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Making History

Nov 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman

Ed Zwick defies the forest.

“It's an old stock, and very contrasty, and that is why I wanted it,” Serra says. “It's not something you would ever use for glamour, but I thought it would be interesting to give the film a look that relates to the period. I had no intention of giving it a more modern look and then trying to create the period look in the DI — I always prefer to do that on the original negative. So I presented it to Ed Zwick, and he understood my idea, but I told him it would put us in some risk. I said I wouldn't use the 85 filter [usually used for exteriors], and I would push the stock two stops, which is not usually recommended. So we were right on the edge of having what we call ‘cross talk,’ which means the colors in the image are not well balanced. I wanted that, to a degree, on the exteriors. For some night shots and interiors — about 20 percent of the movie — I used Kodak Vision[2] 5218 [500T].”

Beyond trying to control inconsistent jabs of sunlight in the forest with his system of silks, Serra stayed very simple and realistic on location in pursuit of his goal to stamp out any hint of glamour — shooting just about everything simply, using Carl Zeiss Ultra Primes and Angenieux zoom lenses.

“No makeup, no rim lights, only realistic light, never pretty — these were the things that were important to us,” he says. “It's not a documentary exactly, but it is a story with many loose realities in it, and we felt this was the best way to achieve those realities.”

Editorial on location

The production editing offices were headquartered inside a former strip-club building in Vilnius, which was essentially a gigantic empty room perfect for digitally projecting HD footage using a 2K NEC NC800C digital projector right out of the same freestanding Avid Adrenaline system used to digitize and sync most HD dailies. Those dailies were processed at Deluxe Laboratories in London, which transferred original negative to HDCAM tapes and sent those tapes back to Lithuania. As a result, the traveling infrastructure in Lithuania was less grueling than what Zwick's team grappled with in Africa for Blood Diamond, and it ended up allowing Zwick to work closely with editor Steven Rosenblum, who traveled with the production for most of the time the shoot was overseas.

“I normally cut on the road when I'm working for Ed,” says Rosenblum, who has done so for almost 30 years, “except for Blood Diamond, when I was unable to travel for personal reasons. I prefer it that way, because you can see certain problems that can be solved with an additional shot they can pick up on location, rather than trying to get it five months later. When we cut material on location, we see immediately how to improve a scene with a certain shot that will drop time out of the cut or increase the emotion or concentrate the story in a way we didn't realize originally while shooting. It's always better to get a pickup shot during production rather than post-production — that is a real advantage.”

The production set up its cutting room in Lithuania with a workflow that consisted of cutting the movie on an Avid Meridian system after using the Adrenaline system to downconvert and sync the HD dailies coming back to editorial from Deluxe. Material was then screened in the makeshift editorial facility in Lithuania directly out of the Adrenaline for filmmaker review.

Assistant Editor Cindy Thornton explains that the production decided it was best to keep the actual cutting work on the Meridian OS 9 platform given the early state of Adrenaline's development at the time and the logistics involved.

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