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MillimeterPerformance Enhancing
Nov 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
Darren Aronofsky’s team strategically highlights Mickey Rourke’s work in character-driven film.
DI phase
Some things that could not be perfected during filming were, of course, addressed during the DI phase at Technicolor New York. Among other things, the process helped adjust color and saturation to make the project evoke a 35mm print. But the DI was not used, in Aronofsky's words, for a major overhaul. “It was used to give us the greatest latitude in different places, add contrast in places, and solve some particular problems largely,” he says.
The DI, however, did play a central role in rectifying a major challenge facing the production. Rourke had real-life personal tattoos removed and fake ones added by the makeup department to fit his character. During the wrestling sequences, sweat, hot lights, wrestling mats, and pounding bodies (all wrestlers except Rourke were real-life professional wrestlers) made it almost impossible to maintain the integrity of that makeup. The DI process was used to paint those problems away.
“That was a huge issue,” says Tim Stipan, the DI colorist from TechnicolorNew York. “We spent a lot of time working on those tattoos. Our conform editor, Jesse Morrow, rotoscoped the tattoo areas and gave me his mattes, and then we graded to remove the dark blue of the tattoos. The way I did this was by taking out the contrast of that specific area and grading it to match the flesh tone around it. I found that by doing this, it basically made it look defocused, so then I added some grain to match the surrounding areas.
“There were also other things to blur out and make unrecognizable, like people [in the crowds during wrestling events] looking into the camera and making the frame a bit distracting. For some of those enhancements, Jesse would cut mattes that would track a certain area, and then put those mattes in the reels. I would instantly have a matte in my Lustre system that I could then color correct and blur without tracking a thing, since he had already done the hard work. So, in other words, we were able to work on both the overall look and some effects during the DI.”
Stipan used Autodesk's Lustre system for color grading, and Morrow conformed the reels on an Autodesk Smoke system. Film was scanned at Technicolor's Los Angeles facility on a pin-registered Arri scanner. Morrow then pulled scans off Technicolor's SGI CXFS storage network, conformed the material, and published it directly to the Lustre.
“The great thing about this workflow is that if the picture edit changes, we can reconform and republish the film in a half day,” Stipan says. Stipan adds that the unheralded digital dust-busting process was actually crucial, on this project as well, since it was shot Super 16.
“Because it was shot Super 16, any photochemical dirt was going to be very obvious,” Stipan says. “Luckily, the person heading our dust-busting department, Jessica Allen, had a team working around the clock to ensure there was not a speck of dirt on this film. She did an amazing job of updating the scans without slowing down the process.”
Continue the discussion on Crosstalk the Millimeter Forum.