Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1513564
34 C I N E M O N T A G E C O V E R film back to L.A., breaking up the 13-hour journey into manageable chunks for each driver. The next morning, the film would arrive at FotoKem and be processed. Prints would be struck and sent that afternoon to the Los Angeles-based editorial team for QC who would report back any technical issues to the team on set. The L.A. film editorial team, led by first assistant editor Tom Foligno, would then break the printed takes down into daily rolls, prep them for telecine, and hand them o to drivers that same night. The drivers would bring the prints back to New Mexico in time for the dailies screening the following afternoon. "We screened dailies every day, watching our dailies from two days prior," Fay said, "Chris [Nolan] really believes in screening dailies as a company every day." A dailies trailer was set up on location and outfitted with projectors capable of p l a y i n g 70 m m a n d 3 5 m m p r i n ts. " We screen a 35mm reduction print of our IMAX dailies because there are just no IMAX projectors small enough to fit into a trailer, but we were able to watch the dailies of the 5-perf 70mm footage," explained Fay. Since the production schedules were based on location and actor availability, sometimes the footage shot in 65mm black- and-white — such as the scenes with Robert Downey Jr.'s character Lewis Strauss — would be held for days, or even weeks, before it was processed at the lab. Fay noted, "This was mostly an issue at the end of the shoot when we, by necessity, needed to do a couple of shots in black-and-white on this day, a couple of shots in black-and-white three days later, and another day's worth of black-and-white a week later. We would hold all that footage until we amassed enough material that it made sense for us to convert the lab to black-and-white. Because we were shooting so much color, we didn't want to slow down the color processing that was the bulk of the material. But it was a little tense while we waited to see those black-and-white dailies we shot weeks ago. Was there a scratch? Was there some other issue that we would only be aware of once we got to see that footage? The wait was a little tense." In addition to large-format film stock, several shots were captured on 35mm color film on an ARRI 435ES. According to Fay, these were primarily visual eects shots on which they wanted to have a very slow-mo effect. He explained, "We were looking to shoot 150 FPS, which the IMAX camera couldn't do. The fastest it will shoot is 48 FPS, but we wanted a slower look than that." As mentioned, FotoKem telecined the dailies, creating HD 1080p 24fps MXF files for the Avid workflow. During production, first assistant editor Nick Ellsberg and the L.A. editorial team started the process of syncing them, organizing them, and prep- ping them for editor Lame. All the telecined assets from FotoKem contained key code information from the physical film, preserved in the master clips as metadata. These numbers correspond to the physical negatives, so all the cuts that Lame made in the Avid could be matched back to the original film. Before picture lock , the team held several screenings on film, including the 10-week Director's Cut screening and Friends and Family screenings. Once Lame locked picture for a screening, Avid's list tool was used to generate an assemble list (cut list). This list was given to the film team, who used it to conform the workprint to match Lame's cut. According to Fay, "The workprint conform started about four weeks into the director's cut. Chris screens his director's cut on film, and that's a 70mm (5-perf) screening, so it was a mad dash to get everything ready." Av i d 's l i s t to o l w a s a l s o u s e f u l f o r generating a cut list for the 65mm (5-perf) negative, but the footage shot on IMAX film required a different approach. Fay turned to visual effects editor Ed Marsh, who de- signed a custom database tool to generate a "minus list" for the IMAX footage. Fay explained, "Basically, IMAX doesn't use traditional Avid-generated cut lists. They prefer a dierent kind of list called a 'minus list.' These lists transform a traditional cut list by taking each key number and round- ing the feet+frames up to the next whole zero frame, and then counting backward to the frame requested. This approach allows IMAX to visually confirm the requested key number on the work print and negative before cutting. Ed's custom database tool automated this step and generated the minus lists for IMAX. The IMAX negative cutter used that minus list in conjunction with the 35mm workprint to check for accu- racy before cutting the negative." So, once the locked cut was approved, the final cut lists were given to the film team to conform the workprint. Once this matched the locked cut, they would give the conformed workprint and a negative cut list to the negative cutters. Fay said, "We did two of these. We did a 5-perf 65mm negative cut and then we did a 15-perf IMAX negative cut. Both of those require dierent workprints and dierent sets of lists to go to the respective negative cutters." Cutting the actual negative is a very purposeful and very manual task, noted Fay. It is not something that can be automated. "We want someone – a human with a brain – who is considering every cut and making sure that the cut they are going to make is SEE PAGE 72 Tom Foligno. 'Waiting for the dailies got a little tense.'