• Blogs
• Forums
• Tradeshows
• Partners
• White Papers
• Podcast Show Notes
• Events

 

Winging It

Aug 10, 2009 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman

Davis Guggenheim and team on the improvisational style for It Might Get Loud.

Cutting and finishing

The ongoing editing process was, at times, laborious. Finton eventually found himself with reams of material to deal with after going weeks with almost no visuals at all. In addition to the film from the personal stories, and the hours of material from the summit, he and assistant editors Mike Azevedo and Troy Rackley constantly grappled with new vintage footage rolling in, frequent new versions and formats for that material, and thousands of still photos.

Azevedo says that during the finishing process, the production constantly labored to up-rez stock footage masters to D5 tape, running sometimes ancient and often degraded imagery from a variety of sources through a Teranex converter box in order to clean the material up. He says that most of the archival footage arrived on DVD or even VHS tapes.

“[For editing], we would export footage as QuickTime files and import those into the Avid,” Azevedo says. “When it came to the finishing process, we experimented with a number of ways to deal with the sources, since many of the DVDs and VHS sources we thought were going to be temporary turned out to be the best-quality master we could get. Some masters were captured, de¬interlaced, and upconverted directly in the [Autodesk] Smoke system. Others were captured into the Avid and de-interlaced and upconverted in [Adobe] After Effects. The Teranex upconversion process was part of this experimentation with finding out what worked the best for each source. But during finishing, we were continually upconverting stock footage one way or another and turning over updated reels to Company 3 every day.”

The editing team cut the film in the same building as Company 3, Santa Monica, Calif., using three dual-core Mac Pros running Avid Media Composer software (v.2.7.7). Material was stored on a 3TB G-Technology G-Speed FC RAID system running CommandSoft FibreJet SAN software. Azevedo says the production found FibreJet more cost-effective than running Avid Unity storage, and more convenient than relying on shuttle drives. Dailies and inhouse screenings were usually viewed in the editorial facility, projected directly through the Avid into a Panasonic PT-AX200U projector.

The biggest editing challenge was how to logically weave together the three separate individual stories, the summit, and a handful of animations designed by Kate Anderson and created by Click 3X New York, which also did the film’s title work. The animations were designed to illustrate anecdotes from the audio tapes that had no film or video footage associated with them. One example is an animation of what White’s boyhood bedroom looked like after he moved out his bed and all other furniture not directly related to music and acoustics. Another is a chart that provides a visual for The Edge’s complex explanation of how sound travels from amplifiers and around a room in different situations.

Related Links

The White Stripes Icky Thump from Mix On the Road: The White Stripes from Mix Led Zeppelin panel from Mix U2 3D from Mix U2's Vertigo Tour from Mix

“The only thing we knew going in, and believed in fervently, was that we would not cut between the stories until each individual story was ready and existed as good stories on their own,” Guggenheim says. “So we spent months just building a Jimmy Page story, an Edge story, a Jack White story. Only when those were done did we sit down to figure out how to put them all together.”

“That was a tough thing to do,” Finton says. “My first cut was assembled almost in a linear fashion, but it was dull—Jimmy shows the first guitar he ever bought and tells that story, and then Edge tell his, and then you know Jack will be next, and the audience will be five steps ahead of the film if you do it like that. So the linear stories were just a starting point, and then it was just a matter of trying different things to make them fit together emotionally.”

Material from so many sources provided a challenge for colorist Rob Sciarratta at Company 3, as he tried to blend the imagery as seamlessly as possible. Video from the summit had subtle grain additions, for example, to moderate its sharp contrast from the film footage it intercuts with. Also, White’s face presented temptations for Sciarratta to bring out his big guns within his Da Vinci Systems Resolve color-correction software, since the musician prefers to wear Goth-style pancake makeup.

“Some of the Led Zeppelin footage from the 1970s—it was like from a Tron movie or something, with heat patterns on the film because it was so beat up,” Sciarratta says. “We also had bad DVD or VHS material up-rezzed to HD or film space, and whenever you do that, you get certain positives, but also a few negatives that can happen from it that we had to address. But the end result was what counted. It’s a documentary, and all this footage was made in a less-than-ideal world, so we had film with grain patterns and then we had HD video. And it was all shot in different places by different people in different lighting conditions. But because it is a documentary, that is what you would expect. All that different stuff should not have the exact same vibe in terms of contrast and saturation. So we tried to clean it up only in the sense of it not being distracting, and to be as true as we could to whatever medium the material was shot in. Resolve is so state-of-the-art, though, that we could do some pretty cool things—isolate stuff, do endless windows, secondary isolations, softening and blending, changing the characteristic curve of video—so it was very helpful.”

At the end of the day, Guggenheim insists his team made a documentary that, as the title suggests, should be played “really, really loud,” but they did it using an unorthodox methodology that made perfect sense to its three leading players. After all, as Guggenheim says, “they are rock and roll guys.”

“They have been improvising their whole careers—so all three of them got it when I explained what we were trying to do,” Guggenheim says. “We just went with it and trusted the process more than designing a story up front. Documentaries, after all, are about the story revealing itself to you as you go. The trick, as the filmmaker, is being ready to adapt when that happens.”

Continue the discussion on �Crosstalk� the Millimeter Forum.
© 2012 NewBay Media, LLC.