Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/47109
and our task is to find, at his behest, every great moment, every great piece of a shot, every syllable of performance, and put them together into really a great seamless experi- ence. That's the joy of working on a film with him. That's the craft involved in every aspect of the film. You get dailies and it's like taking a warm bath because they're so beautiful and the performances are so strong" Both editors agree that the rape scene was one of the most demanding sequences of the movie to edit. "I can say," says Wall, "I have a lot more grey hairs than I did before working on any of those scenes. To do a good job as an editor you have to empathize with the charac- ters, and it's hard. The more finely cut the scene gets, the more the artifice vanishes from it. You don't see the characters or actors ramp into or ramp out of the performance. You're trying to create this simulation of reality. You have to get up every once and a while and go for a little walk to clear your head." "It's important to mention this movie is not trying to glorify violence. You're not hiding, you're spotlighting it," adds Baxter," and the repercussions of that violence are also in the movie. It's that every violent act has major repercussions down the line. It's not about the act itself, it's about the impact it has on those characters and what it makes them subse- quently do." Cronenweth framed the original footage with visual margins around separate shots. "We had a 4352x2176 image sequence with the Red One footage," explains Nelson, "and we are extracting a 3600x1500 center. We also have something similar on our Epic footage: a 5120x2560 image sequence and we're extracting 4122x1718. We're matching those two center extractions in my After Effects timeline and scaling that down so we're outputting one single resolution." During my visit to the brand-new facilities of Light Iron (www.lightiron.com), Ian Vertovec was adjusting the controls on his Quantel Pablo 4K and studying the images displayed on his Christie CP2000 projector and Dolby PRM-4200 monitor, staring the final color cor- rection pass on The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Fincher and Cronenweth were just at the facil- ity. "So I laid down the reels today," says Vert- ovec. "This was the first time Jeff and David sat together in a room and looked at it since they were on set. We made a few adjustments, but a lot of it is exactly where they wanted it to start. So this is an extension and enhancement of what they originally talked about." On this movie, says Light Iron founder Michael Cioni, there was an early marketing trailer that they color corrected and that trailer enabled them "to explore a whole set of looks in the film and what the film could be. So now it's taking some of those trailer options and expanding them into entire scenes." Vertovec had pre-colored Light Iron's Ian Vertovec graded the film using Quantel Pablo. VFX & COLOR There are over 1,000 visual effect shots in Dragon Tattoo. Many of them are like the subtle camera stabilizing and split screens Fincher used on The Social Network. Nelson and his team again did many of these shots using Adobe After Effects. He first generated 10-bit log DPX files from the original camera files and then applied nearly universal camera stabiliza- tion. Fincher's split-screen technique uses a sophisticated repositioning of multiple camera angles or takes in a single frame. Anticipating these effects, Fincher and cinematographer Jeff everything based on information he got from Fincher during that process. "Once I get the files from Tyler (Nelson) I load it and set up the custom extraction. I pre-color and pre-balance everything based on a couple of early sessions I had with David. So I know where he wants to go in specific scenes and I have ref- erences for that." Now, he says, they are in the last stages and some final repositioning. "When you have a creative conversation you are establishing a dogma," says Vertovec about color correction. "How does the Drag- on Tattoo [version of] Sweden look? What kind of world is this, what color are the skies, what color are the flashbacks how do the windows behave with the room? Guys should be not too blue, not too green, not too yellow, not too pink. Wood walls like this, carpet like this, you establish these rules and laws. Brightness levels should live in this space. Blacks should be in this space. You build this world, line it up to that, then you leave yourself open to fur- ther exploration." One of the innovations on this project was the creation of a Light Iron application called "Sub-Clipper" that allows the Pablo to treat the 4K DPX files as "camera original" footage. The custom app built by Stevo Brock allows the final conform to automatically be in perfect sync with editorial, up to and including the lat- est revision. "Because of the amount of visual effects, Red RAW files cannot be used in DI," says Cioni, "yet the cut may change well after VFX are already processed. With Sub-Clipper, all editing changes and VFX shots can smoothly ripple through to the composited 4K DPX files on the Pablo at Light Iron, even though the offline editorial list refers to an R3D source." Cioni says the 4K pipeline is everyone really wanting to raise the bar on this movie. "The Pablo has been 4K for a while," notes Vertovec, "There is something about the grain-free qual- ity of these digital cameras. You get more out of the 4K. There isn't that extra layer between you and the subject. It's much more immediate to have a grain-free 4K image." Cioni says he's really excited to see more 4K releases in the cinemas "so people can experi- ence the same emotional reaction we do to these pictures." He adds, speaking for the entire post team, "We do this on all our films so we can help make products that turn heads." www.postmagazine.com Post • November 2011 19 Top to bottom: Kirk Baxter and Tyler Nelson.