Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/17668
only way to find that tone and appreciate the difference between takes is to subdivide them and compare subdivisions of each take against the subdivision of another take. There were probably maybe 10 or 12 subdi- visions of that scene that I broke down ac- cordingly. By breaking them down and look- ing at these subsets against one another you start to appreciate that,‘Oh, this part of this take is a lot better than this other take.” “You are never fixing things, you are always helping things,” says Baxter. “Fincher’s always got things technically correct. In regards to moving the camera, he will do that to transi- tion into scenes. Or if he’s got larger scenes that are playing between rooms he will swing us out of one thing and into the next. “There’s a lot of deposition room scenes, which is current day, so to speak,” he contin- ues,“and we’re intercutting that with going back to previous tales of what they are talk- ing about in the deposition room. So the de- position room can be quite static, but very engaging because it’s aggressive.” “Whenever you cross cut you create ten- sion,” echoes Wall, “visually and dramatically. Whenever we had those opportunities to cross cut between the past and the present it underlines the structure of the movie.You have this through line [the deposition room], which does not appear until about a quarter or a third a way through the movie. Then basically you’re looking backwards once you introduce the deposition room, which structurally is great because it allows you to make jumps that you wouldn’t nor- mally be able to make if were just telling a story in realtime.” “This film came together fast,” recalls Bax- ter.“Our first assembly was only about four minutes off in length from the final film.We probably cut it too quick to begin with.Then we had another pass where we loosened it up. This one was so enjoyable and it did come together with ease.” Concludes Wall,“David gives you so many options you can craft something that’s per- fectly symmetrical; you can do this perfect version of a scene or the film.The problem is that it can get somewhat predictable in terms of where you are cutting and where you are going to go with your next shots. I tried to be a little more freewheeling in terms of scene structure with this.” Image experts H OLLYWOOD — On one of the larger soundstages at Red Studios in Hollywood, Lightiron (www.lightirondigital.com) colorist Ian Vertovec is perched on a raised platform about 16 feet in the air at the center of the nearly empty space. He gently moves track balls on the Pablo’s Neo control panel, adjusting the color timing for the David Fincher film The Social Network. On the far wall behind him is a Sony SRX-T420 4K projector. On the front wall is a 40-foot screen with an image from one of the first features shot with Red’s new Mysterium X chip. “What Lightiron is doing is putting more creative control with the people who are the creatives,” says Lightiron founder/CEO Michael Cioni. “We believe in file-based acquisition because we believe in file- based exhibition.We want to pull all the chains off the limitations of the media.” Color correction, continues Cioni, is evolving in line with comput- er technology, expanding its potential and opportunities.The process of color correction can be myopic, he says.You bring in files, do the color correction and then you output the files.“A colorist like Ian Vertovec,” he says,“knows how to use the Pablo, but also under- stands color science,workflow, computer networking, compositing, conforming and input-output formats. Ian Vertovec used Pablo to color The Social Network. continued on page 55 www.postmagazine.com October 2010 • Post 49