Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/110591
DC Shoes a more specific tone for the film. That video — edited by Vashi Nedomansky, will be included on Waiting for Lightning's DVD extras — clinched the deal. Post began in earnest in 2010. The goal was to submit to Sundance and South by Southwest (SXSW) film festivals by their fall 2011 deadlines. Bret Anthony Johnson came on board as writer and Carol Martori (King of Luck) started editing full time with Rommel Mendoza as assistant editor. Martori worked on Avid Media Composer 4, so Rosenberg distilled down the nearly 500 hours of source footage, almost 104TB, into roughly 50 to 60 hours of cut down reels and converted that to DNxHD 36. There was also about 20 hours of 16mm and 35mm film that DC Shoes had of Way that had never been scanned in HD. During 2010 and 2011 virtually all the "A-Roll" interviews were shot on Canon 5D Mark II. "It was a very collaborative project," says Rosenberg, "but I was also very clear the type of film that I wanted to make and the type of tone I wanted the film to have. Bret and Carol complemented that vision and in their own way helped to take it further." In 2011, as the Avid edit was being constructed, Holte started building a "conform timeline" in Adobe Premiere 5.5 getting EDLs from a "flattened" single track Media Composer timeline and re-linking the clips back to the source files. Holte divided the 96-minute doc into six 10- to 15-minute sequences, or "reels," in the Premiere Pro project file. "The piece was very graphics intensive," explains Holte, who took advantage of the dynamic linking feature in CS5.5 between Premiere and After Effects. None of the VFX were pre-baked and exported as footage, but instead linked as After Effects compositions in the Premiere Pro timeline. "Doing it that way kept the editing flexible and also saved storage space." The conform sequence "reels" were built as 1920x1080 24p (23.97). So all of the archival footage that was 720x486 (29.97) interlaced, standard def had to be converted. After Effects CS5.5 had a pretty good automatic pull-down converter, says Holte. "What we could not fix there we used Cinnafilm's Dark Energy to process." Holte exported Cineform QuickTime files that were sent to colorist Chris Hall for grading; he used a Blackmagic Resolve running on a Mac Pro tower connected to the Christie 2K projector in the Bandito Bros theater. Everything was calibrated to Rec 709. Hall then sent Holte QuickTime files with the color correction baked in. As the movie was graded, the soundtrack was created by Rob Webber at Sony Studios, who sent back a 5.1 mix. Holte built his master from those elements and sent the final master to West Side Media Group, who transferred it to HDSR videotape, the format required by South by Southwest. At the Austin-based festival, they got interest from distributors, and ultimately closed a distribution deal with Samuel Goldwyn Films. After, Rosenberg and team tracked down even more archival footage that was integrated into the movie. He also shot an epilogue about Danny's new ramp in Kauai that featured Danny skating a never-before-seen ramp. That material he shot with a Red Epic at 120fps in 4K and 96fps in 5K, and some with the Canon 5D. "He wanted the flexibility to do push-ins and such," recalls Holte, "and he wanted to be able to capture what Danny does in a large format worthy of the big screen." Rosenberg decided to cut this footage himself natively in Premiere CS6. "The reason we made the jump from Premiere CS5.5 to CS6," describes Holte, "was because I had begun using CS6 in its beta stage, and had become used to the enhanced Waiting for Lightning was culled from more than a dozen usability of the new user interface. All different formats. the tweaks Adobe made for Pre- miere CS6 made our conform workflow smoother and more stable for the final stage of the film. Plus, the native Red Epic support allowed us to integrate Jacob's Kauai Premiere project directly into the online project to work with the R3D media. "We graded 'reel six' and the finishing color pass on a vastly superior HP Z820 system with an Nvidia Quadro 6000, two Tesla C2075s, and a Red Rocket in an expansion chassis. This system also served as the grain and texture workstation for our Dark Energy use, which gave the film a much more cinematic and filmic look," says Holte. By April of 2012, Holte was prepping for multiple distribution venues. He took his Premiere Pro "reels" and built a 96-minute "nested sequence" that contained the six "reels." He duplicated and stacked the three sequences in a single timeline and set three aspect ratios: (2048x1152) 1.85, (1920x1080) 1.78 and a 4x3 pan and scan version. He also created a nested sequence with text and motion graphics scaled to each of the specific aspect ratios. He exported each version to DPX image sequences in Rec 709 and sent them to Laser Pacific (now Technicolor), which converted the DPX to XYZ and made one DCP version for digital theatrical release (2048x1152; 1.85) and one HDSR Linear Rec 709 Master (1920x1080; 1.78) from which the home video and digital versions were pulled from. "While I would have loved to shoot film and end on film," reflects Rosenberg, "this project simply would never have been made had we had to invest in celluloid and that endto-end workflow. The digital workflow and digital formats kept the film and budget quite grounded, and we used our proprietary grain techniques to help add a filmic edge to the final digital prints and masters" Rosenberg's aim was to make something different than things that came before. "I think that Act of Valor is in a similar boat," he notes. "It has a different look and feel than other action movies, and I wanted this to have a different feel than other skateboarding documentaries. I think we have achieved that." www.postmagazine.com Post0213_014-15-WHAT'S UPRAV5finalread.indd 15 Color grading was done by Chris Hall on Resolve. Post • February 2013 15 1/24/13 4:58 PM