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

 

Making History

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

Ed Zwick defies the forest.

“The Adrenaline was a great aid, but we went with the Meridian to cut because we were in the middle of Lithuania and Adrenalines were new and not so stable back then,” she says. “We had no real support for Adrenaline if something went wrong. But [rental house] GEP [Global Entertainment Partners, out of Los Angeles] was able to provide three Meridians out of their London office, which saved us about $30,000, and gave us any kind of support we needed. So it just made more sense to do it this way.”

This approach was the best of both worlds from Rosenblum's perspective, since his team, at the time, felt Adrenaline wasn't ready to use for cutting remotely, but was perfect for outputting an HD product within the context of the team's Meridian-based workflow — allowing the quick and efficient screening of HD dailies on location. At the same time, all HD material was stored on drives. Later, when it came time to assemble the movie in HD, the production imported data from those drives and the Meridian bins for easy link-up outside of having to rebuild a few subtitles and a couple of visual effects, thus circumventing the need to worry about the online process.

“We could easily move my cut to Adrenaline and output an HD product right away, but have no problem cutting in a system we all knew, which was supported, without any sorts of problems or worrying about onlines,” Rosenblum says. “Everyone is moving toward editing in HD and getting rid of onlines, but [it wasn't feasible or stable] to take four Adrenalines to Lithuania, so we found another way to work around it. We tested how accurate it would be to translate from Meridian to Adrenaline, and it was very accurate. The creative part was a much bigger challenge than these technical issues.”

The DI

Highlighting the claustrophobic nature of the partisans' encampment in the forest while juxtaposing various chunks of material shot by Serra to hit what Rosenblum calls “the emotional throughline” were crucial to the project's success. In that sense, the editor says that the fact that the characters were mostly wearing the same clothes throughout the piece — in the same basic environment and with very few makeup issues — were great assets in his effort to stitch it all together seamlessly. But he and Zwick both feel that Serra's approach to visually indicating the passage of time and seasons, both in production and during the digital intermediate, was central as well.

“The winter is a beautiful example of an artful choice made by Eduardo,” Zwick says. “People tend to do winter as a shade of blue. In this movie, he allows the dark green of the forest to remain visible in winter, with some smoke added to the green and even some yellow to make it cold and haunted and austere. It's a look I really like, and it was achieved due to Eduardo's expertise.”

The digital intermediate was performed at EFilm, Hollywood, by Colorist Natasha Leonnet working in collaboration with Serra and Zwick on EFilm's proprietary version of the Autodesk Lustre color-correction system, dubbed Eworks. Zwick calls the process “a great problem solver” for the production, not only in terms of seasons and snow and colors in the deep forest, but also for certain night shots.

“If you shoot a night sequence and are having trouble darkening those backgrounds to let the faces properly emerge and really trying to help your contrast ratio, you can do a lot in the DI,” Zwick says. “It's almost like zone development in still photography. You place a window over something [using color-correction tools] and bring it down a couple stops in a way you weren't able to do the night you shot it because of the nature of the action or the set or whatever, and now you can still do that. That is an unbelievable advantage.”

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