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MillimeterGenesis on Superman Returns
May 9, 2006 8:00 AM, By Michael Goldman
Continuing Millimeter’s and Digital Content Producer’s ongoing examination of workflows and philosophies surrounding this year’s spate of digitally acquired feature films, the May/June 2006 issue of Millimeter will detail the approach used by director Bryan Singer’s team on Superman Returns—shot entirely with Panavision’s Genesis Digital Camera System. That system was still new and had not been thoroughly tested in the field at the time Singer and his DP, Newton Thomas Sigel, ASC, committed to it, so they had lots of questions going in about the technology’s viability for such things as visual effects plates and fitting data into both their digital dailies and digital intermediate pipelines.
Millimeter’s upcoming article will go into great detail on these, and other, issues. In addition, however, Singer and Sigel offered their insight into how Genesis performed in the field, as compared to their expectations going in. Among other things, Sigel says Genesis performed exceptionally well in low-light situations, as anticipated. But, he adds that he eventually learned to bend the camera to his needs, rather than trying to tailor the imagery to Genesis’ perceived strengths.
“We shot a lot of day exteriors and had no problems,” he reports. “Everyone talks about how the camera sees into the shadows better, and that is generally true, and you are basically better off underexposing, rather than over-exposing like you would with film negative. But having said that, my first few days, I was overly courageous and started going with so little light that, later, when I wanted to play with the image, manipulate it, I had boxed myself into a corner. So you have to be careful not to get swept away about shooting with limited light. You can run into lots of the same problems that you run into when you underexpose a negative and do a DI, saying you want to see more of this or that, and then, when you try to bring it up, you get a lot of video noise.”
In terms of the system’s sturdiness in the field, Sigel adds “We used remote heads a lot, and I must say, the camera held up great. We did a flycam, Steadicam, lots of crane stuff. It’s a little heavy for Steadicam, but we were able to do it, and for everything else, it was pretty much used like a film camera. For this movie specifically, I did not find any situations where there was something I wanted to do that I couldn’t do.”
Entering the DI phase at press time, Sigel said filmmakers were on track for “creating color space in post.” Following the edit, the movie was conformed and data-managed at Digital Sandbox, Los Angeles, before beginning the color-timing phase at Technicolor Digital Intermediates, Burbank, Calif. Singer told Millimeter that the basic plan for the DI was somewhat different from the typical color-grading methodology being used these days on many movies shot digitally.
“It’s not really a digital intermediate in the sense that we shoot digitally—it’s more like a delivery element, I guess you would say,” Singer explains. “It’s different than, say, what George Lucas would do on a Star Wars film. He shoots digitally, drops in all visual effects, and then grades everything as a whole. We, on the other hand, are grading each image—the equivalent of color-timing each image separately, the way you would in a conventional timing session with film, except using technology that permits us to work on digital files. Then, we are putting the effects in and doing a complete re-grade. It’s a little more complex than the way others have done it for these kinds of films, and we are sort of working it out as we go along.”
The end result, both men were confident, will be a painterly, filmic look, stylized to evoke the era that gave birth to Superman comics in the 1930’s. For a complete look at how they executed this plan, see the upcoming May/June issue of Millimeter.
Continue the discussion on Crosstalk the Millimeter Forum.