has sample stills from the finished movie from those same locations to compare them to. Gold!

He mentions what a difference a professional DP, good lighting, good color grading (and not stated but implied a good camera, such as 35mm film) makes when you compare the scouting footage to the stills from the movie.

Not stated but should be pointed out - this is EXACTLY WHY amateurishly shot, poorly lit, non-color corrected, shot on cheapie camera indie movies look like ass and nobody wants to watch them. Same place, different talents used, different tools - ALL the difference.

He also points out how LONG it took to find & secure these locations - there is SO much prep work to be done to shoot a film properly.

John states he'll always video for location scouting from now on, you can tell so much more than from stills. Makes me think about how to best communicate with rest of staff/crew - IF (BIG if) you could quickly make a DVD or website (I'm thinking of iMovie/iDVD/iWeb type stuff as I just got the new versions, or Adobe CS3's ability to make a website from an Encore DVD project), wouldn't that be darn useful? But all contingent on how quick/easy to make and distribute and access that kind of info - and who has the technical chops to do it.

WEB COMPRESSION

johnaugust.com � Three from The Nines - shows compression examples on YouTube -

"In preparation for the trailer competition, I wanted to see how footage from the movie would hold up when subjected to the Flash compression of YouTube and the other video-sharing sites. So I uploaded three clips in various formats to experiment.

The results? Two clips look surprisingly great. The third looks like ass."


He then explains why. Read on.

OTHER

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Other stuff about John and the movie I found researching:

johnaugust.com � The Nines goes to Venice


Out of Africa | Exclusive | Advocate.com John goes to Malawi to paint an orphanage.


Guest blogger John August on publicity shots | Popwatch | Blog | Movies | Music | TV: Entertainment Weekly John talks about families and privacy

John is a smart, interesting, motivated, good hearted guy. I hope I get the chance to work with him (and more folks like him) again in the future - and I can't wait to see the final result for myself, I was unable to get into a screening of The Nines at Sundance while I was there.

-mike

Labels: Avid, workflow