Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/65901
DIRECTOR'S CHAIR [ Cont.from 15 ] years, and it took so many passes to get it close to what I'd imagined." POST: Can you talk about the importance of music and sound to you as a filmmaker? STANTON: "I never approach it like frosting. It's a major element — as important as casting and script. It can carry the heart and soul of a film, though hopefully it's not masking a problem. We did all the mixing at Skywalker. I've been so spoiled as I've always done sound there." [The Skywalker team, which worked out of the Kurasawa Stage, employed the AMS Neve Gemini.] POST: The DI must have been vital? How did that process help? STANTON: "We did it at Efilm with colorist Mitch Paulson. He's young but has worked with [DP] Roger Deakins for quite a while and was strongly recom- mended, and it was huge as we had so many elements coming from so many different places. On top of just getting an even look, we needed to make sure all the VFX FOR TV in a mystical world, this is a show that is supposed to be 100 percent grounded in reality," Fleet explains. "Everything is supposed to be 100 percent believable. So we had to make our stuff photoreal and schedule." [ Cont.from 37 ] feature quality on a television Also adding to the challenge was the show's deci- sion to stay away from the typical high-end cameras used in television production. "They were using GoPros, 5Ds, 7Ds, and I think the hero camera was a Sony EX3, which is a prosumer camera," recalls Fleet. "Sometimes they were shooting 10 to 12 cameras at a time. It's a very different type of show." The camera set-up was a stylistic choice, designed to support the show's handheld feel. "They had the Alexa available, but since the cameramen are actually characters in the show, if you used the Alexa, you essentially doubled the time it would take to get the coverage because you would have the wrong camera in the cameraperson's hand," says Fleet. "So it became quickly apparent that using the Alexa on this show was highly uneconomical." Fleet says it's hard to tell which footage captured by the actors actually made it into the final edit. The on- camera talent wasn't necessarily expected to capture shots perfectly, but if they did get something good, it stood a chance of being used. "If you are a VFX supervisor like me, the first thing you say is, 'OK, we are going to shoot it with the best camera. Give me the highest quality footage and the ON-SET POST process. We can mix all the cameras on a project with no headaches and do the encoding in the background on a take-by-take basis." Since its implementation on Dallas, Remote Control Dailies has been used on a number of projects nation- wide, McClure reports. [ Cont.from 30 ] PROMETHEUS 3D A Red DIT by trade, Jeroen Hendricks maintains his own HD Mobile Labs units in California and North Caro- lina (http://hdmobilelabs.com). He was credited as cam- era data supervisor on the last two films he worked on, Ridley Scott's Prometheus 3D, which is due out in June, and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides 3D. "I'm on set, so that nothing changes for the DP," says Hendricks. "He can just do what he's always done and not have to deal with the data settings. I take care of the rest." For Prometheus 3D Hendricks spent 80 percent of the shoot on set at Pinewood Studios in England and the last month on location in Iceland. "The first thing I do is make sure everything is recorded in the right format and goes into my workflow correctly," he explains. He accomplishes that in conjunction with the first assistant camera. "When they reloaded mags from Red Epic the used mags came to my station — for Prometheus that was myself and Mary Lobb. We downloaded footage into the on-set system and the original footage shipped to an off-set system where it was backed up and sent to 50 Post • April 2012 the post production offices. "On-set we continued setting the framing and color the DP wanted on the footage and, with the stereographer, we built the 3D files and set the con- vergence on that footage. We emailed these text RMD files to the off-set station to add to their foot- age so they'd have the framing, color and conver- gence intended for a shot." Fluent Image provided the off-set system for edito- rial and dailies. Hendricks got feedback from the edi- tors regarding which cards to erase and re-use and which to make changes on — resetting convergence or rematching color, for example — so he could implement the revisions and run the files again. Hendricks believes that on-set post should be a function of the camera department and not a branch of a post facility. "There should be communication between the set and post production, but it needs to come from the camera side," he emphasizes. "We're still creating the image, up until framing and color. We're an extension of the DP and a crossover to editorial." Prometheus 3D used a custom-designed 1 Beyond system for its on-set storage. "We built 16TB RAIDs with a powerful computer and internal card readers for fast ingest," says Hendricks. "With RedCine-X Pro we don't keep the whole movie on-set — only about four days worth. Then we clear the system out and put new data in. Of course, 3D doubles your storage needs." He created a "super-fast data wrangler system from the cards to the RAIDs" to accommodate the use on www.postmagazine.com Prometheus 3D made use of Red's Epic camera. Prometheus 3D of some Red Epic 128GB and 256GB cards for aerial, water and emotion-packed scenes. Technology changes so quickly that "I couldn't have used anything I used on Pirates on Prometheus," he says. "The system I had on Pirates is sitting in my garage doing nothing!" Hendricks sees the role of DIT in flux, evolving from that of a video engineer with the accent on hardware to more of a data wrangler with the emphasis on software. Hendricks puts together his own crew and coordinates with the software engineers at the off-set system to ensure a seamless link from camera to post. But his role is not all technical. On set Hendricks gets to see "everything come together — the color and look with the DP, the convergence with the ste- reographer. It's all very creative," he reports. most dynamic range. Give me everything picture per- fect and if we need to mess it up, we'll mess it up in post,'" says Fleet. "That's the traditional way of thinking. In this case, we were getting some messed up stuff, so we were going to be creative and come up with some workflows and tools to integrate what we do into their footage." Camera movement can help mask the seams of CG, says Fleet, but it also meant having to perform 3D tracking for every effects shot. "Bluescreen and greenscreen pretty much don't work with these cameras," he notes. "Other than some monitors, we didn't use any on the show. We roto- scoped everything and cut out people. That was a decision from the beginning." different VFX matched, and then you have all these characters who are more tanned and red-skinned than Carter, so that took a lot of dialing-in." POST: What's next? Animation or more live action? STANTON: (Laughs) "I never left animation in terms of doing this, but I definitely loved doing live action. To me, this is the future, and people will even- tually stop talking about animation and live action as different mediums. They're just tools that everyone will use."