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MillimeterShooting Enemies
Jul 8, 2009 12:01 PM, By Michael Goldman
Michael Mann on making a period piece digitally.
Photo: Peter Mountain/Universal Pictures
Canning says his engineering department maintained great control over monitoring, manipulating, and painting images live on set because of their use of a 16x16 NVision switcher, an Evertz HD-SDI router, and a For-A DCC-70HS HD color corrector—a system that let them monitor and manipulate images from three or four cameras on one chain, on one display, simultaneously. “The router itself was the heart of the distribution system and allowed us flexible assignment [of images] in [1RU],” Canning says. “Feeds for video assist, as well as sound, were sent from that router.”
But Canning says the biggest engineering improvement on this shoot over Mann’s earlier work was that the project gave him, for the first time, complete remote control over camera settings—making seamless adjustments as Mann called for them.
That was made possible via an Ethernet-based camera-control system, thanks to the incorporation of Sony’s MSU-900 master setup unit, which allows the video team to adjust settings on multiple cameras through an Ethernet interface with an Ethernet hub. Use of such a system on a major, digitally acquired feature film, according to Canning, is a major step, because it allowed him to use standard Cat-5 cabling and a network switch to form the camera-control system, rather than relying on special control cables and sophisticated camera-control hardware.
“I’m pretty sure this is the first time it was done on a [major] motion picture,” Canning says. “It lets you run Cat-5 cable to the camera, which is real simple to terminate, and then, when the cameras are adrift, they naturally pop up in the right position in the MSU unit. The MSU now has an Ethernet port on it, and you can use a simple, off-shelf router with it, and then just plug Cat-5 in to control your camera. It was very powerful to do it that way.
“On this movie, I had full remote control of the camera. I had four remote-controlled cameras and I could turn off the blue channel, for instance, myself [while they were shooting]. That let [the camera people] focus on framing and not having to worry about turning a bunch of knobs.”
Despite the production’s pleasure with the F23, there were situations in which the F23 wouldn’t work to capture particular shots. Several shots inside extremely tight spaces, such as 1930s-style auto¬mobiles, required a more compact approach. For those sequences, Mann’s team opted for Sony’s PMW-EX1 camcorder, reconfigured to record to the Sony SRW-1 recording deck via a single cable instead of using the camera’s flash-memory system.
“That worked well for tight insert shots in cars,” Carroll says. “We also carried a T-camera [a Sony HDC-F950 broken out of its camera housing] with a little package for very tight things inside cars and planes, and then we used a film camera for one slow-motion sequence.”
That sequence comes in the movie’s climax: the shooting death of Dillinger at the hands of FBI agents outside the Biograph Theatre in Chicago. The scene was shot at the exact site of the real Dillinger shooting, and Mann wanted to greatly ramp speeds to stylize Dillinger’s fall. After testing various digital slo-mo options, he and Spinotti opted to shoot film for the sequence.
“We tested [the Phantom camera from Vision Research], but for as much slow-motion as we wanted to do, at 160fps, we decided it made more sense to use film,” Carroll says. “You have to keep in mind how Michael Mann wants to work. We must have done 50 to 60 takes from multiple different angles [of Dillinger’s death] during the shoot, and the workflow of those other cameras, to download from the cache, takes many minutes, and asking Michael to repeatedly wait just wasn’t the best way to work.”
The result of this approach, Mann and his colleagues insist, was the hyperrealism Mann envisioned—a stylized clarity that allows viewers to see 1933 environments and textures in detail.
“These aren’t classic, iconic images that are period-related, sepia tones and all that,” Spinotti says. “But they do have this sense of immediacy and realism that—when you combine them with the fact that we accurately reconstructed the story in terms of locations, costumes, scenarios, and cars—we could only do that shooting it this way. We recorded those period images with a very modern camera that creates the sense of a modern image. That was the most challenging part of the whole operation.”
Continue the discussion on Crosstalk the Millimeter Forum.