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September 2012

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Workflow New frontiers in technology and art B UENOS AIRES — Argentinian perfor- mance group Fuerza Bruta enjoy pushing artistic boundaries. After a friend suggested the promotional trailer for their forthcoming world tour might harness the latest in 4K filmmaking and post produc- tion technology, they realized they had the chance to push technical boundaries too, and were head of over heels at the prospect. Fuerza Bruta's shows are a series of phan- Capturing performance group Fuerza Bruta in 4K. tasmagoric stunts and aerial acrobatic daring, set to a thumping soundtrack, and all in front of a live audience. lighting situations, and these changes happen really fast. Within this, some scenes have very low light and others have really high spots that produce heavily contrasted situations. What's more, we were not able to add any additional lighting to the show. "Second, was the need to change the posi- 252GB SSD cards, capable of holding 15 min- utes of F65 RAW 4K footage. These cards were then offloaded to a 10TB, RAID-5 disk, delivered inside a DIT cart from LA-based digital lab service provider PrePost Data, which was operated by Javier Hick. Two back- ups were immediately made to a 2TB disk. The Buenos Aires-based troupe's latest show, titled Wayra (the ancient Inca word for "wind"), is an eye-popping, 360-degree bar- rage of the erotic, hypnotic and aquatic, including an iconic image of a running man bursting at full-throttle through a series of exploding walls, and a giant tank squirming with partly-naked performers suspended just inches above the crowd. Having heard about the 4K capabilities of Director/DP Leo Aramburú and Cinecolor colorist Luisa Cavanagh. the F65, Fuerza Bruta reached out to friend Nacho Mazzini, founder/VP of worldwide sales at Assimilate, also based in Buenos Aires. With Assimilate having announced support for Sony's F65 at the HPA Retreat earlier this year, Mazzini connected the 4K dots. With Fuerza Bruta's buy-in, he contacted Sony Miami, camera house C&L Rentals and crew in Buenos Aries, post house Cinecolor Argen- tina, and enlisted the talents of director and cinematographer Leo Aramburú. THE SHOW For the shoot, Fuerza Bruta hosted a spe- cial performance of its Wayra show in a 5,000-seat sports stadium, in the city of Rosa- rio, central Argentina, in June. Aramburú was highly aware of the task facing the team. "We had two important challenges during the planning stages of the shoot," he says. "First, the show has dynamic and variable 20 Post • September 2012 The promo was shot using Sony's F65. Assimilate Scratch was called on for the DI. tion of the camera in the middle of the show, an especially difficult task with the audience jumping and dancing around. So we needed a camera with a high dynamic range, high sensi- tivity, good color reproduction and a good degree of portability. We did some tests with the F65 to check out its dynamic range and sensitivity, and were extremely impressed with the results. It produces very clear images, and the details in the black and white areas are really deep. The textures captured by the 8K CMOS sensor are stunning, and there's wide tonal range." The very first two Sony F65 cameras that were available in Argentina were delivered by C&L Rentals. Gastón Delecluze, Clodo Luque, Javier Gonzalez were the camera operators on the shoot, with Laura Iezzi and Juliana Gonzalez pulling focus, and Gustavo Lucero and Guiller- mo Fernandez acting as camera assistants. The F65s were set to capture at 23.97fps, with a shutter angle of 172.8 degrees, an 800 ISO, and a color temperature of 4300K, recording 4:4:4, 16-bit linear RAW 4K to www.postmagazine.com Scratch Lab, running on a Mac, was then used to apply a primary grade to the material and to transcode the RAW 4K material to Apple ProRes proxy for the offline editorial. The footage for the trailer, edited and con- formed by Aramburú on his own Scratch system, then fell under the eyes of Luisa Cava- nagh, senior Scratch colorist at Cinecolor Argentina (www.cinecolor.com.ar). Importing 1.5TB of material, and the Scratch Construct settings from Aramburú, Cavanagh had just three hours to grade 150 shots — word of the production had spread, and the graded trailer was required for screening in 4K at the world's first F65 workflow event at Sony Pic- tures Studios in LA in July. "We were a little nervous as to what might happen during the DI, as this was the first time we had ever handled F65 footage in Scratch," says Cavanagh. "But we needn't have worried. The workflow and the grade turned out to be straightforward. With footage com- continued on page 46

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